David Goldberg. Post-Exit Impact: $10B Pledged to Charities

Written By Anastasia Koroleva

Episode - 8

David Goldberg. Post-Exit Impact: $10B Pledged to Charities

 
 
 

After selling his first business 15 years ago, David Goldberg became obsessed with the idea of making it absurdly easy for entrepreneurs to have an outsized social impact. This led to the creation of Founders Pledge, a community of experienced entrepreneurs who have now collectively pledged over $10 billion to charities. In this episode, he guides us on how to think about our post-exit impact in a rational and authentic way.

What We Discussed:

00:00:00: Introduction to the episode and David Goldberg

00:01:37: David's Purpose

00:03:23: Who is David Goldberg?

00:05:05: David's successful relationship and life balance

00:05:47: What keeps David up at night

00:07:45: What motivates David

00:08:16: David's legacy

00:08:33: Expectations from David's parents

00:10:08: Value of Formal Education and Start of Career

00:13:55: David’s first business experience

00:18:25: The moment of business exit

00:19:32: Motivation for the first business

00:19:47: Change in motivation and definition of success

00:25:00: Decision to get formally educated

00:27:32: Moving to Cambridge, UK

00:28:16: Cultural shifts in Berlin versus UK

00:31:48: Founders Forum group and understanding real poverty

00:37:40: Empathy Awakening

00:40:34: Joining Founders Forum

 

00:26:23: The process of selling Luxy Hair and what came afterwards

00:46:20: How the Founders Pledge began

00:46:45: The role of Founders Forum in the Founders Pledge

00:51:56: Understanding the use of a Donor Advised Fund

00:57:53: How Founders Pledge sustains itself financially

01:00:00: Funding for Founders Pledge

01:00:55: Personal motivations behind running the Founders Pledge.

01:02:00: Concept of Founders Pledge

01:12:57: Spirituality in Giving

01:15:17: Introduction to Pledge Ventures

01:22:57: Pledge Ventures in action

01:27:26: The Impact and Effectiveness of Founders Pledge

01:28:10: Reasons to Support Founders Pledge

01:30:14: The Problem with Traditional Charities

01:31:52: The Future Growth and Potential of Founders Pledge.

01:32:36: The Efficiency and Control in Founders Pledge

01:33:52: What Differentiates Founders Pledge from Other Charitable Enterprises.

01:33:52: Final words

  • David Goldberg: [00:00:00 - 00:00:02]

    The heart leads us to give, but the head should govern how it's done. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:00:02 - 00:00:28]

    David Goldberg. After selling his first business 15 years ago, he became obsessed with the idea of making it absurdly easy for entrepreneurs to have an outsized social impact. This led to the creation of Founders Pledge, a community of experienced entrepreneurs who have now collectively pledged over $10 billion to charity. In this episode, he guides us on how to think about our own post exit impact in a rational and authentic way. 


    David Goldberg: [00:00:28 - 00:00:49]

    All human life has equal value. We are all the same. If that's the case, how can we help as many people as possible by as much as possible? The thing that keeps me going is like, what we're building is important, and it's never been done before in this way. 

    We're like a multifamily office set up exclusively for entrepreneurs that focuses exclusively on philanthropy and charges nothing for its service. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:00:56 - 00:00:58]

    Thank you so much for joining me today. 


    David Goldberg: [00:00:58 - 00:01:00]

    My pleasure. Thanks for having me. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:01:00 - 00:01:37]

    So, for me, you're an extremely rare example of someone who achieved significant financial success early in life. But instead of spoiling yourself rotten or just retiring and enjoying your wealth, or managing your wealth full time, you laser focused on solving the world's nastiest problems. And you created a sustainable vehicle for doing that. And you persuaded thousands of successful entrepreneurs to join you in this quest. So on this podcast, I really want to explore how you decided to do that, how you made this decision. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:01:37 - 00:01:43]

    I'll ask you directly, what is your purpose? How much clarity on that you have? 


    David Goldberg: [00:01:43 - 00:03:07]

    I think, like a fair bit. My purpose is to help as many people as much as possible in the small amount of time that I have. I saw a chart once. It actually gave me more fire and drive than anything I'd ever experienced before. I read this website called Wait but Why. And it's written by a guy named Tim Urban, and he's one of the great communicators of our time. And I remember reading through the website many years ago now, and I found he did an article on your life in weeks, which is like a pretty crazy idea. And he has an a four sheet of paper, and it starts in your life in years and then your life in month and your life in weeks. And it shows the boxes at each stage. And so you can actually print off the sheet of paper and cross off the weeks that you've lived. It's a 90 year life on an a four sheet of paper. Cross off the weeks that you've lived. You're pretty far down the paper pretty soon after graduating from university and having your first couple of jobs, and then you look at where the great people in history, how long they've lived and where they got to by the time they were your age, and you're like, oh, man, I don't have much time left. And you could tick off this chart week by week, and you see the time passing by ever faster. And it really was this just forcing function for we have to do more right now. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:03:07 - 00:03:21]

    Yeah. I love this sense of urgency, which keeps popping up during the century all the time, because it is one of the common traits for the most successful entrepreneurs. So I have all the confidence with your continuing success. 


    David Goldberg: [00:03:21 - 00:03:23]

    I appreciate it. Thank you. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:03:23 - 00:03:26]

    Now, who is David Goldberg? 


    David Goldberg: [00:03:27 - 00:03:32]

    I don't know. We're still trying to figure that out. Not sure. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:03:32 - 00:03:34]

    How do you think your identity changed over time? 


    David Goldberg: [00:03:34 - 00:03:46]

    I don't know. I'm not sure that it has so much. I feel often, like, very similar then and now. Just, I guess, a bit more experience. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:03:47 - 00:03:54]

    Okay, so you don't necessarily torture yourself over the question, who am I, and what's my identity? At the moment? 


    David Goldberg: [00:03:54 - 00:04:14]

    No. My identity is like me. I'm trying to be better all the time, not always succeeding. I work hard. I sometimes push people also to work hard, maybe sometimes too hard. 

    So my identity is like, I'm very much driven by mission. I have been for a long time. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:04:15 - 00:04:18]

    And working hard, which seems to be the story of your whole life, coming from you. 


    David Goldberg: [00:04:18 - 00:04:26]

    I also don't know how to be chill about stuff, necessarily. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:04:27 - 00:04:27]

    You're intense. 


    David Goldberg: [00:04:27 - 00:04:55]

    I'm intense a lot. My partner often teases me that, like, if we have a weekend where we're not doing anything, I will invent things to do. We were joking yesterday, actually, like, sitting in the living room, and I was like, I really want to build a new corner TV unit. He's like, please don't start another project on Sunday morning to finish it that evening. No, I'm not going to, but, yeah, I don't know how to have downtime, necessarily. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:04:55 - 00:05:04]

    So, talking about your husband, what do you think are the secrets of your successful relationship through quite the roller coaster that your life has been so far? 


    David Goldberg: [00:05:05 - 00:05:46]

    Honesty, flexibility, knowing that another person can't fix me and I can't fix him, and giving each other space when we need it and closeness when we want more of that. I travel a lot for work, so we chat a lot. But basically, we're each people on a journey, evolving, hopefully mostly in the same direction. Sometimes not always just being honest about that and being comfortable with. Sometimes we'll be great, and other times we won't be. But we've been on the path together for so long and been through ups and downs that together we can do anything. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:05:47 - 00:05:49]

    What keeps you up at night? 


    David Goldberg: [00:05:49 - 00:07:22]

    A lot. I have struggled to sleep my whole life. I ask people this when I interview people actually for jobs. I ask two questions, like, what keeps you up at night and what wakes you up in the morning? The scale of problems that exist in the world really keeps me up at night. 

    Things have been getting better for a really long time, and in a lot of ways they're getting worse in recent years, we've never seen more sort of interstate conflict, intrastate conflict than in the last couple of years. We've seen real declines in the gains that we made in malaria. We're seeing insecticide resistance in mosquitoes. And so malaria for the first time in decades is on the rise and parts of the world where it's horrible already. 

    I'm worried about how climate change is going to continue to affect how we live our lives in the global north and in high income countries, not to mention just the havoc it's already caused in low income countries and what this is going to mean for disease actors. There's a lot of problems and I feel like often not enough people trying to solve them or focused on solving them. So that keeps you along with all the standard stuff like running a business and making sure it works well and making sure people are well motivated and happy and we're doing a good job. I get into bed and I close my eyes and my head goes, all the stuff that you've not done well, how could you do it better? Thinking about the next day, the next week. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:07:22 - 00:07:24]

    How do you deal with that? Do you meditate? 


    David Goldberg: [00:07:25 - 00:07:42]

    I've tried. I sometimes do that successfully, but I went to a cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, although I don't think I have terrible insomnia. And I've developed a good routine now that I actually get to bed pretty well. But after, like, years of work to do it. Yeah. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:07:43 - 00:07:45]

    So what wakes you up in the morning? 


    David Goldberg: [00:07:45 - 00:08:16]

    I've now got to the age where regardless of alarm, I wake up at the exact same time every single, regardless of if I've gone out the night before, staying up late like clockwork. But the point of the question is, what's my motivation? How do I leave and go to work and do that well? What's the opportunity to affect the world positively? And I really do believe that a founder's clutch lives up to its potential and does well, stuff that must do well, then we can change the shape of the world. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:08:16 - 00:08:19]

    You certainly can. How do you want to be remembered? 


    David Goldberg: [00:08:19 - 00:08:33]

    As someone who's given back, someone who's left a mark on the world? I think everyone wants to leave a mark on history, that my time, my contribution, was worth something. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:08:33 - 00:08:36]

    I want to know what your parents expected from you. 


    David Goldberg: [00:08:36 - 00:09:18]

    Yeah, I think they just expected me to be great most of the time, not ever in a very high pressure way. But my parents were working class. They really worked very hard to provide for my brother and I, even though we grew up with less than most people around us. And I saw how hard my parents worked and knew that from a very young age that I couldn't really squander the opportunity that they gave me. 

