One founder. And a few advisors who've pushed back on it.

That pattern showed up first in the private sector. A team would build a tool to get one piece of content approved and passed to the next team in a pipeline -- solving its own problem well, with no real concept of the pipeline around it, let alone the enterprise it sat inside. Multiply that by every team solving its own version of the same problem, and you get a lot of tools that don't talk to each other and a lot of duplicated cost.

The nonprofit and community-group world has the same pattern, only sharper. SaaS platforms for volunteer management, for meetups, for inventory and donation tracking -- they already exist. They're just priced for organizations that can budget for software, and most NGOs and community groups don't have an IT team standing by to build something custom instead. What's left is a lot of spreadsheets, a lot of Facebook groups doing a database's job, and a lot of cumulative inefficiency across the whole sector -- without any single organization having done anything wrong.

That pattern turned concrete while building a tool for one NGO alongside PATH and Blueprint LA, in partnership with UCLA. Looking back across five years and seventeen of Blueprint LA's projects, the same handful of needs kept resurfacing under different names: a branded page for the organization, a way to sign up volunteers and members, scheduling for meetups and shifts, taking donations of cash or goods, asking for the donations actually needed, distributing them, and tracking enough of the flow to know whether a program is working.

The clearest example of that mismatch happened right inside PATH: one site had boxes of donated items sitting unused, while another had exactly what it needed a few miles away, with no way to know it -- a men's center holding donated feminine hygiene products, a women's center holding donated men's clothing. Nothing wrong with how either site was run -- just no shared way to see across them.

BothAnd is what that analysis turned into -- one shared foundation, with each piece switched on only if an organization actually needs it. A group that just wants a forum and a meetup calendar can ignore the rest completely. If donation tracking becomes useful six months later, it's already there to turn on -- not a migration to a different, more expensive tool. Trading surplus between groups working toward similar goals is still ahead of us, but it's the direction this is built toward: making it easier for mutual aid to go where it needs to go, without asking anyone to adopt a whole new ecosystem to get there.