Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit
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Our annual all-hands summit is next week, and we'll look for ways to work this into our charity match programs. Many people on HN have companies with employees; we were told about running charity matches by other friends who have companies and let me pass the message along: they work really well. Match programs have generated more goodwill for us than bonus programs. Start a match program!
I have a question:
The big charity in this space is Partners In Health, which has an extremely positive reputation (their cofounder is also now the President of the World Bank), spends 94% of their funding on program expenses, and has a CEO who makes less than 6 figures. (PIH is apparently a medical partner for Watsi).
Is the advantage of Watsi over PIH that 100% of funds go to program expenses, rather than 94%? Or is it that fine-grained funding is more compelling and will thus elicit more donations?
So in short, the benefit of Watsi is both of those you described. 1) 100% of funds directly fund treatments and 2) those treatments are performed by great organizations like Nyaya.
Or is the big advantage to Watsi (from a 1000ft view) that it creates an especially compelling way to get people to contribute on-the-ground operating funds to places like PIH?
The latter is certainly a huge big deal, in case I sound skeptical. I'm just trying to refine my understanding of how all this stuff works.
Congratulations on all of this.
That said Partners in Health seems to be a fairly robust organization and seems to have the donation handling and web presence problem solved, but Watsi is still providing a place to evangelize them to people who would otherwise never come across them.
Here's a link to the first patient we funded via Nyaya (http://www.flickr.com/photos/nyayahealth/8405959818/in/photo...). She had to take a 72-hour trip from Far Western Nepal to Kathmandu to receive life-saving heart surgery. This is a pretty expensive endeavor by Nepali standards ($1,125 USD), and without funding from an organization like Watsi, specialty care for individual patients like Bageshwori is out of the question.
Of course, you should also support Watsi because as they succeed and drive a ton of extra contributions toward program-costs-only, even if there isn't enough existing overhead covered, there "should" be strategic donors who see this happening and decide to fund it.
This is all assuming Watsi's average partner is interchangeable with PIH, along with the treatments you'd be funding, which of course they aren't. Based on Chase's comment on Bageshwori, it may be very different-- it sounds like by directly funding PIH you'd be contributing to basic (though still potentially lifesaving) care through PIH, whereas with Watsi-via-PIH you have the option of (and often are?) contributing to more difficult, expensive, and perhaps otherwise-even-more-unavailable care.
If you're feeling generous, support both :)
(PIH spends a remarkably high 94% of its donations on program expenses, fyi: http://www.charitynavigator.org/index.cfm?bay=search.summary..., though there's long been a philanthropy-wide consensus that over-focusing on overhead is common and unhelpful: http://blog.givewell.org/2009/12/01/the-worst-way-to-pick-a-...)
Many charities feel like an investment. This feels like a transaction.
Edit: Here by transaction, I mean it's something that has a very high chance that it's working out. When I order a shirt online, there's a high probability it will get to me. When I fund a new t-shirt company on Kickstarter, it's less certain.
Overall our customer research has found that people find it a lot more compelling to give money to the individual than to hand money to an anonymous institution, even though on the backend it may be treated exactly the same.
"At Watsi, 100% of your donations directly fund medical treatments. Watsi.org is separately funded. They pay all their operational costs from their own funding, and none from your donations. They even eat the credit card processing fees."
This works great with Watsi's crowdfunding-style model. It probably wouldn't help with things which need legs on the ground full-time, but it would be interesting to see more nonprofits looking at an "out of channel" donor model.
P.S. If you haven't clicked through to read PG's announcement and check out Watsi, go do so. Really. This is something YC is going to look back on and be proud of being part of 20 years from now.
"At Watsi, 100% of your donations directly fund medical treatments. Watsi.org is separately funded. They pay all their operational costs from their own funding, and none from your donations. They even eat the credit card processing fees."
It doesn't sound (as) cool me if the founders can only do this until they go broke. It looks like they do accept direct donations to fund their operating costs, but it seems to me that the demand (if that's the right word for the desire to donate) might not increase at the same rate as the demand to fund treatments (and therefore costs for credit card fees, hosting, staff) increases. Better to take a percentage and be transparent about what you use it for.
