2 days ago
From Finance To Philanthropy: Greg Mrva's GoFundMe Journey
Greg Mrva is the CFO of GoFundMe, the #1 trusted global leader in online fundraising, helping to raise and deliver more than $4.0 billion to people and organizations around the world since 2010. At GoFundMe, they believe that the impulse to help a person, fix a neighborhood, or change a nation should never be ignored. In fact, it should be shared with the entire world. That's why they make it easy to inspire the world and turn people's compassion into action. By giving people the tools they need to capture and share their stories far and wide, they have built a community of more than 200 million donors, organizers, and nonprofits who have raised over $40 billion for the causes important to them—and they are just getting started.
Greg and I discussed his path from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, his pivotal career lessons, and how GoFundMe has raised over $4.0 billion to help people worldwide. He breaks down the platform's unique business model, which relies on voluntary tips, and the company's major investments in trust, safety, and product innovation.
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Growing up in Montville, N.J., Greg Mrva understood the value of hard work. His father worked at AT&T, originally working on the phone lines and eventually ascending through the company ranks, and his mother taught special needs students with learning differences. He and his sister were always busy with sports and academics, and they attended a Catholic school, where Mrva learned an impactful lesson about failure on his first day.
'The motto of the school is Latin and translates to 'Welcome to life. You're going to fail often, and through failure, you're going to grow,' he explained. 'It has stuck with me for life. It's certainly good advice for anybody in any profession. Having a growth mindset along the way has been something that I picked up early on in high school.'
Following high school, Mrva attended the University of Virginia, where he received a Bachelor of Arts and majored in economics and history.
He started his career as an analyst at Goldman Sachs. It provided critical training for learning his way around financial statements and understanding businesses. Immediately following Goldman Sachs, Mrva decided to pursue a law degree from Harvard Law School.
But after graduating and on his way to becoming a lawyer, Mrva pivoted and decided that his drive to work in consumer tech and the desire to escape cold Massachusetts winters were enough to inspire a move to California.
He landed a role with Montgomery Securities as an associate. One of Mrva's clients, whom he had helped raise money for in the private markets, encouraged him to help build his business–an online game business called Mpath Interactive.
'It was one of the first places that allowed you to play games online over dial-up modems back in the late '90s,' Mrva explained. 'I was a strategy guy, a biz dev guy, a corporate development guy, and we took the business public.'
When the market busted, the business went south, and Mrva had the responsibility of winding down the business and selling the assets. It was an experience early on where he had the opportunity to learn from failure. And it was a slice of life in Silicon Valley. At the time, the reality was that thousands of companies were chasing the dream, but only a handful made it through.
Mrva made it through that difficult time, going on to hold positions at Yahoo!, Barclays Capital, Morgan Stanley, and StubHub, among others. Key to his success in those positions were the mentors who surrounded him.
When he worked at Yahoo, he started on their corporate development team, which he eventually ran. There, he spent a lot of time with Yahoo's CFO, Sue Decker. Since Decker started her career on Wall Street and worked as an analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette (DLJ), she brought that rigor to Yahoo, which Mrva appreciated.
'Whenever we met with Sue, she would immediately ask the most probing question and be able to see the analysis and see the clarity,' he said. 'She taught me the precision and attention to detail that the job required.'
Mrva also had eBay as a client, where he had the chance to work with Scott Schenkel–then CFO of eBay and currently CFO of Expedia. When Mrva communicated that he wanted to be a CFO, it was Schenkel who gave him that chance. As CFO of StubHub, he had the chance to be operational and help run the business. He has since taken a lot of that experience to his role at GoFundMe.
GoFundMe has transformed the world of fundraising, helping people to donate money to other people in times of crisis or support organizations they care about. Most recently, it was essential to fundraising for the victims of the Los Angeles wildfires. People rallied on GoFundMe.
'In just a few weeks, we raised over $250 million for those communities,' Mrva explained. 'We're still raising money, and that's from over 1 million individual donors. Over 1 million humans in the United States were impacted and felt the need to help. That's the type of help that we see on GoFundMe every day, and it's really what makes it so special to work there.'
