How Baby2Baby stepped up as LA wildfires raged
Episode
37 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Productivity, Relationships, Startups
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Partnership distribution model: Baby2Baby serves children through 1,000+ partner organizations like hospitals, schools, and shelters rather than directly to families, enabling rapid scaling from eight-bed shelters to the entire LA Unified School District without complex individual intake processes.
- ✓Celebrity leverage strategy: The organization negotiated corporate partnerships by pairing celebrity endorsements with escalating donation commitments—starting with 100,000 diapers from Huggies, then 5 million diapers with Jennifer Garner, ultimately reaching an $8 million combined cash and in-kind grant fourteen years later.
- ✓Disaster response infrastructure: Baby2Baby's existing network of local partners enables immediate disaster response because the team already knows which shelters serve vulnerable populations, which schools have homeless students, and where displaced families will relocate when facilities are destroyed or evacuated.
- ✓Revenue concentration approach: The annual gala generates 60 percent of Baby2Baby's operating budget in one night, growing from $1.1 million in year one to nearly $18 million currently through chef stations, celebrity participation, and live giving rather than traditional sit-down nonprofit events.
What It Covers
Baby2Baby co-CEOs Kelly Sawyer Patrikoff and Nora Weinstein explain how they scaled from distributing donated diapers in a 600-square-foot space to serving one million children annually, responding to 100 disasters including the 2025 LA wildfires.
Key Questions Answered
- •Partnership distribution model: Baby2Baby serves children through 1,000+ partner organizations like hospitals, schools, and shelters rather than directly to families, enabling rapid scaling from eight-bed shelters to the entire LA Unified School District without complex individual intake processes.
- •Celebrity leverage strategy: The organization negotiated corporate partnerships by pairing celebrity endorsements with escalating donation commitments—starting with 100,000 diapers from Huggies, then 5 million diapers with Jennifer Garner, ultimately reaching an $8 million combined cash and in-kind grant fourteen years later.
- •Disaster response infrastructure: Baby2Baby's existing network of local partners enables immediate disaster response because the team already knows which shelters serve vulnerable populations, which schools have homeless students, and where displaced families will relocate when facilities are destroyed or evacuated.
- •Revenue concentration approach: The annual gala generates 60 percent of Baby2Baby's operating budget in one night, growing from $1.1 million in year one to nearly $18 million currently through chef stations, celebrity participation, and live giving rather than traditional sit-down nonprofit events.
Notable Moment
When Edelman PR called offering 100,000 diapers and asking if they had forklifts and could accept pallets, the founders said yes while frantically googling what a pallet was, then unloaded the truck themselves in heels without renting equipment.
Episode Transcript
Early stage teams move fast, but juggling contractors, global payroll, HR workflows, visas, and IT equipment, that slows you down. Deal brings all of it into one simple platform so founders don't need multiple tools or a full HR team just to stay compliant. Whether it's your first payroll or your first global hire, Deal is designed to help from day zero and built to scale. Deal is the fastest way to hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Deal, your forever people platform. Visit deel.com/mos to learn more and book a demo. Hey, folks. Jeff Berman here. This week marks one year since the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles. And as someone who has lived here for nearly twenty one years and whose family was affected by the fires, and as anyone who lives here knows, it has just been an extraordinary, devastating experience for us to go through here. And yet, Angelenos are resilient. The city is resilient. People have come together in really extraordinary and beautiful ways to make things better, to help others get through it. It's really the best of who we are. And And to the people who are among the very best of who we are, our baby to baby CEOs, Nora Weinstein and Kelly Sawyer Patrikoff. They lead an exceptional organization that really started with a very simple insight, which was that the resources for new parents to take care of their babies, the most basic resources, diapers, formula, etcetera, were not getting to them. As Angelenos, they were especially focused on stepping in to address the needs coming out of the fires in Los Angeles. From literally day one of the LA wildfires, Baby two Baby was on the ground providing essential items to families in dire need. These are two phenomenal human beings, and I had the opportunity to be in conversation with them last year on stage discussing what it was like to face a disaster in their hometown and how they continue to scale their impact, not just in Los Angeles, but around the world. You gotta have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? You're such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally gonna be amazing. There are so many easy ways. So so I have no idea what to do. I'm sorry. We made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three bedroom apartment. Stetson just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it. We have a day just how you do it. This is Masters of Scale. Kelly, Nora, welcome to Masters of Scale. I can't imagine a more fitting and important conversation for us to have on this stage in LA. I've been here for twenty years in LA. It's home for me. And the fires we've had at the …
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