How GoFundMe became America's backup plan

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28:15Nilay Patel:we're back with gofundme ceo tim cadogan discussing the complex nature of online fundraising customers are really interesting word there you've kind of brought me to the decoder questions quite naturally well done but i want to just ask about customers i understand that on the pro side the customers are big non-profits that probably feels more like a traditional sas business in some way But on the consumer side and the individual side, who's the customer? Is it the person raising the funds? Is the person paying the money? How do you evaluate that? Both. They are both our customer. We start with the person asking for help because they are the source of everything.

28:53And the paradox of help is that it's really hard to ask for help. And when we helping feels great. So I do a thing. I'm talking at a conference. Sometimes I'll ask a little question. I'll say, hey, who in the room likes helping? Everyone's hand goes up, right? Then I say, who here likes asking for help? And usually less than 10 % of the room put their hand up. And then I say, who, that's awesome. Who of you likes asking for help in public? And most of those people put their hands down. We don't like it. And this is not a cultural thing. it's a human thing. We don't like asking for help, but the paradox is for help to flow, someone has to ask.

29:39Because also, we've always all been in that situation where we think our friend needs some help, or a relative, or a child, heaven forbid, and we say, you know, I want to help you with this, but they haven't asked. Often doesn't work. It's awkward, right? can be resisted. But when someone has asked for help and had the courage to do that, they open this door and then the goodness flows in and then the experience flows. So we start with, how do we help people? We know there are so many people who are considering asking for help, but they are inhibited by many emotional factors, societal factors, sense of like, can I do this?

30:23How would I do this? I've never done before. What do my friends that could be all of these different things. So a lot of our work and the smart fundraising coach is geared to help with those problems. So that's the first set of things. And then it's like, okay, how do we give them a great experience? And then how do we give the people who want to come in and help a great experience of helping their friend, their family member, or their local nonprofit, and then also give them other experiences on top. Like, hey, you did a great thing here and that felt great. Would you like to do more? How do we connect you into other experiences where maybe the friend of a friend or maybe there's another local nonprofit or fundraiser in your area that you would like to help with?

31:10So doing more on that. So we think of both as a custom.

31:14Nilay Patel:I'm curious on that. I want to push on the sort of redistribution aspect that you're describing. There might be more people to help, right? That's a fascinating concept. you mentioned EgoFundMe is 850 people. How is that structured? Yeah, so we, as I mentioned, we have one mission, two approaches. So we are here to help people fundraise successfully and get help. We do that for consumers and we do that for nonprofit organizations. The latter is called Pro. Our company is organized largely functionally. So about half the company is in product technology, design data science. That's the biggest chunk.

31:56Then the rest of the company is focused on how do we support the people using our platform? So that's customer care, trust and safety, risk and compliance, you're making sure the money is moving in the right way. And then operations. And then of course, our go to market, which is our relatively small sales team reaching out to nonprofits, marketing, and really important part for us is our communications team, because a lot of what we do, which is very unusual, is we invest heavily in taking our customers' stories and getting them attention in the local, national, international media. That's a very important part of the service we provide to them.

32:38And it also builds awareness of GoFundMe, because what we're trying to do is show more and more people that you can do this too, right? That help works. And this is a powerful way to do it in the digital world. So that's roughly how we're structured.

32:50Nilay Patel:That communications piece is really interesting to me. It sort of tracks intuitively that if you started GoFundMe, you want a lot of people to see it. Yes. Right. There's some fractional percentage of all the people who have ever seen your GoFundMe who will donate. And if you just increase the total number, you're going to get a larger number in the end. That communications piece, there's an element that is curated by you, right? You're going to pick the ones that are the most heartwarming, that might play in the local media the best. Then there's a sort of platform aspect to it, right? You can write a GoFundMe that's going to go the most viral on Facebook.

33:23Nilay Patel:Somewhere in there is your AI coach. Yes. The new tool, I was playing with it today. I almost just started GoFundMe for the fun of it today. I was like right at the end to click on the last button. But it writes you a GoFundMe. You say I'm starting whatever, a shelter for puppies. Help me write the copy to do the GoFundMe. And we'll just do it for you. And there's something about AI in that context and then having a human comms team in the other context that seem like the same idea, point at the same goal, but the AI might, because it is sort of the average of every successful GoFundMe, might pull everyone in the same direction while your human comms team is trying to show how different everything is.

