Non Profits - Making a Difference

I, V, M. and Tony, the two other sagacious members of the team having become two. I don't know what unholy pursuits. One of them is taking lessons.

I fear for the Indian population. Yeah. So when you said scale it and stuff, I just remembered that you are practically a fossil no offense, but at the same time, you have the great ability to be surprised, right? If I was saying it, yet another episode of Simplified.

I'm surprised in your words. I would tell you the story. It's good to know that aging doesn't stop surprises, which is always something that you can look forward to. This is a completely different context, but signs of life is what I was getting at.

So there is this friend of mine who used to study in a cool where it was a Catholic school and the Padre was a big fan of theater. And so he used to teach boys in the spare time. So he used to set a lot by store by theater. So he used to tell that the most important thing in theater is presence of mine.

And what happened apparently was he was telling about his experience. He was in a play where he was a Julius Caesar and someone else was Brutus. And you know, so Brutus stabbed Caesar and Caesar falls. And it's an emotional moment.

So when Caesar falls, there is silence. And in that silence, this guy, the Padre very audibly farts. And he was saying, this is the presence of mine. Brutus immediately says, ah, signs of life and stabs him again.

So yeah, do you ever be surprised as the motto? Yeah, keep your presence of mine. And yeah, so as I was the main thing that I wanted to get to was because Tony and I are missing the intellectual big wigs of the four. We have decided to open someone who is a lot smarter than us, which is not very difficult practically anyone is smarter.

But our guest today is the smartest guy I know told me that he is the smartest guy he knows. So please welcome Royd Sar, hi Royd. Hi, Wayne. Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me here. And thank you for your very kind and generous introduction. So I was just telling Tony before the episode started about a little bit about what you do. So let me preface this with one thing.

I've always been fascinated by the entire. So, you know, the thing about running non-profits, right? So there are two challenges to running non-profits. One is that you need to be very motivated to begin with.

So you have to do, you have to have a clear vision, clear goal. And then when the rest of the world doesn't share your vision, you need to find enough internal drive to keep going at it. Because eventually that's what, you know, that's what makes really good non-profits from the also ran once. Absolutely.

Yeah. So, yeah, this is also the same for atheism, which is famously a non-profit organization. But like something you should be struggling with in your mid 30s, if you're like me, for the rest of the world out there. So, yeah, you're not alone, but also the world as a chair you've used later.

You have to deal with the fact that you are responsible for all the shit that you've made, right? Which is like a weird thing to do. But today we have an entirely different conversation around non-profits, right? No, absolutely.

Right. I think even for me, many ways, it was sort of like a meandering path, multiple different experiences that ultimately brought me to a place where I decided to start up, you know, start working with a couple of people on a non-profit idea. And I mean, I was just reflecting as both of you were talking about it. I mean, it is a journey that is very hard.

It takes a lot of time. It's hard to get, you know, the sort of fit that you're looking for immediately, even harder to get other people to sort of believe in the idea and back you like. But ultimately, I think how we always thought of it was sort of like holding on to the vision that we have and trusting in the process that we were putting ourselves through. And then in time, we would be able to generate value and others would also want to rally around us.

But definitely, I mean, it's one of those things where, I mean, which is for folks who intend to be be there. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, just on the thoughts around me entering the other podcast engines, just jump straight into it without creating any context or listeners. So if you could help us, like, take them back, which we didn't do. I just wanted to ask, you know, begin, actually begin the conversation. I always tend to put the cart before the horse.

So they cut before the horse. There's a fun. So I would go to. So yeah, I just just tell them a little bit about yourself.

You know, what was it like growing up? What what your experiences were just sort of a biography, leave out. Everything but the disgusting details. Keep keep all the disgusting details in and let's go.

No, thank you so much. So I was one character, both of my parents, to live there, have an older sister, younger, two siblings, about 10 years. So I grew up in a family where most of the men who were were engineers. And in some way, that also put me on a pre-audent path towards engineering.

Once as it does with most of the people, mostly in the Alcatar move to my store for five years, ended up learning pretty fluent in Canada and now I'm back in Bangalore again with my full-time job. So in many ways, things have come through circle and headed to IT, come from engineering to the soon after got involved with my first nonprofit experience with data, worked at PNG, worked at Abbott, currently working at an impact investment firm in Bangalore. And for the last couple of years, I've been working on a nonprofit called NoSosome, which looks at housing people who have been displaced due to disaster conflict or anything else. And that is what you and I started talking about in the end, which was sort of led on that meandering path through this conversation that the three of us are having here.

And if I take sort of a step back, right, and think about how some of these things happen and why they fell into it. I think if you think about it, there's a bunch of different reasons for why anyone would do something that is impact oriented. Either they're interested in problem solving and that's like, you know, something that really simulates them. You know, you enjoy the aspect of the kind of impact you've created and perhaps gratitude that folks have, and it just basically could feel good.

And in many ways, it can also be writing some sort of a wrong or an injustice, whether a personal or impersonal, right, and it's empowering, and it feels like the right to think. So I think if I put all of these things together, and that's really how I sort of looked at it, you know, why I decided to start working with Tata Trust, start working on the idea of NoSosome is essentially that you want to kick out of life, right? Life is short, you only get it once. Everyone finds different ways to make it meaningful.

And therefore, I decided that it's important to take up point of view, you know, in terms of what you would like to see the world at and then sort of work backwards from there to realize the vision. And that is sort of where both of these persons working on water sustainability, you know, not these, and they're looking at housing and rehabilitation came into play. If I'm very honest, perhaps I don't have a very specific call or a set of causes that I've determined to, you know, dedicate myself to, but I recognize that there are multiple areas where I have the ability and some context to contribute. And I think that's why I do relatively diverse things, but both sort of lending them to some sort of operational background, kind of doing in college, even the kind of work I ended up doing in my own career.

