Tim Cadogan: ‘Help Is a Relationship’

Living in Altadena, California during the 2025 fires, GoFundMe CEO Tim Cadogan experienced first-hand the way a natural disaster hits close to home. While his home survived, most of his friends and neighbors were not as lucky, which “tripled the motivation to do an even better job.” He began to reshape the idea of the site as a way to extend help — rather than giving. To Cadogan, one is about asking, and the other is about linking people together.

“What you can do is you can set up a fundraiser that allows dozens, hundreds of people, not just to donate to you, but when they’re donating and with their comments, what they’re doing is they’re saying, ‘I care about you. I love you,’” he said.

You can hear more from Cadogan in this conversation with Signal 360’s John Battelle or read our lightly edited transcript below.

TRANSCRIPT:

John Battelle
Welcome to another Signal Conversation. I’m very pleased that my colleague and friend, Tim Cadogan, the CEO of GoFundMe has joined us today. Tim joined GoFundMe as CEO five years ago in March of 2020. And in the past 15 years, GoFundMe has raised more than $40 billion for individuals and nonprofits and is by far the largest crowdfunding platform in the world. Before GoFundMe,Tim was CEO of OpenX, which he built into one of the world’s largest ad exchanges. Before that, he was at Yahoo where he led the advertising business and before that, the consumer search business. Lots going on in those two realms that we care about. And before joining Yahoo, Tim was VP of search at Overture, which is where I met him. and before that, a consultant at PC BCG and McKinsey.

Alongside his professional work and somewhat relevant to what we’ll be discussing today, Tim has been a volunteer for the Sierra Madre Search and Rescue since 2010. So Tim, thank you very much for joining us at Signal.

Tim Cadogan
Thanks, John. Thanks for having me and thank you for that very kind, generous introduction. it reveals that we are getting on. We’ve known each other for a long, long time.

That is indeed true. So let’s start five years ago when you joined GoFundMe. You and I serve on a board together. I remember when you told me that you were moving from OpenX to GoFundMe. What compelled you to make that shift from advertising technology to a global fundraising platform?

I implied in your question is that’s a very big shift. So it was really a couple of things that were actually quite simple. I’d been doing OpenX for 11 years or so, and it’d been a great experience building up a company. But I was at a stage where I just wanted to do something very different. That was really criteria number one.

Number two was I wanted to get back to doing something for consumers. You mentioned that I’d run the search business for Yahoo and I really enjoyed that side of the work. And third was I wanted to do something for my work that felt a little bit like what I had experienced with Search and Rescue. There’s nothing quite like going out to try and help somebody. And it was just a really powerful thing to be involved in. And I started wondering, is there a way that I could have some of that at work? And I got extraordinarily fortunate that I got into the process for the next GoFundMe CEO and got selected.  certainly got what I asked for in terms of very different, very consumer focused, and certainly, we’re here to help each other. We’ll talk more about that. So that’s how it happened.

Now, usually when a company, particularly one that’s already as well known as GoFundMe is looking for a new CEO, that often means that the board might have a strategy in mind and they’re looking for someone who fits that strategy. But sometimes they’re just looking for someone who has ideas that might surprise or delight them. What was the case here? And if there was a strategy, what was it?

My predecessor, Rob Solomon, who’s also another former Yahoo, had spent five years, done a terrific job coming in after the investors had acquired GoFundMe from the initial founders. And five years ago, GoFundMe is testing time and he’d done a great job building it up and was beginning to decide that maybe it’s time for someone else to take the reins and see if they can catapult it to another level.

The board didn’t have per se a new strategy in mind. They just said we want someone with energy, vigor and fresh ideas to come in and see where they can take this because we think GoFundMe committee even more important part of people’s lives. And I had a lot of ideas. I have to say that because of when I joined, I joined at the beginning of March 2020. Those ideas sort of got put to the side because that was the beginning of the pandemic. And we went into immediate large-scale global crisis response which really went on for about a year and a half. So we can talk a little bit more about that

I’d be curious, what changed or what did you have to respond to that might’ve affected a shift in strategy, you know, after the pandemic, you know, resolved a bit, what did you do during those 18 months that lasted throughout the next few years and to the present day?

One of the things that happened is we started to see people using the platform in ways they hadn’t really before. So we started seeing people using it, for example, for small businesses. So early stage of the pandemic, if you remember the lockdowns, bars, restaurants, clubs, all kinds of local businesses had to shut down. Their employees got furloughed. So we saw many tens of thousands of fundraisers for them.

