Financing Solar Energy in the Global South with Lassor and Ruchir

“Introduction

Brought to you by Business Fights Poverty.

Hello and welcome to Business Fights Poverty's Social Impact Pioneers podcast series. I am Katie Hyson, Director of Thought Leadership. These interviews with Social Impact Pioneers provide you with insights, different perspectives, advice, and maybe a little inspiration, giving you firsthand understanding of how businesses and others are tackling some of the world's biggest social challenges so that you can learn from those who have been there before, helping you in your decision-making and action-taking.

Welcome to Social Impact Pioneers. Today, we are reimagining how we finance climate solutions and who gets to participate in building a cleaner, more equitable energy future. Around the world, the places with the greatest potential for solar energy, and often the greatest need, are also the least financed.

Emerging markets across India and Africa have some of the highest social and environmental returns on solar projects. Yet traditional philanthropy and climate finance often overlook them. That's where renewables.org comes in.”

“renewables.org is the Global South solar investing non-profit. It allows anyone, yep, anyone, to invest as little as $25 into solar projects across India and Africa. As those projects generate and sell carbon-free electricity, investors are paid back monthly over five years.

There's no interest return rate, but the impact is powerful. Every dollar invested delivers up to 550% of the carbon impact of a typical US solar investment. Through its open-source Impact Multiplier, the organization shows that its projects can prevent five times more carbon per dollar than comparable solar in developed markets.

So rather than a one-time donation that disappears, this is impact capital that recycles, creating durable, scalable climate solutions while expanding energy across communities that would otherwise not have access. So let me introduce my two Social Impact Pioneers who are involved in this. One is leadingrenewables.org, Lassor Feasley, and the other is delivering that affordable and inclusive renewable energy on the ground, Ruchir Punjabi.

So first, let me introduce you to Lassor. Lassor is the co-founder and CEO of renewables.org. He's a designer by training, a graduate at the School of Vigil Arts Products of Design program.”

“He brings design first, system level mindset to that non-profit finance space. Before launching renewables.org, he's worked with firms like IDEO, Ford and the Gile Architects. And today, he leads that organization.

He is part of that new generation of social entrepreneurs who really believe that non-profit models can sometimes succeed precisely where for-profit climate finance, in this case, struggles by putting impact and access first. Whilst Ruchir, he's the co-founder and CEO of Distributed Energy. They are a company making solar affordable and accessible for businesses across emerging markets.

So Distributed Energy operates across India and a number of countries in Africa and the Middle East, building a diversified portfolio that accelerates the clean energy transition where it matters most. And Ruchir is no stranger to building from the ground up. He previously founded Langour, which grew from his living room in Sydney into one of the Asia Pacific's largest independent digital agency before being sold to the HAVAS Group.

And beyond business, he's a passionate advocate for social change. He's founded the Australia India Youth Dialogue. He served as fellow for the Asia Venture Philanthropy Network.”

“He's acting as founding chair of the School of Policy and Governance, which is a graduate school focused on leadership in and for the Global South. So together, these two are real powerhouses. And they join me today to talk about bridging that philanthropy and finance divide, talking about designing infrastructure that really works for everybody, and talks about partnership, connecting the finance element with the on-the-ground capabilities.

So this conversation, I hope, will be inspiring, insightful, energetic, just what you need at this time of year. So without further ado, Ruchir, Lassor, thank you so much for joining me.

Thank you very much for having us.

Great to be here.

So I wanted to kick off our first sort of part of this conversation, really, is how do you come to be working together on getting solar that's accessible and available to people everywhere? What brought you together?”

Collaboration Story

Well, I'll let Ruchir start with that question after a quick introduction to how I started with renewables.org. Prior to renewables, I had been building a US solar investing crowdfunding platform called Legends Solar. We were going to do for US solar, what renewables.org does for Global South solar, allow anyone to invest small amounts of money into solar projects, commercial solar projects in the United States.

This ultimately did not work in large part because there's already so much institutional money going into US developed market solar, that there was really no need for retail investors in that segment. Even though there are hundreds and thousands of retail investors that I'm certain are really excited to participate in investing in solar. So that's when I was introduced to Ruchir as I was winding down that initial business.

