Vincent van der Holst

Karma: 1,108

Founder of BOAS, a fast vintage fashion platform that donates 90% of profits to the most effective charities that save lives.

Our vision is to move as many of the world’s trillions in profits to effective organisations through Profit for Good businesses (where charities receive most profits instead of shareholders).

BOAS’ mission is save jeans and lives. Peter Singer is an investor in our business.

We’re fundraising, so if you can help, send me an email at vin at boas . co

We’re almost always looking for interns, so if you’re interested please reach out.

Thanks, Vin

Vincent van der Holst 21 Jan 2026 16:31 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Are We Ignoring the Solution to Funding Effective Charities?
What I like most is that if you buy profitable companies, turn them into PFG’s, and against all research and your arguments, there is a zero COA, you’re still left with owning profitable companies. If that’s the downside, it’s somewhat absurd that there seems to be no philanthropist exploring this option to more efficiently multiply their giving.

Vincent van der Holst 26 Oct 2025 20:16 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: Canva to donate $100M over 4 years to GiveDirectly
I stand corrected and I apologise for my mistake. An earlier article I wrote sounded like this was PFG (the way I read it is that they gave away 30% of the stock to a foundation), but this is basically a founders pledge. The 30% might diminish with dilution with new investor rounds.

Still great, but not exactly what we called PFG when we envisioned it, and next time I will read more carefully.

Vincent van der Holst 24 Oct 2025 16:45 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 4
on: Canva to donate $100M over 4 years to GiveDirectly
See updated comment: I stand corrected and I apologise for my mistake. An earlier article I wrote sounded like this was PFG (the way I read it is that they gave away 30% of the stock to a foundation), but this is basically a founders pledge. The 30% might diminish with dilution with new investor rounds.

Still great, but not exactly what we called PFG when we envisioned it, and next time I will read more carefully.

Old comment:
@Marcus Abramovitch 🔸 how do we reconcile this profit for good success (8 billion estimated future value to effective charities) with criticism on profit for good being an inefficient way to fund charities?
I expect 99% of Canva users and most of its employees to choose Canva because of price/quality and pay, but even then there’s a small and compounding upside to adopting this model over a Canva with no charity beneficiaries?

Vincent van der Holst 23 Oct 2025 8:20 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: tomek_olszewski’s comment on: [Funding request] BOAS: Profit-for-Good textile resale
Hi Tomek,
A PFG is not a non-profit. PFG’s are for profits that have charities or philanthropists as owners (and have that governance locked). This is a very important distinction to make.

I know from experience that my current fundraising ask would have been easily fulfilled by for-profit investors, so yes we would be able to grow and become profitable much easier if we were for-profit, but these investors wouldn’t allow me to go back to my PFG model. I have seen multiple PFG’s turn to for-profits and lose their model and impact forever.

Vincent van der Holst 23 Oct 2025 8:17 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: [Funding request] BOAS: Profit-for-Good textile resale
@Marcus Abramovitch 🔸 we should absolutely do what you say in your last paragraph, and we also call that PFG. We just have to make sure this is locked in governance (e.g. foundation owned, steward-ownership). I would love to buy existing businesses and turn them PFG, or invest more in existing PFG’s (e.g. I think a philanthropist should give Humanitix dozens of millions to try and dominate the American ticketing market).
There’s pretty good evidence on foundation-owned businesses outperforming their competitors (I don’t want to seem like I will pick and choose evidence, so start by looking at peer-reviewed data on foundation owned businesses yourself). That’s somewhat amazing considering PFG’s are mostly not allowed to exist, so I didn’t expect this evidence to even be able to exist. Philanthropists and investors have always deprived PFG’s of necessary capital, sometimes intentional, but often unintentional. That Rolex, Bosch, Newman’s Own, Carl Zeiss, Patagonia, AFAS, Rituals and Humanitix have all outperformed in their industries is a very encouraging sign. It’s a shame it’s so far missed by philanthropists. I invite everyone to find as much evidence against PFG’s as possible, and I agree Glo hasn’t been able to be successful.

