In this episode, we sit down with Greg Mrva, CFO of GoFundMe, to explore what it takes to lead finance in a mission-driven organization.
Greg shares his path from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, his pivotal career lessons and how GoFundMe has raised over $30 billion to help people worldwide. He breaks down the platform’s unique business model, which relies on voluntary tips, and the company’s major investments in trust, safety and product innovation. Can purpose and profit coexist to create lasting change? GoFundMe and Mrva believe they can.
—
Listen to the podcast here
I am really excited by this guest that we have, a really fascinating company and a great guy. My guest is Greg Mrva. He’s the CFO of GoFundMe. At a high level, GoFundMe is the trusted global leader in online fundraising, helping to raise and deliver more than $30 billion to people in organizations around the world since 2010. It has one of the best and simplest missions of any company I know. It’s simply to help people to help each other. Greg, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Jack, for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m really looking forward to the conversation. For those of you who are reading, I hope I can have some interesting if not helpful stories to share with you along the way.
I’m sure you will. I’m accused a little bit of oversimplifying, so if you want to take a moment, maybe just fill in the blanks about GoFundMe.
You did just hit the high notes. We are the largest fundraising platform for individuals and organizations around the world. Our mission is to help people help each other. Actually, since inception, we have raised over $30 billion for people in need. What I would say is that help takes many different forms. Every day, we see over 10,000 GoFundMe started on our platform for both individuals and organizations. I think the organization’s piece will spend some time on in this episode, but essentially people raising money for friends and family members in need.
It’s people raising money for organizations they care about. Oftentimes, it’s people coming together in times of crisis to support the communities that have been affected. One example of that is really what we just saw in Los Angeles with the LA wildfires. Obviously, there’s tons of devastation in the communities in Altadena, but was really encouraging and inspiring is just to see the way people came together on our platform to raise money for those in need.
In the span of like two weeks, we raised over $250 million for those communities. We’re still raising money and that’s from over 1 million individual donors. Over 1 million humans in the United States actually were impacted and felt like the need to help. That’s the type of help that we see on GoFundMe every day and it’s really what makes it so special to work there.
That’s fantastic that you’re able to do such a great mission. I know when we were speaking before, you take a lot of pride in the things that the organization is able to accomplish. I’m always curious. GoFundMe, I think it’s fair to say it’s probably a household name at this point, but is there something that might be a little bit surprising about GoFundMe or maybe something that my readers might not know about it that’s interesting?
Yeah, I mean for sure, probably several things. We are a household name when it comes to individual fundraising and we see that because over 100 million people come to GoFundMe every month. What people don’t know about GoFundMe is that we also are one of the largest providers of enterprise technology software to the nonprofit space. Literally over thousands of nonprofit organizations use our software every day for their own fundraising needs, for their digital fundraising needs.
These are organizations that you’ve probably heard of like the Salvation Army, World Central Kitchen, the Michael J. Fox Foundation and Tunnels to Towers, and the list goes on. Literally, thousands of organizations around the world use us in the same way that an e-commerce site might use Shopify. We power their digital giving, their direct giving, their peer-to-peer giving as well as some of their live events. That’s something that we’re really proud of, and we’d like the world to know more about that.
We’ll definitely return to that a little bit, but before I get into it, I always like to chat a little about your young years. Where did you grow up, Greg?
I grew up in New Jersey in a small town called Montville. It’s in the Northwest part of the state. My dad commuted to New York City for a bit. He was an AT&T guy for 30 years. He started on the telephone lines and then worked his way up. My mom was a school teacher. She was a special needs teacher. She taught kids with serious learning disabilities.
My slightly younger sister and I, we grew up really appreciating our parents and the value of hard work. Yeah, we were pretty much always occupied. We were playing sports or studying. I went to a Catholic high school which was really competitive in sports, but the most important thing I learned in high school, I think I learned on my first day there. There’s like a motto of the school, which is Latin and I won’t be able to say the Latin phrase but I can translate it for you.
It basically means, “Welcome to life. You’re going to fail often and through failure, you’re going to grow.” That was really an eye-opening thing to hear on your first day of school, and it has stuck with me for life. It’s for sure good advice for anybody in any profession. If you want to pursue a profession in Silicon Valley, not every company is a rocket ship like Google or Facebook. I’ve worked at quite a few companies that have been fantastic companies, but maybe just have failed in big ways or in small ways, but you always learn through that. Having a growth mindset along the way has been something that I picked up early on in high school.
