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.

One day I came home to find my neighbors son completely bandaged and lying on his stomach, where he spent the next three months.  He had tipped over a bottle filled with 75 cents of kerosene and it had lit on fire and consumed him in flames from head to toe.  Thankfully his family lived in a house with a tin roof, so the house didn’t catch on fire the way so many others do. 

I was very disturbed by the incident and started researching kerosene, and I learned that millions of children suffer from similar accidents yearly, while thousands of others suffer from air pollution and even ingestion.  [I recently learned that 9% of children under 5 in one S. African community were admitted to the hospital for kerosene ingestion!]  It was even harder to believe that about 1.6B people (almost 1 in 4!) are still using kerosene lanterns as their primary sources of light.  Dim. Toxic. Smelly. Dangerous. And Expensive.

Meanwhile, my friend Dan had sent me an LED headlamp he bought in Wal-Mart for a few dollars.  4 leds and 2 AA batteries was all I needed to stop using my kerosene lantern.  I started cooking and even reading (under the mosquito net now!) by the cool white LED light.  I also stopped buying and using batteries for my old flashlight.  I only had to replace batteries every few weeks and it felt great to stop contributing to the piles of inexpensive and incredibly short-lived batteries that were littering my village.

My neighbors and friends loved my LED headlamp - But I only had one!  I started writing LED companies and flashlight manufacturers requesting a distribution arrangement for West Africa.  I never got a single response, but I was convinced that LEDs were the answer.

My resolve was sealed around 2am at an all-night marriage ceremony when the gas generator the family had rented to power a string of fluorescent lights suddenly died. And the dancing died.  And the drums stopped.  And the dust obscured the dim moonlight.  And I held up my little headlamp as high above my head as I could and turned it on.  200 faces from villages up to 35 km away turned to stare at the blinding light coming out of my palm.  The drums started playing.  The dancers kicked up dust.  And the wedding carried on.  2AA’s and a couple dollars could power a wedding.  Why not a household? 

Of course there were a couple things to sort out first.  Like cost. And durability. And distribution.  Not small feats.  And that’s where the design school at Stanford comes in….and a class called Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability...

I am the CEO of d.light design.  A 28 year old white male.  The son in a family that comfortably lights the menorah while thanking Ganesha for our good fortune and admiring our Christmas tree.  I am American.  But I have lived only 2 years in the US, when I received my MBA in California.  Instead, I grew up in a USAID family cocooned in the world of international development. 
 
I remember:

• caravans of camels passing by our house in Mauritania,
 
• Boy Scouts trips to the Kyber Pass in Pakistan shooting AK47’s smuggled out of Afghanistan,
 
• boat trips in the Amazon looking for river otters during school break in Peru,
 
• drinking yak milk tea during high school field trips in the Indian Himalayas. 
 
I was young - deeply concerned with poverty and inequality.  Typical for someone who had never experienced it.  While bicycling 9,000 km across Canada with the Climate Change Caravan I decided to apply to the Peace Corps.  I wanted to understand the life of a poor farmer.  A year later I was living 20 km from the Nigerian border, in a small village in Benin without electricity, water, telephones, or a paved road. 
 
I spent 4 years in Guinagourou in a mud house, paying 25 cents a day for two buckets of water, and cooking and reading at night by a $3 kerosene lantern.  My best friend, Yaru, was a half animist half Muslim farmer and tailor who looked after 3 wives, 7 children, and could not read or do math.  He was the smartest person I knew, the best storyteller, had the best intuition, and was in high demand for curing scorpion and snake bites.  He loved my LED headlamp – but more on that soon!
 
In 2002, I founded an NGO with an inspirational Beninese man David Ogoudadja.  We aimed to provide a sustainable way for villages to tackle malnutrition in Benin.  We trained womens’ groups and doctors in the production, processing, and marketing of Moringa oleifera leaf powder to hospitals and health centers and our results were phenomenal.  Demand was much stronger than supply in the villages, centers and hospitals and I joined the MBA program at the GSB at Stanford precisely because I needed the business skills to scale our activities… and the GSB took my ambitions and scaled them. 

I have a new global plan now.