Soapbox Engage Blog

Happy 20th anniversary, PICnet!

Writing that makes my mind bounce between "that can't be true" and "heck yeah, that feels about right".

On one hand, it feels like it was only yesterday when Grey Frandsen and I were in Tirana, Albania. Way back in 1999, sitting on the top of the Piramida, we discussed ways we could help the relief groups we saw on the frontlines of refugee camps during the Kosovo War. Later that year, back in Los Angeles, we'd walk across the UCLA campus spinning ideas that we thought might lead to a business to solve these challenges, without any concept of what building a business meant.

I can snap a finger and instantly return to those times.

On the other hand, those early days memories seem centuries away. This typically happens around 2 AM on an idle Monday night, when it feels like I'm engrossed in a century-long struggle to solve big technology problems facing our nonprofit sector.

Luckily, the pendulum of time swings more accurately than my memory and sense of distance.

We've seen pretty much everything the world can throw at a small business in 20 years. We've learned, struggled, succeeded, failed, grown, and shrunk. Regardless of the test in front of us, we've pushed forward, day by day. One burrito at a time.

When Grey and I started the company in 2001, we wanted to create an enterprise that walked down a different path than was common in the technology space at the time. Technology businesses centered themselves on growing fast, going public, and cashing out.

We didn't want anything to do with that model, and you wouldn't have met two more contrarian minds at the time than Grey and me.

The dot-com approach of those days didn't align well with the type of support structure the nonprofit sector needed, either in solutions or incentives. We believed that in a sector with little ability to support large profit margins, every moment of focus counted. As business leaders, we wanted to ensure that we could be 100% committed to the needs of our community of clients.

Bucking the trend was imprinted right into the PICnet DNA on the first day. Rather than building a business plan that set an exit strategy, we opted for a 100-year business plan...with no exit plan. If you're running counter to convention, get ready for an earful. The plan wasn't necessarily a hit, on paper. Literally. I submitted the business plan as a cornerstone thesis during my graduate school work in public policy at UCLA, and my professor wrote these following words on the cover sheet.

"Not a good paper. Very disappointing. Your solutions are helpful, but only at the margins."

With that vote of confidence, we knew we were onto something. What specifically that something was, we'd figure out over time.

In an old fraternity house converted into an off-campus co-living space (long before "co-living" or "co-working" was cool), we set up PICnet's international headquarters on a folding table. Other office amenities included Grey's mattress on the floor next to the table, and a golf club we used to chase off mice and squirrels that made their way into the office / bedroom. We also had a couple of Nokia 5190 mobile phones, which we could only afford to use during the "free nights and weekends" minutes.

All of this worked well for us because a) we were still in college and grad school, b) we didn't sleep much, c) there was an In-N-Out and burrito shop a few blocks away, and d) we'd talk nonstop about building the business.

With the naivete that only two people who've never started a business could have, we aimed to build an organization that would be accountable not to rich venture capitalists or banks, but directly to the nonprofit organizations we'd serve. The more direct our relationship with our clients, and the less additional noise the better. We figured we make up for lack of venture funding by working longer hours than our competitors.

It was a pure grind, and we loved it.

In hindsight, we were trying to start a technology company by serving a sector with the tightest budgets, with the least technological capacity, right in the middle of the biggest tech bubble burst in history.

You're getting the sense why I enjoy saying, "we do the hard things" to folks.

Time didn't matter on the scale we wanted to build. Our goal was to remain committed to the cause for as long as humanly possible, or 100 years...whichever came last.

When you've decided to build a technology company that has no exit plan, and no interest in receiving investment capital, the world of people that care about it becomes pretty small. It's the true ride-or-die folks that are always supporting you. It's family that's stuck with you no matter what. It's your closest friends that know you're doing something that by all business standards should fail, but cheer you on. It's coffee shop owners within a 500 foot radius of your apartment that know you by first name.

During these early days, it could feel a bit lonely, even with a great partner by my side. I quickly learned that there's no playbook to building a business like this. No one fully understood what we were tackling, and I found it tough to concisely communicate what we were trying to accomplish.

Add to that a diet that consisted solely of frozen burritos or ramen, and my brain probably wasn't functioning at its highest capacity.

Regardless, we kept pushing forward, one small step at a time.

People have often said you need to have a big, hairy, audacious goal. A vision for an entirely different world. I'm a pretty pragmatic person, so I've always balanced that against the reality in front of me. We wanted our mission statement to get to the point fast. Something anyone in the world could understand. It needed to be something that could encompass the fast-changing landscape of the technology world, but also be clear on our role in the world.

"Empowering the missions of nonprofits with technology."

What did that look like in 2001? It meant burning CDROMs to help humanitarian aid workers in the Middle East. It meant designing laminated maps through new design software for the relief teams in war zones. It meant helping nonprofit organizations connect to the "information superhighway" by getting on our hands and knees and laying ethernet cables inside the offices of organizations. It meant designing databases using FileMaker Pro, which I learned doing consulting work during college.

In short, it meant doing whatever we could do to serve the needs of nonprofits, delivering technology solutions, and hopefully scraping together a little money to keep growing the business.

