Hank Green

William Henry Green II was born on May 5, 1980, to Mike and Sydney Green in Birmingham, Alabama, but his family soon moved to Orlando, Florida, where he was raised. Green is of Irish ancestry. He graduated from Winter Park High School in 1998. He then earned a B.S. in biochemistry from Eckerd College in 2002 and a M.S. in environmental studies from the University of Montana. His master's thesis was titled "Of Both Worlds: How the Personal Computer and the Environmental Movement Change Everything".

Throughout high school and college, Green created and designed websites for himself and local clients. His first project, the "Mars Exploration Page", in 1994, experienced minor success on the heels of the Mars Pathfinder Mission. A later website, IHateI4.com, which was about Green's dislike for Interstate 4, a widely unpopular highway among Floridians, brought press from local news channels and the Orlando Sentinel. Green continued as a web developer after moving to Montana for graduate school, focusing on developing websites for educational institutions (including the University of Montana) and environmental nonprofit organizations.

While in graduate school, Green created "EcoGeek", a blog focusing on technological advancements that benefit the environment. Starting as a class project, EcoGeek evolved into a major environmental publication. It caught the attention of Time, where it was described as "porn for hardcore science, tech and enviro freaks". Writing about environmental issues, Green has been published on numerous environmental blogs, including Treehugger.com, Yahoo! Green, The National Geographic Green Guide, Scientific American, The Weather Channel, Planet Green, NPR, and in The New York Times. During the mid-2000s, Green wrote regularly for Mental Floss and co-authored one of their books, Mental Floss: Scatterbrained.

Hank Green resides in Missoula, Montana, with his wife Katherine Green and their son.

Green was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis in 2003. As a child, he was diagnosed with sensory integration dysfunction and ADD. When asked if he considers himself an atheist, he said, "I don't believe there's a God, but I'm not comfortable saying that there is no God." He is bisexual.

In May 2023, Green announced that he had been diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer that affects the lymphatic system. He received letters of encouragement from President Joe Biden and NASA administrator and former Florida Senator Bill Nelson. Three months later, he announced that his oncologist told him in a post-treatment follow-up exam that he is in "complete remission".

In 2007, the brothers introduced an annual charity project, the Project for Awesome (P4A), in which YouTube users take two days, originally in mid-December, to create videos promoting charities or nonprofit organizations of their choice. The amount of money raised has increased every year (with the exception of 2011). In 2021, the event was moved to late February, and a record $2,368,016 was raised.

DFTBA Records (an initialism for "Don't Forget to Be Awesome") is an e-commerce merchandise company co-founded by Green and Alan Lastufka in 2008. Originally a record label, its main focus was music generated by prominent YouTubers, including Green, Dave Days, Charlotte McDonnell, and Molly Lewis. The company now focuses on selling merchandise for prominent YouTubers. DFTBA Records has an independent distribution network. Lastufka said the record label's goal was to provide a distribution network for talented artists of YouTube and to ensure their music reaches the "largest audience possible". On June 19, 2014, Lastufka announced that he had sold his entire stake in the company and resigned as president, to pursue other projects.

VidCon is an annual conference based around online video first held in 2010. The Green brothers founded VidCon in response to the growing online video community. Hank has said, "We wanted to get as much of the online video community together, in one place, in the real world for a weekend. It's a celebration of the community, with performances, concerts, and parties; but it's also a discussion of the explosion in community-based online video." VidCon was acquired by Viacom in 2018.

In 2011, Green created "2-D" glasses, which allow one to watch 3D movies without the 3D effect. The glasses were originally created for those who experience discomfort watching fixed-focus 3D movies. The 2-D glasses consist of either two right or two left lenses from a pair of regular 3D glasses.

After two years of producing Crash Course and SciShow through grants provided by YouTube, the Green brothers decided to find a more sustainable way to fund the projects. In 2013, they launched Subbable, a monthly subscription-based crowdfunding platform similar to Kickstarter that would let subscribers pledge a monthly donation to creators and receive perks in exchange by building up a pledge bank. Among the platform's initial creators and channels were the Green brothers' Crash Course and SciShow, and YouTubers CGP Grey, MinutePhysics and Wheezy Waiter. In the Subbable introduction video, Green said:

The advertising system is so ingrained that there isn't a technological solution, but there might be a cultural solution. Cultural changes need activation energy and they need catalysts. Nerdfighteria has become kind of a pretty powerful force, so I feel like Nerdfighteria can be the activation energy and Subbable could be the catalyst.

In March 2015, Patreon, another subscription-based crowdfunding platform, acquired Subbable and added Subbable's creators into its fold, with the bulk of the acquisition money going to match up to $100,000 in pledges to ease the transition. Although the two companies joining forces had been discussed since their launch, they got serious only after Amazon announced a change in its payment services that would lead Subbable creators to lose subscribers. As part of the deal, the Green brothers received a small portion of Patreon and Hank signed on as an unpaid advisor.

After VidCon's success, Green launched a new conference, NerdCon: Stories, focusing on all types of storytelling media, in 2015. He said, "Stories, of course, are an easy thing to love. They're how we understand the world... how we pass information from person to person. I'm serious when I say that I think stories are a bit part of what makes us human, so when I was thinking of things I wanted to celebrate, that stuck out." The first NerdCon: Stories was held at the Minneapolis Convention Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on October 9–10, 2015. The conference attracted around 3,000 attendees, and featured guests such as Hank and John Green, Patrick Rothfuss, Maureen Johnson, Maggie Stiefvater, John Scalzi, and the Welcome to Night Vale cast and crew, among other storytellers, authors, performers, and musicians. The second NerdCon: Stories returned to the Minneapolis Convention Center on October 14–15, 2016, with many of its original guests.

In 2016, Green's LLC and production company EcoGeek was renamed Complexly (after the phrase "Imagine Others Complexly"). Complexly is the umbrella organization that produces and manages most of Hank's YouTube shows, as well as a number of other shows, podcasts, and projects. Hank was the CEO of the company from its founding until late 2023.

In June 2016, Green founded the Internet Creators Guild (ICG), the first nonprofit organization to represent online creators. After making a video explaining the new YouTube Red service to confused YouTube creators, he realized an organization representing them would better serve their needs. He established the guild as online creators had become common but were not represented by a professional organization as other industries were. He wrote on Medium that the guild's goal was to "increase the number of people in the world who can be create [sic] professionally. It will do that by providing the protection, representation and guidance that, thus far, has been tremendously lacking." The organization received $50,000 from VidCon, and VidCon staffer Laura Chernikoff served as its executive director. Green served on the advisory board alongside Burnie Burns, Akilah Hughes, Casey Neistat, and Louise Pentland. The ICG worked with creators to negotiate with sponsors, platforms, and advertisers, and to communicate with journalists and other creators. It shut down in July 2019. The board of directors said it lacked "a path to financial stability" and "a way to support the staff necessary to continue our mission." It attributed the shutdown to difficulty organizing without a physical presence, as well as a lack of interest, saying, "Creators with big audiences often don’t feel the need for support from a collective voice." Creators such as Lindsay Ellis and Philosophy Tube had criticized the ICG as only raising awareness rather than being held accountable to help its members, but the guild said this was not the cause of its closure.

Political events

In January 2015, Green interviewed President Obama at The White House as part of a group of YouTube creators Google organized to talk to Obama. In September 2022, during the lead-up to the 2022 United States House of Representatives elections in Montana, Green interviewed Democrat Monica Tranel, who ran for Montana's 1st congressional district, in Missoula. He hosted a second event in Bozeman, Montana, in October, though he did not explicitly endorse Tranel. In May 2024, he interviewed United States Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.