How to Generate Impact at Scale w/ B Generous & GVNG CEO, Dominic Kalms

Show notes as a general guide below. Somewhat in order and not written in perfect grammar because we want you to actually listen to the show!

• Dominic’s last oh shit moment
• What impact work means to Dominic 
• Dominic believes that giving shouldn’t be hard
• How important is it to shift the old giving mentality around sacrifice?
• What role Dominic played during the Covid-19 Pandemic
• Dominic talks about how to create something out of nothing
• How Dominic motivates people to become conscious leaders
• Dominic reacts to a quote from Maya Angelou
• Dominic talks about his company GVNG and what it’s all about
• How GVNG led to his new company Be Generous
• Dominic talks about his new business model
• How does Be Generous generate income? 
• Can clients and customers donate in cryptocurrency? 
• The people behind Dominic’s organizations 
• Dominic’s vision for the next 5-7 years for Be Generous
• What is the key in getting another person or group to believe enough in you to invest millions in your vision?
• Dominic shares his top two traits for a conscious leader to embody.

Check out BGenerous.com and connect with Dominic on LinkedIn!

Connect with Sebastian on Instagram

SebastianNaum.com

Below is a transcript of the video podcast created by Seb’s Robot buddy, Zekton. He tends to make mistakes so please forgive him if you find errors or some funky sounding sentences. For the real deal, watch the video or click on your favorite audio Podcast platform above! Enjoy!

Sebastian Naum:
What up fam today I had on dominant columns, a three time venture backed entrepreneur and philanthropist. He has raised over 120 million in venture and philanthropic capital during his career and has been featured in an array of media publications, such as NBC Forbes, CBS, entrepreneur, BBC, Yahoo, and more. He was most recently profiled on the front page of entrepreneur.com as well as in Goldman Sachs philanthropy web series. Dominique’s no joke fam he’s the founder and previous CEO of the popular online platform giving which Forbes called one of the most revolutionary platforms in the social impact space. Today. Today, Dominic is CEO of a new venture backed FinTech company be generous, which is revolutionizing, how people donate to non-profits through the advent of the first ever philanthropic credit product think donate today, pay tomorrow. Essentially the Shopify of philanthropy. Dominic is also a well known public speaker and has spoken to many global forums on philanthropy and technology such as the United nation summit, the nexus summit, global citizen forum TEDx, and the list goes on and on guys. This is one of my favorite shows to date because we really get into the concept of scaling impact through really creative business concepts that solve real life problems at scale. And frankly, Dominics a freaking badass entrepreneur with endless amounts of energy fueled by purpose. Guys, if you get value from the show, please share it with a friend, tag me on social and definitely subscribe. It means the world to me. I appreciate you spending your time with us. Enjoy the show.

Sebastian Naum:
Dominic, welcome to the show. My man. How are you?

Dominic Kalms:
Awesome. Thanks so much for having me. I’m great. How are you?

Sebastian Naum:
I’m great. Thank you. Stoked to have you on really Stok to have you on. We’re gonna talk about a lot of stuff. Um, you know, we’re gonna talk about impact. We’re gonna talk about, uh, purpose and profit stuff that I love to talk about in your new business venture. But first I wanna ask you the first question I asked my guess, which is what was your last, oh, moment. Anything you can think of good or bad.

Dominic Kalms:
Yeah, I have, I have 10 of those a day. <laugh> so right. It’s um, you know, we are in the lead up to our launch for our product that we’ve been building for 18 months. And, um, it is, it is brutal. It is, it is 20 to 22 hour days, seven days a week. I’m not exaggerating. And um, I’m like chronically sleep deprived. So there’s, there’s a myriad of those that I have every day. I forgot something. I didn’t send an email on time. I didn’t get back someone on time, so I wouldn’t even know where to begin. <laugh>

Sebastian Naum:
Well extra. Thank you then for being on stuck to have you on man 20 hour days, that’s pretty gnarly, man.

Dominic Kalms:
<laugh> it? It is. I I’m a hard worker. Um, but there’s, I mean the, the pace is not sustainable in the long run. I mean, is, this is a pace that can be sustained for weeks, maybe months I’ve been doing this for, you know, we’d be building company for 18 months. It’s always long hours. Of course. Uh, it’s a startup it’s we’re venture capital backed. We raised a lot of capital. We raised a very large, uh, lending facility, which will make sense as I explain what we do, but so there’s a lot riding on this, but, um, so there’s always long hours, but I mean, really the brutal element of it has come in sort of the last four to five months. Um, and so I’m hoping that things get more <laugh> reasonable at some point.

