← Redefiners
Redefiners
Scaling Giving: How GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan Connects 190 Million People to Help Each Other
00:30:02
The term “crowdfunding” was coined in 2006 by entrepreneur and technologist, Michael Sullivan. The number of crowdfunding tools and companies have grown since then, but the purpose has remained the same—democratizing access to capital for those who...
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A
Call them change makers.
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Call them rule breakers.
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We call them redefiners.
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Hi, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Redefiners. I'm Tomas Chamorro, premucic, the chief science officer at Russell Reynolds. And as always, I am joined today by my curious co host, an amazing colleague and leadership advisor, Marla Oates. Hi, Marla.
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A
Hi, Tomas. What a lovely intro. It's so nice to see you.
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B
Likewise. Likewise. And we're in for a treat today, really, as everybody will see. But before we introduce our guests, let me remind our listeners that they can watch not just all of our episodes, but also episodes of our sister podcast, leadership lounge on YouTube, and that wherever they get the podcasts, they can hit that subscribe button and ensure they don't miss any episodes. We're also, as always, very interested in getting people's feedback. So give us your feedback and don't miss any further episodes.
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Today we're going to talk with the CEO of what is widely regarded as the biggest consumer giving website in the world. This is someone who, in the crowdfunding industry, has truly had an amazing impact on the globe.
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B
I can tell you that I have my own history with crowdfunding. The first time I did it, it was during Movember, you know, when men grow a mustache to raise awareness for prostate cancer or and, you know, kind of areas. I still remember traveling in South America and explaining this to people. And as I looked around the room, everybody actually had a real mustache. And they looked at me like, what are you talking about? What's the irony part of that? Now, we did a little bit of research, and it turns out that the first time the term crowdfunding was used was in 2006 by the entrepreneur and technologist Michael Sullivan. Although online fundraising started much earlier in 1997 with a British rock band, Marillion basically funded their tour through online donations.
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A
Well, the number of crowdfunding tools and companies has certainly grown a lot. The purpose really hasn't changed that much from when Marillion was asking fans to donate money for their band tour. The idea is to raise money for a cause by collecting donations from family, friends, strangers, businesses. It all sounds really simple, but we're going to find out today. There's actually quite a bit more complexity and psychology behind all of this. So let's dive in. Tomas.
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B
Absolutely. So our guest today is Tim Cadogan, who is the CEO of GoFundMe, where he and his team focus on accelerating the company's mission. I love this mission to help people help each other. Before joining GoFundMe. Tim was the CEO of OpenX, which he built into one of the world's largest ad exchanges. And during his time at Yahoo, he led the global advertisement business and ran the consumer search division. Tim is widely recognized as a voice in the media on giving and innovation and was recognized as a leading innovator in Times 2025 list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
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Wow. Tim, welcome to Redefiners.
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C
Thank you for that history lesson and great introduction. I'm really glad to be with you.
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Before we Talk specifically about GoFundMe, let's talk a little bit about how you got started. I understand that you, like me, grew up in a small village, but you grew up in England and eventually landed in the early days in the ad tech industry. Can you take a few minutes and just tell us about that journey?
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So I grew up in a. In a small place on the southern coast of England in a county called Dorset. But I wanted to go somewhere really big. So when I went to university I went to the biggest place in the uk, London. London School of Economics, had a great experience there. My first job was consulting Boston Consulting Group in London. It's a fantastic first job because you get to see a lot of different businesses and learn really, really quickly. And then I got lucky enough to be able to come to Stanford to go to business school and that was the mid-90s. Obviously the Internet had existed for some time, but it hadn't really become commercial. And I got into a startup in 1999, ended up at Yahoo a few years later and just loved the way that it changed behavior, that it changed economics, that you could build new businesses in new ways. And I've been doing that ever since.
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B
It must have been an amazing kind of era for idea generation and innovation. You didn't know what was coming. But talk to us a little bit about the transition from maybe kind of being more in the ad side of things to then more in the social impact side of things. Was that planned? Did one thing come up after the other? You know, what was the process?
