If you want to make a tax deductible donation and provide improved lighting please visit WWW.DLIGHTDESIGN.ORG. 

We will be improving the website over the next week to make the donation process easier but I wanted to blog about d.light.ORG because many of our families and friends want to donate during the holidays.  In fact, on Friday, the donations from a generous foundation will provide several hundred Dalit families in Karataka with improved lighting!  I am looking forward to visiting those families in 2008 to witness the impact lights are having on their lives.

Dlightdesign.org came about after I visited REDS twice during my trips to India.  I wrote about one trip to the Dalit community in an earlier blog.  I visited families their who are living by the light of little whisky bottles they fill with kerosene, and I heard stories about how they would wake up in the morning and wipe black soot off their faces where the carbon would settle from the lanterns they left burning dimly at night.  Their children can't study at night easily, and the kerosene costs a significant fraction of their total income, especially for the families who were living under plastic tarps or grass huts.  We at d.light were determined to help REDS deliver improved lighting to the most needy families they worked with.

Meanwhile, I was familiar with One World's Children Fund (OWCF) and the terrific work they have done championing projects overseas and allowing US donors to provide tax deductible assitance to international projects.  It has truly been a pleasure to work with the inspirational founders and staff at both REDS and OWCF.  

Meanwhile, we are very proud to provide solar lighting to these families in Karnataka.  Erica is just back from 20 days visiting families in UP who were using our lights.  She observed first hand that their children are studying on average 1.5 hours per night with our lights, a huge improvement, and both farmers and tailors told her they are saving up to 25Rs a week (over 50cents/week) using the lights to water their fields, tend to buffalos and other animals, and sow crops.  Finally, women are using the lights both to prepare meals in the morning and at nighttime, and the family usually eats and socializes by the d.light.  All the families she met wanted to buy a 2nd light which is great!

Something that's less important to the families, but very important to d.light and many donors, is that each solar lantern not only provides a huge increase in standard of living, but also dramatically reduces carbon emissions which would otherwise be emitted by the dim but polluting kerosene lanterns.  Therefore, donating solar lanterns also plays a needed role in reducing global warming.

Please do spread the word and donate a light for a family by visiting www.dlightdesign.org! 

I’m wrapping up my first trip to China and I absolutely love it (and yes Chinese food in China is 10 million times better than in the US).  Any social entrepreneur designing and selling consumer goods MUST spend time in China.  On this trip, I realized the enormous value of the relationships we have built here over the last 8 months, and I have to thank Xian, one of d.light’s founders, because without him to communicate in mandarin we would be cooked.  For example, yesterday I was brought cold tea with dinner.  I tried to communicate that I wanted hot tea for 5 minutes with every possible charades trick, and eventually they understood and nodded, and then brought me a glass of crushed ice intended to make my tea colder.  Now try to manufacture a product!  Thanks Xian.

Nevertheless, this translation gap isn’t stopping business.  Somebody told me earlier this year that the GDP of Shenzhen, which manufactures about 70% (?) of the world’s electronics, is greater than India’s.  Indeed, I was fully expecting to see really big factories.  However, nothing would have prepared me for the reality.  Over the last week, I have literally driven for 1 hour on the highway in every direction from my hotel and both sides of the road were lined 6 stories high with factories.  The factories stretch as far as I could see through the dense pollution (I haven’t stopped coughing since I got here either).  China is not messing around with factories.  When I visited suppliers, each building actually houses multiple factories.   One factory only owned two of the six floors, and when I asked how many items they were making, they said 800,000 per day.  Holy smokes!  Then they said they were just a small operation and there were 100 bigger competitors and besides they could barely compete with all the families who just scrunch together an easily available machine and start making LEDs in their houses.  This place is mind blowing.