YC is working on addressing the problem of funding Watsi's overhead. The point of the service is that end-users don't fund Watsi, they fund patients. In the same sense as you need to take it sort of on faith that Airbnb can bootstrap and maintain a two-sided market for short-term lodging, you should probably take it on faith that Watsi's model is going to work; if you want to make Watsi work well, go fund a patient with it.
There is a real 13 year old girl on Watsi right now who is unable to walk because of a correctible congenital condition. Who cares about the Watsi founders? Go help the girl! :)
I think the point is not that people particularly care about the Watsi founders; but rather, that they care about the hundreds of thousands of other girls whom Watsi won't be able to help if Watsi and/or its founders go bankrupt because they lack a sustainable funding model.
Note, that comes across as snarky via text, but it's not meant to be. I'm just explaining my way of thinking about it. :)
Also, it is entirely possible to donate and also have this discussion, so you may very well be talking to people who both help present needs and express concern for potential unmet future needs.
On the one hand, I see your point, and I went and helped a little girl (as it happens, a different one). Maybe it doesn't need to be sustainable. It sounds like they've got it covered for now, and if they "only" help a few hundred people before they have to look for other work, that's pretty good.
On the other hand, I don't think it's off-topic to comment on the viability of a business model on a forum about startups. I know it's working in practice, but can it work in theory? :)
However, we feel very strongly that Watsi should be run like a successful startup, and not like a traditional non-profit.
Sustainability is extremely important to us. I'm a terrible fundraiser, and I want nothing more than for us to cover our own overhead.
However, it just doesn't make sense to implement revenue generating features (e.g. take a cut of donations, which to be clear we will never do) until we hit scale. Right now, we're entirely focused on improving our product, speaking with donors, and maximizing our impact.
However, just like any successful startup, there will (hopefully) come a time when the costs associated with scale begin to outstrip the seed-support we've so generously received from people like pg and Jessica. When that happens, we will implement features that generate revenue for our organization, and we'll have a user base large enough to make those features viable.
Without going into too much detail, those features will include things like asking donors for an optional "tip" to Watsi when giving to a patient (expected to net 6-8%), cause marketing products (already a few companies interested), white label, etc.
We will never abandon the 100% model, and I'm completely confident that for as long as there is demand for the service we're offering, we'll find a way to cover our overhead.
Kudos for taking the leap Watsi!
Also, I like the "tip" idea.
Why? Fundraising to cover your overhead costs when you're small is relatively easy but comes increasing harder year after year as you grow.
The reason most non-profits take a portion of donations for overhead costs is so that they can keep the lights on and (hopefully) become better at providing their services more efficiently. Moderate overhead percentages are not a bad thing for non-profits. As a donor you should want the organization that you're supporting to have a way to pay their bills, investing in productivity improvements, and build scale.
I applaud Watsi's commitment to passing 100% of donations onto patients and I'm cheering them on to find a sustainable funding model over the long run.
For example, given charities X and Y both distributing anti-malaria pills (or something). X and Y are identical except X has operating overheads of 80%, and distributes 50 pills per dollar donated and Y has no operating overhead, but only manage 20 pills per dollar donated.
Clearly X is the better charity, since it moves more pills, even though only 20% of the donations it receives get through.
What I'm trying to say is: operating overhead is a poor metric for comparing charities, since the thing that matters is the final outcome given a certain donation amount.
(That said having a high overhead is probably a sign that a charity could improve, and so do more good per dollar.)
Note- site is in spanish - targeted to the Argentine audience
We are a bit less granular though - instead of matching against an individual, we match a specific soup kitchen. But we keep donors updated with newsletters, pictures, letters from the kids and so on.
edit: this level of udpates keeps donors engaged. we dont allow one time donations - instead we require you to subscribe.
When we built masporloschicos.com I wanted to do it more granular (individual level), but we ended up doing it a bit more aggregate because it was really hard / expensive to get to that granular level.
I wonder how is watsi tackling this problem - because ultimately you don't want to spend a lot of funds (regardless of where they come from) on the administration/bureaucracy required to provide quality 1:1 matching.
