#25 - Mission Driven: Bringing Solar Power to 1M People in Africa

some of the best people i've ever met come through the mission aligned work our biggest literacy partner for books for africa i got very involved in that some of the other board members took me to africa and had this experience staying in an off grid village in malawi and then all of a sudden i realized oh there's no electricity entire town of like twenty thousand people so i founded solo electric which delivers electricity to a million people in africa every day and it literally all sprung out of like us sitting around in tanzania go into living rooms and insane okay we think this can work if this thing could do five hundred thousand in revenue that would be shocking right what did it get to got to seventy million five million is nine a alone ten million fifteen million money million dollars hundred million dollar half a billion hundred and fifty million dollars one or two people in a bedroom actually have rents to these like giant multi dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose add another zero to that price buddy add two more zero first million every week we sit down with self made millions theirs and asked them how did you do it i didn't start a podcast i started my own personal business school and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands and businesses that you find today i wanted to know the real stories where all the details like how did you get your first hundred customers what did it feel like shit i ask them how did you spend your money now that you're rich and what would you do if you're starting over from scratch again today if you're like me and you wanna own business instead of living a nine to five job this is the podcast for you the hustle presents my first million alright i'm here with xavier i've been excited to have you on for many many weeks now not only because we're one of my best friends and one of the more interesting people i know but you've done something that not a lot of people have done you have built for profit and social impact businesses and for those you don't know that's a business like you may have heard of tom shoes where you're selling shoes to customers but for every pair you sell you give a pair of away to people in need things like that so businesses that are trying to not only build great products build great businesses but also do a lot of good in the world and xavier you're somebody who not only is does it want you've done it twice and so i don't i wanted to have you on let's give the overview of what are those two businesses and then we'll go into the story of what it did so tell me about the two businesses thanks sean it's thrilled to be here with you and i'm just thrilled that so many more people get to hear your wisdom in your insight oh thank you that i've benefited from over the years so i found better world books which is the leading used book seller on the internet so it has over a million feedbacks on amazon and ebay and and sells about ten million books a year i also founded solar electric which delivers electricity to a million people in africa every day no big deal we got introduced to a friend and we met and he was like yeah he was describing it his basically i was like so it's like solar city which is a kind of a large well known company here in the us i was like he did source city for africa like he literally is providing electricity looking you know the company is providing electricity to million people a day in africa like that is incredible i wanted to know more and so as i got to know you i found out that you came about this in a pretty organic way so how did you start better world books so i started better world books in a room probably no bigger in this podcast studio i wanted to be an internet entrepreneur i was in college during the first dot com boom the one that ended to know one i had a very popular college website that even had a feature called the e dog book and i is the website it was called end today so we were doing hyper local so we would basically and we had about eighty percent of the campus opted into our email list so we could email to them market to them do whatever we wanted and then we were doing this at other campuses too so we'd wanna yale we'd wanna a up pen and we would basically do kinda hack social stuff we had message boards we had polls we'd had teacher reviews were the popular one you could've have built facebook i've thought about that from time john what i would've have built would have been little different yeah no would have been friends sir i would've have built the one that didn't scale because i want i wasn't a good enough code or i didn't i think people don't give zuckerberg enough credit for building something that didn't just get crushed by volume right and so and what was it like that so you're you're saying is during the dot com boom i mean were you looking at the stock market and looking at all these companies where must have been already inspiring like i'm jealous i wasn't oh actively in the game at that oh my god every day every day we were checking the stock market like some of us were speculating you now we take five hundred dollars we'd buy excite stock or whatever we thought was the company of the time i was seriously considering dropping out i really really went back and forth on it and i was like no the internet's not going away i'm gonna finish up and and by the middle of o one it which was when i was a senior and i was graduating like it just crater right i remember going to google's help wanted page in two thousand one and there were no jobs literally no jobs not the whole company but so i was an unemployed internet guy and so i among other things i tutor the noted dame football team and calculus i worked at this printing company in the midwest as a programmer so was the only day job i ever had and right you know as soon as i got job i hated it and i was like i need to be building something here so what you hate about dj you know in that particular one i went in with a ton of energy i was like here some new ideas here's some stuff i wanna build and then i kinda just got the life beaten now to me in about four weeks whereas was like oh this really really mediocre programmer who sits next to me like gets paid just as much and gets three percent annual raise just like i'm gonna get put in half the yeah have an effort put in half the effort and producing one tenth of the actual value right and so you know i kind of settled into a place where i was like well okay if that's the bargain then you know i'll write some useful code but i will do in essence no more than the minimum of course that felt very unnatural for me i always wanted to throw myself and anything i was doing and so i i would say was that disconnect that made me a bad employee i don't think i'd be a bad employee and i'll situations but i think in that one i was gotcha and so you're like i