Gadgetory

I'm Alexis Ohanian I started startups invested in them and met amazing people using the internet to change the world our generation has an opportunity unlike any other we can create small empires without anyone's permission the Internet is disrupting so many creative industries right there are startups now helping filmmakers helping musicians but what about artists who want to put stuff on your wall well article here in Flatiron is turning the entire art establishment upside down we are building technology to support artists and to help you discover the artists in your own backyard get that down pat for the last three years we have rented out our artwork from the New York area what if you could decorate your home with art not have to worry if your investment was a big mistake Kimberly Richardson introduces us to a program that lets you rent pieces of art and if you like them you buy the art sickle think of it as Netflix of the art world the new goal is we really want to organize the world's artists artists have been toiling away in secrecy is trying to create like the next big thing to be discovered but really we need to be able to find our artists in our own backyard so that we can connect with them and really enjoy them what they're building their artists all over this country all over this world and some of them might happen to live in you know Tulsa yeah like what is that gonna mean for those communities I think the thing that's really important about that for me is that those artists in Tulsa are afraid to call themselves artists in a lot of cases there's this definition that comes down kind of from up high right now from from museums from galleries from people that are gatekeepers saying you know you have from you of permission to be an artist and we're saying you have permission to be an artist if you want to be an artist one of the really interesting things about this company is that in sort of startup parlance we always talk about how finding the right co-founder is like finding the right partner yeah it's not usually literally your partner as your co-founder however you and Scott have made that work what's one of the most important takeaways from the fact that you two are not only in relationship but also like running a company together it's not something we necessarily recommend to everyone by any means but articles started as a side project and it really evolved from something we're going to work on nights and weekends while we had our day job and we got to figure out our kind of personal dynamic in advance of going out there and saying like let's do this full-time let's hire people let's go raise money and let's make it a company so your daytime job you were at Amex yes what what motivated you to take on this kind of side hustle this this side gig on the nights and weekends right you you had a job that I'm sure was stressing you out like like most full-time jobs do right you come home from work most people the last thing they want to do is think about starting a company but but yet you two made it work what was what was the motivation there so I actually had an interesting situation at Amex and that I had a great first two years and I got myself promoted into a job at all hated and I was getting to see what life was going to look like in that type of large comfort company structure as you moved up the ranks and so it wasn't even kind of being stressed in my day job it was just realizing that I wasn't making things anymore what already been I mean one promotion I was already done making things and so starting article was about building stuff again I'm gonna guess when you told your folks that you know being a nuclear engineer doing this stuff was nice but not as cool as starting a start-up to help empower artists all over the world they were like awesome or for a while they're like okay here on sabbatical so he was a full-time nuclear engineers ing burns on a he was working on a hardware project with a friend on nights and weekend right so he was like I'm working on a sub today and then I don't know what kind of a clan good night it's like no no I don't have enough going on I want to start a hardware company run okay yes there you've got personality type already there um and that have failed pretty miserably and it had kind of gotten him excited about software yeah because the hardware side he was like oh got it there's a lot of roadblocks I'm gonna build software so he was teaching himself out of program realized it wasn't that far from what he did a nose day job I only took one programming class in college a Voyager I was a 101 CS courser it was 101 Java and it was like at the end of the class I knew what a linked list was I was like wow this pretty useless a bunch of a bunch of Java developers right now are shaking their fist yeah all six of them I was moonlighting on a start-up for a couple weeks before I got my job and just working there like going home from nuclear engineering guy strength this startup there they're like you can work for free I was like cool I will work kid and I touched Ruby or these new dynamic languages I was just like oh my god it's like building Legos like it still requires a lot of hours slamming my head against the computer but I'm actually building something and I can show something show something on the screen so quickly and then with the web I realized I could show that to millions of people like I'm just going to look at it all I did was throw out an early idea and say okay well if you're working on something could you start building me an e-commerce site because I want to help support artists and then actually he spent a ton of time on it because I was not learning how to program I'd recruited my ten artists and that he was kind of on