After selling his first business 15 years ago, David Goldberg became obsessed with the idea of making it absurdly easy for entrepreneurs to have an outsized social impact. This led to the creation of Founders Pledge, a community of experienced entrepreneurs who have now collectively pledged over $10 billion to charities.

What We Discussed:

00:00:00: Introduction to the episode and David Goldberg

00:01:37: David's Purpose

00:03:23: Who is David Goldberg?

00:05:05: David's successful relationship and life balance

00:05:47: What keeps David up at night

00:07:45: What motivates David

00:08:16: David's legacy

00:08:33: Expectations from David's parents

00:10:08: Value of Formal Education and Start of Career

00:13:55: David’s first business experience

00:18:25: The moment of business exit

00:19:32: Motivation for the first business

00:19:47: Change in motivation and definition of success

00:25:00: Decision to get formally educated

00:27:32: Moving to Cambridge, UK

00:28:16: Cultural shifts in Berlin versus UK

00:31:48: Founders Forum group and understanding real poverty

00:37:40: Empathy Awakening

00:40:34: Joining Founders Forum

00:44:51: The challenges of executing the Founders Pledge

00:46:20: How the Founders Pledge began

00:46:45: The role of Founders Forum in the Founders Pledge

00:51:56: Understanding the use of a Donor Advised Fund

00:57:53: How Founders Pledge sustains itself financially

01:00:00: Funding for Founders Pledge

01:00:55: Personal motivations behind running the Founders Pledge.

01:02:00: Concept of Founders Pledge

01:12:57: Spirituality in Giving

01:15:17: Introduction to Pledge Ventures

01:22:57: Pledge Ventures in action

01:27:26: The Impact and Effectiveness of Founders Pledge

01:28:10: Reasons to Support Founders Pledge

01:30:14: The Problem with Traditional Charities

01:31:52: The Future Growth and Potential of Founders Pledge.

01:32:36: The Efficiency and Control in Founders Pledge

01:33:52: What Differentiates Founders Pledge from Other Charitable Enterprises.

01:33:52: Final words

David Goldberg. Post-Exit Impact: $10B Pledged to Charities

David Goldberg: [00:00:00 - 00:00:02]

The heart leads us to give, but the head should govern how it's done.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:00:02 - 00:00:28]

David Goldberg. After selling his first business 15 years ago, he became obsessed with the idea of making it absurdly easy for entrepreneurs to have an outsized social impact. This led to the creation of Founders Pledge, a community of experienced entrepreneurs who have now collectively pledged over $10 billion to charity. In this episode, he guides us on how to think about our own post exit impact in a rational and authentic way.

David Goldberg: [00:00:28 - 00:00:49]

All human life has equal value. We are all the same. If that's the case, how can we help as many people as possible by as much as possible? The thing that keeps me going is like, what we're building is important, and it's never been done before in this way.

We're like a multifamily office set up exclusively for entrepreneurs that focuses exclusively on philanthropy and charges nothing for its service.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:00:56 - 00:00:58]

Thank you so much for joining me today.

David Goldberg: [00:00:58 - 00:01:00]

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:01:00 - 00:01:37]

So, for me, you're an extremely rare example of someone who achieved significant financial success early in life. But instead of spoiling yourself rotten or just retiring and enjoying your wealth, or managing your wealth full time, you laser focused on solving the world's nastiest problems. And you created a sustainable vehicle for doing that. And you persuaded thousands of successful entrepreneurs to join you in this quest. So on this podcast, I really want to explore how you decided to do that, how you made this decision.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:01:37 - 00:01:43]

I'll ask you directly, what is your purpose? How much clarity on that you have?

David Goldberg: [00:01:43 - 00:03:07]

I think, like a fair bit. My purpose is to help as many people as much as possible in the small amount of time that I have. I saw a chart once. It actually gave me more fire and drive than anything I'd ever experienced before. I read this website called Wait but Why. And it's written by a guy named Tim Urban, and he's one of the great communicators of our time. And I remember reading through the website many years ago now, and I found he did an article on your life in weeks, which is like a pretty crazy idea. And he has an a four sheet of paper, and it starts in your life in years and then your life in month and your life in weeks. And it shows the boxes at each stage. And so you can actually print off the sheet of paper and cross off the weeks that you've lived. It's a 90 year life on an a four sheet of paper. Cross off the weeks that you've lived. You're pretty far down the paper pretty soon after graduating from university and having your first couple of jobs, and then you look at where the great people in history, how long they've lived and where they got to by the time they were your age, and you're like, oh, man, I don't have much time left. And you could tick off this chart week by week, and you see the time passing by ever faster. And it really was this just forcing function for we have to do more right now.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:03:07 - 00:03:21]

Yeah. I love this sense of urgency, which keeps popping up during the century all the time, because it is one of the common traits for the most successful entrepreneurs. So I have all the confidence with your continuing success.

David Goldberg: [00:03:21 - 00:03:23]

I appreciate it. Thank you.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:03:23 - 00:03:26]

Now, who is David Goldberg?

David Goldberg: [00:03:27 - 00:03:32]

I don't know. We're still trying to figure that out. Not sure.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:03:32 - 00:03:34]

How do you think your identity changed over time?

