Grassroots Social Entrepreneurship with Desiree Vargas Wrigley

Anita Brick: Hi. I’m Anita Brick. And welcome to CareerCast at Chicago Booth to help you advance in your career. Today we're delighted to be speaking with Desiree Vargas Wrigley, who is CEO and cofounder of GiveForward. She would find at GiveForward.com gives people personal fundraising pages to raise money for medical expenses. Desiree, thanks so much for making the time.

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: Thank you so much for having me.

Anita Brick: What a great idea, and what a great value to individuals. You know, not everyone has health insurance. What a really terrific thing. How would you define social entrepreneurship?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: I think people describe it a lot of different ways. For some people it’s the act of creating a nonprofit or creating a double bottom line for-profit. But for me, creating a social venture really means creating a venture that solves a social problem in a sustainable way. So you really have to look at long-term solutions that help people and don't necessarily take resources out of the system.

Anita Brick: And actually, that's a really great way to describe it. I had never thought about it exactly that way, and it gives us a good place to start. Why did you decide to start GiveForward?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: Like any venture, we've had an evolution, so our road has lots of turns in it. I think it's a great story. Before starting GiveForward, I was working at the Kauffman Foundation, funding entrepreneurship programs at colleges and universities. I got to see all of these 19- and 20-year-olds starting, you know, theater companies or taking groups of students on volunteer travel trips and, you know, making a little bit of money off of it.

And so I thought, you know, if a 19-year-old has the courage to start a company, maybe someday I can do this too. So that's kind of how I got the little bug in my head about starting anything. And the whole time I was at Kauffman, my boss, Judith Cohn, was really passionate about the idea, you know, where does goodness lie?

Does it have to be in the nonprofit space? Can't companies who care about changing the world but then also do well while doing good? And so that was a very strong message in my head in my early 20s, when I was first figuring out what I wanted to do and what I wanted to be. And after working at Kauffman for a few years, I decided that I really wanted a bigger-city experience.

So I decided to move to Chicago. But I didn't know what I wanted to do when I was in Chicago. And I had, you know, all of these other 20-something friends who were paralegals or working at insurance companies, and they just didn't have any purpose in their work, and they were kind of unhappy. And they are facing, you know, 40 more years of this same kind of job.

And so I thought to myself, maybe I can start a company that helps 20-somethings transition from one career to the next, where they could still have benefits and a salary, but try out some new career path and, you know, I'm not sure that's such a feasible business. I think that's what grad school is probably for, but …

Anita Brick: You're probably right.

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: But when I was thinking, how would I fund this company? I thought, well, you know, most entrepreneurs raise money from friends and family, so maybe I could do that. And I realized, you know, all my friends and family were all over the country and actually all over the world, so maybe I could do this online.

And then I had this moment. I realized that—you know, at this time, early 2007, there was no way to raise money online if you weren't a registered 501(c)(3). So I started to think about, you know, all the different reasons people raise money—from, you know, like the local cheerleading squad at the high school down the street, they're doing car washes for the trip to the state competition or, you know, a church youth group raising money to go on a retreat and all the different reasons people raise money but that don't require their own 501(c)(3) status.

And then I walked into a convenience store, and I saw a little change jar for a three-month-old that needed a heart transplant. And I remember thinking, oh my God, you know, of course, medical fundraising. You can't raise, you know, $100,000. You need a quarter at a time. And so it was all those pieces that came together that really made me excited about this concept existing, because it's not very often that you come across an idea that doesn't exist yet.

Even then, I didn't think that medical fundraising would be our focus. I thought we would be a tool to help anyone raise money for anything. And coming from the foundation world, I actually thought that we would be more of a donor-driven site. I thought people would just flock to give forward, create their fundraisers, and we would bring in outside donors to help fund these projects.

What really ended up happening was that bringing new people to your website is a lot harder than you think it's going to be. You can't just build it and they will come. In the early days of GiveForward, we were really just trying to get people to raise money on the site, and we looked at what markets were already doing fundraising online, and the marathon runners were the number one category.

There were already sites like First Giving, Active Giving. And so we thought, okay, well, why don't we help small and medium-sized nonprofits come into this space? They can't really afford these really expensive platforms that, you know, Kintera or Blackbaud are building. And so that's where we started. But the reality is, nonprofits are just a lot of red tape.