his own building out the tech for a while and he got really into the idea and took it to the next level of what if it wasn't just an e-commerce site for artists what if it did more so you're like all right gotta learn rails so I mean are you just going to Google are using like rails for zombies was that your tutorial of course like how I said sadly no that existed those are the very beginning like right now anyone who's watching like rails tutorial comm is amazing project Euler those two resources now can get me started really fast I didn't know about any of those back then I don't think rails tutorial existed then I had a mentor at the start of I was moonlighting at he threw me like the rails to book from like Riley or something that didn't really help once I put down the tutorials just one thing's really starting to work is once you start slamming your head against trying to solve a particular problem doesn't matter what the problem is doesn't matter how important it is but you were going to learn something like doing it the very first thing I had done kind of in my adult life on the web is I had customized my tumblr theme that was your and over again I never liked it and then I added you know then I added some little add widget at one point and they figured out that broke everything and you learn how to fix it um and once Scott kind of explained like what we need to do for the site's gonna be basically what you were doing on your tumblr theme yeah on a different screen okay well that's not that scary I also know that there's a back button like I can just delete it and it goes it's fun it's kind of like you just gotta stick to those hours and when you actually get the fix it's totally a rush of I heard once that there was a heroin addict that started programming that's how he thought of it it's like god I'll get that fixed gonna get that fix finally got it and it totally is like heroin yeah much better for your career exactly you guys have a little bit art here on your walls yeah let's really call some attention at your like favorite one my absolute favorite is actually probably the one above the couch that's the only one here specifically for this space so the rest of these have all recently been printed by someone and it's been returned to us we're hanging on the mythical the artist picks them up which luckily there's always a decent number up but this piece I just love it feels like the energy of New York all the different scenes all right and so who is the artist this is Genevieve Reid and she was a street artist for years and I'm tired of getting the tickets wish I could work on a different medium and started doing really similar work except on wood and on canvas very cool I mean I got a ganache with the fridge Tina started found as you guys had to be so just innovative you just got a hack stuff what's the story this fridge this was a free fridge and we couldn't really turn down a free fridge was it was it like a street fridge it was not a street fridge was coming out of someone's apartment but it was a pretty nasty fridge it was like a like 80s it had been through some better days fridge and so we wanted the free fridge but we wanted it to look a little better and it got a layer of chalkboard paint it's become kind of a project for us we get to draw things on it all the time pretty dance we're here in South Brooklyn not far from Coney Island in a neighborhood called Sheepshead Bay which is probably best known for being home to scores of immigrants from the former Soviet Union probably not the first place you'd expect to find one of the earliest adopters of art school I'm Dan bina I'm an artist of 29 living in Brooklyn New York I grew up in the Midwest I ended up going to the Kansas City Art Institute on a scholarship there are studied painting sculpture woodworking and built furniture and built these two chairs that were sitting in very comfortable chairs thank you you are not a full-time artist right correct and so so what pays the bills to let you you know have this wonderful apartment as well as make your art well I'm a full-time art handler at one of the big auction firms in New York so you know commute into Manhattan and I'm immersed in art history on a daily basis I work with furniture decorative art InDesign paintings you name it and this isn't just art this is high art right this is this is the stuff at auctions for tens of millions tens and hundreds of millions hundreds of millions of dollars okay not six is the great Picasso nude green leaves and bust in 1932 Picasso of monitor is showing on my left and fifty-eight million dollars to stop us 74 million 75 million 81 million 86 million new bidder 87 million 90 million 93 million they're warning now at 93 million dollars last chance see you're stuck 94 million yes 95 million coming back in red at 95 million dollars I'm selling it this time fair warning you all done and selling at 95 million dollars Nick you're better at 95 million dollars but then your nights and weekends you're making art of your own from emerging artists we have all this stuff sitting in our you know closets in our flat files and that's potential income you meet these artists and they're just toiling away working so hard and like really building out their craft in secrecy the artists are making work constantly that's what we do the next question is what does an artist do with all the work that they have I mean New York is notorious first base right it's it's one of our precious commodities so art Sokol has actually given me space to make more work someone asked me once you know what's what's your medium of choice is a painter and like well could be wine could be bourbon could be fear depends on the night yeah but that seems to be what I consume more than pain