Category: Social Innovator Q&A Series

In this series of Q&As, past winners of the BigIdeas@Berkeley social innovation contest describe how they developed their ideas and are implementing them.

In 2011, Thejovardhana Kote (MIMS, School of Information, 2011), Emily Kumpel (PhD, Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2013), Ari Olmos (MPP, 2011), and Anu Sridharan (MS, Civil Systems Engineering, 2011) won in the Scaling Up category for NextDrop. NextDrop uses mobile technology to deliver text messages to citizens about the availability of water in their areas.

Where did you get the idea for your organization?
Co-founder Emily Kumpel, a former student of Blum Center affiliated faculty member Kara Nelson, was collecting water samples in Hubli Dharwad, India, for her Ph.D. thesis. She realized that most of her time was spent waiting for the water and she thought that if it was a problem for her it was probably a problem for other people. She took this problem to a graduate school course at the School of Information at UC Berkeley and a project team was formed. The project evolved into a business plan which eventually turned into NextDrop.

What does your organization do today and what is its impact?
NextDrop connects citizens and governments through data, creating smarter cities.

How has the idea evolved since you started?
Originally the idea was to send text messages to citizens about water supply availability. Over time, utility engineers in India have used this information to improve their operations. We’ve also built applications and products on top of our core platform of sending text messages about water availability.

What have been the biggest challenges in turning your social impact idea into a reality?
Developing the right culture for the organization — one that promotes healthy conflict between team members and encourages personal introspection. Finding the right people to come on board.

If you could go back and change one thing you did, what would it be?
We would fail faster and develop a culture that embraces failure.

Where did you get your most useful advice? (Why was this advice so useful?)
Reading literature that comes from Silicon Valley; sharing with other entrepreneurs and investors. These resources provided much-needed perspective.

How did you find time to develop your project?
We all quit our jobs.

How did you grow a team?
We first developed the right set of values and principles between our co-founders. We then sought out smart, creative people who shared those values and principles.

How did you get funding and resources?
Business plan competitions, grants, venture capital funding, revenue from customers.

At what point did you know your project had wings?
When co-founder and CEO Anu Sridharan signed up 20,000 people in two months during the pilot stage.

What advice would you give to budding social entrepreneurs?
Continuously develop your personal growth. Organizational culture is the most effective and sustainable way to hold people accountable.

What’s next for your organization?
Next is to scale our operations across India.

Where did you get the idea for your organization?
The idea stemmed from a series of conversations among leaders of various organizations at UC Berkeley about the lack of an innovation ecosystem. Most resources were hard to find, didn’t support undergraduates, or didn’t really help students work on ideas for projects or companies outside of class. Students also lacked a central space to engage in this kind of work, not to mention a program or funding source to support them. We studied a dozen universities across the country to see how they solved this problem themselves, and built out the Free Ventures framework from there.

How has the idea evolved since you started?
We’ve seen our impact grow beyond the population we initially focused in on. We quickly realized that the problems we were solving were being felt by the entire student population, not just undergraduates. Although graduate students were never an intended population for the program, we’ve worked with MBAs, and students from the School of Information, Optometry, and even PhDs in Computer Science. We also saw a huge need for a similar, less structured program for companies early in the process of growing and proving a product. We started Free University, a program meant to precede participation in Free Ventures, and provide many of the same benefits but with less structure, commitments, and expectations.

What have been the biggest challenges in turning your social impact idea into a reality?
For us, the University’s bureaucracy has been a constant challenge. We’ve found time and time again that although the school has the best of intentions, many things don’t move quickly on campus. When trying to work as efficiently as possible, we’ve had to find many ways to be scrappy and know when to interface with the university and when not to.

What were your biggest mistakes? If you could do one thing over again, what would it be?
We wish we had started earlier with the work we were doing on campus. By the time we deeply understood the problem we were addressing and could formulate a solution, we were already at the end of our junior year. Getting exposure to holes in the campus ecosystem and finding ways to create new initiatives takes a lot of time.

Where did you get your most useful advice?
Other schools that had already dealt with this problem were an incredible asset to us. Programs solving similar challenges on their campus in terms of supporting young entrepreneurs have been implemented at Stanford, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, just to name a few. The students who helped form and run those programs gave us early validation, ideas of what works and what doesn’t, and thoughts as to how we could build an organization tailored to our own campus.

How did you find time to develop your project?
Free Ventures became our core extracurricular activity. Many hours a week went into moving the program forward, and I dropped pretty much everything else but school and keeping myself healthy and happy for a while. When you really care about something, you find time and make it work.

How did you grow a team?
This is one of the hardest things to do. We initially found students interested in solving the same problems on campus, and had them join us. From there, word spread about what we were doing, and things grew organically. Finding young people interested in working on entrepreneurship who are highly competent, hardworking, and aren’t already busy with other things has been hard. We’re always looking for new ways to find strong students to work with us, and love it when people reach out to hear more.

How did you get funding and resources?
Big Ideas was our first major breakthrough for funding, and it was critical in our development. It was just the start for us, given the scope of what we wanted to do. Finding companies to provide us with free resources has been a process of steadily building partnerships and credibility. Working with companies like Amazon, Google, WeWork, and Alchemy API has been incredibly fulfilling. We’ve also been lucky to get private donations from alumni, as well as amazing sponsors for our semesterly Demo Day.

At what point did you know your project had wings?
Just four months after launching, one of the companies in our first class raised a seed round of half a million dollars, with the first investment from Dorm Room Fund. After that we were all like, “Whoa, this is real.” It really put things into perspective and reminded us that we were actually giving these students a huge boost in what they were doing.

What do social entrepreneurs most need from the university to flourish?
The university has a lot to offer in terms of validating an idea, building legitimacy, and getting off the ground. Being associated with UC Berkeley alone is such a huge accomplishment in the eyes of many people, and the access we have to brilliant minds and change-makers here is incredible. Reach out to faculty who can be your champions, check out programs like the Social Innovator On-Ramp, Free Ventures, and countless others that can help be a guiding light and sandbox to test things.

What advice would you give to budding social entrepreneurs?
Many things comes down to hard work in the end. It sounds super cliché, but it is really clear that the more time you put in, the more things fall into place. People see that you are dedicated, you get more exposure for what you’re working on, you find more inroads to getting money, and you generally build more momentum.

To learn more about Free Ventures, visit their website at http://freeventures.org, and feel free to email free@berkeley.edu to find out how you can help the team running Free Ventures.