Entrepreneur on fire episode 108 welcome to entrepreneur on fire dot com where remarkable entrepreneurs share their inspiring story let their journey illuminate your path to success and now

your host John Dumas fire nation have you ever wanted to start a podcast but during the time knowledge or skills just record an MP3 send it to my team here at entrepreneur on fire and we do the rest it's really that simple visit pod platform dot com that's POD platform dot com to find out more

okay let's get started I am simply ecstatic to introduce my guest today Desiree Vargas Riggly Desiree are you prepared to ignite yes I am all right originally from Costa Rica and Kansas Desiree graduated from Yale prior to launching give forward she worked as a specialist in collegiate entrepreneurship at the Coffman Foundation and as an independent consultant for the Arabella philanthropic investment advisors

Desiree is passionate about philanthropy and the role that young and small donors can have on our communities

wow that was a mouthful desiree but I got through it I gave fire nation a little overview but take a minute tell us about yourself personally we want to get to know you and then tell us about your business

okay sure so I don't know where to start I guess I'm 30 year old entrepreneurs social entrepreneur I started my business with my partner Ethan Austin in 2008 so we've been around a little bit over four years and in that time I think Ethan and I both really kind of just taken a hold of our role in the social ventures here and especially here in Chicago so it's been fun to kind of come of age as the Chicago startup scene is starting to grow also

and I have a little 11 month old boy and a wonderful husband and a staff of 23 people here in Chicago

wow that's a big family so Desiree we like to start entrepreneur on fire off with a success quote we do that because we like to get the motivational ball rolling and get people excited for this great social entrepreneurship content you're going to share with us so what do you have for fire nation today

so the quote that has really been a guiding principle for me since the beginning is an anonymous Zen quote and it is leap in the net will appear and you know I think a lot of entrepreneurs have to do that at some point they have to make the decision I'm not going to look for another job or I'm not going to stay in the job I'm in right now and I just have to make this leap and pray and hope and believe that it's going to work out and so I think that you know if you choose the right thing to leap into and you've done enough research

that you really can kind of expect that net to appear eventually I love that now take us down to the ground level Desiree this is about your journey as an entrepreneur this is about you how have you applied this quote to mentality to your everyday life

sure so I'm going to go back a little bit and tell you that kind of the history of the idea for give forward so you have some context of that leap but I basically came up with the idea for give forward when I was inspired by Hurricane Katrina in 2006

I was frustrated that there wasn't an easy way for you know individuals to give to people who were trying to rebuild that we had to go through a big nonprofit and as a small scale donor you don't necessarily know where your money is going to go

and if you look at kind of how much Americans give small scale donors really do make up the backbone of American philanthropy so I thought that it was really kind of an unfair system and that there should be an easier way for people to give to people

so on my 25th birthday I was I had made the decision to move to Chicago and I was trying to think about what I wanted to do with my life and I looked around and I saw that I had all of these other friends who were in the same position they were

you know in their 20s trying to figure out what their passions were and just didn't have any idea of how to get out of the paralegal jobs or the insurance jobs that they were doing to go find something that they really cared about

and so I was thinking well what if I started a company that helps these people find their passion and in thinking about that I thought how would I fund it and then this kind of came back to the idea of online raising money people to people

and I realized this was now in 2007 that that concept just did not exist on the web and so I had this idea in the back of my head and I got really excited about it

but I didn't have any money and I was moving to Chicago where I had no network and so I decided okay instead I'm going to take this consulting job for Arabella

but I spent the entire year 2007 thinking about all the different ways that a site like give forward would help people

and at one point I went into a convenience store and I saw a change jar for a baby that needed a heart transplant

and this family was trying to raise $350,000 a quarter at a time and I remember thinking if this company existed these people would have so much more power behind this fundraising effort

and so it got to a point where I was just like it was consuming all of my thoughts.

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