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But there is growing interest as the technology has gone better. This week on Explain It to Me, the ethics of embryo-maxing. Listen to new episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, welcome to the Coder. I'm your editor-in-chief, The Verge, and Coder is my show about big ideas and other problems.
Today I'm talking of Tim Cadugget, the CEO of GoFundMe. You know GoFundMe. It's a major fundraising platform where you can donate to help people with everything from medical expenses to little league uniforms to just starting a new business. Tim took over as CEO in March of 2020, a fascinating and chaotic moment in the United States around the world. And the moment you'll hear me argue that GoFundMe became a load-bearing part of American culture.
Perhaps most importantly, GoFundMe is now a kind of proxy for the broken healthcare system. Medical expenses are the single most popular category of fundraising on the platform. And you might be surprised to hear Tim say it's not just America, but in every market GoFundMe operates in. And the CEO of GoFundMe sits inside of a ton of big, messy ideas, wealth distribution, geopolitical conflict, and the holes in our social safety nets. All of that is seeming tension with the idea that GoFundMe is a for-profit company, collecting fees and tips and feeling the natural pressure to grow as a business.
So you can imagine I had a lot of questions for Tim. Now he thinks about all of this and how he makes some very tough decisions about what money to make and what money not to make. To his credit, he was game to go there and talked to it all pretty openly. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. And remember, please subscribe to our YouTube channel for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.
Okay, Tim Cadugget, CEO of GoFundMe. Here we go. Tim Cadugget, you're going to CEO of GoFundMe. Welcome to the Coder. Thank you very much for having me, D.I.
I am very excited to talk to you. GoFundMe occupies an incredibly unique place, I think in our culture, in American culture, American society. It's a for-profit company, which I have a lot of questions about how you think about its place in our culture and the need to grow and deliver returns. And then I was doing the research. You joined this company just in the pandemic, in the heart of the pandemic, when it feels like everything changed.
And now we're six years later, maybe things are settled, maybe they haven't. But I actually just want to start there. You became the CEO when the idea that the public health system, how we think about healthcare in America all got flipped upside down. I know that healthcare expenses are, I think, the single biggest category on GoFundMe. How do you think about the platform and how do you think just about that path from 2020 until now?
Well, yes, there's a lot in there. So I started on March the 2nd, 2020, which was about a week before it became very clear in the US that the pandemic was going to have major implications. But it was already becoming clear in other parts of the world. We operate in 20 countries and we did back then. For instance, Italy was one of, it was an important country first and that was probably the first European country that had a big impact.
So it was just becoming evident, in fact, by the end of the first week we went remote. So things came at us, all of us in the world, very quickly. It certainly came very quickly for me trying to figure out a new company, a new space and all this stuff happening. The root of what we do is extremely simple. We help people help each other.
And we are there to help people in whatever situation they need help. Sometimes those are the most consequential or the most significant thing that is happening in someone's life and has ever happened in their life. And sometimes they're very lighthearted and fun and forward looking like go in a college or sending your kids sports team on talk because they made the state championships. You name them. Everything in between.
If someone thinks they need help, we're here to help them mobilize support from friends, family and networks. And so when you talk about them pandemic, that is a time where millions of people need a lot of help. In some cases, for medical situations, everything related to that, some cases because they weren't able to work anymore or we had a phenomenon where that was not expected. We could not have anticipated this. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses were shutting down restaurants, bars, music venues.
They were all having to shop for a while, didn't know how long for the employee. So we had tens of thousands of fundraisers that were often being set up by really loyal customers who said, I love my local restaurant. I really feel bad for the waitstaff and the kitchen staff. I want to set up and go for me for that. And we had so many of those and it was such a different use case that it was a struggle to figure out how do we handle the volume?
For example, when you raise money into a fundraiser to take the money out, you have to go through a KYC process to verify that the right person. If you're a business, you have to go through a KYB process. And that's different and more complicated. And it means you need paperwork. And if people are no longer at their place of business, how do you get the paperwork?
So we and our payment processes, who we work with, all money goes through our third party payment processes, not through us. So it's a figure out how do we get through this huge amount of new fundraisers to navigate the situation. So those are a couple of examples of the kind of thing. But it goes back to helping people help each other in whatever situation they're dealing with. I think the reason I wanted to start there, and you can disagree with this, that feels to me like the moment when GoFundMe became a load-bearing part of American culture in like very specific ways.
