#125: Tim Cadogan, CEO at GoFundMe - “Our terms of service are actually readable by a human.”

27:25What happens is, to your point, people want to do something really quickly. I will give you the example of LA because we were talking about it and it's very near and dear to my heart because I live in one of those towns that was destroyed. So I was in the crisis. It's very personal to you then, isn't it? Very personal. and so I and I have worked on now probably 110, 120 crises since I've been at GoFundMe but this was the one that hit my tap so to see what happened and how people reacted and how they used our product and so just to make that real within hours and we see this in crisis after crisis after crisis within hours the first people are creating GoFundMe's.

28:12Often in a crisis situation It's not the person in the crisis. It's a friend or relative. We have a saying, best friends do go for me. Because when you're in a crisis, it's a flood or a hurricane or tornado or fire. You're in trauma. You're in shock. You are literally running for your life. So you're not thinking about this stuff. That will come later. But your friend or your cousin or your brother who lives elsewhere, they're thinking about you, thinking, Gareth's going to need a lot of help. And there's lots of friends. We're all like looking at this and feeling helpless. What do we do? How can we help?

28:49Like, oh, you know what? I could set up a GoFundMe. And what happens there, that GoFundMe becomes a channel through which all that love and care, worry and support is pouring in to help that person. And that's what happened again and again and again. Happened 10 ,000 times for LA. Over 10 ,000 people set up family fundraisers, local businesses, churches, small schools, and lots of nonprofits as well. We had 170 nonprofits activate. Folks who use our platform activate. World Central Kitchen, Salvation Army, Team Rubicon, Pasti the Humane, Housing People's Pets. They're all customers of ours as well.

29:33They were all fundraising as well. and so the money raised from gofumbi was often the very first money in someone's pocket yeah because when you're when you're dealing with something like that you know dealing with insurance takes a long time getting money from the government and so on it's going to come but it's going to take a while and so getting that 10 or 15 or 20 or 25 000 or 50 000 or whatever it was that was raised, getting that is so helpful. And again, it's rarely going to be the kind of money that will rebuild your home. That's what insurance government support is for. But it's going to help you get first month's, last month's rent for the new place, the apartment you need to find, or someone to look after your pets or groceries.

30:19So that's why I got to stress this. It's just a part of the solution, right? You need all these other programs. You need insurance. You need the government to help. You need big nonprofits. You need all that. but giving a way for people to show that they care you care for you really really quickly the psychological lift from that i had a customer who was lived in the palisades and and he and his partner they had lost their apartment their home and the church that he lived in and and he told me how tim this this fundraiser represents an almost unfathomable amount of love for me because it's a place where all those people who care about me can come and help.

31:05And I just had the same conversation this morning with someone who dealt with a very difficult situation here in the UK. And it was not just the money. The money was super helpful, but it was like all that care. And her point went even broad. It wasn't just even for her. It was for her family to see all these people who are supporting her in a different situation, but same that psychological support so that's that's what we hope to do for folks yeah i mean i know it is an enabler but it is you know you change people's lives with this technology does change people's lives quite clearly doesn't it is this the biggest spike you've seen in a you know in a single territory of new gofundme pages set up in such a short space of time i I think probably in that short, I mean, we've seen very big, we saw a very big spike to support Ukraine.

31:58Yeah, of course. Probably in that sort of two-week time frame, probably was the biggest time. I'm not sure, 100 % sure. We've had many big ones, but yes, definitely up there, very big. And it was, I mean, again, not we, people raised over quarter billion dollars in a month my goodness and that money got to people in dates like that's the key part right that's and then they could decide how do i what do i most need in my life right yeah because let's not be let's be clear some people lost literally everything didn't they i mean some people lost everything from this everything i'll tell i mean one of my colleagues on the search and rescue team colin he part of what we do in search and rescue if we get cold like we're not firefighters but we'll help with evacuations so we got a call for evacuations now of course i was evacuating so i was already you know moving the family but colin lived in a different part of altadena far to the west which didn't no one thought the fire was going to make it there my area was the one that was threatened right right colin responded to the corn got his uniform on got his gear got the truck went to help with evacuations got home later that night his home was gone everything was gone so photographer all his camera everything got and there are thousands of people like that like colin and so of course we did a team fundraiser for him but thousands and thousands of people everything got unbelievable so how is the area recovering it's very slow i mean this is sort of uh uh with with any disaster like this it takes a long time to remove the debris that was done the army corps of engineers is in the u.s who does that they bring in a lot of contractors they did amazing job they finished several months early so you know you got 6 000 burned structures 3 000 burned cars you know they removed all of that in about seven months which is incredible reconstruction is starting but it's early days and it will be three to four to five years probably maybe six for commercial buildings and so it's a long road but it's starting starting and the community is strong and i think one of the things that happens to any community that is impacted in this way is they realize how much that community you know you sort of realize your community means even more to you realized and so the level of volunteering and participation is uh is really impressive but it's a very hard long road i read in 2017 you became the biggest crowdfunding platform in the world.

