Imagine the following. You’re in the audience of a business plan competition. The next team up to present is d.light, a for-profit social enterprise that plans to bring light to people without access to reliable electricity. Two young men introduce themselves as the founders of d.light, and say they’re going to start their presentation with a demonstration. The lights go out. In a few seconds, you see a dim light at the front of the room, and smell smoke and burning kerosene. After about 30 seconds, your eyes start to water and it becomes slightly uncomfortable to breathe. The lights switch back on and the smoke clears.
The young men apologize for the lack of light and smoke, but say the demonstration was staged to illustrate a point.
Around 1.5 billion people, or more than one fifth of the world’s population, have no access to electricity, and about a billion more have an unreliable or intermittent supply. A large share of these people use kerosene to light their homes at night. Kerosene fumes are extremely unhealthy, even fatal. In fact, the United Nations estimates that kerosene fumes kill 1.5 million people per year, and cause countless health complications for others.

Sam Goldman and the Origins of d.light
The scene described here actually took place—several times. It’s the way Sam Goldman and Ned Tozen, the cofounders of d.light, introduced the company at business plan competitions and when they pitched investors. d.light is an international consumer products company serving “base of the pyramid” consumers who don’t have access to reliable electricity. Although d.light technically started in a class at Stanford University, its beginning can be traced to Sam Goldman’s youth and early adulthood. Growing up, Goldman’s parents worked for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a government agency that provides economic and humanitarian assistance in countries across the globe. Goldman lived in Pakistan, Peru, India, Canada, and several other countries.
As a young adult, while working for the Peace Corps, he lived for four years in a West African village that had no electricity. A neighbor boy was badly burned in a kerosene fire, an event that deeply impacted Goldman. At one point during his time in the village, Goldman was given a battery-powered LED headlamp, and was struck by the dramatic difference that simply having light at night can make in a person’s life. He could now cook, read, and do things at night that were unimaginable without the benefits reliable lighting provides.
Impacted by this experience, Goldman sought out a graduate program that would provide him the opportunity to start thinking about creating a business to take light to people without access to reliable electricity. He landed at Stanford, which was starting a program in social enterprise. A pivotal class was Jim Patelli’s 2006–2007 Entrepreneurial Design course. The class was divided into teams, and each team was challenged to address a significant issue in the developing world. Goldman was teamed up with Ned Tozen, a business classmate, and two engineering students, Erica Estrade and Xian Wu. The team tackled the problem of light for people without access to reliable electricity, and developed a rough prototype of a portable LED light that could be recharged via solar power. That spring, the team traveled to Burma for the purpose of going into villages that didn’t have access to electricity to introduce their device. Villagers told them they spent up to 40 percent of their income on kerosene. When shown how their crude prototype could provide light at night and be recharged during the day simply by deploying small solar panels on their homes, the villagers were so taken that one women actually wept.
According to one account of the team’s trip, in one village the local police confiscated the prototypes. They, too, needed light at night.

Design and Distribution
After completing the Entrepreneurial Design course, the teammates headed their separate directions for the summer. In the fall, they reunited, and determined to continue to work on their business concept. The concept of using solar power to recharge portable lights in poor rural areas wasn’t new. In fact, it had been tried many times. The problem, in Goldman and his team’s estimation, was a combination of design and distribution. Previous models relied either on NGOs and governments “giving” fairly expensive lights to people without access to electricity, which they couldn’t afford to replace when used up or if broken, or commercial enterprises buying extremely inexpensive lights in China and exporting them to Africa and elsewhere, where they performed poorly.
It was clear to Goldman that neither of these models was sustainable.
So Goldman and his team, driven by the possibility of changing literally millions of people’s lives throughout the world, recruited talented engineers and distribution experts, who worked on a near pro bono basis, to help with the project. The goal was to produce a solar-powered portable LED light that was exactly what rural villagers needed—nothing more and nothing less. It also had to be cheap enough that villagers could afford it yet produce sufficient margins for d.light to be profitable. The decision was made early on that d.light would be a for-profit company. The company’s goal was not to impact 100,000 people or a million people but to impact hundreds of millions of people. Goldman and his team knew that their lofty ambitions would take cash and additional R&D efforts, which would require private-sector investment capital.
During this period, which covered the summer of 2007 until early 2008, Goldman and his cofounders continued traveling to remote areas for the purpose of obtaining feedback about their prototype. During Christmas break, instead of traveling home to see his family, Goldman was in the middle of Miyamairi doing research. The team thinned some in early 2008, with Goldman, Tozan, and Wu continuing. d.light was now up-and-running and opened its first international offices in India, Shenzhen, China, and Tanzania.

Discussion Questions
1. Of the six reasons listed in the case that d.light was successful in business plan competitions, which reason do you find the most compelling? Explain your answer.
2. If you were the founders of d.light, what would your marketing strategy be? How would you educate people in remote areas about the existence of your device and the benefits of purchasing it?
3. Why do you think the problem of bringing light to people who don’t have access to reliable electricity isn’t being tackled in a meaningful way by a large lighting company, like General Electric? What qualities do Sam Goldman and his team have that will help them solve the problem of providing light to the 2.5 billion people in the world who don’t have access to electricity or only have access to intermittent electricity, which General Electric or a similar large company is unlikely to muster?
4. Why do you think Sam Goldman goes out of his way to talk about the importance of d.light’s business plan? In what ways do you think having a meticulously crafted business plan helped d.light?

Application Questions
1. Make a list of the ways in which Sam Goldman’s passions and life experiences made him the ideal founder for d.light. Then, make a list of your most distinct passions and life experiences. Study the list. Is there a potential venture for which you might be the most ideal founder?
2. Find an example of an entrepreneurial company that is addressing a significant issue in the developing world (excluding companies featured in the “You Be the VC”
features in this book). Briefly relate that company’s story. What similarities, if any, do you see between the company you’re reporting on and d.light?