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The PM Podcast
Exponential Thinking: A Conversation with Anne Connelly, Author of Bitcoin and the Future of Fundraising
00:53:49
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- [00:00]
A
You're in the middle of rural Africa. How do you pay 200 staff members every month that don't have bank accounts? We pay them in cash. Well, how do you get cash from the capital city to the middle of rural Africa? You carry it in knapsacks on your back. And that was part of my job, was really transporting, you know, enormous thousands upon thousands of dollars in cash in a bag on my back so we could pay our health workers. And that, you know, besides being extremely dangerous and just an onerous task to have to, was really the first thing I thought of when I learned about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin was no one's ever going to have to carry bags of money ever again.
- [00:42]
B
Welcome to the PM Podcast, brought to you by Evertrue Studios, the show that takes you inside the lives of thought leaders, innovators and change makers in fundraising, philanthropy and civil society. I'm your host, Jay Frost. My guest today is Ann Connelly, an entrepreneur, angel investor and a leading voice in blockchain and cryptocurrency for social impact. Ann advises corporations, startups and nonprofits worldwide and teaches blockchain based business models for social impact at Boston University's Questrom School of Business. She is also an expert on decentralized societies at Singularity University and has lectured at Oxford Said School of Business on impact finance. Her work has taken her from boardrooms to the field, including with Doctors Without Borders in the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She is the co author of Bitcoin and the Future of Fundraising and Trust and has been recognized as one of CBC's Young Leaders Changing Canada and among the 50 most inspirational women in technology. In this episode we trace her journey through from Ottawa to Africa, where she carried a backpack full of cash to pay NGO staff and saw wheelbarrows full of currency needed to buy a tomato and how these experiences helped shape her belief in digital currency, technological solutions and exponential thinking.
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C
So Ann, tell me about where you are from originally.
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A
I was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, so I'm a Canadian girl.
- [02:17]
C
But you're hanging out in New York now?
- [02:18]
A
Hanging out in New York. I've lived a little bit around the world, so I've done some stints in Dublin, Mexico, California, Central African Republic, Congo, South Africa, Barbados, and now New York. So loving it here. It's a great city.
- [02:33]
C
Well, I know we're going to talk about some of those places because they inform who you are, the kind of work that you've done. But I do want to ask about Ottawa then, because that, you know, growing up in any place kind of influences how we feel about life and work. So what was that like where in Ottawa? It's a big place.
- [02:53]
A
It is a big place. Yeah. I grew up kind of in the city, but not quite downtown, but not quite suburbs either. It's a really interesting city because it's right on the border with Quebec and so it's very bilingual. So you get this really great understanding of, you know, the different cultures between the Francophones, the Anglophones. But you learn French in school, but you see the value of learning an additional language because it's all around you. So a lot of Canadians living at west per Se will learn French, but they don't hear it in their day to day lives, so they're not quite sure why they would learn it. But for me, I got lucky because learning it opened so many doors for me in the future. So it was a really great opportunity.
- [03:33]
C
You were learning from the time you were young in school, right?
- [03:37]
A
Yeah. Five years old.
- [03:39]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [03:41]
C
Having that kind of immersion experience, it doesn't just open professional doors. It must kind of make you think differently about your role in the world or the way you talk with other people or engage with people.
- [03:54]
A
Yeah, it really helps you understand cultural differences better. It helps you understand what it's like to exist when you're not in your first language. So, you know, a lot of people will look at someone who's speaking in a second language like they're not as intelligent or, you know, they can't, they're not funny. And part of that is just you can't take what's in your brain and get it out with the finesse that you can in your first language. And I can remember working on a project with a Chinese international exchange student and she kept trying to communicate something to our group and we were like, I don't know what you're saying, you know, and we were young and she was a little bit, you know, had a lot more experience than we did. And she finally communicated in math and changed the way we had organized our graphs. And we were like, oh, like now we. Yes, these. This is so smart. Like, thank you. But she couldn't get it out in English. And so I think having the experience of being in an environment where you're not in your first language teaches you so much about how to have patience and treat other people who maybe you engage with in not their first language.
- [05:01]
C
Yeah, that's so interesting about math being the conversion mechanism for, for language and for Understanding something. But I guess a lot of things boil down to. To math. And so you were growing up in Ottawa and you said close to the border. Now, another part of that whole story with Canada has to do with the constant. I don't know if threat's the right word, but the discussion about possible secession. So were you aware of that, too? And because Ottawa's, as far as I know, has never tried to secede.
- [05:35]
A
No, this is. Yeah, that's. I mean, Quebec in. In the 80s and 90s, it was a thing. We actually went to one of the. The rallies to, you know, convince them to stay in Canada in 1995, and it was incredible. You know, as Canadians, we really do. We do want multiculturalism. We do appreciate and value, you know, different types of people and what they bring to our society. So it was. It was great to see that, you know, Quebec stayed at that point in time. There's some discussion of Alberta at this point, but I think it a very fringe minority, and hopefully we won't see that happen.
