Life On The Pledge: Henry Stanley

Please share with us a bit about yourself:

I’m a software engineer with a decade of experience, most recently as CTO of Mast, a startup I co-founded. I built a team of 15 and grew the business to £1M in annual revenue before stepping back to pursue my next chapter.

I studied biochemistry before moving into tech. The switch came when I realised that software was a way to build things that genuinely improve people’s lives while earning enough to give to high-impact organisations. The pivotal moment was discovering effective altruism in my early twenties, and getting advice from a career advisor at 80,000 Hours.

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

The ability to commit publicly to giving a large portion of any upside to highly effective charities. This was always my motivation in building a startup in the first place - the potential to give a much larger amount of money to organisations doing important work than through salary alone.

That turned out to be prescient as Founding to Give has since become a much more well-developed path for those seeking to maximise their impact. Founders Pledge gave me a way to formalise that intention, publicly show my commitment, and hopefully encourage other founders to take the pledge and think seriously about their own philanthropic efforts.

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

Founders Pledge advisory services have been invaluable for identifying urgent funding gaps - opportunities that need money now, not eventually. Founders Pledge flagged to me that The Humane League needed funds to appeal a judgement against DEFRA for neglecting their duties to factory-farmed chickens in the UK. That kind of time-sensitive, high-leverage opportunity is exactly what I’d struggle to find on my own.

What have you most valued about being a Founders Pledge member?

For me, it’s great being part of a community where pledging a significant portion of an exit isn’t unusual - it shifts your reference point for what’s normal. That, and Founders Pledge’s approach to philanthropic research gives me confidence that my giving is best-directed.

What charitable organisation(s) do you support?

I focus primarily on farmed animal welfare, specifically through the Effective Altriusm Animal Welfare Fund, as well as more speculative giving in the wild animal welfare and political lobbying space. The scale of suffering in factory farming is almost incomprehensible and yet it remains profoundly neglected. Reducing that intense suffering feels like the clearest moral priority I can identify.

What’s one question you would like to ask a philanthropic expert at Founders Pledge?

What actually moves high-net-worth individuals from vague charitable intentions to serious commitments, and how can existing pledgers help? On a more personal level, I’m often unsure when to lean towards making grants to specific opportunities versus using advised philanthropic funds. And I’d love a view on if wild animal welfare is too speculative to be tractable, or if that’s exactly why it needs more funding.