Family Business Audiocast | Episode 38 | Robbie | Heeger

Available to Listen Now On: Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, iHeart, YouTube

New Episodes Live: Subscribe to receive exclusive invitations to upcoming episodes of the Family Business Audiocast. Join us as we explore the pivotal strategies and stories behind successful family enterprises. Click to Follow on LinkedIn.

—————————————————

About Our Guest:

Robbie Heeger is a self-taught software engineer and founder of Endaoment, the first nonprofit community foundation fully powered by blockchain technology. He began his career at Apple’s Media Products division before shifting focus in 2018 to impact-driven, on-chain applications. Noticing a gap in charitable tools for digital assets, Heeger created Endaoment.org—an innovative DAF (Donor-Advised Fund) platform that accepts both traditional and digital assets. With a modern interface and deep expertise in complex donations, Endaoment is built to serve the next generation of philanthropic families, individuals, and organizations.

—————————————————

[Transcript]

R. Adam Smith: [Intro] Welcome to the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn. I am R. Adam Smith, creator of this audiocast series. As an entrepreneur, investor, founder, investment banker, and board leader the last 25 years, I'm fortunate for my many experiences within the

family firm industry.

A warm thank you to our live audience on LinkedIn today — and for those listening in the future. A brief comment on why I created this broadcast: private companies are a passion of mine having grown up in a family of entrepreneurs and having engaged for two decades in deals, strategic transformations, investments, and boards with an array of fascinating family enterprises, family firms, and family offices. I founded this series to offer a useful platform for listeners to hear from veterans, academics, and leaders in the vast family firm ecosystem. Whether you're a family business owner, building, running, or advising a family office, or just expanding your me office activities, I hope these conversations are useful and enlightening. And now it's time to turn our attention to our accomplished guests on today's episode.

[1:00] I'm very pleased to host Robbie Heeger as the founder and CEO of Endaoment. Robbie, it's great to have you here today with me.

Robbie Heeger: It's great to be here, and nice to spend some time talking about Endaoment together, Adam.

R. Adam Smith: Definitely. It's a great company. I'm excited to share more about it today and, really talk about the evolution of the space of philanthropy as well as the DAF structure and your company as well, and really being at the cutting edge of philanthropic solutions, for institutions and non-institutions alike. So, a bit on Robbie first.

Robbie is a visionary leader and the president, CEO, as I mentioned, of Endaoment, which is revolutionary revolutionizing philanthropy. It is the 1st blockchain-powered community foundation. We'll talk more about what that means. Robbie is a self-taught software engineer and leveraging this experience, to create a transformative platform founded [2:00] several years ago that allows crypto holders and others to make tax efficient impactful donations to nonprofits. Under his leadership, Endaoment has emerged as a trailblazer in crypto philanthropy, enabling innovative solutions for wealth management and charitable giving.

Robbie has a background in media and technology and a passion for creating equitable systems. And so his work bridges the gap between cutting edge technology and traditional philanthropy, setting a new standard for transparency, accessibility, and social impact in today's digital age. That sounds good. We're delighted to have you today. I guess first, the founding of the company and how that happened.

Robbie Heeger: Well, first off, thanks so much for having me here, Adam. And, you know, I think this is an even more impactful and important conversation after the week that we've just had [3:00] and the last 2 weeks that we've just had with the wildfires down in Southern California. And just thinking of friends and family out there who are affected and I just want to, you know, thank everybody for taking a little bit of their time this week to think about impact. I think, often times, impact is sort of the farther down the stack in the list of priorities. And it was that way for me as well, and it was only through learning about the tax benefits, and the flexibility of a donor advised fund that I really got involved in, what wound up being a backdoor to a real source of meaning and purpose for me, not only in my career, but in my personal life as well.

I think giving is like one of the happiest and most fulfilling things you can do as a person and really, [4:00] my story begins with just wanting to be tax efficient. I come from a family where I have one brother, and he's a CPA, and he is normally the guy who is helping me with my taxes because, you know, when you got somebody in the family, you got somebody to pick up the phone to talk to. And this was in 2019, we were talking on the phone, and he was asking me about the digital assets that I had been holding, that I had invested in, the cryptocurrencies that I had invested in a few years before that. And he was like, “Are you going to give those away?” And I was like — I was thinking about it — but I don't know anybody who takes these digital assets, and at the time, I had been in the habit of using a donor advised fund, which is, basically like a charitable checking account. [5:00] It's like a little private family foundation, in a box, without all the overhead and the board members and the governance.

