Chase Adam at Startup School NY 2014

TL;DR

Chase Adam founded Watsi, a nonprofit crowdfunding platform for healthcare, after observing a woman on a bus in Central America raise donations by sharing her son’s medical record. He built Watsi as a volunteer side project with friends, launched via Hacker News, and became the first nonprofit accepted into Y Combinator.

Key insights

• Starting as volunteers with no funding and no users gave the team freedom to take risks and make foundational decisions they otherwise couldn’t have, such as committing to 100% of donations directly f
• That commitment to 100% donation pass-through was not just a moral choice but a strategic differentiator that shaped the organization’s future.
• For nonprofits, fundraising is harder than for for-profits: donors don’t want to be first, there is no natural deadline (no round closing, no limited equity), and people often string you along without