Dear Friend of Without,
Right before our Shark Tank episode aired, Sima, a former informal worker who has been working with us for close to a year, came into my office, looking exasperated.
“They’ll take my home away,” she cried.
Sima’s husband suffers from a chronic liver issue. He has had multiple operations and for the last one, Sima had taken a loan from a money lender at a whopping 120% annual interest.
She had been making interest payments on time, but it was time to pay back the hefty principal that she just couldn’t afford.
The money lender said, “No worries, just hand over your house to me instead.”
This drove her into a frenzy – that’s all I have.
We helped her out and she still has her home, but what is this world?
Sandhya, the mother of our organization, was admitted to the hospital recently. She has health insurance through us, so the fees were covered. Great, right?
BUT, it took our team two full days to fill out detailed paperwork to file for her claims.
At one point, I had to sign a letter that said Sandhya Chandak Bhosle is the same person as Sandhya Bhosle, because matching first and last names are not enough it seems. And it will still take two months for her to get her money refunded.
So, what’s the point of health insurance? Sandhya is not very comfortable reading and writing, let alone doing any of that in English. How is she supposed to file her claims if there’s no one to help her out? Also, how scalable is our team spending two days on this one claim?
I’ve started with these anecdotes to engage you, and more importantly, to ground myself.
Because I’ll be complaining in this letter about things that are a lot more trivial in comparison, and not for a moment do I want you to think that I’ve lost perspective.
*****
As the glam of Shark Tank and Lakme Fashion Week fades, it’s been back to the grind.
And that’s been good.
It feels like all these distractions from the beginning of the year, while glorious and proud, have been just that – distractions. They don’t make or break our future. They might help push things along but are not critical, so it’s important to not be swayed by their allure.
The last three months have been all about building (and funding, more on that later).
We launched a dandelion of colours for our sunglasses, the justification here being that: this proves our material can be colour-coated with any hex code that you want.
We also fixed some structural issues with the build of our shades, and the current versions are the best they’ve been, still not perfect though.
We also launched a new material, “Eco Terephthalic Acid” or EcoTPA. What’s that? It is one of the building blocks (monomers) of that legendary plastic used to make water bottles you like crushing with your hands – PET. This monomer generally comes from fossil fuels deep within the crust. But we extract it from packets of chips (MLP). So yes, it’s pretty darn “Eco”.
We also upgraded our first material and gave it a semi-sophisticated trade name: Verdiflx (yes we dropped the “e” in flex). As a refresher, it’s a blend of polyolefins extracted from MLP. This upgraded version now flows and moulds a little better, and is also now available in a whitish colour, which is more valuable in the materials world.
Earlier this year, we conducted an important recyclability test for this material – how many heat cycles can our material cope with? Basically, you extrude the same material ten times and see how its mechanical properties are impacted. Generally, with every extrusion or heat cycle, the properties drop, and the material worsens.
But our material magically held its mechanical properties for ten heat cycles. This is pretty nuts. This means our material is pretty recyclable. We even wrote a white paper on it. But the results are probably too good to be true, so we are going to try and replicate it, and temper any celebrations until later.
Whenever I visit the field or speak with folks who deal with waste collection, the new thorn in the mix seems to be textile waste. This thorn kept pricking me too recently, so we dug up the tech we had for recycling polycotton textile waste.
Basically, most of your favourite sports clothes have a blend of polyester and cotton, which feels so nice. And it’s a little stretchy and doesn’t catch too much sweat, it’s great!
BUT, it’s also not good for the environment. It’s considered “unrecyclable” because it is blended with two classes of materials – biological cotton and non-degradable polyester (plastic). So yeah, it’s also multi-material like our favourite packet of chips.
And like for your favourite packet of chips, we also have tech for polycotton that recycles it by separating the polyester and cotton. We are in the middle of optimizing this technology and still need to figure out if there’s enough value in it, but it looks promising.
Meanwhile, the product team have been pumping products. Soon, we will launch keychains, candle holders, plectrums, planters (pots) and coasters. We will probably sell these online but are trying to focus on the B2B space. Because all the cool people seem to be doing so. No, but seriously, that’s an easier market to cater to, if we do crack it.
Our pilot plant design is also in full swing. Detailed engineering is nearly there but it seems like the last 10% is the hardest. And it should be so, we need to get this right. We still don’t know where exactly we will be building this and by when, but it should all happen within the next twelve months if everything goes to plan.
Speaking of which, we have been trying to close our funding round which is soul-sucking. It just seems to find reasons to get delayed, and it might be delayed another 3-6-9 months. Which isn’t fun.
But we are alright, we have enough runway. It’ll delay a few things operationally and make us a little nervous, but we are fortunate on the whole to be able to bear that.
I remember having a tough conversation with one of the investors about this while looking at 4 JCBs destroying the slums that I can see from my office window. Our funding was getting delayed while a whole army of families was being relocated, as they saw their houses get mauled down.
Yes, problems are relative, but so is perspective.
As an organization, we are now 25 people strong. We have had new scientists, engineers and analysts join the fray. And we’ve had some optimisers (former waste-pickers) finish an entire year of full-time work. So much so that they’ve just gotten raises, raises differentiated by merit, just like the normal workforce. They also received their ESOP grant letters at our first quarterly lunch with the team.
The other day, Jayashree, the first informal worker we formalized, came to us a little concerned. She told us that the fixed deposit we had helped set up for her a couple of years ago had matured, but the bank had reinvested it without her knowing. She was almost up in arms until we told her that it was normal.
These are the types of problems I wish more of our optimisers had.
We are at an important juncture in our journey.
The past three-and-a-half years have been great, better than we could have imagined. But the two most important years beckon.
We need to prove the financial viability of our model. We need to be able to economically sustain the impact we want to create. Dhanda banana hain.
While we have done many good things, we haven’t really focused on the monetisation part of things. As a research start-up, that’s alright in the beginning, but it’s time.
I tell the team that it’s like entering the Olympics. You are obviously well prepared for it because otherwise, you wouldn’t have made it so far. But once you get there, you still need to perform to win any medals.
It’s time for us to limber up and perform.
Yours,
Anish
