Waxy.org
Waxy.org is the sandbox of Andy Baio, a journalist/programmer living in Portland, Oregon. I'm the CTO of Kickstarter, created Upcoming.org, and some other stuff too.

Contact Me: log@waxy.org or waxpancake on AIM

Kickstarter

Posted Sep 23, 2008 (Updated Apr 28, 2009)

I wanted to take a moment to announce that I've joined the board of directors for Kickstarter, a brand-new startup based out of Brooklyn and Chicago.

April 28, 2009: Kickstarter is live! I wrote more about the launch here.

Kickstarter aims to let creative people of all kinds — journalists, artists, musicians, game developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers — raise money for their projects by connecting directly with fans, who receive exclusive access and rewards in exchange for their patronage. More than just a fundraising app, Kickstarter's a publishing platform where project creators can communicate with the people that are supporting them. (Think Jill Sobule, A Swarm of Angels, or Sean Tevis.)

I was introduced to founders Charles Adler, Perry Chen, and Yancey Strickler by Caterina Fake back in June, and sealed the deal after a trip to NYC to meet the team. They're a great group of guys with a strong vision, and I feel lucky to be involved.

Ultimately, everybody should be able to support themselves doing what they love using the web, and I think Kickstarter will be a great way to get there. Expect to hear more on Waxy.org as launch day gets closer.

To help them on their way, they're currently looking for a CTO to join the founding team. I've been helping guide some of the technology decisions and building the development team, but we're looking for a passionate and talented person to devote themselves to the project full-time.

If you're interested, drop me an email or IM and I'll introduce you!

3 Comments (Add Yours)

Sep 24, 2008
2:15 AM  
Angel Louzao wrote:

As an amateur comicbook artist trying to make a living out of my stuff, this start-up sounds really interesting. I'll make sure to join once it's launched. :)


Sep 24, 2008
12:58 PM  
zaskoda wrote:

Sounds like a noble and fun idea. The first thing I thought of was Kiva.org, but this is obviously very different. I hope to hear more about this project in the future!


Oct 3, 2008
4:57 AM  
Monica wrote:

Awesome idea, please do keep me posted on the outcome of the project.


 

Leave a comment





Waxy Links
Ads via The Deck
November 20, 2009
Regretsy gets a book deal — the anonymous author turned out to be April Winchell, collector of audio oddities
Google Chrome OS Demo — a world without a local filesystem and apps; also, the Chrome UI concept video (via)
Patrick Moberg's Internet Vices — funny, Tumblr feels more like beer than wine to me
Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck's "Heaven Can Wait" — Keith Schofield's surreal video and insane treatment were inspired by FFFFOUND and Reddit, but maybe too explicitly (via)
November 19, 2009
YouTube adds machine-translated automatic captions — starting with some partner channels, but auto-timing is available to everyone today
Microsoft tries to patent Edward Tufte's sparklines — they were recently added to Excel
Leonard Lin's Retweet Avatars for Greasemonkey — a subtle change, but a big improvement
Web-ops god John Allspaw leaves Flickr to join Etsy — he's the last of the original Ludicorp team to go (via)
November 18, 2009
Laptop Steering Wheel Desk — don't miss the product photos
Interview with Ralph Eggleston, Pixar's production designer on WALL-E — from last February, but new to me; I didn't know the Axiom had three passenger classes
NSFW: Animated pixel-art video for Flair's "Trucker's Delight" — warning: very offensive and sexist, but the attention to 16-bit detail by director Jérémie Perin is incredible
NY Observer on Anil Dash's new government 2.0 incubator project — Expert Labs debuted at Web 2.0 today, funded with a $500k grant from the MacArthur Foundation
November 17, 2009
Google's Dan Morrill explains how the Droid autofocus breaks every 24.5 days — this gets second-place for quirkiest Android bug (via)
Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter on Zach Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns — his style of comedy usually makes me uncomfortable, but this made me laugh
The Pirate Bay shuts down their tracker for good — they're switching to DHT instead
November 16, 2009
How Darren at Link Machine Go found Belle de Jour's identity five years ago — Brooke was part of the early UK blog scene
ICU64, real-time visualization of Commodore 64 memory — the developer also posted videos of Paradroid and Boulder Dash (via)
Russell Davies on pretending and "barely games" — his SAP prototype looks like great ambient fun (via)
NYT Magazine on the indie gaming movement — nothing new here, but good overview with a wonderful closing anecdote from Cactus
Tim O'Reilly on the pending War for the Web — "more than that, it's a war against the web as an interoperable platform"
November 14, 2009
Jason Scott rounds up Geocities' top 10 most popular MIDI files — along with a torrent with 51,000 MIDIs rescued by Archive Team
Matt Haughey on the discovery of his brain tumor, treatment, and the Internet's response — there were about 1,000 #mathowielove tweets in 24 hours
Belle de Jour reveals herself after six year of anonymity — only six people in the world knew, she only told her parents yesterday (via)
Paul F. Tompkins debates comedy ethics with Improv Everywhere's Charlie Todd — great discussion, and it's hard not to see where both are coming from (via)
November 13, 2009
Rogue Amoeba stops iPhone app development after App Store idiocy — I'm with Marco, the only fix is allowing external apps, but it's unlikely (via)
Numb3rs on IRC — "Luckily, I speak l33t."
Prank War 8: The Skydiving Prank — hard to say if life-threatening situations are funnier than public humiliation
301 Works, Internet Archive works to preserve URL shortener data — the shorteners will provide regular backups and hand over data on closure, though TinyURL's conspicuously missing
November 12, 2009
Quizipedia — simple game with trivia scraped from Wikipedia entries
Kill Screen, funding a new art magazine about videogames — sounds like the English analogue of Amusement I was hoping for

Andy Baio lives here. Some rights reserved, for your pleasure.