And that's sort of where I've like, I've like, gravitated if that helps that some of the context. That's quite a comprehensive reply. So let me, let me just ask one thing. OK, so in my observation, OK, there are two broadly two approaches to solving the world's problem.

OK, one bunch believes in sociological solutions, right? So it's everything is socio economic and you increase the income of one, decrease the income of the other, that kind of thing. And the other is the tech bro group, which probably you and I definitely, all three of us probably belong to who believe that technological solutions are really good and are available for many, if not all of humanity's problems. So what what is your so always tech bro is used in a very pejorative sense.

Excessed tech bros don't know it. They like I shall stand in queue for this. I'm usually for another three years. It's not a problem of technology.

Because it looks good on my Instagram, but all other problems can be solved by. What is it? Web three has a solution for this. Is that the right?

I'm sure that must be. I'm sure that must be. No, but so this particular thing, from what little I what little I know about low-cost housing and quick housing, what is something what you people were doing, has excellent solutions in technology, so mass producing panels and this kind of. So can you sort of just run us through what you feel about it?

Are you a tech bro who believes in tech solutions for everything? How does your thinking unfold on this? Absolutely. I'm so like, I don't know.

I don't know if I'm a tech bro. I think we have to know how to code mandatory. And I don't know if we need that very much. I have to shame the view.

Not only code, but print those lines of code and get a lot of us to review it. So that's true. That's true. That's like the argument for a tech bro.

I would imagine. But but no, I think I definitely believe that technology plays a very important role and can be a very important role in solving a lot of the problems that there are. But I think what's very important, perhaps, what sometimes folks may forget, which is why the word tech bro could at times be applied in a negative connotation as well, is that it's not just about designing or inventing something that is cool, but also about keeping things very contextual, that they work and fit for the people in that particular context, and that you are designing your solution, why you of course wanted to be standardized so that you can mass produce it, you can take advantage of scale and all of that. It also has to have the degree of adaptability of flexibility.

So that can work. For example, at home, we thought of the design as something that should work, where it's windy, should work, but it's rainy, should work, but it's hot. And apart from having the constant aspect of it being so deep, being strong and all of you think that. But a lot of them are thinking in terms of the choice of material, et cetera, help guide the design of the house in a way that would work across multiple different content.

Again, examples, right? When you think about how it's the average family somewhere between four and six members, and you want to ensure that you're giving them enough space to be able to lift comfortably, right? So that's contextual. You have to remember that our design relies on people themselves being able to set up the entire time, which meant that again, contextually, you wouldn't have anything that required any sort of machine learning power tools or learning on site.

That would be very simple, like, put pieces together, put a bolt into a bolt into together, right? Something that six people could do in about six to eight hours with very basic hand-held tools. And most importantly, I think what would lead right to solve for is the fact that when people lost their place of living, they lost a lot more than just a shelter over their head, right? You subject yourself to disease and injury.

Your children will typically not be able to go back to school. You will typically not be able to leave your family back home and have restart, you know, your earning and your career because at a lot of time, refugee camps with their open sort of community setting are not very safe for women and children, either, right? So I think when you're really right to solve the psychological damage that has happened from the perspective of using your home, not knowing whether you'll get your home back and then that disrupts your life in so many ways. That's where the context of really building a home, right?

Something that's sturdy, something that's warm, something that's waterproof, something that protects you from the cold at the wind and gives you enough space to be like this is a real house. And that's why, you know, we decided to go ahead and build a house, build a home and not shelter. And all of this technology being applied contextually in terms of the choice of materials, the design, the assembly to build something that was very effective and useful. That's a great answer because one of the things that gets tech bros a bad name is that they have this solution.

And if that solution doesn't fit the person is in it. The problem is the person that is in general, not a problem with the solution. That's the general. So very famously if all you have is a hammer.

You keep seeing everything. Everything, every problem looks like a nail. Right. So like just to tease out the sort of no one's here, right?

One is I think like what you touched upon in terms of the psychological damage that is inflicted on someone where they on the 10,300 of their life had a house and everything put together. And then after they don't. Yeah, they don't. Right.

And that is massively like different for us. Absolutely devastating for someone. And like nothing that any one of us thinks could happen to us, but it could right because life is unpredictable. And on the second sort of side is the fact that you then want to give them sort of great or good experience, which they, you know, have to come to terms with, but also like turn into a home.

So where like in terms of like the space of the problem, right? How do you go about figuring out what is an appropriate solution and like what did success look like to begin with? I mean, so just context, right. So one of the members, I mean, I had muscles who essentially was one of the founding members, Koshel, CEO and bachelor of my from MIT, Kharagpur.

He grew up in the flatbed region of Western Karnataka, right? In and around, would be in mind. And had failed and seemed for the impact of devastation when really you know, in the river, so one of the, called the Gata Para Para Para, sort of flooded every once in a month. Koshel went on to live in Mumbai with his family.

Brodhi wasn't affected by the problem for the rest of his life, but somewhere the memory statement graduated as an architecture student and part of his recent project, Brodhi, he came up with the initial concept of hospital. And sometime later, when I was, you know, in the middle of my first job, it was peak COVID and absolutely chaotic time in life. But Koshel and Mahatma, the senior of my very friend from MIT Kharagpur, sort of came to me and said, hey, we've been talking around with the concept, you know, we've taken it to a couple of events. We've met some people, they really like it.

They have a little bit of sea funding to go ahead and try to develop this. You know, Gata, you know, actually, what's the operation? What's the factory? Is there something rare for people from engineering colleges in these days?

