How GoFundMe is Changing Fundraisers in the Age of AI with Arnie Katz, CPTO

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Arnie Katz, CPTO at GoFundMe, about GoFundMe's latest tech developments and Arnie's leadership journey. Thank you to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this episode. For simple cloud and powerful AI that's built to scale, visit digitalocean.com or just click the link in the show notes. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:26) Let's just start at the beginning with GoFundMe. How long have you been working with GoFundMe?

(Arnie Katz at 00:00:31) Been working with GoFundMe for just over two years now. So joined in August 2023, and yeah, it's been a great journey so far. I obviously joined because it's a great mission to help people help each other, and joined because of a great executive team. I have an amazing boss who just was selected to the list of Time's 100 most influential people. So a really good team and good mission. But also I judged that there is still so much to do to impact that mission. So much more we can do to help more people help each other, and that, of course, translates to impact on the world, but of course also to business creation, to business value creation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:14) I want you to think back to when you were joining in 2023. This was right as, like, the world really started to understand what LLMs were and hear about the ChatGPTs and all of that. When you were interviewing for this job, did GoFundMe already have this type of technology in it, or was that a big part of them bringing you on? Tell me about that.

(Arnie Katz at 00:01:38) That's a great question. So yeah, you're right. It was about three quarters after ChatGPT-3 was out. I'll give you a little bit more background, which is my wife was a researcher at OpenAI before COVID, so way before that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:55) Yeah.

(Arnie Katz at 00:01:55) So I, you know, she—they were very secretive, so there was only so much I knew, but, you know, I obviously had the good sense that something big is coming. So I joined in August, and they were still considering, you know, balancing out between how quickly to adapt and how quickly to move and what data is to share with algorithms. And definitely I think one of the reasons I was brought is to accelerate velocity, and I'm sure we'll touch on velocity further later on. But what AI, what LLMs do is the biggest thing they do is increase productivity, and the reason they increase productivity is they increase velocity. So of course, one of the first—I think the first decision I made—was to sign an enterprise agreement with OpenAI. So we were one of the first ones to sign that new offering, making sure that everyone get a seat for that enterprise deal, start using OpenAI, and we've been early adopters of OpenAI features, Gemini features, Claude, and of course a whole host of other companies and the solutions they're bringing to the table. We've been early adopters of those technologies since.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:15) So you guys are just kind of playing with all the stuff to see what's the most useful.

(Arnie Katz at 00:03:20) We're playing, we're comparing. You know, different use cases—different companies have the advantage, and it's also moving so fast that one company could have an advantage for a few months and then another one takes it. So it's still very much in disruption, exploration. So yeah, we're exploring a lot. We already brought quite a few products to market that I'm excited to share with you more about, but you know, there are a lot more things in the hopper. So it's not just about increasing productivity, which we did and we did a lot of it. It's also about the offerings we make to our customers, to people who want to ask for help and need to receive help and want to give help, providing them tools that are based on LLMs and other types of AI in order to make their lives better.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:16) Yeah. And I'm—I don't know if I would say I'm a customer—what do you call me? I've donated to people that have done GoFundMe. Like, I've contributed, but I've never ran one or managed one or have done anything like that.

(Arnie Katz at 00:04:28) Yeah. I mean, I definitely would regard you as a customer, but I think the real word for it is you're a supporter of causes. Right? Like, whether it's individual fundraising or nonprofits fundraising, you supported, sounds like, multiple of these causes, and you're a supporter. If you also shared with your network, "Hey, I just donated to this cause, this person," if you also shared that cause, we would also call you a champion, because now you're championing that cause. And we found many times that folks who share have as much, if not bigger impact, than just by the act of donation alone.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:08) Oh, well, I feel bad now. I'm not a champion. I keep my stuff private. I'm like, I support that privately.

(Arnie Katz at 00:05:17) Yeah, something to strive for. And yeah, you know, you're touching—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:22) You're my life coach, Arnie.

