Overflow.

Here is the origin story, and it is almost too tidy. A member of Vance Roush's church wanted to donate stock - Facebook, Google, Apple, the sort of thing a person who worked in Silicon Valley in the 2010s tended to accumulate. Donating appreciated stock is, on paper, a wonderful idea. You avoid the capital-gains tax you'd owe if you sold it, the charity gets the full value, everyone comes out ahead. The tax code, unusually, is on the side of generosity here.

The problem was the process. To make the gift, you filled out physical forms and faxed them in. Roush, who had started his career as an engineer at Google, looked at this and reached a conclusion that is both obvious and, apparently, worth tens of millions of dollars: millennials will not fax anything. The wealth was there. The willingness was there. The only thing standing between the two was a piece of office equipment from 1987.

So he built the button. Overflow started as a way to complete a stock donation entirely online, and when that generated real money for one church, Roush did the thing founders do - he noticed the pattern was not specific to his church. It was specific to almost every church, ministry, and nonprofit in the country. They were all fundraising, more or less exclusively, for cash. And roughly 90% of American wealth is not cash. It's equities, funds, real estate, retirement accounts, and - increasingly - crypto.

This is the entire thesis, and it's a good one precisely because it's not clever. Overflow's insight is not that people want to give more. It's that the tools we hand them can only accept the least tax-efficient, least abundant form of their wealth. Fix the tooling and the generosity that was already there simply shows up. Overflow reports that organizations which migrate onto its platform see roughly a 12% average annual lift in giving - not because donors became more generous, but because they were finally allowed to give the way that made sense for them.

What Overflow sells is best described as plumbing, and I mean that as a compliment. The company took every method by which a person might want to give - card, ACH bank transfer, Apple Pay, Google Pay, publicly traded stock, cryptocurrency, donor-advised funds, and a roundup feature that sweeps the spare change from everyday purchases - and rolled them into a single donor flow. From the giver's side it feels like nothing. From the organization's side it means their donation page can now quietly accept a five-figure gift of Ethereum without anyone touching a fax machine.

Underneath, it connects to the systems these organizations already run on - church-management platforms like Planning Center and Rock RMS, payment rails, and CRMs including Salesforce - so the data lands where the finance team expects it. There's a real-time dashboard, because a nonprofit that can suddenly accept stock also wants to see, in the moment, that someone just gave it. Overflow layered analytics on top, then AI-assisted features, then - in a move that tells you how seriously it takes the in-person nature of church giving - hardware.

That hardware is Overflow Tap: a small NFC device that lets a donor tap a phone and give a gift, including a non-cash one, in the room. It's a deliberate acknowledgment that generosity is often a physical, communal act - the offering plate, the year-end campaign, the moment in a service - and that a giving company which lives only inside a website is missing where the giving actually happens.

The ambition Roush has stated is to build something like the "Amazon for Giving" - unified infrastructure for the entire act of charitable donation. That is a large claim, and the honest read is that Overflow hasn't gotten there. But the more grounded version of the claim is already true in miniature: it took the single most complicated form of giving and made it feel like the easiest. That's the whole company, and it's enough.

Consider the arithmetic that makes Overflow tick. Suppose you want to support your church and you own stock you bought years ago that has since tripled. You could sell it, pay capital-gains tax on the appreciation, and donate what's left as cash. Or you could donate the stock directly, owe no capital-gains tax, and the church receives the full pre-tax value. The second path produces a materially larger gift for the exact same generosity. The donor isn't more giving; the mechanism is more efficient.

The reason this wasn't already ubiquitous is that the second path used to be a bureaucratic ordeal, which meant it was reserved for large, deliberate, once-a-year gifts handled by someone's financial advisor. Overflow's contribution is to compress that ordeal into a web flow that a typical donor can complete on a Sunday. It moves asset-based giving from the realm of estate planning into the realm of the everyday donation button. That's a genuinely different market - not a cheaper version of an existing one.

It also explains the choice of customer. Overflow didn't go after the crowded lanes of consumer fintech; it went after the offering plate. Churches, ministries, and faith-adjacent nonprofits are an enormous, underserved, deeply loyal market that most Silicon Valley companies simply don't think about. The culture reflects it - internal principles like "Fight To Pay The Bill" and "Multiply with Momentum" read less like startup slogans and more like convictions. Roush has said he liquidated his own 401(k) to keep the company alive before funding arrived, which is either reckless or the most on-brand possible act for a founder whose product is about the movement of retirement assets toward causes people believe in.