MyRain’s Journey
Everyone, including me, says “we want to change the world”. But if we don’t do anything, it’s just a wish. Wishes don’t change anything. Action does. And action is hard. Our action with Acara is developing leaders to show them how to make their wish/dream into action.
Having said that, it makes me very happy to write this blog entry about MyRain. MyRain is a for-profit venture that started in an Acara course, that is now taking action. MyRain has just closed another round of angel funding.
MyRain came from an Acara Challenge course at the UMN and IIT Roorkee, in the Spring of 2010. It’s an idea for a drip irrigation business, not making the systems but innovation in financing, selling and distributing. That year in the Acara Challenge (it was our first year, after a pilot), we picked two winning teams (one in water and one in energy), plus an honorable mention. MyRain was not one of those three teams. But the team was undaunted by the Challenge judging results and cobbled together some funding. Team members Sam Lee and Sri Latha Ganti from UMN spent some time with some of their teammates in Roorkee that summer. Yash, a team member who was still a student at IIT-Roorkee, helped set up some pilots the following year in the Charba village, in extreme northern India. Last year, Sri spent time in Tamil Nadu, in extreme southern India, talking to a potential partner, CCD, who was interested in drip irrigation for the farmers in their area. Back here in MN, Steele Lorenz and Sri have been relentless in their pursuit of this idea. Finally Steele decided that he wanted to make this business a reality and to do that, he needed to move to India. So last fall, he and Sri started the long process of formalizing the business plan, working with angel investors to fund the business, and solidifying the plan in India. (by the way, this process took longer than the original course they took). They just closed their second round of angel funding and already are getting support for a third round.
I don’t want to draw too many lessons from MyRain, other than it’s a long and winding road from an idea in a classroom to where they are today. And now they are at the beginning of an even longer road!
Getting an idea off the ground simply takes work and dedication. It would have been so easy for this group to give up on this. They didn’t win the Challenge. They dealt with all the team disruption of students graduating and finding jobs. But all during that time, a few core people continued to work on myRain during their spare time. And while their success is far from certain, getting funding in place and Steele making a commitment to leave a great job here in the US and move to India, is a huge step. Even if MyRain doesn’t succeed, the lessons Steele and Sri will learn will be life changing for them. And the impact of introducing drip irrigation to the 4000 or so farmers associated with CCD alone, is a big impact to make. If MyRain is successful, it will have major impact on the lives of many additional small farmers in India.
Other members of the original MyRain team from UMN have used their Acara experience to springboard into other leadership jobs. Sam Lee, a public health major, is now leading a project for a major NGO in Tanzania. A. J. Schwidder is now CEO for a startup called Upstream Technologies, which uses licensed IP from the UMN. Sri was a key leader within Acara itself and is now working for Seagate as an engineer, in addition to her role in MyRain.
People naturally want to see ventures started from students in Acara courses. We can’t always guarantee that will happen, but we will get leaders. Our action with Acara is developing leaders like Steele, Sri, A.J., Sam and Yash, to show them how to turn their dreams into action.
The Changing Face of Education: Free!
It’s been hard to miss this trend. Harvard and MIT announced they will be offering courses for free. Coursera, a consortium of Stanford, Princeton, Michigan and Penn was just funded. Udacity, a startup from Stanford professor Sebastion Thrun. Wired has a lengthy article about this. MIT also announced MITx a few months ago. And of course, while not a university, the Khan Academy has an amazing amount of great material online.
