Chase Jarvis: If You Want to Define Your Future, Create It
Photographer Chase Jarvis turned his passion for teaching into a thriving business. Images courtesy of CreativeLive.
Chase Jarvis views creativity as a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets. But any creator knows they need more than daily reps to reach their goals. They also need to constantly learn—new skills, ways of working, and career steps they never considered taking, such as the entrepreneurial path.
In this case, Jarvis, a photographer, has evolved from athlete into player-coach. Over the past 10 years, he developed and built CreativeLive, a leading company in the online learning space, into a digital school for creators. To date, more than 10 million people have taken a CreativeLive class, which range from how to sell what you make to Pentagram partner Michael Beirut leading a course on how to design a book. (Sign us up for that last one.)
The pandemic highlighted the importance and popularity of online learning and CreativeLive caught the eye of Fiverr, which recently acquired it to bring more educational courses into their freelance marketplace. Below, Jarvis shares what it was like to build and sell his company, how he evolved from photographer to business owner, and what he sees as the future of the creative career. “We’re at a peak level of transformation and opportunity for creators,” says Jarvis.
What was it like to sell your company?
We've been working on the company for 12 years and we are blue chip venture-backed. When you're in that seat, blue chip investors are going to want their money back and from the beginning, that's part of the equation. That provides an interesting impetus to make sure that when you choose someone for the next chapter of the business, you do so with a particular lens and a very high bar.
Those of us who've been building in this space for more than a decade had a clear and keen understanding that the future of learning is online, but it really took the pandemic for the rest of the world to recognize that online learning is actually a thing.
Everybody recognized the importance of companies like ours. It increased the range of possible outcomes for us. Optionality is always an entrepreneur's best friend. We were able to be focused and particular about who we wanted to spend the next chapter with, and Fiverr rapidly emerged early as that company.
What does Fiverr have that made it an attractive match?
They completed a piece of what I consider this virtuous upward cycle for creators. This cycle includes having a passion and then, in pursuit of that passion, you learn new skills. After that, you put those skills to work ambiguously in the marketplace. You do that over and over and that is something that we've advocated for since the beginning. Now, you can literally take a video editing class one week on CreativeLive, and the next week, you can put your profile up on Fiverr and monetize that skill. The CreativeLive and Fiverr intersection made that virtuous cycle that much tighter.
We also spent a lot of time with CEO Micha Kaufman and Fiverr’s management team and saw their vision. They were very committed.
At CreativeLive, they lean into the concept of putting finance in and around the art.
Take us back to your photography roots. Did you ever envision turning your creative work into a larger business?
There’s a narrative in pop culture that you always have the end in mind when you build something. I have a different approach. I believe that you don't have to see the whole staircase and, if you did have to see the whole staircase with everything in life, you’re basically constantly living in paralysis because the reality is you can only see a couple of steps ahead.
It was with that same energy and vision that we started CreativeLive. Having built a large online audience around my photography career, I knew that people were hungry for the opportunity to pursue their passions, both careers and hobbies. Our first class in 2010 had 50,000 people in it. Our second class had 100,000 people and our third class had 150,000 people. That's when we realized we had a tiger by the tail.
Three or four months in, we knew we wanted to build something with our own community in mind and we had a strong belief that we were going to see this dramatically expand over the next decade.
How did your own career path weave into it?
I dropped out of medical school. I bailed on a career in professional soccer, to become a photographer. That is antithetical to so many cultural norms. My path was different and yet, it somehow felt natural because when you're building something that you love, when you're doing it with a community mindset, and you're willing to explore wherever it takes you rather than having some particular end in mind, it takes the pressure out of the situation. And lucky for us, it expanded much more quickly than we ever thought possible.
Steve Hansen on set for this class on professional food photography.
Everyone has their own unique creative process. What’s yours?
My creative process goes by the moniker IDEA. Imagine is the first phase of any creative project. Design is second. You have to figure out how you're going to do it. Then “E” stands for execute. Finally, you have to amplify your work and put it out there. It's a powerful piece to put your work out there in the world and see that it resonates with some people.
What are some of your learnings around creative entrepreneurs?
Something I was passionate about early on is empowering people to change the narrative around what it meant to be a creator. As an entrepreneur, I found that most people in our community are interested in pursuing their passion, even if they don’t make it a full-time career.
That’s the ability to make the side hustle. Something like 45% of working Americans have a side hustle. When you start to put it together, you realize this is not some sort of obtuse thing. This is going mainstream and you can either be a part of it and help put solutions in place, or you can sit on the sidelines and miss out. We chose to lean into the concept of putting finance in and around the art. It was our goal.
If you want to define your future, the best way is to create it. We looked at ourselves as taking an active role in creating a future where we could dispose of the starving artists' moniker. That's one of the reasons that, from our earliest classes, there was always a business component.
What does the future of the creative career look like?
If our parents had one job, we will have five and the next generation will have five at the same time. It's clear that college is much less relevant because there isn't a college that prepares you to have five jobs at the same time. And that's why, as an add on to the education that already exists, you have to be constantly re-skilling.
Most of the jobs that people are going to have in 10 years don't even exist. That's how fast change in the workplace is happening. That’s exciting because with that change, there is a ton of opportunity.
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