 It's the end of the day, so I appreciate y'all being here. Even my peeps in the front, yay. So as I said, my name's Dara Dotz. I want to tell you a little bit about my journey in tech and trying to save the world, right? So a little bit about myself. I'm an industrial designer. I've lived and worked in over 37 countries. I primarily focus on working with communities in need. And I like to use technology to benefit the other 90% of humanity. In fact, I like to say that I use Moore's Law's table scraps to aid those at the edges from disaster survivors to astronauts. Speaking of space, why the heck aren't we an interplanetary species yet? It's 2018. I thought we'd be running around in hamster balls, having flying cars. You know, what's going on? What's preventing us from living in space? Well, there's a lot of reasons, of course. First space is trying to kill us. So we actually have to create a really safe environment for us to be in. And it actually means that we can't really take everything with us. So it's incredibly expensive to take things to space. It takes a year, two, three, to set up a mission. It also is incredibly dangerous. Essentially, you have to take everything you want to bring with you and put it on the nose cone of a giant explosive and send it up and hope that it'll actually go where it's supposed to go. And so with that, I think I was trying to do the numbers. And I believe the last time I checked, it's around 40,000 euros per kilo to get things up to space. So that means that we can't bring it all with us, right? So we have to start building things from there in situ with the materials we find. So I actually worked at a startup called Made in Space. I'll give you guys a guess as to what we did. Anybody? No? We made things in space. So what we did is we tried to work on actually creating a gravity-independent 3D printer. So it worked in zero Gs, right? So what we did is we actually had a 3D printer and we did over 400 flight parabolas. And after that, we had a lot of very expensive, horrible, plastic-tasting spaghetti. But we had actually achieved printing in zero G. And as a startup, there's not many startups that can say we actually launched on a rocket. So this is SpaceX 4 Falcon 9. And it was a pretty exciting day for us. And we actually, it did dock with the ISS. The rockets before actually blew up the entire rocket so we were concerned. So there is always still that risk. And here it is. This is our printer that we put in the science glove box, as they lovingly call it, on the ISS. And the reason it's in this box is because we have to make sure the astronauts are safe. We have to make sure that nothing can go wrong. When you use a 3D printer here on Earth, you can open a window to let fresh air in for the off gassing on the space station. You can't do that. You could, but it would be the only time that you open a window. So this is Mission Commander Butch and Samantha Christopher Reddy from ESA. They're pretty excited about the printer, as you can tell. We actually sent up all the files with the printer because we wanted to make it easier for the astronauts to use. And it turns out that they actually wanted to play with it themselves. So Samantha spent all of her free time learning how to use our printer. We had one more file that we were actually going to test and send from Earth to the space station so that we could preemptively create a plan if there was ever another disaster, like Apollo 13. And what we heard on the radio is that Butch actually said he wanted to test our samples. So what we did is we scratched our file and we custom made him a ratchet, emailed it to space, fastest ever delivery. And it cost virtually nothing, because we already had the systems there. So it's pretty awesome that we could do these kind of solutions for people in space. But what about here on Earth? Don't we have issues where we need crazy engineers and solutions? So does anyone remember Haiti or the earthquake? Not too many people. So that's kind of the point, right? Once a disaster happens and it's no longer on the headlines, we kind of forget that they exist and what's going on. And so I went down to Haiti to see what phase three of a disaster was like, two years after the quake. And this is the kind of stuff I saw. It was as if the earthquake had just happened. And it had an eerie similarity to space. It was incredibly time consuming, incredibly expensive, and very dangerous to get the supplies that you need. This is my friend, Nurse Maeve. She's one of my personal heroes. She was actually delivering a baby one night while I was there. And what happened is she didn't have any supplies left, because nobody was donating. So she had to tie up the umbilical cord of the infant. And so she needed something sterile. So all she had left were her last pair of latex gloves. So she actually cut the fingers off of her gloves to tie up the infant, which is a great fix when you think about it. The only challenge is that she didn't know she was going to have to deliver four more babies that night to potentially HIV positive women barehanded. When I heard this story, I thought was enough was enough. I got really angry, actually. And I realized that those umbilical cord clamps were just simple plastic parts. And it occurred to me, I bet you we could 3D print those. So the next time I had power on internet, I got online and I asked social media if anyone had a 3D printer. And lo and behold, I wound up learning how to 3D print in a shipping container in Haiti, hiding from hemorrhagic dengue and malaria. So it was pretty cool that we got to make parts for Maeve. So now we have clamps in