Dear Friend of Without,
An ex-colleague reached out to Suraj and conveyed, “There’s someone I know who desperately needs help. She lost her husband in 2022 becoming the sole breadwinner for her two children. She’s currently working long, difficult hours earning Rs 230/day and can barely feed herself after she feeds her family. Kuch kar sakto ho kya? (can you do anything?)”
Suraj relayed this to me, and I took a deep breath, almost as if the air I was inhaling was adding this weird pressure to the soul and I said, “Not yet, but keep her in mind.”
A few weeks later, while moving to our newer, larger facility, we realized we needed more help taking care of it – sweeping, cleaning, organizing – more hands.
Suraj suggested, “Remember that lady, Syeda (pseudonym)?” And I said, “Bingo.”
So, we hired Syeda part-time like how we start off most of our optimizers.
We pay fairly so she would already be making almost twice what she was making earlier, working half as much – yes, that’s 4x how much she was making before per hour.
On her first day, she came into my cabin for a chat. As she started sharing her story, she almost immediately broke down in tears in what seemed like a mixture of pain and relief – “Sir, they wouldn’t even look at me.”
No ‘sir’, I said softly and turned cold.
These stories are no longer new. They hit a little less hard than they used to. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
What I felt instead was this weird combination of pressure and responsibility.
Giving hope is a responsibility. A responsibility that if you can’t fulfil, you better at least have given it your Goddamn all.
And even then, that might not be enough.
As an organization, we are headed in the right direction. We are growing and our probability of failure is reducing, but it’s still not low enough.
And that’s why, whenever I think of Syeda or any of our optimizers, I take deep breaths.
*****
I can’t believe it’s been almost 4 years since we started off. Long-term thinking is a key principle of ours, and I think we are starting to see the initial bloom of the impact seeds we have sown.
So much so that I finally feel that we are ready to write our first impact report, and tadah, here it is!
We are still nowhere close to where we want to be.
Our numbers seem small, but it’s the depth of impact that matters more to us. And somehow that confuddles even the stalwarts of the impact space, much to my bitterness.
“The numbers are small, Anish,” says someone from an organization that inspired our work, an organization that has shaped the way I think about impact, an organization I love.
“I know, but what about the depth? We can go wide and shallow, but what does that really change?” I retort, mostly in my head.
So, this impact report aims to remove all the sugar that coats many of the other reports and argues for the importance of the compounding effect of deep impact.
For instance, we believe we have fundamentally changed (and are changing) the lives of 14 folks who were multi-dimensionally poor. Not a lot, right?
But these folks have seen an average income increase of 2.5x that has stayed consistent for an average of 12 months. This alone equates to ~Rs 25 Lakhs of additional income that they have received.
That’s how much it costs to give 25,000 free meals, give 8,000 free prescription eyeglasses to the poor or provide a free short-term training program to 300+ folks. All these fat numbers sound better than 14, but what are free food and 1-day training programs really changing?
And more importantly, why are impact organizations incentivized to jazz up their numbers over making permanent, lasting change?
And the additional income is only a part of the deep impact we have created.
Our optimizers also get upskilled out of informal labour into dignified roles where they get health insurance, preventive health tests, prescription eyeglasses, flexible work hours, weekends off, paid leave, paid sick leave, formal employment agreements with Hindi translations attached, ESOPs in the organization and even friggin’ community support if one of them suffers through domestic issues.
One of our optimizers is now raging on Instagram making semi-cringe reels. Which means that she has the time and security to get on it. Time and security that she didn’t have before because she’s a mother of three with a dead husband who passed away in 2016 leaving behind his parents in her care. How do you measure that?
“But Anish, scale matters.”
It does, it does, but let’s not forget depth. And the holy grail is scaling depth, and that’s what we are out to build.
But it takes time, patience and hard work.
Even when it comes to waste, we try and focus on depth. We recycle the least recycled, “impossible-to-recycle” plastic waste by extracting materials from it and creating new materials that are more recyclable and of higher quality. We are doing small quantities right now, but it’s the scalability and the quality of the tech that matters.
And we are at it. And we’ll keep going at it.
For all the vanity-metric-seeking funders out there, there are also those who get it. And we are fortunate to have found those folks.
At the end of last year, we closed the last part of our US$1.8 million funding round from true, patient, impact investors who believe in the long-term change we want to create, while also realising that there could be some financial upside for them, just not as quickly.
No drag-along exit rights, no crazy reserved rights – just a fair foray of faith into our fire. For that, I’ll always be grateful.
A lot of changes happened last quarter.
We moved into our new facility where we have begun building a demonstration plant. A plant that’s probably going to be the first recycling plant in the world that recycles all post-consumer plastic waste without burning anything while formalizing and professionalizing waste pickers out of poverty. This includes our best friend MLP and the notorious textile waste that we all suddenly seem to have started adoring, and we’ve aptly named this demo plant of ours The Cradle after our favourite book.
A mouthful I know, but this whole letter is now a mouthful – a semi-rant that is aware that only a few people will actually get to this late point in this letter. So if you’re here, you care.
We’ve also gone through some legal restructuring, flipping our HQ to the US while having a fully owned Indian subsidiary. So, nothing really changes when it comes to our operations, but there is just so much more patient capital outside of India, so this new structure might just be favourable as we grow. As my mother often says, who knows?
We are also in the process of setting up a parallel non-profit to complement our impact and have also started to publicly share our audited financials (scroll to the end). We believe that while building impact-first organizations, financial transparency is essential.
All seems to be swell, right? More or less.
There have been a lot of ups and downs. We are still looking to add the right leaders to our excellent young team, and we are still trying to figure out how much effort to put into monetization versus focusing on tech. Our rent expense has now increased 7x, and just thinking of that makes me draw a deep breath every single time.
But in all this commotion, we’ve found Lucy – our half-Alsatian rescue dog that serves, protects and entertains us as we try to figure all this out.
Thanks for reading,
Anish
