How GoFundMe became America's backup plan

Tim Cadogan is CEO of GoFundMe, the for-profit platform where you can donate to help people with everything from medical expenses to little league uniforms to starting a new business. Tim took over as CEO in March 2020 — a chaotic moment when GoFundMe became a load-bearing part of American culture. So you can imagine I had a lot of questions for Tim, how he thinks about all this, and how he makes some very tough decisions on what money to make and what money not to make. Read the full interview transcript on The Verge. Links: The GoFundMe CEO wants you to ask: ‘How can I help?’ | New York TImes GoFundMe CEO: We weren't meant to replace COVID relief | USA Today GoFundMe Is a healthcare utility now | The Atlantic As Gaza is bombarded, GoFundMe donations are stuck in limbo | The Verge For the uninsured, crowdfunding provides little help in paying for healthcare | University of Washington Oregon nonprofits claim GoFundMe impersonated them | Central Oregon Daily News The causes and consequences of medical crowdfunding | ScienceDirect Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder’s producers are Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:45Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, editor in chief of The Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Tim Cadogan, 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 and 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 in America, but in every market GoFundMe operates in.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  All this means GoFundMe sits inside of a ton of big, messy ideas. Wealth distribution, geopolitical conflict, and holes in our social safety nets. All of that is in 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, how 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 about it all pretty openly. I hope you enjoy this conversation. And remember, please subscribe to our YouTube channel for new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay, Tim Cadogan, CEO of GoFundMe. Here we go.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Tim Cadogan, you're the CEO of GoFundMe. Welcome to Decoder.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Hey, thank you very much for having me, Eli.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  I am very excited to talk to you. GoFundMe occupies an incredibly unique place, I think, in our culture, particularly in American culture and 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 have 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,

• 4:05Speaker 02

  how we think about healthcare in America, all got flipped upside down. I know that healthcare expenses are, I think, the single biggest category in GoFundMe. How do you think about the platform? And how do you think just about that path from 2020 until now?

• 4:17Speaker 03

  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 in the world. We operate in 20 countries, and we did back then. For instance, Italy was one of, is an important country for us. 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.

• 5:00Speaker 03

  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, 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 going to college or sending your kid's sports team on tour because they've made the state championships, you name it. 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 the pandemic,

• 5:43Speaker 03

  that is a time where millions of people needed 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, you know, 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 shut for a while, didn't know how long, furlough 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 a GoFundMe for them.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  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 you're 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 processors, who we work with, all money goes through our third-party payment processes, not through us. So we had to 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.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  But it goes back to helping people help each other in whatever situation they're dealing with.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  I think the reason I wanted to start there, and you can disagree with me on 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.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Right? Everything changed. And what are the 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?

• 7:59Speaker 03

  I think your phrase there, which I haven't heard before, but I think is a really interesting part of it, load-bearing. We definitely were used by more people. Awareness of it. Awareness was already reasonably high, but it has increased. To give you a sense, our unaided awareness was sort of in the mid 30s. It's now about 70. Aided awareness is 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 a third of American adults have used GoFundMe now. And also, I think it's not just America, though.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  So we're in 20 other countries, UK, Ireland, Italy, France, all the European countries, Australia, Canada. And a similar thing has happened there, where doing a GoFundMe has become an expression in the vernacular. And it's become something that people definitely relate to as like, that is a way that I can do something. I will give you just a personal example. I was telling a producer before we got on. We were talking about where we are in the country. I'm in Alcatraz, as I mentioned. In January last year, our town burned down. Right? 6,000 homes, about two-thirds of the population displaced. GoFundMe was an incredibly important part of the response.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  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.

• 10:11Speaker 03

  When you do a fundraiser or someone does one on your behalf, suddenly you start to see, here are all these people, some of whom I know really well, some of whom are friends I've seen for a few years. So like, hang on a minute, I want to help. I'm thinking of you, Nila, right? Here's $50, but more importantly, I'm thinking of you and I'm hoping you get through that. So that, the sense that a GoFundMe can be the catalyst of that, yes, you're right, that has become much more significant.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  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 of this 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 that everybody could talk to each other, and then that became consumer software, because we're, I don't know, 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 too. The thing you're describing with GoFundMe is far more cultural, right? It has echoes

• 11:25Speaker 02

  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 one another. How has that changed? Because that feels like maybe the most important part of a for-profit service, where you're, you're taking fees from people who are sending money to one another, but you have the mission you're describing is more of a social good mission.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  I mean, look, a couple of things. One, help is part of what makes us human. Like, we are a social species. We've always lived together in groups, starting with little villages, not up. Anything great that we create, we do it together. And so that help is timeless, it's inherent, and it, to your 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 patterns, what's fascinating, every country, you go to Australia, or Italy, or Germany, or Canada, or UK, and everyone asks, what's different about us? And also, you go within those countries, the diaspora populations, it can be Nepalese in Australia, or the Turkish community in Germany, or you name it. And everyone's like, what's the, the similarities

