Grace Garey Speaks at Female Founders Conference 2015

Hey guys, thanks so much for having me. Like Kat said, I am with Watsi. Watsi is the first global crowdfunding platform for healthcare. So, the easiest way to explain it is you can go on our website and see photos and read stories of patients from all around the world who need life-changing healthcare but can’t afford to pay for it.

The first time that I heard stories about people in need, I was in elementary school. My dad used to take me and my little sister to his favorite café every morning, and we’d read a newspaper from front to back. That’s me and my little sister; I’m the one with a ginormous gap in between my two front teeth. I’ll spare you this picture for much longer!

So, we’d read every single part of the newspaper, from the movie section to the advice columns to the world news section. There was definitely stuff in the world news section that, if I were a parent today, I would probably shield my four and seven-year-old kids from. But my dad was a Berkeley 60s activist, and he thought it was really important that we understood that we were a small part of a large world. There were people out there who were really struggling: that there were people who didn’t have enough to eat, that there were people who couldn’t afford healthcare when they needed it, and that there were people who didn’t have a safe place to sleep at night.

I remember hearing these stories and being curious about these people’s lives. I wondered about the details of them as individuals. But most of all, I wanted to know if I could help. I think that’s a pretty normal human impulse—to want to help someone. But as I grew older and the newspapers that I read with my dad turned into the online news sites that I read every single day, I kept hearing stories about people in need, but it never became any clearer to me what I was supposed to do to help.

So, the first chance that I got, I took some time off of college and I went to Washington, D.C., which is like the center of the international world in the U.S. I got a job at one of the largest humanitarian nonprofits in the world, and when I got there, I remember I’ve never been so impressed with the people that I met. The people I was working with spoke multiple languages; they had lived all over the world; they had really devoted their lives to helping people who needed it. I just remember thinking that if anyone was gonna be able to make a positive impact on the world, it was definitely going to be these people.

Five days after I got to DC, the earthquake hit Haiti. I remember thinking that I was just going to come into the office the next day and it was going to be completely empty. I thought that all of these amazing people with all of their brilliant skills and talents were going to get on planes and go to Haiti and help the people who needed help because that’s what the organization they worked for existed to do. But instead, they stayed in DC and started fundraising.

So, I came to the office, and it was packed. There were people working in conference rooms. I was like a lowly intern, so they just shoved me off my desk and someone else was working there. People were taking every single meeting they possibly could with donors because they knew that when a disaster happens, people donate. What happens naturally in that kind of situation is that nonprofits end up spending all of their time serving the needs and interests of the donors who give them money instead of serving the interests of the people that they exist to help.

One of the reasons that this happens is that most major donors to nonprofits, especially the ones that my organization was talking to, had really specific interests of their own. When they gave the nonprofit money, they tied some restrictions to it that were in line with their own interests. So, this is sort of like imagining you’re going out and fundraising as a startup, and you talk to an investor. The investor is really interested in giving you some money, but when you talk about it a little more, maybe the investor tells you that she only wants to fund your startup if you’ll use her money exclusively to translate your site and to finish because she’s interested in Finnish, and maybe that’s her native language.

As you can imagine, it would just be really hard to pay attention to your customers all the time if you were completely preoccupied thinking about the needs of the people who were giving you money. Unfortunately, that’s what ended up happening in Haiti. Even after they got the money that they’d been chasing, their programs in Haiti were just crippled by being so beholden to the interests of the donors who’d funded the efforts. At the end of the day, of all of the money that was raised in response to the earthquake in Haiti, a lot of people report that up to 94% of it never even made it to the people it was supposed to help.

So, I remember seeing all of this and just feeling completely deflated. Like, I thought I had finally made it to the place where people had all these skills. They were like these superheroes; they were the most badass ladies I’ve ever seen, and even they couldn’t make the impact that they wanted to make. That felt really bad to me, but I still wanted to find a way to help.

So a little while later, I got on a plane and went to go work at a small nonprofit hospital in India. This was a hospital I was actually living at too. I lived in the little corner right outside of the picture, right next to the room where women would deliver babies in the middle of the night. They’d come rolling by in the hallway, and I’d wake up at 2 a.m. It was a pretty interesting experience, but it was an amazing place, and it was the complete opposite of the organization that I had worked at in DC. It was much smaller; it wasn’t a ginormous international nonprofit with thousands of donors, each with their own unique interests. It was small; it was still self-funded by the two Indian doctors who had started the organization, and what that enabled them to do was focus exclusively on the people that they existed to help, and that was just magical.

