Scott Chisholm

Initial launch was actually a charity pub crawl in San Diego for the American Cancer Society because my mom had battled breast cancer through growing up and we wanted to do something good.

And sort of our frustration through the process of trying to give to the ACS, I love them now, don't get me wrong,

Um, it, it inspired us to basically do all sorts of fundraising events in San Diego and bring young people into the fold.

And eventually we sort of discovered this gap with these nonprofits we were working with, that their technology was really outdated and not modern.

And we decided to, I like to say naively, ambitiously throw our hat in the ring and build a platform that would help them basically modernize and reach new supporters.

No, she's still with us today.

She's been in remission for probably 15, 20 years.

And what we realized when we were living with my friends in Mission Beach here in San Diego is that everyone in the house had been affected by it.

And unfortunately, my best friend Pete's dad had passed away from brain cancer.

But he was the one that actually came up with the Stay Classy name, which was our original name.

And that came from the anchorman in the movie, which happened to be playing in our apartment when we were trying to name the original pub crawl.

And then we dropped the stay because we didn't like the $50

And so now we're classy.

But it all stemmed from Ron Burgundy and Will Ferrell.

Yeah, so we bootstrapped it for a while.

To be honest, the venture community wouldn't touch us in the early days.

They were a little bit hesitant about the social good space and the crossover between doing good and actually a business opportunity.

So we first bootstrapped it, and then we brought in angel money, and we eventually scaled from there.

But we've raised $53 million to date.

The first $5 million was all from angel investors, mainly rich, successful businessmen who were also philanthropists.