Growing up in downtown Richmond, Virginia, Everett Taylor was surrounded by gang violence, prostitution, drug dealing, and little exposure to traditional signs of success. Wealth was an abstract idea to him, something he understood primarily as a way out. But he struggled to see himself reflected in the models of success of his generation.
“I was a black kid from the inner city, and I didn’t feel like I had anything in common with Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg,” Taylor told the Observer in an April interview.
But the urgent need to change his circumstances took hold early. He started working when he was 14, after his mother, a janitor, found drugs in his bedroom and forced him to get a job. During high school, he experienced homelessness, an experience that would profoundly shape his worldview and entrepreneurial motivations.
“It really showed me what it’s like to have nothing, but it also added a lot of compassion into my life to also be with others who don’t have anything,” he said. “That’s why I’m so passionate about creating opportunities. A lot of people who are homeless or living in poverty don’t have that opportunity.”
Ultimately, he found inspiration in Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter, whose dual identity as artist and businessman resonated closely.
“I remember seeing him on the cover of a magazine The black establishment“I saw someone who was a creative and smart businessman as well,” Taylor said. “Seeing him make the music he loved and build himself into a billionaire was very inspiring.”
Taylor’s path will follow this hybrid model. He dropped out of college during his sophomore year to launch his first company, EZ Event, a ticket sales platform that grew out of a concert promotion company he co-founded with two of his college friends. After selling the company a few years later, he briefly returned to school, only to leave again, this time for Silicon Valley.
By his mid-twenties, Taylor had built a reputation as an executive who knew how to grow his startup business quickly. At the age of 25, he became CMO of Sticker Mule and then CMO of Qualaroo. He has co-founded several startups, including PopSocial, which he sold for $28, marking his most successful exit.
In 2019, he launched ArtX, a platform designed to support emerging artists, and moved to New York. That same year, he joined online arts marketplace Artsy as chief marketing officer, his first role at an established company.
“I’ve had these small wins with startups, but Artsy was the first really established company that gave me an opportunity to be part of the C-suite when I was only 29,” he said. “It was a huge game-changer, because it gave me the credibility needed to build a truly global, international company at scale.”
At Artsy, Taylor helped increase revenue by 150 percent in one year. In April 2022, he was named one of Forbes Magazine’s Top 50 Entrepreneurial CMOs. suffix Financial Times file Its visibility increased further, and it caught the attention of Kickstarter.
When Taylor was approached to lead the crowdfunding platform in 2022, the company was struggling. Revenues were declining roughly 20 percent annually, and Kickstarter was steadily losing ground to rival Indiegogo.
Taylor’s strategy focused on refocusing Kickstarter around its core strength: community-driven discovery. Unlike traditional fundraising platforms, Kickstarter does not rely on equity funding. Instead, it allows creators to raise money directly from backers. The platform makes money from a 5 percent commission on the funds raised and payment processing fees.
Taylor relied on what he described as “matching niche projects with niche backers” by prioritizing quality, curation, and creative storytelling over growth at scale at all costs. The overlap between creators and supporters (many users participate in both) has become a key feature in reconstructing network effects. It also doubled down on Kickstarter’s identity as a creative ecosystem rather than a transactional marketplace, investing in tools and programming that help creators build audiences, not just raise money.
Since Taylor took over, Kickstarter has regained its dominance in its category, capturing an estimated 98 percent of Indiegogo’s market share, according to Taylor. In 2025, the company announced a 50 percent year-on-year growth in revenue.
For Taylor, the mission is also deeply personal. Having built his own companies without venture capital, he remains keenly aware of the structural barriers facing underrepresented founders.
“I’ve never tried that [raise venture capital]. “I knew what it was like to be a black founder,” he said. “So I focused on building companies where I could become profitable very quickly. I didn’t pursue the biggest ideas because I didn’t feel like I would get funding.
“I started my first company almost 20 years ago. I don’t feel like things are much better than they were then,” he added. Black founders received only approx 0.4% of US venture capital in 2024, down sharply from its peak of 1.3 percent in 2021.
Taylor sees Kickstarter as an alternative funding path that is less restricted by traditional gatekeepers. “We want to make sure you know that founders have the opportunity to succeed on our platform, regardless of their background,” he said.
This commitment also extends internally. Today, all six members of Kickstarter’s executive team are people of color, and half of them are women.
