Revolutionizing Philanthropy: The Role of Technology. Arthur's Round Table Episode.

0:00 OK, Hello. Welcome, everybody. Thanks for joining another episode of Arthur's Round Table. Alex and I have known each other for just a short period of time, but we've gotten well acquainted and he's doing some really cool stuff for philanthropy and also business structure. So super happy to have Alex with us today. Welcome. Thanks for being here. Alex. You want to just give everybody a little background on your journey and then let's get into the weeds about DAF Share. Sounds good? Well, I think to go way back and start at the beginning, I was fortunate enough to be at the University of Minnesota in about 1995 when there wasn't a graphical Internet yet.

0:40 It was still just text. And after I saw it, I kind of got hooked. And then I went to another school the following year, and they boxed through the computer lab and tried to find geeks to build the college's website. And I have to be one of them. And I started out as a programmer, eventually realized I wasn't as good a programmer as some of the others. So I became a graphic designer. So then I realized there were better graphic designers. And so almost accidentally, I started my first company. I actually had a professor that tried to recruit me to build his law firm website and made a deal with me that he'd help me start my company if I could build their firm's website.

1:21 And he introduced me to some of his friends. So that was kind of my foray into technology, specifically the Internet. Since then, that company that I first started ended up going pretty well, but it was pretty boring. We just built websites. We did it for some, you know, Fortune 500 companies, etcetera. And got to a point where we were able to sort of exit from that and figure out what we wanted to do when we said, we, we love everything we do, but we, we don't want to work with clients anymore. So we started doing our own things. And so I've, I've started a number of companies since then or sort of been sort of ACTO for hire. And, you know, regardless of, you know, when I grow up wanting to be a programmer and a designer and all those things, I'm basically the sales guy and the, and the, you know, the visionary because I've seen this from the beginning and I've seen, you know, even today with what I've started now you've got a fairly new industry that hasn't really been affected a lot by technology.

2:26 It's starting to happen. But you see that, you see the same things I saw when I was going door to door. So on websites where people were saying, you know, this Internet thing's never going to stick around. It's just a fad, you know, having those same conversations today. So it feels like Deja vu sometime. No, it is. And, and actually even going way back to that time in about 1999, one of the really formative projects that we did, we worked with a company that was basically saw them as a print company, but they did plan giving content. So you could, you know, get a newsletter and slap your logo on it and have your gift directors contact info. And we built their entire digital strategy and really, I mean, created them as the in a somewhat niche industry.

3:11 They became the leader by far because of the technology that was implemented. And they're still going strong today. But at a very young age, I got thrown into things like charitable remainder trusts and gift annuities and things that I had no idea what those were as a, you know, 25 year old kid still trying to make a company out of it. But I got very, very, you know, like anything, any project we did, we dug so deep that we got, we really understood the content, not just the technology we're building. And so throughout my career, it's, it's stuck with me. I mean, we've done auction platforms. We were one of the I think we think we will probably hold the record for the most successful crowd independently run crowd funding campaign.

3:56 And the only reason we'll hold that title is because then the rules came out and so you can't do what we did anymore. But we, you know, so we had a lot of experiences that it all sort of came back to, you know, there's an angle in philanthropy here and there's, there's just something about, I think the base of the Internet, whether it's, I mean, in today, it's, I don't care if you're talking to AI or you're talking, you know, digital assets or blockchain, it's kind of redefining something that's fundamental. And when I you come back to philanthropy, it's about as fundamental as it gets. I mean, it may be the, you know, world's oldest profession. I know that's debatable, but it's, you know. Although the first one's helping people out too, but in a different way. Yeah, yes.

4:40 Very true. Explain the gap that you identified. That might be a good place. Well. I, I think it's, well, I think there's, it's a gap, but it's also sort of an intersection. I mean, I think you ended up Fintech, believe it or not, is relatively new. I mean, even though we've had the the Paypal's of the world and things like that, like the idea of just redefining some of these systems that don't work well and specifically don't work well with sort of the modern, you know, whether it's the technology or the ecosystem. You know, Fintech was revolutionizing some things. If you look at most, I mean philanthropy or charitable giving, however you want to define it might be the only industry left that still does more checks than digital transactions. And that's somewhat shocking to me. And it's also, I mean, if you, if you, and again, I'm just given where I started in the things that happened in the early part of my career.

