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jjb123

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I’d be down for this/have wanted something like this for remote friend groups like founders, but how does it work exactly? How is it different than most online poker events?

This is inaccurate. In no way did people have to turn to their personal finances to help companies that their company invested in. That is like your banker, seeing your dire situation caused by a third party to you, and writing you a personal check… That is actually what happened across multiple situations I witnessed. Not saying these folks are saints but pretty unexpected to see.

The comments in this thread so far, imo, resemble comments at the beginning of dismissing BTC (just an observation, and I was one of those making similar observations in 2011/2012).

This topic (on a tool like Carta) would be worthy of discussion in a startup forum no matter the author, correct? I see part of your sentiment regarding context, but this can turn pretty constructive with the question that’s also on my mind: Has anyone experienced this by using Carta? I am actually in the process of thinking about switching to them.

How so? Do you mean that people "would" help if they weren't racist? San Francisco, which has one of the largest homeless populations per capita, has a homeless population that is 35% caucasian (the largest represented racial group).

(Edited to add: Caucasians make up 40.2% of the city population)

https://sf.curbed.com/2017/6/16/15818104/homeless-sf-count-2... https://datausa.io/profile/geo/san-francisco-ca

My background is in development economics, and it's amazing how the majority of the developed world thinks a trend is going one way (increasing abject poverty) when the data actually says the exact opposite.

"The world’s most important economic story can be told in a single line."

If only the most important trends got the most attention rather than the most sensationalist/fearful. Glad there are outlets/opportunities like this to give it the attention this important trend deserves. And the young economist at Oxford behind this data, Max Roser, is becoming somewhat of a twitter phenom himself.

I actually don't know the answer to this - but is the situation as straightforward as: "they left money on the table today, but it's in the effort to improve perception and health of the company - and they will be able to sell more down the road with the boost of momentum and health of the stock performance from IPO. At that point, they can capture the value created by an event like today (where they purposefully leave some money on the table) for the move to be net-net positive?

Co-founder here! Tilt differentiates from just about every other crowdfunding platform by focusing on smaller, bite-size objectives - typically among groups and communities that know each other (so instead of a $50,000 documentary, it's a $1,500 birthday for a friend or a $500 block party). Think of it like the twitter of crowdfunding built for a mobile experience.

We've also released developer and enterprise tools powered by our api like Tilt/Open, which is the most popular enterprise crowdfunding tool in the world (currently powering some really cool projects like Navdy, Lily Drone Camera, June Smart Oven, etc)

We appreciate the feedback, and you'll start to see more and more cross promotion of campaigns on the platform in coming months (especially for our projects on the open source version Tilt/Open which has been powering some really cool stuff lately). If you have any additional feedback, i'd love to hear it - my email is james @ tilt.

Congrats to GoFundMe btw!

Hey there - fraud is still an ongoing issue for many non-profits, and it's been one of the most well-received features in the product (an understated but important one!). With Tilt.com and our other enterprise tools, we've needed to build automated and manual systems along with third-party integrations to successfully fight fraud at scale.

The by-product of our current efforts is that we're able to include it into each product we release -- shoot me an email if you'd like to intro us to your contacts at those non-profits. james @ tilt is my email.

Hi there. Thanks for the comment, and it's a valid question if you've never tried to implement current options for donations -- I'd be happy to address each example you're talking about when you say "what's new about this" (eg, stripe checkout, great for payments checkout - but isn't copy and paste, requires server code, isn't customizable, doesn't enable recurring donations, doesn't provide automated tax-deductible receipts, doesn't allow for adding additional fields for addl info collection...).

It turns out that accepting payments vs accepting donations for a cause, charity, political campaign, personal project, etc actually ends up having a different set of needs. And with online giving growing at the rate we see it to growing, a simple / powerful way for any site to collect donations, optimized for conversion on any device, with two lines of code is something we think our customers will find useful.

Yes, there are - though credit card giving is the preferred online giving method (by far), PayPal, ACH, and bitcoin will be implemented (probably in that order) soon.

Tilt.com is still where we spend about 90% of our resources, but our suite of enterprise tools for professional crowdfunding and fundraising (open.tilt.com) has been a big area of growth since we started launching the tools this year -- and additional payment methods have been a frequent request on all products there.

Unlike most modals, you can customize the look and feel to your heart's content. You can also implement as an iframe to give you further control over the user experience (including adding other info fields) for donors.

Paypal will be added soon, but adding PayPal (and Amazon + other payment options) limits the ability for us to enable recurring donations for the org/cause/charity, which has become a significant capital raise mechanism for non profits in the last few years. That checkbox is one of the most well received features that is right out of the box.

Crowdtilt co-founder here. Crowdhoster started right here on HN as an open source project, and this launch to the public is due to the feedback and support it's gotten all along the way from the HN community. Thank you for that! Happy to stick around and help answer any questions or hear further feedback!

Hey HN, since my comment below the article was buried beneath a bunch of ads, and a discussion is developing, here is the original comment I made on salon.com after reading the article:

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(Co-founder/CEO of Crowdtilt here) I just wanted to follow up on the article above and clarify a few things. My replies in the article seem to come across as dismissive of the potential downsides to civic crowdfunding. That couldn't be further from the truth - As team members here at Crowdtilt would tell you, I have actually been quite introspective about how our tools are being used within the realm of community fundraising in the last few days (and as this use case for private security has begun to spread to other cities).

Our tools and platform are built with democratization in mind, not built to further tech elitism or affluent disparity. Like any tool built to connect people (from ships, to the automobile, to the internet itself) the early adoption may be through a more affluent class, but that is not where the impact stays and remains - and its introduction is an undeniable net positive for society. Additionally, knowing that many (more affluent) neighborhoods have been doing things like this for years with homeowners associations to hire private security, we hope this tool continues to lower the barriers for such solutions to problems as dire as security or as aspirational as something like free public wifi for a city (http://tilt.tc/TP07) that we've seen on the other end of the spectrum of civic crowdfunding.

My view is that communities will benefit from the tools we're building, but again, I want it to be clear that we take the potential downsides of civic crowdfunding seriously and think about ways to mitigate those downsides - we/I am not dismissive of these arguments whatsoever.

Please feel free to reach me at jamesb@crowdtilt.com if you have any suggestions or thoughts - would be happy to have a dialogue on the topic with anyone (...I would learn more from that than a one-sided internal monologue with myself or our team). Thanks, James.