'Risks and Challenges'

Back in 2009, when Kickstarter was becoming interesting, I spent hours with Perry Chen, a co-founder and twice the chief executive of the company. His story of why he wanted to start Kickstarter was so moving and so inspiring that I wrote about the company multiple times. Chen was a speaker at one of my events. We had a long chat about the future. I look back at that interview, and not once did I ask the question how things could go wrong for the platform.

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And Kickstarter is one of the good guys. If you look at all the big social platforms and new emergent giants, they all have suffered from their own nearsightedness with regard to how their systems could be manipulated by those with nefarious minds. Social platforms are a reflection of society — after all, they are about people — and though it would be wonderful, society has never managed to operate as one big Kumbaya moment. There are bad people. There are dirty deeds. And that is why you need to build checks and balances early — at the same time that you are building algorithms for hyper growth and are praying at the feet of network effects.

—Om Malik, Kickshitter