GoFundMe CEO: economy is so bad his customers crowdfund to pay for groceries
54 comments
·October 19, 2025digitalengineer
masklinn
He already did that back in 2021: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2021/02/11/gofu...
He might have given up on the country at this point.
janwl
He hopes for what benefits him. Would you rather see him lie and say he hopes people wouldn’t use his platform to pay for groceries?
newsclues
The communication strategy should be to publicly hope for a thriving economy so people aren’t relying on the services for groceries but he is proud and thankful that GoFundme is there to help out in these difficult times…
rat9988
What have you done yourself here about it? For myself, nothing.
63stack
Oh get the fuck out with that.
Not writing disingenuous feelgood bullshit, pretending that I work for some kind of greater good, while actually I'm pushing my own company, and trying to shift burden onto the "young digital natives". For a start.
rcbdev
I don't know about the United States of America, but in my country it's very common to do volunteer work.
andirk
CNBC told me the economy is doing great. My neighbor is borrowing money from me. My friend is borrowing money from me. GoFundMe is becoming more for basic needs. Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason. According to every metric BUT stonks, the economy is holding on by a thread.
concinds
> Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason.
For food, this was caused by supply shocks. First COVID, then Ukraine, now tariffs and the trade war. And on top of that, excessive price-setting power in some highly concentrated sectors of the food industry.
For housing, this was caused by a supply shortage, i.e. bad housing policy. A housing shortage gives property owners price-setting power, which allows them to keep raising the price. However, while we've made it very easy for owners to profit, we've made it harder for developers, feeding the shortage.
For healthcare, we decided to let many middle-men profit. A decent portion of spending could be cut without harming pharmaceutical innovation or new drug development.
These problems all have causes, and the cause is bad policy that benefits a minority while harming the country.
uniqueuid
It is immensely frustrating to me that to this day, after a solid century of advances in sciences and mathematical literacy, we are still implicitly stuck in the mental model of averages.
Reality is fucking far away from averages and we know it. "The economy is doing great/terrible" is an almost worthless indicator unless the person you're talking about actually has business relations into every corner.
Yes, there are interdependencies, but they do not justify that we pretend numbers are so expensive we can only print two of them (mean, sd) at a time. Let's finally stop drinking information through a 2 mile straw and instead show high resolution 2d data at least.
[edit] this is of course not a criticism of parent or OP, it's a systemic problem that we all are guilty of.
libraryofbabel
I agree with all of this. Many is time I've had to tell developers I work with: "don't just look at the mean/median, look at a graph of the full distribution!... then slice your distribution a lot of different ways by all the tags/facets you have and look again at the slices." Often you find that a shift in the mean or median was driven by one particular class of data points that skewed the whole thing. (Looking at you, NVDA.) This is usually a little lecture I give in the context of performance engineering, where it's api response times or whatever, but it applies everywhere.
At the same time - and I think you agree with this and it's probably implicit in your comment - we have to beware of anecdata as well. "Two of my friends asked me for money" means very little, except that your friend group is having a rough time. The meso-scale, your "high resolution 2d data", is where to look if you want a textured picture of what's really going on while at the same time avoiding observer bias. Unfortunately, that kind of data is not always easy to get, or to interpret.
newsclues
I wonder who will be blamed for the reckless spending that resulted in this inflation.
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izacus
Just before elections the democrat/left US reporters were persuading me that US is doing fine on all metrics and that people's vibes are wrong.
It was utterly bizzare seeing the podcasters and media just gaslight everyone that disagreed with "US is doing great" narrative.
pavlov
All the metrics (except AI-related stock prices) are worse today than a year ago.
Does the media acknowledge that? The leading cable channel and broadcast TV stations are Republican-controlled, so now they pretend “US is doing great.”
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izacus
I'm talking about couple of years ago, in the leadup to elections.
fabian2k
Not going to defend the messaging here, they really didn't do a good job. But the US was doing better than most western countries and inflation was getting lower.
Problem is, the inflation that already happened was still there. And that part is what people notice immediately.
But right now, a part of what is happening is that Trump has been blowing up parts of the economy with his tarrifs and erratic actions. The effect of that is still happening and likely will get worse.
throwaway48476
Over the last 30 years the most inflated spending category is education and healthcare, which are arguably the least import dependent.
izacus
Yes, that's exactly the gaslighting I'm talking about :)
netsharc
No reason? Was it Covid, or the Ukraine war? The pandemic ground the gears, there was government help but I wonder what after-effects the flood of liquidity had, did too many people end up in the Ponzi schemes (Gamespot, trading cards, Bitcoin et al)?
