239 | Disrupting the Ticketing Industry & Giving Money to Kids with Josh Ross
Our guest this week on the pod is Josh Ross. Josh is the Co-Founder & CEO of Humanitix, a charitable ticketing platform which supports causes in health, environment, education and indigenous affairs.
Resources mentioned in this episode include:
Interview with Humanitix Co-Founder & CEO Josh Ross
NOTE: While it’s not perfect, we offer this transcription by Otter.ai for those who are hearing impaired or who don’t find listening to a podcast enjoyable or possible.
SPEAKERS
Josh Ross, Paul Zelizer
Paul Zelizer 00:01
Hi, this is Paul Zelizer, and welcome to another episode of the aware printers podcast. This podcast is all about the intersection of three things, conscious business, social impact, and awareness practice. Each episode, I do a deep dive in with a thought leader in this intersection. Someone who has market tested experience, and is already transforming many lives. Before I introduce you to our topic, and our guest today, I have one request, you could go over to Apple podcasts or whatever app you're listening to this show on, hit the subscribe button, do a rating and a review. It helps tremendously. Thank you so much. Today, I'm thrilled to introduce you to Josh Ross. And our topic is Disrupting the Tcketing Industry & Giving Money to Kids. Josh was the co founder and CEO of Humanitix, a charitable ticketing platform, which supports causes and health, environment, education and indigenous affairs. Josh, welcome to the show!
Paul Zelizer 00:58
You guys are doing some fabulous work. And I can't wait to have our audience hear more about it. So before we get into that Josh were called aware printers. And one of the ways we like to get to know somebody is to ask you about a wellness or resiliency practice that you use to resource yourself for this really important work.
Josh Ross 01:15
Sure, thanks. Um, I'm a failed attempted meditator. And I found my best way to kind of shut off from work and give myself some time is to actually get into nature. So my, I try every week, multiple times to either do an ocean swim, hike, wherever it needs to be, but you know, shut off at nature, and I find it meditative to just walk or swim. And it's what I do to keep myself sane.
Paul Zelizer 01:42
You live in a couple of beautiful places, in Australia and in Colorado, and so you had some nice options where you live?
Josh Ross 01:49
That's right, yeah, very blessed. At Humanitix, we just set up here in Colorado, and part of the reason we chose it was the lifestyle in the nature, it does matter to us a lot culturally, in our organization as well.
Paul Zelizer 02:03
Before we get into Humanitix and all the great work that you're doing there give us a little bit of sense of like, what's the short version of your professional journey? You know - your background as a working person?
Josh Ross 02:13
Yeah, sure. So I grew up in Sydney, first job flipping burgers at a Portuguese chicken shop at 14. But my dad taught me that you don't have to flip burgers to make a living, you can actually just sit back on a on a chair, and then invest in the stock market. And so he can't be trading when I was in high school, with the little savings I've made from the chicken shop, and he actually gave me a really good tip is like, look, Josh, you can try and work out the best investments in the world, or you can copy the best investors in the world. And so I started reading the quarterly reports of like the best fund managers. And they're usually mentioned their best picks, and I started stealing their ideas. And when I graduated, I got a job in, in I was actually volunteered at a hedge fund, if you believe you can volunteer for that, to try and get my foot in the door, and I ended up in a job. And so I went straight into a hedge fund. As a professional gambler, one would call it spent about seven years there saving money to then do what I wanted to do with my life, which is Humanitix. And so yeah, it was a bit of a unusual path into the nonprofit sector. But, you know, it worked for me.
Paul Zelizer 03:19
One of the things that I thought fascinating is when you were looking around, you told me the story before we hit the record button that you and your co founder, who by the way, you've been friends, like how long? Many years, right?
Josh Ross 03:33
Yeah, pretty much since since we're 18, we we knew each other before that we were different years at school, so we kind of just knew of each other.
Paul Zelizer 03:40
So you guys knew each other. And you're both like in these business careers. And you're having this conversation about impact. And what I thought it was fascinating is, you called yourself in this industry agnostic, right? You weren't like super attached to one cause but you knew you wanted to have a focus on impact. Tell us a little bit about like that phase of the process and how you ultimately landed on the idea that became humanity.