• 12:50Speaker 03

  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 help 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've 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

• 13:32Speaker 03

  that we take are the transaction processing fees, which in the US for a consumer fundraiser, 2.9 cents, 30 cents per transaction. That's the same as where you use a credit card or a debit card, anywhere in the world, pump your gas, go into 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, is verified, and so on. After that, we ask the donor if they want to give us a voluntary contribution, a tip, totally up to them. 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

• 14:13Speaker 03

  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, you know, 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

• 14:57Speaker 03

  work. Those people need to be compensated, and the third-party services that we use, whether it be AWS and so on, OpenAI, like, they, they cost money. And 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 I think is really powerful.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Is that a stable line 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 line is going up.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Is that, is voluntary donations a stable line of revenue? Is it growing?

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's highly variable at the individual level, but when you talk about the scale that we're talking about, you know, tens of millions of donations, that 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. We 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, hmm, probably not as important as something that does.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  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 have participated in GoFundMe and decided whether or not to donate, and click the box or not.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  And to everyone listening who has, thank you for the help. And if you've contributed to us, thank you for that. Thank you.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  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 an amount of revenue that will track linearly with the growth of the platform overall. And we can come to how the platform might grow in the future, but you're saying that there's something predictable there that lets you grow and generate profit in 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.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  I mean, it's just, it's, it's the average behavior, you know, aggregate, average behavior. So you can see that as more and more people use any feature, your ability to predict how that feature will be used gets more precise. Essentially, your path to statistical significance improves. 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, even though there's large variations. So it's really a law of large numbers thing.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  What is the average donation that people give when they participate in the platform?

• 18:05Speaker 03

  So today, I was looking, you know, it's between $80 to $100. And I say 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, there are two different kinds of donations. There's a one-time donation,

• 18:49Speaker 03

  which is somewhat similar, sometimes higher. And there's a recurring donation, which is much lower, right? That's someone committing to, to give monthly. And that's a very important source of revenue to nonprofits, and one that we're spending a lot of time investing in, because it gives those nonprofits predictable revenue. And that's more in the sort of $25 to $30 range. But if you think personal fundraising, $80 to $100 roughly is, is what people are contributing.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  They're contributing to one another or contributing to GoFundMe? That's not what they're doing.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm sorry. This is a donation to the personal or cause that they're helping.

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Sure. I, I'm curious about that, too. That's a fascinating number. I'm asking more specifically, when they choose to pay GoFundMe.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  For the services, when you say, please pay us, how much are they paying you?

• 19:37Speaker 03

  This is a few couple of few dollars typically if they're choosing and a lot of people are choosing not to. That's fine. And for the folks that are, you know, it'd be a few bucks.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  The law of large numbers piece of it is really interesting to me. I look at other big services that, you know, take percentages of payments over time. I'll just pick on Candy Crush because I love picking on Candy Crush, right? Apple makes a lot of services revenue and probably some huge amount of it is Candy Crush whales. Right? People who spend tens of thousands of dollars buying loot boxes and 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. And there's some enormous disparity between who generates the bulk of the fees and the sort of long tail. Do you have that same disparity? Is there a class of people that pays more money?

• 20:32Speaker 03

  No, no, we have, ours is much more in the center of the bell curve. 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, they, they do much less as a percentage. So people are definitely like looking at that and saying, hey, what's a reasonable number to give GoFundMe, making those choices?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  I'm guessing there's a lot of software design in there. You can dark pattern yourself into getting more money if you wanted to. You could write more heart pull copy to say, GoFundMe won't survive unless you pay us some money along the way. What's the pull there? I mean, that, 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.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  We've gone in exactly the opposite direction from anything like, when I came in, the tipping experience was a stepper. It was like a little thing of here's the suggestion. And if you wanted to change it, it was a couple of clicks. I was like, I don't, I, I want us to be far more transparent than that. So we tested our way into what we now use as the slider, which is, it's right there. It has a suggested amount and just went boom, just, you know, obviously people are most doing on your phone. You can move it without any clicks in less than two seconds. It's right there and it's called out, you know, if you, you know, it's called out there, right? In the main experience, it's called out as you're checking out, it's called out on your receipt. Multiple ways to do it. So it's super clear, super transparent. And that gives people choice and control.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm asking about the, the revenue side and the, the ability to optimize that revenue. Because these are the pressures every for-profit company faces. The number has to go up. And the idea that you can layer in dark patterns, you can do what my friend Corey Doctoro calls in shittification and collect more fees along the way. That pull exists when you are a for-profit company.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  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?

