Sam Yam & Jack Conte, Patreon Founders — SF Portrait
.Patreon and the Creator Economy
Sam Yam and Jack Conte founded Patreon in 2013 after Jack — a musician and one half of the YouTube duo Pomplamoose — realized that a video with millions of views generated almost nothing in direct income for the people who made it. The platform they built together allows creators of all kinds — musicians, writers, podcasters, visual artists, videographers — to earn recurring income directly from the people who value their work, without an algorithm or an advertising middleman in between.
Today Patreon processes billions of dollars in creator earnings and is one of the defining infrastructure companies of the creator economy. Sam Yam, who handles the engineering and product side of the business, and Jack Conte, who serves as CEO and remains an active musician, are both Stanford alumni — which is how Marc Olivier Le Blanc came to photograph them for Stanford Magazine's feature on the company.
. Shooting for Stanford Magazine
The session was shot at the Patreon office in SoMa, San Francisco, for Stanford magazine. As an editorial portrait photographer working regularly for alumni publications — Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins — Marc Olivier Le Blanc approaches these assignments with a clear brief: make a portrait that communicates the intelligence and energy of the subject in a single frame, and that works both on screen and in print.
Two subjects in the same frame is always a compositional challenge. The dynamic between Sam and Jack — the engineer and the artist, the behind-the-scenes builder and the front-facing creative — had to come through in the body language as much as in the expressions. The portraits were shot on location using available light supplemented with a single portable strobe.
. Editorial Portraits of Tech Founders in San Francisco
Marc Olivier Le Blanc is a professional photographer and editorial portrait photographer based in San Francisco, working regularly with technology founders, executives, and public figures across the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. His portraits of tech founders have been published in Stanford Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, and Business Insider.
For editorial or corporate portrait photography in San Francisco, contact us through the website to discuss your project.