all right let's drink some bourbon and make smart oh sweet right if more people knew about the process I'm saying I think there'd be more artists maybe some people have mistakenly identified me as an artist because of the digital art that I make right it's a lot easier to make a straight line when you hold shift so this could suck I mean it's it's just like using a mouse except your hand in the art world I think a lot of people refer to the canvas or the paper is like the white dragon you're always trying to slay the white dragon it's like this blank page might be staring at you and you're really intimidated to make a mark yeah and some people just said make a mark and then you could change afterwards what can I do to help your your side of this composition this is a collaboration after all um well if I was being very diplomatic I could say well how would you like to help oh well you don't have to be diplomatic um I I guess you could put the brush down oh man I can already tell you got this kind of like brush swag to what Bob would have called it who's Bob Oh we're also Bros we're on a first-name basis once the images you know to my satisfaction or to our satisfaction thank you well upload it to the article site hmm and then it'll go live I think it's 2013 why why New York this is the art capital of the world this is where all the artists are all artists are flocking to New York to be discovered kind of thing but also just because of how multidisciplinary the city is like walk across the street and meet advertising guides or people like to make a revolution happening and Brooklyn Brooklyn and I it really is just that it actually keeps you really grounded I haven't spent a lot of time in San Fran but the echo chamber is kind of painful we had an investor really early on tell us that they would invest in less if we moved to San Francisco so we actually think about this question who is this can we call out this investor for being ridiculous it would actually sound Idaho we have to go back and look because they wanted in their mind they thought that if we were closer to them they can better help us which was kind I guess yeah but and so we thought about it because we didn't really have an answer yet to why New York I mean at that time we were just getting started other than that we were here but we knew there was more to it and for us why New York is because there is the highest concentration of artists here creating really incredible stuff and it's also the hardest audience I will ever have to deal with because New York has such a clear definition of what art is and what art should be a lot of haters we kind of said to ourselves we can if we can win New York then we have we have this down we can do our anywhere in the world we can work with artists absolutely anywhere if we can get New York artists to not hate us yeah and we have 250 New York artists who love us and work with us every day and we're ready to go to the rest of the world when someone rents something you get a email immediately updated saying you know someone just rented this piece how do you feel the instant you see the photo of someone instagramming you know one of your works of art in their living room it's some Boyer is sick you know it's it's funny there's there's a great sense of honour that comes with that you know when someone says I like this it means something because you're some message has gone through to them and it's some you know in a sense one of the highest rewards you can get as a maker of things there was an instance where one of their collectors bought a painting of mine a pretty substantial painting and it helped me with a lot of issues financially no and so it was just there's a real-life economic impact yeah and this was it was just like it was a Tuesday and all of a sudden you get an email notification exactly and what was that like as you're reading through I mean you sort you jump out of your chair and you give a good holler and you tell you tell my wife and then she gets excited I realized you know we could pay off this credit card yeah yeah you taught yourself CSS HTML you're building out the site you guys have the version that you're just embarrassed enough to launch what did it look like oh gosh was it janky oh yeah it was a theme for us theme we bought for like 20 bucks and check-out didn't actually work we found out the day we launched oh hold on a plane Wanda this is this is so novel there are so many smart people you do that and then end up being offline for sustained periods of time immediately their app we launched the site and got on a plane down to Art Basel down in Miami because we wanted to know what kind of the art elite would think about this thing that we were doing the crowds returning to Art Basel Miami Beach this show is about a 400,000 square foot plus show we basically ended up standing in front of the Convention Center having people ask us where the bathrooms were because we look like we were helping out with the event because and did not get any publicity for the company at all and yeah I did get a call halfway through the first day from somebody because our phone number was on the site so my check out like I'm just having some problems I'm sure it's something I'm doing wrong at which point Scott is sprinting back to the hotel and hoping that he has good enough internet to deploy what's it like the moment when you hear customer cannot complete checkout you freaked out back then because you're new to this it's terrifying and that's really what you need to start building that tolerance for those situations where your heart keeps falling to the floor because it's not you know you're supposed to say you are not your code but for those first few months you really are your code so the site went