Chen, Perry

Perry Chen, (born 1976, New York City, New York, U.S.), American entrepreneur who created and cofounded Kickstarter, an Internet company that specialized in providing financial support for philanthropic and artistic endeavours by linking project leaders with a vast online community of investors.

Chen was raised on Roosevelt Island in New York City by his father, who was a schoolteacher, and his mother, who was a social worker. He attended Tulane University in New Orleans and received a bachelor’s degree from the university’s Freeman School of Business in 1998. Between 1998 and 2009, he held a number of jobs, including day trader, disc jockey, waiter, preschool teacher, and electronic musician. In 2000, Chen cofounded the Southfirst art gallery in Brooklyn.

In late 2001, Chen was living in New Orleans and working as a musician. After experiencing difficulty in getting two Austrian disc jockeys and venue management to commit to a performance without money up front, he developed an idea to connect investors with artists and musicians that would enable the latter to produce, develop, and promote their work. He imagined a process whereby audience members could pledge money to see a performance. If enough money was pledged (an amount sufficient to cover the production costs of the performance), audience members would be charged and the show would take place.

Chen realized that idea when in 2009 he founded and launched Kickstarter with American media editor Yancey Stricker and American Web designer Charles Adler. Kickstarter quickly became the largest Web site devoted to crowdfunding. Instead of relying on a limited number of wealthy investors, Kickstarter leveraged crowdfunding, in which large numbers of smaller investors—some contributing as little as $1—assisted projects in achieving their funding goals. The company generated its revenue by assessing a fee of 5 percent from projects that reached or surpassed their funding targets. Projects that did not meet their funding goals within a specified time period did not receive any money pledged to them, and they were not subjected to the fee.

Chen served as Kickstarter’s chief executive officer from its founding. By 2020 the company had funded more than a hundred thousand projects from investor donations totaling several billion dollars. The projects ranged from helping individual artists and musicians complete and promote their work to covering the development and production costs of an independent film or a video-gaming system.