Vincent van der Holst 23 Oct 2025 8:05 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: [Funding request] BOAS: Profit-for-Good textile resale
I don’t feel very strong about any of your points, I just want our business and numbers reflected accurately. To your points:
- Brad wrote the post, he didn’t have clear access to my numbers. Again, the pitch has the numbers, and happy to have Brad add them to the post (but don’t think it matters since I posted them in the comments).
- 2025 actuals Jan-Sep: 324K/-177K. Important to note than in retail Q4 usually amounts to 30-45% of yearly revenue instead of 25%. I won’t see such strong revenue growth because we lack funding, but the 450K quoted earlier is likely too conservative. Flat extrapolation would put us at 440K, and I have bigger stores, Q4 holiday season and some B2B deals just closed.
- You are absolutely right that startups and non-profits present things as happening. I also agree it’s put too optimistic. Our financial models use market standard discounted cash flows to account for risks, and this remains a high-EV case.
  - In our latest bridge round (estimated 2025 financials in 2024, but closed april 2025) we raised 100K instead of the required 200K and we’re ending at 440-500K instead of the promised 580K revenue for 2025. I’m not sure how we would have performed with the actually needed capital, but currently we’re making 4-5 euro’s of revenue for each euro burned, so it seems realistic that my forecast was realistic.
- I don’t want people to invest in BOAS without looking at it rigurously, because even with very large discounts (higher than market discount rates), BOAS has a higher EV than donating to give (feel free to adjust the mistakes in Patrick Grubans EV model, discount even more, add continuing values (or not if you somehow argue that you shouldn’t do that), and check for yourself). I’m still missing good economic points on why this couldn’t be an interesting but risky investment for future donations.
I will park this discussion from my end, I’ve made my points (people can dismiss them, more than fine with that) and I have funding to raise for a PFG, which is hard enough with accurate data and portrayals of our company. I encourage everyone to request our actual numbers, contracts and letters of intent, and our different financial models (base, worst, minimum funding cases), and come and jump on a call with me. I wish you and EAIF had done the same before dismissing it.
Thanks for following BOAS, and I hope to prove you wrong in the future.

Vincent van der Holst 21 Oct 2025 10:01 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Patrick Gruban 🔸’s comment on: [Funding request] BOAS: Profit-for-Good textile resale
@Kevin Xia 🔸 thanks for pointing out the mistake too.
In addition to the previously mentioned mistakes, from an economist perspective it would be more accurate to use a ‘continuing value’ after using a ‘discounted cash flow’ for post 2029 profits, adding the lifetime of average foundation owned businesses. This would likely change results (possibly dramatically) while making them more accurate. Your BOTEC stops when BOAS reaches higher profitability in 2029, which is when most of the impact is just starting.
Again, this should be discounted for the risk, which your model has done (accidentally twice, which needs to be adjusted).

@Patrick Gruban 🔸 could you run the model with continuing values for stock market and BOAS, and remove double risk counting? I can check the BOTEC after to make sure it’s actually accurate.

Vincent van der Holst 21 Oct 2025 8:25 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Patrick Gruban 🔸’s comment on: [Funding request] BOAS: Profit-for-Good textile resale
There is a mistake in this analysis, but I’m happy that by removing the mistakes we come out as a clear winner.
- Double accounts for risk (in expected value, and then it applies risk again on the expected value, which already included an 80-90% risk/failure rate)
- Your analysis gives zero weight to the social cost of carbon and social return on investment, which in conservative scenarios return additional millions to society in our case, and in most stock market cases would have costs instead of benefits
- We are not a consumer marketplace, and we are not in recycling
Could you adjust for the mistake please?