The other cool thing was that because they were so physically close to the people that they were helping, they got to know them really well. They talked to them every day, heard about what their needs were, and just got to know them as human beings. When I was there, I got to know them too. These ladies were some people I spent a lot of time with in India. They were patients of the hospital, but they also led this group of female entrepreneurs in the community, and they took out loans together to start their own businesses. They were just really awesome, and they each had their own unique story. They each had their own unique ideas about the world. They could talk about what they saw their own problems being and what they wanted the solutions to be.

I remember once this group of ladies came to the two doctors who ran the hospital, and they said, “We have this idea. We’ve been taking out loans together to grow our businesses. We want to see if we can pool our money and save together for healthcare in case one of us gets sick so we can afford to pay the bill.” The hospital was just able to do it. They knew these people; they had a good idea; they had a relationship, and they were like, “Sure, why not?” And it happened. It was a great thing for the community. But the crazy thing is that never ever would have been possible if the nonprofit had been thousands of miles away from the people that they were supposed to be helping and wading through all of this bureaucratic mess that the donors with all of these restrictions on their funds had left behind.

So, I remember being in India and feeling really inspired by that. I looked at the real impact that a nonprofit was able to have on real people that were right in front of me, and I finally felt like I’d been able to help. But the problem was this was a tiny nonprofit; they served maybe a couple of thousand people a year, and there were still billions more who needed their help. I remember thinking it would be great if there was a way to scale these kinds of individual connections that they had made at this hospital between the people providing the service and the people accessing the service. I thought if there was a way we could do that, the world might look a lot different, and I think it would look a lot better.

So I came back to San Francisco, and the first thing I noticed when I got back to San Francisco was just pink mustaches everywhere. I had no idea what was going on, but technology had just exploded, and it was connecting people in ways that I had never imagined were possible. It was connecting passengers with drivers; it was connecting people with spare rooms with people who needed a place to stay. It was connecting all of my friends with their next date with like the swipe of their thumb on their iPhone.

And it wasn’t just in San Francisco that this was happening. I remember seeing this picture of a group of Pakistani schoolboys holding a candlelight vigil for the victims of a school shooting in Connecticut, and I just remember thinking and having the realization that we are quickly on our way to a world where every single person on the planet is connected. And if that’s true, it’s crazy to me that despite the fact that we are at a place where we’ve never been more connected, we still tackle the world’s biggest problems by anonymously sending help to amorphous groups of people.

So around this time, I heard about a guy who had an idea for a website that would connect people to fund healthcare. His name was Chase; he’d just gotten back from the Peace Corps in Costa Rica, and he’d had an experience from the Peace Corps that really moved him. He’d been traveling on a bus, and a woman got on the bus and started asking all of the passengers for donations to pay for her son’s healthcare. And he just sort of had an epiphany and thought, “We can connect people on Kickstarter to fund creative projects; we can connect people on DonorsChoose to fund education projects; we can connect people on Kiva to fund microloans around the world. Why is there no way to connect people like this woman and her son with a global community of supporters?”

And so, he decided to start Watsi and named it after the town he was traveling through at the time. It took me about five seconds after I heard that idea to decide that I wanted in and I wanted to be a part of building this. There was something about it that just made me think that this could be a way to scale individual connections between human beings for a real purpose in the world.

So I did some LinkedIn stalking, found Chase, and I wrote him a really, really embarrassing, honest email about who I was and why I wanted to get involved. Now that this is projected so big up here, I’m like even more embarrassed because you can’t read it but anyway, he responded for some reason, and we started working on Watsi as volunteers on the side. We would keep in touch through these weekly Tuesday night Google Hangouts. No matter what else was going on in our lives, no matter where we were, we would get on this Hangout and talk about Watsi. On this particular Hangout, we were connected across six continents in eight time zones.

So, like, really, no matter what we were doing, we were there. I think the reason that we would all come every single Tuesday night to talk about Watsi was that we were all sort of united in this idea that we could see a future that looked really different than the world we were living in now—a future where all of these connections were being used for some kind of meaningful purpose.

So we had Jessie building the website for free; Marc and Howard, who were Chase’s friends from the Peace Corps, working on operations and finance; Sally was a medical student at the time who was sort of shaping our global health vision, and we just assembled this ragtag team because we were in love with this idea and it was fun.

So we made some decisions in those early days that really shaped Watsi forever. The first one was that 100% of every donation would always fund healthcare and we would never take a cut. The second one was that we wanted to be the most transparent organization or company in the world. We wanted to publish every single operational, financial transaction; everything we did online for everyone to see. And third, we decided that no matter who we were dealing with, whether it was a donor, a patient, or a doctor, we would always treat people the way that we wanted to be treated, because we’d seen what happened when people’s voices were just left out of a decision that involved them.