- [06:11]
C
So that's life in Ottawa. But growing up, did you have a sense that you wanted to see beyond that?
- [06:19]
A
Oh, yeah. I was always a bit of an adventurer. I left home at 18 to go to school and pretty much every summer found somewhere to backpack around. I did Panama one summer. I taught sex education across Belize another summer.
- [06:37]
C
Wait, wait, wait. How did you get that job? That's very specific.
- [06:43]
A
I was actually running an organization in undergrad. It was called Queen's Medical Outreach, and we sent students around the world to do. Yeah, just teaching and education around health topics, so mental health, sexual education, abuse. And it was great. We worked with primary and high school students in Northern Canada and Belize and Kenya and in Guyana. And so it was actually, that was the organization that maybe got me tilted to the idea of working in the nonprofit sector was, you know, I started as a traveler, did the work in the field, and then actually ended up running the Belize project and then running the whole organization by the end of fourth year. And so it was kind of one of those organizations where you can't tell if it's a really big, small thing or a really small big thing in terms of the impact that you're having. But it was a great introduction to, you know, there's lots of different roles within the nonprofit sector, and some of them might be in the field, but some of them are actually on the project management side and, you know, the organization side.
- [07:44]
C
What was that like for you to go there for the first time? I guess if Panama came First, either of those experiences where you're leaving home, even if you have an adventurous spirit, you're going to a place where that's not a French speaking country. So you're experiencing something totally new and engaging with people about something deeply personal, and you're motivated to do it. But still, it's you. It's the first time. What was that experience like?
- [08:09]
A
I mean, it was incredible. I think you get at a young age a really deep understanding of just how lucky we have it back home and some of the conditions that people have to experience and live in, and the lack of support, but also the beauty of the world and the beauty of other communities and how they treat each other and how they value personal relationships and that kind of thing. And so it was incredible. And it really kicked off a lifetime of wanting to explore this beautiful world and the people that live in it.
- [08:43]
C
I have this impression of Belize, and perhaps this is true of Panama or other places that you visited early in your career, that there's a world of difference. Sometimes it's separated only by half a mile or a mile between the places that are economically very strong or developed, whatever term you want to use, and those which are not. And I'm thinking about Belize right there, the coastal area, cruise ships coming in, different things happening, lots of international investment to the degree that there is there. And then you go in a little bit, and it's not like that at all. What kind of impression did that leave for you?
- [09:22]
A
Yeah, I think the bigger piece for me was the mental shift that happened of like, why is that? Why do we have these just tiny lines on a piece of paper that divide the way that we treat some people and we treat others. And I think it was the kickoff for me of really trying to imagine, like, we need to stop thinking about the world from a country by country type mentality. We are one planet, we are one globe, we have to work together. We need to start thinking more about just because this country does X, Y and Z for its population, why are we not doing that for the rest of the world? And so I think I would love to see the next generation and the one after that start to break down the barriers of these national geographies that we have. And that's going to happen anyway with climate change. You know, there's statistics that show that by 2050, a billion people will migrate from their homes as a result of, you know, floods, famine, conflict, lack of water, et cetera, as a result of climate change. And so it would be great to start thinking in that way. And how do we ease that transaction to start working, you know, collaboratively as a planet instead of as these nation states?
- [10:35]
C
Absolutely. It's something where if you're in the thick of it, as you were, then as a student, you see differently from reading about it online or in a paper or whatever. And let's go fast forward a little bit. So you were doing this work early on, and then by the time you graduated, did you already have a picture in your mind about what you might do? I don't know what your degree was in. What were you. What were you studying?
- [11:02]
A
I did an undergrad in science and then I did my MBA after that. And my MBA was really interesting because we had a co op program. This is at McMaster University in Canada. And so every other term I did a placement. So I did, you know, one at a healthcare consulting company, one at a pediatric palliative care center, and then the third one, I worked at Doctors Without Borders in their fundraising department. And so I really got thrown into the culture of the organization, started learning about different projects. And once I, you know, finished my degree, I actually skipped my graduation ceremony to go work overseas in Central African Republic.
- [11:39]
C
So this is where you can tell us about the backpack story.
- [11:43]
A
Yes. So I worked. I worked, you know, we had two hospitals and six clinics in super rural Central African Republic. And, you know, we had mostly national staff. We're about 200 of them that we had to pay every month. And, you know, a lot of people you hear talking about unbanked populations and unbanked locations, and you think, okay, well, you're in the middle of rural Africa. How do you pay 200 staff members every month that don't have bank accounts? We pay them in cash. Well, how do you get cash from the capital city to the middle of rural Africa? You carry it in knapsacks on your back. And that was part of my job, was really transporting, you know, enormous thousands upon thousands of dollars in cash in a bag on my back so we could pay our health workers. And that, you know, besides being extremely dangerous and, and just an onerous task to have to manage, was really the first thing I thought of when I learned about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin was no one's ever going to have to carry bags of money ever again.