On the personal side, I am realizing more and more that entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart.  I love it – BUT - my life is a total mess.  I am transitioning to India in early January, and 2 days before this China trip I had to pack up all my belongings which were scattered in 3 storage areas.  Meanwhile, I can’t rent a place easily on a month-2-month basis and I am living off the wonderfully kind generosity of friends like Janet and Wylie and others who have been so supportive of d.light (this really is the best part of starting a social enterprise – people rally around to make the impossible possible).  The process of moving is killer, but the end result feels great because I can now pack all my worldly possessions into a Subaru outback!  I’m almost footloose and fancy free!  The much harder part is separating myself from people I love in pursuit of a social career.  Having been a foreign service child, it’s one thing to move around with my family.  It’s quite another to say goodbye to my friends, family, girlfriend etc not knowing really when I will next spend good quality time together.  When people ask how long I’m going to India for I say, ‘3 months, 6mo, 9mo, 5 years!, who knows.”  Meanwhile, the thought of moving back to India, this time without any logistical or support services from USAID or any corporate entity is intimidating and exhilarating.  As one of my mentors said, ‘India is NOT an easy place to live,’ and I don’t particularly want to spend my time in the ex-patriot scenes.  Instead, I want to dive into the world of rural Indian retail, distribution, shipping, and get my hands dirty.  I guess that will mean I’ll have to start learning Hindi as well and re-develop an iron stomach and some serious negotiation skills.  I am up for the challenge.

Last week I received a report from a friend in India, who was looking at the impacts of a two year old solar LED project in Rajasthan.  An exerpt is below:

"3.2 (a) Education
By and the large, the most significant improvement experienced from the solar lighting systems has been the enhancement of educational opportunities for children. All households with school-going children cite a strong increase both in the amount of time
children study each night, and in the children’s educational achievement. Children now study for an average of 1.5 hours each night, from essentially having not studied at home at

As stated by Mr. Sharma, the village schoolteacher, quantifying the increase in educational achievement is impossible, as it is so dramatic that his curriculum has become significantly more advanced as a result. Currently, scores of 60 percent on exams earn a
passing grade. According to Mr. Sharma, if he had administered these same exams previously, not a single student would have passed. At that time, he says, few students would retain much knowledge from one day to the next. He now estimates that on a daily basis, students retain an average of 70% of what was taught the day before, because of the present ability to do homework exercises in the evening."


Meanwhile, we are also starting to see some of the income generating benefits we expressed to investors several months ago.  The recent stories from our customers in India are about tailors using our lights to work at night.  They can't do the work by kerosene because they can't see with enough detail, and they can't afford to run the big hurricane lamps, however ours work perfectly.  Everybody is anxious to see the units hit the store shelves!

And the real music to my ears is that all the neighbors of the original adopters are starting to inquire where they can get them.

I've been on a whirlwind trip to India the last two weeks, including overnight visits to villages in Karnataka and UP. hence my tardy blog this week.  I am spending my time hiring our sales and marketing staff and loving that we have different products in the field. 

My biggest headache at the moment is high import duties.  Despite our focus on rural customers and providing access to improved lighting, the duty structure is such that on average we will be levied at between 31-33%.  This is tremendously high considering that the majority of the 'competition' coming in from China has arranged a variety of schemes to avoid duties.  The most prevalent are:
   
-  under invoicing - we have seen boxes with maximum retail price 6Rs (15 cents) on the outside carton, instead of the actual                 250-400Rs.  These lights then get taxed on this much lower amount
-  overpacking the cartons = we have seen in the factories where cartons are printed that say 10 items, and where 100 units
            will actually be packed inside.  Duties are levied on the 10 items only.
-  mis-classification under a lower duty category
-  straight bribery (of course all of these schemes require complicity)
-  importing overland across porous borders, especially on the Myanmar and Nepalese borders

Nevertheless, the reality is we at d.light have a zero-tolerance for corruption of any sort.  I am realizing more and more that all the little tricks people play will never pay off in the long run.  I am starting to hear stories of companies that made a killing in the short term, but were later assessed back taxes on items with exhorbitant interest rates and subsequently forced out of business.  Other companies have had all of their inventory seized, as well as distributors inventory.  And the biggest risk is that none of the honest and organized business sector will do business with organizations that aren't transparent.

Interestingly there was an article in an Indian newspaper which asked Delhi-ites why they bought grey and black market goods.  Several people responded that they preferred to buy the goods much less expensively, and with the savings they could send their children to better schools, pay for an inverter or generator, repair their car, etc.  Conversely, they said if they bought expensive goods and the government received the money, then they would only see 10% of that in the form of better schools, electricity, and roads. I'm sure this is true in some cases and less so in others.

Thanks for all your comments!  I have never blogged before and it really helps to know people are reading.  I've connected with quite a few of you which is wonderful.  Please don't hesitate to give me any feedback and suggestions - I love positive and negative input!