Josh Ross 04:07
Yeah, sure. So me and Adam were idealistic university students. Now I'd read banker to the poor, which is an amazing book about micro finance. And Adam had his version of that. And we both knew that ultimately, we would only really be content if you know, the, the hours and hours we were spending on our careers were aligned with something that was meaningful to what we're going to create with our lives. And we recognize that a lot of people in our community were failing at that, you know, they might have dreams when they were younger, they might be idealistic when they were younger. And they get their graduate job and they and a couple years in they've friends are getting mortgages, they're settling down and suddenly a kind of trapped in a career path. It's very hard to step away from so we, we kind of made a pledge to each other in university that as soon as we came up with a good idea, which would act as one person and support each other to create to create it. And so I'm fast are almost seven years, five, six years and we're, you know, getting burnt out in our corporate careers. And we have this great idea. And so we shared my salary for 18 months, Adam went full time, I stayed in my job, I was on a handshake, and we kind of built it together me on weeknights, and weekends and him full time, both move back to our parents places, we literally lived off my income, just on a handshake. And so it's a pretty unique stat to the journey for us. But we recognize that if we didn't team up and do it together, the odds of us staying in something that wasn't meaningful, was much higher, because it's quite scary to step away from a comfortable job, especially when everyone around you is moving forward, but forward and inverted cameras. And so yeah, it was much easier doing with it with a name that you trust and being able to share an income. So it wasn't completely out there on the cliff around. So we kind of pair up to do it. Sorry, industry agnostic. Yeah, so we, we kind of, you know, I've done humanity x, which is the world's first charity that's disrupting the ticketing industry. And neither of us had a background on events, we kinda started off with the lens of we recognize technology is a big driver of change. And, and if we could unlock the power of technology for the charitable world, that would be incredibly strategic, and but we didn't have a bit of a horse in the race to put it. So we're kind of very agnostic to which industry, we try and disrupt. And luckily, my experience in the hedge fund was getting paid all day to look at different businesses, different industries, different sectors, government regulation, and trying to work out what was a good bet, and what was a bad bet. And that was kind of the perfect training to try and work out what was a good industry to disrupt or not. And Adam had a tech background and say, you know, that's what we were doing on weekends and weeknights for a couple of years that before we learned humanities is trying to work out and cheaply test which ideas could work and stumbled on event ticketing. Because well, to put it bluntly, everyone hates booking fees, does very little good in the world, and it's billions of dollars recurring. And so like bingo, that's, that's our industry.
Paul Zelizer 07:01
We're gonna get into like, what you built, and it's awesome. Before we did that, anything you could say, because I think this is just such a fascinating opportunity to learn about our founders, people who listen to the show, you know, many of them are some of them have their ideas. Some of them are working scaling ideas, we also have a younger segment or just younger to social entrepreneur, that a segment or listeners who are looking for their idea, anything you could say about that process, or somebody who doesn't have seven years of full time hedge fund, you know, research kind of like, like, what would you say to somebody who's like, I totally resonate with what you're saying, Josh, I want my work to be about having positive impact in the world. I haven't quite fully landed on that idea yet. What can you tell them about what you were doing during that time to vet ideas?
Josh Ross 07:52
Yeah, so I guess the first thing I'd say is, most people try to take the path to what a meaningful career instead of like, really reimagine it. So I mean, just stepping back for a second, when I wanted to work in a hedge fund, there's no graduate positions in hedge funds in Sydney. And so you know, if you're, most people who want to end up there, apply to the accounting firms and investment banks and hope on a five to 10 year view to try and get in. But the better way to get in is to go and volunteer at one. And after a month, if you're valuable, they'll start paying you 25 bucks an hour, and then it's and you can kind of you know, just get through that hump. And you kind of create your own luck. And I was then at that hedge fund for seven years, and no one else knocked on the door in the seven years to say, Hey, can I can I work here one or two days a week, I don't care what you asked me to do, especially valuable to get their foot in the door. No one else did that in seven years. And no one else is doing that is what it turns out to be like, of course there are but like very rare. And so if you are super passionate about, you know, animal rights, or whatever the cause might be, don't sit on the sidelines and try and map it all out, in theory, to then go and try and do it. Most people, if they're smart, with their time can squeeze out a day or two, where they don't have to earn a living and they can put their foot foot in the door. And so that's what I'd recommend. Just put your foot in the door, make up a path, go to whoever is the best in the world at what you want to get into. And I guarantee you not enough people are knocking at their door doing the same thing. Surprising. That's what I'd suggest.
Paul Zelizer 09:22
Great suggestion, Josh. So some real world experience in that space is invaluable and being willing to help out with some of your time is a great way to do it. Thanks for that suggestion.
Josh Ross 09:34
Totally. And if you're valuable, you'll get paid pretty quickly.
Paul Zelizer 09:36
Yup.
Josh Ross 09:39
If you're volunteering there for three months, that's a problem if you've only been interning there for a month and then you can sit down at the person but you can get to the best people in their fields to offer a map often like you know, you got to send out 10 letters but one reply,
Paul Zelizer 09:52
Josh you're gonna get like 10 letters and the next episode goes I welcome it because those people are people you bring it on. So you land on the ticketing industry and like, give us a skit like you're a hedge fund guy, like, give us a sense, like, what kind of numbers were you seeing in the ticketing industry? Where you said, Oh, here we go, here's the opportunity.
