The Trillion-Dollar Generosity Gap + Re-Envisioning the Donor Advised Fund - Adam Nash

1:24AM Sep 28, 2022

Speakers:

Julie Confer

Becky Endicott

Jonathan McCoy

Becky Endicott

Adam Nash

Keywords:

people

daffy

nonprofit

organizations

money

donor

give

turns

charity

easy

funds

becky

app

year

build

donor advised fund

big

talk

advised

features

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Hey, I'm Jon.

And I'm Becky.

And this is the We Are For Good podcast.

Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.

We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impct uprising.

So welcome to the good community. We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.

So let's get started.

Imposter syndrome is real with our guests today. But, man what a human and amazing person as we've already gotten to know him a little bit.

I know. And we're just talking about small topics like you know, closing the trillion dollar generosity gap, because we've got a technological brilliant person on the podcast with us today. But he's made giving really accessible to all of us. And so I'm so delighted to introduce you to Adam Nash. He's the co founder and CEO of Daffy and I can't wait to tell you all about what how cool Daffy is. But let me tell you a little bit about Adams background. Because he's been with a few brands that you may know and already love, such as Dropbox, you know, he was he led and was responsible for the growth, product strategy, product management and product and analytics.

Thank you, Adam

For a platform with 600 million registered users. So just sit with that if you're kind of feeling overwhelmed for a minute, know that he can guide us through some of these big topics today. But before that he was president and CEO of Wealthfront, which again, was this really incredible app that really activated people around investments. And I think this idea of me pairing technology, with activating and giving you democratization of access to resources is really leading to the story today, of founding Daffy and his pedigree, you know, he has an MBA from Harvard Business School. This is where some of this impostor syndrome from us is coming from.

Casual.

He pairs that with a BS and MS degrees in computer science, from Stanford Padam has this incredible family. He was born and raised in Silicon Valley, where he lives with his wife, four children and a Golden Retriever named neon. So we're just so excited to have you in our house. Adam, thanks for swinging by the podcast.

Becky, what's happening?

Oh, yeah. Thank you, Jon, Becky. It's wonderful to be here.

Thank you for doing this. Well, I mean, we're just so inspired by the work that you're doing. We love working with brilliant thinkers that really kind of build their career outside of the nonprofit space, and then channel that into a passion project, to really revolutionize and disrupt the sector. And I feel like that's what you're doing with Daffy, and I haven't given away you know what this really is, but I want to just kick it to you. And first before we go there, tell us a little bit more about your story want to hear about growing up and kind of what has wired your heart to want to do this and your brain to kind of come together to form Daffy?

Yeah, well, I mean, I appreciate that. And, you know, going through my career, it's always funny with careers, because they're, they're not planned in advance, right. But there's certain themes a certain passions you have. And it turns out for me, most of my career has been, I've just been always fascinated with technology and bringing it to new areas, and thinking about what can we do differently? What can we do better now that we have computers that we have connectivity, etc. And so yeah, I started my career at Apple. You know, I've been at a couple of startups, but you know, like, you know, early web days, you know, the reason I was at eBay is that this idea that anyone around the world could set up a small business or make a few $100 extra, you know, for the household budget every month. Which was just a very inspiring thing to me. And it wasn't possible before, it wasn't possible for, you know, someone in Alabama to be selling to someone in Alaska and eBay made that possible. It was fantastic.

You know, and then LinkedIn, of course, you know, we live in this world where, you know, it turns out that, you know, there is no, you know, 40 year job with guarantees and a gold watch at the end, you know, people have a lot of responsibility for their careers for who they know, and what they know. And the idea of building a site that let people own that and control that was very important to me. Because it's a huge part of the economy, right? It's just people working and finding their passions. Wealthfront, you mentioned was all about, you know, helping normal people save and invest. You know, why did the wealthy get access to these high end advisors and sophisticated math? And why can't we put that in software, so everyone can have it. So I'm very passionate about these ideas. Daffy came from a similar place, it was 2020 pandemic, thinking about what to do next, I had a list of ideas that I've been working on forever, everyone in Silicon Valley is tortured by a list of ideas.