34:04Nilay Patel:Does that track? There's something in there that I find particularly interesting. Yeah. So the most important thing about creating and running a GoFundMe is that you can't just put it on the platform and expect people to come to it. Like you as the fundraiser have to tell people about it. So on our coach, we're doing two things. We break it into two main chunks. There is creating the fundraiser, which is what you just went through. And then there is managing it. So creating it, there are a lot of big decisions when you create a GoFundMe, right? So first, am I going to do this a lot? Second, how exactly do I want to write my story?

34:47What do I want the title to be of that story? What do I want the pictures to be, particularly the hero image? What do I want the goal to be? Every one of those decisions is a point at which people drop because I've written my story, but the title, like title, you're a journalist, right? Title writing is hard. That's why immediate organizations have title writing departments. So we identified all of these very difficult blockers. We're like, how do we make that easier? The way we started a couple of years ago is helping with those components. So we would say, we see that people are getting stuck with titles.

35:27Let's take what they've created and suggest three titles. If they like them, pick one, modify one, run with it. It turned out a lot of people use that. In fact, we've had over 90 million uses of these different components. Same with goals. Where we move to this year, early this year as we launched Smart Fundering Coach which said actually you can choose to have an agentic experience, a chat experience of creating your GoFundMe that's going to do all of those things with you holistically in the create process. And the key is it's you, your story, and we're helping you put together. Let me give you an example.

36:06We do a lot of checking people's experience and looking at sample flows. We had a lady whose close friend's son had passed away, and she wanted to create a GoFundMe for her. But she was so emotionally affected that in the interaction was struggling to string together coherent sentences. And just talking about how stressed she was. And the coach could interact with her to take the substance of what she was trying to say in this very difficult time. and put it together and explain what she felt about her friend, what the son, what he'd been about, what they were trying to do, this very particular, difficult situation.

36:59And she was able, with the assistance of the coach, to create that. That's what we're talking about. So for a GoFundMe to work, it has to be you. It has to be your situation because most people that you fundraise from are your friends and family. Over 80 % of the donors are people who know you, first degree connections. And then, yes, there are friends of friends and so on. So people know that GoFundMe is a coherent point for that. So the coach is helping people get through these steps. Another example would be picking the goal. Most people haven't ever fundraised before. Do I pick a big number, a little number?

37:42Do I start low? Does it grow over time? So those are the kinds of choices. And then you get to manage, which is the part that you're asking about, communications. A lot of that is like, how do you share? Who do you share with? When do you share? How often? So, for example, we know that the most effective way is to reach out to people one-on-one. Text them or WhatsApp them. One-on-one, not groups, because it's easier to sort of go quiet on the group. Much harder not to engage. If you text me like, Tim, I was inspired. I set up the GoFundMe that I was talking about and you text me directly, I'm going to be like, okay.

38:19Right? Whereas if you text a group, it's like, ah, someone else will do that. But that coaching will create prompts based on your fundraiser. Like here's a quick little snippet. Here's the URL. It's done for you. You can modify it. Then send it to your 10 best friends first. Get momentum. and then start reaching out and then start posting on social media. So the model we have now is sort of a daily plan. It's a program. Okay, it's day one. Here's what you do. Find 10 people, get it going, get them out. Day two, you've got three donations. Great. Follow up with the other seven. Do this, do this, do this, and we'll do pieces for you.

38:59And then our comms is sort of umbrella on top of that. But the most important thing is to empower and enable the thousands of people starting every day to have a successful fundraiser.

39:12Nilay Patel:I want to ask the other Dakota question here, because I think it's going to flow into everything else. You have a lot of decisions to make. Those decisions can go in a lot of different directions with a platform like this. How do you make decisions? What's your framework? So I love the fact you use the word framework, because there's two really important things that I focus on. The first is before we make a decision, we try and frame the decision. This is so critical because what we're trying to do or what any of the tech companies you're talking to, we're trying to create a future that doesn't exist.

39:45By definition.

39:46Nilay Patel:I think a lot of them are just trying to make money, but I'll grant you that. In our case, we are trying to help people do something that is ancient, but do it in a new way and have more people do it. And that doesn't exist right now. So that's what I'm trying to do. So when you're trying to innovate and create something new, the questions from the future are murky. It isn't like business school where like, hey, there was this challenge, here's the quest play. You have to think very carefully to distill what is the question. For example, let's take one. Should we deploy a more sophisticated recurring giving program on our personal fundraisers?

40:33That's a clear question with an answer. So part one is frame the question. Because what I find is when we don't frame the question, and it's sort of like we're talking about a topic, you get mushy decision-making because you have a mushy question or no question at all. That's one. Two, how do we make decisions? First thing, will this generate more help in the world?

