Hank Green will gladly take billionaire money for education videos

The Verge · Feb 23, 2026 · Collected from RSS

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Today, I’m talking with Hank Green, a longtime friend of Decoder and the cofounder 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’s 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 had to bring Hank back on to 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.Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here.If you’ve been following the Decoder or The Verge, you know I’ve been obsessed with all that for quite a while. About two years ago, Hank interviewed me for this show, and he and I talked a lot 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 I had to start over again now, The Verge would probably be a YouTube or TikTok channel. But starting a business on those platforms also 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.Where you’ll hear Hank get particularly passionate is when he’s talking about where the money is, where it should be, and what prevents it from going there. Because it turns out there’s a lot of money sloshing around in the world. It’s just maybe not allocated 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 say you’re going to like a lot of episodes, but I promise you’re really going to like this one.This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.Hank Green, you are the often guest host of Decoder. I think you’ve hosted the show more often than I have recently. You are the co-founder and former owner of Complexly. You’re a TikTok superstar. You’re a science communicator. You’re everything. Welcome back to Decoder.Hello. It’s always great to be here. I’m a big fan of your show.I’m happy to have you back. One time you were the guest.Yeah, I have been the guest before, but it was a while ago.Long, long ago you were the guest. Recently, you’ve just been the host of the show. Some of our most popular episodes.You guys did a great job of getting people on with me. Your staff was fantastic at giving me good questions to ask, and then I just tried to charm my way through it.It is plug and play. Almost anyone can do it, which is not a compliment for you [Laughs].No, I’m excited to talk to you. I’m excited to have you as a guest. It was wonderful having you as a guest host while I was out on leave. It was fun to listen to my own show as a listener for once. It’s a very unusual feeling. But I am thrilled to have you as a guest because you have done some of the most Decoder bait stuff in history to talk about, which is perfect.I’m so excited. I was just on another podcast and it was 100 percent just talking about memes and stuff. And I was like, “Can we talk about business, please?”Oh no, I’ve got to delete the memes section. So you and your brother, John [Green], founded this company called Complexly. I want to start at the beginning. People know you. They know John. They know the shows you make. They know your TikTok channel. They know you as internet personalities, people who make things, and creators. Do you think they know Complexly? Is that in the foreground? It’s the company that runs all this stuff.No, not as much as I would like them to. So, usually people know the shows. They know Hank and John, and in addition to that, they know the shows. There are shows we make that have a big audience that we are not involved in and don’t host. But the fact that there’s a thing sitting underneath all of it is a little bit mysterious and also, in a way, almost anachronistic. That’s not how media works anymore. But there is, and I want people to know about it. And I think that’s starting to change.But yeah, it’s over 70 people and we make a lot of different shows. You know SciShow, you know Eons, you know Crash Course, or you know Ask Hank Anything. You might know John Green or you might know Hank Green, but you probably don’t know Complexly. Really, part of my job right now is just to say the word “Complexly” a lot. So, let’s do that [Laughs].This is what I mean about the Decoder bait. So you have a company.There is. It’s true.You’ve had one for quite some time. It’s operated all these things. Over 12 years. Yeah, 15 years.And that company had a structure. I’m going to ask you about how you make decisions. This is going to be great.You recently changed the ownership structure of that company. So you and John founded it, you owned 100 percent of it. Notably, you didn’t take any investment. I think there was a YouTube grant somewhere along the way.There was an early YouTube grant.In that period where YouTube was like, “Does anyone want to make videos? Here’s some money.”Honestly, I think that program is considered a failure internally, but it was extremely successful if you only look at the money given to YouTubers. If you look at the money that they gave to media companies, it was a very bad investment. But if you only look at Rhett & Link, Phil DeFranco, the Fine Brothers, and Hank and John, it turns out a lot of good stuff came out of that.I’m curious about that too. I agree with you, by the way, and Vox Media received some of that money. So it goes. But I agree with you that it kickstarted the creator economy in a very specific way, particularly on YouTube. Complexly was your company. It started with some of that, but that was just a grant. YouTube didn’t have any ownership. It was just you and John owning the whole thing. Now, you’ve turned the company into a nonprofit. That’s a big organizational style and ownership structure switch. Talk about that for one second. What does it mean to be a nonprofit now?I think there’s a big piece of this that is an incentive fee. Ultimately, everything in business is incentive, and there’s always been a bunch of doors open to us that feel very business. “We’ve got to turn this into a freemium product. We’ve got to create a subscription service. We should go over the top.” One of the things that Complexly has is an educational video brand that is used in pretty much every school district in America. I would say probably every school district and probably close to every school.We have a really great relationship with teachers. Teachers love us. Students love us. Administrators don’t know that we exist because it’s free and we don’t have to sell ourselves to anybody. People watch because they want to learn even if they’re not inside of a school. So, we have this thing that we could easily leverage. This is why if you had a normal company, you would turn this into some kind of freemium model, or you would be positioning yourself to sell to an ed tech company, etc. That’s what you’d normally do.We keep not doing that. Honestly, I think it’s held us back from developing some projects because we didn’t want to do things that would lead us too quickly or too aggressively into a business-shaped direction. One of the company’s tenets has always been that the videos should be free for everyone forever. That’s what we keep saying to people. That’s what we say to the staff internally.So, this is really a project about impact, which means two things. One, you’re adding value if you’re reaching more people, so anything that constricts the number of people you reach is decreasing your impact. Then, how much good are you doing with the content? How much value is the content itself delivering? I think that all of our shows are doing that work, and we want to keep them all open. We want to continue competing in the online video space. We don’t want to lock ourselves up or lock teachers into using us because then it’s like, “Oh, we did it. We created the moat. We can invest less in the content, and it can be cheaper to make.” You see this happen with educational media companies.That’s all stuff that we don’t think is a good idea. So, if we’re going to lead it this way in the long term, it can’t just be like, “Hank and John say so.” We have to create an incentive structure that’s like, “Actually, what’s the incentive structure that leads you to always be maximizing the impact rather than the revenue?” That’s really a story that’s more about... If our job is now to sell ourselves to crowdfunding, grants, family foundations, or big granting organizations, what are we going to be selling? We’re not going to be trying to lock people in. The people we’re accountable to now are our audience and they’re people who would like us to deliver value to our audience.I think about that a lot because fundamentally, what we’re talking about here is YouTube. Complexly is mostly organized and centered in the YouTube ecosystem. There are other platforms, and they all have big audiences in different ways. But if you’re going to get value out of one of the videos that we’re talking about, you need to watch the whole thing on YouTube, not 15 pirated clips on TikTok with the vertical lines through it. I’m very curious about that whole economy, but what we’re really talking about here is YouTube.YouTube is just under a lot of pressure all the time in a lot of different ways. It sounds to me like what you’re saying is that we should find other ways to make YouTube videos that aren’t so commercial. Because ev