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The Story of WeDrink, Pt. 1
80% of all disease in the world is caused by unclean drinking water.80%.
It all began a couple years ago when I woke up to the realization that I hated my major. Well, I enjoyed finance and economics, it’s some really useful stuff, I just didn’t want to be some accountant or banker (and this was even before the collapse of finance and the death of investment banking). I also decided that nominal values, like the current obsession with inflated gpa’s, were a complete waste of time; and I’d already played that game the first two years at college. So I abandoned any unnecessary studying, and began focusing on real values, the actual knowledge. Over the next year or so I read around 70 books on a variety of subjects and listened to as many lectures as I could on TED.com and BigThink.com. What I found changed everything.
A book is really the story of an author’s life; it’s his or her death-bed advice, just for you. And throughout all these bedsides, I noticed a reoccurring theme. Whether the book or speech was about investing, vagabonding, applied mathematics, nutrition, or even chess, the authors always had a similar request near the end: for fulfillment in life, everything comes down to working hard, and helping other people. That’s all it takes, “everything else is just commentary,” and“chasing the wind”.
And that’s where I found social entrepreneurship.
Dr. YunusThe great Dr. Yunus, father of micro-finance, actually coined the term “social entrepreneurship” back in the 90’s, and it has since then grown to a sizable following of dedicated businesses. It’s based on harnessing the sheer potential and innovation of capitalism to truly benefit society, while also achieving one’s personal goals. It’s what the world needs, the kind of end-game capitalism where everyone really does win.
Last summer while perusing BigThink.com, I stumbled upon a bunch of short speeches on social entrepreneurship by Blake Mycoskie, founder of the increasingly popular TOMS Shoes. They were immensly inspiring, and I immediately wanted to start a similar company based around this buy-one-give-one business model.
Soon after, I partnered up with Dan, and we spent the next few months brainstorming via GoogleDocs a nearly endless list of ideas for our social entrepreneurship. Then, in October 2008, we settled on doing our part to solve the Global Water Crisis.
WeDrink was born. But there were still Mount Everests of work to do before it could actually succeed.
