Imagine a billion-dollar company whose first home smelled of shawarma.
In 2008 four software developers sat in a small, peach-coloured office above a Calgary shawarma shop. They worked for Bryan de Lottinville, who had already done well. He had been chief operating officer of iStockphoto, the stock photo marketplace that Getty Images bought in 2006. The money was made. The question was what to do with the rest of a career.
Companies were giving money away, matching employee donations and running volunteer days with spreadsheets and cheques.
His own answer, as he has told interviewers, was a vow: to spend the second half aligning what he did with what he said he cared about. That is an unusual place to start a software company. Most founders chase a gap in a market. De Lottinville started with a discomfort.
The gap turned out to be real. Companies were giving money away, matching employee donations and running volunteer days with spreadsheets and cheques. Giving was treated as a handout, not a system. De Lottinville wanted it to run like any other piece of corporate software, with employees choosing causes and the company handling the paperwork behind the scenes.
Building that was slower than it sounds. By his account in a 2018 interview, the first couple of years went into the back end: the platform itself and the legal receiving entities needed in different countries so that a donation could actually reach a charity. There was no shortcut. It was infrastructure, built before anyone paid for it.
Then came the quiet compounding. In 2010 Benevity became a certified B Corporation, one of only 15 in Canada. In 2016 Deloitte ranked it the third fastest-growing company in the country, on more than 5,800 per cent revenue growth. A year later it moved into its biggest office yet, in Calgary's Bridgeland neighbourhood.
By 2019 revenue was about US$100 million, and a US$40 million round came from JMI Equity and General Atlantic. In December 2020 the investor Hg bought a majority stake in a deal valuing the company at about US$1.1 billion. De Lottinville stepped from chief executive to executive chairperson and Kelly Schmitt took over as CEO in 2021.
For a first-time founder the most useful detail is the order of events. The vow came first, then the product, then years of unglamorous plumbing. The shawarma shop was only the address.