Out of curiosity why are religious charities banned? https://founderspledge.com/faq
YC and Founders Pledge
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Re: YC and Founders Pledge
#52"The best way to do good in the world is not to be a philanthropist. It’s to be a good capitalist. The need to 'give back' is generally chiefly a sign that people took too much to begin with." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTAE5m3ZO2E
On the other hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
If you can convince your well-off customers to give you an extra $10, which you will then give to the poor(er), why not do so?
The video implies the $10 are necessarily earned by harmful behavior, but that's just demagogy.
Re: YC and Founders Pledge
#53Are the donors creating a legally binding obligation when they sign up?
That's right - every founder involved has signed a legally binding contract. Ben, FP.
What is the consideration?
EDIT: Actually, I just saw the "English" version of the contract. The fact that you can give the contribution to charities other than what were selected would be a deal-killer in my mind, even through that scenario is unlikely to actually occur. I did not see consideration laid out clearly. It seems to say that your providing the service IS the consideration, but that feels weak to me. It feels to me like you are saying "If you give us X% of your assets, we provide the resources to let you, and use your name on our site to market it!"
Obviously, you have plenty of people who did not agree with me. And I applaud the spirit of it all. It just seems like the details need work.
Re: YC and Founders Pledge
#54Really similar to http://pledge1percent.org/ (with Marc Benioff of Salesforce and Scott Farquhar of Atlassian backing it).
As well as pledging a percentage of your equity, they're also pushing making room to donate 1% of your product and free up 1% of your employee's time to put towards good causes, so that it's part of the culture not just a happy side-effect of a possible exit.
Re: YC and Founders Pledge
#55This is a good initiative. Muslims like me have to already give out a fifth (%20) of their earnings every year called Khums https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khums We also believe from numerous Hadith's that the money comes back in double for those that give. As they say, you can't take with your palms closed.
Islam has lots of very different (from a Western perspective) personal finance rules. Just two examples: * Lending with interest is forbidden (which also rules out investment in traditional bonds) * Zakat is a mandatory annual 2.5% wealth tax As you might imagine, the latter makes it very difficult to retire without some sort of pension system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_banking_and_finance https://en.wiki…
Planet Money did a story on a small US bank whose owner was convinced to start offering Islamic-compatible financial products: http://www.npr.org/2016/05/12/477758545/michigan-bank-discov...
Re: YC and Founders Pledge
#56I understand giving to charity is great and all but what about employees 10, 35, 97? So someone works hard at a start-up but they weren't among the first dozen or so to join then they likely get next to nothing from an exit. So how about, instead of a pledge to give to charity, founders pledge to give more equity to later employees so only a small handful are not the only ones to profit. Everyone takes a risk joining…
I know that "employees get screwed" is the hn conventional wisdom, but it's generally false. If a startup is huge success, there will be many wealthy employees. Companies like Google and Facebook created thousands of millionaires. Uber and Airbnb will likely do the same. Of course if the company exits for less than money raised, then yes, common will likely not be worth much, but that's the risk of startup equity.
Most successful startups aren't huge successes.
Re: YC and Founders Pledge
#57I understand giving to charity is great and all but what about employees 10, 35, 97? So someone works hard at a start-up but they weren't among the first dozen or so to join then they likely get next to nothing from an exit. So how about, instead of a pledge to give to charity, founders pledge to give more equity to later employees so only a small handful are not the only ones to profit. Everyone takes a risk joining…
Ben from FP here. To be clear, founders aren't giving away equity - they are pledging a percentage of what they personally receive on exit. This doesn't reduce the equity that is available for other shareholders.
It is effectively the founder saying "I don't need/want as many shares as were allocated to me, but I value more than the people who helped me reach this outcome." It's a big screw you to the later employees.
Re: YC and Founders Pledge
#58I'd like to encourage founders who are participating in this to consider directing at least some of their pledges to support open source software. I don't think there are any YC companies which would have existed if it hadn't been for a large amount of open source software; if you want to maximize the impact of your donations, helping the projects which build tools the next generation of startups will rely on is a pr…
I would similarly like to encourage founders to build a ethos of "giving back to the community" in their day to day companies. Even if the start up does not set the world (and stock market) on fire, the accumulated talent and energy would be of immense use in hack-a-days, in food shelters and of course in open source projects and conferences
We want your money tomorrow, of course, but just in case you don't make any, we will take your time and energy today :-)
Re: YC and Founders Pledge
#59I haven't figured out a way to find the actual text of the agreement(s). Does anyone have it? When I explored doing something like this in the past (a binding pledge via 3rd party under US law), one issue brought up by lawyers was that there needs to be some "consideration" http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/consideration-every-c... ; I'm curious how they worked around that.
Once you click "I'm ready to make this official" in the signing flow, you'll see the full legal document pre-filled with your information before you sign anything. The consideration is access to our post-deployment resources, recognition on our website and invitations to our events.
Hmmm. Well, I just got to that point in the flow. It first required giving all your personal information (I put in fake stuff; also FYI the email went to my spam folder on gmail). There was no obvious way I could see to save the actual contract and show it to a lawyer before submission. I could only copy the image files of the text! I understand that you are working across multiple jurisdictions (so different templates), and using a 3rd party signing service, but I'm curious if there are plans to improve this. Let me know if you want UX etc. support for that; am happy to help!
Thanks for clarification re. consideration. (similar to what I considered for my binding pledge project, though yours is better!)
Re: YC and Founders Pledge
#60I'd like to encourage founders who are participating in this to consider directing at least some of their pledges to support open source software. I don't think there are any YC companies which would have existed if it hadn't been for a large amount of open source software; if you want to maximize the impact of your donations, helping the projects which build tools the next generation of startups will rely on is a pr…
I would similarly like to encourage founders to build a ethos of "giving back to the community" in their day to day companies. Even if the start up does not set the world (and stock market) on fire, the accumulated talent and energy would be of immense use in hack-a-days, in food shelters and of course in open source projects and conferences We want your money tomorrow, of course, but just in case you don't make any,…
Right. And at Tarsnap I do exactly that -- but Tarsnap is designed to be profitable. For startups which lose money hand over fist, it may be hard to justify making such contributions until after they're acquired.