And by a very well-known social entrepreneur named Primal Shah. And Primal is a PayPal mafioso. He's known for being on the founding team of PayPal.”

“But he went on to build a social enterprise called kiva.org. And kiva.org allows anyone to invest small amounts of money with entrepreneurs and impoverished individuals across India and Africa, who pay you back in monthly installments over one year. You don't make any financial return on Kiva, but you are helping these people who, for what might be for an American pocket change, that can be a transformative amount in certain markets in India and Africa.

So Kiva was really defining to Web 1.0, like the early Internet, maybe the middle-aged Internet around 2007 through 2012. Primal and Ruchir have known each other for a long time. Maybe that's where I'll let Ruchir jump in and discuss how they came to conceive of renewables.org and the journey that they took together.

Yeah. Thanks, Lassor. So in a parallel universe while Lassor was working on his previous avatar of renewables.org, I had known Primal for close to 15 or 20 years at this point.”

“We actually met through common relatives and shared a ride to Gandhi Ashram in India. Anyway, long story short, I just started working on deploying renewables in India and Africa, and I reached out to Primal because he'd been so successful in Kiva. I wanted to find a way to get more people involved in deploying capital for renewable energy in India and Africa.

So we created a version of renewables.org, much like Lassor did with Legend Solar that focused on a similar idea of investing in solar in India and Africa. We realized the amount of friction that exists in creating a retail funding structure, and decided that it made more sense given the type of return profile of these assets in India and Africa, that renewables.org exists as a not-for-profit. We'd been watching Legend Solar on the side, and Premal suggested that he would reach out to Lassor to see if we can work together on it.

That's how we came together. We decided that Lassor would be the best person to lead a new renewables.org that actually was a not-for-profit that did a Kiva-like lending for renewables in the Global South.”

“Oh, I love a good kind of intermediary collaboration. You know, it's just serendipity is a wonderful thing. And Ruchir, I want to sort of stay with you and just turn the clock back a bit because we are a podcast that cares deeply about who you are and where you've come from and your journey.

And in further, a little bit about kind of what you've been doing recently from a career point of view. But I wanted to wind the clock back a bit more. Because if you sort of look, scrape back the surface, I mean, you, your background is, you originated doing youth dialogue and being an advocate and president of the University of Sydney's Union.

How do you move from being a youth advocate through to being a sort of leading thinker in solar and working in India? And I know that you're based in Dubai today. Tell me a bit about that journey.

How many hours do we have? I'll keep it brief. I'm actually a programmer by training.”

“I grew up in India. I ended up in Australia. To study, I ended up starting my last business there, which was a digital agency, which again expanded back to India and across Asia, including Dubai.

I ended up exiting that in 2019. And that's when I was working through a number of options of what next and ended up meeting my now business partner, Matthew, who used to run a large energy business and he had just exited to KKR. So I was brainstorming with multiple people about different businesses, but the one that stayed with me the most was the idea of deploying or accelerating the deployment of renewable energy in India and Africa.”

“And what we discovered through that journey when we were just starting up was how there is a fair bit of capital going into large-scale utility solar, but almost very close to zero at the time going to small-scale commercial and industrial. So we wanted to try and focus on that space where small and medium businesses, people who may not have the capital investment required to transition to renewable energy, neither do they want money tied up in renewable energy assets. How could we help them transition to renewable energy?

So that's how we started the business now called Distributed Energy, which basically builds, operates and transfers solar plants for small and medium businesses. That's the short version of the story.

Oh, I love it. I appreciate it's the short version. We ought to do the long version, full biography at some point.”

“But just the thing about supporting the small, medium enterprises who don't want their assets tied up is interesting because I'm based in the UK and I've had very similar conversations over here. I did some work with one of our big kind of councils, who obviously have a kind of remit to go and support their small enterprises. And they just can't figure out that the numbers don't work.

So the fact that you are making this work, whether it's in India or Africa, is just super impressive. And we're going to dive more into that in a moment. Lassor, I wanted to turn to you.

It's your turn now. What is your biography? I mean, you come from visual arts, is that right?

And then through to solar financing, maybe I've got that wrong.

Lassor? You know, that's right in a way. Many people see that I went to the School of Visual Arts in New York City and they assume that I must have come from a fine arts background.”