Haiti, yay. But what does that mean? Because there's a lot more nurses than just Maeve, right? She's not the only one in this situation. And if you actually want to scale and teach people, what about teaching locals to provide their own solutions? So this is Johnson and I teaching him how to CAD. He's from Sitte Soleil, which is the Slum Porter Prince. And teaching him how to CAD and make medical devices. And here's some of the parts we're doing to get more people in oxygen. And this is actually my favorite photo from all the work that we've been doing. This is Johnson teaching other Haitians how to make their own supplies. And I think that's really powerful. It's not about treating people like victims, it's about treating them like creators. And the most important way to scale, as we all know here, is to have a kick-ass team, right? So as all startups grow, we want to spread out. You got to have people you can have fun with, especially if you work in war zones and crisis zones. You got to be able to laugh and have fun together. So our first big project as an NGO was actually responded to the Nepal earthquake. As you can see here, this is up by the Langtang region and the roads are completely knocked out. Nobody could get supplies. I was on the ground within 37 hours. Other planes couldn't bring supplies in because they were out of gas. So the planes could come in, but they couldn't leave. So these are kind of situations you deal with in crisis zones. So we, as a nonprofit, our goal is to really empower people in these communities, right? So what we do when we go to these communities in crisis is we identify the problems with them collaboratively. We never assume that we know what they're going to need. We actually ask the survivors what they need so we make sure it's actually something they're going to use, concept. And then we co-design with them to get their input so there's a sense of agency and ownership of that solution. And then we manufacture those solutions, primarily actually trying to use what's locally sourced. And then what we do is we leave the equipment and knowledge behind so that when we return home, they can continue forward and keep on solving their own problems. So essentially what we do is we really focus on getting people what they need, where they need it and when they need it. And I don't think you can get a much more perfect example of direct to consumer, right? So we drive up there, we ask them what they need, we create it and build it right there. So that's what we've been up to ever since. And this is an example of a, this is a baby incubator that was in a hospital in Kathmandu that was being unused. This is the corner of it. You wouldn't want to have an infant up against this raw metal, right? So we found the old part, we added a new fix, turned out stronger and better. And we were able to get this $100,000 machine originally back online again for 50 cents worth of plastic. This is a water pipe fitting. We were requested, it sounds kind of funny. Most people can walk to the hardware store to get a pipe fitting. In this case, this was up in the Himalayas. So the snowmelt was really critical for Nepal because so much of the water is contaminated. And so what they needed is a pipe fitting. And for a normal person to get a pipe fitting, they'd have to walk all the way down. It could take anywhere from three to four days to get to a village where they could buy the right pipe fitting. That's if they buy the right pipe fitting when they get back. So it just wasn't feasible. And also, we actually usually train people how to use the 3D printer and the CAD. And the idea of training someone 80 hours to make a simple part seem kind of unrealistic, especially if they live in a tent, right? So we're kind of challenged with, how do we remove the friction? So what we did is we partnered with the university in the UK and made an app. Yay. OK, so this is the first app we've ever made. So I was pretty stoked on it. And so what it is, it's make my pipe. So you don't actually have to spend 80 hours whittling away on solid works or whatever or fusion. You can actually, it's like a generative design software, right? You just put the two measurements in, out pops the 3D model, and then hit Print. Voila, pipe connectors. So it's been really interesting to see how you can take things from the extreme to apply it here. I'm sure you guys can see how this would be very handy here if you have your plumber at your house and you need a custom part. Instead of waiting a week, he can actually make it in his van. So it's kind of fun to think about, right? And then our team lead in Nepal, our designer, Rahm is, I'm going to let him tell you guys about an entrepreneur that he worked with. Local innovator, Mr. Casey had an idea of improved cookie stroke burner, but he couldn't make it because of the level of complexity in his design. So Mr. Casey was planning to go to India to find a CNC machine to make his new design into a prototype because no local run pattern maker were able to turn his product into a prototype. So when he found Filderly with 3D printer in Nepal, then he came to us and shared his design idea. And then we were able to turn his idea into prototype in less than a week. This new cookie stroke burner has a better biomass efficiency. So it consumes less firewood and is good for environment. And also, it produces very less smoke. So it's good for users' health. So what was neat about this is that the product was made by a local entrepreneur. It wasn't a whole new system of how to burn less wood. It wasn't something we had to ship the culture. It already fit within the