We had so much fun with this that we’ll probably do another team photo shoot sometime soon.

Amazing news, friends! Essmart wins its largest check to date – $10k in the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge! This is hugely encouraging to us, as we’ve come close to winning competitions but fall just short of the monetary prize. We’re entirely thankful to the MIT community that has supported Essmart since its humble beginnings: Kate Mytty and Bina Choi who run the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge, Alison Hynd and Sally Susnowitz who work for the MIT Public Service Center, Laura Sampath from the MIT International Development Initiative who spends hours talking with us, Joost Bonsen from the MIT Media Lab who not only introduced me and Jackie but also gave us the name Essmart, Amy Smith and Saida Benhayoune and others from MIT D-Lab, and everyone else we’ve met along the way. MIT is a fantastic environment to start something in, and Essmart is a proud member of that ecosystem.

After the awards ceremony, one of our poster session judges approached us to chat. Something that I’ve been learning throughout this entire process of fundraising is that investors actually invest more in people than in ideas. The people sell the idea. Essmart has been blessed with a wonderful, well-balanced team that works together incredibly well. I am definitely thankful for my teammates and the unique talents yet united passion that they bring to Essmart.

I don’t have any pictures of the team from tonight, but I will put them up when they come in. In the meantime, high fives all around, and go Essmart!

The past week or so has been quite busy for the Essmart team. We made it to the HBS Social Venture finals and had the opportunity to give a five-minute pitch in front of a great audience. Unfortunately, we didn’t take home a prize. One of our semifinal round judges came up to us afterward and gave us a much-needed pep talk. She said that the semifinal judges loved the idea of Essmart and saw it bringing huge, sustainable impact to the Bottom of the Pyramid. Janet – if you’re out there reading this, thank you very much for providing encouragement at just the right time.

On Friday, after a meeting with one of the HBS Social Venture winners and a quick pitching session with Bain Capital, we got to pitch at the MIT Sustainability Summit. It was a lot of fun. Jackie knows how to nail 60 second pitches, and she did a great job fielding the audience questions. In the end, through the texts of supporters in the audience, we took home the $500 cash prize! Awesome! Many thanks to the MIT Sustainability Summit for organizing the event.

On Monday night, we had had the opportunity to present our poster for the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge. Our four judges approached us early in the night. The conversation that unfolded was actually unexpected; IDEAS has traditionally been a competition celebrating innovation and community service. But the questions that were thrown at us all had to do with our financial model, which hadn’t been included in full in our written submission. Taylor did a wonderful job fielding the tough questions, though. At the end of our interview, one of the judges joked with us by asking how we would choose the most entrepreneurial student project. Jackie bantered back by telling him to invest in the team, not the idea. Obviously, the team should demonstrate passion, know-how, and commitment. And obviously, that team is who now? 😛 We find out about the results on Thursday night.

And tonight, we had a great talk with someone who stumbled upon Essmart through our online content. He works for the World Bank and offered great insights about marketing at the village level. Suhail, thanks for your input, and we look forward to bouncing ideas off of you in the near future.

Thursday was a busy day for the Essmart team. As a President’s Challenge finalist, Rob and I were fortunate to attend a lunch with Professor Muhammad Yunus. Each finalist team got to briefly describe our start-up idea, and then the floor was open for questions.

Two points that Professor Yunus made during his answers stood out to me the most. The first is that the Grameen Bank does A LOT, but they didn’t start out that way. He started by taking bite-size steps. He identified one problem, for one person, in one village, and solved that.  When that worked, others came to him with the same problem. So he solved that too. Since then, the Grameen Bank has grown, and now they have many, many different business lines.

Part of me has a hard time believing that you can be successful with so many different business activities. We’ve been trying to narrow Essmart’s focus recently because we’ve received feedback that we’re trying to do to much. That being said, the Grameen Bank expanded slowly over 30 years. They did start out very focused, and Professor Yunus definitely emphasized the importance of taking small steps, of changing one life, and then thinking about scale.