The same way that Zoom maybe became a load-bearing part of American business for five minutes. Everything changed and what other resources and what is the infrastructure and what are the tools. And GoFundMe emerged as one of those things. And obviously you were the new CEO at the moment, so maybe you just had to react and one foot in front of the other. But I'm wondering if you feel the same way about what GoFundMe has become after that time?
I think you're phrased there, which I haven't heard before, but I think it's a really interesting part of load-bearing. We definitely were used by more people. Awareness was already reasonably high, but it has increased. To give you a set-side, unaided awareness was sort of in the mid-30s. It's now about 70, aided awarenesses in the low 90s.
So almost everyone has heard of GoFundMe. And yes, I do think that along with a lot of digital services in that time period, the awareness and usage elevated and has continued to grow since then, I think about more than the third of American adults have used GoFundMe now. And also I think it's not just America though. So we're in 20 other countries, UK, Ireland, Italy, France, all European, but Australia, Canada. And a similar thing has happened there where doing a GoFundMe has become an expression in the other than Accula.
And it's become something that people definitely relate to is like, that is a way that I can do something. I'll give you just a personal example. It's telling your producer before we go on. We were talking about where we are in the country. I'm in Atenas, I mentioned.
In January last year, our town burned down. Right? 6,000 homes, about 2,000 of the population displaced. GoFundMe was an incredibly important part of the response. The response involved many things, national agencies, local agencies, nonprofit organizations.
GoFundMe was the way that over 10,000 families here in the Palisades could mobilize support and love from friends and family immediately. That's one part of the response. As I mentioned, there are many parts. But the thing that I think maybe people don't realize until you're doing a GoFundMe is it is actually about a lot more than the money. The money is obviously important, critical.
But what comes with that is the expression of support. So when you're dealing with a tough situation, many times people feel alone. When you do a fundraiser or someone does one on your behalf, suddenly you start to see, here are all these people. Some of them I know really well. Some of them have been friends I've not seen for a few years.
So hang on a minute. I want to help. I'm thinking of you, Nita. Right. His $50, but more importantly, I'm thinking of you, I want to get through that.
So that, the sense that GoFundMe could be the catalyst of that. Yes, you're right. That has become much more successful. I'm curious about that dynamic. And I think there's a lot of different ways I want to come at it through the course's conversation.
But just to make the comparison to Zoom, for example, another service that sort of exploded in use during that time became a phenomenon. Zoom is business software. The idea that a bunch of businesses needed to use Zoom so everybody could talk to each other. And then that became consumer software because we're going to run elementary schools over Zoom. The idea that Zoom is a for-profit business that expanded its market and then that changed.
That feels simple in one specific way. This is enterprise software for businesses that people are going to use in different ways and they're going to charge you money to. The thing you're describing at GoFundMe is far more cultural. It has echoes deep into how society is structured. How should our communities help one another?
What is the expression of that help? How should you feel about asking for that help? That echoes differently through time, through situations, through our politics. You've mentioned several times that GoFundMe operates in different countries. Different countries have different social safety nets.
They have different cultures. They have different attitudes towards asking and receiving for help from the government from another. How has that changed? That feels like maybe the most important part of a for-profit service where you're taking fees from people who are saying money to one another but the mission you're describing is more of a social good mission. I mean look, a couple of things.
One, help is part of what makes us human. We are social species. We've always lived together in groups. We're starting with little villages, not anything great that we do it together. So that help is timeless, it's inherent.
To a point, it's universal. So what I've found, I've been to 10 or more of our countries, a bunch of them even just over the last year, is the patents. It's fascinating. Every country you go to Australia, Italy, Germany, or Canada, or UK, and everyone else, what's different about us? And also you go within those countries to diaspora populations, it can be Nepales in Australia, or the Turkish community in Germany, or you name it.
And the similarities are actually a lot more strong than the differences. One, everyone finds it hard to ask for help. I haven't met anyone yet, so that was easy for me to ask for help. And the paradox is so powerful, but it's difficult and takes courage to open the door and I want to come back to that. But you're asking me about what does it mean to do this work but to do it as a business?
So a couple of things. One, how does the business work? We thought very carefully about this. Our goal is to get as much help to the recipient as possible. So how do we structure the business?
