Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed

by Alexis Ohanian

  And Pebble won’t be the last of its kind. Remember, we’re still in the infancy of innovation on the connected Internet, and crowdfunding online still isn’t mainstream, even here in the USA.

  And as I said at the start: everyone is the media now. Ninety-one people supporting your new restaurant aren’t just giving you $15,371 in capital to buy peas and carrots and hire the cooks, as was the case with Colonie, the first Kickstarter-backed restaurant10 (and one of my neighborhood favorites in Brooklyn Heights). They’re giving you publicity: these ninety-one evangelists will spread the word because they feel like the restaurant is theirs, too!

  Kickstarter, while it wasn’t the first, certainly has been responsible for bringing the notion of web-based crowdfunding to the masses. But this model continues to evolve: it’s not the end, it’s only the beginning. A few years ago crowdfunding wasn’t a proven way to raise money online, but after Eric and his Pebble team raised more than ten million dollars in preorders, people noticed. Now platforms are emerging for scores of verticals. If you need a crowdfunding platform exclusively for [fill in the blank, reader], it probably exists or will be launched by the time you read these words. In fact, that’s why I invested in crowdtilt.com, which has built not only a crowdfunding application that lets communities save local toy stores or fraternities fund tailgates, but also the “plumming” so that anyone can build a crowdfunding application they can dream up using their pipes, so to speak. What’s so exciting is that we’re in such new territory. On this battlefield of ideas, there will inevitably be winners and losers, but we’ll all be better off for it.

  Once crowdfunding proved effective online, technologists and politicians alike (pity there aren’t many technologist politicians, but more on that in chapter 8) acted to capitalize on this shift. Yes, even Washington, DC, has been moved to facilitate the innovation made possible by the Internet. In 2012, the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act passed the House and Senate, and while its ultimate impact remains to be seen, there are already startups pitching investors with the idea that this legislation will next facilitate the iteration of democratizing investment. Their argument goes: If banks won’t do it, why don’t individuals back our community businesses? I hope the muffin bakers are still reading this. We could all potentially get our morning glories from a cute local bakery that we all own a few dividend-paying shares in. The ideal scenario sounds awfully nice, actually.

  The Innovation Multiplier

  I’d never heard the phrase “innovation multiplier” until Michael Hancock, mayor of Denver, used it to answer a question I posed to him on a POLITICO panel before the first 2012 presidential debate. It was our first event for the Internet 2012 Bus Tour and I was up way too early. But what he said really struck me, because it set a tone for the rest of our journey through the middle of America. Hancock said that, as startups moved into Denver, the city was experiencing an “innovation multiplier” effect as creative people started building their businesses, bouncing ideas off one another, inspiring more ingenuity, and ultimately generating more innovation. What happens when even one startup takes off is a thing of beauty, because the effect isn’t limited to just the startup community where it was launched. In truth, it can affect the success of a muffin bakery in your neighborhood and countless other businesses just like it in other neighborhoods.

  So support startups for the muffins’ sake. Or if that’s not enough, do it for your ’hood.

  Why? Because we can’t forget what happens in so many of these startup communities once someone has found success. When the founders exit, either through acquisition or an IPO, and when the founders and early employees get rich, many of them will pour money back into the startup economy that raised them. The ecosystem continues to flourish. It’s how Silicon Valley got its start, and it’s how countless other innovation hubs are developing across the country and around the world. Think of good investors as Yoda firefighters (on call 24-7 to give useful advice or roll up their sleeves and pitch in, although much less heroic) armed with money and talent to help entrepreneurs build businesses, create jobs, and ultimately create more Yoda firefighters, which in turn help entrepreneurs build businesses, create jobs, and… you can probably see where this is going.

  “Do or do not… there is no try.”11

  CHAPTER SIX

  Using the Internet’s Power to Make the World Suck Less

  Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.

  Desmond Tutu

  I’ve given you my own story and my own blueprint, but the promise of the Internet is not just for aspiring entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurial behavior is rewarded online, where traditional gatekeepers don’t exist. Even if we’re not starting a business, we can use the Internet to leverage human and financial capital—in philanthropy, publishing (both digital and dead-tree), music, and even politics and mass culture—more directly and efficiently than we can anywhere else.

  All the people mentioned in the following chapters would have been just as awesome in a less connected world, but we’d probably never have witnessed their talent. What they all have in common is that they didn’t ask anyone’s permission to strive. Whether you’re a public school teacher in Chesapeake, Virginia; a comedian in Austin, Texas; a cartoonist in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; an impoverished soul-music legend in Petaluma, California; or an activist anywhere else in the United States, your time has come today.

  When Donors Choose, Students Win

  Charles Best was a social studies teacher in the Bronx who, like many of his colleagues, struggled to keep his classroom adequately stocked with school supplies. He and his colleagues, like too many teachers across the United States, were routinely spending up to five hundred dollars of their own money per year on supplies for their classrooms. Inspired by this, Charles set out to find a better way. According to Charles, he thought: “I gotta start this site, because if I can tap into the expertise and ideas of my colleagues, we’re going to unleash better-targeted, smarter, more awesome ideas than anything that someone’s going to come up with at headquarters or in the ivory tower.”

