What is Watsi, and How it's Changing Donations/Charity Forever | Watsi Founder Grace Garey

Well, thanks for having me, first of all. You guys look so comfortable. I'm really jealous. So Watsi is a global crowdfunding platform for healthcare. It's basically a website where anyone can go on and see photos and read stories of people from all around the world who need really life-changing healthcare but can't afford to pay for it, and anyone can donate as little as $5 to directly fund their care. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about my story, how I got to Watsi, what we're doing so far, and hopefully we can wrap that up without too much time, and then we'd love to hear more about what you guys are working on and take your questions too. But I first started hearing stories about people in need when I was in elementary school. My dad would take me and my sister to his favorite coffee shop every morning before school, and we would read the newspaper from front to back. Like every single section of it. We'd read like the movie reviews and the advice columns and the world news columns. And he did this because he's sort of a Berkeley '60s activist, and he just thought it was really important that we grew up understanding that we were a small part of a large world, and that there were people who didn't have access to things that we'd grown up with access to, like enough food to eat and access to education and a safe place to sleep at night and healthcare when we got sick. And I remember hearing these stories and always being really curious about these people and their lives and, you know, what they were like. And most of all, just what I could do to help. I really wanted to help. And so as I got older and these newspaper stories turned into the stories I read online every day— thank you— I was just as interested in these stories, but it never totally became clear to me exactly what I was supposed to do or what I could do to help. And that felt a little bit confusing for me. And so the first chance that I got, I actually moved to Ghana, West Africa. Are you from Ghana? Yeah. Awesome. I love Ghana. So I moved to Ghana, and I moved there to study post-conflict peacebuilding and transitional development, which is basically the study of how people rebuild their lives after something really terrible has happened, often like war or conflict. So there's a big refugee camp in Ghana that houses Liberian refugees called Buduburam. And I went to Buduburam to help out with a research project. But I remember my first day there, I expected to see what I had learned about and heard on the news and sort of expected to see in a refugee camp. I expected to see UN blue helmets and kids in school and people maybe in line for food and temporary housing. And instead, I saw buildings with UNICEF painted on the side that were crumbled and empty. And I saw people talking amongst themselves and just sort of figuring it out on their own. And the international community was not there anymore. And the last thing I saw was these signs pasted up on community boards all over the camp. It was a message from the UNHCR that basically said the funding from the international community has been cut, and so we need to pull out of the camp. And then I noticed that these people weren't actually just like sitting around waiting for someone to help them. Like, the people who'd been left behind in the camp had actually just figured out ways to sort of solve their own problems, at least in the short term. I got to know this guy named Abraham who had been a professor back in Liberia, and when the UN pulled out and shut down the schools, he self-organized and he started his own informal schools, and he sort of crowdsourced a library from books that people had brought into the camp with them. And in some ways that was really inspiring to me that he had been able to solve a problem that he saw because he was surrounded by the people who were facing it. And he was able to provide a really direct solution because he was literally friends and neighbors with the people that he was trying to serve. But I was also really frustrated by the fact that he had to do this by himself and that the international community, like all of us who sort of signed on to take care of each other when something really bad happens, had just sort of dropped the ball. So I wanted to understand why. And I went to DC, which is like the nerve center of humanitarian work in the US. And I got a job at one of the biggest advocacy organizations in the humanitarian world. And I was really excited to be there. I got there, and I've never been so impressed with a group of people in my life. Everyone who worked there spoke multiple languages. They'd all lived in other countries. I I figured, like, if anybody is the right person to solve these problems and make a positive impact, it's gotta be these people. But it didn't take long after being there before I realized why, despite having brilliant people who are interested in tackling the world's biggest problems, help doesn't always get where it's supposed to go. Because in my first week in DC, the earthquake hit Haiti. Oh, no. And I expected that in response to this earthquake, all these brilliant people that I worked with were going to get on planes and fly to Haiti, go assess the situation, talk to the people who needed help, and make sure that they got what they needed. But instead, everybody stayed in DC and they started fundraising, because people know that when a disaster strikes, donors give. And that's sort of a natural response as a nonprofit, but But the also natural situation that it creates is that nonprofits end up serving the needs of the donors that they're fundraising from rather than the needs of the people that they actually exist to serve. And that's exactly what happened in Haiti. Even after my nonprofit and all of the ones around us were done chasing funds and they'd managed to raise money, all of their programs in Haiti were totally crippled because they were so crippled by the needs of the donors who had given them money and tied the money to various restrictions and what they wanted, and at the end of the day, Only a fraction of the $9 billion raised to rebuild Haiti actually made it to Haiti. And that seemed crazy to me. And it seemed like the complete opposite of what I had seen the smaller community of people do in Liberia, or in the Liberian refugee camp, which was be right next to someone who has a need, respond to their need, and make sure it's something that's useful for them. They were doing something on a much smaller scale, But they weren't beholden to the interests of big donors. They were right next to the people they were trying to serve, and they were able to provide a pretty decent solution. Whereas in DC, we were separated by thousands of miles and layers of bureaucracy, and we basically totally screwed it up. So I came back to San Francisco after that, feeling a little bit deflated, not sure what I wanted to do next. And the first thing I saw was pink mustaches everywhere. Technology had completely changed everything, right? It was connecting people in ways that I never imagined were possible. People were finding spare rooms in people's homes on Airbnb. They were matching drivers with passengers with the click of a button on their phone. My friends were finding dates by swiping on their iPhones. And it wasn't just in San Francisco that this was happening. I remember seeing this picture of a group of Pakistani schoolboys holding a candlelight vigil for the victims of a school shooting in Connecticut. And just thinking that, like, we are so well on our way to a world where every single person on the planet is connected. And it just seemed totally crazy to me that despite that, we were still tackling the world's biggest problems by sending, as an anonymous group of people, a group of resources to another amorphous anonymous group of people and just hoping that it was useful. So around this time, I met a guy who had an idea for a website. that would connect people directly and fund healthcare around the world. And it took me about 5 seconds after hearing this idea to decide that I wanted to work on it. So I sent him this really stocky LinkedIn message. A very long one. I wouldn't recommend sending one this long. I know. I think it's because he deleted himself from LinkedIn since then when I took the screenshot. But anyway, I told him I wanted to get involved. And we met up for beers, and we started working on Watsi on the side. So we were this sort of ragtag team of volunteers. We would get on a Google Hangout every Tuesday night and just talk about Watsi, and our Hangouts at one point connected us across, I think, 6 continents and 8 time zones. Like, we were all over the place. We had other day jobs, and we just got together to do this because we loved it. And we made some decisions in those early days because all we had time to do was just sit around and make decisions and think about what Watsi should be, that really shaped the organization even today. The first one was that 100% of donations on Watsi would always fund healthcare and we wouldn't take a cut. We wanted to provide the most direct way to support another person across the world. The second was that we wanted to be the most transparent nonprofit on the planet. We wanted to publish everything, Even if in the early days that meant manually updating a Google spreadsheet with 20 fields of data about every single patient, which we did for the first 2 years before we automated it. And the third was that we wanted to be a bottom-up solution. We wanted to start with the needs of a real person and go find the funding based on that, rather than chase funding and then lob it over the fence and hope it was useful for someone. Thank you.