Pinch Me

Maybe five years from now this whole beginning phase of the company will feel like a blur, like one crazy, exciting, exhausting, and intense chapter. But right now, it feels like every month is its own chapter, with its own story, its own challenges, and its own growth outcomes. A lot of sleepless nights, terrible jokes, and max hustling (all of which are on-going) from a group of people who are now my closest friends, and we have built something together that is cooler than my wildest dreams could have pictured. 

The last couple weeks felt intensely surreal, as I worked remotely from beautiful Indonesian islands and managed the launch and installation of a new project. Don’t worry, despite the stunning views, nothing goes quite according to plan, so the challenges were aplenty. Still, it was too absurdly good to be true, especially when I retrace our steps and think about how we got here.

It was only a year and a half ago when the tech didn’t work and we were watching our runway approach zero. We had team meetings to discuss all the scenarios in which we would succeed, but also to plan for the possibility of failure. We worked in one village in Cambodia, with one partner. And for every software update we wanted to release, we spent the entire day going to the village, plugging a computer into each Okra unit and manually transferring new code. We lived together, worked out of our living room, and used ping pong tables as desks, never having time to play ping pong itself. As an energy company, we once forgot to pay our own energy bill and had our power cut off. We fumbled when investors asked for our legal team to review documents, and wrote employee contracts for each other when a grant committee asked where they were. Thankfully sometimes it looked like we knew what we were doing, but we were constantly winging it.

Slowly, moments of triumph gave us a boost. We made changes to our algorithms which enabled us to distribute 50% more power throughout the village just by better utilizing wasted power. We built the ability to update devices remotely and successfully pushed out new code to an entire village while sitting in the office. We began shifting focus towards productive uses of energy, and learned so much about crickets that we received a grant to develop and pilot cricket incubators powered by Okra. We started getting traction towards large scale expansion in other countries. And we hit a necessary grant milestone of 100 households electrified by the end of 2018, at 7pm on December 31. 

But with the growth came new growing pains. An inadequate amount of community education after we installed a village’s first freezer resulted in people opening the lid too frequently, causing the freezer to operate in overdrive and break. Our traction in Indonesia fell through after months of negotiations, and we had to begin again, this time with plans to scale in the Philippines. Then we thought we were on the verge of launching in the Philippines, only to realize that negotiating conversations with investors, regulators, infrastructure companies, energy distributors, communities, and field teams, would take a lot longer than planned. About 1 year longer than planned. And while increasing the number of households so rapidly, we discovered critical manufacturing errors and had to frantically hand-solder fixes to dozens of circuit boards to meet our deadlines. 

By now our juggling skills have leveled up. Still such a small team, we’re working on the old product and and the entirely new product, simultaneously. We built mobile money functionality which unlocked remote, island communities as ideal markets. We brought on interns, have gone through multiple hiring cycles, and have built an intensely streamlined and data-driven HR process. We travel to meet investors and form partnerships all around the world, and our financial models and schemes have reached new heights of complexity and innovation. We’re launching new plans for community activation and work with multiple partners across multiple countries. We competed in and won Booking.com’s incubator program, and we’re actively open-sourcing chunks of hardware and software to further the IoT sector. And maybe the most extreme indicator of all, we’ve gone from a living-room to a proper office.

To be clear, the obstacles are never-ending, which probably fuels our excitement and determination. Every day we discuss the zillions of additional ways we need to improve and grow, to actually have the large-scale impact that we are all passionate about. There are so many risks, so many ways we still need to validate our ideas, and so many things that could go wrong. Constantly focusing on everything we haven’t yet figured out is both motivating and overwhelming, so when I looked back to compile this list of milestones and achievements, I was stunned. If this really is just one chapter in my life, it sure is a densely packed one.

The past couple weeks were a particularly surreal display of how far we have come. Team members in the Philippines kicked off phase 1 of our biggest project, overseeing almost 60 new homes get energized; myself and Cal oversaw another village come online in Sumba, Indonesia, where a new technical configuration brought both energy and internet to a previously completely offline village; team members in Cambodia spoke with government energy regulators about crafting subsidized scaling agreements; team members continued R&D in Cambodia, Australia, Shenzhen, and Austria; and everyone, amidst all the craziness, worked on new types of risk mitigation, data analysis, optimization, modeling, and strategy. And honestly, that doesn’t even begin to cover the number of things happening on a day to day basis. 

When we tuned in for our most recent weekly meeting, 12 people in 7 locations across 5 countries and Skype unsure how to display so many videos at once, I was instantly uplifted, reunited with such an incredible group of people. Physical distance doesn’t prevent us from cheering each other on, troubleshooting problems together, and bantering in the most ridiculous ways possible. As the meeting went on, I was overcome with gratitude. Here I was on a remote island of Indonesia, facing challenges and unreal adventure, for my job. How did this happen? Somehow, we have the opportunity to travel to stunning, completely remote parts of the earth, learn from people and cultures I never thought I’d ever get the chance to meet, and work with all our heart towards massive challenges that fire us up every single day of the week. And somehow we have had the most supportive mentors, friends, and family who, every step of the way, give unreal amounts of time and energy towards this vision, enabling us to chase this dream furiously. The fact that Cal and I, two chronic workaholics, can work even longer hours than normal while being held up on tropical islands is a pretty good indicator of loving our work. But remote island or not, I never stop being blown away by how far we’ve come, and how far there is to go.

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From Cal’s and my adventures around Sumba! It was a rough road journey, but the gorgeous, secluded coves and beaches that we explored were well worth the bumpy ride.

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The next group of photos is from our stay in Mandas village, the site of Okra’s first Indonesia project. From box assembly and wiring to panel installation and satellite internet connection, we saw the first Okra homes come online! That excitement was paired with the harsh reality of the climate, lack of livelihood opportunities, and incredible remoteness of these communities. In contrast to the beautiful coasts of the island, the center was mountainous, filled with dust storms, and completely lacking resources. But we soaked in as much as we could about the community, their ways of life, and their stories.

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