You're basically trusting a community foundation, another 501c3 tax exempt organization to administer, like the micro family foundation for your personal charitable giving. And I was doing that at the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund, and me and my brother were actually doing a donor advised fund together, where we would give stocks, you know, like we had been doing some investing, and we would make some, you know, gains on a particular position and give that stock. Instead of selling it and giving the cash, we would give that stock to the donor advised fund. In that way, you don't actually incur the gain of selling the asset. You just donate the thing and get the whole donation.

And so I was [6:00] used to that with stocks, but then I started having more holdings in in digital assets and there was a gap in what was available. You couldn't really give the long tail of digital assets, and there really wasn't a single donor advised fund that was trying to be this kind of ultimate giving machine.

R. Adam Smith: And, so, you saw a hole in the market. Also, you saw where the market was going, the philanthropy was expanding, and especially for the high net worth and family office market.

Robbie Heeger: I think, it's classically been something that is just for high net worth and family office individuals, you know, people who meet that market. But increasingly, we're seeing DAFs play a role at even smaller sizes and especially with younger professionals earlier in their career when they're getting equity as a part of their compensation package. And, so, I think it's a great bridge into the world of wealth management. It is like [7:00] a really pure first experience for somebody who either has a windfall financial gain, or maybe is set to inherit wealth, or is starting to inherit wealth, or, even is starting to make their own wealth independently, you know. It's a way for them to sort of mitigate their taxes without going into the deep end of charitable remainder trusts, or charitable lead trusts, or family foundations, or any of these more complicated structures that family offices and financial advisors leverage all the time, but, you know, tend to be further down the priority stack. So this is a good, like, entry point, I think, for a lot of people into this: How do I give back with the gains that I'm making in my personal finances?

R. Adam Smith: Okay. So, yeah, in fact, donor advised funds have become a cornerstone of a lot of slam, philanthropic strategies [8:00] because they are more more flexible, and they have certain tax advantages. Just talk a little bit more about that professional journey of yours in in, like, deciding the DAF structure. And then, how does the DAF structure relate to the next gen? Because a lot of the things we talk about on the on this podcast are next gen, increasingly related to their lives, both in terms of their wealth flows, but also their passions.

Robbie Heeger: Yeah, my professional journey was super, serendipitous, just kind of like, a product of my upbringing and just being, you know, in an environment in the right place in the right time to see the status quo change as I was getting educated. So I was, in college around [9:00] 2010 and learning about, like, broadcast media, journalism, communications. I was really into this idea of, like, how do we leverage technology to have a better informed populace? How do we use technology to disseminate knowledge farther and wider than we have in the past?

And that led me to an internship at Apple in their media products division. So, you know, iTunes, the App Store, Apple Music, Books, TV, podcasts. Really anything digital content on an Apple device was all powered by a group of teams spread out across the world that were curating all of the new media that was coming into existence in a 155 different markets. And they all use this one piece of technology that was pretty expansive and gnarly, so to speak. And it was our team's job to help teach [10:00] them on how to curate and how to leverage the capabilities of the software to help them tell a story with what new media was entering the market. And I did that for, like, 7 years, and it was an amazing like, just the most amazing first job that I could have had out of college. I consider myself very, very lucky to have spent the time that I spent at Apple.

But also, like, when you see things happening at scale and you see the impact that scaled technologies can have, you start to think about, you know, what is the root motivation of this technology? And in the case of Apple's media products, it's to, like, advance the culture. And I was looking more for — at that time, I sort of got a little burnt out on advancing the culture, and wanted to do more work of consequence, more impact focused work, and work where it felt like, [11:00] you know, I was a little bit closer to the ground floor. And that was what led me to take a little break, sort of, step away from Apple at the end of 2018.

Then, as I was becoming more and more interested in the technologies that collectively are called the blockchain, or distributed ledger technologies, or Bitcoin, or smart contracts, web 3, whatever you wanna call it, whatever buzzword you want to affiliate with Bitcoin and all of its friends. I was getting more and more into that and learning how to code as a part of my personal growth story. And then this opportunity or, like, the gap that we were talking about earlier, Adam, where there was this hole in the market, where there was nobody who could take digital assets as charitable gifts.

I was like, oh, you know, like, [12:00] there's work of consequence that can scale, that is geared towards a newer, younger investor class, that has a broader mix of assets in their portfolio. And, you know, when we talk about, like, the great wealth migration that's happening over the next 30 years from boomers to Gen X and Gen Y and Gen Z, you know. Those investors, or those individuals, are finding their identity both as investors, and as professionals, and as societal participants, and in general, they skew to be very impact oriented. The stats on millennials and Gen Z individuals is that they give much more frequently than the general population, and they give at larger amounts.