(Arnie Katz at 00:05:26) You're touching on psychology, right? And one of the things that excite me the most intellectually over the past two years, and even actually through the interview process, to be honest, was the psychology around asking for help, right? And by the way, there is not enough research around that. There is more research around giving help, not as much research around asking for help. But imagine how hard it is. Like, you're going through something hard in your life. Maybe your kid is in the hospital. You don't know how you're going to pay the bills. Your kid is in the right state. You are not a marketer, obviously. You're not a fundraiser. You're not a person that their profession is to fundraise, but you know that you have to have money. So one is you know that you need to ask for help, but it's so hard. We've seen people struggle with—over a decade. I met a lady that took her over a decade to ask for help, and many, many different calls from people, "Hey, you should start a GoFundMe. You should start a GoFundMe," over a decade before she did. And then when she did, by the way, she raised over $80,000. So that's psychology. Then there's a psychology about helping. Like, what would spur you, Joel, to support a cause and help? And to your point, now that you helped, what would spur you to become a champion to share? So a lot of the research we're doing, a lot of the data collection, a lot of the data analysis is around exactly that. How do we help people go through the barriers around asking for help and then giving help and then, again, championing for more help to be given?

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:06) That's interesting too. I should explore that in my own reflection time. You know, I would be open to it. Like, if I knew the person in real life, I would definitely—and I donated—I would definitely repost and help. I guess it's because I just don't know them in real life. And so often when I donate to those people, I just—I don't—it always asks me at the end. You do a really good job too. You make it very easy. You make it very easy at the end to share. I'm just like, I just don't do it. Sorry about that. This is my public apology.

(Arnie Katz at 00:07:46) No apology needed. Thank you for the support, and yeah, I'm sure your money and support and words of support, you know, whatever way you supported, meant a lot to the people you helped. So thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:56) So asking for help, that's actually something a lot of people struggle with, whether it's something as big as a complex medical issue or something that GoFundMe is happening, or something as small as asking your boss for help on how to progress in your career. Do you have any good tips on how to ask for help? Putting you right on the spot.

(Arnie Katz at 00:08:21) Yeah. I mean, this is a great question. And yes. So I think the biggest tip, to be honest, is people want to help you. Like, I know it's hard to think that way when you're at a point where you really need help and you're trying not to bother everyone and, you know, will there be anyone out there that will actually be willing to help? And the answer is yes. Like, when you helped someone, Joel, when you wrote that check, swiped your credit card, whatever you did, right, you felt better because you did it, right? And it just touches a very important, again, psychology of us as human beings. We are social creatures. We want to help each other. We want to feel part of a community, and part of the ways to feel part of a community is to help people in trouble within that community. So when you are considering, "Do I ask for help?" right? I think the first thing to remember is people want to help you. And that could be when you need money, and to your point, it could also be when you want to go to promotion. Your boss most likely—I can't guarantee it in all cases, but most likely—would want to help you progress to the next level. And if you frame the question the right way, not, you know, obviously if you frame it in a very adversarial way like, "Promote me now or else," you know, then that psychology of wanting to help maybe would go away. But if you do it more of, "Hopefully I've been here, you know, I've been here for a couple of years. I've been supporting the organization. I had this impact, X, Y, and Z impact, and I'm really trying to understand how to have even more impact on the organization. Like, what do you think I need to do in order to get to the next level in terms of being able to provide more impact, maybe move up the ladder a bit?" If you frame it that way, people, again, inherently want to help you. So I think the biggest, most important thing I would say is understand that people want to help you and don't be worried about asking for help. Then, like we said, the framing is important. What text, what means, and what timing, you know, these things matter as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:33) No, that's actually really good. That's actually really good. Real quick, before we continue, I wanted to give a special shout-out to DigitalOcean for sponsoring this episode. DigitalOcean is cloud infrastructure that's simple to spin up, complete with integrated AI dev tools plus 99.99% uptime SLAs and industry-leading pricing on bandwidth. We all know DigitalOcean. It's super reliable. It's been around forever. And now with DigitalOcean's Gradient platform, developers can train, fine-tune, deploy, and scale AI workloads all in one place. DigitalOcean is reliable and affordable at any budget. Companies can save up to 30% on their cloud bill when they come to DigitalOcean. Use code DO25 and get $200 in free credits to get started. Simple cloud, powerful AI, built to scale. That's DigitalOcean.

(Intro Narrator at 00:11:27) Now, back to the episode.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:29) Okay. So that "how to ask for help" advice, that's actually really good advice, because whenever I am stressed out, I would imagine that I am going to bother somebody. But then on the flip side, it's like when you're in need, you almost imagine it's a nuisance. But on the flip side, I just moved into a new neighborhood about two months ago, and a neighbor needed an egg and knocked on the door and said, "Hey, do you have an egg?" And it made me feel so useful. Like, it made my day to be like, "Yes, I have this egg. Here you go."

