Kyle Woumn is building technology for philanthropy

SHACK15’s Journal spoke with member Kyle Woumn, who just made Forbes 30-U-30 Social Impact list for his work with Overflow, which uses technology to make it easier for people to donate stock options to nonprofits. Woumn believes the future of philanthropy is in donating stock vs cash, and Overflow was created to streamline this process.

SHACK15: Tell us about yourself and how you transitioned from being a software engineer to co-founding Overflow?

Woumn: I'm originally from Atlanta and have always been fascinated by technology growing up. Particularly, it was the iPod and wanting to know how it worked that piqued my interest in the technology space. From there, my parents helped cultivate my knack for technology and put me in every program they could find that could expose me to engineering. I ended up attending Georgia Tech and studying computer science. I saw so many emerging technologies around me that I knew the future was software and I made a resolution that I would move to the Bay Area to be part of the movement in hopes of one day starting my own company.

When I moved to the Bay Area, I landed a job at Twilio as a software engineer which I had interned at for two summers prior. I had the opportunity to gain valuable industry experience honing both my technical skills and business acumen. While at Twilio, I wrestled with the idea of making the jump to start something new for some time. A friend of mine came to me with an opportunity to start a company called Shopr which was an on demand delivery service for clothes and was looking for a technical co-founder. I decided to take a leap and worked on building out Shopr full time. Unfortunately, shortly after we started Shopr the pandemic hit and it wasn’t the right time for our team as a collective to pursue this business opportunity so we decided to walk away from it.

During this time, I was still interested in entrepreneurship and was going through the On Deck Founder Fellowship that my friend Vance Roush referred me to. I met Vance when I first moved to San Francisco in 2017 as he was my pastor at VIVE Church. While I was trying to figure out my next thing after Shopr, Vance and I connected and he shared with me the idea of Overflow that he was working on which was created to make donating stock an easier process.

I knew exactly the pain of donating stock as I had once donated stock in the past. As Vance was looking for a technical founding team member, I knew this was the next opportunity I wanted to pursue. I had worked with Vance in the past in the capacity of helping with church, so I knew he would also be a great CEO and business leader. In May 2020, I joined the founding team of Overflow and we publicly launched July 10th, 2020. Since launch, we’ve facilitated over $11M in donations and serve nonprofits doing mission critical work all over the U.S. including Tipping Point, Golden State Warriors Foundation, and New Story.

SHACK15: What is Overflow and how did the idea come into being? What were the main challenges that led to launching the company?

Woumn: Overflow is a platform that streamlines the stock donation process for donors and nonprofits. Every year VIVE Church, the church Vance Roush co-founded, has a gala and raises funds for community initiative such as paying off people’s medical debt. With VIVE’s main location being located in Palo Alto, a lot of the members work in tech and have part of their compensations paid in equity. There were many members that were interested in donating stock, however they didn’t quite know how. As a result, Vance set out to solve this problem with Overflow.

The average person has a majority of their wealth in non-cash assets such as stock and crypto and only about 10% of their wealth in cash. Today, nonprofits have been exclusively fundraising in cash and are leaving money on the table by not accepting non-cash assets such as stock. Our hypothesis was that if we can make the stock donation process a lot easier, then we could unlock unprecedented levels of generosity.

In the earliest days, the biggest hurdle was educating both nonprofits and donors on the benefits of stock donations. There were nonprofits that figured since they hadn’t already received stock donations that there wasn’t an appetite for them. We were able to demonstrate that most of their existing donor base already has stock, however didn’t know it was an option to give. Through this, we were able to work with those visionary nonprofit organizations and provide stock as an option for their donors to give. We now have over 200 nonprofit customers with an average stock donation value of over $8,000 on our platform.

SHACK15: Is there a general trend among people and organizations to donate money in stock vs more traditional ways?

Woumn: There is absolutely a trend of people donating non-cash assets to nonprofits. Donors we’ve connected with love that they can be generous, however they don’t have to give out of their personal budget that they’ve already allocated for expenses like rent and groceries. On top of that, donors have learned that giving stock is tax advantageous by them not having to pay capital gains tax on the shares that are being donated. For nonprofits that have adopted Overflow, they are seeing that they are receiving higher value donations through stock, an asset they had not previously promoted.

SHACK15: Where do you see Overflow headed in the next 3-5 years?

Woumn: At Overflow, our mission is to inspire the world to give. We want everyone to have the opportunity to experience generosity. In the next 3-5 years, we want to allow people to easily give anything of value. In today’s world of fractionalized ownership, a person can own just about anything. At Overflow, we want to allow people to give just about anything in a streamlined way. Additionally, we are starting to work with enterprise companies helping them increase employee engagement through giving by allowing their employees to easily donate stock.