Meet Catlin Powers of One Earth Designs, who went to study climate change in Chinese Himalayas as a sophomore and ended up creating a Solar cooker with her co-founder Scott Frank, an MIT graduate.
Powers journey as an entrepreneur makes for a fascinating study. She dropped out of college when she found out the pollution levesl in the nomadic communities in Qinghai in China. The pollution stemmed from the yak dung that the families used as fuel to cook their food. That is when Powers discovered how families struggle to find fuel for their basic needs in this part of the world. In fact energy deficiency is a problem for millions of people around the world.
Powers dropped out of college and spent time to study the ppollution effects and discovered that there were significant health problems, including cognitive deficiency in the population using yak dung.
She roped in Frank, who was also in the Chinese province working on a different project. Together they worked on finding a solution and the result is a solar cooker called Sol Source, which they introduced in 2013. They bootstrapped their startup and won prizes from foundations and eventually raised $1.2 millon for their company One Earth Designs.
One Earth Designs is headquartered in Hong Kong, Powers travels around the world trying to find new markets for their product.
Powers went back to school and completed her undergraduate and went on to earn a PhD from Harvard.
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