Dinesh Wadhwani’s life science business has tackled everything from crop yield to energy efficiency, but when COVID-19 hit, they pivoted to saving lives. Wadhwani discusses how their technology is used purify air and track airborne COVID-19. Listen to learn how this Indian-Ghanaian-American entrepreneur paved his own path to entrepreneurship.
Transcript
Denzil Mohammed: I’m Denzil Mohammed, and this is JobMakers
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Denzil Mohammed: Migration stories aren’t always simple. Families might have moved to different countries in different generations for different reasons. However, it is that entrepreneurial spirit of leaving everything behind, taking a risk and working for better in a new land that not only keeps them going, but drives innovation and resourcefulness. For Dinesh Wadhwani, founder and CEO of ThinkLite LLC in Natick, Massachusetts and immigrant from Ghana, that journey began with his grandfather who was forced to flee India for another British colony. And despite having to work all alone from nothing, he was able to build a business in Ghana and pave the way for the generations to come. When Dinesh moved to the United States in 2008, as a student at Babson College, the mandate from his father was clear: build a life and a business in the U.S. and not return to Ghana. And that’s just what Dinesh did. Even while he was studying entrepreneurship, he became an entrepreneur. In just a few short years, his technology-based life science solutions business expanded across the globe and evolved into a lifesaving enterprise, purifying the air in hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, as you’ll learn in this week’s JobMakers.
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Denzil Mohammed: Dinesh Wadhwani, founding CEO of ThinkLite, welcome to JobMakers. How are you?
Dinesh Wadhwani: I’m very well. Thank you, Denzil. Thank you for having me here today. I truly appreciate it.
Denzil Mohammed: So give us a 30-second pitch about your business. What is ThinkLite all about?
Dinesh Wadhwani: So ThinkLite is a technology company based out of the Boston area here in Massachusetts. We specialize in high-end technologies, specializing in facilities, and [inaudible]. We started off in the energy space, which has grown into a large division and a company that there’s high-end efficiency lining for commercial applications. We have a division that does grow lighting for agriculture and poultry optimization. And most importantly, which has come center stage the last few years, we have an air division that specializes in very tiny particulate monitoring of viral loads in the air, in the health care space. And as you can imagine, that has kind of crossed boundaries to go well beyond health care for the last few years. So that’s what we do as a company.
Denzil Mohammed: So apart from the obvious, which is the pandemic and your most recent foray into the air space, why is your business important in today’s world?
Dinesh Wadhwani: Our ethos really is we call ourselves technologists, we love technology, we believe technology is going to save our world and we love to build things that create value in a very impactful way. That’s really who we are and what we are all about. Our supply chain extends from designing stuff in Boston, to Germany where we do a lot of engineering and to Asia where we do a lot of the semiconductor manufacturing, and we work very closely with Samsung as well in Seoul, South Korea. So, if you think about it, given the talent that we are fortunate to have cultivated over the years and our interest and what we believe in we have always felt that we want to build products and services and bring it to the world in a very innovative but effective way that can add a value for sustainability, for wellbeing and for challenging the wasteful practices of our current planet. And we started there with bringing to market the first of its kind ultra-efficient LEDs. We were 30 to 50 percent more efficient than traditional LEDs and about 90 percent more efficient than your traditional fluorescent lighting. And now that evolved into smart building and smart lighting, because that was kind of where the opportunity became, now that you had efficient lighting, what else can you do? If you made them smart and turn them on and off and dim them, you could further optimize it. And then, that’s kind of pivoted into, how can we use everything we know about lighting and smart buildings to add value beyond its energy savings? And this kind of happened around 2015, where we were studying together, the executive team and I, and we said, “Think about it.” It’s kind of quite an amazing phenomenon that you have lights almost every feet in the building with a fixture and electricity coming through it. It’s got to do more than just save you money. And that’s when we said, how can we apply everything we know about smart building automation, manipulating spectrums of light and creating different waves of light and marrying that with other chemical compositions to add value in a different way. And that’s how we got into agricultural lighting, we got into poultry lighting and then along the same concepts, and around the same time, we got into how we could use light spectrum to do disinfection as well.
