Why We Are Proud To Invest In Kindly — A New York Based Social Impact Platform And Addressing The Future Of Work
Kindly.org fills a critical niche within the tech eco system, helping local communities to leverage their member’s talents to volunteer to gain purpose by providing their time and valuable skills. This will help solving the most burning challenges of our communities.
Our pre-seed investment fund WSN Angels & Startups has one specific area that we as an agency driven fund are interested in.
It’s is how the global and local workforce is actually changing. Inlcuding all impacts that come along with the drastic societal, economical and psychological changes.
The Future Of Work Re-Engineered
The problem statement: What we do in our job today, will be gone in 5–8 years! This creates a loss of purpose for people, frustration in a community, more mobility and travel time, health issues due to loneliness and so on.
If you haven’t lived under a stone for the last 5 years, it should be clear that society is shifting jobs at a rapid pace. Just recently, I had the chance to visit Google’s office in London and just two days later Microsoft’s office in Munich. What I’ve learned when I talked to the engineers there was that all the jobs my friends, colleagues at Wildstyle Network, and even our clients are currently holding, will be affected by automation.
Although we’re sseing an all-time low in unemployment, we could interpret this as a pre-storm signal that the workflow we know will dramatically change while engineers will do their job and start to identify every high paid labor to replace it with an algorithm to automate the job.
The brutal truth is: We’re doing the same. Every. Single. Day!
It is time that the society needs a new north star and an alternative to paid labor. The team behind Kindly.org understood the future challenge and created not just a volunteering app like Golden or GoVolunteer but a service that helps communities to auto-search and find time in the schedules of their busy citizens (mainly Millennials) and asks them politely to support urgent community issues like serving food at the homeless shelters or teach underprivileged kids in music. Kindly’s app for iOS and the real-time pattern recognition model is learning about someone’s interests and skills and looks for ways and the right moment to present a skillful person an opportunity to volunteer in their community.
Team Thinks ‘Community First’
The team behind Kindly also puts the needs of the community first. When they presented the business plan, we were surprised how much they’re inline with the privacy aspects of the GDPR and the needs of a the local agencies, NGOs, and do-good organizations.
We strongly feel that this way of working with communities — not sucking and stealing their volunteer data — is the way forward.
Well Rounded Team With Insights, Operations Know How, Sales And UX Know-how
We always try to make sure that the early founding team covers most of the needed business roles so they can get as much done as possible in house. The team at Kindly is motivated to take on every challenge even if this means learning new skills in lightspeed.
The two co-founders and their team are comprised of digital operations, technical and sales business as well as user experience. Their ability to learn every day, their regular chats about their personal vulnerability and the respect they have for everyone made are the most important qualities of a great founding team, for us as a strong supporting and operational fund.
Social Impact For Profit?
The Kindly.org team around Brandon Litman (CEO) and Alexander Bierling (COO) made us rethink how a social impact venture can consider profit margins. Their progress can be compared to change.org — a company which began as a nonprofit that connected charities to donors, but has transitioned into a for-profit company that makes money by selling advertised petitions on its website. Change.org has truly disrupted the social tech landscape by having impact and being profitable. It is convincing that it’s no shame to earn money to create more features, move ideas into reality, and attract a great team.
We strongly feel that Kindly is able to expand the customer base when doing business with one faction without making the service an enemy of the other.
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If you think, you should join Brandon and Alex’s mission to turn the impact space upside down, then connect with them within the app or on LinkedIn.
If you want to connect with us, whether it’s regarding our fund or funding, visit WSN Angels & Startups or send an e-mail to steve.nitzschner (at) wildstyle-network.com.
