Rik Lomas: The Future of Creativity is Collaborative

Rik Lomas has seen the creative community move toward a default of learning and sharing among peers. Images courtesy of NewDealDesign

With students from over 90 countries and team members who span nine time zones, SuperHi founder Rik Lomas has a unique global view on the creator community in 2022. It’s multi-disciplinary, has traded in secrecy for collaboration, and is much more focused on empowering members to fulfill their creative goals without making sacrifices to their personal lives or burning out.

To expand the mission of helping creative people get ahead in their careers, SuperHi recently introduced a new idea: a universal basic income program that was launched by raising a $4.9 million Series A, led by one of the largest VCs in the decentralized finance industry, Framework Ventures, and Design Fund, among others. SuperHi’s Basic Income program includes $1,000/month, a free laptop and access to all their online courses, given out to seven recipients who can use the money on any creative need.

Below, Lomas discusses the future of the creative career, the thinking behind SuperHi’s universal basic income model, and why the four-day workweek makes so much sense for the creator community.

These are just some of the sites SuperHi alum have created, including the one for Kylie Jenner’s swimsuit line (far left).

What does the future of the creative career look like?

If you read the tweets of most VC or Web3 nerds you’d think that the future of work is something like gig work, where you’re working on several projects at once, but having spoken to plenty of creatives in the SuperHi community and seeing applications for SuperHi Basic Income, most people want to work fully on something they give a sh*t about.

The lack of a safety net to fall back on is a major problem for many creatives wanting to achieve their goals, so I treated SuperHi Basic Income as a science test to see if that could change. Are people more likely to try their goals with $1,000 a month for six months, a laptop, and educational resources? If not, it proves me wrong, but after three months into it, we’ve already seen very positive results—like one recipient who has already started educating two students on filmmaking and photography.

What sparked your idea to introduce a universal basic income for creators? 

At SuperHi, we’ve given out scholarships and we’ve seen those been life changing for people. We’ve also seen a range of people at this point in their careers where they couldn't do things they want in their career due to the financial part. So it came from an experiment around how we might help people in their careers from an educational and financial standpoint. 

What would the best scholarship in the world with a stipend to learn and create look like? The more we worked on it, the more it resembled universal basic income. We didn't call it universal in the end because we had a limited pool of what we wanted to spend. We had 22,000 people apply for it in the end, and we only had seven stipends to give. There is a big need for this kind of thing. I know people who've moved from cities because the price is too expensive for them to change jobs and be a freelancer there. That’s such a drastic thing for you to do to try to make your career. Why should you have to move out of the city that you love living in to make the career you want? That tradeoff feels odd.

Tell us about some of the people who received the money and what they are using it for. 

One of our winners lives and works in Mozambique and he has used the money to buy cameras and set up a photography mentorship program to help local photographers in the area. That’s really interesting because we didn’t expect someone to apply and use the money on a program for others. 

Then there was someone from San Juan, Puerto Rico, who distributed the money throughout his local creative community, to give it out to people who needed it. They knew people who needed it and gave 10 people $100/month. 

More good looking sites designed by SuperHi alum.

While building SuperHi, what have you learned about building a business while building a business?

This might be a huge cliché, but hiring people who are better than you at the tasks you’re not as good at was a big lesson. Maybe it’s a mix of ego and being scared to hand over work, but for a long time I felt like I could do all parts of the business passably—probably somewhat of a bootstrapping / scarcity mindset in our early stages—but that ended up with me being a roadblock and gatekeeper for too many areas of the business and it was impacting productivity. 

We hired some really good people who, of course, are much better than I am at their expertise and in turn, it’s helped speed the whole business up.

You’ve been an early adopter to the four-day workweek. What impact has it had on your team? 

We’ve found that our employees feel much healthier and focused. The work we do is particularly intensive and requires creative problem-solving, rather than a continuous, repetitive output.

People assume that doing the four-day work week would mean that it’s an easy working life, but similar to an athlete, it lets us work harder without burning out.

What does “creativity” in 2022 look like?

My hope for the creative field is that it keeps being open towards sharing and collaboration. When I started in the creative industry in 2005, it felt like there was a guarding of secrets and techniques, but I feel like this has changed over the years with a move toward a default of sharing and learning between peers. We’re going from a competitive industry toward a collaborative one.

If you’d like to read more from The Creative Factor—such as Morten Bonde’s story about reinventing himself as a LEGO Art Director while losing his sight or Edése Doret: Inside the Mind-Boggling World of Private Jet Design—sign up for our newsletter.