About microPledge
Who, why, and where
The founders of microPledge are three business-minded brothers from Christchurch, New Zealand. Being people with plenty of ideas, we kept wanting to start projects – the kind we knew people would find interesting. If we could only get people to pledge to support them ...
Then one day it dawned on us that we had to run the service ourselves. microPledge was conceived in January 2006 on the way home from work, and launched mid-2007.
Read more about our mission, who we are and where we operate.
Our mission statement
microPledge is a place where great ideas are turned into reality – a reality that serves other people. Not only do we want to do the right thing by our users, but also the right thing according to God. Also, as Christians, we want to do our small part in making the world just that little bit more user-friendly.
This means we aim to provide
- high quality services
- based on trust and honesty
- to as many people as possible
- at a low cost or completely free.
In short, we believe business is far more than just making money.
Of course, like most humans, we’re far from perfect, so please contact us to help us work towards these goals.
Who we are
Geoff Shaw plays the role of our big-business brains. He is also president and a co-founder of Pharos Systems, the print asset management company, and he lives in upstate New York with his wife and two children. He is a pleasure to talk to, and gets excited about anything to do with selling grandma cheap oranges.
Berwyn Hoyt is an electronics engineer who secretly likes the internet more than circuits. He’s married to Veronica and the two of them have a severely cute son, Emlyn. Berwyn’s the “big” in the phrase “big ideas” – microPledge is his brainchild. He’s also the guy who started up the whole unicycling fad around here, and he dreams of creating a self-propelled, autonomous basketball.
Ben Hoyt also studied electronics, but these days programming is what really gets him going. He’s married to Franci and they have a daughter, Marica. Ben’s one of those strange people who likes words, and he even started a small-scale magazine once. Other things he enjoys are music, Douglas Hofstader, unicycles, and C. S. Lewis.
Bryan Hoyt has been designing web sites for a few years now. Among other things, he’s responsible for our spiffy-looking logo. Bryan spent four years studying computer science at the University of Canterbury, but he still hasn’t figured out how to set the clock on his microwave. Right now he’s hoping to become a Luddite, but only if everyone else does too.
Where we operate
Fancy that – we’re online, but we have a real phone number and street address! So you could email us, but feel free to contact us the old-fashioned way as well:
Phone or fax
+64 3 359 2101microPledge HQ
82 Crofton Road
Harewood
Christchurch 8051
New Zealan