In this talk, the Watsi co‑founder recounts the startup’s chaotic early days and the pivotal moments that turned a modest idea into a global health crowdfunding platform. After a modest launch, a post on Hacker News sent 20,000 unique visitors to the site, crashing it but also funding every patient they had listed, far exceeding their initial goal of treating ten patients in six months. The surge attracted mainstream media coverage (TechCrunch, Huffington Post, NBC, Fast Company) and a flood of donors that outpaced their ability to add new patients. Struggling to secure traditional nonprofit funding, the team faced rejection from a well‑known foundation and realized the sector’s risk‑averse nature. They entered a $10,000 online voting competition, mobilising friends, family, and even bar staff to win by a narrow margin, securing their first cash injection. This exposure caught the attention of Paul Graham, who invited Watsi to become the first nonprofit in Y Combinator. The three‑month accelerator stint provided focus, mentorship, and a substantial investment that allowed the founders to quit their day jobs and work full‑time. Since then, Watsi has grown to a 10‑person team, raised $5 million from 14,000 donors, and funded healthcare for about 5,000 patients across 20 countries. The talk highlights specific patient stories—a set of three Guatemalan siblings with congenital heart defects and a Kenyan teen with a brain tumor—to illustrate the platform’s direct donor‑to‑patient connection. The founder concludes by emphasizing the broader vision: using people‑powered crowdfunding to reshape global health financing and empower individuals worldwide to make tangible impact.
Chapters
So we launched Watsi, and on the first day, we were expecting amazing things to happen. Not much happened. Chase's mom donated. My mom donated. We were kind of like, hmm, all right, maybe we should get this out there a little more. So Chase posted on a website that I had never heard of at the time called Hacker News, basically town square of Silicon Valley. And we shot to number 1. on this forum. Everybody upvoted us. We had about 20,000 uniques hit our site. They crashed Watsi, and when the website came back up, they funded healthcare for every single patient that we had posted. Yeah, it was pretty awesome. So our original goal when we launched Watsi was to fund healthcare for 10 patients in our first 6 months, and we did twice that in the first 6 hours. So after that, Thanks. So after that, we entered sort of a whirlwind. TechCrunch picked it up, Huffington Post picked it up, NBC picked it up, Fast Company picked it up, and we started getting written up in all these places, and more and more donors kept coming to Watsi, and they were actually funding healthcare for patients faster than we could post them and faster than we could get new ones from these 3 little pilot medical partners that we had found to test this out with us, and we all had day jobs at the time, right? In the bathroom of my job in New York, writing Watsi patient profiles on my phone and sending them to Jesse, who would hard-code them into the website, and then donors would fund it 3 minutes later, and I'd be running back to the bathroom. So I think my bosses in New York just thought I had some big problems. So we were desperate for some funding to be able to actually do Watsi full-time. We're like, at least one of us needs to be able to quit our jobs and work on this, because we can't even Keep up. And so we started approaching all of the normal people you approach to fundraise for as a nonprofit. And we had this call with a foundation. They're really well known. They were the first people to fund Kiva and all these organizations. And we just had no idea what we were doing. 10 volunteers got on this one call with this really high-powered woman, and she was just like, what? We were all talking over each other, and she cut the call off after 15 minutes. She was like— You're not ready. You guys are clueless. You're so new. I'm not gonna take a chance on you. And that was sort of the theme. Nobody wants to be the first one to touch you, especially as a nonprofit. It's a very risk-averse funding environment. So we got pretty desperate, and so we entered in an online voting competition, which I would not recommend. They're just such a waste of time. But it was our only option at the time, we felt. And it had a prize of $10,000. And so we spammed all of our friends and family for 2 weeks, got everyone to vote for Watsi over and over again from Wi-Fi, on their phones, on data, so they wouldn't know it was the same person, all kinds of stuff. And finally, we got to the end of the competition with an hour left, and we were neck and neck with another nonprofit that was up for the $10,000. And it looked like we were just sort of out of ideas. We had no idea who else we could ask to vote. And I was living in New York at the time, and I happened to be at a bar with a group of my friends. And so I decided to ask the bartender and the bouncers if they would ask people to vote for Watsi on their phones before they entered the bar and before they ordered drinks. And they agreed. So this guy asked everyone coming to the bar to vote for Watsi, and we ended up winning the voting competition by 1%. So that was our first money, and not long after that, Paul Graham from Y Combinator heard about us on Hacker News, and he reached out with a really simple email. He just said, are you guys in the Bay Area? If so, I'd like to meet. And so we went and we met with Paul Graham, and he invited us to be the first nonprofit to join Y Combinator. He was the first person to give us a substantial amount of