  Charles had a hunch that there were a lot of people who wanted to help supply underfunded public school classrooms like his, but only if they could easily see where their money was going. Charles set out to build a way for them to verify that their donations were being put to good use. He recognized that these potential small donors wanted to feel like their contributions weren’t just going into a black box. Whether they were donating twenty dollars or twenty thousand dollars, they wanted to know that their contributions were making a concrete, measurable difference in the lives of students and teachers. Soon, Charles was hard at work developing a novel way to tap this potentially tremendous resource.

  Charles took a simple pencil sketch of his idea to a computer programmer who had recently emigrated from Poland. For two thousand dollars, the programmer built Charles a working version of DonorsChoose.org. This was in 2000, years before anyone was using phrases like “crowdsourcing” or “social media.”

  The first version of the website was markedly low-tech. Charles used a manual credit-card reader, like the ones you find in grocery stores, to process donations. It wasn’t pretty or fast, but it worked. The term “minimum viable product” hadn’t been coined yet, but that’s exactly what Charles put together. The first projects were posted on the site by Charles and a few of his fellow teachers whom he’d bribed with baked goods from his mother—roasted pears with spices, apricot glaze, and slices of orange rind (remember that part about treating your first customers like gold?).

  Those first eleven users then went on to create eleven projects, including a Baby Think It Over doll1 for health class, quilting supplies for a wall-to-wall art project, and test-prep books for students gearing up for the SAT.

  For his own project, Charles, then a history teacher, wanted to fund a field trip for his students to the home of Moctar Teyeb, who’d escaped from modern-d
ay slavery in Mauritania and was then living in the Bronx. Charles had been teaching his students about Frederick Douglass and had told them to read a New Yorker profile2 of Teyeb. With the donations from his website, Charles was able to take his class to meet Teyeb in person.

  Odds are you’re thinking these sound like awesome classroom projects that we’d hope our own children would be fortunate enough to experience. So why wasn’t this something the schools themselves could facilitate?

  Explains Charles: “It would have taken a huge amount of red tape and waiting, and bureaucracy—and even then good luck—to get the microfunding we needed to execute those ideas.”DonorsChoose.org let Charles and his colleagues bypass that red tape. All eleven of the initial projects were funded within days. Charles was onto something.

  Today, teachers can request everything from textbooks to microscopes for their classrooms, and donors can read about and even see pictures of their donations in action. That’s the connection that motivates people to give to strangers in faraway places. And it works because the story can be told with some easily uploaded photos and some text. The cost to deliver this content is basically zero, and the donation process requires just a credit card. It’s not hard to imagine the alternative—a much less effective monthly printed catalog, which of course would quickly become unsustainable given the costs of production.

  All the schools and teachers are vetted before they can post projects to the website, and when a project is funded, the teacher doesn’t receive cash: she gets the item itself, a transaction facilitated by DonorsChoose.org. On top of that, there’s an employee at DonorsChoose.org whose job it is to detect odd activity; she uses data to sniff out suspicious projects and has conducted multiple site visits. More often than not, though, she discovers just another ambitious teacher doing remarkable things to transform a classroom with DonorsChoose.org-funded supplies.

  Charles explains, “You could count on one hand, maybe even one or two fingers, the number of projects where something really sketchy happened”—that’s out of more than 350,000 projects3 (at the time of this writing).

  Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gates, Buffett, You

  DonorsChoose.org has been wildly and consistently successful. Even as institutional donors and school systems have been tightening their purse strings, every year this scrappy nonprofit logs more and more donations to an increasingly wide array of classrooms and projects, Great Recession be damned. In hindsight, this shift toward empowering small donors through transparency and choice seems obvious, but just a few years ago it would have seemed unthinkable (remember, most of the time we don’t even realize something is broken until someone else shows us a better way).

  When DonorsChoose.org started picking up steam, plenty of traditional foundations weren’t fans of this bold new model. “There were foundations that believed that someone, a donor—a citizen philanthropist—wielding nothing more than common sense, not possessed of a PhD or technical expertise, has no business making decisions about which classroom projects are worthiest,” says Charles. Even school systems themselves were suspicious: “We had a real cold shoulder from school system leaders in our first couple years because they thought that teachers were gonna use our site to get funding for books they hadn’t approved of, or were gonna get funding to do field trips that deviated from the mandated curriculum.”

  While some administrators have been wary of DonorsChoose.org, it’s been a tremendous hit with its most important beneficiaries: students. Most anyone who’s donated through the site can tell you about the awesome feeling that comes with opening an envelope full of handwritten student thank-you notes. There’s an immediate connection. You’d be surprised at how thoughtful, passionate, and sometimes funny these thank-you notes can be.