Sebastian Naum:
Absolutely. I was talking about the, the, the concept of balance, uh, a couple months ago with somebody and we believe that a lot of the times we’re thinking balance has to be like on a, on a daily. Right. And it’s great if you can have balance on, on the daily. That’s awesome. But I believe that for building businesses, I think it’s totally okay. And I would call it like major sprints of weeks, months at a time. And then allowing that time later on to kind of re recoup and regenerate. And I think I, I would still consider that balance cuz if you have a big mission, that’s the only way to accomplish it. Sometimes

Dominic Kalms:
Absolutely balance is incredibly important and um, I, I preach it and I do practice it as much as I can. Yeah. Um, but I mean, having a work life balance, healthy, eating, healthy living is critical. I do what I can, um, in, in the moments. But, um, I, I, it’s definitely something I need to focus on

Sebastian Naum:
More. I feel you, man. I feel you well, Dominic impact and purpose are words that are now becoming mainstream in the corporate world. What does impact mean to you?

Dominic Kalms:
Yeah, so I mean, you know, I I’m the guy that, um, came outta graduate school with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt went to work for wall street because everybody I knew went to work for wall street. I went to graduate school at Columbia university. My whole class effectively went to wall street, I thought, all right, you’re supposed to go to wall street. So I went to wall street, I was making six figures and I hated it. And so I I’m literally the guy who quit a six figure income job at a prestigious pink to write articles for $300 of pop at a think tank in Washington, DC about international affairs. And the reason I did that is because for me, um, you know, impact is about following your passion in order to make the world a better place. And for me, I felt that my skills would, would better be utilized in trying to, um, show the world what’s happening in certain hotspots, in certain areas in the world, which is why I got into the IR international relations space and less, uh, and, and use my skills less to, um, push, push around buttons on a screen.

Dominic Kalms:
Um, and so, you know, I, I, I followed my passion. I followed my dream. It was incredibly scary at the time. Um, but I did it because I was genuinely passionate about what I wanted to do. And I’ve always been interested in doing something that could make the world a better place. That’s been really something I’ve cared about since I was a young man.

Sebastian Naum:
I love that, man. I love that. You know, a lot of us kind of grew up thinking that, you know, think, think of like a champion of giving an impact, like a mother Teresa, right? So then we grow up with this mentality that in order to give and make a difference in the world, we have to sacrifice and it’s gotta be painful and it’s gotta hurt. How important is it to shift that mentality?

Dominic Kalms:
Yeah. I mean, impact doesn’t, you know, there, there’s this idea, I think going back, uh, many centuries, even that impact should be painful. It should be difficult. It’s this sort of idea of, um, you know, it, it’s certainly rooted in theology in some aspects, right? Yeah. Um, you know, the penance right. Is, is this entire idea. Um, and, and then you can take that to an extreme with, uh, um, you know, so, so I, I, I, I, I, you know, I agree with you. I don’t think that’s the case, certainly not in the modern age. And, and that idea though has been so pervasive and so damaging to the impact movement because it’s really infected. I would use the word infected, it’s infected everything, right. People used to think, for example, when you invested your capital in the markets, for example, it was like either you’re an impact investor or you’re looking for returns. Well, we’ve really realized if you look at like the Indi indices over the last 10 years, that track the impact metric, the, the impact indices, um, and certain like ETFs and other, um, and, and even the broader markets, um, from the impact side of things, when you’re tracking certain companies, those returns are incredible. They’re just as good as non-impact companies, except now you have a positive externality in the world. So I think it’s a false understanding and a false assumption. And I think that’s been routinely proven wrong over the last particularly two decades.

Sebastian Naum:
So glad it has been. Yeah, absolutely. At Dominic in 2020, you started a nonprofit. Um, and COVID 19, which donated hundreds of thousands of mass to hospital schools, native American reservations, et cetera. I I’m fascinated by the ability to be able to launch something so fast and, and just execute. What does it take as a leader, um, to kinda create something outta nothing and just go now other than 20 hour work days.

Dominic Kalms:
<laugh> yeah. Yeah. So, um, yeah, I mean, it’s interesting, you know, I had just gotten COVID so COVID, this is when COVID exploded onto the scene. I had just gotten COVID. Yeah. I took my mother to the grocery store to help her, um, get some groceries and I knew it was a bad idea, but family is family and I came, I got COVID and this was, this was the OG COVID. This was like, this isn’t like the Omicron. And, you know, I have a cold, this is like the, oh, <laugh> I, this is my oh, moment. This is like, oh, I have this disease that nobody knows what the hell’s going on. Yeah. Came from Wuhan. This is when no vaccines, no therapeutics. Nobody knew what the death rate was. This was very scary. And, um, so I got it and I recovered thankfully.