- [12:48]
C
And before we get to that epiphany, that realization and solution, I'm trying to put myself in your shoes, arriving in the Central African Republic, but never having been there. And can you paint us a picture of that for those who have not been there, which is almost everyone listening what it was like, what you experienced and what you imagined. And then the difference maybe between what you imagined and what you saw.
- [13:11]
A
I mean, it's one of the most beautiful places on earth. There's no question the nature is incredible. It's this deep red earth and these huge baobab trees. But you know, the villages on the sides of the road are. It's mud hut, thatch roof. Extreme levels of consistent daily poverty hit with waves of malnutrition and malaria and different infectious diseases that come through. And it's a really challenging country. You know, the French came in, they did a real number on it, and then they left. And, you know, there's still, it's, it's a very difficult situation to, to help in terms of development. It's not super stable. In the north, they had a major coup in, I believe it was 2014 that destabilized it further. But the people are, are wonderful, you know, just incredible communities of people that, that help each other and, you know, really stepped up to help their communities when our organization came through. And so it's, I hope that one day it's able to become stable enough that, you know, people can really travel there from a tourism pers. But I think we're a long ways away from that, unfortunately.
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C
So this was what year that you went?
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A
This is 2010.
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C
2010. And so I'm imagining the feeling you must have had to have a backpack stuffed with money because did you have. Were you traveling with a team of people? Was there a security contingent to help you?
- [14:42]
A
No security. I mean, we like to joke that the security was our white T shirt. You know, we wore our white T shirts and that kept us safe. And to a certain extent that, that is true. You know, the communities, when we come through, we provide health care, we provide employment, you know, the entire community benefits as a result. And they want us to stay. And if we get attacked, then we're leaving. You know, we can't, we can't justify as an organization staying in a place where our staff is being attacked. And so in a lot of ways, the community would sort of self police to make sure that we were, you know, kept safe and that sort of thing. And so we, yeah, no security, but it's usually me and one or two other people in a, in a car that we just, you know, our Land Rover would make the trek from the city to the country. And that was about it.
- [15:28]
C
And this, this, this money is pretty essential for the program and also all the people, the 200 plus staff, local staff who are working there, but they all suffer from the same kinds of vulnerabilities that you would have had as a, as a, you know, person coming in from Canada.
- [15:47]
A
Oh, absolutely. You know, the staff members picking up their monthly salary on, you know, on payday, they'd have to walk home with, with that as well in cash. And they're storing it in their house in cash. And so it's. Yeah, you know, and it's also a currency that, you know, it's not, it's not unstable in the way that, say, Zimbabwe was, but, you know, it's currency that's partially managed by France. And in 1994 they decided to devalue the currency by half. So having this money is not necessarily the best store of value for them either. So it's really looking at the issues that come from being in a bankless society. It's extensive. You can't get loans to be buying property to move yourselves up the socioeconomic ladder. You really have to depend on the people around you a lot more than we would in a society like where I live in New York.
- [16:43]
C
And again, it's sort of like, describe the Central African Republic now. Describe what it's like to be in a place without a bank. I mean, you just talked about the practical aspects of that, which are pretty important. But it's also hard to imagine for people who are living in the US or in Canada, what it's like to be in a town that, that doesn't have an ATM machine or doesn't have a bank teller window somewhere. How is it that these communities don't have those things at all? And what do people do in the absence of them?
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A
I mean, they don't have water, they don't have electricity, they don't have any of these things. You know, at the time in 2010, most people, a good number of people would have a cell phone, like a T9, you know, 1, 2, 3, texting cell phone, but they didn't have anywhere to charge it. So you would see there was a kiosk in the market that had a generator and you could leave your phone there and pay to charge your own. And, and so, yeah, I mean, everything's done in, in cash. The, the market suppliers everything in cash, trying to transport everything. So it's, it's really challenging and I think it, it keeps people from progressing in ways that you can when you have access to even small amounts of credit or the safety of kind of keeping your, your money in a Place that isn't in your house. So it's. Yeah. Having access to financial services is not something we talk about a whole lot in the nonprofit sector. But it is really critical. It's like a foundational element to being able to move yourself up the socioeconomic ladder.
- [18:14]
C
You mentioned those phones, and I imagine that that's a part of the story later because phones become a critical element in everything. Digital conveyance of information as well as currency. So that's something we can touch on. So you were there for how long at doing this kind of work?
- [18:35]
A
Yeah, that. The Central African Mission was about seven months. I did another short trip in Congo a couple of years later, drc. And then.
- [18:44]
C
Which was a very complicated environment there.
- [18:47]
A
I'm sure it was less stable than. Well, it's hard to say. You know, I mean, it's. When you're in like limited areas of these different. Different countries, it sort of depends on where you are. But also. Also a very challenging environment to work in for sure. But also just an absol. Stunning, stunning place.
- [19:07]
C
And so that was just another bit of time at DRC or.
- [19:12]
A
Yeah, and then I did work with an organization called Dignitas International. It was doing HIV AIDS work in Malawi. So did some field visits there and then ended up living a few years later when I shifted into the blockchain space into. In South Africa for a little while.
