Three years ago, Alex Budak and Tom Dawkins teamed up to co-found StartSomeGood, a crowdfunding platform with a focus on social change projects. In a blog post today, Dawkins writes that his co-founder has left the company.
One reason given is that Budak is based in Sweden and wants to get more involved in local projects. Plus as the only full-time employee working on StartSomeGood for the past three years juggling development of the website, operations, and management, he’s burnt out.
“He’s been amazing to work with to this point and I’m going to miss him, but life must go on,” wrote Dawkins.
Dawkins named a couple of key people who will carry on Budak’s work. Brendan Rigby of their Venture Support team will step up as Director of the team. Renata van Diete, who was previously a senior engineer at Microsoft, will become their Chief Technical Officer. But at this time Dawkins, who values having a co-founder, still needs a business partner to oversee operations.
Before StartSomeGood, Budak was a StartingBloc fellow and Dawkins was the Social Media Director at Ashoka, where he started #SocEntChat on Twitter. #SocEntChat is a chat still being used by the Twitterverse to discuss topics related to social entrepreneurship.
Dawkins calls this executive shakeup a “significant business challenge”, but remains optimistic of the team’s passion and commitment.
“The worst-case scenario for something like this is that it drains the motivation and optimism of the team, that we slow down, that we start letting more and more things fall through the cracks in terms of implementation,” he wrote. “But as with any challenge it is also an opportunity, for us as an organisation and for the entrepreneurs joining our team.”