“But that is not the case, because I actually majored in product design in this graduate program at the School of Visual Arts. So product design is inclusive of some hard skills, like user interface design and software design. But there's also a lot more soft skills involved, things like qualitative research and design thinking, user interviews.

How do you meet a customer need to the tools available to you through design and in commerce? So that was the focus of the product design program. And from there, I bounced around the design consulting space for a few years before diving into solar crowdfunding.

So that's the cliff notes on how I went from design and into solar. I do have more than a passing familiarity with finance and financial concepts. My father is a serial entrepreneur who founded multiple private equity firms as I grew up, and I always kept a pace of that.”

“And I have just a general curiosity about the world, which often leads down that road. And so coming to renewables.org and basically connecting the customer demand to all these people who are curious or concerned about the climate with solar developers like Ruchir is a really interesting challenge from that perspective. And so I'm really involved in much of the interface design and the user experience design at renewables.org and some of the more technical aspects of financing and the hard work of getting on the grounds, talking with site managers and business owners across India and Africa.

That is somewhat outside of my domain and that's where Ruchir comes in and solar developers on the ground who are actually making things happen with this financing mechanism.

And that entrepreneurial spirit and like passing on, it does feel like somehow you need to have some sort of some sort of experience of how to be entrepreneurial. It's so difficult if you've always been in the kind of, you know, here's your pay packet, you do your job, you do it really well. But being entrepreneurial and making something from nothing, it's just, it's another head space.”

“And Lassor, just staying with you for a moment. Clearly, I mean, you've made something from nothing here in terms of the financing mechanisms and then obviously Ruchir will bring you in a minute, but to bring that into actually deploying on the ground. Lassor, I was curious what you're learning about that financing, because so much of the work that I'm doing at the moment, particularly is around, isn't blended finance going to be amazing?

Aren't there amazing new innovative financing models? Sounds great, but actually practically on the ground, there's more fails than there are wins. And so I was just wondering, what are your kind of big learnings and what have you struck on without giving away all your IP?

You know, back when I was doing US solar crowdfunding, I would go to solar conferences and meet with developers. And they were hounded by investors who wanted to get money into their projects. It's true now, it was especially true three or four years ago that there's just incredible demand from investors to get into solar projects.”

“And so getting a call with these people was almost impossible. However, there are serious bottlenecks in solar deployment in the United States and also to some extent across Europe. Those bottlenecks typically are not capital availability.

They have more to do with permitting red tape, with getting solar facilities integrated into the power grid and navigating the regulatory landscape with sometimes adversarial utilities and so on. But the capital availability is not the problem. And this is a huge contrast with solar development across the Global South.

Many solar developers are basically full-time fundraisers. If you're the CEO of a solar developer like Ruchir, you might be spending a large part of your day looking for capital, talking to foreign direct investors and other sources of capital from NGOs and blended finance and so on. And it's probably the biggest struggle.”

“And developers reach out to me at renewables.org. They see what we're doing very frequently on a weekly basis, I would say. So that's their challenge.

But then on the other hand, and particularly with commercial scale solar behind the meter, the other barriers that US solar developers are much lower, I would say. It's easier to get integrated with the grid. It's especially cheaper, cheaper construction costs.

And so from the point you get the shovel on the ground to the point you have an operating solar facility, it's a much shorter duration with much less turbulence, I would say. And probably Ruchir can speak to that as well.

And Ruchir, just to sort of add to that, I'm curious about how you are finding, bringing together that innovative finance with kind of connecting into that opportunity, you know, the businesses, the small business owners who, from my experience, you know, they're quite careful, very careful about where they spend their money. They don't have much time. They just want to get it done.”

“What have you learned on kind of connecting those dots and making it actually happen?

That's so true. So, the way we think about it is most of our customers, the small and medium businesses, they don't actually necessarily want renewable energy. They just want cheaper energy.

And they're happy that it happens to be renewable. More than 90 percent of our customers who sign up with us, they do so because we offer them cheaper power. The cheaper power comes from solar.

So they're happy and they're happy to talk about it to their friends and so on. The way we structure these contracts, we learned this very early on. When we started talking, we spoke to over a thousand businesses when we entered doing this startup.”