(Arnie Katz at 00:11:59) Exactly. And it connected your relationship with that person, right? And by the way, research suggests that those connections in your community have a lot of relationship to your happiness. So, you know, this is, again, one of those things that in the modern world, we're spending so much time on our screens, and, but, you know, again, it's just basic human need to be part of a community, and a basic part of community is to help each other. Like, when we were groups of 30, 40, 50 human beings living together, we would help each other all the time, right? And it was part of being in a community, it was part of having strong ties with those around you, it was part of being happy and having a fulfilling life, and part of what GoFundMe, what we are doing here, is bringing that back at scale in a way that fits the digital economy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:54) Yeah. I was doing some research on communities a few years ago, and there was, like, certain numbers at which the community has these different attributes. A little bit off topic, but it would make sense that GoFundMe has an unusual amount of knowledge on how communities work because they're working together to raise the money often.

(Arnie Katz at 00:13:12) Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been very successful, but maybe I'll give you—you asked, like, tips for how to ask for help, right? And I'm a very data-driven guy. I consider myself very customer-focused. Hopefully others consider me too—at least I strive to be. And when I joined and started looking at the data, one of the things I saw is that a lot of people start—they ask—they go into the flow of "I need to start a fundraiser," in order, you know, asking for help. And not as much of them—not enough of them, I would say—finish and actually publish the fundraiser and get it going. So then I started looking at the data even deeper, like, what steps do they fall? Where do they drop off the funnel? And one of the steps—the main steps—they fell were the part where you write your story, you write the need basically, and you put a title to that story. And actually, surprisingly, more people fell on the title part than on the story. Even the story, they needed help, but the title was even more important. And, again, I say surprisingly, but then I think about the context of journalism. Even journalists that are very good at writing stories—they do that for a living—you go to the large newspaper desks, there are departments for writing titles. Like, this is a profession that is separate than the story-writing profession. So even for journalists, writing the title is hard and they need support. So then the question is, "Okay, what do we do about that problem?" that too many people are dropping off at that stage. And to your point before, Joel, there are LLMs now. And LLMs are actually great story writers. They're helping you write stories. It's one of their strong suits. So we developed two different capabilities. One is to help you enhance your story. So we're not going to write your story for you, obviously. We don't know what your need is with no data. But once you give us a bit of context and you put enough data in and enough text in, you can click on "enhance," and you're basically enhancing your story. So that's a story enhancer. Once you wrote the story, maybe we don't need you to come up with the title anymore. So we started playing around with what if Gen AI, if the LLMs, will actually suggest titles for you, and we put in a feature where we suggest three titles. And we found a few things. One is a lot more of the fundraisers actually saw the light of day. So the hypothesis that this is a hard place and a hard mission, hard task to ask the person fundraising to come up with a title and refine their story—that hypothesis was true, and more fundraisers got published. And by the way, they were as successful as the ones that were published before. Two is 80% of our fundraisers today, the title was actually suggested by the LLM. And by the way, more than half of these, it's the first option we suggested out of the three. So we also are good at guessing what the titles should be within these options. And then the third important thing is that those titles are actually more successful than the titles that the folks could come up with by themselves. So we are also helping with the fact that those fundraisers are now raising more money. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:53) That is interesting.

(Arnie Katz at 00:16:53) Yeah. So a huge win using AI and also, you know, using the power of data and using the power of bias to action and putting a product and shipping it and putting it out there, something we're very proud about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:09) So do the AI titles that are AI-generated, do they generate more money than the normal ones?

(Arnie Katz at 00:17:15) Yeah, they do. That's crazy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:17) Well, you had a bunch of data on how much money was raised in titles, so you can really train that thing.

(Arnie Katz at 00:17:22) Yeah, exactly. We have the entire history of every story and the title that was associated with it and how much money it raised, and therefore, the LLM can make the right recommendation based on your story. And of course, no two titles are alike, but based on your story, what would be the title that would convert the most amount of supporters into action, into donating?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:45) Someone's gonna do that for raising VC. Definitely. They definitely are.

(Arnie Katz at 00:17:50) I needed that feature when I was a failed founder many years ago.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:54) Oh, tell me about that.