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Because as a company, we can invest a lot more. Very simply, you know, 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 about 50 or 60 people. And to do what we're doing and to do it at the scale we're doing around big chunk of the world, like 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 a company. It's really hard to do that as a nonprofit. So that's the biggest reason.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  And it is elegant in the sense that our objective is 100% aligned with what our customers are trying, trying to achieve. We are trying to make it easier for more people to ask for help. And then more people to come in and respond to that help. And that takes a lot of thought, a lot of innovation, a lot of software development. And we'll talk about the coach and the things that we're doing there.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  And therefore it is us that have done this. Right? That 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 it's, and you, the way we think about growth is directly linked to how to help more people mobilize support for each other right now.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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• 26:18Speaker 02

  We're back with GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan, discussing the complex nature of online fundraising. Customer is a really interesting word there. You, you've kind of brought me to the decoder questions quite naturally, well done. But I want to just ask about customers. I understand that on the pro side, the customers are big nonprofits. That probably feels more like a traditional SaaS business 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?

• 26:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  And when we, helping feels great. So I do a thing, I'm talking at a conference, sometimes I'll ask a little question. I'll say, hey, who in the room likes helping? Everyone's hands up, right? Then I say, who here likes asking for help?

• 27:18Speaker 03

  And usually less than 10% of the room put their hand up. And then I say, who, that's awesome. Who of you likes asking for help in public?

• 27:28Speaker 03

  And most of those people put their heads down.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  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 in that situation where we think our friend needs some help or a relative or our child, heaven forbid. And we will say, you know, I want to help you with this, but they haven't asked.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  Often doesn't work. It's awkward, right? Can be resisted. But when someone has had, someone has asked for help and had the courage to do that, they open this door and then the goodness flows in and then the experience flows. So we start with, how do we help people? We know there are so many people who are considering asking for help, but they are inhibited by many emotional factors, societal factors, sense of like, can I do this? How would I do this? I've never done before. All my friends that could be all of these different things. So a lot of our work and the software, the, the, the smart fundraising coach is geared to help with those problems. So that's the first set of things.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  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 doing more on that. So we think of both as a customer.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  I'm curious on that and I want to push on the sort of redistribution aspect that you're describing. There might be more people to help, right? That's a fascinating concept. You mentioned at GoFundMe is 850 people. How is that structured?

• 29:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we, we, as I mentioned, we, we, we have one mission, two approaches. So we are here to help people fundraise successfully and get help. We do that for consumers and we do that for nonprofit organizations. The latter is called Pro. Our company is organized largely functionally. So about half the company is in product, technology, design, data science. That's the biggest chunk. 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.

• 30:13Speaker 03

  And then of course, our go to market, which is our relatively small sales team, reaching out to nonprofits. Marketing and really important part for us is our communications team. Because a lot of what we do, which is very unusual, is we invest heavily in taking our customers' stories and getting them attention in the local, national, international media. That's a very important part of the service we provide to them. And it also builds awareness of GoFundMe because what we're trying to do is show more and more people that you can do this to. Right? That help works and this is a powerful way to do it in the modern digital world. So that's roughly how it's structured.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  That communications piece is really interesting to me. It sort of tracks intuitively that if you start a GoFundMe, you want a lot of people to see it.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Right? There's some fractional percentage of all the people who have ever seen your GoFundMe who will donate. And if you just increase the total number, you're going to get a larger number in the end. That communications piece, there's an element that is curated by you, right? You're going to pick the ones that are the most heartwarming, that might play in the local media the best. Then there's a sort of platform aspect to it, right? You can write a GoFundMe that's going to go the most viral on Facebook. Somewhere in there is your AI coach.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Right? The new tool, I was playing with it today. I can't, I almost just started GoFundMe for the fun of it today. I was like, right at the end, it's like click on the last button. But it writes you a GoFundMe. You say, I'm starting whatever, a shelter for puppies, help me write the copy to do the GoFundMe and it will just do it for you. And there's something about AI in that context. And then having a human comms team in the other context that seem like the same idea, point at the same goal. But the AI might, because it is sort of the average of every successful GoFundMe, might pull everyone in the same direction while your human comms team is trying to show how different everything is. Does that track? There's something in there that I find particularly interesting.