So I just wonder how are they doing it?
Sites like Watsi are now making people realize two things: which inefficiencies we can cut away, and that simple experiences like funding medical treatment can be enhanced. Those are two very big revelations that will fuel so much of peer-to-peer funding.
1) We may have a slight advantage working in healthcare. Our partners already collect patient info (and sometimes even photos) for patient medical records, so requesting they send us that info isn't a big ask.
2) We leverage technology to ensure we can efficiently process and allocate donations. Look at kiva.org - they've leveraged their platform to fund individual microloans for nearly a million people, and that's a much more complex process (because of repayments, interest, currency conversion, etc.) than a one-way donation for a medical treatment.
Happy to talk more offline if there's any way I could be helpful: chase at watsi dot org.
When I say not a fan of the concept, I absolutely don't mean I disapprove. I don't have any problem with organisations raising money this way, nor with people choosing to donate money this way - I simply don't like donating myself.
Trying to chose between fighting HIV or starvation, cancer or... etc. etc. is hard enough. Looking at Watsi's homepage, does Chimwemwe from Malawi deserve my money more than Kirshan from Nepal? What about Lidiya from Malawi? I can see the point of view that it's nice to know your money has definitely made an impact on somebody's life, but personally I don't enjoy the burden of making that decision. I'd far rather be 0.0000000001% of a big solution than 100% of a small one when it comes to charitable donations.
All that said, the fact that I dislike it doesn't take anything away from my thinking that Watsi looks like a great site, my opinion doesn't change the fact that anyone raising money for good causes is great and if the method used here helps that then no complaints from me.
Oftentimes there is institutional support for specific "mainstream" conditions (e.g. HIV, TB, etc.) and as a result, some patients who are in unique situations (e.g. have a rare condition, need a slightly expensive treatment, need referral care, etc.) often fall through the cracks. Watsi provides an opportunity to those patients by enabling them to tap into the crowd.
While there are pros and cons to each approach, it's important to note that they are complementary. Charitable giving is not a zero sum game, and we're working hard to expand the pie, not take a piece of it.
While you'd obviously always prefer to expand the pie rather than just take a piece, there's nothing wrong with the latter - like you said, your approach can help people who slip through the gaps, so even if the pie doesn't expand, your taking a piece of it can still be a good thing.
Keep up the good work.
Donors that are interested in maximizing impact, and not necessarily interested in helping a specific person, can give to that fund. We'll then use those donations to support organizational projects (e.g. $1 vaccinations and the like).
We're considering leveraging an organization like GiveWell to help us identify organizations and projects that will be beneficiaries of the general fund.
(This is not meant to sound negative. I am truly excited to see it, interested to see what the YC network can bring to it, and very curious about the investment thinking behind it.)
Hopefully it'll quickly join the ranks of the larger crowdfunding non-for-profits like Kiva.org, Donorschoose, etc...
I could see this being a good way to help new non-profits get over the initial hump of raising awareness, getting administrative issues sorted out and so on. Certainly a service worth more than just the money provided.
The model of charityfund-operationsfunding separation is quite enticing. This kind of transparency fosters trust. If they ask for donations on the side to keep their operations running, by golly they've got access to my wallet alright.
For those of you who want to donate to non health related issues there is also SeeYourImpact.org founded by Scott Oki, one of Microsoft's early execs. They also ensure 100% of the donation goes to the person and absorb all the overhead expenses.
Shameless plug: For our Hacker News Clone for African startus, business and technology we will be running ads for SeeYourImpact.org but strictly for educational needs. Check out the site here: http://AfriTech.org/about.htm Actual news stories on front page: http://AfriTech.org
As well, patients aren't able to solicit Watsi funding. In fact, they don't even know we exist until a doctor at one of our partner organizations has identified them as a candidate and presents them with the opportunity to have their care funded by Watsi. You can think of us as an "Emergency Fund" for on-the-ground healthcare providers.
