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If you are seeking new ways to increase your ROI on marketing with your commerce platform, or you may be an entrepreneur who wants to grow your team and be more efficient with your online business.
Talk Commerce with Brent W. Peterson draws stories from merchants, marketers, and entrepreneurs who share their experiences in the trenches to help you learn what works and what may not in your business.
Keep up with the current news on commerce platforms, marketing trends, and what is new in the entrepreneurial world. Episodes drop every Tuesday with the occasional bonus episodes.
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Brent Peterson (00:02.382)
Welcome to this episode. Today I have Disney Petit - Disney GoHead and she is the founder of Liquid Donate. Disney GoHead, do an introduction. Tell us your day to day role and one of your passions in life.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (00:13.209)
Yeah, sounds good. Well, my name is Disney Petit. Super excited to be on the podcast today. My pronouns are she and her, and I am the co -founder and CEO at Liquid Donate, which is a sustainable social impact software company that matches all of the excess inventory, including returns in the world with the schools and nonprofits that need it. And that is what I'm most passionate about in life. So very lucky to get to do that day to day.
Brent Peterson (00:37.614)
That's great. We met at shop talk recently and we, we, we did that, whatever quick, quick introduction meeting thing with another 2000 people or no, it's probably 3000 people in a giant room. And it was, it was great to hear your story. Before we dive into the content though, you did volunteer to be part of the free joke project. And, and so I'm going to tell you a joke and all you have to do is say, should this joke be free?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (00:50.425)
Yeah.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (00:58.553)
course.
Brent Peterson (01:02.415)
Or do you think at some point we should pay for it? I realize now I do have a couple of Disney jokes, but I didn't bring one. But I have, I think a better joke. It's more of a, it's more of a, yeah. Anyways, and then you're gonna tell me a joke. So I think that it doesn't matter. Let's just get started. Here we go. What do you call a soup made entirely from ingredients extracted from the atmosphere? A broth of fresh air.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (01:08.057)
Okay.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (01:11.801)
Okay.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (01:31.961)
Oh, I don't even get to guess the answer to the question. Oh, should it be free, a broth, or fresh air? Well, I think almost everything should be free, so I'm gonna go with yes.
Brent Peterson (01:44.014)
Okay, good, thanks. And oftentimes I have people that would sit for five or ten minutes thinking about it, so because my jokes aren't, they're not very funny either, so that's why.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (01:50.553)
Uh -huh, not good podcast. No, no, I think that I just really like to try to solve the puzzle. So for me, I was like, what could the answer be?
Brent Peterson (02:00.846)
Yeah. All right, so Tellus, you have one as well?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (02:03.833)
I do. Okay, so, Brent, why didn't the lifeguard save the hippie? Because he was too far out, man.
Brent Peterson (02:12.11)
Why?
That's a great one. Perfect one for California.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (02:19.705)
I know, I'm very California, so, makes sense.
Brent Peterson (02:23.662)
Good, all right, well, so Disney, you have Liquid Donated, but you have a much, you've done a lot of work previously as well. Why don't you just give us a little introduction about how you got to Liquid Donate and some of the things you've done in the past.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (02:39.737)
Awesome. Yeah, I'm happy to share. So prior to starting Liquid Donate, I was the 15th employee at Postmates. And so I spent a long time at Postmates, which as many of your listeners know, I'm sure is a food delivery app, very similar to DoorDash and Uber. And after about 10 years of working at Postmates, we were actually acquired by Uber. And so I was able to spend a few months there as well.
But when I joined Postmates, they asked me to start our customer service team. So I did that. I started the team and grew the team from about five to 100 in a year. We transitioned that team from being pure customer service to being an operations team so that the folks on that team could have a little bit more experience outside of just customer service and making sure that everybody as a part of the three -sided marketplace that we were building at Postmates had a great experience.
So that was the couriers, the customers who were receiving the food and also the restaurants. And so that was a really interesting business model to be a part of building out really early on and seeing what was working and what wasn't working at a really deep level there. After I started the customer service team, I was asked to start our sales team. And so I signed the first 500 restaurants to the platform in a time when restaurants were not particularly excited about third party food delivery.