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C
It was definitely a big shift. I mean, I Co found OpenX and we had a great run and I really enjoyed building a company. But after about a decade I just wanted to do something completely different. One of the things I enjoy most is learning and I think of life pretty much as an adventure and learning is the key part of that adventure. So I sort of had three things I wanted to do. I wanted to do something completely different. I wanted to get back to a Consumer business. And I wanted to see if I could work on a business that also had a really positive impact and a little bit of the shift. For me, it started around 2010, because while I was building my startup, I also became a search and rescue volunteer. We could actually go out when someone needed help and either rescue them or find them when they were lost and bring them back home safely. And that was just very, very powerful thing to be a part of. So I started wondering, could I take what I know about running companies and building teams and building technology and combine that with an aspect of that kind of impact on people's lives? And I got incredibly lucky that I was hired to become the next CEO of GoFundMe at the beginning of 2020, which really is one in a trillion, and it's such a privilege to be doing it.
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A
So, Tim, as I understand it, you stepped into the CEO role basically. The week Covid started, I think it was March 2nd, and by Friday, we were all living in the COVID world. Because of COVID I imagine there was probably some sudden increase in fundraising, and I'm sure that created a lot of complexity and growth. Can you tell us more about that time?
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C
I joined on March 2, 2020. By the end of that week, it had become clear that this was a global pandemic. So I had four days to meet people, and then the first Friday, I made the decision, based on the information that we were receiving, that we needed to start working remotely. I thought probably with many others that might be for about three weeks. I was thinking back on the SARS epidemic, some of the other things that happened, thinking, okay, well, I have no idea how to do this. I've never worked remotely. I've never run a company remotely. Most of my team hadn't. We're just going to have to figure this out, and we're going to have to figure it out really quick because our customers need us. So whatever was sort of difficult for us, that's nothing compared to what many of the people who needed our service in that time period was. We figured out a lot of things, not just about how we work, but how to support customers in these new situations at an incredible rate. And that year, year and a half, is a blur right now. It really is.
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You had alluded to growing and scaling, and I think what's really interesting about you, I mean, OpenX, you started it, you scaled it from zero revenue to be a successful company. And then with GoFundMe, it was about 10 billion in funds raised, and you scaled that to 40 billion in business. Tell us a little bit about, like, what does it take to scale? What does it take to grow?
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C
You have to have a very clear purpose. Tomas, you mentioned at the beginning you like our mission statement. Thank you for that. We actually created that a little bit. It was about a year, year and a half after I joined. But making that very, very clear and embedding that in every part of the organization so that every team, every individual, every meeting we're in adds back to how can we generate more help in the world, Making it operational. Not just a slogan on the wall, but an operational mission statement that imbues everything you do with purpose. The second thing is then having a strategy that's going to help you scale so you have your purpose. And I've learned this lesson. Like, I think one year at OpenEx, I had eight strategies. This is just way too many. So two or three things that ladder up to that and then mapping all the work to those. And then the third thing is spending a lot of time with the team to listen and to learn from them and to understand how to connect their work to those strategies and that purpose. I'll give you an example. One thing I did When I joined GoFundMe, as I said, I wanted to learn a lot. So I came up with a concept I called the Open Source curriculum. And I came up with the initial set of topics that I wanted the team to teach me about. And then, of course, it's open source. So I'm like, you add topics and you add in who should be the teachers. So I would sort of sit at the feet of typically like three to five people who are expert in an area, and they would teach me about the business, which was great because it's a great way to learn, and it's also a great way to show people that expertise and authority is distributed in the organization. I wasn't coming in saying, I know what to do here. I'm saying I'm here to help and I'm here to learn and you know what you're talking about. So if you go back, clear, mission, logical strategy, and then a lot of listening and helping connect the dots.
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B
Tim, we'd love to hear a little bit more about your leadership style and what you've learned in terms of managing people and leading teams. But before we do that, I'm just curious. It seems like there's disproportionate coverage on stuff that is negative, bad impact, individualistic, bad effect. Is it that we don't pay attention to all the Positive venture sites and initiatives that exist, such as yours, or are there a smaller part compared to the wider world of businesses in the digital sphere?
