Sarah Angello: The Startup Founder Rebuilding Trust in Philanthropy Artwork

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Badass Women in Business

Sarah Angello: The Startup Founder Rebuilding Trust in Philanthropy

December 09, 2025 • Aggie & Cristy • Season 4 • Episode 51

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Most people donate because they want to help. Few ever find out what actually happens to their money. Philanthropy has a trust problem. Nonprofits have a transparency problem. Donors want clarity but rarely get it. And donor-advised funds have become a quiet holding place for billions of untapped charitable capital.

After fifteen years working inside philanthropy, Sarah Angello could not ignore the friction anymore. She saw the outdated systems. She saw the lost potential. She saw how giving had become complicated when it should feel meaningful.

So she left a stable career, stepped into tech, and cofounded Daffodil, a fintech platform designed to rebuild trust in the nonprofit sector by making charitable giving transparent, simple, and accessible.

In this conversation, Sarah explains the gap no one was addressing, how donor-advised funds actually work, why impact reporting is broken, and how she is solving a systemic problem with zero-burden, real-time data. She opens up about raising capital as a woman, choosing cofounders, navigating risk, and the lesson that shaped her leadership: almost everything is fixable.

If you have ever given to a nonprofit, wondered where your money went, or thought about starting something meaningful, this episode will change the way you see philanthropy and the business behind it.

Chapters this episode explores:

The moment Sarah realized philanthropy needed a complete reset
Why donor-advised funds hold more than 250 billion dollars that rarely reaches nonprofits
What the GoFundMe controversy revealed about trust in the sector
How Daffodil built a system to deliver real-time impact reporting with zero burden on nonprofits
Why transparency is the next frontier in charitable giving
What she learned moving from nonprofit bureaucracy to tech speed
How she chose her cofounders and why their history matters
The reality of raising money as a woman in a male-dominated funding environment
Why she believes fear of being copied is fear of weak execution
The early mistake that taught her that almost everything is fixable

Key lessons:

Transparency is not optional; it is the foundation of impact
Good ideas are everywhere; execution is the differentiator
Donors do not stop giving because they lack generosity but because they lack visibility
Founders should build in public, not hide in fear
Careers are long, and mistakes rarely ruin them

Contact

Website: www.getdaffodil.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/getdaffodil/
Email: sarah@getdaffodil.com

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