Dominic Kalms:
And when I recovered, this was also at the time when our country was having a massive shortage of things like N 90 fives, uh, you know, medical masks, face, shields, gloves, pure. I mean, you couldn’t, there was, as you probably remember, you couldn’t find these things. Yeah. And so, because of my background experience, what I did is I actually partnered up with a buddy of mine and we called up a lot of our celebrity friends. I, I used to, uh, work at a private philanthropy consulting firm. All of our clients were celebrities. And so I had a lot of connections in that industry. Um, and you know, today I’m actually on the, the board of Val Kilmer’s foundation and I’m on the fundraising board of forest Whitakers foundation. Both of whom are, you know, friends of mine and I’ve worked with both of them. But, um, the point is I called up a lot of my celebrity, friends and entertainers and so forth.

Dominic Kalms:
They said, look, we wanna raise capital and we wanna raise philanthropic dollars. And we wanna put this money and we wanna literally buy hundreds of thousands of N 95 mass space shields. We wanna just give ’em away. We wanna give them to hospitals and schools and native American reservations and, and, and communities that don’t have access to this stuff PPE, right. Personal protective equipment. And so, um, we basically ran this big campaign on my buddy’s platform. Uh, we had everybody from David Blaine to Kean Thompson, to Naomi Campbell, to ne to outcast. I mean, tons of celebrities, Jeremy pav, and all these interesting people, um, Kristen Genworth, Manuel Shiki and all these awesome people. And we able, were able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars during like the height of COVID. So this was like, everyone was locked down and we were raising money.

Dominic Kalms:
Yeah. We had a couple hundred thousand dollars and we basically went and, um, went to the most reputable PPE suppliers at the time. They were very few and everyone was trying to rip you off left and right. But I had a contact in the space and we bought a significant number of medical, mass space, shields, gloves, bureau, all that stuff. We donated it to the Culver city school district in LA. I talked to the mayor there at the time. She was like ecstatic to have this. We donated it to native American reservations across the United States. We donated it to various, a lot of hospitals. We in local, in LA, and also, I believe there was a hospital in, um, Washington. We donated to so Kaiser Permanente, I mean, we, we, we got this stuff on the front lines and I subsequently found out that our N 95 masks were actually used the ones that we donated were used at the first, uh, drive through testing facility in LA to protect frontline workers. Uh, it was an incredible campaign and, uh, I ultimately interviewed on CBS about it, but, um, it was great, really impactful stuff.

Sebastian Naum:
That’s awesome, man. That’s really cool. Uh, that’s amazing that you did that. And so one of the things I’m hearing too is if we go back to the original question of like, how can you build something so fast out of nothing, it sounds like you really just it’s like picking up the phone and really using the network and connecting with other people on a common mission and just using your network as much as possible. Right. And it’s just pushing hard on that sense. Yeah.

Dominic Kalms:
That’s, that’s definitely right. I think, um, you know, because of my work in the space, because of my background, I had a, you know, pretty good network in this world. Um, and I was able to tap into that and, you know, everybody wants to help something I found out is that if you ask that’s half the battle, most people never ask. Most people never ask for help. They never ask for a favor. They, but the reality is you can contact almost anybody. I mean, I’m talking about from ex-presidents down to whoever, if you ask the question that is half the battle, um, and I just ask,

Sebastian Naum:
That’s just such simple, great advice from anybody listening. It’s incredible. How, how are you when you’re building something with urgency and you’re pushing people really hard because you’re needing teamwork, you’re asking for favors, but you’re also maybe pushing your team and, and really pushing hard to get something off the ground are how are you able to still be a conscious leader when you’re working people so hard and you’re working so hard, hard yourself?

Dominic Kalms:
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s a great, it’s a great question. Um, I think, you know, there’s a, there’s a great quote. I believe it’s John Kaz in and he says, wherever you go, there you are. Um, and it, it seems very simplistic on its surface, but if you actually think about that on a daily basis, you know, your, your, your life is happening in every single moment, right? We are here. I’m being present with you and vice versa. If I’m thinking about 10 other things, I’m not living in the present, I’m thinking about the future. I’m thinking about the past, that creates anxiety, stress, frustration, and there’s nothing you can do about those things. For the most part, you can’t do much about the past. Can’t do much about the future. All I can control is the moment that I’m in. So while you plan for the future and you try to learn lessons from the past, ultimately, um, you have to remember to be present. And so that is, I think the biggest piece of advice I would ever give about being a conscious leader is you have to be present with your team members present with what you’re doing in that moment, and really focus on what’s in front of you. Otherwise you miss your life, go by

Sebastian Naum:
Presence, beautiful, uh, Dominic, uh, quote, here by Maya Angelo. I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver, this is actually on the giving website, which is a company, uh, that you started. And, um, I would assume that in one way or another, this quote, I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver, how does that resonate with you?

