At Y Combinator, I was inspired by the ambitious mindset of other founders, which contrasted sharply with the skepticism we faced before. It motivated me to fully commit to making Watsi a reality.

After launching Watsi, we experienced a surge of interest, with major media outlets like TechCrunch, Huffington Post, and NBC covering us, leading to a rapid increase in donations that outpaced our ability to post new patients.

I realized that while non-profits are crucial for addressing certain problems, the most pressing issues in the world were being solved too slowly, which led me to start Watsi.

During the early days of Watsi, I was juggling a full-time job while trying to manage the influx of donations and patient profiles, which often required me to sneak away to the bathroom to update our website.

Launching Watsi on August 23, 2012, was initially underwhelming, but after posting on Hacker News, we quickly gained traction and funded all our medical treatments in our pipeline within hours.

I faced significant challenges in fundraising, as I had no connections in Silicon Valley and struggled to secure initial funding for Watsi. No one wants to be the first person to take a gamble and support you.

Chase, who had an idea for a website to connect people to fund healthcare, inspired me to join him in building Watsi, aiming to scale individual connections for a real purpose.

Two weeks after winning the competition, we received an email from Paul Graham inviting us to be the first nonprofit to join Y Combinator, which became a pivotal moment for Watsi's development.

The turning point for starting Watsi came when I witnessed a woman on a bus asking for donations for her son's medical treatment, and I thought, "Why isn't there a website to fund medical care for individuals?"