Last night, I spoke at The SF Acumen Fund Chapter‘s event and someone asked a question that struck me as important.  They asked about Acumen’s perspective on design.  My gut reaction was that Acumen Fund is not a design firm, but the question warranted more consideration.

Bavidra Mohan, another Fellow in my cohort, took the lead in highlighting the importance Acumen and its investees place on human centered design principles.  In particular, Bavidra’s role at D.Light (incidentally the full name is D.Light Design) was to gather feedback from the end customer in rural India and take those lessons all the way back up the supply chain to D.Light’s manufacturing plant in Shenzhen, China.

While Bavidra was speaking, it occurred to me that design is not only a popular trend (we actually held the event in a design company’s space) but that it has now become an essential component of how anything is developed, from internal processes, to advertisements, to product messages.  While it may not be the first thing you think of when you consider diligencing a BOP business, it is true that Acumen is fundamentally in the business of investing in products and services that are designed in a way that meets the mass market (think BOP) consumers’ true needs. Read more »

I never thought working in the flood affected areas of Pakistan would be so hot (temperature-wise).  One time while I was on site the power went out from 1pm to 8pm as part of routine load shedding.

It was nearly 50 degrees Celsius (120+F) outside and without our fan, who knows how hot it became inside our little oven, er…office.  Even Pakistanis thought the area was rough.

Every time I visited the site, I was incredibly impressed by the physical conditions our field team put up with on a regular basis.  In the middle of nowhere, they lived in extreme heat and still managed to make incredible progress constructing a 166 home village for flood victims.  Read more »

Perhaps it is fitting that my last month in Pakistan has been the month of Ramzan (Ramadan).  For those unfamiliar, Ramzan is the month of sacrifice in the Islamic calendar.  Jawad Aslam, my CEO, close friend and resident expert on all things Muslim, described Ramzan to me as “religious boot camp”.

On the surface, Ramzan is a month of fasting—no food,  no water, no cigarettes, no consumption of any kind from about 4 am to sunset.  Many shops are closed in the afternoon, and restaurants open around 6pm to serve a packed house the moment the fast breaks.

The fast, however, is merely a symbolic (and admittedly difficult) gesture that represents a deeper sense of sacrifice.  Muslims use Ramzan to give up bad habits, spend more time with themselves & Allah, and seek further enlightenment.

Though Ramzan makes it impossible to schedule goodbye lunches and teas with the many friends I’ll be leaving behind here in Pakistan, I’m glad to experience it at the end of my year here.

As I look back to the kind of year its been, I see so many parallels with Ramzan.  I gave up a lot to be here, and in the process I’ve come to know myself & the world around me in a much deeper way than before.  Jawad jokes that I’ve aged 5 years in 10 months.

At the outset of this journey, I wrote that I expected to be stretched like a rubberband in the coming year.  When a rubber band stretches, it snaps back, but it ends up larger than it was before.

My hope was that the experience would broaden my horizons, but not so quickly that I snapped.  It seems to have worked out.

Admittedly, the tendons in my knees have tightened because I never quite felt comfortable running outside in Pakistan, but my perspective has been stretched beyond expectations. Read more »

In nature, caterpillars take some time off from the world to grow into something beautiful.  At the moment, I’m sitting on the plane, heading to Pakistan – my own personal cocoon.  I hope that my time abroad will teach me new skills and help me to reflect on what is to come next.

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