Josh Ross 10:18
Yeah, so our strategy wasn't about. So if you want to solve social problems with technology, you need money to experiment. And the world of philanthropy is kind of broken. In that sense, there's very little funding for true innovation and technology, I'd say maybe in medical research, there's an exception, because it's like, it's inherent in clinical trials. But um, but you know, if you're looking at issues of mental health, or, you know, domestic violence or education, or you know, that there's just very little technological innovation in the nonprofit sector, it's because the system is broken, the, the donors don't want to funder, these types of things. Boards are generally stacked with 60 year olds who are very conservative. And so when you're pitching an idea that's 90%, likely to fail. But if it pays off, its massive, well, how am I going to look to the market, if we waste $5 million on an app that didn't do anything, and say, you know, they're more worried about reputation often than then outcomes. And of course, there's some exceptions out there. But fundamentally, it's kind of the sector's broken for using technology. And they can't attract good software developers because they can't compete with the Googles of the world. So what attracted us to ticketing and technology was we recognized that we needed to be our master of our own destiny, if we're going to innovate with technology, and therefore, we need a robust economic engine to fund that. And so in ticketing, yeah, there's billions and billions of dollars in ticket sales every year. Like, I'm talking 50 to $100 billion in ticket sales here. Globally, there's not high barriers to entry. So you can scale internationally relatively easily. It's you can do a Software as a Service software as a service solution, which means not having to invest in box office and infrastructure. And that makes it again, really quick to scale up. So what's so attractive about ticketing is it was heavily presented a big enough market that, you know, if we did well in that this was going to be success. And highly scalable. It ticked all the boxes, like if you look in the for profit world, the businesses making the most money in today's world are generally software, marketplaces, software's or service applications. And so yeah, if we're gonna change the world through the power of technology, we needed to tap into that. And so we're kind of forced into it, because there's no Foundation's there that fund this type of work. And sorry, when I say this type of work, what I mean is like, okay, so people with disabilities struggle to go to events, because they can't always get the information they need. Maybe the venue is wheelchair accessible, but the stage is not, maybe it's the fonts and colors on the ticketing page that are just not web accessible. So someone who's blind using the text or voice or screen reader, it won't work on our ticketing pages. And so that's a problem that needs a technological solution. But none of the for profit event platforms are solving a properly, because it's not a commercial thing to solve. And so that's an application that is leading to people with disabilities being excluded from social from, from events and cultural experiences and educational experiences. And that's something we've started solving with our humanity x. And we wouldn't be out to do that if we didn't have this robust engine to fund that. That development.
Paul Zelizer 13:25
Nice. So this was going back if I remember, right, it's like six, seven years ago, where you guys launched Is that Is that right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And what are the past six or seven years been like?
Josh Ross 13:38
Yeah. Exciting. So the first two years like anything, yeah, almost falling over every second month, and it's quite scary and stressful, and you work around the clock, and you burn yourself out. And your girlfriend's asking you why you've moved back to your parents place and trying to, you know, you're trying to psychologically get through that period. That's where I have the utmost respect for entrepreneurs who do it solo, I couldn't imagine doing that I would have failed, definitely would have failed. This is not me trying to be humble and modest, I like totally would have failed. So either of us tried to do this alone. And then, you know, we kind of got a minimal viable product, according to startup world, live about a year into starting the project. And it took off, and it actually took off too much. So we built this, you know, sticking together this little platform that could sell tickets, and we thought we might sell a million dollars and tickets and sell 4 million bucks in tickets or something like that in the first year. And so we have massive growth pains the Met, it was not robust for that level of scale. And so like, great, this is a good proof of concept, but we almost fell over. And then we were like, Okay, this is exciting. Go to philanthropist and show that it works. And they'll give us the next level of philanthropic capital, we need to scale this up, but that that proved to be very challenging. We then won the Google Impact Challenge in 2018. And that's it. competition that Googles foundation puts on all around the world looking for the best tech ideas to change the world. And that came with a million dollars prize money. And so that was a big game changer for us. Because until then, we were, you know, me and Adam could only put in so much we'd had a few brave philanthropists Strida, some small checks, to kind of help us hire some developers and prove the concept. And then Atlassian foundation got behind us. And then things just started happening in Australia, the greatest rugby Captain we've ever had won two World Cups, he came on, as our ambassador for free. Got a whole bunch of press and boom, it exploded in Australia, New Zealand, we're now one of the largest ticketing platforms, the market growing the quickest selling close to $150 million in tickets a year sustainable. And it was all like, great, we're going to go into America now. Because that's half the world's ticketing market. If we get this right there, we will be giving like $30 million a year into education programs. And then COVID hit. And so I was actually in America in mid March 2020. Living the dream, you know, this was working a crazy concept that got through the risky page, and then boom, our revenue goes from doubling every six months to to zero. And this beautiful team of people that have joined us along the way, most of them had joined us in a volunteer capacity and then got full time jobs as we were able to afford them. Yeah, we didn't know if we'd be able to give it. It was just horrible. All events industry was screwed. He thought everything had been pouring our lives into for the last five years was gonna end but we managed to get through it. And we actually managed to keep the whole team together was quite amazing. Because people joined humanities to change the world not because it's the job meant that as we had to take pay cuts and reduce hours, everyone still worked full time. So we ended up being the best ticketing platform through COVID. And that reputation accelerated our market share growth. And so in Australia, New Zealand, our revenue is now well above pre COVID levels. Even though the market is still down. It's because we really looked at our event organiser hosts, they had people to chat to it humanics, where our competitors are laid off all the time. And so you know, you've got an issue. As an event organiser, you've got no one to talk to at our competitors. And this is at a time when you're under immense pressure because your revenues also evaporated. And so yeah, we kind of the whole social enterprise model showed a really unique strength in that, like if your staff are bought into your mission, that's a massive competitive advantage, especially when times are tough. And so we're not out of the woods yet with COVID. Who knows what the next variant will show, but there are a lot lot better off than our competitors.