And I wanted to make that experience as seamless as possible because it was really obvious to everybody who was working at Postmates that third party food delivery was not going anywhere. It was something that was going to be really popular and become kind of a standard, at least in the United States. And so we wanted to make that transition as easy as possible for these restaurants that we were working with.
So I became a product manager for the merchant tablet. And I would actually take beta versions of this tablet, which is how all restaurants receive their third party food deliveries today. And I would take beta versions of it to local restaurants and actually see what the tablet looked like in action and be like, oh my gosh, like people are wearing gloves when they go to press this functionality on the tablet. And therefore this needs to be a physical button instead of a virtual button. And that level of attention to detail on the product management side,
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (04:49.145)
made a big difference in building a product that really worked for the people who were actually touching our product, people who were interacting with it on a daily basis. I learned so much from that experience. It was one of my favorite things that I did while I was there. Then I would go back to the engineering team the next morning, let them know what changes needed to be made, go back to the restaurant and say, hey, because of you, we made these changes. And that was really empowering. And as someone who used to work in restaurants and retail before I fell into tech,
I would have wanted someone to do that for me too. We don't want to leave folks behind in those conversations that are really interacting with the product in a meaningful way. So after that was launched and live, I started our social impact team and our social impact team at Postmates leveraged our existing infrastructure, which was third party food delivery.
in order to build food security products that made a difference for people in the communities in which we lived and worked. So the first product that we built there was called Food Fight. And Food Fight enabled the restaurants we worked with to just press a button and have us pick up all their excess food and take it to local shelters in 800 cities across the US. And my now co -founder and CTO of Liquid Donate, his name is Chai, he was the lead engineer on that. So we have a long working history together in the social impact space as well.
And then the second product we built was called Bento and Bento is still around today. And Bento enabled folks who don't have access to smartphones to text the word hungry to a specific phone number and receive a free meal from the nearest Postmates pickup restaurant. And for that, we won the Time Magazine Invention of the Year award. After that, we were acquired by Uber. And so I was there, like I said, for a few months. And then I decided to leave to start Liquiddonate and was really excited about starting this journey where we're doing a real
expansion of what we were building on at Postmates, but doing it in a way that has a huge impact on the retail sector and on the e -commerce sector and even on landfill diversion. So excited to get more into that as well, but appreciate you giving me some space to share a little bit about how I got here.
Brent Peterson (07:01.134)
That's awesome. I know one of the things that I've experienced in maybe putting on some events is that oftentimes you're traveling or if you're putting on an event in another city, it's hard to know what to do with all the extra food that you have. And we've been lucky to do lots of events in Austin where we just bring the extra food down to a shelter. But I can imagine that there's a lot of opportunities to.
Well, I mean, there's I would think that most people still, unfortunately, probably throw it away. But there are so many opportunities to do something with it. So tell us a little bit about how liquid donate helps somebody. Probably a restaurant owner would be the target. But where they were, how they can easily find a place for that food.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (07:49.913)
Yeah, so when we were working on the food security issue, we were really leaning on the sustainable development goals set forth by the UN and focusing on that zero hunger piece. The zero hunger piece is around 40 % of the food that is usable ends up in the landfill in the US. And that is obviously not an appropriate amount of food to end up in a landfill when it's still considered totally usable. And so a lot of this is a logistics and a matching problem.
And so what we were doing with Food Fight was we were saying, hey, what are the logistical challenges of getting the food that is excess from these restaurants to the place that could actually use them? And a lot of it is travel, transit, time, money, mismatch in hours, availability. Like these types of things are all able to be solved by technology. And so that's what we did there.
Now there are a ton of companies that are out there solving food issues now that are doing food rescue like Copia and Replate. They're really wonderful companies and they are doing great work in the space with food delivery and with food waste. There are already companies tackling that. And so what we decided to do when we were moving outside of the Postmate sphere is we wanted to say, what can we have an impact on that is similar, but even bigger and in a space where no one is really working.