And, but, you know, I really, it really struck me that, you know, we've made so much progress, like all this technology, all these features that help us shop that helped us save that helped us invest. Why can't we use the same technology to help people get right like, Why? Why can I feel so good? You know, like, Why do I get confetti when I buy a stock? That's great. Why don't I get confetti when I give? I mean, these are all very simple things. But um, that's where Daffy came from was like, hey, you know, my co founder, Alejandro had a similar passion, he had done some work with Donors Choose in the past, one of the best engineers I've ever worked with. And we've been thinking about doing a company together for years. And so Daffy real came up with this idea of like, let's try it. Let's see, if we apply, you know, the best engineers the best design to kind of the space, can we actually make it easier for people to give, and that's what Daffy came from, it's just such a wholesome story. And there's this thread in your story from the beginning of just accessibility, and democracy. And everything we do in the uplift of the little guy, I'm just sitting here thinking like Adam is that like, every man for every man, every woman, and I, I love when I find brilliant tech people who will go down and say, we've got to equalize something. Because we believe in the power of philanthropy, we believe, and we have seen it change people change their lives, the very act of giving, I mean, it just it hardwired dopamine, and it gets into our heart center. And it's like, if we could replicate that feeling, rather than just on giving day or year end. It's like if that was a part of our normal day, think about how much that would alter just the neuroscience in our brain, how much we would love, you know, life just a little bit more. So I before we dive in, to like Daffy, and its brilliance and its accessibility, you have the story about how you had a death, and the issues that you saw with it, which for anyone who's new to nonprofit deaths, donor advised funds. And it's just such a cool tool we want you to talk about, you know, talk about like a brief overview of DAV, for someone who's not familiar with this, talk about the benefits, and then talk about this issue you saw in this own data that you had that kind of gave you this light bulb moment? Well back, yeah, I'm glad you brought it up. I mean, it's funny how you can come to giving from a lot of different places, right? Most people have some more moral authority in their lives, right? They remember a parent, and uncle or an aunt, a teacher, you know, a priest, or a rabbi, someone who taught them that actually part of living a good life is giving, it's getting out of your own selfish needs, and realizing that no matter how you're doing, there are people who are less fortunate than yourself, right. And we're all in this together at some level. And so, and it's been amazing to me at DAFI, hearing these different stories. Now, the other place you can come to this is, of course, from the financial side. And that's, that's where I have a lot of experience and expertise, right? I've been able to see, you know, I know how billionaires manage their money and people, millionaires, and then people who are just trying to get by people just out of school trying to build a life. And I find these problems fascinating. And it's very interesting that part of what Daffy is based on this idea of a donor advised fund, actually is very similar to the idea I mean, we have accounts for everything now. Right? It, it's very hard to save for your retirement, like it's very hard to see that far in the future for most people. So we built these accounts to make it very easy, but we know that retirement saving into a 401 K or an IRA, if you had to write a check every time you had to put money away for retirement, most people wouldn't do it. Yeah. And so what do we do? you automate it, you have a little money come out of your paycheck each time and then you save that over years and

decades you've saved for retirement. So a donor advised fund is just like a retirement account, except instead of it being for retirement, it's forgiven. And Becky, right, I have had several donor advised funds. I mean, the donor advised fund is this fantastic product, right? Because, you know, it turns out like most people, income is rarely stable, right? Like you have some good years and some tough years. And so the natural instinct is during good years to put a little extra aside, so that you can give more when times are bad. And by the way, we've seen this a Daffy with the recent market correction and potentially even a recession, we see that people's contributions go down to their accounts, but because they have money set aside, they can keep giving to the organizations that need it, and they need it more when the economy is down. But unfortunately, the donor advised funds that I had before while there were good people involved and they cared. The fundamental problem with these donor advised funds is that they mostly focus on the wealthy, right, their business model, the way they make money is by charging a percentage of assets. And so as a result, you it's not just that you get more service, most people have never even heard of a donor advised fund, because they're in the business of looking for people who have millions of dollars or more people can put aside hundreds of 1000s of dollars for charity. And by the way, I love it. When people put aside hundreds of 1000s of dollars for charity. I think it's wonderful that that they support nonprofits. But the truth is, there's about 60 to 70 million households in the US who give every year. Turns out most of them are not millionaires or billionaires. They're just normal people giving. And so when I looked at the donor advised, I said, How can we reinvent this to be more aligned with the way people actually want to behave? How can we make it as simple as putting aside $10 a week, $50 a month, putting it into an account where it accumulates tax free, it's invested, it grows over time. And then anytime you want to give to an organization, you have an app on your phone, tap tap tap, taken care of. And that's a lot of what we tried to do for the donor advised fund is very different than the existing products on the market. Yeah, I mean, we call it an impact uprising, because we That's our vision around here, because we believe in the power of philanthropy. And that is the translation of what giving does to each of us as individuals. And we feel like getting more people involved in it could change the world is revolutionary. And that's what this is to me like it's giving people an outlet to get in the rhythm of giving even that automation as a rhythm. Just so you are freed up when that moment comes that you want to be incredibly generous. You have that set aside ready to go. Like that's a beautiful concept. I wonder, you know, it sometimes gets a bad rap. And in the nonprofit office, Becky and I built our careers in inside a nonprofit. And there's some problems with it too, because you know, it is locked up. It's not necessarily activated right away. What is the opportunity for nonprofits today as they kind of look at this product and kind of Daffs in general? Well, I think you're right. And like I said, there are a lot of issues with current donor advised funds, not really with the donor advised funds themselves, but how some people are using them. One of the biggest problems that nonprofits that I've been involved with have is actually the fact that every year they have to raise money, right? And there's been this major push towards getting recurring contributions, recurring donations, you'll see that a lot of the forward thinking nonprofits now on their websites, and others have a way of actually saying, Oh, I will give $10 a month or I will give a certain amount every year, because they need ongoing support for their missions. Right. Like, they actually rather get ongoing support than just a one time gift. And I think that that's highly aligned with what Donor Advised Funds can do. You know, I know sometimes people look at donor advised funds and say, well, there's all this money there. Why can't they just give that today? But you have to remember that the reason giving is so difficult, is really because it's two hard problems for people. One is how much can I afford to give. And the second one is who to give it to. And there's a lot of effort, great efforts on that second problem, right a lot of directories. We build directories, we have a lot of features and DAFI to help people find organizations that align with our causes, even nearby organizations if they want to keep their giving local. But there hasn't been a lot of focus on that first problem of helping people actually put money aside for charity. And so what people miss about donor advised funds is like I said, by having people put money aside and label it, this money is now forgiving. Turns out from a behavioral finance standpoint is incredibly powerful. When we label it. It's called mental accounting.