gotta do something for myself where basically what i put in is what i'm gonna get out and i want to throw myself in because i'm not getting any resistance from other people you know this my company this is my baby exactly you know i just didn't know what it was and i had this vague idea that i really really wanted to do something with social impact and that made money but we didn't have tom shoes then like we didn't really have much to look to right and so it was just a la like one of my roommates came to me and was like hey do you know any websites you can sell textbooks on because we have all these old textbooks and our you know our roommates had left and they've gone to their consulting jobs if they still had them and they're you know their banking jobs and they've left all these good textbooks and so i was like yeah half dot com but i don't know if anybody actually goes there to shop you should try it out and so he diligently went off more diligently than me and plugged in all the isbn numbers and came back the next day it was like dude i just got three hundred dollars of orders for these random textbooks that the bookstore wasn't buying and so we were like whoa that's something and so then the scramble was on between the two of us to like hustle all our friends for textbooks right here like hey i'll give you say see you're not using that over there i'll get six pack of beer for that pile of textbooks there right ed we were going to the library and like buying their extra book you're just selling them online for for cash right which just for cash yeah you're not even thinking about a separate business no it wasn't even no we didn't know that there was gonna be a business in this because we didn't have any money to buy textbooks and even if we did we wouldn't have known what to buy or how we would compete against the bookstore to buy textbooks books and so it was just one of these things that was turning over and over in my mind for like six months right okay book sell on the internet for a lot of money i don't have any money i don't know which wants to buy right so how i get textbooks and the was like i wonder if people would just give their books like i wonder if we just ran a book drive if people would just give their books you know this kinda made sense and so but i talked to my friend about it who was the fellow textbook hustle and he thought it made sense and then even then we sat on it for a month and i remember him being like dude we gotta do this before school years over because we were out of college by that point but we were still hanging around college town so it was really easy for us to have access and so i'm glad you brought that point up which is that sometimes you sit on the idea some something like z actually did this with facebook where started facebook and then plan to really like kind of do another project wire hog and you know he had other plans it wasn't clear that this was like the the magic idea to go all in on i remember my first startup we started the company we started getting some momentum i got a really good job offer i kinda went and did that for a month and then i came back and so it's not always a right away thing so if you're out there and you've got an idea that you're kinda sitting on that's a normal place to be in very natural thing to happen early with ideas as you sort of stew on it for a little bit you take some action and then you commit at some some given time that's so true sean i mean if you had asked me even after my body had said yeah we really gotta do this what the biggest this business could possibly be what the absolute maximum might be like if this thing could do five hundred thousand in revenue like that would be shocking to me right and what did it get to it got to seventy million right and so i was like was absolutely crazy and so even then that would have been a stretch i would've have said at best this is a lifestyle business that like we do this once a year we collect some books we sell them for fifty thousand dollars and then we go search for something and and did you have the the sort of social impact angle at the beginning or did that come a little bit later because explain the mechanics how it works so you guys collect books sell them online and then how do you distribute sort of the the profits and at where where it is the social impact part come in so the original book drive and was kind of the thing that formed our model of doing this so our original book drive we went to a profit that was local in south indiana and we knew them we said hey we wanna do this thing we think it'll raise some money for you so run a book drive with us and then we will essentially sell the books online and then after expenses we'll share what's left right so that was kind of the very first simple version of that and then that was the model that more or less worked to about a thousand college campuses and i a dumb question yeah why do that versus just sell the books and pocket the cash and go sir why did you even want to have this partner you can't run a book drive without a credible nonprofit as a partner because people will say well aren't you just gonna take the books and sell for cash and go surf right people are dumb and if anything they're more skeptical when they're asked you know for something for free so mean we got a fair amount of flack in the early days even with our super credible partners right and so it was really important to us to be genuine like we didn't want this to be a hustle we wanted this to be something that like worked right and so one of the first things we did after the very first book drive worked was we went out and found three or four national literacy nonprofit and you know who we thought were cool and we're super credible and we could verify we're doing good work you know we teamed up with them and they became what we call our literacy partners gotcha and so you build this business when did it start to scale we did the momentum start to pick up you know i think it really picked up it was one of those businesses that actually just worked on a unit level if you wanna say that right so every college campus we would go to as long as we did a somewhat decent job we would collect books valued somewhere between ten thousand and fifty thousand dollars then we can sell that and our total cost into that was like a tank of gas and like fifty cardboard boxes right and then the great thing about this business was amazon was providing the demand right even from the time when we had sold our first books on half dot com amazon had become the bigger place to sell textbooks so we were one of the first pro merchants on amazon we this was long before fulfillment by amazon we were basically one of the first kind of programmatic sellers on amazon right not alone as they grew we grew as they grew and they brought the customers for so long that it was really hard to even build a culture in the company of marketing