What’s up with this? How can these (expensive) universities offer courses for free? Well, they aren’t offering them for the same credit you get if you pay for courses, they are very clear about that. You get a “certificate”, not a transcript. Why are they doing it if they are free? Why would students take them? Free as a business model has been around for awhile. Usually you offer the main service for free and may have a premium service people pay for (Skype is a good example of this). In this case, the premium service is the normal tuition. What’s the value to the universities? Several things: these schools are all global brands, and they want to reach out to the booming demographics of the growing middle class and their children around the world. They want to keep getting the best and the brightest. In addition to branding, these classes are great ways to identify hidden talent around the world. And most universities are serious about their education mission and part of this is outreach. The western university is still widely admired and universities in developing countries, while improving rapidly, still rank well below most top western universities. Students (and their parents) want the education they can get from a US university. While the courses described above are not the same as being admitted, that could (and will likely) change in the future, once the model gets worked out. You can’t charge developed-world tuition in a developing country (one course will cost as much tuition as a full year or more) but with large online audiences, you may not have to. You can create different tuition rates for different experiences.
Distance learning has been around since I was in college, so what’s different now? Well, now you can get high quality video and other tools through just a plain old web browser and you don’t need an expensive studio to produce it. The basic web platforms are available, virtually anyone in world can find access to a internet cafe or hookup, and now with everyone is expecting high quality content online.
Will this work for all kinds of courses? Most of the offerings seem to be engineering or computer science now. I think that’s part of the experiment, can you use crowd sourcing for grading essays or papers? What are the best ways to have discussions? These are questions that the Harvard/MIT group explicitly has said they want to address.
And while the courses may be free, it’s certainly not free to put them online. The Harvard/MIT collaboration is putting $30M USD into it, and the Stanford professor put in $300K of his own money. You can certainly do it for less, but not much less.
What does this mean for Acara, where global collaboration is such a integral part of what we do? We certainly utilize web platforms heavily now for reviews, judging panels and lectures, but, up to know, they have not been open to the public. We are very attracted to the idea of open courses for aspiring social entrepreneurs around the globe. We are open to thoughts about what potential students think is best for them and how we can do it affordably.
The Changing Face of Education: Education vs. Impact
When we started Acara a few years ago, our mission was to help start social ventures. Even though we were working with university students, we felt our mission was really about impact. We believed that university students had the passion, ability and desire to create innovative venture plans. After several years of doing this, we have found those beliefs to be true in every respect. But we have also learned a lot about student entrepreneurs. Starting social ventures is not only hard, but a departure of career aspirations for many students. If Acara’s only mission was starting ventures, it would be stupid to just work with students, we would work with entrepreneurs of every age. We would be better off running a program like Unreasonable Institute or Y Combinator. It’s hard to separate education out of the mission of these organizations, as they definitely educate the attendees, but success for an incubator is clearly measured by success (finding funding and starting up) of the ventures in the incubator.
Nor is Acara meant to be a pure competition like the Dell Social Innovation Challenge or Rice Business Plan competition. (I guess everything really is bigger in Texas). The Dell competition is based on a large grant from Dell and the latter is primarily fueled by potential investors in the businesses. These program perform a large marketing effort to get as many entries (up to several thousand) as they can.
So what is the Acara mission? And how do we balance the education mission of a university with the desire to create impact? The issue of whether a university should be tied to real-world impact probably seems silly to many people. For most people, education is about learning a skill to get a job. Period. And many schools (vo-tech schools, community colleges, even university programs such as nursing) do exactly that. But university education is also about learning how to learn, exploring things, academic freedom, and getting a well-rounded education. I referenced this article in my last post, but this New Yorker article on Stanford digs into the question of whether Stanford is too closely tied to the business interests of Silicon Valley. Perhaps a more revealing view of that question are these class notes from the startup class being taught by Peter Thiel at Stanford. I spent a career in a big company, not in a university, so I completely get classes like this, and many of those same topics work their way into Acara lectures. In my experience on the corporate side of hiring, I wanted the T-shaped students. I wanted the depth of knowledge, but I assumed that was a given. What I really wanted was the initiative AND curiosity. In the end, those were always the best people I hired and made the most impact.
