How GoFundMe became America's backup plan

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**Nilay Patel** (1:58)
Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Tim Cadogan, the CEO of GoFundMe. You know GoFundMe, it's a major fundraising platform where you can donate to help people with everything from medical expenses, to little league uniforms, to just starting a new business. Tim took over as CEO in March of 2020 A fascinating and chaotic moment in the United States and around the world, the moment you'll hear me argue that GoFundMe became a load-bearing part of American culture. Perhaps most importantly, GoFundMe is now a kind of proxy for the broken health care system. Medical expenses are the single most popular category of fundraising on the platform.
You might be surprised to hear Tim say it's not just in America, but in every market GoFundMe operates in. All this means GoFundMe sits inside of a ton of big messy ideas, wealth distribution, geopolitical conflict, and holes in our social safety nets. All of that is in seeming tension with the idea that GoFundMe is a for-profit company, collecting fees and tips and feeling the natural pressure to grow as a business. So you can imagine I had a lot of questions for Tim, how he thinks about all of this, and how he makes some very tough decisions about what money to make and what money not to make. To his credit, he was game to go there and talk to it all pretty openly. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Remember, please subscribe to our YouTube channel for new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay, Tim Cadogan, CEO of GoFundMe. Here we go.
Tim Cadogan, CEO of GoFundMe. Welcome to Decoder.

**Tim Cadogan** (3:32)
Hey, thank you very much for having me, Nilay.

**Nilay Patel** (3:35)
I am very excited to talk to you. GoFundMe occupies an incredibly unique place, I think, in our culture, particularly in American culture, in American society. It's a for-profit company, which I have a lot of questions about how you think about its place in our culture and the need to grow and deliver returns.
Then I was doing the research, you joined this company just in the pandemic, in the heart of the pandemic when it feels like everything changed.
Now we're six years later, maybe things have settled, maybe they haven't. But I actually just want to start there. You became the CEO when the idea that the public health system, how we think about health care in America, all got flipped upside down. I know that health care expenses are, I think, the single biggest category in GoFundMe. How do you think about the platform and how do you think just about that path from 2020 until now?

**Tim Cadogan** (4:30)
Well, yes, there's a lot in there.
I started on March the 2nd, 2020, which was about a week before it became very clear in the US that the pandemic was going to have major implications, but it was already becoming clear in other parts of the world. We operate in 20 countries and we did back then. For instance, Italy is an important country for us, and that was probably the first European country that had a big impact. It was just becoming evident. In fact, by the end of the first week, we went remote. So things came at us, all of us, in the world very quickly. It certainly came very quickly for me trying to figure out a new company, a new space, and all this stuff happening. The root of what we do is extremely simple. We help people help each other, and we are there to help people in whatever situation they need help. Sometimes those are the most consequential, the most significant thing that is happening in someone's life. It has ever happened in that life. Sometimes they are very light-hearted, and fun, and forward-looking, like going to college, or sending your kids' sports team on tour because they have made the state championships, you name it. Everything in between, if someone thinks they need help, we are here to help them mobilize support from friends, family, and networks. When you talk about the pandemic, that is a time where millions of people needed a lot of help. In some cases, for medical situations, everything related to that. Some cases because they weren't able to work anymore, or we had a phenomenon where that was not expected, we could not have anticipated this.