When you give money, the only fees that we take are the transaction processing fees, which in the US for a consumer fund raised at 2.9% and 30 cents per transaction. That's the same as where you use a credit card or a debit card anywhere in the world, pocket gas, go in the supermarket, all of those businesses have those fees. That's it. We have to do that because we have to use third-party payment processes to make sure that money flows in the right way as verified. After that, we ask the donor if they want to give us a voluntary contribution, but to totally up to that.
Make a suggestion, people change it, a good chunk of people do give us a tip, a good chunk don't. I think last year 15 to 20 million people didn't give us anything, which is fine because the donor is the person in this equation who's bringing the financial resources and we want to leave it up to them whether they want to compensate us for the service or not. That's it. So we feel that that's very well aligned. Now the reason that we ask for a contribution is because we have 850 people here working extremely hard running servers, building the websites, doing the marketing, doing the trust and safety, running the company, running the organization that enabled 80 million people last year to donate and has generated over $40 billion of help over the last 10, 15 years.
So that takes real work. Those people need to be compensated in the third-party services that we use whether they know we are since on it, open AI, like they cost money. We need that, but we make it, and I think it's very unusual, we give people the choice how much they want to pay us, which is really powerful. Is that a stable one of revenue? It's a for-profit company.
I imagine at some point you have to go in front of a board of directors and say the revenue that you're going up. Is that voluntary donations a stable line of revenue is a growing? Yes, it's highly variable at the individual level, but when you talk about the scale of we're talking about tens of millions of donations, it aggregates to a fairly steady average. And our growth comes from helping more people help each other. Everything we focus on is how do we generate more help in the world?
I mean, it's literally my true north objective is start every meeting with that. It's like if we're making a decision, the first dimension of making that decision is will this thing that we're thinking about doing help more people help each other? If it does, let's lean into it. If it doesn't, probably not as important as something that does. Can I just sit in the it aggregates out to a pretty steady percentage across the tens of millions of people?
That is a huge insight, right? On the individual level, it varies. I'm sure most people listening to this, I participated and go from me and decided whether or not to donate and click the box or not. And to everyone listening who has, thank you for the help and if you contribute to just thank you for that. Thank you.
There's a part of that where you're saying if you can get to tens of millions of people, there will be a steady state of donations and there will be a amount of revenue that will track linearly with the growth of the platform overall. And we can come to the platform, I'm going to feature it, but you're saying that there's something predictable that lets you grow and generate profit and return. What is the mechanism that goes from individual decision to donate or not to in the aggregate, it's steady? Because that feels like a big insight, almost like a bet that a company would have had to make at some point that it would aggregate over time at scale that doesn't seem intuitive to me at least. I mean, it's just the average behavior, aggregate average behavior.
So you can see that as more people use any feature, your ability to predict how that feature will be used gets more precise. Essentially, your path to statistical significance gets improved. This is the same for anything about what we design that more and more people use as you get more people, you run more people in the experiment, you start to see, okay, the volatility of usage is going down and we can now see that we think it's going to settle in here, even though there's large variations. So it's really a lot of large numbers. What is the average donation that people give when they participate in the platform?
So today, it's between $80 to $100 and I see that because it's moved in interesting ways over the last year, it varies a lot based on the category and it varies a bit by country as well. But somewhere in the $80 to $100 for personal fundraising, it varies a little bit more. So another side of our business is called GoFundMe Pro. So we offer fundraising software to nonprofit organizations. These are folks like World Central Kitchen, Salvation Army, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and so on.
And there are two different kinds of donations. There's a one-time donation, which is somewhat similar, sometimes higher, and there's a recurring donation, which is much lower, right? That's someone committing to give monthly. That's a very important source of revenue to nonprofits. One that we're spending a lot of time investing in because it gives those nonprofits predictable revenue and that's lower than $25 to $30 range.
But if you think personal fundraising, $80 to $100 roughly is what people are contributing. They're contributing to one another, contributing to GoFundMe. That's not what they're doing. This is a donation to the personal core cause that they help you. Sure.
I'm curious about that too. That's a fascinating number. I'm asking more specifically when they choose to pay GoFundMe for the services. When you say, please pay us, how much are they paying you? This is a few couple of fee dollars typically.
I guess they're choosing, but a lot of people are choosing not to. That's fine. For the folks that are, it'd be a few bucks. A lot of large numbers, a piece of it is really interesting to me. I look at other big services that take percentages of payments over time.