Paul Zelizer 17:36
Next, since six years, you went from concept to like, best known ticketing platform and are these one of the best or the best used in Australia New Zealand, right? That's pretty fast. Congratulations.
Josh Ross 17:52
Thanks. It's been really exciting to watch it grow because like I origins are in like 10 person yoga workshops and, you know, tiny community events. And that is still is the majority of our platform. But now in Australia, Parliament House use us for all their toes, Sydney's whole news Eve precinct for the fireworks around the harbour bridge and opera house that was on our platform, from the city of Sydney. Mardi Gras, one of the biggest in the world and Sydney that's on our platform, you know, it's we're no longer the cute guys. We're now like, the guys, industry. So it's quite exciting in Australia.
Paul Zelizer 18:25
And anything you could say about like, how at least up until now, Josh, like, we've seen a wide range of the wonderful social entrepreneurs who come on in the podcast, and some of them, like the Impact mission is like front and center, right? Like we give a ton of money for kids. And that's why you should use another, it's more like we're an awesome ticketing platform. And you can actually get a hold of a live human and talk it through, you know, and we also happen to give as much as we can to these great causes, like how much is the impact? Is it front and center in your brand is a little little further back and you lead with customer service or being a better ticketing platform they give us? Where does the impact and messaging fall into the humanity pics like conversation in the marketplace?
Josh Ross 19:13
Yeah, that's a great question. And it's actually different depending on the event organizer in the market. So like if you're a small community event organizer, then you're not getting serviced by any of the ticketing platforms, you can use their software, but you're not going to chat to someone or if you do, it's like very rare. And so you when they come to us, it's because generally they love what we do. Our fees are lower. So we don't charge an ethical premium. We're like much better price than the vast majority of competitors. And but then they can speak to real humans. And that's a massive point of difference. I think for some of the bigger event organizers, when it comes to them, it's just pure tech like this is way too risky for me to switch to something that sounds nice. I need to know that when 20,000 people come through the gate in a two hour period that this is going to work Put your scattergun equipment. So you know, when we get major contracts like city of Sydney that is purely looking at the product. And it's a nice to have that, that you're a social enterprise. But when it's a small community event, and the risks are high because you selling 10 tickets to the workshop, then I think most people are switching for ethical reasons. I think everyone appreciates the ethical reason, especially because you as a customer, when you buy a ticket, you see that the fee is reasonable. It's not excessive, like some of the competition, but also that the profits are funding amazing projects. And so it adds to the brand equity for the event organizer. So a lot of them. Wellness, mindfulness, type of event organizers have organically switched to us because they align with our mission. It's consistent with what they're trying to create in the world. And so yeah, it's a real mixed bag. To be honest, it's hard to you know, even the hedge fund conference uses us. So it's really a mixed bag.
Paul Zelizer 20:56
So you hear at least four different kind of USPS, right, there's, yeah, there's your fees are in no particular order, the order might change, depending on if you're somebody doing a 12 person yoga class, or whether you're that hedge fund conference, they might turn to you for a different combination, or at least the ranking order, they like all of them, and like all four of these things. But some situations, really lean into one or two of these and other situations will lead into different ones. And the four I heard Josh's one is your fees are lower. And I want to ask you about that in a second. The service the actual being able to reach out to humans, particularly if you're a small event producer to be able to get to live humans or at least get your questions answered, as opposed to like, a friend who's having problems with his Google business page. And like, how do you get ahold of human at Google? When you're small? Your business profile? Like he's like, there's no human zero? Yeah, that's a big, you don't work that way right there, you can get a hold of a live human ask a question, you get the actual product itself. And then certain features of it like your accessibility features. And you thought really hard about that. And it's the best solution in certain ways, like in terms of accessibility. And then there's the impact story and what you're doing with the funds. And we're going to talk more about that in a second. So those four things are all differentiators and you highlight different, you know, depending on what that person's values are and what their needs are, they might value different aspects of those four benefits. Is that fair to say?