our own brand because we just didn't need to we our first customer five minutes after we uploaded our inventory list right and so there's some pretty remarkable things you guys are done with the better world right so first i just love that it's just kind of like although you sell on amazon you're sort of a competitor to amazon as well right because you're right you could buy the book off of one of many providers of amazon or a lot of people buy direct from you guys so that was you know interesting to see somebody competing with amazon at the thing amazon started which is selling books online yeah and then the other part that was interesting was as you scaled this up it wasn't just college book drives right you're getting books from libraries with the surplus and you built the scanner and you you had all kinds you've built a pretty interesting business what are some of the highlights that stand out for somebody who's never heard of a better world what are some of those highlights of really interesting things about the business the first thing really interesting about better world i would say from an entrepreneur entrepreneurs perspective is that you could actually compete against amazon with a book selling website and that the way better will books dot com competes is it doesn't have to take a hundred percent of the bookmark the bookmark it's actually pretty huge you know it's it can be very happy with between point one and one percent of the bookmark right around the world and so it can target people in our case it's value conscious shoppers so if you wanna get let's say i buy books from my daughter a lot she makes me read about three books a night so that's a pretty good clip that i need to acquire books and so i buy those from better world because i know i can get let's call it twenty books for about fifty dollars with shipping included that if i bought those same books used on amazon i'd pay a hundred and fifty so just the pure value argument right but then that's actually more profitable for better world than the hundred and fifty would be for amazon right because we do it end to end so because we have the proprietary sources of all these use books all over the world then we can list them and we can sell them and then whatever margin is left we can share that in some proportion so it's not always fifty fifty i think we've had to get a lot more sophisticated with the economics and kind of recognize the true costs of various partnerships right various ways of getting books but we've still raised almost twenty five million dollars for literacy and libraries over the year so we've really have made a real impact that's measurable yeah you're delivering the good so twenty five million delivered to those literacy non nonprofit partners and you're also just ingesting a lot of these books that would otherwise go to landfills right absolutely these are books that are they're sort of doomed and you're you're sort of it's like toy story you're saving the toys that are that are going in the garbage there and so how many books a year or a day or give me a sense of the how many books you guys are collecting so better world takes in about thirty five million books a year sells about ten million rafael and does this and you know that's about a barnes and noble worth of books every day so every twenty four hours there we we intake those and you know in a lot of businesses when you receive inventory you know what you're receiving in our business it's random right so you just get a random box of books and then you have to work your way through that and a lot of books are barcode coded but not all the barcodes are accurate there's a lot of nuance to that sometimes they're secured some of those books to old dev a barcode we've even an a aquarium division that's gotten books in the fifteen hundreds i mean we have we get some crazy stuff amazing and so somehow better world books led you to starting z electric which on the surface team completely unrelated one is a a used books seller and then the other one is providing you know solar energy to a million people a day in africa so how does that happen what is the like i literally don't even know this link our biggest literacy partner for better world books was books for africa it's a minnesota based nonprofit basically is one thing ships high quality books that people actually need and demand to african schools okay and universities great so ship about twenty million books a years i got very involved in and became got on the board for a while and so some of the other board members really took me to africa and showed me like the real africa so we rode on bus public buses and you know went to rural villages and had this experience of staying in an off grid village in malawi after going hitch hiking in malawi ended up at this cool village where you can go scuba diving on in lake malawi and you can see the chic and as one does as one does and so i had i'd gone scuba know my instructor and invited me over for dinner at his house and so came to pick me up from this little hostel i was staying at and then all of a sudden i realized oh there's no electricity this entire town of like twenty thousand people and so he's leading me by ke lantern down these like completely dark back streets of an african village and just like no one will ever know what you can know where i am if something bad happened just like if i survived this maybe i should fix this yeah maybe i should exactly maybe i should work on this and and we sat with his family we had dinner by ke lantern and it was this very cool thing like very very memorable i mean this sounds amazing but were you like a fish out of water in this or did you feel comfortable like i can't even imagine just being in a in a village and malawi that there's no electricity eating dinner with a family that i don't know by cares the lamp like what were you feeling at that moment i think it was the sense of adventure for sure i think i'd had always been really restless like i grew up in a small town in northern minnesota it was very isolated you know i had saved up money to travel even when i was fourteen i was doing something and saving up money and going to travel and so by that time i had opened our uk business you know just showing up in the uk and starting to make things happen and so i had a little more of a global taste but africa was definitely like a whole another level up and that was right i think that's part of when what was for dinner oh we had it was good i think we because they really treated it as well so it's you know one thing you see when you travel a lot of is amazing yeah the the poor people are the more hot hospitality is is important so they had had some eggs from their chicken and they made us this kind of omelette and this kind of you know some rice and like a little stew and it was really really nice and yeah and they just generally wanted to hear about what life was like in