This team was carefully chosen. We all strive for our lives to mean something. We all seek to be a part of something greater. And, when the times call upon us, we all do whatever it takes.

We are now living in a time where it’s never been so clear that humanity must unite and rise to the occasion. At stake are not only the millions who would die gasping for breath, drowning on land — but, for those that remain: dreams shattered, economic devastation, and the suffering of loved ones lost.

There is a meme going around that is some variation of this:

That is some insulting and condescending bullshit. Yes, stay home to do your part to limit the spread, but equating that to heroism is pathetic. We all can do more than just stay at home.

This is what a hero looks like:

If I could choose an alternate universe, I would be this doctor in Italy, working 18 hours a day, under constant stress, trying to save as many as possible. Or I would be racing to find a vaccine. Or manufacturing thousands of ventilators.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how to do those things.

We all need to figure out how to best use our talents. My answer is easy:

• We can help hundreds more founders tackling this crisis to move faster, get more money, and connect them with those who help. I don’t know how to discover a cure or a make a lot of N95 masks, but I can help those who can.
• We can help reduce the economic devastation. Each business we fund can save multiple jobs. Each job is someone’s food, housing, college tuition, and self-respect. Some of those jobs are also someone’s hopes and dreams.

I don’t intend to do these things half-ass. If doctors in New York are working non-stop with no protective equipment, I’m not going to work less hard, while safe at home.

Each of you should find your own answer. If you decide you can better contribute to humanity outside of Wefunder, we will offer you at least three months of paid leave to go and do it. Godspeed.

If you stay at Wefunder, there is no box, and we need to work harder. We’ll have to handle “business as usual” to some extent. But we need to do a lot more. Given our capabilities, how can we maximize the number of lives we can help? How can we best serve our Public Benefit Charter in this crisis?

Over the last week, this is why we’ve:

• Set up the Fight The Virus Challenge to fund startups tackling the crisis
• Set up the Coronavirus Loan Program to help save small businesses
• Set up the Pandemic Fund so we can deliver more money, faster
• Set up the Volunteer Program so we can connect startups with people who want to help.
• Talked to Congress, SEC, & Treasury on the $1 trillion+ stimulus package
• Investigated if we could help the SBA automate the application for $300 billion in emergency loans (we decided others are better equipped).

This is only the first week. Things will get worse before they get better. There is so much more we can do.

The Universe Is Trying To Kill You
(because it loves you)

Most of you know that this is the title of a book I am writing.

Stars explode; meteors strike; volcanoes erupt; viruses replicate. The universe seems designed to kill us, given enough time.

Most other animals ate our ancestors; go back far enough, and we were once tasty dinosaur snacks. Yet, humanity now dominates this planet.

Why? Humans have been uniquely good at handling each crisis the universe has thrown at us. After each challenge we’ve surmounted, we’ve gotten better. I am confident that this challenge will be no different. I don’t believe the worse case scenario will happen. We won’t let it.

As Churchhill once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste”. A crisis is a time when we are all forced to rise to the occasion; when we ourselves must become as great as the times demand.

I live for these moments. It’s never so clear that everything matters.

I have a lot of faith in us humans. This virus has no chance.

I also have a lot of faith in this team. Thanks for being here.

Yours,

Nick

Email to Wefunder Users

RE: Joining the fight against the coronavirus

Hi Fred,

Our entire society is now at war with the coronavirus.

Wefunder is focused on doing our part. We can’t match the heroism of our doctors and nurses, but we can help save more small businesses… and fund more startups with good ideas to reduce the massive disruption to our lives.

Here are some ways you can help:

• Share the Fight The Virus Challenge. We invest $50k to $1 million in startups working on vaccines, therapies, remote education, senior care, manufacturing medical supplies, and more.
• Invest in the Pandemic Fund so we can deliver more money, faster, to startups tackling the crisis.
• Share the Coronavirus Loan Program with your favorite small business that needs more funding to survive the lockdowns.
• Volunteer to help. We’ll match your skills and desire to help with a startup or a city.