A real challenge for me right now is prioritizing my time and transitioning from the purely 'product development' side of the company to the marketing and distribution side.  I am in charge of setting up our sales and marketing offices as well as coordinating new product design.  To do so I need (and WANT) to be oversees full-time, as close to our customers as possible.  It is pretty emotionally draining and stressful preparing to move to another country and set up an office there right when all the pressure of selling our first units and building customer pull is happening.  But this is what I signed up for, love, and it is totally energizing at the same time.

My main concerns at this point are :
    1) how to hire the right people.  The way I see it, the first 2-3 people we hire in each country are absolutely crucial and will really set the stage and tone for success.  I'm looking for YOU, and will find you - that one in a million person who wants to work with me to build a massive business in India and impact millions and millions of peoples lives.

    2)  how to market our products  :  India and Africa are a million times different from US marketing.  I realy need to understand the complexity of Indian marketing and consequently the 'educational system' we will use to inform our customers on the d.light value proposition.  For example, when I was in Hyderabad last I went into a roadside store or kirana and asked if they had any lights.  They whipped out a bunch of grey market chinese emergency lanterns and started regaling me with facts, "long lasting sir", 'higher quality", "the green band on this box signifies better quality battery, feel the weight", and my favorite, "this one is 200% brighter."  I asked for the later and the box said in big bold letters 200% brighter - to which I asked the shop keeper, 'than what."

The point is that the shopkeepers had internalized the packaging and were using it to sell to their customers.  There was no training or advertising and the customers were almost completely dependent on the shopkeepers for input as to which products were better than others.  In many cases, customers just ask for a light, or a candle, or a battery, and the shopkeepers pick the ones they want to sell based on margins and volumes. 

Does this mean that d.light needs to educate shopkeepers about our products more than customers?  Or are we really trying to sell to the early adopters and start the famous Indian word-of-mouth chain going? What do those early adopters care about?

anyway - if anybody has any good books I should read, videos to watch, or people to call to better understand marketing, I am spending a lot of my time on these issues now.  How to stand out as quality and value in a sea of competition?   Thats what I'm learning about everyday.

Somebody told me a few weeks ago that the job of a CEO is to say NO.  Constantly and incessantly say no - so that when the Yes's pop up they signal direction and focus.  I see myself more as a YES person, but this week has torn me.  We have designed super flexible and really killer lighting solutions.  However, their flexibility means we can toggle the features up (increasing cost) or down.  There are some really big decisions I have been making in terms of the quality, features, and cost of the components we source and their impact on the final prices of our initial product line.  This is exaggerated in economies like India's where  a slight rise in manufactured cost is magnified many times as the government taxes you, and then taxes you on the tax, and then taxes that.  I have heard anecdotally about some of the world's largest beverage companies that have been losing money for decades in India, and where the population is so price sensitive that they have lost up to 30-40% of a given customer group with a 2-3cent increase in price.  Ouch.  In that environment, we have to make trade-offs on how long our lights should last, how bright they should be, how durable and how portable, and finally how aesthetic and powerful.  This is what has been tearing me up, especially because i am not living in a village and can't go and test different versions of the product every day to see what our clients would choose.

To give a backdrop - I like to remember how we started d.light design with a simple point of view - we were NOT going to be another bone in the growing grave-yard of primarily foreign led attempts to introduce alternative technologies into emerging economies.  In other words - we were not ,that is, I was not, going to produce another $50 lantern nobody could afford.  Instead, we went to the other extreme and challenged ourselves to produce a $5 lighting solution that almost any family would desire.  Not an easy task.  Now I have had to make decisions on what ultimately I think will be best both for our customers and for the growth of our company.

I'm actually kind of sad that I can't share the details.  This is one of the problems I feel with blogging about a social enterprise on the net.  We are not an NGO and I can't elaborate on our strategic choices until either they are common knowledge, or, we have succeeded and are past the vulnerable start-up stage.

In any case - I've heard it before but I have been emphasizing to myself that perfect is the enemy of the good.  I want to sell product lines made after careful and well informed choices, and then I want to constantly improve them and out-compete companies that can't meet customers needs as quickly.  In the end - I think customers want choice and we can provide them with really great choices - but probably not perfect ones... and there are just too many bad products out there to fill that gaps while we search for the perfect solution!