(Arnie Katz at 00:17:56) Oh yeah, I love telling the story about my failures. So I founded a company with a cofounder, a very talented guy. We founded it almost 20 years ago, 2009, out of Charlottesville, Virginia, which is where I went to school and my wife went to school as well. And the company was an online grocery company, and our founding hypothesis was that online grocery delivery is not gonna work, which now in 2025, you're probably laughing at me. What are you saying? But in 2009, it actually made a lot of sense because in the .com boom and bust, some of the biggest failures were online grocery companies. Like Webvan raised a lot of money and then went belly up. And the reason why they went belly up, one of the main reasons was that the density for delivery wasn't enough, so the cost of the last mile were very expensive.

(Arnie Katz at 00:18:57) And turns out there was an article written before the bust happened by a professor called Tim Laseter from University of Virginia about the last mile to nowhere, and the hypothesis was that the last mile is just too expensive. So again, the hypothesis was delivery is not gonna work. So we came up with a method of pickup locations. We're gonna bring the groceries to where you congregate anyway. So when you leave your work, we'll put the groceries in your trunk and you drive home, and we just saved a lot of money on delivery, and we can give you those groceries with no pickup or delivery fee.

(Arnie Katz at 00:19:33) Or if you go to your place of worship or pick up your kids from school. So we founded the company, we started expanding from Charlottesville to Richmond, and then DC and Baltimore and Raleigh-Durham, et cetera. And we also had a side business, by the way, of delivery, where you would pay a lot more money for delivery, but we treated it as a side business because, again, our main hypothesis was people are not gonna be willing to pay for delivery. We grew the business quite a bit. We raised $30 million from the likes of Barrie Ventures and other investors, and at some point the business just stopped growing. We got to a scale where we just couldn't get it to grow further.

(Arnie Katz at 00:20:16) And the big mistake I made—I thought we were very customer-focused. We were designing, taking those designs to Starbucks, interviewing people. I would meet people at the pickup locations. I would answer customer service calls and talk with customers. We thought we were very customer-focused, but the one thing we weren't willing to do is to look at the data in a way that would challenge our assumptions. And then basically four and a bit years in, in 2014, all of a sudden, we looked at data in the right way for the first time and realized that actually that side business, the home delivery business, was actually retaining customers. So you looked at the customers who ordered the first order, many of them were still there tenth order in. But you look at the pickup location customers, and we weren't retaining them. An absurdly low amount of people would stay to their tenth order.

(Arnie Katz at 00:21:14) And again, we thought we were customer-obsessed, but we weren't willing to challenge ourselves, challenging our founding assumptions. And by that point when we found out, it was too late. Turns out you can get to enough density, and people are willing to pay for delivery if you give them a fast enough response time, which is what Instacart figured out and the business they built around it. And I later implemented it at Walmart as well. But it was a big failure, and it was a big failure of not listening to your customers enough.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:50) Was it a complete failure though, or was it just not as good as you wanted it to be?

(Arnie Katz at 00:21:54) I mean, the outcome for investors was zero, right? They put money in and it went to zero. The financial outcome for me was zero as well, aside from a small salary that I took, and the same thing for a lot of our employees. So yeah, in that sense, it was quite the failure. Good things came out of it, I would say. For me, I became a better entrepreneur and a better tech executive.

(Arnie Katz at 00:22:24) I think a lot of our other team members went on to have successes in other places. The innovations we brought were adopted by Walmart, Amazon, Instacart, and many other companies. So there were good outcomes out of it, but yeah, I definitely would say this was objectively a big failure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:47) Well, thank you for talking about it. So many people are too shy to talk about it. And honestly, when you share your failures, those are usually the episodes where I get the most people writing in and saying that was helpful. Thank you.

(Arnie Katz at 00:23:00) Oh yeah, I'm happy to share a lot of failures. I think, generally, people are afraid of failure way too much, and it slows them down and it prevents them the ability to one, move fast and learn things, and two, to get feedback and improve. Fear of failure is actually something that I talk a lot with my team about, that you should just not have it.

(Arnie Katz at 00:23:28) Not have that fear. There are some failures, of course, that should be prevented—obviously, I don't need to name the things that are irreversible, et cetera. But most decisions we make on the day-to-day, 99.9% of our decisions are very reversible. If you fail, you will learn. And the most important thing you can do is to have velocity, to have confidence in your decisions, but then listen to feedback, look at the data that comes back, hear what people are saying, and adjust based on what you're seeing.

