Social Impact Tech: Eshed Doni of GiftCrowd On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact

Your wellbeing is dependent on others, as theirs is dependent on you. Our lives, no matter how different, are intertwined. Your best contribution to the world will result from helping others and improving their lives, both those who know you personally and those you don’t.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Eshed Doni.

Eshed Doni is a serial entrepreneur born and raised in Israel who has focused his career on using technology to solve everyday problems and support healthcare solutions. After starting his career in the Israeli Air Force Technology Unit, he split his professional time between working in software engineering and product management. Highlights of his career include founding GiftCrowd, SendM (one of the first mobile group messaging solutions), and App2Go (an early developer of mobile applications).

Eshed now resides in NJ with his wife and kids. When not working, he is an avid hiker and swimmer. He is also a music lover, with his tastes ranging from country to heavy metal, and enjoys live concerts regularly.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I grew up in a small town in Israel. In those days, there wasn’t a lot of technology around to engage with, so I spent most of my free time outside, playing with friends, and getting around on my bike.

The closest major city was Tel Aviv, which we would travel to by bus for extracurricular activities. The best time of the year was summer when I got to spend time on the beaches of the Mediterranean Sea — the only bad part about my beach trips was the bus ride with no air conditioning, which took one hour even though the beach was only five miles away.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

The most interesting story actually happened while I was on a break from working. I started my career as a software engineer and climbed the ladder in software engineering management, but after close to a decade of software engineering, I felt that something was missing. At that point, I was able to persuade my direct manager to approve an unpaid leave, which I used to travel in Central America.

After three weeks of traveling, I found myself sitting on the roof of a bus that was stuck on a dirt road in northern Guatemala and enjoying the amazing view. It was there that I had the realization that what I was missing in my career was a broader point of view. I decided that I wanted to focus on fostering connections between humans and technology, rather than focusing exclusively on tech.

As I realized that my passion was using technology to improve everyday life, it drove my transition from product development to product management, which has shaped my career path ever since.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I was fortunate enough to work for a CEO who had a very logical thought process and methodically analyzed every situation. I learned from him to repeatedly ask the question, “What is the worst thing that can happen if we don’t do X?” I also learned from him to carefully track pieces of information back to their origin in order to assess their true value. Very often our tendency is to respond to situations based on our gut feeling while making all sorts of unconscious assumptions. That CEO taught me to step back and clearly analyze the situation based on actual facts and nothing but facts, which is a crucial tool for every business leader.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

One of my favorite quotes is, “It ain’t no big deal if you don’t make it one.” As an entrepreneur, you need to take care of all sorts of tasks, many of which you would prefer to assign to a very junior employee. However, as a founder you are typically the most senior and most junior employee at the same time, which means the only choice is to roll up your sleeves and get the task done.

The quote reminds me that no task is too small, too intimidating, or too difficult — I simply get it done. Your journey will involve many unexpected obstacles that will slow you down and even force you to steer in a different direction. The more you expect the unexpected, the less those obstacles will surprise you and the faster you can overcome them.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

The three traits that were most instrumental to my success were creativity, tenacity, and a sense of humor.

I consider creativity to be the ability to look at things from a unique perspective and solve known problems in an innovative way. This is how GiftCrowd came to life. I was looking for a new way to make group gifting simple and I wanted a creative business model that would not involve any usage fees. When you have a new idea, you should not be discouraged if you discover that someone else has already developed a product that solves the problem. You should only be discouraged if you do not know how to solve it in a better way.

Tenacity is important mainly because it provides you with the strength to keep moving forward with a strong and unwavering faith that eventually things will work out. There will always be difficult times when it feels that nothing is working and nothing ever will. At those times, giving up is always the easy choice.

For example, I remember a Friday afternoon after a major rollout when I realized that the rollout inadvertently disabled major functionality. To make things worse, the entire engineering team had already left for the weekend by that time. Emails and calls from dissatisfied customers started to pile up, and for a moment, it felt that there was no way we would have a single customer left after the weekend. It was tempting to just shut my computer off and walk away, but being tenacious led to a better and more rewarding course of action. I created a script that kept customers patient while making sure that we could safely fix the issue during the weekend. In the end, our customers did notice the efforts we made to stay in constant communication and some even expressed their appreciation.

Finally, having a healthy sense of humor will help you to maintain your balance and wellbeing on a journey that is long and often filled with obstacles and unexpected challenges. Laugh when things go wrong. When you make silly mistakes, laugh at yourself and keep moving forward. Fulfilling your career goals is important, but your family and friends are no less important.

