You know, one of the best things about Silicon Valley is that almost no
one is from Silicon Valley. Great people come from all over the world to
build companies and technology here. But it turns out I actually was born in
Silicon Valley and I grew up here. I built my career here in technology.
I previously served as the president and CEO of a company called wealth Front,
and I've held executive and technical roles at companies you've probably heard of,
Apple, eBay, LinkedIn, Dropbox. In addition, I have a real
passion for personal finance. I serve as an adjunct lecturer at Stanford University.
I've taught a class there for the last seven years called Personal Finance for Engineers.
It's a class I always wish they offered when I was there, and
now they let me teach. I'm also an active angel investor. I've invested
over one hundred and thirty different companies, some of which may I have heard
of, Companies like Firebase, which was sold to Google, open Door,
which went public a few years ago, and then of course notable private companies
like Sigma, Gusto, and a whole range of others. All right,
well, thanks for sharing all that, and of course we're here to talk
about Daffy. Now. What I'd like to do and I love this part
of the series when we get to talk to entrepreneurs and leaders and CEOs is
about that idea. And obviously, as an entrepreneur, you've had lots of
ideas, You've created companies, you've sold them. It's the American dream,
it's capitalism and it's rocking and rolling all the time. And it's such a
neat story about Daffy. So if you could for me and our listeners that
hiptus the idea of starting Daffy. You must have seen a hole in the
industry where there was something to be filled in and say, you know what,
I think we have an idea here that we have something special that doesn't
exactly exist the way we wanted to for our clients and the members out there,
can you talk about the origin? Please? Very happy to And the
story of Daffy really goes back to the pandemic in twenty twenty, my co
founder Alejandro and I we're thinking about building a category defining product in a space
that we thought would be really meaningful, and obviously during the pandemic, everyone
was thinking a lot about what was going on in their communities and local needs.
And we saw that a lot of people were giving and supporting charities and
nonprofits in their area, even though the process was harder and more frustrating than
it had to be. I mean, I've had a long career in fintech,
both as an operator as an investor, and we've seen so much success
in the last ten to fifteen years with new companies and products that have helped
people spend better and save better and invest better. And all Hondro and I
asked, where is all that great technology going forgiving? Right? Can we
make all those ways that we've discovered to help people spend and save and invest
better? Can we apply that to helping people give better? And So,
I mean, like a lot of financial priorities in life, automation helps,
particularly with financial tasks. Right. If you set a goal for your retirement
and automate it, it makes it easier to hit that goal. And we
just really fell in love with that idea of doing something like that for charitable
giving, and so Daffy was born. We raised around and built the team
and spent our time launching what we think is a category defining product. To
help people be more generous more often outstanding. Well, if we can,
before we get into exactly what you do, Adam, do you have a
mission statement that you can share with people. We do, And actually,
as I just mentioned, our mission at Daffy is quite big, but it's
very simple. Our product and platform exists to help people be more generous more
often. We believe that with the right combination of technology and design, we
can actually help people make giving a habit and inspire them to give even more
to the causes and organizations that they support. I love that that's well said.
So let's do this. If you were to give a thirty thousand foot
view to myself, our listeners and basically tell us what you do. What
is it that you do in the company. What's Daffie do? Yeah,
Daffi is well, you know, true to my background as an engineer,
Daffy is a pretty straightforward name. It sounds like fun, but it really
stands for the donor advised fund for you. You know, we believe that
everyone should have some money put aside for charitable giving, and that's what DAFI
is. Daffie is a modern platform for charitable giving that helps anyone open and
fund and support the organizations that they care about. A donor advice fund,
of course, is a tax advantaged account where you can put money aside,
get a tax deduction for giving money to charity, one of the best tax
deductions out there, and then anytime you're inspired to give to an organization,
you just make a recommendation, a few taps in the app, and the
money gets sent to the charity that you support. In some ways, it's
similar to a four to one K for retirement or a five point twenty nine
plan for college savings. But it really is an amazingly flexible platform to help
people put money aside for charity. And now the best part, of course
is that you don't only have the ability to put cash aside. You can
actually donate stock, you can donate mutual funds, you can even donate crypto.
