Who am I?

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.