Watsi has this Impact page where you can see every person you've helped — their photo, their story, the country. I visit it more often than I'd like to admit.
I have been building a startup since the last couple of years and as we all know it is relentless. There are weeks where nothing seems to work, where you question every decision. In those moments, pulling up that page and seeing real people whose lives changed because of a few dollars a month — it resets something. It reminds me why building things that matter is worth the grind.
Thank you to everyone at Watsi for creating something that gives back to donors just as much as it gives to patients.
I couldn't remember when I joined, but it turns out 2014 too. From that date and dang's comment below, I found the HN submission that motivated me to join:
Thank you for the incredibly inspiring work! At a time when 99% of the founders and VCs just want to bank on the next big hype cycle and accumulate power and wealth, it’s good to be reminded that actual life changing work with direct impact on people is still possible.
I made the biggest donations in my life via Watsi. Thank you for building this site. I love you guys have an API as well. I thought of building an app on top of your API but never got round to complete it. If you are curious, I can share; I think there may be an opportunity to capture value in free giveaways and turn it into charity. Many people try to give away their things quickly on fb marketplace or letgo, ...what if they could ask for a donation to a charity? I know there are challenges like, what if they want to return. But there has to be a way to solve this with an escrow service or something. A similar model already works in used, 2nd stores that work for charities.
Also, fun fact: 619 of our current monthly donors first made a donation 10 or more years ago, and I'm pretty sure many of those were/are Hacker News readers. If you're interested, see https://watsi.org/universal-fund
I've long played around with the thought of what would happen if someone started something like the universal-fund you mentioned, but had it snowball like a sovereign fund? (ie, instead of spending the in flow, invest it and only spend the profits from the investments, for example) ...
Particularly for basic needs like housing,food,clothes... Like what if instead of giving a charity $100 we created 41c per month? of UBI (roughly the cashflow from investing that same $100). Yes it would seem too little today, but in time it would be massive because it would never dissipate.
IDK, just my musing while claude takes, err does, my job.
Plenty of those have existed, but in the end they always get stolen and given to the dogs trust.
There’s nothing people hate more than lasting charitable foundations. They take them to court so that they can crack them open and wank away the entire fund in 6 months.
There was one which was supposed to pay off the entire national debt. They cracked and spaffed it.
Another was supposed to end piracy. Cracked and spaffed.
You could save a million people a year, but that won’t save you from being cracked and spaffed. They’re already rubbing their trotters at the thought.
I don't comment on Hacker News very much -- in fact, extremely rarely, but I do remember this more than a decade ago and its awesome that you've stuck with this for this long.
Congratulations to you and all the work that you've done and the impact that you've had. That's pretty cool and something I think many of us aspire to. Cheers Chase!
You should be unbelievably proud of what you've achieved, and it's lovely to be reminded of the amazing things people can accomplish amongst the backdrop of almost deafeningly negative sentiment going around.
Thanks for doing what you do and for sharing your story!
Thank you :) Watsi is lucky to have an incredible team and medical partners, who work in some of the most challenging environments to provide care to patients.
Great work. Do you have specific countries you work with? How are health partners selected? Would love to introduce some doctor friends of mine in Southern Africa. Every now and then they have some cases where we end up just pooling as friends and send to them. Again, great work!
One thing I always thought of converging businesses with helping people in need.
I know a lot of people think about this in a negative way in charity circles but I’d rather like to see companies sponsor donate in return of some sort visibility.
Somehow I always thought that would be a good fit for an organization such as yours. (I did donate through you guys previously, thanks for facilitating that).
I’ve been a monthly donor since ~the beginning when I was just an undergraduate, and I still read the stories and emails I receive. I’m glad that you opted for the steady growth path, and that you’ve made it a sustainable thing.
Your support every month in our Universal Fund means the world to us! This consistency and reliability helps us plan ahead, show up faster for patients in need, and grow to reach new hospitals and communities.
Great work Chase! I remember meeting you back in the shared office with Teespring. You are right, we are not our startups, but there is a lot to be proud of, an impact is always the goal, for profit or non. Onward!
Grateful for your work, and sticking it out serving human beings while others hustle to secure the bag. There's nothing wrong with securing the bag, of course, but it just makes work like this even more impressive to me. Kudos!
Why would for profits not make the world a better place?
For-profit does not mean “shareholders and ROI over user” or something. You can do for-profit and not enshtfy and make the world better. That’s my goal at least.
If profit is the objective, it will turn into growth-at-all-costs machine because that's how the mathematics works.
If, however, the objective is, say, improve as many lives as possible with the constraint of being profitable, it's definitely possible to do good. You just have to make sure you understand what level of profitability is sufficient, which is rare but doable.
