- WOTC is a nonprofit crowdfunding platform similar to Kickstarter for healthcare.
- The speaker couldn't give a formula for startup success or funny stories of lessons learned because they are not experienced or successful enough.
- The best startup presentation the speaker heard was from Airbnb, but wondered how many other startups failed after persisting for a long time.
- The speaker decided to start WOTC after a bus incident in Central America where a woman was collecting donations for her son's medical treatment.
- The speaker spent 5 months in the Peace Corps thinking about and planning WOTC.
- Nonprofits are more complicated than for-profits because it is harder to measure success and get feedback.

- The narrator observes Haitian women selling eggs, plantains, and rice in the market.
- The rice is being sold for a very low price due to the flooding of the Haitian market with free or heavily subsidized rice from non-profits and governments.
- The narrator and a team of volunteers start Watsi, a non-profit organization focused on providing medical care.
- Watsi adopts a transparent and minimal fundraising model, with 100% of donations going towards medical care.
- The organization operates with a circular organizational structure and treats patients and donors with the same respect they would want.
- After a slow start, Watsi gains attention and support through a post on Hacker News and coverage from NBC and TechCrunch.
- The organization experiences challenges after launching and struggles with fundraising.
- Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, reaches out to the narrator and provides funding, leading Watsi to join Y Combinator.
- Y Combinator helps Watsi focus on one metric and increase donations.

- The speaker discusses their experience with YC (Y Combinator) and the benefits it provided for their nonprofit organization, Watsi.
- YC helped increase weekly donations by 30% and provided a valuable network of advisors and entrepreneurs.
- YC's stamp of approval made fundraising easier for Watsi, as nonprofits face challenges in gaining support.
- Initially, the speaker struggled with fundraising because they didn't know what they were selling and tried different approaches such as selling emotion and impact.
- Eventually, they realized that what they were selling was a vision of making the world better by making it smaller.
- Watsi had successful fundraising efforts, securing large donations from influential individuals and raising $1.2 million.
- The speaker acknowledges the challenges Watsi faces but expresses determination to continue their mission of funding patients and making a difference.
- The speaker advises finding something to work on that one cares about more than oneself, and believes that as long as they fund one more patient, their efforts will be a success.

- WOTC is a nonprofit crowdfunding platform for healthcare.
- The speaker started WOTC after witnessing a woman collecting donations for her son's medical treatment.
- Watsi, a nonprofit organization focused on providing medical care, adopts a transparent and minimal fundraising model.
- Y Combinator provides funding and support to Watsi, helping increase donations and providing valuable connections.
- Watsi faces challenges with fundraising but remains determined to fund patients and make a difference.

My name is Chase, and like Jessica said, we recently had the privilege of being the first nonprofit to go through Y Combinator.

So to tell you just a quick 1 minute about WOTC, we're a nonprofit crowdfunding platform.

So the easiest way to think about us is that we're basically like Kickstarter for healthcare around the world.

So you can go on our website, see photos and read stories of patients all over the world that need access to low cost, high impact medical care but can't afford to pay for it.

And you can donate as little as $5 and directly fund say a life saving heart surgery for a 12 year old girl in Nepal or directly fund a prosthetic arm for Jose, a 46-year-old man, father of 5 in Guatemala.

So I spent a lot of time thinking about what on earth I was gonna talk about today.

And I thought about all the good startup presentations I've ever heard in my entire life.

And I realized that every good presentation falls into 1 of 2 categories.

There are informational presentations where really smart people get on stage and tell you that A plus B plus C equals startup success.

And there are motivational presentations where really successful people get on stage and tell you really funny stories about all the mistakes they made and all the hard lessons they learned on the long road to success.

And I was really frustrated when I realized that I couldn't give either 1 of those 2 presentations today.

On the 1 hand, I'm not experienced or smart enough to have the slightest idea what the formula for startup success is.

If I did, I'd be doing 10000000000 dollars a year.

And on the other hand, I'm not successful enough to tell you funny stories about all the lessons I think I learned because I have absolutely no idea if those lessons are ultimately going to result in success or if they're ultimately going to result in failure.

2 days ago, I remembered the best startup presentation I've ever heard in my entire life.

The best startup presentation I ever heard was when Brian and Nathan of Airbnb came to Y Combinator and told us a story about how Airbnb spent their first 1,000 days, 1,000 days searching high and low for product market fit.

I have never left a presentation more motivated, more inspired in my entire life.

But I had 1 problem with the presentation, 1 nagging thought that I just could not get out of my mind.

And it was at Brian and Nathan and everyone else at Airbnb, they earned their right to come to my accommodator and tell that story.

But I couldn't help but go home and wonder how many other startups have persisted for a thousand days, or maybe a hell of a lot longer and ultimately failed.

