075 - Transforming Charity with Bitcoin: Ismael Dainehine’s Vision for EverGive

In this episode, Ismael, founder and CEO of Evergive, discusses the transformative potential of Bitcoin in the charitable sector. The conversation delves into the challenges of measuring the impact of charitable donations, the misaligned incentives within the charity sector, and how EverGive aims to create a sustainable funding model for charities through Bitcoin reserves. Ismael emphasizes the importance of trust and security in Bitcoin custody, the challenges faced in engaging charities, and the need for education and advocacy in the sector. Ismael also shares insights on navigating regulatory challenges, the sustainable business model of Evergive, and the team's operational dynamics.

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Chapters
00:00 Introduction to EverGive and Ismael's Background
10:39 The Role of Bitcoin in Charitable Giving
19:18 Challenges in Measuring Charitable Impact
27:28 EverGive's Innovative Approach to Charity Funding
34:38 Engaging Charities and Donors
38:01 Education and Advocacy in Charitable Giving
42:10 Sustainable Business Model for EverGive
45:08 Team Dynamics and Operational Structure
47:18 Future Roadmap and Philosophical Vision

References
https://www.evergive.com/
https://x.com/ishabisinia

https://www.buildwithbitcoin.xyz/
https://x.com/BuildwBitcoin
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❗ DISCLAIMER: This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions consult a professional.

Transcript

Ismael: 0:00

And then we also added layers that makes it really safe for charities at this early stage to get on board. So we underwrite the downside risk of Bitcoin for the charities so they enjoy all of the upside of the Bitcoin and with no downside risk. So we underwrite that. We also have what's called like a hold more earn more incentive program, where the more they build out their reserve, the more rewards that they unlock on a monthly basis.

Israel: 0:37

Welcome to today's episode where we explore how Bitcoin is reshaping the world of charitable giving. Join us as Ismael, founder and CEO of evergive, shares his inspiring journey and groundbreaking vision to transform philanthropy through trust, innovation and sustainability. As a reminder, this podcast is for educational purposes only. If you enjoy the content, please remember to follow share and leave us a comment. Thank you. Lynne and I are partners at base layer advisors, where we use our network of Venture Capital Partners and startup founders to connect investors with unique opportunities within the Bitcoin innovation space. Alongside this, we help startup founders with their growth and fundraising. Visit our website's advisory section to learn more. Welcome to build with Bitcoin. I'm co host Iran. Munoz joined with co host Lynne Bairstow today we have the great pleasure of welcoming Ismael, founder and CEO of evergive Ismail. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me pleasure. We're excited to get into today's conversation. So evergive is rewiring the entire charity and philanthropy model, and that's, of course, going to be the focus of the conversation. However, we would love to get a little understanding of your background and kind of what what drives you Ismael, you've also raised over 100 million pounds, I believe, with two past ventures of yours in the charitable giving space. So maybe we can start there. What is it about the charitable giving sector itself that that speaks so loudly to you? What got you into this?

Ismael: 2:10

Yeah, I mean, the charitable sector has always been a feature in my life, like, like, varying kind of, like, degrees of intensity, because I was born into scarcity, really, coming with immigrant coming from an immigrant background into the UK with little more than like hope and kind of the parents desire for us to have a better life. That kind of environment really kind of shaped how I kind of view the world. And so after university, I had gone traveling for a bit, and also went out and built, like a few startups, some failed, and some succeeded, pretty, pretty, like, got, like, good success. And but throughout that period, on the side, I was doing kind of charitable ventures, and then when I got into building out tech solutions and becoming a lot more invested in how tech could be leveraged for social impact, that's when things really started to scale, and then outgrew even our own expectations of what's possible. And so while I was building out my regular for profit businesses, it was really fun to begin with, but then it very quickly became quite kind of soulless and quite hollow. And I was really enjoying kind of building out this social impact with just a group of friends on the side, and that's where it all really started. So just a genuine interest and like affinity with other people suffering, and then also the skills that I was developing just in my own career, and how I could kind of make the two meet. And what

Lynne Bairstow: 4:00

about Bitcoin? Where does Bitcoin come into this? How were you introduced to that? And why has that become such a focus of what you're working on?