EDIT: Note on transparency: all the donors have their own website login information ("angel ID") to track every donation and see exactly how much was sent to whom. The stories of recipient families are provided, along with their address + telephone number. The donors have an option to remain anonymous or reveal their contact information. I never contacted any recipients or revealed my name to them but I have heard stories where the donors and families in distress got in touch and supported each other with prayers, encouragements, etc.. "Good angel" also makes it possible to keep sending donations to the same families if you choose to (otherwise the families will be chosen at random, which is the default choice -- or at least was the default for me when I signed up in 2007).
One small thing, although I just donated 50$ for two people, I found myself to be a bit uncomfortable with my actions,
I didn't really pay attention much to who I'm donating to, just clicked on the first picture that caught my eye without thinking, and donated 25$. Then I noticed, I'm donating to a 1 year old baby, with a cute photo. I really want to think of myself as someone who pays more attention, reads and makes a decision based on facts, medical condition, urgency, and likelihood to succeed, but no, I just clicked based on prejudice, 1 second first impression, biased decision, without noticing I did so.
Then I saw a 37 years old woman and noticed she got much less donations although her total needed amount is higher, perhaps her medical situation is less severe, but I would be naive to think that that's the only reason. So I asked myself, am I doing some sort of unconscious decision that is not really fair and unbiased? I would lie if I say I didn't.
So I donated 25$ to her as well, just so I feel a little better with myself, and then I thought, well, this is a feature request.
So to avoid the "cute baby gets more donations" bias, what would make it a little nicer to me is to donate without knowing who it goes to, I'd like a button that says - "donate to most medically severe case", or "donate to most time sensitive case" and have someone else make the decision. This will make me feel a little more in peace with myself, and actually might make such biases less common. Right now it might not have affect, but as it will hopefully grow to help more people, having such "donate to who needs it most medically" option will help prevent such gaps.
Also moving to a better payment system, Stripe or even Google checkout will make it a much nicer experience.
EDIT: the baby's profile was on the home page, where as the woman's profile was one click deeper, so this could be another reason, but this brings another enhancement, please automatically promote / rotate profiles that have less donations / most urgent medical conditions to the front page
Another feature I'm missing is to allow subscription, I would think many would be happy to donate 5$-20$ a month and automatically give it to those who have the least donations, or must urgent medical condition. Getting traffic is hard and critical for making this work, and not every day you get to HN front page, I would take advantage of it and offer a recurring donation as soon as possible.
So have a look at the Medical Partners that Watsi uses. See about donating there.
We're in the process of switching to Stripe, building a general fund that will auto-allocate donations to patients, and enabling recurring donations (with the option to personally allocate your credit to a patient, or have your credit auto-allocated). All in that order.
We're usually pretty hesitant to add new features to Watsi for fear of complicating things (we're big fans of simplicity). However, you hit the nail on the head with your suggestions, and all of them will be included in the coming iterations. Thanks again.
I have an unimportant question. PG's post says "They even eat the credit card processing fees", but Watsi's FAQ says, "As part of the cost of the treatment, we have included PayPal credit card processing fees (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction). These PayPal fees are unavoidable, and no portion of the fees go to Watsi."
Who is right?
When we first launched Watsi we had absolutely no operating budget and because of that we had to include credit card processing fees in the cost of treatment. We are now paying the credit card processing fees out of our own operating budget (see our Transparency Document for more info: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah3wJ9CRQzyHdDZ...).
Thanks for catching this. We've updated our FAQ to reflect this change.
I wrote this minutes ago in a thread about the 3rd world. If you ever come across a startup that solves this please fund them:
"The biggest problems right now involve education and health. Example: 60-80% health problems follow the same pattern: you see a doctor, he asks for blood/urine tests, you get the results, go back to the doctor for a prescription. Build something that the poor can explain their symptoms and do those tests without going physically to a doctor and become a semi-god here. That would involve a website (or phone call) and portable blood testers. (Specially for things like malaria, E. coli, colera, dengue fever, typhoid fever, etc)"
But this is one of the sites where a login would probably be a good idea, so that I can keep track of my donations and particularly the status/health updates of those whom I am helping, and also potentially for tax purposes.