But anyway that people want to put money aside, they want to give
to charity, we try to make it easier for them to do so with
a simple app in their pocket. And Adam, I don't have to tell
you this and you're just mentioning it because it's on the phone. That makes
it so easy to do, and it's so brilliant that way. I did
want to ask you this. I'm a sports guy. I've been in the
business for over thirty years, and I always love to ask professional athletes,
when did you know that you were really good? Or when did you know
you were going to be a pro. So with this app and this idea,
which is freaking brilliant, when did you and Alejandro know that you know
what? I think we have something pretty special here that could really work.
You know, there's there's a few different moments, but for me, I'm
always inspired by the members bye bye, people who actually are putting money aside,
who are actually supporting organizations. I remember when we just launched the product.
One of our first donations, our first contributions, was actually a member
in New York who wanted to support their congregation, but they wanted to give
them a bitcoin. And of course, like most congregations, like most charities,
they don't know how to handle a bitcoin. And this person had seen
our press release and said, oh, I get it, I download your
app, I give you the bitcoin, and you'll get cash to the charity.
And the fact is we didn't know that person, we never met them.
They were three thousand miles away. But that magic of realizing that,
Wow, by building this app, by using technology, we could make it
easier for this person thousands of miles across the country to donate an asset which
granted as a novel asset relatively recent to bitcoin, and actually have that money
reached the charity that they cared about, all in a matter of days.
It made all a hand and I feel like we were really onto something that
this could really be a big part of helping people be more generous. Has
anything surprised you over the three and a half years since you came up with
the idea and co founded this company, because you know, as well as
I do, tech and the world's moving very quickly. Has anything surprised you
in the sustainability of the growth of the company over the last three three and
a half years. You know, the biggest surprise to me continues to be
how little most people in the industry and the technology industry have focused on this
sector. I mean, let's be honest. In twenty twenty two, Americans
gave almost half a trillion dollars to charity four hundred and ninety nine billion dollars.
I mean, that's almost two percent of GDP. By the way,
that is an extraordinary number. It is extraordinary. It's a huge market.
And the estimate is that about sixty million American households give to charity every year.
By any measure, this is a huge market. This is a lot
of value, and it deserves to have the investment of top quality people and
engineering design working on this problem. Clearly, giving matters to people, and
I think, you know, the craziest thing about Daffy is that we actually
believe that people want to give more. You know, our research shows that
when people set a goal for their giving, they actually end up giving thirty
two percent more to charity than just giving when people ask them. And so
you know, we look at that number and as big as five hundred billion
dollars a year sounds. We think that if people actually were able to easily
give as much as they want to give when they want to give it,
they might give as much as one hundred billion dollars more a year to charity.
And that could be a trillion dollars over the next decade. Wow.
So that's what gets us fired up and excited about what we're doing. And
I imagine without me having any context or any research, A lot of it
would be just the ease of using the app I imagined to make it easier
for the client to do those things. Right. You know, you're right.
Technology has a huge role to play, and we all know that when
you have an easy to use app or service, you use it more often.
And so that sounds like a wonderful thing for giving, right. If
you have this app in your pocket and you have money put aside for charity,
it's so much easier to respond to any request you get. But the
real benefit of a platform like Daffi is that it turns out that putting money
aside for any financial goal makes it more likely that you'll hit that goal.