David Goldberg: [00:03:34 - 00:03:46]

I don't know. I'm not sure that it has so much. I feel often, like, very similar then and now. Just, I guess, a bit more experience.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:03:47 - 00:03:54]

Okay, so you don't necessarily torture yourself over the question, who am I, and what's my identity? At the moment?

David Goldberg: [00:03:54 - 00:04:14]

No. My identity is like me. I'm trying to be better all the time, not always succeeding. I work hard. I sometimes push people also to work hard, maybe sometimes too hard.

So my identity is like, I'm very much driven by mission. I have been for a long time.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:04:15 - 00:04:18]

And working hard, which seems to be the story of your whole life, coming from you.

David Goldberg: [00:04:18 - 00:04:26]

I also don't know how to be chill about stuff, necessarily.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:04:27 - 00:04:27]

You're intense.

David Goldberg: [00:04:27 - 00:04:55]

I'm intense a lot. My partner often teases me that, like, if we have a weekend where we're not doing anything, I will invent things to do. We were joking yesterday, actually, like, sitting in the living room, and I was like, I really want to build a new corner TV unit. He's like, please don't start another project on Sunday morning to finish it that evening. No, I'm not going to, but, yeah, I don't know how to have downtime, necessarily.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:04:55 - 00:05:04]

So, talking about your husband, what do you think are the secrets of your successful relationship through quite the roller coaster that your life has been so far?

David Goldberg: [00:05:05 - 00:05:46]

Honesty, flexibility, knowing that another person can't fix me and I can't fix him, and giving each other space when we need it and closeness when we want more of that. I travel a lot for work, so we chat a lot. But basically, we're each people on a journey, evolving, hopefully mostly in the same direction. Sometimes not always just being honest about that and being comfortable with. Sometimes we'll be great, and other times we won't be. But we've been on the path together for so long and been through ups and downs that together we can do anything.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:05:47 - 00:05:49]

What keeps you up at night?

David Goldberg: [00:05:49 - 00:07:22]

A lot. I have struggled to sleep my whole life. I ask people this when I interview people actually for jobs. I ask two questions, like, what keeps you up at night and what wakes you up in the morning? The scale of problems that exist in the world really keeps me up at night.

Things have been getting better for a really long time, and in a lot of ways they're getting worse in recent years, we've never seen more sort of interstate conflict, intrastate conflict than in the last couple of years. We've seen real declines in the gains that we made in malaria. We're seeing insecticide resistance in mosquitoes. And so malaria for the first time in decades is on the rise and parts of the world where it's horrible already.

I'm worried about how climate change is going to continue to affect how we live our lives in the global north and in high income countries, not to mention just the havoc it's already caused in low income countries and what this is going to mean for disease actors. There's a lot of problems and I feel like often not enough people trying to solve them or focused on solving them. So that keeps you along with all the standard stuff like running a business and making sure it works well and making sure people are well motivated and happy and we're doing a good job. I get into bed and I close my eyes and my head goes, all the stuff that you've not done well, how could you do it better? Thinking about the next day, the next week.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:07:22 - 00:07:24]

How do you deal with that? Do you meditate?

David Goldberg: [00:07:25 - 00:07:42]

I've tried. I sometimes do that successfully, but I went to a cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, although I don't think I have terrible insomnia. And I've developed a good routine now that I actually get to bed pretty well. But after, like, years of work to do it. Yeah.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:07:43 - 00:07:45]

So what wakes you up in the morning?

David Goldberg: [00:07:45 - 00:08:16]

I've now got to the age where regardless of alarm, I wake up at the exact same time every single, regardless of if I've gone out the night before, staying up late like clockwork. But the point of the question is, what's my motivation? How do I leave and go to work and do that well? What's the opportunity to affect the world positively? And I really do believe that a founder's clutch lives up to its potential and does well, stuff that must do well, then we can change the shape of the world.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:08:16 - 00:08:19]

You certainly can. How do you want to be remembered?

David Goldberg: [00:08:19 - 00:08:33]

As someone who's given back, someone who's left a mark on the world? I think everyone wants to leave a mark on history, that my time, my contribution, was worth something.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:08:33 - 00:08:36]

I want to know what your parents expected from you.

David Goldberg: [00:08:36 - 00:09:18]

Yeah, I think they just expected me to be great most of the time, not ever in a very high pressure way. But my parents were working class. They really worked very hard to provide for my brother and I, even though we grew up with less than most people around us. And I saw how hard my parents worked and knew that from a very young age that I couldn't really squander the opportunity that they gave me.

Yeah. They really just sort of expected me to be great and excellent and excel in everything I did and I tried to.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:09:18 - 00:09:28]

But it sounds like they created this environment where you felt that you were lucky to be where you are. It sounds like there is gratitude there. You said you couldn't squander the opportunity.

David Goldberg: [00:09:28 - 00:09:49]

Yeah. I mean, my dad worked two jobs. My mom had a small business and did work on the side, so they worked long hours, and it was very obvious to me that they did. Whereas the kids in my neighborhood, parents, one parent had a job, the other was a stay at home mother, which meant that it just seemed different in other homes. Really?

