Chase Adam at Startup School 2013

TL;DR

Chase Adam, founder of Watsi, tells the story of building the first nonprofit to go through Y Combinator. He emphasizes that nonprofits are harder to measure than for-profits because success isn’t in dollars, and that the key to Watsi’s early traction was a vision of making the world smaller rather than selling emotion or impact.

Key insights

• Nonprofits face a measurement problem: they fundraise from one group and deliver to another, making it hard to get honest feedback from beneficiaries.
• Being small and obscure allowed Watsi to take risks and ignore traditional nonprofit constraints during its formative period.
• The initial launch on Hacker News was followed by a “trough of sorrow” because all patients were funded instantly and the organization had no pipeline or processes to sustain momentum.