Right. We know this from retirement, right. You don't just save for
retirement one off writing one off checks, right, You want to set up
an automatic deduction from your paycheck. This is why for one case work,
and it's same for a lot of financial goals. And it turns out the
research says it's the same forgiving. And so the biggest value I think of
having Daffy, having that app in your pocket is that any time you're inspired
to give, the money's already been put aside, so all you'd have to
do is make the decision to give. And so by making that decision easier
for people, we think that that will unlock a lot more giving. You
know, Adam, we talked about this brilliant idea that yeah with Daffy,
and I imagine that when you do have this great idea and you implement it,
that eventually there's going to be copiers or people that want to do what
you want to do, or there might be some assemblance of competition where it
might be a little bit different than what you're doing out there. With all
that said, how do you combat all of it when people want to do
what you do? When you've got this great idea, you've implemented it,
you're executing it, things are going well, but people want to they don't
want to rip you up, or they want to copy and maybe do something
like you're doing. How do you deal with those things? Yeah, it's
a great question. And we don't have the luxury of being the first or
the only donor advice fund in the country. Actually, donor advice funds have
been around for decades and some of the largest financial institutions out there, I'm
talking the biggest banks brokerages like Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard all have donor advised
funds, But we differentiate ourselves in two very big ways. One is,
of course, the technology that we talk about, which enables us to implement
features that no one else has. Right. We have a family plan to
help support families who like to give together. We have a workplace plan.
We give the ability for people to send charitable gifts, letting other people pick
what charity they want the money to go to and then have the money sent
off. We even let people run campaigns and so we have a lot of
innovative features. But probably the biggest differentiator we have, which frankly is going
to be very difficult for the incumbents and other large institutions to support, is
that we have a very different business model, which we took from the nonprofit
industry. Most of these firms that have donor advice funds, you know,
Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, their investment shops, and they have a way
of charging for things. They tend to charge a percentage of assets, and
that has the problem that it makes them mainly focused on large accounts. Right,
if you have a twenty five thousand dollars account at Van Garter Schwaber Fidelity.
You're going to pay one hundred and fifty dollars a year for that account,
and by the way, it's very hard to even figure out what you're
paying. Daffy is based on a membership model like a lot of great nonprofits,
and our price starts at a very simple three dollars a month. And
so we think that the combination of technology in our business model is going to
be a lot of differentiation in this market and really shake it up in ways
that hopefully help more people. Give Adam, I did want to ask you
about the future. And I had the good fortune to live in Portland,
Oregon, where I knew a lot of people worked in Nike, and I
remember meeting somebody in a very special place and a very special ten person board
that thought about the future and the future only about what a shoe was going
to be like five ten years down the road. I found that fascinating.
I didn't know it existed, but now I know that every company, especially
a brilliant like yours, is always look into the future, whether it's a
couple of years down the road, five or ten. So with all of
that said, with you and Alejandro and your team when you think about,
well, we're sustainable, things are working now, here's the future and possible
growth. Where do you see the company going as you look down the road.
Well, it's a good question. It's always a little dangerous to ask
founders that question because founders are known to dream big. And that's okay,
a great question. Yeah, and it's yeah, No, it's a it's
a it's a great one to ask, and I think it's an important one,
especially if you're joining a platform where you want to know what it's going
to grow up to be. Yeah, what are you signing up for?
For Alejandro and myself, we you know, we started our careers. One
of the platforms we built together was a company called LinkedIn, right, and
we were both small parts of a very big team there, but LinkedIn had
a vision of really connecting all of those companies and opportunities out there with the
talents out there. And when I look at the future of Daffy, what
I see is I see tens of millions of people across the country who care,
who give, who put money aside and donate to organizations and causes they
believe in. And I see a country that has almost two million charitable organizations,
and there's no good way for those organizations to find the people who care.
And there's no great way for those millions of people to find organizations that
inspire them, that do the work that they want to see done. And
so the idea of building out this community where those millions of people can discover
and find those millions of organizations and vice versa is really exciting to Alejandra and
myself because it's something that doesn't exist today. Right if you look on social
media, if you look online, it's all news, it's all finance,
it's dating, it's shopping. But where's charity, where's giving? Building that
space online for charitable giving is what gets us excited every day every week with
what we're building in the plottform behind Daffy. You know, one of the
exciting things of the world that I live in with sports and news is that
I'm on social media all the time, and to this day, Adam,
it still amazes me how things get viral, and I know there's really not
an answer to that. And so I throw this at you as an owner
of a company with this great idea, and you've been around for a handful
of years. You know, for me, when I get a great haircut,
I tell somebody you should check out that barber. It's a great haircut.