Their expectations are really high, and sometimes they're not willing to pay for the services that they receive. We're facing an uphill battle in that space we just decided to go after, like the sorority fraternity market who does fundraising also, and even the elementary school fundraising market, because 90% of their fundraising is product based and it's mostly things that people don't need.

So we thought, oh, let's try to change the way that works. A startup that has two founders and a handful of interns doesn't have the bandwidth to do any of those things well, when you're spreading things so thin. So we actually got really lucky in March of 2009. We had two sisters come on the site from Chicago. The younger sister was 22 at the time, and the older sister, I think, was 25.

And the younger sister came on to raise money so she could give her older sister one of her kidneys. The older sister had a heart transplant when she was ten, and so her transplant coverage was maxed out even though they had insurance. And so they were facing an $80,000 bill out of pocket. Through GiveForward, and then the powers of Facebook, the younger sister, Amy, raised $30,000 in 30 days for her older sister. It was enough money to really get the attention of the hospital that wasn't agreeing to do the procedure at first. We helped the story in the Tribune and in the USA today, and we started to see more and more medical fundraisers on our site.

In August of 2009, we were a year old at that point, we took a step back and we said, okay, what's working with our company and what isn't working? Because, you know, a social venture has to have revenue, otherwise it's not sustainable. And at that point, we'd only raised $185,000 for people. So about $6,000 in revenue total, which is enough to pay our rent. And that was it.

We realized that the area where we were having the most traction, where we were getting the most thank-you emails, where people were donating the largest dollar amounts, all had to do with medical fundraising. That August, we changed our branding and our messaging and just really focused on bringing medical fundraising to the site. And once we made that shift, we started to really investigate how big the need was.

By August of 2010, we had a really clear idea of how big the problem is. Americans spent $280 billion a year in out-of-pocket expenses. Seventy-five percent of Americans can't come up with $2,000 if they had to in a pinch. The average deductible in this country is $5,000 for a family. So pretty much any medical diagnosis is putting a family into financial hardship.

And, you know, part of our challenge as a social venture is building awareness about the fact that, you know, when you are facing a medical crisis, it's not charity. When you ask your loved ones for help, if you think about all the different times that people give, you know, we give when someone gets married or when they have a baby or a bar mitzvah. All these celebratory moments.

But then the most, the scariest and most financially devastating thing happens to a family, and Americans don't think to give. And so we're very much now working on changing that mindset. And it's a big challenge for sure. But it's exciting to see how our adventure has evolved from being, you know, this tool that sororities and fraternities can use to actually being something that is keeping American families out of bankruptcy.

Anita Brick: You're very, very passionate about it. It sounds like you went through these twists and turns and an evolutionary process. You know, you anchored on this and clearly there's a need and clearly it's valuable. How did you have the courage, one of the evening students asks, how did you have the courage to jump into a social venture rather than a more traditional job?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: I went to Yale for undergrad, and a lot of my friends were in investment banking and consulting and then or law school. So seeing all of my friends in their 20s making, you know, over $100,000 a year, and then at that same time deciding to basically have no income, wait tables at night to start a social venture, didn't seem attractive at first, even though I really loved the idea of GiveForward. What happened was the idea honestly took over my brain.

I moved to Chicago. I ended up taking a consulting job for a philanthropic investment advisory group that actually has some money in that space, because you're consulting with foundations and high-net-worth individuals on how to strategically give their money. And it was a really interesting job. But at the time, GiveForward was in the back of my mind and it just kept getting stronger and stronger.

You know, like a lot of people, I didn't have the courage to start the company right away. I was 25. I had no assets. I owned a home with a girlfriend that I wasn't going to use as collateral because we owned it together. At around the same time I came up with the idea for GiveForward, a company called Change.org launched, and no one knew what it was going to become.

And when I talked to their founder, they were really thinking that now people would come up with these projects and be able to fundraise for them, and they wouldn't necessarily be nonprofit related. I thought, okay, well, they've already started, they've launched. Let me wait and see what happens with that company. And I waited, and a few months later, it didn't seem like it was turning into what I thought GiveForward should be.

So I was in Chicago and I randomly was seated next to Andrew Mason, who was, you know, the founder of Groupon, at a lunch at the time, he was raising money to start The Point, which was the predecessor for Groupon. So we're sitting there and he had already raised $1 million, and he was trying to raise another five.