So do you think you'd be able to build houses the same way you build a machine? And I had absolutely no idea. But I mean, it was just an incredibly audacious talk, right? Like, can we iterate it or ideate it through the different things that the designers have to have?

We're not as a small one of these problems, temperature, water, safety, security. That's what we can feel like, a house would be pretty in for the lack of better words. It has to be cheap, can't be ridiculously expensive. We have to be able to build relatively low resource settings.

Like some fabricator with the shops somewhere, if you can weld and cut and grind, you should be able to put a shelter and put a home together. And that is where all of this basically started. If I talk a little bit about how we arrived at this. So thankfully, there are a lot of good resources out there in the public domain, which broadly look at what principles you should have in trying to design a shelter as a starting point.

You know, how much space you need to give, what your strength should be, how you think about insulation and water-proofing and all the good things. Second, we wanted to sort of go with the design, you know, that would fit in with the kind of setting that it was going in. So low single-story how large sort of open space, windows, all the flow of air through the entire structure. And all of this essentially had to be done using fairly standard materials.

Like as we were mentioning, that mass manufacturing is an advantage. But only if your design can take benefit of. And we start with a bunch of time. I think the hardest part was essentially drawing out all of these individual components and designs of the house by hand.

Sort of sitting and finding out visualizing how different elements would go together. So I think there was some 140, 150 components we initially started with, right? And over time, we find them to the absolute bare minimum, you know, 30, 40 things that the house required and put them together in terms of assembly. And I think this was really the starting.

Hope to a lot of people who are working in the rehabilitation and disaster relief space. A lot of NGO was other NGO's people in the government and people in the private sector who were building housing solutions. And I think one thing became incredibly clear to us, right? That it was never going to be possible for the remote nostrils to actually go ahead and deploy houses ourselves.

And we needed, therefore, a design and a solution that was not limited in scalability by our bandwidth or team type, but rather could leverage the simplicity in the design. And we went through the entire process ultimately and ended up building out, you know, almost like Lego-like assembly system for the house, which folks would put together. And I think even at a conceptual level, when we designed everything and we tried to simulate and see whether everything fits how it works, it was quite incredible. As of today, we find a patent on the design, patent pending in both India and the UK.

We've been about a year since we find our initial patent and we haven't had any challenges. And we hope that we get granted in the next few months in 2023. And then, you know, maybe take a pause here and we can reflect on some of these things. But going forward was just a whole bunch of operational and execution challenges in terms of building the houses with the vendor, shipping them to a site, having, you know, people who had never seen the homes work on them for the first time.

And that is, you know, sort of what the entire journey was not so sort of about. But it came from a very personal context. It was designed to essentially keep, you know, the person who's using it at the center of it. And we're never just learning from a lot of different people, a lot of different sources, a lot of thinking, time went into this design and simulation work.

They'll be finally at something that was cheap to build in effective and easy to understand as well. So that's very interesting. What I want to know, you know, going a little ahead is when you designed it, when you designed it, so there would be few things that you would have in mind. Number one is what are you going to offer?

Is it primarily a shelter? Is it a proper home, which, you know, which can be or you can send that whether it's going to be something temporary till they can do or whether it's something or to be permanent. And what about the other things that people do in houses such as cook and study, children will study and things like that. So, you know, those are different access to sort of.

Absolutely. How do you think and handle that? So one interesting thing that we found out when we were designing this house here, and you're speaking to people who are in the disaster relief space, is that on average, you know, people can take up to five and a half years to actually regain their housing. Which means it's not a temporary shelter, right?

There's nothing temporary about five and a half years. And if you lose those five and a half years, essentially, you know, saying that, okay, I'm going to restart my life after five and a half years when I get my pucker house back. That's catastrophic. That's life changing.

It's very, very hard. You know from COVID, something like that. Yeah. And literally six months pauses are, you know, shattering people's lifestyles.

Yeah, disrupting people's lifestyles, right? Absolutely right. Absolutely. And that was disruptive and to say in the least, right, this is essentially devastating.

Because everything that you've had, you've also mentioned, right? You can't go back to work. You can't go back to school. You're at risk from like disease and illness.

And all of that just compounds this cycle of negativity. And you know, at the end of the day, if you can't feel safe, you can't feel confident. And you're constantly burdened by all these things and your chances of like making and building your life back up is low. And that's really the core of the problem that you want to discern.

So we've built centers that have a life for at least 10 years. The idea was that, you know, they could have multiple deployments and redeployments so that money that's spent on them, one continues to provide that impact over a long period. Hence sort of looking at steel and as for the frame and the structure of the design, looking at sort of like sturdy mass produce panels for the walls and the roof and sort of ensuring that the design is robust enough that you can take it down, you can put it back up, you can move it from place to place. And the components will broadly be broadly to find.

I'm sure that gets cut loose a little bit of paint here and there, but broadly the structure of the house has to be made like. So I think that's the first thing that we've got. In terms of the other facilities, our ability side, and this was an interesting advantage for us to make. So, you know, ideally you would think that if we had a fully functioning home, you know, our toilet would be part of a dedicated, would be part of it and sanitation would be a part of it as well.

What we realized when we looked at the best practices for a refugee camp, the enemy looked at, you know, what the leading player would take care of hundreds of thousands of refugees across the world are doing. I think two things became very clear. One, from a perspective of ensuring sanitation, right, it's preferable if you do not have the washroom inside the house. Because ultimately you can build a good toilet to get inside the structure, but it's very, very hard to manage like, you know, real solid plumbing in a set of letters.