the us and and the guy was he worked in tourism so he spoke good english and it was nice to to do that if you had asked me at that point again would you would you move to africa i like no i wouldn't do that would you start a business in africa no i wouldn't do that but kinda planted the seed of adventure i guess that that stuck with me a little bit and so what did sort of cause that to bloom and become you know z electric how did that come about then this is the experience yeah where did that become the business sort of lightning at a bottle moment so i met a guy on a train as i was going to a conference in oxford and he was telling me about you got this scholarship through this gold foundation it was this scholarship for social entrepreneurs where you get an mba at oxford completely paid for and you become part of this network and i was like that kinda sounds like me i wonder if they take me and do that i hadn't really been thinking i was gonna lead better world full time but you know it could kind of become a one trick pony like it did one thing really well which was sell use books on the internet and right anytime it tried to play a r on that we just waste money and we waste time and we'd go back to doing what we good at and so i was feeling like i wanted to work on something new even though i think the you know probably most safe and conservative thing for me to do certainly would have been just to keep my head down on better world and you know keep pushing that business forward and so i took a year and did the program at oxford i got into it and i spent that about half that year trying to figure out whether i was gonna go back to better world or whether i was gonna go do something new and and had a lot of conversations around that topic and then eventually it just was kind of i don't know when at least when i start working something new i start talking about it and then i talk to enough people about it and i get more and more information and then i also measure my own excitement level mh and i see what am i feeling like i can give energy to and can i run after this or and so what was feeling more exciting to me was working on this problem of i'd had been obsessed with that ever since i went to that village like why doesn't this guy have a solar panel i thought solar was gonna change the world i really wanted to move into renewable energy but i didn't have an electrical background i didn't i know people in the renewable energy industry so it was really a kind of diving in head first and trying to read as much as i could about this problem and what people were doing about it and who had started companies in that space and that that sort of thing so we have mutual friend sully and and i don't know if you know ramon but he's another great friend so we're at ramon house and we were talking and we had this young entrepreneur come join us this guy far if you're listening far as a he likes the podcast i think so i i don't i don't know how old he is he think he's like twenty two twenty three years old something like that so he joined us and he we were talking about potential ideas as far as i was gonna go start one of the things he kept counting himself out on was he was like you i would love to do this but i'm not an expert of that i i don't know anything about this and and sully whose brother started native deodorant was like giving him the example he's like he's oh i don't think about that at all when it comes to business he's like when i start a business of course i don't know anything about it that's sort of just the starting point but as long as i understand the problem and like the basics of what a solution might look like i don't need to be a master of the solution and so he's like six months in my brother knew everything about deodorant but he started saying i know nothing about deodorant but watch in six months i will know everything about deodorant that really stuck with me because it's reminds me of what you're saying right now which was going in you didn't know anything about solar panels solo like electricity but it didn't deter you you were like okay i don't know if you had the confidence back then but what i would have told you that you know now is saying don't worry in six months you know everything you need to know about solar to do this business because you will dive in and become an expert over time yeah i think that's so true i think that's so true and i think that the only kind of brackets i would put around that are like it's the better you can understand the technical underpinning so the one thing i wish i had done in those first three months was actually just give myself a crash course on electrical engineering mh i kinda gave myself a crash course about five years later right it was just overdue like the second i got into that i was like oh okay now it all like knowing that would have helped what in this case no no old cost that that that's exactly it knowing these specifics with z it was about solving someone's problem at a price point mh you can solve any electricity problem with an unlimited budget the question is how do you solve that at the budget of somebody who's buying little sac of ke and burning them in their house night right and so understanding the solution to that actually does mean understanding well what are the engineering trade offs and what are the production trade offs and how's that all right right right yeah yeah take lesson from the i will know everything about deodorant is don't let it deter you up front but also don't think you can do this without becoming an expert you can need to give yourself that crash course and so go for it you're targeting excited about this idea let's give people a sense of what exactly is the product how does it work so it's solar panel that's is going into villages like the one that you visited which were you know places that are today off the grid completely is that the yes and that it's funny how we've evolved i think the other thing you know this happened with better world and it happened z is like original idea gets you in the game but it doesn't get you to the finish line unless your sometimes your original idea is so good you just keep r on that and and but i don't think that's most of it so in better world we had to start working with libraries which actually a very different business than running college book drives for textbooks right or we would have been at tenth of the size right today and at z what was the sort of before and after so for z the before essentially was only serving was people who are completely off grid and the after is using solar and batteries to be better than an unreliable grid right and and talk about unreliable grid because when you told me about what you know what the we take for granted like i'm sitting in the studio there's eight light right above us that are on i have no fear that they're gonna go out i have no fear that this podcast studios is gonna