Why Chairing a Nonprofit Board Makes Me a Better CEO

I think one of the more unique things about me as a founder isn't actually my background or Blaze's origin story. It's that in addition to running a $150M business, I also chair the advisory board of the Salvation Army of San Francisco, one of the city's largest nonprofits. The past fourteen years of serving as a supporter and an advisor to the Army has taught me more about leadership, systems thinking, and driving change than almost any business experience I've had.

You've probably heard about CEOs that get involved with nonprofit work after a huge exit, but I actually started working with the Army almost a decade before starting Blaze, and I've been active with them ever since. It's been a lifelong journey I've embarked on to help give others the same opportunities I've had and to stay connected to my community.

I couldn't have predicted this a decade and a half ago, but my work with the Salvation Army has also taught me an enormous amount about building movements, getting folks on board with a contrarian but correct vision, and finding the persistence and motivation to keep going until that vision becomes reality. It's all made me a more effective leader and CEO.

How It All Started

The story starts in my early twenties, when I landed a job out of college working at Bridgespan, the leading consulting firm for nonprofits. One of my first major engagements was with the Central Territory of the Salvation Army, spanning 10 states of the American Midwest. My job was to help them double their impact on poverty within ten years.

I was a bit skeptical at first; I'm Jewish and gay, and I had heard bad (but ultimately wrong) things about the Army's treatment of LGBT people from some news article. But what I learned by working hand in hand with the Army team in my first few years on that project made me trust, respect, and ultimately love the Army's unique culture.

The Salvation Army isn't just a nonprofit. It's half-church, half-army—and they're serious about both parts. Everyone in the Army's leadership structure is an ordained minister who dedicates their entire life to the cause. They don't take salaries, and the Army owns their homes and their cars. Every five years, they get rotated to a different location around the world, so they never get to put down roots, just like actual military personnel.

They make these sacrifices for the Army's mission—to serve all those in need without discrimination in Jesus' name. They are completely devoted to this cause in a way most secular nonprofit leaders can't be. And because of that, they're incredibly, uncommonly effective at what they do.

What Makes Them Extraordinary

The Salvation Army is the largest operating nonprofit in the world. They have a presence in every single American ZIP code. They're the biggest provider of food assistance, disaster relief, and rental assistance in the US. And they do it with incredible efficiency, with more than 80 cents of every dollar going to the mission work, not overhead.

That's because the Army is fundamentally oriented around impact, not politics, status, or ego.

When I was at Bridgespan, I spent two years in small towns across the Midwest—Elkhart, Green Bay, Gary—working with Salvation Army social workers on the ground to design what became known as the Pathway of Hope program. The Pathway of Hope has grown into one of the Army's signature programs nationwide, and has helped millions of people escape cycles of intergenerational poverty.

The Pathway of Hope takes a revolutionary approach to helping people out of poverty. We designed the program not just to hand out boxes of food or clothes, but to comprehensively address clients' root causes of poverty and help them develop a plan to escape it based on their personal goals, intrinsic strengths, and community connections.

In piloting and scaling the Pathway, I got a front-row seat to the dedication, passion, and persistence of the Army's staff and officers. Unlike so many other nonprofits, their primary concern was the people they were serving, and they were committed to walking with their clients until they achieved their goals. It was deeply humbling and inspiring.

When I moved to Honolulu to work for Hawaiian Airlines a few years later, the Army asked me to join the advisory board there, and I continued serving in Boston when I went to business school—and then back in San Francisco where I returned after HBS.

San Francisco Needs The Salvation Army

When I moved home to San Francisco in 2015, the social media and mobile app boom was minting new millionaires every day, but despite all the newfound wealth, the street conditions only seemed to get worse. I couldn't understand how the richest (and highest taxed) city in America was also producing the most homelessness and addiction.

When I joined the SF Advisory Board, I was the youngest member by probably twenty years. We'd have monthly lunch meetings where we'd listen to updates over sandwiches. I was only tangentially engaged, as it wasn't clear how I could make an impact.

Then, in 2018, the Army's newly appointed leader in San Francisco, Darren Norton, asked me to chair a new committee to figure out how the Army could focus their resources and increase their impact on homelessness in San Francisco.

