Founders Pledge
The Founders Pledge is a program based in the UK and which was started by a non-profit known as Founders Forum for Good, where entrepreneurs make a commitment to donate at least 2% of their personal proceeds to charity when they sell their business.[1] It launched on June 10, 2015.[2]
The same name is used by an unrelated program of the same name run by Full Circle Fund, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, that encourages startup founders to build giving into their company's DNA from the start through a combination of equity, time, and product pledges.[3][4][5][6] Full Circle Fund launched the Founders Pledge at the Runway Incubator on September 10, 2014.[7]
History
David Goldberg, the director of Founders Forum for Good, previously quit a Ph.D. program after realizing that its impact on the world would be small. He also worked in finance, sold a business in Europe, and ran a chain of Segway dealerships. He was also involved with the Founders Forum for Good, that was focused on helping social entrepreneurs build and scale businesses.[1]
Goldberg says he realized that making social businesses was hard, and a potentially higher-leverage strategy might be to make it easier for people who were founding successful technology businesses to commit to donating the money they would eventually earn. He says that the ideas of effective altruism (that he first encountered in Peter Singer's TED talk), earning to give, and the work of 80,000 Hours in particular, was influential to his thinking and his decision to choose this route. Goldberg further stated that tech founders, who were generally too busy to spend time and energy trying to investigate the best philanthropic causes, found the idea of pre-committing a share of their future earnings particularly appealing.[1]
The Founders Pledge money pledged has increased steadily:
- $28 million at the time of public launch (June 10, 2015).[6]
- $45 million in August 2015, when the Duedil CEO wrote about it in the Huffington Post.[8]
- $64 million in November 2015. Of this, $1.3 million has already been realized as a result of exits worth $350 million.[1]
- $134 million in May 2016 leading up to their one-year anniversary.[9]
In September 2016, the Open Philanthropy Project (funded with money from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz's private foundation Good Ventures) awarded a grant for $1,032,947 to Founders Pledge for two-year support to expand to Germany, France, and Sweden, and hire a developer.[10]
Participants
At the time of its public launch in June 2015, the Founders Pledge had founders at a number of UK companies signed up, include Duedil, Huddle, Farfetch, SwiftKey, Tapdaq, and Zopa.[2] The total estimate of money pledged, based on the founders' equity and the companies' valuation as of their most recent fundraising round, was $28 million.[6]
Damian Kimmelman, CEO of DueDil, one of the pledgers, explained his reasons for signing the pledge in a Huffington Post article in August 2015.[8] Ed Rex, founder of Jukedeck, also wrote about his signing of the pledge in a blog post for Medium.[11]
A more complete list of participants is available on the Founders Pledge website.[12]
In September 2016, Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, wrote on the Y Combinator blog about the Founders Pledge, saying: "Many of our founders ask us about how they can donate part of their equity or post exit proceeds, and now we have an answer: Founders Pledge."[13]
References
- 1 2 3 4 MacAskill, William (November 26, 2015). "One of the most exciting new effective altruist organisations: An interview with David Goldberg of the Founders Pledge - 80,000 Hours". 80,000 Hours. Retrieved November 30, 2015.
- 1 2 Prosser, David (June 10, 2015). "Entrepreneurs Pledge Millions To Social Good". Forbes. Retrieved November 30, 2015.
- ↑ "Founders Pledge". Full Circle Fund. Retrieved December 5, 2015.
- ↑ Rauber, Chris (September 11, 2014). "Full Circle Fund asks startups to pledge 1 percent of equity, employees' time to philanthropy". Bizjournals. Retrieved December 5, 2015.
- ↑ "Press Release: New Partnership Aims to Shift the Story of Startup Culture". Full Circle Fund. August 10, 2015. Retrieved December 5, 2015.
- 1 2 3 Butcher, Mike (June 9, 2015). "UK Tech Founders Take The Founders Pledge To 2%, Committing $28m+ To Good Causes". TechCrunch. Retrieved December 5, 2015.
- ↑ "Founders' Pledge Launch and Mixer".
- 1 2 Kimmelman, Damian (August 13, 2015). "Can Tech Really Fix the Big Problems?". Huffington Post. Retrieved December 5, 2015.
- ↑ "Founders Pledge generates £90m in its first year". City Philanthropy. City Bridge Trust. Retrieved 24 June 2016.
- ↑ "Founders Pledge — General Support". Open Philanthropy Project. October 31, 2016. Retrieved November 1, 2016.
- ↑ Rex, Ed (June 25, 2015). "Why I Took The Founders Pledge". Medium. Retrieved December 5, 2015.
- ↑ "Members". The Founders Pledge. Retrieved December 3, 2015.
- ↑ Altman, Sam (September 20, 2016). "YC and Founders Pledge". Y Combinator. Retrieved September 20, 2016.