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:09:50 - 00:10:08]

So you are unusually well educated for an entrepreneur. In our community of post exit founders, we often debate the value of formal education. And I wonder, if you look back at your life, what do you think your education gave you?

David Goldberg: [00:10:08 - 00:12:15]

Well, it's interesting, because when I was a kid, I really didn't like learning. I found school, high school, to just be like a supreme waste of time. I think I was mostly pretty bored. And in fact, I dropped out of high school when I was 17.

And just decided that finishing high school diploma didn't make any sense. I wanted to go make money. I realized at a sort of in my teenage years that money see well I thought money was the answer to all problems, and I decided I was going to just go make as much of it as possible. And staying at high school didn't seem like the right way to do that.

So I dropped out when I was 17 and got a job when I was 18. By sort of luck and happenstance, I was able to convince a private bank to hire me. I walked into this private bank. I knew someone who knew someone there. I dropped a name.

I was able to speak to the president of this bank, and I convinced him to hire me as his assistant, and it was January 7, 2002, and I just turned 18. I basically proved that you didn't need education to get a good job. It turns out I wasn't very good at this job. Why would I have been? I'd never worked before.

I certainly didn't like taking orders from someone as an assistant, it turned out. But rather than getting fired, which I had every right to be, after about a month, I got put on a rotational program and ended up joining a department a couple of months later. That was doing something that I was quite good at, basically. And so I was successful sort of pretty early on, and I worked in this bank selling mortgage backed securities on secondary markets for about three years, and found myself a couple of years later, 21 I was hiring. MBAs work underneath me. At that point, I didn't feel that education really mattered.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:12:15 - 00:12:20]

So what changed? Why did you end up doing quite a lot of education?

David Goldberg: [00:12:20 - 00:12:41]

It's a slightly long story. Well, it's a long story, basically, but the short version is, I did this career in finance for a couple of years at the end of 22 I really didn't like who I had become. I was working to live, as opposed to the other way around. No, that's not right. I was living to work.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:12:42 - 00:12:43]

Exactly.

David Goldberg: [00:12:43 - 00:12:50]

All I did was work. 07:00 a.m. In the office, home at midnight, six days a week, rinse, repeat, for years.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:12:50 - 00:12:57]

Which makes a lot of sense, because that's also what your parents instilled in you as a core value.

David Goldberg: [00:12:57 - 00:13:40]

I worked really hard. I made a lot of money, and I found myself approaching. I felt like I was approaching this decision. Like I either double down on this space and I just do this for the rest of my life and commit to being unhappy, which is sort of what it felt like, or I get out right now. And I thankfully got out, and I quit this job at the end of 2005, and I'm so glad I did. 2006 came around.

I bought a one way ticket to Europe. I traveled for a couple of months and then ended up in Berlin, which was the most fun city I'd ever been to. I'd never been out of the US before, and bought this ticket to Europe.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:13:41 - 00:13:55]

That was incredibly brave of you. But also, it brings us to one of many things I find extremely impressive about you is how you built a business in a country where you didn't speak the language. How did that happen? Tell me that story. Yeah.

David Goldberg: [00:13:55 - 00:14:58]

So I moved to Berlin. Well, I went back to Berlin with the intention to live there. And I figured it'd be pretty easy to get an apartment to set up a life, figure out what to do. I didn't really have a plan, and I soon learned that if you didn't speak german, it was really hard to get an apartment to rent a flat. And I went through this pretty harrowing process where I found an estate agent who spoke very broken English, who gave me a list of properties to see by myself that I had to arrange by myself.

And then when I eventually found one I liked and negotiated with the landlord for the rent, I got an invoice from this estate agent charging me two months of rent. And I was just flabbergasted because he basically did nothing and that he wanted a lot of money. And it turned out, I started talking to people. I made some friends over the couple of weeks that I'd been there. I was staying in a hostel, and it turned out this is sort of how it worked.

And I thought, that's crazy and broken, and I could do it better for less.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:14:58 - 00:15:00]

You'd recognize the opportunity and you were ready for it.

David Goldberg: [00:15:00 - 00:15:33]

There was a real need, I felt. And Berlin was becoming cool at this point, it wasn’t you know, I don't think it was at sort of peak coolness at that point. And so I started a business helping people like me figure out how to live in a country where they didn't speak the language. And it started as a relocation company, and it grew very quickly. It wasn't a technology company, there was no investors, it was bootstraps, and it wasn't sexy. It just made money pretty quickly. And a couple of years later, I sold it.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:15:33 - 00:15:38]

A couple of years. It's a very short period of time from starting a company to actually exiting.

David Goldberg: [00:15:38 - 00:15:38]

That's right.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:15:39 - 00:15:42]

Quite incredible, especially in a country where you don't speak the language.

David Goldberg: [00:15:42 - 00:16:40]

Yeah, I didn't need to speak the language. I mean, I fully leaned into this thing that you can come to me if you want to live in Berlin and not ever have to speak a word of German to get an apartment and have your life set up. This is as YouTube was becoming a thing. And so we started doing YouTube walkthroughs and putting them on the Internet so that people could rent an apartment without having ever seen it physically from a different part of the world. And we just streamlined the whole process, end to end, hired students to work with our clients in English.