5:38 You think of this idea that what of e-commerce before on Amazon. And it's literally everybody competing for attention. Go to your own site, put in your credit card, especially in a day when nobody thought you'd ever put a credit card online and everybody competing against each other one off. And inevitably, unless you've got gigantic budgets, you're not going to win. Well, I don't care what you're selling now and how much you're selling through your website. If you're not on Amazon, you're missing 80% of your sales. And so I see philanthropy specifically, if you look at it from the nonprofit standpoint, that's exactly where we are today. Everybody is competing with their website, cold calls, robocalls, mailers.

6:23 I mean, it's, it's almost like nothing's changed from when I started. And so as we went through this and we saw sort of the inefficiencies and even one of the big things I think that came about was just the rise of donor advised fund. You know, those became, they've been around since like the 60s or 70s, but in the last 20 years they've grown. Why do you? And and if if you look at the growth in philanthropy as as a whole, it's basically can be attributed. To the group I. Think it's because it just became easier, you know? And even though it's not super technological, the bar for starting our private foundation keeps moving up because if you're not not doing it to employ your family members, if you're not doing it because you want that much control, if you're doing it really for the purpose of generosity, why wouldn't you use a shared model where you don't have to cover the back end, you don't have to color due diligence, taxes, legal, everything like that.

7:26 So, you know, I could start a Family Foundation, but unless I'm pretty sizable, it doesn't make sense with the overhead. And even if it does, what we're finding a lot of right now is even the people who have want that control have significant well they're using donor advised funds almost like budgets like here. OK, we're going to give away. We, you know, by law we have to get 5% away this year of our assets that are in our private foundation. Well, it's still legal and I think will be for quite a while to give that to a DAF and then to send it out from there. So it just makes it easier instead of going, oh, shoot, we for, you know, that one check didn't get cashed.

8:09 And so now we're under our required distribution. OK, let's use Dafs as a budgeting tool. And and I think it also brought people in that could never afford to cover the overhead of a private foundation, but make enough money that there's a tax benefit. And I mean, you have to give the United States a little, even the IRSA little credit there. We have a good system that allows us to be self determinate, determinant on what help we want to go out, You know, and I think if we've learned anything over the last, call it decade or so, you can't really count on the government doing the things that you think are needed, no matter which side you're on.

8:50 You know, paying your taxes is not a charitable act. So, so I think that I think all that factors in and I think the trend, no. I'm sorry, I was saying aside from the scaling challenges of a foundation, what else has caused Daffs to become so popular? Well. I I think there's also a negative trend that I think is affecting this in some ways, which is even though the dollars continue to go up, that's given to charity, the number of people keeps going down. And I think it's a real concern, not just not just for the charities themselves, which it is to them. And even, and even a lot of the Daffs are going our, our customer is, you know, kind of phasing out it's, you know, and, and when it goes to the next generation, are we going to get, is it going to be similar?

9:43 Is it going to be invested in the same place in the same way? Is it that sort of thing? And really we, like I said, we still are in an industry that's based on a lot of paper and based on a lot of things that if you don't, if we look at our kids, how much of you know, what happens in philanthropy? Have they even ever experienced, you know, they ever reconciled A checkbook? Have they ever, you know, open a piece of mail? And so, so charities are asking themselves what happens to us when our when our donors age out. But even the Dafts themselves are at a point where, you know, they're, they're going, hey, 70% of our client base or our DAF holders are not going to be around 20 years from now. And the younger generation is just nothing's been done to excite them about it.

10:32 You know, they have either gimmicky things like, you know, I'll round up at the pump for Saint Jude or something like that. But look at what they do all day. Look at how they act, look at how they interact with each other. I mean, if you, if you have a teenage kid, which fortunately I do, I mean, if without those devices, you would be isolated, you know, and that's how they do everything. And so, you know, building things that are going to accommodate that next generation. And frankly, you've also got, you know, next generation of family offices, of family foundations that are going to do things differently. So if you're sitting on your laurels and just going, hey, that you know that money will come in forever and not making an attempt to connect with the next generation and. In this case, could be out.

11:21 For rude awakening. Daf share seek to mitigate that problem. For example, I. Think there's a number of ways. I mean, the one thing that we've done because there's DAF share is actually 2 entities or two organizations. There's the Fintech that runs the platform, runs the technology, etcetera. But then because we couldn't find any donor advised funds sophisticated enough to want to work with us, we had to create our own. So on the donor advised funds side itself, what we've really focused on is just making it portable. I mean, being able to literally say, Hey, I've got money in my DAF and I can give it to somebody else that might be a family member. There are companies now building Daffs where they're funding their employees, they're matching everything.

