You Can’t Cancel the Safety Net: Reinventing Nonprofit Power with Kian Alavi of Mazlo

Welcome to the Legacy All Stars podcast. We feature inspirational stories from people who dedicate themselves to helping others. Here is your host, Alan Pavloski.

All right, all right, all right. I am super excited. Welcome to the Legacy All Stars podcast. The show where we spotlight extraordinary people who are using their platform, purpose and passion to make the world a better place. Our guest today is building a future where social impact is accessible, scalable, and most importantly, sustainable. Kian Alavi is the founder and CEO of Maslow. That's Maslow with a Z. A technology that helps everyday leaders launch and grow nonprofit organizations with ease, speed and confidence. Maslow is a powerful software platform that connects fiscal sponsors and mission driven projects through modern, easy to use technology. It removes barriers to entry by streamlining operations and helping leaders focus more on impact and less on admin work. At a time when trust in traditional institutions is fading, Kiyan is helping a new generation of community leaders rise by giving them tools and infrastructure they need to build safety nets where systems have failed. Let's dive into the future of philanthropy, equity and real grassroots power with Keanu Lavi. Welcome to the show, my friend. How are you?

Thank you, Alan. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me on. Big fan.

Yeah, love it. People familiar with my journey know that I absolutely geek out on legacy building, technology and social impact. So on that basis, you hit the proverbial trifecta. Yeah, I can't wait to kick the tires on Maslow and see how it helps others. So let's dive right in.

Okay, let's get in.

What inspired you to launch Maslow and what problem were you setting out to solve?

That's a great question. So, you know, some people think there's this aha moment inspired. You know it, you see it. I would say it's more of a grind. You're iterating forward. You're learning how to build systems you're building for good. And we were building for good on grants management software and asking folks, hey, how. How does this look to you? We were using it. I was using it in my previous life as a deputy director, automating hours and hours of just like manual work in a mainframe, punching in numbers and started sharing that around when I realized it had some power. But what we heard over and over again was, that's important, but that's a vitamin. The painkiller is the back office. That's where we need the painkillers. The back office is super hard. And if you are in a nonprofit, you know, it's the most complex engine, economic engine, if you will, to run much harder than a private business. There's multi ledger accounting and tons of compliant driven workflows. So when we started to get into that, we realized, oh, this is where we can be useful. This is where we can ideate. And that's where we started to see a path forward.

Nice. Nice. You often say that you can't cancel the safety net, this social safety net, if you will. What does that phrase mean to you and why is it important right now?

Yeah, that's a, that's a really big question.

Look, nonprofits are a hugely American innovation. As this country started to turn forward and build industry and rise with democracy and capitalism, it also built the nonprofit sectors. There's three sectors, government, private and nonprofit. Where government won't go or can't go, where private won't go or can't fund is the nonprofit sector. And the nonprofit sector literally started as great people in communities linking arm in arm and going after problems and solving them. And so what you have is the true safety net from coast to coast. Every, every state, every city is the nonprofit sector. And so I call it sometimes the safety net under the safety net, if you will. Now, there's a lot of pressure and scrutiny across the three sectors, especially government right now. Maybe there could be some more in the private space, and there's a lot in the nonprofit space. And sure, it's important to weed out the bad apples and get it going, but you can't cancel the safety net. The nonprofits will be there where others will not be there or cannot go. They bring people off the streets and help them on their journey to recovery. They support elderly, you know, they support our veterans. They support our schooling systems and our teachers. It's just such a critical part of what makes America amazing. And so there's a lot of bashing in the media. There's a lot of, you know, scapegoating and whatnot. But I just want to remind folks, like, these are amazing Americans, right? This is a $600 billion a year space. I mean, that means that our Americans are giving out of their pocket every year that kind of money to fund nonprofits and the work they do. Nonprofits employ 10% or more of our country. 12 million plus people. That's not including the contractors and the vendors and the electrical contractor that comes in and wires a preschool. Right? And in some of our heartland states, that's 12, 13%. So, you know, we have to be really careful when we talk about, you know, nonprofits are bad or, or let this kind of narrative float out there when the reality, the reality is that people, and this is over decades, people trust nonprofits first, then small businesses, then corporations, then governments. And why? Because non profit, non profits show up quietly every day, day in doing day.

Doing the hard work for sure.

Yeah, yeah. So you can't cancel the safety net. It's a really important part of what makes this country great.

Yeah. How does Maslow make it easier for leaders to launch social ventures or nonprofits?