It’s a great message. I don’t know if it’s the most uplifting thing for a fourteen-year-old entering high school, but no, I get it. It’s such a valuable thing. You mentioned Alphabet/Google and I have a friend who works there. They’re relatively high up, not C-suite level, but below that. She shared with me they probably have the worst batting average of any company in the world. Failure is just part of their culture and it’s okay because you fail and then you’ll learn from it, [and] you get it right the next time.
It helps to have a core business that enables you to take those risks elsewhere. That’s been true about Google search for years. We will probably get to it at some point, but I was at Yahoo when Google was just getting started and obviously, Google’s a big part of why Yahoo didn’t really succeed in the way that it originally started. That, in and of itself, is a lesson. You have to constantly evolve and you have to learn from what your competitors are doing and Google obviously did a great job of that. Through that search engine business, they really have been able to take a lot of risks elsewhere.
It’s a great business model, for sure. You grew up in Montville and then undergrad, you went to UVA, I believe.
Yeah, I was UVA. I know you’re from the Northeast yourself. I was trying to go South. I wanted to get away from some of the winters, although I ended up back in Boston later on in my lifetime. I guess I didn’t do too good a job of that. Yeah, I was an Econ and History major in undergrad. I guess that was in part because I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up, and so I was doing a little bit of practical and a little bit of liberal arts at the same time.
Did you play football at UVA?
I did. I was a walk-on. It was one of those things where I wasn’t good enough to get drafted to be a Division I player. I had opportunities to go to some smaller schools, but I really wanted to play at a school that actually had a big program. It’s like a full-time job. Your day’s programmed. I think it’s even more of a full-time job these days, just how much effort goes into it now, obviously with the NIL money that some of these kids can make. However, back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, it was still a full-time job.
I didn’t play sports at any high level, but a number of my friends did. It’s amazing they found time to do their schoolwork and go to classes.
It helps with discipline, for sure. It’s the executive functioning skills that you have to develop pretty early if you want to do both. If you really want to be a student athlete, you know you have to like [having] every hour of your day scheduled out, including the hours that you want to reserve at the end to have a little bit of fun and actually enjoy college.
You should enjoy the experience. It was only of interest to me because when I take the stage at conferences, I actually take the stage to Enter Sandman because I’m perpetually nineteen years old.
I love that. A guy who used to do that. Obviously, I live in San Francisco, so the San Francisco Giants. One of their closers was this guy by the name of Robb Nen and he used to come out to Enter Sandman.
I remember him but not his name. I remember the reliever coming out to that and for years, I thought it was Mariano Rivera from the Yankees.
He did. To be honest, I would imagine Trevor Hoffman and Mariano did it as well.
It’s an appropriate song for them.
For sure. Time to go to sleep and then Steph Curry does it all the time.
Yeah, that’s true. I don’t think Mariano is quite the showman that Steph is, though. He seems like a quiet guy.
Yeah, he is something special, for sure.
You’ve had a really interesting career. You’ve led finance strategy operation teams. You have a law degree from HLS, I believe.
I do. I started my career at Goldman Sachs. I was fortunate enough to, again, get an offer to be part of the analyst class in 1992 and that really was just one of the best experiences of my early career. It’s obviously an intense job and it was old school. We had computers, but I don’t think we had Microsoft Excel yet. We certainly didn’t have the internet.
You would go to the library and pull 10-Ks and 10-Qs and just sit there and spread the financials and do all the analysis. Obviously, it was great training for learning your way around financial statements and understanding businesses. At the end of that program, I actually ended up going to law school.
My dad was a lawyer at AT&T for a number of years, and I went to HLS. A number of my good friends from Golden were across the river at HBS. I took a few classes over there. I was on my way to being a lawyer. I actually did a summer at Skadden Arps and then this thing called the internet happened. It was like the mid-‘90s, like ‘95, ‘96, ‘97 timeframe, which was a terribly cold time to live in Boston.
