Hank and John Green
Co-founders, Complexly. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderauthorhostentertainerhankandjohn.com ↗
Hank and John Green created the YouTube channel Vlogbrothers, co-founded the VidCon convention, and built the educational studio Complexly. John has authored novels including The Fault in Our Stars, while Hank is an author and science communicator.
1shows
1appearances
28statements
5resolved
5supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Hank and John Green said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Online video is a cultural shift equivalent to the printing press
“This isn't like TV. This is like the printing press.”
Complexly's catalog lacks acquisition value because it can never be paywalled
“So obviously I think that there's a lot of value that it creates, but I don't know that it's that valuable because you can't pay wallet. Right. Because that's outside of the promise that has been made. All of the content is free. So it's creating the value, bu…”
Hank Green: Luck is structural advantage rather than random chance
“Luck is not like rolling dice. It's a series of structures and power systems That make paths easier for certain people.”
John Green: Flawed books make storytelling mechanics easier to analyze
“The thing about books that aren't that good is you can see the strings of the puppets a little easier.”
Green: Early YouTube creators were driven by peer connection, not money
“YouTube was very much that way, where there, it was very experimental, and the thing that was driving people forward was impressing their peers, and connecting with people, and having a good time.”
Optimizing for views and revenue ultimately harms the health of your community
“Optimizing for views is And optimizing for revenue does not optimize for the health of one's community, necessarily.”
Earnestness is the most underrated quality in contemporary human experience
“Earnestness is the most underrated thing in contemporary experience, I think.”
YouTube gave Crash Course a $450,000 advance without taking IP ownership
“Yeah, I think they gave us 450,000 dollars. Yep, that is right... So it's sort of an advance against advertising royalty. So they recouped via advertising revenue, but we got to own the IP.”
Green Brothers: Businesses Always Capture Only a Minority of the Value They Create
“What your actual business is, is creation of value. And that there's always a majority of that value that isn't being captured by you. It's being captured elsewhere.”
Hank Green: Vast majority of creators make under $15 per hour
“The vast majority of people who are working really hard to make interesting content that entertains people, or educates people, or captures people's attention, are making less than, you know, 15 dollars an hour or something.”
Hank Green: Tens of thousands of creators can earn middle-class incomes with better monetization
“And so our interest is really in those tens of thousands of creators who will be on that journey if only we have better monetization tools.”
Creator careers resemble professional athletics: short lifespans with no post-career support
“You know, it, it's almost like a career as a professional athlete. It lasts a couple or three years and then you're 30 years old and you've only ever Done one thing, and you, it's hard to figure out what to do next.”
A sock subscription is by far the Green brothers' most successful venture
“It's by far the most successful thing we've ever done. It's true.”
John Green: Maximizing output and doing good at all costs is unsustainable
“I'm alive to do as much good as I can as fast as I can for as long as I can. And man, that is not a, that's not a sustainable strategy. It's not a good way to live a life.”
Vlogbrothers produced 200 videos before reaching 200 YouTube subscribers
“I mean, we, we'd made 200 videos before we had our 200th YouTube subscriber.”
Hank Green: Vlogbrothers reached 70,000 to 80,000 subscribers by late 2008
“And then by late 2008, we were at 70 or 80,000. Which was, you know, one of the bigger channels on YouTube.”
All Green brothers' ventures have been bootstrapped and profitable from inception
“We've never taken on substantial investment for any of our things. Everything that we do has been profitable from the beginning. It's grown with its own, I guess they call it bootstrapped where you take the profit and use that to grow the company rather than t…”
Green: YouTube refused to sponsor the inaugural VidCon in 2010
“Yeah, I mean, we were on the phone with you two telling them what sponsorship number we thought made sense, and. And they were telling us, no, we will not sponsor this janky convention.”
Green: A $20K Cisco sponsorship made the first VidCon profitable
“I remember the actual difference between making money and not making money that first year was that I said on a Vlogbrothers video, if anybody knows anybody who would like to sponsor an online video convention, please email me. And the daughter of an executive…”
Green Brothers: Advertising Is Complexly's Main Revenue, Supported By Grants and Crowdfunding
“That's definitely the biggest piece of the pie. And then the rest is crowdfunding and grants. So organizations that are like, hey, you're making this and you're making it for free. Like, we'd like you to make an episode, like a series on this particular topic,…”
DFTBA is a $25 million company operating on very narrow margins
“So you can say that DFTBA is a, I don't know, twenty five million dollar company, but a lot of that money is going back. And it's very narrow margin business, as is complexly.”
John Green takes a $27,000 annual salary from his multi-million-dollar businesses
“I think I make 27,000 dollars a year. Yeah, John takes a very small salary.”
John Green: My writing process requires deleting almost the entire draft
“I have a very inefficient process in the sense that I write a draft, and then I delete almost all of it, and that's the only way I know how to write a story.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Hank's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-founders, Complexly | 1 | 28 | 100% 5/5 | full record on How I Built This → |