Watsi Lands $1.5M Donation From Humble Bundle(thenextweb.com)
thenextweb.com
Watsi Lands $1.5M Donation From Humble Bundle
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/12/16/healthcare-platform-watsi-lands-1-5-million-donation-gaming-startup-humble-bundle/
6 comments
We've been a beneficiary of several bundles, and so far Humble Bundle users have contributed a total of $1.5M to Watsi.
That is an amazing amount, congrats you guys! Also, thanks for the clarification -- somehow the article (perhaps unintentionally) reads as though the management of the Humble Bundle company donated from their own funds/profits.
To those considering donating to Watsi - the best part is when they send you an update on the patient's condition after surgery. The transparency is admirable.
Yes this is a good step in the right direction I feel. Personally though some updates would have been nice, I think there was at least 4 months between funding and hearing that surgery was complete for the patient I helped with. An earlier update would have been nice, was wondering what was going on for a while. Also they used the original picture of the patient rather than an updated one. Maybe I'm just being picky but I think those things could help improve the response that a donor feels from helping out.
Agreed - I just think it's lightyears ahead of other charities. Most of the time, I have no idea where the money even goes, which is really unfortunate (and makes me not want to donate to them)
Yes, completely agree, we need more of this as it helps people better see the impact their donations have in areas donors will likely never visit. I like how Charity:Water is also doing this by giving you photos and GPS coordinates to the pump you help fund. If there's a such thing as a disruptive charity, it's organizations like these.
I agree, these organizations are great. Speaking as a long-term software engineer at Kiva, I've come to see there is always a fine balance on what to update on and how frequent to update people. For the what, there are many concerns, namely privacy. For the frequency, we've tried to allow users a lot of choice in choosing how often to be updated, but then it's still a question of how much resources should the charity spend on getting updates. It is usually going to cost someone's time and money to gather updates, whether the charity in question or the partner they are working with in the field, or both. So, one has to think critically on how to balance spending money on that with spending money on the actual help to people. Granted, the exciting thing is that as the people these charities are helping get more connected to online networks, there is more opportunity for them to make their own choices in regards to when and on what to update the people who are helping them.
Yep. I tend to fire and forget with charity, and it's always awesome to get those emails and see you've really helped someone.
This sounds really cool and exciting on the surface, but honest question: is there a conflict of interest when two YC alumni donate between each other? Is there any real issue here at all?
I don't know the answer to that one way or another, but I think it makes for interesting discussion.
I don't know the answer to that one way or another, but I think it makes for interesting discussion.
I don't think so – Humble Bundle is a for-profit company, of which YC owns (a small non-controlling set of) common shares. Watsi is a non-profit that YC doesn't own any portion of.
What HB does is really up to them – and donating to charity has always been a core component of both their business and mission/vision.
What HB does is really up to them – and donating to charity has always been a core component of both their business and mission/vision.
I don't think so. They are both networked into the same valley culture and would obviously have met and know each other's projects well. It would seem natural.
No.
Great for them! Watsi is doing great work utilizing the internet for good. I'm super excited to see where they go in the future!
Does this raise a concern of people stopping donating to Watsi directly, since many, many treatments will be funded from this one donation and no unfunded treatments will be available?
Good question. $1.5M is a lot of amount of money, but it will by no means fund all the patients, so there will always be treatments for donors to fund.
This is funding for the business side of Watsi, so that donations made for treatments can go 100% to the treatments.
No, this is actually 100% for treatments, not our operations.
Sorry, I guess I read too much into "donation towards its business" in the first line of the article.
Awesome! From the article, Watsi have raised a total of $2.2 million including this, so this is huge.
Or is this a separate donation from the Humble Bundle leadership or such?