Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit • Hacker News Board

Re: Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit

#171

Post by dbaupp » Sun, Jan 27, 2013, 8:02 AM UTC

dmoney wrote: post #165

dbaupp wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although it is a good sign, it's not that cool. The operating overhead of a charity should be largely irrelevant to working out if it is a good charity. For example, given charities X and Y both distributing anti-malaria pills (or something). X and Y are identical except X has operating overheads of 80%, and distributes 50 pills per dollar donated and Y has no operating overhead, but only manage 20 pills per dollar d…

Why can Y distribute fewer pills if they have no overhead?

Don't know, this is purely a thought experiment and, in fact, it doesn't matter: for whatever reason, Y distributes few pills.

Re: Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit

#172

Post by nowarninglabel » Sun, Jan 27, 2013, 11:19 AM UTC

andrewem wrote: post #156

nowarninglabel wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh what a coincide! I work on the software, Viva, that the volunteer translators use at Kiva :)

Nice! Have you considered open sourcing Viva? I bet it would be useful to other nonprofits.

Well, it's funny, Viva is predominantly built on Drupal (which is open-source), though running D5. Then there is a heavy amount of customization on top of it, including hacking core. I inherited it 2 years ago when I came to work for Kiva and had to do a lot to get it to just stop breaking all the time. That said, actually two non-profits have asked to use it or have a similar functionality built for them, and I'm interested in doing something like that, but we'd have to de-couple all the Kiva specific stuff.

Re: Meet Watsi, Y Combinator's First Nonprofit

#173

Post by rdl » Tue, Jan 29, 2013, 4:33 AM UTC

robg wrote: post #145

pg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a donation.

Have you considered ycombinator.org? Call it a program-related investment and mirror the .com?

One of the things I respect most about pmarca and a16z is that they donate the difference between real income tax rates and the bogus carry-as-capital-gains rates to charity (individually or as a firm, I forget).

I wish all VCs would do this, because carry-as-capital-gains is an incredible abuse of the system. I'm fine with founders getting this, and with LPs who invest cash, but VCs do not deserve preferential rates over other workers when they do not themselves take financial risk.