Back to refining our own mission, we utilized the Business Model Canvas to examine our value proposition and business model. It was clear that our value proposition is education. It’s a clear value proposition to the student, we offer something they value, and tuition is a well understood payment mechanism. We don’t want to create a business model based on an equity stake (like many incubators do), because many social ventures won’t have enough revenue and if that was how we funded things, then we would prioritize to only get businesses that were going to be successful in making a lot of money. At the end of the day, our output is really individuals. Our successes are students that learn how to be leaders, and are empowered to go out and start or change something. This kind of discussion gets at the heart of what a social venture is, and what you want to accomplish as an organization. And it’s a fair argument to say that if the venture doesn’t make a lot of money, it’s not helping anyone. I think the field of “social ventures” is new enough, that no one really knows what it means. But for us, this is what makes sense. We want students to get the holistic view. But the only way to do that, is via real world experiences, and working on real problems.
Therefore, one of our board members (a former engineer turned CEO) defined success for Acara by the equation:
Success = A (# of students) + B (# of pilot ventures) + C (#of successful ventures).
Each term would be equally weighted, so we don’t overall emphasize eduction over successful ventures or vice versa. Good ideas, esp in the social sector, take time to develop. To me, what this says, is we are trying to push the boundary of the university as far as we can into creation and incubation of social ventures. It may not be the fastest way to develop ventures but it is the best way to develop leaders.
The Changing Face of Education: T-Shaped Students
Higher Education has been in the news a lot these last few months, mostly because of the ongoing issues with student loans and debates on the value of a college education. But there are a lot of other more fundamental changes going on. It’s something I’ll write about over the next few weeks. Acara is a program that is in the middle of this changing university education, so we are in midst of navigating many of these challlenges. In the very early days of my career in the technology business, I had a boss who called what we were doing on the leading edge of chip design research, the “bleeding edge”, because we got bloody a lot from breaking new ground. Acara is similar, we’ve tried lots of new things, some of them have made us bloody.
In this post I am going to talk about what are sometimes called T-Shaped people. This is a term that was first used by Tim Brown of IDEO, and is a popular term in Silicon Valley. This extensive article in the New Yorker about Stanford, (a good article, I will come back to it in later posts) describes how Stanford uses the term to describe desired attributes in their students. What is a T-shaped student? Namely a student that is very deep in one topic (the I) and then has some cross-disciplinary experience (the top horizontal bar to make the T). Universities are generally excellent at developing students into an I shape. Whether the student is studying engineering, design, public health, business, ecology or any other discipline, a university like ours does a terrific job of teaching students the theory and basic knowledge of that field. Students generally go into a major because they like it and have a passion for it but ultimately they want to use that knowledge to make an impact in the world. That’s where the T comes in. That means sticking your head up out of the I, looking around, working with other disciplines, and understanding how they work together to solve real problems. Universities traditionally have not done very well at putting the T’s on students.
Acara is in many ways a program to make the T. We uses words like social entrepreneurship, sustainable development, designing solutions, but in effect, what we are doing is putting students into real life, multi-disciplinary situations, which require using both broad and deep skills of the team members. This requires students from multiple colleges and majors across the university, it requires a curriculum that focuses on the broad topics, it requires lecturers and mentors from different disciplines, it requires working on real problems and not the least, it requires cooperation across all these groups in the university. Traditional university departments are set up to be deep (a PhD is a pretty big I). Acara, because it is part of a multi-disciplinary center like IonE, not part of a particular college, and has a dual mission of education AND impact, is perfectly situated for making the T.
