AAMER TRAMBU

Continued on P2

A SAUDI GAZETTE PUBLICATION www.saudigazette.com.sa Tuesday 14.12.10 Muharram 8 1432

BUSINESS PLUS.MONEY MANAGEMENT .TRAVEL .AUTOMOBILES .ADVERTISING

Orthopedic surgeon Dr. Wael Kaawach

talks about the growing medical

community in the Kingdom.

Page 3

Saudi Aramco will bring its largest gas

plant Wasit online in 2014.

Page 5

Despite global turmoil, the Middle

East remains a strong market for business

aviation.

Page 6

NWC has awarded Accenture a contract to design and deploy

a comprehensive IT solution for its

services.

Page 9

Joshua To and his life seem to be taking the shape of a hollywood blockbuster, exciting and full of surprises, peppered with lots of

emotion and drama.

a marathoner at heart with a zeal for making the world a better place, he tries his best to make every day of his life worthwhile. To is a 27-year-old american

What’s cooking in Josh’s ‘soup’?A former employee of Google Inc. and entrepreneur gets candid about his visit to the Kingdom, experience at KAUST and his innovative new venture

from san Francisco who left Google Inc. three months back to start a new venture called soup.

surprisingly, soup is neither the first nor last enterprise he is leading. head of BRuTE LaBs, WellDone and now soup, To seems to be on a perpetual roll. Two weeks earlier, he and his team arrived in the Kingdom, on invitation by the King abdullah university of science and Technology (KausT) in Jeddah to conduct a 3-day workshop called

“Fresh air & The Weight of Things”, an idea focused on realizing the potential of creative minds in saudi arabia. To disclosed his method of generating ideas with students at KausT and came across some creative business ideas himself. In an interview with saudi Gazette, To provides a unique perspective on how saudi youth, if given the right tools and training, can play a significant role in the global innovation ecosystem.

Creative fun (R-L): Joshua exploring KAUST with PlayLab partners, Jeff Franklin and Archie Lee Coates IV. (Courtesy photos)

Imagine harnessing the water leaking from ACs for drinking or to beautify the city. In my mind that is absolutely tremendously changing the lives of people. We can be saving millions of liters of water a day.

Joshua To

2 COVER STORY Tuesday deCember 14, 2010

What is Soup?Soup is a company focused on combining Design, Technology and Business to tackle some of the world’s gnarliest problems. Issues as massive as climate change, clean water and over-population or an opportunity as interesting as KAUST is what catches our interest. KAUST is an amazing hub of science and technology research but not a lot of innovation or infu-sion of creative ideas. At Soup we are trying to see how diverse groups can bring Design, Technology and Business together to create something compelling and shape the future in a positive way.

What projects is Soup working on since its inception?We are working on a software platform called Future Building that aims to bring accountability and transparency to online donations and fundraising process. This is how it works: If you wit-ness the destruction in Haiti and want to donate some money to build a school in there, you can choose a charity, pay them an amount and believe that your money will help bring the school into reality. You may ask local businesses or friends and family to chip in. This is the conventional way. We are trying to bring the online shopping experience along with the wedding registry experi-ence into fundraising. So instead of approaching a charity and saying ‘Hey,

here’s some money I want to donate’, you can pick and choose what items you want to buy. What’s exciting is it applies healthy pressure on non-profits. One of the biggest complaints about non-profits is that you give them money, maybe SR200,000. You have no idea how they spent the money, when the project gets done, if the money was spent on the project you intended or not.

We are essentially creating a platform where we allow people to say ‘hey I want to buy 120 nails, 14 bricks’ and be able to pay for those specific items. And as the user clicks ‘next’ to check-out, we create a beautiful infographic that reflects the actual donation that the donor has invested into a specific project. We are working on launching two proofs of concepts, using this plat-form to aid in the fundraising to build clean water wells in East Africa as well as build an elementary school in Haiti. . Once we work out the kinks, we’ll be selling this product to non-profits who want to engage with their donors in a new and exciting way.

What projects are you working on with KAUST?In a lot of ways, this is also a product, capability or service we are offering in which we are convening a diverse group, a small catalyst team into any organization in order to get them to start thinking about the possibilities. At KAUST, with the help of Eric Martin and Ernesto Sandoval (two students who attend KAUST), we were invited to go out and work with the students where we ran a series of workshops for three days. Day one involved con-ceiving the inconceivable and day two was about choosing the best ideas from the previous day and challenging

students to pitch them as if their life depended on it. They had to make a convincing presentation on why their idea deserved funding. On day three, we took the most promising pitches and worked with the students to cre-ate solid proposals. The primary goal was idea generation, visualizing the idea and rapidly prototyping the idea into a practical working model. We are well-suited to that because we have a design background and most people on our team are entrepreneurs whether it was for non-profit sector or otherwise.

How do you feel about the thought shared by many entrepreneurs that they can change the world?One of the most well-received ideas at TEDx Arabia was the AC flower-box, a product that uses waste water that flows out of an air conditioner. There are thousands of liters of water con-densed by air-conditioners every day and we can use this waste-water as a resource by watering plants or storing it for consumption. Imagine harnessing

the water leaking from ACs for drinking or to beautify the city. In my mind that is absolutely tremendously changing the lives of people. We can be saving millions of liters of water a day.The concept behind “Haj Traffic Engineering/Quake Wave Friend” was how we can harness high-density areas where thousands of people are walk-ing. If we can harness the energy of the five million people who walk about in Makkah during the Haj season, we could harness one Watt of power from every step, collectively harness all the energy and store it. You could power entire cities and meet about 10 percent of Saudi Arabia’s energy needs. If you partner with KAUST and other similar universities, and couple that with some creative thinking and business acu-men, something exciting will happen.

How big is your team at Soup?Currently it is just me and Mike working on Soup full time. Mike is a Stanford graduate and Head of Technology at Soup. have also been working with a team of designers who have been working on building out the user interface and experience for Future Building. I also have three partners, John Bielenberg, Erik Cox and Greg Galle who provide resources, strategic advice and guidance.

What’s your message to youth in Saudi Arabia?Two tips: Set small goals and do what-ever you can to achieve them and then go beyond that. I like to destroy and obliterate those goals, so for example, instead of saying ‘I’ll put up a website this week’, say ‘this week I’ll get the plan done, next week I’ll build the first page and actually get it done’. Focus on your strengths and aggressively and proactively find the talent that you need in order to get whatever you want to get done, done! n

– Saudi Gazette

Young expertise Joshua sharing his enthusiasm for innovation at the recently concluded TEDx Arabia conference in Jeddah.

Innovative Soup Joshua To in Malawi to survey clean water projects in remote villages. (Courtesy photos)