And so that's with liquid donate why we chose to be completely category agnostic. And so everything that we move on our platform comes from a retailer, a brand or a business. And it's something that is still in new or like new condition that still has usable life, but is no longer needed by the person who possesses that item. So that could be the retailer. It could be a customer with a return. It could be short dated product from a CPG retailer that just can't sell the product because it has less than a month of shelf life left.
Even though that best -by date is still just a best -by date and the product is still consumable beyond that So we don't focus on prepared food with liquid donate We focus on everything else the real niche that we found to is oversized inventory So there's a lot of return management softwares that do a good job of matching things like apparel really easily shippable items to the warehouses
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (10:04.153)
And then those warehouse managers are able to help sort those items and get them donated sometimes. Our software helps them donate it even faster and easier. But with our niche, it's really these oversized items. Like what do we do with items that are really difficult to pick up? And so for example, let's think about mattresses and furniture. If you go online and you buy a couch, you're going to have that item most likely delivered to your home.
If that isn't the right fit for your home, for whatever reason, you're going to ask for a refund and you're going to want it gone. In a lot of cases, these companies haven't figured out logistics on how to pick up, let's say a mattress from your home and take it somewhere that is cost effective for them. And so what we've done is that we've built this matching software that's able to say, okay, you want to do this return, set a pickup window for the time that you're available to pick it up. And then our software will automatically schedule a pickup.
from a third party courier service who's able to accommodate the size of this item and deliver it directly to a nonprofit from our database. And so all of that works really seamlessly and it's cheaper for the retailer to do this than it is for them to do anything else. And so we've really focused on this oversized inventory piece because we're really trying to play well in the space and make sure that we're solving a real issue. And because there's so many folks that have tackled food,
we wanted to move into a space that was a little bit untouched. But to answer your original question, what should people do? I would definitely recommend Replate. I would definitely recommend Copia. Those are two great companies and organizations that are doing food rescue. Of course, there's also lots of other amazing local groups like Food Runners is an all volunteer run organization that does a lot of food pickup and distribution. And...
Yeah, I think the nut has been cracked on food donation at this point. We just have to get more people aware of doing it and more people aware of how convenient it is if they just put a little bit of planning into it in advance of the event.
Brent Peterson (12:09.102)
For the goods, and we talked a little bit about the charity that I'm involved with here called Mile in My Shoes. How do you connect with those specific charities and how do you then connect maybe with the broader community?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (12:27.481)
Yeah. So with the nonprofits, they're able to go to our website at liquiddonate .com and then they're able to register their nonprofit. When they go to register their nonprofit on the website, they're going to tell us the types of items that they want to be notified about, as well as the type of quantities that they would like to receive. And then we have two ways for the nonprofits to receive items through us. One is they can automatically opt in to receive returns from us. And that is a really cool feature for folks who have
you know, maybe their nonprofit has a lot of storage, maybe they can accept a variety of different types of items because they serve a number of different populations, or they just don't really want to have to deal with going online and accepting in -kind donations. So that's one way that it can happen is automatically. The second way is that if these folks are not interested in having those items just show up and they would like to be a little bit more selective about what the items are.
they can actually shop our marketplace. So once they register, they'll get a notification email every morning with what's available in their area. And they can decide to check out just like any other e -commerce customer, except the items are all free. So with any nonprofit that wants to register and sign up for the flow, they can do it one of those two ways. And they could also opt in for both. But the point is to really make sure that we're giving our nonprofit partners choice. It's something that...
As someone who's volunteered a lot in the community, I'm a weekly volunteer here in Oakland where I live preparing and distributing 300 meals for the unhoused. Like getting donations of product that are not actually helpful for the organization is something that we've experienced before. And while it's all in good faith, we just wanted to really build a product that focuses on giving retailers or I'm sorry, giving nonprofits choice because that's something that kind of gets lost.
in the situation when people are trying to do good, we want to make sure that we're also making sure that these are not creating any undue burden to the nonprofit.