They practiced their English, which was nice for them, and then they interacted, on the other hand, in German with owners and property managers. And it just became this really easy thing. I charged half as much and did twice the work, and it became thing pretty quickly. I think it was mostly right place, right time, and two years in, I got an acquisition offer, like inbound acquisition offer that I took.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:16:40 - 00:17:15]

Brilliant. So when I first met you, I thought one of the things that made you really stand out from my perspective was that you are very well aware of your natural amazing communication skills. And you mentioned yourself very early in life when you persuaded the head of a private bank to hire you. Help me understand, at what point did you realize that talent and how did you work on those skills? Because it seems to be such a core talent for you. Core skill as well.

David Goldberg: [00:17:15 - 00:17:54]

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't remember where I was like, yeah, this is the thing that I'm really good at. I'm really good at talking to people. But I certainly remember persuading my parents as a child to allow me to stay up late to watch Star Trek with my dad or, like, not go to bed. So I always negotiated for everything, and this sometimes got me in trouble, but it often worked.

And I never really took no for an answer. And again, this often got me in trouble, but it also mostly worked most of the time. So I sort of realized that talking was a way to get what you wanted. If you were good at it, you could get lots of things.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:17:54 - 00:18:02]

Yeah. So do you think your parents encouraged it or you think they tried to suppress it, but they couldn't?

David Goldberg: [00:18:03 - 00:18:08]

I don't know, actually. But I like to think that they encouraged it as opposed to try to suppress it.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:18:08 - 00:18:08]

Okay.

David Goldberg: [00:18:08 - 00:18:24]

So my dad and I used to play scrabble and do riddles and board games as a kid. So I assume that he had some thought into like, oh, my son is a good communicator. How do I make him better at it? How do I increase his vocabulary? I guess.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:18:25 - 00:18:32]

Can we go to that moment when you first realize you were exiting your business? How did you feel?

David Goldberg: [00:18:32 - 00:18:43]

Overwhelmed. I wasn't planning to. That's the thing. I was living in Berlin. I was pretty you know content. There was this thing that was sort of running itself. I didn't really do much. I didn't love it.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:18:43 - 00:18:46]

After just two years, you also automated.

David Goldberg: [00:18:46 - 00:19:27]

I liked the zero to one a lot, and it just seemed to work. I hired different people, made them well, and it just sort of ran on its own mostly. And I got this inbound offer from a larger property company saying, we've been following your progress. You're out competing us with this market. We'd like to acquire you?

And I was like, yeah, that sounds good. I talked to my partner and it just made sense. My heart wasn't in it. It was a nice offer. I maybe, probably could have got more or like, much more if I just kept on doing it.

But it didn't really feel like it was a thing that I wanted to do.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:19:27 - 00:19:32]

So would you say that your motivation for your first business was purely financial?

David Goldberg: [00:19:32 - 00:19:33]

Purely.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:19:33 - 00:19:47]

Purely financial, yeah. It happens so much, doesn't it? So many of us just have this idea of getting financial freedom. Sometimes we want to prove ourselves. Plus, it's financial freedom, but it's more financial freedom for sure.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:19:47 - 00:19:57]

How has it changed for you in terms of your motivation and your definition of success as well? After you sold your business.

David Goldberg: [00:19:58 - 00:22:52]

Pretty radically. The deal happened quick, and I realized sort of as it was concluding, that I'd gotten really lucky. I think that this is a thing that we under index on as a community of entrepreneurs, being in the right place at the right time and just things sort of working out. And it wasn't just that I got lucky at this point, it was that, on reflection, I'd gotten lucky a lot. And it wasn't a crazy exit where I never have to do anything. It maybe could have been, I guess, but I felt like I'd won the life lottery sort of three times as a kid I felt poor. We weren't in relative terms, but actually, I was born a white man in California in the 1980s, which is sort of as good as it gets. And then I got the shuttle in finance, and I was just freshly 18, literally the week I turned 18 and was successful and did that for a bunch of years and left of my own accord. And then I had this business that I started and sold without real intent or direction. And it just felt like I had accrued a ton of good karma that I probably needed to redistribute if I was going to stay on the bright side of the books.

And so I felt sort of compelled to do something more than just sit on my wealth and allow it to amass and aggregate, aggregate aggregate, just for me. I just sort of had this moment where I was like, this isn't really mine, is it? I've just sort of been lucky enough to have this good fortune. I should get back.

And I guess I was a bit naive in thinking that it would be just a very straightforward and easy thing to do, and then I'd spend a couple of months on it and then move on to the next project, whatever that project was. I didn't know but I felt like at this point, I should rebalance the scales. And what I thought was going to take a couple of months, I'm still working on 15 years later. Right. It was a much more challenging thing.

And to answer your question, this is what sort of brought me back to education. I had this outcome. I wanted to give back. I started looking into charities. It'll be easy.

I'll ask for some data. I'll look at the numbers. I'll figure out which is best by doing some analysis, and then that'll be that. But charities just couldn't provide data in the way that I wanted. They weren't very numerate or quantitative.