I'll just pick on Candy Crush because I left Picking on Candy Crush, right? Apple makes a lot of services revenue and probably some huge amount of it is Candy Crush Wheels, right? People who spend tens of thousands of dollars buying loot boxes in Candy Crush and Apple just collects the 30%. And then there's a long tail of the rest of us who understand that it's a 30% fee to do an in-app purchase and maybe we do one or two a month and that's it. There's some enormous disparity between who generates the bulk of the fees and those sort of long tail.
Do you have that same disparity? Is there a class of people that pays more money? No. No. We have ours is much more in the center of the bulk of because most donations sit in that area.
And unsurprisingly, when people are donating more, if they choose to contribute to us to tip us, they do that much less as a percentage. So people are definitely like looking at that and saying, what's the reason the one I'm going to give you for making those choices? I'm guessing there's a lot of software design in there. You can dart pattern yourself into getting more money if you wanted to. You could write more hard pull copy to say, go find me one, survive unless you pay us some money along the way.
What's the pull there? I mean, that seems if you wanted to optimize a business result, there's a lot of levers to pull around the checkbox that says, give us some money. We've got an exact the opposite direction from anything like when I came in, the tipping experience was a step. It was like a little thing of his suggestion that if you wanted to change it, it was a couple of clicks. I was like, I want us to be far more transparent than that.
So we tested our way into what we now use as a slider, which is right there, it has a suggested amount and just went boom, just obviously people are still doing your phone. You can move it without any clicks in less than two seconds is right there and it's called out. If you, it's called out there, right in the main experience, it's called out as you're checking it out, it's called out and you'll receive multiple ways to do it. So it's super clear, super transparent, but that gives people choice and control. I'm asking about the revenue side and the ability to optimize that revenue because these are the pressures every for profit company faces.
The number has to go up. Yeah. And the idea that you can layer in dart patterns, you can do it my friend Corey Dr. O'Korri calls in certification and collect more fees along the way, that pull exists when you are a for profit company. Why be structured that way and have all of those bad incentives exist as opposed to being a nonprofit or a B Corp or any of these other kinds of structures that might reduce that pressure?
Because as a company, we can invest a lot more very simply. We work for some very significant nonprofits, some of the biggest in the world, but the biggest doesn't have a technology team more than 50 or 60 people. And to do what we're doing, to do it at the scale we're doing around Big chunk of the world, you need more technology, you need more people, you need the capacity to be able to innovate, which is what we have done. And so in order to do that, you need to be able to run as companies really hard to do that as a nonprofit. So that's the biggest reason.
And it is elegant in the sense that our objective is 100% aligned with what our customers are trying to achieve. We are trying to make it easier for more people to ask for help and then more people to come in the response that help. And that takes a lot of innovation, a lot of software development. We'll talk about the coach and the things that we're doing there. And therefore it is us that have done this.
We invented this thing. We have scaled it. We have helped now many, many tens of millions of people, actually hundreds of millions of people, help each other and we're continuing to do that. So it is working. And the way we think about growth is directly linked to help more people multiply support for each other right now.
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We're back with GoFundy C. O. Tim Cudogan discussing the complex nature of online fundraising. Customers are really interesting. You brought me to the decoder questions.
Quite naturally. Well done. But I want to just ask about customers. I understand that on the pros side, the customers are big non-profits. That probably feels more like a traditional assessment in some way.
But on the consumer side, on 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. And the paradox of help is that it's really hard to ask for help when we're helping fields great. I'm talking at a conference, sometimes I ask a little question. I say, hey, who in the room likes helping?
Everyone's helping. 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 if you like asking for help in public? And most of those people put their heads 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. Because also, we've always all been that situation where we think our friend needs to help or relative or our child, helping for a bit. And we say, I want to help you with this, but they haven't asked.
It often doesn't work. It's awkward. Right? It can be resisted. But when someone has asked for help and had the courage to do that, they open the store 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 fact, emotional factors, societal factors, a sense of like, can I do this? How would I do this? I've never done before with my friends. They can be all of these different things.
So a lot of our work and the soft, 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 a another local nonprofit or fundraiser in your area that you would like to help with. So we think of both as a customer. I'm curious and I want to push on this sort of redistribution aspect that you're describing. There might be more people to help, right?
That's a fascinating concept. You mentioned that you go from these 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 companies in product technology design data science.
