LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman announced today that he’s making a big bet on Change.org, the site for social justice petitions. Hoffman is leading a $30..<\/b>
\nLinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman announced today that he\u2019s making a big bet on Change.org, the site for social justice petitions. Hoffman is leading a $30 million round, with other investors including big names like Bill Gates and Y Combinator president Sam Altman.
\u201c Change.org, the global hub for collective action, is a crucial democratizing force in this era of growing civic participation, \u201d wrote Reid Hoffman on LinkedIn . \u201cIt helps enable a world where you don\u2019 t need to hire a lobbyist to have real impact on the issues and policies that matter to you.\u201d
The organization was founded in 2007 by CEO Ben Rattray. Since then, almost 200 million people around the world have used the site to raise awareness for a range of causes including human rights, the environment, education and health issues.
Rattray wrote in a post about the global mission. \u201cWe are in the early stages of the development of a new, more participatory form of democracy, and in order to realize the potential that technology has to transform civic engagement, we need to build tools that give us wider reach and enable deeper involvement, \u201d he said.
The proverbial tongue-in-cheek in Silicon Valley is that people want to build things that \u201cchange the world.\u201d This one actually does.
But they\u2019 re not a non-profit, they\u2019 re a business. They make money by charging companies and nonprofits to sponsor petitions which they say they brought in $20 million in revenue per year. Unfortunately, that wasn\u2019 t enough to keep them from laying off 30% of their staff in September. They have since introduced crowdfunding, which has generated \u201cmillions of dollars of revenue.\u201d
This isn\u2019 t the first time that Hoffman bet on the Change.org team. In 2014, he was part of a large group of high-profile investors including Richard Branson, Ashton Kutcher and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams.
They\u2019 ve raised over $42 million dating back to 2012.<\/p>\n

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Sentiment rank: 2<\/div>\n

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