The company had been headquartered in San Diego since its launch, but now it opened up new offices in Silicon Valley. But in 2015, they allowed investors to take over the company, accepting venture capital money that valued GoFundMe at about $600 million. They felt that gave them some independence over how they ran GoFundMe. In the early days of GoFundMe, its co-founders bootstrapped their project, meaning they raised enough money to run it themselves, instead of getting big outside investments with strings attached. Turning health care funding into a contest, with the losers unable to pay for treatment, seems like a bad road to head down. But I do think that these platforms do enable an organization to pop up, exploit the marketplace sentiment, and then just as quickly fall back and not really leave the kind of trail that more traditional organizations leave when they’re doing their fundraising.” “Which isn’t to say that there haven’t always been abuses in charitable giving.

“It allows these organizations to move at lightning speed, so quickly that it’s difficult to really thoroughly vet the validity of the cause and the use of the funds,” MacDonald says. And, of course, there’s the We Build the Wall fiasco, where the organizers bilked millions of dollars out of unsuspecting GoFundMe users. You can find people faking cancer diagnoses to get a few thousand bucks, or starting a campaign on behalf of a needy friend and then just keeping the money. There’s a site called GoFraudMe that catalogs shady doings on GoFundMe. For one thing, she says, it allows scammers to thrive in a way that would be far harder to pull off using a more traditional fundraising approach.

But MacDonald still thinks there are some problems with GoFundMe.

Setting up gofundme