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C
There was a lot of belief in the promise that the Internet and this new technology could connect people in more effective ways. The irrelevant. It's done a mix of different things because as humans, we take a technology and it brings out the good in us and sometimes it brings out the bad in us. In our case, helping each other is one of the best parts of us as humans. And the important thing to understand about help is that it makes every situation better. It cannot always resolve the situation, obviously, but having other people help you makes people feel less alone, makes them feel more loved, and makes them feel that they don't have to go through this without the support of others. And that helps. In a way, what we're doing is we're saying, look, helping one another is inherent to us as humans. We are a social species. All we're doing is we're updating that for the digital era and we're making it work with the new technology, but we're not changing that fundamental human desire.
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B
Fantastic. And you mentioned already, Tim, the importance of purpose. It's clearly been a central part of your own career trajectory and path. You know, a lot of leaders talk about purpose, vision, et cetera. But what is the secret to building a purpose led organization? And talk to us a little bit about your leadership style, your own approach to kind of leading people and teams.
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I think purpose comes from your customers. I think every great business, every great organization has realized that there is a problem in the world, there's a challenge, and that they can and want to do something about it. So in our case, it is that we know that people need help. We know that it's very hard to ask for help and we want to solve that problem. And the way you bring that purpose to life is through customers and customer stories. We as an organization do a lot about telling customer stories to help them get attention and support. I do a lot in terms of traveling around and meeting customers and bringing their stories back to our company. We do that sometimes through videos. I lead every monthly meeting with a story about a customer. So I will tell those stories always to connect. Like, hey, the team that's working on our payments infrastructure, why does that matter? That matters. So I'll give an example of a customer I just met in Scotland. Carolyn and Freya can receive the funds that they have asked for help, receive that quickly and safely, and get the medical support that they need so that is at least my approach for how you sort of imbue purpose into the organization and into the culture.
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I think that's a great, super practical and relatable example that many CEOs can take in organizations. I want to shift gears a little bit. So you were CEO at at OpenX for 11 years and then you went to GoFundMe. And so during that period I understand you also transitioned to being the chair, moving on to the board. This shift from, you know, CEO to board member can be tricky. Tell us a little bit about how you shifted your focus, what you spent time on and what you gave up.
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C
I'd run OpenX with my partner, John Gentry, and he became the CEO. I'm using the past tense because John died in January and he was also my best friend. So it's a difficult thing to talk about, but we had a very natural partnership and so that was easy. And I think when you are on a board, it's not about you. You have a very particular role. You are not an operator. Doesn't matter if you were the co founder or the CEO, you're there to help, you're there to support and ask pointed questions and encourage, but you're not making the operating decisions. And I'd had a bunch of other board experience on other PE back boards and a public board. And so it was a pretty seamless transition. I had a very big, busy new job. And so I think if you move to being on a board and you don't have another job, then maybe you sort of find it a little harder to let go and maybe you're not quite so busy. But I think for folks who are busy, understand your role, understand the role has shifted and be the best possible advisor and supporter that you can be.
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A
First, Tim, we're sorry for your loss and thank you for sharing that practical advice. I mean, it sounds like you had a really nice transition. You know, tell us a little bit about how you were able to plan for such a easy succession.
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C
It was a being open with John and my investors and board at OpenEx that, you know, about a year before I'd said, hey, I think I would like to start thinking about doing something different. So there were no surprises. And then when I took the GoFundMe offer, I communicated that early and then I had a good transition. So it was very smooth. Obviously, once the team heard, they've been used to me being around. But this is the thing, organizations are very durable and they move on. And as long as you've got a good leadership team in place, which fortunately we had. It's going to be okay.
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We'll be right back with Tim Cadogan. But first let's hear from Emma Kuhn, leadership advisor and the UK Board Practice leader at Russell Reynolds. Emma is also the host of our brilliant sister podcast, Leadership Lounge, where she and our advisors answer some of the most pressing questions executives face. Today she will be sharing what it really takes to move from an executive role into the boardroom. For many senior executives, a board role
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is an alluring next step, but it's never been a straightforward one. And those challenges have only increased as the business landscape becomes more complex. So how do you know if you're ready for your first board role? And just as importantly, how do you succeed once you're there? In Leadership Lounge, we unpack the journey from executive to board director, what boards
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are really looking for, how to determine
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what the right opportunities are, and the behaviours that set the most effective board directors apart.
