In October, Reddit announced Formative, a web series that tells the stories of well-known entrepreneurs. About six weeks later, the first episode of the series arrived, with business owner, YouTube star, and filmmaker Casey Neistat taking center stage.
When Formative was first revealed, Reddit invited its users to list any entrepreneurs who they felt were worthy of a profile in one of the series’ episodes. The responses were collected in a single thread, and users upvoted their favorite choices to the top. Neistat received more love than almost any other entrepreneur, with only Elon Musk receiving more upvotes.
As the user suggestions began to take shape, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian explained that Musk would be a tricky guy to get a hold of, and so Neistat’s story became a logical starting point for Formative. The 34-year-old Neistat doesn’t have a typical YouTube origin story; instead, his early life includes a teenage pregnancy, a job as a dishwasher, and a one-way train ticket to New York City. Now, he has more than one million subscribers on YouTube and his own social media startup, Beme.
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Formative, which is sponsored by the Google Cloud Platform, joins Reddit’s other recent forays into the world of original programming. The “front page of the Internet” has also produced a series called Cyborg Nation as well as video versions of some of its “Ask Me Anything” threads. Formative is the company’s most polished and crisply-edited video work to date, and if the other entrepreneurs have stories that are anywhere near as interesting as Neistat’s, the series will be worth following. You can check it out (and watch some behind-the-scenes videos) on its official subreddit.