We had to figure out how to react to that, which was a very different set of situations. But generally what we saw is an increasing awareness that GoFundMe was a way to get social support for all kinds of situations. And so the brand awareness of what we did went up and not just in the US, it went up in most of the European countries that we work in. And that led us to believe that we can build this into an even more central service that should be a part of most people’s lives. What it led to is sort of two things about a year and a half later, we evolved our mission statement, which had been a little bit more centered on giving. We shifted it to help. And our mission is helping people help each other. And help is a broader and more complex concept because it’s about two people coming together. Giving is very much about a person deciding I’m going to help. Help is about someone asking and someone giving. So help is a relationship. So that kind of formed in my head over the 18 months of sort of seeing how this platform was used by communities around the world. That was part one. And then part two, was moving into the nonprofit side of our business.

We acquired a company we closed in 2022 called Classy, which was one of the leading providers of nonprofit software to mid-size and larger nonprofits. We recently renamed that GoFundMe Pro. We can talk some more about that. But those are a couple of the things that germinated during that pandemic experience.

Right. And the business has grown quite a bit over the past five years and, book ended, if you will, by the pandemic when you came in, which was to been like an incredibly tumultuous time to start as a new CEO, but also with the LA fires, which were, only a few months ago.

Yes, it has.

With your experience, in search and rescue, very personal, not just because you worked in the search and rescue efforts immediately following the fires, but because your home was impacted as well. Can you tell us that story?

Sure, yes. Just to sort of back up a bit, most of what we do at GoFundMe is what I would call cycle of life, which is people asking for help at various stages of a life that all of us have. Having a kid, going to college, having an illness, this cycle and all of the things that happened in between it. But we also respond to crises. We respond to the run rate currently is about 25 a year.

Some of them are bigger than others. Hurricane Helene last year was a very big one. Obviously the LA Fires this year were one of the biggest domestic crises that we responded to. So in a macro sense, the way to think about it is we had about 10,000 families, local businesses, churches, schools setting up fundraisers.

I happened to live in Altadena, which is one of the two towns that was severely affected. We live very close to where the fire started. I saw it about 20 minutes in. We evacuated very quickly. I was pretty sure that our house and our neighbors’ homes were gone. In a very strange, fortunate turn of fate for our little part of the community, the fire sort of went around us.

But most of the town, as you know, and you originally come from this area is destroyed. 66% of Altadena is destroyed. But of the 42,000 people who live here, only about 10 or 12 are back.

We are very fortunate because our home survived and we were okay. We were out of our house for about four months. Most of my friends and neighbors are not so lucky. And what that has done for me and for us as a company is just redouble our motivation to help more and to do that with even more empathy and intensity and to try and figure out.

How can our product be there for people in their time of most extreme need? And this goes into some really important sort of psychological and emotional aspects of our product because our product is about emotion, right? No one’s buying a good or service. They’re doing this to ask for help or receive help. And for a family under extreme duress, it’s very hard to process what’s going on. So, for example, we’ve been encouraging friends to help their affected friends by setting up a GoFundMe. So we’ve seen a lot of people do that because what it does is it allows the extended network to channel their love and care for you. Because what happens when something tough happens, whether it be a fire or a medical issue, is we tend to all say, what can I do to help?

And in many cases, there isn’t a sort of an obvious thing. What you can do is you can set up a fundraiser that allows dozens, hundreds of people, not just to donate to you, but when they’re donating and with their comments, what they’re doing is they’re saying, I care about you. I love you.

We had a customer from Pacific Palisades, he and his partner, they not just lost their home, but their apartment was attached to the church that they work at and they lost their church. He was called Ross. And he told me that my family represents an almost unfathomable amount of love. And what he meant there was there were some 300 people from across his life. I think it included a teacher from his high school, and this is someone in the early 40s who had given to that fundraiser, saying, “I see what’s happening to you guys, we want to help.” So for us, it’s like that is such an important thing that we do.

The second strand of what we do and then I’ll move on is we enable nonprofits to respond. So we do the fundraising for many of the nonprofits. So we had World Central Kitchen providing food. We had Salvation Army providing financial support and spiritual support. We had Team Rubicon. We had Pasadena Humane, like all of these organizations. We had Core doing incredible work. We’re helping them fundraise so they can do that work. And when a crisis hits a community, people need help in all forms. They need the large scale government support. We have the Army Corps of Engineers here doing amazing work, doing debris removal. They need those nonprofit organizations and they need the love and care of their friends. And that’s one of the key things we allow them to do. So I knew this all because we had been doing it. We responded to about a hundred crises since I’ve been here, but I…felt it at a different level because I was in it and part of it.