“And what we learned early on was most people wanted to be supplied cheaper power from solar without having to do the work for it. And so we were thinking about business models early on, whether we should do only installation or whether we should only focus on financing and so on. But realize that most people don't want the hassle of the work it takes to build a mini power plant and then to maintain it.

So the structure we came up with, what is actually well known in the Western world, is around a power purchase agreement, where you set a power rate, you stimulate how much power that plant will generate, and you then supply this electricity to the business downstairs from the roof. The one innovation we did have to do on top of the financing was we have invested heavily in the technological stack, the tech stack, if you will, to manage lots and lots of sites remotely. Given that our average installation size is 350 kilowatts, we've done installations that are smaller, 17 kilowatts in dollar terms, that means $10,000.”

“We are managing lots of small power plants remotely, and the only way we can do that successfully and in an economically viable way is by monitoring these assets remotely. So we built our own software, internally called Atlas, that helps us manage all of these assets remotely. We can do invoicing as fast as within two hours for all our sites, as opposed to a larger, more traditional solar installer taking weeks and weeks because they have to download data from the inverter and so on.

We sort of automated a big chunk of our business to be able to enable this delivery of power from the small plants or the smaller medium businesses.

Oh my gosh, it's one of those things where, I mean, I literally can imagine that happening here. And you always think, oh, you know, the glorious West is going to sell everything to the, you know, everybody else is absolutely rubbish. It's like, no, you guys have hit on the model and, you know, that microgeneration, you're managing it remotely.”

“The risk is therefore spread out. Oh my God, please come here, Ruchir. Come and sort out our country.

As I sit here in the rain and there hasn't been sun for months, but you know, other than that, it would be fine. But I'm also thinking about how it's, you know, it's so applicable to so many of the other big challenges. You think water, for example, so much the problem is about transferring water over large distances, long pipelines, they drip, etc, etc.

Then, you know, the financing doesn't work because people aren't prepared to pay or shouldn't have to pay the huge amounts of money it takes to manage water over a long distance. But actually, if you can micro generate that in a local area, again, it becomes super interesting. Oh, I'm all excited for you.”

“Okay, so we're going to get back to the innovative financing piece again. I think Lassor will probably bring you back in at this point because everybody I'm talking to at the moment, as I mentioned right up front, innovative financing, blended financing, it's the buzzwords that are kind of everywhere, probably because no one sector has enough money at the moment to be able to lead and just go it alone, albeit I appreciate there is quite a lot of financing and climate at the moment. Could you give us a bit of a 101 on what innovative financing looks like and what is proving to work?

Because innovative often also can mean risky or they're not sure. We haven't proven it yet. What is working?

What does good look like? Where do you imagine this going as well?”

“Financing Innovation

I would say what is innovative about renewables.org and its financing is the way that we have structured the investment to meet the consumer where they are, but also to be useful to developers like Ruchir. renewables.org, when you come onto our site, you can make as small as a $25 investment on the site. It's a 0% interest investment, meaning you're only going to get your principal back.

You can't make a financial benefit or return on this investment, but we'll make you whole again. And you get repaid starting the very next month in 60 equal monthly repayments. So over five years, you'll be fully made whole again.

You'll have all of your principal back. So you're not getting an interest rate on renewables.org, but what you are getting is carbon impact and a lot of it. In fact, we think that our analysis shows that we create five and a half times more carbon impact investing in solar projects across the Global South than you would create had you invested that same amount of money in the United States or Europe.”

“And that's for three reasons. Number one is that the cost of construction is just so much lower in these regions. So you're building three times as many watts for every dollar you invest.

Number two is that the carbon intensity of the regional grid in a market like Botswana or Rwanda, is often two or three times more greater than US carbon intensity. So you're feeding clean energy and avoiding the consumption of coal or diesel produced energy. So you're creating a lot more impact that way.

And then on top of that, it's just sunnier in these regions. So these panels are absorbing up to 20 percent more sunshine each year. So between those three effects, you're creating 550 percent more carbon impact per dollar invested.

So that's the approach that we've taken. Rather than giving you a pretty good climate impact investment that's maybe a so-so financial return, renewables.org has zero financial return, and we've put all of our eggs into the impact basket. Now, that's great from the consumer's perspective, and it gives us a really clean approach to say, listen, there's no other financial product or impact product of any kind.”