12:06 That it's nothing new in the sense that, you know, companies have done that for a long time, except just like philanthropy itself, it's a huge HR based paper process. And you know, it it, it gets, it gets underutilized to put it nicely. And so we've made it portable and we've also just tried to make it fun. I mean, we have, there are, there are really two groups of givers and, and, and I mean, there's Shades of Grey in between, but there are people who are, who have been fortunate enough, who have charitable assets, who are really the driving force and giving. And then on the flip side of that, you've got the people that have good hearts, maybe early in their lives, early in their careers, but it takes both of those coming together to make a cause successful.

12:54 And so being able to make that interaction and bring both people to the table is really what the entire platform is built around. We've got some sort of sillier and more fun based features, like you can play a game for your favorite charity, but the core of it is really just the donor communities that get built around every I. Think where we left off was bringing the two platforms together. Nope, sorry. Say that again. So I think where we left off is bringing the two platforms together, OK. And let me try to I I actually did finish even after you fell off. Yeah, right. And I think it was reported. I don't. It usually fixes itself, so I can't explain what's going on here, but let's just continue, no?

13:37 Worries, OK, so let me let me reset. So OK, the the two companies we've created, the fintech, that's who runs the platform, would create the donor advise fund and there's sort of innovations that exist within each. The technology itself is much more social, much more dynamic. There's 1.5 million donor communities based on a charity or whatever the charity is. There are things like being able to bring other people in there. You can, you can share your DAF with other people so you can give them the rights to give the money away. You still get the tax write off. Obviously you have companies that are doing it and funding basically their company DAF giving some of those funds to employees in their own Daf's, matching those and then you know, sort of building an internal community. So everything is, you know, it's like I said, it's, it's, it's innovation in that it's taking technology that's already been proven out and is a big part of our lives and applied into this industry.

14:41 And then on the donor advice fund side, one of the things that that's allowed us to do is things like games and contests and have some fun with it because it really the donor advise fund financial vehicle is what's really important to us. Being able to use that vehicle to do a lot of things that you couldn't if it was peer-to-peer or it was a, you know, it was, it was some other system. And so between those two things, what you've got is people who have the assets, who can deploy the assets more effectively and in the process bring in the people that you need to, you know, create a community to create a ecosystem of donors that aren't, you know, either dependent on one big donor or, you know, the economy goes down and all of your $30 donors are gone.

15:29 So it it creates basically sustainable donor communities that benefits all people, all parties involved. So let's use an example like who is your customer and once they become a customer, what happens the? Customers are donors. Period. What we're trying to do is make it easier, more effective. Everything we've got built is built around donors. If you think of privacy, which is important to a lot of donors, you can give anonymously. You can give as an entity like a company or a family office or Family Foundation more specifically, or you can give completely publicly if that's what you're looking for, If you're looking for, you know, hey, I'm kicking this off. I have some name recognition, you know, people are going to not only want to join the charities that I'm supporting, but are going to want to follow me. And so it allows the sort of family foundations to be the influencers.

16:26 And, and so sorry, I've got a reset on that one. Ask the question. No, no, I was. It's the ideal customer for you. It's the donor. OK, sorry. So the customer is the donor. We we built everything we built around the donor, whether it's privacy, whether it's the investment side, some of it benefits the donor, but also it has some scalability for the nonprofit, like most nonprofits today can take Bitcoin if you wanted to. And obviously there are a lot of people who are wanting to lock in some of their gains on Bitcoin and realizing, wow, there's a huge tax obligation to doing that. So we have the ability to do that in one place. You can decide to keep that in Bitcoin and as your charitable assets or you can liquidate it and do something else or you can give it away.

17:17 But for most charities, that's that's a very difficult task. And same thing applies to a lesser extent to securities, etcetera. Donors are 100% our customer. That's what this is built for. And if I hear a DAF, for example, and by definition is a donor advised fund, right, can I just place it on your platform and then enjoy the benefits of your Fintech stack to do the sort of things that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do? You made a great example with donating Bitcoin and selling it or not selling it. So somebody with a DAF presently is a good potential customer for you because that's a donor. Certainly, certainly and, and even going a level further, so are the Dafts themselves, because a lot of the, the Dafts that are out there and again, they, they have billions and billions of dollars if you look at a Fidelity or a Schwab or any of the big ones.

18:17 But right now they have to transfer the money over. Eventually we'll be working directly with those Dafts. So it's just like plug in a bank account on Amazon. So, so that's why again, where we were sort of reluctantly forced to create the DAF, what happened as a result, as we found some ways to innovate within the space because it was a necessary evil, but now it's become even an advantage. And so when someone's considering executing a DAF to do whatever tax planning or charitable intent they could put into Fidelity and then ask Fidelity to use your platform or they could contribute to your DAF and then enjoy the benefits.