The other breakthrough this week is that I am so so impressed with our team.  I really have to say that if we want to do the impossible and eradicate kerosene, I think I've teamed up with a group that can.  Erica is heading up a needfinding efforts, making logos, packaging, and figuring out how to build our new products, Xian is scaring me because he's going to be a manufacturing guru before we even move out of our first office, Ned is synthesizing insane amounts of data and running monte carlo simulations (Wow - go business school), and Gabe is working with Brian to build a space station (testing stands:) ) in the back of our office. Go Team!

I am totally re-invigorated.  I need to be around crazy entrepreneurs with wild visions more often.  I am more and more sure that we can bring light to millions.  The wind is at our backs.  We have a ridiculous need and a great product and the right team and supporters to make it happen.  I can’t wait to get selling!

Gray Matters Capital

First I need to introduce Gray Matter's Capital (GMC), our first institutional investor after we won the DFJ Venture Challenge.  GMC works to connect private social investors with social enterprises.  They are all about jump starting social change.   

I attended the GMC retreat last week and here's a  download of the incredible people I met there.

Lumni:  Filipe is a born entrepreneur, and already runs several language centers in the US while he raises money for Lumni.  Lumni is already in 4 countries and invests in students. They find people with high aspirations to attend higher education but who can’t afford it, and then they pay the education, train them in interviewing, confidence building, job skills, etc and take a small percentage of their future income for severals years.  For example, I heard the story of Marco who was packing crates in a store for $150 a month and saved enough to pay for 1 credit of classes each semester.  So, it would have taken him a minimum 7 semesters to graduate.  Felipe gave him a loan for $2500 and Marco graduated and has had 2 promotions and now makes $36,000/yr.  Marco wants to reinvest in the fund now for another student.  I think this is a really awesome idea and if you have a min $5000 you can invest in a life.

Cell-Bazaar:  Founded by Kamal Quadir, the brother of the founder of Grameen phone, they are essentially creating craigslist in Bangladesh over mobile phones.  People sell rice, bananas, used watches, and thousands of other items directly to others in their localities.  Kamal tells a great story the day he learned that his driver was actually making about 50% addition income above his salary by selling used cell phones through cell-bazaar.  When Kamal heard the story he knew that he was on to something big.

Paralife:  Founded by Rolk Hueppi, a charismatic and retired insurance guru with a ton of energy and vision.  He's raised millions and has decided he can provide 70% of the world with life insurance, especially the poorest of the poor who cannot afford to lose an income earner.  Paralife has started by training handicapped people in Mexico (an estimated 10% of the global population are handicapped) who really can’t afford to have people who look after them pass away.  He trains the handicapped to admister life insurance and rides on the infrastructure that larger banks have already developed .

United Villages:  Drive-by wi-fi!  They are setting up kiosk operators in different states in India, and then they install their proprietary wi-fi transmitters on buses and motorycles that ply the roads.  When the bus comes by it uploads and downloads all the information so you have internet even off-line.  Go MIT technology labs.  Villagers can get products, services, and information after buying a prepaid card.

Rentbureau:  The largest monthly expense for many lower income families is their rent.  However, even when they pay it consistently on time it never factors into your credit rating (as opposed to wealthier paying mortgages which do).  Rentbureau has devised an online system to reflect payments and provide apartment owners (now in the UK and US) with data to make better rental decisions, while helping to build credit for honest renters.

I also had dinner with Iqbal Quadir, the founder of Grameen phone, who is starting Emergence BioEnergy to take a sterling engine and create 1kw of energy from biogas, and to role it out to every family in bangladesh in need, starting with those that can use the excess heat produced to dry vegetables.

Finally, GMC is now going to start a fund to finance entrepreneurs all over the world that have started private schools in slums and other areas where public education is insufficent (quantity or quality).  They found schools charging families from $2-4/mo and which needed capital ($5-10K) to build new classrooms, get furniture, etc to grow and provide more kids good quality education.  These private schools are committed, families like them and demand good results, and generally they take kids with not other options, like aids orphans, free.

You've got to love this portfolio!

I have been thinking lately about the few days I spent with Raj and Jyoti in India.  As an entrepreneur, one of the lessons I have been learning more and more is that meetings I think will be extremely important seldom are, and the meetings I can't tell from afar what to make of, often yield fruits of many forms.  Meeting Raj and Jyoti was a rare flower.