Brent Peterson (14:33.102)
Have you found, or you must have a lot of data now, is there particular places or things that are needed a lot compared to some things that aren't needed?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (14:43.577)
Yes, absolutely. So anytime we get consumer packaged goods, which is a CPG as the abbreviation I said earlier, anything that is packaged food product is always really, really popular on our platform because it's perfect for a lot of different organizations. So for retailers and brands that are creating products that are packaged,
that maybe have a longer shelf life, they're non -perishable to a degree, like those types of products are really great because they can go to schools for their school pantries, they can go to nonprofits who are giving them out at the end of a foot race. Like there's just so many options that those types of products can be used for distribution. And then the second category is furniture. So we get a lot of furniture donated through our awesome partners, for example, like Room and Board.
is one of our national donation partners. And to just see that somebody who has maybe been experiencing a difficult time in life for, you know, years to see them get their first apartment and have it furnished with furniture from room and board that was all donated. It's super high quality furniture that is going to last a long time and really provides a lot of dignity and respect for these folks to step into this new life that they have. And
So yeah, furniture has been amazing. Consumer packaged goods are also really high value. And then the third category I'll mention is shoes. Getting nice shoes donated that are in new and like new condition can be game changing for folks. Something that as you grow, your feet continue to change size. It's not something that you can really do a one and done. And so that's also been something really, really popular and helpful on our platform when we receive donations of.
apparel but particularly shoes.
Brent Peterson (16:37.134)
You answered my question about national to local. How do you ensure that that national brand is getting to the place where it needs to go?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (16:48.505)
Yeah, so our software is a matching algorithm and that matching algorithm takes a number of things into account when determining which organization is the best fit for that retailer's product. Number one, our product exists because we save retailers at least 50 % on their reverse logistics cost. So what we do is when a customer has a return at their home that they'd like to make, we instantly match that product with the nearest nonprofit that wants it.
And we instantly produce a shipping label for that customer for a nonprofit that's usually within 20 to 25 miles of their home. And so now that item, let's say it is a pair of shoes, is going to a local nonprofit that needs that item. The customer, maybe they know, maybe they don't. It depends on the retailer and how particular they are about reading the shipping label. And now that retailer no longer incurs any additional cost.
they saved 50 % on the shipping label because instead of shipping those shoes from, let's say California to New Jersey, they're paying less on the shipping label because it's shipping locally from that customer's home. And they're now eliminating any fees that they would pay at the warehouse. Warehouse fees are usually per item based. And so for every single item that ends up at the warehouse, even if they know that they're going to landfill that product because 80 % of returns end up in the landfill,
they're still processing it and paying more money for that product. And so it just does not make sense to even send it back to the warehouse. So we cut it off before it even gets there.
Brent Peterson (18:22.542)
I know that rural and urban are two different things. Is there a difference in how products get to say rural communities compared to urban communities?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (18:37.721)
So because of the shipping networks that have been created for e -commerce, it's pretty much the same today. There are delays, like things will take longer to get to more rural communities, but with nonprofits, that's one benefit we have on the demand side is that speed is not necessarily the number one factor when it comes to serving populations that are served by nonprofits. So while a customer may say, hey, I am not willing to wait three days for my new dress to arrive,
because they've been trained by Amazon and others that they can receive products the same or the next day. Non -profits don't necessarily have that same requirement. And so the little bit of time that it may take to get there is more beneficial to them and getting that product for free than to have spent money on that product and receiving it maybe 24 hours faster.
