Can one Boston startup influence young people to give to charity?
Cofounder of ButcherBox shifts to philanthropy
For a kid who grew up selling baseball cards in Cohasset and was always looking for new businesses to start, Mike Filbey was living the dream by age 26.
Running a multimillion-dollar marketing budget and overseeing a team of two dozen workers for ButcherBox, an online organic meat seller, Filbey was the cofounder of one of Boston’s hottest startups — and had an equity stake worth millions of dollars.
But instead of a dream, his chief marketing role turned into a stressful nightmare. At an escape room team-building event in 2018, job pressure overwhelmed Filbey. After passing out in a bathroom, he was rushed to the emergency room. He quickly recovered but had two more episodes and spent a night in the intensive care unit.
Quitting the job was one of the hardest decisions of his life. “I’ve had an interesting-slash-somewhat-unhealthy journey with self-worth and money,” Filbey said.
After leaving ButcherBox in the summer of 2019, and forfeiting a portion of his equity, Filbey took a few years to process the experience and broaden his horizons. He got married. He also got into philanthropy.
One major influence was Peter Singer’s book on effective altruism, “The Life You Can Save.” The approach, which emphasizes evidence-based giving, has come under fire thanks to the association with troubled crypto execs like Sam Bankman-Fried. But for Filbey, the book opened his eyes to the unmet needs in other parts of the world.
So he’s founded a new business, his third, called Pepper. And the big idea is not to build a cash cow that goes public but rather to use the cutting-edge marketing techniques he perfected at ButcherBox to create a nonprofit to raise money for charity. The name comes from the spice — “something that’s small but packs a punch,” Filbey said.
Pepper’s website format is simple: Sign up and agree to donate $10 per month. There are no other levels of giving and no decisions to make about where the money goes. Pepper splits all proceeds equally among four charities chosen for their impact and efficiency: the Against Malaria Foundation, the Malaria Consortium’s Seasonal Malaria Chemoprevention program, Helen Keller International’s Vitamin A Supplementation program, and GiveDirectly’s cash transfer programs in Africa.
“There should be a way to start giving to charity that takes less than 30 seconds and you’re confident it’s going to make a real impact,” Filbey said.
Filbey is still designing his marketing campaign. The concept will be to keep the message positive — no pictures of starving children — and rely on social media and influencers to get the word out.
“What most charities have done historically to get people to give is a lot of guilt-inducing stuff,” he said. Pepper “is all positive, about the good that you can do, not the bad that you should feel.”
The time may be ripe for Filbey’s effort, as the pandemic raised awareness among younger people about giving to charity.
But the philanthropy world online is crowded with thousands of individual organizations and broader efforts such as GreaterGood and ReliefWeb. Filbey’s online marketing skills, however, shouldn’t be underestimated, his ButcherBox cofounder and Boston entrepreneur Mike Salguero said.
“He’s a brilliant marketer and brander,” Salguero, ButcherBox’s CEO, said. “And he’s relentless. When he has a goal, he will do anything to see it to completion.”
Filbey is covering operating expenses for Pepper himself and plans to seek grants in the future. He could also strike marketing deals with retailers seeking to improve their image with Filbey’s target demographic.
Though he has had multiple offers to join for-profit companies, Filbey said he is only interested in his nonprofit right now.
“We’ve been told that there’s a linear relationship between the amount of money that you accumulate and your happiness,” he said. “But as everybody learns, there’s not.”