It was really about trying to, for charities, tell a compelling story and grab someone by the heartstrings and get them to bind the idea of the mission rather than what does the thing actually accomplish. And it was really crazy to me and really foreign that charities were selling this emotional product, and I really wanted a rational conversation.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:22:52 - 00:22:53]

Right.

David Goldberg: [00:22:53 - 00:23:10]

And it just seemed like they were focusing on the wrong stuff. I mean, I guess from their perspective, their donors wanted to feel good, feel, like, emotionally compelled by this mission, of course. And they optimized for that. And it's really not what I wanted.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:23:11 - 00:23:15]

Isn't because you already thought as a business person. Yeah.

David Goldberg: [00:23:15 - 00:23:44]

I was like, I run my business this way. I invest my money in this way. Why would I not think about philanthropy in the same capacity? Right. Yeah.

When we make decisions about what to invest in or what not to invest in or which product line to double down on and which to cut, which strategy works and which doesn't, we don't make decisions based on how emotionally compelling something is, we make decisions based on the data. We run the numbers, we do tests, and we iterate based on the result.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:23:44 - 00:24:31]

So how much time did you spend in soul searching because you have such amazing clarity of, I guess, your true purpose right now. But how difficult was it to find it? Because I think that once we've exited, we suddenly have the time and financial freedom to do this soul searching. But it feels hard and unpleasant for most of us, so we try to avoid it by jumping into a familiar activity. You and I saw it many times, whether it's angel investing or jumping into another business, but people really try to avoid this kind of hard thinking and facing the truths that you seem to have faced very brilliantly. But I don't want it to sound as if it just happened like this. If it hasn't, help me understand. How did you get to that?

David Goldberg: [00:24:31 - 00:25:00]

It's been a process, right? So I did not really feel like I had the luxury of time, even though I guess I did, in retrospect, I felt pretty compelled, like there was this really big problem and I don't like problems that feel solvable. And this felt solvable in a way. Like, it made sense that organizations working on big social problems would use data, and they didn't. And it felt weird.

David Goldberg: [00:25:00 - 00:25:47]

But I also didn't really know how much I didn't know. I knew that I didn't know a lot, but I didn't know how big a lot was and I didn't know how to start thinking about it. So my soul searching was I don't really have enough knowledge or ability to think critically about this space or how to affect it at all. My soul searching led me to I need to get educated finally. Like, I jumped at high school.

I had no real formal education and I could hustle. I was street smart and I was like numerate, but I didn't know how to think critically or systematically. And so I decided my soul searching led me to I'm going to go figure out how to think better and upgrade my operating system.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:25:47 - 00:25:50]

So how was the idea of founders pledge bond?

David Goldberg: [00:25:50 - 00:27:00]

So I had this exit. Wanted to give back, tried, did poorly. I was really unhappy with the stuff that I gave to and I felt like I really thought critically about it. But I decided to run a test. I'll give some money to a couple of different things and see what I get back.

And it was pretty unnerving and I was unhappy about it. And I concurrently moved back to the US with my then boyfriend, now husband, and we enrolled in community college. So I had to do a remote correspondence to finish high school, which I did, and then went to community college, studied there for two years, we both did. And then transferred to UCLA, where I did a double in political science and public policy. I thought these were two areas that would lend themselves well to understanding levers of systemic change. It did. And from there I sort of got the learning bug. I went to my undergrad at 25 and all of my peers were teenagers, basically. But I like learning. I was really taken by it. And then came to the UK to do a PhD. I started one, at least.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:27:00 - 00:27:02]

How did you persuade your husband to join you?

David Goldberg: [00:27:03 - 00:27:29]

Pretty straightforward. Okay, so he's from Berlin, wanted to see the world and travel. It was clear that we were in a long term relationship. We were going to go do life together. So he came with me, which was fun.

And he's from Berlin, so the deal was always, we'll spend undergrad in the US and then we'll come back to Europe for the next chapter.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:27:29 - 00:27:32]

But you came back to London.

David Goldberg: [00:27:32 - 00:27:52]

Well, I came to Cambridge, to the UK. I applied to a bunch of schools, I got into the ones that I wanted and Cambridge was the place for me. They had one of the best international relations programs in the world and went there. Jacob came with me, was much, much closer to home. And, yeah, I studied.

He commuted to London and worked.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:27:53 - 00:28:16]

So I'm also someone who had two immigrations in my life. So I can appreciate how difficult that is to understand a new culture, but it opens your horizons amazingly. It really changes you as a person. I would love you to tell me how it felt for you, living it in a different culture for a while.

David Goldberg: [00:28:16 - 00:28:19]

Yeah, I mean, I lived in Berlin, so it was like, really radically.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:28:19 - 00:28:19]

And built a business there.

David Goldberg: [00:28:20 - 00:29:44]

Yeah, but the UK was different. I just come from California. UCLA was where I did my undergrad, and I absolutely loved it there. The teachers really were invested, professors invested in their students'outcomes. They really wanted people to succeed.

I had maybe one of my favorite professors ever who was just he never published anything, but he just really cared and he put time in to every student and there was just like this sort of stewardship that happened. And then I came to the UK. There's Cambridge, one of the old hallowed universities, and it was radically different. The professors just mostly like unhappy old men and who really didn't take the same level of care with their students.

