(Note: I solemnly swear this letter was not generated by AI. And some of the names below have been tweaked a little as an attempt at privacy.)
Dear Friend of Without,
Today, I want to tell you a story about why capitalism does not have to suck, and why I am so anxious.
In the 1970s, Ramesh’s grandparents came to urban Pune in search of hope.
Their village (gaon) was distraught with drought, and a lack of rain generally meant that their subsistence farm-life, imprisoned by their marginalised caste, was pretty untenable.
The trend then (and even now) was to migrate towards opportunity – a city of hope. Or well, they didn’t really have a choice. Aspiration and action can come from desperation.
Ramesh’s mother picked waste from the streets to earn a dime while they lived in the slums because where else would they live for free?
Neither of his parents went to school, but Ramesh was proud to be the first in his family to finish grade 12, and he started working when he was 18.
At one of his first jobs, he toiled on an assembly line for a reputable manufacturing company that had probably sub-contracted him for far, far less than what would be considered fair.
He thought he had health insurance there, but when a heavy load fell on him and shattered his right leg, he realised he was on his own.
This is the genius of sub-contracting in India.
As a “reputable” manufacturing company, you can sub-contract your sins for pennies and then wash your hands off it when the going gets tough because it’s the “contractors’ problem”, not yours.
Ramesh couldn’t seem to claim health insurance for his shattered leg, but, with the help of support from SWaCH, he managed to get a surgical steel rod inserted into his leg, and recover almost fully.
That’s when Ramesh joined Without, in April 2023, after a few months of recovery.
I remember how quiet, diminutive and cool Ramesh was when he joined us.
“Cool” in the sense that he had the perfect, flowy Bollywood-hero hairstyle and an ear piercing that made him look far cooler than me.
Today, he’s still cool and quiet, but not diminutive.
Ramesh quickly learnt how to use all the machines we had in our lab, including complex engineering machines like Twin-Screw Extruders, and soon he was teaching IIT graduates and PhDs how to use them. He coupled his innate sharpness with discipline and a hunger to grow, which has made him a rockstar at Without.
So much so that recently, he got promoted to being a Shift Manager at Without, running the Cradle floor, alongside Tarun, who is a rockstar of his own, as cool as Ramesh, and with a backstory as tragic.
Tarun became an orphan before the age of 10 and was brought up primarily by his grandmother, who was also a part of the God-sent SWaCH waste-pickers’ union.
Having grown up in a slum house marred by alcohol, Tarun still manages to bring energy, poise and optimism in the way he is. And his hairstyle and Instagram poses are symbolic proof of all that and more.
Despite it all, Tarun and Ramesh have a hunger for growth that might never satiate. They want to get themselves and their families out of the slums, permanently.
And they are willing to work hard for it. It seems like they just needed the opportunity.
Right now, I sense something special brewing at Without.
Yes, I’m biased, but I remember, early on, even the well-meaning used to hint: “Anish, you’re trying to recycle the hardest types of plastic waste WHILE trying to graduate the urban informal poor out of poverty? That’s noble and all, but insane and uhh, bad business.”
But here’s the twist.
Six years in, the two hardest things we do have become our biggest competitive advantages.
Because we tackle the toughest type of plastic waste, it’s easily available. No one wants it, not even the mafia (yet). In fact, we have a long list of folks who can’t wait to send their chip packets to us. So “feedstock”, which is the Achilles heel for many recycling start-ups, is a competitive advantage for us. And it’s cheap.
And because we took on the moral and fiscal responsibility of formalising and training the informal urban poor, folks like Ramesh and Tarun, while paying them living wages (2x of what they were making), while giving them fairly basic benefits like stock options and health insurance, we now have close to 0-percent voluntary attrition on our manufacturing team. Which, in India, is pretty unheard of.
Seems like a pretty good ROI.
In fact, some of the folks have so much potential that now, it would actually be bad business to hire managers over them instead of promoting them.
Why did we decide to do this from the get-go?
Because I wouldn’t want to build Without in any other way. It felt like it was the morally right thing to do, even if it seemed like “bad business” at start.
It seems that if you have the patience, doing the right thing might actually be a better way to do business in the long run.
And now we are deliciously poised in the world of capitalism.
The more revenue we make, the more “impossible” waste we recycle and the more urban poor we give an opportunity to, in a virtuous cycle that uses profit as a tool to do good, not as an outcome to maximise.
We are trying to use capitalism to make capitalism better.
And then, perhaps, this new way of doing capitalism, with people and planet at its core, doesn’t have to suck.
*****
We’ve had the best quarter in the history of Without.
We spun 1 DPF yarn from the worst textile waste, blew food-grade-worthy bottles and film from “impossible-to-recycle” flexible plastic waste, optimized our reaction time by 75% while reducing water usage by half, got into some of the top corporate accelerators in the world with L’Oreal and Mars through Unreasonable, were one of the winners of the Kering Generation Awards, have some good funding news, danced at New York Climate Week, Times Square and at H&M Foundation’s Global Change Awards (a big shoutout to the H&M Foundation team who actually seem to read these letters), refused 4 orders because we were out of capacity, had so much fun at our offsite that we came back tired, dropped a video about our tech that went viral globally and have bombarded you with so much glory on LinkedIn and Instagram that it’s probably, most-likely, borderline annoying.
But behind the glory are still clunks in the machinery that need refining.
We still need to improve our material quality in some respects. We are designing VerdiCycle 2.0, which is so much better than 1.0, but we need to de-risk key changes before scaling 50x with limited time and runway. We need to try and sell the capacity of a first-of-a-kind commercial plant that might only go live more than a year from now. For which we need to raise our Series A for a capex-heavy investment into a new tech that everyone loves but only a few want to actually back.
For all the glory that this story of Without espouses, we are not there yet.
The next two years will determine whether we become another anecdotal failure in the valley of death that “got close”, or an exceptional success that can prove that impact and business can be done better.
And we have a shot, a real shot, at cracking this.
The team is fifty-strong and buzzing, we have the best investors and advisors, and a support system that wants us to succeed. The ball is in our court, we are positioned well and we have to just execute.
But it’s so damn hard.
We only crack this if we can prove that at commercial scale, we can break even financially with serious potential to thrive.
Wherein lies the slippery irony. That in the end, a capitalistic measure will perhaps prove how capitalism can be reformed, which perhaps is our ultimate success.
Which drives my anxiety up the wall.
I’ve never worked harder.
In the last few months, I have taken 21 flights to and from 10 cities across 3 continents (cue: carbon footprint gasps) and have had 275+ meetings, at least half with brands, investors and partners.
I was only able to calculate all this because of MCPs and my best friend, Claude, who have not only made me and us at Without more productive, but have shown us greys of mental fatigue that I am not used to.
My personal life is non-existent, I don’t really work-out or play football or read or write anymore. I am inadvertently pushing people I love away for something bigger?
Because cliché as this sounds, since I quit my finance job in New York almost a decade ago, this is the moment I’ve been building towards. Isn’t this the time to lay it all on the line? To go full throttle?
Change doesn’t come easy.
I just hope I’m not drinking my own Kool-Aid.
Thank you for reading,
Anish
*****