And that's when I realized the 1 thing I could actually talk about today, the 1 story I could tell you guys.

I could tell you our story, the story of WOTC, and I can tell it with an honesty that successful people can't.

I can tell you the story of WOTC on our 999th day.

The day before anyone knows if we're going to be a massive success or if we're just going to be a spectacular failure.

So about 2 and a half years ago, I was serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Central America.

And I was sitting on the back of a bus right at the Panama-Costa Rica border.

And I remember that at that point in my life, that bus was the absolute last place in the entire world I wanted to be.

It was hot, it was muggy, I was sweating like crazy.

There was this old guy sitting next to me that kept kind of like nudging into me and so I was just curling up against the window trying to sleep but the baths was too bouncy so I couldn't sleep against the window.

I remember I just kept constantly smelling mildew because I'd been living in the tropics for a year and a half.

Your clothes never get a chance to dry and so I'm just smelling the mildew coming off the collar of my shirt.

I remember there's a black North Face duffel bag at my feet, and in that black North Face duffel is every single thing in the world I own.

I'm $10,000 to $12,000 still in student loan debt.

I have another $1,000 to $2,000 in credit card debt I have no hope of paying off until I'm done with the Peace Corps.

The worst part is that I just a day before I'd gotten off a plane from the United States.

Now I was back home in the United States.

I was there for my grandmother's funeral.

But while I was there, I caught up with a bunch of my old college and high school friends in San Francisco.

And I have no idea why I thought this, but before I saw my friends, I figured they were all going to be miserable.

I was the guy that had spent the last 5 to 7 years working with nonprofits traveling around the entire world.

I figured they were living the office space life, working dead-end jobs in cubicles in San Francisco, miserable day in and day out.

Every single 1 of my friends, every single 1 of my friends had an awesome apartment.

They actually had girlfriends and boyfriends.

They went out, they got to date, they were having fun.

But beyond that, they were working for companies and building products and solving problems that they cared about.

They were happy, they had found a way to do good and do well.

And in contrast, the 6 years I had spent traveling around the world working with nonprofits, it seemed slow, it seemed bureaucratic, it seemed underfunded, it didn't come with the same energy and optimism and innovation that San Francisco had.

And so this is a direct quote but I told every single person I knew, my friends and my family, when I was back in San Francisco, I said, I'm done with this.

I said, I'm not gonna sell my soul, but I'm gonna come back to San Francisco and like all of you, I'm going to find a way to do well and do good.

So there I am sitting in the back of that bus in Central America, trying to think about how on earth I'm going to get through my last 5 months in the Peace Corps.

This is a picture of 1 of the actual buses.

Woman gets on the bus and she starts asking all these local passengers for donations to pay for her son's medical treatment.

Now the second I hear that I just tune her out and stop listening.

People in Central America get on the bus every single day, 1 after another, asking for donations, preaching, selling products.

But a few minutes later, I noticed that this woman was walking down the aisle of the bus toward me, and all of the local passengers were giving her money.

And I could not, for the absolute life of me, figure out why all of these local people trusted this woman when they had never trusted all the women that came before her.

And it turns out that these people trusted this woman because she had her son's medical record with her.

She was passing it around the bus, it was in a red folder.

They were grilling her with questions about the doctor or the hospital or the condition, and she seemed to earn their trust.

She got to the back of the bus, I gave her 500 colones, which is like a dollar because all these local farmers are donating.

I didn't want to be that 1 stingy gringo that doesn't give her any money.

She gets off the bus and I get goose bumps.

And I think it's crazy that we have websites like Kickstarter where with the click of a button you can crowdfund really any type of creative project.

We have websites like DonorsChoose, where with the click of a button, you can crowdfund a classroom project for a student really anywhere in the United States.

Why on earth is there not a website where we could crowdfund really the most important thing of all, which is healthcare for people that can't afford to pay for it?

So right then, having been the most jaded I've ever been in my entire life 5 minutes earlier, I decided to start Watsi and I decided to name it after the town I was traveling through when the woman got on the bus.

So this was my little hut in the Peace Corps.

It had 1 outlet, 1 light, running water for 1 hour a day.

But for those last 5 months, they were really the best 5 months of my life.

I just became obsessed, like obsessed with WOTC.

All I could do was think about WOTC for 10 to 15 hours a day.

And I would play a game, and the game I would play is, I would just think up every possible issue or problem or externality that could arise with the WOTC model, and I'd try to come up with a solution for 5 months.

And to you guys, that probably sounds crazy.

Most of you could probably build Watsi in 2 months, and here I am sitting in the middle of nowhere thinking about the idea for 5 months.

But in retrospect, those 5 months for me were some of the most important 5 months in Watsi's history.

And the reason for that is that nonprofits are oftentimes...