Watsi seems to be doing great work, but the title—"you helped save 33k lives"—reads as misleading to me. I guess "helped" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but I would be incredibly surprised if the counterfactual number of lives saved was more than 3000. (But don't let this dissuade you from donating; concretely improving someone's life is totally a worthwhile goal, and Watsi seems very good at effecting this)
"Counterfactual number of lives saved" is not the normal sense of the phrase "save a life". By that logic, each person's life can only be saved once, which is not how people normally use the phrase.
Your definition may be useful for cold hard utilitarian calculus, of the sort that hospital directors need to do if they've run out of fundraising opportunities. However, "effective altruism" – which I suspect you're alluding to here – isn't actually an efficient way to save lives, the way it's usually practised (ignoring second-order effects, and everything that doesn't fit on a spreadsheet).
You're right; I should've been more precise. However, we have tools for dealing with this—that's what quality-adjusted life-years are for! I don't contest that surgeries often significantly increase QALYs, and may do so pretty cost-effectively.
Lol, I just care a lot about saving as many lives as I can; the most effective charities I've been able to find good evidence on save one life for $6–8k. If Watsi had a credible claim at being able to save lives 10x cheaper I would redirect my entire donation budget to them!
That said, once again, Watsi is great. I really appreciate all the hard work they've put into making this happen—this is orders of magnitude more impressive and impactful than most projects I've ever seen!
Thank you Chase -- I was an early Watsi supporter (and still am actually) but you just reminded me I need to donate soon haha :) Either way fantastic work and thank you!
No problem! I would absolutely help again. This is an important cause that is near to my heart. Speaking for the HN community: we are always happy to help!
Chase- thank you for what you've done in creating Watsi to impact 33,000 lives! It also made me believe in the potential for non profits to create a positive impact again.
We'd love to have GiveWell evaluate Watsi. They often recommend global health interventions because every dollar goes incredibly far in saving lives. In the meantime, here's what a few (independent) experts have said about investing in access to surgery:
• A review across 23 LMICs found that low-complexity surgeries (e.g., appendectomy, hernia repair) cost as little as $17 per Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) averted (Mengistie et al., 2025). Overall, 89% of surgical procedures studied were cost-effective, and 76% were “very cost-effective” based on GDP thresholds (Ifeanyichi et al., 2024).
• Essential surgery often achieves costs per DALY well below standard willingness-to-pay thresholds and can be more valuable than essential drugs or vaccines on a per-DALY basis (Mengistie et al., 2025). Low-complexity surgical interventions compare favorably to—and are sometimes more cost-effective than—interventions such as HIV antiretroviral therapy, family planning, and TB vaccinations (Ifeanyichi et al., 2024).
Incredible, I didn't know about Watsi, but I am glad that I do now. Direct support for something as important as healthcare seems to be one of the best ways to deploy donations to positively impact the world. Thank you for creating this!
So awesome to hear - thank you! Hoping others will join in on watsi.org to help too. We want giving to be a bigger and more meaningful part of our day to day lives and to do this, it helps to always know and trust the impact you are making.
I have been a Universal Fund member since 2014.
Watsi has this Impact page where you can see every person you've helped — their photo, their story, the country. I visit it more often than I'd like to admit.
I have been building a startup since the last couple of years and as we all know it is relentless. There are weeks where nothing seems to work, where you question every decision. In those moments, pulling up that page and seeing real people whose lives changed because of a few dollars a month — it resets something. It reminds me why building things that matter is worth the grind.
Thank you to everyone at Watsi for creating something that gives back to donors just as much as it gives to patients.
> I have been a Universal Fund member since 2014.
I couldn't remember when I joined, but it turns out 2014 too. From that date and dang's comment below, I found the HN submission that motivated me to join:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7550005
Thank you aaur0 - you have no idea how much this means to us. Grateful for ever ounce of good news and good health we can spread in this world.
Thank you for the incredibly inspiring work! At a time when 99% of the founders and VCs just want to bank on the next big hype cycle and accumulate power and wealth, it’s good to be reminded that actual life changing work with direct impact on people is still possible.
I made the biggest donations in my life via Watsi. Thank you for building this site. I love you guys have an API as well. I thought of building an app on top of your API but never got round to complete it. If you are curious, I can share; I think there may be an opportunity to capture value in free giveaways and turn it into charity. Many people try to give away their things quickly on fb marketplace or letgo, ...what if they could ask for a donation to a charity? I know there are challenges like, what if they want to return. But there has to be a way to solve this with an escrow service or something. A similar model already works in used, 2nd stores that work for charities.