Josh Ross 22:32
Yeah, there's actually 1/5. One I should have mentioned, which is, from a data perspective, which is much cleaner than a lot of our competitors, you don't have to create an account to use semantics, the UI is very efficient for getting people to check out. So the data collection strategies we employ like there's there's some technical stuff in the ticketing side, that thanks to our two major partners, particularly Atlassian, to their foundation, we've really tried to, we philosophically always held the view that we have to be the best ticketing platform to have the most impact. And so if you walk into our office, you'll see it's full of software developers. We don't, yeah, we don't rely on the ethical point of difference.
Paul Zelizer 23:10
Beautiful. Thanks for sharing that. So let's do this. Let's take a quick break here a word from our sponsor, when we come back, I want to hear Josh about exactly how much money you're giving away and who you're giving it to. Because that's why people listen to our show. Wait, wait, wait, what are they doing? How much are they giving you two? How do they raise this? So I want to come back about that. And a couple other questions. But for first a quick word from our sponsor. Do you have a business that's about making the world a better place, and you want it to grow both in terms of helping more people, your impact, and also your quality of life, your income. So I'd like to talk to you about some research that scientists tell us lead to humans actually achieving their goals. Whether it's in the realm of fitness, or growing an impact business. When you look at when we set a goal, the single biggest predictor of whether we actually reach that goal scientists tell us is something they call social support. Think of like pre COVID going to a gym and trying versus trying to work out. You know yourself and read your fitness that letter. When you have people are on a similar journey and you can share the ups and downs of that journey. It was a great week, I got my best client ever or that contract I thought I was going to get it fell through Ouch. As well as tips and strategies of being on that particular moment in that particular journey. That's what makes the difference. Well, we're printers has a wonderful community, global community of social entrepreneurs. And that's exactly what we do with each other. It's called the AWARE printers community. Whether you need a website, or referral to somebody who does Facebook ads for this kind of business, you need a logo, or you need a lawyer who can help you with your trademark for a social enterprise. It's affordable, incredibly generous people. And because we have an online presence, you can post what you're needing help us at any time of the day and night. If you'd like to get more information, you can go to a where printers.com forward slash community. And thank you to everybody in the enterpreneurs community who sponsors this podcast. So Josh, and the second part of the show, we'd like to joke about putting on our entrepreneur glasses. So put on your entrepreneur glasses with me, we're gonna talk about a very exciting development, you already mentioned it, you're coming to North America, you're in North America, we'll get there. But like, right now, on the ground, if you put on your glasses and 2020, to give us a sense of what it looks like, from an enterprise, who's using it, how many people are, you know, putting events on humanics in any given month, or a year? And like, is it like 12? People, events, or 20,000? What's the majority of that? Just some little more some data?
Josh Ross 25:54
Sure, sure. So, globally, we have close to 11 12,000, unique event organizers using our platform every year. They totally vary in shapes and sizes. But we're selling about half a million tickets a month now. And again, growing rapidly, we have over a million people in our database. And it's exciting with standard experiment with that in terms of how we can drive social impact through our database. So unlike a for profit, platform with data, we're not going to sell it to advertisers, we're not going to, we're not going to monetize it. What we're looking to do instead is say okay, so in extra Australia, for example, where most of our databases right now, there's a massive gap in our policy around early childhood education for single mothers. And so we're about a test and Advocacy Project, lobbying and trying to create get activism around, changing the laws there so that single mothers don't have this poverty trap negative incentive structure where they can either put their child in, in childcare, get a few days assistance, and work and contribute and, and keep their skills lives that they're not cut off from the job force in the long term. But if they do that, then they get no subsidy for childcare and their wage effectively covers their childcare. So it's a really obvious blind spot, that's a loss for society, a loss for the economy, etc, etc. And we've got this amazing audience that we can use to change things with. So that that's, that's exciting. So that's the data piece from an impact piece. So it's, it's hard to be asking a tough time because if it's really hit our profitability for the last 18 months, we've actually lost a bit of money. Last financial year, we've managed to give a quarter of a million dollars to our education projects, which we're incredibly proud of, I don't know of another ticketing platform that made a profit last year. So you know, that was really killing ourselves to get that out there. But to date, we've given roughly a million dollars to our projects. The other side to the financials that we get is we don't we give charities and non for profit platform at cost price, we don't actually make a profit of them. So in Australia, New Zealand and now starting in America, you know, Cancer Council, United Nations, Rotary Clubs, etc. They've all migrated to us. Because typically, our fees are 6070 80% cheaper than the for profit platform that we're using before and so is it's close to another million dollars in savings were generated for the industry. And, excitingly, we're also building out donation features for charities because often they they get hit with high fees on that as well. But yeah, so if we weren't in COVID lockdowns, I can't run rates outside of lockdowns because you got to remember most of our revenue at the moments in Australia, which has been one of the strictest countries in the world. You know, when we're not in lockdown, we estimate per annum at today's scale, we're giving about one to $2 million dollars to our projects here. Similar amount in savings for the sector a little bit smaller. And we're self funding charities that we don't need anyone donating to us to achieve that. But it's just hard right now, policy keeps changing and our markets. We did a massive month in November and then in December, crashed 70% Because Sydney and Melbourne on the current policy is what it is. And so we're kind of rolling with the punches. But but it's exciting, because when we come out of it, we've really taken a lot of market share something after our clients.