18:59 Without that, I'm not saying Fidelity's an encumbrance, but without that for example, well. They certainly can't do the social aspect or the fun aspect of what our platform does. You know, Fidelity, God bless them, they made the industry. They have billions and billions of assets and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of DAF holders. But it's about as sophisticated as online bill pay right now. You look up who you're going to pay and you send them a check. That's exactly the sophistication that they have. So I will say the vast majority of our customers to put it in the term you used our current DAF holders and or private foundations that are moving their money from other Dafs into us so they can do more with it. So it becomes sort of a hey, I'm maybe they don't move their whole DAF, but they say, hey, here's what I'm going to give away this year.

19:58 So I'm going to just, I'm just going to move that over. And then I'll just, I'll just leave my investments in Fidelity because I don't want to mess with that. You know, but more and more we're seeing people also go, hey, I'm let's skip, let's skip the fidelity step. Let's put it in this DAF because we can put it to use. And frankly, I mean, there's a huge term in any family office of capacity Guild building grants. And we want to build capacity. We don't want to be on the hook that if we decide to give to someone else next year, your organization's going to go under. And this is, I mean, this is really the digital embodiment of capacity building. You know, if you did a matching grant through our platform A, it's only going to trigger if other people give to it. And those could be 10-50 hundred thousand, you know, any size donations, but that's going to be people across the age spectrum, across the income spectrum, you know, and I think of the other thing too, if you look at the way charities approached their donors, they really focus on the biggest donors.

21:01 And so, you know, that person that might be going to your college right now, that five years from now is going to have the next big start up, the next big clothing company, whatever it might be. They've been ignored by use the entire time. But if they came in because of this, the biggest thing about our system that has proven out is nothing breeds generosity like seeing other people do generosity. So I see someone stepping up wants to make a big gift. Maybe I'm a kid in college. Maybe I'm, you know, maybe I'm a third year resident or first year resident that 10 years from now I'm going to be a neurosurgeon and I'm going to have a lot more money than time and I'm going to need a tax write off.

21:48 Well, they're only coming to you when they need something and it's not their fault. I don't blame the charities because that's how it works. You prospect, you sell. And do you want to put that time into someone who's going to donate 50 bucks to you? No, this is wealth managers have the same problem, but they at least have technology options that say, hey, you don't have enough assets for us to work with you. But here, use something like Betterment. We'll keep track of it. We can have a call once a year. And then when you're, you know, when your income is such that it requires individual attention, we can do that. Well, I mean, essentially that's what our platform does. So if somebody were in Fidelity or just let's pick on them for a little while and they're super happy with the investments, they could come all over, overlay your FIN, your your program on the investments that currently exist without having to move assets in the current investments. Does that work?

22:45 Not yet. I mean, there's there's also there's there's so there's a couple of pieces here, right? There's one is just right now we are the only, we, our DAF is the only DAF that our platform supports. We are working with a number of other Dafs right now to get to that point. We're not there yet. But the other side of it, I mean, there's a sorry for being corny here, but there's a, there's an old saying in philanthropy. Friends don't let friends give cash. And it's true because if you're given cash, you already paid the tax on it. You did this, yeah, you're going to get a little deduction, but it's, it's going to pale in comparison to if you would have given that away to begin with. So be being able to give the stock is a lot more valuable, especially to the donor then to, to, to write a check or to, you know, all the things that are being done today and smart big philanthropies that have, you know, people on staff to handle that, they do it.

23:40 But it's why that gap is widening more and more is if you don't have those resources and, you know, Betty, who's a volunteer on Thursdays, is the one taking that call. She has no idea what you're talking about. To be able. To kind of just, you know, turn it into a financial machine of of fintech in its pure sense is key. So in my example, forget about Fidelity, I've got shares from a company that I've exited. I need the tax deduction. The DAF is one that my advisors have recommended. I have the shares of that company which have a low basis and a high amount of margin.

24:22 And so I donate those to your DAF and they sit in that form on the balance sheet and that's that. You get full value for it and you get the full write off for it so that the basis actually ends up not meaning much. I'm not a tax guy, so I'm going to tread lightly in that area, but that that's exactly why you do it. And, and even back to the Bitcoin example from before, there are a lot of people that said, if it, if Bitcoin ever hits, OK, I'm going to take some out because I want to realize my gains because, you know, hey, I bought it for 20 grand 10 years ago or whatever it was. I'm going to cash in a little of that. A lot of people don't even realize just by selling that you've got a tax obligation.