I think we had like two of the biggest winters on record when I was in school there. I just remember just being drawn to the Netscape IPO. Yahoo, I think, was going public. I wanted to be on the West Coast. I wanted to do consumer technology, and the easiest way for me to do that was to go back to investment banking. I moved to California, and I joined Montgomery Securities as an associate.
Interesting story. With hindsight, sure, that’s a beautiful thing. That’s an obvious move. Follow the money with the internet. At the time, I’m sure you had people who were like, “You’re walking away from HLS? You’re insane.” Because that’s the golden ticket.
Sure. My father felt that way. It ended up working out. It’s been an eclectic path, for sure. I owe a lot to investment banking. I’ve worked at four different banks in my career, and they each have exposed me and given me opportunities to meet really great people. I was at Montgomery Securities for all of a year and a half. It was the dot-com boom. One of my clients, whom I had helped raise some money for in the private markets, encouraged me to come join him and help him build his business. It was an online games business called Empath Interactive. It was one of the first places that allowed you to play games online over dial-up modems back in the late ‘90s. We built the technology to do that.
I was a strategy guy, I was a biz dev guy, I was a corporate development guy and we took the business public. It did one of these and then did one of those where you we were valued for way more than you were worth. It was an ad-supported business. It turns out that running an internet business was expensive back then. You had to have your own data centers and all your own hosting.
That was one of my first failures. When the market busted, our business really went south, and I was one of the guys who was tasked with winding the business down and selling off the assets. That was a very early and poignant experience in learning from failure. That’s Silicon Valley. There were thousands of companies that were chasing the dream, and only a handful made it through. Yahoo, Amazon and eBay made it through. I ended up working for both eBay and Yahoo in my career. Those were also very rewarding experiences.
I just want to go back because I’m intrigued. Your parents sound to me like remarkable people. If I heard you right, your dad worked for AT&T and he worked on the lines physically and then he became an attorney?
He was an engineer. He went to Purdue undergrad. His first job was working on the telephone lines and being an electrician and then he went to law school. He did it not online, but through a night school program, and then moved out to New Jersey and New York. He met my mom and worked his way up through there. Early childhood, I remember my dad, because it was the ‘70s and ‘80s and this was when AT&T was still a monopoly. My dad was one of the guys who had to litigate the divestiture proceedings with the federal government.
Your mother is a special needs teacher, which I love. I’m the father of two autistic adult sons. Anytime I hear somebody doing that for a living, I just think it’s wonderful because I see firsthand how difficult that is.
Yeah, my mom’s a saint, and she dealt with severely learning-disabled kids for most of her life, and she taught me a lot. I can’t imagine how hard it is to be a father of two kids with autism.
Every parenting role has its challenges. I don’t know anybody who says, “This parenting thing’s easy.”
No, for sure not.
Except my parents, of course, and probably yours, too. Not really. Anyway, back to your career, and I apologize for the sideline. I was fascinated by that. Early in your career, very few people get to your position without some mentors who make an impact on them. When you look back, are there any that stick out? That you would say, “I’m a better CFO today because I worked with or for them.”
I would call out three individuals who’ve had such a huge impact on my career as much as role models as they were mentors. Two of them happened to be CFOs. One of them was my boss at Morgan Stanley and I’ll talk a little bit about each of them. I mentioned I made my way to Yahoo, which was in the early aughts. It was shortly after my experience with Empath.
I was originally on the corporate development team. I ended up eventually running the corporate development team. I spent a lot of time with Sue Decker, the CFO of Yahoo at the time. Sue was an amazing person. She herself actually started her career on Wall Street. She was an analyst at DLJ, and she really brought that rigor to her job at Yahoo. You can imagine I’m the person whose team is in charge of assessing potential opportunities and companies that Yahoo might consider buying. Whenever we met with Sue, she would immediately ask the most probing question and be able to see the analysis and see the clarity. She basically taught me the precision and attention to detail that the job required. That was Sue.
The second person who really impacted my career was in between Yahoo and when I actually got the opportunity to become a CFO, and that was at Morgan Stanley. I ran the consumer internet business at Morgan Stanley. We worked with a number of awesome companies: Snap, Facebook, all the consumer internet companies. That’s been my passion since I moved out to California. My boss at the time was a guy by the name of Michael Grimes; he’s somewhat of a legendary technology banker.
