Changemakers: Making Lives Brighter

Ned Tozun: I had the opportunity ever since I was a little kid to go to Northern Cyprus. That’s where my family had immigrated from, and I’d be able to experience this contrast between Silicon Valley and where a lot of my family lived in Northern Cyprus. The electricity wasn’t very stable, the infrastructure wasn’t that stable. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for people, and I think I realized at a young age there was this gap of opportunity based on where you’re born, where you grow up, and I really felt like that was wrong and I wanted to do something in my life about that.

d.light is a company that we started 16 years ago, and we started the company to enable people without access to electricity to have access to a brighter future through accessing renewable energy. The real origin of d.light started actually a few years before we started the business. My business partner, Sam Goldman, was living in Benin, which is a country in West Africa, and his neighbor’s son was burned one day in this terrible kerosene accident. And Sam realized that this is just fundamentally an injustice that you have people using kerosene lanterns, and yet we have technology that should make that completely obsolete for everybody. So he went to business school at Stanford to figure out how do we do something about this?

I was very clear going into business school that my whole purpose there was to start a social enterprise. I was determined to get into the design for extreme affordability course, and actually when I applied, I didn’t get in. So I felt like my whole purpose of being in business school was to be in this class. So I actually just kept showing up. For weeks and weeks I just kept showing up and then finally they let me in. When I connected with Sam and heard his story, it absolutely resonated with me and I felt like this is what I’m called to do. He had this passion for bringing energy access and lighting for people without access to electricity. I had more of the tech and entrepreneurship background. So we joined up together and started d.light.

We initially wanted to get people off of kerosene. When we started the business, 1.6 billion people in the world were still using kerosene lanterns as their primary source of life. So our founding goal was actually to get 100 million people off of kerosene lanterns by 2020. In January, 2020, we got our hundred millionth customer off of kerosene. I remember early on in d.light’s history, I met this nurse and she said, “Did you know I have delivered now 15 babies with your product?” And she just gave me this huge hug because before they had been delivering babies with just these kerosene lanterns or they’d have to turn women away if they were in labor in the middle of the night, and she said, “You don’t know how many d.light babies there are that I’ve delivered.” We’re actually at 150 million people off of kerosene today.

I think the most powerful thing about business school really was the community. Being at Stanford and being in that business school environment, we were able to get meetings with investors that frankly wouldn’t have talked to us, I think, otherwise, there’s so many people around you who want you to succeed. There’s so many resources around you to support. So I would just encourage you to take advantage of those things while you are there, and also really focus on building a community that can carry on beyond just your time at business school.

These products really are making an impact, and that’s what keeps us excited and energized to keep doing what we’re doing. I think there’s a lot of deep personal satisfaction that I get in having a life that’s driven by purpose. It’s enabled me to live a life that’s not always the easiest, but has always been exciting and filled with a lot of adventure. I wouldn’t change it for anything.