Hank Green

Hello and welcome to Decoder.

I'm Eli Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.

Today I'm talking with Hank Green, a longtime friend of Decoder and the co-founder and now former owner of Complexly, an online education company he started with his brother John in 2012.

I say former owner because Hank and John have just converted Complexly into a nonprofit and given up their ownership of the company in the process.

That is some of the purest decoder bait that ever was, because it's all about how you structure a company and how you make decisions about changing that structure.

So of course, I asked Hank to come on the show and talk all about it.

But in addition to being pure decoder bait, the story of Complexly is also about media and how any of us can look at the internet and video landscape of 2026 and

try to do something meaningful and ethical with it, while still growing an audience and making enough money to survive.

If you've been following Decoder or The Verge, you know that I've been obsessed with all that for quite a while.

About two years ago, Hank interviewed me on this show, and he and I talked a lot back then about why I call The Verge the last website on Earth, and how video has really taken over the world.

Regular Decoder listeners have also heard me tell a whole lot of CEOs and media executives that if we were starting The Verge over right now, we'd probably be a YouTube channel or maybe a TikTok channel.

But starting a business on those platforms means giving up a lot of control over your distribution.

And Hank and I spent a lot of time talking about that in this episode.

What you're going to hear Hank get particularly passionate about is where the money is, where it should be, and what prevents it from getting there.

Because it turns out that there's a whole lot of money sloshing around the world.

And it's just maybe not going to the people who are doing the work.

This was a really fiery conversation.

Hank was really animated for a lot of it.

I know I'm always saying you're going to like the episodes, but I promise you are going to really like this episode.

Okay, Hank Green, former owner of Complexly.