Yeah, it's a really good question. So Maslow is a fintech and we partner with great finance organizations to bring embedded finance into the software. But what are we really trying to do here? When you think of a nonprofit back office, for those of you who don't know, it's really complex. There's, like I said earlier, fund accounting and so much more compliant driven stuff. But you have to have audit readiness at any given time, especially right now. Right. If you're going to stand up, you have to stand up with audit proof numbers. So with Maslow, you get to deploy Maslow as your command center or the power layer that connects all of your pieces together, whether it be your accounting system, your HR system or your donation platform. And in Maslow, you benefit from these financial workflows that will keep you compliant, that will drive audit readiness. And this is what we found. It's not sexy. You know, people are generally like looking at this and saying, I don't know what this is. But for those who know and for those who live the pain in the back office and they see Maslow, they get it, and they can sleep better at night because they know every last transaction that's flowing through is accounted for. Its restrictions are applied, its releases are applied. It's compliant, it's audit ready, it's ready to go into the 990. So with Maslow, what you have is a trusted technology partner that helps you pull it all together and keep it running smoothly. Eliminating data work and making sure you're audit ready.

That's fantastic. Well, Maslow isn't a fiscal sponsor itself, but it plays a vital role in the ecosystem. How does the platform support both sides of the equation?

Yeah. So many nonprofits out there will practice fiscal sponsorship where they support community driven projects or initiatives. And that means creating technology that brings the nonprofit and the sponsor and the project closer together. So previously what you had was a very disconnected system where donations are coming in from here and money is coming into a bank account and there's a card over here and there's a accounting system over there and to with gravity, bring all those numbers together and scrub those numbers and get them into accounting and get them back to the community leader or to the nonprofit support team to make sure that everybody's going in the right direction. That could take weeks, months, sometimes longer than that, depending on the complexity. With Maslow, it's real time. You come together in one space, all those workflows are there, Everything's transparent. You're communicating across the platform. You're doing your work together across the platform. So we bring sponsors and projects closer together so they can focus on what matters. Right? We're doing the stuff that shouldn't be hard. They're doing the stuff that's hard. So with Maslow, we just eliminate all that hard tech stuff or financial stuff or workflow stuff so that they can have real time information. They don't have to gum up each other's emails, lots of spreadsheets and going back and forth. No, it's there, it's done, it's clear. Go do what you came to do.

Let me ask you this. How is Maslow helping to democratize access and level the playing field?

That's a big question. So if you look at the nonprofit sector, you can chunk it into three segments. The enterprise side, which is, you know, 20, 30, $100 million a year nonprofits, there's a middle space, which is what I would generally call the transfer transformers, which is somewhere between 10 and 15 million. And then there's everything under about one and a half million or smaller. Now, the majority of this space is the small nonprofit. And that makes sense, right? Every year, every week, there's new issues facing our communities and folks are standing up new solutions and they're starting nonprofits. Now. The problem that a early adventurer faces is what do I choose to use in my back office? How much time do I set spend setting all of this up and connecting it? And can I at the end of the day, drive financial data? Financial data is critical. So you can turn in that budget alongside your narrative for that grant request and unlock larger and larger amounts of funding. And what occurs is there's a huge mortality kind of line, if you will, around one and a half million. You could be have an amazing solution for your community. You could be great at shaking the trees and raising money or grassroots fundraising and. But you don't have a good stack. You didn't have enough time to set it up. And you can't drive a budget and therefore you can't apply to larger and larger amounts of Funding. And that's inequitable, and that's truly inequitable. You shouldn't be restricted from growing just because you don't have an MBA in spreadsheets.

Right?

Yeah.

Can you share a recent success story or project that Maslow helped bring to life?

I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot. Yesterday our team was very touched by seeing an explosive kind of donation campaign, if you will, around a young person who lost their life due to school violence. And nothing will bring that child home. And when you see a parent get with a sponsor, start a project immediately, stand up all the assets needed and start raising and can start moving forward with whatever recovery and healing means. And seeing all of these donations come to them from their loving community. Like, there's nothing that can describe the feeling that you're building technology to support that kind of good from a sponsor level or from a nonprofit level. We have seen fiscal sponsors cut their reconciliation times by 90%. You know, it would take six or seven hours from kind of upper level, you know, in the finance team scrubbing data every month, and then it would come over to the finisher, if you will, that would get it into the accounting software. And there's always a suspense account. Right. I don't know what this, this, what this money is for. I don't know who it's from. We have to suspend it until we sort that out, the compliance side, and that's extremely frustrating. And by deploying Maslow, we see them getting up to 90% of that back in terms of lost time and more importantly, 100% financial precision. No more. Who is this money from? Who is this money for? What are the restrictions on this money? Can I use this money? Did that vendor get paid? Do I have a W9? All the things that come with these workflows just gone. Gone. Technology can do it.

That brings a lot of, a lot of simplicity to the world. I mean, I've come from the space where I've had a lot of activity in the nonprofit world and boy, oh boy, the cost segregation and all the things you have to do to make sure that you're compliant, making sure as a fiscal sponsor that you're project is being accounted for properly while still not messing up your own 990. I mean, that's, that's got to be. You got to have a lot of fans that are raving about this, given the solution you're providing.