Ismael: 4:07

Yeah. So Bitcoin was an interesting one. So, like, my kind of foray into bitcoin really came in two, three waves. Like, primarily two. The first one was the co founder and investor of a prior business nothing to do with charity. Was a retired hedge fund manager, and he had just gone deep down the Bitcoin rabbit hole. And he was like, Look, we're generating, like, a lot of cash on this business. I'm going to invest some of it into this thing called Bitcoin. And I was like, okay, cool. I have no idea what you're doing, but I trust you. You've got this far in your career. I'll just continue building the the wealth, and then you can just, like, actually grow it. And so he was investing in in Bitcoin back in 2015 and. So then I only saw it as a speculative asset. I understood it as a product guy. I understood the the terminal supply of it, and how that could be valuable given the right circumstances around it, like like the sociopolitical circumstances I can imagine. I could understand why a product like this would be valuable, but I didn't see it anything more than this is going to help people just get richer. The real tipping point where I was excited about Bitcoin was after we had raised $100 million for charities. This was in back in like 2019, 2020, onwards. So we'd raise over 100 million and that was on a part time basis. We weren't even taking it that seriously. It was something that just scaled and became a lot more successful than we anticipated. And we asked us we instead of feeling really prideful at that moment, we felt quite haunted by the fact that we had raised $100 million pounds, in fact, and we couldn't really tangibly point to real impact. So we thought, like, the next 100 million that we raise, it can't feel as empty as this, like, what is the impact that we are actually having on the world? And we started to ask ourselves much harder, more introspective, more philosophical questions about what are kind of like the structural causes of today's repression and poverty and suffering, etc, and why is it that we're raising, on aggregate, billions, if not, like, kind of trillions for charity over the years? And things don't seem to be improving. I remember a lecturer of mine called Jason Hickel at university, an anthropologist. He's still quite kind of a prolific speaker on the scene at the moment, not Bitcoin, but just in the anthropological development world. He had given us a talk in one of our anthropology modules at the time and written an article in The Guardian in a famous paper in the UK on how aid is done in reverse, where, essentially we're told this big lie as a society that we, as kind of the rich OPEC countries, are funding and benevolently and charitably supporting the Poor, or like the global South, the developing world, however you might want to define, define those countries. And he was just exposing the lie of what we've been told all these years and and uncovered through really comprehensive research studies from the Global Financial Integrity think tanks in the US and Norway, that if you look at the net flow of funds from kind of Western institutions to the global South, and then flows from the global south back to Western institutions, there's actually a net surplus today, approximately of $5 trillion that goes the wrong way, which is from the global south to kind of Western institutions, whether that's corporations, government, IMF, etc, and I just found that really, really sickening. And it felt that something is just so deeply broken and it's not real. So then I couldn't, in good faith, speak to the audience that we'd amassed over the years of at this point, 300,000 donors. We were telling them that put like donate to this platform and work together, we're making the world a better place. I couldn't, in good faith, continue to say that because I wasn't sure. I was very conflicted that the money that we were sending for a food pack here or like to build a well over there. I was worried that we are just further entrenching a system that's designed to keep the global south down. And we had understood that the real solution, or at least, a key part of the solution has to be to restore a safe and equitable and sovereign base layer where these people could peacefully opt out and extricate themselves from a monetary system that's oppressive and designed to keep them in what can we uncover to be debt slavery and a kind of reconfiguration of colonial and imperialist, kind of ambitions and goals, bailed

Israel: 9:52

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Ismael: 10:13

with Bitcoin. So So then, once we started to uncover that, and then we went down the rabbit hole of Alex Gladstein and the Human Rights Foundation have put together some, like, fantastic literature on this. And that's when so Jason hickle, not a bitcoiner, but as we were going down that rabbit hole, we discovered Alex Gladstein, and he is, as you guys know, a very, kind of prolific bitcoiner. And then that's when we started to be a bit more hopeful that, wow, there's actually a solution. Because on the on Jason Hickel, for all of the merits of his argument, we didn't, we still felt very we feel, still felt that the future was very, very bleak. We were in a really dark place at this point. We were like, we felt hopeless that, okay, we've just uncovered a really sickening reality. But like, we didn't feel like we had any solution that is actionable. And when we were going through Alex literature, we felt like, oh my god, like, I think this might just be our last hope. And that's when we we became really excited about Bitcoin. Sorry, that's a long answer.

Lynne Bairstow: 11:19

No, no, no. And you know, it's really interesting. As you're talking, I'm thinking about your background, which Israel and I shared similar perspectives. But it's like coming from technology world where everything is so is so carefully measured. You have KPIs, you have metrics, user growth, you know, impact revenue per whatever, but the charitable world really lacks those metrics. And it's like, when you're as you're raising this money for causes, it's like, what is the impact and what are the metrics that charities should be looking toward in order to to determine how effective they really are? I mean, it's, it's a great question to ask.