- [19:29]
C
Well, so what. I mean, you saw the need for the ability to move money without carrying it around on your back. But in fact, you showed me something when we had a conversation earlier. It's in a piece of Plexiglas.
- [19:45]
A
Oh, yeah.
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C
On your desk. That's pretty profound. Could you describe that for people who can't see it?
- [19:51]
A
My $100 billion bill, and this is a bill from Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, the inflation rate was so ridiculous that money just really lost all its value. And what happened was. Yeah, essentially government mismanagement led the currency to have hyperinflation. As a result, people's salaries were pretty meaningless. Like, if you can imagine, you had a hundred thousand dollar salary and then all of a sudden $100,000 didn't buy you a chocolate bar. You're not going to show up to work. So schools and hospitals shut down. People would bring like wheelbarrows full of cash to the market to buy a couple of tomatoes. And as a result, the entire economy really, it just broke. And that's, you know, that, that can happen pretty quickly if you have some, you know, fairly, you know, you get governments that can't manage things properly. Things can slide quite quickly. And so I really. I keep this bill kind of as a reminder of why I'm doing this work. It's really to give people who live in situations where this is what their money looks like the opportunity to store value in another place. I had a gentleman who grew up in Greece into one of my classes, and he told the story about his grandmother who just said, yeah, as soon as payday came, she filled the fridge with anything she could possibly buy because the food was going to hold value better than the money was, and she needed to be able to feed her family at the end of the month, and the money wasn't going to allow her to do that.
- [21:27]
C
I'm just sitting with that idea for a minute because any of us could be in that position with any of our currencies, in theory, if our governments didn't do what they needed to do. So before we jump into this whole area of cryptocurrency and blockchain as a way to address these problems, I'm wondering what that experience did to inform the way you think about governments and their interaction with people and also the vulnerabilities of the people, not just in not having access to what they need, but then what ends up happening to the whole population when trust erodes because of things like that?
- [22:07]
A
Yeah, trust really is the foundation of absolutely everything. And I think having seen governments that didn't work very well gives me sort of two views on. On things. And one is that we are humans, we still need to collaborate, and if we work together, we can, you know, move upwards together and be better and move forwards. But I think it also gives me the pause about how is the best way to do that? You know, is it the structures that we have? If you look at our governance structures in North America, there are systems that were created at a time when you had to get on a horse to go and represent your town and village to, you know, a group of other people that would discuss things and then come back. I mean, that just doesn't suit the 2026 society. Right. We don't need to do it that way anymore. So what is the best way moving forward? There's lots of things that we're trying. I don't have the perfect solution, but I think we need to really move away from some of the institutions that we've leaned on for a while. But I've also seen, you know, a lot of libertarians are saying we don't. We want no government. That's terrible. And I'm like, I've kind of lived that. I live in a country where, yes, technically, there was government, but it just didn't function. And you don't want that. You really don't. You know, you don't want to have to build a fortification around your house and have guns everywhere to be able to protect your family. Like, you want to be working together with other people to really have the rising tide that lifts all boats. And so I think the real question, though, is we've come to a time now where with AI, trust is going to be almost impossible, almost impossible unless it's in person and that sort of thing. So it's, how can you build trust within societies, maintain trust, and have people feel that their government is actually working in their best interest? And that's going to be a real challenge.
- [24:05]
C
I think I definitely want to return to that idea. But let's talk about how, then you made your own discovery, your personal discovery of blockchain and cryptocurrency. You were doing this stuff again starting in 2010, where you were in there in the field. And then when did you decide that you wanted to explore cryptocurrency as a possible solution mechanism? And. And how did that come about?
- [24:33]
A
So I started reading about bitcoin on Twitter in 2012, and, you know, I was curious just, what is this? And kept reading more about it. And then once it sort of clicked again, the first use case I thought of was this. Carrying knapsacks of money. And a lot of North Americans will hear about bitcoin and just say, well, why would I want that? And. And I totally understand. Makes sense. You've got a financial system, you've got a credit card. Everything works. Why would you want it? But I thought about all of these people overseas that don't have that and they don't have access to it. And I just thought about people sending remittances overseas home to their families. You know, there's about $580 billion of remittances that's sent every year. And if you're pulling 8%, 12% off the top by Western Union, you know, it's almost $50 billion. That's. That's not getting spent on the poorest people on the planet. And so for me, I was really trying to solve the same problems we were trying to solve in the nonprofit sector, but doing it in a different way, trying to fix some of these underlying issues. And so became very excited about looking at applications of this technology for social impact. And I got lucky because I was living in Toronto at the time. And Toronto is really the epicenter for the creation of Ethereum. And we had these incredible meetups with some of the smartest people in the world that were solving a lot of these really challenging technological issues and building some great products. And so I was lucky enough to be in and around that group and just learning every day, which was so exciting, and figured that my role could be looking at this for the nonprofit sector. So I launched a crypto donation program at the charity I was at. This was 2013, 2014, and started.
- [26:27]
C
This was giving presentations. Yeah.
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A
What's that?