(Arnie Katz at 00:24:04) And if you'll have that bias to action, if you'll have that hunger to learn, you will look for feedback, you are going to make so much more impact on the world versus analyzing decisions to infinity and never acting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:19) Oh, people get stuck in planning. I didn't think these people existed until I met some of them. But I heard that there are people that'll read every book on a topic and actually take no action. I was like, no, that can't be the case. And then I met one of them, and I was like, you are real. I've always been a big fan of doing first and then reading. Because when I do first, I get all this experience, whether it's good, bad, what works, what didn't work. And then when I go read someone else, what they say makes more sense when applied to the thing I already tried to do versus if I'm gonna go do something, just sitting down and reading all about it—I'm too active for that.

(Arnie Katz at 00:25:04) I couldn't agree with you more. And again, one of the things I talk with the team a lot about is, do while you plan. So oscillate between planning and doing, because if you try to plan every single scenario, every single edge case, you're never gonna get out of it. You're not gonna ship anything, you're not even gonna start writing any code or building any screen on Figma. The right way to do this is either start with light planning, or to your point, even start with doing a mock. And today, doing a mock with Lovable or Cursor is so easy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:40) Oh, that's great.

(Arnie Katz at 00:25:41) Build a mock. Yeah, it's an hour or two, and you have a prototype that you can show people, you could play with. You can maybe show it to someone in Starbucks even, and get feedback. And then you can start planning. This is actually what I wanna be building. It will be different from my mock in this and those ways. Here are some edge cases that I now realize I need to think about. You do maybe that for a few hours, but then you go back and you do again. And that oscillation between planning and doing, one, you would make so much more progress. Two, your plans are gonna be so much better. Yeah, this is the way of working. I think it's always been good for the past two decades, three decades, but with the arrival of LLMs, it's even clearer that that's the right way to do things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:31) I wanna go back to velocity. At what point in your career did you really—you've mentioned it several times in the interview, velocity. And so at what point in your career did you really understand, like, hey, this velocity thing really does matter?

(Arnie Katz at 00:26:47) I understand that velocity matters again and again. It's every time, every few months, I'm like, oh yeah, velocity matters even more than I thought. It's one of those things that the more I mature in my career and hopefully get better at what I do, the more I find that it's even more valuable than I thought before. And I also find that there are always ways to accelerate it further. It's, yeah, the frameworks, the way I talk about it is becoming more sophisticated with time and more experience I have.

(Arnie Katz at 00:27:36) But the first big unlock was that, again, if you go back to the early days of my startup, I think I mentioned to you my cofounder was—he's still a very talented person. And we would spend a lot of time arguing between us. And I'm talking about months and quarters of arguments about what the direction and what should we do. And two or three years in, we finally realized that actually, we were killing the company with those arguments. And both of our points of view had merit.

(Arnie Katz at 00:28:19) But the way to actually productively use the disagreements between us was not in arguing who is right, but was in clarifying to ourselves why is our position the way it is, and then basically writing it in the form of a hypothesis. I think that the customers would want X because of Y and Z, right? And then thinking about what is the lowest-scale, lowest-cost experiment and the fastest time to market in order to test that hypothesis and prove or disprove it. And once you prove or disprove it, you can move on.

(Arnie Katz at 00:28:57) Right? Your idea was either wrong, and then you can move to the next idea. Or it was right, then you can double down and go further. Once we did that, the unlock to the speed of the execution of the company was immense. Then I saw the same thing in my next stop at Walmart where we built the online grocery business in the U.S. from the ground up, and the next stop and the next stop.

(Arnie Katz at 00:29:22) And again, every time, I would see it happen again where when we were in action mode, when we were developing experiments and then running them and then testing them and then looking at the data, we were making progress. And when we were analyzing things too much and arguing too much, we were not making progress and not learning. So that validation happened, and it's still happening here at GoFundMe. Two years in, from time to time, I look at this last few weeks, and I'm like, wow, this is the most we've ever shipped, and we've learned so much.

(Arnie Katz at 00:30:00) And that gives me the motivation to look for ways to ship it faster and learn even faster and get more feedback from the market. So yeah, I'm still learning it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:12) Velocity is the key to success. Maybe that's the title. I don't know.

(Arnie Katz at 00:30:16) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:17) That's too lame. We'll come up with something better than that.

(Arnie Katz at 00:30:20) Yeah. And again, if I may get philosophical a bit, I think what the LLMs, what the current AI revolution is doing, at its core, it's allowing us to increase velocity. It increases productivity of human beings significantly. And I'm talking about a big productivity event. This is way bigger than the iPhone, way bigger than the internet. I would argue bigger than the personal computer.