If you look at that wrong, then you're just asking for a disaster in terms of public health and disease. So generally the idea was always to sort of set up a community later in a sanitation set up that was likely part of the house. In fact, if you even look at a lot of people who have toilets in their houses, design their house and light, you know, you'll have one place where you stay, where you eat, but your toilet is often essentially an outcome connected with a septic tank. Because even that, you know, contextual ways are from a plantation standpoint.

People often prefer to separate their house from their sanitation set up. So that is one thing that we kept in mind, and we did not build toilets into the house themselves, but instead designed for separate sort of house units using the same lightweight modular design philosophy. And finally, in terms of cooking, again, from a hygiene and sanitation standpoint, centralized kitchen, where you can control the quality and the safety standards for food, make sure that the food is warm, is definitely one priority that the nonprofits that we were engaging with were interested in. And second, you know, that also there are also prevents a very important with regards to a household of fire.

Electricity is something that we did think about. So there was an option given that there was a grid that the refugee camp itself overall could get connected. You could have a capacity to add a small switchboard and like you get lighting, etc. within the houses.

And although we haven't done it yet, we were also exploring the idea of supporting solar panels on the roof and connecting it via switchboard and battery set up to provide like phone charging, lighting, etc. inside the house itself. So I think the electrification is something that we brought in thought sanitation also like certainly without something that we brought in soil. But I think both sanitation and cooking is something that we tried to best maintain outside the house, given the sort of close proximity setup of our refugee camp.

That's the most practical thing. That's the most practical thing. Yeah, most practical thing. So I think with the house, there were certain things that we kept in mind, right?

We wanted to design something that was suitable for a single family, right? And a single sort of big hall sort of main type of setup. I mean, there's a lot of Google housing looks like context. I spent time in the northeast with the Tata Water Mission.

I spent a lot of time living in the villages with folk as we tried to understand what issues were the water supply was, some context from there. Which part of northeast was this? This was in Assam, first near Guwati and then near the Assam, which is in these flood-prone areas. So these weren't flood-prone areas.

These were areas where we had a lot of trouble with the groundwater table. A lot of groundwater, which is the primary source for drinking and any form of domestic consumption. A problem with arsenic and iron pollution in the groundwater table. I worked on this arsenic remediation with university, Abakle University.

I see. I see. So then you have context for sure. You know, I set up a water ADM, you put some chemical media to clean the water.

And I was actually there trying to examine how we could better improve the efficiency of the water and sources of the water. For the water mission and the NGOs that they funded, which were deploying these solutions on the ground. So I think a bunch of context came from the ground there. What should I try to do in the early years, Google, Western, and Canada.

A lot of context from there. And we generally have the privilege of engaging with a lot of partners from the ecosystem, interacting with the government of Nagaland and some NGOs in there who are interacting with habitat for humanity. So one of the largest NGOs that look at building houses. And a bunch of other NGOs and private sector players as well.

No, not least. I've never been to the northeast, but I understand that it's very different from the rest of India. The terrain is very difficult. Connectivity is very limited.

And society also, people tend to be very clustered in their own sort of. You don't have that system of urbanization. You don't have people from between communities and things like that. So that would have been a unique challenge as well.

That is sociological. Absolutely. I think when you kept some of these contexts in mind, and brought to design something that looks similar to the houses that people have. And sort of taken to context all of these things.

We were fortunate that when we did our first pilot deployment in Western Karnataka, back in Koshaswamtang, and we had a bunch of people from the local communities mostly involved agriculture or some other form in the service sector. Someone was amazing. Someone worked as an electrician, as a technician. But most people from an agricultural background.

I think there was a lot of excitement and enthusiasm that people had in terms of building a lot of them at some of the other point of time. And unfortunately, some of the other form of displacement over the years. And then had the experience of living in traditional refugee campsite. So when they themselves built the houses without, and they saw that how easy the solution is, and it only takes a few hours to put it together.

It's almost intuitive what part will be where. And they saw the sheer difference between what they had had as shite as before and what they have as their own now. I think there was a lot of appreciation, a lot of acceptance in terms of that. That this will really what would have made a difference if we had had it.

When we had lost our houses, whatever, five, six, eight, ten, fifteen years ago. And I think that was the biggest sort of validation. So I think between the first time we deployed the houses in November of 2021 and the second time we deployed the houses in March of 2022. We definitely took a lot of feedback from our vision to plan on what to make it easier, what to make it more appealing, what to people like better when we were building these houses up.

So I think combination of thoughtful design, getting a lot of feedback from people who are already working in this space. And then nothing like actually going ahead and building the first couple of houses out. And having a lot of people from the local community engage with you and give you very pointed feedback on what they like, what would have been better to sort of do that continuous improvement, use that feedback to make the houses better and better. Interesting.

So this is also nice back to something called design thinking. So you don't have the luxury when you're dealing with real world problems of unlimited iteration. So you have at best one or two because if you keep having to iterate on and on, all your channel, everybody connected with the thing loses heart, loses confidence in the product. So you have to get less than expensive.

That's expensive. Which means you have to think a lot about it, design wise. So that's what I was wondering. How can I generalize this?

How can I generalize the approach of design thinking to anything that you might be doing? If you had to solve a problem, let us say you were solving a problem of, I don't know, warm clothes for people affected very badly with winter somewhere. How do you think about it? How do you have no experience of cold weather?

You have no idea what bitter cold feels like. Time for a little break. Stay tuned and see you on the other side. It feels like everyone is talking about two things right now.

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Welcome back. We are in conversation with Roy Saru telling us about his journey with nonprofits. I think we've hit up on a really important point in the meantime, which is especially in a non-profit setting. It's relatively hard.