    Yeah. They really just sort of expected me to be great and excellent and excel in everything I did and I tried to. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:09:18 - 00:09:28]

    But it sounds like they created this environment where you felt that you were lucky to be where you are. It sounds like there is gratitude there. You said you couldn't squander the opportunity. 


    David Goldberg: [00:09:28 - 00:09:49]

    Yeah. I mean, my dad worked two jobs. My mom had a small business and did work on the side, so they worked long hours, and it was very obvious to me that they did. Whereas the kids in my neighborhood, parents, one parent had a job, the other was a stay at home mother, which meant that it just seemed different in other homes. Really? 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:09:50 - 00:10:08]

    So you are unusually well educated for an entrepreneur. In our community of post exit founders, we often debate the value of formal education. And I wonder, if you look back at your life, what do you think your education gave you? 


    David Goldberg: [00:10:08 - 00:12:15]

    Well, it's interesting, because when I was a kid, I really didn't like learning. I found school, high school, to just be like a supreme waste of time. I think I was mostly pretty bored. And in fact, I dropped out of high school when I was 17.

    And just decided that finishing high school diploma didn't make any sense. I wanted to go make money. I realized at a sort of in my teenage years that money see well I thought money was the answer to all problems, and I decided I was going to just go make as much of it as possible. And staying at high school didn't seem like the right way to do that. 

    So I dropped out when I was 17 and got a job when I was 18. By sort of luck and happenstance, I was able to convince a private bank to hire me. I walked into this private bank. I knew someone who knew someone there. I dropped a name. 

    I was able to speak to the president of this bank, and I convinced him to hire me as his assistant, and it was January 7, 2002, and I just turned 18. I basically proved that you didn't need education to get a good job. It turns out I wasn't very good at this job. Why would I have been? I'd never worked before. 

    I certainly didn't like taking orders from someone as an assistant, it turned out. But rather than getting fired, which I had every right to be, after about a month, I got put on a rotational program and ended up joining a department a couple of months later. That was doing something that I was quite good at, basically. And so I was successful sort of pretty early on, and I worked in this bank selling mortgage backed securities on secondary markets for about three years, and found myself a couple of years later, 21 I was hiring. MBAs work underneath me. At that point, I didn't feel that education really mattered. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:12:15 - 00:12:20]

    So what changed? Why did you end up doing quite a lot of education? 


    David Goldberg: [00:12:20 - 00:12:41]

    It's a slightly long story. Well, it's a long story, basically, but the short version is, I did this career in finance for a couple of years at the end of 22 I really didn't like who I had become. I was working to live, as opposed to the other way around. No, that's not right. I was living to work. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:12:42 - 00:12:43]

    Exactly. 


    David Goldberg: [00:12:43 - 00:12:50]

    All I did was work. 07:00 a.m. In the office, home at midnight, six days a week, rinse, repeat, for years. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:12:50 - 00:12:57]

    Which makes a lot of sense, because that's also what your parents instilled in you as a core value. 


    David Goldberg: [00:12:57 - 00:13:40]

    I worked really hard. I made a lot of money, and I found myself approaching. I felt like I was approaching this decision. Like I either double down on this space and I just do this for the rest of my life and commit to being unhappy, which is sort of what it felt like, or I get out right now. And I thankfully got out, and I quit this job at the end of 2005, and I'm so glad I did. 2006 came around. 

    I bought a one way ticket to Europe. I traveled for a couple of months and then ended up in Berlin, which was the most fun city I'd ever been to. I'd never been out of the US before, and bought this ticket to Europe. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:13:41 - 00:13:55]

    That was incredibly brave of you. But also, it brings us to one of many things I find extremely impressive about you is how you built a business in a country where you didn't speak the language. How did that happen? Tell me that story. Yeah. 


    David Goldberg: [00:13:55 - 00:14:58]

    So I moved to Berlin. Well, I went back to Berlin with the intention to live there. And I figured it'd be pretty easy to get an apartment to set up a life, figure out what to do. I didn't really have a plan, and I soon learned that if you didn't speak german, it was really hard to get an apartment to rent a flat. And I went through this pretty harrowing process where I found an estate agent who spoke very broken English, who gave me a list of properties to see by myself that I had to arrange by myself. 

    And then when I eventually found one I liked and negotiated with the landlord for the rent, I got an invoice from this estate agent charging me two months of rent. And I was just flabbergasted because he basically did nothing and that he wanted a lot of money. And it turned out, I started talking to people. I made some friends over the couple of weeks that I'd been there. I was staying in a hostel, and it turned out this is sort of how it worked. 

    And I thought, that's crazy and broken, and I could do it better for less. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:14:58 - 00:15:00]

    You'd recognize the opportunity and you were ready for it. 


    David Goldberg: [00:15:00 - 00:15:33]

    There was a real need, I felt. And Berlin was becoming cool at this point, it wasn’t you know, I don't think it was at sort of peak coolness at that point. And so I started a business helping people like me figure out how to live in a country where they didn't speak the language. And it started as a relocation company, and it grew very quickly. It wasn't a technology company, there was no investors, it was bootstraps, and it wasn't sexy. It just made money pretty quickly. And a couple of years later, I sold it. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:15:33 - 00:15:38]

    A couple of years. It's a very short period of time from starting a company to actually exiting. 


    David Goldberg: [00:15:38 - 00:15:38]

    That's right. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:15:39 - 00:15:42]

    Quite incredible, especially in a country where you don't speak the language. 


    David Goldberg: [00:15:42 - 00:16:40]

    Yeah, I didn't need to speak the language. I mean, I fully leaned into this thing that you can come to me if you want to live in Berlin and not ever have to speak a word of German to get an apartment and have your life set up. This is as YouTube was becoming a thing. And so we started doing YouTube walkthroughs and putting them on the Internet so that people could rent an apartment without having ever seen it physically from a different part of the world. And we just streamlined the whole process, end to end, hired students to work with our clients in English. 

    They practiced their English, which was nice for them, and then they interacted, on the other hand, in German with owners and property managers. And it just became this really easy thing. I charged half as much and did twice the work, and it became thing pretty quickly. I think it was mostly right place, right time, and two years in, I got an acquisition offer, like inbound acquisition offer that I took. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:16:40 - 00:17:15]

    Brilliant. So when I first met you, I thought one of the things that made you really stand out from my perspective was that you are very well aware of your natural amazing communication skills. And you mentioned yourself very early in life when you persuaded the head of a private bank to hire you. Help me understand, at what point did you realize that talent and how did you work on those skills? Because it seems to be such a core talent for you. Core skill as well. 


    David Goldberg: [00:17:15 - 00:17:54]

    Yeah, it's interesting. I don't remember where I was like, yeah, this is the thing that I'm really good at. I'm really good at talking to people. But I certainly remember persuading my parents as a child to allow me to stay up late to watch Star Trek with my dad or, like, not go to bed. So I always negotiated for everything, and this sometimes got me in trouble, but it often worked. 

    And I never really took no for an answer. And again, this often got me in trouble, but it also mostly worked most of the time. So I sort of realized that talking was a way to get what you wanted. If you were good at it, you could get lots of things. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:17:54 - 00:18:02]

    Yeah. So do you think your parents encouraged it or you think they tried to suppress it, but they couldn't? 


    David Goldberg: [00:18:03 - 00:18:08]

    I don't know, actually. But I like to think that they encouraged it as opposed to try to suppress it. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:18:08 - 00:18:08]

    Okay. 


    David Goldberg: [00:18:08 - 00:18:24]

    So my dad and I used to play scrabble and do riddles and board games as a kid. So I assume that he had some thought into like, oh, my son is a good communicator. How do I make him better at it? How do I increase his vocabulary? I guess. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:18:25 - 00:18:32]

    Can we go to that moment when you first realize you were exiting your business? How did you feel? 


    David Goldberg: [00:18:32 - 00:18:43]

    Overwhelmed. I wasn't planning to. That's the thing. I was living in Berlin. I was pretty you know content. There was this thing that was sort of running itself. I didn't really do much. I didn't love it. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:18:43 - 00:18:46]

    After just two years, you also automated. 


    David Goldberg: [00:18:46 - 00:19:27]

    I liked the zero to one a lot, and it just seemed to work. I hired different people, made them well, and it just sort of ran on its own mostly. And I got this inbound offer from a larger property company saying, we've been following your progress. You're out competing us with this market. We'd like to acquire you? 

    And I was like, yeah, that sounds good. I talked to my partner and it just made sense. My heart wasn't in it. It was a nice offer. I maybe, probably could have got more or like, much more if I just kept on doing it. 

    But it didn't really feel like it was a thing that I wanted to do. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:19:27 - 00:19:32]

    So would you say that your motivation for your first business was purely financial? 


    David Goldberg: [00:19:32 - 00:19:33]

    Purely. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:19:33 - 00:19:47]

    Purely financial, yeah. It happens so much, doesn't it? So many of us just have this idea of getting financial freedom. Sometimes we want to prove ourselves. Plus, it's financial freedom, but it's more financial freedom for sure. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:19:47 - 00:19:57]

    How has it changed for you in terms of your motivation and your definition of success as well? After you sold your business. 


    David Goldberg: [00:19:58 - 00:22:52]

    Pretty radically. The deal happened quick, and I realized sort of as it was concluding, that I'd gotten really lucky. I think that this is a thing that we under index on as a community of entrepreneurs, being in the right place at the right time and just things sort of working out. And it wasn't just that I got lucky at this point, it was that, on reflection, I'd gotten lucky a lot. And it wasn't a crazy exit where I never have to do anything. It maybe could have been, I guess, but I felt like I'd won the life lottery sort of three times as a kid I felt poor. We weren't in relative terms, but actually, I was born a white man in California in the 1980s, which is sort of as good as it gets. And then I got the shuttle in finance, and I was just freshly 18, literally the week I turned 18 and was successful and did that for a bunch of years and left of my own accord. And then I had this business that I started and sold without real intent or direction. And it just felt like I had accrued a ton of good karma that I probably needed to redistribute if I was going to stay on the bright side of the books. 