34:38And obviously, you joined three years later. But what I wanted to ask, and obviously, I know that growth has continued. I just wanted to ask you about that from a technology standpoint, with all the scale you've experienced in your time there, what technology challenges have you experienced in that time? And what technology challenges do you envisage experiencing over the next couple of years? Well, like any company that's been around for more than about three years, we've experienced, you know, how do we navigate tech debt? So some of the systems that were built early on that were great for a while and now are no longer ideal.

35:13And how do you do that at the same time you're trying to innovate really quickly? So we have been navigating that, I think, pretty well, but it's an investment, right? You really have to think about, okay, you have your portfolio view, how much capacity do you have? You've got to allocate a good maybe 20, 25 cent for a period of time to getting through that. So I think we've now got through most of that. The other thing is maybe less of a challenge. Well, just how do you figure out? We are trying to put immense technology power in the hands of users in a very simple, intuitive way. We are using AI machine learning because we have this enormous database of people who run fundraisers, tens of millions of fundraisers, hundreds of millions of donations.

35:54So that gives us great insight into what works and what doesn't when you're fundraising. So what I want to do is when the next anxious person comes and they're asking for help, they're setting up a fundraiser, many times they've never done this any before, they've never fundraised before, they're often in a maybe difficult emotional state. How do I give them tools that are incredibly easy to use and immensely powerful, but almost like a very powerful car, you just have to hit the gas. You don't have to understand how it works. You just have to understand it's going to get you there where you want to go.

36:34And so that technology challenge is how do you take that power and represent it and present it to people in design that is easy and intuitive and leads them in the right path. And we are working on essentially a coach for everybody, right? I have a wonderful customer success team who for some of our customers can really provide them coaching. For instance, if the fundraiser becomes really big, it often becomes very complicated to manage. And we can allocate them a person who's a total expert to work with them. Also a person, not an AI agent then. In a complex fundraiser case, it can be a person.

37:15But I can't afford 5 ,000 of those people to help. It's not practical then. It's just not feasible. But I think now with the technology that we have, and also with the way that AI systems can be increasingly empathetic. How can we help give everybody a coach? In this case, a fundraising coach. What do you do when you first launch it? What do you do in the next few hours? What do you do on day two? What do you do on day two? Yeah, I wouldn't have a clue in those situations. So yeah, that makes total sense. Someone to hold a system to help hold your hand to like, Gareth, it's okay. We got you. We're giving you the best insights built on the largest set of requests for help in the world.

38:07No one else has as much experience of individuals asking for help as we do. We're just going to set you up for success as best we can because we can leverage that and you can use it in a way that relates to you. We still have a ways to go with that. But that, I think, is the opportunity. And I know we wanted to talk about AI, and we already are here, but I think what a really interesting thing for us is because what we do, helping people help you know that, is all about our emotion. No one's getting a good or a service out of it. They're not getting money. You know, obviously, fundraising for money, when people help each other, they're doing it because they feel something.

38:51Yeah. They love this person. They care about them. They care about their cause. They feel connected to them. It's all human emotion. And so it's a really interesting combination of using artificial intelligence to help people do something and be even better humans for each other. Yeah. Yeah. Altruism, isn't it? It does come naturally to people. Yes. I want to come back to AI quickly, but I want to ask you about governance and guardrails. okay so this is just something that i thought of which i it's got to be a difficult challenge for you and your leadership team how do you dictate which campaigns you support and which ones you don't because there'll be a lot of bad bad actors out there trying to raise money well yeah questionable reasons let shall we say i don't need to give examples i'm sure everyone's got an imagination how do you navigate that that must be a nightmare it's it's actually it's we've got a very well-oiled system for this now.

39:51As I mentioned, we've had millions of fundraisers, over$40 billion raised. So we've sort of, I wouldn't say we've seen everything under the sun, but we are properly approaching it, right? So we have a very clear, simple sets of terms of service. And our terms of service are actually readable by a human. Wow, that's a fist. Just like you read them and like they're actually, we've very, very, very carefully written them. So anyone can read them and they totally make sense and they're common sense. It's a bunch of things that you can't fundraise for, frankly, pretty damn office, right? And as long as you fundraise within those guardrails, you're good.