standpoint is incredibly powerful. When we label it. It's called mental accounting. And it turns out when we label money, it actually has huge power and how what we do with it, right, like, and this is why budgets are powerful, right? When we say we're gonna put money aside for retirement, we're going to put money aside for our kids college fund that has power that has emotional power for us. And so the idea of a donor advised fund is having an account right and so just like how Having a large account so that you are safe and secure and retirement is important. similar features forgiving, you know, it matters. It turns out once you have that money set aside, the great thing about a donor advised fund, you know, I opened my phone, I look at Daffy. If someone comes to me and says, Hey, we're raising money for a great cause, can you contribute? I don't have to reach in my wallet anymore. I have to think about my budget, I can open up my app, there's already a balance there. It's so easy. And by the way, we all know this by my old career, like, you know, in the early days of the web, this is one of the secrets we learned at eBay was that when people had money in their PayPal accounts, it was a little easier to spend.

Yeah, right.

Like, the friction is gone. And we saw it. And by the way, that's why PayPal was so beneficial to eBays numbers, because when people had these PayPal accounts, it just made buying a little easier. And that was good for the entire eBay community. Because more purchasing happened. Like I said earlier, why can't we do that forgiving. And I really think that donor advised funds changed me, I know it changed it for me. Because when I put money aside in my first donor advised fund over 10 years, and I've looked at the data, it turns out, my giving went up multiple times, not a few percentage points, hundreds of percentage points and has been consistently higher since then. And I attribute this all to the fact that once I made that hard decision of separating some of my money and putting it aside where this is no longer for me and my family. This is for organizations and causes I care about it made it just much easier to give. And so setting a goal, right? Keeping that goal automating it. I'm a huge believer that this is really the key to unlocking potentially, as you mentioned earlier, over a trillion dollars more of giving in the United States. I mean, what a concept, it seems so simple. It's like if you put some intentionality around your life, the things that are important to you, you know, I'm gonna go back to values because we talk about those all the time, when you sit down and think about the things that are most important to you, your family, your community, your maybe it's a faith community, your neighborhood, there are causes that rise to the top of that, yes, we're worried about funding our kids education. That's why we have 529 plans, you know, if we're able, again, there's privilege that comes with that. But you know, why would you not set aside something as easy as automating your generosity, because as you're talking, I'm sitting here thinking, you know, there have been times I've been so triggered by an event in the world that I just immediately go and give to it, you know, like crisis in Ukraine, or the gun reform that was going on this year. It's like I just wanted to give and it's like, if I went to my account, I honestly think I would have given more if I had used something like adath instead. So I love this. I love the democratization of it. And I want to talk you mentioned this generosity gap and this like Trillion Dollar General generosity gap. And so we want to talk about how your reenvisioning, the donor advised fund through Daffy, you know, understanding that there is a generosity gap. So talk to us, you wrote this really great article. And I think the thing that I took away from it, and we'll link it up in the show notes is that people just don't seem to find the time to give what they believe they should give. And you did this lesson, talk to us about that generosity gap and how Daffy is coming in and solving that problem? Well, I'm glad you brought this up, Becky, because it's it's a simple idea.

But it turns out the United States is a pretty big place. Like I said, there are 60 to 70 million households. We already give I mean, the in 2020, we gave well over $400 billion to charity. I mean, I know that sounds like a big number. But that's actually a meaningful percentage of GDP. It's over 2% of GDP. And to give you context, agriculture of agriculture is smaller than that in the US. So we're a very generous nation. And so I have seen many startup pitches I have seen many organizations talk about how generous Americans are and how much they give, and why can't we do more with that money. But what I didn't see, I know that sounds a little counterintuitive. But actually as big as that number sounds out of that 470 billion or so, over 300 billion of that comes from individuals, right? Not big corporations, not big Foundation, etc, individuals. And so most people look at that number and say it's so big, but I I actually think that it could be a lot bigger. And the reason I think that is that when I did the first interviews, right? I'm a big believer, you know, my background, you do a lot of user research. You've talked to people find out what really is motivating them. And so when I did the early interviews for the product that became Daffy, what I discovered was most people if you ask them how much they want to give to how much they think people should give to charity. Well, it turns out people have opinions and they don't agree

I heard every number I heard percentages or numbers, you know, some are biblically inspired. Some are kind of things. So I was like, Well, if you have a good year, you know, it's very funny, everyone has a different idea. So that was actually very discouraging upfront, because you know, when you build a product, you want a simple number, like, Oh, what if everyone could give this amount? Yeah, Americans don't agree. Sorry,

not that clean?

opinions. It's pretty sure, yeah.