- [26:30]
C
A dignita? Is that a dignita? Dignita.
- [26:32]
A
Yeah. Yeah. And started talking to people about how this could impact charities, how they could start sending money overseas using this technology. And it was. Yeah, it was really exciting and it really felt very hopeful about how there was a whole new way that we could help create impact globally.
- [26:53]
C
There's this whole concept I know is described by one author, is crossing the chasm, where you have early adopters of something and they find something really interesting and cool, and their minds are set afire so they find a solution. But it takes a while to get other people to make that leap because that chasm can look pretty scary, and then things can move pretty rapidly if it works well for that next group of people. I'm just wondering how, when you were talking to people initially, how other people were receiving this idea, because I've seen these kind of successive introductions of technology into the nonprofit space where initially people said, oh, that's never going to work here. And sometimes it doesn't. It ends up being the beta to vhs. But other times it's like email, where people at first didn't want to deal with that or a CRM. And now every single person has it. It almost if they. Even if they don't want to. So how did you find the conversation from the Ethereum? Conversation with lots of good thought leaders translating into something that other people could say, well, you know what? I'm not that afraid. I will try.
- [28:08]
A
Yeah. So in the early stages, I would say, well, people would ask, what do you do? I work in Bitcoin. And they would laugh at me because they thought I was kidding. They thought I was making a joke. And then I'd say, no, that's really what I do. And they'd be like, oh, okay, tell me more. You know, And I spent a lot of my time convincing people. And so I've really learned a lot of good things about how to change people's minds. But I think that, you know, the real piece, and I saw this very much in the charitable sector more than any other, is that they are not open and receptive to innovation. They are the last people to get on board with new technologies and new ways of doing things. And part of that is risk aversion. You don't want to spend donor money on something that's not tried and true. But a bigger part of that is just mindset. And so one of the things that I teach a lot about is something called exponential thinking. And it's really this idea of how do you change the way you think to try to solve problems using, like, 10x solutions? So let's say, you know, if I asked you, how would you make this room better? You might say, well, I'd have more natural light or more plants or a more comfortable chair. If I said, well, how would you make the room 10 times better? People get really stumped. They're like, well, I'd have two plants. I'm like, that's not really 10 times better. What if we had holograms of our friends who couldn't make it sitting beside us? What if the room flew from New York to Paris during the duration of the meeting? And so it's really about getting people to think like, okay, we're working on, say, a domestic violence organization. How, you know, instead of making it 10% better every year, how do we make it go away? How do we make this problem never exist again? And that, you know, Jimmy Carter did that. He did that with guinea worm. He just said, like, we're in my lifetime. I'm not going to pledge to give away all my money. I'm going to pledge to solve a problem in my lifetime. And he did. They took the cases from about 3 million down to last year. There were two cases of guinea worm in the world. And so I think, you know, part of this with nonprofit is it's taking the time and the mental space to say, like, we are open to learning about all these things. You don't need to know about them, but you gotta be open to learning. And you also have the mindset to be able to predict where they're going to be five or ten years from now. Because technology doesn't grow on a linear scale the way humans think. It grows exponentially. So if you look at AI today and you're like, well, these videos that they're making are not. They're not good enough. You know, we can't really do anything with it. We're not even going to touch it we're not going to get a membership to an AI company, but if you think that it's going to double in the next six months in its capability and double again and then six months after that and again and again, what it's going to be able to produce is going to be incredible. But by the time you're there, if you haven't trained and educated your staff, you haven't put a plan plan in place of how you can use it, you're starting from zero at the time when the technology is available. What you should be doing is starting from zero a couple years in advance with the idea that you know where the technology is going to be two years from now when you're ready to roll out or what have you. And so that's really part of what I work with organizations on is how do you change the way you think as opposed to change what you know.
- [31:34]
C
It's really about imagination. I mean, the way you described not one plant, not two plants, but maybe it's turning the whole space into, I don't know, a jungle that improves the oxygen for all the occupants. That's a very different way of thinking and it's exciting. It's also something that's, I know, challenging for some people in this sector and you've talked about it a little bit about that kind of resistance to change. But I wonder if there's another element here. For example, if we have a self fulfilling prophecy at play in who we're bringing on to our leadership or our boards or our staff, the way we're training people once they're there, even if they're receptive to new ideas, are we constantly retraining them for old ways of thinking? What are some of the ways that organizations can, and I know we'll get back into the practicalities of this, can really open themselves up to exponential thinking.