I think it's mostly like there was this. If you get here, you proved that you're among the best, and now you have to prove you're among the best at the best, and you got to do it alone. And it felt like very I felt very alone and very unsupport. I didn't love my time at Cambridge.

I did well there. Right. I really had something to prove. I felt like going to UCLA and getting good grades. There was like I had something to prove.

But I got into Cambridge, I really got it. Now I have to be the best. I was, but I didn't love it.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:29:44 - 00:29:46]

Looking back, was it worth it?

David Goldberg: [00:29:46 - 00:30:06]

Yeah, of course. I don't like doing things halfway or part way, and I really went for it. I made wonderfully good friends there who thought I worked too hard and tried too hard and had less fun than they did. And that's probably true, but I'm glad that I did and didn't stay to do the PhD. I started and stopped.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:30:07 - 00:30:12]

I remember you mentioned that you figured it wasn't the best way for you to give back.

David Goldberg: [00:30:12 - 00:30:14]

It wasn't the best way for me to spend my time.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:30:14 - 00:30:15]

Exactly.

David Goldberg: [00:30:15 - 00:30:38]

And I was older than most of my peers even then. And it's just like, this isn't the right use of five years. I could go do something. I remember back to this moment where I was like, I'm going to go to school and we have to think about how to think better. You're going to think better.

And then I'm going to go do the thing that I wanted, which is like, how do you solve these big system level problems that we've had forever?

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:30:38 - 00:30:46]

So has that formal education in two different major universities help you solve those problems?

David Goldberg: [00:30:46 - 00:30:47]

Absolutely.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:30:47 - 00:30:51]

Okay, so without that experience, you don't think you would do it at least as efficiently?

David Goldberg: [00:30:51 - 00:31:14]

No chance. I mean, I didn't know how to think systematically. I learned how to think about the world and about the power structure, who's within it, the role that policy plays, how social movements actually form and what they mean. I learned how to actually think quantitatively rather than just be numerate. I wouldn't change it for sure.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:31:14 - 00:31:48]

So would it be correct to say that your definition of success after you sold your business, changed into this idea of how do I grow myself? How do I prepare myself to achieve that goal that I have, which was given back? And then it drove you to succeed in those two universities in quite a challenging atmosphere where you were the oldest person in the group. So your definition of success has changed into preparing yourself to give back what happens next?

David Goldberg: [00:31:48 - 00:33:08]

So I leave Cambridge. I see a job spec on the Internet. It's like it was written for me. Then it's that moment of like, oh, wow, these people are looking for me for this job. And it was a job running or helping to run a new initiative that was within the Founders Forum group.

Founders Forum is this wonderful community of tech entrepreneurs started by Brent Hoberman here in London. I think it was like just after the first Dot burst, 2002, as like a way to collectively heal as a community of entrepreneurs. And I joined them just as they were turning ten to help run this program called the Founders form for Good, aiming to help social entrepreneurs build more commercial products and sort of scale impact using technology. So it was this very cool idea that I was well suited to. I had a really clear sense of what impact meant at that point.

I was really taken by the idea that technology has the capacity to really transform the level of scale and how the delivery of good happens. And it just made sense. It's like a job written for me.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:33:09 - 00:33:22]

You said something very important, so I have to interrupt you here. You said that you had a clear idea of what impact meant for you. I come across people every day, as I'm sure you do, who want to do impact, but they actually don't know what it means.

David Goldberg: [00:33:22 - 00:33:44]

Yeah. So for me, it's like affecting people positively, whether that be helping them from dying or improving the quality of life or reducing the burden and disease burden that they have. Impact is like, the way I think about it at scale, is affecting as many people as possible, as much as possible towards a better or more positive life.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:33:44 - 00:34:11]

Brilliant. So you are comfortable with having such a broad definition? You don't feel the need, that you don't have the need to focus on a particular problem? The reason I'm asking is because I feel that lots of people are wasting literally years thinking that they need to find that one problem that they want to dedicate their lives to. But you felt very comfortable having this broad definition.

David Goldberg: [00:34:11 - 00:34:44]

Absolutely. I mean, helping people is not like just helping a group of people, helping all people. And my view has been and continues to be, that all human life has equal value, regardless of where it is, where people are born, how they're born, to whom they're born. Right. We are all the same.

And so if that's the case, how can we help as many people as possible? By as much as possible. And it doesn't mean just focusing on one thing. It means sort of taking a broad approach and moving the needle as much as possible. At least it did for me.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:34:44 - 00:34:50]

So it sounds like at the time, when you started your first business, you were quite selfish. You wanted to solve a problem for yourself.

David Goldberg: [00:34:51 - 00:34:59]

I wanted to make money. I solved a problem that I faced that I assumed other people would have. And I figured I could make good money doing it.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:34:59 - 00:35:19]

But eventually, that was money for you. So it was, if you're honest with yourself, quite a selfish question. And then it looks like in a few years, you have grown so much spiritually that you had this clarity that now I want to help other people.