• 32:12Speaker 03

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

• 32:56Speaker 03

  What do I want the goal to be? Every one of those decisions is a point at which people drop. Because I've written my story, but the title, like title, you're a journalist, right? Title writing is hard. That's why media organizations have title writing departments. So we identified all of these very difficult blockers. Well, 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. It turned out a lot of people use that. In fact, we've had over 90 million uses of these different components.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  Same with goals. Where we moved to this year, early this year, as we launched Smart Fundering Coach, we said, actually,

• 33:50Speaker 03

  you can choose to have an agentic experience, a chat experience of creating your GoFundMe that's going to do all of those things with you holistically in the create process. But, and the key is, it's you, your story, and we're helping you put together. Let me give you an example. We were, we do a lot of checking people's experience and looking at sample flows. We had a lady whose close friend's son had passed away. And she wanted to create a GoFundMe for her. But she was so emotionally affected that, you know, in the interaction,

• 34:34Speaker 03

  was struggling to string together coherent sentences. And just talking about how stressed she was. And the coach could interact with her to take the substance of what she was trying to say in this very difficult time and put it together and explain what she felt about her friend, what the son, what he'd been about, what they were trying to do. This very particular, difficult situation. And she was able with the assistance of the coach to create that. That's what we're talking about. So for a GoFundMe to work, it has to be you. It has to be your situation because most people that you fundraise from are your friends and family.

• 35:20Speaker 03

  Over 80% of the donors are people who know you, first degree connections. And then, yes, they are friends of friends and so on. So people know that GoFundMe is a cohering point for that. So the coach is helping people get through these steps. Another example would be picking the goal. Most people haven't ever fundraised before. Do I, do I pick a big number, a little number? Do I start low? Does it grow over time? So those are the kinds of choices. And then you get to manage, which is the part that you're asking about, communications. A lot of that is like, how do you share? Who do you share with? When do you share? How often? So for example, we know that the most effective way is to reach out to people one on one.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Text them or WhatsApp them, one on one, not groups. Because it's easier to sort of go quiet on the group, much harder not to engage. If you text me like, Tim, I was inspired. I set up the GoFundMe that I was talking about and you text me directly, I'm going to be like, okay. Right? Whereas if you text, you text, you know, a group, it's like, ah, you know, someone else will do that, you know? But that coaching will create prompts based on your fundraiser. Like here's a quick little snippet, here's the URLs done for you. You can modify it, then send it to your 10 best friends first. Get momentum and then start reaching out and then start posting on social media. So the model we have now is sort of a daily plan.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  It's a program. Okay, it's day one, here's what you do. Find 10 people, get it going, get momentum. Day two, you've got three donations, great. Follow it with the other seven, do this, do this, do this, and we'll do pieces for you. And then our comms is sort of umbrella on top of that. But the most important thing is to empower and enable the thousands of people starting every day to have a successful fundraiser.

• 37:16Speaker 02

  I want 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 with a platform like this. How do you make decisions? What's your framework?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  So I love the fact you use the word framework because

• 37:32Speaker 03

  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. By definition.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  I think a lot of them are just trying to make money, but I'll grant you that.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  In our case, we are trying to, we're trying to help people do something that is ancient, but do it a new way and have more people do it. And that doesn't exist right now. So that's what I'm trying to do. So when you're trying to innovate and create something new,

• 38:10Speaker 03

  the questions from the future are murky.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  It isn't like business school and like, hey, there was this challenge, here was the quest. Like you have to think very carefully to distill what is the question? For example, let's take one. Should we deploy a more sophisticated recurring giving program on our personal fundraisers? That's a clear question with an answer. So part one is frame the question. Because what I find is when we don't frame the question, and it's sort of like we're talking about a topic, you get mushy decision making because you have a mushy question or no question at all. That's one. Two, how do we make decisions? First thing, will this generate more help in the world?

• 38:56Speaker 02

  When you say help, does that, does that mean money? I just want to be very clear about that.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  Yes, we, I focus on help because help is the thing that we're doing. And there is so much more around the experience than the money. Yes, we count it by looking at the money. It's a simple, easy way. But the implications of that, the emotional and societal consequences of that are far bigger than that. I'll give you an example. I went to Liverpool in the UK, because they were the most generous city in the UK. And about two years ago, there were a bunch of riots in reaction to a murder. And there was a sort of lot of riots around immigration and so on. And a bunch of things in Liverpool were destroyed. One was a local library called Spello Lane.