(Arnie Katz at 00:30:53) My sense and what I'm reading from economists and others is that this is gonna be as big of an event as the Industrial Revolution. And you look back at the Industrial Revolution, right? You look back 400 years before the revolution, over 40% of the human population were farmers, and under the poverty line, struggling to subsist. No running water, no electricity, obviously no podcasters, no computer engineers, and by the way, no massage therapists, no psychologists. And all of these professions exist because of the Industrial Revolution. And again, this revolution, this AI revolution—

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:37) There weren't psychologists before the Industrial Revolution?

(Arnie Katz at 00:31:40) No, there weren't. That's shocking, isn't it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:42) What? I'm fact-checking for sure.

(Arnie Katz at 00:31:44) How do people survive? Yeah. Sigmund Freud was in the early 1900s, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:50) Oh, wow.

(Arnie Katz at 00:31:51) I'm gonna spread that information too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:54) I'm gonna create it, and that's fascinating.

(Arnie Katz at 00:31:58) Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:58) Next time I'm in therapy, I'm just gonna be like, your job didn't exist.

(Arnie Katz at 00:32:03) And that job was enabled because people had a lot more free time and a lot more resources, a lot more money, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:10) Well, you get the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? If you're trying to survive, how you feel is really not that important.

(Arnie Katz at 00:32:17) Not an issue. If I need to put food on the table for tonight, then that's the only thing I'm focused on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:26) And that's not a fun place to be. I know a lot of people glamorize the homesteading. That is not a fun, necessary place to be. When you can't provide, that's a real difficult—you don't think clearly. You don't have good planning. You don't have good decision-making. It's just action-reaction chaos.

(Arnie Katz at 00:32:44) 100%. 100%. Yeah. Maybe getting into philosophical—there's a show called Survivor, I think on the History Channel or Discovery. You can see people struggling with that and you can see what it does to them. And yeah, it's not a fun place to be. Wouldn't recommend it. So again, the LLM revolution will be as big. We cannot predict what exactly would happen, but I can tell you that one, people will be much more productive, they'll generate a lot more impact, each one of us will deliver more impact. Our professions will change. What we do will change radically.

(Arnie Katz at 00:33:23) Twenty years from now, the titles of what people do will be very different. The structure even of the economies and societies, I believe, will change radically. Because again, if you look back at democracy, democracy was enabled by the Industrial Revolution. So there are gonna be a lot of impacts coming, and part of it is back to the velocity point that we just made, because LLMs enable so much more velocity, so much more productivity. What we're able to do, what we're able to even dream, is gonna change radically.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:59) No, it is very exciting. And then so navigating that, your concept of or your strategy for navigating that is velocity. Experiment with the tools, monitor what's coming out, ask yourself how it can be applied, form hypotheses, test it against data, roll new products out, and just keep working.

(Arnie Katz at 00:34:19) Yeah. And companies that will thrive on the others, you know, during this revolution and on the other side of it, will be companies that behave in that fashion. And the companies that will go away, that will disappear, if you trace back to the reasons why, the fact that they didn't move fast enough, didn't try enough things, would be a big part of it. So yes, velocity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:46) So I did want to get your perspective on fail. We talked a little bit about failing, but in the context of how you create an environment where your team knows that they can try things and fail. And what I mean specifically is, can you tell me exactly what you do? Is it a behavior? Do you actually just tell people constantly and remind them that it's okay to fail? Do they watch you fail? What are the tactical things a leader listening right now could actually do and express

(Arnie Katz at 00:35:23) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:23) In the next couple weeks with their team that would let them know it's okay to try some stuff and fail?

(Arnie Katz at 00:35:29) It's all of the above, but I would first start with you give them an infrastructure that supports it. So we have a very strong data team. The data is available in the warehouses and the data lakes and visualized in good ways. We have all the tools around that. We have strong analysts. We have a strong research team that does more qualitative research when you can talk with a few dozen people, maybe. And of course, you have strong professionals in product and engineering and design and go-to-market functions, and I can go on and on and on. So you have the infrastructure to support that. Then yes, you give them the psychological safety to do that. You're being vulnerable with your own failures, to your point. I don't mind admitting my failures as a professional, as even as a human being. And I call out when I made the wrong decision and why we're changing it. What did I learn since? Why did I think I made the wrong decision, too, right, so that we can learn from it.

