Four New Global Businesses

Posted by Kathryn on Dec 6, 2012 in BoPBiz, Bottom of the Pyramid, Business, Paul Polak | 1 comment

Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley- March 13, 2012

My dream is to create four new global businesses. Each one of these businesses will serve at least 100 million customers, generate at least ten billion dollars in sales, and show attractive profits. To create businesses like this is a much higher risk because of the unknown nature of the market. But it carries with it a much higher return if successful. So, I am totally at the opposite end of the people who feel that investors in this market should expect low returns, or no return, or to be charitable. Or, like Muhammed Yunus, who says that he expects investors in social businesses to just get their money back when the business is successful. That to me amounts to about a 50 percent subsidy. I think that investors in this space should expect a very attractive return, commensurate with the risk, but be willing to accept the very high degree of risk because of the uncertainty of creating a totally new transformative product. I want to create these global businesses in water, energy, health, and education. I’ve started the business in water, [it] is in the late beta-test stage; [in] the business in energy there are two initiatives in an earlier stage; and health and education are on the backburner until we get the first two up and running. We’re also negotiating with several multinationals because there is a tremendous amount of interest in this space. So as I said before, the dream is that each of these new businesses creates ten billion dollars in sales and reaches at least 100 million two-dollar-a-day customers. These are the most unserved or bypassed customers in the world right now.

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