Every illustration/Fast Company.

How Yancey Strickler ‘Scrolls’ Offline

The Kickstarter and Metalabel cofounder just needs butcher paper to work through ideas

Feb 7, 2025 · 9 min readUpdated Dec 17, 2025

Kickstarter cofounder Yancey Strickler wants you to think for yourself.

When Every last spoke to Strickler in 2020, he told us how he wrote his book This Could Be Our Future by logging off, shutting off his computer, and covering his Chinatown apartment walls with Post-it notes.

Five years later, he’s back working on another startup— Metalabel, a collaborative platform for making and publishing creative work. And, he told us, he’s still finding ways to “intentionally work in offline ways.”

We caught up with Strickler about Metalabel, his online and offline work, and why he uses a physical scroll to think through ideas. We also discussed his evolving views on generative AI, what it’s good for, and how over-reliance can hinder real creative thought.

Key Discussion Points

• How working offline intentionally can unlock creativity
• Strickler's evolution from wanting to "shut (AI) all down" to cautious positivity
• Metalabel's structure as a "heterarchy"

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