(Arnie Katz at 00:36:35) When someone fails, we dissect whether it was a failure of the idea or the execution. If it's a failure of the idea, then we celebrate it. Like, that's actually great. We just disqualified an idea and we can move on to the next one. So that's a good thing. That's a very good outcome. If it's a failure of execution, then we learn from it as well. You know, like, what could we have done to execute better? Because failure in execution, the problem with them is that you didn't actually learn whether the idea was the right one or not, right? So you sometimes need to execute again, which is a bit wasteful. But again, it's never about pointing fingers. It's about what could we all have done to execute better as a team. We also talk a lot about the fact that we should not fear failure. We talk about how you disagree, how you commit, how you escalate if you disagree, and all of that in order to create an environment of trust where people trust one another and again have the safety, the feeling of safety, so that they can run and move and provide impact. By the way, am I perfect at this? Am I always succeeding creating that environment? Yes. No. No. There's no way. No way. I fail at that too. But, you know, it's a process, and you keep getting better at it. And you keep encouraging, and you keep pushing, and you keep giving good feedback to those kinds of learnings. And in the end, the machinery, you know, starts moving faster and faster with every passing week.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:14) Yeah. That is the hard part about doing some of these interviews. Like, we'll be doing them, and I'll be sharing some advice. And then as I'm sharing it, I'm like, I need to do a better job of this that I'm talking about, right? Like, I know this. It's deeply ingrained in me, and I talk about it all the time. But like, I need to actually do a better job at doing it. You know?

(Arnie Katz at 00:38:31) Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, we are—none of us is perfect. Right? We are not perfect creatures, and that's fine. That's great. It's part of what makes us human, and I wouldn't change that. But then, you know, what I do sometimes in order to not give myself as hard of a time as I could is I take a step back and you look at GoFundMe, and $40 billion was raised on this platform in the last fifteen years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:01) Oh, wow.

(Arnie Katz at 00:39:02) $30 billion of that in the last five years. $10 billion of that in the last year and a half. So it just keeps on accelerating more and more. Right? So

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:13) That's inflation.

(Arnie Katz at 00:39:16) It's the right kind

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:17) Of inflation.

(Arnie Katz at 00:39:18) Yeah. And so, you know, sometimes when you're in the day-to-day and, you know, like, I could have done this better and could have done that better and, you know, the day-to-day is—you're sometimes exhausted at the end of the day. But then in the weekend, I take a step back and I look at what we achieved and, oh my God, we made the life better to so many people because of work here, and then I have the energy to do it again the next day or the next week.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:45) Yeah. That's a pretty good recruitment bullet point there. A lot of people want to work and make a difference, and working at GoFundMe, there's like a very clear path to helping a lot of different people in a lot of different ways.

(Arnie Katz at 00:40:01) 100%. Yeah. I'll give you an example of something, a product we released recently that I'm really excited about. There is—I don't know if you've heard, but there is this financial product called donor-advised fund. And this financial product allows you to basically move your money, basically donate to charity whenever it fits you, for example, end of year in December, or if you sold some stocks and made, you know, significant capital gains. You can move money into this financial tool, and then you can actually move it to the charity or the cause that you would like. You can do that at your own time later. And when I looked at that industry, it's dominated by financial institutions, and a lot of that money is parked there. And only 1% of the population in the US, only 1%, have a donor-advised fund account. So most people don't even know about that product. I didn't know about that before I joined GoFundMe, and I should have known about it. I would have used it. So a lot of conversations here in learning and research, and we came to the conclusion that we want to build donor-advised fund that will enable much more access and will be a consumer-grade product that will facilitate much better discovery than existing anywhere else. And we set out to build this product. We started coding late December of last year. We had the alpha live in early April of this year. We released it June 30th, just on time. So, you know, just a week over half a year of working on the product, and it was out there in the wild. And it's enabling access. You can donate as little as $5. We're taking no fees. Have your money there. You can invest it in ETFs. You can let it grow. Then you can sell it tax-free because it's already within a charity. And then you can move that money to your cause, which is, by the way, very easy to find on GoFundMe. We have over 1.4 million nonprofits that are easy to find. You can move that money to the causes when you feel the right time is for that. So it's a product that embodies velocity that we talked about quite a bit. It also embodies customer focus. There is a need in the market and pain points in having the ability to open that account and manage it and then donate and move the money to their cause, easily find it—is a need that is very clear in the market. We also shipped very quickly. So again, the alpha was out just over three months. The beta was out six months in. We started collecting feedback, making the product better. It's been two and a half months since it launched, and it's already a much better product now than it was on launch day. And we will, of course, we know how to continue to make it better in the next few quarters. And it's just a great example of a lot of the principles we talked about so far today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:20) That is interesting. So it sets up, and then the final donation has to be to a product, like an organization that's on GoFundMe. You can't just donate it to a charity that's not on GoFundMe?