David Goldberg: [00:35:19 - 00:36:17]

Yeah. So I guess the real turning point was actually understanding what poverty is. So I thought I was poor as a kid, and I was in relative terms, but I wasn't really. So when I was in Berlin, I traveled a bit. I went to Asia for a month, 2007, and I saw what poverty is and evated it. Yeah, it was horrible.

And it really made me reevaluate. Like, I wasn't really very poor at all, was, you know, when you look at income data over time, I realized that I was actually amongst the wealthiest people ever to have existed, even though in relative terms, compared to my peers in Los Angeles, I was at the very bottom of the income spectrum. But if you zoom out to the world, it's like, way at the top. And if you zoom out even further and look over time, I was very lucky to be born when I was where I was.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:36:17 - 00:36:19]

That trip happened after you sold your business?

David Goldberg: [00:36:19 - 00:36:20]

No, before. Yeah.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:36:20 - 00:36:21]

Okay.

David Goldberg: [00:36:21 - 00:36:28]

Took a month off, business was running well, sold the business at the end of 2008, went on this trip in 2007, and I saw it, I was like, wow.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:36:29 - 00:36:48]

So by the time you became wealthy yourself, you already had this idea. That explains why it took you so relatively short period of time to make such a huge jump into this desire to serve other people, whoever they are, wherever they are, and not just a small group of people you could relate to.

David Goldberg: [00:36:48 - 00:37:16]

Yeah, because I didn't relate to the culture in Southeast Asia, I couldn't. But I saw that these were people and they were living hard lives their whole lives, and kids were dying and there was poverty and mosquitoes and mosquito borne disease, and it was harrowing. I mean, parts of this trip were really fun because I had to sort of offset the, like, I really felt the.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:37:16 - 00:37:19]

You felt compassion.

David Goldberg: [00:37:19 - 00:37:40]

A lot of it. It was hard to witness because I was this relative. I hadn't had this exit. But still, in relative terms, this wealthy white person going in, know, Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam and Thailand, it was like, wow, these people really have it much worse than I ever did. And does it have to be this way?

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:37:40 - 00:38:05]

Yeah. So in a way, if we talk to someone who just exited their business and they theoretically want to have a lot of impact, this is quite a common situation, but they don't really feel it. Deep in their heart, they're not nearly motivated. Would you say, go to these poor countries, experience them, and see if that triggers your compassion? Would that be a practical advice?

David Goldberg: [00:38:06 - 00:39:14]

It's a good and challenging question, and I don't know. It was helpful for me, but I'm not sure that. I'm not sure that I'd recommend it necessarily, because it triggers a really emotional response. And that emotional response tends to lead people to make decisions that aren't calculated or considered. So these days, I do something different.

My business now helps entrepreneurs figure out how to use their resources to affect the world positively. And we try to discourage poverty tourism, which is, I think, often people have a desire to go see what the rest of the world is. Like, with the lens of, I have money and I want to use that money to affect the world. I guess maybe I was just going to travel and see more because I hadn't really done that. And as part of that experience, I saw this poverty, and that really affected me.

But most of the people who have exits now have traveled, seen the world, have context in a way that I didn't because I was very sheltered.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:39:14 - 00:40:02]

Yeah. My problem with poverty tourism is that some people just feel good about themselves when they travel beyond Asia, and that is a problem. But I like to think that people who already have so much experience as exited founders and usually already have quite developed compassion, because I think to succeed in a business, we actually have to have compassion for our customers, for our employees. If you don't, you may have a business, but it probably will never be really successful. So I find that lots of exited founders already have lots of kindness and compassion and the desire to give.

So for them, traveling may make a lot of sense because they may have experience like you, that seeds of compassion will grow when they expand their horizons.

David Goldberg: [00:40:02 - 00:40:24]

Yeah, I guess to the extent that it actually traveling allows someone to have more compassion and decide that they want to give, I guess, more power to them. But the approach that I take now with founders pledge is different than that. We try to approach the question of, like, how.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:40:24 - 00:40:34]

I want us to get there because you said it took a bit of time. So you traveled, you edited the business, you went to university, now you have all the skills, now you get involved with Founders Forum. What's next?

David Goldberg: [00:40:34 - 00:40:51]

So I helped to run this foundation for about a year. It was a really lovely idea that didn't really work. And the idea was, let's help these socially minded people scale better commercially using technology. They were social entrepreneurs. We call it social tech entrepreneurs.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:40:51 - 00:40:54]

Why didn't it work? Sounds like a brilliant idea.

David Goldberg: [00:40:54 - 00:41:00]

Yeah, it does, right? Yes, it should work. I guess it's because they weren't great entrepreneurs.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:41:00 - 00:41:02]

Okay, so it's an execution problem.

David Goldberg: [00:41:02 - 00:41:39]

I think so, yeah. They were very well intentioned, good people that had all of the desire and just lacked the grit, capacity, determination, execution to do it. Well, there's a couple of people who were better than others, but overall, we gave almost a million pounds of cash to 20 companies, 50,000 pound grants, equity free grants, usually businesses, to accelerate their growth and with mentorship from within the founders forward community. And it just didn't work. A year in, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. Right?

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:41:40 - 00:41:46]

So basically, you're talking about the companies you invested in, these are the people who didn't have enough tuition experience.