25:07 So if you actually give those away, you can, you can offset that tax application or tax obligation considerably. And securities are no different. I mean to the IRS, they don't care which it is. Doesn't matter. Yeah, they. Just know if you do it wrong, they can they can charge you more, yeah. So let's, for the benefit of the audience and those that might want to invest in your company, how do you make money? And let's just use our current example where somebody puts shares in that haven't been liquidated. And so in order for you to make money, there's got to be some cash, I imagine. So let's talk about that.

25:49 Well, in a lot of ways we've sort of reversed the process because if, if you took your advisors advice and said, hey, I'm just going to put this in a DAF and it doesn't matter who it is, they're they all pretty much work the same. They charge a fee on assets under management, you know, it's call it one percentage .100 basis points, whatever. And you can find ones that do more and less, and there are some that are cheaper. Normal fee structure, yeah. Exactly. So that money sits there, you could leave it there in perpetuity because unlike a private foundation where you do have to give a certain percentage of your assets away every year, in ADAF you don't, it's a public charity. So you could leave it there.

26:30 It could never go to charity and you just keep growing then that's great. But we, one of the reasons that we exist is to get people giving. So our business model is on the other end. We actually as a DAF, we are a no fee DAF. We don't, you don't charge a penny because we would rather your assets grow the most they could not, but taking fees out at that point. And we trust our technology. We trust the sort of infectious, you know, viral nature. I hate to, it's such an overused word that I hate that word, but it is engaging. So you're actively giving more, you're giving to more groups, you're seeing other people give as well. We make money on that end.

27:16 And, and, and that even is dependent on how involved the charity is. So if we have a charity that you're giving to that has never even logged onto the platform, we are still cultivating, marketing, building things to help that grow independent of the charity itself. And that money still does go to the charity and, and in that case, there's a higher fee. If they're involved in their thinking, their donors and they're giving updates on what's going on, they're talking about the current event, then they pay a lower fee. OK, so let's let's go through that through line. I donate $10 million at my arguably private, illiquid shares.

28:02 Then I want to donate to a charity through my DAF. I do that by borrowing against the shares, liquidating them, somehow socializing me, making that donation to the charity on your platform. Others come in and see me doing it. How's that work? Well, the simplest way to cover that first part is right now in order to give you more likely will liquidate some of those shares. And so if they are illiquid shares, that becomes difficult. There are some Dafts that will do that. We right now are not it. We have not added that yet. But if they are marketable securities, then you'll sell whatever portion that you want to fund. You can, you can pledge your donation even without doing that.

28:48 You just have to eventually liquidate and and fulfill that pledge. So once that happens, then you make a gift. The socialization happens anyways. In fact, I mean, I'm, I'm literally looking at my screen that I had up before we started and there's an organization that just, I don't know who it's anonymous donation, just got a donation because somebody last week played football for that charity. So the act of giving is the promotion. Now, if the charity's on top of things and they're posting information, they're thinking they're donors, they're even reposting things, then I mean, it's just like it's, it's like any of the platforms we use. If you're on LinkedIn right now and you see my post, that's a miracle because if you log in 5 minutes from now, you're not going to scroll far enough to found. Exactly.

29:35 The feed's going to go down, right? Yeah. Exactly. So for us it is. It's about activity much more than it is about, you know, the size of the donation or kind of the entire, I don't know, infrastructure that the current philanthropy or charitable fundraising, especially world is built on. And so how would a charity, once they acknowledge that this donor executed a donation, is it like the LinkedIn feed where it gets buried? Or can they come in and see what happened and then socialize that with their other donor base? Well, and it's actually built for the entire donor base because there's, there's two sides to it. There's my feed, which is influenced by whatever whoever I've given to.

30:18 But there's also every single charity has their own feed. Just like I mentioned earlier, a company has their own feed. And it's kind of like a lot of these things get married together because right now we've got a number of companies using this where it's really just a weekly Pro Football pick a office pool and everybody's having fun. And then the winner, all of it goes to their charity, you know, and that too, is it it the technology is, you know, I, I would say a slight innovation, but using a Daff for that's unheard of. So that the, the innovation is really in making Daffs do something that and, and, and Daffs are interesting too, because when they were first created, they were an idea that was to like almost get around the rules. You know, any DAF you ever sign up for, the first thing you will read is once you make this donation, it is not yours. And we have no obligation to do anything you tell us. So help me God forever and ever.