Raj and Jyoti are interested in providing hundreds of thousands of lights to families truly living in the dark.  They have been organizing the Dalit (sometimes incorrectly called Untouchable) community in India for many years to provide them a voice in Indian society, with political representation through private elections, and corresponding lobbying to increase the Dalit communities access to land titles, proper representation in the eyes of the police and courts, etc. 

[A brief aside, Gandhi called the Untouchables Harijan's or children of God, which many consider terrible because it came from the use of Harijan girls in the temples by some upper-caste men.  Those girls later gave birth to children without fathers, and because they were birthed at the temples they were the 'children of God.']

I ignorantly thought that I could provide lighting to these families if I could provide appropriate financing.  I was amazed as an outsider to discover it wasn't so easy and that very little progress had been made to erase caste prejudice in the Indian villages I visited.  I learned that caste is sometimes even more strongly (and wickedly) enforced in the Christian and Muslim communities than the Hindu ones.  I witnessed villages where one side of the road was literally all cement houses with electricity and water, and the other side was thatch houses with kerosene lanterns.  The kids from the thatch houses would try to study under a bulb hanging off a power line running directly over their houses, but other caste children would come and throw rocks and smash the light and relegate them back to darkness and kerosene.  The problem wasn't supply of power - power was 10 feet away - the problem was 2000 years of society blocking access to power.  In fact it was legally free to these citizens!

On one of our visits to a community that had recently had some of their houses burned down by a group of upper-caste men, some of the non-Dalit community thought we had come to redistribute land to compensate the families.  They started shouting and raising a big ruckus in the meeting.  When they learned we had no power and were merely there to learn about lighting, they promptly left.  I began to wonder what institutions would serve this population that obviously was in need of lighting.

With Raj and Jyoti I showed our lights to families who lived in thatch houses so dark even during the day that the women had to use kerosene lanterns to cook.  They loved the lights but were very blunt that they could not afford more than 25Rs (about 40cents) for all their expenditures per day and there was no way they could afford $10.  I also realized that they were unlikely to get government support soon, as there already existed government programs to provide them with electricity and  electricity meters (heck the power lines were running right overhead), but either a) they would be hooked up and then promptly taken away when the collector came one year later and demanded the hook up fee and monthly payments or b) and more likely, they were never given the electricity because you need a land title to get the benefits and they were never given land titles.

It truly was sad for me to open up a newspaper and look at the marriage ads ; with a scant one or two ads per day that would say 'caste no bar.'  What amazing people those must be and incredible families to have the guts to be caste-agnostic.  I would like to meet them.

It has since become obvious to me that to supply this portion of the population would require working very closely with individuals and institutions.  What remains to be seen is the social, economic, and political consequences to a business that pursues a path of working with Dalit communities in India.  I heard many stories of successful individuals with close private sector and government ties who, upon opening up that their parents were Dalit's, would lose all their 'upper-caste' friends.  Those friends would now have somebody else answer the phone and then say ' so and so is not home.'

This population of Dalits is one group at the base of the pyramid - and they are several hundred million strong!

The best part of my days are the 7:30am brisk 4 mile bicycle ride to work on back-roads.   Falls coming, my belly is full, mind alert, and I am usually rushing to implement some change that popped into my head at 1am while I lie in bed rehashing our strategy.  This morning was hastier than usual, as I sprinted to make a conference call with the supplier of one of our most important components - and eureka, it was definitely worth it.  We shaved about 5% off the cost of our product and can ring our little Tibetan bell.  The bell is an auditory reminder of our goal, and we keep handy whenever we can color in the thermometer we drew on the side of our wall measuring the drop in cost of our product.  ring ring ring.  We're just responding to customer feedback - and they want the price to drop ;)

I've spent the last week basically going over the thousands of pictures and videos that Lubna, Melissa, Nora, Erica, and Rohan took in India, as well as Ned and my pictures.  If there is one thing I learned at the d.school its the power of pictures and most importantly video.  We put a short video on youtube of a girl studying with our light after spending her whole life using kerosene.  In fact, I'm amazed at how many of the India MBAs at Stanford  spent their youth studying at one point or another with kerosene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA2g0IObKP0
I really just can't wait to get some more units out to commercial pilots so we can starting getting broader feedback and designing more products.  On that note, I wanted to thank Nick Webb extensively for being the worlds most amazing Intern.  Nick's back at Stanford for 8months in the mechanical engineering program at which point we'll try and lure him back!