Ismael: 12:00

I mean, that's, I think we were really fortunate because we were at this intersection where we were in the charity sector, but we were at the periphery of it because we were, we were building out our own kind of regular mainstream companies and E commerce and general tech companies. And we were doing this out of kind of passion and a willingness to see tech leverage social good, and so we were applying a lot of the kind of like entrepreneurial rigor to to to the space, and that's what probably enabled us to look at it through slightly different lens and ask us the hard Questions that led us to the the answer that we are no longer willing to make more money for charity. Now it's about making the right money. Which is, which is Bitcoin, in our view,

Israel: 12:51

you mentioned Ismael, something that I think probably resonates with anyone who has been studying Bitcoin. You know enough. It's easy to grasp, but not easy to understand, which you summarize, basically, as we have this massive problem where the impact isn't actually felt and and at a global scale, I mean, just put, putting it in simple terms, you have, you know, all these trillions sloshing around, and, you know, global leaders talking about financial inclusion and all this stuff. But the reality is, is quite different, right? So there's just very intuitively something very off there, right? And a lot of it, of course, leads us to the money, to the misaligned incentives and all that. But why? Why is it specifically that you mentioned it was so hard for you to measure the impact of that 100 million that you had raised. I mean, can you help the listener understand that that disconnect there?

Ismael: 13:49

Yeah, absolutely, because things just weren't getting better, right? So then that led us down a kind of an investigative path. I'll give you an example of Ghana. So Ghana, we were we had like, several campaigns to try to help malaria. So Ghana is one of, like, the top countries are affected by malaria in the world. So any kind of small contributions that we could make there didn't seem to make a dent. And then we were looking at global initiative like the Gates Foundation are in that part of the world trying to fix this problem, but it doesn't, and it seemingly attractable problem, but doesn't seem like there's much progress being made there. And then when you kind of pull that thread and kind of unmask, kind of the role of money and loans and kind of the financial colonialism component of it, then you realize, okay, cool, like it makes complete sense. Now, Ghana isn't able to even invest in their own public health, because in 2019 for instance, they were only able to spend a billion dollars on their own public health, but in that same year, they spent $4 billion on the. Interest payments to the IMF. So so we were like, this is an absolute scam, and we're not involved in it anymore, and we need to fix things at the fundamental base layer and give these people their economic sovereignty. They don't need our kind of handouts. They need real money and and that will set them off on their own, their own kind of path of freedom. So they can start to even imagine other freedoms beyond their own financial ones,

Lynne Bairstow: 15:30

similar to El Salvador as a country too, just trying to kind of get out from under the shackles of the IMF and, and I do want to highlight you mentioned Alex Gladstein, who we know and respect, he's like a hero of mine, but the book hidden repression, I just want to give a shout out to that, because I think if you're not familiar with with it, and he talks even about the story of how hard it was to uncover the documentation to support his thesis of the operation the IMF, really supporting the growth of developed countries at the expense of the developing countries. And then you take it down, and you've also identified, I mean, there are inefficiencies in charitable organizations as they operate as well. I mean, can you speak a little bit about what a typical charitable organization goes through, what percentage they spend on attracting donations and kind of the vicious cycle they go through that you identified as the problem that you're solving?

Ismael: 16:27

Yeah, absolutely, in terms of the percentage that they are spending on, um, kind of administrative, uh, initiatives, etc, we can come to that. But I think that the bigger issues that are plaguing the charity world are no different to what's plaguing kind of society at large, which is this obsession and trap of high time preference and misaligned incentives, which, as you know, Bitcoin really speaks to very, very kind of directly and aggressively and and this is what one thing that I wish that people generally would better appreciate about Bitcoin, that it's not just money or a tool. It's like kind of the civilizational and cultural shift in how you know you think, and how you and build, and the assumptions that society is even kind of predicated and based on So, so charities are no different. So the high time preference just means that charities are stuck in this kind of perpetual cycle. They so they fundraise, donors, give charities, spend, run out of money, and ask for more money and ad infinitum, and that that cycle just repeats again and again. So donors are fatigued. Charities are fatigued and funded fundamentally, at least it that then leads to all these misaligned incentives where charities are no longer incentivized or are less incentivized to actually deliver impact and value to the end recipient, which is the beneficiary, and are more incentivized to impress the donor, who will then give them the money. So there's this kind of principal agent dilemma where the actual beneficiary, who's actually the customer just being served, doesn't really have much of a say in how the service is being managed, so but the issue is, if the charities are constantly in this race to justify next year's donation, ask that what that therefore means is that they are they prioritize initiatives and projects which will yield very quick results, and then they can demonstrate that again to their donors. And therefore they're no longer seeking structural solutions to these kind of really complicated problems like that are really solved by long term strategic thinking, and they are just constrained to short term projects that deliver short term impact, so then the donors can be impressed and given. So then that cycle is, I think, leading to more lives lost as a result, because people are not having their kind of, their fundamental kind of problems and grievances resolved, and it just leads to all sorts of other kind of problem, downstream effects from that. And kind of the misaligned incentives is kind of as I've described above, which is the donor, the charity and the beneficiary have completely misaligned incentives, and that causes a fundraising activity that is not optimal for for for the donor, and therefore the impact is just just, just isn't being felt. So then what Bitcoin allows us to do, if it shifts the culture and the mindset of the. Sector and can donors at large, from short term giving to long term giving. You can already imagine that a charity will if a charity relies less on donations and is more self sufficient as a result of its Bitcoin reserve that hopefully is continuing to grow in value, then they are no longer anxious that they won't have enough funds to deliver on projects in year one, year two, year three. So then all of a sudden, their ambitions start to their time horizons start to lengthen, and they can actually start to work on long term project and feed back to donors, real impact, real, sustainable impact, and that there that will therefore excite donors more and then hopefully lead to a much more kind of wholesome and healthier charity sector. But what killing the charity sector at the moment is the high time preference of it, and this the absolutely misaligned incentives that means charities are serving donors and not the beneficiaries.