And he's telling me about his concept for The Point, which is about social action and empowering people to do the things that they really want to do to make the world a better place. And so I'm sitting there thinking, okay, well, he has $1 million already, and this sounds very similar to what I'm trying to do with GiveForward. I'll just wait and see what happens with the Point. But then the Point launched and it didn't turn into what I thought GiveForward should be either. That little voice just kept getting stronger and stronger. And literally one night in December—and I went kind of on a soul-searching trip to Costa Rica—this little voice in my head woke me up at 1:00 am telling me to get started, and I jumped on my laptop.

I wrote a little three-page business plan of what I thought GiveForward should be, and I knew from my work at Kauffman that a lot of universities have clinics in their law school that help small businesses get started. So I wrote to that person in charge of that at Northwestern, the SBOC, and he wrote back to me the next morning saying, if you're half as good at selling GiveForward as you are at selling me, you're going to be a great success.

And that was that first external vote of confidence that I needed to think, okay, maybe I really can do this. I cut my trip short, came home, and I really just started telling everyone I knew about this business and a month later, I incorporated the company. And honestly, that month was the hardest, scariest part of this whole process because, you know, your friends and family are looking at you like, you know, it’s a nice-sounding little project, but you're never going to make any money off of this.

And why don't you just go take a job for a while and make enough money until you can actually start this company? I just had this drive, this fire in my belly that I knew I had to do this. And I think that's how a lot of entrepreneurs feel, especially social entrepreneurs.

Anita Brick: I would agree, but obviously you can't do it alone. One of the alums asked, how did you form a team, and how did you get people to come on board, whether you were paying them or not?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: It's a great question, and probably the most important question in the first few months of starting. You know, there are a lot of solo entrepreneurs that do amazingly well, but I knew from the work I did at Kauffman that you really do need a team of people, whether they're salaried or not, that support your vision because nothing is created in a vacuum.

I literally told everyone I met what I was trying to do because when you tell people your idea, then they have some way of helping you. They know the context in which maybe they can fit in, maybe they can't. So I was at a Super Bowl party two weeks after I registered the company, and a friend said, you know, you should really talk to my friend Ethan Austin. He had a similar idea for a fundraising platform for marathon runners. And so in early March, Ethan and I finally connected, and we spent three hours on the phone. And then his idea was a lot like GiveForward or Active, so it was kind of already being done. But the idea for GiveForward, combined his expertise in this peer-to-peer fundraising space with, you know, my vision, and he just really got it.

So he came out to Chicago for St. Patrick's Day. He was coming to visit friends. We bonded over car bombs on St. Patrick's Day. And he decided to move out in May, which, you know, was a huge leap of faith on his part. I think it helped that I had already started the company. I already had made the first payment to the web developers, so it wasn't as big of a risk for him.

He came and with him he brought $25,000, which was about what I figured I was going to put in between credit cards and a prosper loan. We started just the two of us, and I had worked in this office building for Arabella, and the owners of the building said, you can have office space for really cheap. It's just one tiny, like ten feet by eight feet office.

So we went there, and the two of us … and we moved in and we had this empty cardboard box and we each had a laptop, and we actually only had one pen and a calculator. That was how we started. And we just put an ad on Craigslist saying we were looking for interns. We ended up getting three really great interns, one from Columbia College, one from Columbia University in New York, and then one from Harvard.

We worked with interns for the first year and a half of the business. So that was really how we started the team. We weren't able to attract tech talent until we raised a funding round.

Anita Brick: Before we move on from this, how did you even attract internship talent? I know people will do internships even if they're unpaid, but they still have to feel like they're getting something. What did you do to attract internship talent?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: It was actually surprisingly easy, and I don't know if it was a product of the fact that, you know, in 2008 it was hard, but …

Anita Brick: [...] passion though, too.

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: And that was a big part of it. Not very often in an internship do you get to come in and actually feel the impact of the work that you're doing. We were really dedicated to the idea that these interns weren't going to come in and make copies or do data entry. It was going to be about learning about the work that we're trying to do at GiveForward and spreading that message.

They had a combination of event planning and customer service responsibilities and customer service. We didn't call it this at the time, but really what it is in our company is fundraising coaching. So we talked to people that, you know, have kind of a vulnerable state in their lives or their friends’ lives, and we really walk them through the process of how to make a fundraiser successful, because most people are first-time fundraisers on the site.