Vincent van der Holst 21 Oct 2025 8:12 UTC
11 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Marcus Abramovitch 🔸’s comment on: [Funding request] BOAS: Profit-for-Good textile resale
Hi Marcus,
I appreciate you taking the time to write out a critique. I had to clarify and rectify some of what you wrote below.
But first, I’m not going to go into your take on PFG’s not having a disadvantage, because a lot has been written on it, and a lot of data has been referenced there. For that I refer to the research on foundation-owned businesses, the success of Rolex, Bosch, Patagonia, Humanitix, ThankYou and other PFG’s, the talks of the PFG conference, and the reasoning for their success in the TEDx talks of Alex Amouyel, Brad West, myself and the writing of Peter Singer and The School for Moral Ambition on these subjects. You can also read my writing, as well as that of @Brad West🔸 on this forum about it. People can make up their own minds on benefits for PFG’s existing or not. I can only anecdotally share that I have had many benefits of being a PFG (I have written on that already), and only one clear disadvantage (the one that might kill this business): the lack of access to funding. Your comment reinforces that system, although you do it with the best intentions (wanting people to donate directly or ETG, which I believe perpetuates suboptimal systems). What I can say with certainty is that we would have not gotten the contract that is likely to make our company much larger and profitable next year (the 3.4M/KG per year textile resale streams).
What is important is that the data and critique on my company is accurate. I’m sure it’s unintentional, but there are some things that I need to clarify and rectify:
- I do share monthly KPI’s in our investor newsletter (the one you’re getting), including the ones you mention. Any investor has full and transparent access to past performance and predicted performance. Anyone on here can request and get them immediately (vin@boas.co). Sharing monthly’s here is going to be messy without tables. So sharing FY and estimate of this year here for 2023, 2024 and 2025 (expected). 2023 Revenue/Net Profit 30K/-47K. 2024 225K/-151K. 2025 450K/-170K. This post was written by Brad West, with my approval, and focuses on future performance. There was never any intention to hide past performance, nor do I think it’s as bad as you say:
  - Granted to you, we still burn 1 euro for each 3 euro’s we make, but this is quickly declining (we burnt 5 more euro’s per revenue euro 2 years ago), and our revenue has doubled in a year where focus wasn’t on revenue growth (see below). I can share current costs and new contract costs, which cuts our biggest cost center (resale fashion buying) in half, so I can substantiate revenue increases and cost decreases with contracts and data. Please note that in the last 6 months our company burnt less than 50K and I expect our Q4 to be close to or break-even, and our two store are net profitable, so the burn is mostly going to overhead and the building of the hub.
  - This year was a bridge year, we built robotics (in a separate company because BOAS didn’t get the necessary investment for it because it’s a PFG, but I did manage to pledge 90% of my shares to the BOAS foundation, currently valued by signed investors 1M, and most of that value is thanks to BOAS) and AI for faster and higher margin resale with BOAS, and we were securing large contracts (which we succeeded in). With the new contract (can be shared under NDA) we have access to 4-6x more clothing at half the price I’m currently paying. Considering our stores are net profitable (again, happy to share numbers with investors) at the current 2X higher price, we have made it somewhat credible that this company will be significantly bigger and break even at the end of next year. Again, all of this is modeled extensively in financial forecasts, which were made by me (economics degree) and checked with dozens of professionals, as well as passing due diligence by investors, including a bank.
  - Our pitch deck obviously includes past financials, but cannot be shared without NDA because it contains information I’m not allowed to share. I can share an anonymised version, but prefer to hop on a call with serious investors to show the actual contractors (since the contract is of demonstrably high value).
- BOAS pivoted 2.5 years ago, and I do acknowledge I ran a sustainable marketplace before that (for 1.5 years, parttime next to a fulltime job with zero funding), which was a terribly bad idea. I think it’s fair to say that BOAS should be judged on the past 2.5 years, and I don’t think our numbers offset to the investment received are bad, but I do agree they are not great either. I argue that with the contract, they will be significantly better.
- Our investors include economic ones, and they include a bank. Obviously you’re going to get philanthropic/foundation funding if you donate 90% of profits, since you can’t go to for profit investors, so the ‘non-economic investors’ isn’t completely true.
- Of course, BOAS would have surely died without investors, similar to our for-profit competition, who have raised and burnt (far) more money. We’re trying to scale up fashion resale, which is very hard (I would argue impossible) to do without funding. Is there a problem to me asking for investment vs. my for-profit competition asking for investment?
- We are not a recycling company. We are a clothing resale company. We agree recycling is a terrible business with high failure rates, although you should be aware of the EPR and ESPR regulations in the EU currently and quickly changing the recycling game for the better.
- “If BOAS isn’t giving to your preferred cause areas, it obviously makes more sense to donate there directly. If Global Health is your preferred cause area, you should simply, donate there directly and/or invest money and give away returns.” Investors can invest X% in BOAS and we can return the multiple of that investment in future donations to preferred cause areas (e.g. X% of the profits), as the post clearly states. We disagree on investing to give being more effective than PFG (see top of this comment for people to make up their own minds).

Vincent van der Holst 20 Oct 2025 14:54 UTC
0 points
0 ∶ 0
on: [Funding request] BOAS: Profit-for-Good textile resale
Thanks for publicly posting the final stretch of our fundraising request! You can invest for as little as 20 euro’s if you want to contribute to the BOAS and Profit for Good journey: https://platform.eyevestor.com/eyeventures/NL_BOA?lang=en

It’s good for the public to know that EAIF just declined this same request (no feedback so not sure why).