Paul Zelizer 29:25
Beautiful. Anything you could say about like your impact priority. Yeah, million dollars, it would be a million a year If COVID wasn't in the works, right? And and I'm so sorry. It's disrupted your growth, and congratulations for you know, finding ways to be flexible and pivot and work with COVID. Because I can only imagine I mean, the event brands I'm talking to you it's had a major impact. So I'm not surprised and I'm glad to hear you guys are working with it. And I'm sorry that you have to I mean, so many really scuffle entrepreneurs have been hard hard hit by COVID. So, good work, and I'm sorry.
Josh Ross 30:06
Thank you. But uh, yeah, it is what it is. We're incredibly lucky, our teams kind of held it together. And there was a lot of personal sacrifice our team took for that. But um, but yeah, so in terms of what we fund, and where our priority areas are, so from a tech perspective, accessibility is our priority, we kind of talked about that. So we'll go into that, again. Where we choose to put our funding, we have an education mandate around children's charities. And in Australia, our indigenous population is by far the most disadvantaged, on essentially every well being statistic, whether it be incarceration rates, alcohol, and drugs. Unfortunately, life expectancies over 10 years, less than the general population. And I don't know how much your audience knows about Australia's Australia's history, but it's pretty shocking, was Yeah, so it's so we focus our impact in Australia, around different education programs for regionally disadvantaged Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids where we've partnered with an indigenous group in Australia and other non for profit, who effectively go out into communities, and help provide education scholarships to really promising kids in there, you got to matter this is regional Australia don't have access to decent schools, often. Or it may be that they're showing a lot of promise, but the community they're in is incredibly dangerous. Unfortunately, there's a lot of child abuse, and social socio economic issues that come with the poverty trap, and the history. And so that's why we focus in Australia and New Zealand, we do a lot around our Pacific education programs a lot around digital literacy. Globally, we focus on literacy and life skill programs for young girls. Mainly, we're all in low income countries, but mainly in parts of Southeast Asia and Sub Saharan Africa. And we partner with an organization called A Room to Read on that. And the reason we internationally focus on young girls literacy is a couple of what is this one of the it's a very measurable, effective approach in education. So if you can kill illiteracy in a generation, if you teach someone to read and write, there's no way in hell, they're going to let their child grow up to not read and write. And so hopefully, it's an issue we won't be addressing in 10 or 20 years. But there are still some parts in the world where it's it's a major issue, keeping young girls in school, etc. It's also really good for the environment, heavily correlated education with fertility, and birth rates. And that's the world with families having six to eight children. It's a it's a not good for the environment. It's not good for the family. And so, yeah, so that's a big thing we do internationally. And then in America, we've just landed. And so I didn't answer your question before. But we've already got hundreds of events on the platform. It's actually very exciting. We've got a team here in Denver now. But we're partnering with code.org, which, effectively the leaders in the states in computer science and STEM related subjects for students in school. And they focus on lower socioeconomic kids. And they actually help design with the curriculum for a lot of different schools and how to teach computer science and STEM literacy. And their approach, which we agree with, is, even if you're a farmer, growing up, right now, you're going to be a farmer in 20 years time and you're a kid, if you're not somewhat tech literate, you're going to really struggle to find a place in the job force. And so it's this future problem that's starting to emerge already. But where every field is getting touched by technology, and you saw during the pandemic, like, you know, kids who could go home and had a room and a study and a laptop and internet connectivity, versus children who share a room with three other people don't have a laptop, don't have reliable internet connection. Like it's, I mean, that's one side to it. But the other side to it is, you know, everyone's going to need to understand a little bit about software and coding and technology and computer science. And so they're an amazing operator. And we've only just partnered with them. So it's very exciting. That's going to that's, that's coming. So that's what we're doing in the US now.
Paul Zelizer 34:07
And speaking of being in the US now, just today, I was doing some of my research getting ready for this and the governor of Colorado is like welcoming you like we got him out to fix a bunch of other awesome, like values based company coming to Colorado and I thought that was fabulous. Tell us a little bit about landing in the States. Why you're coming here. And what some of the things you're working on in terms of bringing humanity to North America.
Josh Ross 34:33
Yeah, sure. Yeah, well, we love Colorado. It's an amazing state. It's a beautiful place.
