On Thursday, April 2, 2020, Tech Matters formally launched as a new organization. I want to share some of the exciting happenings from our first day out of “semi-stealth!” I say semi because we’ve actually been working to support social sector clients over the past 18 months – but we wanted to wait to officially announce ourselves. Against the backdrop of a global pandemic, it seemed completely appropriate to announce our support for social innovators, and carry through on our planned launch virtually, given that we’re pretty much a virtual nonprofit.

To kick off the morning, the Tech Matters story was broken by Ned Desmond, the head of TechCrunch, the tech media giant.

Next, I had a fireside chat with Erin Baudo Felter, the VP of Social Impact for Okta, as part of their Oktane20 conference. Erin announced a major grant to Tech Matters that morning, to support our work to advance the field of Tech for Good!

The most scary and exhilarating part of the day came in the early afternoon (California time), during our Skoll World Forum session. We had originally planned to launch Tech Matters during the Skoll World Forum conference in Oxford, England.  When the Forum was moved to a virtual conference, we decided to go ahead with a Zoom session on Why Tech Matters. It went pretty well, although my team spent the first ten minutes doing “Whac-A-Mole” on a group of Zoom-bombers. Luckily, we had clamped down enough in setting up the session, that they were only a minor irritation, and we just had to clip (barely noticeable) twenty seconds out of the session video:

All-in-all, an exciting day letting the world know Why Tech Matters!