    And so I felt sort of compelled to do something more than just sit on my wealth and allow it to amass and aggregate, aggregate aggregate, just for me. I just sort of had this moment where I was like, this isn't really mine, is it? I've just sort of been lucky enough to have this good fortune. I should get back. 

    And I guess I was a bit naive in thinking that it would be just a very straightforward and easy thing to do, and then I'd spend a couple of months on it and then move on to the next project, whatever that project was. I didn't know but I felt like at this point, I should rebalance the scales. And what I thought was going to take a couple of months, I'm still working on 15 years later. Right. It was a much more challenging thing. 

    And to answer your question, this is what sort of brought me back to education. I had this outcome. I wanted to give back. I started looking into charities. It'll be easy. 

    I'll ask for some data. I'll look at the numbers. I'll figure out which is best by doing some analysis, and then that'll be that. But charities just couldn't provide data in the way that I wanted. They weren't very numerate or quantitative. 

    It was really about trying to, for charities, tell a compelling story and grab someone by the heartstrings and get them to bind the idea of the mission rather than what does the thing actually accomplish. And it was really crazy to me and really foreign that charities were selling this emotional product, and I really wanted a rational conversation. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:22:52 - 00:22:53]

    Right. 


    David Goldberg: [00:22:53 - 00:23:10]

    And it just seemed like they were focusing on the wrong stuff. I mean, I guess from their perspective, their donors wanted to feel good, feel, like, emotionally compelled by this mission, of course. And they optimized for that. And it's really not what I wanted. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:23:11 - 00:23:15]

    Isn't because you already thought as a business person. Yeah. 


    David Goldberg: [00:23:15 - 00:23:44]

    I was like, I run my business this way. I invest my money in this way. Why would I not think about philanthropy in the same capacity? Right. Yeah. 

    When we make decisions about what to invest in or what not to invest in or which product line to double down on and which to cut, which strategy works and which doesn't, we don't make decisions based on how emotionally compelling something is, we make decisions based on the data. We run the numbers, we do tests, and we iterate based on the result. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:23:44 - 00:24:31]

    So how much time did you spend in soul searching because you have such amazing clarity of, I guess, your true purpose right now. But how difficult was it to find it? Because I think that once we've exited, we suddenly have the time and financial freedom to do this soul searching. But it feels hard and unpleasant for most of us, so we try to avoid it by jumping into a familiar activity. You and I saw it many times, whether it's angel investing or jumping into another business, but people really try to avoid this kind of hard thinking and facing the truths that you seem to have faced very brilliantly. But I don't want it to sound as if it just happened like this. If it hasn't, help me understand. How did you get to that? 


    David Goldberg: [00:24:31 - 00:25:00]

    It's been a process, right? So I did not really feel like I had the luxury of time, even though I guess I did, in retrospect, I felt pretty compelled, like there was this really big problem and I don't like problems that feel solvable. And this felt solvable in a way. Like, it made sense that organizations working on big social problems would use data, and they didn't. And it felt weird. 


    David Goldberg: [00:25:00 - 00:25:47]

    But I also didn't really know how much I didn't know. I knew that I didn't know a lot, but I didn't know how big a lot was and I didn't know how to start thinking about it. So my soul searching was I don't really have enough knowledge or ability to think critically about this space or how to affect it at all. My soul searching led me to I need to get educated finally. Like, I jumped at high school. 

    I had no real formal education and I could hustle. I was street smart and I was like numerate, but I didn't know how to think critically or systematically. And so I decided my soul searching led me to I'm going to go figure out how to think better and upgrade my operating system. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:25:47 - 00:25:50]

    So how was the idea of founders pledge bond? 


    David Goldberg: [00:25:50 - 00:27:00]

    So I had this exit. Wanted to give back, tried, did poorly. I was really unhappy with the stuff that I gave to and I felt like I really thought critically about it. But I decided to run a test. I'll give some money to a couple of different things and see what I get back. 

    And it was pretty unnerving and I was unhappy about it. And I concurrently moved back to the US with my then boyfriend, now husband, and we enrolled in community college. So I had to do a remote correspondence to finish high school, which I did, and then went to community college, studied there for two years, we both did. And then transferred to UCLA, where I did a double in political science and public policy. I thought these were two areas that would lend themselves well to understanding levers of systemic change. It did. And from there I sort of got the learning bug. I went to my undergrad at 25 and all of my peers were teenagers, basically. But I like learning. I was really taken by it. And then came to the UK to do a PhD. I started one, at least. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:27:00 - 00:27:02]

    How did you persuade your husband to join you? 


    David Goldberg: [00:27:03 - 00:27:29]

    Pretty straightforward. Okay, so he's from Berlin, wanted to see the world and travel. It was clear that we were in a long term relationship. We were going to go do life together. So he came with me, which was fun. 

    And he's from Berlin, so the deal was always, we'll spend undergrad in the US and then we'll come back to Europe for the next chapter. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:27:29 - 00:27:32]

    But you came back to London. 


    David Goldberg: [00:27:32 - 00:27:52]

    Well, I came to Cambridge, to the UK. I applied to a bunch of schools, I got into the ones that I wanted and Cambridge was the place for me. They had one of the best international relations programs in the world and went there. Jacob came with me, was much, much closer to home. And, yeah, I studied. 

    He commuted to London and worked. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:27:53 - 00:28:16]

    So I'm also someone who had two immigrations in my life. So I can appreciate how difficult that is to understand a new culture, but it opens your horizons amazingly. It really changes you as a person. I would love you to tell me how it felt for you, living it in a different culture for a while. 


    David Goldberg: [00:28:16 - 00:28:19]

    Yeah, I mean, I lived in Berlin, so it was like, really radically. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:28:19 - 00:28:19]

    And built a business there. 


    David Goldberg: [00:28:20 - 00:29:44]

    Yeah, but the UK was different. I just come from California. UCLA was where I did my undergrad, and I absolutely loved it there. The teachers really were invested, professors invested in their students'outcomes. They really wanted people to succeed. 

    I had maybe one of my favorite professors ever who was just he never published anything, but he just really cared and he put time in to every student and there was just like this sort of stewardship that happened. And then I came to the UK. There's Cambridge, one of the old hallowed universities, and it was radically different. The professors just mostly like unhappy old men and who really didn't take the same level of care with their students. 

    I think it's mostly like there was this. If you get here, you proved that you're among the best, and now you have to prove you're among the best at the best, and you got to do it alone. And it felt like very I felt very alone and very unsupport. I didn't love my time at Cambridge. 

    I did well there. Right. I really had something to prove. I felt like going to UCLA and getting good grades. There was like I had something to prove. 

    But I got into Cambridge, I really got it. Now I have to be the best. I was, but I didn't love it. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:29:44 - 00:29:46]

    Looking back, was it worth it? 


    David Goldberg: [00:29:46 - 00:30:06]

    Yeah, of course. I don't like doing things halfway or part way, and I really went for it. I made wonderfully good friends there who thought I worked too hard and tried too hard and had less fun than they did. And that's probably true, but I'm glad that I did and didn't stay to do the PhD. I started and stopped. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:30:07 - 00:30:12]

    I remember you mentioned that you figured it wasn't the best way for you to give back. 


    David Goldberg: [00:30:12 - 00:30:14]

    It wasn't the best way for me to spend my time. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:30:14 - 00:30:15]

    Exactly. 


    David Goldberg: [00:30:15 - 00:30:38]

    And I was older than most of my peers even then. And it's just like, this isn't the right use of five years. I could go do something. I remember back to this moment where I was like, I'm going to go to school and we have to think about how to think better. You're going to think better. 

    And then I'm going to go do the thing that I wanted, which is like, how do you solve these big system level problems that we've had forever? 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:30:38 - 00:30:46]

    So has that formal education in two different major universities help you solve those problems? 


    David Goldberg: [00:30:46 - 00:30:47]

    Absolutely. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:30:47 - 00:30:51]

    Okay, so without that experience, you don't think you would do it at least as efficiently? 


    David Goldberg: [00:30:51 - 00:31:14]

    No chance. I mean, I didn't know how to think systematically. I learned how to think about the world and about the power structure, who's within it, the role that policy plays, how social movements actually form and what they mean. I learned how to actually think quantitatively rather than just be numerate. I wouldn't change it for sure. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:31:14 - 00:31:48]

    So would it be correct to say that your definition of success after you sold your business, changed into this idea of how do I grow myself? How do I prepare myself to achieve that goal that I have, which was given back? And then it drove you to succeed in those two universities in quite a challenging atmosphere where you were the oldest person in the group. So your definition of success has changed into preparing yourself to give back what happens next? 


    David Goldberg: [00:31:48 - 00:33:08]

    So I leave Cambridge. I see a job spec on the Internet. It's like it was written for me. Then it's that moment of like, oh, wow, these people are looking for me for this job. And it was a job running or helping to run a new initiative that was within the Founders Forum group. 

    Founders Forum is this wonderful community of tech entrepreneurs started by Brent Hoberman here in London. I think it was like just after the first Dot burst, 2002, as like a way to collectively heal as a community of entrepreneurs. And I joined them just as they were turning ten to help run this program called the Founders form for Good, aiming to help social entrepreneurs build more commercial products and sort of scale impact using technology. So it was this very cool idea that I was well suited to. I had a really clear sense of what impact meant at that point. 

    I was really taken by the idea that technology has the capacity to really transform the level of scale and how the delivery of good happens. And it just made sense. It's like a job written for me. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:33:09 - 00:33:22]

    You said something very important, so I have to interrupt you here. You said that you had a clear idea of what impact meant for you. I come across people every day, as I'm sure you do, who want to do impact, but they actually don't know what it means. 