40:53Nilay Patel:When you say help, does that mean money? I just want to be very clear about that. Yes, I focus on help because help is the thing that we're doing. And there is so much more around the experience than the money. Yes, we count it by looking at the money. It's a simple, easy way. But the implications of that, the emotional and societal consequences of that are far bigger than that. I'll give you an example. I went to Liverpool in the UK because they were the most generous city in the UK. And about two years ago, there were a bunch of riots in reaction to a murder. And there was a sort of a lot of riots around immigration and so on.

41:36And a bunch of things in Liverpool were destroyed. One was a local library called Spellow Lane. And it was ransacked, burned, severely damaged, unusable. A local woman called Alex McCormick set up, is a mom, local mom, set up a fundraiser. I just want to do something. I want to raise 500 pounds. Well, it took off to rate 250 ,000 pounds. The local council got that library rebuilt in less than a year. And I went, met the mayor, met Alex, went to see that, met the community full of books, full of kids, full of people using the workstations to get jobs because it's a dual purpose place. Yeah, you could say that was about the 250 ,000 pounds, but it's not.

42:17It's about a lot more than that. It's about community saying, no, this is not right. We're going to do something. It's about the country coming together. You had Matt Haidt, the author, you had the queen donating books. It's just a lot bigger. But yes, we count through the GDP, but that's why I focus on help. So will it generate more help? That's number one. And then pulling in the right people to pressure test the logic of, okay, how are we going to go about it. But that is the essence. Frame the key questions, make the decisions, and keep the eye on the singular objective that we exist to do.

42:57We have no other businesses. We don't do advertising. We don't sell data. We don't do any of those other things. We exist to help individuals and organize, mobilize more support for what they need.

43:09Nilay Patel:What strikes me out your answer there is there's a very important values component to what you're describing here. Right? If the target is just money, there are a lot of ways for you to make more money. You could do algorithmic discovery in the GoFundMe platform, and you would probably generate more money because you would have the most heartwarming pictures of puppy shelters possible right on the front page. But that's not there. There's very little of that going on. You're saying that the fundraisers are on their own, and you're going to help them raise money. There's many, many other things you could do to make money.

43:39Nilay Patel:You're saying your values, the company's values inside of decisions prevent you from doing those things. And I just want to push on this a little bit more, and then I want to bring it more practically to some of the areas that you raise a lot of money in. Are the values enough to keep you from the pressures of having to make money? Because that seems like where most businesses are failing, at least in America, in 2026. There are things they said they wouldn't do. I'll just point at the AI companies. They all said they wouldn't do military and defense work, and the money showed up, and now they're all doing military and defense work.

44:15Nilay Patel:Are the values at GoFundMe so enshrined, so inbuilt that they will prevent you from saying, actually, the dollar should be the target? Because when I talk to our audience about your platform, that's the thing they worry about the most. Well, so far it's worked. We only focus on help, which we count that through a measure called GDV, which is gross donation volume, right? That is the amount of money that people are giving to one another, to organizations. And that is the thing. We talk about every meeting, talk about every company meeting. We tell stories, like the ones I've just shared with you about how that is.

44:54I've been here six and a half years. We haven't gotten into other areas. You know, the thing we have added is we bought a company that did fundraising for nonprofits because we said, hey, look, we're doing well at helping individuals and we want to continue to grow that. But we know that a lot of the consumers that are giving to our individual fundraiser are also helping nonprofits. So that seems like a natural extension. But every opportunity we think about is like, how do we do more of this? One of the things I love about being here is that singularity of purpose and clarity. Like, I have never felt pulled into a different direction because it's just, this is why we are here.

45:40Like, this is it. This is the whole point of this organization. There's a lot of other organizations doing a lot of other things. But we are, I think, put on this world to do this one thing.

45:53Nilay Patel:we need to take on a short break we'll be right back

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48:29Nilay Patel:We're back with Tim Cadogan, CEO of GoFundMe, diving into how the platform intersects with the United States health care system. Let's put this into practice. And I want to start with healthcare because I think GoFundMe's relationship to the healthcare system in America is fascinating. And as you have said, you operate in many different countries with many different versions of healthcare systems. And when I say many different versions of healthcare systems, what I specifically mean is they almost all have nationalized healthcare. The United States is a particular outlier in not having that. Maybe that's going to change.