Dominic Kalms:
Well, it’s, it’s absolutely true. I mean, not only is that sort of figuratively true, but literally there are enumerable benefits to be philanthropic, right study after study shows that people who are philanthropic are happier on average have lower levels of stress, have lower levels of high blood pressure, lower levels of diabetes, lower levels of cancer, um, report higher general satisfaction with life, less anxiety, less depression. It’s incredible. The act of helping somebody actually has therapeutic benefits on the person who’s doing the giving in many cases. Um, and so, you know, I actually have another company that I, uh, uh, you know, I put aside while I’m running my existing company coffee, Regenerist called philanthropy therapy, which is the idea of using philanthropy as a therapeutic tool to actually help people lead happier and healthier lives. So I do believe giving liberates this whole, and I do believe that there are so many benefits, um, to being a giver.

Sebastian Naum:
Oh, that’s like straight up science <laugh>.

Dominic Kalms:
Yeah, exactly.

Sebastian Naum:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. Uh, and before we, we get into talking about your new startup be generous. So giving is a very successful company that you started and, uh, essentially it’s a digital platform that allows individuals and brands to digitize and essentially facilitate precisely that giving, can you give us just a little bit about what it is, um, and why you started it in your

Dominic Kalms:
Experience? Yeah, absolutely. So I’m sure you’ve heard of Shopify. Yeah. Um, you know, Shopify is a digital one touch solution for instantly launching your e-commerce store. There are 2.2 million e-commerce stores in the United States. It’s a huge market. They’ve been very successful. What most people don’t realize is that they’re 1.7 million nonprofits in America virtually the same size market. And yet the cost labor and time of starting running and operating nonprofit is very prohibitive. It’s very expensive, it’s very labor intensive, um, and it’s very time consuming. Um, so you have the cost portion of it, the labor portion of it. Um, and the time portion of it, it, it takes a long time to get what, what is five known as 5 0 1 C3 status approved at the state level, the federal level, the local level. And so what we did is we created a digital OneTouch solution for instantly launching your nonprofit project in a box, basically.

Dominic Kalms:
So imagine us as, uh, you know, Forbes did a very nice article on us and they called us the Shopify for nonprofits. So that’s why I describe it. We are the Shopify for nonprofits. We power tens of thousands of nonprofit projects across the world. We power the nonprofit projects for a lot of entertainers and high profile celebrities and companies, but also just your average everyday person who wants to do something in beef philanthropic at start a giving campaign start at, uh, effectively a, um, what’s considered sort of like a donor advised fund, um, or start a nonprofit project where they wanna get their website up and running have grant tools, distribution tools, uh, volunteer management tools. And all of these things at various stages are part of the, um, product offering that we have. And so that’s what giving does. I mean,

Sebastian Naum:
Hey guys, I just wanna remind you, if you wanna find more content like this, you can visit Sebastian nom.com. That’s Sebastian NA, um, dot com. You can also get a ton of other marketing resources for myself. And my agency’s ranging from SEO to social media, influencer, marketing, branding, web development, and more again, that’s Sebastian, no.com. Thank you. And enjoy the rest of the show.

Dominic Kalms:
I started I think, seven years ago. Um, and it’s just been an incredible, uh, journey. You know, it’s, it’s a private technology company. It’s a FinTech company backed by venture capital money, but we have built a product that makes starting running and operating a nonprofit significantly more efficient. We, in fact, we reduce about 98% of the cost labor and time was starting a nonprofit very, very wow. Significant.

Sebastian Naum:
Yeah, that’s great. The proper solution to a real problem out there that was really slowing down. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s great. You guys have been able to generate a lot of impact through that and your success and your experience with giving is what’s essentially eventually led you to your current startup be generous, and which is essentially like a donate now pay later, uh, platform that you’re launching. And I, I wanna, I wanna drop this again, cuz you just actually said that step, but the us nonprofit donation market is equivalent to this size and scope of the entire consumer e-commerce market in the us. Yes. What that’s mind blowing. Right. So, and here are some other stats that have blown my mind. I had no idea before we got on this conversation. Yeah. That over 1 billion donated daily, 73% of Americans donate to nonprofits annually blew my mind.