    David Goldberg: [00:33:22 - 00:33:44]

    Yeah. So for me, it's like affecting people positively, whether that be helping them from dying or improving the quality of life or reducing the burden and disease burden that they have. Impact is like, the way I think about it at scale, is affecting as many people as possible, as much as possible towards a better or more positive life. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:33:44 - 00:34:11]

    Brilliant. So you are comfortable with having such a broad definition? You don't feel the need, that you don't have the need to focus on a particular problem? The reason I'm asking is because I feel that lots of people are wasting literally years thinking that they need to find that one problem that they want to dedicate their lives to. But you felt very comfortable having this broad definition. 


    David Goldberg: [00:34:11 - 00:34:44]

    Absolutely. I mean, helping people is not like just helping a group of people, helping all people. And my view has been and continues to be, that all human life has equal value, regardless of where it is, where people are born, how they're born, to whom they're born. Right. We are all the same. 

    And so if that's the case, how can we help as many people as possible? By as much as possible. And it doesn't mean just focusing on one thing. It means sort of taking a broad approach and moving the needle as much as possible. At least it did for me. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:34:44 - 00:34:50]

    So it sounds like at the time, when you started your first business, you were quite selfish. You wanted to solve a problem for yourself. 


    David Goldberg: [00:34:51 - 00:34:59]

    I wanted to make money. I solved a problem that I faced that I assumed other people would have. And I figured I could make good money doing it. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:34:59 - 00:35:19]

    But eventually, that was money for you. So it was, if you're honest with yourself, quite a selfish question. And then it looks like in a few years, you have grown so much spiritually that you had this clarity that now I want to help other people. 


    David Goldberg: [00:35:19 - 00:36:17]

    Yeah. So I guess the real turning point was actually understanding what poverty is. So I thought I was poor as a kid, and I was in relative terms, but I wasn't really. So when I was in Berlin, I traveled a bit. I went to Asia for a month, 2007, and I saw what poverty is and evated it. Yeah, it was horrible. 

    And it really made me reevaluate. Like, I wasn't really very poor at all, was, you know, when you look at income data over time, I realized that I was actually amongst the wealthiest people ever to have existed, even though in relative terms, compared to my peers in Los Angeles, I was at the very bottom of the income spectrum. But if you zoom out to the world, it's like, way at the top. And if you zoom out even further and look over time, I was very lucky to be born when I was where I was. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:36:17 - 00:36:19]

    That trip happened after you sold your business? 


    David Goldberg: [00:36:19 - 00:36:20]

    No, before. Yeah. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:36:20 - 00:36:21]

    Okay. 


    David Goldberg: [00:36:21 - 00:36:28]

    Took a month off, business was running well, sold the business at the end of 2008, went on this trip in 2007, and I saw it, I was like, wow. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:36:29 - 00:36:48]

    So by the time you became wealthy yourself, you already had this idea. That explains why it took you so relatively short period of time to make such a huge jump into this desire to serve other people, whoever they are, wherever they are, and not just a small group of people you could relate to. 


    David Goldberg: [00:36:48 - 00:37:16]

    Yeah, because I didn't relate to the culture in Southeast Asia, I couldn't. But I saw that these were people and they were living hard lives their whole lives, and kids were dying and there was poverty and mosquitoes and mosquito borne disease, and it was harrowing. I mean, parts of this trip were really fun because I had to sort of offset the, like, I really felt the. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:37:16 - 00:37:19]

    You felt compassion. 


    David Goldberg: [00:37:19 - 00:37:40]

    A lot of it. It was hard to witness because I was this relative. I hadn't had this exit. But still, in relative terms, this wealthy white person going in, know, Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam and Thailand, it was like, wow, these people really have it much worse than I ever did. And does it have to be this way? 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:37:40 - 00:38:05]

    Yeah. So in a way, if we talk to someone who just exited their business and they theoretically want to have a lot of impact, this is quite a common situation, but they don't really feel it. Deep in their heart, they're not nearly motivated. Would you say, go to these poor countries, experience them, and see if that triggers your compassion? Would that be a practical advice? 


    David Goldberg: [00:38:06 - 00:39:14]

    It's a good and challenging question, and I don't know. It was helpful for me, but I'm not sure that. I'm not sure that I'd recommend it necessarily, because it triggers a really emotional response. And that emotional response tends to lead people to make decisions that aren't calculated or considered. So these days, I do something different. 

    My business now helps entrepreneurs figure out how to use their resources to affect the world positively. And we try to discourage poverty tourism, which is, I think, often people have a desire to go see what the rest of the world is. Like, with the lens of, I have money and I want to use that money to affect the world. I guess maybe I was just going to travel and see more because I hadn't really done that. And as part of that experience, I saw this poverty, and that really affected me. 

    But most of the people who have exits now have traveled, seen the world, have context in a way that I didn't because I was very sheltered. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:39:14 - 00:40:02]

    Yeah. My problem with poverty tourism is that some people just feel good about themselves when they travel beyond Asia, and that is a problem. But I like to think that people who already have so much experience as exited founders and usually already have quite developed compassion, because I think to succeed in a business, we actually have to have compassion for our customers, for our employees. If you don't, you may have a business, but it probably will never be really successful. So I find that lots of exited founders already have lots of kindness and compassion and the desire to give. 

    So for them, traveling may make a lot of sense because they may have experience like you, that seeds of compassion will grow when they expand their horizons. 


    David Goldberg: [00:40:02 - 00:40:24]

    Yeah, I guess to the extent that it actually traveling allows someone to have more compassion and decide that they want to give, I guess, more power to them. But the approach that I take now with founders pledge is different than that. We try to approach the question of, like, how. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:40:24 - 00:40:34]

    I want us to get there because you said it took a bit of time. So you traveled, you edited the business, you went to university, now you have all the skills, now you get involved with Founders Forum. What's next? 


    David Goldberg: [00:40:34 - 00:40:51]

    So I helped to run this foundation for about a year. It was a really lovely idea that didn't really work. And the idea was, let's help these socially minded people scale better commercially using technology. They were social entrepreneurs. We call it social tech entrepreneurs. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:40:51 - 00:40:54]

    Why didn't it work? Sounds like a brilliant idea. 


    David Goldberg: [00:40:54 - 00:41:00]

    Yeah, it does, right? Yes, it should work. I guess it's because they weren't great entrepreneurs. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:41:00 - 00:41:02]

    Okay, so it's an execution problem. 


    David Goldberg: [00:41:02 - 00:41:39]

    I think so, yeah. They were very well intentioned, good people that had all of the desire and just lacked the grit, capacity, determination, execution to do it. Well, there's a couple of people who were better than others, but overall, we gave almost a million pounds of cash to 20 companies, 50,000 pound grants, equity free grants, usually businesses, to accelerate their growth and with mentorship from within the founders forward community. And it just didn't work. A year in, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. Right? 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:41:40 - 00:41:46]

    So basically, you're talking about the companies you invested in, these are the people who didn't have enough tuition experience. 


    David Goldberg: [00:41:46 - 00:41:47]

    That's right. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:41:47 - 00:41:53]

    I understand. So the Founders Forum did have that ability to execute. 


    David Goldberg: [00:41:54 - 00:42:09]

    The issue was not founders forum. The issue was these 20 companies the Founders we're trying to support just weren't great. And we looked long and hard, we looked across Europe and had hundreds of applications and picked the 20 best. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:42:09 - 00:42:15]

    When you picked them, you only picked those that actually had a socially impactful purpose. 


    David Goldberg: [00:42:15 - 00:42:15]

    That's right. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:42:15 - 00:42:22]

    Is it possible that these were just types of problems that could not be solved by businesses? 


    David Goldberg: [00:42:25 - 00:42:26]

    No. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:42:26 - 00:42:29]

    Okay. So it's really just the quality of execution. 


    David Goldberg: [00:42:29 - 00:44:51]

    And the issue was like, good people, not great entrepreneurs, really cared about affecting the world positively, but couldn't, couldn't have commercial model, the skill. Yeah. And so we spent a year doing this, and I didn't want to spend another year, waste another year having it not work. And I sort of took a step back and I thought, how do I approach this problem differently? And had this moment where I was like, what if I just help great commercial entrepreneurs be more social instead of helping these social entrepreneurs be more commercial? And it really just like, it clicked. And I was like, I'm going to build the thing that I wanted when I sold my business, which was, how do I make decisions about using my resources to affect the world positively? They're scarce resources, so how do I use them as effectively as possible to do as much as possible and work with a community of people that are already sort of on their way to success and are going to have much much more of it than even your sort of the top quartile average. And at the same time, there was this tech was becoming mega and I was seeing people becoming billionaires like right, left and center. I mean, these were not overnight successes, but they were like an overnight success after ten years. Right? That's how the saying goes. But there was this subset of people in the world that had more earning potential than anyone else, and it was venture backed technology companies and the founders behind them. So I thought, let's just help people like this give better. But it became clear that I was not a person to be listened to. 

    I sort of had ideas about how to do this well and then developed a bit of a framework for it. But I was not venture backed. My exit was not like a venture backed tech exit. And so I didn't have any credibility or network to execute with. And so I thought, maybe there's this idea like, let's get people to commit to give before they've actually made money. We discount the value of the future extremely, such that if you commit to give away 5-10 percent of something that hasn't yet materialized, something in the future you're committing to give away today, five or 10% of nothing, which is zero. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:44:51 - 00:44:58]

    David, please tell me how the Founders Pledge works, because obviously I know, but some of our listeners wouldn't. 


    David Goldberg: [00:44:58 - 00:46:20]

    So the basic idea is that we ask founders of technology companies to commit legally to give a percentage of their exit, if they ever have one, to go to charity, and they sign a document, a contract that binds them to do that. Now, it's not like a 20 page legal contract. It's a one page. If X, then Y X is I sell shares in my company and make money Y is then I'll donate some percentage of what I make. The charities are social causes of my choice at that point. 

    And the first person I spoke to, I got a meeting with under different pretenses, guy named Nick Hungerford. A company started called Nutmeg, actually, recently just passed away, which is quite sad. He's the first person I talked to about it, and I pivoted in the middle of our meeting. We were talking about something else. I don't even remember what it was anymore, but I said, hey, I've got this idea I want to run by you. 

