A daughter asks her father what he does for a living. For Bryan de Lottinville, already experienced in the business of building and selling companies, the question became an awkward little audit. A career could look perfectly satisfactory on paper and still require a better explanation to his daughter. He wanted work that would make his daughter proud. Eventually, he would build a company around helping other people find something similar in their own working lives.
There is a pleasing complication in his story: the business was software for charitable giving. Few things sound less likely to produce a billion-dollar valuation. Yet Benevity, founded in Calgary in 2008, attracted customers including Nike, Apple and Google. Its underlying proposition was disarmingly ordinary. Give employees a say in the causes they support. Make participation convenient. Let the employer help.
Good intentions were plentiful. The arrangements for acting on them needed work. De Lottinville had spent enough time inside companies to recognize an operational problem wearing a respectable suit.
A lawyer discovers the power of the crowd
He grew up in Ottawa, trained in law and worked in corporate finance in Toronto. A meeting with entrepreneur Mogens Smed carried him toward Calgary and an operating role at SMED International in the mid-1990s. He subsequently became chief operating officer at iStockphoto, which Getty Images bought in 2006 for $50 million.
Those were useful apprenticeships for an unlikely destination. At iStockphoto, he had watched a community contribute material to a shared marketplace. Small transactions, multiplied across many participants, could support a substantial business. Participation and choice were practical ingredients. He would later look at charitable giving through that same lens.
After the sale, he considered working directly in the nonprofit sector. He concluded that his temperament and skills would be better employed elsewhere. An investment in a loyalty-program business built around giving failed, but brought him closer to the mechanics of donations. Even a disappointing investment can provide an education. The tuition is simply less attractively advertised.
He calls himself a “recovering lawyer,” a description that gives his reinvention a suitably dry edge. The legal training did not disappear. The next project would involve moving money, verifying recipients and working across jurisdictions. Idealism was about to acquire quite a bit of administration.
Two years of excellent meetings
Benevity’s early proposition had an appealing flexibility. Its donation technology could sit inside a company’s existing systems. The company would provide the underlying machinery; customers could build their own interfaces or connect through its application programming interfaces. Giving could become part of transactions people were already making.
The meetings went well. The business moved more slowly. De Lottinville later described a couple of years in which enthusiasm for the idea failed to become much commercial traction. Potential customers had budgets, competing priorities and limited capacity to build the missing pieces themselves. Agreement about the destination did not supply a vehicle.
Benevity responded by building a ready-to-use cloud offering. Its company timeline dates the employee engagement solution to 2010. Customers could use an existing service for giving and volunteering rather than undertake their own development project. The change made the original belief easier to purchase and easier to put to work.
A 2012 business-school case captured the early uncertainty in two blunt questions: who was the market, and what was the product? The platform could address individual donations, workplace giving and donations attached to purchases. Such breadth created choices for the company itself. Every possible customer was also another possible distraction.
That makes the pivot more revealing than a neat founding legend. A mission can explain why a founder persists. It cannot, by itself, decide which part of the software a customer will actually buy.
Calgary, Canada
Giving meets volunteering
A global workplace customer
Kelly Schmitt becomes CEO
Permission to care about something else
The more interesting part of de Lottinville’s argument concerns authority. A company may have a preferred cause. Its employees will have many others. A program built around their choices lets people bring their own convictions to work, instead of borrowing the convictions printed in the corporate campaign.
He has consistently argued for giving and volunteering throughout the year, with room for personal preference. In his account, these experiences can strengthen people’s connection to their workplace as well as benefit communities. The business case matters to him because it makes participation something companies have a reason to keep supporting.
Money is only one route into that participation. Time, skills and smaller actions can also count. Someone need not arrive with a large cheque to have something useful to contribute. That widens the invitation, especially in a workplace where pay packets and available hours vary considerably.
There is also the less photogenic work of delivering donations. De Lottinville is listed as director and president of the American Online Giving Foundation, which advocates electronic payments to charities. Its explanation is wonderfully practical: cheques can go missing or remain uncashed, and their processing consumes resources. A donor’s generous moment still needs a functioning route to its destination.
This attention to plumbing helps explain the company he built. Benevity’s subject is generosity; much of its work concerns the systems that allow generosity to travel. Both deserve attention, even if only one gets the stirring conference music.
“I aspire to Benevity outgrowing my capabilities”
Bryan de Lottinville, 2019 interview
A unicorn, with an exit from the corner office
When a majority investment from Hg was announced in late 2020, Benevity reached a reported valuation of US$1.1 billion. De Lottinville and Kelly Schmitt marked the news for staff dressed as unicorns. Venture-capital terminology occasionally demands a ridiculous wardrobe. They obliged.
The valuation gave the mission a financial marker. It also set up a more personal decision. In January 2021, de Lottinville announced that Schmitt, then president and chief financial officer, would become CEO on February 1. He would take the executive chairperson role, concentrating on strategy, relationships and support for his successor.
His public explanation included family. His daughter had left for university at McGill, making the speed of her childhood newly apparent to him. He wanted more time with his son and wanted to support his spouse’s career after years in which she had supported his. A founder discussing succession had admitted that other people’s calendars mattered too.
The handover fitted an earlier statement about wanting Benevity to grow beyond his own capabilities. Founders often speak as though their company and their personal identity share a single passport. His ambition allowed for a company whose next stage might require somebody else at the controls.
Believing in the next person
Schmitt’s account adds an essential perspective. When she joined as CFO in 2018, de Lottinville was already looking for a successor. She initially did not want the position. She later credited his mentorship and belief in her abilities with helping her become a CEO. The promotion was preceded by encouragement, feedback and time.
That is a concrete connection between his public ideas about opportunity and a consequential appointment. Workplace choice can sound abstract until somebody gets an opportunity they had not imagined for themselves. Here the outcome included the founder relinquishing his own job.
In 2024, Axis Connects recognized him with its Male Champion award at the Calgary Influential Women in Business Awards. Benevity colleague Jill Farley wrote about the effect of his advocacy extending into the conduct of other leaders. Her emphasis was on habits that had become ordinary within the workplace, beyond a single act of sponsorship.
It is a useful way to assess a founder’s influence. A company contains decisions made in rooms the founder never enters. What colleagues do in those rooms eventually tells more about its culture than another speech from the stage.
The US$1.1 billion figure was a reported company valuation in the Hg transaction. It describes the business, not de Lottinville’s personal wealth.
Still interested in the unfinished work
By his July 2024 conversation on Collisions YYC, he was still concerned with the demands of growth and the danger of becoming satisfied with an established position. The subjects included institutional investors, innovation and moving from the CEO’s office to a board role. The work had changed shape; his interest in how a business behaves had endured.
Calgary recognized that career again in 2025, when Haskayne School of Business and the Calgary Chamber honoured him with the Inspiring Business Leader Award. Benevity’s current public description gives him the title Founder & Chief Enthusiast. The title has a little more room for personality than chief operating officer ever did.
The story began with a question from his daughter and returned, years later, to how he wanted to spend time with his family. In between came a company built to let other people express what mattered to them. Good intentions became a product only after he made them easier to act upon. His own ambitions eventually required the same treatment: a successor appointed, a job changed, and space made for a life beyond it.