Dominic Kalms:
Yeah. <laugh> yeah.

Sebastian Naum:
And 10% of Americans work for nonprofits and the average individual donation of nonprofits is $1,050. So I’m hearing this and I’m like, what’s the issue here? What, what’s the problem that we’re trying to solve? This is great.

Dominic Kalms:
Right, right, right. Yeah. So you are right. The market is extraordinarily big. It is the same size as the e-commerce market in the us. Americans do give away more than a billion dollars a day. And 72% of all giving in the United States comes from individuals like you and I, corporate giving is very low foundation giving is reasonably low. So it comes from people like us. I

Sebastian Naum:
Would’ve thought it was 90, 90% was corporate giving.

Dominic Kalms:
Yeah. Corporate giving six about 6%. Wow. <laugh> so we need

Sebastian Naum:
To change that.

Dominic Kalms:
I, I wrote, I wrote like an oped in Forbes sort of calling out corporations for yeah. I would say virtue signaling about how much they do philanthropically, but not really doing that much. Wow. Um, so yeah, corporate givings, very anemic foundation giving about 18% that you know, a little, well a little bit less, but the rest is, is, is individuals. And so, um, what’s extraordinary is that last year total donations to us based nonprofits were just under half a trillion dollars, $471 billion. And it philanthropic giving on average goes up about 3% year over year. It’s been increasing every year for many years. So the market is huge. The problem, um, is that as the world becomes more chaotic and particularly in the United States, we don’t have a very strong social safety net. Right. So why do we have 1.7 million nonprofits in America? Whereas Norway and Sweden don’t have anything like that.

Dominic Kalms:
Most countries have nothing like that. We have a huge philanthropic sector and Americans are incredibly generous and charitable more than any other country in the world. The global philanthropic market around the entire world is valued at about $2 trillion on an annual basis. That’s globally. How much is donated the United States, um, is one fifth of that market. So, wow. We’re only, we’re one of 193 countries in the world, but we are 20% of the global philanthropic market. I’m sorry, we’re at, we’re actually 25% is one fourth. We’re 25% of the entire philanthropic market. Wow. In one country. And the reason being though, to answer your point to answer your question is that, um, we have a lot of problems in the United States and we don’t have a strong social safety net. The government, our government does not provide a strong social safety in it. So nonprofits have sprung up to catch people that fall through.

Dominic Kalms:
And as the world becomes increasingly chaotic, COVID lockdowns, the Warren Ukraine, energy spikes, inflation, homelessness, mental health problems, civil Liberty issues and so forth and so forth. Nonprofits are needed more than ever today. The problem is that you there’s only so many times you can go back to the same donor base again and again and again. Right. Um, and so what you end up happening is you’re stressing your donor’s bank accounts. You’re stressing their checkbooks and you’re stressing their ability to continue to support. But because I, as I said earlier, Americans are so incredibly charitable over 70% of Americans in the last poll that they wanted to donate more to their favorite nonprofit, but were felt constrained by their current liquidity or cash position. So Americans actually wanna give more, but they feel constrained in their ability to do so.

Sebastian Naum:
And so how do platform work then? How does it solve that exact problem? How do we give more and solve that, uh, cash liquidity problem?

Dominic Kalms:
So have you heard of buy now pay later companies like affirm bar after base? So these companies have been extremely successful and what they’ve done is they’ve sprung up over the last 10 years and they’ve created a whole new industry called buy now pay later. And those products allow you to do exactly what it sounds like. They allow you to do buy a product now and pay for it. Later. They give basically an unsecured consumer loan to a purchaser that purchaser can buy a television, can buy a refrigerator, can buy a Washington scheme, buy a pair of jeans, whatever it might be. The merchant gets the money. The donor gets the, uh, the consumer gets the product. And then the consumer pays that down over time. Um, usually let’s say like, I’m making up an example, but 10 payments, 12 payments of a hundred bucks a month with some interest.

Dominic Kalms:
So what we’ve did, what we’ve done, excuse me, is we’ve created the first ever philanthropic credit product, which instead of allowing someone to buy now pay later, allow someone to donate. Now pay later in effect, allowing the donor to finance a charitable contribution to a non-profit. The nonprofit gets the full donation upfront in a lump sum. The donor gets the full gross tax deduction without spending any money out of pocket today, no money comes outta the donor’s bank account. And then the donor chooses over a certain time period, three, six or nine months. How they want to pay that donation down with no interest, no fees, no transaction costs, no late fees, no hidden costs, absolutely nothing. We’re simply taking the principle of the donation amount and allowing people to pay it over time while fronting all that money to the nonprofit and giving the donor the full tax deduction up front.