Second, Professor Yunus said that he doesn’t often talk about failures. Not because he doesn’t learn from them, but because he views every failure as simply an idea to be put on the back burner. He’ll then pull out these ideas later down the road, when he’s found a more appropriate place for them, or he’s figured out a way to fix them. I’m a firm believer that we should talk about failures and lessons learned more in this field, and I found this framing of failures rather interesting.

After lunch with Professor Yunus, Taylor, Jaya and I pitched Essmart at the Boston Beta demo night. It was a fun and relaxed event. I got to practice my pitch again (you can never practice enough!), and I enjoyed watching Taylor and Jaya pitch! We’ve definitely all started to adapt some of the same phrasings when pitching. Thanks to all those that came up and supported us!

Why does Essmart exist?

Why are we Essmart team members working on Essmart?

These important questions were posed to some of our team members today. We had a Skype interview with an MIT IDEAS Global Challenge judge, who asked us a series of great questions and gave us useful, thought-provoking feedback. I think that those of us who could make the interview had different take-aways, but I was particularly moved by this concept of starting with why. When we explain Essmart to potential customers, supporters, and funders, we must share our motivations, our beliefs, and our burdens before we get into the nitty gritty of what we do, which is distribute technologies to retail shops.

Our judge asked each of us to explain why we are working on Essmart. We all have a shared motivation, but I can only tell my own story in detail. This is how Essmart began for me:

MIT has a suite of classes housed under D-Lab, which introduces undergraduate students to grassroots international development through engineering. I took the introductory D-Lab course when I was an undergraduate. I ended up traveling to rural Western China and seeing how a innovative solar cooking technology could be helpful for Tibetan villagers. While the class was a great experience, I also completed it feeling jaded. My classmates were mostly concerned about technological innovation, not actual implementation.

I pursued my Master’s degree in international development to continue researching this topic of technology dissemination for community-level development. My geographical region of interest switched to India, where there are many more examples to study (India has historical leaning toward village level development, due to Gandhi’s ideal of self-sustaining villages).

I visited India multiple times, seeking out nonprofit organizations and social enterprises that were developing technologies for the base of the pyramid. I was saddened, though, because end users were not benefiting from these great technologies at scale! No one had figured out how to disseminate these technologies widely. Many nonprofit, donor-driven models were used, and they were financially unsustainable and geographically small-scale. Small manufacturers did not have the resources to devote to marketing and distribution. In a way, all of the excitement in the Western world around the next “world-saving widget” was just hype. Technologies designed for the other 90% were designed in vain because the other 90% was not using them.

I returned to MIT with a renewed sense of purpose. Why just research this problem when I could do something to address it? It was fortuitous timing – one of our team advisors introduced me to Jackie Stenson in Fall 2011, and Essmart was born through our independent experiences and shared motivations. Our team, similarly driven, grew over time. We’re now committed to changing the world through making these technologies – and others – accessible at the bottom of the pyramid.

Thanks for coming by, folks! Jackie and I had a great time meeting you all.

I, for one, love MIT’s ID Night and ID Fair. They are amazing events where MIT’s International Development community can come together and share the amazing work they’re doing. Being in a place where there are so many like-minded individuals is inspiring and encouraging. It’s not easy to address big problems, but at least we know we have support!

Jackie Stenson (@JackieStenson) and Rob Weiss did a fantastic job presenting before the judges during yesterday’s Semi-Finals. We’re happy to have gotten through that round, and we’re looking forward to preparing for the Finals on Tuesday, April 24!

Awesome news! Essmart was just announced as one of the 10 Harvard i-Lab President’s Challenge finalists! Evidently, there were about 170 teams that entered the competition, so this is a pretty big deal for us.

Thanks, Harvard i-Lab! We look forward to finishing out the competition!

Vote for Essmart in the MIT IDEAS Global Challenge:
1. Register to vote (if you’re not at MIT you’re an MIT friend): http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/users/register
2. Check your email to confirm registration
3. Sign in and vote for Essmart! http://globalchallenge.mit.edu/teams/view/240/