• 39:44Speaker 03

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

• 40:27Speaker 03

  You had Matt Hague, the author, you had the Queen donating books. It's just a lot bigger. But yes, we count through the GDP. But that's why I focus on help. So will it generate more help? That's number one.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  And then pulling in the right people to pressure test the logic of, okay, how are we going to go about it? But that is the essence. Frame the key questions, make the decisions and keep the eye on the singular objective that we exist to do. 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.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  What strikes me out, your answer there is there's a very important values component to what you're describing here. Right? If the, if the target is just money, there are a lot of ways for you to make more money. You could do algorithmic discovery in the GoFundMe platform and you would probably generate more money because you would have the most heartwarming pictures of puppy shelters possible right on the front page. But that's not there. But there's very little of that going on. You're saying that the fundraisers are on their own and you're going to help them raise money. There's many, many other things you could do to make money. You're saying the, your values, the company's values inside of decisions prevent you from doing those things. And I just want to push on this a little bit more and then I want to bring it more practically to some of the areas

• 41:55Speaker 02

  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 poke, I'll point at the AI companies. They all said they wouldn't do military and defense work and the money showed up and now they're all doing military and defense work. Are the values at GoFundMe so enshrined, so inbuilt that they will prevent you from saying, actually the dollar should be the target? Because when I talk to our audience about your platform, that's the thing they worry about the most.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  Well, so far it's worked. We only focus on help, which we, we count that through a measure called GDV, which is gross donation volume. Right? That is the amount of money that people are giving to one another, to organizations. And that is the, the thing. Like we talk about every meeting, talk about every company meeting, we tell stories like the ones I've just shared with you about how that is. Now I've been here six and a half years. We haven't gotten into other areas. You know, the thing we have added is we bought a company that did fundraising for nonprofits because we said, hey, look, we're doing well at helping individuals and we want to continue to grow that. But we

• 43:12Speaker 03

  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? And one of the things I love about being here is that singularity of purpose and clarity. Like, I have never felt pulled into a different direction because it's just, this is why we are here. Like, 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.

• 43:56Speaker 02

  We need to take another short break. We'll be right back.

• 44:08Speaker 04

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• 45:03Speaker 06

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 45:07Speaker 06

  How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses. There's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level, and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts. And wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off.

• 45:38Speaker 02

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

• 46:20Speaker 03

  It raises the largest amount. Here's what's interesting and may, may, um,

• 46:27Speaker 03

  may surprise you. It's actually the number one category in terms of fundraising dollars in every country we operate in. I mean, obviously, I'm British originally. I'm familiar with that system. You know, variety of systems, a lot of different systems, hybrids and so on. But it's actually number one everywhere. So why is that? There's a couple of reasons. One, when a significant medical issue occurs, like we face our mortality.

• 46:57Speaker 03

  And when we're facing our mortality, or that of a loved one, whether that be a friend or a relative, that's the biggest thing. That is the moment where more than any other moment, people want to support and show their love for someone, more than anything else. And when you think about it that way, maybe that's not surprising. The second thing is that there is no medical system on earth that takes care of everything. Now, even though there are systems in other countries that take care of the medical costs, none of those systems takes care of all of the different things that happen when someone

• 47:41Speaker 03

  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 relatives does the fundraiser. I'm looking to help to make sure these, all these other things are taken care of. Because they're, they are hugely consequential moments

• 48:22Speaker 03

  in our lives. And I say our lives, it is true for all of us. Like, we are human, we are mortal. All of us will go through this cycle at one point or another. And it's the moment where peace, people most want to help. The third thing is when your aunt or your best friend is going through something in a health-related area, there's actually not much we can do. We're not doctors. Right? We don't, we're not cancer researchers. And we feel a bit helpless. What can I do? How often do you, do you hear that? Or do you say that? Where you see that happening and say, well, how can I help? This is a way

• 49:06Speaker 03

  that you can help. You can set up a fundraiser or you can give to a fundraiser, you can mobilize, you can, you know, follow up, you can, it builds community. Can I, can I give you another example? I know I'm telling, but I just want to make it real because

• 49:22Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  It's very, very real. Like, I recently got to know a young girl called Hollow, who's about, what is five? She might just have turned six. And our mom, Daphne Hollow, has a very, very rare genetic disease. And her parents figured out how to get treatment, actually through an amazing foundation based in San Diego called N. Lorham Foundation. And that foundation would cover the medical treatment, but that medical treatment had to be done at a hospital. And there were a lot of administrative costs related to hospital and those weren't covered. It's about $120,000. They also lived in a different state. So Daphne, who's Hollow's mom,

• 50:08Speaker 03

  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 Peloton Moms Group, who became 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 wouldn't fall off the edge. But for people with, for example, ultra rare or nano rare diseases, like a GoFundMe can be a really important part of supplementing what is already happening.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  And it's life changing. Like absolutely, she hollows gotten a unique gene therapy, and it is helping and it's life changing for her and her family. And so I could tell you many, many stories like that. But I think overall is because we're human, those moments matter more than anything else. No system is perfect and we can supplement that. And it gives people a way to come together that is different from an institution supporting you. An institution can do a lot. The NHS can do a lot. Medicare in Australia can do a lot. But it's not coming with love. Right?

