With their Stanford MBAs stuffed in their back pockets, Ned Tozun and Sam Goldman are leaving Silicon Valley for China and India to make the world a better place.
And to make money doing it.
D.light Design has a mission that sounds both straightforward and challenging: replacing the kerosene lanterns used by one-quarter of the world’s population, or 1.6 billion people, with cheap, portable LED sources.
Kerosene, which often is burned in a glass bottle with a wick, is a “terrible solution” for lighting, said Tozun, D.light Design’s president. People get burned. The light itself is dim, making work and studying difficult. It emits carbon dioxide, and causes respiratory ailments.
Goldman and Tozun will be selling three designs of light-emitting diodes, from $12 to $25 a piece, that can be charged with small solar panels or via electricity. A fully charged product will emit 12 to 40 hours of light, depending on the brightness setting.
The pair’s idea, developed while they were studying for their master’s degrees at Stanford University’s business school, won a design competition at the school. That led to entering, and winning, the $250,000 Draper Fisher Jurvetson Venture Challenge contest in 2007. That prompted a variety of venture capitalists – traditional ones, Indian ones, ones concerned with both profit and social benefits – to come aboard.
Getting money from VCs – Tozun won’t say how much has been invested – is unusual for a company like D.light Design. “But our social mission is really well-aligned with our profit mission,” he said.
When Bill Reichert, managing director at Palo Alto’s Garage Technology Ventures, first heard about D.light he figured it was one of those “venture/philanthropy, double bottom line, not-for-us kind of deals.” But Tozun and Goldman convinced him that the size of the project might spawn a large, profitable company.
The managing director of an Indian venture firm said he invested in D.light because of the “humongous” size of the market opportunity.
“The founders are very passionate and committed and the product is very differentiated at that price point,” said Suvir Sujan of Nexus India Capital Advisors in Mumbai.
Tozun will head the company’s manufacturing and international-sales office in Shenzhen, China. He’s moving there this week. Goldman already heads the company’s sales and marketing office in New Dehli, India.
Reichert said the idea of two company principals being so far apart and so far from Silicon Valley is “a little nerve-racking for us, but they seem to be handling it brilliantly.”
Perhaps that’s because they share an international point of view. Tozun, who previously headed several start-ups, emigrated with his parents from Cyprus. Goldman’s parents worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development, and he grew up in India, Pakistan, Peru, Rwanda and elsewhere. He also served in the Peace Corps for four years in Benin in western Africa.
D.light’s initial focus will be India, where 72 million households are without electricity. Its growing economy means that some of these families are now ready to move away from the basics of kerosene light.
An unusual component of D.light Design’s business plan is its www.dlightcares.org link. Here, people can donate $30 to provide a light for a family, and get a photo and a story in return.
Tozun admits it’ll be good publicity for the company, but it also will provide lights to the poorest of the poor who can’t afford them.
“We are very driven by our social mission,” he said. “Everyone we hire is passionate about providing families with better quality of life by providing better light. But that mission, I don’t think can be achieved, unless we build a very successful business.”
That means selling millions and millions of lights.
Right now, he said, the company has thousands of its products in use in India, and hundreds in Africa, where it’s likely to expand in the future.
In Tanzania, for instance, 90 percent of the population uses kerosene fuel for lighting.
Contact Matt Nauman at mnauman@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5701.