Israel: 21:02

Yeah, and you're, you're really getting at the at the root difference between the fiat system and the Bitcoin system, right? I mean, I think the, the fiat monetary system is based on control mechanisms, and the Bitcoin monetary system is based on freedom mechanisms, which is why the dynamics of of building long term are just so night and day between the two and so you, you are mentioning Ismail that you essentially identified the problem being that there, There is this control mechanism, right and misaligned incentives and all the inefficiencies that that leads to. So you identified the problem. But I've heard you speak before to the fact that you, initially, you guys, evaluated the potential solution as being a variety of assets beyond Bitcoin, and you eventually landed on Bitcoin. Can you speak to that? I guess that process of assessing what the right solution was, after identifying the problem,

Ismael: 22:09

yeah, yeah, I'm at risk of offending Bitcoiners here, but we don't actually care about Bitcoin like we don't we care about freedom technology and how do we build a more free world? And then all roles just happen to lead to Bitcoin. So what we tell people is that we we weren't, we weren't approaching this as Bitcoin purists already kind of from a very dogmatic perspective, but just from a conviction that this is the only asset that solves the problem that we're trying to solve, and therefore that's why we are so convicted about Bitcoin. So we explored a number of different avenues, one being the main other two being real estate and gold. So we so I think there needs to be an appreciation first, that the time horizon, the asset that you choose is very much a function of kind of the time horizon that you're operating at. So what we're saying to our donors and our charities is that we want to make you financially secure forever, right? And so on a very long timeline, like 400 years, 500 years, all of a sudden you're going to be thinking very differently to investing in Amazon stock or Tesla or companies where statistically most fail within years, let alone decades. So within that framework, we thought, okay, cool, the only plausible contenders are real estate and gold. So firstly, with real estate, we eliminated that fairly quickly, because we really wanted real estate to work, because people just intuitively understand it, and were like, that's just gonna make our life so easy. But the issue was the counterparty risk of real estate, and in 500 years time, who knows who's going to own the real estate in central London or in Miami, etc. So we can't, with confidence and in good faith, tell our donors and our charities that, yeah, this asset will last forever. And it was a really bold claim of, like, how do you make something last forever? Like, what asset really underpins that claim? So with that counterparty risk, we like, okay, cool, that's eliminated. And then we turned our attention to gold, kind of like, gold has to be a winner. Like this won't fail us. This 5000 years of like, culture and like and economics and money and so this is gonna, this is gonna, like, save the day for us. But then we realized very quickly, again, that over a long enough period of time, and at a certain scale, the custody fees will just erode the value of the of the of the gold. And then there's the issue about like, kind of storing it and custodying the. The Gold, where do you custody it, and what are the vulnerabilities around that, around moving it, etc. And so we were like, I don't think that this is going to really fly. And I wrote an article about this on our on our blog. We also, like, took a very start lesson from history, where aluminum was at one point the the the luxury of, like emperors Napoleon famously, would feast his guests basically on aluminum utensils, and then his kind of second rate guest would eat on, like, you know, with with gold utensils, and along with innovations in technology, aluminum went from the most precious and rare metals to things that we use, that we throw away with coke cans, right? And so we were like, with enough innovation in technology, could similar to aluminum gold, then be replicated in a lab. And then we discovered that that actually is possible today, but it's just very, very expensive to do so with the rate of kind of improvement of like artificial intelligence and whatnot like that could that's a that's an area of vulnerability that we just weren't comfortable with gold. And then that led us to Bitcoin, and all of the criteria, the very strict criteria that we laid out, Bitcoin just satisfied all, all of them. And it was kind of backed by absolute, raw and like, kind of mathematical and terminal, like logic. And we were like, This is it? And it was, it was a product that just that this wouldn't be possible. Evergive wouldn't be possible before Bitcoin. So then that's, that's what's really striking for us. I think

Lynne Bairstow: 26:50

that's a great segue into, let's get a little bit more tactical about evergive. I mean, we've talked about the problem that you're solving, we've talked about, kind of the core asset behind it. But can you, can you explain to us exactly how it functions and how you help charities think long term and provide a long term funding source?