The Wefunder community has already come together. While the stock market has crashed, investments on Wefunder have doubled. People want to support the businesses and causes they care about. It’s inspiring. Thank you.

We’re doing this to make a difference, not to make a profit. We’ve entirely waived our fees for any startup that may save lives. For the coronavirus loan program, we’ve reduced fees 50% — enough to cover our costs.

If there is any other way we can help, please let me now. The entire Wefunder team wants our lives to have meaning, to help a cause greater than ourselves. We can’t fathom sitting on the sidelines during the crisis of our times.

Please stay safe.

Nicholas Tommarello
CEO, Wefunder

Our letter to the SEC was originally published in Wefunder Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There are months when the raw passion of creating something new consumes me.

There are other months when it feels like everything is on the line; when all I’ve worked for is at risk of being destroyed.

When that happens, it’s all I think about. I don’t eat right, sleep right, work out, answer the phone, reply to email or texts, hang out with friends, call grandma… or even truly notice the people around me.

I am unable to let go. For example, last week I was having dinner with an old friend in Boston. She was sharing something deep and personal, but I couldn’t force myself to be fully present. I was shouting silently in my head, “Disconnect! Listen! Be here!” It didn’t work; my thoughts would keep drifting back to drama from work.

On one hand, I consider this one of my greatest strengths: complete dedication to the task at hand. I perceive myself as someone who will rise to the occasion through sheer brute force, focus, and willpower. I can spark something to happen; help me, or get out of my way.

On the other hand, my soul is damaged. The sacrifice is high.

I’ve known this about myself since I turned 30 — the year I realized I had lost five years of my life and damaged all my relationships. So I changed. It’s been much better since. I thought I had it mostly figured out.

Until now.

It sneaks up gradually. One year, you are surrounded by good friends and teammates who throw a surprise birthday dinner. The next birthday, it’s just your team minus the friends, but they all chip in on a thoughtful gift. The birthday after that, you are in your office writing 60 pages of documentation singlehandedly in one day… and just one cofounder shows up.

It sneaks up gradually. You get out of life what you put into it. You get out of relationships what you invest in them. That investment must be continuous; the memories of the past fade.

But what inspired this post is not so much my personal experience. I’ve known about my flaws for years, and I’m sure many founders can relate.

Instead, I spent today thinking about how this has applied to my company — all the complex and convoluted relationships in any organization.

The phrase that came to mind was relationship debt.

Like technical debt, sometimes you have to take short cuts that you’ll get around to fixing later.

When things are going smoothly, the group has more opportunities to bond more closely without making an effort — campfires, dinners, lunch chats, fun off-sites, meaningful one-on-ones, informal talks, train trips, dinosaur digs. As a result, the work seems more meaningful and fun.

When things are not smooth for more than a few months, these things stop happening one by one. The relationships subtly — oh so very subtly — fray. Sometimes you notice it happening, but in the chaos, no one has the time to manage it. It’s just one more thing you don’t have time to do.

Startups are not smooth. There are those times when the group must buckle down and rise to the occasion.

But life is a marathon, not a sprint.

Eventually, the debt comes due.

When I travel, I am sometimes asked why I love my country.

My answer is always the same: to me, what makes America great is that anyone can become American. To me, it’s self-evident that all of our wealth and power comes from our openness and diversity. It’s America’s heritage as melting pot that makes us special — that anyone, no matter what they look like, can be considered an American.

That is our greatest strength. And what happens here in Silicon Valley — where immigrants create tremendous wealth that benefits all Americans — serves as proof for how powerful our diversity is.

Now we find ourselves in a time where there is a huge backlash. Many of us are angry or mystified. How can values that we hold so dear, that are so obviously morally correct, and so obviously in our economic self-interest be questioned?

Partly in an effort to answer this, I’ve traveled to over 30 states and met a lot of Americans with very different beliefs and world views.

