Givefront Joins Owner
It’s so rare to meet someone who’s high-agency, caring, and technically excellent. It’s even more rare to meet 3 such people. That’s why I was thrilled to meet the Givefront team.
Each year I help select candidates for the Thiel Fellowship. They’re all excellent. But even in that group, Matt, Aidan, and David stood out. I asked them to meet me at the Owner office.
I was moved when they recognized our customers’ faces in the pictures on the walls. They knew many by name from our case studies.
Our discussion became valuable instantly. They launched into what they’d learned from working with hundreds of local nonprofits in 2 years of building Givefront.
They recognized more than our customers’ faces.
They also recognized the problems that I’ve devoted my life so far to solving.
Matt had me on the edge of my seat as he walked me through my own worldview from a different angle. He had helped run several nonprofits and grappled with the limits of their tech. He’d seen how subpar tech was hurting them. Just like small brick-and-mortar businesses, local nonprofits were losing people’s interest for the wrong reasons. They were falling behind not because people didn’t value them, but because their owners lacked technical skills like SEO, CRO, app-building, and marketing automation.
“The more we become a tech-centric society, the more the average local organization struggles to keep up,” Matt said. “I believe every small business, church, or local charity should be able to run like a tech company.”
Matt shared that he’d dropped out of Harvard to start Givefront. Then his co-founder Aidan dropped out of Berkeley to be the full-time CTO. Finally, David, their employee #1, got so excited about the mission that he persisted with Matt and Aiden until he could leave high school to join them. This was yet another parallel, since I dropped out of high school to start Owner.
With their small team of 3, Givefront simplified life for hundreds of local nonprofit leaders. They built something awesome. When we met, they were looking for the best way to make an even bigger difference.
There’s a sense in which I started Owner as a place for people like them to make the biggest possible difference. I’ve hoped for years that Owner would grow into a movement of founders and owners.
The movement feels real with the Givefront team joining. They’re such high-quality people, and they’re being welcomed by others like them. More than 20 tech founders have already joined Owner to extend their missions at scale. They’ve built successful companies and raised millions in venture capital. They include Will Schreiber (Bottle), Anusha Rajan (Roar), Jay Gokhale (Mogara), and Daniel Ternyak (Rep.ai).
It’s the honor of my life to build Owner alongside these talented people.
Adam Guild
Co-Founder and CEO at Owner