Fortunately, we do. We have a community forming and really actually informing what we do. So everything we build, we have seen as a pain. And then we go to this incredible learning economy of humans across this country and say, this is what we're seeing as a pattern. Is this what you're seeing and feeling? Tell us what you think and if there's enough demand and need, we'll move on to bringing it to life and validating it. So everything we have built literally has been shoulder to shoulder with the nonprofits we work with and just solving pain after pain after pain. And fortunately, that's, that's how we've been growing. I mean, we haven't really done any getting the word out. It's just folks are coming to us because people are picking up on what we're putting down.

Yeah, that's great. All right, I'm going to ask you kind of a bonus, bonus round here.

Let's go.

If you could wave a magic wand and fix one systemic issue in the non profit sector, what would it be?

This is a big one.

Well, obviously I would love for trust based philanthropy to be the norm. However, I don't ever think it will get there fully and completely. And I understand why people want to know that when they put a dollar down that most of that is going to the work and that they can see that. I think that there is an opportunity to create a space where trust is guaranteed and that is in the financial data. So nonprofits are required to report through their 990 their activities, making it public because they are, you know, benefiting from tax free status by providing a public benefit. I think that there's an incredible opportunity to bring all of the nonprofit sector forward in more of a standardized financial data model, if you will, empowering more sharing of data. So, for example, I am a foundation or I am a donor and I want to send money or deploy money in something that really I care about and, and I want to see what's going on. I also don't want to burden the nonprofit with reporting and things like that. Financial data can do that work. If there's some standardizations and some overall bringing everyone up with financial power around the data, then we can share that. We can share that data very quickly and we can network the need to the funder much faster and we can eliminate the lift on reporting back on, on what's going on. So that's a, that's a long answer, but I would say I think there's a incredible opportunity to standardize the space in terms of how we share financial data and that will lead to just bringing everyone closer together, moving faster and doing less administrative work.

Yeah, that's great.

Let's go to another question. What have been your biggest lessons since launching Maslow and what's next?

Startup life is hard. You know, I, I started nonprofits and I would still say that a nonprofit startup is far harder than a for profit startup.

Right.

We're a technology company. We have incredible funding. Our funding is values aligned. You know, we have people that really believe in what we're doing. But with a startup that is a nonprofit, you're fundraising every day, you're fundraising every year. It never stops. And you, you give service to, to someone and then you try to take funding from another and you try to bring that all together. That's really complex. So I would say that starting a technology startup has been easier than I expected and still incredibly hard and challenging. There's no doubt about that. And, and the lessons that I find in Maslow, specifically in the community that's coming together, not around Maslow, so to speak, but just forming in general in this space, is that everybody's ready, everyone's ready for technology to do those, do that heavy lifting. And it's starting to happen. And there's an incredible amount of optimism. I can move faster, I can do more, I can accept more community led projects and help more. And that's really exciting. So I think I was, I guess I was unsure of how big a need it was, and I'm finding that it's far bigger than I ever expected.

Yeah, well, to quote Tom Hanks from League of Their Own, of course it's hard. It's the hard that makes it great, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Tough things are always, are always difficult, but they're worth it.

So, yeah, yeah, I'm here for it.

Yep. How does Maslow support founders emotionally and mentally through the startup process?

We're talking about nonprofit startup founders, is that right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I did this, right. I started as a model C project in San Francisco supported by a local family resource center, an amazing one that.

They didn't do fiscal sponsorship, but they saw what we were doing and they helped. It was an occasional fiscal sponsor, if you will.

And it's really, really freaking hard to stand up a very complex business while all you're trying to do is knock out the task of the day and drive the van with the kids back to the program, you know, and then you're staying up all night trying to figure out how to install QuickBooks and make that work. So with Maslow, you get a very simple, intuitive space where you can bring it all together and you can be confident that every moment you spend in there is a moment doing the work you need to do versus trying to make it all talk together. So in terms of how we support folks, you're going to sleep better at night, you're going to get a person on the phone or on a zoom screen that's going to walk you through. And often we'll just explain the knowledge that we have come to learn over the years to help you understand fund accounting and all the esoteric language around compliance and audit readiness. But really, at the end of the day, you're going to be confident that you have the numbers and those numbers will stand up. And that's what matters. Because if you have the numbers that stand up and paired with amazing work, you will be able to keep going, doors will keep opening. So instead of stressing about I got to take a day out of program and spend time with this terrible systems and figure this out because I need to drive a report. No more. Just use Maslow. It's going to be fine.

Yeah, I mean, with any disruption, there's always kind of a shift in how people see the work that they're doing. I mean, does Maslow eliminate any need for some of the need for, you know, bookkeeping and some of those other things that just take up so much time and are so expensive to implement?