product. There was no adaptation phase, right? So it was immediately adopted. And what's great about this is it was new technology to make the mold, but traditional casting technology to make the parts. So it was still just augmenting what was already there and not taking away other jobs. And the best part is actually he got a contract for 210,000 of these stove top runners. Which means that in the next, should be in the next 10 or 12 months, 1.2 million people will be positively impacted by this little project. So it's fascinating how you can impact people by just giving them the strength to help themselves, right? And this is another disaster. Yay, crisis. So this is a Hurricanes about a year ago. Hurricane Maria and Irma. This was the devastation that we saw. And I found this particular photo interesting because it's a solar farm and you can see how it's completely decimated on one side with mango metal and another part, it looks like nothing happened. So you never know how the destruction is gonna be tearing places apart. So we got there about a week after the Hurricanes had left. It took that long to get in there to help. And what we found was that there was challenges with power. People couldn't actually charge their phones to even call the mainland to ask for help. So what we found was tons of garbage and broken solar panels. And we were thinking, what if we can repurpose these solar panels or get some little bit of life out of them to get them working again? So what we did is hack, test, rinse, repeat, right? I don't know if any of you guys are hackers, but it was a lot of testing, a lot of prototyping and a couple of broken batteries and other things, but it was a lot of fun, right? So you're in a mess and you gotta get something done and you're on a time crunch, right? So we actually wound up figuring out how to get them working again. We used garbage bags, duct tape, and chewing them. Not even kidding you, like best prototype ever. But once we figured out a safe way to do this and to teach others, we actually had a system and we taught our local partners on the ground there how to reproduce it. So this is my brother's workshop and they actually teach at-risk youth job and construction skills. So now these kids are spreading the information around the island. This is the first Wi-Fi station, completely powered off of garbage. On the island it was a safe area with lights and a way to charge phones. And the really cool part about this is that now these kids know how to make their own solar charging station. So unfortunately there are gonna be more hurricanes. This is not the last they're ever gonna see, but now they can actually help themselves before FEMA and the like even touch ground. And I think that's really the piece about resiliency that I love. This is another happy area that I work in. Our team, has anyone here heard of the white helmets? Few of you, awesome. Oh wow, okay cool, people actually know. So the white helmets are real life superheroes. They are the Syrian civil defense. So when the regime goes in and drops bombs, they actually chase the cars so they can be the first ones there to pull people from the collapsed buildings. We were contacted by one of their partners. They needed more search and rescue tools and they were wondering if we could help them. And so what we discovered is we needed a way to lift buildings off of people, right? And we heard that only three inches is sometimes all you need to save a life. So we had to figure out, because it's in Syria, we couldn't cross the border, we couldn't count on electricity and we certainly couldn't count on any kind of technology getting over the border. So we had to figure out how to make a solution out of what was locally available. So we had phones, we had bombed out cars and bombed out buildings, we had medical kits. So how are we gonna do this? Well, we basically wound up making really strong bladders or balloons. And they were awesome and they're excited because you would never know he's in a war zone, right? Because he's actually making a difference. So we made these really strong balloons that could actually lift buildings and it was super cool until it wasn't because it turns out they kept puncturing. So you're like, what are we gonna do? And then we realized in the back of the cars there's actually rubber mats that you can take, right? Because they're strong, they're resilient and we sewed them over the bladders and it actually prevented them from puncturing. So here's the system. And we were able to make this system for $50 in spare parts. And do you guys wanna see this in action? So here's the testing. So as you see it lift, these can actually lift nine tons. That's about nine or 10 cars. And it's all out of garbage. And the best part about this is that now, this is Usama, he's our team leader in Syria, has made over a hundred of these kits and distributed them around Syria to help the Syrian self-defense. And the really cool part that I love is that this is like lessons we've learned from a war zone, right? But where else can we use things to lift buildings? Earthquakes, right? Other disasters, things like that. So now Usama and his team are actually teaching our Nepali team how to make these airbag lifters to help them apolly government for the next time there's a big earthquake. And our hope is to take this around the world in the next year and teach more people how to save lives. So these are the areas we've been working with other crazy projects. If you guys are as excited about this as I am or wanna learn more, please reach out. And I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much.