So after about a year and a half of working on Watsi on the side, on August 23rd, 2010, we were finally ready to launch. This had been a long time coming; we’d been working on this like perfect launch email for weeks; we knew what we were gonna put on social media; it was like we’d built it and everyone was gonna come and it was gonna be amazing.

So we sent out the email and we sat there, sort of waiting. We were like refreshing to see donations come in, and eventually, a donation pops up and it’s Chase’s mom! So we waited a little longer. Another donation pops up, and it’s my mom! Thanks, mom! And then that was sort of it.

So then Chase decided to post a link to Watsi on a website called Hacker News. I had never heard of Hacker News at the time, but it sent 20,000 people straight to our website and crashed it. When it came back up again, they funded healthcare for every single patient that we had posted. I think our original goal when we launched Watsi was to fund healthcare for ten patients in our first six months. If we did that, we would be a success. And we funded healthcare for ten patients in our first couple of hours! So it was really an amazing day.

In the weeks that followed, Watsi just took off like a runaway train. TechCrunch picked it up; Huffington Post picked it up; NBC picked it up; Fast Company picked it up, and with every new piece of press, we would just run out of patience on the website. Donors were funding them faster than we could post them. At the time, I had just moved to New York; I had just gotten my first big kid real job. I was sitting in an office at a desk, like next to one of my bosses, with the other one right behind me. They were both like Hawkeye on me all the time. I was trying to be really impressive and like a good new employee. Meanwhile, Watsi was just like running out of patients every half an hour, and I could tell because my phone kept buzzing with emails that people were sending me that we got to get more patients on the site.

And the worst part was our process for posting new patients in those days was just absolutely insane. A medical partner would submit a new profile to Marc; Marc would forward the profile to Sally, who was literally treating gunshot victims at UCSF during her residency program, and she would like approve the profile from her phone, send it to me. I would hear my phone vibrate at my day job, and I would run to the bathroom, find an empty stall, sit down, and like type the patient profile on my iPhone and then send it to Chase, who would send it to Jessie, so that Jessie could hard-code the patient profile into our website. It was just ridiculous! I think I spent the first eight weeks of that job in the bathroom.

So this went on for a little while, and it was just exhausting. I thought I was gonna lose my job; like we needed people to be working on Watsi full-time. So Chase sort of went out to try and fundraise, but a big problem that’s shared between nonprofits and for-profits is that nobody really wants to be the first one to give you money. Nobody knows how this is gonna go yet; like that’s a pretty risky thing to do, so everybody kept saying no.

By November, we’d been doing this just sort of flying by the seat of our pants holding on for dear life to Watsi for a couple of months, and we were really, really desperate. So, we decided to enter into an online voting competition with a $10,000 prize. Now, $10,000 to us at the time seemed like a lot of money; we were pretty sure that we could float Watsi on $10,000 for like a year, easy. So we were really excited about this, and we took like a week and just spammed all of our friends and family. We made everybody vote. My sister got all of her social justice college friends to spend like eight hours on one Saturday afternoon just posting the link to Watsi on all of these different campus Facebook groups so then everyone would get all excited and vote for us. It was crazy!

Despite all of that work, in the last hour of the competition, we were neck and neck with another nonprofit. I was at a bar in New York with some of my friends, and I was just seeing this $10,000 slip away. I was watching the votes come in on my phone, and I was like, man, this is a bummer. I’m gonna be in the bathroom of my job for another six months, and it’s not gonna be fun. So I decided to go up to this bouncer at the bar, and I asked him if he would consider making everybody vote for Watsi on their phones before they came into the bar, and he said yes! He did it, and people started voting and the little tally started going up, and after like 45 minutes, we won by 1%. So we won the $10,000! It was great; the bartender rang the bell; everybody celebrated. It was a fun night.

So about two weeks after that, we got an email from Paul Graham. He’d seen a post about us on Hacker News, and the email had two sentences. It read, “Are you in the Bay Area? If so, I’d like to meet.” He ended up inviting us to be the first nonprofit to join Y Combinator, and that was a really interesting moment for me because three months before, I had never heard of Hacker News; I had never heard of Paul Graham; I had no idea what Y Combinator was. But in that moment, Y Combinator became something really important to me. It became a door to making Watsi a real thing, and so despite the fact that I didn’t know what it was a couple months before, I dropped everything and I left New York and I came to California to do Y Combinator with Watsi.

So Chase, Jessie, and I moved into a little apartment in Mountain View. This is the photo of us; we were really excited! It was my first time ever having like a big monitor; that was cool! So we moved into this apartment, and we just started working on Watsi nonstop. We were getting up at 6 a.m. to have calls with medical partners in Kenya; we were going to bed at 3 a.m. after planning our latest marketing email, and Y Combinator was a really amazing experience for a lot of reasons. I won’t go into all of them now; I’m sure you guys have heard it from a lot of other speakers today.

