By Juli Kloza and Natascha Elbech
Sam White
On February 6th, Sam White, co-founder of Promethean Power, joined the Social Enterprise Institute for our Speaker Series to speak to students about his unintended journey to becoming a social entrepreneur. When asked about his motivation to starting his enterprise, Sam simply replied that it was out of pure luck; from years of trial and error while living in rural India with a team of engineers. Promethean Power, which started out as a solar energy company, now runs on thermal-energy technology to power cold storage units for milk and other dairy products in villages throughout India.
When Sam and his partners started their journey, they didn’t realize they would be called upon to solve such a niche problem. After placing second at the 2007 MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition, they received grant money to travel to India and get closer to the places they were trying to assist. They went from village to village, trying to understand what the biggest need was. Until one day, they were introduced to a man who had an extremely passionate demeanor towards one single problem: milk chilling.
India is the world’s leading producer and consumer of dairy, producing upwards of 100 billion liters per year. Dairy farming is a major livelihood and a source of income for many rural households, and requires strenuous and time-consuming work. From the time a cow is milked to when the product reached a dairy processor, it can take upwards of six hours on the back of an Indian rickshaw. However, industry standard says milk must be chilled within four hours of being harvested, otherwise too much bacteria has grown and the milk becomes unsafe to drink.
While many of these rural communities may have access to power grids, electricity is often unreliable. Unlike in the US, where electricity is available at the flick of a switch, villages in India only have about seven hours of power per day. As a result, much of the milk sent to dairy processors is thrown to waste, farmers can’t generate a profit, and consumers have to boil their milk before drinking it to kill off bacteria, which also removes some of the milk’s greatest nutrient benefits. Sam White and his business partner saw this issue as an opportunity that their solar technology could solve in an emerging market they could easily get a head start on. They traveled back to the US, and began prototyping.
When speaking of his creative process, Sam placed an emphasis on the errors. There was no blueprint to what they were doing; no one in industry to guide them or to refer to. Back in Somerville, MA, Sam and his partner were designing prototypes in a warehouse they shared with other clean energy startups, who coincidentally all came together to be able to afford rent. This collaboration eventually grew into Greentown Labs, now the nation’s largest cleantech startup incubator. After spending over a year working on a solar-powered milk cooling system, it was rejected by dairy processors back in India for being too large to fit into village homes and for needing too much electricity to power its generator. After trying different techniques and technologies to replace the energy needed for cooling – even hauling ice into villages – Sam had to abandon his original model and build something that made sense for rural communities, like thermal electrics.
Sam explained to us that every one of his failures taught him something valuable, and his journey of trial and error shows that in order to solve a problem, you have to get close to where it originates. Although Sam never intended on being a social entrepreneur, his perseverance and drive to make an impact certainly proves him to be one.
To watch Sam White’s 2014 TEDx Talk, click here.
