My 15 year journey to building a hybrid events platform for non-profits

A quick story on my 15 year journey to building Fondi, a hybrid events platform for non-profits, and why it's so important to me:

(TL;DR: I dropped out of college, moved to Africa, turned a spreadsheet into a database used by the United Nations, co-founded a SaaS events company and recently launched a hybrid events platform to help non-profits thrive in this new era of fundraising).

2006: College Dropout to the Pearl of Africa

After my freshman year of college in 2006 at San Diego State University (SDSU), I moved to northern Uganda to volunteer and ultimately begin working for Invisible Children (the non-profit most famously known for it's documentary "KONY 2012" and its incredible work it continues to do in East Africa).

What was supposed to be 3 months of volunteering turned into 2 years maintaining makeshift Wi-Fi networks (think: aluminum foil wrapped antennas), managing servers and building a non-profit CRM called Pearl (PHP, MSSQL, jQuery) to replace a set of spreadsheets and help manage logistics around the students we were sponsoring and the financial programs we were overseeing in the local villages.

I loved it. I had taught myself to code at age 13 and had been building websites and software applications since. I turned all those nights I spent coding in my midwestern basement into something that made someone's life better.

2008 - 2014: Livestreams, Politics, Warlords... oh my!

Much of the next 10 years I sought to contribute in similar ways, trying to find the crossroads of technology for good:

• I helped lead a team in live streaming an activist "holdout" where for 14 days, 50+ people slept on the sidewalks outside of an Oklahoma government building to convince a US Senator to release his hold on critical aid funds. We leveraged live stream technology (brand new at at the time) to raise money and awareness.

• I bought a 1978 RV, recruited a few friends and crossed the country with the intention of live streaming ourselves doing community service events at stops along the way, trying to increase community involvement. We called it Live to Journey.

• I worked for the Obama for America campaign in Laredo, TX, Hattiesburg, MS and Rocky Mount, NC before accepting a job with the Missouri Democratic Party to manage their entire database of voter information (every voter in Missouri). Fun fact: I was also tasked with trying to re-create CNN's "Magic Wall" using Adobe Flash.

• And boomeranged back to Invisible Children in 2010 where I'd spend 3 more years stateside overseeing the IT and web development teams, including the launch of KONY 2012 and several other of our ambitious fundraising campaigns.

2014: Events 101

In 2014, I started Lennd with Chris Carver to help solve problems for event teams around event operations -- the same problems we were seeing and experiencing first-hand at Invisible Children, with a 100+ person team conducting in-person fundraisers around the world on an annual basis.

The first lines of code for Lennd were written on a small Netbook while living on a leaky sailboat in San Diego Harbor. Today, Lennd is a SaaS platform that helps event teams (endurance, sports, conferences, festivals, and more) build and run the equivalent of small cities over the course of weeks (and then tear them down in 2 days).

We've had the honor of working with some of the biggest and best event teams in the world, from the NFL to PGA to Outside Lands Music Festival and beyond.

2020: COVID = Virtual and Hybrid

And then, the world pressed pause. The events industry across the world came to a halt. While we had to make some hard decisions within Lennd, one of the hardest was deciding on our course: Who did we as a company want to be at this time? While many things were discussed, we decided that there was one thing we did know: virtual and hybrid events were here to stay.

Our talented product team got to work and over the next few months we released the first version of our virtual events platform, built specifically for non-profits and marketing teams. With the help of some early partners (Mark, Tim, Erin and more!), we introduced our new product to the world: Fondi.

Since the launch of Fondi, we've released integrations with Neon One, Classy, Hubspot, Blackbaud, Eventbrite and Salesforce. We've hosted virtual events around the world, bringing people together and building new relationships between brand and customer, donor and cause.

Oh yeah, we even hosted a 12 hour virtual cyclethon across Europe, raising money for the fight against cancer:

2021 and Beyond:

New voices = New revenue. Community = Retention.

Simple formulas for a not so simple time. Over the next year, Fondi will make the world smaller by making your fundraising events bigger. Our ambitious roadmap empowers you to return to in-person events but also encourages you to open the doors to the rest of the world. I am thankful for the opportunity to work with a talented team that will bring it to life.

And just as this journey started, 15 years later I am excited to be using tech for good once again.

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