:) Even saving 1 life is worth celebrating.
Much more, 33,241.
Thank YOU Chase :) (I work at Watsi)
If you'd like to see an example of what Watsi's about, check out Emmanuel's profile: https://watsi.org/profile/79acfc50bee4-emmanuel
Also, fun fact: 619 of our current monthly donors first made a donation 10 or more years ago, and I'm pretty sure many of those were/are Hacker News readers. If you're interested, see https://watsi.org/universal-fund
I've long played around with the thought of what would happen if someone started something like the universal-fund you mentioned, but had it snowball like a sovereign fund? (ie, instead of spending the in flow, invest it and only spend the profits from the investments, for example) ...
Particularly for basic needs like housing,food,clothes... Like what if instead of giving a charity $100 we created 41c per month? of UBI (roughly the cashflow from investing that same $100). Yes it would seem too little today, but in time it would be massive because it would never dissipate.
IDK, just my musing while claude takes, err does, my job.
Love the idea and have long wanted something like this to exist. One other twist is you could let ppl vote on where to donate the profits.
Plenty of those have existed, but in the end they always get stolen and given to the dogs trust.
There’s nothing people hate more than lasting charitable foundations. They take them to court so that they can crack them open and wank away the entire fund in 6 months.
There was one which was supposed to pay off the entire national debt. They cracked and spaffed it.
Another was supposed to end piracy. Cracked and spaffed.
You could save a million people a year, but that won’t save you from being cracked and spaffed. They’re already rubbing their trotters at the thought.
I don't comment on Hacker News very much -- in fact, extremely rarely, but I do remember this more than a decade ago and its awesome that you've stuck with this for this long.
Congratulations to you and all the work that you've done and the impact that you've had. That's pretty cool and something I think many of us aspire to. Cheers Chase!
You should be unbelievably proud of what you've achieved, and it's lovely to be reminded of the amazing things people can accomplish amongst the backdrop of almost deafeningly negative sentiment going around.
Thanks for doing what you do and for sharing your story!
Thank you :) Watsi is lucky to have an incredible team and medical partners, who work in some of the most challenging environments to provide care to patients.
Great work. Do you have specific countries you work with? How are health partners selected? Would love to introduce some doctor friends of mine in Southern Africa. Every now and then they have some cases where we end up just pooling as friends and send to them. Again, great work!
You did a great thing! Thank you.
One thing I always thought of converging businesses with helping people in need.
I know a lot of people think about this in a negative way in charity circles but I’d rather like to see companies sponsor donate in return of some sort visibility.
Somehow I always thought that would be a good fit for an organization such as yours. (I did donate through you guys previously, thanks for facilitating that).
Watsi is incredibly inspiring!
I’ve been a monthly donor since ~the beginning when I was just an undergraduate, and I still read the stories and emails I receive. I’m glad that you opted for the steady growth path, and that you’ve made it a sustainable thing.
That's incredible. Monthly donors are Watsi's lifeblood - it is so impactful to be able to bet on receiving a certain amount each month - thank you!
Your support every month in our Universal Fund means the world to us! This consistency and reliability helps us plan ahead, show up faster for patients in need, and grow to reach new hospitals and communities.
Great work Chase! I remember meeting you back in the shared office with Teespring. You are right, we are not our startups, but there is a lot to be proud of, an impact is always the goal, for profit or non. Onward!
The old Teespring office, those were the days!
Never heard of Watsi, but I just donated!!!
Grateful for your work, and sticking it out serving human beings while others hustle to secure the bag. There's nothing wrong with securing the bag, of course, but it just makes work like this even more impressive to me. Kudos!
That's incredible. Why even compare your startup to for-profits, while you actually make world a better place?
You’re sentiment is correct, but I also think that most Certified B Corporations arguably make the world a better place.
Why would for profits not make the world a better place?
For-profit does not mean “shareholders and ROI over user” or something. You can do for-profit and not enshtfy and make the world better. That’s my goal at least.
If profit is the objective, it will turn into growth-at-all-costs machine because that's how the mathematics works.
If, however, the objective is, say, improve as many lives as possible with the constraint of being profitable, it's definitely possible to do good. You just have to make sure you understand what level of profitability is sufficient, which is rare but doable.
> For-profit does not mean “shareholders and ROI over user” or something.
It’s not definitionally true, but it happens often enough that there’s no denying a clear trend.
I've appreciated following your story. Happy that it's brought more meaning to your life and been a net-positive for the planet. That says a lot.
Watsi is without a doubt the best thing to come out of YC.