One thing I learned is that facts don’t matter. Statistics don’t change anyone’s mind. It doesn’t matter if the stats say immigrants commit less crime, or start more businesses, or hire more native-born Americans, or that immigration reform would increase our GDP.

Instead, what works is emotion and empathy, an appeal to the heart, not the head. Because most Americans are fundamentally decent people. And if you connect with them on a human level, their fundamental decency will overcome their fear and tribalism.

That is why the photography displayed here by Helena Price is so effective. It makes it clear what the human cost is. It makes it clear that these are good people that belong in our country, that make us all stronger.

I also have my own personal stories.

I remember my friend Harley, who came here from Vietnam to attend college. I remember him sleeping only three hours a night for two months straight because he was so passionate about his idea for a startup. And he was so desperate to stay in America to start his company that he considered marrying his male cofounder. Even though they were both straight. When that didn’t work out, he had to return to Vietnam. It’s a tragedy that America can’t benefit from his drive and hunger.

I also think of Jiwon, who joined our company a couple of years ago. She’s sitting right there. She’s a Korean citizen who applied for American citizenship after the election because she wants a voice and a stake in America’s future. That to me, shows the power of America - that those from other countries want to join us in our struggle to meet our own ideals.

I also think of Linlin, Phoebe, and Omar, first-generation immigrants who we also hired. I know our company would not be anywhere near where it is today without them — and that every job we help create in the future by crowdfunding other businesses is a result of their hard work.

And since this is not just about tech, I also think of a friend from Mexico. Her kids are American citizens, but she is not. And yet she works long, hard hours in a menial job, sacrificing her happiness for her kids future. Those are also the people I want in my country. Those who work hard to ensure their children will have a better life. Because that is what America is about.

Finally, I remember the look on my friend Amna’s face on election night. I remember the fear in her eyes. She is an American citizen, and yet she was afraid of what might happen, because she is a Muslim.

And that makes me angry.

As President Obama said, “Progress has never been a straight line. We zig and we zag.”

Everyone knows America was built by immigrants. But we appreciate less that the backlash against immigration has also always existed throughout our history, simmering just under the surface. Every 80 or so years it erupts into a full out assault.

We must remember that progress is not guaranteed. We can’t assume that history is on our side. Every generation must fight the battle anew.

Now it is our turn to rise up and defend our values.

I last saw my father on Christmas day.

I had a strong feeling that it would be the last one we shared together— it was almost too perfect, everyone was happy, there was none of the usual drama. So I lived in the moment and soaked in the memories.

I thank God for that day.

After it was over, I planned to write my dad a letter, so the unsaid could be said. But I procrastinated a few weekends in a row. I was busy. I thought there was more time. And then time ran out.

Yesterday, I finally finished that letter. I’ll read it now, and hope he can hear.

Dear Dad,

I could not have asked for a better father. I’ve always felt your love.

But I wish I could be certain you felt mine. I wish I made it clear how much I’ve learned from you.

I stand on the shoulder of a giant.

You taught me that rules are meant to be either broken or remade. Most of us are a prisoner of our own self-imposed limitations, limitations that we don’t even realize exist. But you forged your own path. You were the captain of your own ship: people could either climb aboard or jump off the plank — you didn’t really care which. That’s a trait shared by great men and pirates… and you were a little bit of both.

You taught me how to create something from nothing. How, with hard work and sheer force of will, you can force the impossible to happen. I learned this when I was 17 and you were the exact age I am now, when just the two of us — with no cash and a just few credit cards — worked day and night over a summer to build that nightclub. I remember finishing construction when the doors opened and people streamed in, and being in awe that we actually did it. Barely. But we did it.

You taught me loyalty and generosity. You stood by your wife for 26 years, as she stood by you, when it wasn’t easy for either of you. You went out of your help to help those in need, even when you had nothing, even when no one would know. But God forbid when someone crossed your friends or family. It was probably for the best that the police stole your shotguns.