    And I pitched him this idea, a founder's pledge. I didn't have anything to walk him through. It was just like the idea. He's like, yeah. He asked a bunch of questions, and he said, if you gave me a piece of paper that said something along those lines, I'd probably sign it. 

    I said, oh. I said, really? He said, yeah, why not? It'd be committing to give away something I haven't made yet, and only if I make it do I give it away. I was like, yeah, that's right. 


    David Goldberg: [00:46:20 - 00:46:42]

    And I asked, okay, I'm going to put this together and I'm going to send it to you, but in the meantime, who are three other people you think I should talk to who might react similarly? And he gave me three names, and he said, reach out to them and say, I told you to reach out. No, he did not offer to introduce me. He said, you might consider reaching out to these three people. And I did. 

    And I got two meetings, and two said yes. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:46:42 - 00:46:44]

    And that they had a proof of concept. 


    David Goldberg: [00:46:45 - 00:47:06]

    It became a thing pretty quickly, and the Founders Forum were very good to me, and they gave me access. As soon as I thought the proof that people were interested in this they basically said, okay, well, you can grow this within Founders Forum. Come and talk at our next event in June and launch founders pledge there. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:47:06 - 00:47:07]

    That's incredible. 


    David Goldberg: [00:47:07 - 00:47:08]

    Yeah. That I did. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:47:08 - 00:47:09]

    Very generous of them. 


    David Goldberg: [00:47:09 - 00:47:11]

    Very generous. It wouldn't exist without them, for sure. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:47:11 - 00:47:14]

    Brilliant. Are you still involved with them? 


    David Goldberg: [00:47:14 - 00:47:38]

    I mean, a bit. So we spun founders pledge out of Founders forum in the very, very early days. We've been independent since 2015, but I think we're still part of the family, maybe the extended family now, but I go to most of their events still, and they have been and continue to be very generous with their wonderful network, and they don't have to. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:47:38 - 00:48:01]

    When you first told me about Founders Pledge, I was not only impressed by the novelty of the idea of pledging something that you don't have yet, which is brilliant, but I was also really impressed by how you make the decisions later what causes to give to. Can you please walk us through that? 


    David Goldberg: [00:48:01 - 00:49:34]

    So foundry's pledge at the start was just, let's get people to commit to give and see if we can get enough people to do so that we could actually build some momentum in the space and become a bit of a creative zeitgeist. And it soon became clear that it wasn't just enough to get people to commit to give. They needed to give better. And at the same time, there was this real desire I found for community, and not just community, which is like we're fintech entrepreneurs or B to B SaaS or whatever it is. There was this nascent desire to have community with people who were on the same journey. And I don't want to say spiritual journey, because it's not spiritual, but it's, like, purposeful, like sitting at the sort of the heart of who a person is and their desire to have success often is this idea that we can affect the world positively with the success. So founders pledge started as this pledge and then became a lot more. And so once someone pledges, they become a part of a community. 

    We do lots of events and convenings per year, so this year we'll do about 30 events all over the world just for our members, or we bring them together to explore issues of relevance to the group. So they're typically small groups, ten to 15 people around one of our members kitchen table with a thought leader or expert guiding a discussion about something relevant. We used to do big forums, but the idea of community brings people together around thematic areas, and they arrive as strangers and leave as friends. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:49:34 - 00:49:36]

    How many people in each event? Usually. 


    David Goldberg: [00:49:37 - 00:49:40]

    So the dinner is ten to 15 sometimes 20. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:49:40 - 00:49:42]

    Yeah. So they really have a chance to get to know. 


    David Goldberg: [00:49:42 - 00:49:59]

    Absolutely. It was important that they be small enough that you can talk to everyone there. Everyone could speak and have their voice heard and share their perspective. And so we do a lot of these now. The community of members is almost 1850 now from 40 countries. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:49:59 - 00:49:59]

    Amazing. 


    David Goldberg: [00:49:59 - 00:51:54]

    And so we have this community educational program that runs forever. Someone can join as they raise a series A for just having signed an Loi, that they're going to sell their company and still participate in our community and learn something from it. And then the final bit is actually helping our members to give better. I think that's sort of what you were alluding to. Not just enough to commit to give and then give, but we should give as effectively as possible. There's a problem that I faced, which is like, how do I do know? I'm not Bill Gates. I don't have Bill Gates money. And even when you do, it's not necessarily very straightforward to give away billions of dollars. You know, I decided to build some infrastructure to enable this impact to happen at a real scale. The first piece was actually how to give better. So built a think tank within founders pledge, hired tremendously smart people, often philosophers, statisticians and data scientists, to sort of build out this framework of, like, how do we do the most good? And that's grown a lot over the years, and we've really found our voice and our path amongst the lots of paths that exist out there, and then built the infrastructure, the financial infrastructure, to enable people to give globally, regardless of where they're a tax resident. So it actually turns out to be slightly more complicated than you might expect if you're an American, to give money to Africa or to Asia, to South America or wherever you're like. Typically, a government wants to see money stay within its tax jurisdiction. But often the biggest problems aren't where the most money is made, as often the case where if you make money in America and you want to really have outsized impact, you should probably be focusing on low and middle income countries. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:51:54 - 00:51:56]

    How do you solve that problem? 


    David Goldberg: [00:51:56 - 00:53:49]

    Well, we bring data into the equation and we help people to make better decisions using it. So we've built a framework that focuses on effective giving that tries to sort of take a very humanistic, utilitarian approach to making decisions, which is all equal, do as much good as possible, follow data, invest our money, invest in air quotes, donate our money. In the same way we invest our money for return of capital, in markets or in funds, see which funds perform the best, invest in those, make money, invest more money, and it grows over time. In my view, our view was, let's deploy money to the things that we know will do as much good as possible. And we know this because there's data to support it, evidence to support it. Randomized control trials have been run on specific types of interventions that say, in a pretty causal way, that if we do x, y will happen, and we believe that y to be greater than the next y, y one, or y two or y three, the other types of interventions that exist in the world. And so we really tried to be rigorous about understanding how do we affect the poorest of the poor and increase the quality of their life, whether that be in reducing infant mortality or self reported well being, or reducing the disability burden that they face as people who live in low income contexts or improving the quality of their life. And thankfully, there is a large body of evidence, development economics and development aid and the World Health Organization that have been thinking about this space for a really long time and have developed excellent hybrid metrics that enable us to compare apples to apples, as opposed to apples to oranges to pears to peaches. Right. Which all are sort of similarly shaped, but are different fruit. 

    And it's hard to make decisions with different metrics. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:53:49 - 00:53:59]

    So do I understand you correctly, that you are very focused on how to use the money efficiently and you determine that by looking at data? 


    David Goldberg: [00:53:59 - 00:54:00]

    Yes. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:54:00 - 00:54:04]

    As opposed to emotions or what I feel like doing. 


    David Goldberg: [00:54:04 - 00:54:26]

    We really discourage people from taking an emotional first approach. Often it's easy to do that. It feels good, at least at the start, to take this very, like my heart says this, or I've met this amazing charity, or this amazing charity CEO, and I've seen their work, which is like a thing that we hear a lot. It's like, you really haven't seen their work. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:54:26 - 00:54:31]

    Which is how most charities operate. And you mentioned it yourself. 


    David Goldberg: [00:54:31 - 00:55:00]

    They optimize for the emotional appeal, because that works. But if all decisions were made that way, then we'd be way worse off. We'd have way less quality of life than we actually do. 

    Because most decisions are not made using sort of emotional markers. They're made using very rational, considered, quantitative decisions. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:55:00 - 00:55:18]

    So you mentioned that countries naturally don't want money to go out of their borders. Is there anything you do from the legal standpoint to make it easier for your founders to invest, as you said, into the founders pledge? 


    David Goldberg: [00:55:18 - 00:57:08]

    So we operate something called the donor advised fund. It's not a new structure or vehicle. There's lots of donor advised funds out there in the world. It's actually the most common giving vehicle in the United States, and I think it's becoming increasingly popular here. Like, a percentage of all giving happens through donor advised funds. 

    And it basically is like a charity checking account. It allows a donor to irrevocably donate money or assets to a nonprofit charity. They get a tax receipt the moment they donate it, and then that nonprofit holds their money, either investing it in public funds or holding it in cash until they're ready to actually give it away. And then that donor advised fund makes the grants on behalf of the donor. 

    Pretty simple concept. And our take was donor advised funds really only ever give within the same tax jurisdiction that they receive assets. Again, very limiting. So our donor advised fund only works with a small number of people only founders pledge signatories. So it means we don't have to cater to many, many thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, like all the others do. 

    We're focusing on a very small subset and we're enabling them to give anywhere in the world. And so the UK has a very expansive charitable regime, and it means that we can make grants from the UK and also from the US, having conducted rigorous due diligence on the organizations, ensuring that they operate and would pass muster if they were based in the UK, but aren't from a donation perspective. So we can make grants globally. So when someone works with founders pledge, they can, but certainly don't have to use our donor advised fund. And if they do, they can make grants anywhere on the planet, as opposed to just within the UK. 


    And that's the same for our members across Europe and across North America. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:57:08 - 00:57:10]

    That's very helpful. 


    David Goldberg: [00:57:10 - 00:57:18]

    Yeah. And interestingly, our donor advised fund is zero cost, so we don't charge our members fees for using it. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:57:18 - 00:57:24]

    I was about to ask you that, so please tell me how it actually works. Technically, it's very important. 


    David Goldberg: [00:57:24 - 00:57:53]

    Typically, donor advised funds are pay for service, and they are typically based on the assets under management. So if you donate a million pounds, you'll pay a fee based on that million pounds. Depending upon the donor advised fund, it could be more than 100 basis points, which is 1% per year of admin fee. So it's not an insignificant amount of money, but that creates a weird incentive. Right? 