It's relatively quick with your iterations and you can iterate only so many times. I think a large part of design thinking is not having a situation where the first thing you build is so very wrong that you have to start a word from scratch, that would sort of defeat the purpose. Not that that doesn't happen. But the intent would be to not end up in that situation.

We are on simplifying about the 290th iteration of something. We still not figured it out. So very different metrics. But okay.

So I think one place where I sort of built this lens in terms of how to think of this realm was kind of work that I did in my first job, like at BNG. When I started, I was in my second year of work at BNG. And the job there was broadly as an operations manager's object. So it's a production unit.

You have a lot of people working a lot of equipment. And you essentially have to develop operational and financial results. And if you sort of heard of the whole production model where you use small, fine, small, small, small gap in between where you want to be. And you run a continuous improvement to keep improving.

The challenge is all of this improvement side. Whether it's like you make up change to the maintenance schedule, whether you decide to improve some design on the equipment, whether you decide to speed up the machine by the person to get more production from it. All of this will require changes that at scale. I will just sort of have to be deployed and implemented across an entire production line with people who are coming in shifts who are not there and all of this will be cut in the morning.

But now we might have to figure out learn and start working all of this by themselves as well. So I think my muscle in terms of thinking of things from a stakeholder point of view really came from here. When you're running continuous improvement projects and changing 20, 20 things every couple of months in terms of how you do it all quickly getting people to forget what was there before. Learn what's there today and look forward to what's there tomorrow.

I think you end up building some perspective on how to go about it. I think number one is basically to put yourself in the other portion of the site. It's to have as much information as you possibly can about the problem. We do this in three ways of what not.

There's a lot of information in terms of design, et cetera. We look at that. There's a lot of people in the ecosystem that we need to write at the very beginning. We didn't spend any time trying to imagine what the right house should look like.

We straight up went to people who'd been building houses for the last 10 years or 20 years. And as if you were to build something that would enable this concept, what would that essentially look like. And all of this at the end of the day start from your theory of change, right? It starts from what is the transformation that you want to speed there.

And I think that's really very important in terms of how you define the starting problem statement and everything else from there. We didn't set out and take the idea that you wanted to build the cheapest or the lowest path that you have in mind. We didn't set out two of the solution that said that you will build houses that will last for 20 years. We set out with a very clear problem statement that people get displaced.

They typically spend about five years in a temporary shelter before they get their houses back. What can we do to ensure that the transition from losing their house to getting their home back is as undestructive and normative as possible. And that was the kind of entirety of the design. On top of that, what we ended up layering once you got to figure out, okay, I'm my design constraint.

The transform is I want to deliver are they are they solid? I think you start adding two more layers. For the second layer, okay, can this be made? Which meant then not to sort out what the house should be, but who's going to manufacture this?

Are these materials available? Can these designs on the house, like holes you have to drill, things you have to cut out, pieces you have to bend? Can all of this be done by a relatively unsoticated manufacturer anywhere in a distributed set up in India. And then the third constraint, again, going back very literally putting yourself in somebody's shoes, is when someone sees these houses, how are they going to interact with these houses?

How will they know what these houses have to go where? On the way to how are you going to unload these materials from the house and just be able to make sure that they're not missing a very important piece that was important for one house. And I can imagine you do all of this to ship the house and come on for again, so like unload a column over a beam and suddenly one entire wall of the house can be assembled or set up because that's something someone could identify. So our design thinking really went across all of it.

You know, conceptually what the house had to provide. Structurally what the house had to provide. From a manufacturing ability, hence standpoint, how the houses could be designed. Cost also became a very important component of this manufacturing ability aspect as well.

And then finally in terms of how the user interacts with it or the refugee interacts with it, how do you pack the houses into a house? How do you like even small small things that are putting a number of things which sort of has the design of the part number for the column being a wall of window on it? And finally, how do you communicate the essence of the design? So I think we do two things here.

We built out a very, very visual, I mean, I don't know if you guys have seen how a lego assembly guide looks like. It literally closed your house built up as you start adding one thing to another to another and then we have the next piece of the house to go like. And combining sort of like, you know, putting like these information signals or templates on the components. And then a visual guide, both in terms of printout that you would send to the houses and like a QR code that you scanned would sort of take you to like a 3D video which is like showing a simulation of how the pieces are assembled along with like actual photographs of our pilot deployment of people fixing these things together.

You know, to sort of land that confidence that it is possible to do it, all things that we did along this design thinking journey. Right. And when you put it out like that, it sounds fairly simple. It's obvious that you would have to do it.

But believe me, it took days, it took hours and days and weeks of just like, you know, how different things would go together. You know, does the panel come first and then the column comes first and then the panel which is more intuitive if you fit one, maybe you can't fit the other thing. And how would it just go about doing all of this? Right.

Is all about the spend time on and coming to your specific example, right, for the benefit of whoever is listening to the part. How do you take something like designing designing a material that's made for the code? I think it all comes from that same design. Like what you're trying to solve.

I'm trying to build something that is the one I'm trying to build something that is the people I'm trying to build something that is the value combining the warmth and the price of the product. Second, I'm trying to solve for environmental content. I'm sure you could build a fairly warm article of clothing out of like, you know, all your materials, people build it out of like, whoo, but I'm trying to be ethical and saying that I'm not going to be using animal total and I'm using this type of material. I think all of these become considerations that you're trying to do this sort of design thinking right from the, if I were really what is the change that you're trying to bring about?

What are the specific constraints within which therefore you have chosen to operate with the design? Second, how are you going to manufacture and prepare these, keeping them constrained, you know, such as ethics, environmental constraints, cost, material availability, in mind. And then finally, if you're going very bold and saying, hey, I'm going to provide a design where people can like stitch their own clothing. Then how practical or simple is it, right?