And I think that's, like, a really exciting, very hopeful version [13:00] of the future that I want to try and catalyze. And that was sort of the motivation for starting Endaoment. It was like, how do we get better at making impact a part of an investor's story from the very earliest days when they're just starting to make capital for the first time, before they wind up in situations where they're making a huge windfalls and have to try and figure out what to do with it for the first time, they’ll already have a history of giving. And I think, you know, bringing them modern solutions for that giving is a really powerful and exciting high growth area for not only Fintech, but also philanthropy and donor advised funds in general.

R. Adam Smith: Yes. I agree with that. We know the market is huge. Statistics I see about the size of the crypto market are varied, somewhere between, [14:00] you know, five and ten billion dollars in the US. But, certainly, looking at some of the stats that's statistical on Forbes and McKinsey, we're looking at, at least, you know, 15, 20% CAGR growth and probably more than that in the current market with the current administration, etc.

So we're witnessing this massive shift in wealth, not just generationally, but also towards alternative asset classes. We talk a lot about alternative assets classes on the podcast, and, of course, I'm in the family office and alternative investment industry, so I'm seeing this massive growth, including crypto. So, these blockchain powered institutions are getting large and they're transforming decision making and very active in — obviously coming from wealth generation — they're very active in the family office market [15:00] and crypto is also becoming part of both public and private alternative investment portfolios.

So what I see looking at Endaoment is: you're leveraging innovations really to create a more democratic and effective model for philanthropy. Right? So, can you talk a bit about the family philanthropy relationship for endowment firms like yours? How do you create that dialogue and get involved with this philanthropic relationship? And where do you see that relationship going in the next 5 or 10 years? Like how large do you think that philanthropy can become within the family offices, with Endaoment? Because it seems like the story is just beginning, really.

Robbie Heeger: Yeah. I mean, we're 5 years into this at this point, and I think we still haven't really broken out of our shell [16:00] yet. You know, they say overnight successes take 7 years to make happen. I think we're still about a year or two away from really breaking out and starting to see us operating at that nine, ten, eleven figure scale that you see major community foundations operating at, but it's sitting right there. And largely, I think it's sitting right there because the alternative asset market is poised to just have higher beta growth than the broader traditional equities market. Right? That, where are people having their biggest gains, their biggest taxable, biggest taxable incurrences from their portfolio. Like, what of their assets have the highest tax obligations? It's going be those impact, or alternative, or digital asset investments that they bought at the earliest stage and grow to 10 or 100 or [17:00] 1000 times their original size. And that makes these alternative investments the perfect DAF asset, the perfect charitable asset, really, because you're taking a huge amount of tax obligation off the table by giving an appreciated alternative investment that has experienced significant growth.

And so, not only is this kind of the new frontier for the family office about “How do I get involved in crypto?” or “How do I get involved in impact investing?” or “How do I get involved in alternative investments?” But also, now if you're successful in that space, you now have the ideal asset for making a charitable gift that's optimally tax minimizing. And so I think that combination is what sets Endaoment up for success down the line, but it requires us to be able to adopt the whole spectrum of alternative asset types. And [18:00] to that effect, you know, you brought up our blockchain native infrastructure, like, there's nothing really new about what we're doing on the blockchain. It's just that it gives us a lot of flexibility and a huge decrease in the amount of overhead it takes to manage a complex array of different asset classes under one record-keeping system. We're effectively using the blockchain as a record-keeping architecture. And that's, at its basic level is very simple, and then there's more growth that can happen into, like, the more creative applications of, like, community governance.

R. Adam Smith: I understand the structure, and I think that's become increasingly clear to the market, and at the same time, I feel like crypto is such an unusual asset class and experience because it's been so dynamic and so explosive. Especially for younger people, that it's almost like the [19:00] IPOs in 1999, right around the tulip craze in the original psychology of market craziness. But, certainly, crypto will grow, but I think that there's been such an exclusive amount of wealth created with especially with younger people that there is this sense of “I want to be able to redeploy that with a sense of purpose.”

Robbie Heeger: If I can jump in really quick, Adam, on that point, you know, for a lot of people, they make a $1,000 or $10,000 or a $100,000 bet. Right? That represents 1 to 3 to 5% of their net worth on some of these alternative assets. Right? And it explodes like you described, and then they're kind of like — especially because it happens on the Internet — there's kind of this feeling of, like, I found this money under my mattress. Like, it's kind of this, [20:00] it is the sensation of found capital. Like, where you were making a way out there bet and it works out. And now all of a sudden, you've taken 1% of your net worth and turned it into a doubling of your net worth.