But the amazing thing is, then when I ask people, How much did you give to charity last year, there was a little bit of a pause. Because people do whatever opinion they have whatever numbers in their head, whatever percentage they think is, right. People like to be consistent with their beliefs. And what I discovered was that most people had not given as much as they wanted to as what they thought they should give. And so there can be a lot of reasons for this. But we looked at the research. And it turns out, there's real academic research that says that if you intentionally make a goal for giving you whatever the number is, it's just like everything else. And saving and investing, it turns out, you're more likely to hit it. And in fact, by setting a goal and automating it, the experts say that that can boost your giving by about 32%. So as big as $300 billion, is, if we all set a goal, and we're intentional about it, that could be an extra 100 billion a year. And that would be over a trillion. I think, I think the math says it's 1.2 trillion over the next 10 years. If we all just set a goal, and gave what we already want to get, right we and so listen, I have done a lot of products. I teach a class at Stanford on personal finance, right? Like I I'm very used to talking to people about money. And this is this pattern repeats over and over again, there's a big distance between what we want to do and what we actually do. And the reason is, we're just all busy, life is busy, we have jobs, and we have kids, and we have socialized and a lot going around. And you know, giving unfortunately, like you said, Becky, unless there's an event that pulls us out and says oh, no, now is the time to get up. Yeah. And that's what the research says the research says that we give a lot because what happens, these events happen, and we give, but we would give more, if we just automated that goal. If we just have whatever your number is, like I said, I It's very funny I get I get these arguments, sometimes people want me to give them a number what they should do. And I was on the same like, you know, the truth is, everyone's in a different situation. They have a different background, different capabilities, different feelings about this. I am not worried about getting everyone to set a big number. I want everyone to set a number. And we call that an Daffy it's built it's called the given goal, we ask everyone when they join that simple question. And we have a little calculator to help people figure out how much they should give. Some people do it based on their salary. Some people just put in a number. We even have licensed data from private companies. So you can see in your neighborhood and your zip code, what the average household gives to charity, which by the way, turns out to be a number that no one knows. Yeah, like no one talks about this. And so we just want people to set a goal. And we believe that if everyone did set a goal, just imagine how much more all those worthy organizations could do. And like I said, in the data, we see it now. You know, we haven't been around that long we launched last year. But we've already had several events that have motivated people to give right? Like the war in the Ukraine, it was very obvious that there were a lot of people who wanted to give immediately. And because they had money set aside, they didn't have to worry about what their budget was this month, they didn't have to worry about whether you know, the where their food bill was, or rent or you know, oh, I actually had to buy something like none of that. They had money in the account already. They could just give and we saw them give and it was phenomenal. And so we're just big believers in that idea of, of if you if you think something's important, if you think giving is important, and a lot of people do, be intentional about it, pick a number, and then we'll help you stick to it.

I mean, you're surrounded by like minded friends here in this space. And so I would love for you to help us bridge because we talked about Daffs, kind of at a high level, and they still feel inaccessible bridge the gap of like, what are the features? How did Daffy come on the scene to disrupt and make this accessible to everybody? In the US specifically?

Oh, it's very kind. I mean, we're just getting started. And the great thing about building software, I know this will sound idealistic. But if you haven't met an idealistic engineer before, then

we're ridiculous idealist. Like hit us with whatever you're about to say go for it.

But I actually think building great software. It's a very interesting dynamic because you have to have a little bit of inspiration. Right? There's a reason this doesn't exist, and you have to figure out what it is and no one will really tell you and like, you know, my belief is actually some of the best ideas in software turned out to be the simplest, right you know, I'm on the board of directors of this company called eight corms that helps people save what a simple idea. Save your spare change. That's such a common idea. It was even in that Pixar movie Up, you remember that sequence in the beginning where the couple they put the change in the jar is so touching and but then to have emergencies have to break into it. So don't get to take their vacation but saving spare change. But what did acorns do? They put it into an app, so that anyone could have it. And now there's almost 5 million people who use that service to save. It's unbelievable. And like I said, like, why can't we do it forgiving? was the question that I asked. And so that was a lot of the inspiration. But when you get down to like what makes a great app, it's, it's actually the feedback once you have this inspiration, you put it out there, you may have heard this term lately about building in public. But that's the wonderful thing about building software. It's like we don't know all the great ideas. We don't have all the ways to give, we keep learning from our members. Right? So Daffy is a membership based organization, right? So our members give and they give in different ways. And it's inspiring to see how they give right, you know, and by the way, it's all over the map. One of our earliest contributions, was a guy who wanted to give money to his local synagogue and orthodox synagogue, but they couldn't accept a crypto contribution, Bitcoin, but he figured out that if you just download Daffy, right, you give the Bitcoin to Daffy put in your fund, and then we get a check to the synagogue. And that's perfect, because not every organization actually most organizations can't take stock, they can't take Bitcoin. We have a modern technology platform, you can link your bank account, you can pay with Apple Pay credit card, debit card, you can use crypto, stocks, ETFs, we take it all, because our goal is to make it easy to give, but um, we keep learning from our members. When when we launched by the way, we got some things wrong. Maybe you always