- [32:36]
A
First thing first, you have to stop hiring from within the nonprofit space. You have to hire people who have done work outside of that, have seen other things, other way of doing different activities. Get new ideas in all the time and if you can't hire them, then bring them in to talk, have them in, you know, reach out to different entrepreneurs. Interesting tech people say, please come in, do a little half an hour brown bag lunch for our team so that you're constantly being exposed to new ideas and that, you know, maybe not all of them are going to fit with you, but they might tweak something in your mind. And so I used to have these innovation days with my team when I was the head of fundraising at Dignitas. And we would clear our calendars. No meetings, no work, and all day, we would say, okay, we want you to look at anything that you've seen in the world. It might be something a company has done, it might be an advertisement, it might be anything that you've seen that's interesting. And I want you to take it and adapt it for our organization. And they would spend, you know, an hour looking for things and maybe two hours putting it together, and we'd pitch it all and we'd have a great day. And out of it, you know, it's. You wouldn't necessarily. They wouldn't all be actionable items, but a lot of them would be or would be, you know, you could tweak them so that they would be actionable. And it was really inspiring for people because they got to live out their wildest dreams, if even for a day. And we got some really neat things that came from that.
- [34:08]
C
There are going to be people who listen to this and they think, yeah, but the people we might bring in from corporate America, we've done that before. I know this is a broader issue, but that's one of the reactions. And there's some truth to that, right? I mean, that corporations that are designed to make money and to help increase shareholder value, for example, that's only one thing. But that are they thinking with the same kind of moral compass? Are they devoted to the same principles? So for those who might say, that sounds great, get new ideas and people with flexible thinking, I'm all for that. But are we really going to be bringing in people who have no compunction about doing evil things in order to achieve their objectives?
- [34:53]
A
I think there's two sides of that. First, I think, again, every idea should be thrown on the table, even if they're evil. And then you take the evil out of them as you refit them to see what you can do. I think the other side of it is you can take a lot of the process and the way of working from corporations and again, adapt it for nonprofit. So if you look at, like I can remember, I worked with, you know, collaborated with an organization that I won't name that measured nothing. They measured absolutely nothing. They had no idea what they achieved with the money that donors gave them. And they were really happy because they just said, well, look, we helped this lady, and she's so thrilled with what she got. And I said, okay, but if you'd done it like this, if you changed X, Y and Z, you could have helped Five ladies. And to them, they didn't care. And for me, I was like just ripping my hair out, saying, you have to have some level of kind of professionalism in what you're doing to be able to help more people. So I think it's about how do you take what's good from what corporations are doing? And some of that might be, you know, methodologies, mindset structures, whatever it is, and adapt that to achieve the outcomes you want to achieve. On the flip side, I think we could also go to corporations and say, you've got some incredibly talented people. How do we take them out of a world where their only role is to make money and convince them to leave that, but to solve some of the world's most incredible problems? How do we start to shift, like these wonderful workforces of people onto missions that matter a lot more? And that's a bigger conversation we need to have in some society.
- [36:35]
C
And I know that that is probably a conversation that goes beyond the scope of what we can talk about today. But you are working with people who are going to go into the social sector, the impact sector, but also into other ways of working with government, the public sector, or with private business. Are you seeing that plasticity of thinking existing in all the sectors, or that opportunity for people to say, maybe we can look beyond just either the balance sheet on the one hand, or just the making sure that that lady feels good on the other hand. Is there a way that we can ensure that each of the sectors can think exponentially?
- [37:15]
A
A lot of that is working together and cross exposure. So again, having the nonprofits into the corporations, having the corporations into the nonprofit, and that's going to teach you how to create better relationships as well. So you want to pitch a corporation on some of your work. Like if you're not going in with a high quality pitch deck with good metrics and a good story like, you're not going to get the money. So you have to understand what their expectations are, how they operate, what they look at when they're making financial decisions. And then, you know, similarly, it's, they need to come to the table if they're bringing their money. And they say, well, we want X, Y, Z, we want this outcome. And you say, that's actually not how we work in the impact space. You know, these are the other things that matter. Here's the bias and the ethics or whatever it is, and start to teach them not just to kind of throw money at problems, but to say, okay, here's how you can get involved in a More deeper, long term, more effective way. And I think everyone will benefit as a result.
- [38:15]
C
I'm curious, is this the way you've always thought or is this something that came to you as a result of some of these experiences?
- [38:25]
A
I think my brain is, is more wired to really look at problems and like, rip them apart and rebuild them. And, you know, so I'll go into a lot of organizations and just like, be like, that doesn't work, that doesn't work, fix this, this, this, this, this. And we're going to change that. And for a lot of people, it's very overwhelming. And so I've actually started to warn people in advance. I said, listen, this is how I work. I'm going to throw everything at you. We don't have to fix it all in one day. But like, don't feel like you've done a bad job. I'm just, I have an eye to see everything that, that could be better. And I, and I would say that about people as well. I'll look at people and just say, like, your potential is so incredible. Here's a life plan for you that I think you can achieve all of your dreams if you do X, Y and Z. And then often they won't do it. And I get very frustrated that they're not reaching their potential. So I have, you know, this is something I have to work on for myself of just saying, like, not everybody wants to or, you know, is going to push for the absolute maximum level of their potential. And that applies to people and organizations. And you have to kind of really look at, well, where, where can we find a happy medium? Where are you going to get the best bang for your buck if you make, you know, these changes instead of those changes. And. But it is in my nature, I think, to really try to get to the best possible outcome that we can.