Brent Peterson (19:33.07)
We spend our winters in Hawaii and I've definitely noticed a lot of homeless that are there and shoes are something that people need. How do you let, like how would somebody go about getting it to the right person other than, I guess is the easiest way going through a charity that's local and then that charity be responsible for reaching out to the people that need, that have those needs?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (19:59.993)
Exactly. Yeah. So the way that we've made the process more seamless and also more streamlined is that we work directly with the nonprofit organizations that serve different populations. So, for example, we have a number of nonprofits that are in Hawaii. And so in Hawaii, they would be able to register their nonprofit. And then the folks who need services would would likely be going to these nonprofits to receive those services. And so they would go and say, hey, I need.
shoes or I need whatever it is that I need. And then that nonprofit would be able to go onto our marketplace and actually see if those items are available and then order them for free. We have a number of retailers, brands and businesses that are donating on the different islands in Hawaii. And so that would be a totally fine use case for the product as well, where we would keep those products around that local community. The other really interesting thing is,
We've seen a really, we were a first of its kind product. And with that, we've learned a lot and had a lot of different people approach us. And one of the organizations or companies that has approached us that has been really fascinating are cruise ships. So there's a lot of cruise ships that dock in Hawaii and on other islands, of course. And what do they do with all of the slightly damaged furniture on these ships? Today, they pull into a port and they throw it out.
a lot of the time. And so what if there was a way that we could use our software to actually know that, hey, this ship is coming into port at this time. They have 20 green chairs that they have slight scratches or they're maybe a little outdated for the ship and they need to take them off the ship. What if we could have a nonprofit there waiting in order to accept those items versus having them go to a landfill or having them go to a storage unit on the ship?
which obviously adds more weight to the ship, which draws more gas, so an environmental play as well. So a lot of cool iterations of our technology to come over the years, but today we're starting with anything that can be picked up, shipped or delivered.
Brent Peterson (22:13.07)
I want to flip things around a little bit. Do you have an opportunity for people to find nonprofits in their local area for possible volunteer opportunities? Like if somebody's in room and board happens to be located in Minnesota, like if there's a nonprofit that you want to support that's local, but you also want to support your local, or there's a company that's local, you want to support a local nonprofit, is there opportunities?
to see who's there in that region and you could also be kind of that connector. I know that's not your business model, but there's an opportunity there.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (22:49.209)
Yes. Based on the team that we have, we all are very well connected to the communities that we live in and in some of the communities where we have organizations and companies because we are a fully remote team. And at our previous company, when a lot of us were at Postmates together, we...
ran or organized part of the volunteer program there as well. So if anyone ever has any questions around volunteering or donating or spending time or money somewhere, you can email us at support at liquiddonate .com and one of us will email you back with a great option on where to spend your time, your money, volunteer hours, donate your products, those types of things. We all are very invested.
in making sure that the community has equitable access to products and services, which is one of the ways that we're doing that is by building this technology. So right, like you said, not our business model, but always happy to help because we do it too.
Brent Peterson (23:54.894)
That's awesome. What is your biggest goal for your company now? Is your goal to get more charity involved? Is your goal to ship more product without having to come back to the source? What is the underlying goal?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (24:11.897)
Yeah, so any nonprofit or school can register on the site. And today we have over 3 ,700 nonprofits and schools that are using our services today. And so it's free to join. Everything on the site is free for nonprofits and schools. If they can pick the product up, there's no additional fee. If they'd like to have it shipped or delivered, then the nonprofit eats some of that fee as well. And our goal here is to have enough supply.
Enough retailers that have products that are being donated on a regular basis that nonprofits that want to receive product every day are able to receive product every day. That is useful to their mission. There's a trillion dollar deficit in need on the nonprofit side. And if we're able to take the, just the return sector alone of what ends up being returned in landfill, that's $813 billion every year. We wouldn't fill the trillion dollar gap.
that is there today, but we would get close. And so our goal is to make sure that, like, is to get as close as possible to making sure that nonprofits are having their needs met so that these items that are already in existence and still in new and like new condition can just be matched with the people who need them versus having to create a new product. One of the other goals we have is around, we want to like be responsible for a landfill closing. So that's something that's really exciting for us is to know like, hey, like,
they didn't need this landfill anymore because we diverted so much waste from going to the landfill in the first place that it didn't make sense anymore. So yeah, meeting the need, the trillion dollar need is definitely our number one goal as a company.