The approach worked. Over time, we kept chalking up wins and feeding the growth of the business. This growth has rarely been linear. That's nearly impossible working within a technology space that is alway reinventing itself. Instead, we've known from the outset that our business model would need to be flexible enough to change with the rapidly shifting technology sector.

While our team has been through multiple business cycles, our mission has kept us focused on the future needs of the nonprofit sector. Recounting the years, I've counted at least three iterations of PICnet through the years.

PICnet 1.0 was all about bridging the digital divide for nonprofits. This was well before Facebook and Twitter even existed. It was about ensuring that every nonprofit we touched could communicate with their community online. Getting there required achieving the basics, like Internet access. So, we focused on digitizing an organization's operations first. For our first few years, it was a scrappy approach that could be summed up as "if you're a nonprofit, and you need a technology solution, we're here to help!"

Starting in 2003, I figure PICnet 2.0 began. We focused quickly on the growing opportunity for organizations to better share their message via the Web. We built beautiful websites for groups to share their mission, but found that this often meant delivering expensive custom design and development solutions. While this was profitable, it was outside the budget of the small organizations we really wanted to serve. Frustrated and looking for a better technology solution, we dove headfirst into the open source community. There, we were able to leverage a variety of solutions to help us deliver our Non-Profit Soapbox software as a service offering as a way to package the website needs of the typical small nonprofit into one solution.

Then in 2008, PICnet 3.0 began. As the website business continued to commoditize and grow, we noticed that the real value we provided was the critical touch points between nonprofits and their communities of supporters, donors, and members. We took the greatest hits from Non-Profit Soapbox, repackaged them, made the pricing even more accessible, and called it Soapbox Engage.

While organizations might find our online fundraising and engagement pages effective, we realized that they would need a rock solid database to store their data. Rather than build yet another nonprofit CRM ourselves, we paired up with nonprofit tech friends from the Salesforce Foundation and its community. We dove deep into the community, aiming to learn, contribute, and grow alongside fellow nonprofiteers. Our business goals were two-fold: contribute the knowledge we'd learned to the community, and provide the best online engagement offering specifically for this community.

The rest, they say, is data integration history.

As you'd expect, our team finds itself in a new and changing technology world yet again. With our client-first approach, we realize that a new chapter is starting to emerge in our business's story. We're excited to have one of the first online fundraising offerings for the burgeoning Microsoft Dynamics community, and we're looking forward to taking our 20 years of best practices and continuing to evolve them for an additional technology ecosystem.

I figure we're starting down the path of PICnet 4.0.

To be candid, I'm a rather "looking forward" person. I rarely take a chance to reflect on where we've been (just ask our team after some of our biggest wins and software releases). Looking at my calendar, today's likely not the day that suddenly changes. That said, I keep trying to remind myself of where we've traveled together, and that we're only a fifth of the way through the PICnet lifecycle that Grey and I set out 20 years ago. The vast majority of our history is yet to be written. We're still building the engine, tweaking its parts so that we can shift gears as technology changes and the needs of our sector change with it.

Building the engine requires economic support, and that purely comes from the amazing community of organizations we serve. We sincerely appreciate the opportunity to work alongside nonprofits that continue to create the change we seek for a more just, prosperous, and peaceful world. It's an honor to deliver on our promise to these changemakers, and we're excited to continue to evolve our solutions for them as we grow.

Fueled by a passionate community of customers, I can't imagine a better way to live a fulfilled business life than alongside fellow PICnetters. Along the way, there have been three PICnetters that have poured more than a decade of their careers into our collective work. Kevin Devine, Tim Forbes, and Brad Grochowski have a combined 43 years of experience serving our community. They are the cornerstones of PICnet, and continue to successfully lead our engineering, product, and support efforts. Their contributions are directly correlated to our success, and I'm lucky to pull the PICnet oars with them daily.

In addition to these long-haulers, we've had a community of more than 60 current and past core employees, contractors, and consultants that have enabled us to be flexible and grow as our clients have needed through the years. To all our current PICnetters, PICnet alumni, and partner colleagues, I'm eternally grateful for all your contributions to the business we've built together.

Of course, it's not just our teammates that enabled us to reach this special anniversary. We have a rich ecosystem of supporters that have shouldered the burdens and enabled our company to grow. I'm thankful for family, friends, allies, and even competitors that continue to support and push us as PICnet moves through uncharted waters over and over again. Their contributions, and sincere understanding that "work-life balance" can be hard to keep when you're doing big things, fills our emotional batteries and supports us when we're exhausted.

Finally, I want to thank Grey. The likelihood that PICnet would exist today without his early contributions hovers somewhere between 0% and 0%. The name "PICnet" probably wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for his realization that "PICnet" sounds like "picnic", and people like eating, so...we should obviously just use that "PICnet" as the company's name.

It's been an exhilarating 20 years of status quo busting, community organizing, delivering awesome solutions, and taking the road less traveled. And, we're just getting started. With at least another 80 years ahead of us, I can't wait to keep laying the groundwork for our future. I'm so darn proud of what our team and community has accomplished, and I can't wait for the opportunities ahead of us.

As I've said in our company's chat room every morning since 2007…. "Gooooood morning PICnetters!"