Is that nonprofits oftentimes need to be a little bit more careful, a little bit more skeptical, and a little bit more introspective than for-profits.

And the reason for that is that with nonprofits, it's often really, really hard to know if you're succeeding or if you're failing.

With a for-profit, I envy all of you guys.

If people want that product, they buy it and they give you money.

The better your product, The more money they give you, the more people buy it, the more you succeed.

The worse your product, the fewer people buy it, the less money they give you, the less you succeed.

You can measure success in real time, and you can measure success in dollars and cents.

Nonprofits, We have to go to 1 group of people, we have to convince them to give us money, we have to turn around 180 degrees, take that money and give a product to an entirely different group of people.

It's really hard to get feedback from that second group of people.

They're living in a really isolated area.

It's also difficult because when you're giving people something for free, or when you're giving people something that's heavily subsidized, they're often really reluctant to give you any negative or critical feedback at all for fear that you're gonna stop giving them whatever it is you're giving them.

And it's also hard because sometimes you give people things that help them on day 1, and they end up hurting them on day 365.

I remember when I learned this lesson the first time before I was in the Peace Corps, I was living and working in Haiti.

And my third week in Haiti, local Haitian friend of mine took me to this outdoor Haitian market.

Got to the market and there was 50 plus Haitian women and there were little groups of women and maybe 5 to 7 to a group, and they're all squatting in kind of like a semicircle.

The first group of women, a bunch of eggs.

And the second group of women are squatting down, and they're selling plantains and bananas.

And my friend taps me on the shoulder, and he says, Chase, look at the third group of women.

But they have white bags coming up in front of them.

On the front of the bags are an American flag.

And inside the bags are rice with a little cup to scoop out a cup of rice.

He said, those women are selling rice for pennies on the dollar.

They're selling rice for 1 1 100th of what it should actually cost.

So the reason they're selling rice for so cheap is that every time there's a humanitarian disaster or there's a crisis in Haiti, What happens is a bunch of non-profits and a bunch of governments, many of them in the United States, but not only, go to 1 group of people.

They send that rice to Haiti, and they give it to people that are starving.

The problem is that this has happened so many times, right, that we flooded the Haitian market with free or heavily subsidized rice.

And he said, Chase, we've put all the local farmers out of business.

How can a local Haitian rice farmer compete with a free product?

And I remember hearing that story and getting really frustrated and thinking, but the problem is so clear.

But the solutions and really the whole nonprofit world can oftentimes just be really complicated.

So I got back to the United States after the Peace Corps.

We had Grace, who was an indie at the time, helping us with marketing.

We had Jesse in Portland doing all of our code.

We had Howard in South Carolina doing all of our finances.

And we'd get on a Google Hangout every Tuesday night, and we'd work on Watsi.

We had no funding, no office, no salaries, no users, no revenue, and we didn't want any of those things.

The last thing in the world I wanted to do was build a big non-profit organization.

We were only doing Watsi because we thought it was cool, because we thought it was fun, because we wanted to start a nonprofit that we ourselves would donate to.

And in retrospect, being small and being obscure actually gave us a huge advantage.

We were beholden to no 1, and we could take risks, and we could do things that the big nonprofits could never do.

So during that year and a half, we made 5 decisions, which I think shaped the future of Watsi.

The first was we decided to be radically transparent.

We were going to be the most transparent nonprofit in the world.

That means exposing all of our operations, all of our financials, and even doing extra work to do things like take screenshots of each funds transfer and post them online so people can see exactly where their money is going if they donate on our website.

If you donate on a Watsi, 100% of your donation funds medical care, we'll never take a cut no matter what.

The third thing we decided as a team was just minimal fundraising.

We had all seen how operational fundraising can just destroy nonprofits.

There are so many nonprofits out there that get so obsessed and so dependent on fundraising, things like annual galas, that they forget about why they started the nonprofit in the first place.

We decided we were gonna have a circular organizational structure.

What that meant is that there's no bosses, there's no hierarchy, right, there's no management, and that everyone at Watsi's responsible to every other person.

And we even got rid of founder and co-founder titles.

We believe Watsi's in a perpetual state of being founded.

It's crazy to me, every new person that joins our team brings something completely new.

They change the entire trajectory of the organization.

It's nuts to think that we've been founded, right?

And the last thing we decided was that whenever we were making a decision, any decision that impacted our patients or impacted our donors, that we'd always treat our patients and our donors exactly how we would want to be treated if we were in their specific situation.

So we worked on Watsi for a year, year and a half, every Tuesday.

Built the site for nothing, and then spent $3,000 to try and get a nonprofit, which we did ourselves, and got denied.

And we sent out an email to our entire network.

And I remember thinking, OK, it's going to go crazy now.

