Some quips

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Last week, Patreon cofounder and CTO Sam Yam announced on X that he's leaving the company he helped build over 13 years to lead OpenAI's new Creator Product division. He's bringing two Patreon execs along with him: Drew Rowny (SVP of Product) and Shannon Ma (Head of Engineering).

I find this interesting for a lot of reasons. Let’s start with OpenAI.

When you have seemingly unlimited capital and some of the world's brightest minds, everything starts to look like a nail. On top of frontier models, OpenAI has been busy launching consumer apps, a social network, a web browser, data centers, custom chips, hardware devices, a media network, and a whole lot more.

Earlier this year they broke the media world (and aroused podcasters everywhere) with their reported nine-figure acquisition of TBPN. You can thank them for the litany of knock-off streaming shows flooding your feeds these days.

But it turns out that focus still counts for something. While OpenAI was busy building a consumer video app so I could create hyper-realistic videos of myself as a 49ers wide receiver, Anthropic began to eat their lunch.

Anthropic has stayed laser-focused on building the best coding model and selling it to enterprises… and their revenue ramp is every founder’s wet dream. Their revenue run rate has climbed from $9B to $65B in seven months (~7x), and is reportedly on pace to top $100B this year.

And they passed OpenAI in both revenue run rate and business adoption earlier this year.

Sam Altman declared a "code red" in December. Three months later, OpenAI's CEO of Applications told staff they "cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests." Within months, they shut down their web browser (Atlas), their social video app (Sora), and in-chat shopping (Instant Checkout).

So to a lot of people, investing in a creator product probably looks like yet another distraction. If I remove my bias and put on my business analyst hat, I might even agree.

But I could also squint and make sense of it.

There used to be a time when you'd visit CNN for news, Expedia for travel, Yelp for reviews, and Google for everything else. Now, more and more consumers start and end their journey in an AI client like ChatGPT.

OpenAI has already scraped and indexed most of the open internet, published books, and everything in between. Their blind spot is creator-generated content: the stuff that lives on closed social platforms that block their crawlers, behind paywalls, and in inboxes (shoutout newsletters).

Meanwhile, the creator economy is exploding with niche, high-value content, ranging from local restaurant reviews to LEGO Castle news (real example). Access to that content could become a real differentiator for OpenAI's models.

But it’s not just about training data. Creators and publishers are increasingly anxious about their content being used without compensation. Winning them over with distribution and monetization could ease those concerns.

And for consumers, being able to read creator content without ever leaving OpenAI pushes ChatGPT one step closer to the super intelligent super app: the only destination you'll ever need for information and entertainment.

Anyway, we won’t need to hypothesize for long. Yam said they'll tease their first creator products at OpenAI's DevDay (which is today).

As someone who’s super bullish on the creator economy, and recently proclaimed that it is the future of media, I find OpenAI’s interest in the space rather validating. Whether it’s ultimately a distraction or a stroke of genius is above my pay grade, but I’m excited to see what they launch.

All that said, OpenAI hiring a trio of Patreon's leaders says a whole lot more about the company they left than the one they joined. It's rarely a good sign when a cofounder bails on their own company.

And it comes just two months after Patreon laid off 20% of its staff. Related: our team hears from hundreds of frustrated Patreon users every single week.

Feeling the pressure from Substack's rise over the past several years, Patreon did what any uninspired company without a real product vision would do — copy them. Late last year, they launched a newsfeed of "Quips" to mirror Substack Notes.

Raise your hand if you’ve Quipped lately.

I've been openly critical of companies trying to build the next consumer social app (it’s not going to work). Let’s check in on how Bluesky and Mastodon are doing.

Here, let me zoom in a little to help.

The only exception has been Threads, which has two unfair advantages: access to the nearly 4B people who use Meta's apps, and nonstop promotion within the native Instagram app.

I've said it since the day Substack Notes launched: it’s never going to reach true scale. And Patreon’s bootleg version sure as hell won’t either.

What's keeping Patreon afloat is one of the most nefarious and under-reported realities of the creator economy: its creators can't leave. If you've built a business on Patreon with paying members (aka patrons), you literally cannot migrate off the platform and take those subscriptions with you.

That's platform lock-in, and it's unambiguously one of the least creator-friendly things a company can do. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Of course, I'd prefer beehiiv users never leave. But it’s important to note that they can. And they can take their content, audience, subscriptions, and data along with them. That was a very intentional choice.

I've written extensively about data portability. Put simply, it's the difference between renting your audience and owning it. It's your ability to take your audience and paying subscribers with you if you ever decide to leave a platform.

And it's as pro-creator as it gets. Creators who own their audience outright and can choose their platform have the best shot at long-term success.

Let's make this real.

Say you run a paid podcast on Patreon. A few thousand listeners pay you every month for bonus episodes and an ad-free feed. It's not a side project… it's your rent.

Patreon takes 10% of every dollar you earn, plus payment processing. And Apple takes another 30% if a fan subscribes through Patreon's iPhone app.

Then Patreon lays off 20% of its staff.

Two months later, its cofounder and CTO walks out the door and takes two of Patreon's top product and engineering leaders with him.

Meanwhile, the company's roadmap is built around Quips, Clips, and a TikTok-style discovery feed (read: the next Mastodon). Not your private RSS feed. Not your listener analytics. Not the tools your business actually runs on.

In a functioning market, you'd shrug and move somewhere better. That's the whole point of competition, and exactly what data portability is for.

But you can't, because your listeners' payment info belongs to Patreon, not you. To leave, you'd have to email every paying subscriber, convince them to cancel, then convince them to sign up again somewhere new and re-enter their card.

So you're stuck. And that's the reality for far too many creators, trapped on platforms that put themselves ahead of the creators who made them what they are.

But like I said above — it doesn't have to be that way. I believe the future of the creator economy is open, with no take rates and no platform lock-in. The old guard got away with it for years because nobody offered a better alternative. That's no longer the case.

Patreon may have been one of the early pioneers of the creator economy, but I think its best days are behind it.

Clearly, its leadership team agrees.

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