Like if I were to take a peg out of your own book, Nariar and Anthony, how simplified can this be for someone to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to. So I think all of this goes into that perspective of design thinking, starting from the problem ending at the user and putting yourself in the user's tool and imagining what it would be like to do what you're asking the person to actually do. And then solve, you know, for the intent of making it as simple as possible. Yeah.

So just two quick responses to this, right? One is obviously IKEA is famously regarded as, you know, the best sort of D.I. In the entire world. But when they came to India, they realized they need the help of urban company because no one's going to sit in a symbol for days together.

And therefore your fundamental assumptions need to change, not saying IKEA is going to go about it. But like one of the things that I've been lucky enough to do is also sort of like be able to teach some participants of a cause as it were, whether it's marketing or slightly around UX design. And like one example that I like to use, especially when you sort of mentioned that when you mentioned that it seems simple enough when you're explaining it in hindsight versus how you actually experience it. I personally think that this is an example that resonates with anyone who's been in the Mumbai T2 airport, right?

And especially if you're sort of landing into it for the first time. Whenever my family lands there, I make it a point to go and pick them up. Not just because Malu uncle's frown on you if you don't go and pick them up, but because while it is aesthetic, it is horribly designed that a person who's landing there for the first time cannot find out how to bloody get to the place where they want to get to, right? And therefore like the problem- Leaving the airport becomes the right.

Yeah, exactly. The problem statement they've designed sort of defined is that you need to be able to deplane. We have aeroburgers for everyone. But like how the fuck do you get out of the airport?

Like it's impossible to figure out. It took me at least three times to figure it out. And I was like, okay, my brother came from Ireland this night. I'm like, don't worry.

I'm going to be outside this particular exit number three. That's all you need to do. Leave the rest of it to me. Because there is a, you land at P6 or P4 or one of those things and you need to head to P4 or P6 to get a cab.

And there's an escalator that just skips two floors and goes somewhere without any signifiers, without telling you what it's supposed to do. All of these things, right? So when you think of design, people usually at a fundamental level tend to think that, oh, wow, look at how high the ceilings are at the airport. And like how beautifully this geometry is coming about to create an district-e pleasing appeal, right?

But the problem is also inspired by, I think it was inspired by 10,000 people. Check out, but you can actually never leave. And that's something that I have experienced the very first time that. No, actually bad design is all around us.

Which makes it even harder to appreciate good design. Because good design is practically when you don't sort of experience that there's been something that's been put in the place. Which is a consummation devout to be wish to see the airport. But I've unmuted myself.

I agree with, I have a particular grouse with Mumbai T2 Airport. And I agree with Tony that good design is when you don't even realize that it's there. It just, everything happens seamlessly. Just go through it.

I'm trying to, you know, rummage in whatever I loosely call my mind. For instance, what I think might be good design. I have nothing to do. It's like the lesbian sheep, right?

Have you heard about it? So, feel that sheep? They are very illicat. What context is have you heard lesbian sheep going to L.S.A.T.A.T.

response from any audience? Yeah, yeah, of course lesbian sheep. Like, yeah, I saw the BBC documentary yesterday. But too, do tell us about lesbian sheep.

This is why our listeners turn in. To my mind, it is a most logical law. I don't know. So, sheep, like female sheep, they indicate their sort of readiness to mate by standing absolutely still.

So, the female sheep is absolutely still, she is ready to mate, basically. That's the signal that a ram takes. But the problem is, what if that sheep is lesbian? And what if there are two lesbian sheeps next to each other?

Yeah. So, that's all of, I was somehow connected in my mind that with good design. So, good design equal to lesbian. But I don't know how much that's all of that.

You're supposed to, you're supposed to count the sheep and fall asleep. Not stay awake and think of how lesbian sheep mate. No, no. So, I don't know what I was tangently getting to was.

You've sort of had the experience of actually seeing how people react to their design. How do you sort of define that design success and have you had moments where you're like, yeah, what are you doing is right or there's something that we need to change? I think the way we went about it is we defined very clearly for ourselves what success would look like. And it was very simple.

We didn't have too many metrics. I think it had totally three metrics that we looked at when we said, yeah, if this happens, then we say that our design is helpful. And we did it about something that we could. Number one should not take more than 60 people to build it.

Number two should not take them more than 60 people to build it. And number three, it should not require anything apart from very simple tools. In fact, nothing apart from panel or range and some bolts and not to build the house together. And we felt that if you can demonstrate these three things and or rather they would be demonstrated by people who had no concept of what an also home one people go back and say that design is ready for mass production.

And that's it. So, I think the product aspect that I'm getting at is it's very important to have criteria to say that your design is successful. Absolutely. And to not leave it vague or open and like sure anything can work at the end of the day.

It could work even if the house is two days to build and required like 10 people and a blowout and a drill that would also technically be building the house and having them work. But when your design intent is essentially do not do any of these things. That's in many ways what I'm trying to say is that your success criteria have to be a reflection of your design intent. It has to be easily verifiable very big thing.

I think we built the first two houses and we've heard that there's a bunch of stuff that's wrong. These two holes are not in the right place. This column is too long or too short. These two joints aren't as intuitive and it's very difficult for someone to actually put their finger there and tighten something with the boat.

Some of these things even after like hours and hours of like simulation and like just like thinking and visualizing what they are just fighting. Right. Like part eight supposed to be right. Absolutely.

And that in our office then poor designed at our end because if you haven't put something out of the house that makes it very easy to understand. Okay. This is part number one. This according to the design goals and this order and then we've done something wrong.