Back to the theme of growth mindset, learning from failure or learning from the things that you do. On my very first week of the job, we went to Zynga and I was presenting to the management team there, and it was one of these wide-ranging conversations covering the finance markets, the strategic opportunities. It was a great hour-long conversation. I thought I killed it.
I was like, “Okay, this is great. Things are going to be awesome.” Zynga’s based in San Francisco, and I live in Menlo Park, about 30 minutes south. I got in my car and drove down here. When I got to my house, I opened up my Blackberry because we were still using Blackberries at the time, and I saw this email from Michael. I was like, “He must be calling to say nice job, etc.” I opened it up and it was a five-page-long email that basically didn’t say, “Nice job,” but “Here are all the things that you did well and here are all the things that you could have done better in that meeting.”
It was itemized by the page I was on and what I said and what the reaction was. This was in my late 30s or early 40s. Really, he was the first person who I realized was serious about feedback. Feedback really is a gift, and take it for what it means and grow from it. That was Michael. There’s one more that I want to mention because he’s still very much a part of my life.
When I left Morgan Stanley in 2018, one of my clients was eBay. I spent a lot of time working with eBay. Actually, they’re on the shelf back there if you can see my bookshelf. Scott Schenkel was the longtime CFO of eBay and he’s now the CFO of Expedia. Scott gave me my first opportunity. I told him I wanted to be a CFO. I felt like it was a really great fit for the next phase of my career.
He said, “You should come work for me and you can be the CFO of StubHub. It’s a divisional CFO role. The best part about that job is you get to be really operational and help me run the business. You have to deal with all the stuff that I have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.” Anyway, I’m still very friendly with Scott. It was just great to have an opportunity to watch him do his thing and be part of his team and I learned a lot from that experience that I’ve taken with me into this current role.
That’s fantastic and that’s actually a really good segue to the current role. Is there a story behind how you got the role? I think it’s pretty obvious to a lot of people, but with everything you’d accomplished at that point in your career, you probably had your pick of CFO-type roles. What about this one was particularly interesting.
A couple of things I’ve always really enjoyed, as I mentioned, consumer internet businesses, but beyond that, I was at a point in my career where I wanted to work at a company that had a purpose and had a mission that resonated with me. I wanted to work at a place where my kids could be proud of what I was doing. I was reconnected with Tim Ugg. Tim is our CEO. Ironically, Tim and I worked together at Yahoo back in the mid-aughts. Tim ran our search business, which obviously was a pretty substantial business at Yahoo.
I was reconnected with Tim, and we had a conversation about his vision and where he wanted to take GoFundMe as a platform. At the time, GoFundMe was just starting to get into the business of providing software to nonprofit organizations, which I mentioned. It was just an opportunity to take everything that I had done previously but bring it to a company that actually had meaningful impact in the world.
One of the questions I do often ask about is the relationship that a CFO has with a CEO. The reason is that for years, we, as CFOs, have been saying that the strategic partnership with the CEO was the most important relationship that we have. However, in recent years, CEOs have been saying it backwards, too. For the first time in large numbers, CEOs are saying, “Yeah, my most important strategic partner is the CFO.” Given that you have a little bit of a history, how does that work [at GoFundMe] and how do you build that meaningful, long-term, impactful relationship together?
First off, I agree with everything you just said. I think the trust between a CFO and a CEO and the relationship that those individuals have with each other is absolutely critical. There must be complete transparency, complete trust, and accountability. Tim and I have that. Tim is just a fantastic human being to begin with. Just to say a few things about that, for the last few years, he literally, in his spare time, goes out on the weekends on search and rescue missions in the Sierra Mountains behind LA.
When he is not running our company, he’s literally saving people’s lives. If he’s not doing that, he’s actually big into ultramarathons and fitness. We share a love for fitness together, although he’s much more fit than I am. I really respect him as a human. As a leader, he just really sets a very high standard. He lives the mission; he cares deeply about the impact we’re having.
He also sets a very high bar for expectations of what the team can achieve, [the] belief and trust and empowerment in the team and then complete transparency, ownership and accountability. All the things that I think matter in a leader, Tim exhibits. When you can have that, and obviously you need to have the same value system, you need to have the same desires, I think you can be really good partners and effective partners together.
