Creators --

Today my cofounder, Sam Yam, announced to our team that he's leaving Patreon after 13 years. Sam and I met in college. We were roommates:

A few years after graduating, he was my first phone call when I started sketching out an idea for a new website I wanted to build. We met at a coffee shop, and I showed him the drawings.

Sam was so excited he started building it that night. He had infinite energy, infinite ambition, and infinite enthusiasm.

I created a google doc to brainstorm a name. We chose "Patreon" about an hour later and bought the domain on godaddy for $10.17 per year.

Here he is, 13 years ago, working on the initial codebase:

Within 2 and a half months, he had built a completely functional first version of the site, and on May 7th, 2013, we launched Patreon.com.

Our first office was a 2-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. Sam and I lived there. This was a morning meeting, right when we moved in, before we even bought desks:

That spot got us up to 12 teammates. It was crowded and messy.

Sam was the only engineer, but we were getting thousands of emails from creators asking for bug fixes and new features. He would sleep, wake up and code, nap for 20 minutes, wake up and write a new feature and ship it, nap for a few minutes, and on and on.

He did that for 9 months straight, around the clock, before we even hired a second engineer.

I have infinite gratitude for Sam. He gave 100% of himself to bring Patreon into existence.

13 years later, fans have paid creators over $10 billion on Patreon, and creators continue to earn over $2B per year.

If you're a creator reading this, would you please give Sam love in the comments below? Maybe tell him how you've benefited from his work? I want to make sure he can really feel the impact he's had on people's lives as he closes one door and opens the next.