    David Goldberg: [00:57:53 - 00:58:32]

    So if your whole business is built on charging fees based on assets under management Aum, then you're optimizing to have as much Aum as possible, because that's how you make money. But this means that the donor advised funds have no incentive to get money out the door to charities that actually need them. Far from it. There's a proliferation of what we call zombie dafts, where it's just like they hoard money and sit on hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of assets that are invested, making fees on that money, and never push their donors to actually deploy the capital to profits. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:58:32 - 00:58:32]

    Wow. 


    David Goldberg: [00:58:33 - 00:58:47]

    And so this was problematic, obviously. And rather than creating the same broken system, I decided I'd eat the cost of running the donor advised fund, so that our incentive actually was to get money out the door so we don't charge. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:58:47 - 00:58:49]

    How do you eat it?


    David Goldberg: [00:58:50 - 00:59:02]

    I raise money from donors to fund founders pledge, and with that, pay for the entirety of the operations of the nonprofit without charging our members anything ever. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:59:03 - 00:59:07]

    So these founders have a choice whether to support your organization. 


    David Goldberg: [00:59:07 - 00:59:07]

    They do. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [00:59:07 - 00:59:10]

    Or to send all their money into causes. 


    David Goldberg: [00:59:10 - 00:00:00]

    And we don't say, hey, the moment they pledge, leave a percentage of your pledge for us, or the moment that they put money in the donor advice fund. Hey, you've got money. Now do you want to support Founders pledge? Our whole thesis is built on we should be earning our keep and delivering value. And if we're delivering value and it's better than anyone else's value, then our members should want to support us of their own accord. 

    And that's proven to be the case. Okay, so we raise money independently of our members and of their pledges every year to keep the lights on. Turns out in the early days, our members didn't have money because they just pledged and they were just like everyone else. And so we raised money from existing philanthropists with this idea that we can help our help people that are going to be very wealthy be better philanthropists. And they might have been themselves as early donors and sort of increase the efficiency of their giving. 


    David Goldberg: [01:00:00 - 01:00:11]

    And as a result of that, they started to fund us. And as time has gone on now, nine years in, the majority of our funding comes from our members because they choose to support us, not because they have to. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:00:11 - 01:00:22]

    So you accepted this enormous risk that next year you won't have that mining, right? Because there is no formula that works automatically. So you have to go out and talk to people. 


    David Goldberg: [01:00:22 - 01:00:55]

    Every year. In the early days, it was cheap to run, and so I would spend a month or two every year bringing in 150,000 pounds to run founders pledge. And now we spend about $8 million a year to run. So it means I spend a lot more of my time doing it. But after nine years, we've become very effective. 

    The differential between how much we spend and how much we help our members donate is significant. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:00:55 - 01:01:24]

    We'll get to the numbers in a minute, but I really want to understand on the personal level, how do you keep that desire to do it going for so many years? Because how many years it's been now. Right. So basically, for nine years now, you've been living in this extremely stressful situation, trying to raise money for your next year, for your next endeavor. What kept you motivated to do that? 


    David Goldberg: [01:01:24 - 01:02:00]

    Yeah, I mean, it is really hard, right? So it's like raising a series A in perpetuity, every year, year on year, for the last nine years, from the same investors. But the thing that keeps me going is, like, what we're building is important and it's never been done before in this way. I'm a real believer that if you align incentives well structurally from the start and do good work, then I believe you'll have success if you just put all of your energy into it. And so the reason I've done it this way is to ensure that our entire purpose is built around impact first. 


    David Goldberg: [01:02:00 - 01:03:16]

    And it's not built around making it easy or raising money because it's emotionally compelling. The whole idea, founders pledge, is that impact should be everything, and we'll figure out how to keep the lights on. And it's mostly like going out, talking to existing philanthropists and convincing them that at some point in the future, the differential between what we spend and what we get out into the world will be exponential and it will be worth the investment. Well, it's not just like, but it's similar to how you raise money from VCs as a tech founder and you spend a lot of money every year for many, many years, losing year on year until you sort of hit this curve and you 100 x the investment. Yeah. 

    And now listen, we're not going to 100 x the investment. Well, maybe we will, but certainly not there yet. The idea was that by investing in the infrastructure of this initiative really early on and continuing to invest, we could just focus on keeping the main thing, the main thing, and not ever have to sell to survive. Focus on brutal transparency and honesty and helping people be better donors, philanthropists. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:03:17 - 01:03:21]

    So how much money is currently committed to the founders pledge? 


    David Goldberg: [01:03:21 - 01:03:24]

    Yeah, so 10.2 billion or so. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:03:24 - 01:03:25]

    That's impressive. 


    David Goldberg: [01:03:25 - 01:03:26]

    Yeah, it's a lot. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:03:27 - 01:03:30]

    How much of it has already been employed? 


    David Goldberg: [01:03:31 - 01:03:36]

    More than a billion. 1,002,000,000 or so, I believe. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:03:36 - 01:03:43]

    Can you give me maybe your favorite story of how you created impact with that money? 


    David Goldberg: [01:03:43 - 01:03:58]

    I sort of assumed when I started founders pledge that I'd have a really long time between when I started signing people up and when exits started to happen. And it actually started, like, I figured I'd have many years, and it happened really quickly. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:03:59 - 01:03:59]

    Oh, wow. 


    David Goldberg: [01:03:59 - 01:04:02]

    So, like, in year two, we saw our first exit. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:04:02 - 01:04:03]

    Incredible. 


    David Goldberg: [01:04:03 - 01:04:34]

    And my philosophy was, we'll build the infrastructure to deliver impact as we need to. Right. Like, I don't want to have a big team in year two working on the research and sort of the think tank before there's money to give away. And it just started to materialize. And so we had to sort of spit up operations pretty quickly, and there was some learning to happen. 

    And our really early donors, really early members who had liquidity, were, like, pretty patient. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:04:35 - 01:04:39]

    They'd been through startup also, so they could relate. 


    David Goldberg: [01:04:39 - 01:07:13]

    That's right. And we started to produce research and started to find organizations that were doing good work. And our thesis was, like, find organizations that had or cause areas, at least at the start, that had real scale. There was a really large, total addressable market that had solutions that could potentially work. So there was tractability in the space. 

    And importantly, if those two first conditions were met, the third was there needed to be neglectedness. So we didn't want to give into areas that felt that were, like, large in scale, that had solutions, but didn't need money. So it needed to have all three of these commands. And it soon became clear pretty early on that mental health was, like, a very deeply neglected area. Okay, neglected in the sense that mental health captures, like, one 50th of the funding that goes into HIV AIDS in low income countries. 

    And when we think about mental health, we tend to think of it as like a global north, high income problem. Only we people of privilege have mental health issues. But it turns out not to be the case. It turns out mental health is health, and it's a pervasive health issue everywhere, but it gets so much less attention in low income countries, typically sub Saharan Africa, where it's just not a thing that is focused on. So in the year two ish, sort of the end of year two, year three of founders Pledge, we identified a nonprofit working across Africa doing mental health treatment and intergroup personal therapy with women and mothers in sub Saharan Africa. 

    And it's had this incredibly beautiful, eloquent model, which was train women who are well respected leaders in their villages to facilitate more therapy amongst the people in their village. And you can sort of have this spread of mental health. It's called strong minds. And we were one of the very early donors to support them and maybe gave them catalytic funding that's enabled them to continue to grow and scale, and wasn't one of my really early memories of being like, wow, we really, we enabled this organization, I think, in a lot of ways, to grow, and they continue to do tremendous work, but in an area that is just so historically underfunded. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:07:13 - 01:07:46]

    Yeah, I can totally see why. So by now, you've seen so many founders who pledged their money and exited. How do you think the fact that they pledged the money before they exited affected their post exit journey? Because both you and I know that looking for a new purpose is probably the most painful thing that happens after we sell our businesses, we're usually shocked by it, and we feel this need to fill the void.  


    David Goldberg: [01:07:46 - 01:10:06]

    Totally, I think in a pretty real way. So I think most founders start businesses to solve problems. We're natural problem solvers, and that desire to solve problems never really goes away. Most founders, we spoke about this at lunch some weeks ago. Most founders have this exit and then feel empty inside because they're like, okay, now what do I put my energy to? 

    There's still so many problems out there. And so they try to make themselves feel less empty with stuff often and experiences, but it really is just like putting a bit of a plaster on the wound. It doesn't really solve the problem. And I think committing early to philanthropy is actually like a really powerful motivator. It says, my journey is in service of something. 

    It's directional. And when I have this outcome, if I have this outcome, then I know that I've already committed to doing this. And it gives sort of an anchor point of like, this is what happens next, and it's our job as a nonprofit. As founders bloodshed, we're trying to take these people on a journey to help them scale up over the course of time so that they're really well prepared by the time they have this outcome, or approaching this outcome, to be able to think about it well. So our events aren't just socials and networking events, and in fact, they're like. Not that. It's about learning and connecting and being more coordinated with peers also on this path, such that you can come to an event and know nothing about eclectic tropical diseases or mental health in low income countries, or high income countries, or what the climate crisis actually means, or our energy needs for the next 50 years, or how to affect air pollution or oral health, and leave with much more knowledge and a way to dig into that area. If you're interested in real depth, such that by the time there is an outcome, there's a very clear path for more. So I think to a large degree, many of our members would have given to charity, regardless of us. But I think as a result of founders pledge, they typically commit to give more, and they certainly give much, much more effectively as a result. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:10:06 - 01:11:31]

    For me, there is a very personal, you can even say selfish benefit from doing that. When we sell our companies, we face this confusion. We're overwhelmed, confused. We lose our structure, we lose our relationships. We don't really know what to do. 

    And I can imagine that if you already have a commitment to founders pledge, you suddenly actually have a structure and you have relationships. So you solve some of the biggest problems for these people early on they have something to hold on to. But also what I love about it, I see a direction being very much out from your selfishness and to selflessness, which always feels fulfilling. So I think from my perspective, you actually create this amazing vehicle to help people get to more fulfilling lives and to have greater impact in life without wasting this time after exit. 