David Goldberg: [00:41:46 - 00:41:47]

That's right.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:41:47 - 00:41:53]

I understand. So the Founders Forum did have that ability to execute.

David Goldberg: [00:41:54 - 00:42:09]

The issue was not founders forum. The issue was these 20 companies the Founders we're trying to support just weren't great. And we looked long and hard, we looked across Europe and had hundreds of applications and picked the 20 best.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:42:09 - 00:42:15]

When you picked them, you only picked those that actually had a socially impactful purpose.

David Goldberg: [00:42:15 - 00:42:15]

That's right.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:42:15 - 00:42:22]

Is it possible that these were just types of problems that could not be solved by businesses?

David Goldberg: [00:42:25 - 00:42:26]

No.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:42:26 - 00:42:29]

Okay. So it's really just the quality of execution.

David Goldberg: [00:42:29 - 00:44:51]

And the issue was like, good people, not great entrepreneurs, really cared about affecting the world positively, but couldn't, couldn't have commercial model, the skill. Yeah. And so we spent a year doing this, and I didn't want to spend another year, waste another year having it not work. And I sort of took a step back and I thought, how do I approach this problem differently? And had this moment where I was like, what if I just help great commercial entrepreneurs be more social instead of helping these social entrepreneurs be more commercial? And it really just like, it clicked. And I was like, I'm going to build the thing that I wanted when I sold my business, which was, how do I make decisions about using my resources to affect the world positively? They're scarce resources, so how do I use them as effectively as possible to do as much as possible and work with a community of people that are already sort of on their way to success and are going to have much much more of it than even your sort of the top quartile average. And at the same time, there was this tech was becoming mega and I was seeing people becoming billionaires like right, left and center. I mean, these were not overnight successes, but they were like an overnight success after ten years. Right? That's how the saying goes. But there was this subset of people in the world that had more earning potential than anyone else, and it was venture backed technology companies and the founders behind them. So I thought, let's just help people like this give better. But it became clear that I was not a person to be listened to.

I sort of had ideas about how to do this well and then developed a bit of a framework for it. But I was not venture backed. My exit was not like a venture backed tech exit. And so I didn't have any credibility or network to execute with. And so I thought, maybe there's this idea like, let's get people to commit to give before they've actually made money. We discount the value of the future extremely, such that if you commit to give away 5-10 percent of something that hasn't yet materialized, something in the future you're committing to give away today, five or 10% of nothing, which is zero.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:44:51 - 00:44:58]

David, please tell me how the Founders Pledge works, because obviously I know, but some of our listeners wouldn't.

David Goldberg: [00:44:58 - 00:46:20]

So the basic idea is that we ask founders of technology companies to commit legally to give a percentage of their exit, if they ever have one, to go to charity, and they sign a document, a contract that binds them to do that. Now, it's not like a 20 page legal contract. It's a one page. If X, then Y X is I sell shares in my company and make money Y is then I'll donate some percentage of what I make. The charities are social causes of my choice at that point.

And the first person I spoke to, I got a meeting with under different pretenses, guy named Nick Hungerford. A company started called Nutmeg, actually, recently just passed away, which is quite sad. He's the first person I talked to about it, and I pivoted in the middle of our meeting. We were talking about something else. I don't even remember what it was anymore, but I said, hey, I've got this idea I want to run by you.

And I pitched him this idea, a founder's pledge. I didn't have anything to walk him through. It was just like the idea. He's like, yeah. He asked a bunch of questions, and he said, if you gave me a piece of paper that said something along those lines, I'd probably sign it.

I said, oh. I said, really? He said, yeah, why not? It'd be committing to give away something I haven't made yet, and only if I make it do I give it away. I was like, yeah, that's right.

David Goldberg: [00:46:20 - 00:46:42]

And I asked, okay, I'm going to put this together and I'm going to send it to you, but in the meantime, who are three other people you think I should talk to who might react similarly? And he gave me three names, and he said, reach out to them and say, I told you to reach out. No, he did not offer to introduce me. He said, you might consider reaching out to these three people. And I did.

And I got two meetings, and two said yes.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:46:42 - 00:46:44]

And that they had a proof of concept.

David Goldberg: [00:46:45 - 00:47:06]

It became a thing pretty quickly, and the Founders Forum were very good to me, and they gave me access. As soon as I thought the proof that people were interested in this they basically said, okay, well, you can grow this within Founders Forum. Come and talk at our next event in June and launch founders pledge there.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:47:06 - 00:47:07]

That's incredible.

David Goldberg: [00:47:07 - 00:47:08]

Yeah. That I did.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:47:08 - 00:47:09]

Very generous of them.

David Goldberg: [00:47:09 - 00:47:11]

Very generous. It wouldn't exist without them, for sure.

Anastasia Koroleva: [00:47:11 - 00:47:14]

Brilliant. Are you still involved with them?

David Goldberg: [00:47:14 - 00:47:38]

I mean, a bit. So we spun founders pledge out of Founders forum in the very, very early days. We've been independent since 2015, but I think we're still part of the family, maybe the extended family now, but I go to most of their events still, and they have been and continue to be very generous with their wonderful network, and they don't have to.