Another site on these lines which I like a lot is Kiva.org (no affiliation, just a user). It's micro-finance, not donations, but all 3 people whom I lent to on Kiva, have paid me back so their enterprise has presumably succeeded. It feels great to be able to help some poor villager in Africa buy some fertilizers or a cow, and I like how Kiva makes it easy to keep track of them :)
Update: Watsi just emailed me a receipt that I can use for tax purposes, and promised to send me a email when the person I donated to receives treatment. So I take back my minor complaint above!
"Thank You HN: From 30 people whose lives you saved" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4815006
"Show HN - We just built a site that saves lives" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081
My guess is that they would come up with many arguments against this startup-ish approach and would lobby for legal barriers.
Charities are not going to lobby against Watsi.
This is a POV from Germany where you have a wealthy population willing to donate and many sharks eager to catch the fish. Add to this that some legal circumstances make it possible for the established players to keep fresh competition out of public money streams or eat plenty of the private donor money (e.g., up to 49% for admin costs).
It makes sense to route contributions to reputable charities. In the medical space, you have not only PIH but also organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières/DWB-USA. One of the very cool things about what Watsi is doing is that they provide a front end that routes contributions to multiple reputable on-the-ground health care providers, like PIH clinics.
At least within the tech non-profit world (GlobalGiving, Kiva, DonorsChoose.org, charity:water, etc) we're all very friendly and supportive of each other. We're so strapped for resources that it only makes sense for us to help each other out.
After all, we're all in this to make the world a better place and know that we can't do it alone.
So good luck Watsi and you've got my email. :)
Also be sure to check out givewell.org for very HN-friendly (rational/research-driven) tips on how you might think about giving in general.
That way, there's at least a chance that I'd see the person that I helped someday.
The same is not true in Haiti or Malawi. Without the funds to pay for care, a child can live for years --- their entire life, even --- with easily correctible medical conditions.
Charity comes from the heart, and where you should direct your love is your own choice. If you feel the people in your country are closer to you, there's no shame in helping them before others. We are human after all.
That's the nationalistic bigotry I was talking about. That's like saying if there was a charity that only helped white people, maybe I should contribute to that because I feel that people of European descent are "closer to me".
But when it comes to paying for perfect strangers to receive medical treatment, and I'm choosing between someone in the US, whose medical treatment costs more, and who will receive the medical treatment anyway at the risk of personal bankruptcy, vs. someone who wouldn't receive the treatment at all in Port au Prince, you can't make an argument that I should give to the American. The American will get the treatment with or without my help. He might just end up bankrupt, but being bankrupt in America is not that bad. In fact, there's a good chance there will be no bankruptcy and the American will just have to go on a payment plan for the next few years. The Haitian won't receive the treatment at all. In fact, even after the treatment, the Haitian will still have to live in Haiti, which is probably a materially poorer existence than being bankrupt or having to make a payment plan in America.
Providing less help to someone who is in lesser need of it at greater expense, just because you share a nationality with them, is bigotry, and you've said nothing to refute that.
This is just not the case, so first of all you are wrong.
And second of all, that you think one should spend his charity with maximum (perceived) efficiency is just _your_ ethical view.
I give charity to the Dutch cancer battle fund. I don't do this to save anyone I love, they are either already dying of cancer and won't be helped because of my donation or have already died.
A majority of people will never live to die of cancer. It is a disease that kills rich healthy people. Yet I give as much to them as I give to unicef. It is because the disease hits close to home.
Anyway, that might make me an egoist. But not a nationalist bigot. And frankly I think it was hateful of you to introduce those slurs into this conversation.
To some extent this is just human nature. But it's a problem that people think this way, and I would prefer to solve this problem than exacerbate it.
I wish all VCs would do this, because carry-as-capital-gains is an incredible abuse of the system. I'm fine with founders getting this, and with LPs who invest cash, but VCs do not deserve preferential rates over other workers when they do not themselves take financial risk.
How do they pay for operations costs - is there a separate donations channel?
A few weeks after donating, I later got an email from them letting me know that the boy whose heart transplant I had funded had died. It kind of wrecked my whole day, but I was still glad I got the notification. I didn't expect to have such an emotional connection to a person I have never even interacted with before. Godspeed, Watsi.
