As Giving Connection grows, one of the questions I think about most is how we scale our impact without losing sight of why we started in the first place. Growth for the sake of growth has never been the goal. We want to build something that is useful, sustainable, and genuinely makes it easier for people to connect with nonprofits and community resources.

That is why I was incredibly grateful to be one of 40 founders invited to participate in the Masters of Scale Early Stage Founders Program, created in partnership with Capital One Business.

In October 2025, our cohort came together in San Francisco for the Masters of Scale Summit. It was an opportunity to step outside the day-to-day work of building our organizations and learn alongside other early-stage founders facing many of the same questions around growth, leadership, sustainability, and impact.

Over the course of the experience, we participated in founder-focused programming, connected with one another, and joined hundreds of entrepreneurs, innovators, and business leaders for the Masters of Scale Summit. The Summit featured conversations with leaders including Reid Hoffman, Brené Brown, Dr. Fei-Fei Li, and Andrew Ross Sorkin, with sessions exploring the decisions, leadership, and character required to build organizations that last.

For me, some of the greatest value came from simply being in a room with people who had more to teach me—and with fellow founders who understood firsthand how challenging and rewarding it can be to build something from the ground up.

When I founded Giving Connection, we started with a simple idea: make finding what you need as easy as buying what you want.

As that idea has grown, so have our questions. How do we reach more people? Where should we invest our limited resources? How do we use new technology thoughtfully? And how do we grow without losing the people-first approach at the heart of Giving Connection?

The word scale can easily become synonymous with numbers: more users, more nonprofits, more communities, more features. Those things matter, but they aren't enough.

For Giving Connection, scaling means expanding our reach while making the experience better. It means helping someone find the right nonprofit or community resource more quickly, making nonprofits easier to discover, and giving volunteers and donors better ways to connect with causes they care about.

Most importantly, it means continuing to put people first as we grow.

I am incredibly grateful to Masters of Scale and Capital One Business for investing in early-stage founders and creating an opportunity to learn from people who have built before us—and from the founders building alongside us.

There is still so much for us to learn. We know why we are building Giving Connection. Experiences like this help us learn how to build it better.