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Search Kindly - Search to benefit charity
By Dan | April 1, 2007
I conducted an interview with Syed Karim, founder of searchkindly.org, a search engine that donates money from your searches to charity. Every time you visit the site, Syed and his team donate ad revenue portions to charity. Syed is a student at Lake Forest College in Chicago, with a self-designed major in Social Entrepreneurship.
What is search kindly and how did you get the idea to launch it?
Search Kindly is an experiment in microvolunteerism. Instead of having people give up their valuable free time, or making solicitations for their expendable income, we redefine altruism by asking people to do nothing more than tolerate a minor inconvenience. Search Kindly hopes to capitalize on the collective micro-efforts of thousands of people through the synergistic effect of microvolunteerism.
The creation of Search Kindly can be traced back to the failure of another one of my ventures–Kwizzical.com. One of the questions that I had wondered about during the development of Kwizzical had to do with the two sides of human nature: selflessness and selfishness. After having realized that Kwizzical was going nowhere in a hurry, I decided to simplify my curiosity and concentrate on just the selflessness that is inherent in all people. The seeds of Search Kindly were sown by the failure of Kwizzical.
How does search kindly fit into your entrepreneurship/social responsibility curriculum at school?
Well, Lake Forest College doesn’t really have that kind of a curriculum. It’s a small, Midwestern liberal arts college which really focuses on a broad-based course of study. What I did over the last four years was well outside of what was normal–but that doesn’t mean that I wasn’t encouraged and supported. I just had to work a little harder to find that support and encouragement. One of the great things about going to such a small school is that you have so much more intellectual freedom than could be found at a much larger and more inflexible institutions. How many other places would I have been able to self-design a major in Social Entrepreneurship.
What sorts of resources does your school provide for you as an entrepreneur?
I think our greatest resource is the accessibility to our professors and access to alumni. As a student at Lake Forest College over the past few years, I’ve been able to meet several members of the board of trustees, many of whom are very successful and experienced entrepreneurs. Another resource that I’ve been able to take advantage of is the freedom to pursue what was of interest to me–such as inventing and entrepreneurship. At what other school would an undergraduate student be granted his own laboratory for a semester to pursue his own research on an alternative energy invention?
What experiences have you had – positive or negative – that have really made a difference as a young entrepreneur in college?
Well, I guess the negative experience is that I still haven’t come up with any idea that has really hit. But that’s not all that bad, being that I’m constantly learning from all of my mistakes. As for the postive experiences, well, my senior thesis was the creation of a non-profit organization that lets people donate money for free. How much more positive of an experience could you ask for?
How do your classmates view you? Do they support you as an entrepreneur, or are they indifferent to what you do with your business?
Actually, I think they see me as a crackpot. Or maybe they just don’t know what to make of what I’m doing. I’d say most are pretty indifferent to what I’m doing, but that’s not to say there isn’t a lot of encouragement. I think the biggest cause of indifference has to do with how we as Americans are socialized to believe that higher education is just a step towards getting a good job. I think if there was more active, real-world encouragement in creation and innovation, then there would be a lot more interest in the kinds of things that I tend to focus my energy on.