Watsi seems to be doing great work, but the title—"you helped save 33k lives"—reads as misleading to me. I guess "helped" could be doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but I would be incredibly surprised if the counterfactual number of lives saved was more than 3000. (But don't let this dissuade you from donating; concretely improving someone's life is totally a worthwhile goal, and Watsi seems very good at effecting this)
"Counterfactual number of lives saved" is not the normal sense of the phrase "save a life". By that logic, each person's life can only be saved once, which is not how people normally use the phrase.
Your definition may be useful for cold hard utilitarian calculus, of the sort that hospital directors need to do if they've run out of fundraising opportunities. However, "effective altruism" – which I suspect you're alluding to here – isn't actually an efficient way to save lives, the way it's usually practised (ignoring second-order effects, and everything that doesn't fit on a spreadsheet).
You're right; I should've been more precise. However, we have tools for dealing with this—that's what quality-adjusted life-years are for! I don't contest that surgeries often significantly increase QALYs, and may do so pretty cost-effectively.
You must be fun at parties ;-)
Lol, I just care a lot about saving as many lives as I can; the most effective charities I've been able to find good evidence on save one life for $6–8k. If Watsi had a credible claim at being able to save lives 10x cheaper I would redirect my entire donation budget to them!
That said, once again, Watsi is great. I really appreciate all the hard work they've put into making this happen—this is orders of magnitude more impressive and impactful than most projects I've ever seen!
Thank you Chase -- I was an early Watsi supporter (and still am actually) but you just reminded me I need to donate soon haha :) Either way fantastic work and thank you!
Thank you so much!
No problem! I would absolutely help again. This is an important cause that is near to my heart. Speaking for the HN community: we are always happy to help!
Chase- thank you for what you've done in creating Watsi to impact 33,000 lives! It also made me believe in the potential for non profits to create a positive impact again.
I basically only trust GiveWell on global aid, have you been evaluated by them?
We'd love to have GiveWell evaluate Watsi. They often recommend global health interventions because every dollar goes incredibly far in saving lives. In the meantime, here's what a few (independent) experts have said about investing in access to surgery:
• A review across 23 LMICs found that low-complexity surgeries (e.g., appendectomy, hernia repair) cost as little as $17 per Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY) averted (Mengistie et al., 2025). Overall, 89% of surgical procedures studied were cost-effective, and 76% were “very cost-effective” based on GDP thresholds (Ifeanyichi et al., 2024). • Essential surgery often achieves costs per DALY well below standard willingness-to-pay thresholds and can be more valuable than essential drugs or vaccines on a per-DALY basis (Mengistie et al., 2025). Low-complexity surgical interventions compare favorably to—and are sometimes more cost-effective than—interventions such as HIV antiretroviral therapy, family planning, and TB vaccinations (Ifeanyichi et al., 2024).
Incredible, I didn't know about Watsi, but I am glad that I do now. Direct support for something as important as healthcare seems to be one of the best ways to deploy donations to positively impact the world. Thank you for creating this!
This is my fav charity option. It's so hard some times to know where you can do maximum good with your money: Watsi might well be it.
So awesome to hear - thank you! Hoping others will join in on watsi.org to help too. We want giving to be a bigger and more meaningful part of our day to day lives and to do this, it helps to always know and trust the impact you are making.
Nice to hear from Watsi after all this time! Here's the original Show HN Chase linked to:
Show HN - We just built a site that saves lives - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4424081 - Aug 2012 (183 comments)
... followed by the other threads I could find (in forward order for a change):
Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5117385 - Jan 2013 (168 comments)
The Story of Bageshwori, Watsi's First Patient - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5299910 - Feb 2013 (63 comments)
Watsi (YC W13) and the Future of Patronage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5445014 - March 2013 (11 comments)
Catching up with Watsi: Y Combinator’s first non-profit graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508064 - April 2013 (20 comments)
PG chooses healthcare non-profit Watsi as his first board seat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5579353 - April 2013 (31 comments)
Watsi (YC W13) raises $1.2M first-of-its-kind 'philanthropic seed round' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6103506 - July 2013 (94 comments)
Watsi Lands $1.5M Donation From Humble Bundle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6916609 - Dec 2013 (20 comments)
A dose of perspective - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7549245 - April 2014 (38 comments)
Stories from our first two years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8286476 - Sept 2014 (34 comments)
Universal Fund - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8563558 - Nov 2014 (29 comments)
Saying Yes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9428403 - April 2015 (13 comments)
Watsi launches universal health coverage, funded by YC Research - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15165111 - Sept 2017 (281 comments)
How we built Watsi Coverage without stable electricity, WiFi, or email - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16398220 - Feb 2018 (25 comments)