“There's no wreck or carbon offset you can buy that creates more impact per dollar than renewables.org. Then on the other side of our marketplace, we have developers like Ruchir, and they get access to these funds themselves, but they have to, to some extent, leave something on the table too. The first thing is, we're doing a five-year loan duration, which is a bit quicker than most solar projects can normally accommodate.

So the Distributed Energy has to pay back that principle on a tighter schedule, which may have an adverse consequence or may be somewhat less profitable for that developer. We do charge what we think is a reasonable rate of interest to the developer, so they're not our beneficiary. The environment is the beneficiary of our investors' participation on renewables.org.

So yeah, and that's pretty key to the benefit and the collaboration that Distributed Energy and Renewables have had. Ruchir has been very instrumental in helping us to develop this model and find a way to help the developer meet the retail investor in a way that we think is going to be really scalable and productive.”

“Interesting. And Ruchir, I'll bring in just a second, but Lassor, just a follow up, which is you mentioned their retail investor. Do you see this as also being kind of corporate or commercial investors as well?

I'm just, as you were talking, thinking about the kind of carbon credit and carbon offsetting pieces and actually for them to, you know, invest, albeit get some of their money back without interest. Is there sort of work afoot for them too?

I think that there are a lot of opportunities for corporate partnerships. We actually do have some corporate partnerships existing today. One is with Climate Action Now, which is a climate advocacy group, and they direct some of their users to investinrenewables.org.

Another is called We Recycle Solar, and we have a partnership that's been very productive with them as well. I think that in the future, as I envision what the potential of renewables.org is, I can see, for example, a partnership with an airline to channel investment from passengers into renewables.org in order to offset flights. And you do see products like that already, but they're nowhere near as consumer-oriented.”

“As renewables.org is. And so I think that by keeping a really clean and simple promise, this promise of more carbon impact per dollar invested than any other product, that we might be able to resignate and allow particularly consumer brands to extend that promise into their own product.

Yeah, and the scalability and flexibility in there too. Ruchir, just to bring you in at this point, both in terms of your reflections on that financing model, but I'm also curious, where do you see your business going? How do you see it in five or 10 years time?

And what is it going to take to realize that vision?

Future Vision

What we think most about is how do we accelerate deployment of solar and now batteries for these small and medium, commercial and industrial organizations in India and Africa? And so for us, deployment of scale is very important. Driving, getting the sales engine out, getting the capital required to then back the sales fields that are taking place to make sure that these businesses start saving money and we deploy the solar and storage alongside them, is very, very important.”

“So the next few years are going to require us to 100x where we are now. At least that's what we are going for. And for us to reach that scale, we need every single skill as in high quality people possible to help us deploy that scale, as well as sort of spend time and energy on using tech to automate like so many components of this.

In terms of the financing and what it means, the difference that renewables.org makes in our capital stack, the capital stack is usually in infrastructure projects like these, usually involves equity and debt. renewables.org introduces the idea of mezzanine debt, which is very catalytic in that it helps us get the project off the ground and build it, whether or not financing of equity and debt has been arranged for it through family offices, banks, development finance institutions and so on. It helps us get projects started right away, and so it helps us deploy much faster.”

“So that's the meaningful difference renewables.org and Lassor make in the life cycle of getting more renewables in the market. Otherwise, or especially the space we are in, which is the small commercial industrial, we would end up with a fast, lower deployment of renewables in the space we are in.

Both the fact that you've got a 100X mission, but the fact that you're all set in a place where, right, we need really good quality people. Anybody listening, thinking the jobs market is dead, it's not, you just need to go and hang out with Ruchir. I was curious, Lassor, to bring you in at this point too then.

So what do you see, what's your vision, asking you the same question? What do you see the business being like in five and ten years time? What are you going to need to get there?”

“I always look to kiva.org for inspiration of what renewables.org could become. kiva.org raised billions of dollars for the microfinance cause. But their even greater impact is that they seeded many of these markets with microfinance institutions that can go out and find individuals whose lives might be benefited by taking out a microloan.