31:19 Now, obviously they respect that. And if you say, hey, give the money to this group, they're going to do that. But it is, you know, that that they were kind of a hack to begin with. But then since they figured that out and they've kind of gotten into the financial world, innovation stopped. And so now we're doing some things with it where it yeah, don't you can, you can give your rights to someone else. You can't give your tax write off to someone else. I think there'd be problems with that. But it lets you involve other people. It lets you show what you're doing. And even if you do it anonymously on that charity's page, you still see the anonymous donation. That's one of the problems with anonymous donations is they go, OK, we can't even say who did it, but here you at least you see the donation. And again, because we're built for the donor, it's up to them. Yeah, so we're not in the business either one of us are giving tax advice, but let's just say that's Yeah, super cool.

32:19 I can't give my deduction away, which I don't want to no, and I can't direct the money where it goes in the DAF, correct? You can, you can. I mean you both on the gift side and the investment side, you are in control. OK. But what you can't do with any other DAF right now is give it to somebody else. And in your case, you can give the rights of your donation capacity to somebody, which is super cool. Is that correct? It is. It is. Well, I sent you an invite to give you some of my DAF so that that's that's what you did. Yes, you did, and I've done absolutely nothing with it.

33:02 Not, and I watch football all the time. Exactly. We'll see you next week on that then. Yeah, well, tonight can I do tonight? Monday Night Football, right? Well, you can, except now you're way behind that because you've already lost all the the Thursday games, the Sunday games. You're not going to win this week with one win next week. You got to get in for all. Yeah. And, and but just to break that apart so it doesn't just sound like we're silly football people. Yeah. That's fine to. Break that apart. What we're essentially doing is what ADAF is to begin with. When you make that, when you sign that agreement and say it's not my money, I'm giving it to you and we don't have to do what you say, but we probably will. We're doing the same thing to say, hey, if we all want to play a game and we all throw our money in, then the person that decides is just the one person that want. So we did it with March Madness.

33:56 We did it with that. And, and again, when you make this financial vehicle that portable, it's a platform in and of itself. We've joked about some of the and not really joked, but like, could you do Clash of Clans and go raid other villages and steal people's death money? Now, like I said, we haven't done it, but the possibilities are almost endless. And the beauty of this is everybody's afraid of not just gambling because you've got the gaming laws, but there's a whole huge set of regulations around charitable gambling. This is neither. This is literally just a creative way to give money away with other people. Yeah, that's super cool.

34:41 Yeah, I could see where you could take that and really involve a lot of people and raise the awareness of the charity. Well, and I think that I mean, there's another side of it too, which is just the what I would almost call the marketplace or, you know, probably better set as the App Store. I mean, you know, how many games are out there that have been built that never really figured out how to monetize themselves? Yeah, totally here. OK, so. Plug in our our back end, plug in our financial engine and you can make money off of it because that fee that comes when that money is given away is something we share with the developers. So if we're not the smartest game people in the world, and I'm sure we're not, that's OK because we've built the financial backbone for it.

35:25 And again, games are one piece of what we do, but it's part of any, I mean, think of anything you, you belong to a church or a synagogue, you go play bingo. Why? Because there are other people there. Maybe the kids come along. You bring multi generations like we're losing that physical communal, you know, sense that exists around just the idea of helping others, especially if you're fortunate enough to do so. And now we're bringing that back. But we're bringing it back in a way that people interact today and doesn't replace the face to face. It does replace the human element, but it does enhance it and it does make it a lot more available. I mean, just how often can you give cash to somebody these days? I don't know about you, but I don't ever have cash on me. It's like, do you have Venmo?

36:13 I can. Venmo, Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I could see this and you're probably doing it totally replacing the office pool, right, which is what you've done with the football thing, right? Yes, yes, yeah, it's and right now we're early in, in a lot of, I mean, one of the things we have built good technology, but we have not focused on just hey, get all the eyeballs, get all the users, etcetera. We have really studied and even obsessed about how people use it, how they're doing it and the companies that have come on board so far every game you can just go look, it's everybody in the office.

36:53 It's it's their office pool. And so it's, and it's not just the office pool, but I think it's, it's also growing into a perk like you, you might not like football, fine, but you still get $200 every year to give away to your favorite charity. And we'll even match that $200.00 with a gift from the company. And for the company, it's a huge win because it's almost like they're sending their people out to do good in the community. And then all of a sudden the company comes on top and puts their donation in as well. It's one of the most effective advertising you could ever do. If you're a huge supporter of the local dog shelter and you see some company, you never even, you know, realize they gave any money away, but actually see even a small gift, you're like, wow, I will start shopping there. I still, I will, I will stop by, you know, and it happens organically because it's their employees given to who they care about and them supporting it with their name and their company name as well.

