Tej Gundavelli on blockchain donations through Touch a Life

0:20in the blockchain space in the giving space and how that led to you starting the touch of life foundation so kind of my journey within the space started more on the gaming side I went to a Catholic High School where they heavily emphasized the importance of service spent time working in local nonprofit organizations such as Sacred Heart Community Service getting to know kind

0:43of what the local nonprofits over there were working on what issues were important to them and towards the end of my career I started to learn about issues that I guess we're hitting a lot more closer to home in terms of the types of people that were affected within the school district that I lived in so to put in more in context there were around 80 homeless students

1:05homeless high school students around my age who lived within the air within the area so specifically my district and I live in a relatively affluent neighborhood so just hearing about that kind of struck a nerve with me and it made me realize that kind of the systems that we have in place I guess structurally there's a lot more that we can be doing in terms of awareness and

1:28in terms of how we decide to help other people fast forward to a couple years later I go to school for computer science and applied math I get a nice job at PayPal and in the meantime I'm still working with the touch of life foundation I'm working with a lot of these nonprofits and a lot of these you know school districts on how I can help other people but it's entirely a manual

1:48job but as I started to work at PayPal we have something called an opportunity hack where you can kind of come up with various ideas in terms of how you can help in terms of Financial Inclusion and PayPal has a big stress on financial inclusion within my own life as well I started to think about just how can i integrate the to various aspects of my life of you know I'm doing

2:10a lot of this computer science stuff and I'm also trying to just help people how do I two great those two things and that's kind of where the child giving app was formed where we wanted to have this mechanism of helping other people and to address that in a way that felt more personal and game if I really acts of kindness so kind of the same sense of

2:31joy that you get when you get seeing you know likes on Instagram or Facebook we wanted to be able to do that for do an app format for nonprofit organizations and in the same way that uber connects you to say a driver we want to be able to connect you as an individual that wants to donate to causes that you care about oh that's a great backstory

2:50Tesh and it's great to see that PayPal is actually supporting this cause because it is a great really great initiative and that led you to starting the towel Giving application can you talk a little bit more about you know what is exactly in the towel giving application and how is it specifically disrupting another public donation space right now yeah so I think one of the

3:12bigger disruptions within the public donation space that we're doing is you know we don't take any of the funds that come along the way when we are actually trying to run a donation at the moment we do have this small little transaction fee that happens you know when you do transfer money but we're hoping to remove that cost as well through some of the you know some of the advances that

3:34we're gonna see in blockchain that you know we'll discuss a little bit later but that's one of the big things and the other aspect is that this application we plan on making it entirely community driven we want this application to be something that lives beyond us and in that sense in the same way that you start to see on Reddit you see various moderators that are in charge of

3:53different communities and you see those communities entirely ran you know via the internet we're trying to start similar programs via a program we call Scouts where we have students within various school districts who kind of help along the way in terms of moderating content and in terms of just bringing awareness to some of the issues that exist within these areas so Thao

4:16Scott's is one part of it we want to also you know bring corporate sponsors and get them involved within the program as well we sincerely think that there is a genuine opportunity I think CSR has played a much larger role this year than it has in any other previous year when you take a look at how important it's been for you know coronavirus or like

4:36black lives matter movement I think it's very important now especially today for a company to be aware of what the values of their employees are and we wanted to tell giving application to really showcase how that would happen and what exactly they don't place care about yeah it's great to have a community driven support system and I think that's one of the things

5:01especially in the blockchain industry that is helping grow because everyone seems to be caring so much for each other and especially in this time of need and these crowdfunding platforms have done so much for people that now you know you can democratize raising money for somebody in need for you know real situations and you know GoFundMe has been a huge success in the past

5:22years but now moving forward this new technology and adding a twist and unique perspectives you know how would you say tall' giving has its differentiation points from GoFundMe or any other you know fundraising crowdfunding platform so if you kind of take a look at the landscape right like you have your patreon your GoFundMe and your Kickstarter there's a lot of their

5:42business models itself baked into it is this idea of we will take a cut in between and that tends to be where even amongst the user base of those platforms once cost structures start to change or once demands from investors start to change the actual user base is advocated of this isn't what we asked for this does not serve the needs that we wanted and they're also significantly limited

6:07in the way in which transactions can happen because of the way our existing financial system is right whenever we want to make an ACH transaction or some kind of money movement operation there is sometimes a flat fee and so that gets in the way of things like micro transactions and micro donations and so when we had as part of our values in mind we want to just completely

6:26facilitate giving and the entire goal of this product is moreso to raise awareness and to help you know empower communities rather than to take something in between I think it causes to think a little bit differently in terms of looking at what technologies were growing up in terms of blockchain and how it how we can leverage that to just change in the

6:48model at which we do business which is why it's blockchain itself it's a very community driven engineering platform and we try to move that into or we try to integrate that into how we've developed our platform as well yeah definitely great to be giving back to the community and I notice as well that you know when these corporations get super large or they become public

7:08and they take that percentage you know the percentage starts rising and it's usually not what people thought you know as the platform continues to grow they have all the power and they can set the percentage at whatever they would like and often you know it takes a large cut of somebody who's already in need and there's also those financial intermediary transactions so you know

7:28what was the main decision behind you taking zero cut and how will that create you know a sustainable business just by working through your corporate partners or through other avenues in the way that Tasha Life Foundation will be able to sustain itself I think the main decision behind the zero cut to be honest was thinking from a user perspective right I