The company's impact goes beyond the dollars. Many people might be surprised to know that, beyond being a household name for individual fundraising, they are one of the largest providers of enterprise technology software to the nonprofit space. Thousands of nonprofits use their software every day for their own digital fundraising needs–including the Salvation Army, the Michael J. Fox Foundation, Tunnel to Towers, and more. GoFundMe is behind the digital giving, direct giving, peer-to-peer giving, and live events.
Mrva's role isn't just a job–because he wasn't looking for just any job when he was looking a few years ago.
'I was at a point in my career where I wanted to work at a company that had a purpose and had a mission that resonated with me,' Mrva said. 'I wanted to work at a place where my kids could be proud of what I was doing.'
He was reconnected with Tim Cadogan, GoFundMe's CEO. They had worked together at Yahoo in the early 2000s, when Cadogan ran Yahoo's search business. They connected about Cadogan's vision for GoFundMe and where he wanted to take the platform. To Mrva, it represented the culmination of everything that he had done previously and an opportunity to make an impact.
Over their three years of collaborating as CEO and CFO, they have built a rapport based on complete trust, transparency, and accountability. Mrva admires him for his leadership and overall character.
'I really respect him as a human,' Mrva said. 'As a leader, he sets a very high standard. He lives the mission; he cares deeply about the impact we're having. He also sets a very high bar for expectations of what the team can achieve, the belief and trust and empowerment in the team, and then complete transparency, ownership, and accountability.'
One component that leadership keeps in mind is how to deliver the maximum amount of help to individuals and organizations that are fundraising on the platform. More than 10,000 people start GoFundMes every day. A GoFundMe is free for an individual to start, and the company only charges small transaction fees to pay their payment processors and safely deliver funds. Because the fees are so low, the company asks for voluntary tips, which is unique.
'I've worked at a lot of technology companies, and I don't know of anybody that has a business model where they let the users decide whether and how much the service is worth,' he said.
Mrva explained that people more than pay for the service, enabling GoFundMe to invest in the trust, safety, risk, compliance, product, and technology innovation on the platform.
Innovation in technology has been a game-changer for the company, and AI has helped. Their investment has increased substantially over the past three years, going into three camps: how to make the process easier; how to make the process of donating more impactful and inspiring; and how to activate the community on behalf of individual and nonprofit organizers.
'Our product releases include things like AI storytelling,' he explained. 'We will help get you past that blank sheet of paper. Beyond that, one of the most efficacious things you can do once you've actually created your story is to share your story. We'll use AI to help you do that.'
They have integrations with Meta, Instagram and others to help get the word out. AI coaching tools will help walk people through the steps and act as a coach along the way. They can also leverage AI to suggest donation amounts and help donors share with their networks.
A new product, GoFundMe Profiles, allows people to do just that. It's a LinkedIn-style page, but it's tailor-made for giving. The page helps people curate the causes and organizations that they care about and share them with their networks.
Strategic partners have helped to elevate this new product. Individuals like Paris Hilton have been active in helping to raise money for victims of the Los Angeles wildfires, and Flavor Flav was instrumental in helping Olympians' families raise money so that they could watch their kids compete at the 2024 Games.
Leveraging audiences has created more and more community behind giving, something the company is focused on moving forward.
'We think that we can make it more meaningful for you and me to give,' Mrva said. 'It doesn't have to always be money. It could just be support. We see influencers on our platform who might not donate themselves very much, but their networks can actually be orders of magnitude greater and more impactful in terms of the amount of giving they inspire.'
The goal is to inspire the millennial and Gen Z generations, who are civically minded and deeply aware of the need to help others, to be more supportive of the individuals and organizations they care about.
Regarding future generations, Mrva's advice to aspiring CFOs is simple.
'It really comes down to three things,' he said. 'There's no such thing as a linear path. If you want to be a CFO, you have to take risks in your career and take opportunities when they come your way. You're going to make mistakes and you're going to fail; it's important to learn from those mistakes. Finally, be willing to give and accept feedback. If you can do that along the way, you're going to accomplish great things.'