Denzil Mohammed: So Dinesh, you’re from Ghana originally, grew up speaking English, and your grandparents were from India. Is that right?
Dinesh Wadhwani: That’s correct. Yes.
Denzil Mohammed: So this is a very fascinating but also very common story of migration. Not only from India, but from other countries. But, take us back and tell us exactly what happened, how and why.
Dinesh Wadhwani: Sure. My granddad was actually one of seven brothers and our original hometown is a state called Sen in the North Western part of India. And during the 1940s and the time of colonization when India was being divided into India and Pakistan, a lot of people in the middle kind of lost their homes. Because you know, what was considered a general area was now being divided politically into different countries. So my granddad and his brothers actually went to hide in British boats to prevent being a prisoner of war or going to fight. And these boats were trading with other ex-British colonies at that time and that’s literally how my granddad ended up in Ghana, Western Africa, which at that time was a British colony as well. And many of his brothers ended up in Hong Kong. So today, fast forward 60, 70 years, we have a lot of family there and some came to the U.S., but it was a common practice of those who didn’t wanna be part of the political situation and wanted to leave would go to the other colonies that was ruling the countries at those times. So my granddad went there and he made a living for himself. He adapted, he was an entrepreneur and raised a family there. And that’s where my dad was born and that’s where my brother, myself and my younger sister were born. And that became home.
Denzil Mohammed: That’s really fascinating. But again, as you said it’s not an uncommon story. And just to be clear, your grandfather’s options were really slim. It was either fighting a war, convert to Islam or escape. Right?
Dinesh Wadhwani: Right, and many would actually seek refuge in India. And many people did that, where they would go, but start from scratch, right? They didn’t have a home state. They lost all their property, they lost all their jobs, they lost all their land and just have to start from scratch.
Denzil Mohammed: And you, obviously, were able to straddle two very different, I would say, kinds of cultures: Western Africa, Indian subcontinent. So how is your experience, of being an immigrant from another country, has that impacted your business style or the kinds of goals you set for yourself?
Dinesh Wadhwani: Yeah, definitely. I think most immigrants who come to the U.S. for better opportunities or for a better life can probably relate to this. There’s so many things over here in the U.S. that many people take for granted and growing up. We were not exposed to many of these facilities or stilled infrastructure, stuff like internet. I remember growing up, there were times where Ghana, during the 90s, had something called load shedding where there was not enough electricity in the grid. So they would publish in the newspaper that for this week from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM, you’re not gonna have electricity, right? So I remember when my brother and I would come home and we had to finish all our homework before it gets dark. Because when it gets dark there’s nothing much you can do with a candle. Go to bed, right? Little things like this, where we grew up of it being the norm and that’s the life we knew. And when I came to the U.S., you realized how much more advanced the infrastructure is. And you realize how much of an opportunity this is to be able to have fast internet, to be able to have good roads or infrastructure, to move around or to meet people. And to me, there is so much here to be grateful of that we didn’t have growing up. And that changes your perspective. Most immigrants say this, that the United States is the “land of opportunity” because there is a good infrastructure that creates enough opportunity for you to come from nothing, right? I remember when I came here I didn’t know anybody. And it’s less about who you know specifically, which is how it works back home in Ghana too. You could now have a lot of information and have a lot of skills, but it comes down to who you know, for the most part. While that is important over here, of course, there is so many cases we see every single day where someone would come far away from a country knowing no one, but worked really hard, worked honestly, worked to develop certain skills and become successful. And I think it’s just a very well balanced society that we have in the U.S. that creates a platform for doing that. So it makes me always grateful, what we have here. Most countries don’t have that and it changes your attitude. You wake up every morning and you say, “You gotta seize this opportunity”.
Denzil Mohammed: Makes you more humble, more grateful, more appreciative. That’s fascinating too.
Dinesh Wadhwani: It does.
Denzil Mohammed: 12 hours a day you don’t have electricity, isn’t that just crazy to think about now?
Dinesh Wadhwani: Yeah.