You taught me not to judge people by their credentials. You never finished high school, but you were the most brilliant man I’ve known. I’ve watched you run circles around lawyers my entire life.

You taught me grit and perseverance. Whenever you clawed your way to the top of a mountain, life punched you in the face, and pushed you off. And you got back on your feet and soldiered on, marching your way back up, no matter how heavy the weight became. Over and over and over.

You taught me how to be a man, and it’s only a lesson that is just now dawning on me. Some have to become a man when they have their first child, others when they bury their father. You were such a rock that I took it for granted. And now I can’t.

Finally, you taught me to live life without being ruled by fear. You’ve always told me, “When your time is up, your time is up”. You did not fear death, and neither do I. But I wish we had more time. I wish you could live to teach your grandchildren.

Instead, we will keep your memory alive. Your grandchildren will learn who the patriarch of this generation was.

And then, one day, we’ll meet again.

I imagine you up there in purgatory right now, as one of those rare souls who truly enjoys it. I imagine you and David together right now, starting fights with those other wayward souls, and loving every minute of it.

I have a feeling you’ll be stuck there for a while. So I’ll meet you there.

Stay at a beach cabin

Here or here. Or here.

Go on Safari in Kruger Park

There’s a 3 day jeep version or a more hard-core hiking version.

Go Glamping in South Africa

AirBNB has some nice stuff. Or here. Or here.

Touch a Great White on the Nose

Lots of cages available from tour operators.

Race Ostriches

Yes, you can do this.

Find this spot

The Blyde River Canyon

Jump off a bridge

Bloukrans Bridge

Charter a plane to Namibia

Sand Surf in Nambia

Quad Bike to the sand dunes

Here’s one deal.

Paragliding over dunes

Stay in Damaraland Camp

Just your typical wilderness safari in Namibia

Our goal was help investors find the types of companies they are interested in, but still allow for some serendipity and fun. We also wanted a design that could scale up to thousands of companies. We have ambitions for 2017. :)

Top Level Categories

On first page load, we present some popular search options.

Some highlights:

• Easily find companies you followed or invested in
• One click to the popular searches, such as Debt offerings or Y Combinator alumni.
• Nine very broad categories. Every company on Wefunder will fit into at least one, and up to three.

Company Cards

We also tweaked our company cards.

Some highlights:

• Click the heart to save and follow a company for future updates
• Hover over the founder avatar to learn more about them
• See a label with the criteria being sorted by (in this case, % funded)
• See the type of security and the valuation at a glance

Tags

Each category or tag will display the most popular tags associated with it. Click on any tag to filter all companies on Wefunder.

Advanced Filters

You can get extra fancy and choose some nitty gritty details to search by. We hope to add more in the future, like revenues or profitability.

Location

We’re funding more and more local companies, like breweries and coffee shops, and expect this to accelerate. So we think it’s important you should be able to find what’s next to you!

Of course, this being San Francisco, my search results show tech startups!

One more thing: by clicking on the little map icon next to the city name, you’ll see a live view of the country, and Wefunder’s funding volume in each state. You can click on any state to jump to it.

Longer term, once we fund many more countries, we’ll enable a drill-down to the county level within each state.

Saving Searches

Come back next week!

As the CEO of Wefunder, I rarely find time these days to get my hands dirty designing or programming. So this project was a welcome return to the past!

Special thanks to Linlin for visual design and crafting some nifty icons… and thanks to Mariusz for setting up all of the Algolia indexes. (If you are a developer, and never heard of Algolia, check it out!)

P.S. —Sorry Greg for mucking up your code base. One day that chart will be real. :)

New Explore Page was originally published in Wefunder Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As of today, Wefunder is a Public Benefit Corporation. We are now known as Wefunder PBC, not Wefunder Inc.

I’m proud that over 200 Wefunder shareholders signed our Charter. This is akin to our new Constitution.

What is a Public Benefit Corporation?

A PBC is a new form of company that 31 states have enacted since 2010. The most well-known —Kickstarter — became one in 2015.