• 51:34Speaker 02

  This is very interesting. I am very, I'm very curious about that aspect of it. It's not coming with love is fascinating to me. Maybe it's because I'm American and I exist in this cultural context and have mostly existed in this cultural context and you have a much broader context. But I would say broadly, Americans do not trust the government. It feels like a thing I can say, it's a claim I can make. And, 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

• 52:17Speaker 02

  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. Right? The Peloton Moms Group has some capital that they can allocate to this problem and they're going to allocate it to this problem. And that person is going to feel great and be taken care of. And that is what our government should be doing. Right? That is actually the function of all of this is to redistribute resources across 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 GoFundMe. Right? Creating a different redistribution

• 53:02Speaker 02

  structure and process. And it works so well that some people in aggregate give you enough money to have 850 people, most of whom work in product. Something about that in relation to healthcare specifically, strikes me at least as absurd. And I, maybe that's just the American context where we've got it gotten it so wrong for so long. And I just look at healthcare and I, I think about how wealthy the healthcare companies are and how people feel about pharmaceutical profits and the fact that they can't get care. And there are studies saying the vast majority of people who have donated to a crowdfunding campaign in America did it because of healthcare expenses. Or there's University of Washington study that I'm looking at here, the half a million medical expense campaigns found

• 53:46Speaker 02

  that 30% of them raised $0. And the more medical debt a state has, the less money the campaigns in those states raise. So that it's not actually equalized. Right? There's actually great disparity in the average outcome of the medical campaigns. That is how what like what government spending and tax policy should accomplish, right? Is a more equal policy. I'm just asking how you feel about GoFundMe's role in that. Because as a business that has to make money, any change to that structure, at least in the United States, would have an outsized impact on your business. Right? Like there, there's some relationship to how broken the United States healthcare system is and your profits.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  And I can't quite bring those together. I'm wondering how you think about it?

• 54:34Speaker 03

  I would love for people to have be taken care of more in whatever way works. Right? So I think you're making some connections that I agree with, but I think there's a dimension here, which I'll just reiterate, which I think, I think you're being very rational about it. Right? 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 GoFundMe 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

• 55:18Speaker 03

  buying anything. Right? You are helping because you care. And in many cases, because you love someone else. And I think that is intrinsic and permanent. And I think it will be valid on top of whatever system we have, because I think that is something that a big system can't provide inherently. It's just different. So yes, I would love for more people to have more access. And I would also, I'm very hopeful. My big hope for AI actually is the first thing is medical breakthroughs. That more people like Harlow,

• 56:02Speaker 03

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

• 56:45Speaker 03

  enough to, you know, get that first month rents in the place that you had to stay. And it, God, it made people feel better. You know, that we're not alone.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  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 gonna, I'm

• 57:05Speaker 03

  I would say, I would say resistance. Right? Just be, I think the profit is derivative. Like our job, as I've been, 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 to us will continue.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  But the thing you just said, you know, we've interviewed many, many politicians on the 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 and tax revenue will go up. And whether you think taxes should go up or down to do that, that is the goal. And I'm just wondering if you see the connection, because it's fascinating to me.

• 57:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I had not, I mean, I do now you mention it, I'd never thought of it quite that way. But I, 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 able to work at an organization where I can be like a do CEO type stuff and work on really interesting tech things, but do it for this purpose. I mean, I'll just, you just.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Well, I'm gonna run out of time. So I apologize. I appreciate all the examples. Um, let me push on that just one more time on healthcare. And then I want to talk about platform moderation with you, just to wrap this up. And I appreciate that you're saying the platform is more emotional and I'm operating in this very abstract aggregate way, being rational, as you keep saying. And I'm looking at a study here from a bunch of economists that found that when there's ACA Medicaid expansion, there's a significantly meaningful effect in reducing health related GoFundMe campaigns. So if a state expands Medicaid, the number of GoFundMe campaigns in that state goes down. This suggests the demand for crowdfunding campaigns is actually driven by gaps in insurance coverage. And so maybe

• 59:25Speaker 02

  there's the emotional component and all the stuff around. You've lost a job, you just need living expenses. But there's also just a statistically meaningful connection to healthcare 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?

• 59:52Speaker 03

  No, we definitely don't lobby against that.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  We've had people on this show lobby against things that would would harm their businesses. I wanted to ask.