That's the biggest chunk. Then 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, making sure the money is moving in the right way. And then operations. And then of course our go to market, which is 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. And it also builds awareness of good fun because what we're trying to do is show more and more people that you can do this to. Right. That helps works and this is a powerful way to do it in the more digital world.
So that's roughly how it's structured. That communications piece is really interesting to me. It sort of tracks intuitively that if you start to go funny, 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 go funny who will donate. 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. You're going to pick the ones that are the most heartwarming, they might play in the local media to the best. Then there's a sort of platform aspect to it.
You can write a go funny that's going to go to the most viral on Facebook. Somewhere in there is your AI coach. Yes. Right. The new tool I was playing with it today, I almost started going for the fun of this.
I was like right at the end, it's a click on the last button. But it writes you a go funny. You say I'm starting whatever, a shelter for puppies, help me write the copy to do the go funny and we'll just do it for you. And there's something about AI in that context and then having a human comms team and the other context that seem like the same idea pointed the same goal. But the AI might, because it is sort of the average of every success will go funny, might pull everyone in the same direction while your human comms team is trying to show how different everything is.
Is that track there? There's something in there that I find particularly interesting. Yeah. So the most important thing about creating and running a go funny 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 go for me.
So first, am I going to do this a lot? Second, how exactly do I want to write my story? 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 about the title. You're in journalists, right? Title writing is hard. That's why media organizations have title writing departments.
So we identified all of these very difficult lockers. 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 the people are getting stuck with titles. Let's take what they've created and suggest three titles.
If they like them, pick one, modify one, run with it. We turned out a lot of people use that fact. We've had over 90 million uses of these different components. Same with goals. Where we moved to this year, early this year, as we launched Smart Thundering Coach, we said, actually, you can choose to have an agent experience, a chat experience of creating a go for me.
That's going to do all of those things with you holistically in the create process. But the key is it's you, your story, and we're helping you put together. Let me give you an example. We do a lot of checking people's experience and looking at sample flows. We had a lady whose close friend, son, had passed away.
She wanted to create a go for me for her. She was so emotionally affected that in the interaction was struggling to string together coherent sentences and just talking about how stressed she was. 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. It's a very particular difficult situation. She was able with the assistance of the coach to create that.
That's what we're talking about. For a go for me to work, it has to be you. It has to be your situation because most people that you fundraise from, you're friends and family. Over 80% of the donors are people who know first degree connections and then, yes, they're friends and friends and so on. People know that go for me is a cohearing point for that.
The coach is helping people get through these steps. Another example would be picking the goal. Most people I haven't ever fundraised before. Do I pick a big number, a little number, do I start low, does it grow over time? Those are the kinds of choices.
Then you get to manage, which is the part that you're asking about communications. A lot of that is how do you share? Who do you share with? When do you share? How often?
For example, we know that the most effective way is to reach out to people one on one. Text them or what's happened. One on one, not groups, because it's easier to 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'd be like, okay. As you can text a group, it's like, ah, smell, smell, smell, do that. But that coaching will create prompts based on your fundraiser. Here's a quick little snippet.
Here's the URL is done for you. You can modify it and send it to your 10 best friends first, get momentum, and then start reaching out and then start posting on social media. The model we have now is a daily plan. It's a program. Stay one.
Here's what you do. Find 10 people, get them a day two. You've got three donations. Great. Follow it with the other seven.
Do this. Do this. I'm not going to stop at that. But the most important thing is to empower and enable the thousands of people starting every day to have a successful fundraiser. I'm going to ask the other decoder 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 in the platform like this. How do you make decisions? What's your framework? 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, what any of the tech companies you're talking to, we're trying to create a future that doesn't exist. I think a lot of them are just trying to make money. I'll bring 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.
That doesn't exist right now. That's what I'm trying to do. When you're trying to innovate and create something new, the question is from the future of murky. It isn't like business school. It was this challenge.
You have to think very carefully to distill what is the question? For example, let's take one. Should we deploy more sophisticated recurring giving program on our personal fundraisers? That's a clear question with an answer. Part one is frame the question because what I find is when we don't frame the question, and it's 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 what. Two, how do we make decisions? First thing, will this generate more help in the world? 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 gender-city in the UK.
About two years ago, there were a bunch of riots in reaction to a murder and there was a lot of riots around immigration and so on and a bunch of things in Liverpool were destroyed. One was a local line be called Svelolene. It was ransacked, burned, severely damaged, unusable. A local woman called Alex McCormick's set up is a mum. Local mum set up for a reason.