A PBC is still a for-profit company. However, public benefit corporations are required — by force of law — to pursue goals that relate to their mission. Shareholders can sue if they fail to adhere to their charter.

Put simply, a public benefit corporation does not single-mindedly maximize share value at all costs. Decisions must be balanced between all stakeholders, such as investors, employees, and the impact on society.

Personally, I see PBC’s as similar to standard corporations as they were commonly understood a few decades ago… until it became fashionable to seek short-term profits above all else. PBC’s are correcting that trend.

Why is Wefunder a PBC?

I believe the motivation to seek profits is — by far — the best way to create more wealth, faster, raising all of our living standards. Thanks to capitalism, those living in extreme poverty fell from 94% in 1820 to 44% in 1980 to 9.6% in 2015. That’s a remarkable achievement.

Yet, unless continually corrected, unfettered capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction. Wealth accumulates in the hands of a few. Eventually, the rewards of capitalism are not felt equally by everyone, and the powerful use their power to defend “their” turf, limiting the opportunity of others. Or, sometimes the cycle swings too far the other way, and overly burdensome regulation stifles the freedom of potential entrepreneurs.

Achieving the right balance is a never-ending struggle. Every generation must fight this battle anew.

Wefunder is becoming a PBC to fight on the side of increased opportunity, for everyone, over generations. Our goal is for Wefunder to fight the good fight — as proscribed in our charter — long after the founding team has died. We will never become a soulless finance company focused on moving little green pieces of paper around; we focus on creating real wealth for our entire country by building relationships between founders and investors.

Our Charter: Defend the American Dream

The American Dream is an ideal our country has always strived to reach: that anyone — no matter how low they start — can rise as high as their talents allow, with hard work. No barriers. Just opportunity.

To get closer to this ideal, we’ve made a number of commitments in our Charter that aim to increase economic growth, increase social mobility, and reduce wealth disparity. For one, we commit to donating 5% of our profits to programs that mentor more first-time entrepreneurs.

Overall, we seek to balance protecting investors with turbo-charging the amount of capital that funds startups and small businesses. In doing so, we hope to ensure that everyone, with hard work, can reach their potential.

This Charter was drafted with feedback from the entire founding team. It is inspiring to work alongside them on this mission. Onwards!

Wefunder is a Public Benefit Corporation was originally published in Wefunder Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dear Mike, Greg, Dylan, Linlin, Omar, Jiwon, & Theresa:

We’ve dominated the opening act and stand alone at the top. Those we expected to be tough competitors turned out to be paper tigers. Yet, this is bad for America. Competition is good. It forces everyone to be better, faster.

If we’re going to fix capitalism, we need to compete with ourselves: with who we are now, versus what we can become. We’ll have to reach down deep to meet our unrealized potential — not only for what we aim to achieve with Wefunder, but for ourselves: we get out of life what we put into it.

But above all, we have a responsibility to do so. We have the talent to improve the lives of millions. Failing to do so, in my view, is immoral. We’ve been given great advantages. Now is the time to give back.

Let’s remember what matters: people

Right now, we’re measuring success by investment volume: we’re 5x over every other competitor combined. But let’s remember this is a short-term yardstick. It’s not what truly matters.

We are not fixing capitalism by pumping more money into businesses. We’re fixing capitalism by making it more human.

Our institutions, regulations, and bureaucracies were designed in the industrial age, when people sacrificed some measure of freedom, uniqueness, and creativity in exchange for efficiency and scale.

The previous generation concluded that a few gigantic banks on Wall Street should fund businesses, not their neighbors. They concluded that multinationals like McDonalds — staffed by powerless employees with little autonomy— should run rampant over local business. They decided that the pursuit of short-term returns to shareholders should trump investment in a living wage, local communities, or R&D.

We ended up with a system that is literally inhumane. The human connections between customers, owners, employees, and investors frayed over time. The systems stifled us. And now they hold us back.

