Catena Media Co-Founder Erik Bergman has quit his position at the company to start his own charity, Great.com. The charity is dedicated to providing children in West Africa with school and educational equipment.
Affiverse caught up with Bergman to find out more about the initiative, as he explains how the skills he has developed in the affiliate industry can help make this project a success.
Affiverse: Hi Erik! Why did you choose to start this charity?
Erik Bergman: The main reason is that I want to have a purpose in life. I want to build on something that is bigger than myself and something that can really add value to the world. I believe this is the best way for me to help others, I can do it over long term and it will
be both challenging and meaningful.
AI: What do you believe you can achieve?
EB: I see this as a project over the next 50 years. In 50 years the goals can be almost
endless. Google as a company is just about 20 years today. I’m not saying this would
ever be Google, but the aim is definitely to create something that generates billions of
dollars to charity during my lifetime.
EB: Catena is not involved at all yet. I’m happy to talk about future cooperations further down the line but it’s been to early so far.
AI: What exactly will the charity aim to do in West Africa?
EB: The focus moving forward will be to help people living in extreme poverty, not necessarily in West Africa. Key questions for us right now is malaria and deworming programs. We get a lot of our inspiration from GiveWell.org. An amazing site that evaluates which causes and which charities make the biggest impact in well being for the most people per dollar invested.
AI: Your work illustrates the power of igaming affiliates. What would you say to other’s in the industry who would like to follow a similar road?
EB: That they really have so much power to make an impact. They can save tons of lives and really contribute to the world! One way is to just check GiveWell and donate to any of those organisations. They are all among the best in the world! Another one is to reach out to me and I’m happy to tell them about what I’ve learned during my research.
AI: What can the affiliate sector do to assist you in your aims?
EB: SEO will be a very important part of this. In SEO links is as you all know a very
important ingredient. If you run any kind of website and want to be a part of this. Add a
link to Great.com and Great things will happen!
AI: What are your mid to long-term goals for the charity?
Depends a bit of what “mid to long-term” is defined as. For me long term is 50 years,
but I guess for most people it’s rather 5. So, I’ll give you 3-5-year vision. During this
time period the aim is to have a fully working organization of 50-100 people involved.
We will be spread all over the world and have managed to understand how to build a
remote organization in the best possible way.
Everyone loves this project and managed to contribute with great passion while still
keeping their work-life balance perfect. We have a really good product on the market
that generates lots of revenues, we might not make big profits yet, but everyone is
already talking about us and we are growing very rapidly towards our high set target.
This is a really touching story, and one that shows the power of igaming affiliates. When this power is harnessed in the right way, it can have some pretty amazing consequences, as demonstrated here. The gambling industry is often the target of a lot of criticism, but stories like this show that the sector isn’t just made up of money-driven robots lacking a conscience.
Read the full story at https://great.com/the-story/
