Software caused massive damage through scaling at break-neck speeds to get better returns for investors, and stockholders. That stops with us. We are not here to get rich off of the data of our users, or irresponsibly scale a product to get better vanity metrics. Software is our tool to create change first and foremost.
We serve our users first. Being able to help people with some of the hardest issues of their lives is a privilege, not an earned spot. Our users need to trust us for us to help them, and we won't do anything to harm that trust.
Software and the penetration rates of technology and the internet at large have enabled unprecedented access to tools, resources, information, and services. We take advantage of that accessibility and flexibility to provide tools for the issues people are facing, with no strings attached.
Whatever we create, we take a "bottoms-up" approach: we help the most at-risk and under-served populations first, and hit the broader markets and areas last. As a non-profit, we have the flexibility to go into the places where no one else can because it's unprofitable. Those people need our help and have been ignored the most, so they get served first.
We are here for a long time, and we act like it. We never take short-cuts to quickly scale. We build and scale slow, and we do it right the first time around. Helping people is a long, slow, and pain-staking process. Optimizing for short-term gain at the expense of long-term vision is failing.
We allocate resources to the biggest and most urgent issues we see first, and we go from there. Although we work in niche areas, we engineer solutions are used in a broad number of areas to have the most impact.
Many things are upsetting and wrong within the world. But no politician, organization, or person will come to fix it all. If we see something that needs change, we are the ones who initiate that change. We have to push to make that change by ourselves, as an organization, and through the things we build. We don't wait for change from others, we push for it ourselves.
The goal we've given ourselves is monumental. We as an organization cannot do it by ourselves. We work with other companies, organizations, people, and anyone else we can find to spread the work around as far as we can. The more people involved, the closer we are to achieving our mission. Change on a massive scale comes from massive amounts of people. We have a role in that change, and we need to empower others to do their part, and pay it forward whenever we can.
We do not build these products to fill a gap in the market, because of pity, or to make our resumes look better. We build these products because we love the people around us - because we have seen how they can suffer, and want to do what we can to make the change they need.