#25 - Mission Driven: Bringing Solar Power to 1M People in Africa

**Xavier Helgesen** (0:00)
Some of the best people I've ever met come through the Mission Aligned Work.
Our biggest literacy partner is Books for Africa. I got very involved in that. Some of the other board members took me to Africa and had this experience of staying in an off-grid village in Malawi. And all of a sudden, I realized, oh, there's no electricity in this entire town of like 20,000 people. So I founded Zola Electric, which delivers electricity to a million people in Africa every day.
And it literally all sprung out of like us sitting around in Rishat, Tanzania, going to the living rooms and saying, okay, we think this can work. If this thing could do 500,000 in revenue, that would be shocking to me.

**Shaan Patel** (0:44)
What did it get to?

**Xavier Helgesen** (0:46)
It got to 70 million.

**Shaan Patel** (0:50)
5 million is not enough. 10 million.

**Xavier Helgesen** (0:52)
20 million dollars. $100 million. Almost a half a billion in revenue. $850 million.

**Shaan Patel** (0:57)
One or two people in a bedroom, actually the threats to these giant multi-million dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose.
Add another zero to that price, buddy. Add two more zeros.
Every week, we sit down with self-made millionaires and ask them, how did you do it? I didn't start a podcast. I started my own personal business school and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands and businesses that we find today. I wanted to know the real stories with all the details, like how did you get your first hundred customers? What did it feel like when shit hit the fan? I ask them, how do you spend your money now that you're rich? And what would you do if you were starting over from scratch again today? If you're like me and you want to own your own business instead of living a nine-to-five job, this is the podcast for you. The Hustle presents My First Million.
All right, I'm here with Xavier. I've been excited to have you on for many, many weeks now, not only because you're one of my best friends and one of the more interesting people I know, but you've done something that not a lot of people have done. You have built for-profit and social impact businesses. And for those of you who don't know, that's a business like, you may have heard of Tom's Shoes, where you're selling shoes to customers, but for every pair you sell, you give a pair away to people in need, things like that. So businesses that are trying to not only build great products, build great businesses, but also do a lot of good in the world. And Xavier, you're somebody who not only has done it once, you've done it twice. And so I wanted to have you on, let's give the overview of what are those two businesses, and then we'll go into the story of what you did. So tell me about the two businesses.

**Xavier Helgesen** (2:34)
Thanks, Shaan. It's a thrill to be here with you.
And I'm just thrilled that so many more people get to hear your wisdom and your insight. That I've benefited from over the years. So I founded Better World Books, which is the leading used book seller on the internet. So it has over a million feedbacks on Amazon and eBay and sells about 10 million books a year. I also founded Zola Electric, which delivers electricity to a million people in Africa every day.

**Shaan Patel** (2:58)
No big deal.
We got introduced through a friend, and we met and he was like, yeah, he was describing it as basically, I was like, so it's like Solar City, which is a kind of a large, well-known company here in the US. I was like, so he did Solar City for Africa? Like he literally is providing electricity. You know, the company is providing electricity to a million people a day in Africa. Like that is incredible. I wanted to know more. And so as I got to know you, I found out that you came about this in a pretty organic way. So how did you start Better World Books?

**Xavier Helgesen** (3:24)
So I started Better World Books in a room probably no bigger than this podcast studio. I wanted to be an internet entrepreneur. I was in college during the first.com boom, the one that ended in 1 I had a very popular college website that even had a feature called the e-dog book.

**Shaan Patel** (3:39)
What was the website?

**Xavier Helgesen** (3:41)
It was called Endy Today. So we were doing hyperlocal. So we would basically, we had about 80% of the campus opted into our email list. So we could email to them, market to them, do whatever we wanted. And then we were doing this at other campuses too. So we had one at Yale, we had one at UPenn, and we would basically do kind of hacky social stuff. We had message boards, we had polls, we had teacher reviews were the popular one.