Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007 - (Page 14)

and the PEACE CORPS An Enduring Partnership SIT Graduate Degrees and Professional Programs • Master’s Degrees in 7 Dynamic Fields • Integrated Field Work • Worldwide Alumni Network already provide up to 120 lumens per watt while compact ﬂuorescent and incandescent bulbs provide only 45 and 20 lumens per watt. In Benin, it was very economical because I could get up to tens of hours of LED light with a small battery that lasted for about three weeks when I used it every night. e LEDs last for up to 100,000 hours of usage. An LED light can cost as little as 1 cent or as much as $4. At any price, it’s a lot less than a $3 lantern that lasts a year and the requisite kerosene, which can run up to $6 a month on the blackmarket. I vividly remember attending a local wedding ceremony when around 2 a.m. the rented generator conked out and all the ﬂuorescent lights died. I pulled out my headlamp and lit up the entire courtyard. e musicians started drumming again, and 200 people focusing intently on the batori–that’s me, the stranger, in Bariba–as I held up my tiny device, shining like crazy. e dancing stirred up clouds of dust and the wedding continued full of energy. Every single one of my friends wanted me to sell it to them. uinagourou was a profoundly moving experience. For three years I watched the transformation of Benin to cell phones, computers and free-market capitalism. Everyone around me wanted televisions, modern medicine, radios, motorcycles and cars. ey wanted better roads, education, improved access to seeds, building materials and accurate crop prices. Government and donors weren’t delivering on many of those promises, but microﬁnance and business were. I wanted to ﬁgure out how to harness the market’s power for what I saw as better purposes. My four years there were the inspiration for my new business, d.light design. My goal is to leverage the power of LEDs to transform the lives of 1.6 billion people–one fourth of the world’s population. I came home and entered Stanford’s Graduate School of Business program and later, the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, the “d.school” with its orange couches, a friendly gray poodle running between work benches, a NE W ! $10,000 Scholarships available for members of National Peace Corps Association G NE W ! Low-Residency Master of Arts and Certiﬁcate in International Education Toll-free: 800-336-1616 admissions@sit.edu www.sit.edu School for International Training is the accredited higher education institution of World Learning. The Experiment in International Living School for International Training SIT Study Abroad International Development Programs cement ﬂoor, and plenty of colorful post-its notes scattered around bowls of candy. Life was good. One class, Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Aﬀordability, focused on designing products that provide enough value to base-of-the pyramid customers that they will sell without subsidies or donor support. We look for needs that other companies are not ﬁlling around access to water, health and lighting. We follow a human-centered design process, spending a lot of time learning about what our customers need before we try to design to meet those needs. en we spend even more time testing prototypes. is is how we continue to design products at d.light. In this class I met my co-founders of d.light design: a mechanical engineer who has worked for Boeing, another who had worked for Apple, a friend from the business school who had already started two businesses and a Silicon Valley electrical engineer who was married to another Stanford classmate. We spent the ﬁrst year designing prototypes for our lights and building and patenting a technology to fast-charge batteries. In Benin, few can aﬀord solar, but they could recharge a battery in a town marketplace. ey needed something that recharges in oneﬁfth the time of a normal battery and will hold the charge for a couple of weeks. We wrote business plans, entered design competitions at school and began attracting venture capital. Eight months ago, we ﬁnalized our ﬁnancial plan through friends, angels and venture capital ﬁrms: Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson, Garage Technology Ventures, Gray Matters Capital, Acumen Fund, Mahindra & Mahindra, and Nexus India Capital. ese are the people who funded skype and hotmail. We hope to have the same impact but for a diﬀerent audience. We made sure that all our technology development was oﬀ-campus so that Stanford couldn’t claim rights to it. Our designs remain conﬁdential and are being patented. We worked on our graduate school degrees by day, met in the afternoons and built prototypes long into the night. At midnight, I would do a few hours of homework, then start making calls to Asia. On a 14 Winter 2007 http://www.sit.edu http://www.sit.edu

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007

Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007 Contents President's Note Lafayette Park Note to Readers Commentary Letter from India Commentary Letter from Botswana Letter from Ha Teboho Letter from Jumbi Valley Letter from Mununga Letter from Medellin Giving Back Community News

Worldview Magazine - Winter 2007

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