Young girl uses fizz of Silicon Valley and social media as lemonade serves charity

At Silicon Valley's Techmanity conference, the crowds hadn't only come to see actor Jared Leto lecture about entrepreneurship and a Weezer concert that night. They were also there to see a 10-year-old girl in a princess dress talk about raising millions of dollars in venture capital.

This is Silicon Valley, after all. No surprise, then, that the girl, Vivienne Harr, has attracted investors that include Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, the co-founders of Twitter, and that Stone later joined Vivienne on stage. I had come to Techmanity to find out what Vivienne has been doing since I wrote about her odyssey almost a year ago.

Vivienne first achieved fame by ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange last November, when Twitter went public. Standing beside her were actor Patrick Stewart and Cheryl Fiandaca, a former spokeswoman for the Boston Police Department. Vivienne was chosen by Twitter for the honour because of her lemonade stand.

This was no ordinary stand. Vivienne had started the lemonade stand to end child slavery, vowing to sell lemonade for a year or until she raised $100,000. Because this is a Silicon Valley story, she had become an internet sensation by the 14th day. It didn't hurt that Vivienne and her family lived in the San Francisco Bay area and that her father, Eric Harr, was a social media public relations professional at the time. He has done a good job.

Most people would have stopped at raising a few hundred dollars for child slavery. But Harr, with Vivienne, founded Make a Stand, a fair trade organic lemonade drink company. Their idea was the company could be among the new breed of for-profit charitable companies like REI, which are specifically chartered with devoting some of their profits to a public mission.

Make a Stand’s mission would be ending child slavery. It would donate 5 per cent of its revenue to a number of charities devoted to ending the horror. Vivienne and her father raised about $1 million to fund the business, and Harr quit his job.

This is where they were a year ago, when Vivienne rang the bell. Now everything has changed. A children’s book was introduced, as well as a variety of new lemonade flavours. Vivienne spoke at LinkedIn and at Twitter, and is speaking later this year with the Dalai Lama.

But as Harr put it, “The beverage business is hard.” He had to figure it all out from scratch, finding out where to get the bottles, the fair trade lemons and the sugar. There was also the all-important matter of finding distribution in a competitive market. But still, Make a Stand lemonade seemed to be on to something. Consumers don’t want to just drink lemonade these days – they want an experience.

So the Harrs have moved on from lemonade and are riding the mobile app wave, because this is Silicon Valley. The app is also called Make a Stand, and allows people to set up a crowdfunding campaign for a charity in just a minute. You select the charity, post a picture and send it to your friends on Twitter, Facebook and other social media. Make a Stand serves as the intermediary, taking 4.9 per cent of the donation as a transaction fee but also vetting the charities through a relationship with guidestar.org, the charity rating and information organisation.

The goal of the app is to go global by leveraging everyone’s social connections.

What about the lemonade? As Biz Stone put it at Techmanity, “You can only do so much with glass bottles of lemonade.” He was referring to doing good, but that statement might also apply to making money. After all, apps are fetching tens of millions, if not billions, of dollars. And selling an actual manufactured product is hard.

Harr is no longer running the lemonade business, which is being managed by a professional team. According to Harr, the lemonade company is still expanding and negotiating distribution deals with national outlets. The Harrs’ hearts now seem to be in the app, seeing it as a bigger way to push their mission to do good while doing well.

Because the Harrs are plugged into Silicon Valley's network, the new Make a Stand app has raised millions from a variety of Silicon Valley luminaries, including Dorsey, Stone and Chade-Meng Tan, whose official title at Google is Jolly Good Fellow. (He was Employee No 107.) A new company separate from the lemonade business has been formed and has raised another $1.5 million, with 20 per cent of its ownership given to the old investors in the lemonade business to reward them for pushing the idea forward.

I caught up with Vivienne and her family, including her mother, Alexandra, and brother, Turner, at Techmanity. (They all travel together to these events.)

This story couldn’t have happened anywhere but Silicon Valley, and certainly not without the energy of a father with social media skills who happened to live in the area. But the story of Make a Stand also shows how, in today’s world, social connections are replacing old community ties. From a lemonade stand someone can tweet their way up to millions of dollars in funding and, perhaps, a game-changing role in charity.

It’s a reminder of the power of social media, and people are learning how to take advantage of the connections it builds, creating vast wealth.

At Techmanity, Biz Stone was all smiles. For him, Vivienne's entry into charity gave her a chance to do more good as well as "reap early and compound dividends" by doing good early in life. Stone also invoked the much-discussed TED talk by Dan Pallotta, in which he questioned whether the cost of running a charity should be the main measure of its performance. Pallotta argued that charities should be run more like businesses, along with a similar compensation model. So the for-profit business model may be just what charities need, and Silicon Valley may be the place where it happens.

It is easy to be cynical, especially at an event called Techmanity, about whether this is all about charity or money.

Vivienne talked about how she next wanted to help animals. In fact, the first campaign for the new app is for Animal Sanctuary, a charity that aims to eliminate animal cruelty in farm animals.

Perhaps we shouldn't be cynical. Instead, maybe we should just marvel at the velocity of Silicon Valley in all its absurd glory, and at a 10 year old who has raised millions for two separate businesses and may also help change the way we look at charity. – (New York Times)