If your company eventually fails (and keep in mind that the statistics are against us, entrepreneurs), you still want to have your family and friends around you. Being harsh with yourself and others whenever things go wrong will drain all your energy and make your life miserable. The only way to go through challenging and tense times is by maintaining a good spirit and healthy relationships.

Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?

GiftCrowd makes the otherwise cumbersome process of gifting as a group easy and fun. In situations where groups want to appreciate and celebrate someone — like a teacher or a coach — GiftCrowd is the tool that makes it easier for everyone to participate and for the recipient to get a gift they will truly appreciate.

How do you think your technology can address this?

GiftCrowd is an online solution that democratizes group gifting by making it easy for anyone to create group gift initiatives and invite others to join. It allows every participant to contribute as much or as little as they want and to provide their own personalized note. It also lets the gift recipient choose the gift they want from a wide range of choices. GiftCrowd makes group gifting a win-win-win situation that serves the organizer, the participants, and the recipient by removing the cumbersome, painstaking, and awkward processes involved in traditional group gifting, allowing everyone to focus solely on the fun of giving and receiving.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

I learned the hard way how difficult, frustrating, and time-consuming organizing a group gift was when I volunteered to oversee the holiday gift for my son’s teacher. I thought it would simply involve a couple of emails. Gosh, was I wrong!

I sent numerous email messages and reminders, called parents who did not respond, collected cash (which required carrying small bills to give change), and, in the end, had no idea what to buy! Immediately after I purchased a gift card for the teacher at a nearby drug store, another parent showed up with their contribution.

I was exhausted by the whole process and convinced there had to be a better way for me and the countless other parents who regularly went through the same ordeal. When I couldn’t find a solution, I decided I would build one.

How do you think this might change the world? Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

Gifting is part of our lives. Sometimes, we are on the giving side, wishing to express our appreciation and gratitude, and other times we are on the receiving side, feeling loved and cared for.

Making this process simple and painless will increase the number of gifts people give and receive, creating more opportunities for people to establish and strengthen the emotional bonds in their relationships. I really cannot think of a way to turn the technology around and use it in a negative way.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

The first thing that you need to know well is the problem that you are trying to solve. As you work through that process, you need to make sure it is a real one.

With GiftCrowd, there was a point when we were thinking about expanding its capabilities to collect class dues and keep track of expenses. However, when we interviewed class parents and presented them with the concept, we learned that the roles they play vary significantly depending on the school. As a result, we concluded that was not a direction we should take.

The second thing is to make sure that a large enough number of people suffer from that same problem. When I got frustrated by the difficulties of organizing a group gift, I started to ask others around me how they were taking care of the same task. The unanimous response was that it was not a pleasant experience nor an easy one. From there, I used US census data to calculate the total market size.

The third is to find out how you can solve that problem in a better way than others. It is not the end of the world if another solution already exists, but it will be the end of your venture if you do not have a way to solve that problem better than others.

The fourth thing is determining whose help you will need to succeed. No one knows everything, which means we need to partner with those who can fill our knowledge gaps. Include individuals you can trust, who will have your back, and with whom you can disagree with agreeably.

While those first four are applicable to any technology initiatives, the fifth is unique to the positive social impact aspect. Remember that you are working for the greater good, not for your personal benefit. Consequently, there are countless individuals who want you to succeed and would vouch for you. Feeling that aggregate energy makes you much stronger and more resilient.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

This thought might be intimidating to a younger audience, but at the end of the day, we must accept that our time on earth is limited and we decide how we use it. You need to ask yourself how you want to be remembered and what kind of dent you want to leave in the universe. I believe if you really think about the moments that have mattered the most to you in your life, you will realize that without exception they all included other individuals who cared for you.

Your wellbeing is dependent on others, as theirs is dependent on you. Our lives, no matter how different, are intertwined. Your best contribution to the world will result from helping others and improving their lives, both those who know you personally and those you don’t.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

There are quite a few individuals with whom I would love to grab lunch with. One of them is Reed Hastings, one of the Netflix founders. He had such a clear product vision that he started building it before the technologies that would be crucial for mass use existed. For a decade, Netflix would send physical DVDs to users because the broadband internet necessary for streaming was not yet available for mass use.

Netflix waited 10 years for the technology that ultimately made it so successful to be available. As a product person, I truly appreciate those who have the ability to start a long journey that aims beyond the horizon.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I always welcome like-minded people connecting with me through LinkedIn and I encourage anyone who might want to buy a gift in the future to join the GiftCrowd mailing list by creating an account on our website.

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.