It's certainly a bit of a dilemma, but we've made a promise to be 100% transparent, even when it hurts.
FWIW we've found ourselves even more dedicated to Watsi since receiving our first negative outcome. We always knew that what we were doing was real and important, but there's something about death that really puts the gravity of the problem we're attempting to solve into perspective.
I, and a lot of other startup founders, have limited income to donate, but potentially have equity which could be worth a lot of money someday. It is a lot easier to donate equity than current income.
It adds overhead and complicates your "transactional" model, but it might be a good way to fund your overhead, or to fund longer term projects, and could eventually be a recurring income stream to pay for some number of treatments.
This foreshadows an era where non-profits must aggressively publish their spending and compete on how lean they become. My guess is there are going to be a lot of niche sites that perform exactly like Watsi.
I really like what Watsi is doing. They even "eat the credit card processing fees"
It doesn't maximize the utility of donations to spend lots of money saving the lives of a handful of people vs. other interventions that can save the lives of many more people suffering from diseases like malaria at a much lower cost per patient than the interventions that Watsi is promoting.
I think Watsi donors will feel good about helping specific people, but I'm personally interested in my donations actually being maximally impactful. If you want to save the most lives per dollar, the sort of extraordinary treatments that Watsi funds are not a great way to do it.
If Watsi didn't exist, many of the patients on our site would have likely died. How do you quantify that impact? How do you prove that all the donations made via Watsi would have been allocated to some other cause had we not existed?
Also, I'd like to say that we really respect GiveWell's work. Quantifying social impact is a really tough challenge, and it's great to see such an intelligent team working on the problem.
Furthermore, we actually think they'd be big fans of donations made on Watsi, at least those made to patients at Nyaya Health, which was rated one of GiveWell's "Standout Organizations" last year.
Roughly, by comparing it to the number of people who die in other hypothetical scenarios. You can't get exact numbers, but you can do a damn sight better than saying "it can't be done".
> How do you prove that all the donations made via Watsi would have been allocated to some other cause had we not existed?
Of course they wouldn't. But what if, instead of creating Watsi, you had put the same effort into advocating for more efficient charities? (This is a serious question. I actually wouldn't be completely shocked if it turns out that that would have been less effective.)
> Nyaya Health, which was rated one of GiveWell's "Standout Organizations" last year.
However, they didn't estimate its cost-effectiveness. And on that metric... I go to your website and see that $1000 can stop someone from maybe becoming infertile, and that just doesn't seem like it can possibly win against malaria nets. (Looking deeper, that seems like one of the lowest value treatments available, but I don't expect the others to win either.)
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you guys are doing this. I'm not convinced you're doing the best you possibly could, but you're doing far better than me. I absolutely think your impact on the world is massively positive. But I don't anticipate donating to you myself any time soon.
Anecdotally, I'm not someone who normally gives to charity, but I gave through Watsi, because I could see and to some degree feel the real impact of the money. As a secondary effect, I actually feel more charitable, whether that means I will give to other types of organizations remains to be seen, but I would not discount the halo effect systems like Watsi may have.
People who are already giving the max to GiveWell-supported charities should not divert their funds to Watsi.
People who have more to give and want maximum impact should follow GiveWell's recommendations.
However, many people have not given to the max, nor do they care so much about maximum impact. For them, there is Watsi to direct their dollars to a noble cause, rather than on Minecraft-themed plush toys or something.
I also use Kiva [1] which is brilliant in a different way. You can loan money to people so they can fund their businesses etc.
I'm off to donate to Watsi now.
[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081 [1] http://www.kiva.org/
But what about the USA, especially disabled veterans, people on disability, people on no or low income, homeless people, and others who cannot afford their healthcare and got shafted by the federal government?
There are some charities, but they collect funds with Quadriga Art, that keeps the lion's share of the donations and little to no money goes to the charity or people in need. CNN has investigated this company http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/26/us/senate-charities-investigat... http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/24/fund-raising-company-f... http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/25/charities-in-debt-to-f...
This is the reason why so many charities are broke in the USA and the money never goes to the people it is supposed to help. We can reform this problem by starting up a non-profit web company to keep the costs low for raising money for these charities and making sure the people in need get the money and life saving medical treatments and surgeries that they need.