It's word of mouth. In this day and age, with this brilliant
idea and the app and what you're executing now, you could buy all the
marketing you want and you can get this platform. In that platform does simply
come down that somebody has a great experience. It's still word of mouth,
and that is the best thing that a company could ever have. Well,
word of mouth is definitely important, and I think that sometimes, especially in
the technology industry, people get so fascinated with metrics and virality and sure building
these different ways to spread the word that they can sometimes forget that the best
marketing and the best way for something to spread is for someone to use your
product, love it, and then they will tell other people. Right.
But I also think that the problem space you work in, the problem you're
solving for customers, is also very material to that. And one of the
things I love about giving is that, unlike most financial tasks, giving is
fundamentally social right. We don't share our bank accounts with other people, and
investing tends to also be very private and personal. But giving is something that
we do with other people. Right. We go to events, we support
organizations, we volunteer, we fundraise for organizations we care about. And we
don't do that alone. We do it with others. And so you know,
Daffy has seen amazing growth. Right in twenty twenty three, we saw
growth of over four hundred and twenty five percent. We went from twenty million
in contributions to over one hundred and five million dollars in just one year.
Wow. And a lot of growth has to do with the fact that,
yes, I think the product is wonderful and differentiating, and yes, I
think that people who use the product say, wow, this is such a
better way to give. I can't imagine going back to the way I did
it before. But a lot of the power and a lot of that growth,
a lot of that virality comes from the fact that people who give to
organizations and support organizations talk to each other and they talk about the ways that
they give, and so we're seeing the apps spread quite a bit through those
mechanisms. That makes a lot of sense. I appreciate you sharing all that
we Adam, Let's do this. This is one of my favorite parts of
the interview. As we wrap up, I love to give the floor to
you, and we've had a great discussion over the almost twenty minutes that we've
had a chance to visit. But maybe just a few takeaways for our listeners
as we wrap up the questions, the answers, your thoughts on Daffy,
and just a few things that you would like to leave our listeners with when
it comes to your great company. So the floor is yours. W you
know. The advice I'm going to give is very simple, and it's a
personal story because I remember when I opened my first donor advice fund and I
was amazed when I look back historically at how much it affected my giving and
how much more I support the organizations and causes that I care about. And
so my advice for people would be very simple. If you do give to
charity, whatever you give, whether it's hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars,
whatever the amount, set a goal for your giving, even if that
goal is just the amount you gave last year. Use a platform like Daffy
to set some money aside. Make it a part of your budget. Not
only will you find that it's easier to give, but the rewards you get
from giving get magnified over time because it is a bit addictive when you put
money aside for charity, when you watch it grow because it's invested tax free,
and then when you're inspired you have that money of itailable it feels good.
It feels good because you can support the organizations you care about, and
it feels good that you actually were prepared that you put that money aside.
So I would encourage everyone, whether it's Daffy or another donor advice fund,
to set a goal for their giving and make giving an actual part of your
financial life, well said Adam. And one last thing, website and where
people can download the app at Oh Fantastic yuess. So we do have a
native app. We were the first donor advice fund fully functional in the app
store. So if you go to the app store and type in Daffy,
you'll find us Daffi Charitable Fund. You can also just go to Daffi dot
org and easily sign up within a few seconds. You can fund it with
a card, you can fund it with your bank account, and like I
said, you can even do fancy things like donate stock or crypto. But
yeah, definitely go to daffi dot org and check it out. I's standing,
Adam. I really enjoyed our conversation and really appreciate your time. Continue
to success to you and Alejandra and your team, and thank you so much
for joining us on CEOs. You should know, thank you for having me