Brent Peterson (25:55.15)
Um, okay, so I'm going to ask kind of a weird question, but Disney, if you were, if you were super frustrated or angry about something that you're solving, what is that number one thing right now that is really just driving you to do the next thing?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (26:06.169)
Hahaha.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (26:10.297)
Uh, so there's the thing that is the most frustrating is at larger companies, the executive teams are sometimes disconnected from the work that the warehouse managers are doing on a daily basis. And so when we have a conversation with a larger retailer and we say, Hey, historically, the national average is 80 % of returns are ending up in the landfill.
We have built software that will instantly match the item from your customer's home to the nearest nonprofit, saving you at least 50 % on your reverse logistics costs. And they say, we don't have this problem. And that is the most frustrating part because just because there are folks who may not necessarily be seeing the problem in person, it doesn't mean that that problem doesn't exist. And I think that when we get the warehouse managers on the phone,
They're like, oh my God, I cannot wait to get this stuff out of my warehouse and prevent it from building up again. Like this is what we've been looking for. I love this. And so it's just like, that's frustrating that there's like such a disconnect between a lot of times the executive team at a large retailer and then the reality of the person on the ground at the warehouse or even the person handling in -store returns at the counter of these physical stores. Like you could go to any,
almost any big box retailer and ask the person at the counter what they're gonna do with their returns and they say, oh, we put them in the trash. But sometimes the executives will disagree with that statement. And so that disconnect is something that's very frustrating and we are working to lessen it as time goes on.
Brent Peterson (27:57.326)
Yeah, I can, I can definitely empathize with that statement of the disconnect between management or especially executive management and what's actually happening on the ground. And, and maybe the CFO kind of knows it, but a lot of times it's just rolled up into a bottom line of a loss or write off and nobody actually knows or cares or digs into whatever that thing is. And that is such a great, that's such an important thing to
try to get through to in an educational standpoint to those people. So we have a few minutes left. I want to ask two questions. First is, what is your predictions now for 2024? How do you think the, let's call it the donation market or the volunteering market or the nonprofit? I know that in over, you know, the pandemic, a lot of times they were hurting a little bit, but.
It seems like things are coming back now. What do you think is happening now in terms of how people are giving?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (28:54.553)
Yeah.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (29:02.073)
I think that people are continuing to give what they can. The people who have been giving have always given what they can and people who are interested in giving for the first time have a lot of resources on where to give and how to give. And I think that that's great that the giving space has grown. We are a builder of the Pledge 1 % movement. Pledge 1 % asks companies to donate 1 % of their company time product.
equity and or profit to nonprofits. And so what we've done with liquid donate is that we've set aside 1 % of our company equity so that when we have a liquidity event, that 1 % will turn into cash that we'll be able to use to grant out to nonprofits. And the growth that we've seen in the Pledge 1 % movement, I think is indicative of how people are thinking about the social impact space and giving back.
uh, on a company level. Nonprofits are continuing to have needs and they will always continue to have needs because as soon as one need is met, another arises. I mean, if you think about what's going on in the world and what's going on, even in the U S with the, um, the Baltimore Francis Scott Key bridge collapse, like that was an unexpected accident that occurred. And now there are people who,
need access to goods that they didn't need two weeks ago. These types of things are going to always happen and change as natural disasters and human disasters occur. So we might my prediction is that things will continue to be needed. And the better we can get at matching those needs with the supply of things that already exist, whether it's capital, whether it's physical goods.
it doesn't make a difference. That matching just has to get smarter so that we can move things faster, so that we can help meet the needs where people are at.
Brent Peterson (31:07.854)
I think we could probably keep talking about this forever, but I'll try to make a last question. Sorry, this is super interesting to me. Is it more difficult for an organization to just take money or to take stuff? And I only say that, or figuring out how to get their team to...
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (31:16.281)
Yeah, no worries.