40:31And we're not judging you. Some fundraisers may be flippant. They may be whimsical. They may be not particularly worthy in some people's view. We don't decide that. As long as you're within the guardrails, which are very common sense this is a platform for everyone who decides our friends family community strangers that you reach on your social network that they will decide is this worthy of my money and support or not so yeah play within the guardrails we apply those guardrails completely consistently increasingly we use technology now because technology is much better at making interpretive judgments than it was even three or four years ago.

41:19So that's great. And then we use people on top, apply the guardrails, and then let the activity take place. And so that's our sort of approach to trust and safety. And then, of course, we're also, from a financial point of view, we're looking at not just us, but our payment partners are looking at the money coming in. Is it legitimate? Are there any issues with that? And then we're looking when the money goes out, who's the recipient? Because sometimes, as I said, it's a friend fundraising for someone else. So the recipient is the beneficiary. The fundraiser is the person running it. And so we need to get their information.

41:56They set up a separate account. They share their banking details. We verify all of that and make sure the money's going to the right place. And again, we've done this millions of times with our partners, PayPal, Stripe, Adyen, and Soar. So that's how the system runs. And then, of course, we keep learning, right? We keep learning and we're getting faster and faster at that. That's how we do it. Yeah. Well, that's fantastic. I've got to ask you about AI. How do you envisage utilizing automation and AI technology over the next couple of years, Tim, in terms of helping you scale and also helping you deliver a better product to your customers, essentially?

42:33Well, I'll tell you, Gareth, we're already doing it, right? We've been building it in over the last couple of years. we've already had users use AI-powered features more than 70 million times. I'll give you some examples. We're using it to help people craft the title. So people will write their story. We can help them clean that up in grammar and so on. But when it comes to the title, people really struggle. We know this. I mean, the news organizations have title writing departments because even professional journalists struggle to pick the title for the thing they've written. Individual folks writing a fundraiser at first time is really hard.

43:08So we'll take your story, we'll pull out what we think are three good titles, we'll suggest them to you. You can pick one, you can pick none, or you can take one, you can modify it. We find that 70 % to 80 % of users pick one of those, use it, and they tend to do better. We will use AI and machine learning to suggest your goal based on the story you write, where you are in the country, what other people have done. People really struggle, like, should I ask for$1 ,000 or$3 ,000, and can I change it? We'll ask you what you think your ultimate goal is, then we'll set your preliminary goal. And if you opt into our smart goal system, it'll move the goal up as you make progress.

43:44For example, it infuses the donations on the giving side. We'll suggest donations that could be based on the fundraiser, based on the location, based on what other people have given. If you've frequently given in the past, based on your activity. It's already woven in. Yeah. But the next level I touched on a little bit with you is this idea of coaching, right? taking coaching to another level. That's kind of a next chapter for us that has started, but it's going to get, I think, a lot more sophisticated in what we can do. Yeah. So would that coaching be for everyday customers like myself who've never raised money before?

44:27Yes, most importantly. But would it also be for professional fundraisers as well, working with big charities and stuff like that as well? Is that sort of on the roadmap as well? The coaching, first and foremost, will be more for the former, for the individual who's never done this before. To build a coach for somebody who's already a professional fundraiser, like that's a different kettle of fish. But there's certainly pieces of what that person does. For instance, a lot of intelligence reporting isn't always that intelligent, is it? So it's still reporting. So how do you make that intelligence like, oh, you're doing this top of funnel campaign here versus this retargeting campaign here.

45:08Like if you blended them these two way and brought the audience, you get a better result. Like what's that insight? What are the two or three actions you should take based on the data versus here's a report? Yeah, absolutely. So I think it takes a different form for a professional fundraiser, but I absolutely think there's applicability. Just on AI, Tim, I wanted to ask you, Looking beyond fundraising and GoFundMe specifically, and just more in terms of business and society, what are you most excited about in relation to this explosion of AI innovation over the last couple of years? I'm actually most excited about some of the medical innovation.

45:50And the reason for this is, as you probably know, we see a lot of people use GoFundMe for very serious medical situations. I've met with families in the last two days whose children or grandchildren have quite rare diseases and in some cases have passed away from those diseases. And the challenge there is how do you pull the research from around the world and make that accessible to someone, say, in the UK where there's only 50 people with that disease? well if you can use the technology to find the common points you can A bring treatment options that may be available but distributed so the pattern recognition and the other is just the raw innovative side of it like some of the work going on particularly with cancer treatments is very very promising but requires very very intense analysis and And I think it could really help.

