Pledge 1% Award at The Cloud 100 2020
Transcript

Byron Deeter, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, and Matt Garratt, Managing Partner at Salesforce Ventures, conclude Cloud 100 2020 by discussing the Pledge 1% movement, an organization where leading cloud companies donate one percent of their company’s time, product, and equity to help non-profits and philanthropies. This year, Cloud 100 presents the Pledge 1% Award to Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of Canva.
 
Matt Garratt (00:01): Thank you again for joining Salesforce Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners in Forbes for this year’s Cloud 100. We’re so thrilled you are able to join us virtually to celebrate the best of the best in cloud and hear from these amazing leaders. Increasingly, successful companies are recognizing that giving back and integrating strong values into their business practices is not just the right thing to do, it’s also the smart thing to do, especially when it comes to attracting and retaining top talent and even partners, customers, and investors.
Matt Garratt (00:31): There has never been a more important time for businesses to leverage their own time, product, profit, equity, and their voice to be a force for good. We’ve been amazed to see so many Cloud 100 honorees step up to support their communities in this immense time of the year. From helping nonprofits, schools, and health providers effectively deliver services remotely. By leveraging free technology to investing time, resources, to address issues around PPE, public health awareness, food security, and small business viability. The impact has been remarkable.
Byron Deeter (01:04): That’s why Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures are strong supporters of the Pledge 1% movement. Pledge 1% is a global movement to inspire, educate, and empower companies like yours and leaders like you to be a force for good.
Matt Garratt (01:20): Each year the Cloud 100 reward the Pledge 1% Impact Award to a company that demonstrates an authentic, outstanding commitment to social impact, not just by delivering programs that directly make measurable positive impact. I’m honored to name this year’s recipient Canva.
Melanie Perkins (01:40): Hey, everyone. We’re really excited to get announced this year’s winner for the 1% Pledge Impact Award. The 1% Pledge is an incredible program that we’re really proud to be a part of. It encourages companies to give back and hopes to be able to culture corporate philanthropy. It’s up to all of us to help build the world that we want to be a part of. The 1% Pledge is very aligned with our two-step plan at Canva, one to build one of the world’s most valuable companies and two show the most good that we can do.
Melanie Perkins (02:05): We still have an incredibly long way to go on step one. We are less than 1% of the way there, but hopefully we are headed in the right direction. And I guess in this day and age companies have a much greater responsibility than the old mantra, to do no evil. We have an incredible opportunity and in fact, an incredible responsibility to create a world that’s better for everyone who lives here. I would love to see every business, every VC, every journalist, in fact, every single person to step up and to take heed of their power to help make this world better for everyone who lives here. It’s easy to think that it’s someone else’s responsibility, but it’s not. It’s absolutely all of ours.
Byron Deeter (02:45): The Canva team and their amazing CEO, Melanie Perkins have consistently shown their dedication to giving back. Being a force for good has been one of Canva’s core values since day one. The Canva Foundation’s goal is to solve global challenges in the most impactful way possible. By giving youth in poverty access to the skills needed to succeed in the digital economy and empowering nonprofits to achieve their goals and increase their impact through design.
Matt Garratt (03:12): Along with donating their product to over 60,000 nonprofit organizations, Canva has also completed their 1% Equity Pledge and set aside a portion of their company’s equity for social impact. So they can continue to do amazing work through the Canva Foundation as they grow.
Byron Deeter (03:30): Today we want to encourage all founders and CEOs out there to join with us, the members of the Pledge 1% movement and specifically to set aside a portion of your company’s equity. This is something that you can control today that will enable you to have the resources to tackle issues that we’ll face in our future.
Matt Garratt (03:45): In fact, many of today’s most successful companies and Cloud 100 graduates like Canva, DocuSign, PagerDuty, Pluralsight, SendGrid, Slack, and Twilio have pledged equity. In the last four years alone, Cloud 100 companies have set aside equity for social impact and ignited over $500 million of new philanthropy, that is just a staggering number.
Byron Deeter (04:09): Pledge 1% has published a comprehensive CEO Equity playbook, which includes the best practices, templates, and tools, and everything you need to take the Equity Pledge today. You can read more about this and download the playbook here.
Matt Garratt (04:23): Thank you again for joining us today to celebrate the 2020 Cloud 100, to our judges, to our sponsors, our fantastic speakers, and the team that helped put this event together. We also want to say a big congratulations from all of us.
Byron Deeter (04:40): To all of our cloud founders and CEOs who made the 2020 list…Congratulations on all of your success.
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