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  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 make, become aware of all the different things that you can use GoFundMe for. So no, that's if that, if that's the case, and people are getting more care and they're, well, that's awesome.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Again, the thing that I'm pushing on here is you've described, even in your decision making process, a value based approach that another CEO might say, actually, I need to lobby against tax reform, which is a real thing that has happened on the show, a real conversation I've had before. And you're saying somewhere embedded in the company is something that will prevent you from maximizing profit, not making profit, but maximizing profit. And it seems like that is, it obviously seems like that's very important to you. Do you, is there pressure to change that? Because that's the one that I look at. Right? Where, okay, ACA expansion would reduce the biggest bucket of dollars that comes through the platform.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  A more craven capitalist would take a hard look at that in a different way.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  No, I mean, I'll give you a different example about during COVID rent. There were some government programs to support people with rent and we

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

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

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  This brings me, I think, to platform moderation. GoFundMe is a platform. Every platform CEO has to make big moderation decisions. You mentioned you have a sizable trust and safety team. If the theme of this conversation is what are the things you won't do? There's actually a long list of things GoFundMe won't let you raise money for. Tell me about that list, what's on it, what's off it, and how you make those decisions.

• 1:02:28Speaker 03

  So we have a set of terms of service, which sounds like you check them out. They're actually readable, right? So we put a lot of work turning into English that anyone can read and they're pretty practical, right? There's a bunch of things, frankly, most of them are legal, that, you know, if you do a fundraiser for, you know, you want to spend it on drugs or guns or all 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, GoFundMe is for everybody. We want anybody who can come here, fundraise for help themselves, a friend or an organization. And here's some simple, we think are very pragmatic

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  guardrails. They're 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, you know, well set up and off we go.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  Clear in the context of content moderation is simple for the CEO to say, and I would suspect if you go ask your trust and safety team, it's much more complicated.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  That's why they're the great professionals they are.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  You have a rule against funding defenses of people who are alleged to commit violent crimes, like legal defense funds.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  We have, yes, we don't allow fundraising for the legal defense of violent and financial crimes. So, you know, murder, you know, fraud, a bunch of nasty list of things. Yes, we made a decision that no, we're going to, you know, not play in that particular area for the betterment of the of the community.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  And that's a values-based decision, right? That's just GoFundMe's decision.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  It is GoFundMe's decision, yes. And just to be clear, it doesn't reflect on the innocence or guilt of people in those situations. It's just like, hey, look, that's gets very complicated. It's just better for us to, for fundraising purposes on GoFundMe, it doesn't make sense for us.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  Right next to that, there has been ongoing controversy since 2023, the Verge has covered it, around the freezing of payments and an alleged disproportionate rejection of fundraisers for humanitarian causes in Gaza and Palestine. Again, we've covered it, that these things have just gotten frozen, that people are complaining about it. Is that a values-based decision at GoFundMe? Is that something else?

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  Not at all. I mean, it's, it's just a sort of trying to, trying to find the right line in terms of the policy. So we, through individual fundraising and fundraising for nonprofits, we've enabled over half a billion dollars of support to go into the Israel Gaza conflict, which is a

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  a very large amount of help. And so we but we are also working, and again, 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, you know, didn't, 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 illegitimate. So of course, what you hear is you'll hear people bringing it up when, 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

• 1:06:03Speaker 03

  that upholds our commitments and keeps the platform safe and secure and following laws and regulations. So that's the case.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  One of the themes that comes up in every conversation I have with a platform CEO when it comes to trust and safety is the payment processor. In some cases, the payment processors are a much more shadowy figure in the scheme of content moderation. In your case, you're talking with them quite openly. You're saying, well, we accept a lot of payments, we move a lot of money, their rules are important. What is that dynamic like? Do you push back on their rules?

• 1:06:34Speaker 03

  So they, so we work with Adyen, Stripe and PayPal Giving Fund. And actually, all funds

• 1:06:43Speaker 03

  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 when you, if you think about a fundraising journey, we do a bunch of steps to validate that the fundraiser is legitimate. We're doing a risk assessment of donations coming in. And then when the time comes for someone to verify that they are the beneficiary, and that can often be someone different than the person who's fundraising. They go through the KYC process. I talked about it in the connection of small businesses for in COVID, right? At the first part of the interview, and they have to be verified.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  And then the processor can unlock 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.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  There's a pattern that plays out with every platform that has tighter moderation rules. Another platform shows up with looser moderation rules.

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  You know, Twitch bans a streamer, they go to kick, YouTube, you go to rumble. With GoFundMe, it's other platforms. There's like a give, send, go, and they will allow all the things you don't allow. In the context of, well, this has become infrastructure, right? And there's things you won't do. And then you have competitors who will do all kinds of things. Do you think about the dynamic or is it the payment processor set a floor and you're just interpreting based on your values?

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  No, I mean, there are terms of service, we're obviously looking at what makes sense in the world of money movement. But they are ours and we take full ownership of those and, you know, head and shoulders ahead of what anyone else, and we tend to have smaller

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  companies that offer a service a bit like ours in every country we operate in. But we focus on what is the right thing for legitimate customers? And how do we craft a coherent, sensible, easy to understand set of rules that are rules of the road for everybody and you go from there?