Also, does anyone have a good intro to OpenPhil for this request? People tell me they are a good fit, but I can’t reach out cold unfortunately.
I look forward to getting any questions regarding this funding option!

Thanks,
Vin

Vincent van der Holst 24 Jul 2025 15:13 UTC
20 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Building EA Projects While Working an Unrelated Full-Time Job
Thanks for sharing your mental struggles Brad, that is deeply important, and I share your feelings about EA leaving you out. If there was ever one person to fund with EA money, it should have been you. It’s incredible what you have built part-time, achieving more than some full-time teams working on the common EA paths (moving millions to effective charities on just a part-time basis, inspiring conferences, Peter Singer, Rutger Bregman and many others), and I know what you have given up for that success.

I’ve ‘left’ the EA community years ago for similar reasons (only logging in now to support you), although I fully back the EA principles. I have found very encouraging communities elsewhere who support my work in profit for good financially and emotionally. I believe that EA remains by far the most obvious body to fund my work (because it’s effective, and I believe we have proven that with limited amount of funds we built a company now worth 3 million for effective charities, and we influenced companies to donate way more than that).
I would encourage you to focus on people and communities more supportive (both emotionally and financially), and focus on the EA’s who do support your work. I also want to mention that you are not alone, and I’ve struggled with my mental health on this too, and I applaud you for being vulnerable on this.

Vincent van der Holst 19 Feb 2025 7:31 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
on: USA Today Highlights Profit for Good
Great article emphasising the minor shift in capitalism needed to transform philanthropy.

Vincent van der Holst 15 Aug 2024 15:50 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Bella’s comment on: AMA about roles at 80,000 Hours
Thanks Bella,
I agree there are certainly benefits to on-site. In recruitment scoring I give additional points for proximity, so when I have equally scoring candidates the candidate in our city would win. Usually remote wins in our model, but the proximity scoring depends on the role (e.g. someone doing physical events would almost certainly have to be on-site).

Ultimately it depends a lot on the company and the role, but thanks for explaining and I think it’s good to have both remote and on-site open.

Vincent van der Holst 14 Aug 2024 16:48 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AMA about roles at 80,000 Hours
Why is on-site preferred? 58K GBP for a marketer with no prior experience could land you someone with absolutely amazing experience in a remote role. I’ve hired extensively both on-site and remote and in this particular scenario I would lean strongly to hiring remote to get someone with better prior work and assessments at half that budget, or get someone amazing who is not in London at that budget.

Vincent van der Holst 14 Aug 2024 16:41 UTC
12 points
1 ∶ 2
on: Who would you like to see speak at EA Global?
I work in this space, but I would like to see some Profit for Good (companies that donate the vast majority of profits to (effective) charities) company executives. Most of these companies don’t donate in ways that EA’s would call effective but that makes it more interesting imo to invite them.

With billions in market value (Bosch, Patagonia, Carl Zeiss, Newman’s Own alone are worth around 10B I believe, all pledged to charity) in this space these are some of the biggest future donors and an interesting alternative to classic philanthropy. There’s a bunch of smaller PFG’s as well and Humanitix is a well known EA example who are quickly growing their donations and market value.

There’s some critics of PFG in EA as well and I would enjoy a panel with both sides too.

Vincent van der Holst 19 Jul 2024 14:14 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: AMA: Beast Philanthropy’s Darren Margolias
Sorry I missed that point: a 20 minute video might indeed be significantly higher CPV and because it’s not an ad might be favoured higher on that point too.
All in all it’s hard to say. I suppose GD will have some numbers on increased traffic and increased donations versus baseline, but this will be quite hard to measure correctly even with tracking in place.

Vincent van der Holst 18 Jul 2024 16:01 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: AMA: Beast Philanthropy’s Darren Margolias
I’m not going to do this because of time constraints, but if you really want to know you can run google ads on youtube on just Beast Philantropy videos and get a CPV and you’d know the worth of that video according to advertisers (who probably have a similar target audience to beast philanthropy watchers). Question is if givedirectly’s TA is the Beast Philanthropy TA. My best guess is that it’s not because most donors are older, going to spend less time watching youtube videos and would watch other content than this, so you’d have to discount the CPV with whatever you think is best. If I would do it I would probably discount it with 50-75% and value this at 1-2 cents per view for givedirectly, so 200-400K worth for givedirectly.