So I mean despite all of this design thinking the first time we actually put our houses on the ground two of them built and you only managed to assemble two bunch of screw ups from our vendors and a lot of things that were that were supposed to have been delivered not getting delivered. And then we had to put in the right things that we had thought of incorrectly as well. Right. I'm going to put it more in particular.

I had thought of thought of incorrectly since I was holding the pen on the design. But the advantage was that because all of this happens on codified was just as easy for us to play around with their job. It didn't take us too long to identify the modifications that we would need to do a design. And the next time when we went to deploy them in March and you know we had someone who were running a machine shop in the local area come and work with us for some on-field modifications and PES.

The vendor facility was very far away from where we should have heard as a deployment happening near Bangalore. We were able to get a lot of this stuff done. I think two design iterations is ultimately what it took us to do over a period of one year finalize our design and get all four houses built by six people in the cars using nothing but spanners and trenches and nuts and bolts. Amazing.

Thank you. You've been very generous with your time. You have a question? Yeah.

No, I just want to observation that there is this famous philosopher named Karl Popper who said that for his theory to be scientific it has to be falsifiable. So otherwise it's not scientific. Good design. You should be able to pinpoint your key failure area.

So if these things don't happen in the design, the design is failed. So for me, that's like one aha mata. Yeah, that makes sense. So that was good.

And there's another thing about Karl Popper wrote in another book is about so he was talking about I think what government should be doing. It's a book called Open Society and its enemies lovely book written in the time of the war and looking at where fascism emanates and he finds and he argues very convincingly that it emanates. From within the society and within the democracy and within the set up that we have. But the point he makes is this that everyone talks about increasing people's happiness.

But you really can't increase anyone's happiness because humans are humans. Happiness means different things to different people. What you can definitely do is reduce people's misery. So I think that's an enormous thing that you guys have done in the Lost Souls homes.

And that's it. There is no guarantee you can make anyone happy. You can make them less unhappy and less miserable. So there's just one additional me and Rick part that I wanted to explore which you've sort of beautifully let me segue into and the films of that you mentioned.

Obviously couldn't monetize any of his thoughts which is why he was called Popper and not like Karl millionaire. But sort of like the question, right? Which is like part of this podcast is also about obviously unfortunately men trying to be vulnerable to the extent possible. Right.

And like we've had episodes where we've discussed the concept of happiness versus chasing meaning and all of that. I recently registered a sub stack called where is Bill what is in dot sub stack dot com which is zero post on it. But the idea being that Bill what is in was probably like, you know, one of like what he looked at as a conventional success and then he's fucking walked away from it. And nobody knows where he is.

And he's like you don't seem interviewed on any of these common pop culture media that you consume. And therefore you have no idea what he's thinking. So sort of like the job of the thought was to find these people who find meaning and things that are not conventionally defined as success. And like from the waves spoken through it like you have extreme clarity on what things need to be and how they're done.

And I was hoping you know you could just turn that on yourself as a person and sort of tell us like what is the motivation for you to keep going in a space that you can't do. And keep going in a space that is less sexy than you know what is probably like monetarily most viable and you know what do you find meaning in and how do you sort of keep going every day. Absolutely. Thank you.

Thank you so much for that question. And you know one of the things that I was reflecting on as I worked at North Storz got started before this. Why I sort of started doing all of this again as I continue to spend more time. What is it that I really look away at what I found to be inspiring in the entire journey.

So I think number one, you know the fact that you would fundamentally code switch between different things in your early career. I've always done all of these things in a volunteer capacity. We took a ferry, delivered it at North Storz to not pay ourselves and keep it volunteer. Primarily because the idea was that every dollar that we raise or to be that we should go towards building houses and impact.

If you had to have a team of eight to ten people we were to pay even average market salaries. Then that's a lot of money. A lot of houses are essentially not getting built at that point of time. And sure it was a stretch for everyone to either like pull college or like work and then manage to like I mean also practically like a second job at that point of time.

When you were like building houses and engaging with vendors calling the truck driver and asking where are the houses. How long is it to take to reach. And like literally like doing hammer-and-tons and building the things by our own hands. Doing rain, summer, thank you and whatnot in Manzo.

And I think that is sort of like the starting aspect of it. In terms of what happens first. The second that you know the ability to work on large problems that are global in nature is fundamentally exciting. The kind of aspect of seeing other people within the team.

So it may be more important than whatever they do. Whoever is being funded is like working with deployment partnerships. Someone who is with media and T.R. and see all of them like you pull all of this together and succeed.

And finally just the thought that if there is mass mobilization that occurs along this narrative right. Of people may be holding like full-time jobs and like expertise and whatever it is that they do. But lending their skills and capabilities to work on problems that don't necessarily pay them on it. But pay them for the lack of better world to be a degree of satisfaction.

And the kind of potential that they have for transformation across the world was just fundamental. And that is at the end of the day I think what all of the folks I know who joined NOSTOs team 8, 10 people from India from the UK, from the UK, from the local, from the architecture, from the engineers. And all doing diverse different things in the organization. I think that's where it really came from.

The idea that what I said about earlier problems solving and the fact that it's stimulating. The degree of gratitude and feeling good from having done something that has hit someone else. And also a degree of just like your satisfaction from the empowered from having the right and around or doing something that right from injustice. I think all of this really puts together and motivates me.

And a very important factor is the fact that you're inspired by the people that you work with. I think it's a new world that I learned sometime recently. This world called what it means to convene. When you get like talent, you get money, you get innovation.

All around an idea. And it's almost as if everyone around you is hooting and trying to help you succeed. And that's just a great thing. So I think contrary in some ways, to understand that it's possible that it's not as rewarding or as it's based, that might be more less sexy.