That world is coming to an end. Thanks to software and networks, power is being transferred from bureaucracies back to humans. Best yet, when we have more freedom and autonomy, our productivity and happiness is increased. We can have our cake and eat it too.

Houston, we’ve got a problem

Yesterday, I stood in awe in front of a Saturn V in Houston. I soaked in the power of the place. I felt the optimism and can-do spirit of a time when our country could say, “Let’s go to the moon!”, and then do it. On schedule!

It was also a relic of command and control planning when it worked best. When, faced with the Soviet threat, 400,000 Americans came together and spent $100 billion in today’s dollars to accomplish something amazing… so amazing that 20% of today’s Americans don’t even believe it happened.

At first, I was saddened by our decline, by the failure of our institutions. But as I stood there reflecting — staring at that giant-ass rocket — I was struck by a thought: perhaps we are in the middle of a transformation, feeling the drawbacks, but still unable to see the light at end of the tunnel?

We feel the pain and culture-shock of our rapidly decentralizing culture… but perhaps, the major benefits are yet to come? When more small groups of super-motivated humans are empowered, will it become more common to outperform the greatest achievements of the industrial age?

We now live in a world where 4000 employees of SpaceX with $1.5 billion in capital can build a reusable rocket, something no government can do. Will SpaceX or NASA reach Mars first? I know where I’d place my bet.

Everyone need not be Elon Musk; the same principle applies for a rebirth of small business. Do we want more McDonalds workers serving sorta-beef-burgers, or more owners cooking healthy, well-loved food?

A better capitalism, a feeling of belonging

We aspire to belong to something greater — nation, cause, village, religion, family, company. We strive for meaning, for purpose, some greater thread connecting us together. Our modern world fails us. So many people, alone.

Yet, in our capitalist society, starting a company is one of the best ways to make the world a slightly better place, to improve how things work, to create ‘wealth’ in its most basic sense. And each company we help fund — no matter how small, local, or seemingly trivial at first blush— is its own social movement to do just that.

We help the humans in those social movements build stronger relationships. The stronger the community, the more shared the feeling of ownership, the more likely that company can succeed in fulfilling its vision. We help bring people together to accomplish amazing things. We help people belong to something greater than themselves.

Before, we could only buy stock in some huge public company like Chevron, a financial transaction devoid of meaning, impact, or connection. Now, we can invest in our friends and neighbors at the act of creation. When we walk into that brewery, we know that we had a small part in building it, in helping the owner reach their dreams, in helping those two drunk customers meet and fall in love. Likewise, when we invest in a biotech that helps kids with diabetes, we feel connected to something greater, more important.

Before, local bankers with little autonomy applied algorithms to judge the worthiness of an investment. Can a human truly be evaluated by a FICO score? Can bankers with no operational experience vet a business? Now, experts, friends, customers, and neighbors can look someone in the eyes — ask the hard questions — and decide whether or not to risk their money. What is more human then that?

Before, we were only customers. Now, we can be owners. How does this change how we interact with company whose product we buy, the places we visit, or the dozens of people we invest in? That, in a nutshell, is the core of our future. When we prove that sharing ownership within a social movement is powerful, we’ll know we’ve accomplished something. Providing capital is the easy part.

Onwards!

This is all within our grasp. The value of Wefunder is a secret that the rest of the world hasn’t quite figured out yet. But they soon will.

Our hunger, vision, morals, and experience give us an edge.

We need to be so good, that the world can’t ignore us.

Instead, the world will adapt to accommodate us.

So let’s get it done.

Let’s make capitalism more human was originally published in Wefunder Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We are honored that we’ve been asked to write a letter in support, and hope the legislators find our on-the-ground experience useful.

Over the past six months, we’ve spent many hours speaking with the offices of Representatives Patrick McHenry and Maxine Waters. We are impressed with how deeply they have dived into the issue, and are hopeful they will come to a bipartisan compromise over the next week.

Congress asked us to write a Letter of Support for the Fix Crowdfunding Act was originally published in Wefunder Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.