37:53 So you're, you're seeing this become a perk. And it's not just that I can. I can go to HR and fill out a bunch of paperwork and you might pay me back for the money I gave to somebody. Right, it's. Real time it's active. Yeah, we've talked about this. There's buckets of money for matching programs that goes unused on the company balance sheets, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, it's extraordinary. My numbers are outdated, but I mean it. I said something like 64% of the money set aside for corporate giving or, you know, corporate social responsibility of whatever, whatever label you put on it, I think 64% goes unused.

38:33 And then you've got others there. There's a, a family office that we're working with right now that I, I have to tip my hat to them, but they're, they have literally A5 match. If you give $1000 to the charity you choose, they'll give $5000 on top of it, you know, and again, they deal in philanthropy. So that makes sense. But to be able to automate those things and not make them these things to get done is half the people, I mean, it's even right now. I, I don't, I don't have the numbers on this. But I can tell you at every gala, the whether it's the silent auction or the everybody stand up who wants to give $1000 or anything like that, half of the people in there put it on their credit card even though they have money in the debt because it's just not convenient.

39:22 It's not convenient, but you fix that right? Which is no no small problem to fix. Well, and what I would say is we've built the infrastructure to fix any of those from we've fixed a number of them. We've addressed the ones that are sort of the low hanging fruit. But the underlying infrastructure if I want to call it or the vehicle, the financial vehicle itself can lend itself to any of those things. And how far it goes, I don't know. Can you have a debit card that you can use only with a nonprofit and therefore right up that table you can win the signed basketball or whatever it is? Well, that that works in the healthcare where the healthcare companies give you a debit card that only can be used for certain purchases, but it's part of the benefit program, so I meant it to. Health savings accounts, yes.

40:15 Yeah. And I, and I almost see, I mean, I see if you, if you marry those two, the, that angle with the corporate, you know, employee benefits angle got the same thing where, you know, HS as 20 years ago were kind of novel. Now you've got people handing $1,000,000 health savings gone down to their heirs because they, you know, put money in it. They. Needed the money. Didn't didn't get sick. We've got the same sort of thing where you know, you keep, you put this in the company, money keeps getting shoveled into it. It's invested in the market by default or or whatever you want, maybe Bitcoin or some crypto or whatever it is. You end up with a fortune you didn't know you had. Whether you utilize that or whether you pass that on or whether you break it up and share it with a bunch of people becomes pretty exciting.

41:07 So let's talk about you're raising money now, but before we talk about that, what is it that if the people listening to this felt like helping out would be helpful to you one. 100% the people who are I would call influential or major donors or people who have charitable assets, specifically private foundations right now, whether they admit it or not, they are leading the world of philanthropy. For them to get on board and to use their influence to build this across all the different groups, all the different economic levels, they could provide so much more impact to the charities that they support if they used our platform.

41:55 So as much as I definitely, we are raising money, we are, you know what we are getting investors in and it's great. And we need that to scale. That's not our main focus right now. Our main focus is finding some philanthropy partners who aren't satisfied with the status quo. And, and, and I will say most family foundations are run by people that benefit from the status quo. And so they're OK writing the checks and doing the back end, you know, whatever they do. And so we, we have to find partners who see the vision and who see, you know, philanthropy just cannot continue this way for another 20-30 years.

42:40 It's something's got to change. And they can be part of the story of what changes. So there's a the number of companies that actively seek to be the backbone for foundations on behalf of donors. You know, every financial institution has one and then there's foundation source. Are there foundation source a customer that like or do they want to keep their hands around the cookies and you're a threat to them that? Is a really good question, and it's a good question. First, good question of the month. No, well, it's, and maybe it maybe even even better stated, it's a complicated question because you're, you're not asking about facts or reality or anything else. What you're asking about is what's people's emotional reaction to, to change.

43:38 And so I can tell you having spoken with a lot of companies, and I'm not going to name any because, you know, it's ongoing, but I am so often surprised at the people that I go, this is a match made in heaven. You guys do this better than we ever could. And we do something that you would never attempt. And all of a sudden they turn around and say, well, you're a threat and you're a competitor. And I'm, it's just baffling to me. It's like we will be, but if if we get on board with this together, that's not what we want. But we see, we do see the future here. We we do realize the Internet will be around for a little while. And if this doesn't change, you're either going to just be left out in the cold or keep doing what you're doing. Because the foundation source and again, I have some exposure to them.