Watsi was founded on a few simple principles, and 2 that we apply to every possible treatment are "low cost, high impact". Unfortunately, health care in the US is not low cost. It's ridiculous.
I hope one day we can collaborate with an organization or 2 that will take on the challenge! Until then, there's Give Forward, which does a great job itself.
I see from your website you are a 501(c)(3) charity. I will submit your organization for approval for the matching program at my employer, which I like because it allows me to 'stick it to the man' by donating to all kinds of things my employer might or might not support (this doesn't fall into that category though). They also match volunteer hours by employees at $17 bucks an hour (after the first 10 hours), which can be a great way to get free work and free money.
I like the fact they're not taking a transaction fee. But, it seems to me that they're also a benefit to healthcare providers, insurance companies, and big pharma (after all, the money raised is going to end up in their pockets). Aren't there ways Watsi could make money from these companies?
This is a common misconception about not-for-profits. They are expected to make money, and overhead is important.
I think everyone is trying to do good here, but nobody is solving the real problems.
You bring up a really interesting point. Is crowdfunding a sustainable solution for healthcare? It's something we think about a lot as a team.
Right now, there are people dying for lack of available and relatively cheap medical treatments, simply because they can't afford them. We think the only moral thing to do is fund their treatments.
However, is this sustainable? I'd argue that it is for two reasons.
First, the organizations we partner with are all working towards fairly obvious sustainable solutions. Some establish public-private partnerships, others cross-subsidize, and others have a very strong focus on training local doctors (some do all three - we require at least one).
Second, and without getting into a really deep discussion here, only about 40 out of 200 countries in the world have a formal healthcare system. And those systems that work best are, for the most part, universal healthcare systems financed by the government (i.e. the costs are crowdfunded via taxes). However, with the world becoming smaller by the second, is it too crazy to think that Watsi might one day be the first truly universal healthcare system?
What if instead of a mandatory tax, of which a % is allocated to national healthcare, human compassion was enough to fuel a global healthcare system? For the first time in history, the internet is making this feasible. The only question that remains is whether human compassion is enough to solve one of the world's greatest challenges.
Not because of the non-profit nature of this startup but the endorsement YC has now given to non-traditional and perhaps massively big ideas.
An idea to get more people to give more - make it competitive. For example, it'll be cool if I could create a group for my school and then get people to 'tag' their donations with the group ID. Would love to see which school can get the most donations!
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah3wJ9CRQzyHdDZ...
<< If Watsi didn't exist, many of the patients on our site would have likely died. >>
If a surgery isn't funding in time to save a patient's life, would you fund the remaining amount of the loan out of your own funds?
In one of the updates, the patient passed away before treatment [2]. Funding was refunded.
[1] Transparency Document: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/pub?key=0Ah3wJ9CRQzyHdDZ...
[2] Update info: http://us4.campaign-archive2.com/?u=4ee1aaad2e315a0de585af61...
A similar criticism was made of Kiva, as covered by the NYT here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/business/global/09kiva.htm...
It's really important to disclose the date of any surgeries. And if a surgery has been performed prior to the profile being fully funded (or even prior to posting), the date of the surgery should be displayed and the profile should be labeled as pre-treated.
Just want to make sure you guys avoid some of the growing pains of Kiva! (I used to run Marketing over there for a bunch of 2010/2011.) Good luck!
I think this model of achieving more direct distribution through technology could profitably be applied to a number of for-profit and non-profit endeavors.
This seems like it could also be a better way of addressing hunger, contributing food to individuals but using a managed distribution system.
What a cool idea :).
That's great! I'm excited that you're excited. I imagine we'll see a lot more non-profits in YC shortly. Will 2013 be the year of many such non-profits, like 2012 was for hardware startups?
2. I really wish you had the ability to donate on behalf of someone else, either to fund Watsi or to fund medical treatment. On Amazon I set up a wishlist that people can easily access for ideas of what to buy me on Christmas or my birthday. If I could set up something like that on Watsi instead, I probably would. And if your tech was open source, I might even implement the feature myself!