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We also look at how to build
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strong relationships in the boardroom and make a meaningful contribution from day one.
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To listen to the full episode, you
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can find it in our show notes or search Leadership Lounge, Boardroom Bound, wherever you get your podcasts.
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Now back to our conversation with Tim Cadogan.
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Tim, we've heard you speak a lot about the psychology of helping and a lot of the things you've learned through this journey, including what CEOs and leaders can apply to their style. When it comes to asking and giving help. Can you share some of the lessons learned and why this might be useful or important, particularly to CEOs who are often trying to optimize their style for seeming very strong, invincible, and might not be that vulnerable, not that open to kind of these behaviors.
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You don't get anything done without a team. I know there's talk about the billion dollar single person company now that maybe will emerge, but so far, at least when you run a company, it's a team. No one individual can do it all. In fact, no one individual can do even 5% of it. Every time you hire someone, what you're actually saying when you're recruiting for that role is you're saying, we need help doing this. I think there's also humility in that, which is like, we can't do this big thing we're trying to do without a lot of help from a lot of different people who are more expert in these areas than in certainly my case, than I am. I do think very much of leadership as a team sport in which the unit is what leads the company and the bigger unit is what is the company. And so, for example, when I recruit an executive, I'm first thinking I'm recruiting a leader of this company who has a certain expertise, not the other way around. My team laughs Because I use this example. But the strongest things on Earth are not single elements. They're compounds. One of the strongest things is tungsten carbide. It's a combination of tungsten and carbon, and it's incredibly strong. So the key is to find that group and then to mesh them so that the strengths and the different mindsets and the different personalities combine to create something much stronger than anyone could.
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Tim there's an emotional component to asking for and receiving help. I think of how people turn to GoFundMe at times when they're looking to raise money after some tragic loss or a natural disaster. And a key part of that is that human connection. You really need to share your personal story for people to feel the emotion to give. How are you using that emotion to play into your platform and the tools that you offer to fundraisers?
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C
When you give, you don't receive anything in the traditional economic sense. You don't receive a good or a service. When we help someone, we get something here, we do it because we feel it's either someone we love or someone we know and care about, or an organization that we care about. It's all driven by emotion. That's the whole motivator. I'll give you an example. I live in Altadena. That is one of the two areas of LA that was destroyed. We lost two thirds of our town. I have many, many, many, many friends and neighbors who lost everything. Many of them set up gofundmes or had gofundmes set up for them, which actually is very common in a crisis situation because there's so much trauma and shock that it takes someone else to do it for you. And they will very often tell me things like, the GoFundMe money was super helpful in getting me back on my feet. But what I didn't expect and was far more powerful was how it made me feel the love and support. I remember meeting a customer in the Palisades who had lost his home. He and his partner had lost the church they worked in that was adjacent. And he told me, you know, this GoFundMe represents an almost unfathomable amount of love. That emotional piece is so needed. It's just a really, really important part of what we do. Here's the really interesting part of this. So asking for help is really Difficult. Humans do not like asking for help, and they certainly don't like doing it publicly. But once you've asked for help, you open this door through which that love, support and help can flow. And conversely, it's very hard to help someone who hasn't asked. We recently launched a major new product, the Smart Fundraising Coach, which is all about how do we make it easier to ask for help? How do we help people feel less alone, less stressed, and more confident that they can actually do this? And it's a good thing to do, but it's a really interesting psychological and emotional dimensionality to the problem that we work on.
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Do you find this issue to be universal, or do you find cultural nuances or differences?
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I've talked to people from many countries, many cultures, many religions, and they will often tell me, in my culture, it's really hard to ask for help. And I sort of smile a little bit because I'm like, I have to tell you that everyone I've met has told me the same thing, from every culture, every creed, every country. To me, at least, it is universal that it's hard to help, and it's also universal that we like to help. So it's a really fascinating problem.