44:27 I'm a fan, but they are a great what they did was they lowered the bar for having a private foundation. We can be your back end. They're not in I mean just in in broad general concepts, they're in many ways the same as a DAF except they're going to allow you the benefit of that comes with the control around a private foundation. And so that's what they are now. I think they've even created a DAF and ironically, I there were I did not believe they ever would because they had said no, we're not a daft, we're the opposite. We're we're we're for private foundation. So, you know, there are forces that just continue to happen that make people move in a certain direction. And some are going to be early adopters, some are going to be, you know, the end of the curve and the late followers. But right now having a, you know, having a family office who is more specifically, well, I mean, a family office fits because they're investing the family foundation's assets too. Having someone there that sees an ability to have more impact, to build more capacity and if they desire to show the responsibility of it.

45:40 I think the one unfortunate thing that we suffer from right now is we know this whole everybody wants to eat the rich. Someone else should pay for something. And so we, in some ways, foundations have kind of done that to themselves because they are secretive. They are, you know, they don't have to tell who is funding them. They don't have to do those things. Here's a chance to literally get credit for the good that you do and change the entire idea that, you know, just because you did well doesn't mean you're nefarious. In fact, without those foundations, without people with large Dafts, 99% of the charities wouldn't exist. That's true.

46:24 You know, and all the good that those charities do. So I, I know a fair amount of Bitcoin billionaires that will never sell their Bitcoin or their Ethereum, let's just say that and they're doing what is an acceptable method of hypothecating that. And could you, could a Bitcoin holder with low basis make the donation, take the tax deduction, keep it in Bitcoin or Ethereum, hypothecate it within the DAF or do they lose that control to make that happen?

47:04 And could they could they suggest that you do that? They can and and, and essentially once they make, once they donate the Bitcoin, then it really it is ours. So we would be the one to do it and, and we're still early in that world right now, but all of those things, whether it's staking or all the different things you can do with digital, with crypto in general, you know, will eventually be a part of our platform. But right now we're still in the early, early stages of that. You know, if you tried to do that with Fidelity or if you tried to do that, like to say you gave it to, I don't know, Saint Jude, they're going to laugh at you. Whereas we're trying to build it so that this is this is for those type of people that you know, if if you did that well in Bitcoin and you're still doing that well, you learned some technology to get there.

47:55 It's not that easy. It's not like you just pulled out a debit card and said sure. No, it's not and. Especially if you're talking about staking it or, you know, earning interest on it or anything like that. I mean, you're no neophyte at that point. That's for sure. So. So that's that's who we're building for. All right, before we wrap things up, tell everybody about what how they can invest and hurry up about it. Not you have them hurry up, invest in you sounds. Great. So the company is DAF share. We are going out with the Series A, we're raising for 5.3 and we're doing it in a convertible debenture which to some might be a interesting choice, but the I think it's signals our intentions. Well, we are trying to build it in a way where the investors that do get involved have a long term stake. I think the the term is 10 years and along the way the quote UN quote interest payments are in the form of a revenue share. So as revenue grows, the shareholders including the debenture holders get paid out and at the end of it they have the option to convert their principal or not and just get the principal back.

49:07 So it offers a good return and it also gives us a long enough runway to really realize because I did the the biggest thing for us is, you know, it literally we're looking at 2050 or 2045 when we kind of get to the end of this generational wealth transfer. And so we want to be in the perfect position to be a major steward of, of that. And you know, for for all people that are doing it, because the nice thing about any sort of wealth and again, taxes, tax law can change. But anybody that's inheriting anything right now knows that a bunch of that has to go to taxes. And they're a good way to reduce that is charity. If we can position ourselves at that, you know, between now and then, we're going to be as powerful as Amazon is in the e-commerce world.

50:01 Yeah, Yeah. I think that it's worth people who are actively investing and I'm going to say Fintech to look under the hood here because there's a number of ways that could this could go in terms of monetization. But having a coupon along the way is certainly more interesting than just not having a coupon. Yeah. Just having paper. Exactly, this has been really good, thank you for doing this. Well this has been amazing. Thank you. Yeah. And by the way, we have Alex and his firm on Family Office Insights, which is separate from this podcast, but many of you familiar with that so upcoming this week. So we'll keep an eye out for an announcement for that as well. So Alex, thank you for doing this. It was awesome it.

50:50 Was a pleasure, thank you so much. Yeah. And then we'll make sure everybody gets a chance to see this sounds good to you next time. Thanks. OK. OK, recording's off. You're awesome.