And because of that sort of almost disconnected or, like, serendipity feeling that you get from the investment, it also lends itself to turning it into impact. It's like, I feel like I should give some of this back because, like, all I did was buy it early. You know?

R. Adam Smith: Right. Like, now what do I do? I have all this liquidity, right, or I can create liquidity, but I have this liquidity, and I feel like it's a blessing. And I want to put that into the right thing. Of course, some of it might go into a startup or to the family or savings or investing, but, that emotional connection, I think, is much quicker to be able to [21:00] give it away, which is exciting. And frankly, I think our society needs that movement, even in the US, which is probably the most philanthropic country, largely.

Robbie Heeger: It's a great invitation into the family office experience. Right? Like, if you're a family office manager, or professional in the family office space, or family business space, and you're working with a second generation or a third generation or a rising generation of any number that is trying to figure out how it can get involved or what role it should play in the family business, or in the family office. Here's this opportunity to translate what has usually been relegated to, like, broker dealers with Fidelity and Schwab Charitable and say, “Hey, here's, like, a tech forward environment that you'll love to use, and it takes the assets that you're making your first investment around.” And now you get to [22:00] carve your own identity as a participant in the broader family office. And so I think it's a endowment serves as a great tool to try and bring in that rising generation that doesn't really have a vehicle for feeling like here's my contribution to the space.

R. Adam Smith: Okay. I like that. That's good. That's exactly what I was thinking. Let's move back to your own company. We have about 5 minutes left, so let's talk about the company itself as well. A little bit about your organizational structure and your culture, like what is your true north as a firm, when you hire people, and you walk in the door, and you're thinking about the brand and where it's going, I would love to hear like, what do you want Endaoment to be known for in the industry? Then also thinking about society as a whole.

Robbie Heeger: It's a [23:00] really interesting question that we've spent a lot of time on, so I'm grateful that you're bringing it up. At its core, you know, Endaoment is a series of smart contracts. Right? Som it's like this: there's this root level, at the very core of the planet that makes up Endaoment is this protocol for tax mitigation and charitable giving.

And the question becomes, like, okay, if you have that as your core, what are the services that you could leverage that core for? And so, endaoment.org is our community foundation, and they provide donor advised funds. And that's how we leverage this core of being able to do custodian agnostic, asset agnostic tax mitigation through philanthropic engagement. And so, from a narrative perspective, it's like: if you make, [24:00] if you do really well in the market, you should spend some time thinking about how you give back to the community that got you where you are today. But that's not the only way to do tax mitigation with alternative assets or with, you know, emerging technologies.

And so we see an opportunity to take that same core, that same sort of center of gravity for us — that is the protocol that keeps the records, that manages the accounts, that handles the grant making program, and turn that into other kinds of popular vehicles when it comes to tax mitigation. Whether that's the charitable remainder trust or the charitable lead trust like we've been talking about earlier, or even IRAs, or 529s, college savings funds, or any of these opportunities to, kind of, put money aside, where the government says, “Hey, you get a tax break by thinking about your future, [25:00] by thinking about your community's future, by thinking about your children's future.” And I think that's the brand value that we really align ourselves with, which is, like, it should be fun, inviting, easy to use, and multimodal. Right? Like, asset agnostic, custodian agnostic to be able to put money aside for the future and whether you're putting money aside for the future for your community through philanthropic giving or you're putting money aside for your family through college savings funds or lead trusts or gift annuities.

Right? Or you're putting aside money for yourself through similar vehicles or retirement accounts, like, you need a record-keeping service at its core. You need the technology at its core that can handle 21st century asset classes and portfolio mixtures. And that's the value of what we see us building at the technology company that builds the DAF platform for endaoment.org, [26:00] and is also exploring these other kinds of financial vehicles that allow you to think future-forward. And so we sort of see that as our mission at the technology company. Endaoment is really 2 entities: it's a technology company and a nonprofit.

And I think you'll see us moving in the direction of expanding our offering, not only to adding features to the donor advised fund provider, but starting to think about, like, what are other common financial vehicles and scenarios that people in the family office or high net worth or even just retail investor space wanna be thinking about to plan for their community or their family's future.

R. Adam Smith: That's great. And lastly, I guess, thinking about that and looking forward the next couple years, what are some milestones you want to achieve, for each — for the tech company and for the nonprofit? And then we'll wrap up.