And then about an hour and a half, 2 hours after he sent out the email, that was it.

And so I said, I decided that I wanted to post to Hacker News.

I'd never posted to Hacker News in my entire life.

I was too scared that people were just going to destroy me.

But I decided not to tell our team, because I figured no 1 was going to upvote it, and I didn't want them to all get disappointed.

So my plan was that I would post to Hacker News, and if it got upvotes, I'd tell the team, but if it didn't get upvotes, I was just going to delete it and pretend like it never happened.

I don't know, maybe like it probably says on there.

I can't see, but probably 11 AM that morning.

And by lunchtime, we were the number 1 post on Hacker News.

We funded every single medical treatment almost instantly in our entire pipeline.

We had 189 comments on Hacker News, hundreds of tweets, hundreds of Facebook posts, hundreds of emails, text messages.

And I remember I told my boss, I was working in finance in the city at the time.

And so my boss was like, I need the day off.

And I just sat in my desk shaking, answering Hacker News comment after Hacker News comment for the entire day.

So after we launched, we got Hacker News, and then a few days later, NBC picked it up and wrote an article about Watsi, which was the coolest thing ever.

And then a few days after that, I was in bed, and I got a Google alert that TechCrunch had written an article about Watsi.

I had no idea they were going to write – I had no idea they even knew who Watsi was.

And I remember – this is so embarrassing – I remember, like, I was crying.

That was the biggest thing in the entire world.

I'd been reading TechCrunch, and Watsi was on TechCrunch.

And I didn't even know they were going to write about us.

And I remember turning to my girlfriend at the time and saying, do you think all the startups that TechCrunch writes about are secretly as crappy as we are?

The idea is awesome and the website is good.

But we have no office, no full-time employees.

You can't even donate to a patient on our website because we're completely out of patients.

And you would donate on Watsi and we wouldn't even send you a receipt.

I think she was trying to secretly make us look better.

But that first trough of sorrow was we never thought about what would happen after we launched.

We never in our wildest dreams thought we would fund all the patients.

We thought we had 6 months worth of patients and they were funded in a few hours.

I decided to quit my job and I said, I gotta do this, I gotta try and do Watsi full time.

And the next rational thing to do was to fundraise.

We had no money, and the only way to run an organization is to get some money and pay people.

So I went out, started fundraising, and fundraising was just a complete disaster.

Spun my, actually the worst part, I can tell you 1 of the worst parts about being a non-profit is that no 1 will ever tell you no.

Everyone will go like this, they'll pat you on the back and they'll say, good job, you're doing something really good for the world, that's awesome, I really want to help you, but they'll never write you a check, right?

And so I did that for like 3 months, just spinning my wheels, I kept telling the team, we're so close, there's like these 50 people that are about to give us some money, I promise, never gave us the money.

So then, about 3 months later, it's November 22nd, and I'm flying to Southern California to spend Thanksgiving with my dad.

I check my email, and in my personal email, there's a message from Paul Graham.

And Paul Graham had seen a recent post about Watsi on Hacker News.

And He found my personal email through my Hacker News account and he just wrote 2 sentences.

And the sentences were, are you in the Bay Area?

And I remember being so excited that I got off the airplane and left all my luggage for Thanksgiving on the airplane.

We met with PG a few weeks later in Mountain View, met with Jessica, he wrote us our first check within like an hour, I'd been meeting with people for 3 months and no 1 writes a check.

PG made our first donation, we joined Y Combinator.

Y Combinator was the best thing to ever happen to WOTC.

The big 3 things we got out of YC, the first was focus.

It enabled Jesse to come from Portland, Grace to come from New York, the 3 of us lived and worked in Mountain View.

Beyond that, what Airbnb taught us was to only focus on 1 metric.

And the only thing we tried to do for 3 months was to get more people to donate, was weekly donations, just to get more people to donate.

We managed to increase weekly donations 30% every week.

The second thing YC gave us was a network.

It's like when you go to college, you're like, wow, everyone here is kind of like me.

I mean, it's the most amazing network of advisors and entrepreneurs I could honestly ever have imagined being a part of.

And the third thing was a stamp of approval.

I think that now that YC's accepting nonprofits, this might actually maybe be more important for nonprofits than for profits.

But in the nonprofit world, nonprofit philanthropists and foundations are the most risk-averse group of people on the planet.

No 1 is willing to take a bet on a new nonprofit.

And to have YC come on board and say, we're taking a bet, we're making a public bet on Watsi, made it really easy when we eventually went out and started fundraising.

And I learned my lesson the first time, and I said, we made a new rule, that we're only going to fundraise for 3 months, and that's it.

Even if we don't raise a dime in 3 months, we're not going to fundraise again for 18 months.

See all Y Combinator transcripts on Youtube

Chase Adam at Startup School 2013