(Arnie Katz at 00:43:33) It actually doesn't have to be on GoFundMe. But, and if the nonprofit specifically for any kind of reason is not on our fund, you can ask us to add it. But yeah, you can donate it to actually any IRS-approved nonprofit cause.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:50) Oh, so you're really just—you've made donor-advised funds more accessible with technology.

(Arnie Katz at 00:43:55) 100%.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:56) That's actually pretty cool.

(Arnie Katz at 00:43:57) And that's what we set out to do. And we are already getting a lot of very positive reaction and traction from the market, from, you know, people like you that want to support causes, and we just made their life easier. We are providing them with one tax receipt. So instead of donating to ten, fifteen different places, now they have one place, one tax receipt they can get and file with their taxes. And again, very easy to discover, to your point. We also allow them to manage, to set a goal. How much giving do they want to do every year? To then hold themselves accountable to that goal. So a lot of features that were built out of listening to the needs of the customer around them wanting to be more effective givers, more effective philanthropists, and what tools they need in order to become that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:51) That is so cool. You guys are launching lots of products over at GoFundMe.

(Arnie Katz at 00:44:55) Yeah. We're moving very quickly. I'm very, very proud of the team. And, you know, the mission is, of course, amazing. The team is amazing. And there is so much green space and so much impact we can have further here that, yeah, it's, to be frank, quite easy to recruit good people here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:18) So as we start to wrap up, I'm curious. We talked a lot about velocity and other different leadership things. You've got thirty years experience in leadership. I'm curious. Velocity is something that you found works. It continues to work today. Are there any examples or times where you found something, you thought it worked, and then it just really didn't hold up, like a strategy or a way of leading or managing?

(Arnie Katz at 00:45:41) Oh, in terms of leadership? Yeah. Yeah. I'll give you, yes, I used to think that the more I'm going to grow in my career and manage larger teams, I'll get out of the details because, of course, if you manage a lot of teams, how can you be in the details? Right? Like, and my job will be more high-level strategy and directing of resources. And of course, a big part of my job is high-level strategy and what is our product strategy for next year and making sure the right teams and the right priorities have the right resources. Of course, it's part of my job. But one thing I've learned over the years is that if I don't get into details, I'm actually not being as effective. So in times, in quarters and years where I wasn't enough in the details, those were times where the velocity was not high enough. So I learned that yes, the more you grow, and when you get to the chief productivity and technology officer role, yes, you have to think about the strategy a lot more. You have to pay attention to resource allocation and, you know, being part of the executive leadership team of the company and meetings with the board, et cetera, et cetera. But you also can't drop the details. So the way of working that I now both do myself and promote to my leadership teams and to others is to oscillate very high frequency between high-level strategy and the tiniest details. And of course, I can't be in all of the details all at once for my entire team, all of my products. That, of course, is not possible. But when I do focus on one specific product or one specific team, I will go down all the way to the tiniest details. And, you know, if it's visually, like, where is the button? Why is the color of that? Why are we using that font? Why is the button where it is? Why are we asking for that detail, for that field, and not asking for that other field? If it's from an engineering standpoint, it could be, you know, why are we architected in this way? Why is that code looking like that? What is a tool? Why are we using this tool and not the other? And I can go on and on with different functions, but I get all the way to the tiniest details. And then I pull out again, and I don't need to go in that specific area maybe for a week or a month or half a year or a year. But the ability—the fact that I was so much in the details allows me to be very effective in the direction I give the team, not micromanage them, but the guidance I gave. You can also see if there are issues—process issues, technology issues, other issues, ways of working issues that I can be helpful with. I could give feedback to the team in helping them get better at their job. So there are a lot of benefits of that oscillation as a way of working. And yeah, the reason I learned to work that way is because I saw not getting into the details doesn't allow me to have as much impact.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:56) I love it. That is actually really great. I found that to be true in my own way. But yeah, that checks out. Well, Arnie, man, we did it. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Arnie Katz at 00:49:09) It was great, Joel. Thank you so much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:12) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.