- [39:53]
C
Going back to the technical aspect of this, the way you found that your route to solving some of these issues outside the classroom, where you do teach today, but bringing these tools into practice for the impact sector. You were taking us to 2012 and 2014, that kind of neighborhood. Then you saw it grow. In another conversation we've had about your book, you've talked about that growth of the sector. Now it's, of course, cryptocurrencies, I think you told me there are thousands of them today. There are trillions of US dollar equivalents in those marketplaces. There's a lot of money, we don't know exactly how much, but is flowing to charities around the world through these currencies. But when you were just starting that work, how were you then able to take it beyond the place where you worked and start talking to others? And how have you seen that adoption flow over time? What does it look like, the change that you've seen between then and now?
- [40:57]
A
Yeah, I think in the early stages, when I was giving presentations to large groups, maybe half the room had heard of bitcoin and it was in a newspaper headline. They'd seen the word, but they didn't really know anything about it. Maybe one person out of 100 actually owned a little bit. And so it was a lot of education of not only like, what is it? But what problem is it solving? And in a lot of ways, blockchain as a technology solves problems that people either don't have or don't know that they have. Whereas, you know, AI, it's like, oh, I can make cool videos and it's going to do this report for me. Blockchain's like, well, I'm going to eliminate the ability for centralized institutions to have too much control over our financial system or over our governance or identity. And it's these enormous philosophical, societal level problems. And in a lot of cases as well, it's not a useful technology until there's a tipping point of people that have it. So in the same way with email, like, I had an email address in like, God, must have been the mid-90s. And they're like, you could send emails to your friends. I'm like, I don't. I'm the only person with an email address who am I going to send an email to? And the same thing is kind of with crypto is like, well, you can send this to people, like, but nobody, nobody has this, nobody wants it. Why would I send it? But that's again, that, that sort of tipping point. And I like to talk, you know, about the, the growth of credit cards in the same way where in the early stages, only places you could spend credit cards were luxury hotels and super fine dining restaurants and, you know, maybe airlines. And so you'd say, well, why would I have a credit card? I can't spend it anywhere. But that has grown and obviously it's super ubiquitous now. So we're just in that transition phase of, you know, crypto being something that a few people earn. It's speculative. You're playing around with it to like, this is a foundational element of our society that everybody uses.
- [42:55]
C
And so today, obviously people are using it. I think more people are becoming familiar with the terminology, less blockchain probably for the reasons you just said, than crypto, because that has to do with money and people are all about the money. But for the charities themselves that were so reluctant and still continue to think in sometimes rigid ways, perhaps just because they're trying to get resources to people tomorrow and they don't think they can take on a new task right now. Are you seeing a sea change with them? Are they able to, not just at the top organizations, but across the spectrum able to use these systems and tools and ideas in order to drive change?
- [43:42]
A
Yeah, and I think there's two sides to that. One, the infrastructure from the blockchain, the crypto world has improved and made it easier to get involved. And then the mindsets have changed. And part of that is just that there's fewer reasons they can say no now, you know, so if they say, well it's, it's just for criminals, you say, well, that, I mean criminals can use it. Criminals also use bank accounts and cash and like, you know, the banks are using it and Microsoft is using it and all these major companies, so there's no brand concerns anymore the way there were historically. And you know, if you look at climate change type stuff, we've debunked a lot of the myths around some of those concerns. And so it's, it's, there's a little bit less to hide behind is the way that I put it. Because often like people will just put up a wall and you knock it down, they put up another wall, you knock it down and you get to the end. And they don't want to do it, but they can't explain why. And it really is this, like we call it, instead of fomo, we call it fogy. The fear of joining in where you just, you're just really afraid to have to learn about this and deal with it and navigate it. And you know, it's just one of those things you can move past in a couple of hours if you put some time into it. So I've been seeing, I think a lot of charities are more open to saying like, oh, I still don't know anything about this, but like, yeah, come, come give a presentation, let's talk about it. Let's, let's see. And in a lot of cases it's just understanding that you can accept the crypto to a third party company. They hold it, they exchange it for money, they just drop money into your bank account. You don't touch it. There's nothing you have to set up. It's really easy. And so if you can add a whole new donation mechanism to your organization in 24 hours for $0. Why would you not. There's really no question as to why you wouldn't do it. And so I think that's, that's helping people get over that first hump. But from there, obviously, money's just not going to roll in the door the same way with credit cards. You've got to learn more about the community. What makes them different, what makes them special, what do they like to donate to? And how can you approach them in different ways that might be unusual from what your standard major donor looks like.
- [45:58]
C
As you're talking about all this, I'm wondering, because you seem to like to, as you described it before, tear things apart and then put them back together in better ways and maybe in ways that the pieces themselves don't allow. So you're looking for new things too?
- [46:14]
A
Yeah.
- [46:16]
C
What does this not offer? So the current world of cryptocurrency, which you know so well and others are kind of dabbling in, has solved or has a potential to solve many of these problems. But what problems does it not solve that you're now trying to tear apart and put back together in new ways?
