Following last night’s GrepBeat Happy Hour sponsored by Qodeo at Bull McCabe’s, the GrepBeat crew returned this afternoon to discuss everything going on in the tech world.
Our featured guest today is Amy Gardinier, who is the co-founder of Givefinity. It’s a Holly Springs-based startup that offers a volunteer tracking mobile app making it easy for anyone to give back and be the change in their community. Prior to her current role, Amy worked as a special events coordinator for JDRF International. [We first profiled Givefinity in March.]
Here are some highlights:
- Pete, Joe and Jackie talked about the evolving situation regarding Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk. He sent out an email Wednesday morning to all Twitter employees, issuing an ultimatum. Employees either had to commit to a ‘hardcore’ Twitter by replying back “yes” by 5 p.m. yesterday, or hit the road with a three-month severance package.
- Pete talked about attending a few local tech events this past week: NC IDEA’s NC Ecoystem Summit in Winston-Salem and Duke I&E’s VCs in the Hot Seat. The trio briefly discussed the crypto exchange FTX as well as Pete’s 26-minute daily naps he takes in one of the GrepBeat meeting rooms. (Pete says he thinks he is cutting them down to 20 minutes.)
- A conversation at the dinner table sparked the idea for Givefinity. One of Amy’s daughters was a Key Club member in high school, who described how inconvenient it was to manually track her volunteer hours and chase down required signatures from volunteer organizers. To address this problem and with the hopes of creating a more generous world, Amy and her husband, Kenton, launched Givefinity in 2021.
- Other than the free app, the company offers schools and nonprofit organizations—for a subscription fee—an enterprise dashboard to help track the student volunteer process. Amy talks about the benefits of volunteering and their traction with private schools and nonprofits who work specifically with teens.
You can watch the full episode on LinkedIn here, or on Facebook here.
Or on YouTube:
Auditory learners can listen (and subscribe to!) the podcast version:
