LaunchGood posted a job for a data analyst. A friend saw it and said I should apply. At the time, I was doing well financially. For my age, I was probably making two to three times as much as my peers. Comfortable. Secure.
I applied anyway. Kind of a throwaway application, honestly. I didn’t think much of it.
Three months later, they finally called me back.
And something shifted during that conversation.
The questions I asked
I started asking questions about their setup. “Hey, do you guys have this? What does your data warehouse/architecture look like?” I’d worked in startups before. I knew what the leading-edge, bleeding-edge technologies looked like. I knew best practices.
The answers kept coming back the same way: “No, we don’t really have this. No, we’re not using that. No, we don’t even know what that is.”
At the end of the conversation, I told my future boss something she probably wasn’t expecting: “I don’t think you guys need a data analyst. I think you need a data engineer.”
I explained that an analyst would just work on some Excel reports and be incredibly limited. What they actually needed was someone to set up the foundation: the systems and the infrastructure. Only then could they produce any meaningful analysis or insights.
She agreed.
We went back and forth on negotiation. I ended up taking a 50% pay cut to join.
From first data hire to a team of five
Four Ramadans later, not four years. That’s how you measure time at a Muslim nonprofit. I went from being the very first data hire to building a team of five people.
And LaunchGood truly became a data-driven organization.
Every single team. Every single function. Finance, marketing, program management, biz dev. They all had dashboards, had insights, had specific things they were tracking. They were actually using data to make informed decisions.
I can clearly map that transformation back to the work we put into place. The analytics strategy that didn’t exist before. The change management. The organizational technology strategy. All foundational things that we built from nothing.
We went from $254M in donations in 2021 to over $664M in 2024. I’m so proud to have helped deliver that.
It took me years to understand this.
The corporate path was never the destination. It was training.
These were places to learn. To see the talent level. To understand what excellence looks like at scale.
Then you take those skills and apply them where they actually matter.
Mission over money isn’t a platitude people put in their LinkedIn bios. It’s a strategic choice. And it compounds over time in ways you can’t predict when you’re making the decision.
That 50% pay cut bought me four Ramadans of building something that mattered. It bought me a team. It bought me proof that this work actually increases average donation amounts for nonprofit organizations.
Worth every dollar I didn’t make.