learned I bless you for saying it. No, no, it's

like, for example, when we first launched the app, we did not have a feature where people could transfer money from their existing donor advised funds. And so we spent a few weeks to figure out how to do that and got it live in the app. Another thing that was pandemic, the pandemic shifted a lot of people's feelings about giving to local organizations, there was a lot of passion when you when you see your neighbors and local stores, and businesses struggling, there's a lot of people who wanted to give more locally. And so we quickly had to build a feature. Actually, if you open up Daffy, that's really cool. I think it's cool, because I like, but it's like we open up the app. Now you can go to charities, you of course, can search we support every basically every legal charity in the US over one and a half million organizations. But there's this tab called nearby, and it opens up almost like Google Maps. That's awesome, right, or Apple Maps. And there we have, right wherever you are, it doesn't matter. Like, you know, if you're traveling, you're in a different city, you can open up this app, and not only can you see the nonprofits that are near you, they're color coded by their cause. So you can just pick and explore. And so, you know, these are not ideas that we had when we launched the app. But that's what that's what makes great software platforms. Great. In my opinion, it's not what you launched with, it's that constant iteration and improvement. And I just happen to come from a school of design thinking. And it says that you get that inspiration from your users from the real human beings who want to see something in your product and want to use it to solve a problem. And what I love about Daffy is the problem that people want to solve is that they want to give is that they want to support organizations. And so we keep getting fantastic ideas from our members. And when we have problems, we tried to fix them. But I'm actually very excited about this. There has not been a lot of innovation in this category, especially around donor advised funds, if you use the typical donor advised fund. I mean,

you might be emailing PDFs back and forth. Yeah, that's what I'm imagining in the old days. Truly, you're using these older websites, they don't render on your phone properly. I mean, I was actually shocked when we launched Daffy. It turned out, we were the first donor advised fund that launched an app in the App Store where you could download an app, open an account, fund it invest the money and give to any charity in the US. Like, let's talk about that. I mean, it was yes, that wasn't even a year ago. So you are truly on the cutting edge. And it's shocking that there was not an app for donor advised funds. Well, I'm not totally surprised, like I said is because the industry's business model is so geared towards the wealthy. I mean, and by the way there we could talk about some of the issues there. They're not even incentivized properly to help people give because it turns out they make more money if you don't write if you

don't even get me started.

Donor Advised Fund at a firm like Fidelity I mean, unfortunately fidelity, great people and they're doing great work and the people I've met in that organization cared deeply about helping people give but incentives or incentives if you have $100,000 account at fidelity, and you give $10,000 away, they make 10% less revenue. That's just how their model works, right? Because they charge about point 6% of the assets you have, I mean, Vanguard, which is a wonderful firm that I love, won't even take your money less than $25,000. That's their minimum 25,000 minimum, and then they charge point 6% of the assets.

So, you know, once again, you know, a $50,000 account with them would cost like $300 a year, Daffy, we set up more like traditional nonprofit organizations, right? Like, you know, if I support like the San Francisco Zoo, or my local community center, or a lot of organizations, it's just a membership, right, we charge a simple membership fee, right for for most people, we charge $3 a month. At the high end, we do have some features where people pay $20 a month. But that's because we wanted to set up this model, we wanted to change the donor advised fund, so that we were free to encourage people to give, right and that's all we do, is all we do is we encourage people to put more money aside for charity. And if the we try and inspire our members to give to the causes and organizations they care about.

Taking a quick pause from today's episode to thank our sponsor, who also happens to be one of our favorite companies Virtuous, you know, we believe everyone matters. And we've witnessed the greatest philanthropic movements happen when you both see and activate donors at every level. And Virtuous is the platform to help you do just that. It's so much more than a nonprofit CRM. Virtuous helps charities reimagine generosity through responsive fundraising, volunteer management, and online giving in we love it because this approach builds trust and loyalty through personalized engagement. Sounds like Virtuous might be a fit for your organization, learn more today@virtuous.org, or follow the link in our show notes.

I want to thank you for something I want to thank, I want to thank your entire team for something. One, I love your tagline. Make giving a habit. But it is very clear to me that you one are such a curious innovator. And that you will this product is going to be iterating all the time, because you're listening, and you're taking feedback. And you're not just listening to the top 1% You're actually listening to what we believe like is the most powerful thing, which is the base and the everyman everyday man. And the second thing I want to compliment you on is the way that you integrated community into this app. Because giving is identity we're learning I mean that this is such a moment where people feel that who they are is so tied to their giving. And they are in their most connected and most and feel emotionally at their best when they're doing it with other people. It feels good when you feel like you are locking arms, with like minded friends towards something you're all passionate about. And just to have that community feature of saying, what are the needs? And where is that around my community? And just the accessibility piece? For everybody? It $3 a month Are you kidding me? That's so fantastic. And to have all of these automations where I can be walking down the street and get a CNN alert that you know, Haiti had an earthquake. And I could just literally go to my app and say, immediately, I want to get them some funding and just boom, boom, boom, and go on about my day is sensational. So thank you for doing this. And for everyone listening out there, especially, you know, we have a wide swath of listeners that are in the nonprofit sector. This is like a twofer today for you. Not only is this good for you as a human being and for your family, but what a an evolved resource to alert your donors to about how they can help quickly get their money moved to your mission. Because folks, there's like a hundreds of billions of dollars just sitting in these desks. And if we can find very simple ways to move that money faster to our missions. Everybody wins. Everybody wins. Bravo to you.