There is a genuine degree of satisfaction. I don't like one person that I at least have felt from doing this work. The big chunk of that is not just the outcomes that you create and that it's key in food. But the fact that you rally a bunch of people around yourself and you around them and just feed off of that positive energy and inspire yourself.

I think that's a big part of what has and will continue to motivate me to do more work in the impact. No, I'm amazing. But I'm just going to push a little harder if that's okay. But basically what I'm sort of grappling with is that when it's sort of like an end of stage evaluation of where you reached, it seems like an inevitable linear path.

But like you've been to IIT Kharagpur, you've seen lots of your batch with X, Y, Z. And I'm guessing there have been like points of conflict in your own journey to say, you know, should I do X or Y, right? And like I feel like that's where some of the more interesting narratives that we don't tell ourselves exist. To say, you know, how do you sort of understand or like how did you sort of reconcile with what it is that you wanted to do or was it always very straightforward for you?

I think it was definitely an evolution. In my school days, I knew I wanted to go to engineering, but I wasn't particularly interested in any brand that's been going to engineering. It was more around the fact that this is an area where it is something that looks like problem solving. I probably meet other peers who are interested in similar things.

I get a platform like so we use a lot, you know, early education or career, this thing or that thing. We'll provide some sort of a platform like that. And you're trying to keep as much optionality as possible. That's how that funnel started for me.

I grew into a bunch of things over time. I figured out that I wanted to do something initially that was like supply chain operations oriented. I enjoyed the idea of like problem solving at scale, took me to my first job at P&G, built a bunch of capabilities and leadership in systems and operations. Wanted to move then next to something that was more commercially oriented but I think both of these stages, you know, going, working in a factory, how will that be?

What is the advantage of doing that kind of role? It was for major sort of thinking point, right? I grappled with that realization for a while. It's not easy.

It's very, that is definitely one role, which is very unsexy if I would say so myself. And it took a bunch of time to arrive at the understanding that, you know, your job is not just one thing, but it's actually a combination of many things. It's almost like you're a small business owner running a little bit, a small unit that employs 50 people and does some production and business in a year and that you're responsible for the end all of it, right? Like sort of open minds eyes up to what strategy, what operations, what all of these things.

That is what you mean. Definitely challenging. It took a lot of time to grapple with this, get that sort of articulation of value. And I think my big takeaway for right and it's a takeaway that I've then since gone on to be a constant problem.

Is this really all about what value you articulate in the work that you're doing or the work that you're going to do that? And I think this value that you sort of articulate is a combination of three things. That's how I sort of distilled this into like a principle that I reflect on mentally. I mean, it's a combination of three things.

How will you get it? One, what is it that you like? And when people get the wrong video, they think of this in terms of like whole descriptions and why I want to be a product manager or software engineer. But it's a lot more fundamental, right?

Do you like solving problems? Do you like working with people? Do you like doing things that are creative in the future? And all of this can then take you along the path through very different job descriptions, right?

Which I don't know for them to tell inadequate to explain what the real value articulation of a job is. In terms of like what you like. Second of course, what you're hoping that everyone has skills, everyone has things that they get to us. Some of us are more creative, some of us are better with numbers, some of us are better with people and various combinations.

And the third finally, very importantly is what you get out of all this like like compensation, whether it's financial, whether it's in terms of exposure and being able to learn anything, whether it's in terms of the ability to help others and feel a degree of satisfaction. I think for me, it was essentially about spending enough time to realize that first triangle like that and then to realize what with it triangle works for me, which is sort of allowed me to start out on a studio journey that is very, very focused around all things impact. And I think going forward, I will continue to look at things both on the fall profit or like sort of the more traditional career side while also holding, you know, one leg in the nonprofit side of things very, very closely. And that's sort of how it's going to be.

But all of it, I think boils down to being able to articulate the value in what you're doing. And that is really the starting point and also the ending in some way of figuring out these these crossroads that life will invariably do do it, whether you want to work in a factory, moving to a commercial role, deciding that investing is something that I wanted to do after that, continuing to keep up on the nonprofit thing also out irrespective of what I've done. I think it all stems from that singular point, which is articulating value. And I think that's one of the most important things that I had the privilege of learning from the people I was with earlier in my career, which made up a different.

And, you know, it's a great, I just want to this up with one anecdote. I read it. It's such a nice thing. I'm surprised it's not a WhatsApp forward.

So here's the thing. Yeah, it will be now. So this was sort of probably an apocryphal story. But I think that so there are two great American writers, Joseph Heller and Kurt Von book that alternately I wanted to throw against the wall and ultimately exclaim that this is absolutely brilliant.

I mean, the most brilliantly frustrating book that I've ever read in my life. Absolutely. Everything is a walking contradiction in cash, 22. It's not a funny book.

It's the funniest project book ever. But sorry, it's funniest. I interrupted you when Heller and Vony go to win to a party. So they were invited.

They were invited to a billionaire's house. Right. So a lot of other people were too. And, you know, there was all the finest champions, the prettiest women, you know, everything, great masters hanging on the wall, everything.

And so Kurt Vony got tells Joseph Heller says, do you realize, Joseph, you might have written the greatest book in American history, but this guy makes more than you ever made in your life. He makes it in a single afternoon. So Joseph Heller laughs and tells Kurt Vony got it says, yes, but I have one thing which that man will never have. So he says, what is that?

He says, I have enough. So I think that is the key to being motivated for being in any way involved in pursuits like running or running nonprofits or being anyway involved in some social cause because the metrics are so difficult. So you have to be internally satisfied that you have what you have wanted out of life. And so I'm going to take this opportunity to wind up this lovely conversation with our usual sign of line saying stay safe, stay satisfied and say simplified.