money, and that enabled us to quit our jobs. and start working on Watsi full-time. I had never heard of Y Combinator, by the way, before this. I had no idea what that was. To me, Paul Graham was just a guy who was giving us a ticket to work on Watsi, and that was special to me then, but then Y Combinator and PG became really important to us for lots of other reasons in the next couple months. This is me, Chase, and Jesse in our little apartment in Mountain View. We all moved in together for YC, and we just slept, ate, breathed Watsi for 3 months. YC was cool for a lot of reasons, but I think the biggest one was probably, A, focus. There was literally nothing else we could have been doing. I mean, there's not a ton to do in Mountain View, so you just sort of hunker down and you work on Watsi. But the other thing was that everybody around us was sort of thinking about things the same way that we were. We were getting used to telling people our ideas for Watsi and how we thought the world should be different and how we thought we could make nonprofits better, and basically getting a pat on the back. It's like, nice big idea, good luck, try it out, we don't really expect anything from you. But there was sort of a different mindset, and you guys probably see this here too, but we told people at YC, both the partners and our peer batchmates, about what we were trying to do, and they just assumed it was gonna work. They just assumed that because we seemed like smart people with a good idea, and we seemed like we were gonna hang on for dear life and never stop trying until it worked, that it was just gonna work. And that was a really energizing feeling to have, that you were around people that maybe they were just as crazy and delusional as you, but if nothing else, it definitely gave us a lot of energy to keep going. And so we worked incredibly hard for those 3 months. And we have continued working really hard ever since. So we have a little office in San Francisco now. We've grown the team. We're 10 people now, soon to be 12 probably. And as of today, about 14,000 people have donated $5 million on Watsi to fund healthcare for 5,000 patients in 20 countries. So it's going pretty well so far. And we're definitely proud of what we've accomplished. Always new challenges coming up, and it never totally gets easier. But it's worth it to me because we've been able to do a few of the really important things that I wanted to do when I first started working in this space, which is that we've managed to provide a solution that's driven by the people who need them. I remember talking with our first medical partner in Guatemala. It's run by this Harvard global health professor. And we were just asking him, like, you know, if we were to partner with you, what would be the first patients you'd want to submit to Watsi? Like, what are your biggest unmet needs? And he told us about how for years he'd been receiving institutional funding from traditional healthcare financiers and traditional organizations, and because the funding was so restricted, he'd had all this funding for very specific conditions like cleft palates, And he was going out and his team was spending all this time going and diagnosing children with cleft palates in these rural areas, which is a super high-impact treatment to provide, but they're incurring all the fixed costs of diagnosing these kids, and in the meantime, obviously they're diagnosing kids with other conditions too that they have the knowledge and the ability to treat, but they didn't have the funding to treat. And so what Peter told us is that he had a waiting room full of patients with, for example, congenital heart defects. Patients that were not going to live more than another year or two without a really simple surgery. But despite the fact that he had a lot of funding, he didn't have funding for that particular thing, and so they'd just been waiting. And so we said, "Sure, let's fund the congenital heart defects." And so the first three patients posted on Watsi from that partner were these three siblings. Their names are Maya, Maida, and Dullier. They all were born with the same congenital heart defect, and they all had surgery. Funded on Watsi, and they're all completely healthy now. The second thing that I'm really proud of that we've been able to do is provide a real human connection, right? This isn't lobbing amorphous money at an anonymous group of people. This is really connecting individual people to each other. And there are people like Joyce. She is a 16-year-old girl. She lives in Kenya. She wants to be a surgeon herself. And she was diagnosed with a really life-threatening brain tumor. And her parents just had no way to pay for it. There was nothing they could do. And they were referred to a Watsi partner hospital in Kenya. And in less than 24 hours, 33 donors from around the world raised the $1,260 she needed to live. So this is her post-surgery. She's back in school. I hope she will become a surgeon herself one day. But I think that's what really makes me most excited is the idea that we're able to provide an impact for real people. We're able to hopefully change the way that global health and humanitarian aid financing works in some fundamental ways. But most of all, I hope that people who grow up now hearing stories about what's happening on the other side of the world, Don't feel paralyzed by the inability to understand what these problems are or to do anything that's useful, because it's getting a lot easier to connect people and make a really direct impact in their lives. And Watsi's sort of been our experiment in that, and we're excited to see where it continues to go. Thank you.