46:54And just sadly, I meet a lot of people who are suffering from this. And I think we will get there. I think we'll get to a new level. And I hope and believe that AI will be a huge, huge part of it. Yeah, I think you're right. I think everything from drug discovery through to MRI scans and spotting patterns in things like that, that the human eye would miss. I mean, it's very exciting, the impact that AI will have over the coming years, isn't it, in terms of saving lives, essentially. So that's a really good choice, Tim. Just an inverse of that, is there anything or what are you fearful of? And what can go wrong with this technology, do you think?

47:36I worry about our attention. I think that, in a way, our lives are where we spend our attention. That's sort of our conscious, focused mind. Like, what are we putting it to? maybe it's not a quite so specific day i do worry about ourselves families like how fragmented and unfocused our attention is yeah especially children yeah i mean i've got to be careful with i do watch my you know watch my kids who are a bit older now but i just it's not what we were designed to do yes it's not what really makes us feel good in the end maybe feels good in the moment. But I think just really, really being in command of our attention and therefore being able to continue to do deeply focused work and get in a flow state and creating really important works, whether they be business ideas or works of art.

48:35100%. That's where the magic happens, isn't it? Require big chunks of time where you're just not distracted. it so i i i worry about that's i mean one has probably multiple things to worry about but um that's one that's brilliant there's a brilliant book by an author called cal newport i think he's west coast of the u.s based he's called deep work and it talks about this exact issue is a really good read and there's a lot of eye-opening statistics and facts in this but yeah i mean And it's, I mean, it's interesting, Australia banned under 16 social media, which I think is probably a good thing.

49:15It's not going to go down very well with a lot of people, but it's probably for the best. And I would expect a lot of other nations to follow suit over the coming years, which I wouldn't be particularly annoyed about, because I think it's probably for the best, like I said. So yeah, but it's an interesting topic, isn't it? So Tim, I noticed recently, congratulations is in order. You made the Time Magazine 100 list, which is a fantastic achievement. Big surprise and very flattering. Absolutely brilliant. A bit of a left fielder on that one. One for the mantelpiece, for sure. I know you've got a long way to go yet in your career, by the way.

49:55But looking back now, with the benefit of hindsight, if you could speak to that 21-year-old in the early days of your career, what advice would you give to that young man? Clueless 21 year old. I was probably a bit shy back then. So, you know, I just think encouraging that 21 year old to sort of try and meet as many people and just be curious and find out what they did. I think, you know, when you're early on, still now, like trying to understand what different jobs are. I just think it's a big mystery, right? And I think the way we match people to jobs it's sort of it's like a bit of a random this is a random like you don't really know you know what do you do gareth and you know what why does it mean to to create content and then if you're like what is that and what do you what is what is that like you know also our jobs you know both of our jobs didn't exist 15 20 years ago like i mean when i was in college the internet or the internet existed but the worldwide web did not exist like this world that i've spent a whole career in did not exist yeah that's it's crazy when you put it like that yeah it's absolutely well isn't it and that's going to happen again and it's going to happen faster right so just sort of being just trying to meet people and learn about what they do and what they like about what they do and what they don't and trying to trying to pattern match to yourself and trying to know yourself well enough to know that those are things that probably be interesting those are things that also this is probably wouldn't be interesting to me.

51:27And just being super curious and just trying to get a lot of conversations going, probably suggest that. That's really insightful. Thanks for that. I know you're a big reader, Tim. We always ask guests, do you have a piece of content or something, a documentary you've seen or a blog or something, something that's inspired you recently? You know what? Actually, since we were talking about attention, I recently read a very long sub stack, but very good by James Marriott about reading. So he's a Times opinion writer. Oh, okay. And he has a sub-stack and he's really developed a really interesting position instead of writing about reading, about attention, about how important that is and how, frankly, sort of under threat it is that we are generally reading less, reading long form less, I'll find you the link later.

52:23I mean, you know, perhaps not ironically, it's a pretty healthy read and it's got quite a grand title, but actually being quite thought-provoking, not just for me, but my family. I've shared it with my kids. Oh, wow, okay. I don't know how much they're taking it on, but I think it's pretty thought-provoking. It's not work-related. It's more sort of how do we spend our time? How do we think? How do we develop our opinions and perspectives? And I am a big reader because I think reading is... Cultural capital, is that him? Yeah. Yes. Yes, there you go. Yeah. So I think you'll find it interesting.