49:00Nilay Patel:Maybe it won't. But that is the state of affairs in America today. I think in 2024, GoFundMe said medical expenses was the most common fundraising category. Is that still true today? It raises the largest amount. Here's what's interesting and may surprise you. It's actually the number one category in terms of fundraising dollars in every country we operate in. I mean, obviously, I'm British originally. I'm familiar with that system, a variety of systems. There's a lot of different systems, hybrids and so on, but it's actually number one everywhere. So why is that? There's a couple of reasons. One, when a significant medical issue occurs, like we face our mortality, and when we're facing our mortality or that of a loved one, whether that be a friend or a relative, That's the biggest thing.

49:57That is the moment where more than any other moment, people want to support and show their love for someone, more than anything else. And when you think about it that way, maybe that's not surprising. The second thing is that there is no medical system on earth that takes care of everything. Now, even though there are systems in other countries that take care of the medical costs, none of those systems takes care of all of the different things that happen when someone is dealing with a major health issue. Give you an example. When a parent has to go for cancer treatment, they have to travel. They can no longer work.

50:45They may be looking after their kids or looking after their older parents and they may no longer be able to do that. And so there are a lot of other expenses that come along with a health situation. And those are the moments where folks want to pitch in. And so quite often it will be a friend or relative who does the fundraiser. I'm looking to help to make sure these or these other things are taken care of. Because they are hugely consequential moments in our lives. And I say our lives, it is true for all of us. Like we are human. we are mortal all of us will go through this cycle at one point or another and it's the moment where peace people most want to help the third thing is when your aunt or your best friend is going through something in a health related area there's actually not much we can do we're not doctors right we don't we're not cancer researchers and we feel um a bit helpless what can i do how often do you do you hear that or do you say that where you see that happening and say well how can i help this is a way that you can help you can set up a fundraiser or you can give to a fundraiser you can mobilize you can you know follow up you can it builds community can i can i give you another example i know i i'm telling you but i just want to make it real because sure it's very very real like i recently got to know a young girl called hollow who's about five she might just have turned six and our mom daphne hollowhead has a very very rare genetic disease.

52:27And her parents figured out how to get treatment actually through an amazing foundation based in San Diego called N. Lorem Foundation. And that foundation would cover the medical treatment, but that medical treatment had to be done at a hospital. And there were a lot of administrative costs related to hospital. And those weren't covered. It's about$120 ,000. they also lived in a different state so daphne who's dhalla's mom set up a fundraiser and with a lot of hesitation um and it actually worked amazingly well and in four days they raised the funds they needed and a whole community of people including her paleton mom's group who became a half fly like they made it happen and i got to meet harlow in june she came to one of our company events actually one of our hackathons and she's doing so much better and she's got a little stroller and she was zooming around the stage and i was trying to make sure she wouldn't fall off the edge but for people with for example ultra rare nano rare diseases like a gofumby can be a really important part of supplementing what is already happening and it's life-changing like absolutely she harlow's gotten a unique gene therapy and it is helping and it's life-changing for her and her family and so i could tell you many many stories like that um but i think overall it's because we're human those moments matter more than anything else no system is perfect and we can supplement that and it gives people a way to come together that is different from an institution supporting you.

54:18An institution can do a lot. The NHS can do a lot. Medicare in Australia can do a lot. But it's not coming with love, right?

54:26Nilay Patel:This is very interesting. I'm very curious about that aspect of it. It's not coming with love is fascinating to me. Maybe it's because I'm American and I exist in this cultural context and have mostly existed in this cultural context and you have a much broader context. context. But I would say broadly, Americans do not trust the government. It feels like a thing I can say. It's a claim I can make. And you can disagree about how much we should trust the government or not. But I think broadly in 2026, trust in our government is very low. Even if you could provide a great healthcare service, Medicare for all, whatever form that takes, you're saying There's something else the government cannot provide for you.

55:11Nilay Patel:And at the same time, I'm just listening to what you're describing in these individual stories that are very powerful. And I'm thinking about them in the abstract. In the abstract, all we're doing is redistributing money, right? The Peloton Moms group has some capital that they can allocate to this problem and they're going to allocate it to this problem. And that person is going to feel great and be taken care of. And that is what our government should be doing, right? That is actually the function of all of this is to redistribute resources across a society in some way that makes sense for everyone.

55:44Nilay Patel:And some governments do it well. Some governments do it poorly. And somewhere in there is GoFundMe, right, creating a different redistribution structure and process. And it works so well that some people in aggregate give you enough money to have 850 people, most of whom work in product. something about that in relation to healthcare specifically strikes me at least as absurd and i maybe that's just the american context where we've got it gotten it so wrong for so long and i just look at healthcare and i i think about how wealthy the healthcare companies are and how people feel about pharmaceutical profits and the fact that they can't get care and there are studies saying the vast majority of people who have donated to a crowdfunding campaign in america did it because of healthcare expenses.

