Donation Matching
Early mornings in London before the team is online = stream of consciousness writings…
Starting a company is really difficult. I guess, starting just about anything is difficult. But trying to build a business comes with so many decisions, unrelated to building the company, that are not even on your radar in the beginning. I’ve been fortunate enough to lean on my partner, Eric Sullivan, in setting up many of the foundational (no pun intended) aspects of the company. As a serial entrepreneur, he’s been through this process multiple times. But he’ll admit that each new business has it’s own set of challenges. Building our engineering team in Costa Rica has come with requirements that we did not consider. Setting up payroll, managing vacation schedules without a real vacation policy, developing single sources of knowledge, keeping track of passwords (surprisingly difficult!)...juggling multiple offices and time zones with clients all over the world (who all require your undivided attention) has lead to many late nights at the office or sitting at my kitchen table until I can no longer keep my eyes open. When I’m out with friends or meet new people who tell me that they like what they’re doing, but would really like to “strike out on their own,” the seemingly unforeseeable challenges (challenges that are often taken care of by the time a company is big enough to hire at scale and the people to which I’m referring are employed) are what come to mind for me. My instinct is to tell them, DON’T DO IT. But I never have. And the reason I restrain is because it is a truly rewarding experience trying to go from 0 to 1. And if you can get there, you’ll be granted unmatched control over company decisions (at least until you get too big and every decision has consequences bigger than you— that’s how I imagine it, anyway). For right now (and maybe forever), we have that control. This realization did not come out of anything glamorous or humanity impacting. What prompted this writing was the ability of ours to institute a donation matching policy without having to ask for anyone’s permission. From now on, FoundationLab will match 100% of donations made by team members. And we will encourage our team to take advantage of this. To contribute to causes they deem worthy. This decision feels small now. I’m really hoping that one day, we’ll be unable to make decisions as swiftly. But I do hope that this one lasts and that this small choice on September 27, 2017 has a much greater impact on our culture years down the road.
Okay, off my soap box…for now.