We had interns. No one knew what they were doing. We were all learning as we went, and when taking lessons from previous successful fundraisers, their job was really gleaning those tips and tools and then spreading them on to the next group of fundraisers. You know, they would talk to someone on the phone and that person would raise $5,000 in the next week.

So that intern felt like, okay, wow, the work I'm doing is really helping this family. You know, one way we feel like a nonprofit in that sense. And so that's really rewarding for the interns and the other thing is that we were really good about recognizing success for people.

Anita Brick: What do you mean?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: In the early days for any startup, you're not going to be profitable. That's just how it is. There are other ways to measure the work that you're doing. And for us, we measured it in thank-you emails and thank-you cards. Whenever an intern or a staff member got one, we would, you know, have like a special moment of appreciation for them. And even—it sounds a little bit hokey, but we really brought appreciation into our value system before people came in, and they just really felt like they were making a difference and they felt like they were being recognized.

And then at the end of their internship, whether or not they were getting course credit, we would write this really great letter of recommendation for them, kind of listing off their accomplishments so that they could use that for future jobs. And that was enough for people at the time. Our first hire worked with us, I mean, virtually for free for a year before we were able to hire her full time. You can only get that kind of dedication from someone when you have something that's valuable to them. And that's really what we helped create for our interns.

Anita Brick: It's a really good point because an alum had asked that question like, how do you know that you're actually making a difference? It sounds like—which is something a lot of people can't say—for you, it's immediate and it's very tangible. And I like the fact that when people thank you and whether it's email or cards or whatever, you know, and I guess you can also look on the site and see how much they're actually raising because your guidance is supporting them to do that, too, there's some very concrete, tangible ways that you know that you're actually having a positive impact on others.

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, our business model, it's fortunate in that way, that every day we see how many donations come in, and with each donation come words of encouragement for the patient that's going through whatever they're going through. So we get all of that anecdotal affirmation that what we're doing is really important. And what we've learned over time is that our site is actually not so much about the money as it is about creating a support system and a sense of community around a patient.

We had one story in the early days: a man who was passing away from prostate cancer, and he received 200 donations from people that he'd known over the last 20 years of his work at Johnson & Johnson. The family wrote to us after he passed away, saying how amazing it was to receive all of those words about their father and about you know, her husband.

Those are the messages that you never get on a normal basis, because people are too shy to pick up the phone and say what they really feel about someone when they're passing away. They don't want to acknowledge that process and by giving them kind of this not anonymous, but this free way to make that line of communication, we really are making a difference in people's lives.

And it is so tangible for us, especially when we get a message like, I was going to have to declare bankruptcy, or I wasn't going to be able to send my kids back to school because of the cost of my treatment. And then, you know, that they got $13,000 and it kept them from having to do any of that. And we're very lucky in that sense.

Anita Brick: Wow, it's amazing. You had mentioned this before, but I think in order for you to continue to have this impact, really from day one, there had to be some funding in addition to what you put in and what your partner put in. I know that there are a lot of sources for startups. What have you found to be the best sources of funding for social ventures?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: It's a great question. It's a tough space, though, especially in Chicago. You know, in California and in New York, in the Boston area, there's more funding available for social ventures just because people are more comfortable with the term and the concept. Most social ventures are volume based. You really have to get a lot of buy-in to make the kind of money that investors find attractive, but it's definitely happening.

So I think that we'll start to see more and more in Chicago, and I know that there's a fund being created that's a joint effort between Kellogg and Booth and some of the pretty well-known investors here in Chicago. When we were starting, that money didn't exist. And so I had a first conversation with a venture capitalist. I didn't know anything about fundraising. And I went in and said my pitch for GiveForward. And I heard, sounds like a great nonprofit. If you ever find a way to make money, come back and prove me wrong.

Anita Brick: Did you go back?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: I did, yeah. We see him often now, and he congratulated me often in the beginning. If your business model is scalable enough and revenue-generating early enough to bootstrap, I think it's really the best way to go, because proving your concept is so important before taking on money, because you can give away so much of your company if you haven't proven your model. For us, the first year and a half was a really big effort for us to say, okay, we know we can make money off of this, let's prove everyone wrong.

And we did that honestly by having second jobs. So I waited tables at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba; Evan wrote blogs on the side. His father passed away from cancer when he was young, so he had inherited a little bit of money that he very bravely put towards GiveForward. And I had a really big line of credit on my credit card, you know, for someone my age.

