Channeling your inner cockroach to put your best foot forward
so it started off
as all good things do at an indian
wedding
i was back home in december 2016
for my first winter break from college
when i saw
my favorite uncle who’s known as the
style icon of the family
wearing his trademark fancy suit but
very bulky shoes
and he looked somewhat timid and
uncomfortable
he didn’t want to get up from the table
and he went right at the back during the
family photograph
so i was curious as to what was going on
so i asked my father and he told me that
my uncle
was recently diagnosed with diabetic
neuropathy
and he hadn’t been the same ever since
so
what was diabetic neuropathy and why did
he have to wear footwear that looked
like that
so i decided to take a step back and i
realized
that every 20 seconds one foot
is lost due to diabetes in the world
today and over
half of these could be prevented if
people
just wore the correct footwear in fact
there are over 425 million
plus diabetics worldwide and over 40
percent of them
will require this footwear so you might
be wondering
how are diabetes and footwear even
related i thought diabetes was a
sugar-related condition
so diabetes causes sugar buildup in the
feet which causes the nerves to lose
sensation
and hence any small cuts bruises or
wounds that take place on your foot
make the foot not able to feel it
because of the loss of sensation
and so it can’t heal it the loss of
sensation is so bad
that one day i remember someone told me
she saw blood on the floor
and she just didn’t know where it was
coming from
later she looked under her foot and saw
that a nail had pierced through and she
just didn’t realize
so to sort of safeguard this foot
they need to wear special kinds of
footwear and this footwear is very big
and bulky and people just
don’t want to wear it i remember during
one of our market surveys
um someone told me hey vlan how can i
wear that
that shoe i’d rather lose my foot than
wear that
this was a joke and a seemingly
improbable possibility
but 14 months later he had two of his
toes amputated
to me this just seems like an unfair
choice
why should someone have to choose
between looking good
and saving their foot there has to be a
better way
so i decided to apply for a research
grant
to create fused diabetic dress shoes
which combine
medical performance and chic style
i went to my faculty mentor dr mark
sivak to understand the design thinking
process
because this to me seemed like a very
daunting task
big brands had tried and the results
were clear for everyone to see
so we wanted to create footwear that was
hyper specific to the needs of
the key stakeholders so thus began
my first phase of research where i went
back
to india and i spoke to 200 plus
patients diabetologists and podiatrists
to understand from all these people what
do they expect from diabetic footwear
then we put it all together and i built
this on top of existing literature
literature to identify four fundamental
design goals
which was to evenly distribute planter
pressure
to accommodate bone deformities to
reduce shear and friction
and to prevent external shock now that
we knew this
i had to put it in a shoe so i decided
to pack my bags
and fly to italy the shoemaking capital
of the world
and i landed in chivdanova market which
is a small little town
which speaks no language other than
italian to learn how to make shoes
i went in without a plan and this wasn’t
a great idea
so i just walk around and talk to anyone
i knew
to ask them hey who can help me make
this diabetic footwear and then they’d
point me to a direction literally so and
i’d walk over or hitch a ride
and continue my quest there in this
process i
i stumbled across a mom and pop factory
which
had been making diabetic footwear for
the last 40 odd years
and uh over there with the help of a lot
of sign language i got a total master
class on how to make diabetic footwork
how to think about materials
leather shoe components fit they knew it
all
so after that i was ready for the third
phase of our research
i went back to india where i was
repeatedly iterating and prototyping
and we gave out samples to doctors and
patients and so on to get their feedback
and for the fourth phase i came back to
school in boston
and i spoke to thought leaders in the
medical industry here
to understand you know are we in line
with where the industry is headed
so we repeated this four phase design
cycle
twice over the course of two years and
at the end of which
we had our solution which looked like
this
now i i remember speaking at a
conference where we had 100 plus people
there and
uh i gave a 30 second introduction to
what we were doing and
a quarter of the audience came up to me
and said you know hey vlan where can we
buy this
for my father for my uncle and so on so
i said okay people really wanted what we
have
so then i said okay let me test some
sales channels and then i spoke to some
doctors and distributors who said
yes this is great when can you get it to
us and i said i don’t know
so at that point i realized that i i
needed to go all in on this
to actually make this big and so i
decided to take eight months off from
school to go back to india to start this
company
although i’d grown up in india i didn’t
quite realize just how
difficult it is to work there
we spent the first four months just
trying to
set up the entity and figure out the
regulatory landscape we were going to
operate in
production was extremely difficult and
had
a lot of delays because yeah we were
producing small quantities and factories
didn’t give us the importance
uh that we needed so it was just very
hard
and for someone like me who’s impatient
and when i want something i want it now
this was very frustrating if i were to
describe a production in india in two
words it was
stuff happens i remember one day
we had 30 plus customers waiting for the
orders and my shoe order was delayed by
45 days
so i called up my factory and said you
know hey what happened uh it’s been a
week
uh it’s been so long when can i get it
and they said sir you know
the ring around your shoelaces the rest
of it is ready we just ran out of those
so it’s going to take a week more so we
had a lot of adjusting to do we had a
lot of learning to do and now we work
with much smaller
factories who are more agile in their
processes and so on
so starting a company is an emotional
rollercoaster because the fortunes of
the company are tied to your own
emotions
so i remember
one day um we we
didn’t we weren’t getting enough sales
in i’d hired the wrong team
and our production was all over the
place so i just came back home and i
dove headfirst into bed and i said you
know
this is it i don’t want to do this
anymore
so then my parents would’ve been my
therapist for the last
for all my life basically they said you
know vadon you’ve gotten this far
only because you kept pushing you just
never
never gave up and you know why don’t you
just go out go get some fresh air
and go for a drive so i went for a drive
and i landed up in the lane of my high
school
so i was sitting there listening to
music and
reminiscing about times past when a
thought struck my mind
would my high school self be proud of
where i was today
and the answer to that was a resounding
guess
and i decided that no i gotta gotta pick
myself back up and bring the mojo back
i often sort of talk about how my spirit
animal is a cockroach
it’s on my linkedin bio i’m not even
kidding
cockroaches have outlasted dinosaurs and
they will survive on hair grease and
glue but they will survive
and i just believe that persistence as
an analogy
to entrepreneurship is just perhaps the
most important virtue that you could
have while starting off
so we decided to pick ourselves back up
keep pushing and today
we’re in 85 plus hospitals and clinics
across a few cities
so the message i’d have for you today is
that
the best time for you to start a company
is right now if you have an idea if you
have something that you’ve been thinking
about
go out go talk to people go build
something and just see if people are
excited about it and if not
fail quickly and get back up again for
me i was in college
around an infrastructure that was
designed to help me succeed
i had phenomenal mentors who cared about
what i was doing
and i had relatively few
responsibilities
i was able to talk to some incredibly
busy people if i
thoughtfully reached out to them and
told them you know why i wanted to talk
to them because
who doesn’t want to help a college
student right so
while starting a company is an emotional
struggle
and i do want to assure you that once
you find
that thing that tugs away at your
heartstrings
it’ll be so so worth it because
at the end of the day you’re only going
to regret the chances
that you did not take thank you