How GoFundMe became America’s backup plan

GoFundMe 如何成为美国的“备用计划”

CEO Tim Cadogan on how a for-profit company becomes a social safety net. GoFundMe 首席执行官 Tim Cadogan 谈一家营利性公司如何成为社会安全网。

Today on Decoder, I’m talking with Tim Cadogan, the CEO of GoFundMe. You know GoFundMe — it’s a major fundraising platform where you can donate to help people with everything from medical expenses to Little League uniforms to starting a new business. 在今天的《Decoder》节目中，我采访了 GoFundMe 的首席执行官 Tim Cadogan。大家都知道 GoFundMe——这是一个大型筹款平台，你可以通过它捐款帮助他人，用途涵盖从医疗费用、小联盟运动服到创业资金等方方面面。

Tim took over as CEO in March 2020 — a fascinating and chaotic moment in the United States, and the moment, you’ll hear me argue, I think GoFundMe became a load-bearing part of American culture. Tim 于 2020 年 3 月接任首席执行官——那是美国历史上一个迷人而混乱的时刻，也是我认为 GoFundMe 成为美国文化中“承重支柱”的时刻，稍后你会在节目中听到我的观点。

It wasn’t just the pandemic that changed the nature of fundraising platforms like GoFundMe. 2020 was a major turning point in the history of political unrest in the US, and GoFundMe has become a central player in many contentious news events since — not just in the US, but all over the world. 改变 GoFundMe 这类筹款平台性质的不仅仅是疫情。2020 年是美国政治动荡史上的一个重要转折点，自那以后，GoFundMe 已成为许多争议性新闻事件的核心参与者——不仅在美国，在全球范围内皆是如此。

The platform is also now a kind of proxy for the broken healthcare system — medical expenses are the most popular category of fundraising on GoFundMe. You might be surprised to hear Tim say this is not just in America, but in every market GoFundMe operates in. 该平台现在也成了破碎医疗体系的一种替代方案——医疗费用是 GoFundMe 上最热门的筹款类别。你可能会惊讶地听到 Tim 说，这种情况不仅发生在美国，在 GoFundMe 运营的每一个市场都是如此。

All of this means GoFundMe sits inside a ton of big, messy ideas: wealth distribution, geopolitical conflict, the holes in the social safety net. And that’s also in direct tension with the platform being a for-profit company, collecting fees and tips and feeling the pressure to grow as a business. 这一切意味着 GoFundMe 处于许多宏大且棘手的议题中心：财富分配、地缘政治冲突以及社会安全网的漏洞。这也与该平台作为一家营利性公司的身份产生了直接冲突，因为它需要收取费用和小费，并承受着业务增长的压力。

So you can imagine I had a lot of questions for Tim: how he thinks about all this, and how he makes some very tough decisions about what money to make and what money not to make. To his credit, he was game to go there and talked about it all pretty openly. 所以你可以想象，我对 Tim 有很多疑问：他是如何看待这一切的，以及他是如何做出那些关于“赚什么钱”和“不赚什么钱”的艰难决策的。值得称赞的是，他非常乐意深入探讨这些问题，并相当坦诚地谈论了所有这些话题。

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Tim Cadogan, you’re the CEO of GoFundMe. Welcome to Decoder. Tim Cadogan，你是 GoFundMe 的首席执行官。欢迎来到《Decoder》。

Hey, thank you very much for having me, Nilay. 嘿，非常感谢邀请我参加，Nilay。

I am very excited to talk to you. GoFundMe occupies an incredibly unique place, I think, in our culture, particularly in American culture and American society. It’s a for-profit company, and I have a lot of questions about how you think about its place in our culture and the need to grow and deliver returns. 我非常高兴能与你交谈。我认为 GoFundMe 在我们的文化中，特别是在美国文化和社会中，占据着一个极其独特的地位。它是一家营利性公司，对于你如何看待它在文化中的定位，以及它对增长和回报的需求，我有很多疑问。

I was also doing the research. You joined this company in the pandemic, in the heart of the pandemic, when it felt like everything changed. Now, we’re six years later; maybe things have settled, maybe they haven’t. But I actually just want to start there. You became the CEO when the idea that the public health system — how we think about healthcare in America — got flipped upside down. I know that healthcare expenses are, I think, the single biggest category on GoFundMe. How do you think about the platform, and how do you think about that path from 2020 to now? 我也做了一些研究。你是在疫情期间，在疫情最严重的时候加入这家公司的，当时感觉一切都变了。现在六年过去了；也许情况已经稳定，也许还没有。但我其实想从这里开始。你接任首席执行官时，公共卫生系统——即我们对美国医疗保健的看法——被彻底颠覆了。我知道医疗费用应该是 GoFundMe 上最大的单一筹款类别。你是如何看待这个平台的，又是如何看待从 2020 年至今的发展历程的？