I just want to do something. I want to raise 500 pounds. Well, it took off to raise 250,000 pounds. The local council got that lively rebuild in less than a year and I went and met the mayor, met Alex and 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.
It'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 Haid, the author, you had the Queen donating books.
It's just a lot bigger. Yes, we count through the GTV, 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, not logic of, okay, how are we going to go about it?
That is the essence. Frame the key questions, make the decisions and keep the eye on the singular objective that we exist to do. We 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. What strikes me on your answer there is there's an important values component to what you're describing here. Yes. Right.
If the target is just money, there are a lot of ways for you to make more money. You could do algorithmic discovery and go fund me 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 do to make money. You're saying that your values, the company's values inside of decisions prevent you from doing those things. I just want to push on this a little bit more and 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 it to AI companies. They also they wouldn't do military and defense work and the money showed up and now they're all doing military and defense work. Are the values that go fund me so in trying, 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 GDP, which is gross donation volume. Right? That is the amount of money that people are giving to one another two organizations. That is the thing.
We talk about every meeting, talk about every company meeting. We tell stories, the ones I've just shared with you about how that is. I've been here six and a half years. We haven't gotten into other areas. The thing we have added is we bought a company that did fundraising for nonprofits because we said, hey, 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 fundraisers 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've never felt pulled into a different direction because this is why we are here.
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. We need to take on a short break.
We'll be right back. We're back with Tim Cadigan, CEO of GoFundMe, starting into how the platform intersects the United States health care system. Let's put this in practice. And I want to start with health care because I think GoFundMe is a relationship to the health care system in America is fascinating. And as you have said, you operate in many different countries with many different versions of health care systems.
And when I say many different versions of health care systems, what I specifically mean is they almost all have national health care, United States is a particular outlier in not having that. Maybe that's going to change. 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. It may surprise you. It's actually the number one category in terms of fundraising dollars in every country we operate.
I'm obviously. It's originally unfamiliar 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, we face our mortality. And when we're facing our mortality or that of a loved one, that would be a friend or a relative, that's the biggest thing. That is the moment where more than any other moment, people want to support and show their love for someone, more than anything else.
But 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.
They 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 a relative who says, does the fundraiser looking to help to make sure 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. We are human. All of us will go through the cycle at one point or another. And it's the moment where 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. We're not cancer researchers. And we feel a bit helpless. How often do you hear that? Or do you see that happening and say, 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 follow up, it builds community. Can I give you another example? I know I'm trying to give it, but I just want to make it real because it's very, very real. I got recently got to know a young girl called Harlow's about five.
She might just attend sex and I'm definitely, Harlow has a very, very rare genetic disease. And her parents figured out how to get treatment actually through an amazing foundation base in San Diego called Enlorm 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 work covers about $120,000. They also lived in a different state.
So Daphne, who's Harlow's mom, set up a fundraiser and with a lot of hesitation. And it actually worked amazingly well. And in four days they raised the funds they needed and a whole community of people, including her pallet on mum's group, it became a 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 stroll and she was zooming around the stage and I was trying to make sure she would fall off the edge. But for people with, for example, ultra-rail, nano-rare diseases like agafone can be a really important part of supplementing what is already happening. And so I changed you. 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 can tell you many, many stories like that.
But I think overall it's because we're human. Those moments are manageable, 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. An institution can do a lot.
The NHS can do a lot. Medicare and Australia can do a lot. But it's not coming with love. Right? This is very interesting.
I'm very curious about that aspect of it. It's not coming with love. It's 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. But I would say broadly Americans do not trust the government.
It feels like a thing I can say is 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. And at the same time, I'm just listening to what you're describing and these individual stories are very powerful. And I'm thinking about them in the abstract.
And the abstract, all we're doing is redistributing money. 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. That is actually the function of all of this is to redistribute resources across the society in some way that makes sense for everyone.
And some governments do it well, some governments do it poorly. And somewhere in there is go fund me, 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 them work in product. Something about that in relation to healthcare specifically strikes me at least as absurd. And maybe that's just the American context where we've gotten it so wrong for so long.
And I just look at healthcare and 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 crowd from the campaign in America did it because of healthcare expenses. 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 zero dollars. And the more medical state has, the less money the campaigns in those states raise. So it's not actually equalized.
