Over the past year, several platforms have revised their agreements with creators. Twitch slashed its streamers’ revenue share from 70% to 50%. Substack canceled creator health-insurance stipends while lowering guaranteed payment amounts. Meta

AI music with Holly Herndon, Mat Dryhurst, and Jesse Walden

May 31st, 2023 1h 12m

Last month, in April 2023, a song that used the AI-generated voices of Drake and The Weeknd went wildly viral across social media before being taken down from streaming services for breaching copyright. Shortly after, Grimes took a more permiss

Social tokens, NFTs, and lessons from Uber ft. Matt Alston

May 7th, 2023 59m 29s

Two years ago, it was predicted that every creator would have a social token, which would enable fans to bet on that creator and invest in their success. That clearly hasn’t panned out, and in their place, NFTs have become much more popular as

TikTok’s Creator Strategy ft. Paul Marvucic, Head of Product Marketing

Apr 3rd, 2023 50m 23s

TikTok has been in the news for a lot of reasons recently, but one thing that they’ve done well is pioneering various initiatives that moved the creator economy forward, like the TikTok Creator Fund, creation tools that dramatically lowered the

DAOs Explained ft. Tracheopteryx

Mar 22nd, 2022 54m 29s

Historically, humans have organized themselves in a variety of ways: from tribes and councils, to LLCs, and C-Corps. But these forms of organization tend to be centralized in nature, and feel slightly out of place today. With so much of our per

The Rise of Fashion NFTs ft. Dani Loftus

Mar 15th, 2022 51m 6s

How we portray ourselves online has become almost as relevant as how we portray ourselves IRL: Bored Apes and CryptoPunks are the new tailored suits and designer handbags. In years past, digital status-signaling was largely restricted to gaming

Ethereum Explained ft. Preethi Kasireddy

Mar 2nd, 2022 48m 47s

In this episode of our web3 explainer series, we take on an ambitious task: explaining Ethereum from the ground up. We unpack what Ethereum is, how it works, and why it matters.We spoke to Preethi Kasireddy, founder of DappCamp, which introduce

Is Crypto *Actually* Destroying the Planet?

Feb 15th, 2022 39m 25s

In this second episode of our new web3 explainer series we ask an important, and hard to answer question: is crypto *actually* destroying the planet?Over the last year, crypto has witnessed mainstream adoption, with billions of dollars of value

DeFi Explained ft. Nat Eliason

Jan 25th, 2022 52m 40s

For the next few episodes of Means of Creation, we are piloting a series of web3 explainers—unpacking some of the fundamental concepts of web3, from first principles. The goal is to explore various topics, trends, and projects that people want

A Look Inside Pinterest’s Creator Strategy

Jan 11th, 2022 47m 4s

Pinterest is often written off as a digital mood board used to inspire purchases and future plans—a place for its 444 million monthly users to share recipes, DIY craft projects, home décor ideas, beauty tutorials, fashion, or just about anythin

Braintrust’s Founders on How to Run a Decentralised Marketplace

Dec 14th, 2021 56m 24s

A recurring theme on this show has been creator and user empowerment—more specifically, how founders can build scalable businesses that don’t just extract value from their users, but instead, allow them to directly benefit from the value they h

Should Creators Own Their Means of Creation?

Dec 7th, 2021 59m 33s

In this episode, we were joined by Erik Forman, the co-founder of The Drivers Cooperative, a driver-owned alternative to Uber and Lyft. Erik spoke about how he got interested in the labor movement, his experience organising workers, what it mea

Li Jin on the journey behind Variant’s new $110M fund to back the ownership economy

Nov 30th, 2021 1h 25m

Nathan interviewed Li in this special episode of Means of Creation, where she talks about the $110M fund she recently raised with Jesse Walden and Spencer Noon of Variant. If you’re an avid fan of the show, you may have noticed how the podcast’

Packy McCormick on Web3 (how he got sucked in)

Sep 28th, 2021 51m 54s

Packy McCormick, author of Not Boring, one of the most widely-read analysts in tech. His newsletter now has more than 75k subscribers and he's raised a fund to back startups he finds interesting. In this conversation, we focus on how Packy went

How Crypto Projects Like Loot are Rewriting the Playbook for Building Communities

Sep 14th, 2021 55m 39s

The hype around crypto-native communities such as Loot and Nouns DAO have taken over all our Twitter feeds. But how do these communities arise and gather momentum? Our guest this week, Patrick Rivera, gives us an inside look into the social and

Understanding The Culture and Commerce Driving NFTs, with Kyle Chayka

Aug 31st, 2021 56m 3s

The creator economy is in constant flux, with DAOs and NFTs currently having taken centre stage. Our guest this week, Kyle Chayka, is uniquely positioned to understand these shifts. As a writer covering technology and culture, he is simultaneou

Building a Driver-Owned Alternative to Uber and Lyft

Aug 17th, 2021 49m 57s

In an increasingly platform-mediated world, platforms have outsized control over their participants—whether that’s app developers in the creator economy, or rideshare drivers in the gig economy. We’ve been trying to understand how this can be c

Playing Games to Earn a Living in the Metaverse

Jul 26th, 2021 51m 9s

Within traditional games like RuneScape and World of Warcraft, there have always been vibrant economies where players buy, sell, and exchange in-game assets. But these traditional games are also closed ecosystems—none of them let players transf

Inside the Longform Content Game at Twitter

Jul 16th, 2021 49m 18s

here’s a shift afoot at Twitter. The long-time microblogging platform has recently made a series of moves to position itself beyond just tweets, including acquiring the newsletter company Revue and introducing tools to help creators make money

Jarrod Dicker Is Thinking A Lot About ‘Web 2.5’

Jul 8th, 2021 56m 24s

You can watch this episode on YouTube or listen to Means of Creation on your podcast app of choice.

Inside Spotify's Vision for Audio Creators

Jun 29th, 2021 57m 23s

Spotify is doubling down on investing in creators. Within the past week alone, the music giant both launched its own live audio app, Greenroom, to directly compete with Clubhouse and acquired an audio news feed app, Podz, to improve creator dis

#33 - Alex Kantrowitz on going solo as the creator economy goes mainstream

Jun 7th, 2021 1h 4m

Alex Kantrowitz is a journalist who has spent years studying the inner workings of tech companies—how and why they make strategic decisions. He’s also a solo creator with a newsletter and podcast (Big Technology), and has written a book, Always

#32 - Kat Tenbarge on Why Influencers Need Watchdog Journalism

May 2nd, 2021 48m 37s

Li and Nathan are joined by Kat Tenbarge, senior reporter at Insider. Digging into Kat's work as an influencer watchdog—including her recent expose on sexual assault allegations against David Dobrik's Vlog Squad—they discuss the importance of h

#31 - Alex Zaccaria, Co-founder & CEO of Linktree

Apr 17th, 2021 47m 17s

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#30 - Turner Novak on Substack Pro, Twitter Spaces, and what makes Clubhouse engaging

Mar 23rd, 2021 46m 49s

Li and Nathan spoke to Turner Novak, a former GP at Gelt VC and an omnipresent memelord on Twitter and TikTok. He is currently just vibing while he works on launching something new. He’s deeply insightful about the creator economy, and this con