Ismael: 27:10

Yeah, so I think given a nutshell is you can think of it as a forever engine for generosity. So instead of charity being a leaky bucket, which it is today like, how do we build a financial backbone for charities that outlive political trends, donor fatigue and economic shocks? Right? How do we build out that resilience? So then we the problem, as we've kind of outlined earlier on, charities are relying on donations, and that skews all sorts of incentives. So the solution that we found was to take donor donations and charitable funding, investing that in Bitcoin and holding it in Bitcoin forever and charities therefore and holding that on on Bitcoin reserve on behalf of charities. And then charities can benefit from that in two ways. One, they could take out a portion of the growth each year, a capped portion of the growth each year, but ideally, they could borrow against it, and that will then enable them to hold onto the Bitcoin for much longer and benefit from the appreciation of it. So then what happens is that the charities now have a growing asset every year on their balance sheet, and that gives them the confidence to therefore, go out and extend their time horizon and take on more ambitious goals to make the world a better place knowing that they've got funding.

Israel: 28:43

And you know this, this mechanism you speak to is quite interesting as well, because you're basically leaving the principle untouched to grow. And anyone who's familiar with the price appreciation and trajectory of Bitcoin knows that that as you speak to on a longer time horizon bears bigger fruit. What percentage of their charitable giving is coming through you guys and being held in Bitcoin,

Ismael: 29:10

we're still fairly kind of early on, so we've got about 30,000 donors who have contributed into the evergive Bitcoin reserve for various different charities. So our model is one of two, so charities can rely on us to build out their evergive reserve for them. So we go out and we feel this proposition to donors to get them into the reserve, or charities can integrate a widget. Think of that. Think of it like, like you must have this in the US as well with like airports or like supermarkets, where there's an option to donate a portion of it to charity. So charities can integrate an advocate widget of that same sort into their natural flow on their website. Right? So when donors are checking out, they can add $5 or$10 to contribute towards the sustainability of that charity. So we ask the donors, would you like to make your donation sustainable? Would you like to make the mission of this particular charity sustainable for, like the long the for the long term? And then we see about 30% of donors opting in to say, like the idea of that charity that they're already supporting lasting longer than it otherwise would have. So that way, with the widget, the charity can start to build out their own reserve, leveraging their own existing traffic, and they can also rely on us to go out there and solicit those that interest for them

Lynne Bairstow: 30:42

too. And then how, what about the technical implementation, where the funds held? Is it held through the charity, or is it held through evergive? How did those mechanics look?

Ismael: 30:55

Yeah, this is an interesting question, because when, when you're building out, especially with with a new asset where custody is like a is a big deal, and you're in the charity sector, so it's even more of a big deal, and transparency is is key, just building out Bitcoin, just truly with the principles of Bitcoin, rather than just seeing it as another asset, like, if bitcoin, if you were to rewrite charity with Bitcoin principles, what would that look like? And that's the framework that we try to approach ever give with. So we treat Bitcoin custody like, like nuclear material like like maximum redundancy, maximum security with no single point of failure. So that's what that's that's where we met. We were introduced to on ramp, which is a multi institutional custodian, and they offer all of these kind of redundancies, of like, really, really they. The thing that I really like about on ramp is that they really take pride in restoring kind of faith and confidence in kind of Bitcoin custody, especially after the blunders of FTX and a few other of the other exchanges. Like, how do we at least make sure that that isn't kind of an attack vector on Bitcoin? So yeah, so we, we, we custody. Are all of our Bitcoin with on ramp. And the way that multi institutional custody works is that it's the keys are spread between three different institutions, and those institutions are spread, kind of geographically, continentally. And so it just really adds a lot of redundancy and reduces your exposure of any kind of fraud or theft, etc. So then that's pretty key in terms of like the custody side, okay,

Israel: 32:51

and so you've, you've built out a very robust and solid savings mechanism for these for these charities, Ismail, and the benefits of that. I mean, you guys are quite young, so the benefits of that, the charities will only be exponentially feeling as the years go by. But in this initial phase, what feedback are you getting from some of these charities? I mean, how quick is it clicking for them? Are there maybe other unexpected benefits that you've come across.