lose its electricity during this recording but that's not the case in certain places of the world correct and apparently pg and is gonna shut off the power to two million peeps people so we we may yeah maybe maybe people wearing but but yeah if you go to place like nigeria and nigeria is africa's largest economy it's larger than south africa it's two hundred million people there it's kind of the united states of africa and it in a sense like vibrant dynamic economy so there's more diesel generators there than people the average power situations powers on eight hours off sixteen hours wow per day per day per day so every day you just have no idea and you have no idea when that's gonna happen and that's just normal that's just that's not a a temporary situation that is the state of the union right now that is the state of the union and basically what happens is is electrical demand grows about double gdp roughly and so a lot of african countries are growing at six or seven percent gdp which means electrical demands growing double digits right you've gotta basically replace all your infrastructure every five years or so to grow an electrical system at that rate right because everything that you set up gets too small and gets over capacity and so every transformer in every subs station they always basically need to be torn out and replaced at a certain point because you know you had a few little homes in the neighborhood and now you have a cement factory okay that's completely different right right and so you started off providing to those who had no electricity and now you're saying to those who have that eight hours a day of electricity for example yeah this can be a a supplemental thing that is more reliable gives you more consistent electricity throughout your day well even more so that the solar and battery becomes your primary power source and the grid becomes an unreliable backup so that's that's what it is so when it's available we might use it to charge up the battery depending on the time of day right but we're not gonna count on that and a customer that's using your battery solution what is their daily electricity look like yeah it used to be at a eight hours on sixteen hour off what is it with you twenty four hours so that's that's what we market it so we just mark twenty six hours at yeah that's six hours a day exactly we give you two we got yeah we give you two for free and that's actually good marketing and i remember you told me because when we first i was like so how do you sell this was back when you were doing i think yeah a little more of the completely off grid estimate i remember just being like how do you sell to someone who doesn't have electricity like where do you reach them how are you even you know how do you take payments from that what is this i i remember just being mind blown and so walk through like a sample customer who is one of the let's say off the grid customers yeah what are they buying the solar four what is their main use case are they doing tvs refrigerators what do they want yeah what does it cost them and and how do you guys make money on that great question so i would say our average customer today is buying it's really a complete solar system so it's important to understand that so the basic components of the system are a solar panel of course smart battery which is really the essence of what we do so we build a very intelligent battery that has for example a mobile phone modem in it so we can talk back and forth to it but then we even include the lighting so we even built our own light switches because we wanted the whole thing to be plug and play and we wanted to not require electrical wiring because once you have high voltage wiring you have electrical codes so you have both a skill requirement and a cost requirement that already is gonna blow many customers out of the water so the smartest thing we ever did just stepping back a little to how we actually got started so once we decided we were gonna do this my c cofounder erica it was a real hard ass and she's like okay you guys might think this is cool but you know you're moving to tanzania right right and myself and josh are my i other c founder were like but we like california and she's like we aren't gonna achieve anything unless we all go and we all move and we live next to our customers and that was a really powerful yeah that was a really key moment where we're were like because she'd worked in africa ten years before this and i'd met her at oxford and and she knew that all the nuances that you had to figure out that there's just no way were gonna figure out sit in california and so we dived in and we moved to tanzania and then the smartest thing we ever did was just sitting as many living rooms as possible so we had a few local guys we hired early on on the team and we would just say hey just find us people who are willing to take us in for fifteen minutes right and have a conversation about their electricity situation what they're doing right now why they're not on the grid what they're spending and i remember the first customer that i sat down with it was one of the early ones was really like okay i can solve her problems so easily so she was a mom and so new mom and she earned a ke lamp all night is like a night light so it was really you know it's important to have a night when you baby she was spending probably thirty dollars a month on ke which is jet fuel just to fuel this little oil lamp and like with a five watts solar panel five watts is so tiny it's a like the size of a hard cover book you can generate enough power to like that house ten times brighter than what she was getting from that from that oil lamp and so i was like can i deliver that for thirty bucks a month absolutely like there's no question and so so then we dived in more and more and said okay what are people spending on substitutes for electricity right now so there's they're buying ke for lighting okay but they're also buying d cell batteries to plug into radios right because it's just like anybody's been to burning man or camping what do you do you have some batteries you plug those in okay you gotta charge your phone so what people in africa do is they pay other people to charge their phones for that there's a lot of households will have a ten dollar a month phone charging budget of you know fifteen cents twenty five cents at a time paying for phone charges so we'd kinda total up these three things and then that'd be the pitch we'd make to the average person is say look well you're already spending this much what if we gave you something way better that cost you less every month wow and that that works and that worked yeah and so the other thing that we did is we didn't build any hardware until we had that so until we knew what the price was what we were gonna offer and then we work backwards first to find off the shelf hardware so that we could put that into people's homes even