Sebastian Naum:
That’s great. So how does, um, so, okay, so I wanna donate $60 just to make it easy. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and uh, I don’t wanna, I don’t, I can’t front the $60. I don’t have that cash and I’m wanna do it over six payments. So basically I’m gonna pay 10 bucks a month for six months. That’s right. And then the organization gets the $60. Now I get the, the, um, deduction right away. So let’s say I did it in December for tax purposes. I could do it right away in December. Okay. Um, and then the organization gets it right now. So there’s essentially it’s financial technology, right. Again, that we’re looking at here and now, no interests. Um, that’s right. Incredible. So this is going to essentially one, it, it, I’m assuming it’s going to encourage to donate more Americans. You said Amer 70% Americans wanna donate more. This is gonna allow them to donate more, which means we’re gonna be able to give more, which means we’re gonna have generate more impact, which is awesome. And so how do you make money?

Dominic Kalms:
Yeah. So that, you’re exactly right. By the way, I’ll tell you this. In our early alpha testing and survey results, 83% of donors who had an opportunity to understand the product, watch our product video, engage with the product. 83% said that they would double their contribution if they had the ability to use donate. Now pay later. And if you think about it makes a ton of sense, right? Imagine that you give $50 every year to like the red cross as an example. Right? So the way it normally works is go to their website. You see the donate button, you put your $50 in, on your debit card or whatever it might be after transaction costs, they probably get like 47, 40 $8. The $50 comes out of your bank account. You get the tax deduction, the transaction is over. Now, imagine you go to the red cross and we say, okay, Sebastian, how much do you want to, how much do you want to, uh, donate today?

Dominic Kalms:
And you say, I’m, I’m here to give $50. And we say, okay, instead of giving $50 in having that come out of your bank account, would you consider giving us $10 a month for the next 10 months, you’re gonna get the full hundred dollars tax deduction today tax deduct received today. And the nonprofit will receive a hundred dollars in their bank account today. And you’re gonna pay zero today, nothing. And in fact, your first payment isn’t even due for 30 days, 83% of people accept that offer. They say to themselves, yeah, what’s $10 on, I could do $10 a month. So for me, I get to pay $10 over time where each month, first payment’s not due for 30 days, I’m walking away with a hundred tax deduction. I’m supporting an organization that I genuinely care about even more and more, most importantly, the nonprofits getting all that capital up front. So it is a win, win, win across the board. Completely. Exactly. So that’s basically

Sebastian Naum:
I sorry to interrupt you. And so, and then the reason, a lot of the times that for example, I would be not so willing to do the, you know, the monthly donations, which a lot of organizations offer is because I’m sure a lot of people say, I don’t wanna get into a monthly thing that I may just forget about. Right. So this way it’s like, okay, no, it’s actually exactly a hundred dollars, $10 a month. I’m not gonna just forget about it. And then all of a sudden I find out that I’ve got, you know, five different organizations that I’m donating monthly to, that I completely forgot about.

Dominic Kalms:
Right. That’s exact, that’s exactly right. And you’re also not paying interest. You’re not paying transaction fees. You’re not paying hidden costs. You’re not paying late fees. It’s totally free. Right. So not only, and, and like you said, you forget it, you said it and forget it because you know that it’s gonna end at finite time. Yeah. But you also know more importantly, presumably you actually care about the nonprofit you’re donating to. I guarantee you that nonprofit wants that a hundred dollars right now, rather than 10 payments of right. Or in this case rather than of course the $50 that you intended to give. Right. So you’re, they’re getting more money on average, we’re increasing the average donation value for nonprofits substantially, right? That’s the goal increase the average donation value while not stressing the donor’s wallet or bank account by allowing them to pay overtime for free right. For free.

Sebastian Naum:
And it also, and for the first time Americans, I’m a Aine and originally, and I’ve known about inflation for a long time, but for the very first time, yeah, Americans are really truly experiencing inflation. So this is also helping battle inflation cause at the end of the day, and not essentially battling the problem of inflation, but for the nonprofit that a hundred dollars today means more than the $10 a month over the 10 months too, because

Dominic Kalms:
It, it, it absolutely does. I mean, for a nonprofit, I mean, you know, a dollar in your bank account now is worth more than it is in a year from now because of the fact that we’re running it eight and a half percent inflation. Right. So giving them the capital up front, now the ability to use that capital front now versus dripping and dripping and dripping in this is a huge hedge against inflation, huge hundred percent.