The war caused energy prices to go crazy, Europe needed gas and was willing to pay a premium, and the laws of supply and demand meant the price went up for everyone.
I used to live in a country where the government subsidized the price of oil (including petrol). When they needed to cut that subsidy, people knew the price of oil would go up, and that affected the price of everything else, my reasoning was because all the trucks transporting goods needed petrol, but it's probably because everything needs energy to accomplish..
watwut
I dont think Covid or Russian invasion into Ukraine can explain price movements last two years. Covid happened years ago and Russian invasion started years ago.
FirmwareBurner
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greffel
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OuterVale
Life imitates art.
GoFundMe CEO: We Could Use A Few Fun Ones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIsXEkR5OVs
kpmcc
There is a method for dealing with widespread inequality coinciding with generational wealth transfer, it’s called taxation. Tax transfers of wealth. It’s not complicated and doesn’t rely on the goodwill of ‘values-driven, digitally native, and community oriented’ young people.
We have a system designed to incentivize greed. Gross inequality is the result. Taxation is one viable method to deal with such a failure mode.
throwaway48476
Wage suppression has had a far bigger impact. Governments have lots of policies to prevent the 'wage price spiral' because they don't want the real dollar term asset distribution to change.
aborsy
This method has problems too. There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience, overall is not doing well.
lenkite
> There are more beggars in EU than in other countries in my experience,
Are there really more beggars and homeless in the EU compared to the US ? Admittedly, my anecdotal viewpoint is only that of a visitor, but having been to both, it seemed US cities had a far more severe problem.
The first time it was a bit of a shock to me - the US had this patina of glory that crumbled for me after my first visit.
neuronic
Uh yea, thats because we tax everyone to hell EXCEPT the rich. Wealth inequality is a serious problem and we are moving to catastrophe sooner rather than later on the current path.
It's obvious why the ultra-rich are building bunkers and hide-outs. Those are of course scams by the building companies, as they give a false sense of security, but the idea of what is REALLY going on is obviously out there.
mvdwoord
It's a method, for sure, but not a fail-safe one nor the only one. There seems to be an active experiment going on in the UK right now.
bargainbin
Care to elaborate a bit on the UK comment, because it’s not clear what you mean or if you even live here?
The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax.
All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less than me.
The whole system is broken because they refuse to tax the wealthy at an equivalent rate to the working class.
aydyn
How can you be poorer than people earning less than you? Thats not how progressive tax works. Am I misunderstanding something or is UK that messed up or something?
drittel
Today on HN: Solve all your money troubles with THEFT!
Your victims are "greedy" and deserve it!
rimbo789
If the “victim” is a large corporation is almost certainly does
drittel
It's ok, just be honest about it. Don't act as if it's a virtue.
Yeah, when the old lady next door croaks, you can steal half of her stuff. It doesn't make you a good person.
Endorsing armed government thugs to take 50% of her estate doesn't fundamentally change the scenario. You're still an awful person. Inheritance tax is a horrible thing to wish upon your compatriots.
greffel
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HPsquared
Rent is too damn high.
integricho
At the same time millionairs and billionairs are doing just great.
BartjeD
Buying gold and silver to get through the inevitable stock bubble pop is out of reach for normal people with normal wages and savings.
Houses and stocks got cheaper per ounce of gold last 20 years. But in terms of dollars they got way more expensive... inflation has been robbing us for more than 2 decades.
fzeroracer
By most metrics we're in a recession as many of our state economies are crashing due to the psychotic tariff policy and economic decisions by the current admin. Some places are temporarily avoiding the fallout because the ramifications of breaking our ability to manufacture and import stuff is going to take months to fully hit and the rest of our economy is propped up by AI psychosis.
With the job market being the shittiest I've seen and more ladders being kicked out than ever I think this crash will end up being possibly one of the most violent ones. We might see a return to the early 1900s era of union vs corporate violence as corporations have gotten more brazen than ever to try and stop any sort of concerted effort by labor.
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oldpersonintx2
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onetokeoverthe
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peter-m80
Capitalism
nxm
Still better than the alternatives
BartjeD
Doing Capitalism better means preventing market failures and accepting more state intervention... which i suppose the trump / republican government is doing.
Free market Capitalism is dead in the USA, winners are getting picked. Coal over solar. Who knows, perhaps it's right, but I suspect not.
“The GoFundMe CEO hopes younger donors, who are often more values-driven, digitally native, and community-oriented, will push giving higher and faster.” I can’t believe it. THIS is what he hopes for? He is not stating he hopes his country can get out of this mess? Or researching what his company can do? He’s just looking after his cut.