From his desk in Kickstarter’s Greenpoint office, Taylor Moore got out a pad of Post-its and started making a list of names. It was the fall of 2018, and Kickstarter, then a nine-year-old startup, had built a reputation as a different kind of tech company. Its founders vowed to measure success by the number of creative projects they helped bring to life, not the size of their profits. The company had reincorporated as a “public benefit corporation,” a legal designation that obliged the company leadership to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not just shareholders. But Moore’s list of names was the first step toward another potential distinction: he wanted Kickstarter to be the first white-collar technology workforce to unionize in US history.
Moore, who is also a podcaster, loved working at Kickstarter. “In the early days, there was a rule that you couldn’t hire anyone unless they also had a creative side hustle or significant creative projects,” he…