You know, we don't foresee a future where we're going to eliminate bookkeepers or accountants or CFOs. AI is incredible and AI is, is here and it's transforming how we see work. And it's. We're early innings really. I mean, it's incredible stuff. That said, a lot of this work is routine and mundane and can be automated. And that which can be automated will be automated, freeing you to do more work. So when I was saying earlier, one of our early use cases has cut their back office reconciliation monthly rec time by 90%. That's because of Maslow's automations that we brought to them and the ease of use. So yeah, I foresee people being able to do more. And here's another thing that's important. 75% or three out of four nonprofits are under, resourced or understaffed in the back office. And why? Because accounting jobs, financial management jobs, we are fighting with the for profit sector for folks, we don't pay as much and there are no equity packages. And this has been the case for a really long time. Everyone is always looking for back office help. With Maslow, you can pick up so much speed. The ideal State is we help you eliminate that search for another to help you grind and sort the mundane stuff. And you really just focus on the high value financial tasks and thinking and decision making that you need to do.

Right. All right, we're going to jump into the next section. I'll call this the legacy round. I try to do this with everybody on the show. Tell me what legacy means to you personally and how do you hope Maslow contributes to that vision?

I thought about this a bit over the years. I've been around the block a few times. I'm in my late 40s and I'm not sure where I read it. It could have been in a Dale Carnegie book. But I think the number one thing when it comes to legacy is the people you support and empower and help quietly. Not for need of thanks or gratitude or accolades, but just, you know, heart to heart. Doing that work and seeing them move on and go forward, I still get, I just got a text message the other day saying guess who's going to so and so college. You know, and those are, those are amazing that they still show up. And of course we talk back and forth and whatnot. And I think about the folks that I have been so blessed and privileged to have been there with in community as an ally and support. And when I think about legacy, I think about what they may do for others one day and no one's going to know that Kian was a part of their journey and that's totally fine. So I think about people first. I'm raising two boys. I'm extremely grateful to my, my wife and, and to God to giving me this incredible family. So I feel about, when I think about legacy, I think about the people that you were able to support and hopefully the good that they can go on and do from their hearts and put into the world after. I think about people, I think about country. So, you know, I am a proud American. This is an incredible, incredible country. It is the greatest experiment in history, right in terms of a civilization. And I think about the nonprofits that we can help and that I have been a part of helping and building with and that's infrastructure. That's 120 year old organization that will live for another 100 years, hopefully longer. Right. These are new organizations that will live for many, many years. And it does not matter if people know that my hands were helping, but to see these infrastructures be being built for good and somebody showing up and having an incredible experience volunteering and supporting that filled their soul like that. I think you Know, people being able to support our country through great technology and infrastructure, empowering others to do good and all of that, again, coming into a greater thing, which is, I think we all have the, the want and the need to lead from our heart and our mind. So letting more people lead from their heart.

Yes, certainly this generation, one of the most encouraging things that I see of the younger generation is just they're, they're much more mission and purpose driven than previous generations. And I love that about the younger, younger audience.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, as a builder now in the, in the kind of technology world, and some called me a disruptor, if you will. I'll take it. Sure. What I'm seeing from the young folks coming up is they're not interested in building another photo sharing app. That's just not where they're at. They want to be a part of something that does good. Sure. They're capitalists too, and they want to do good and they want to put money in their pockets and they want to buy a home and they want to raise a family, many of them. But they want to know that what they're working on is making a difference, wherever that is. And I'm really encouraged by that, 100%.

Yeah, I love that. How can people support your mission? Follow Maslow or get started with your team.

Maslow's easy to find. M A Z L O dot com. You can book time with me if you want to chat with me, see a demo or just learn about our work or share your work and get some thoughts on it. I'll share with you what I know and what I've come to learn. Or our team will share with you what they have come to learn. I have an incredible team. By the way, I will say that I am one of many amazing humans in Maslow, including my co founder, Sean, who I'd like to shout out Ride or die. This guy's been there through it all. And otherwise you can find me on LinkedIn. That's where I mostly am active when it comes to socials.

Or you could just reach out to me by a DM there or email me. You can find me on the website.

Yeah, I mean, look, a lot of people I interview on this show I've known for years. I've only known you for a short period of time, but I did get a demo of Maslow and I am super impressed. So anybody who, who's had struggles with that back office, part of the nonprofit space, man, I, I really encourage you to, to check this out. It's it seems like a game changer to me.

Alan, I appreciate you, man. Thank you for amplifying our work. It means a lot to me.

Yeah. All right. I want to thank my special guest, Keon Olavi, for sharing his vision today. I hope this episode has inspired you to seek a path that helps others. For Legacy All Stars, I'm Alan Pavloski signing off. See you on the next episode.