(Note: I solemnly swear this letter was not generated by AI.)
Dear Friend of Without,
It started with a moment of clarity from Sri Sanjana.
“It’s like a sphere, Anish.”
A moment where it all came together after days of brainstorming, as if the Gods had conjured this hallelujah themselves.
Sri Sanjana is our precocious 21-year-old Gen-Z marketing wiz who is way beyond her years, but who also makes me feel terribly old (she had never ever heard this song).
We had been going back and forth over the concept of circularity and how incomplete it felt.
Conscious consumption should be more than just circular or environmentally focused.
There are also deep-rooted issues around exploitative supply chains that need to be addressed. 700 million people globally are classified as poor while being employed. They are made invisible – easier to exploit, right?
And then there is this whole wave of greenwashing sweeping over, both intentional and unintentional.
There is a gap between what feels sustainable and what actually is.
We call this the Green Gap (thank you, AI, for that blessed name because the phrase greenwashing was clearly not enough).
It’s the hidden reality behind good intentions, where “recyclable” doesn’t mean that it actually gets recycled, and “recycled” doesn’t mean that it’s being done ethically.
70-90% of bioplastics are either not compostable or industrially compostable – i.e. they need to be taken back to special composting facilities with fancy temperature, humidity and UV settings – yea, not happening.
We felt that the idea of circularity didn’t capture this nuance.
In the pursuit of evolving circularity into something more multi-dimensional, we came up with some terrible names. Names like The Dharmic Loop and The Karmic Loop that would even put our local Osho buddies to shame.
And then, Sanj dropped the sphere bomb into the room. The stars aligned, the angels sang, and for a hot second, it felt like we had cured cancer (and poverty).
Our overexuberance eventually faded, but the idea of the sphere held strong. And then we got all philosophical because we had clearly just seen God.
The Earth is not circular, it’s spherical (vah beta vah).
Consumption and materials shouldn’t just be circular, they should be spherical.
Sphericality is our call to go beyond circularity. Because sustainability isn’t just about closing loops, it’s about making them fair, transparent, and future-ready.
So, we came up with the Sphericality Index, which helps us measure exactly that – our product or material’s real impact across six core pillars:
- Environmental Impact (Full-Spectrum): Goes beyond carbon, including land use, ocean leakage, and pollution footprint.
- Social Fairness: Fair wages, safe work, human dignity.
- Economic Viability: Affordable, scalable, self-sustaining.
- Transparency: Honest about both impact and limitations.
- Circularity: Is it recyclable, reusable, or landfill-bound?
- Additionality: Creates net new impact, not just green reshuffling.
We then went to our Science team and said guys, “Let’s white-paper this.”
And in true research style, Midhun and Dr Lok took this idea and fleshed it out into a 100-page bible with a fully weighted, sophisticated scoring system. They then condensed it into a 15-page white paper and a custom GPT, BounceBright, that can help you estimate the sphericality of a product or a material.
Yes, we used AI heavily, but as Midhun mentions eloquently in the paper: While AI helped us write this paper, it did not author our values, nor did it shape the Sphericality Index itself – that work is entirely our own.
I think that part he fully wrote himself.
Then the sphere was handed over to the other prodigy on the team, Ajvad, who used AI and his brains to conjure an interactive, colourful sphere that morphs and twists and turns as you toggle the various factors of sphericality – the more spherical the product, the more sphere-like the output. Go check it out here.
And I stood there in awe, marvelling at how humans and machines came together to create this in a couple of weeks. Something that would have taken months, if not years, to put together only a few years earlier.
To be clear, we’ve created the Sphericality Index to measure ourselves and to keep ourselves honest, not to put ourselves on a pedestal, or to bring anyone else down.
Sustainability will never be a perfect sphere, but we should strive towards it and be brave enough to be transparent about where we can be better.
Our sunglasses scored a low “B” grade on the Sphericality Index.
Even though they are ~90% recycled and made highly ethically, the frame is coated with paint, which reduces its overall circularity. Our current manufacturing process is also expensive compared to existing processes.
Don’t get me wrong, we think our recycled sunglasses are more spherical than regular sunglasses (they scored a “D”), but we are not perfect. The white paper and this page here have grades for some of our other products and materials if you’re curious.
This has made our entire team smarter. It’s given us a better blueprint to develop processes, materials and products while keeping in mind that perfect is the enemy of good, but the least you can do is be transparent about it.
*****
Unfortunately, this letter is not yet over. My sister probably continues to be bewildered at why I’m writing this sentence, some 900 words in.
But you must know that in addition to spheres, the machines have finally arrived.
Our first-of-a-kind demonstration plant is almost fully decked out and trials have been largely successful. All of this has been delayed by a solid 8 months, but progress is progress, and molecules are friggin’ hard.
And it’s not been without drama.
Fights with vendors, electricity struggles, deep human issues, landlord troubles, machine limitations and diarrhoea-like rain have all played their part. For all those entrepreneurs building apps on laptops, I envy you and your bits.
Through all of this, the team has held strong.
Not a day goes by without me feeling deeply fortunate about our team – they give and do with all their heart, almost relentlessly, despite me being mainly the bad guy.
It’s time to celebrate all that and more. We will be showcasing our demonstration plant and everything we stand for here at Without on October 11th, 2025.
It’s probably going to be the most important day in Without’s life so far (and mine too). If you’ve read till here, you probably care, so reach out to me if you want an invite to this event in Pune, it’s going to be a ride.
A whole lot of other things have also transpired in the last three months, a lot of which we will be singing about in the next three months, so this deep end of the letter can be spared.
But I do want to end on a loss.
Last quarter, I had to terminate a former waste picker whom we had hired, trained and who had worked with us for a couple of years. This was the first termination that was not for a dramatic cause (such as alcohol abuse or death threats). This was because of continued underperformance despite multiple chances and warnings.
And it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.
Because it was going to hit her hard. And it did.
A week after we let her go, her ex-husband passed away. Her current partner stopped giving her attention, perhaps because she was no longer earning. Her two daughters seemed to have run away to avoid domestic trouble. She’s finding it hard to get a different job.
When I let her go, we gave her an extra couple of months of pay and forgave a 0-percent personal loan. For the couple of years she had worked with us, we had taken deep care of her health, helping with preventive health care and helping her make the most of her health insurance.
But she didn’t seem to keep her end of the bargain – multiple lapses, leaves and lies and an inability to deliver despite multiple chances and warnings.
Was this the right decision? How many chances are enough? Where do you draw the line between charity and fairness?
I’ll leave you with this: since then, we have hired a replacement who was also in need and is now thriving, learning rapidly and adding value to our work that seems fair.
So, we move forward, learning and reflecting along the way, hoping we get more things right than wrong, knowing that we’ll never really know.
Yours,
Anish