But I also had heard about a site called prosper.com, which is actually more often used for people to refinance their credit card debt. So you have $20,000 in debt and you are at 29%, and you can go in and people can bid down the percentage rate. And so you can end up paying 10% on that same amount of money.

But they also had small-business loans at the time. So I took out a $10,000 small-business loan, which was really great affirmation for me that the idea was strong because all of these people funded my request within three days. And I thought, wow, you know, there's 300 people that believe in GiveForward. They probably just liked the interest rate, but I still like to tell myself that, you know … So that was the money we started with. But then we also looked for grants. So the Chamber of Commerce has a grant for startups that social ventures can qualify for. We went through the Illinois Hispanic Chamber because I'm half Costa Rican and we thought that would be a smaller pool to compete in.

So we got $5,000 there, which doesn't sound like a lot when you're starting a company, but actually when you're in bootstrapping mode, $5,000 is huge. It's, you know, four months of rent or it's the ability to buy T-shirts and marketing materials, so it actually can have a big impact. You know, as far as funding for GiveForward, we got really lucky.

We were accepted into the first class of Accelerate Labs, which is a tech incubator here in Chicago. You know, with that came a little bit of funding. But the real outcome of that program is that you get to pitch to investors in front of 250 investors, actually, at the House of Blues. For us, that really put us on the map for investors in Chicago.

We even now have some from Arizona, California, and Denver. That was how we were able to raise half a million dollars, which was a seed round for us. One thing that I will say is that going through that process, you know, learning the way that hardcore investors ask questions about your profitability and your ability to scale and what your market size is, is so important as a social venture because you have to answer all of those questions.

Plus the social impact question. Learning how to answer that question really helps you focus your business and helps you figure out, okay, we can only do the work that we want to do if we're profitable or, you know, at least if we're generating strong revenue. So how do we get to that point?

Anita Brick: Right. Absolutely.

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: And in a large part, I mean, that is why GiveForward pivoted towards medical. We didn't know that it was going to be as motivating and inspirational as it has been. But our initial reason was we have to make money if we're going to keep our, you know, virtual doors open and that everything was pointing to medical, you really have to listen to your users and pay attention to how you're going to make money.

And I know I saw a question in there about being worried about following your passion more than the revenue. And if that's the case, then you should be starting a nonprofit. Nonprofits have a lot easier startup phase. You can be raising money from friends and family. They get a tax deduction for it. Once you get big enough and prove your concept, you can start going for grants.

Even though you do have to constantly be fundraising, it does take about 40% of your time and effort. If you know that you're not going to be driven to sustain the business through operations, then I think you should start a nonprofit.

Anita Brick: Why did you choose the for-profit mode?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: You know, when I was in college, I was studying in Spain, and I was riding the bus back and forth to my host family's house, and I ended up sitting next to this lawyer who was just going off about how American companies are so greedy and how they're ruining the world and the environment, and they provide no social value.

And so that inspired me for my senior essay to look at, you know, what companies were doing something to improve the social circumstances of the communities where they were working. And, I don't know, the CSR bug bit me. And I really, truly believe that businesses have a role to play in our society that's positive and that creating value can be seen in so many different ways, whether it's creating jobs that, you know, allow families to put their kids through college for the first time, or providing a platform for people to raise money for out-of-pocket expenses.

I just think that businesses really can help people, and I was passionate about being in that space. And I also am not a fundraiser. My first job was giving away money. I fully respect people's ability to go out and raise those top-dollar amounts from large corporations and from large foundations. But I knew that that wasn't in my DNA, and I was more passionate about growing something that sustained itself.

Anita Brick: I got it. And you talked about the funding. Did you also seek—and you can tell us whether you gained them or not—did you seek strategic partners who weren't necessarily funders but more strategic partners? This was from a weekend student, actually.

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: It is a great question, and it's really important to growing a business. We are in the process of doing that right now. In the early days, honestly, our brand was too small for these bigger companies and organizations to take on the risk of partnering with us. When you hit $4 million, $5 million in donations, people started taking it more seriously.

So we now have Livestrong sending us patients. We have the Patient Advocate Foundation, American Cancer Society, MD Anderson, Mayo Clinic, Dana-Farber Institute. So we're starting to get more and more traction in these partnerships. And our goal really is to ultimately have co-branded pages where we're helping some of these larger nonprofits like Susan G. Komen raise money for the organization at the same time that they're raising money for the patients that they help serve.

