Knowing why someone is doing something is important to May Piamenta, co-founder and CEO of Vee. Understanding someone’s purpose can change your image of them. She shares that everyone has their own reasons and their own causes they want to support, and Vee aims to help connect people with opportunities to help. As a good network, it allows people to share and sign up for volunteer opportunities. Piamenta explains that they plan to expand to collect donations and offer ways for people to directly help those in need rather than going through an organization. As a platform for social missions, Vee targets hearts rather than minds, she says. In the process, they are learning insights about volunteer behavior. For example, people are more likely to volunteer with a friend who invites them, even if they’re not passionate about the cause.
Thank you for allowing me to participate in Vee as a small investor. Tell me who you are and how you ended up starting Vee.
I’m 22 years old. I am originally from Dimona. I have two brothers and grew up in a family of great parents, not connected to technology in any way. When I was eight years old, I lost my best friend to cancer. His name was Efrat. After she passed away, I wanted to give back to her. When I was 13 years old, I saw an article by Zichron Menachem, the Israeli non-profit organization that supports children suffering from cancer. She asked the girls to cut their hair and help with the preparation of wigs and to donate the roots for cancer hair loss research.
I saw this article and knew it had to be me. I want to cut all my hair. So I went up to my mom and said, “Mom, I’m getting my hair cut. I’m shaving everything.” She told me, “You’re never going to do that.” The next day, she had no hair.
I can only imagine going to school the next day as a 13-year-old girl with no hair.
It was terrible. He looked like a boy. He was super weird, especially at that age. She was so embarrassed about being hairless that I bought a wig. My grandfather took the wig and threw it in the trash. He said, “You just can’t give this hair that much room in your confidence.” Having no hair and seventh grade was a big challenge. I changed and moved to the other school in Dimona.
Luckily, I landed on the day they were recruiting for the school’s robotics team. I signed up for two majors: one was fashion, one was robotics. With my fashion side, I opened a swimwear website and ran it for a year. But then I got accepted to the robotics team and I participated in FIRST Robotics competitions for five years. That was the best experience of my life. They gave me back my confidence. They gave me my English. They gave me my business skills. I was exposed to so many things.
Tell me about the confidence it instilled in you and how this has shaped your perspective now.
When I shaved my hair, I did something for a good cause. When you get such a terrible response from people, it doesn’t make sense. I was like, “I don’t want to be here. I want to be around people who understand the purpose of what I did.” When I’m taking this experience today, I know that as a founder, CEO, friend, girlfriend, colleague, I always want to see the reason why a person does something, whether it’s good or bad. Understanding reason and purpose and where a person is coming from can completely change the picture. This is what I embraced from this experience as a person.
Tell me about Vee’s formation.
Vee is the “network of good” as we call it. We are building the web of good that will bring together and connect people from all over the world around social missions, whether they are the creators of missions or the people who help in the missions. Right now, it’s only through volunteering, but soon it will be through more aid channels, like donations. Eventually, our goal is that our technology and platform will eventually connect the people who need help directly with the people who help them. We monetize this beautiful thing by helping the largest organizations, such as companies, ministries, municipalities, schools, universities, etc., to do good at scale.
Let’s say a company like Sisense wants to volunteer with 600 employees year-round, so they use Vee to connect their employees with missions around them, bring them together, report their hours and get tax refunds, and so on. . So it all comes out on the B2B side. But we’re looking at Vee and how we can do this at scale. We are attacking this super scale from the bottom up, taking over city by city all over the world. It’s hard, but it’s definitely possible.
The solution came from my experience managing volunteers at FIRST competitions. They chose one student from each country to join the CSR team, and I was the one from Israel. This is where I was exposed to the challenges and potential of the world of Corporate Social Responsibility. It was so early, 2016. Now all companies know that it is a must. The transformation was crazy. We will be the technology that puts it all together.
What is the consumer behavior part? Is it necessary to do a lot of market education? How receptive are people to this new way they are going to spend some of their time within your organization?
We ask ourselves all the time how to become the consumer’s brand, even more than the employer’s brand. If they want to do it, the problem is solved for the company. First of all, we invest a lot in branding and local branding. For example, we are now on a mission to make Vee the number one platform in New York. So we’re starting to do a lot of local brand initiatives. Underground. Billboards. We need real users and people to know us, to trust that we know where to send them.
Although Vee is currently an employee benefits product, most of our users do not use Vee at work. They take their children. They go with people outside of work. This actually leads us to understand that we are solving a bigger problem for people: that they don’t necessarily want to volunteer alone with their colleagues. They want to go with their children, wife or friends. This is where Vee comes in because our opportunities are so diverse. We now have over 1,000 live missions on the platform. We had a hundred at the beginning of this year. Having so many opportunities allows us and gives us the opportunity to explore more new use cases. For example, we have a building owner who is giving residents Vee. We would never think of that when starting out.
When a building owner gives their tenants Vee, they can go and choose one of a thousand quests that speaks to their own why. Right? If we can align that why with a need someone else has, then we can find a huge win for everyone. Vee is using inspiration from SaaS companies to monetize this and do it at scale, right?
Without connecting the why to a need, it’s very difficult to scale from there. Building the network for us is simply finding those whys, finding those needs, satisfying them locally. I want to volunteer for something that is a 10-minute walk from my house, that the community knows about. We are like a startup that does not play with the mind; we are playing with hearts. We know what things will change the needle in the hearts of people in New York. Eventually, we will be able to find out which people will donate to these causes. We are going to have data for fundraising platforms.
But another thing is that it is not only the cause. People prefer to volunteer with people who invite them, even if it’s not their number one cause. I want to do it with you instead of going alone to something that matters to me. In the product we always try to get people to invite each other because then the conversion is greater than 90% yes.
Michael Matias, Forbes 30 Under 30, is the author of Age is Only an Int: Lessons I Learned as a Young Entrepreneur. He studies Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University, is a Venture Partner at J-Ventures and was an engineer at Hippo Insurance. Matías previously served as an officer in Unit 8200. 20MinuteLeaders is a tech entrepreneurship interview series featuring one-on-one interviews with fascinating founders, innovators, and thought leaders who share their journeys and experiences.
Contributing Editors: Michael Matias, Megan Ryan