Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit

This is really cool, but I'm curious how an investment in this is different than a charitable contribution. The contribution is awesome for the network it introduces Watsi to, but I can't imagine there will ever be a return on this kind of investment.

(This is not meant to sound negative. I am truly excited to see it, interested to see what the YC network can bring to it, and very curious about the investment thinking behind it.)

pg,

I wrote this minutes ago in a thread about the 3rd world. If you ever come across a startup that solves this please fund them:

"The biggest problems right now involve education and health. Example: 60-80% health problems follow the same pattern: you see a doctor, he asks for blood/urine tests, you get the results, go back to the doctor for a prescription. Build something that the poor can explain their symptoms and do those tests without going physically to a doctor and become a semi-god here. That would involve a website (or phone call) and portable blood testers. (Specially for things like malaria, E. coli, colera, dengue fever, typhoid fever, etc)"

If it takes off and is successful on a massive scale, I'm sure they will find a method to monetize it other than transaction fees on donations. One example that I can think of off the top of my head is to charge medical device manufacturers or pharmaceutical companies a fee to market their products the recently funded with direct messages or traditional advertising.

We (masporloschicos.com) have been doing roughly the same since 2005. (instead of health we focus on malnutrition)

Note- site is in spanish - targeted to the Argentine audience

We are a bit less granular though - instead of matching against an individual, we match a specific soup kitchen. But we keep donors updated with newsletters, pictures, letters from the kids and so on.

edit: this level of udpates keeps donors engaged. we dont allow one time donations - instead we require you to subscribe.

When we built masporloschicos.com I wanted to do it more granular (individual level), but we ended up doing it a bit more aggregate because it was really hard / expensive to get to that granular level.

I wonder how is watsi tackling this problem - because ultimately you don't want to spend a lot of funds (regardless of where they come from) on the administration/bureaucracy required to provide quality 1:1 matching.

So I just wonder how are they doing it?