Vance Roush

The accountant who decided generosity needed better software

Vance Roush did not set out to run a fintech company. He set out to fix a problem sitting on his own desk. As the finance lead for VIVE Church, a congregation he helped co-found in the Bay Area, he kept running into the same wall: people wanted to give generously, and the tools to let them do it were stuck in another era.

The specific breaking point involved stock. Members of his church worked at Facebook, Google, and other Silicon Valley companies, and many held appreciated shares they wanted to donate. Giving stock is the most tax-efficient way to give, but the process to actually do it required paper forms, signatures, and, in some cases, a fax machine. Most people gave up before they finished. Roush watched real generosity evaporate over paperwork, and he could not let it go.

So in 2020 he built Overflow, a platform that turns a donation of stock, crypto, or cash into something closer to a few taps on a phone. The first proof point was his own church, which generated millions through the tool. That was enough to convince him the problem was not unique to one congregation. It was everywhere.

"Donating stock is the most tax efficient way to give." Vance Roush

From a lawn-mowing round in Kent to a product desk at Google

Roush grew up a first-generation Asian American in Kent, Washington, a working-class suburb south of Seattle full of immigrant families. His father worked in aerospace, often pulling double shifts. The entrepreneurial itch showed up early: as a grade-schooler, Roush ran a lawn-mowing subscription service, charging neighbors on a recurring basis before he had any language for what that meant.

Determined to avoid student debt, he stacked jobs through high school and earned merit scholarships that covered tuition, rent, and books at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business, where he studied marketing and information systems. The scholarships, he has said, even freed him up to study abroad.

After graduating he joined Google in 2011 as a "Noogler," working in a product role, then spent years as a director of product management at the travel-data company ADARA. The through-line across those jobs was product thinking: understanding a user's pain deeply enough to design the thing that removes it. It is the same muscle he would later point at generosity.

Building what he calls the "Amazon for giving"

Roush is unusually direct about his ambition. He describes the goal for Overflow as building the "Amazon for giving," a single, frictionless place where any form of value can move from a donor to a cause. That means stock and crypto, not just credit cards, and it means an experience that feels closer to modern consumer software than to a paper pledge card.

The market has responded. Overflow raised a $10M Series A in 2021 led by R7 Partners, then a $20M Series B in February 2024 led by the Wesleyan Investment Foundation, bringing total funding to roughly $30M. The Series B came with a widened mission: to move beyond giving into spend management and become a comprehensive financial partner for churches and nonprofits. Early customers span from Meals on Wheels to the Golden State Warriors Foundation.

"We're now positioned to expand beyond our core giving solution to new product areas such as spend management." Vance Roush, on the Series B

There is a detail about Overflow that says a lot about how Roush thinks. The company gives away 10% of its annual revenue to charity through its own foundation. A company built to sell generosity that also practices it is not a marketing line for him; it is closer to a design constraint.

A business plan rooted in a single verse

You cannot separate Roush the CEO from Roush the pastor. He co-founded VIVE Church and serves as an executive pastor, and his Christian faith is the engine behind Overflow, not a footnote to it. He returns often to Proverbs 11:24 - "the world of the generous gets larger and larger" - and frames the company's entire purpose as helping more people experience what he calls the enlarged life of the generous.

He is also candid about the discipline behind it. He prefers podcasts and audiobooks to sitting down with a book, structures his mornings around a routine that includes Bible devotionals, and keeps a personal mantra as simple as it gets: "I am loved." His family plays a running game called "Fight To Pay The Bill," a good-natured competition over who gets to be the generous one at dinner. It is generosity as a household sport.

"Life travels at the speed of relationship." Vance Roush

Roush has put his ideas on paper, too. He wrote High Growth Fundraising The Silicon Valley Way, a guide to unlocking crypto, stock, and other assets for nonprofits, churches, and schools, and the Silicon Valley Business Journal named him one of 2022's rising innovators to watch. He hosts the "Give It Up Podcast" and has backed early faith-tech projects like Bible.ai and PulpitAI as an angel investor.

Storyteller, optimist, and unapologetic believer in giving

Ask Roush about his own strengths and he lands on storytelling. It is the tool he uses to move money toward causes, and it shows in how he talks about entrepreneurship. "Entrepreneurs are problem solvers," he says, and he treats customer value as the only validation worth chasing: "Customers and providing value to them is all the validation you need." He is a basketball fan who pulls lessons from the game, an optimist by temperament, and a relationship-first operator.

He and his wife Kim, who once worked for Teach for America, are raising four children in Silicon Valley. The lawn-mowing kid from Kent now wants to be remembered less for the company he built and more as a catalyst for other people's ambitions. If Overflow works the way he intends, the measure of success will not be a valuation. It will be how much easier it became for ordinary people to give away what they have.

"Customers and providing value to them is all the validation you need." Vance Roush