56:31Nilay Patel:Or there's a University of Washington study that I'm looking at here, the half a million medical expense campaigns found that 30 % of them raised$0. And the more medical debt a state has, the less money the campaigns in those states raise. So it's not actually equalized, right? There's actually a great disparity in the average outcome of the medical campaigns. That is what government spending and tax policy should accomplish, right, as a more equal policy. I'm just asking how you feel about GoFundMe's role in that. Because as a business that has to make money, any change to that structure, at least in the United States, would have an outsized impact on your business, right?

57:14Nilay Patel:Like there's some relationship to how broken the United States healthcare system is and your profits. And I can't quite bring those together. I'm wondering how you think about it. I would love for people to have, be taken care of more in whatever way works, right? So I think you're making some connections that I agree with, but I think there's a dimension here, which I'll just reiterate, which I think you're being very rational about, right? In the sense that the thing I have learned, and I share these stories because I've met so many people now who've used GoFundMe to help them in their lives, is how it makes them feel.

57:55and how it makes the people that contribute feel. And our business and our platform is about emotion. When we help each other, we do not do it in expectation of return. It's not a product or a service. You're not buying anything, right? You are helping because you care, and in many cases, because you love someone else. And I think that is intrinsic and permanent. And I think it will be valid on top of whatever system we have, because I think that is something that a big system can't provide inherently. It's just different. So, yes, I would love for more people to have more access. And I would also, I'm very hopeful, my big hope for AI actually is the first thing is medical breakthroughs.

58:51that more people like Harlow and there are a lot of other people dealing with situations similar have better pathways to earlier identification and cures. You know, we have something that can help people come together, support each other, realize there are stronger communities. I have seen it shifting away from medical. I've seen it in crisis now in my own town, right? Pretty much everyone I meet, you know, had to go for me. Lost their home. And it's not enough to replace your home. You need insurance and you need support for that. But it was enough to, you know, get that first month's rents in the place that you had to stay.

59:42And it, God, it made people feel better. You know, that we're not alone.

59:48Nilay Patel:I'm pushing on this because you have brought up the values of the company and your values and your resistance to profit several times now. And so I'm going to. I would say resistance. Right. Just I think profit is derivative. Our job, as I've been hopefully pretty clear, is that people help each other. And then if we do that, well, they will be more successful and more people will think I can do that, too. And that means that we'll be able to, you know, and hopefully the laws of scale that I mentioned in terms of people contributing to us will continue. But the thing you just said, you know, we've interviewed many, many politicians on the show.

1:00:29Nilay Patel:In some way, what you've just described is what every politician hopes tax policy will do. We're going to help more people with more better education and they're going to make more money and tax revenue will go up. And whether you think taxes should go up or down to do that, that is the goal. And I'm just wondering if you see that connection because it's fascinating to me. Yeah, I had not. I mean, I do now. You mentioned it. I'd never thought of it quite that way. But it's just a personal perspective and people are very different. For me, being able to run the company in a disciplined way such that we can make investments and continue, that's an important financial discipline.

1:01:08But the purpose is this big purpose. And it's the same purpose. And it is consistent. And I feel incredibly lucky to be able to work at an organization where I can be like a do CEO type stuff and work on really interesting tech things, but do it for this purpose. I mean, I'll just give you just.

1:01:31Nilay Patel:Well, I'm going to run out of time. So I apologize. I appreciate all the examples. Let me push on that just one more time on health care. And then I want to talk about platform moderation with you just to wrap this up. And I appreciate that you're saying the platform is more emotional and I'm operating in this very abstract, aggregate way, being rational, as you keep saying. I'm looking at a study here from a bunch of economists that found that when there's ACA Medicaid expansion, there's a significantly meaningful effect in reducing health-related GoFundMe campaigns. So if a state expands Medicaid, the number of GoFundMe campaigns in the state goes down.

1:02:10Nilay Patel:This suggests the demand for crowdfunding campaigns is actually driven by gaps in insurance coverage. And so maybe there's the emotional component and all the stuff around. You've lost a job. You just need living expenses. But there's also just a statistically meaningful connection to health care costs on their face. This, again, suggests to me that if there is more Medicaid expansion, you will have some impact on your revenue. Is that a problem? Is that something you think about? Do you lobby against it? How do you approach that? No, we definitely don't lobby against that. We've had people on this show lobby against things that would harm their business.