I put together a small, powerful team of board members to study the root causes of our homelessness crisis—and what we discovered changed everything.

Finding the Real Problem

Despite what established homelessness service providers had been saying for years, homelessness in San Francisco isn't primarily a housing issue. We actually have more subsidized affordable housing per capita than almost any other city in America. But seventy percent of people who are on the street for 30 days or more suffer from addiction, and another thirty percent suffer from mental illness.

The prevailing wisdom around how to solve the addiction crisis was a combo of approaches called "Housing First" and "harm reduction"—basically supporting people in their addiction: providing needles and other supplies with the hope they could manage it, and providing housing without requiring treatment or other services alongside it.

The enablement offered by harm reductionists made our street crisis worse: more people died of overdose deaths in San Francisco than COVID during the pandemic years—and 2/3rds of those happened inside publicly funded housing.

From talking to hundreds of people on the street, we learned that what clients really wanted was long-term, sober treatment options with work training and community support to actually help them get better.

So we developed a program called The Way Out, a recovery-oriented system of care that could help people move all the way from the street back to independence. The missing piece wasn't immediate treatment (the city had that) but extended recovery: transitional housing where people could continue their journey, find a job, reconnect with families, and get their lives back—with full support at each step.

The Results

From the ten-bed pilot program we launched in 2022, The Way Out has grown to 650 beds today—and we're on track to more than double that to 1,500 in the next few years.

We just held a gala that raised a million dollars in one night, with more than half the Board of Supervisors and SF's mayor attending. And our focus on client impact, program evaluation, and performance improvement has paid off: The Way Out has a 76% success rate, compared to the national average of just 12%.

Most importantly, we've helped hundreds of people get their lives back—people who were literally on the verge of death, and are now well on their way to independence.

Why The Army Makes Me A Better CEO

I often think about how our journey to make The Way Out a success parallels my own "for profit" experience building Blaze. Working with the Army, I've...

Used systems thinking to correctly diagnose a problem and design a solution

• The Army is successful because they leave preexisting ideologies out of problem diagnosis, and instead listen to their users and follow the data. Homelessness and addiction are complex, multifactorial problems, and it's harder and more impactful to embrace the hard truths than it is to oversimplify.

Spent years grinding on the details to eventually become an "instant" sensation

• When we started working on The Way Out, local elected officials barely gave us the time of day, and donors were skeptical. It took us six years—through COVID, leadership changes, and years of pilot programs and marketing efforts—to be in a position to scale.

Proved our worth with data

• We knew we were proposing a controversial approach, so we started small with a 10-bed pilot to show we could achieve a 76% success rate (6X the average) at half the cost of other providers.

Moved public opinion towards a contrarian, correct vision

• We had to spend years relentlessly messaging to the public that the status quo wasn't working, and that we had a better, more effective and cost-efficient alternative. Due to our marketing and awareness efforts, we moved public opinion and shifted elections towards a new mayor and supervisors—and we're now the city's preferred addiction treatment provider.

It's the same kind of focused, ambitious, persistent thinking I use every day running Blaze.

My work with the Army also has kept me grounded. At Blaze, we're building cutting-edge AI that helps entrepreneurs grow their businesses. But there's no experience more humbling than working with people who have far more basic needs—people who are literally fighting for survival—and walking with them towards a better life of their own making. It’s something every leader should seek out.

My Biggest Takeaway from Nonprofit Work

I've learned that the same basic playbook works in both startupland and the nonprofit world: find the truth from listening to users, challenge conventional wisdom with a better approach, iterate relentlessly to make it work, measure everything to prove you're right, get people on your side through a movement, and never, ever give up.

No matter what kind of product you're building, you have to be willing to go against the grain and grind through years of unglamorous work to create the conditions for an "overnight" success.

The Salvation Army has taught me that the organizations and companies that do the most good aren't always the loudest ones—they're the ones that focus on producing real good for their users and execute towards their missions tirelessly until their vision of a better future becomes reality for everyone.

If this story feels familiar, I'd love to hear from you. How do you stay grounded in what matters? How do you expand your perspective? What does meaning look like for you?