Unreasonable at Sea day 64: deep dive Aquaphytex, design thinking class, and a package

The next 6 days we are on the water from India to Mauritius: we will spend the next few days gaining clarity on our business model, financials, etc. The next three mornings mentors & learning partners will spent 1 hour with each company going over:
Day 1. Business model
Day 2. Off day
Day 3. Basic Financials
Day 4. Timeline:where aer you now, where are you pushing towards?

Deep Dive with Aquaphytex

Then we had a deep dive into Aquaphytex in the morning, 9:30-12:30. It was really interesting. Pedro discussed some of his issues and long term visions, and the biggest challenge is that they seem to differ with his partner’s long term visions. Profit versus worldwide impact, social benefit, and keeping his core team of employees. So we spent the first 1.5 hours understanding the issues, then spent the next 1.5 hours putting ourselves in Pedro’s position and trying to brainstorm together in three groups of 4 people, how to move ahead with Pedro’s company if we were him.

It is nice to have Tom Clayton back on board because he is super helpful, piercing at times, and asks amazing questions.

Design Thinking Class, student review

In the afternoon, we had the design thinking class session with George, and the students had prepared more work on Protei and our broad, open-ended question about engaging the open hardware community through a website and gamification platform.

The interesting things I took out of it:
Group 1: most people didn’t understand at first what Protei is, what the technology is, and a quicker way of explaining it to people will be beneficial. Most people do not feel comfortable with technology and therefore feel fearful to get one so an “empowerment video” would be the best next step in order to engage people to take the next step : from interest to actually purchasing one.

Group 2. They prototyped a game. Making a website as a hub for activity using gamified methods of technology to incentivize people to change the world is what will be useful. People didn’t necessarily love the game aspect but what is most important is the SOCIAL aspect.

That afternoon and evening I spent trying to catch up with work and documentation.

a Package

Finally I got the package from Heather from that had travelled from Brooklyn to LA (Laura’s house) to Bangalore (from Laura’s hotel to Taylor’s room in the service center) to Kerala Kochi with Taylore onto the MV explorer. I finally got it from Taylor’s room. The weird thing is it was opened completely, but I still ate the swedish gummi shoes, despite being mysteriously opened.