  Don’t take our word, or the above doodle, as irrefutable proof. Just ask Mudosir, a student in an elementary school classroom whose project I funded. Mudosir sums it up well in a neatly handwritten letter he glued to a fine sheet of purple construction paper and decorated with a bold red crayon border:

  Dear Breadpig,

  Thank you for the laptops. I love your computers because you can download a lot of games on it. I like the Internet, too, because we were researching for information about plant, animals, and India. Thank you for the laptops. If it wasn’t for you we would not have laptops. These are reasons why I want to thank you for the laptops. Thank you very much.

  Sincerely,

  Mudosir

  Now Mudosir has a computer in his classroom that will teach him everything he could want to know about plants, animals, and India. And he’s quite thankful for all that.

  At the time of this writing, DonorsChoose.org has raised more than $175 million for public schools across the United States. I’m fortunate to sit on the advisory board of this impressive organization, which has made a real impact in the lives of children across the country who need it most.

  DonorsChoose.org is the first of several bottom-line-minded, tech-savvy nonprofits to spearhead a massive shift in the way we think about philanthropy, including Kiva.org (I was a volunteer for them in Armenia after my reddit contract ended), Vitanna.org, CharityWater.org, and GlobalGiving.org, to name a few. I’m convinced this will be the future of giving. No longer will a guilt-inducing letter that arrives in December convince the Internet generation to cut a check for an organization without accountability.

  That’s the promise of an open Internet. We as donors no longer have to be content with sending our money into a void—we don’t want huge percentages of each donation to go to administrative overhead and never reach those who need it. An open Internet connects the once-invisible dots between donors and communities in need, allowing donors and recipients to build strong, transparent connections.

  Through DonorsChoose.org, teachers get supplies they need for the education their students deserve (and love); and donors—in a way that feels both personal and substantive—are satisfied knowing their money has actually made the world suck a little less. This is the future of the nonprofit world. If I can see a picture of someone’s snack in Amsterdam,4 I’d better be able to see where my donation is going.

  Of all the thousands of projects that DonorsChoose.org has facilitated, perhaps none have had quite the impact of Debby Guardino’s.

  Joplin

  Late in the afternoon on Sunday, May 22, 2011, Joplin, Missouri was hit by an EF55 tornado that killed more than 150 people, injured a thousand more, and flat-out obliterated a chunk of this city of about fifty thousand people.6

  The next morning, the residents surveyed the damage. Among the buildings devastated by the storm was Joplin High School. Although, fortunately, no one was in the school when the storm struck, 260 teachers—many of whom had their own homes damaged or destroyed—were left without classrooms or supplies.

  While the residents of Joplin were taking stock of their losses, twelve hundred miles away in Chesapeake, Virginia, a special education teacher named Debby Guardino heard about the tragedy and was touched. She wanted to do something to help. So she went to her computer.

  By her own admission, Debby is hardly a tech expert, but she had been using DonorsChoose.org to solicit donations for supplies in her own classroom. Just a few years ago, this same woman wouldn’t have been able to do much more than forward some e-mails to friends. But the modern Internet is one hell of a platform. And Debby Guardino is one hell of a woman. Debby opened DonorsChoose.org in her browser and searched for classroom projects in Joplin, Missouri. Her search returned zero results. Since there were no teachers in Joplin using DonorsChoose.org, Debby started a giving page for them—as anyone who uses the site can do, taking advantage of tools the site freely provides. From there, funds can be raised for whatever classroom projects are posted online.

  After she started a giving page, Debby began contacting education companies online—through e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, whatever she could find—asking them to donate supplies she could bring to the Joplin teachers. With no network other tha
n her Internet connection, Debby was able to build momentum for her cause. Among the thousands of people she reached out to were me and the team at hipmunk, who were so moved by her story that we flew her out to Joplin. By the time she arrived in Joplin five weeks later to personally deliver the supplies, she had raised more than four hundred thousand dollars in donations online and had three tractor trailers (seriously, three eighteen-wheelers!) and tons of boxes shipped from all over the country containing educational resources for Joplin teachers. And she did it all from her home in Chesapeake, Virginia, using social media alone.

  When Debby arrived in Missouri on July 3, the scene she found was overwhelming:

  Images online do not come close to what it is like on the ground. Try to imagine getting in your car, driving six miles, turning and driving a mile, turn again drive six miles, drive another six miles and then imagine it gone, some areas where I am told there was hundreds of houses, just cement foundations or cellars… and then nothing… no sign that there was anything there… go a little further and parts of houses still standing, but nothing can be salvaged… clothing, toys, furniture crushed in the rubble and items all over the ground… the ground is embedded with fragments of these families’ lives… many areas look like the contents of people’s homes were churned up like a blender and thrown everywhere… trees stripped of all bark, or pulled up by the roots… but mother nature takes over and these trees that look totally dead… are now sprouting small green leaves.7