Key Themes Early in his career, a future boss at Google.org gave Justin Steele one piece of advice: take a bet on yourself. He took it, and spent a decade directing $700 million in philanthropic grants. Even credentialed at Harvard and trained at Bain, he still got treated like an outsider inside Google's business culture for having just come from a nonprofit. He calls people who carry both worlds bridgers, people who can sit in the boardroom and the campsite and refuse to let either one erase the other. Even someone who has spent his career solving for belonging fell into the same trap most people do: building the tech solution first and hoping connection would follow. When Justin and his wife Sally built the digital version of Outdoorithm, the platform solved logistics and discovery, where to go, what to bring, but a board member told him on a call that she still felt alone using it. He rebuilt it that weekend. His teenage daughter is now helping code the belonging layer, training a system to catch not just whether someone shows up in a comment section, but whether they actually feel safe. Justin created an AI fundraising platform called Kindora because his own nonprofit needed ten thousand dollars for tent heaters and got nothing but noise back from the expensive tools on the market. So he coded an AI persona modeled as a program officer and set it loose: Reviewed 13,000 funders one by oneRejected 12,000, politely, at machine speedNarrowed the remaining 1,000 to 100 through historical grant data and mission fitOf 50 applications submitted, won $100,000 "This is a perfect example of human scale versus AI scale," as Jama puts it. As Justin was making those funder calls, he and Jama met at a 2025 conference on responsible AI, where Justin first landed on the idea that became his company's founding structure, deciding not to take venture capital. That is also why the company's investment round is open to anyone, not just accredited investors. Be part of it here: wefunder.com/kindora. Asked what keeps him going, he points to two things: conviction, and belonging, communities of people who reflect real values and make you feel, in his words, deeply alive. Action Opportunities Try Kindora. Free to start at kindora.co/en/demos. If you have ever chased funding for a mission you believe in, “Kindora is like turning on a light in a dark room. They're like, wait, there are people out here who can support our work, and you're helping us bridge relationally and leverage our networks. Get involved with Outdoorithm Collective. Fully supported multi-night camping trips for urban families at outdoorithmcollective.org, built to help any family find where they belong outdoors. Ask yourself Justin's question. What's standing between you and success in your mission? Build the small, rough version of the fix anyway. Featured Quotes "I'm alive in a way I've never been alive, at least professionally...I wouldn’t work this hard for anyone else." — Justin Steele "What motivates me every day to keep doing it? The first thing is conviction, which we've already talked about, but the second piece is belonging. I think we all want to belong to something, find communities of people that reflect our values and make us feel alive, and to me, belonging is a big part of the reason why I do what I do." — Justin Steele "To be part of a community, to be building for other people, to breathe something new into the world that means this much to people; the stories I get every day, of tiny little grassroots organizations who'd started to lose hope they were ever going to be funded to do the thing they believe in, because they just want to be doing the work." — Justin Steele Bio Justin Steele is Co-Founder and CEO of Kindora, a Public Benefit Corporation democratizing professional fundraising tools for every nonprofit. When he couldn't afford the fundraising tools that would help his nonprofit succeed, he coded something better with AI.
