gracegarey

Watsi | San Francisco, CA | Full-time | On-site preferred

We're looking for mission-driven, full-stack engineers to join our team.

Watsi is a San Francisco-based nonprofit building technology to finance universal healthcare. We’re a small, agile team united by the belief that everyone deserves healthcare, and motivated by the opportunity to use technology as a massive lever for positive change in the world. So far, our work has helped make life-changing healthcare possible for more than 20,000 people in 23 countries.

At Watsi, the code we write makes a direct impact on people’s health — whether by enabling patients to access services they previously couldn’t, or by helping health system administrators devise strategies to improve the quality and affordability of care.

More info here: http://blog.watsi.org/engineers/. Please email jobs@watsi.org to apply.

Thank you! I was excited when we pulled that number, too - I lived in Ghana for a while. Great country and great people.

Most of our funders don't receive anything in return. They just want to help Watsi scale. That said, many of them serve as informal advisors to us.

So far, we've asked two of our funders to sit on our board (alongside Premal Shah of Kiva): Paul Graham, and Christy Chin of Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation.

Yes, we have plans to open source our software in the future. Stay tuned!

Thank you! It's been a combination of 2 things: 1) building tools that make it easier for our hospital partners to scale with us more efficiently, thereby increasing their capacity to send us more patients, and 2) product/marketing.

If you're interested in the growth side of Watsi, we opened up a bunch of our data to Segment earlier this year, and they put out this post about the growth learnings they gathered: https://segment.com/blog/what-we-learned-from-watsis-data/

We also talked with First Round a few months ago about how we use email marketing to grow donations: http://firstround.com/review/what-startups-can-learn-from-wa...

Hopefully we'll be able to share more learnings in the next couple of months!

Wow, thank you! It took less than 90 minutes for all 1,000 of Segment's gift cards to be claimed.

You can still buy a gift card here: https://watsi.org/gift-cards. They're a holiday gift that's perfect for everyone and 100% of every gift card funds life-changing healthcare.

We want to thank the team at Segment for making such a generous donation to Watsi patients.

Segment not only buys Watsi gift cards for each of their new employees, but they donate their product (which we love) to Watsi so we can fund healthcare for more patients using the best tools available.

They are amazing :)

Amazing! Thanks so much for signing up.

Your donation will go to a patient who's fundraising on our website but hasn't had their treatment fully funded yet (like these folks: https://watsi.org/fund-treatments).

Np!

People are generous with tips, which is awesome and helps a ton. At this stage, we're 100% focused on raising money for patients. But down the line we'll likely start optimizing more for tips as well, in hopes of becoming self sustaining (https://watsi.org/faq#how-do-tips-work).

Thanks for the kind words!

Our operational funding comes from investors and philanthropists (https://watsi.org/faq#how-does-watsi-fund-its-day-to-day-ope...). You can see them all on our About page (just tab over from team to "Founding Donors"): https://watsi.org/about

Glad you found your answers! Feel free to shoot us an email with questions anytime. I'm grace at watsi.org and the person leading our medical partner program is dan at watsi.org.

Of course. Thanks again for the support! You're helping a lot of patients.

The Universal Fund is a rebrand/official launch of monthly donations. Your next month's donation will be automatically matched because you were one of the first thousand to join (thanks for being a Universal Fund OG!).

You'll get an email about this tomorrow morning (we didn't intend to launch today, but it got out on HN a little early :)

Sorry for any confusion!

Yeah! Every month, donors receive an email introducing them to the patient they supported, which serves as a tax receipt for that month's contribution. We also aggregate tax receipts for every Watsi donor and send them out at the end of the year for easy reporting.

Thanks for sharing! Want to make sure we mention that thanks to the founders of Teespring, donations are matched for the first 1,000 people to sign up. Let us know if you have feedback!

Thanks, Josh! Our operational costs are covered by foundations, philanthropists, and donors who leave an optional tip during checkout. More in our FAQ: watsi.org/faq

Swapping out the screengrab too, will be updated soon.

You're 100% right. Edited.

Yikes, sorry to hear that. What was the error message? Feel free to email me - grace at watsi dot org - and we'll sort it out.

Thanks for wanting to sign up!

Thanks! We used https://exposure.so/.

Grace from Watsi here. I totally understand where you're coming from based on how the post is written - our fault for being hyperbolic. Of course, we would never walk through a hospital and record people without their explicit permission.

Patient privacy is something we take really seriously. It is so important to us that Watsi funds cases regardless of whether or not the patient wants to publicly share their story with the world (https://watsi.org/faq#how-does-watsi-handle-patient-privacy) so that patients are never trading privacy for access to healthcare. More info here: http://blog.watsi.org/post/62445601517/patient-privacy

That said, what I've learned after talking with dozens of Watsi patients is that the overwhelming majority of them feel compelled to share their stories. They hope it will enable more people to access the healthcare they deserve.

I'm sorry to hear you thought the post was snarky. Our goal was to bid a lighthearted farewell to our blue logo and raise money for patients. No hard feelings toward the company. We chose not to name them because it wasn't the point of the post, not because of any legal obligation.

Thanks so much for donating! Appreciate the bitpay info -- will look into it.

No trash burning, just a little party to send off our blue logo in style :)

Thanks, Matt!

No, this is actually 100% for treatments, not our operations.

My favorite was Noplu (North of Plum) but the debate rages on :)

Gorgeous, the page and the philosophy. The world needs more of this.

Sorry if this is unclear, but you don't need to create an account at all to donate. All you have to do is enter an amount and click "Fund Treatment." Creating an account just saves your payment info for quick checkout in the future.

Fixed!