1:02:50Nilay Patel:I wanted to ask. If that's going to help people, that is great. We think there are a lot of ways that people want to help each other. And we are constantly focused on helping people become aware of all the different things that you can use GoFundMe for. So, no, if that's the case and people are getting more care, that's awesome. Again, the thing that I'm pushing on here is you've described, even in your decision-making process, a value-based approach that another CEO might say, actually, I need to lobby against tax reform, which is a real thing that has happened on the show, a real conversation I've had before.

1:03:33Nilay Patel:And you're saying somewhere embedded in the company is something that will prevent you from maximizing profit, not making profit, but maximizing profit. And it seems like that is – it obviously seems like that's very important to you. Is there pressure to change that? Because that's the one that I look at. No. Right, where, okay, ACA expansion would reduce the biggest bucket of dollars that comes through the platform. A more craven capitalist would take a hard look at that in a different way. No. I mean, I'll give you a different example about during COVID, rent. And there were some government programs to support people with rent.

1:04:10And we tried to make people aware who were using our services that they could avail themselves of these services. Because a lot of times with programs that are there, but folks just don't know that they're eligible for them, they don't know how to access them. So we have tried to tell people, like, there are other programs that are available. Similar to, you know, we will work sometimes with some of our nonprofits who are providing services, a lot of them medical nonprofits or homelessness-focused and food insecurity and so on. And so we'll work with them. Like, there are services that are available to you if you have these needs because we want to make sure that we can direct people to those services if they're available.

1:04:57Nilay Patel:This brings me, I think, to platform moderation. GoFundMe is a platform. Every platform CEO has to make big moderation decisions. You mentioned you have a sizable trust and safety team. If the theme of this conversation is what are the things you won't do, there's actually a long list of things GoFundMe won't let you raise money for. Tell me about that list, what's on it, what's off it, and how you make those decisions. So we have a set of terms of service, which sounds like you checked them out. They're actually readable, right? So we put a lot of work turning into English that anyone can read.

1:05:29And they're pretty practical, right? There's a bunch of things, frankly, most of them are legal, that if you do a fundraiser for, you want to spend it on drugs or guns or these guys, you can't do that. A lot of these also are representation of our payment processes terms as well. So those are reflected there. And we think they're a common sense set of guardrails, which is, hey, the fund is for everybody. We want anybody to be able to come here, fundraise for help themselves, a friend or an organization. And here's some simple, we think they're very pragmatic guardrails. They're like, hey, just stay within the guardrails.

1:06:06You're good to go. That's it. Now, those have served us really well. And fortunately, I don't really get very involved in decisions around that because they're clear, the team's well set up, and off we go.

1:06:23Nilay Patel:clear in the context of contact moderation is simple for the ceo to say and i would suspect if you go ask your trust and safety team it's much more complicated that's why they're the great professionals they are you have a rule against uh funding defenses of people who are alleged to commit violent crimes like legal defense funds uh we have yes we we don't allow fundraising for the legal defense of uh violent and financial crimes so you know murder um you know, fraud, a bunch of nasty list of things. Yes, we made a decision that, no, we're going to, you know, not play in that particular area for the betterment of the community.

1:07:05Nilay Patel:And that's a values-based decision, right? That's just GoFundMe's decision. It is GoFundMe's decision, yes. And just to be clear, it doesn't reflect on the innocence or guilt of people in those situations. It's just like, hey, look, that gets very complicated. it. It's just better for us to, for fundraising purposes on GoFundMe, it doesn't make sense for us. Right next to that, there has been ongoing controversy since 2023. The Virgin has covered it around the freezing of payments and an alleged disproportionate rejection of fundraisers for humanitarian causes in Gaza and Palestine. Again, we've covered it, that these things have just gotten frozen, that people are complaining about it.

1:07:45Nilay Patel:Is that a values-based decision at GoFundMe? Is that something else? Not at all. I mean, it's just sort of trying to find the right line in terms of the policy. So we, through individual fundraising and fundraising for nonprofits, we've enabled over half a billion dollars of support to go into the Israel-Gaza conflict, which is a very large amount of help. But we are also working, and again, I want to stress is we work together with the payment processes to make sure that we're adhering to national and international regulations and laws. And in some cases, some of those fundraisers, you know, didn't meet the criteria to allow them to proceed.

1:08:32And that is a shame, but we have to adhere. It's the right thing to do to adhere to those, but in no way does it reflect a policy of like, we don't want to enable people to help. It just has to be legitimate. of it. So, of course, what you hear is you'll hear people bringing it up when things were frozen. You don't hear from all of the stuff that is actually happening, but they're important decisions. They have to be made. We have to do that in a way that upholds our commitments and keeps the platform safe and secure and following laws and regulations. So that's the case.

