One thing I’m particularly proud of in my career is founding Pledge 1%, an organization that encourages companies to give back to their communities by donating a portion of equity, profit, time, or product to nonprofits in its community. It was bold idea from the beginning and I’m happy to see that more and more companies are taking the pledge (we’re around 20,000 strong now and growing quickly). Recently, Pledge launched a new initiative, Boardroom Allies, to broaden their network and reach. The Allies program is comprised of an alliance of VCs who have committed to unlocking $5 billion in new philanthropy over the next five years by helping their portfolio companies set aside equity for social impact prior to liquidity…
Category
Philanthropy
Free Money | Supporting Entrepreneurial Non-Profits
At Pledge 1% our mission is to encourage entrepreneurs and companies to give back to their communities through the donation of equity, product, profit and time to non-profits. We launched this program less than a year ago we already have over 1,000 members of our community. And it’s growing quickly. As entrepreneurs ourselves we’re always looking for new and innovative ideas that help us achieve our mission. Today we’re announcing a major new idea in connection with SRS Acquiom, EscrowUP. The idea behind EscrowUp is as brilliant as it is simple. When companies sell, buyers typically set aside a portion of the purchase price (often 10-15% of the total deal value) in case unexpected expenses come up. For simplicity sake these escrows are…
Joining The B Team
For a long time I’ve been fascinated by the intersection between entrepreneurship and social change. When I say that I’m not describing social entrepreneurship (a term I really don’t like; it’s not a subset of entrepreneurship, it’s simply “entrepreneurship”) or impact investing, at least not as they’re commonly understood in the current business lexicon. I really mean two things: The first is the application of entrepreneurial principles and startup techniques to solving critical, basic needs problems around the world (many of the companies I’ve worked with as a founding board member at the Unreasoanble Institute fall into this category, as one example). The second is that all businesses, regardless of the product or service they produce, can work to create…
Introducing Pledge 1% – Let’s make a difference together
There’s a great scene in Office Space where the movie’s heroes check their ATM balance after one of them has written a program to scrape tenths of pennies off of Paymetech (the movie’s fictional company) transactions. The guys figure this action will both go unnoticed and also generate a relatively modest sum for them. Instead when they check their balance it turns out that the sum of their tiny rounding transactions actually equated to over $400k to them over a weekend! It’s a funny scene (and a funny movie) but the moral here is actually important: The sum of a large number of small actions can be huge. Today we’re announcing the launch of Pledge 1%. A joint effort between The…