Ismael: 33:21

Yeah, we really struggled at the outset to convince charities that this is a good idea. We were treated like radioactive, like voiced to begin with, and shoot out the door many, many times. So then what we had done is look, what's the path of least resistance. We've got two sides of the marketplace. We've got charities and we have donors. We think that donors are going to be easier to convince that this is a good idea. So we decided that we won't start with Bitcoin. We'll start with the problem in very, very simple terms, that is offering the donor. And that problem was, very simply, would you like your impact in the world to last forever? That's it. And so then their entry point was like, Yeah, that's a pretty cool idea. And then they would read a bit more and discover, like, kind of, what the perfect asset that we're using to enable this thing, to enable, kind of this ambition, and without any marketing, we had got, very quickly over 20,000 people contribute to this fund, and a lot of them not Bitcoiners at all. They're here because they like the idea that their impact just doesn't stop, right? So then we went back with that traction to the charities and say, Look, you might be pretty spooked out by this radioactive thing, but there's a whole load of donors here that are telling you this is how they want to give. And it's not about Bitcoin, it's about them wanting you to be around forever. So if that is a comparison. Link proposition to you. Ignore all of the jargon, just strip all of that away. This is what it enables. And then we also added layers that makes it really safe for charities at this early stage to get on board. So we underwrite the downside risk of Bitcoin for the charities so they enjoy all of the upside of the Bitcoin and with no downside risk. So we underwrite that. We also have what's called, like a hold more earn more incentive program, where the more they build out their reserve, the more rewards that they unlock on a monthly basis. And the way that we do this is because we have a community around us of high net worth, kind of donors and philanthropists who really believe in the mission that we're doing. So then they're pulling some capital together to enable these programs to and this kind of like risk reduction to to exist. We're going to have to figure out a way to scale that for sure, but at this early stage, we're quite happy with how charities have responded, because it allows them to get into Bitcoin with very, with very little risk and all the upside and so and then we've been able to work with really, kind of, really proudly, with, with some, some, some, some good partners like Amnesty International, BBC, media action, some really notable names who've seen the value in what we're doing and how safe we've made it to come into the space.

Lynne Bairstow: 36:35

Yeah, and we were talking prior to the recording, but you know, I expressed a charity that I've been working with for years, and they're in the process of raising a like a legacy, a permanent campaign, for supporting a specific project that they have, but education. I mean, are you guys helping at all with educating people are less familiar with Bitcoin, the those who believe it's still radioactive and and how do you get over that comfort level, the hurdle to do that, or what's what support is available to charities or the board members?

Ismael: 37:09

Yeah, absolutely. So education is a massive thing for us on two fronts, on the charity side, but also on the on the end recipient side. So we have a lot of fun, a lot of people who donate directly to ever gives kind of core mission, which is, how do we promote fund and support to circular Bitcoin economies around the world? Because what we don't want to do is money flowing into bitcoin only for that to then be sold back into Fiat, because then that just really undermines our mission. So what we're what? So we have a target by the end of the year to fund and support 50 circular Bitcoin economies where a bitcoin is really starting to become a medium of exchange, rather than just a store of value, because we really believe in that transition. So educating on that side is pretty challenging. Involves a lot of advocacy work and and whatnot, and we're still in the very, very early stages, but we know that's such a central part of our mission, we're beginning that nonetheless, at the moment. And then on the charity side, we've been blessed with some like smaller charities and some large charities, but particularly the smaller ones who really understand what we're doing, like groundswell is an example here in the UK, and they're just so clued up about Bitcoin, and now they're helping us. So we'll be doing like a joint webinar where evergive and groundswell are collaborating to then teach other charities. So we're collaborating with other charities who already get it to kind of educate them, teach other charities. But I find, to be honest, the most effective way to educate Charities is through their donors. Like, once their donors tell them, like, guys like, either we're going to give to this thing without, with you or without you, that's a much more effective educator than the webinar.

Lynne Bairstow: 39:06

And then in terms of availability, do you run into any are you Where are your charities operating? Do you have any restrictions or regulatory issues in terms of what you can offer.

Ismael: 39:21

Yeah, loads regulators are not, are

Lynne Bairstow: 39:27

we're used to, we're used to asking this of like, FinTech startups, but I just, I'm not even sure how the regulatory environment is when it comes to charitable giving. But yeah, there is one.

Ismael: 39:38

Yeah, I'm selling Israel, in the in the in the UK, it's a lot more hostile than it is in the US. So we definitely had our challenges, but that's made us a lot more kind of resilient. And also in an environment and a sector like this, especially when you're building out a Bitcoin company, we found that it's been quite advantageous. Just to be under that kind of scrutiny and rigor, so that it really helps alleviate some of the kind of concerns that would have naturally emerged from kind of customers, clients and whatnot. So we've definitely benefited from that, or that's just probably our kind of coping mechanism of just getting through it, but, but we do. We operate in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia. So, I mean, our dominant market so far has been the UK, but we've already started to make entries into the US and Canada, and we think that the US is probably going to be our if we don't relocate there permanently, it will definitely be a big feature in our kind of growth

Israel: 40:47

plans. And Ismail shifting a little bit to you guys as a as a company, as an organization, and how you've managed to get to where you are and where you need to be. I mean, how, how have you guys sustained yourselves. What was the fundraising journey for you? And what's the what's the business model for evergive? I mean, how do you guys actually monetize and stay afloat?