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. Because the inspiration piece is a big piece of it. We don't talk about giving enough. I mean, look, you know, I was fortunate enough to be one of the early folks that helped build LinkedIn, which was all about helping people align around their careers. And the reason we built LinkedIn, quite frankly, is because even though careers and jobs and skills and earning a living are very important. It can't compete on normal social networks. It can't compete with shopping and dating and news and all the things that people talk about in their feeds. It setsWrite, it just can't. And so we felt like it needed its own space. And we built LinkedIn to be a separate space, right to talk about these things. I feel the same way about giving, you know, on Daffy, one of the things you can do, and we've been talking to nonprofit organizations about this. It's a form of advertising and inspiration when someone gives on Daffy, we give them the option to leave a public note about why they're giving these notes are phenomenal. And what I mean by phenomenal is that they're very human. They're very rich, and they're very honest, right? There are people who give, because a loved one passed away. And they always cared about an organization and they support it on their anniversary of their passing. There are people who give for medical reasons, family reasons people give because of causes. But it comes out of these notes. And those notes appear with the charity, right? These are not Yelp reviews, these are not. These are real stories from real people about why they give and we're big believers that if more people gave this way, that the money isn't, believe it or not the most important thing, right, the most important thing is sending this message to others, not just that giving is something that you do. But to explain a little bit of the why that inspiration. And so we have been talking because it turns out and we're actually we're probably gonna lean into this quite a bit more. We've done a lot of requests for features, right. So on Daffy, right now, you know, if you know someone else on Daffy, you can actually go see their profile and see the notes that they've left, we just don't talk about it, right. This is not something you see on Facebook, or Twitter or Instagram, and, and that's okay, we have no interest in building.

We're not we're not trying to build a social network or anything like is what we're trying to build as a better platform where it's not just a safe place to talk about something as fundamental as giving. But like I said, it's inspiring. And we hope to open up more broadly, I think I told you earlier, you know, we, we rolled out a feature, one of the features, we got requests for, once again, in with full humility about missing things in the beginning. It turns out for a lot of couples, giving is something that they want to talk about together. And by the way, spouses partners have different passions, different causes they believe in. And so we added to data, the ability to add your spouse, right out a partner, you both have separate profiles, right? different causes, you believe in different charities and organizations you support. But you're investing together out of the same fund, you're donating out of the same fund. And so now it's a reason to talk about it, you see it, you know, if your partner gives to an organization, you don't just find out about that at tax time when you're searching for receipts, which it turns out a lot of people search for overseas at the end of the year for their taxes. Yep. But it's actually something that could become part of the conversation. Actually, it's been such a popular feature, we're planning on extending it, you know, more broadly, for families in the future. You know, we're here for that. Because we truly believe that if you can start having these conversations with your children, with your spouse, like with your family, there's a different mindset that happens as you walk through life when you're aware of your generosity, and you're aware of the things that you care about. So I love that you're adding that in and the conversation that it starts. And I just can't imagine there's so many stories that must come out of that. And I would I would love to just kick it to you and let to hear tell us a story of maybe it's a use case of someone who's used AFI and what they've been able to accomplish, or is there a moment where philanthropy has come into your life and you have felt, you know, that the habit of generosity changed you? Yeah, well, I think, Well, for me, I'm inspired. In this regard.

Look, I've had the good fortune, I've been on the board of a couple larger non for profit organizations, been a volunteer fundraiser, etc. But you're talking about inspiration. I don't know. It's a really simple story. But you know, my kids, they go to this, this school, right little school and they have a tradition. Every Friday. They bring in spare change. They put a little like everyone, all the kids runner up, by the way, it's really cute because they're all going to their parents real quick, like what they're rooting for spare change. It's the only time that people use change anymore.

They're in the couch.

Yes.

But fundamentally, like they're looking for change, and they run it. And they all like in their little sharing, they put in this little piggy bank. And then every quarter the class votes on which which organization to give that money to. That's awesome. And it's just so sweet. So when I look at that, that gets back to that purity, that simplicity of I mean, this is we talked a bit about humility, but as a parent, there's a lot of

them, you have to show them. And so, you know, that little moment of how they teach the kids to give. And it's every week, right? Every Friday, I mean that some of that inspiration is in the product, right to this day, if you go to Daffy, you know, most people want to put money aside for charity, every year, every quarter every month, but we have weekly, just for the people, just that little inspiration of putting money aside, but this is why we're going to add you know why we're adding families to Daffy? I mean, most donor advised funds are like financial accounts. Right?