Paul Zelizer 34:41
But that's only because you haven't seen New Mexico yet. Josh, why don't you because you'll be sorry, you didn't move here? No, I'm
Josh Ross 34:49
sure we haven't seen so much of the US yet. But um, yeah, that was a massive leg up so that it was interesting because we we approached a few states about moving to the US and setting up our office again. One of the few states that we chatted to Colorado was definitely the most ethically aligned, they've really done a lot to support us landing here. And we've actually designed a program where we're trying to, as much as we can, you know, we're gonna hire the best person for the job, but we're trying to create employment pathways for disadvantaged or people from low to medium income backgrounds. And so, you know, it's, we've already hired a small team here in Denver, we've set up an office, starting to scale the service, got some good PR, we got a Sam Harris gave us a big rally, especially for ad, which was feature and semantics that led to a lot of traction over the Christmas period. We're right now looking for an ambassador. And so you know, it's all part of just the game of replicating what we've achieved elsewhere. And, and just the prize here is so large, the market so large, there's, you know, if we get this right, in the States, there'll be $30 million a year going into programs like COVID. Org at no extra cost to anyone. And that's massive, and this country needs it. To be honest, the education system is failing in areas and might be the wealthiest country in the world. But there's a lot to be said for, for how many people in this country are living today. And so it's exciting, that opportunity to do good. It's sad that it needs to happen. It needs to happen in Australia needs to happen everywhere. But we're finding the models rarely resonate, like with just getting amazing reactions from event organizers who either can benefit because they're a nonprofit, and they'll save a fortune on their ticket sales or their for profit, who, wow, this is great. This is great for our brand, this is a tangible difference we can make. We love what you stand for this fits our diversity inclusion policy. It's just Yeah, but I feel like in there in America, the the approach to social impact is actually more advanced in Australia, New Zealand, in terms of businesses and how they're starting to operate. At least the branding of them is. So I think we're coming in at the right time. Which is exciting. Yeah,
Paul Zelizer 37:01
I would agree. And I hope listeners, you'll help spread the message, far wide, any of your nonprofit brands, it saves your nonprofit, you know, your favorite nonprofits get to save money using pneumatics. And if you're a for profit, social enterprise, like, do you want to give more money? Not that I have anything against Eventbrite or any other ticketing platforms, but like, do they really need more your money, like give it to Josh and his team, they'll take what they need. And we're going to talk about the way you all set yourself up as a nonprofit, which I think it's fascinating, you know, a decent livelihood, but it's a nonprofit. And you're going to give as much money as possible to kids in the ways that Josh just outlined. So I just please listeners go tell anybody who's about making the world a better place about humanitarian, please, please, please, please, please. So enough said about that. Josh, talk to us that that I just mentioned that you guys are set up as a nonprofit, which is not common in a software as, you know, service type solution like we are right. This is interesting. Oftentimes, it's a for profit entity that has many similar as other kind of tech solution type structures with a certain percentage giving them back then. And we have lots of those on the podcast. And I'm, I imagine we'll have a lot more. But to have something of the scale you guys are talking about, with the kind of attention to tech, like gritty, let's just make this a great tech product. And your nonprofit. Like that's fascinating. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Josh Ross 38:41
Yeah, no, thanks. Mostly. Still, even in Australia, most people don't realize we're a registered charity. And so here in America are 501 C three, there's this, you know, simple, go to business doing something good, which is great. But we don't, you know, you won't, you'll find it buried on our website that we're a 501 C three. And there's a reason for that we don't want people to use us because we're a charity, want them to use us because we're adding the most value to the world and to them. But fundamentally, we're structured as a charity, because we think that's the right structure to change the world for this vehicle. That means there won't ever be a conflict of interest between shareholder profits and how much goes into education programs. It means people sign up to, to this idea, which is that we can have an incredibly competitive, great organization maximizing good in the world. I mean, step back for a second, like imagine if Amazon's mission was to save the Amazon rainforest would have been fixed 15 years ago. But if it's a CSR brand, building exercise problems don't get fixed. They might get alleviated. Everyone's too grateful because that big corporates just running a check to your cause. But imagine if we had the biggest companies in a world focused on solving issues. And so that's a big part of our vision. We want to have the that power directed towards solving social problems. And you know, I don't have expensive tastes Adam, my co founder, and CEO, our border, all volunteers, the staff are all paid. They weren't at the beginning that we had to volunteer for quite a while. But it's a really pure genuine mission, you don't have to worry that I'm going to turn around in five years and start putting this all into the Josh Ross. I enjoy surfing and hiking, I don't need a $20 million home. And so like, cool, if we converted this into a for profit, suddenly, I'm got all this money that what I want to probably give the charity Anyway, like I really agree with the founders pledge and what gates in them have done. So I think it's better if we do the structure. That way, people don't have to believe me, it's in the structure. And so that's how we've structured it. And it's been interesting, because it's, it's Yeah, I don't know of another tech charity in the world that's doing something quite like us. So it is, is exciting that if we can make this work, and it is working, we can unlock in terms of, you know, a moral evolution of how we do business.
