The Pledge 1% Impact Award

Salesforce Ventures

August 11, 2021

Join Salesforce Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners as we award one of the Cloud 100 companies the 2021 Pledge 1% Impact Award. Each year the Pledge 1% Impact Award is given to a company that demonstrates an outstanding commitment to social impact, not just by delivering programs that directly make a measurable positive impact, but also by rising up as a leader to inspire and empower others to make a difference.

Speakers

Alex Kayyal, Managing Partner at Salesforce Ventures, Byron Deeter, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, and Rachel Carlson, CEO of Guild

Transcript

Alex Kayyal: Thank you again for joining Salesforce Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners in Forbes for the 2021 Cloud 100. Time and time again, we have seen Cloud 100 honorees step up to leverage their time, products, profits, and talent to support their communities and help us navigate this new world. We’ve seen more and more businesses set aside a percentage of the company equity prior to their IPO to ensure funding for future social impact.

This year, in particular, we’ve seen companies collaborate generously as they work together to promote vaccine equity and take on some of our toughest societal challenges.

Byron Deeter: 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 this force for good

Alex Kayyal: Each year at the Cloud 100, we award the Pledge 1% Impact Award to a company that demonstrates an outstanding commitment to social impact, not just by delivering programs that directly make measurable, positive impact, but also by rising up as a leader to inspire and empower others to make a difference. I’m honored to name this year’s recipient, Guild Education.

Rachel Carlson: Thank you so much. Rachel Carlson here, CEO and co-founder of Guild, and it’s an incredible honor to represent the Guild organization. And thank you all for being recognized for the Cloud 100 and Pledge 1% Impact Award. At Guild, we’re on a mission to unlock economic opportunity for America’s workforce. And we do so by providing education and up-skilling to those 88 million employees who are in need of a path to the middle class. However, the way we do our work beyond that mission statement is through a double bottom-line business model, where we’ve put all of our revenue at risk, tied to the success outcomes of the students we serve. And so for that reason, this award is so meaningful to Guild, and so tied to the work we aim to do every day. This past year was obviously unlike any other. Beyond our core commitments to our mission and our students, the events of 2020 compelled us to think about how our solution might serve our community and an even broader group beyond the customers we support today.

As part of our reflection and all of the work that our team did in thinking about how we ought to have a bigger impact in 2020, Guild did a few things. One, we open-sourced our technology and became a founding partner of Skill Up, a nonprofit created to help more than 40 million workers who were displaced during COVID, to get rehired into on-demand jobs of the future. Beyond that technology, Guild also donated 1% of our team’s working time to support that organization and its mission. Additionally, we wanted our employees to be able to give back in their own way to causes in their own communities that were near to their hearts. And as a way of doing that, we added a benefit where all Guilders have five paid days off for volunteering and civic engagement each year. That meant we had team members across the country doing things like volunteering as poll workers during the election season, creating restaurant coalitions to provide free and healthy meals to frontline workers during the crisis, volunteering at food banks and a myriad of other opportunities within their community.

Guilders also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars between individual contributions and matching for COVID-related relief efforts, racial justice movements, and other local and national philanthropic causes.

I’m so proud of my team for this work. These efforts are really about who we are. We built Guild with that double bottom line mission so that we could ensure that we’re aligning incentives of our stakeholders, to drive to something bigger and societally positive outcomes. And one thing we’ve learned is that we need organizations like Pledge 1% and the B Corp community to hold us accountable in that work. For that reason, it’s such an honor to accept this award today, and I’ll choose to view it as an encouragement to continue to do our best and push others to do the same. Thank you.

Byron Deeter: Pledge 1% was created with a vision of baking philanthropy into the DNA of every business around the world. Together, we’ve already unlocked hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate philanthropy. Today, we want to encourage all of you to join us as members of Pledge 1%. whether it’s pledging your company’s equity, time, product, and/or profits, you can grow your business by giving back. It’s a small commitment today that can make a huge impact tomorrow.

Alex Kayyal: Thank you again for joining us today to celebrate The 2021 Cloud 100. We want to thank our valued partners, The Cloud 100 judges, and our fantastic speakers. And of course, a big congratulations to all of the Cloud founders and CEOs who made this year’s list

Byron Deeter: Until next year, see you in the Cloud.