In the meanwhile, its time to prepare for another trip to India.

I have to admit - It is tough continually riding the rollicking wave of our start-up.  Always having new things on my plate, whether its making big product decisions, watching our first product samples come back, hiring new employees, traveling to India, getting updates from all over the world, or prepping for board meetings.  But at the same time it is what I love.  I absolutely love the highs, looking back briefly, but basically forging ahead full pace... and then all of a sudden things dipped last week. 

whoosh - everything slowed down. 

I found myself back in Palo Alto, with a two week sub-lease on an apartment, boxes in storage in three places, my friends from biz school and previous years scattered helter skelter about the globe, and not quite enough happening at work to keep me occupied 24-7.  So I borrowed 10 movies from a friend, got out my mountain bike, enjoyed brunch with friends, and got to work at 8:30am instead of 7:30...but I was a little uneasy.  d.light is in a transition and i'm realizing i have to make my own personal transition as well.

I noticed I have come to equate speed with progress -  which can be a problem and I need to learn to nurture these slower periods and even plan them so our team can recuperate.  We need it.  We (d.light that is) have been extremely fortunate - and some harsher realities of life came up last week which I hadn't planned for.  Xian, our amazing mechanical engineer and d.light founder, was (is! Damn the immigration system) having trouble with his visa status and in a worst case scenario might have to go hang out in our factories for a few months.  Ned, or most humbe and softspoken president, was really sick and we thought he had malaria.  Meanwhile, manufacturing wasn't moving as fast as our idealistic hearts would want, and I'm quickly learning that 'minor' design changes take MAJOR effort.  So my spirits dipped a bit and it was great to see our team rally.  We went back to our roots and as a team asked ourselves - 'what do our customers want' - -  We then applied our magic formula based on months of visits to villages over 2 years and we made some design changes and strategic decisions that stripped about 10-20% of the cost out of our unit without dramatically impacting the functionality to our target customer! I feel great!

(I realize this is scattered but hey its 9:30 at night and I haven't eaten dinner ... I can feel things are picking up a bit though:)

We are in India!  It’s been over 10 years since I was last here and the moment I got off the plane it all flooded back.  I stayed with my university roommate at his place in Dwarka, a neighborhood of endless apartment complexes that didn't even exist when I went to school in Delhi.  But before we set off to conquer India, here's a couple quick lessons I learned for all those aspiring entrepreneurs looking to set up shop in India:

-         find a local friend to buy your cell phone before you get here (and get one with low roaming charges b/c when you leave the city it starts roaming and each state has a different SIM)

-         buying a wireless card for your laptop will be well worth your while!

-         There is a serious talent crunch.  There is lots of great talent but it is all being snatched up immediately.  Give yourself plenty of time to recruit the best!  (in fact, if anybody knows any amazing candidates for VP Marketing & Sales with 7+ years of experience with rural marketing in India please contact me)

India is the ultimate retail market and quite a challenge.  As far as base-of-the-pyramid and rural marketing is concerned, I have found a few surprises.  The first is how sophisticated the market has become.  For example, the Chinese imports coming in as emergency lights have received a terrible reputation for low quality, and although they are still sold by the tens of thousands, newer Indian brands are springing up.  Although the Indian brands are higher priced (often 2X) they come with guarantees (6mo-1yr) and often service warranties (up to 3years).  Consumers are not only demanding high quality at low prices, but they want to be able to easily and inexpensively repair their products.  If you are offering products that cannot be easily repaired – it is going to be hard to crack this market.

India is also on the move.  Screaming horns, fried snacks, and truck loads of goods grumbling by every second.  Plenty of Chai!  to keep you awake, Paneer! to make your mouth water, and Masala! to spice it up.  I am very optimistic and love being here.  The wholesale business is mind boggling in size and everybody is trying to penetrate into the huge rural markets.  This is it – potentially the toughest most competitive market to serve in the world – and we are wadding in with one purpose – to provide better products for underserved customers. Onwards! Onwards. Onwards!

I’m off to Asia on Thursday with our (nearly) final first product.  This is the fourth iteration of the light.  It’s hard to believe that what started out as a series of sketches 1.5 years ago is now ready for manufacturing.  Collectively our team has spent over four months interviewing families in SE Asia and testing our different battery and superbright LED combinations.