Brent Peterson (31:29.742)
go beyond just the money part of it. And I say that, like one thing that as part of the 1 % is asking for volunteers to do something, but maybe there's not a skillset within that organization to know how to do that something or even more important, how to manage that something. So I think in your case, getting those products to the right people, but.
within that organization, is there always a challenge to make sure that there's a skill set that allows for that organization to sort of get beyond to the point where a single or a small team can do it, but a larger team would have to take care of it?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (32:13.945)
So I think it's important, I mean, and I regret that I'm saying this so late in the podcast, but it's important to start out by saying that nonprofits and businesses are not a monolith, right? And so what works for some nonprofits isn't going to work for all nonprofits. So I'll cage my answer in that. When I'm thinking about what nonprofits are able to accomplish with a small team, they have to accomplish things with a small team.
Uh, most nonprofits don't have the luxury of having large teams and being able to do more with less is kind of the name of the game. Do I think that's appropriate? No, not on a personal level, but at the same time it is the world that we live in today. And so thinking about it realistically.
cash dollars in unrestricted grants is always going to be the best thing for most nonprofits. Most nonprofits would like unrestricted capital so that they can meet their mission, pay their workers, do what they need to do in order to solve the problem that they're set out to solve. And so cash donations are always something that the nonprofits that I've worked with, and obviously I haven't worked with all of them, have said that needs to continue no matter what. And...
I think that's very true. It's a very similar thing to raising capital from venture capitalists for tech startups, right? It's like, we need money to keep going so that we can prove out our vision and nonprofits need the same thing, except they might not have any revenue streams. And so they're fully relying on donor dollars to make a difference here. And what our aim is with liquid donate is to make sure that every product has a second life. And so we don't see.
these physical goods being replacements for the donor dollars that are going into these organizations, but rather a supplement and something that maybe they would be able to use a donation of a nice desk from room and board for their office so that now they don't have to spend donor dollars and that capital on buying a desk for their office. So we see this as a supplement and not necessarily a replacement for the cash that people should continue to donate if they have the means to do so.
Brent Peterson (34:30.702)
That's great. So Disney, as I close out the podcast, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything you'd like. What would you like to plug today?
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (34:42.297)
Yeah. So my shameless plug is always around unrestricted grants to nonprofits. I just mentioned it, but unrestricted grants to nonprofits are the bee's knees. If you are considering doing a philanthropic donation of cash to a nonprofit organization, please consider doing it unrestricted because it's really important that the people who are working at these places doing this life -changing work have access to spend the money the way that they.
see fit because they're the ones working in these organizations day in and day out. And so while it might be really important to you to feel that you directly impacted the lives of X amount of people or animals or whatever the organization's cause is, it's also important to make sure that the people who are doing the work are given the autonomy and the dignity to make decisions on their behalf in a very similar way that we do with businesses and corporations. And so that's my shameless plug is unrestricted grants all the way.
Brent Peterson (35:40.654)
That's awesome. Thank you. I normally don't give a shameless plug, but I know we talked about my volunteer organization is called Mile in My Shoes and it helps people coming out of prison, coming out of out of homelessness, an addiction to get back on their feet and it's done through movement. So we meet two to three times a week and we just run. And I believe in the fur of.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (36:06.329)
I love it.
Brent Peterson (36:07.598)
running, but more importantly, it's about community and how you get to speak to somebody in a way that you wouldn't get to with all the life's distractions. And I say especially if you're not sitting there on your phone or you're one -on -one with somebody for 30 minutes to sometimes four hours. So I'm...
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (36:31.993)
Yeah, I was like that 30 minutes is like maybe a mile for me. So.
Brent Peterson (36:34.606)
Yeah, whatever we can walk to. So I normally don't do a shameless plug, but I'm doing one today. Anyways, I see that my next guest has showed up a little bit early, but that's fine. Disney, it's been such a pleasure to speak to you today. I know we planned on 20 minutes and we've gone a little bit over, so I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. All right. Bye.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (36:49.881)
All good.
Diz Petit @ LiquiDonate (37:00.569)
All good. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much for the opportunity and we'll talk soon.