Life On The Pledge: Ben Trombley and Kimber Lockhart

What first drew you to Founders Pledge, and what motivated you to make the pledge?

Kimber: Unlike many Founders Pledge members, we discovered the organization after we had already gone through exits. We didn’t make the formal pledge beforehand, but we had already committed to giving away a percentage of our income and wanted to continue that commitment.

Ben: We knew the scale had changed, but we didn’t know how to move from intention to action. After several years without a clear plan, a friend, Eugene, suggested we speak with Founders Pledge. I had assumed it was only for founders before an exit, but it turned out to be exactly the guidance we needed.

How has your Founders Pledge experience changed the way you think about impact?

Kimber: Founders Pledge helped fill a blind spot for me. I have always wanted to support causes that I care deeply about and that have maximum impact, but especially in international philanthropy, it can be hard to validate which organizations are truly best positioned to deliver that impact. Founders Pledge’s research and advisory support helped translate our values into a much clearer understanding of where our giving could be most effective.

Ben: I came in already wanting to do the most good, rather than simply support organizations we had heard of or that had strong branding. What changed for me was seeing the depth of the research and being able to compare organizations in a more quantified way. For example, in global health, looking at lives saved or quality-adjusted life years. Knowing that a serious team had done that work gave us much more confidence.

What have you most valued about being Founders Pledge members?

Kimber: I’ve always been surprised by how few tech founders and executives have a thoughtful plan for philanthropy. Founders Pledge felt like a light in the darkness: a community of people who care enough to make a serious plan. My hope is that Founders Pledge can reach more people who have been fortunate and help them examine the impact they could have.

Ben: For me, one of the most valuable parts has been the community, especially the annual gatherings. I really like founders: they tend to approach the world with a can-do attitude and are comfortable with messy, difficult problems. Founders Pledge brings together a group of founders who also care deeply about the world and have thought seriously about giving. Spending time with people like that is really meaningful.

What charitable organisations do you support, and what motivated you to do so?

Kimber: Working with Founders Pledge helped us structure our giving as a portfolio. We allocate across local and global causes, and across different impact areas. That structure lets us support many kinds of change that matter to us while being intentional about the role each part of the portfolio plays.

Ben: We think in buckets. One is local giving, including organizations combating hunger and homelessness in the communities we live in. Another is global health, where we support organizations that are clearly saving lives and reducing hunger and malnutrition.

Another area I personally care about is catastrophic risk. It is easy to ignore, underfunded almost by definition, and includes risks like nuclear war that would be truly catastrophic. It is an area where philanthropy can help address gaps left by governments and markets.

About Ben and Kimber

Kimber is a technologist by training, and spent much of her career in the startup and scale-up world. She was part of the early team at Box, and later led product engineering at One Medical through our IPO. A pivotal moment for Kimber came in 2014, when she realized that the work she was doing outside of work — volunteering, philanthropy circles, giving back — could become central to how she spent her time. From that point on, Kimber, along with Ben, became committed to orienting their careers, investments, and philanthropy around impact.

Ben's background is also in technology: first working at startups, and later founding a startup in San Francisco. One of the biggest influences on how Ben thought about giving was marrying Kimber. Together, they decided to give a percentage of their salary every year, and every January they sit down and decide where to donate. That became something meaningful they built together.

As Kimber’s company went public and Ben's company was sold, that same commitment became possible at a larger scale. Making the decision in advance about how much to give also freed them both from asking whether to give, and enabled them to focus on how to deploy capital most effectively.