Catching up with Watsi: Y Combinator’s first non-profit graduate

I'm a huge fan of Watsi, but looking over their transparency document has me worried. The funds for 47% of funded treatments haven't made it to their medical partners. On average, the unsent funds have been waiting for 43 days, with the longest wait being 160 days (!!). I'd love if someone from Watsi could explain why it takes so long to send funds to medical partners after successful funding.

    Funded treatments: 261
    Treatments waiting for funds to transfer: 124
    Average wait for funds: 43 days

Data and script for calculations can be found here: https://gist.github.com/kyleconroy/5332776

This is the most interesting part of the article, IMO:

“[Watsi’s] goal is to become the largest crowdfunding medical treatment platform. This is way down the line, but we could move into providing social medical insurance. As soon as we have large enough dollars coming through the platform, we could even treat patients in the USA.”

The first time I visited the Watsi site, seeing all those photos and reading the stories of people in need of medical care, I thought of the many people I know in the US who have little or no health insurance. Well educated, hard working people who can't afford medication and common medical procedures, people who haven't been to a dentist in years, and so on.

I understand that in developing countries more can be done for more people with the same funds, but I'd be very happy if this project took off in such a way that it would let the world help the US population in need. It might be more realistic than waiting for the implementation of a healthcare system deserving of a first world nation.

I've really like Watsi since the first time I saw it on HN (before you were in YC). I was thinking about it yesterday and I think the satisfying part is the ability to see a case actually get funded. A lot of charities you give money but it is for a somewhat amorphous problem, to "fight hunger" or "help fund education" or "research a cure for cancer". These are all noble causes but it is somehow less personally fulfilling because you can't see any near term changes and just have to tell yourself perhaps your donation helped in some small way. With Watsi you can actually see that you and some other anonymous strangers paid for an actual procedure, and it got done, and it is pretty easy to see the direct connection between your donation and a real, positive difference in someone's life, even if you don't know / will never meet that someone.

It is the same with that IndieGoGo fund the other day to help the Kenyan hacker trying to get to NYC for Hacker School. There is something fulfilling about refreshing that page and seeing the goal met and then exceeded and knowing it will impact their life in a way that is greater than I could have impacted my own by spending the same money on something for myself (or, perhaps, something more directly for myself, since clearly this kind of thing gives me some personal satisfaction or I wouldn't do it, selfish altruism and all :))

I think they have a huge opportunity to create a habit for these first donors. Big donations from big VC people certainly is an opportunity for fundraise, but not for learning. As a early stage social network site is all about engagement, not traffic, they should focus on engagement for small, regular donors. Impulse donations are used and abused all over the social sector, but they won't be the base for a game changer nonprofit, as I imagine Watsi is trying to be.

Even more important is engagement because nonprofit usually have multiple missions. Watsi shouldn't just "get the money to the people" as a business oriented mind would think about their model. Engage donors to give money and understand the situation of the people receiving the money, and the situation of their city, the public health system in their country, how their families and neighborhoods deal with health issues. These are the things that will make the world smaller and the humans closer. A big VC writing a check of 100,000 dollars won't acomplish anything on that, 10,000 people giving 10 bucks each month, a reading their newsletter, understanding more about the world. That is an accomplishment.

With YCombinators investment in Watsi, is it a charity investment, or do they actually intend to make money off Watsi, and if so, how?

I've been following Watsi for a while now and was excited to hear they made it into YC. I've always had a bit of a crisis trying to find a balance between humanitarian work and our craft as programmers. As a programmer, the odds are likely that your impact is localized to corporate or consumer products that have little to no effect on the quality of life of others. I'm tempted to go the Peace Corps route when I graduate, but I feel the opportunity cost is too high and that my skill set would not be useful.

Watsi seems like an amazing opportunity to resolve these issues- are you guys looking for interns or volunteers?

Just an idea: how about adding gamification to the mix, linking Watsi accounts to social network profiles? You can take some pages from Zynga's evil playbook and use it for good.

https://www.coursera.org/course/gamification

I think it'd be awesome if they used vine-style short video clips of the people rather than the present photographs. i know there may be insurmountable barriers of access, but still.