Denzil Mohammed: So you came to the U.S. in 2008 as a student on your student visa. You went to Babson. Of course you already spoke English, but adapting to U.S. culture is always a challenge and an experience for everyone.
Dinesh Wadhwani: So my dad would say, even throughout my entire high school and when I was starting where I want to go to school, what I wanna study, he would say, “Hey, listen, you have a good plan B. If things don’t work out, you can always come back to Ghana and we can either you work in the family business, or we are ‘Old Timers’ here and we can find some opportunities for you. But frankly, go to the United States, make a better life for yourself and don’t come back,” right? And that was the message that he gave me and my brother when we came here to study. And when I came and I landed at Logan Airport, I remember it was the day before probably orientation, and I land and I still remember this the day till today is like, “Okay, here’s where I gotta make my life,” right? My goal is to learn, obviously, make new relationships and meet new people. But really, gonna make a living for myself. And the goal is to make the family proud and take advantage of my education and what I’m coming here to do: of what they have sent me here to do and not go back.
Denzil Mohammed: So you founded ThinkLite in 2009. In just a few years you were in 14 different countries. That must have been a rollercoaster.
Dinesh Wadhwani: It was. And I would say that almost every single connection of that came from the Babson community, which is quite incredible. It’s very international, as you probably know, and a lot of friends and I was fortunate enough to be on the scholarship program at Babson. So every semester I had the opportunity to meet with the trustees who also were from all over the world and they would be intrigued with what would be doing. And it was quite a very supportive environment where I remember doing classes where I would tell the professor, “I’ve got to travel over the next three weeks because we have these big projects or big deals that I think I have to be there for.” And the professor would say, “Keep a diary of it and I’ll accept it as your thesis.” Very real and very quickly given the small community it was, many of the professors, the Dean, the president, at that time, were following ThinkLite very closely. And until today I’m so ever grateful to them because of the support that I received. And they would be making introductions all the time. And the exposure we got within the U.S., of course, but even internationally, was we got to seize the opportunity. So the next thing I know, they would say, “This is incredible technology,” and, “You are spending a lot of money for businesses and make more of impact in the U.S. Can you come and do it in the United Kingdom? Can you come and do it in Thailand? Can you come and do it in Singapore?” And I was like, “Absolutely.” And they would literally treat it like a real business and they would say, “Okay, great. You have a team that can come over and train people?” And I would say, “Yes, let’s go”. I would forget many times that I’m still still in college and I have to attend class and I would say, “I’ll come back and catch up.” And I would go. So it was throughout from 2010, all the way up to 2015 there was a lot of expansion internationally where we were building a foundation in those countries where we had large distributors and we were making a lot of impact with our technologies over there; which fostered growth in the U.S. and vice versa too.
Denzil Mohammed: You’re not quite doing exactly what you did at the beginning. So tell us how the pandemic impacted your business.