Ismael: 41:11

Yeah, the easier answer is our business model. And then I'll come to how we sustain ourselves. So the so we take nothing of the donations and our interest is a percentage, so we're still figuring out the final percentage, but it's likely to be in the region of 15 to 20% of the appreciation of the Bitcoin as a one time fee, and then anything beyond that, the charity keeps for themselves forever, and that's it. So that's that, that's how that, that's how we monetize and in turn. So then the the money, even from the public, doesn't even land in our account. So the money from the public goes directly to a donor advice Fund, which I think is quite a popular term in the US as well. So it's like a third party regulated. You can think of it as an escrow account. So it goes from that escrow account to on ramp, the multi institutional custodian. So it's a way completely outside of the money flow. So as soon as the 20% appreciation is triggered, then there's kind of a release where that portion then comes to us. So that's our business model, and in terms of how we sustain ourselves. So I've built out several businesses to date. The only investment I've taken was from my co founder, who was my co founder in my earlier businesses, but is also now the co founder with me in evergives. His name is Mohammed yeshawat, so that's the only investment I've ever taken, and it was different because he was also a co founder. But since then, we haven't taken any investment, and we've just been big believers in just old fashioned How about you actually make something valuable and charge a customer type model? So that's that's what we've been doing for for a number of years. But in particular with evergive, we were quite fortunate to have sold our previous company, which was an E commerce company, for a good, a good, a good sum. So we're using a lot of that, our own funding, to fund the early stages of evergive.

Lynne Bairstow: 43:30

Can you talk to us a little bit about your team, how you're structured? Are you remote or based in London? How does, how are the operations run?

Ismael: 43:39

Yeah, so we are remote, but we're rethinking it. I think where we are, I think remote has its place for certain types of companies. But I think when you're building out something as fast moving as kind of the space that we're in now, and where you're really building out like really strong culture and mission. You really want to be, in our opinion, very closely kind of collaborate, collaborate very closely together, and have just that bandwidth of communication that allows, like, really good ideas to flow and feedback to flow very quickly. And so we started out hybrid, where we'd come to the office once, every once or twice, every month, now shifting more towards in office, where you know where, where, again, going back to our old fashioned routes.

Lynne Bairstow: 44:33

Your monetization model is sinking into me, but as it does, it's like it's really beautiful, because you're not taking anything as a percentage directly, and it's only on the appreciation, which just shows the conviction that what you're doing is really beneficial for the charity, and it's how your business succeeds, too. So you're really values aligned, incentives aligned, that you wouldn't be suggesting this. It's like you're not taking anything until what you're you. What you're projecting is, actually is being achieved.

Ismael: 45:04

Yeah, it really comes back to like, wearing like, putting it out there. And if you're gonna espouse kind of Bitcoin principles, like, live it and show it authentically in your own model, yeah, if Bitcoin doesn't appreciate we die on that hill, but it's a hill like, you know that we've, you've got conviction in and it's just clean for for donors as well. And, like you said, incentives of mine, and that was all really important

Israel: 45:30

for us. Yeah, it speaks to the power of of an decentralized, open network. In my opinion, that's just this concept that each participant and node benefits the rest of the of the network, and especially in these early days, it's just, it's just so powerful once you, once you open your eyes to it and you see it. But yeah, no. Love what. Love what you guys are, are working on and building is my end. As far as, and you hinted a little bit to this, but as far as you know, near to medium term roadmap, forever give, I know you mentioned you're looking at new, new geographies, but any other features, or, you know, things you're looking to add on the platform?

Ismael: 46:13

Yeah, the thing that I'm most excited about validating more kind of strongly, is this widget feature, and then proving that out in different environments and different types of charities, and seeing how much we can bring kind of the sustainability proposition to various different charities. So we have a fairly small sample size now, but I'm really excited about more charities coming on board and leveraging this, this technology, and integrating the widget into their own website, and yeah, once we have enough kind of data points on that we'd be really excited about trying to integrate that into every kind of charity, every airline, every supermarket, and getting just the whole world behind. Because with evergive, it's not just about making kind of charity, loss forever or impact, loss forever. It's like, philosophically for us, it's like, what responsibility do we have to the future? What responsibility do we have to future who are human beings, who will exist and are no less important to us? Like, how do we manage that? How can we kind of demonstrate to them that, like we thought about them in building out the infrastructure of society, so getting people behind that kind of initiative and that mindset really, really excites

Lynne Bairstow: 47:37

me. Yeah, me too. I think everybody's so focused on like, ETF inflows and things like those. But if we had a measurement that measured how much of Bitcoin daily cost averaging, or just small percent, small amounts that just go into a fund that helps support future conservation, water purity, you know, health education, what an amazing difference that could make.

