FIP 90: Drones for Social Enterprise? Imagining What’s Possible with Lauren Fletcher

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Today we’re doing a replay of my interview with Lauren Fletcher of Biocarbon Engineering – a social enterprise that is imagining what is possible with drones – and this, he describes, is about reforesting the planet at scale. This is the last in our three part series on high tech for development.

Some of the things you’ll learn on this podcast include:

• How social entrepreneurs should always be stepping back to see how their product or solution fits within the bigger picture, which can, specifically, link you up with those who have available resources to help you go further.
• How Laurent went about finding his founding team, and how he looked for people with exposure and basic understanding of the subject matter he needed.
• Their strategy of finding early capital, where they went after equity, prizes and government grants
• We learn the downside of going after prizes, including how they are a lot of work for not alot of money, but the upside was a viral video that got over a million views that gave them the notoriety to attract seed round investors
• How their product development roadmap panned out, which included building a pre-prototype basic flying planting machine in 3 weeks for the Drones for Good competition in Dubai.
• How they’re thinking about getting their first clients, and the short to long term vision for revenue generation and growth

Resources:

• biocarbonengineering.com

Connect with Lauren

• Twitter.com/BioCarbonEng
• Facebook.com/BioCarbonEngineering
• linkedin.com/lauren-fletche