As a founder, I think that this viewpoint misses the reality of a fixed budget. If I can make my team of 8 as productive as 10 with LLMs then I will. But that doesn’t mean that without LLMs I could afford to hire 2 more engineers. And in fact if LLMs make my startup successful then it could create more jobs in the future.
I believe that it’s because people are not investing in bitcoin because it’s a viable cryptocurrency (unlike Ethereum and some others) but that’s it’s a scarce commodity (like gold) that adds diversification to an investment portfolio.
SIRUM (YCW15 Nonprofit) | https://sirum.org | Software Engineer & Product | Atlanta or Remote (US) | Full-time
SIRUM saves medicine to save lives. We make sure that unexpired medicine goes to someone in need rather than polluting our air and water. We are a small but mighty team of 40 people. We are a mission-driven organization that is growing very quickly!
“Work” doesn’t have to be wasteful. It could be based on the number of pieces of litter that were collected, the number of meals to the homeless that were served. It’s just easier to measure when work is something wasteful.
SIRUM (YC W15 Nonprofit) is making medications affordable for all. We’re a small (~25) but quickly growing team that’s passionate about our mission of reimagining healthcare access for those in need.
We come from organizations like McKinsey, the Clinton Foundation, and Stanford Biology. We like to work hard, solve tough problems, and are determined to improve healthcare access for families who have trouble affording the medications they need to stay healthy.
We are currently hiring for both our Palo Alto and Atlanta Offices as well as some fully remote roles. We have opportunities for senior software developers, sales, customer success, operations managers, and communication managers.
If you want to work in health-care, love mission-driven work, and thrive in a startup environment, then we may be a good fit. If you see a position that you like then apply at https://www.sirum.org/about#careers. Even if you don’t see something that’s the right fit right now, email adam -at- sirum.org - we love hearing from folks on hackernews who share our mission.
SIRUM circumvents the traditional medication supply chain by connecting people with surplus medications. Our goal is to leverage the ~$10B of surplus that goes to waste every year to improve health equity for families who need it most. Everyone deserves the medications they need to stay healthy with prices that are low, stable & transparent
As one of the first two full-time engineers, you will work directly with the co-founder/CTO, play a key role in the direction and architecture of our technology, and gain exposure to every functional part of the organization, including all three of our core teams: pharmacy automation, clinic partnerships, and medicine donors.
Founder of a YC non-profit, SIRUM, here. We and most of the other non-profits that have gone through YC all have open sourced our software development.
It's a small group of tech focused startups (we have all mostly done fastforward.org and DRK Foundation as well) so we all know each other well and you really can't go wrong, just pick one where you like the mission and shoot them an email.
We had some concerns that drug manufacturers would think that we were cannibalizing their revenue, however, the medicine is going to the uninsured or people who could not afford their co-pay or deductible so that concern never seemed to materialize. In fact, since launching we have had several manufacturers who had over-produced approach us to make donations. Despite the popular examples to the contrary, I do think that most people in the industry do want to improve access to medication and view it as a basic human right.
It's refreshing to hear that at least one country seems to have solved this problem. Here in the US we have a whole industry of Reverse Distributors (Stericycle, Genco, INMAR) whose job is to sort and then incinerate unused medicine.
A lot of the medication at these institutions are bubble packed, so you could donate the last 2 in those cases. Thankfully this is the vast majority of our volume right now. If it's an open bottle it would depend on the type of donor whether it could be re-sealed. For example, a pharmacy could.
If you can overcome the high capital costs, I think it could be very successful. You may want to check out One World Health which is a nonprofit drug development organization that does incredible work as well.
State laws have a lot of safeguards built-in to ensure all the medicine is safe. For example, all the medicine donated must be checked by a pharmacist to ensure that it is unopened, unexpired, from an eligible licensed facility. We also use a bar code scanner to enter and identify the medicine before it is sent.
Most of the medication is donated in its original packaging. In most states the recipient can then repackage so the patient gets a normal amber vial just like any other source.
We do donate a lot of injections, patches, and inhalations. Currently we are not able to do refrigerated medicine like insulin, but are working on cold-chain shipping so hope to offer that soon.
This makes me think that it at least as much to do with high (unrealistic?) employee expectations as business stinginess.