though it didn't make economic sense for us to buy something at retail put in their home and you know kinda wire it together but it gave the experience that they were willing to gonna pay for they thought they were paying for at the price that they wanted and then that was what allowed us to essentially raise money behind our friends and family was gotcha okay train that you hey moved to tanzania yeah you started talking to customers you figured out what is the sales pitch that will work and also what is the price point that will work for these customers and what do they need to get out of that price point and then you work like that became your technical spec to say we need to deliver this much power at this cost yeah at this reliability exactly and you were able to do that initially with off the shelf stuff even though the economics are not great and it's not what you wanna do in the long run yep but in the short run it help you prove that this is something that you can do and that customers do want and let you raise money and now you guys raised a lot of money so how much money has been raised into the company today so we've raised over a hundred million dollars of equity and probably another fifty of debt or financing facilities right so this is a and this is a major major company that you've you know helped build and c founded and so that's a pretty remarkable achievement and so where do you sit to today you're not active with either company is that is that correct no i'm still active with ola oh she's active z okay yeah better world books give people sort of the end of the story arc for those two businesses now where that today yeah so better world books you know it's funny about that i was chairman for a while after after i starting z and then i stepped back and was a board member and at a certain point it was actually taking more of my energy and time and then it was really given back and so i can't share where better world has landed but it's actually landed in very very good after home so with a very socially conscious owner so i'm now completely out of that as a shareholder and everything which is great great and what's next z electric where does it go from here so we've just launched this product called infinity which is really my baby so this is this is the one i saw yeah so so this one's the one i mean where i got to live my jobs in fantasy of of i wanna build a big shiny box it does something magical and if you see this thing it literally looks like this came from cup dino from apple headquarters yeah you would never think this is some big ugly battery pack that's gonna be on someone's wall this thing is slick it is beautiful it is well designed you could tell a lot of love has gone into this box it thank you and and the amazing thing about it is it just works and that's really hard with electricity it's really really hard if you go to someone's home today in in nigeria who even who's got all the money to afford any solution they want there these giant lead acid batteries usually with the terminals exposed and they look at big car batteries and and there's just wires running between them and if your kid touched those connectors like they would get a an electric shock that could kill them they're unsafe they're ugly and you know lithium batteries give us this opportunity to build beautiful batteries and in some ways even a macbook is a beautiful battery with it right with a bunch of stuff around it and so we wanted to build this battery system that would just work you'd plug the absolute minimum possible you run one wire to the electrical grid so you could get power if you needed it and you could export power if you needed it and then one wire out that's your twenty four hour reliable power and then you run that to whatever if you wanna power your whole home on it that's great if you can't afford that yet then you power some of the plugs in your home or the lights in your home and etcetera right and you build up to ultimately what you want which is just to generate your own power use your own power and if you need to buy a little from the grid sometimes that's fine sometimes it's cloudy right but not counting on it and you can disconnect completely if you want to so it's a huge step forward for us technically it really pushed the limits of a very very good engineering team to build and yeah i'm just proud it's shipping and there's been interest all over the world so we're literally shipping our first units this month you know that's just the thrill yeah cheers man excited for that i remember i don't know your plus ago when you were talking through how to do this and oh my god you coached me through the deal that led to that happened and and everything i mean it's i can't talk too much about it but there was a very very intricate and innovative partnership with a public company that led to this product shipping because we couldn't build all it by ourselves and it's funny when you find some technology out there even if it's owned by another company there's always a way to solve for that and get it deployed for you and so we should also tell people we interact in part of this little group i don't know what we we call the juno group for those who don't know so jun the reason we got this name was such a good name it's a good name and that origin is back in the day i think it's ben franklin yes it's a ben franklin ism ben franklin had a group i'm gonna kinda butcher the definition i think you might actually know more about it maybe maybe i should like do it but i'll i'll give you my version you correct me ben franklin used to have this group that he would meet with on some either every friday i think it was every friday or something something like that where he would go and it was a it was a group of like minded individuals who were coming together for what what he called mutual improvement it was a club of mutual improvement and so they would get together and in their case they would talk about politics and philosophy and social issues and that it was just a discussion club and the idea was if you get all these great people together every friday i'd have a discussion it will raise everybody's game we kinda do the same thing mh me you and a group of friends and we get together not as off as we want to but you know it used to be monthly and now as we lost a little bit of our momentum but we get together we eat dinner and we talk and we talk about hey you know here's where i'm at here's where i'm at with our business here's the big challenge on my plate so when you were negotiating this deal you said i'm negotiating this really tricky deal help me think through this and we get together and this has been one of the most useful things for me as an entrepreneur and one of most fun things for me as an entrepreneur is to have this group talk a little bit about what your experience is there because i want people listening to this if even five percent of the people