Kickstarter’s CEO is championing human creativity in a flood of AI

In today’s CEO Daily: AI is a catalyst and challenge in the creator space.

The big leadership story: Tech stocks take a beating.

The markets: A sea of red globally as U.S. stocks look set for a rebound.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. Is Gen Z helping to create an economy of affection here in the U.S.? I first heard that term as a student at the University of Nairobi, when a classmate had to host a relative stranger in her apartment for two months because this person came from her village. As she explained to me, that’s just what you did. In a society without deep pockets, social programs, or job security, the bonds of community, kinship, religion, and tribe created a network of support.

My son, 25, calls it the friendship economy: he’ll buy t-shirts and go to concerts for a friend in music, help with another friend’s startup or movie, or sometimes throw a little money into various projects through some peer-to-peer platform. As AI and an anemic job market spark anxiety about traditional career paths, entrepreneurial and creative pursuits—sometimes funded by one’s social network—become more attractive. Goldman Sachs projects the number of creators to grow from 67 million to 107 million by 2030 and the creator economy to generate half a trillion dollars by next year.

I recently spoke with Kickstarter CEO Everette Taylor about how these trends are playing out on his crowdsourcing platform, which enabled more than 24 million backers to spend close to $9 billion in funding 277,302 projects as of April 2025, creating more than 1 million jobs. (Kickstarter launched in 2009 and became........

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