Ismael: 48:00

Yeah. I mean, we had a design, like, when we saw, like the we actually had this idea a long time ago, in 2020, but after the kind of the FTX thing happened, like, the world is not ready for a Bitcoin treasury, for Bitcoin reserve, for charities at All, so we parked that idea and, but, yeah, it's when we saw kind of the the flurry of more and more for profit, kind of Bitcoin treasuries surfacing. We were like, we can't allow the organizations who are invested in humanity's biggest problems to be priced out of this future, right? So that's fundamentally what drove us to act now,

Israel: 48:46

and the second and third order effects of of you know, this charitable giving concept that you're building out is always so interesting, because as it plays out, it's just going to be so it's going to create so many positive synergies. I would imagine that many people, you know, when you mentioned the supermarket example, there's, there's, you know, I have no idea what the number is, but I'm sure it's a high percentage of people who don't click on Donate. Because ultimately, you you either you have no idea it's kind of a black hole, right? You have no idea if that's going to be properly managed, or you're aware of the, you know, misaligned incentives, so it's it creates almost, you know, a disincentive all this opaqueness and inefficiency to even give right. So when you solve that simple equation, I would imagine even the activity in the philanthropic space will just grow as well.

Ismael: 49:45

And you really hit like, go to the heart of like, what took us out of like, this really bleak depressive state when we were looking for a solution post depression and like, more hopeful for like, humanity. Future is like when you're trying to build out a fund that's designed to last forever. What are the things that have to be true? One of them is transparency, so then people can just see very clearly on the ledger. This is how much we have in our evergive, in our Bitcoin reserve. This is how much has been deducted, and like, you wouldn't want, like it to be opaque for a fund that you know you hope to grow and be kind of the financial backbone of this whole industry. You'd want that to be super, super transparent and outlive you in a way that has integrity, so for many, many different reasons. I mean, we tell people like we're genuinely, we genuinely mean it like we ended up with Bitcoin by elimination, like, this wasn't like the first thing that we ran to is like, it just solves our problem.

Lynne Bairstow: 50:53

Yeah, that's a really important point, because I think there's a part of the education process is there's this misconception that Bitcoin is vague and hidden and shady, and it couldn't be more wrong. It's incredibly transparent. You can track what's going on with it. And I think, you know, to Israel's point of people don't know where money is going. I think the doge commission in the US revealed, or at least, you know, made people concerned that when you're giving to a treasury, or that there's a lot of missing dollars, or you don't know where money is going, and it just and it did a disservice to the charitable world, because I think it caused hesitancy, perhaps, to, you know, to make donations. But if there's a transparent way where you can track exactly where it's going, which is possible on the Bitcoin time chain, then you know exactly where your donations, how they're being used. So that's a that's another super benefit of this technology.

Israel: 51:51

And, you know, maybe as we, as we wrap up conscious of time. Here Isabel, What? What? What? Words of advice, or, you know, what would you like to close

Ismael: 52:04

on? I think, well, in my own kind of journey, I found that when taking, when going into entrepreneurship, the biggest risk that people typically fear is failure. But I genuinely feel, and this has been like the through line in my experiences, that the biggest risk is success without clarity. And what I mean by that is, you Lunde, you underestimate the the momentum that ostensible success, what, what kind of momentum that that that drives, and then how far along and how much time you spend on this path that you think is successful, only to be unclear about your principles and your actual goals and your values, to realize many years later on, that this you're you're working to build a kind, a version of the world that you actually hate, and you can tell this is like, my own personal experience coming up. And so what I would encourage entrepreneurs to do, if really, entrepreneurship is about, how do we serve humanity through this vehicle of like, business or like, yeah, if that's what it's about, then be super clear on what your principles are and what kind of world you want to build and what your values are, and then let that kind of guide your success, rather than subscribing to what might look successful like optically. But I mean, Paul Graham has this really famous quote, which is, make something people want, and then now, like, I would just advise entrepreneurs to also think about what you really want as well. And then, at the intersection of those two things, that's where some, some real magic kind of emerges

Lynne Bairstow: 54:01

that's beautifully said, Ismail, thank you so much for your time and sharing your journey with us and your wisdom. And we couldn't be more excited about whatever give is doing and just the positive change we feel it can it has the potential to make in the world. So we appreciate you.

Israel: 54:16

I really enjoyed this. Thank you guys. Thank you Ismail. And where would you like to send people, by the way, where can people get in touch?

Ismael: 54:21

Yeah, x or LinkedIn, both of those

Israel: 54:26

great well, we'll make sure to include them. And we certainly look forward also to keeping up, to keeping up with the progress. Ismo, maybe we can do a check in at a future date.

Ismael: 54:35

Yeah, when we, when we, when we LeapFrog. Michael Saylor, then we'll be back and let you guys know,

Lynne Bairstow: 54:41

perfect, we'll look forward to that. You.