Givefront Joins Owner

‍

It’s so rare to meet someone who’s high-agency, empathetic, and technically excellent. It’s even more rare to meet 3 such people. That’s why I was thrilled to meet the Givefront team.

Matt, Aidan, and David - they each struck me as extraordinary young people with a high slope. For the past few years, I've helped interview amazing young finalists for the Thiel Fellowship. They're all excellent. And these 3 came across as similarly great. When they reached 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 conversations became valuable instantly. They launched into what they’d learned from working with hundreds of small 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 for the wrong reasons. They were falling behind not because people didn’t value them, but because their leaders lacked technical skills.

“The more we become a tech-centric society, the more the average local organization struggles to keep up. I believe every small business, church, or local charity should be able to run like a tech company.”
— Matt Tengtrakool

“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 co-founder & CTO. Finally, David, their first employee, got so excited about the mission that he persisted with Matt and Aidan 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 impact.

And they’ve already started to. Within weeks of joining, they’ve shipped great improvements to our product and customer experience.

There’s a sense in which we've built Owner as a place for people like them to make the biggest possible impact. From the beginning, we’ve wanted to ensure Owner becomes a movement where founders can thrive on our team.

More than 20 tech founders have already joined Owner to extend their impact at scale. The movement feels even stronger with the Givefront team joining. They’re such high-quality builders, and they’re being welcomed by others like them: founders who have built great products from zero to one and raised millions in venture capital. They include Will Schreiber (Bottle), Alex Patin (Mona), Jay Gokhale (Mogara), and Daniel Ternyak (Rep.ai).

It’s a highlight of my life to build Owner alongside world-class builders.