Vincent van der Holst 17 Jul 2024 13:20 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Sebastian Schwiecker’s comment on: AMA: Beast Philanthropy’s Darren Margolias
I just want to note that the vast majority of the money moved is likely to be of the ad revenues from the videos (on the channel they write that they’d donate 100% of ad revenue). Jimmy sometimes spends millions one a single video, and the ad revenues of his videos are dozens of million.

Vincent van der Holst 8 Jul 2024 10:18 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Vincent van der Holst’s Quick takes
BOAS is closing it’s public investment campaign soon.

Why you might consider this as a very effective use of your money is best captured in my TEDx talk about Profit for Good. Other reasons you might want to invest:
- We’ve already donated €16.432 donated to charity, which helped distribute 8.648 bed nets, protecting 17.297 people from malaria and preventing 2.783 malaria cases. This not only saves at least 3 lives, but also adds €197.184 to the local economy through reduced illness. We have a feasible path to do multiply tens to ten thousands of times
  - Since we are not profitable I should add that a lot of that money was generated from voluntary donations and my world record attempt for AMF
- With the first 100 investors we opened a store, signed partnerships with MUD Jeans (you can also invest in them on the same platform!) and United Repair Centre, and hired the core team. We’ve grown revenue with an average of 25% per month this year
- We have 300K investment from a large bank and foundation, which I cannot disclose yet, so we’re not only backed by ‘friends, family and fools’. This does not mean we are overfunded, we are actually heavily underfunded because our plans are ambitious (and have to be if you want to move millions to EC’s)
- Invest from €100, so becoming a co-owner of BOAS is feasible for most
- Up to 100% of your investment as a gift card (yes really!), and lifetime discounts for all investors, so you can always get vintage denim at the best prices in return for you helping us continue to grow fast
- A unique opportunity to invest in the profit for good system’s change. BOAS was featured by Elle, Parool, Peter Singer, Bangkok Post, Rutger Bregman, BNR, Algemeen Dagblad, BNN Vara/Dolf Janssen, Radio 538, Metro News and many others for our ability to save jeans and lives, if you think PR is an important indicator of whether this works or not
- More than 100 people, including Peter Singer and tennis pro Marcus Daniel have already invested in our mission to save jeans and lives
- We’ve already saved 7.000 jeans and 3 lives, saving 23 million liters of water saved (9 olympic swimming pools), 202.621KG of CO2 saved (2.006 flights from Amsterdam to Barcelona), 14 football fields saved from cotton farming and 488 trash bags of waste saved from being dumped or burned
  
  Why you should not invest?
- Our investment is not made to make you rich. 90% of returns are dedicated to effective charities like the Against Malaria Foundation. That’s the whole idea of Profit for Good
- This is an investment in a high risk high reward startup. We have a small shot of moving a lot of money to effective charities, but also significant odds of not generating much impact if we go bankrupt
- EAIF thinks we’re not a good fit for their fund and have rejected investment in BOAS multiple times, I have commented about that in the critical piece of EAIF
You can invest here.

Thanks,
Vin

Vincent van der Holst 12 Jun 2024 7:59 UTC
2 points
3 ∶ 0
on: On Estimates of how much Zakat there is
First of all, I love the idea of redirecting Zakat to the most effective charities, and regardless of the size of global Zakat, this seems neglected and a large opportunity. I do however think your estimates are off.

I refer to @Stan Pinsent for his great data, and that is basically my view on it too, but I wanted to add a couple of things to that.
Total yearly global philanthropy seems around 841 billion. 590 of which are remittances, which some don’t even see as philanthropy. More than 90% of philanthropy flows from wealthy countries that are either non-muslim or where a significant part of muslims are secular and/or don’t follow zakat rules.
I would put my confidence interval that Zakat is less than 350 billion USD at 90%. It seems incredibly unlikely that more than 30% of global philanthropy stems from Zakat for the reasons stated by Stan, and looking at global giving.
This is not hard data, but I’ve also run ad campaigns for large NGO’s, and they promote more during Zakat, and I know it was driving less than 10% of yearly donations for these charities (and one of these was a popular charity for muslims).