Dinesh Wadhwani: Sure. So around 2015, we made a conscious decision of how can we leverage our technology, our experience, our relationships and the marketplace to do more than just save energy, right? Like I mentioned before. And I think the single most important change that I personally experienced, and at the company, was we started an initiative to say each time we would close a big project and go do a lighting project for them, “I would like to speak to the head of facilities or the head of our operations myself personally,” and say, “Can you please tell me a little bit more about the other problems you’re facing when you’re challenging in your workplace or your facility?” One of the biggest things that really changed the trajectory of our company was this initiative to ask customers what else we can do for them. And that’s where we learned about a lot more opportunities that we can address. Whether it was, “They have good lighting, but it wasn’t smart enough,” or, “They had good lighting, but they needed to have a unique spectrum of light to increase their yield of a produce,” or when talking to hospitals, which is most relevant in this day and age. We were working with Boston Children’s Hospital back in 2017 and we learned from the facilities’ people that their number one challenge was hospital acquired infection via the air. And this is not something that’s unique to any particular hospital. This is something that exists forever, right? And if you think about it, when people come to the hospital because they’re unwell, they’re sick, they’re coughing, they’re spreading germs and diseases. And simultaneously you have people there who are undergoing surgery, or who have compromised immune systems who are unwell. And these two groups of people are under the same roof, sharing the same air. It’s quite a recipe for disaster and unfortunately there’s no better way, right? I mean, that’s just the nature of how facilities … and what happens all the time, which really cut my heart, was the number one cause of debt in our country was secondhand transmission of germs in these hospitals. And I’m discussing that saying, “We are replacing fixtures every three feet. There’s got to be a better way.” And that’s when the idea of producing a light fixture that can also purify the air at the same time was born. And that evolved into less leverage of technology to now monitor it and make it smart, so we even know how bad the air is to start with and we can always keep it that way. And then it evolved into, let’s make it connected to the HVAC system so it can be even smarter and involved into less stand alone units. Here we have found a software, we built an entire ecosystem of technology, that could monitor the air; tell you if there’s a viral load in the air. Light fixtures that would seamlessly clean the air free of these viral particles. And the whole world was coming to a standstill because of an airborne virus. And it took COVID 19, our global pandemic, for people to realize that you don’t need to be in a hospital to share air with someone to get disease from that. That’s when, for the first time, we learned that what we thought was a niche in the health care world is now something that is applicable everywhere else. And that’s how the pandemic really changed our ThinkLite air division. And next thing we know our marketplace just expanded by infinite-fold, really, of the addressable market.
Denzil Mohammed: Oh, wow. Dinesh, that’s incredible. So finally, Dinesh, as an immigrant to the U.S., your grandparent was taken in by Ghana and you were taken in by the U.S. and this country has allowed you and your family and your business to thrive. How do you feel about the United States of America as your adopted homeland?
Dinesh Wadhwani: There’s a very admirable amount of respect in this country for people who work hard, for people who are trying to make a positive impact. And whoever you share with, in my experience, what you’re trying to do or what our business is about they’ll say, “Hey, talk to this person,” or, “Have you thought of that?” and this celebration of solving problems in this country. I feel this country as a whole really promotes entrepreneurship and promotes originality. It promotes trying to just do good and by doing good: trying to create good value for people. Very few people can say that about the experience going to any other country, really, and being embraced and being part of the community to say, “Hey, we are here creating, creating impact, creating jobs for the people in the country,” it’s really a nice feeling. So I’m always gonna be grateful to this country for that.
Denzil Mohammed: I think one of the things that makes the United States extra special is that it celebrates entrepreneurship and innovation no matter where you come from.
Dinesh Wadhwani: That’s right.
Denzil Mohammed: It’s the idea, it’s the hard work and it’s the value that creates it. And I hope that you and ThinkLite are able to continue creating value and having a positive impact and purifying our air. Please, we need that a lot.
Dinesh Wadhwani: Absolutely.
Denzil Mohammed: We will continue doing our best to educate people on this topic that is so important and affects their bottom line, right?
Dinesh Wadhwani: Yes, that’s right and thank you. And it’s a joy to see the impact that The Immigrant Learning Center does in empowering, whether it’s by your language, by your life skills. It’s always been close to my heart. So I admire that and it’s such an important thing that we need to have for people who come here with a twinkle in the eye and for opportunity and giving them these skills and giving them these tools to help them fulfill their dreams. It’s something that’s close to my heart. So, thank you for that.
Denzil Mohammed: That’s very nice for you to say, Dinesh, thank you so much. Dinesh Wadhwani, founder and CEO of ThinkLite, thank you for joining us on JobMakers.
Dinesh Wadhwani: Thank you, Denzil, a true pleasure.
Denzil Mohammed: JobMakers is a weekly podcast about immigrant entrepreneurship and contribution produced by Pioneer Institute, a think tank in Boston, and The Immigrant Learning Center in Malden, Massachusetts, a not-for-profit that gives immigrants a voice. Thanks for joining us for today’s incredible story of immigrant entrepreneurship. Got comments, questions, or know someone we should talk to? Email Denzil that’s denzil@jobmakers.podcast.org. I’m Denzil Muhammad. See you next Thursday at noon for another JobMakers.