    Because my personal sort of mission in life, you can say, is that to help post exit founders, who are some of the most competent and consequential people in the world, to not waste this time and to go straight into solving even bigger problems and solving them better and getting the benefit of fulfillment. And I see that founders pledges is a fantastic vehicle exactly for that. 


    David Goldberg: [01:11:31 - 01:11:52]

    Well, you put it very well. I agree completely. Indeed. I think these people are really sort of some of the most tremendous executors and operators that exist. And if they just stop doing the thing that they're really good at, that they've spent years working on and do nothing, they go stir crazy. 

    Absolutely crazy. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:11:52 - 01:11:56]

    Depressed, talking about mental health issues. 


    David Goldberg: [01:11:58 - 01:12:45]

    And we try to sort of just funnel them into the next thing. And I think philanthropy is a stepping stone. I don't think it's the end. I think that every good entrepreneur, even if they're getting up there in years, has another business in them. And maybe that next business, as a result of working with us, can be one that's more focused on solving the really tough social problems. 


    And coming back to my time at the founders for good, the issue was talent. It wasn't the best talent, exactly, or the right talent. Imagine if the people who had these really great outcomes, sold their businesses, made their millions or billions of dollars, understood the world better as a result of doing really effective philanthropy, decided then start another business focused on solving big problems. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:12:45 - 01:12:46]

    Exactly. 


    David Goldberg: [01:12:46 - 01:12:52]

    Instead of making money. How do we solve distribution issue X in country Y? 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:12:52 - 01:12:56]

    Yeah, because for most of us, actually earning money is no longer a motivator. 


    David Goldberg: [01:12:56 - 01:12:57]

    That's right. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:12:57 - 01:13:35]

    And we are looking for a new one. And you offer that direction, which I think is important. You mentioned something profound before, that you don't feel the journey you offer your founders is a spiritual one, which I was surprised about, because for me, spirituality is actually this growing out of selfishness and into certain and giving. And I would like to explore your thinking a little bit, because I definitely feel that you are guiding people in the spiritual journey and how I see it from the outside. 


    David Goldberg: [01:13:35 - 01:14:11]

    Well, it may be spiritual, but we don't intend it to feel spiritual. We intend it to feel, like rational. So I often say the heart leads us to give, but the head should govern how it's done. If we index too much on the heart and how we feel, okay. Then we sort of fall prey to pretty specific problems that we can avoid by taking a more sort of rational, head based approach. 

    So it doesn't ignore spirituality, it just doesn't make it the focus of the exploration. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:14:11 - 01:14:28]

    No. Now I can see where you're coming from. You actually want to differentiate yourself from those charities who sell emotions in a way, or sell big ideas, spiritual ideas. You want to differentiate yourself. Yet again, I feel that without advertising it, you actually are guiding people in their spiritual journey. 


    David Goldberg: [01:14:29 - 01:14:31]

    We just don't call it a spiritual journey. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:14:31 - 01:15:05]

    And I understand now why, because you want to differentiate yourself. And I guess there are lots of people who may be also scared by that, because they may think our spiritual means religious. And then you open up a whole pandora box when you start talking. People, unfortunately, are quite uncomfortable talking about spirituality. And I can see that you don't want to scare them away. 

    But again, I think those who stay with you for a long time, they probably, if they look back, will say, yes. I spiritually evolved significantly thanks to my involvement with this pledge. 


    David Goldberg: [01:15:05 - 01:15:16]

    Yeah, I bet if you'd ask several hundred people who've had liquidity and have given their money away and worked with us, that I bet many of them would describe it as they've been on a spiritual journey. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:15:17 - 01:15:42]

    I'm sure. I'm actually really sure about that. This takes us to your next venture, your newest project, which I find very, very exciting. And I would like you to talk more about it and also to educate my audience about what it is. So tell me about pledge ventures and how it works together with founders Pledge. 

    What's the relationship there? 


    David Goldberg: [01:15:42 - 01:20:13]

    Yeah, so I mentioned I do a lot of fundraising to keep the lights on for Founders pledge. We spend about $8 million a year every year to operate, and I'm sort of at the center of it. I have a very good fundraising team that supports me, but at the end of the day, I go out to our donors and make the asks and do the clothes. And in June of 2021, I had a lunch. I just finished lunch. 

    I was leaving and was walking back to the office, and it was on my phone, and I went to step into the street and nearly got hit by a bus. So I'm from America, so I looked the wrong way. Bus was coming the other direction. I nearly got smashed. It was close call, and it really freaked me out, and I sort of stepped back, and I was like, okay, I didn't die. 

    But I nearly thought, you know, my family would be, you know, they'd get over it. What would happen if founders pledged? And I sort of came to the conclusion that it would be in real trouble. Not because it's not well run. It is. 

    I have a tremendous COO and a tremendous team. They're wonderful. And it works well, mostly because I don't do most of the Ops, but I do fundraising. And if I disappear, we struggle to pay our team. And so I realized that I can't be a single point of failure anymore, and so something has to change. 

    And I spent a couple of months trying to figure out what that was and what that would look like. And to cut a long story short, I sort of came to this moment where we ask our members to fund us after they've derived value from us. But our members make their money primarily from exits in their business. What would it look like if we went a level higher and made money alongside our members? What would have to be true in order to benefit at the same time as our members did? 

    The answer was pretty clear. We'd have to be on the cap table. And it was just a hop, skip, and a leap until I sort of realized we needed to start a venture fund, which we did. Pledge Ventures is a commercial venture fund that was incubated by Founders Pledge, and now it's entirely independent with spun out of it, although we share some resource. And the goal of Pledge Ventures is to invest in founders pledge member companies with a set of rules. 

    The LPs invest for commercial returns. They're there to make money. But the GP is effectively a nonprofit in that it donates back 85% of its carried interest, everything that it makes to founders pledge to run the operations. So you have this nice idea whereby Pledge ventures invests in member companies, and the rules are pretty straightforward. There's three of them. 

    One of the founders has to be a member of Founders Pledge. The company is raising a series B or later of $20 million or more, and there's a top tier fund participating in the round. So we looked at the data. We found sort of what top quartile performance looks like, and it was B plus alongside top tier investors. And my belief was that we, as founders pledge adjacent, could invest in our members because we knew them at this very crucial, consequential scale moment, alongside the best investors in the world, and get allocation to rounds that are otherwise totally inaccessible to everyone else. 

    Way oversubscribed. But because the GP donates back so much of its carry to charity, we should be able to get a small slice of big rounds very reliably. And that was the thesis. And so I went out and spoke to about 25 or so founders pledge members, saying, hey, I've got some cash on my balance sheet. You're raising a funding round. 

    Can I participate? And people were like, wait, you guys have money? Are you sure you have enough to do that? And I was like, yeah, no, it's good. Don't worry. 

    And these are people who are actively fundraising at the moment. And every single person said, yes. They said, yeah, of course, we'd love to have you participate in our round. And I was like, cool. Well, I don't actually have money to invest. 

    Just kidding. But I wanted to confirm that if we did you give me allocation? These are all over subscribed rounds. And so I was like, I did 25. 

    I should probably talk to another 25. I cherry picked. I was like, these are the people that I know. Then I went out to a wider array of people and spoke to another 25. So about 50. 

    And, like, 22, 23 people were like, insta yeses. Like, yes, we'd love. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:20:13 - 01:20:18]

    That's quite incredible. I mean, they really must feel you're giving that value. 


    David Goldberg: [01:20:18 - 01:21:21]

    Yeah. And the idea was, we're not writing big checks. We don't do follow on. It's a one time investment at a very consequential moment, and it's about giving back. So the idea was like, you could take money from venture capitalists, more money, or the same amount of money that he would have taken, or you can take money from venture capitalists minus a million and a half or $2 million, and take the rest from us, and we'll participate in your success alongside you. 

    And when you have money, the fund will be successful. And when the fund is successful founders pledge makes money from it. So it was a nice idea. I did this testing at the end of 2021 and then realized there was really something here. I told people, obviously in the same conversation, that I pretended that I wanted to invest, that we're not actually going to, but I want to start a venture fund. 

    And over the course of these conversations, we got a fair bit of commitments as LPs. I wasn't intending to fundraise, but we got really early traction with people on a single phone call. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:21:21 - 01:21:37]

    So you basically, in that concept, you made two major assumptions. One was that the target companies will welcome you, but the other one was that this world's best investors will also welcome you into their rounds. How did that work? Did you prove that part? 


    David Goldberg: [01:21:37 - 01:22:56]

    The concept, end of 21 times were still pretty good. Start of 22 became the change. We spent a year trying to figure out actually how to do this model. It hadn't ever been done before. Where you have like a commercial LPGP venture fund with a 220 structure, but the GP donates to charity. 

    It needs to be tax efficient. How can there be effective control by a nonprofit without there being too much control and too much linkage that it creates conflicts of interest. So we spent, like, nine months with lawyers trying to figure it out, and eventually did. In that nine months, the world really changed, and we went from the biggest bull run to the dark times of winter, where we're still there, but we raised $43 million. 

    We're still fundraising. We'll do our final close at the start of 2024, but we've started to invest. So, to answer your question, how do other investors view us? Pretty favorably, actually, I think. But I was prepared to fight for every allocation in every round. 

    My LPs were like, you're going to have to fight. I was like, yeah, no, I know. That's what I've been doing. Yes, exactly. For the last decade. 


    David Goldberg: [01:22:57 - 01:23:49]

    I can keep on keeping on, but it turned out not to be that much of a fight. So we're investing really alongside top tier investors, but in hot companies that are raising oversubscribed funding rounds. They're oversubscribed because the companies are great. When the companies are really great and they're really oversubscribed, the founders have a lot of control, and these are founders who've been on a journey with me and with founders Pledge, and they have derived value from us over the years and we've never asked for anything back, and so we've accrued nine years of goodwill and we're asking for a million a million and a half, 500,000 of around 30 or 40 million. And when they say to their lead investor, this is important to me, the lead investor always lets us in. 