Robbie Heeger: For the nonprofit, [27:00] I think it's really important that we demonstrate not only the capacity of this technology to facilitate complex donations, but also to demonstrate how we can build new financial institutions that are governed and powered by their community of users. That, you know, at most large national, charitable foundations, where they're offering donor advice fund programs, there's not a direct line to using and being philanthropic and using your DAF to, oversight and accountability of the organization at large. And that's something that the sort of crypto native technology landscape provides us an avenue towards. So you might see us doing some things around, like, tokenizing membership in the nonprofit where we look at the way you're using your DAF, and give you voting power, and sort of governance rights in the organization. I think [28:00] that's a really powerful way to show, like, what is going to be new and different about financial institutions of the 21st century when it comes to sort of user controlled or sort of giving that co-op feeling to our financial institutions.

And at the tech company, we're really excited about trying to embed into more Fintech into the broader Fintech industry, embedding, giving as something as natural as having a retirement account — that trying to think about how we create deep connections between custodians or advisors or even tech platforms in the Fintech landscape. How do we make it so that tax mitigation and planning for your future is incorporated deeply into the Fintech tooling that is driving better yields or better visibility [29:00] across the entire portfolio? We want to be that sort of service provider that provides the special compliance scenarios underneath the new technological solutions that are coming out of the Fintech landscape.

R. Adam Smith: Yeah, it's exciting. I totally see that. And I'm excited for you. And also frankly, for the whole space that there's more tools on our phones or online or with our wealth platters, you know, to be more active than philanthropy. It's really, as you were saying, the the week that the that LA is having, the world is having observing the tension between humanity and nature and the the essential need for philanthropy, and not just from a money perspective, but also from a speed perspective in the private sector.

So lastly, just a bit for our community here, how can they get involved in, you know, learning more about Endaoment, [30:00] and thinking about blockchain and crypto in their in their family office strategies? And then, how can they also get involved in the nonprofit?

Robbie Heeger: Well, it would be great to hear from folks who are listening today. Or if you're listening to a recording in the future after today's live cast, we would love to hear from you.

So if you go to endaoment.org, that's endaoment.org, so it's like endowment, but d a o instead of d o w. You can read more about what we do and how we do it, but also in the bottom right corner, there's a little chat bubble, and people always think that that's an AI chatbot thing, and it's not. It is real people. There are real people on the other end of that chat bubble, and we would love to hear about what you're working on, what situations you've been facing with your clients or in your practice. And we really, [31:00] really love working with people who have unique giving scenarios. We were just working with somebody on a big collection of baseball cards and how they could give a big collection of baseball cards. Or, you know, we've been involved in auctions of, the constitution for a real copy of the constitution, and it's like the more wild and crazy your philanthropic dream, the more fun we have with it at Endaoment. So we would just love to hear from everybody who's listening to this.

So please do come check us out on endaoment.org, and you can always just chat right at us through the little chat bubble in the bottom right of the of the screen, or, you know, I am I am very reachable. Feel free to email me, robbie@endaoment.org, or message me on Twitter. You can find me on LinkedIn. We're here on LinkedIn today. I have become deeply, deeply connected to my LinkedIn account as I've become an entrepreneur.

So, yeah, just don't [32:00] hesitate to reach out. We would love to hear from you. And and and keep in mind that if you have something that you would like to donate, but you think maybe it can't be donated because it's too complex or it's too unique, before you say no to that donation, let's have a conversation.

R. Adam Smith: Sounds good, Robbie. Thank you, Robbie Heeger, founder and CEO of Endaoment, and also founder and manager of Endaoment.org. You're building a great company in an important space, an important time for our society and our economic system, and I want to thank you for joining today.

Robbie Heeger: It's been my pleasure and, just really enjoyed getting to know you more, Adam, as well, and wanted to say thanks for hosting this great environment, and holding space for important conversations like this. It means a lot.

R. Adam Smith: You're welcome, and thanks for the attendees today. This is R. Adam Smith signing off. Stay tuned to the next episode [33:00] of the Family Business Audiocast on LinkedIn and also live on YouTube and X.

—

Explore the strategic intricacies of family business success with the RAS Family Business Audiocast. Join R. Adam Smith as he delves into exclusive discussions with global leaders shaping the future of private wealth and enterprise. Each episode offers a rare glimpse into the core decisions driving prosperity in high-stakes markets. Tune in to gain expert insights and innovative strategies that empower family businesses to thrive across generations.

Available On : Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pandora, iHeart, YouTube

Disclaimer:
Opinions presented are personal and do not represent the positions of speakers’, sponsors’, or guests’ organizations.

Family Business Audiocast™