My Ya’s Story

On one of my first visits around Christmas 2006 I met My Ya.  She was working with 6 of her family members making mud bricks.  They earn 5 cents per brick, and each person nets about 50 cents after a hard 12 hour work day.  I left a small solar light with her with 2 Leds and came back one week later.  To my surprise, on my next visit My Ya wasn’t as excited as I’d hoped.  She liked the light but it only worked for a few hours at night and she had to charge it all day.  It turns out that her family works from 8am-6pm, eats dinner and sleeps from 6pm-1am, and then work again all night from 1am-6am.  They have to make bricks all night so that the mud bricks will dry when the hot sun comes out.  They normally had 2 or 3 diesel lanterns running (petrol wasn’t available) and it cost them one persons profit to buy the diesel per day. 

I visited My Ya again and this time swapped the solar light for our battery/LED/circuit board prototype.  When the NGO we were working with returned to visit My Ya, she actually started crying.  She absolutely loved the light – and it had changed her life.  She told us that she would pay $2 for the other solar light but would give $10 for ours because it lasted so much longer and was inexpensive to charge at a local recharger.  Not only that, but one of her neighbors had left his light on for 48 hours straight just to see what would happen, and he was finally convinced on the 2^nd day – as were all his neighbors.  We later learned that one of our lights was used by a single family for 4 months on a single charge!  After repeated visits to My Ya and surround villages we coined the term, “quality of light = quality of life” because that is what we saw.

3rd & 4th Iterations

The third iteration of our light was the brainchild of two of our engineers, Xianyi Wu and Erica Estrada who hand built and vacuum formed it.  This beauty we coined the ‘forever-bright’ and it has earned us over $1M in venture funding.  Nonetheless, after several weeks of harsh testing in Cambodia it was rusted, the charging circuit broke, switches fell off, etc.  But we had lots more stories.  In one area the police even ‘borrowed’ the light, semi-permanently from one family to light the police station!

Now we are off with our fourth generation lights and ready for final testing before manufacturing.  This is extremely exciting - 1.5 years of work coming to a head.  The lucky thing is we are also needfinding for products 2, 3 and 4.  Wish us luck.

I can’t wait to deep dive into the daily trials of building a global social venture BUT first I want to share more of d.light’s history.  Our story starts in a class at Stanford University called “Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability.”  The class brings together engineers & business students to solve the world’s hardest problems and make water pumps, incubators, lights, and other products and services affordable and accessible even to the worlds’ poorest citizens.  It is one of the key reasons I attended the Stanford MBA program and it definitely didn’t let me down! Check it out (under the 'classes' tab) www.stanford.edu/group/dschool/.

In the class, our team examined lighting and power – and the central question we asked ourselves is WHY light-emitting-diodes (LEDs) have not replaced kerosene and kerosene lanterns even though they are brighter, more efficient, less expensive, and safer.  We found: 

a)     High Priced Solar: almost all the existing lights relied on solar panels – and the solar panels were often 2 or 3X more expensive than the light and battery they powered

b)     Low quality LEDs: the LEDs in local products are of extremely low quality (that’s what you get for 1 penny) and work as a flashlight but not for the 1000s of hours required of a house-light

c)     Lots of Options: there is a whole world of options to avoid relying on solar and still provide back-up power and bright lighting to off-grid families -- and we are designing into this space

We traveled to SE Asia and spent weeks meeting with families, taking pictures, and listening to stories. And more stories. And more stories.  Our early prototypes were huge successes and we spent the next 18 months refining them and revisiting families.  After our last trip to Cambodia we realized we could build a global business with ultra low-cost (and super high volume) products designed specifically for rural customers.  We committed to a new venture together, turned down our job offers, and started polishing our venture pitch! 

On May 21^st, d.light design was born with 5 full time employees, no real money, and on May 31^st we won $250,000 from the Draper Fisher Jurvetson Venture Challenge – and that’s when things really started going!  See a picture of my business partner Ned and I shell shocked with a big check here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/522409778/

But I don’t want to get caught up in the money.  Our company is - at its heart – focused on eliminating kerosene and providing good design to underserved customers.  So next week I’ll share stories from Hla Win, My Ya, and other families who have used our products.