Well, yes, there’s a lot in there. So I started on March the 2nd, 2020, which was about a week before it became very clear in the US that the pandemic was going to have major implications, but it was already becoming clear in other parts of the world. 嗯，是的，这里面包含了很多内容。我是 2020 年 3 月 2 日入职的，大约在那一周之后，美国才非常明确地意识到疫情将产生重大影响，但在世界其他地区，这一点已经变得很明显了。

We operate in 20 countries, and we did back then. For instance, Italy is an important country for us, and that was probably the first European country that experienced a big impact. So it was just becoming evident; in fact, by the end of the first week, we went remote. Things came at us, all of us in the world, very quickly. It certainly came very quickly for me, trying to figure out a new company, a new space, and all this stuff happening. 我们在 20 个国家开展业务，当时也是如此。例如，意大利对我们来说是一个重要的国家，它可能是第一个受到巨大冲击的欧洲国家。所以情况变得显而易见；事实上，在第一周结束时，我们就转为远程办公了。事情发生得非常快，对全世界所有人来说都是如此。对我个人而言，在试图摸索一家新公司、一个新领域的同时，还要应对所有这些突发状况，节奏确实非常快。

The root of what we do is extremely simple. We help people help each other. And we are there to help people in whatever situation they need help. Sometimes those are the most consequential, the most significant thing that is happening in someone’s life and has ever happened in their life. And sometimes they’re very lighthearted and fun and forward-looking, like going to college or sending your kids’ sports team on tour because they’ve made the state championships, you name it. Everything in between: if someone thinks they need help, we’re here to help them mobilize support from friends, family, and networks. 我们所做之事的本质非常简单。我们帮助人们互相帮助。无论人们在什么情况下需要帮助，我们都会在那里提供支持。有时，这些情况是某人一生中发生的最重大、最有影响力的事件。有时，它们又非常轻松、有趣且充满希望，比如上大学，或者因为孩子们的运动队打进了州锦标赛而送他们去巡回比赛，等等。介于两者之间的一切情况：如果有人认为他们需要帮助，我们就在这里帮助他们动员朋友、家人和社交网络提供支持。

So when you talk about the pandemic, that is a time when millions of people needed a lot of help. In some cases, for medical situations and everything related to that, some cases because they weren’t able to work anymore. Or we had a phenomenon that was not expected — and we could not have anticipated this — when hundreds of thousands of small businesses were shutting down: restaurants, bars, music venues. They were all having to shut down for a while and didn’t know how long they had to furlough employees. 所以当你谈到疫情时，那是一个数百万人需要大量帮助的时期。在某些情况下，是为了医疗状况及相关事宜；在某些情况下，是因为他们无法继续工作。或者我们遇到了一个意想不到的现象——我们无法预料到这一点——当时成千上万的小企业正在倒闭：餐馆、酒吧、音乐场所。他们都不得不暂时关闭，而且不知道需要让员工停薪留职多久。

We had tens of thousands of fundraisers that were often being set up by really loyal customers who said, “I love my local restaurant. I really feel bad for the wait staff and the kitchen staff. I want to set up a GoFundMe for them.” And we had so many of those, and it was such a different use case that it was a struggle to figure out how we handle the volume. 我们有数以万计的筹款活动，通常是由非常忠诚的顾客发起的，他们说：“我喜欢我当地的餐馆。我真的很同情服务员和厨房员工。我想为他们发起一个 GoFundMe。”我们有太多这样的案例，这是一个非常不同的使用场景，以至于我们很难弄清楚如何处理如此巨大的业务量。

For example, when you raise money into a fundraiser, to take the money out, you have to go through a [know your customer] process to verify that you’re the right person. If you’re a business, you have to go through a KYB process. And that’s different and more complicated. It means you need paperwork. And if people are no longer at their place of business, how do you get the paperwork? 例如，当你为筹款活动筹集资金时，要取出这些钱，你必须通过“了解你的客户”（KYC）流程来验证你是否是本人。如果你是一家企业，则必须通过“了解你的企业”（KYB）流程。这更复杂，也更不同。这意味着你需要文书证明。如果人们已经不在营业场所了，你该如何获取这些文书呢？

So, we and our payment processors who we work with — all money goes through our third-party payment processors, not through us — had to figure out how to get through this huge amount of new fundraisers to navigate the situation. Those are a couple of examples of this kind of thing, but it goes back to helping people help each other in whatever situati… 因此，我们和我们合作的支付处理商——所有的钱都通过我们的第三方支付处理商，而不是通过我们——必须想办法处理这海量的新筹款活动，以应对这一局面。这些只是此类事件的几个例子，但归根结底，这还是回到了在任何情况下帮助人们互相帮助这一核心上……