Welcome to the Stage: Ashby Foltz
Co-Founder and COO of Charityvest
Meet Ashby
Startup Spotlight: Charityvest
Charityvest is an Atlanta-based fintech startup sitting at the intersection of philanthropy and payments. Charityvest offers users their own personal charitable giving fund — all for free. Contributions to your fund are tax-deductible and can be reserved for future giving or sent right away to virtually any nonprofit in the US. Charityvest charges zero transaction fees, so charities receive 100% of your donation. Their revenue model? They invest the platform’s assets in the background, earning a small return on the funds before they are sent to their final charitable destination.
Meet Ashby, co-founder, Charityvest
Prior to co-founding Charityvest, Ashby spent two years as Vice President of Product at Atlanta-based real estate tech start-up Rented.com. Before that, he had stints at McKinsey, as well as San Francisco-based private equity firm Serent Capital. I’ve been fortunate enough to know Ashby for a little over a year, and after he launched Charityvest, I knew I wanted to interview him for Welcome to the Stage to share his why behind launching Charityvest and his experience being an entrepreneur in the Southeast.
1. What's been the biggest challenge you've faced as a founder?
One of the reasons I enjoy working at this stage of business is because the task list is never-ending, constantly growing. Every morning is a chance to reprioritize that list and work on the single-highest value thing for the venture.Â
However, I really value and crave spending time with others. I'm also a total people-pleaser, and as a consequence, I really struggle to say 'no' to things, especially when someone wants to meet. And, as it turns out, there are only 24 hours in a day.
You can't take every call, attend every networking event, pursue every partnership opportunity and have the time or focus to do the deep work actually needed to build the product, operations, team, or culture. And, while you can simply stop doing a task if you suddenly realize that your time is better spent elsewhere, it's incredibly rude to reschedule or cancel a meeting, or even to backpedal from the promise of the partnership once you've started walking down that road.
So, I think the biggest challenge for me in the really early-stage venture is to avoid distractions, especially ones that can grow and multiply, and those tend to be the ones that involve the time and energy of others. It's also helped me drastically increase my respect and value for other people's time, as we find ourselves in discussions/meetings that have a real promise of leading somewhere valuable and rewarding.
I feel particularly lucky that co-founder conflict is not an issue for us. I think that is generally one of the biggest challenges of any earl-stage venture. We are unusually blessed at Charityvest with a three-person founding team that has strong complementary skills and a deeply-held sense of what kind of culture we want to build and values we want to have. The fine folks at First Round Capital put together a blog piece with Esther Perel, who in addition to being a couples' therapist also counsels co-founders. Her core values of what people on a founding team value (which happen to be the same things we look for in any deep relationship) are authenticity, belonging, trust, empathy, and transparency. We value all of those highly at Charityvest.
2. Why start your company now?
We see how successful Venmo has been for peer-to-peer payments, Robinhood for self-directed securities trading, and Wealthfront for financial advisory. But, within charitable giving, no one has successfully created a digital-first platform that focuses on creating a simple, intuitive, free experience.
Every other financial product or behavior has already been disrupted by a no-fee fintech consumer play. We think it's giving's turn.
Combine that with the size of the US charitable giving market ($400B annually), the secular growth trend within donor-advised funds even without Charityvest (>20% CAGR), and the fact that only 10% of giving currently happens online, and we believe strongly that US consumers will be excited for an easier way to give to any charity, from one place, for free.
We also struggle to imagine times where someone would choose not to use Charityvest versus another payment or donation modality. It's too compelling of an experience for donors and for nonprofits. And, it's free.
3. Is there someone or something that you rely on to get through the tough days?
Admittedly, we have a lot more fun days than tough ones at Charityvest, but there are two things I lean on when any doubt creeps in about our venture.
The first is my dog, Ace. Most mornings, I take him on a long walk around our Atlanta neighborhood and answer emails or customer tickets, while Ace does his morning work: giving his territory markings any necessary touch-ups, identifying who has been on the route since our last visit, and generally menacing the local squirrel population. When we get home, I spend a few minutes hanging out with him, playing fetch or tug-of-war. It's hard to hang onto much worry, doubt, or fear when your dingo is deeply engaged in attempts to wrest a squeaky stuffed triceratops from your clutches.
The second, and more important one, is the deep conviction I have in the venture's likelihood of success, and what that success could look like.
At Charityvest, we have the vision to give everyone in the United States a personal charitable giving fund. From that fund, they can actively manage their financial resources for impact. We have over 30 years of precedent from players like National Philanthropic Trust, Fidelity Charitable, Schwab Charitable, Vanguard Charitable, etc. that this model results in a very good impact for charities and is financially sustainable. (In many cases, it's quite profitable, which would allow us to generate great returns for investors and build a sizable team of top-flight talent, enabling further impact.)
But, we haven't seen it done well in the digital era. We see personal charitable giving funds as our first product on top of our core fintech / compliance infrastructure: payment rails for nonprofit dollars that keep administrative costs exceptionally low, and that help nonprofits reach non-lead donors that makeup 80% of nonprofit campaign participation, but less than 20% of total funding. We can help them capture that 80% with a substantial reduction in administrative time and pain while increasing the amount they fundraise (both through better payment fulfillment, and the removal of transaction fees.)
4. What do people get wrong about startup founders in the southeast?
I'm not sure what notions people have about startup founders in the southeast, but generally, I'd say that while the southeast does not have the density of VC investors, and historically has not been as prominent of a place to found an early-stage technology venture, the quality of talent here is as high as any other major city which may be more commonly thought of as an early-stage hub.
I recently had the opportunity to hear Tom Cunningham of the Metro Atlanta Chamber speak about his economic outlook for 2020. One of the things he mentioned was the "thickness" of talent and experience across industry areas in the Atlanta metro area - the idea being that, what you want for economic competitiveness in any given city is the ability to reach out to someone who has faced a problem that your company may be facing, and who has already arrived at an answer (or, at least, thought about different ways to approach the problem). And his point was that, unlike cities that are known for a particular area of depth (banking, pharma, insurance, etc.), Atlanta has unique breadth ("thickness") in its talent coverage.
For us at Charityvest, that means being able to access top-flight nonprofit tax attorneys and advisers that happen to be just down the road from the innovation hubs of the world's largest payment processors, which are also across the street from regional Google, Twitter, and Salesforce offices.
Want to learn more? Visit Charityvest.org to create your personal charitable giving fund for free!