I have to say, when you’re describing all he does with the search and rescue and the ultramarathons, I developed an inferiority complex for 10 or 15 seconds. It’s like, “What a guy.”
I think we all have one. I think everybody has their thing. He’ll do these like crazy three-day 100-mile races where I’m like, “I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like fun.”
I can understand the accomplishment of doing it would be nuts. Yeah, for me, I don’t know. I’m comfortable watching Netflix instead of doing stuff like that. Maybe. That’s so cool. Anyway, one thing about GoFundMe and I think intuitively a lot of us know what you do, but it fascinates me as a business model. I guess in the simplest terms, how do you make money
At first, it’s important to go back to first principles, which is the mission of the company is to help people help each other. When we designed the business model, we had that in mind. We want to ensure that we can deliver the maximum amount of help to individuals and organizations that are fundraising on our platform.
For starters, it’s free to start a GoFundMe. There’s, as I mentioned, 10,000 people start GoFundMes every day and we try to make that process as easy as possible and we could talk a little bit more about the investments we’re making there. With the exception of a small transaction fee, which is like the 2.9% plus $0.30 that we charge, we need to charge to actually pay our payment processing partners: Visa and Mastercard and the credit card fees.
Aside from that transaction fee, which enables us to safely deliver funds, it’s free to donate. You ask, “How do you run a business?” We ask for voluntary tips. We ask users. This is actually really unique. I’ve worked at a lot of technology companies, and I don’t know that anybody that has a business model where they let the users decide whether and how much the service is worth.
Fortunately, when you have millions of donations a year, we had I think $70 million-plus donations on our platform in 2024, enough people do. Not everybody does, and that’s okay because we want that help to go to the folks who need it. The people who do, they more than pay for the service. They enable us to invest significantly in the trust and safety of the platform, the risk and compliance as well as pretty substantially into product and technology innovation.
You mentioned technology innovation. Given your background and the fact that it’s almost impossible to have a conversation these days without Gen AI somehow coming up, I’m curious how you’re using Gen AI in the fundraising experience. Undoubtedly, for every company, including yours, it’s a game changer.
It is. Our investment in product and technology has increased substantially in the three years I’ve been here. We’re spending close to $100 million a year on product and tech innovation for the individual platform as well as for our non-profit enterprise technology. The innovations go into three camps. The first is, how do we make the process of fundraising easier? The second is, how do we make the process of donating more impactful and more inspiring? The third is, how do we activate our community on behalf of our individual organizers and our nonprofit organizers?
Gen AI has a huge role to play in all of those. For the first one, just the process of making fundraising easier. The hardest thing to do in fundraising, whether you’re asking for money for your friends and family or for an organization that you care about, is asking for help. The first step is the hardest thing to do. A lot of our investment at the top in AI is, how do we actually make that process easier? How do we help you tell your story?
Our product releases include things like AI storytelling. We ask a ton of questions. “Tell us about what happened and tell us about the individual organization.” We will help get you past that blank sheet of paper. It’s what you see ChatGPT and other AI companies do. We use that technology to help you tell your story. Beyond that, one of the most efficacious things you can do once you’ve actually created your story is to share your story. We’ll use AI to actually help you do that.
I’ll talk a little bit about some of the integrations we have with some of our partners like Meta, Instagram and others to [help fundraisers] get the word out. There’s a whole process. We have AI coaching tools that’ll actually walk you through and basically be your coach along the way.
That’s on the fundraising part. Regarding the donating aspect, the same principle applies. We see millions of transactions a year on our platforms. We can leverage AI to actually suggest donation amounts to you and to help donors share with their networks. You get multiple degrees of separation from the person who created the campaign to grow that campaign and drive impact.
To further do that, we’ve invested in a new product that we call GoFundMe Profiles. It’s exciting. If you haven’t checked it out, please take some time to do it— everybody out there. It’s a LinkedIn-style page but it’s tailor-made for giving. Think about if you had your own profile, and I’m sure there’s a number of causes and organizations and maybe individuals that you support on a pretty regular basis, we help you curate that and share that with your network.
