

Watsi Lands $1.5M Donation From Humble Bundle - minimaxir
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/12/16/healthcare-platform-watsi-lands-1-5-million-donation-gaming-startup-humble-bundle/

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msg
Is this just a bottom line of their donations through customer purchases of
Humble Bundles? That is, when people buy Humble Bundle X, they can specify the
money goes to charity, the developers, or Humble. Watsi has been a featured
charity along with the Red Cross and EFF.

Or is this a separate donation from the Humble Bundle leadership or such?

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chaseadam17
We've been a beneficiary of several bundles, and so far Humble Bundle users
have contributed a total of $1.5M to Watsi.

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ultimoo
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.

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lukethomas
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.

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xhrpost
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.

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lukethomas
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)

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xhrpost
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.

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nowarninglabel
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.

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mmastrac
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.

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sakai
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.

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zachlatta
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!

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spIrr
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?

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eterm
This is funding for the business side of Watsi, so that donations made for
treatments can go 100% to the treatments.

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gracegarey
No, this is actually 100% for treatments, not our operations.

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eterm
Sorry, I guess I read too much into "donation towards its business" in the
first line of the article.

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mcintyre1994
Awesome! From the article, Watsi have raised a total of $2.2 million including
this, so this is huge.