listening to this like start a club like this i think it will like be one of the best things in their life so tell me what your experience has been with this mutual improvement society that's you you said it i just recommend this so highly to everybody now because it's what a difference it's made for me i think when you're an entrepreneur and when you're creative sometimes you're the only person like that in your company right because you're gonna surround yourself with executor right you need people especially people who are in let's say non competitive or adjacent but somewhat related practices i mean the amount of value you added for me despite being in video game streaming from i i'm an african solar electrification and like you've given me tips of can you know transform the culture in my company you've given me tips that made me more productive but more than that i think it's sometimes even just talking through something with really smart people who ask really good questions right like that alone just gets you ninety percent of the way there yeah yeah i i would say it's like thirty percent therapy and seventy percent strategy but in reality the numbers might be the opposite yeah yeah i it totally is it totally is and it's so i think what's worked really well for us twos we've kept the level really high so we will only kinda bring one new person at a time and right kinda see if they gel and see if they add value to the group but i can count on that the core group is just so smart and just it really does feel like a mutual it feels like in some ways i'm just always getting more than i give to it and right that's the right feeling and you just hosted everybody in utah for a trip so once a year we actually get together for a weekend xavier has this amazing house in utah we go there missed it this year because i have a new baby so i wasn't able to join what did i miss anything great oh man well well you you missed a lot of things i think zach had one of the best ideas for a new app ever so i'm not gonna say it on this podcast because i want anybody to steal it but it's a real a really good idea see eva and i another member of the group we're working on some projects together so that's i think one of the exciting things about seeing this now is we're seeing each other through exits and cycles and new startups right and collaborating with each other on new stuff which is really funny just to see that cycle of like rebirth yeah it's you know they do in in science they do these things called longitudinal studies right where they they measure a population for like twenty years yes and they observe them to check with them what you know half a year every year or something like that they so they give this amazing like long term view of how something of the long term effects of x y and z and i'm doing the same essentially with other people in their companies right so like you know we've been doing this for a couple years and now you see people like you said you know we sold our company somebody else did theirs somebody else's company has to fall and then they get reborn and so you see oh i remember when we were thinking about that decision then they made that decision this were the effects of that decision here's what's next so you get to learn in this way that you don't usually get because normally if i read a book or i read tech crunch or something like that i'm just seeing that after the fact here's what happened yep moment in time type of thing i didn't get to see how the decision was made what were the effects what were the results what came after that that that deep context is so powerful isn't it yes and i do think in entrepreneurship it's like shu like creative destruction like it plays out on an individual level probably even more like i've seen this with my entrepreneurial friends when they get into like they're like incredibly talented but they're working on either a mediocre idea or something who's kinda time is passed in the market and just by force a will and creativity they're still making the thing grow and they're still making the things thrive but they're kind of tiring themselves out and then i see one way or another they transition out of it and they have this rebirth moment and it's like oh my god now they're taking everything they learn and they're right and they're they're go after this next thing and so and it's nice i have some space now i went from being ceo of z to it was really a three or four year project to remove myself as ceo because i knew i didn't wanna be that forever i knew my job with that company the most important thing i did was just to start it but not only to start it but really start an industry mh and so i had lunch with a friend of mine who's been an entrepreneur entrepreneurial both for profit and nonprofit and he's like i don't care what happens to z what i'm gonna give you credit for is that you showed everybody that you can bring solo to the mass market in africa and that has a spurt of boom in an investment i mean we've raised a hundred and fifty but there's probably five times as much investment at least that's gone into the sector around that and all sorts of different models that we've learned from big corporates getting into it all sorts of things and it literally all sprung out of like us sitting around in rush tanzania go into living rooms and saying okay we think this can work yeah you know what you just said i think is not something most people would say so most entrepreneurs when they hear you know i started this thing i was the kind of i ran through the walls to like get started in this space and now there's all these competitors or just all this funding going into all these different companies a lot of entrepreneurs view that as a negative right because it feels like you know i have this pie and it's being now competed on with all these other people but when you're doing a social impact business you're doing a mission driven business it is actually net positive hey the more of us that are attacking this problem the more likely it gets solved and more likely like like all of our missions actually come true i think that is one of the beautiful things about doing a social impact business and so i wanted to ask you if somebody listening to this they have that aspiration which says yes i got this business brain yes i have this execution ability but i wanna apply it in a way that's gonna do a lot of good in the world i build for profit or or even nonprofit but impact businesses what would you advise them what should they be reading what was really impactful for you give some advice to that person i mean number one you're barking up the right tree i think some of the best people i've ever met in my life some of even my closest friends have come through the mission aligned work because you find that there's an automatic filtering mechanism that happens for your employees or your partners or your investors mh there's