 When I was at business school, I connected with Sam Goldman, my business partner. When he was in Benin, he was living for a couple years in the Peace Corps in a village without access to electricity, and his neighbor's son was burned in a kerosene fire. And Sam witnessed this and came out of the experience thinking, this is not right. In the 21st century, there is technology with solar panels, with LEDs. It shouldn't be that one-fifth of the world still uses kerosene lamps for lighting. Since we started in 2006, we've been able to impact over 30 million people living without access to electricity. Once people have light, it opens up time for them. It opens up opportunity. Kids can study longer. People can do more productive things at night that they couldn't do before, which allows them to actually earn more income. And we find that our customers not only save money because they don't have to buy kerosene anymore, their incomes actually go up. In order to make the company successful, we really needed to be in the market. So Sam moved to India to focus on sales and marketing. And I moved to China to focus on the operations and quality side. There were multiple challenges we faced along the way. The quality standard actually has to be far higher than if you're designing products for the U.S. and Europe, even though these customers have very little ability to pay. They don't want to buy a product and invest a huge amount of money, $5, $10, or $20, which is a large sum of money for them, and a product that's going to break in two months. There have been conditions that are hot, dusty, humid. The products are going to get wet. They're going to get dropped. They're going to be kicked by a cow. All sorts of things will happen to these products. And they're in use nearly all the time, almost 24 hours a day. They're being charged during the day. They're being used at night, and these products are constantly moving around. And I think what enabled us to get the quality level to a place where our customers really loved the product was a lot of field testing, a lot of human-centered design, and actually taking real physical manufactured product into the village, seeing what broke, and then iterating back into our manufacturing process. Very often, I think, I see a lot of product concepts that are out there, often created in universities or in design schools, and sometimes there's a gap between a good idea and what's actually realistic in the field. The other thing we did on the product side was really partner with our supply chain, and that was really why I was in China. There are things you can do to reduce costs that actually increase quality. In order to do that and to make those decisions, we had to work very closely with all parts of the supply chain. And those things aren't really available, like if you search the web or try to find other resources, you really just have to be there having a presence on the ground. In China, it was critical to our success for the product. This is our most affordable product. It's our entry-level solar light. It retails for around $8 to $10 in the market. And you charge it in the sun during the day, and you get four hours of light at night. And this is really designed as a study lantern for children. This is a solar lantern. And when I show this to people who are living in the US or in Europe, their first instinct is, this looks like a thermos for water. When you actually talk with customers in a village, when they see this shape, they immediately say, ah, it's a lantern. It's a modern lantern. It's just always been critical for us from the beginning to design our products in collaboration with our customers to have marketing that really appeals to them and doesn't talk down to them, but really treats them as an equal and with dignity. When we started in D-Lite, there was essentially no market penetration of any solar products. Initially, it was our view that businesses just weren't taking this seriously. They weren't looking at this as a real market, similar to what happened with mobile phones in Africa. So we really wanted to be a first mover into this space. We thought the products would just sell. If you have a great product at a great value for money, it's just going to move in the market. And that was a challenge that was really unexpected for us. Distribution and marketing and branding, those things were so important and required, I would say, more innovation than even the product side so people could be aware of the product and then the product could be pulled off the shelf. It's been a process. It really took four or five years for us to get to a point where there was enough understanding in the market about these technologies. There was enough understanding and trust of our brand that larger partners with brands of their own were willing to take us on. I think there were a few key components for us in enabling us to really scale. We organized our company from the beginning as a global company. We created a global manufacturing base, even though initially we were selling only in one country. We created an investment structure that could really scale with the company. When we initially raised funds, we raised just equity money. And we had a mix at that time of both venture capital and impact investment. The impact funds were more patient in their time horizon. They realized these were difficult markets we were trying to crack and having that patience in our capital structure was really critical for us. And then in addition to those sources of financing, we were also able to get some grant funding. And this is something that we hadn't even considered at the beginning when we started the company because we were a for-profit organization but there were foundations that were out there that were so interested in the impact we were doing and there were projects we were doing within the company that we wouldn't be able to fund out of equity or debt financing but could accelerate our growth and accelerate our impact. One thing that founders can do sometimes is try to hold on too long. And in our experience, letting go of control at the right times has been really enabling and it enables others to step up into leadership and we made a decision to really professionalize our executive team. We realized that the company was gonna just enter into a real hyper-growth of scale and we felt in order to do that with minimal risk, we really needed to bring on people who were culturally aligned but who had the right kind of experience and background. It's really important to get the right people so it's important to spend the time to really get to know them, to go through a very tough recruiting process but once they go through that, really empowering them is something that's critical in order to scale up the organization because as the organization gets big, when you're operating in 60 countries and are building many different kinds of products and there's just a lot going on, you can't know everything anymore so it just becomes really important to release some of that control to people you trust and people who have the right kind of experience.