What follows is an edited transcript of the first part of my conversation with Gret Glyer, creator of DonorSee. For the full conversation, listen to the episode. Petersen: My guest today is Gret Glyer, he is the creator of a new app called DonorSee. Gret, welcome to Economics Detective Radio. Glyer: Thank you for having me, Garrett. How are you? Petersen: I am great! So, DonorSee is a charitable giving app with a very interesting twist which---we'll get to the app itself in a little bit---but first let's start with some background. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got involved with the nonprofit sector. Glyer: Sure. So, I graduated from college in 2012 and immediately started working at a rental car company and did that for about a year and did really well. And I was promoted very quickly and I was told by upper management I was going to skyrocket through the ranks and that whole idea of being very successful having six or seven figure income, getting a company car, that kind of stuff, was just a depressing thought to me because I didn't want to wake up in twenty years and be really good at renting cars to people. So I started looking at a bunch of different ways to find something more fulfilling, more around doing work that I cared about and I decided to go overseas for a year and I found an opportunity to go to Malawi, Africa. So I went over there, I spent a year as a math teacher and I really loved being over there. Teaching math wasn't exactly my vocation in life but being in a very impoverished area and being a part of helping those people, that was something that I found a lot of fulfillment and gratification in. So I spent another two years out there and then I came and I was out there, I did a whole bunch of different crowdfunding stuff and I got involved. I started a charity and a few other things and then when I came back---about six months ago---that's when I started this new company DonorSee. It's kind of in the nonprofit sector, but I've also been telling people it's kind of like the anti-charity. There are so many negative connotations associated with what charity is, and how people understand it, and how effective it is, and how much they waste money that I almost don't want to be associated with non-profits or with charities, I'd almost rather be considered like the opposite end of the spectrum. So, in some ways it is in the nonprofit sector in some ways it's the farthest thing from it. Petersen: Yeah, well I'm hesitant to describe it as the Tinder of charity but it's almost like that. So, you're not a tech person, you're not a computer programmer but you come from, well not charity, but from the helping others in poor countries angle. How did you get to this point where you can start a tech startup? Glyer: Yes. So, basically, you can do anything you want as long as you have the resources to hire people who do the stuff that you can't do. So, I came up with the idea back a year ago, actually in January, and I spent the next two months developing it and writing out a business plan for it and getting screens made to see how it would look, and what the flow would be like, and how people might use it. And then I paid a guy online who lives somewhere in Eastern Europe and he---I think it was Ukraine---and for a relatively small amount of money he made a basic very buggy first draft, like a prototype, and I used that. And I took it to investors to show them what the app was like. And they believed in the idea, they believed in my vision for what the app could be and how it could disrupt the charity sector and so forth. And so they saw that and they decided to provide me with investment money and I was able to use that money to hire the tech people and hire a marketing team and all that kind of stuff. So, that was how I got from having no technical background to running a tech company myself. Petersen: Yeah that's great! So many idea people are also sort of averse to hiring others. You know a lot of pe