And, you know, we said like, why can it be more human? Why can't you add your children to your account so that every time you give, they get a little notification on their device, about the organization you gave to? And you can have a conversation about that at the dinner table. Right, you can talk about why you give to that organism support. And then we've added an extra feature, so that the children can actually make their own recommendations, right. They can also say, like, I heard about this organization we should give to them. I mean, listen, I have four children. So believe me, I get a lot of requests, permission to download apps, can I buy this at Amazon, I get a lot of requests on my phone, I think it's a meaningful thing to also have them be able to request. And like I said, this is not just for young children. A lot of people have teenagers are trying to teach them how to volunteer and give back and be a part of the community. It's a big part of a lot of high school programs, obviously, college students and even young adults out of college, they are living busy lives, it's hard for them to make the time for that we see a lot of parents who want to involve them. But you ask for stories. I mean, there's a few I mean, I've had grandparents come and say that, you know, they have a little bit more time now. They're, they're retired, can I set up a fund where their kids and grandkids can make recommendations of organizations to support and, and you know, the grandparents can help teach that giving is actually something that they should do, and they can help just give it that little nudge to make it easier to do. I see siblings, you know, who get together and want to have a fund so they can give regularly to causes they believe in and involve their kids together. Right? You know, we're big believers in cousins playing together, that sort of thing. So we're excited about it. But this is a new feature for us, you know, just launched so we'll learn a lot about what people do with it. And hopefully, well, the whole idea is to keep taking all these innovations, right? Like all these things, like Apple makes it so easy to buy apps and subscribe to services. And Amazon makes it so easy to buy almost everything and, you know, companies like you know, Wealthfront and acorns make it so easy to save invest. Why can't we do the same thing? Forgiving? That's the thing, right? So you know, it's funny. I set up these family features all the time. I mean, I don't know about you guys. But yeah, it turns out setting up those X Box permissions is not not always as easy as you think.

Don't even get me started.

Yeah. And so but yeah, I think that's right. And so I love it. So I love this idea. I love having the communication, I have a reason. It's very simple things, little things. But what I'm hoping is that more families that have set up funds and are putting money aside for charity will find it useful and meaningful to have an excuse to talk to the rest of their their family, their kids, their siblings, their parents, about giving and about causes and organizations that they believe are making a difference.

Adam, I want you to go back to your kids school. And I want you to get the stories of what the the coins have bought. I want to see all I want to know the stories of the nonprofits served. I want to see the little kids chest puffed up because they did that like what a story you had me at coins in a jar. Well done.

Well, it's one of the reasons you actually I talked about this. It's one of the reasons I had the piggy bank here in the office. It Believe it or not, when when we originally were funding this organization, it was in the original pitch deck was a piggy bank just like this one. Because if you search Amazon for piggy banks, for kids, they're not just piggy banks, a lot of them all have this this section that you can spend, here's the money for a rainy day that you're saving. And here's the money you're gonna give to people less fortunate than yourself. And they almost all have these slices. And that's, you know, we clearly want to teach our kids this idea. I mean, it's so common that there's literally rows of piggy banks on Amazon that do this thing. But as grownups we don't do it. You know, we don't put money aside and so that gets to the heart of what we're trying to do at Daffy is just make this normal make it a very easy thing to do for people to put money aside for charity.

Let's do it.

Yeah, I love it. Thank you for centering community in this conversation because it's just so cup filling. They just think of people coming together and having this level of conversation around dinner tables about who we're giving to and why we're why we're passionate about that. Like that excites me so much so I hate to round this out. But I need your wisdom on this. We end every Interview with asking you for your one good thing. And it doesn't have to be related to Daffy. It can just be a mantra that you have or a secret to your success or a hack that you believe, like, what's one good thing you would leave with our community?

You know, it's gonna sound similar to what I've talked about in Daffy. But I'm really a big believer in intentionality, of actually, if something's important to you, naming it, you know, speaking it to doing it to actually activating it. You know, the first time that I became a CEO, and I ran a company, I would actually park about 10 minutes away from where our headquarters was, it turned out parking permits in Palo Alto are hard. And we can talk about that later.

I bet.

was a wonderful thing to walk in the morning, every morning, I would walk into the office and think about what are the three things I need to get done today? Right, the three things I want to do, that actually came from some advice I got from one of my early managers earlier in my career, they said like no matter what the time period is, this year, this quarter, this month, this week, today, if anyone asks you, what are the what are you doing today? What are the three most important things that you're doing today? You know, and most of us don't make time to have that intentionality to give even a spare moment to think about like, what, what are what is the most important thing that we're going to do? And so, I mean, for Daffy, obviously, we've applied that to give in, which is just be intentional, what's your goal? How much do you want to give to charity? Because once we name the thing, it's so easy to do it. But I think that it's it's very easy to get busy. So if I was given one piece, one piece of a piece of good advice is that if things are important to you, name them know them don't have the list of 100 things to do. We all have a list of 100 things to do. And I know,

I know, they all need to get done. I for kids, I tell you, I know there's 100 things to do. But knowing just that simple prioritization of what what's the most important thing, or what are the one or two things you need to get done, when I give advice to folks about how they approach their day, or they approach their jobs or you know, at home, etc, is just to remember what those things are. And to name them. So that's usually the advice I would give to most people about having because my experience has been for me personally and for other folks, is that when you have intentionality, even when life throws you curveballs and things don't work out. And we all have bad luck sometimes, and things don't pan out the way we want to. And we try and we fail and we get up again, when you have intentionality. At least you know why you did it. And you know that you made that choice. And it's so much more empowering to be in a world where you have agency and intentionality. And so, I mean, like I said, with Daffy, we tried to do that with giving.

