Profile // Operator · Founder · Los Angeles
Senior Executive Business Partner at GoFundMe. Founder of Easy Living Collective. Fifteen years inside Google's machine - then out, building something that matters.
Sarah Wood - Los Angeles, CA
Who She Is
The January 2025 wildfires burned through Los Angeles fast and indifferently. Fifty women-owned small businesses - a bakery in Altadena, a flower shop in Pasadena, a hair salon that had been open since 1987 - sat in the ash of everything they had built. Sarah Wood helped coordinate the response that put $1 million in direct cash grants into their hands. A year later, 90 percent of those businesses were back open.
That's not a press release. That's a career in one paragraph.
Sarah Wood is a Senior Executive Business Partner at GoFundMe, the crowdfunding platform that has now facilitated more than $40 billion in giving since it launched in 2010. She is also the founder and CEO of Easy Living Collective, a company she built around a simple and almost universally overlooked premise: the mental load of running a household is real work, and working women are drowning in it.
Before either of those roles, she spent eight years at Google - not in one seat, but five. Learning and development. Google Cloud executive support. Ads, Commerce, and Payments. People Operations. And finally a rotational manager role at Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm. Each move was lateral in title, exponential in scope. She arrived as a program manager and left having operated inside some of the most complex organizational machines ever built by a private company.
She earned her Master of Arts in Liberal Studies from The New School in New York - graduating in 2008, just before the financial crisis cracked the world open and made everything she'd learned about human systems suddenly relevant in ways no coursework could have predicted. That humanist foundation - the habit of asking "but what does this cost the person?" - threads through everything she has done since.
What distinguishes Sarah Wood in a city lousy with LinkedIn titles and conference panel bios is that she keeps choosing the harder, less glamorous version of each job. Operations is the part of any organization that nobody celebrates until it fails. Program management is the connective tissue that makes large institutions function without anyone noticing it's there. She chose both, repeatedly, and got very good at them.
Easy Living Collective grew directly out of that expertise. After watching senior executives struggle to manage the cognitive overhead of their personal lives alongside enormous professional demands - and noticing that this burden fell disproportionately on women and caregivers - she built a company to address it head-on. Household management, mental load reduction, work-life infrastructure. It is the kind of business that sounds obvious in retrospect and nearly impossible to monetize, which makes the fact that she built it anyway a reliable indicator of character.
GoFundMe's position in American civic life is stranger and more central than most people realize. The platform has become the de facto infrastructure for crisis fundraising in a country with thin social safety nets - medical bills, disaster recovery, small business survival. Sarah Wood operates inside that infrastructure, connecting GoFundMe's strategic capacity to the people who most need it, particularly through the platform's philanthropic initiatives targeting underserved entrepreneurs.
The LA wildfire work is the clearest window into how she works. The grant program required identifying affected businesses, building trust quickly, moving money efficiently, and following up long enough to know whether it actually worked. Not a press event. Not a landing page. The whole chain, from need to result, documented and verified. That's an operator's instinct, not a marketer's.
She is based in Los Angeles, which is its own kind of commitment in 2025 - a city that has spent the last several years burning, flooding, pricing out the working class, and still somehow remaining the place where people who want to build things show up. Sarah Wood is one of those people.
The mental load is the emotional and administrative burden of household management - the invisible labor that falls hardest on women and caregivers. It's real work. It just never gets called that.- Sarah Wood, Founder, Easy Living Collective
Career Arc
Sarah Wood's Google tenure was a masterclass in purposeful internal mobility - each role a deliberate expansion of scope, not a lateral drift.
When the January 2025 LA wildfires hit, GoFundMe.org partnered to deliver direct cash grants to 50 women-owned small businesses in the affected areas. One year after the grants were disbursed, 90% of those businesses had returned to full operation. The program didn't just move money - it moved people back to work. That's what operational excellence looks like when it's pointed at the right problem.
Organizations
The world's largest crowdfunding platform, with more than $40 billion raised since 2010. Based in Redwood City, California, with 1,300 employees and a growing philanthropic arm (GoFundMe.org) focused on community relief and underserved entrepreneurs. Sarah Wood serves as Senior Executive Business Partner, operating at the intersection of strategy and execution.
A household management company built for working women and caregivers. Founded by Sarah Wood after 15 years watching senior executives struggle with the cognitive overhead of managing their personal lives - an invisible burden that professional success never seems to eliminate. The company provides household management services and mental-load support for people who run both a career and a home.
Sarah's M.A. is in Liberal Studies from The New School - the same institution known for producing artists, activists, and systems thinkers. Her career turned out to be all three.
She navigated eight years and five distinct roles at Google before leaving - a tenure that put her inside Learning & Development, Cloud, Ads, People Ops, and Philanthropy.
Easy Living Collective's contact is in the 818 area code - the San Fernando Valley's own area code - for a company solving a very LA problem: doing too much at once.
The technologies at GoFundMe where she works include Anthropic Claude, Databricks, Snowflake, and LangGraph - she operates at the frontier of AI-assisted operations, whether she'd put it that way or not.
The 90% return-to-operation rate for wildfire grant recipients isn't a talking point. It's a year-long measured outcome that most emergency relief programs never bother to track.
What Drives Her
Sarah built Easy Living Collective on a conviction that the domestic and administrative labor of running a household is real, measurable, and fixable - and that nobody was treating it that way. The "mental load" is her subject matter, not a metaphor.
From the wildfire grant program to Google.org to People Ops, Sarah's fingerprint is on the full chain of delivery - not just strategy or launch, but the follow-through that tells you whether it actually worked. She counts the 90%.
Each of Sarah's moves - from learning & development to ads infrastructure to philanthropy to crowdfunding - has followed a through-line: getting resources to people who need them, inside systems complex enough to bury that goal. She keeps finding the buried goal.