There's actually great disparity in the average outcome of the medical campaigns. That is what government spending and tax policy should accomplish, a more equal policy. I'm just asking how you feel about go fund me's role in that. Because as a business that has to make money, any change that structure at least in the United States would have an outside impact on your business. 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 and whatever way it works. So I think you're making some connections I agree with, but I think there's a dimension here, which I'll just reiterate, which I think I think it being very rational about. In the sense that the thing I have learned and I've shared these stories because I've met so many people now who've used to help them in their lives is how it makes them feel and 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 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 will also, I'm very hopeful, my big hope for AI actually is the first thing is medical breakthroughs that more people like Harlow and there are a lot of other people dealing with situations similar have better pathways to earlier identification and cures. We have something that can help people come together, support each other, realize they're a stronger community. I've seen it shifting away from medical. I've seen it in crisis now in my own town. Right.
Pretty much everyone I meet had a good for me. I've 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 get the first month's rents in the place that you had to stay.
And it got to make people feel better. You know, they're not alone. 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. But profit is derivative. It's like our job as I've been, but I 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 over the laws of scale that I mentioned in terms of people contributing us will continue.
But the thing you just said, you know, we've interviewed many, many politicians on a show. 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 in 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 never thought of it quite that way. But it's just a personal perspective and people very different. Like for me, you know, being able to run the company in a disciplined way such that we can make investments and continue like that's an important financial discipline.
But the purpose is this big purpose and it's the same purpose and it is consistent and I feel incredibly lucky to be out of work at an organization where I can be like a do CEO type stuff and work out really interesting tech things. But do it for this purpose. I mean, I'll just you just well, I'm going to run out of time. So I apologize. I appreciate all the examples.
I'm a person. I just want more time on health care and then I want to talk about platform moderation with you just to wrap this up. And I appreciate it. You're saying the platform is more emotional and I'm operating in this very abstract aggregate way being rational as you keep saying. And I'm looking to study here from a bunch of economists that found that when there's AC and Medicaid expansion, there's a significantly meaningful effect in reducing health related go funding campaigns.
And the state expands Medicaid. The number of go funding campaigns on state goes down. 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 the 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, definitely don't lobby against that. We've had people on the show lobby against things that would harm their business. 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 getting more care, that's awesome. Again, the thing that I'm pushing out 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 a tax reform, which is a real thing that's happened on the show, a real conversation I've had before. But somewhere embedded in the company is something that will prevent you from maximizing profit, not making profit, but maximizing profit.
It seems like that is obviously seems like that's very important to you. Is there pressure to change that? Because that's the one that I look at, where ACA expansion would reduce the biggest bucket of dollars that comes through the platform. More craven capitalists would take a hard look at that in a different way. No, I'll give you a different example about the June COVID rent.
There were some government programs to support people with rent. We tried to make people aware who are using our services, these could avail themselves to 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, we will work sometimes with some of our nonprofits who are providing services, whether a lot of them are medical nonprofits or homelessness focused on food insecurity and so on and so work with them.
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 that are available. 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 in safety team.
If the theme of this conversation is one of 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 sends out your check them out. They're actually readable, right? So we put a lot of work to turn you into English that anyone can read and they're pretty practical, right?
Practically most of them are legal that if you do a fundraiser for drugs or guns or these like 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 there are common sense set of guardrails, which is, hey, you're a funny for everybody. You're anybody who has a company that fundraises for help from sales or friend or an organization and here's some simple, we think they're very pragmatic guardrails.
Like, hey, just stay within the guardrails, you'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. Clear in the context of content moderation is simple for the CEO to say, I would suspect if you go ask your trust in safety team, it's much more complicated. That's why they're in the great professionals they are.
You have a rule against funding defenses of people who are allegedly commit violent crimes, like legal defense funds. Yes, we don't have a fundraising for the legal defense of violent and financial crimes. So murder, fraud, a bunch of nasty list of things. Yes, we made a decision that no, we're going to not play in that particular area for the betterment of the community. And that's a value-based decision, right?
That's just go-fund-me's decision. It is go-fund-me's decision. Yes, just to be clear, it doesn't reflect on the innocent's or guilt of people in those situations. It's just like, hey, look, that's gets very complicated. It's just better for us to, for fundraising purposes, it doesn't make sense for us.
Right next to that, there has been ongoing controversies since 2023. The version's covered it around the freezing of payments and alleged disproportionate rejection of fundraisers for humanitarian causes in Gaza and in Palestine. We've covered it, but these things have just gotten frozen and the people are complaining about it. Is that a value-based decision to go-fund-me? Is that something else?