    We've not had an issue yet. We've done six investments so far, and it seems to be working. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:23:49 - 01:24:00]

    Yeah, you have to wait for a while to really see if you get enough money that way. So I assume for now you're still very busy fundraising to keep the lights up. 


    David Goldberg: [01:24:00 - 01:24:21]

    Yeah. And to be fair, it's hard, but we have people who really believe in us. We support many families and family offices now with their philanthropy. So we've sort of expanded just from working with pre exit founders to we support philanthropists with our research and our resource. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:24:23 - 01:24:33]

    So walk me through this. I assume they don't pledge equity because that's not how they're structured. So they just directly give you money to support the organization. 


    David Goldberg: [01:24:34 - 01:26:18]

    We work with families and family offices and all try net worth individuals for whom a traditional pledge, like we'd have a Hungerford signed. That doesn't really make sense. But we have a couple of programs that enable us to work with existing wealth in a nice way. So we have a program called the foundry. And so this is like a multi-year program to fund founders pledge, because people believe that we're important to exist in the world, the global public good. 

    We produce research, we help people give better. The research that we produce is all public. There's no paywalls, like it's all on the open Internet. So you don't actually have to be a member to take advantage of it. So people fund us because we're just very effective as far as leverage goes. 

    So when someone makes a multi year commitment to fund founders pledge, they become a member by that commitment. And then if they are giving away more money throughout the year, then they can work with us, our advisors, and our research team to optimize their giving for impact. And so we have, I think, twelve or 13 families now that are a part of the foundry, this giving program that we help with their philanthropy. And then we have another program for people who are giving away much larger sums on a yearly basis, built bespoke research programs for them. Typically people giving in the order of 5 million plus per year. 

    We can really help them to build foundational knowledge if they're just getting set up, or if they're doing a pivot out of work that they found is less effective, or the strategy has changed. We help people really go from first principles and build real sector expertise on the back of research and active grant making. So we work with several families. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:26:18 - 01:26:30]

    The way we're structured, you feel that the incentives are aligned. Incredibly, there is no conflict of interest in that at all, because, again, you're not charging any fee. 


    David Goldberg: [01:26:30 - 01:27:26]

    So the foundry program, people make a commitment to donate to us, and as a result of that commitment, then they get access to everything that we have to offer. So I don't consider it fee for service. As a result of that, there are lots of philanthropy advisors out there who charge fees for an engagement cost upfront, and then they're a provider of a service. And the people who gave them the money are the client. The client is always right. 

    Right. You go to a restaurant, you don't like the food, you send it back because you're the customer of the client, you're always right. But with philanthropy, it's often like the client is mostly wrong, or often wrong, or needs to update in some way, or is liable to make mistakes absent a challenge or provocation. And so we take the view that when people become foundry donors, they're partners, they're not clients, they're not a provider of a service, they're a member. And so we work with them like members. 


    David Goldberg: [01:27:26 - 01:28:07]

    And when they are potentially making decisions that the data doesn't support, or that seem wrong, bad, we challenge them on it. Now, they can still make those decisions because they're people with agency and they don't have to follow our advice. But if presented with data that says this isn't good and this is twelve times better. So since the data, people tend to make the more rational decisions and follow absolutely the recommendation that actually makes the most sense. So we consciously complicate conversations so that people can be better donors, expand their moral circle, and as a result be more effective. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:28:07 - 01:28:10]

    So why would someone give money to founders pledge? 


    David Goldberg: [01:28:10 - 01:28:45]

    Yeah, I think there's probably a couple of reasons, but maybe the most compelling one is we create leverage. So you could give a dollar to a charity. A charity does a dollar worth of good, one for one, I guess that's fine. But if you give a dollar to us, we will at the very minimum in year create 23 more dollars of charitable giving that go out into the world. Okay, so we're a machine for leverage. 

    The difference between what we cost to run and the amount of money that we help our members to donate every year is so significant that funding us means 23 x more goes to charity as a result. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:28:45 - 01:28:46]

    Incredible. 


    David Goldberg: [01:28:46 - 01:29:49]

    If you care about specific things like global health and well being, or mental health, or climate philanthropy, or improving quality of science. A large portion of the money that we help our members give every year goes into these areas. And so at the very least, you're getting some multiple on your money that otherwise wouldn't happen if you're just giving directly to a nonprofit. So that's probably for me, the most compelling reason to support the other is we're really helping to improve the efficiency of giving and the impact that happens as a result of it. The research that we publish is truly public, so everything we do is on our website. 

    It's pure, all reasoning transparency. So anyone can go there and utilize the resource at any time. And it allows us to sort of remain laser focused on this without having to sort of monetize our membership or create weird incentives that don't help anything aside from. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:29:49 - 01:30:14]

    So your incentives are aligned with your members. And that's hugely important because that, I think, is a fundamental problem with charities. After my exit, I gave to charities a lot just to realize that I'm not happy about it. And I felt horrible about myself because I thought I'm such a selfish person. I'm not getting much out of it doesn't make me happy. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:30:14 - 01:30:24]

    I don't get fulfillment from helping others. And I think it is just because the incentives are not aligned and it doesn't work. 


    David Goldberg: [01:30:24 - 01:30:26]

    You had a cognitive dissonance. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:30:26 - 01:31:07]

    Yeah. The industry is broken. And I love it that you are thinking about it very differently. You're thinking about, how do we align our senses? How do we do good together. 

    That's right. And then the community bit is very important because I think people will reinforce each other's commitment, because I asked you before, what sustains your drive towards your true purpose? And oftentimes I find that if other people around you are not on a similar journey, that it becomes very lonely. And then you can just lose focus and you're less driven, you have less energy going that way. But the community helps people stay focused. 


    David Goldberg: [01:31:07 - 01:31:43]

    And it's really nice to get the odd message from someone who we've been working with for many years who's had that liquidity event. Finally, the overnight success after ten years. Right? And it's a life changing event. And they often feel hollow and alone and empty, even with family and kids. 

    And then we help them figure out how to give and take them on this journey. And I get the occasional note that says, thank you for helping me find myself again. And it's just like it really sort of hits right in the middle of the chest. I get that emotional feeling. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:31:43 - 01:31:52]

    But it's so important because without that you'll probably give up because it's too hard. You have to have that feeling to keep going. 


    David Goldberg: [01:31:52 - 01:32:34]

    And I think the other part of it is we've not even scratched the surface of the potential that we have yet. Nine years in, it's been a long journey. It's been hard. We really have ground our way to $10 billion of pledge value. We've ground our way to a billion dollars of actual donations. 

    But it's a drop in the bucket. The bucket's floating in the ocean, and all of the water is money. And we have the ability to really impact the world at real scale. And we're just starting to hit that real exponential growth curve in a way that I've been promising to my donors we'd hit. But 2022 and 2023 are looking to be the years that it actually really takes off. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:32:34 - 01:32:35]

    Oh, fantastic. 


    David Goldberg: [01:32:35 - 01:32:36]

    Yeah. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:32:36 - 01:33:04]

    I can't wait to see the results. But to me, also, a very attractive thing about your model has always been this efficiency. Just knowing that every dollar I give will be used for the right thing, that it will be used as efficiently as possible, because the people who make the decision have this experience and have this mindset, which is very much aligned with my mindset. It's like, how do we use every dollar the most efficiently for a business? But it's the same mindset, just a different purpose. 


    David Goldberg: [01:33:04 - 01:33:19]

    We don't actually make the decisions on behalf of our members. We help them make better decisions using data. So often people think that when they pledge that they give away control of their money, and it's definitely not the case. So when someone pledges and they donate, they have total control over where they give to. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:33:19 - 01:33:20]

    They can get huge. 


    David Goldberg: [01:33:20 - 01:33:52]

    They can afford anything they want, regardless of its effectiveness. If we consciously complicate a conversation and make a challenge saying, hey, maybe you shouldn't give to this butterfly sanctuary in Madagascar, maybe it's not the most effective use of your money. People can say, yeah, that's okay, but I want to your money, you should do what you want with it. You can do what you want. We'll make the grant on your behalf. 

    So it's important to just note that people have control. We just empower them with data and try to help them make better decisions. We don't always succeed, but that's also okay. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:33:52 - 01:34:16]

    So, to summarize, what differentiates you from other charitable enterprises out there? So, leverage. You described it beautifully. The fact that your members keep control of their money, which is great. You help set up a legal structure which takes that work out. 

    It's not their problem anymore because you have a very efficient tax structure. 


    David Goldberg: [01:34:16 - 01:34:16]

    That's right. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:34:16 - 01:34:19]

    To help them. What else am I missing? Community. 


    David Goldberg: [01:34:19 - 01:34:36]

    Of course, we do events and convenings and really try to coordinate people so that they aren't doing this alone. And often it feels very. Or it can be very harrowing to have the responsibility of stewarding wealth. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:34:36 - 01:34:37]

    And, of course, there is no fee. 


    David Goldberg: [01:34:37 - 01:34:38]

    There's no fee. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:34:38 - 01:34:53]

    So people are basically free to use the money the way they want. They keep the control. There's no fee. There's, like, really no downside for somebody to. No wonder people make the commitment in minutes at a meeting.


    David Goldberg: [01:34:53 - 01:35:00]

    Or like a multifamily office set up exclusively for entrepreneurs that focuses exclusively on philanthropy and charges nothing for its service. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:35:00 - 01:35:06]

    Sounds too good to be true, but it's not. When something is too good to be true, it's worth investigating. 


    David Goldberg: [01:35:06 - 01:35:06]

    I think so, yeah. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:35:06 - 01:35:08]

    Dave, thank you so much. 


    David Goldberg: [01:35:08 - 01:35:09]

    My pleasure. Thanks for having me. 


    Anastasia Koroleva: [01:35:09 - 01:35:11]

    This was wonderful. Thank you. 


    David Goldberg: [01:35:11 - 01:35:11]

    Thanks.


 
Anastasia Koroleva
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