Sebastian Naum:
So how are you guys able to do this? It almost sounds too good to be true. How does, how does be

Dominic Kalms:
Generated? Yeah, so, um, so, okay. So we raised a large venture capital round. Um, we have some incredible venture capital funds, family offices, angel investors in the round, um, including some of the leaders of, of the Bator, uh, movement and some of those, um, some of the largest FinTech companies in the world and their representatives, uh, are investors. But, um, we, what we also did is we, we raised a huge credit lending facility. What I mean by that is that we have banks that have given us effectively capital in order to lend out. Cause ultimately this is a consumer lending product, right? We are a lending capital on an interest rate basis, or it doesn’t cost the donor anything to do this. Um, but it is still a con you know, an unsecured consumer loan. And so we have a, a very large credit lending facility, um, to be able to do this. And so that’s, that’s how it’s all made possible.

Sebastian Naum:
So where’s the interest. So where’s the interest coming from then.

Dominic Kalms:
Oh, so how do we make money? So, yeah, so we make money. Okay. So when the money comes to the nonprofit, the nonprofit pays, what’s called an MDR merchant discount rate. And the merchant discount rate is a pre-approved rate that the nonprofit has agreed to pay on each transaction. So you can think of it, like if you’ve ever used like, um, a GoFundMe or something like that. Yeah. Or classy or black bot, all of these companies will put fees basically on these, um, transactions. Right. That’s how they say business. That’s how they make money. So ours is called an MDR, a merchant discount rate, or a nonprofit discount rate, if you will. Um, and, and that is, and it’s a preapproved rate that the nonprofit agrees to ahead of time on each transaction basis. Got it. So that’s how we basically are able to make money.

Sebastian Naum:
Yeah. That’s great. And you have to make money if you don’t make money, you can’t scale this and you can’t the

Dominic Kalms:
Impact. That’s right. If you don’t, we can’t do this. That’s right.

Sebastian Naum:
That’s right. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, am I gonna be able to donate crypto on the platform by the

Dominic Kalms:
Way you will, over time. Yes, we will. Over time.

Sebastian Naum:
Yeah. Cool, cool, cool. And, uh, Dominic who’s, who’s behind this, are you in general? Are, are you, is this something that, you know, you got some, some people I know you’ve worked with a lot of big names, uh, celebrities in the past. Do you have anybody particular that you’re gonna be working on this that’s behind this, uh, movement?

Dominic Kalms:
Yeah. We, we have a lot of famous folks involved from some of the most well known CEOs in the United States to some of the largest venture investors in the United States to, um, many celebrity investors that we have. We’re actually rolling the platform out in a couple weeks with a couple of celebrity nonprofits. Um, I’m not able to say who they are right now, but, but, um, it, it will hopefully unveil itself shortly in the market.

Sebastian Naum:
Love that. Love that. Yeah. Dominic, what is your ultimate vision for the company? What does this look like in, in seven years? What does success success look like for you?

Dominic Kalms:
Yeah, I mean, so very clearly there is very clearly the metric of success is unlocking billions and billions of dollars of additional liquidity for nonprofits. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, I mean, that effectively is what success looks like here. If you allow people to pay overtime, when in any industry, whether it’s on a credit card that charges interest rates, by the way that we don’t, whether it’s a buy later product, whether it’s a mortgage, whether it’s a car payment, people are willing to spend more money because they get out time. The vast majority of Americans cannot go and put down a million dollars on a home. But if you have it over paid over 30 years, you are willing to do that. Right. Yeah. So think about, think about using that for, for good as a force for good, right. I may may not be able to give, uh, the red cross a thousand dollars today, but if you allow me to finance that over the course of a year, as an example, that becomes a lot more doable for me, or $500 or whatever it might be.

Dominic Kalms:
And of course the red cross is getting that money up front. Now we are, we’re not working with the red cross. It’s just an example. But, um, success looks like unlocking billions and billions of dollars from additional capital for nonprofits right now. And, and, and imagine, um, what that capital could do for people’s lives. Yeah. There are so many, there are millions of people that rely on nonprofits for food, for shelter, for water, for education, for social services, right. Um, and I’m not getting into a political debate here, but our government doesn’t necessarily provide all of those things, but this is not Sweden and Finland and Norway. We’re not a social democracy in the true sense of the word. Yeah. Whether that’s good or bad is not the point. The point is there’s a lot of people that rely on nonprofits for these services and the, no, we have a, we, we need to make sure we need to ensure that our nonprofit sector remains healthy.