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  Every platform, including yours, is now caught in the dynamic of wanting to help regular people make better things with AI, with an AI coach that helps you get through the process of starting a fundraiser and marketing it, and then being flooded with enormous amounts of slop. In your case, the enormous amounts of AI slop might be scams. It might be people trying to raise money against fake fundraisers or fake people. How do you balance that? Because that seems like the hardest problem for every kind of platform to solve right now.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  You know, because I would say we have not seen that as much as maybe some other platforms.

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

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

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  So maybe it's just a bit of a different dynamic.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  Are you on guard against it? Are you seeing it pop up even a little bit?

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're absolutely on guard against it. But in terms of like massive spikes in starts, which is fundraiser starts, like we haven't seen crazy spikes like that.

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  But we're very much on guard against that. We're very much, we're certainly using AI in our tooling to help our folks make the right judgments and so on. So we're doing those things.

• 1:10:47Speaker 02

  Not to continue to be just 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 for nonprofits that had not signed up for GoFundMe. A bunch of state attorneys general had accused you of plagiarizing the charity pages and setting up nonprofits. You apologized, you took them down. There is a class action lawsuit. That to me looks like we need to increase the number of inputs. Right? Yelp ran into the same thing. If you're going to be the platform for all charitable giving, you need to have all the charities. For Yelp, it was, you need to have all the businesses. We're just going to set up the listings and go. What led to that decision?

• 1:11:32Speaker 03

  So that was, you know, it's a classic of you have your overarching principle, which is, hey, we want to mobilize more help in the world. Our full process was we got more than 100 million people coming to GoFundMe 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 and national charities. So why don't we make it a little bit easier for them to find those organizations? Because we know those organizations want more supporters and are trying to work through an increasingly fragmented digital environment. Like, we're a place that people are coming to help. Wouldn't it be great to just?

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  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, let's, you know, take a beat, change our approach, which we have, and lean into that because, you know, if you don't like it, it's not working.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  I just want to connect that to the AI piece. And I understand there's a lawsuit there. That's probably all I can get out of you on that one. But let me connect that to the AI piece. Classic tech company move. We see demand. What you're describing is GoFundMe is an aggregator, right? You have, you have the demand, the same way that Google has the demand or Instagram has the demand.

• 1:13:07Speaker 03

  We have a lot of people coming who want to help.

• 1:13:09Speaker 02

  Who want to help. And then you can redistribute the demand. That's an aggregator move. The, the response on the other platforms has been, oh, we're going to put more stuff here. Well, I'm going to use AI and I'm going to make 500 YouTube videos a day to try to capture pieces of that demand. You can see it happening on the web and Google search a thousand different ways. You can see it happening on Instagram. I know people who have fully automated their Instagram accounts to post hundreds of reels a day using Claude and MCP connectors. Why hasn't that happened to you if you're the aggregator of demand?

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  So if you're talking about nonprofits?

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  Well, I'm saying what I, 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 conclusion it's going to come to. But that was the response is to see the demand and then do something about it. On every other platform, AI has stepped into the middle of that cycle and the response is, oh, we're going to overfill the demand because the cost of production is so low. Right? I can just say, go make five 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.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  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, in whatever way that, that occurs, I'm going to go get literal money, not clicks, but actual money. I'm going to find a way to get it. What is keeping that happening right now? You're saying it's not happening? And what might prevent it from happening? Cause that strikes me as a pretty huge risk.

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  I think probably the reason that that's maybe not happening is that when you give, you have to have an emotional connection. And that comes from a, some sense of relationship, either a relationship with a person who's fundraising or a relationship with a cause or an organization that resonates with you. 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.

• 1:15:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  I'm curious how that goes over time. I'm reliably told that AI can be your girlfriend. So we're going to find out that we've had, again, we've had CEOs on the show tell 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.

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  I'll just leave you with this. The more powerful the technology, like the, the more significant the, and unknown the implications. So, you know, sure, some of those guys are right.

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

  That is a big question. I don't think we have nearly enough time to dive into it. Tim, thank you so much. What's next for GoFundMe? What should people be looking for?

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  We are focused very heavily on evolving the coach. Just to 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 quarter of a billion. So that's a lot more help. And it's making people feel better. Like two thirds of the folks who are using it feel less stressed, more confident, critically less alone. So from a consumer point of view, we are leaning very heavily into that. And we hope over time to be able to show more people that we will help them take the brave step, ask for help and unlock the support that will come out. So that's a big focus for us.

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll have to have you back soon to see how all of these things go. Tim, thank you so much.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  Great conversation. Good, really searching questions. Thank you for that.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  I'd like to thank Tim for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. You really do read all the emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. We also have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're both at DecoderPod as well. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder's producers are Greg Ott, Kate Cox, Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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