And now, today, there is a whole network of philanthropies and NGOs powering a $100 billion a year plus microfinance market. And so kiva.org is just the tip of the iceberg, but they have used the power of their community of retail investors to build up this ecosystem that is touching millions and millions of people's lives every year. So today, renewables.org is pretty new.

So we're only starting down that journey. But as I think about what the ideal outcome five or ten years from now would be, it would be the same. It would be that we're able to provide a source of scalable capital to distributed energy and potentially other solar developers across the Global South.”

“And then ideally, we would extend into other product categories as they become available, extend into batteries and in other sustainable technology and basically be a resource to accelerate the adoption of sustainable technologies that are tried and true and proven in more developed countries in the Global South. And to really do a lot to engage our investors in that journey. What we need to get there for the time being is additional investment on renewables.org.

We have hundreds of investors, hundreds of thousands in investment. We raised twice as much in 2025 as we did in 2024. We're playing the long game, though.

And I would hope that within five years, we would be able to see evidence that we're starting to follow along on the same path.

Super exciting, guys. I love this opportunity and the fact that you're so grounded, both of you. One of my favorite questions to ask people, I just love hearing what you are seeing in terms of trends.”

“Emerging Trends

And so I wanted to, Lassor, perhaps, if you wouldn't mind going first, I'm curious, given the work you're doing, given the experience that you have, what are you seeing in terms of trends that perhaps others just aren't at the moment?

I think that one thing that can't be understated is that solar is getting into these markets. There is a super abundance of solar modules coming, not just out of China, but out of India and other manufacturers. They're largely going to distributed off-grid locations, so that means individuals who will build them on top of an informal housing unit, for example.”

“And so solar has just become a part of everyday life all over the world, in this distributed off-grid way. And that's really encouraging and really promising, because it was only 10 years ago that you could be easily dismissed as a pie-in-the-sky, crunchy idealist for wanting to see solar adoption proliferate. Today, it seems like solar is just a falling knife in terms of power production, because the unit costs of these modules are getting cheaper and cheaper, and the economic advantages, the geopolitical advantages are making themselves known as the industry develops and as adoption proliferates.

So that's the first thing, I think, a trend that people need to get familiar with. Because to this day, I still hear people saying, you know, maybe, maybe 10 or 20 years from now nuclear will be ready to avoid climate change or small modular reactors. This is a really dated and old fashioned way of thinking about the world.

The solar technology has already proven itself to be scalable in a way that is almost determinative of how energy and energy production and independence will be thought of moving forward.”

“I love that. And I also never heard the saying about a falling knife. I'm going to use that.

Definitely borrow that one.

Basically, I do have a spiel about this. When you think of nuclear or coal or even wind, and you think of sort of the industrial learning cycle that takes place to bring up economies of scale and bring down pricing, you have General Electric or Siemens or these big multinational engineering firms doing all the engineering and procurement, maintenance and so on on a five or 10 year plan. And so that's how long it takes for them to learn how to do it better the next time.

And in contrast, in solar, there are millions of firms all up and down the value chain that are doing deployment and financing, basic research, manufacturing, distribution, logistics, and so on. And they're all operating concurrently. So at every single step of the value chain, there are thousands and thousands of learning cycles.”

“And that, I think, is the story. It's the story of Moore's law to some extent and how we have incredibly cheap digital components for computers today. But it's also the story of solar and to some extent battery as well.

And so these efficiencies are going to continue to compound. And it's going to be really difficult for any other source of energy, whether it is sustainable or not, to compete with solar and batteries.

Oh, so interesting and so right. I've been nodding along very happily. Ruchir, I want to ask you the same question.

What about yourself, given the work that you're doing, your experience, what are you seeing in terms of trends that others perhaps aren't seeing?

I spend a lot of time thinking about the technology that enables scale and a big part of what's starting to become viable in our markets are batteries. And the reason why batteries are important, but haven't been viable, is they can offer reliability both to the user as well as the grid. But the cost of power in most of the markets we operate in is artificially low.”

“So, batteries haven't been viable until now. What that does is as batteries do become viable, at least we start to see different models in which they become viable. For example, charging them more than once and discharging them more than once.