Anita Brick: That's great. I am so impressed with what you've done. So exciting. And the other part of it is that you've had the crusade, the resilience and the backbone, the commitment just to keep moving forward. You know, you hear of people starting things like you have maybe not in exactly the same space, but they have this really strong desire and then they can't stand their ground. And so I really admire that you have been able to stand your ground. What's the future hold? Where do you want to see this go?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: In my mind, I have always imagined GiveForward being the number one place people go to when a loved one's in need. Whether it's helping a family rebuild after a fire or helping a family cope with funeral expenses or a memorial fund, or even complications when a new baby is born, I really see us being the resource that community uses to come together around a loved one in need.

So much opportunity for us to get the word out, to be that resource, and to encourage people to give at times that they wouldn't normally think to give. I really see us being a household name when someone gets sick or someone gets in a car accident. I don't want to sound negative, because what we provide is a really positive experience and a positive way to engage with each other.

I want GiveForward to be that name, that place that people go. You know, Facebook is great for connecting with friends from college and talking about whatever you eat for breakfast, but it's not really that warm kind of place where people come and say, you mean more to me than I can ever say, and I want to help you through this journey. That's who we want to be and where we want to go.

Anita Brick: Well, I want to stay in touch. I want to hear progress reports down the line. Do you have time for one more question?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: Yeah. And, you know, I realized I forgot to mention something else about funding sources for social ventures. There are a bunch of new crowdfunding sites coming up [...] in the crowdfunding space. And that just means people, sometimes strangers, coming together to fund one purpose. A new site called 33Needs is dedicated solely to helping social ventures get off the ground and running.

And there's another site called ProFounder.com, which is for any startup looking for funding, but they also bring in social ventures, and then even Kickstarter.com, which is traditionally for the arts, is also having social ventures on their site. So I want to make sure those names get out there in case there's anyone listening who's looking for funding.

Anita Brick: That's great. You're welcome to send me a list and we'll post it on the site. Okay, good. So final question, at least for now, but I want to keep the door open for the future. Based on your experience, what do you wish you would have known? What are three things that a person considering launching or even joining a social venture can start to do today?

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: Well, I think observation is really the key to coming up with the right idea. Travel, go volunteer, see what's happening in your community or in other communities where there's a need that isn't being met, and see if there's something that's in your skill set that you can do to help solve that problem. I think that's a great place to start with, at least the idea generation process, and then meditate on your idea.

Let other ideas kind of come in and out. That's how the idea for GiveForward came. It was actually a secondary idea, just, you know, let ideas come to you and don't shut them off because they're not part of your core initial idea. One of the best things people can do also is volunteer. Social entrepreneurship definitely happens in the nonprofit space, and there are a lot of business students that can bring some really great insight and analysis to existing nonprofits, and it's a great place to get your feet wet and see what's happening in a space, and see if there's an opportunity to create a for-profit model out of something that's happening in the nonprofit world.

The other thing I would say is go work at any startup. The process of being in a startup in the early years is so great for just expanding your awareness of, you know, what it takes to market a small business and how you get funding and how you have to measure the money coming in versus the money coming out, and wearing so many hats. When you're in a startup you really get to see firsthand how hard it is, but also how doable it is.

The energy in the startup community, especially in Chicago, is just so contagious that you're in it. You see these people doing all these amazing things, and you just either want to be part of it, or you want to create it yourself. And it's really motivating to have those people around you. So I would say observe, volunteer, and go work at a startup.

Anita Brick: Sounds great. Thank you so much, Desiree. Incredibly inspiring. Passion and practicality. You're a great combination of those two things because you're not just talking, you're doing and you're moving ahead and being profitable. Thank you for being an amazing example for us.

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: Thank you so much for the kind words and for having me on the show.

Anita Brick: Well, thank you. And I guess one final thing. You said at the very beginning, where does goodness lie? And not to be corny, but it sounds like it lies at GiveForward.com.

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: Oh, thank you.

Anita Brick: We hope so. Well, you'll keep us posted.

Desiree Vargas Wrigley: Absolutely. Hopefully we'll talk in six months or a year, and those numbers will be 10 times what they are.

Anita Brick: That sounds great and thank you all for listening. This is Anita Brick with CareerCast at Chicago Booth. Keep advancing.