From what I understand @Eastblock and @L_Mariachi, the original genesis of Kickstarter was them wanting to launch a conference like XOXO, but needing to pre-sell the tickets before fully putting together the speakers, the venue, and all the other logistical stuff.
If you’ve ever put on a conference, it is rather nightmarish to realize you don’t have enough ticket sales to justify all the stuff you’ve already spent tons of money on. We had to cancel a giant conference for Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange (DevDays 2011) for this very reason.