52:56And reading is sort of like a way of time traveling and mind traveling and personality traveling. Yeah, 100%. That's, you know, very, very powerful thing. If you give it the time. Yes, no, absolutely. I completely agree. And we'll put that on the show notes as well. But thank you for sharing that. But let's finish with this one, Tim. I can't let you go without this one. Can you just give us maybe a top two or three pieces of advice for fundraising? For general setup of GoFundMe page, how can I raise money for a good cause? Generally, what advice do you give for fundraising on a very general level?

53:35Write a very clear story that says who you are, why you're fundraising, what you'll do with the money. On the profile page. On the profile. Okay. Use pictures, have a great, ideally very human picture up front. You can now add multiple, add those pictures into the story. So tell your story. That's the first part. Second part, I think most important, write down a list of 10, 20, 30 people you know, hopefully reasonably well, that you think will have a good chance of supporting you. Okay. and then text or WhatsApp them one-on-one. So I would say, Gareth, I'm doing this fundraiser. I love that, yeah.

54:18I'd say it's for Chris Hoyes, you know, tour de foot. And here's why I care about that a lot. And I thought, you know, you might want to just support it. Just a little bit would be great. And also if you could share it. And if I text you one-on-one, the chance of you responding is so much higher. Absolutely. And what that then does is it's probably five, six, seven, eight, maybe 10 of those people say, you know, I'll give 10 pounds, 50 pounds, whatever. And that will create momentum. And then your fundraiser will have some support. Maybe it's got eight, 10 donations. And then start sharing it more broadly.

54:58If you're younger on your TikTok, if you're older on your Facebook, right, or if you're into Reddit on Reddit, wherever it is that you have a community. and then also we put qr code if you go to church put it in the church ask the vicar if you can do it or your sports team or your whatever yeah or you know if there's a pinboard at your local community place or on the pub then you start pushing it out and then when people come they're like oh yeah tim's fundraiser is like move it it's got 10 now it's got 20 because people want to participate in something that has momentum. So good story, realistic goal that we can tune for you over time, reach out one-on-one and then spread the word.

55:40And then last piece of advice, really, really, really ask people to share with deference. Because what people don't realize and what we can measure now for you is your share will often be worth more than your donation. Let's say you give me 45 pounds, which is our UK average, and you share with 20 people. I bet you your share will generate way more than 45 pounds. So your power as my supporter is both what you donate and what you share. We had a user a while back in the US. She donated five bucks. It was a Hurricane Helene fundraiser. She shared. She had a big network. She generated$100 ,000. $5 to$100 ,000.

56:24Goodness me. wow that's incredible those are the steps great story that's yours text first expand from there encourage everyone to share and then just keep doing the thank yous and the updates and just keep going at it and keep engaging with it on socials and things yeah that's fantastic that's way more than i expected there that was brilliant tim i've absolutely loved talking to you by the way tim okay and um yeah same here it's been a great chat appreciate it yeah we covered a lot good stuff yeah i've really enjoyed meeting you so thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story with us and your and your opinions and thoughts has been really it's been brilliant so thank you so much cheers cheers well i hope you have a great weekend and hopefully maybe we can bump into each other at a bat principality sometime you know you never know that would be brilliant

57:19wow i love that conversation that was uh that was a really enjoyable conversation There were a couple of moments in that conversation that really stood out for me, though, and will probably stay with me as well. I think the first one was Tim talking about his personal experience of the Los Angeles fires, which I didn't realize was a year ago. It doesn't feel that long back, but it was about a year ago, Tim said. But I hadn't realized that his own home narrowly escaped the damage. It was literally down to the way the wind was blowing. But I know many of his friends and neighbors were far less fortunate.

57:55The scale of devastation was quite shocking. But listening to him describe the scale of the loss and the despair in those communities and the long road to recovery was genuinely sobering. At the same time, hearing how GoFundMe helped mobilize support for people was also, you know, on the flip side, was very inspiring. Some people lost absolutely everything. but it's just a reminder of the good that GoFundMe do and a reminder of what technology can enable at its very best. So that was just something that obviously stood out for me. The other one to draw attention to is Tim's advice for fundraisers.

58:33I won't repeat what he said, but it was obviously very thoughtful, practical, and clearly deeply informed. I've never run a fundraising campaign myself, but this is advice I'll certainly remember, whether for my own purposes or to support somebody else. So I thought that bit was absolutely brilliant. It was a grounded, honest conversation. Tim is clearly a brilliant communicator who really lives and breathes the essence of what GoFundMe are about. And as I've said many times in the past, it's an absolute pleasure to talk to someone who is so passionate about what they do. Yeah, but thank you so much for listening.

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