It’s something that we’re really excited about. We just launched it in the fall of 2024, but it’s something that we’re investing in and we think can actually really help activate the community, which is the third piece of our investment area. We’ve invested in enabling all these individuals. Over 100,000 people have created GoFundMe profiles since we launched them, including some names upi might recognize.
Paris Hilton actually has a profile and she’s been really active in raising money for the victims of the LA wildfires. Actually, this one’s unique, but Flavor Flav actually has a profile on GoFundMe and he was instrumental in helping a lot of Olympians in 2024 and their families raise money so the families could travel to the Olympics and see their kids compete. The use cases are amazing.
We’ve launched what we call GoFundMe Nonprofit Pages. There are probably close to 5,000 nonprofits that leverage our software to build their own direct-giving campaigns and direct-to-consumer campaigns. We power all their websites, but we also have a presence for over 700,000 nonprofit organizations on GoFundMe.
This is a place where you don’t ever actually have to leave GoFundMe, where you can build communities and where we can now start to activate our community of 100 million users a month to create engagement around those organizations. “Cause categories” are very important to our users.
I think 100 million users a month is like the population of Canada or something. If you were a country, you’d be like the tenth or twelfth biggest in the world. That’s remarkable. One thing I want to ask you a little about, because you’re at the intersection of finance and philanthropic stuff. You have to balance the company’s financial sustainability with the fact that it’s very mission-driven.
Trust, transparency and things like that, they’re very natural to a CFO, but how do you create that type of environment so that people feel good about making the investment and going back and understanding that, “If I’m giving $35 to Charity X, they’re getting $33 out of that $35,” or whatever it might be?
For sure. I think there might be a couple of questions there. The first is just the trust and safety of the platform, which is vital and our number one priority. We have to earn trust every day with our users. We have zero tolerance for any misuse of our platform.
As a CFO, you can appreciate this. That [trust and safety] comes from a significant amount of investment. It comes from investment in systems, technology, people, and processes to ensure that there isn’t any misuse. It comes from working in close partnership with payment provider partners to have multiple layers of protection. What does that do? The things that you would imagine. All the KYC, “know your customer,” work—identity verification, address verification [and] bank account verification to detect and prevent any potential misuse. We rarely have any misuse of our platform. Because we’re so confident of that, we have what we call the GoFundMe Guarantee, which guarantees 100% of all individual fundraising on GoFundMe.
I think over the course of the last few years, we’ve collectively invested over $100 million into the platform. The second part of your question comes from the business model we talked about earlier. You’re right. We ensure that if you give $100 to an organization or an individual minus the transaction fee we talked about, the 2.9% plus $0.30, so let’s call it $3, $97 will go to the organization or the individual that needed it.
That is a massively efficient nonprofit business, a massively efficient fundraising business. In some cases, it goes to nonprofits and in some cases, it goes to individuals. Whether or not GoFundMe makes any money is totally voluntary…If you decided you wanted to give us $5, then GoFundMe would take that $5 and turn around and invest it in the trust and safety platform and in the product innovation I just talked about.
Another question about your company, and again I may be a little off base here, but we’re living in, it seems like, constant economic volatility, I know in a lot of cases, when you’re in an economic downturn, charitable giving and crowdfunding can be impacted adversely more than some other industries perhaps. When you’re thinking about financial planning, long-term and medium-term, how do you approach it and how do you build resiliency into the company and into its financial models to make sure that you survive those rough patches?
It’s obviously very important for us to be able to predict, because we want to obviously continue and sustain the investments we’ve been talking about. I’d say if you look at a macro level, there’s roughly $500 billion of giving that happens each year in the United States. GoFundMe, I won’t say specifically, but we’re in like the small single-digit percentages of that market.
There’s a big opportunity for us to give our technology to organizations to actually help them raise more. That $500 billion doesn’t grow very much. It grows along with GDP, and I think it’s really our mission to make the whole process of fundraising easier, which we talked about, to make the process of donating more impactful and inspiring. By doing that, we think that we can actually increase the size of the TAM.
We think that we can actually make it more meaningful for you and I to give money and support. It doesn’t have to always be money. It could just be support. It could be just an acknowledgement that this is a cause or an organization or an individual that you care about, and activating your network. We see influencers on our platform who might not donate themselves very much, but their networks can actually be orders of magnitude greater and more impactful in terms of the amount of giving they inspire.