Anything makes something hit home, it would be that. Thank you for doing that service and that work. I’m gonna pivot here from that topic and ask you about something you mentioned earlier, which I found interesting because one of the things about GoFundMe is it feels very personal and almost, I don’t mean this in a pejorative way, but almost small in that you give what you can afford to give. It’s often comes from a credit card or, it’s a donation you make on the fly.  Through that acquisition, you mentioned of the company that supports nonprofits has some news that just came out about integration with a larger system of giving known as donor-advised funds. Can you tell us about that?

Some of the donations can be quite large. We’ve had Taylor Swift give a hundred thousand dollars.

Well, of course it was Taylor Swift.

She’s very generous and she’s helped a lot of people. Yes. So thank you for bringing that up. Giving Funds is a new product that we’re releasing at the beginning of July. Here’s the essential point. We’ve done a lot of research on regular everyday consumers and we found that people want to have a more organized way to run their giving on an annual basis. But they don’t have that right now. They have a sort of fractured set of tools and a bit of a spreadsheet here and there.

What’s interesting is there’s actually a product out there, a sort of a financial product, it’s basically a charitable savings tool, it’s called a donor advised fund. But it has mainly been offered by big wealth management companies like Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, and so on. It’s essentially being positioned as a wealth management product. But it’s not really geared as a giving product.

We’ve taken that base financial product, and we remade that into a consumer grade giving product. And the idea is simple, very low bar. So you can contribute as little as $5. You can put your money into this account, you very easily put it into a variety of investment vehicles so that it can grow. We’re making that super affordable. In fact, we are covering all the fees so there are no fees to put money in and there are no management fees so that the money can grow as quickly as possible. And then the other piece is to make it really easy to give that money.

We have built simple discovery. We can talk about our shared search background, simple discovery so that you can then donate through the GoFundMe flow that you’re familiar with. And you can search the base of 1.4 million charities in the US, and as that money goes out, it goes out at no cost.

So it’s designed to be very simple, very accessible and make this world of donor-advised funds, which is currently used by only about 1 % of Americans. What we hope is that we start to move it more like the 401k, which about 40 % of adult Americans have a 401k. Obviously that’s taken some time, but it’s happened. We think we can help with that and we think we’ll help a lot of people manage their giving in a simpler and more effective way.

I think that’s exciting news. It’s a world that I’ve only recently become familiar with. You’re tapping into something big and the idea of sort of democratizing the concept is a new, it feels like a pretty significant new potential business line for you. that, that is exciting.

We’re thrilled. One of the things we’re hoping to do is to have more consumers use GoFundMe more in a bit of an enduring way, because it becomes the place where they run their giving and that they express this part of their identity. So you have your job identity, you express that at LinkedIn, your sort of social identity, you express it in various social tools. There isn’t one place for you to say,

This is sort of what I care about. This is what I give to. We think we should be in place, and this will be a really helpful piece of that.

I have one last question for you because we’re running up against time. But I couldn’t let you go without asking you your opinion, given your long and storied history with advertising search and technology generally. We’re in a pretty interesting spot right now. The headlines seem to have caught up with many conversations you and I have had around the impact of, for example, artificial intelligence on search and the impact on advertisers and marketers who are interested in engaging with audiences where they are as audiences move to new forms of engagement with information like AI.

What do you think the impact is on the advertising technology world? Do you have any insights on maybe how people who care about this, like the many, many thousands of marketers who are watching this, what should they be paying attention to? What advice do you have for them?

Well, I think it’s absolutely on a par with the mid 90s with the internet sort of coming in and changing a lot of the ways that we interact. think potentially it’s more significant than that just in terms of the breadth of the implications of the new technology. So I think the approach is to be extremely observant and agile because I don’t think any of us know what is going to happen. What I think we do know is that very different things are going to happen and they’re going to happen very quickly and they’re going to keep changing. I think being as agile as possible and being prepared to move and evolve and throw out the old ways of doing things are sort of the only firm prediction I would have. As to the exact form of it, I don’t know.

But I think it is amazing that search and the sort of search model and the monetization model has sort of been in place for 25 years. That’s an amazingly long time for a paradigm to essentially be the model and then that model has rippled into other areas like social and so on. So the fact that it’s endured that long is sort of amazing. It is completely changing now. What form it will take and how to think about engaging audiences on the back end of the new paradigm we’re going to have to see. We’re going to have to be quick to figure out how to play in this new world.

Absolutely. Tim Cadogan, CEO of GoFundMe, thank you for your time and joining this Signal Conversation. Look forward to talk to you again sometime.

Thank you so much, John. I really appreciate the time.