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B
Tim, we managed to almost come to the end of the interview without asking you about AI, but it's impossible not to, not least because you've been in the tech space for almost three decades. I'm sure you've seen it all before, but, you know, with everybody talking about this as if it's the end of the world or the solution to all of our problems, where do you stand? How is your business using it, and what should we be thinking about it when we think about AI today and
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C
in the near future, in our case, it's interesting. So in terms of the core of what we do that is inherently human, but AI can be extremely helpful to our customers. Smart Fundraising Coach. It uses AI to create a personalized coach for every person who's asking for help that draws on the knowledge that we've garnered from having over 30 million people fundraise on GoFundMe. The dream here is I know how anxious people are when they're setting up a GoFundMe, and I want to handhold every single one of them with the most empathetic coach to help them through all the steps. And there are a lot of steps to being an effective fundraiser, and some of them, as we talked about, are psychologically hard. Obviously, we can't do that with humans. There are thousands and thousands of people starting GoFundMes every day. But now with AI, we can give them that. And even leading up to that, we'd woven AI into our features over the last 18 months and had users use those AI power features over 80 million times. So it's already proving very helpful for helping our customers help each other. Like most tech companies, we are certainly using it internally, not just in product and technology, but in marketing and finance in many of different areas to help us do our work as well.
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B
You made me think of all the data and the studies that have shown that people are often more inclined to ask help to ChatGPT or AI than another human. Right. Which backs your point. We seem to have maybe an inhibition that applies to other people, but not so much to AI.
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It's fascinating. We have seen that 65 to 75% of the folks we surveyed were less stressed, felt more confident, and critically felt less alone when they used the smart fundraising coach versus the traditional way of doing things, which is exactly what we're going for in our business. The functional benefits are very important, the functional things people need. But the emotional aspect of it is so critical weaving that in. So I'm really hopeful for how much further we can take this.
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A
That's terrific. You've had this amazing career to date, Tim. Just incredible experiences. Two time CEO board experiences. Looking back, was there a redefiner moment that really helped shape your career or perhaps how you think about leadership?
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I mean, I think for me the clear inflection point was starting at GoFundMe. It's a transformational organization and at the time I came in and having to learn at that insane rate given the onset of the pandemic. So learning what we did and how to apply it in this new situation and how to get my arms around how to lead a team and recruit into a team, doing it all virtually just multidimensional, multifactorial change and learning rate and just that sort of sense of privilege to work on the problems that we work on while at the same time. Definitely a redefining moment.
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B
So, Tim, are you ready for the final section of this conversation, which is our rapid fire question?
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Sure, absolutely. Let's see where you take us.
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Good. So let's go. Remember, short answers will be fine and don't overthink it.
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C
Yeah.
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B
Okay. So first, what is your favorite method of exercise?
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C
Oh, I'm a trail runner.
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A
If you were to devote the rest of your life to philanthropy, what cause would you choose?
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I'd actually focus on what I'm doing right now, which is how to solve the problem of making it easier to ask for help.
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What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?
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C
Be multifaceted.
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What is one important skill every person should have?
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Be a really good listener.
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What do you wish you had learned sooner?
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I'm a fairly quiet person by nature. I wish I'd learned to be a little bit more proactive about getting out there and meeting people and having conversations. Because to my point about listening, there's so much to learn. I think that's a very valuable thing
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if you had more time. What is one subject you'd like to learn more about?
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I did my undergrad in politics and history, so I would read more, learn more. That would definitely be it.
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And the final one, Tim. Define what success means to you in five words or less.
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Generate more help in the world.
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B
So this has been a fascinating conversation. We've heard about an amazing leader, a great trajectory from a small town near Dorset to a meteoric rise through lse, bcg, Stanford, and managing to be at the epicenter of the tech boom, the first one, and a successful career that included founding a business, scaling it, two CEO appointments, and really what sticks with me is this amazing ability to combine purposeful leadership with a mission based business, an incredibly humble and soothing leadership style that comes across in every answer, and a desire to learn. And what I think is one of the most amazing and inspiring missions we've heard in a long time to make it easier for people to ask for help and receive help. So in essence, how can we apply the latest advancements in technology, including AI, to make the world more pro social and make it easier for people to receive help. So it has been an inspiring conversation. Thanks so much Tim. It's been great having you.
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C
Thank you guys. Take care.
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B
All right.