An interview with Trevor Loke from Weeve.It

Because of my close friendship with John Van, Minna Van and Jay Catalan, cofounders of The Network Hub, and my unique position in the Vancouver startup ecosystem, I have gotten to know many Vancouver entrepreneurs. I love profiling young folks who catch the entrepreneurship bug, and I heard about Weeve.It as a crowdfunding platform, unique in many ways. I interviewed Trevor Loke to let me know a little bit more about their startup, Weeve.It, and here is our conversation.

1. What drove you (all, or you Trevor) to start Weeve?

Each of the founders is passionate about doing good, and we surround ourselves with a culture of giving back and making our community better. I was first introduced to Weeve when I was working as a professional fundraiser and realized the importance of sustained individual giving. The trends in the nonprofit sector aren’t good. When just 23% of Canadians are giving (an all time low) and government’s are cutting grants, something has to change.

2. A startup offering a crowdfunding platform with no overhead costs. Sounds like a dream (or how the heck do you guys plan to finance it? There must be a plan behind this!)

Ultimately for us making money is not the priority right now. Don’t get me wrong, we do want to monetize the site, but it’s not our explicit purpose. In order to be different and start a new movement we had to offer something no one else could, a quality site that provided nonprofits with what they needed, donors with ease and simplicity, while being free. It’s our goal to attract a large user base so that we can help create change in our community, and then look at expanding to other cities to building capacity there. Once you have a strong user-base you can look at ways to build revenue, so long as you do it without a negative impact on the user-experience.

3. Vancouver has A LOT of worthy charities. How do we choose amongst all these worthy projects? Is there a hierarchy of projects that can be crowdfunded through Weeve it?

I agree, there are some amazing charities and projects out there. Our goal is to provide diversity in terms of the size and scope of projects, we want to provide something for everyone. Choosing isn’t easy, but as a donor we want to provide you with an easy way to get information about the projects looking for funding where you live.

4. You sound like you’re growing fast. What advice would you give would-be entrepreneurs on creating a start up?

I feel like as quickly as we’ve moved on this project, it can never be quick enough! In all honesty though, our idea has generated a lot of positive feedback, and it’s really because of the amazing team of people we have who work so hard. If you have an idea, it should not just inspire you, it should inspire a team of people who love the idea too. Any idea you have has to be flexible and adaptable; being a lean and agile startup is an absolute must to being successful.

Some advice from the Weeve team to entrepreneurs: Be audacious, ask for advice, the worst thing that can happen is being told “no”. Be tenacious, you never know what’s around the corner, don’t let others direct where you are headed, you are the captain of your own ship. Be adventurous, try new things, learn, open your mind to ideas; think big, start small, scale fast.

5. You (this question is for you, Trevor) are also in city politics. How do you manage all of this?! (and this comes from someone whose schedule is perpetually busy!)

It’s not always easy, especially since I don’t usually drink coffee (though emergency coffee days do come up!). I have some late nights and early mornings, but I keep going because I do genuinely love being part of making society a better place, and I actually believe I’m having an impact in that. Politics can be quite emotionally draining and exhausting, but I also really enjoy being part of creating solutions and developing policies to make our city better, so it’s a rewarding experience that I really enjoy being part of. In terms of balancing a schedule, I’m still learning how to do that, any tips?!

Dear Trevor – with regards to your question I’m still learning how to balance my life, though I am happy to share my Managing Yourself series 🙂

6. You all are so young! Any words of advice and/or encouragement for youth out there?

Young people have more power than we’re told. We have the ideas, the energy and passion that you need to make real change. Alienation is the result of young people accepting when older generations tell us that our ideas are undeveloped, or our passion is misdirected – it’s complete nonsense. Do whatever it is you want to put your mind to and don’t accept systemic constraints that enforce the alienation of our generation; challenge the status-quo.

7. What do you like best about weeve.it?

Well, I love my coworkers, but the site itself I think is great because it has no barriers for nonprofits or users. By that I mean that nonprofits can easily create projects, share those projects, receive dollars and keep all of the money they raise while donors are able to easily register (or do a guest checkout if they prefer) and donate money to a tangible project that will create meaningful social change.

8. What is next for you guys?

As of today we’re now part of GrowLab’s program called “Farm Team” which will help Weeve grow; we receive funding, office space, mentorship and amazing networking opportunities. We’re looking at expanding into the US and Taiwan markets in the fall and bringing on more nonprofit partners to help grow our platform. Getting started with Weeve is as easy as visiting www.weeve.it

Thanks, Trevor for answering my questions! Weeve.It sounds like an exciting project!

UPDATE – I got an email from Alex Chung, the Founder and CEO of Weeve. Below is some additional info that he shared with me.

I also want to give you the inside scoop on Weeve’s origin. Weeve was started by Vincent and I back in October, 2011. I’ve noticed a pain in the nonprofit sector through my involvement with UBC’s Community Business Project program. Vincent and I spent 5 months designing the platform, incorporating the business, and securing nonprofit partnerships. In March 2012, we brought Trevor on board as a Founder and COO to help us expand our nonprofit outreach. Trevor’s background in nonprofit helped us tremendously in securing some great partnerships. And thus Weeve was born, founded by three young social entrepreneurs who have a passion for social good. Vincent is the man behind the entire platform. As CTO, he designed and coded the entire web platform from grounds up. Vincent has begun to grow his network in the social media space and his twitter handle is @soulinas.