Sorry for no new Jawncast this week folks, but hopefully what I’m sharing here will interest you as much as it did me.
I have a huge man-crush on Baratunde Thurston, he’s a Harvard graduate who grew up in Washington D.C. and has gone on to do so much awesome stuff I wouldn’t know where to begin to tell you about it. You should probably just buy his superb book How to Be Black
Anyway, as part of his superb new project Cultivated Wit he has produced a web series called Funded which is about crowdfunding. If you listen to the Jawncast you may know that I have a somewhat tempestuous relationship with the concept of crowdfunding, feeling some people misuse it. My feeling is that crowdfunding is a way to give opportunity to a person, group or organization where there previously where there previously was none. The ones I have been unhappy about are ones where people have leveraged their existing online following to basically get paid for things they used to do for free, or celebrities who have plenty of their own money asking their fans to fund their own vanity project.
Funded is great however because it is inspirational and fascinating to see crowdfunding in action doing cool things. I have embedded the Ouya episode below because I think that one might appeal to the kind of visitor we get here but please, check out all of the episodes! Mr. Thurston is awesome and this show is really something.