Saket Vora

We woke up, got dressed, and took the bus over to the University of Washington by around 9:30am. The GSEC was being held in their Foster school of business, so we found an empty conference room and took some of the nice food they had setup in the hallways outside the classrooms. We spend the next several hours going through the presentation, assigning slides and rehersing the talk, and making handouts. We found a Kinkos nearby to print and did four full run throughs before go time. We were the first teams to present.

For context: the day before, the 16 invited teams had the first round of presentations. Kari, Will (who both arrived wednesday night) and Naman (arrived thursday at like 1am) presented in the morning. Six teams would advance to the final round.

We gave our 10 minute presentation which went well, and followed by 10 minute question period. The finalist judging panel was five people and they asked very pointed very detailed questions. Kari and Will said that these questions were orders of magnitude over the questiosn they had yesterday. We did our best and watched the five other teams go. It was readily clear that three other groups had truly impressive financial analysis and projections. The Akan Energy team from Cornell was particuarly strong. The last group was Help For Malaria, and Naman was a bit skeptical of some parts of their presentation, the health science side of it anyway. I’m saying this not as a conflict of interest as a competition — I wouldn’t be surprised if Naman is currently considered a world top 50 malaria researcher. He knows his stuff regarding malaria.

Anyway, we were really hungry (skipped lunch) and eventually the bus left to a convention center downtown where they had the awards banquet. The groups milled about outside the dining room for almost a hour before it got underway. I should mention two people here: Duane Dunk was the mentor that we were introduced to via GSEC. He is Director of Drinking Water at HaloSource, a Seattle-based company specializing in point-of-use water purification units. Duane has had experience is so many countries (is taking his 20th or 30th trip to India on Monday!) and is a tremendous resource. He was there the whole week meeting with Joel and our team and providing invaluable feedback. I spoke with him at length that night about point-of-use vs community approaches, difficulties in patent enforcement in the developing world, distribution and sales models, possible partnerships, etc. Amazing guy. Getting to know him is probably the best thing we took away from GSEC. The other is Eric Reed, the UW team ambassador. Eric is a senior in HR at the B-school and was a lot of fun to hang out with and took good care of us while we were there.

The dinner was like the ones for the Park finalist dinner only a bit more nicer. Li Li joined us for this and that’s actually where I got to meet her. A lot of distinguished guests in the audience from Seattle businesses and the UW. They asked all the teams to come up and say something they learned from GSEC. One of the students from the India Institute of Management said that he learned to a) speak slower and b) how to pitch to American investors: use more pictures, fewer numbers. Best line of the night. Bill Clapp, a major figure in microfinance world, gave a keynote address. The “People’s Choice” award for a poster talk given on Monday was given to Help for Malaria. The ‘Investor Award’ for the company most likely to be a real business was Slag Works, a team I’m not familiar with and not one of the finalist teams. The final awards were in two categories: normal and global health. Seeing as two of the six finalists were health related, we knew what might happen.

WaterPLUS took 2nd place in the global health category, while Help for Malaria took 1st. In the normal category, a business plan regarding a sunflower farm to combat poverty won 2nd place, while KAITE, a German-Zimbabwe partnership venture won the grand prize. I thought KAITE had a great chance — they have been going since 2007. KAITE was working with Zimbabwean villagers to create organic products like essential oils and herbs and sell them at a premium in the booming European market. They already have EU Organic certification, pretty cool.

We hung around the hall for a while, meeting other people. I spoke with the President of the Grameen Bank (the microfinance bank started by Muhammed Yunis who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for this). An investor came up to us afterward and told us to keep him up to date on how we are progressing. We also said goodbye to Duane, but we’ll be keeping in contact with him going forward.

We took the chartered bus back to UW and were too tired to go out on the town. It was around 10:30pm this point. We bid Eric adieu at the bus stop and made it back to Li Li’s house, we sat in the living room having tea and just having some really thoughtful conversations. I felt so at ease and comfortable with all of them, despite Naman being the only person I’ve met personally for more than a few days. Tremendous people.

Our flights were scattered, with Will having to leave around 9am, Kari at 12pm, me at 5:45pm, and Naman at 10pm. We ended up heading to sleep around 1:30 or 2am.