We had a fundraiser on GoFundMe where this influencer herself might have given $5 but her network gave $100,000. We think that our product innovation can inspire the new generation, Millennials and Gen Zs, who are going to inherit a ton of wealth. They are very civically minded and deeply aware of the need to help others. We think that we can inspire that generation to even do more than their parents have and be more supportive of the individuals and organizations they care about.
One thing I like to ask CFOs, because it’s so important, is the concept of work-life balance. You have a lot going on. You’re the CFO of this organization. I know you do some philanthropic activities and whatnot, but how do you manage the work-life balance thing?
It started early on. I think just prioritizing. I prioritize family. I have two kids in high school and my daughter is a volleyball player, so I try not to ever miss any of her games. My son’s a tennis player. I try not to miss any of his matches. My wife is a rockstar executive in her own right. She was the head of marketing for Apple’s online store for about 10 years, and then she ran a women’s healthcare company called Willow for about 5 years. She sits on a bunch of boards. We all have a lot going on but family’s first.
You have to stay healthy in order to be able to do all of this. I try to stay fit. Work is something that I really care about and love. I think if you’re inspired by what you’re doing and you really enjoy what you’re doing…We have a great team and a great mission a,nd we have a lot of really important work to do. It’s not that hard, but it is those three things. It’s my family, staying healthy and then giving every ounce that I can to helping make GoFundMe a better place.
That’s great because some people focus on their career. When you’re young and you’re in your twenties, you can get away with it, but for most of us, there’s just so much more out there and you want to make sure you don’t get burned out and you remain productive for a long time. I understand you travel a lot, is that correct?
I used to travel a lot. For investment banking, I think you’re on the road all the time, so not as much for work [as I used to]. I’d say my life is much more of a pretty centralized these days just because I mentioned my kids and there’s probably some athletic event that I’m attending multiple times a week. We’ll be at a tennis tournament. GoFundMe has an office in San Francisco. While we’re not a full return-to-office type of culture, we are hybrid. In some of the locations where we have concentration of talent, we try to get together a couple of times a week.
I’m probably going up to San Francisco two or three times a week to meet with the team. I think that’s a really good balance between work from home, where I am right now, and being able to get the juices flowing when working in front of a whiteboard or problem-solving with your team. [It’s about] building a culture where everyone wants to come in a couple of times a week.
I have a question and I do like to ask this question of, we’ve had some great guests, very accomplished and you certainly had one of the more interesting career paths of people I’ve gotten to know. What is your advice for the next generation of CFOs? I’m thinking of those people who were maybe in their first CFO job or on the cusp of getting their first CFO job.
We talked a little bit about it throughout this episode. I think it really comes down to three things. I think it’s don’t be afraid to take chances. There’s no such thing as a linear path. Take risks. Not huge risks. If you want to be a CFO, you want to take measured risks, but take risks. You have to take risks in your career and take opportunities when they come your way.
We have talked about this theme, I think, throughout the episode, which is, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to fail along the way. It’s important to learn from those mistakes. We all grow through the mistakes that we make. Then, be willing to give and accept feedback. I told the story about Michael because it was just so impactful, but I think if you can do that along the way, you’re going to accomplish great things.
I think that is wonderful advice and I certainly appreciate your time. I know you have a lot of things going on right now and I would just love to give you the final word.
Alright, well we’ve been talking a lot about GoFundMe and I think the thing that I would encourage this audience to do is just give it a try. It is so easy to go start a GoFundMe for an individual or organization that you care about. I started two in 2024. On Veteran’s Day, I started a campaign for the Navy Seals Foundation. It’s an organization that I care about.
For Giving Season, which folks might not be familiar with, it starts on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. We call it Giving Tuesday, but then it runs until the end of the year. You have some time to think about it or you can go do it right now. For Giving Tuesday, I launched a campaign for the Challenged Athletes Foundation, which is an organization that does great work for athletes and individuals who have disabilities. It helps them get them back out there on the track or in the gym. Moving is very therapeutic.
Give it a shot. Go start your GoFundMe or go build your own GoFundMe profile page. I think you might find it’s inspiring to start to think about the causes and the organizations you care about and sharing those with your friends. You’ll be amazed at the impact that you can have by doing that.
