Wello really started, it stemmed from my curiosity about lack of reliable access to safe water. So, prior to starting the company, I spent about, I think how long. Close to a decade of living and working in low resource settings all around the world from Mexico to Kenya, India. And one thing that I noticed pretty consistently was that women and girls were always the ones responsible for water collection for the families. Spent sometimes, hours a day, collecting water hauling it over long distances. The water wasn't always safe to drink, they never had enough of it. And it really held them back from pursuing other opportunities, that would have been potentially more useful things like education or other jobs that would enable them to earn more. And I couldn't for the life of me understand why. As cell phones are starting to penetrate, solar panels, all kinds of new technology. Why women and girls were still carrying water the way their grandmothers and their great grandmother's had done for hundreds of years. So I got curious about this problem and it happened to coincide with starting a graduate program studying Sustainability and Business at the University of Michigan. And I sort of reframed the way I was thinking about it. What if it wasn't a problem, what if it was an opportunity? What if there is a business that could potentially lift this burden off the shoulders of women and girls? So maybe it was a slow start, but it was kind of like a snowflake going downhill where it just kept building and building and building momentum until it was just this thing that became much bigger than me and had a life of its own. >> Thank you and your main product is called a water wheel. Could you describe it a water wheel is? >> Sure, so a water wheel is a 15 liter container, essentially a large cylindrical container with a handle on it. So instead of carrying water on the head, you put the water inside the container and then push it the way you push the baby stroller. So it moves anywhere from three to five times as much water as a woman, or man would move on their own. I tried to always be aware of the fact that I didn't know everything. And really relied on my colleagues and on advisors and on our customers to really help me understand what the context was. And in keep in plain sight at all times what the problem we're solving is. And so I think being a venture, whose ambition was to alleviate the burdens of water collection. It would have been really hard to do that from someplace like New York, where the burden isn't even there, no one is head loading water. Water is easily available from your tap. So it kept the problem front and center, and I think that alone was the best reason to be based in India. But I would say be patient, and though initially as a student, right? So, understand the context, really take the time to wrap your hands around the problem that you're solving. In my case I moved to a rural village in Rajasthan and just experience what it was like. It'd been a couple of years since I'd lived in a really remote, low resource setting and I had never lived in India before. So I just wanted to get a really full picture of the problem before I even started to experiment with my solution. When I initially moved to India, I moved to a tiny little village in Rajasthan and experienced village life. So I carried a lot of water. And I spent a lot of time doing essentially anthropological research, looking at how people were spending their time. Who was collecting water? What were some of the challenges? I noticed some differences between one village to the next. Some villages used a donkey that they would use to collect water. But they wouldn't collect much more than they could carry themselves because they felt bad for the donkey. They knew that they would burden the animal. So for example oxen were only used to transport water in dire circumstances. Because if they used the ox all the time to transport water the oxen's knees would be damaged. So I was able to really clearly understand the problem, people couldn't collect enough water. They needed way more water than they could possibly get just by moving water themselves and even by employing animals. So then we started to get creative and I worked with a designer, a mechanical engineer, who helped me frame the problem for people. Work with the designer to craft a couple of experiments to test some of our assumptions around how we might solve the problem. So we came up with some crazy ideas, there is a very participatory process. We involved everyone in the community from children to elders, men and women. To get their perspectives on, why was it so challenging to get enough water? When did they need it? Where did they need it? And then we experimented with some actual prototypes of things that might work to help enable them to get water more easily. >> You know, in Republic, nobody can drink water. It doesn't matter what area you live. It's just that the higher classes they buy bottled water. And so there's nowhere that you can drink the water [INAUDIBLE]. So, yes, and I was living in an area where I can easily work with people. Who couldn't afford to drink bottled water. >> What were they drinking? >> River water, mostly. >> River water, again, full of pathogens, bacteria, and the like. >> But in their ignorance, to be fair, they assumed that because the water was flowing, that it was clean. And they had a history, it's an old community. And they had a history of their people being fine drinking that water for years. And so they thought, well, my ancestors have drunk this water. My parents drink this water. I drink this water. There's nothing wrong with this water. So there's a level of ignorance there that not of any fault of their own. There is a lack of understanding of the culture and honestly Americans just really don't understand the water crisis, they don't. When you can go and get water from a faucet anytime and drink it, you have water fountains. Water fountains for me became like the symbol of a wealthy nation, and people just don't understand. And so I had so many issues to try and explain the project in the United States. They were caught up in first world issues.
