Why Tim Ferriss Loves Donors Choose

Mar 28, 2020 1:53 am

Remote learning, two little kids at home, and working with clients is all swirling together for a magical mixture of chaos on day 15 of social distancing for the Dawson family...


So, to keep things simple, I'm sharing one question and one answer from my conversation with Charles Best, which I published this week on the EdTech Startup Show. The show notes, I found especially useful for this one, and you can access those here.


Here we go...


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Gerard Dawson: When you interviewed Tim Ferriss at a SXSW Edu a few years ago, Tim said he supports DonorsChoose because you run it "like a lean for profit," and he thinks the criteria should be the same: specificity and accountability. So, can you talk a little bit about that?


Charles Best: Sure, and I'll start by sharing a really small world connection that Tim and I have... We were high school schoolmates. We were on the wrestling team together, and we had a coach, Mr Buxton, who we both really looked up to. And in fact, it was that coach who Tim and I both had that made me want to be a teacher.

And so actually, if anything, DonorsChoose wouldn't be around today, if not for that coach and teacher whom, Tim and I shared in high school. So Tim and I go way back.


But even if we didn't go way back as friends, I think that, one thing that does excite him about DonorsChoose that excites a lot of our board members and a lot of our supporters is that, although we're a charity, and although we actually love nothing more than to recruit people to join our staff team who used to be teacher users of DonorsChoose, we also operate like, a web company where we are as data-obsessed, as performance-minded, as agile and creative, I hope as any for profit company.


But, but it's for a mission reason. We think that by operating in a lean, creative way that we'll get more teachers' classroom projects funded.


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I made an "audiogram" of this clip and posted it on Twitter. You can listen to that and give it a retweet ; ) here.


Thanks for reading,


Gerard Dawson

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