live in December 2010 it was terrible January spent completely rebuilding it and in March we launched the first version of the rental site and things started to blow up on us yeah that was the first time we talked about it really publicly and the press just kind of snowballed out of control we set up two or three interviews and that turned into something like 40 in the first two weeks that the site was live at that point we had been working in Dogpatch labs for about three months and we could have made some early connections with people and I don't think we didn't really understand PR we didn't really think that there was much strategy beyond there is no sir I do PR isn't you know we talked to a couple people that made this big deal and wanted to do this big exclusive we're like I don't really know how about we just do small stories with three different organizations like okay so you identified here's a journalist at a publication that we dig um and you you open up Gmail and and what what is that silk remember that page look like we had started working on article like the previous summer on the side we started going to meetups we'd started going to events so we knew the reporters at all three at that point personally we'd had drinks with them we had never had anything to ask them for right and so I kind of just called them and said I don't know if this is appropriate or not would you cover this it was really that simple and they said well maybe what would it be so somebody just give us right so you you worked really hard on making something people wanted then you were you treated journalists like human beings and then you were just really honest and asked if it really that simple they're probably some members the team here that we can distract I bet there are let's let's ruin some productivity like we should run Kevin productivity Fuhrman because your puppy is yeah that's your dog's foulness all day long yeah so it looks like I've seen some CSS here yeah as a friend in front of designer um we kind of do everything um just everyone here does the full stat we do says add and stuff we do front end we do all the rails so weird wearing a lots of different ads did you have any jobs before this that bass in the corner over there is actually mine I spent a year at Juilliard oh I was a candidate for master's degree in jazz bass I hated my job I mean I hate a bassist as a bassist when I was playing professionally in New York for like four or five years did all throughout college and when I got there I realized really quickly that it was not there's not thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life so I quit Julliard didn't get my degree just dropped out and started learning to code and I gotta ask what how did your parents react when you told them you were leaving Julliard my dad's a programmer so so he was like it's about time yeah that's funny I'm like we never really had much to talk about so when time came like I'm actually gonna start coding now and it's like I told you you know it shows you showed them this like a long time ago you know as a developer you really can take your pick of where to work right now and probably for the near future why article when I was looking at the job listings and like all the internships almost places that were available arts really set up because we were helping people that were like me when I was working and like struggling New York like playing gigs but at 2:00 a.m. for $50 like there we wish that people were building things for us to support us and to make time for us just focus on being better musicians and rather than like managing all like our business contacts and all these things just make us better creatives do you feel like we're missing out on great artists right now because of how inefficient it is because of you know showing in Chelsea because you got the lucky pole from the right curator to get there absolutely absolutely I think um you know Darger was discovered years after he died he was a famous Chicago based folk artist and now his work has really sought after and he built an entire career almost completely invisible to the rest of the world I mean he was a recluse and he might not have used article but if somebody would have pointed him in that direction had the technology existed we might have seen an entire different career for him this is disrupting and appending something that is been a very long tradition of people who know about art who know art deciding this is art yeah and whatever about that other stuff what do you think the repercussions of that I mean recoup the absolute repercussions will be huge like we are playing on put the crater on top where the really content is king that who the crater is and what they're making it's what matters not what brands or agent is no they selling through or has chosen them and anointed them as fine art you know this isn't going to necessarily support one group of artists versus another artist it's not kind of only the anti-establishment artists everybody needs this everybody needs a way to keep themselves organized and help their work be found by the community and that can happen across all levels of careers from ten dollar pieces to two thousand dollar pieces article is not only helping existing artists it's also helping would-be artists come out of their shell art should be as diverse as the world we live in you don't have to make something that would hang in the MoMA to make something that could hang on someone's wall my little terrifying I just got a sale or touchdown I don't know what happened what are we celebrating it depends sometimes we celebrate big deploys sometimes we celebrate new artists sometimes we celebrate big sales I'm gonna celebrate article and a great shoot of small