usually easier ways to make money that don't have any mission involved in it but you find past a certain point at least for a lot of people that you have enough as far as money goes you know you'll always be able to get a normal job if you need to make some more money and so you know what matters and so you see a lot of people coming to this much later in life previous generation where they were sixty and they made a bunch of money in roofing or god knows what and they're like oh my god i gotta get back and then they formed big foundation and they try to give as much as they can and i think that's still a valid model but i think you look at a lot of people now and they're saying no not only do i want to give back sooner because the problems are pressing today climate change is not a problem i can donate to fifty years from now clementine problem i need to work on today but if you do have resources if you have sold a business people are given it away today i have a friend in australia who has made over a billion dollars over his career in mainly accounting software of all things and he is given it all the way in the next ten years in the next ten years he's given it away and he's basically gonna be left with i think he's keeping about what think about one percent of his wealth so he's given away ninety nine it's gonna be gone in ten years wow not leaving a foundation with his name on it just funding as much good work as possible over next step as soon as possible basically yeah yeah yeah so i think that the one thing i would say about impact businesses you get a lot of goodwill from customers and you have to communicate that to them what you're doing but you really get rapid fans there's a lot of investors who really wanna get behind it i would say every one of our investors has gotten in mission first even though they've gotten in in commercial terms right but i think you do have to make the economics work i've seen some people do something where they're not really clear on what are the economics like it has to work as a business and then in a perfect world i think better world did this better than most actually where it was so baked into the business model the mission you couldn't take it out you you would actually lose in our in that so that business you lose all the partnerships that generate all the inventory that the business stops it's so not nice to have if it's what makes the engine work and in fact it makes the engine even better because we have all this trust with these partners so in better world's case everybody's paid on consignment well that requires a tremendous amount of trust that we will actually do what we say we do which is sell the books and and you know pay them their their share and that trust only get it's built up over time so we actually get a lower cost of inventory and we get a differentiated brand in that case from that model and that and that i think is really kind of the ideal thing you can you can run after and if you were twenty one years old again today and you couldn't work on z you can work on better world what would you wanna start today oh man so many good things out there so i think the things that i see we you know because i'm in the energy world i'll speak to that first but then i'll speak more broadly so we are in this giant transformation of how we do a lot of things when it comes to energy we've we've gone from a world where essentially energy was abundant and cheap because you could burn coal to one where it pays to be thoughtful about energy and it also now energy is cheap in the form solar but unreliable so solar insanely cheap you can deploy it anywhere but it's it's completely unreliable as a as a source power and so one of my views is that batteries are gonna eat the world just of all sizes that if you look twenty years in the future almost every home almost every business in the developed and developing world will have batteries it mh and that battery might be an electric vehicle but it might also be a stationary battery in your home and that's both economic reasons because they're actually very useful to the power grid so it saves the power grid a lot of money if there's energy storage way down the line at the household level right but they're useful to the household because if the power cuts your your power doesn't go off and so i think people in the us are really unprepared for this because we've been used to reliable power and now pg and e's just turned everybody off so i think that's one thing that people can watch and can get involved in and it's something that's highly distributed the value proposition for a commercial energy storage in new jersey is gonna be completely different than in florida and in florida maybe the need is more air conditioning so maybe you do something where you cool block of ice overnight when the electricity cheap then you release the cool from that during the day when you need air conditioning so there's all these innovative approaches and technologies to how do we use resources more efficiently that are totally profitable but require local deployment and require innovative thinking require software often to to manage that so i think that's one big thing i also think that university education has just become this thing that drives people into crippling debt yeah and we're starting to see interesting solutions to that i think we're still in like any one of that nine inning game of truly disrupting and decent education in a way where you get better education that's more credible at a way lower cost and you get it on the time you need it where you need it there's so many opportunities in that it's kinda blowing i like it okay great so if if i'm listening to this and i'm like this guy's amazing which i think a lot of people are gonna say and they wanna follow you more they wanna hear more thoughts you get in touch with you whatever shout out how people should kinda connect with you beyond this well i'm terrible at twitter but maybe this will be the thing that actually gets me to tweet right so luckily i'm the only xavier he out there x a v i e r h e l g e s e n so you can as a bunch of people who follow me on linkedin there's let's see my is private but definitely follow me on twitter and i i will promise to tweet okay great love it and if you are starting your own june group tweet at me i'm at sean on twitter or you know how to get to me email me linkedin whatever you want and i will give you my playbook of how we did it how we set it up how we run the meeting that sort of thing you could do whatever you want with it but i if i if that helps you get started with your group of society of mutual improvement oh you ready the playbook on yeah i i will be download or number one and i will i will be a editor and a contributor or whatever i can be to that playbook because loving that will make society better is more more great alright thanks for coming man i appreciate it thanks sean