Dominic Kalms:
And right now it’s not super healthy. Uh, there was a report put out very recently that said, unless something’s done to alleviate the current liquidity problem in the nonprofit space, which was of course exacerbated by COVID four out of 10 nonprofits in the United States will close within three years. Wow. I mean, just, just imagine that you’re talking just, just for the viewers who are listening to this, this is an industry that holds $3.8 trillion worth of assets, half a billion, half a trillion dollars, excuse me, of donations a year and 10% of the American workforce. One outta every 10 Americans work for a nonprofit and, and they provide, and there’s 1.7 million of them providing services to millions and millions and tens of millions of people. So the idea that a 40% of these nonprofits could go outta business, there could be a 40% contraction in the market that would be a nightmare, a nightmare for the country. So we need to make sure that the sector maintains, uh, its ability to operate and in maintains its ability to be healthy and vibrant. And that’s what we’re trying to do.

Sebastian Naum:
Well, that’s that right? There would mean 4% of America’s lose their job.

Dominic Kalms:
Absolutely. It’ll be a DISA. It would be a disaster for real.

Sebastian Naum:
Wow. Yeah. That’s that’s wild, man. Um, uh, I’ll let you go here shortly. Dominic, I wanna ask you a, what is the key in getting another person or group of people to believe in your vision so much to invest millions of dollars to help you achieve what you wanna achieve?

Dominic Kalms:
I, it’s a great question. It’s a very good question. I would say there are two things which above, I mean, I’ve raised capital now for several companies and I I’ve raised a lot of venture capital money. And I would say it’s really two things, a very, very, very thorough understanding of the marketplace that you’re operating in. Very thorough. I, I, I, I’m not sure if there’s a question about philanthropy that I would be stumped on at this point. Now I might have to think about it. And I might have to say, I’ll get back to you. I wanna give you a really good answer, but I’m not sure I would be completely stumped at this point. I, I, I know a lot about the marketplace that I’ve been running companies in and the second is having passion. Um, you know, passion, you know, people talk about that as this sort of throwaway term, you know, investors respond to passion.

Dominic Kalms:
Investors want to see that you are willing to work till three or four o’clock in the morning every night, not cuz not, you know, not cause you’re making tons of money cuz you don’t make tons of money in startup, but because you genuinely care about the problem, you genuinely care about the company you genuinely want to, to fix this issue. Um, and passion cannot be there. There’s no substitute for passion. Doesn’t matter how much money you have, how much time you have, how many people on your team you have. If you’re not passionate, you’re not willing to put in the hours. As we talked about when we started the conversation, um, there is no substitute and, and a smart investor will pick up on that very quickly, I think.

Sebastian Naum:
Yeah. Yeah. Well you definitely have that brother. So, uh, and this question, uh, that we’ll close on we’ll you may lead right into that, with that. What, what do you believe are the top two traits that a conscious leader must embody today?

Dominic Kalms:
That’s a great question. Top two traits that a conscious leader would embody. Um, so going back to what I mentioned earlier, wherever you go there, you are live in the present moment. I think that is, there’s just no substitute for that. Um, and the second thing I would say is, um, you have to maintain a level of respect and trust for those who work for you and with you. Uh, I, it is so important to surround yourself with people that you really respect and trust and can place faith in them because you know, no, no company is an island. No man is an island. A woman is an island. You need other people to succeed. I’ve seen so many great entrepreneurs fail because they wanted to do everything themselves. They didn’t trust others and they wouldn’t, weren’t willing to work collaboratively with others and that’s incredibly important. Um, so I would say that’s, that’s the other one,

Sebastian Naum:
Love that dominant. Well, thank you so much. You know, you truly are a conscious leader yourself. Really appreciate what you do. Please keep doing what you do and bringing what you bring to the world. My man. And thank you you. So yeah, of course people will be able to, uh, click on all the, all the links that are necessary in the notes and get a hold of, uh, follow you on social. And of course follow, be generous and giving and all that good stuff. So thanks again for being on my man, truly a conscious leader. Keep doing you brother.

Dominic Kalms:
Thank you so much. I really appreciate you having me, um, would love to have anyone who wants to learn more, come learn more and uh, we’ll see you out there in the marketplace in a couple of weeks.

Sebastian Naum:
Love it. Thanks so much.

Dominic Kalms:
Thank you.