But I think the thing that blew me away the most about Y Combinator was that nobody was there to do anything small. Everyone there was making a big bet on the future, and it was really refreshing for us because after a year of telling people about Watsi and getting basically like a pat on the back—like, “Good job! That’s a nice idea. Very sweet nonprofit, kids. Like, it’s not gonna happen.” When we told people at Y Combinator about what we wanted to do, they just assumed it was gonna work. They just defaulted to thinking that if you have a good idea and you work hard enough, you’ll succeed.

Being around people like that was so energizing. I think if there’s one piece of advice I can give, it’s surround yourself with people who just light up when they talk about what they do every day because it’ll push you in that direction too. I’ll never forget, we once went to Jeff Ralston, one of the Y Combinator partners, super stressed out. We had like this list 50 items longer than anything we could ever accomplish. We were just like swimming with priorities, and we had no idea where to focus. We didn’t know how we were ever gonna get all this done. Jeff just looked at us and said, “Just work harder.” So we did, and we haven’t stopped working hard since.

It hasn’t been easy by any means, but we’ve hired an amazing team, and since we launched about two and a half years ago, over 10,000 donors have funded healthcare for 4,000 patients in 20 countries. We’ve raised over $3.5 million, 100% of which has gone directly to the people that it’s supposed to help. Even more exciting for me, people really like this, and when they do it once, they want to do it over and over again, which is incredible to me.

A couple of months ago, in November, we launched our monthly donation product, the Universal Fund, and just since then, we now have almost a thousand people signed up to support a new Watsi patient every single month. I can promise you those are my favorite people in the world. If any of you are here, please let me buy you a beer—that’s amazing! But what’s more important to me than the numbers is the fact that we’ve figured out how to connect people with a purpose.

We’ve figured out how to provide solutions that are driven by the people who need them, and often those are the same people that were left out of the traditional nonprofit fundraising model. I remember once talking to the head doctor at our medical partner in Guatemala before we had ever launched Watsi. I was talking to him about which kinds of patients he’d want to submit to Watsi once we launched, and he didn’t even hesitate for a second. He said that he had been taking funding from these same institutional donors for years, and because he was so beholden to their interests, he could only provide healthcare to patients who had a condition that they were interested in funding, like a cleft lip.

So, despite the fact that he had a waiting room full of patients with conditions that were just as serious, he couldn’t treat them because his donors had restricted his funding so much. He told me about three siblings from the same family who had all been diagnosed with the same life-threatening heart defect. He had known about them for months; he could treat them each for $670, but he still didn’t have the resources to help them because of the way that these narrow channels of funding and support were set up. These are the three patients that he was talking about: their names are Ma de, Maria, and Dooley. They were some of the first patients ever funded and posted on Watsi. They’ve all now received the surgery that they needed for $670 each. They’re living normal lives. One of them—well, all three of them are probably gonna go off and change the world someday!

Another thing that we’ve managed to do, another thing that I’m really proud of, is that we’ve managed to tell real human stories about people. When you donate on Watsi, it’s not an anonymous transaction between strangers. You get to see where your money goes, and you get to meet the person on the other end.

There are people like Gattu. Gattu is a 27-year-old guy from Kenya who a couple months ago was the victim of a car robbery. The other passenger in the car was shot and killed. Gattu was shot in both knees and left on the side of the road. A group of strangers found him there, and they stopped everything that they were doing and raised enough money amongst themselves to pay for transportation to a local Watsi partner hospital, where a doctor submitted him to Watsi for funding.

We posted him, and within 24 hours, 13 donors from around the world had fully funded the $535 surgery that he needed to walk again. Sometimes this completely blows me away—that so many people from so many walks of life could come together and completely change the trajectory of Gattu’s life. But in some ways, it feels like what we should have been doing the whole time.

Every time somebody donates to a patient on Watsi, they pull us a little bit closer to a future where that’s just the kind of life we live—where when kids are reading the newspaper with their parents and they feel an impulse to help, they know that they live in a world where that impulse can actually turn into something meaningful.

So if there’s one piece of advice that I can give you today, it’s to find something to work on that’s meaningful to you. You don’t have to save the world or like win a Nobel Peace Prize or anything like that; you just have to find something to do that will make you light up in the morning when you go to work. The world does not need more people with solutions in search of problems; the world needs more people who have found a problem that they are excited to spend the rest of their life solving. And I have found mine, and I can’t wait to hear about you guys’—I hope to talk to you after this!