But I actually believe that in general, about life,

I just want to adopt you. You're so great, Adam, like we have so many other problems and nonprofit can you take on the tech? For those too, we got to simplify this stuff. Thank you for this and for what you and Allah hundra have done?

Well, you know, I will tell you, it is a dream. And you know, every tech company, every every startup has a dream of what happens if you get to scale and you get big, and you know, the different dreams, you know, we would dream big at LinkedIn, you know about what it would mean, if everyone had control over their careers, you know, who they knew and what they knew, and, and, and their reputations? You know, Wealthfront, we had a dream of what if everyone had sophisticated financial advice, not just the wealthy? But you know, I will tell you, there is no great technology platform in the giving space. Right? That hasn't happened. We don't we have so many in E commerce, we have so many in saving investing, so many in FinTech, all these different categories. But where is that giant that invest in technology just for one purpose to help make giving better to help these organizations fulfill their missions? I think it's possible it might be decades away. It might take a long time to get there. But I keep getting motivated. I look at Daffy. We're so small right now, it's just beginning. But what if we had 100,000? People putting money aside every week or every month for charity? What if we had a million? What What would the voices of that million say? What could they do together? When those events happen? How could that group work together to actually have impact? I mean, we certainly got people talking online. Yeah, I'm not sure that first of all,

it's not all turned out to be positive. But I love the idea of activating people around giving etc. So maybe hopefully, someday, Becky, we can invest in those technologies to help organizations. We're starting with this. But you know, we have big dreams like everyone else. Incredible. I mean, my heart is so full from this conversation. Just love whichever you're doing and consider us super fans over here. Thank you. Yeah, deeply appreciate it.

I think, what I'm hoping is that you're not alone, that there are, the data, the statistics are true. That actually, it turns out most of us believe in giving. We just need something that's easy enough to do and that we can do together.

Amen. Okay, so Adam, you gotta tell everybody how they can connect with you. I'm in the App Store already. I'm downloading Daffy, by the way, great instructions and screenshots and all of it, it just looks so user friendly. Talk about how people can connect with you. Where are you on socials? Give us all the details.

Oh, happy to so yes. So thank you, thank you, what you're doing is perfect. So if you just go to the App Store, and search for Daffy, you will find us and that experience is a fantastic experience. We're going to ask you simple questions. It we're gonna ask who you are, we're going to ask what your goal is, how much do you want to give to charity? And do you want to put money aside every week or every month or every quarter. And then if you don't want to do that, we'll see you can skip that for now. And we will ask you to put a little bit of money aside for charity just to get started. And then we'll ask you how you want that money invested, we have all these different portfolios. If you don't know what to pick, you pick the standard one, it's fine, just a bunch of low cost Vanguard funds, very easy, good financial advice. But we have ESG portfolios and crypto portfolios if you're really excited. And we also have conservative portfolios, if you don't want to take risk. You can just pick cash or inflation protected bonds or something that suits you. And then you're ready to go. And you can even do it. If you don't want to go to the App Store. If you don't have an iPhone, that's okay, you can just go to dafy.org. And it's right there. For me. I mean, our handle on Twitter is Daffy giving dafis also on LinkedIn. We have a YouTube channel as well. But if you want to follow me, I can't promise I mean, I tried to be very upfront with people my Twitter bio, I will tell everyone that I'm only slightly amusing just slightly.

So but if you if you want to follow a slightly amusing Twitter account, you can my I'm just Adam Nash not not a lot of creativity in the handle there.

Well done getting that brand and capturing it. Proud of you.

Yeah, but no, there Well, there are some advantages to being relatively early on the internet, as it turns out, although every now and again, there's another Adam Nash out there who gets angry because I have it. I have the domain.

But, it's very easy to follow me very easy to follow Daffy. But like I said, if you're going to do just one thing, I would say just go to daffy.org and sign up and get started, pick that goal. It doesn't have to be a big goal, just pick that goal. put some money aside every month, link your bank account or your credit card or debit card, and just go from there. And it's okay, if the first few months, nothing happens. That's okay. You're building the account. But I think what will happen for you is what happens for me after Daffy launch, which is that you'll meet someone they'll talk about a cause of support and the power of being able to pull your phone out of your pocket, and just support them right there.

Oh, my gosh.

It's amazing.

Wow. So cool.

Totally sold. And, I have to bring up core value number two is we're closing out, we believe in playing the long game. This is a long game play. And it can actually maximize your philanthropy which Gosh, that's what everybody wants to do. So thank you for just coming in. Thank you for building this wonderful product. Thank you for democratizing it. You're just you're just a stellar human. Glad to know you.

Thank you both for having me on the show. I really appreciate I appreciate what you're doing as well. Hopefully we can all inspire more people to give.

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