It’s important to make sure there is both a vertical and a horizontal to the student. There has been a lot of press about Peter Thiel and his Thiel Fellowship to take young people under 20 and pay them not to go to university. Well, they do work in a concentrated academy of sorts, so it’s more like a self directed study. But it’s not likely to develop the depth of training needed if you are going to tackle serious problems in the world. Along the same lines as Thiel, Jonah Lehrer (who seems to be the new Malcolm Gladwell) in the Wall Street Journal talks about what a college education really should be teaching students, and rightly focuses on T skills. I certainly don’t disagree with Thiel or Lehrer; the ability to learn how to think and learn on your own, to work with others, and to learn how to make an impact are the core of my beliefs also. But an 18 year old, no matter how brilliant, generally does not have much of an I. Unfortunately, recent examples like Instagram selling to Facebook for $1B do not help this case much, perception-wise. Students will think they can write an app, and that’s it. Instagram is a nice, fun app, but it’s not worth a billion dollars and is hardly going to tackle a serious problem like renewable energy. That takes I people and T people.
This all seems obvious, and is certainly done well in pockets in many universities, so why isn’t it done more? First of all, it’s harder than it looks. You need to do it collaboratively from a teaching standpoint, as not many people are able to teach something so diverse single handedly. That means bringing in other lecturers. That’s time consuming, logistically challenging, and can be expensive if you pay them. Universities are notoriously siloed organizations, which makes this bureaucratically challenging. And there is not a particular incentive for an individual professor to do this. It’s not what they are typically rewarded for. It takes a few champions in a university willing to spend the time to make it happen. Here at the UMN, we have found the right champions who believe this is crucial for the 21st-century university. Universities develop I’s, it is important to do the T’s here as well.
Creating T-shaped people is a key goal for Acara. We want to take I’s and help them to use those skills to make real impact.
Acara Fellowship Winners
Acara has a mission to educate student leaders who will design solutions to the world’s toughest environmental and social challenges. In order to effectively address these global challenges, education in the 21st century must go beyond the traditional university boundaries. Therefore, an essential aspect of Acara’s mission, is having students work on real ventures, designing solutions for real problems. This requires classroom time but also time outside the classroom, putting their venture idea into practice. The Acara Venture Fellowship Award, and the Rosene Acara Fellowship are awards to give passionate University of Minnesota students the opportunity to put their classroom education, and their desire to change the world for the better, into action. The Acara Venture Fellowship is an individual award, and the Rosene award is a team award. These awards are made possible by several generous benefactors.
We are happy to announce this year’s winners.
Emily Torgrimson, co-founder of Eat for Equity (E4E), will be awarded $5K as the Acara Venture Fellowship winner. Emily is graduating this May from the UMN with a Master’s Degree in Public Health. E4E is a non-profit that organizes monthly benefit dinners, engaging communities to eat, drink – and raise thousands for a greater cause. E4E was just featured on NBC’s Today Show. Building on their success in Minneapolis, Boston, and Portland, Eat for Equity will use a mobile kitchen tour to bring this community-driven model to more cities across the country.
Blue Food and Rot2Roti each will receive a $5K Rosene Fellowship award.
Blue Food will provide consulting and marketing services to street food vendors in New Delhi communities. Through this, the team expects to improve the safety of the street food for the consumers. Blue Food UMN team members are: Ally Czechowicz, Amine Dahab, Phillip Kelly, Camilla Kuo-Dahab, Kathryn Klarich, and Eric Svingen. Blue Food’s TERI University (New Delhi) members are Anshu Singh and Nimisha Shah.
Rot2Roti is a renewable energy production business that will convert the waste generated from the Azadpur Mandi (wholesale produce market) in New Delhi into fuel for the adjacent Shalimar Slum, thus addressing two problems: a) Costly and limited fuel supplies in the slum; and b) Inefficient waste disposal from the Azadpur market. Rot2Roti UMN team members are Alexander Schmidt, Anne Haws, Charlie Butterworth, Indira Manandhar, and Zachary McGill. TERI University team members are Harmeet Kaur, K. Aditya Reddy, Nida Yamin, and Nitya Rachel George.
UMN students come from the College of Science and Engineering, the College of Design, the School of Public Health, the Carlson School of Management, and the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.
Links to all the plans are here, also on the page are videos of the presentations.
We will be keeping the blog up to date over the next few months with progress of these teams and others participating in the Acara Summer Institute.