1:09:03Nilay Patel:One of the themes that comes up in every conversation I have with a platform CEO when it comes to trust and safety is the payment processor. In some cases, the payment processors are a much more shadowy figure in the scheme of content moderation. In your case, you're talking with them quite openly. You're saying, well, we accept a lot of payments. We move a lot of money. Their rules are important. What is that dynamic like? Do you push back on their rules? So we work with Adin, Stripe, and PayPal Giving Fund. And actually, all funds to personal fundraisers go through our payment processes. We actually never touch the money.

1:09:41And that's important because it creates another layer of check and balance. So if you think about a fundraising journey, we do a bunch of steps to validate that the fundraiser is legitimate. We're doing a risk assessment of donations coming in. And then when the time comes for someone to verify that they are the beneficiary, and that can often be someone different than the person who's fundraising. They go through the KYC process. I talked about it in the connection of small businesses for COVID, right? At the first part of the interview. And they have to be verified. And then the processor can unlock funds and begin to disperse those funds.

1:10:21So they are an important part of our infrastructure and the design of the system to ensure that it's as safe and secure as possible.

1:10:30Nilay Patel:There's a pattern that plays out with every platform that has tighter moderation rules. Another platformer shows up with looser moderation rules. Twitch bans a streamer. They go to kick. YouTube, you go to rumble. With GoFundMe, it's other platforms. There's like a give, send, go, and they will allow all the things you don't allow. In the context of, well, this has become infrastructure, right? And there's things you won't do, and then you have competitors who will do all kinds of things. Do you think about the dynamic or is it the payment processor set a floor and you're just interpreting based on your values?

1:11:05No, I mean, there are terms of service. We're obviously looking at what makes sense in the world of money movement, but they are ours and we take full ownership of those. And, you know, we're head and shoulders ahead of what anyone else. And we tend to have smaller companies that offer a service a bit like ours in every country we operate in. But we focus on what is the right thing for legitimate customers and how do we craft a coherent, sensible, easy-to-understand set of rules that are rules of the road for everybody. And you go from there.

1:11:49Nilay Patel:Every platform, including yours, is now caught in the dynamic of wanting to help regular people make better things with AI, with an AI coach that helps you get through the process of starting a fundraiser and marketing it, and then being flooded with enormous amounts of slop. In your case, the enormous amounts of AI slop might be scams. It might be people trying to raise money against fake fundraisers or fake people. How do you balance that? Because that seems like the hardest problem for every kind of platform to solve right now. You know, because I would say we have not seen that as much as maybe some other platforms.

1:12:25Because the process of setting up a fundraiser has to be so authentic. People call it crowdfunding. I don't like that term because a crowd implies a large group of strangers. You know, it wouldn't work as well, but it's more like friends and family fundraising. so fundraisers that don't resonate with your network your community your friends and family don't work so uh it's very hard to get a fundraiser to go viral unless it has some initial momentum and that the initial momentum comes from the people who know you know your situation want to help and create that so maybe it's just a bit of a different dynamic are you on guard against it

1:13:13Nilay Patel:Are you seeing it pop up even a little bit? Yeah, we're actually on guard against it. But in terms of like massive spikes in starts, which is fundraiser starts, like we haven't seen crazy spikes like that. But we're very much on guard against that. We're very much, we're certainly using AI in our tooling to help our folks make the right judgments and so on. So we're doing those things. Not to continue to be ruthlessly rational about your platform. But if I look at it and if you have more fundraisers that will lead to more outcomes, you got in a little bit of trouble recently on the nonprofit side.

1:13:54Nilay Patel:You've set up pages for nonprofits that had not signed up for GoFundMe. A bunch of state attorneys general had accused you of plagiarizing the charity pages and setting up nonprofits. You apologized. You took them down. There's a class action lawsuit. That to me looks like we need to increase the number of inputs. Right? we Yelp ran into the same thing. If you're going to be the platform for all charitable giving, you need to have all the charities for Yelp. It was, you need to have all the businesses. We're just going to set up the listings and go. What led to that decision? So that was, you know, it's a classic of you have your overarching principle, which is, Hey, we want to mobilize more help in the world.

1:14:32Our full process was we got more than a hundred million people coming to go fund me a month. Now, many of them are helping directly something, but we also know that a lot of those people are interested in supporting local national charities so why don't we make it a little bit easier for them to find those organizations because we know those organizations want more supporters and are trying to work through an increasingly fragmented digital environment like we're a place that people are coming to help wouldn't it be great to just give more people that opportunity. Now, classic tech company thing, we moved a little bit too quickly.