- [46:38]
A
That's a good question. Yeah, there's a lot of problems in the world that are probably never going to be solved. I work with a great organization called Day One in New York, and they do work with dating violence for young people 14 to 24. You're never going to live in a world where there's no domestic violence. You just can't. It's. You have to change every single human on the planet and every experience they have, it's not going to happen. You're always going to have that in society. The question is then how can you make that a better experience for victims? How can you help abusers so that they only do it once? And there's a lot of things that technology won't necessarily solve, and that's just something we need to work around. But I think that there's a lot of problems that technology can solve. And some of that might be the poverty issues that might lead to the stressors that cause domestic violence. Part of it is not necessarily thinking about what is that specific problem we're solving, but how can we predict what changes in society, what the knock on effects of those changes will be? That's something I work with organizations with as well, is how can you predict the impact of different societal shifts and different technologies on society? And then how is that going to change what is happening in the problem space you work in. So things you might not normally think about, you know, like, for example, this year airlines are going to save. Can't remember, it was like $170 million or some stupid amount of money they were going to save this year because. Because of Ozempic, because passengers are thinner and they spend less money on gas. How many airlines would have predicted that a particular medication was going to save them millions of dollars? But the same thing applies in the nonprofit sector, right? So if you're able to, you know, if you look at Colorado, for instance, Colorado rolled out statewide marijuana, and as a result of having state sanctioned marijuana, their domestic violence rates and their drunk driving rates dropped by some obnoxious amount. It was like 40% or something. So how many organizations working in domestic violence are like, our solution to this problem is to get marijuana in the state? Probably none of them. But these are These sort of 10x type of solutions that we need to be thinking about that might tackle more of the underlying issues and the societal shifts as opposed to these very specific kind of outputs or outcomes that happen as a result of these shifts. Wow.
- [49:20]
C
Yeah. I keep thinking about what you said about the guinea worm. And I mean, I know that story well. And the idea that you can envision a future that is unimaginable for people because the problems, it seems, they seem intractable. They seem so difficult and they're so real for people, but you can do it, and it's not impossible. And it's not just the tech, though. It's what you've been talking about right now. It's the imagination. The tech just facilitates it.
- [49:52]
A
That's something we see in the startup world where people have the ability to say, I'm going to throw whatever a million dollars at this company and it's going to grow very little in the first five years, and then it's going to explode. But we don't look for solutions like that in the impact space. In the same way we say, well, we want to get a bit more this year and a bit more next year. It's like, why don't you build a system and a structure where you tell donors, listen, you're going to get nothing for the first five years, and after that it's going to explode because we've developed a system that's going to create exponential change. And I'd love to see more of that type of thinking in the nonprofit space.
- [50:33]
C
You know, it really hasn't been that much time since you took that backpack into the Central African Republic. And then you're doing what you're doing now. Really hasn't been that long, but so much has happened. And I know it's because you've pursued it in this way. To find these solutions, I wonder, I often ask people what. What would they tell the younger version themselves? And here I wonder if that would have made a big difference or not. If you had known about these things, you know, when you were in your first iteration of yourself, would that have changed any of this? Or would you have just taken the same approach? Regardless of what technology existed or what problems you encountered, would it have been essentially ripping things apart and putting them back together in new ways?
- [51:25]
A
That's a hard question to answer, I think, because, I mean, part of why I shift between different, between tech and impact and all these things is an absolute pure frustration with the way things are done. And it was like, this is not good enough. I found this thing. I'm so excited about it. Like, what I learned about crypto, I've never been more excited about anything in my whole life. And it was fabulous, you know, and even now I've been in the space for how many years now? Like 14 years. I'm looking for the next thing. I want that next thing that I'm excited about because I'm like, okay, I think we've, we've done a lot of things. This industry is on a roll. Like, what's the next one that's going to help change hearts and minds and do some really good work? And I'm on the lookout. And I think part of that comes from the frustration of working with some of the people in the crypto space and them not working the way I want them to. And so part of it is like, how do you find the right technology, the right solution? And then part of it's, how do you find the right people to take that solution to solve those initial problems? And finding people with that mix of knowledge, of understanding the problem spaces in the nonprofit sector, but understanding technology, innovation, all of that and how to mix them, that's a rare, That's a rare person. And I'd love to see more of that. I'd love to see some school open, like a non profit, you know, global solutions type thing. So, yeah, it's an interesting. I've shifted through life, maybe with passion, but not necessarily a path, and that's been great.
- [53:05]
B
Well, that's it for this episode of the PM Podcast. You can learn more about Ann's work, including her book Bitcoin and the future of fundraising. At AnnConnelly IO our thanks to our sponsor, Evertrue, the global leader in donor engagement and fundraising intelligence, helping nonprofits find, engage and inspire their supporters. Our producer is Jack Frost and our theme music is Moving Out, Moving in by Jay Taylor, courtesy of Epidemic Sound. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe and check out our sister shows, Front Lines of Social Good and How to Raise, all part of the Philanthropy Mastermind series. Until next time, I'm Jay Frost.
- [53:45]
C
Thanks for joining me.