Paul Zelizer 40:58
I'd agree I've not seen at this, this kind of business not seen anything like it good for you for setting it up that way.
Josh Ross 41:07
There's a lot of cool inspirations out there a couple in Australia, but just not in the software space.
Paul Zelizer 41:13
So look ahead, like if you were to dream ahead five years from now, what does he manitex look like? What kind of impact do you having? What kind of scales that look like five years?
Josh Ross 41:23
Yeah, so I'd love one of our big. So, again, we don't lead with this on our site. But we want to turn the events industry on its head from accessibility perspective, such that if you're blind or you need, you're deaf, it is not a major challenge for you to get the information you need and to participate in societies because events are the oldest way people get together, whether it's around a fire in the bush, or, you know, a festival conference. And to get it, you know, the number one issue reported by Australians with disabilities is social inclusion, and so like a fence are really critical. That that's the most reported issue doesn't mean it's more important than other issues. But it's right up there. And so as the registration gateway to events, we actually hold the key. And so we can solve that problem, next five to 10 years, as we improve our solutions for those problems and make it super easy for event organizers to cater to disabilities. But also, as we scale and take shifts that organically happen, event organizers won't even have to do anything different, their web platform will just be accessible for someone who's blind. And so we've seen we've already achieved some of that we just don't have the scale we want. We'd love to be have this internal generator of good, whereby, you know, I said before, if we get this right in the States, the next few years, we won't be giving one or $2 million a year, our projects will be in 30 $40 million a year. And maybe at that scale, we decide, okay, $20 million goes into these education projects. But $20 million is going into solving X Y, Zed and mental health or XYZ and domestic violence where there's a really cool experiment we could do here. That's high risk, but like a real technical, innovative solution, that the traditional world of philanthropy won't touch with a 10 foot pole, but we can't because we're not answering anyone. And it's a good bet. And we're not conservative, we're gonna experiment and we might waste the money this year, but like, it's worth a spin. So that's kind of what you know, that's what I went through. I'd love to be in five years time, because I don't think that exists in the world. There's some chump change going to cool ideas, like, semantics is a cool idea. We, you know, was amazing that we got a million dollars from Google for winning the Impact Challenge, but a million dollars is chump change when you're trying to change the world. It's just you know, there's billions and billions going into a lot of different causes. But very little of it goes into like, technology ideas for
Paul Zelizer 43:46
them. Well, Judge, I can hang out with you all day, you're doing fabulous work. And listeners, we will put links to the HumanIK site, the giving partners, the Muhammad Yunus book, lots of things we mentioned in here, just look down below in the links, and you can find out if there was something Josh, you were hoping we would have touched on and we haven't yet, or there's something you want to leave our listeners with on their journey to have more positive impact in the world. And you want to kind of say, hey, as we start to wind this down, think about this in your impact work. What would that be?
Josh Ross 44:19
Thank you. Well, um, I guess from a selfish ass perspective, I guess if you know any event organizers, please let them know about us and feel free to email us about them. Feel free to post about us. We find that when people hear about us they switch because it's, we try to do our best to make it a no brainer from a person's individual journey. I mean, if you're interested in social enterprise, I highly recommend reading banker to the bull by Muhammad Yunus. It's an incredible book about an amazing social entrepreneur who flips one of the oldest industries. Being banking completely acted in a revolutionary way. was a big inspiration for me. I'd say don't feel You need to do things alone, like the power of having a co founder. Wow, it's changed. Yeah, it's just made this all possible. And if you do do that, guess two lessons that share that worked really well for us was really around communication. But one was that as soon as you're doing something that's annoying the other person, you have to raise it. Even if it's the smallest thing like my co founder, Adam Smith is taking my pen and never returning it. And my pens always missing after raise that even I feel pity raising that that's an easy one to raise. But other things we usually pass over and don't raise them become sources of resentment. And that's why most founders fall out with each other. It's small things that add up and then you blow up about other things that are unrelated because there's so much pent up frustration. So we've had an amazing six years together, there's been moments of stress, but nothing has been allowed to build up and, and then blow up. So yeah, just really stressed that if you're doing something with someone, you cannot keep it to yourself. We have this rule with Ira something from three months ago. He did it that pissed me off. It's actually become my fault sitting on it for three months. And yeah, I think that's what's allowed us to successfully work together.
Paul Zelizer 46:15
Tasha, thank you so much for being on the show today. And for all your positive impact in the world, you guys are doing fabulous things.
Josh Ross 46:23
Thanks so much for your help, and your pleasure to chat today.
Paul Zelizer 46:27
So that's all the time we have for today's interview. Before we go, I just want to say we'd love listener suggested topics and guests. If you have an idea, just go to the word printers website, right on our contact form. We have three kind of guidelines that we that where we try to be really transparent of what we're looking for. And if you look at that and say yes, this is a great idea. I think it fits please send that off. For now, I just want to say thank you so much for listening, please take really good care and these intense times. And thank you for all t