7:49myself wanted to be able to donate to these organizations internationally or locally and I consistently saw that I was being charged some kind of flat fee or a twenty five percent fee and I it was like that's ridiculous right and wanting to see I mean we still technically are paying it like to be completely upfront but we are building our ecosystem such that eventually

8:11were removing that part as well but and we're trying to get you know in terms of our legal fees in terms of our accounting and etc we actually have partners that are working with us that are helping do this pro bono right and that is exactly what I say when I mean community driven approach which is we're relying a lot on our network to help make an organization like this possible

8:34where we're really saying hey we have this idea or this ideal in mind can you help us out to help make this possible through the free time that you have available something that you know we thought about when we were thinking about the giving process is giving isn't just money it is also about giving the items that you have giving in I endure giving just the time that you

8:56have available and a lot of people have come up to us saying look we live in the Silicon Valley we have all of these niche skills like in law or accounting or medical skills how can we give our time and our skills away and so that's really allowed us to rethink the business model of how a non-profit like this could work in the sense that we're not just thinking in terms of okay like

9:18these are some costs on the balance sheet but like how do we actually engage people to help make facilitate a culture of giving within our community yeah at the end of the day it's all about helping other people and I think that you have that vision set straight so I guess I still have a couple questions about the tech side of the platform in terms of integrating

9:39blockchain into it and adding in that innovation factor or that unique perspective in terms of tech or IP you know how has tallking integrated that new technology so we've done four to start with like a minor coinbase Center integration just to like see whether we can donate through kryptos on the targeting platform that's kind of been our first pass at it but what we

10:02eventually want to do is we're doing a little bit of extensive research right now into what kinds of lock chains out there can really help cut those middleman costs so stellar has been very exciting some of the developments within aetherium recently as well I've also been they've also been doing some really good stuff in terms of reducing the gas price or just the cost of movement

10:22across various assets and then something that we're also doing a little bit of research into as well is how we can look into tokenization of various other assets to see whether that can also funds donations as well I think because the blockchain space is still growing we're right now just relying on some bread and butter a hyper ledger and aetherium related stuff and some like

10:46very common integrations to be able to help make the platform possible but we are extensively looking at you know how we can integrate with a lot of these future technologies that are out there that are really going to help speak to our kind of fundamental values and what would you say is going to be one of the main or some of the main key success factors for ensuring that

11:08life grows into a mainstream platform even beyond the blockchain community I think with anything within the technology space user users matter right user and user engagement matters the most and so when I think about the company I think about it blockchain ii like an actual giving foundation first right because i am trying to see how exactly we can spark joy within the

11:36actual user experience how we can actually make users feel more attached to the user experience and i think just overall when we look at the new blockchain applications that are emerging within the space increasingly the protocols that people are trying out however fancy they may be people are trying to abstract that or obscure that away from the end customer

11:55and they're trying to really highlight the application itself and showing the power of the application through hey here's all of those middleman fees or here's all of those questions of who owns the power that we are addressing through our platform but fundamentally this is also just a great app to use yeah I think I think your team has hit the nail on the head with you

12:17know customer service knowing what your customers wants wants and needs are and fulfilling those as the top priority I think Amazon did a great job doing that you know seesee from by Nance also just mentioned last week you know we didn't really have a strategy we just made what our customers wanted right and that's how they get all the traction and you

12:37know they've had a lot of philanthropic initiatives as well creating finance charity and things like that you know is now giving working with any other charities or initiatives to expand your cause as well we're working with charities the more ground-level no no crypto related charities or no blockchain related charities at the moment so right now we're working with

12:58the San Jose School District's mckinney-vento program working with them in terms of being able to donate like backpacks socks sweaters etc and just trying to get our community base just actively involved within that piece on the international front we're also trying to help in terms of being able to help people within India that are affected by recent coverage sanctions

13:22more poor communities over there have been very heavily affected by just a shelter-in-place because you no longer can have small businesses you no longer a lot of the traditional jobs that people rely on are no longer available as they're not available over here so just figuring out ways in which we can help people during this time is I think very important to us definitely that's

13:44great and now one of my last questions is what is the next big thing that's coming up for touch-a Life Foundation you know by the end of this year or in the next 12 months definitely by in the end of the figure I think what you can kind of look towards is just again we're trying to focus entirely on UI so just a very great UI experience we are trying to increase the

14:08number of partnerships that we are having amongst the user base that we were working with so I mentioned corporate sponsors earlier so you can see that touch of life is going to be more involved with donation matching programs within other companies or maybe you know helping us facilitate again within that middleman process or reducing the cost of actually doing

14:27business those are the big things that we're focused on and then on the more research side we are trying to again within the next 24 months we're hoping to get a lot more clarity around what we can do within the settlement space in the International Settlements base it's very exciting lots to look forward to and if there are other strategic partners or potential

14:45customers or people looking to download the application what's the best way for them to learn more and to get involved so go to WWE Title York you can hear a lot about just a touch of life since its inception and what our vision for the company is and then on your Android app store or your Apple App Store go ahead and download the tao giving application just find causes that

15:08you care about if you really feel passionately passionately about some cause add it to the platform otherwise donate to any cause that you might care about or you feel excited about when you take a look at through the app great I'll leave those links in the description box below thank you so much for your time tej it's been a pleasure learning about touch of life and all the

15:29best on your initiatives moving forward and let's follow up in the near future awesome thank you I actually you