Not at all. It's just 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-Gazza conflict, which is a very large amount of help. And so we're also working, and I want to stress this, 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 didn't meet the criteria to allow them to proceed, and 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. So, of course, what you hear is you'll hear people bring 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.
One of the things that comes up in every conversation I have with the 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 seem of content moderation. In your case, you're talking to 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 adhering, strike and pay, and actually all funds to personal fundraisers go through our payment processes. We actually never touch the money. And 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 fundraisers are legitimate.
We're doing 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 cannot lock funds and begin to disperse those funds.
So 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. There's a pattern that plays out with every platform that has tighter moderation rules. Another platform shows up with looser moderation rules. Twitch bans a stream where they go to kick, YouTube, you go to rumble with GoFundMe, it's other platforms. It gives 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?
No. There are terms of service, obviously, looking at what makes sense in the world of money movement. But there are some we take full ownership of those and head and shoulders ahead of what anyone else. And we tend to have smaller companies that offer service like ours in every country we operate in. But we focus on what is the right thing for legitimate customers?
Then how do we craft a coherent, sensible, easy to understand set of rules that are rules that are right for everybody? You go from that? Every platform, including yours, is now caught in the dynamic of wanting to help regular people make better things with AI. An AI coach that helps you get to 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. Because I would say we have not seen that as much as maybe some other platforms.
Because the process of setting up a fundraiser has to be so authentic, people call it crowd funding. I don't like that term because a crowd implies a large group of strangers. 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 that work. So it's very hard to get a fundraiser to go viral unless it has some initial momentum.
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? Are you seeing it? Probably even a little bit?
Yeah, I know we're actually on guard against it. But in terms of massive spikes in starts, which is fundraiser starts, 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 and tooling to help 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, you've set up pages where nonprofits have not signed up for go fund me. A bunch of state attorneys general had accused you of plagiarizing the charity pages and setting up nonprofits. You apologize, you took them down. There's a class action lawsuit.
That to me looks like we need to increase the number of inputs. We help 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 listings and go.
What led to that decision? So that was, it's a classic of you have your overarching principle, which is, hey, we want to move a lot more help in the world. Our full process was we got 100 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 supports. And I try to work through an increasingly fragmented digital environment. 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. We 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. If you don't like it, it's not what you're going to do.
I just want to connect that to the AIPs. And I understand there's a lot of theory. That's why all I can get out of you on that one. But let me connect that to the AIPs. Classic tech company move.
We see demand. What you're describing is go fund these an aggregator, right? You have the demand, same as Google has demand or Instagram has 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 make 500 YouTube videos a day to try to capture pieces of that demand. And then you can see the data that's 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 cloud 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 what I, 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, right?
And maybe that was the right thing or the wrong thing to do and that will come to whatever regulatory conclusions can come to. But that was the response is to see the demand and then do something about it. And 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. I will use AI to go get it, right? In some way, 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.
It's keeping that happening right now, which is not happening and what might prevent it from happening because that strikes me as a pretty huge risk. I think probably the reason that's maybe not happening is that when you give, you have to have an emotional connection. And that comes from a some-to-censive relationship, either a relationship with a person who's fundraising or a relationship with a cause or an organization that resonates with you. And 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, excuse me, 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. I'm curious how that goes over time. I'm reliably told that AI can be a girlfriend.
So we're going to find out. We've had, 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. 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 more significant the unknown the implications. So you know, sure. So those guys are right. That is a big question.
I don't think we have nearly enough time to dig into it. Tim, thank you so much. What's next for GoFundMe? What should people be looking for? We are focused very heavily on evolving the coach.
Just give you a sense very quickly. It's helped people be more successful. We thought it would help raise about $125 million more this year. It's on track to double that. It's a lot more help.
And it's making people feel better. Like two thirds of the folks who are using it feel less stress, 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 brief step, ask for help and a lot of support that will come out. So that's a big focus for us.
Yeah. We'll have to have you back soon to see how all these things go. Tim, thank you for listening. Great conversation. Good.
Really, certain 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. Thanks for listening.
I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed it. Bye. Bye.
Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.
and your piece of no. In Swedish, not all bummies, night monkey. Aah! Mom! Aikia, 50 years of Swedishness at home.
Look, he's wearing middle-pack jamas. So cute.