We see a proliferation of batteries across all our markets. And that is going to have a really interesting effect in that not only will we offset gen sets, which everyone likes and wants, but we also start seeing the grid to becoming more stable in some of these markets. And solar, which in places like India is seeing rapid acceleration, that's finding an outlet in terms of excess power being supplied to batteries, because then you don't have to live in the cycle of the sun, as in the grid doesn't have to plan just around the cycle of the sun.”

“The grid can also start planning how to use the power of the sun in the evening or in the night. So now we're starting to see, what we're starting to work on is software that enables managing lots of batteries, lots of solar in coordination with the grid. And there's some technical components of it that I won't get into, but we will start seeing benefits of these distributed power plants going to our customers, the businesses, the smaller media businesses we work with, because they'll be able to start saving a lot more money because of these systems.

That's the phase of the journey we're in. Batteries have been viable and available in the West for quite a while because the cost has been higher, and especially in the West, in a lot of these markets, there's live pricing markets where the cost of electricity changes through the day. But batteries will enable this side of the market in places like India and Africa, where we don't really have live pricing markets spread across the board.”

“So we'll now be able to use cheaper day power and allow the smaller media businesses to benefit from evening power to the use of batteries.

It's so interesting, isn't it? You just spend your entire time listening to the news and thinking the whole world is just free falling. And then you come and listen to you guys and you're like, the opportunity is massive.

It's happening right now. The costs are falling. It's inclusive and the development opportunities, the economic prosperity opportunities that will come off the back of just having reliable energy that is affordable.

It's just phenomenal, gents. Thank you and massive, massive good luck. We are pulling this conversation to a bit of a close, which I'm really sad about.”

“I want to carry on. But I just wondered, given the entrepreneurial, I see a challenge and I can find a solution to this mentality that you guys both clearly have, albeit with very different backgrounds and experience. I was just wondering for each of you just to close out the conversation, what would be your one piece of advice to someone who's listening to this, who might be thinking that they might be a potential entrepreneur, whether a social entrepreneur within a big company or a social entrepreneur going alone?

Entrepreneur Advice

Lassor, would you mind going first? What would be your piece of advice?

Yeah, I would say two things. The first is that both mine and Ruchir's career are a testament to the power of moving laterally. Ruchir was in engineering consulting and development, and I was in product design consulting and in other industries, and we both managed to find a way to orient our careers in line with our values and to address this incredibly important cause.”

“And so if you are in consulting or accounting or in some other industry with some skill set that you think might not be valuable or useful as an entrepreneur or as a contributor to solutions to climate change, then you're wrong. You can really get creative and find ways to pitch in. And the second is that you don't necessarily have to be a pure entrepreneur and go put up your own shingle.

renewables.org has benefited immensely from climate-aligned people inside of large firms who want to communicate and lead initiatives to have partnerships with renewables.org. In particular, many large employers have a donation matching policy where they'll match their employees' donations up to several thousand dollars. And that's been hugely helpful.

We have stakeholders inside of Microsoft and Google who evangelize renewables.org among their peers, and that's spurred a huge amount of investment on our platform. So there are plenty of ways to contribute no matter what your position within an organization is or what your skill set in industry is.”

“I love that your advice is also entrepreneurial in its own methods, you know. It's like, you can do it, here's a way, here's a really practical way that you can make it work right now. Ruchir, what about yourself?

What's your advice to budding social entrepreneurs?

I think we can spend a long time looking for things that make us happy, looking for things that make us money, and looking for things that are good for the world. Part of my journey in exiting the last business and taking this on was I wanted an overlap of all of these things, the Japanese concept of Ikigai. And for anyone starting out, I just say, if you can try and look for things that make you happy and make you money and bring you joy, you will lead an incredible life.

So that will be my experience. I really enjoy doing this. And I think finding things that bring you joy and make you money would make you supremely lucky.”

“Oh, it sounds, it's perfectly fitting to finish this conversation then, gentlemen. Thank you so much for giving your time and your deep wisdom today and your practical can do. We are making a difference insight as well.

Ruchir and Lassor, thank you so much.

Thank you so much, Katie.

And if you like what you've heard today, please do rate and subscribe to us. I would also love to hear your feedback. So please do drop me a line at any time.

I'm Katie at businessfightspoverty.org. Many thanks.

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