1:15:15We didn't think carefully enough about how to bring people into that and give them control. And we got that reaction and we're like, you know what, you're right. We did go too quick. We made a couple of mistakes. We are sorry for that. That's not our intent. Our intent is to get more people supporting your organizations. But let's take a beat, change our approach, which we have, and lean into that. Because if you don't like it, it's not working.

1:15:41Nilay Patel:I just want to connect that to the AI piece. And I understand there's a lawsuit there. That's probably all I can get out of you on that one. But let me connect that to the AI piece. Classic 10 company move. We see demand. What you're describing is GoFundMe as an aggregator, right? You have the demand, the same way that Google has the demand or Instagram has the demand. We have a lot of people coming who want to help. Who want to help. And then you can redistribute the demand. That's an aggregator move. The response on the other platforms has been, oh, we're going to put more stuff here. I'm going to use AI and I'm going to make 500 YouTube videos a day to try to capture pieces of that demand.

1:16:18Nilay Patel:You can see it happening on the web and Google search in a thousand different ways. You can see it happening on Instagram. I know people who have fully automated their Instagram accounts to post hundreds of reels a day using Claude and MCP connectors. Why hasn't that happened to you if you're the aggregator of demand? So if you're talking about nonprofits. Well, I'm saying the connection I'm making more specifically is you saw the demand to give to nonprofits. And in a very manual way, you set up a bunch of pages for them. And maybe that was the right thing or the wrong thing to do. And that will come to whatever regulatory conclusion it's going to come to.

1:16:55Nilay Patel:But that was the response is to see the demand and then do something about it. On every other platform, AI has stepped into the middle of that cycle. And the response is, oh, we're going to overfill the demand because the cost of production is so low. Right? I can just say, go make 5 million YouTube clips of this episode and just fire them into the algorithm all day and all night. And let's see what happens. And you can just see it happening all over the place on all of those platforms. Here you have demand. If I was an unscrupulous actor, I would say, boy, there's a bunch of demand of people who want to give help, give money on that platform.

1:17:32Nilay Patel:I will use AI to go get it, right? In whatever way that occurs, I'm going to go get literal money, not clicks, but actual money. I'm going to find a way to get it. What is keeping that happening right now? You're saying it's not happening. And what might prevent it from happening? Because that strikes me as a pretty huge risk. I think probably the reason that that's maybe not happening is that when you give, you have to have an emotional connection. And that comes from some sense of relationship, either a relationship with a person who's fundraising or a relationship with a cause or an organization that resonates with you.

1:18:12And that really can't be manufactured. Right? People feel it. And it has to be real. And it's fundamentally human. And I just think it's a lot harder maybe to try and synthesize that versus just having it stay real. And so that's the way we use AI for the folks who are fundraising, who are asking for help, is to assist them in telling their story, their way, to their people. And it just has to be completely real and genuine for it to work.

1:18:59Nilay Patel:I'm curious how that goes over time. I'm reliably told that AI can be your girlfriend. So we're going to find out. Again, we've had CEOs on the show telling me that you can marry an AI. that emotional connection is coming in one way or another uh we'll see how it goes thank you so much for all this time i'll just leave you with this the more powerful the technology like the the uh the more significant the the an unknown the implications so you you know sure some of those guys are right that is a big question i don't think we have nearly enough time to dive into it tim thank you so much what's next for gofundme what should people be looking for We are focused very heavily on involving the coach.

1:19:41Just to give you a sense, very quickly, it's helping people be more successful. We thought it would help raise about$125 million more this year. It's on track to double that, a quarter of a billion. That's a lot more help. And it's making people feel better. Like two-thirds of the folks who are using it feel less stressed, more confident, critically less alone. So from a consumer point of view, we are leaning very heavily into that. And we hope over time to be able to show more people that we will help them take the brave step, ask for help, and unlock the support that will come out. So that's a big focus for us.

1:20:18Nilay Patel:Yeah, we'll have to have you back soon to see how all of these things go. Tim, thank you so much. This is great. Great conversation. Good, really searching questions. Thank you for that. I'd like to thank Tim for taking time to speak with me. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod.

1:20:43Nilay Patel:We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're both at DecoderPod as well. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe over your podcast. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Box Media Podcast Network. Decoder's producers are Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Cozy season is ahead and you'll be spending way more time inside. Is your home ready? Don't worry. With Wayfair, you can upgrade your space without breaking the bank.

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