A letter from Danny

So here’s the commitment we’re making, and why we’re calling it Optovo For Tomorrow: 5% of every dollar of profit Optovo makes goes to City of Smile — a foundation that treats kids with cancer in Armenia — for good. Not a one-time campaign. For as long as this company exists.

I want to tell you why this one matters so much to me.

I’m Armenian, and I’m in Armenia right now — I’m writing this from here. I came to see my family and my homeland. While I was here, I went into a hematology and oncology hospital with my older brother — he’s the Co-Executive Director of an organization called Kids Cancer Connection — to bring posters to the kids there who are fighting cancer. I thought I understood what that meant. Standing there, I realized I didn’t.

Here’s the part that got me: a lot of these kids actually make it. Thirty years ago, a child with the most common kind of childhood leukemia in Armenia had almost no chance — at one point only 3 out of more than 400 survived. Today, more than 70% of them do. The doctors there pulled that off with almost nothing. It’s honestly incredible.

But it’s holding on by a thread.

In a lot of the world, whether a kid survives cancer mostly comes down to where they were born. In rich countries, more than 8 out of 10 make it. In poorer ones, it’s often fewer than 3 out of 10. And usually it’s not the doctors — it’s whether anyone can pay for the treatment.

In Armenia, paying is rough. There’s one hospital in the entire country — a country of 3 million people — that treats kids with cancer. Families pay about 84% of their medical costs out of their own pocket, the highest rate anywhere in the world. For a lot of them, a cancer diagnosis doesn’t just threaten their child. It can wipe out everything they own.

And it gets more real than money. A lot of the medicine these kids need isn’t even available in the country. Out of 30 essential childhood-cancer drugs, only 22 are officially registered there — and some of those still aren’t on the shelves. When a drug isn’t registered, you basically can’t get it, at any price. Even basic pain relief runs out. At one point the hospital had no IV morphine, and the kind you take by mouth wasn’t available in the country at all.

And if the money runs short, even for a little while? In cancer treatment, missing just four weeks has a name. Doctors call it “treatment abandonment,” and it’s one of the biggest reasons kids in poorer countries die from cancers that should’ve been curable. In one study, 95% of the kids who finished treatment survived. For the ones whose treatment got interrupted, it dropped to 77%. A few weeks without funding isn’t a delay. It’s the difference between a kid making it or not.

This is what City of Smile quietly carries. Every month they fully cover treatment for 80 to 100 kids — and not just the chemo. The scans, the blood work, the anesthesia so a child isn’t in pain, even the food, because the hospitals don’t feed them. They never ask whether a family can pay. And they keep less than 10 cents of every dollar for themselves.

That’s the whole reason those survival numbers exist. It’s also why it’s so fragile. They run entirely on donations. They’re always one bad year away from having to look a parent in the eye and say, “we can’t cover all of it anymore.”

Standing in that hospital, looking at those kids — not as a number on a page, but as actual children, with names and favorite colors and things they want to be when they grow up — something shifted in me. I didn’t want to just feel bad and go home. Right there, in that moment, I decided we were doing this.

And honestly, it’s personal for me in another way too.

When I was little, I was sick too. I was born with something called Hirschsprung’s disease, and I spent a big part of my early childhood in and out of hospitals. I got better — and a huge reason is that I was born in America, and I had a family who was there for me through all of it. These kids are fighting harder than I ever had to, with way less, in a place that can’t always even get them their medicine.

I got lucky. The only real difference between me and them is where I happened to be born. I can’t change that. But I can do something with it.

And this isn’t some new thing for us. Even before Optovo, me and my co-founder Ryan were always the type to give. If we saw someone homeless, we’d stop and get them food and water. If we saw an old man pulling cans out of a trash can, we’d hand him whatever we had on us. We just always wanted to help where we could. The only thing that’s changed is that the business finally lets us do it on a bigger scale.

So we built it into the company itself. We’re just getting started — building Optovo from the ground up — and we can’t write some huge check ourselves. But we can decide what our company is for. That’s where the 5% comes from: 5% of every dollar of profit we make goes to City of Smile, for good. And we took it a step further — we built a toolkit where 100% of what people pay for it goes straight to them too. It’s not a one-time thing, and it doesn’t switch off when business is slow. It’s the whole point.

If you want to help

Here’s how — and anything helps, we mean that:

Right now there’s a two-year-old over there who dreams about a yellow motorcycle, and a ten-year-old who wants a telescope so he can look at space. They’re in treatment. They’re fighting. And a lot of them are winning — because someone, somewhere, decided to help pay for it.

We’d really love for that someone to be us. And maybe you.

Thank you for reading all of this. It honestly means a lot to us.