If I were asked to describe myself with one phrase, I would say “problem solver.” It is in my DNA. As a kid in my home in Iran, I would try to fix anything that broke—and sometimes even if it wasn’t broken. The more busted something was, the more I was motivated to try and fix it. It didn’t matter if I knew how to repair it or not, I would improvise. That urge to tinker turned to building. I would build toys and gadgets out of anything I could find around the house. Yes, this sometimes meant that I repurposed a perfectly fine shade to build a merely serviceable kite, which didn’t make my Grandmother too happy. But seeing something built from scratch working for the first time brought me infinite joy and pride.
Perhaps that’s why I love XPRIZE so much. We gather problem solvers from all over the world to address the biggest challenges facing humanity and the planet. We look for what’s broken, especially if there are few efforts at repair, and set the sites of innovators, tinkerers, engineers, and builders everywhere on fixing it. I feel like we are the solution factory for the world. No, we do not build the solutions ourselves. However, with a childlike imagination we peer into the future, not distracted by the challenges of the present, and we lose ourselves in the possibilities of what humanity can build together if we focus our attention and resources.
Like all of you, because of the pandemic, I have been isolated away from family and friends, without much contact with the outside world except for rare grocery runs. Even then, with masks and gloves and staying six feet away from others, it doesn’t feel like much human contact. The faces on my Zoom calls, while animated and live, seem so distant as if I were back on the Space Station again.
But you know what I miss the most during this time of social distancing? My days at the XPRIZE office.
Walking around the XPRIZE office is like a tour of an idea laboratory and a solution manufacturing plant in one. On my regular walkarounds of the office, I was endlessly fascinated and enthralled by the work of our XPRIZE team. In one corner a group would be doing a deep dive on the root causes of child trafficking while another was brainstorming what the workforce of the future would look like. In a conference room, the Carbon XPRIZE team would be talking to a competitor from India to help them find investors. As I would turn the corner, I would see on a widescreen display the call-to-action for our Gender Data Gap Initiative, a campaign to create a movement that will put an end to the data bias that permeates every aspect of our world, from drug discovery, to product design and policy issues. Next to my cube, another team would be getting ready for our Rainforest XPRIZE team registration with plans on how to make sure we break the record on number of teams registered from the greatest number of countries. In the far corner from my cube the entire wall was covered with our plans for three days of Visioneering, an annual event where we would bring the best minds in the world and greatest entrepreneurs and philanthropists together to help us decide which problems to focus on in the coming year. Our theme for 2020? Existential Threats to Humanity: Asteroid Impact, Nuclear Disaster, Cyber Attack, and Pandemics!
My day would not be complete without at least a couple of calls with potential sponsors. Early this year, before the pandemic ground the global economy to a halt, we were nearly halfway toward securing the funding to launch our most audacious prize ever. The $100M Carbon Removal XPRIZE seeks to restore earth’s natural carbon cycle with both biological and engineered solutions in only four years. We were getting ready to ask the world’s greatest innovators to build a solution to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at the gigaton scale. Every step that we got closer to fully sponsoring the prize, the more hopeful I was about the future of our world and solving the problem that all the climate accords have failed to solve.
When the world was faced with the COVID-19 pandemic and chaos ensued, we quickly jumped to our feet and acted by convening our network of innovators, scientists, institutions, and companies, in an unprecedented global Alliance to collaborate and share information toward accelerating solutions not only to put an end to this pandemic but also to find ways to safeguard humanity from future outbreaks.
The drive to solve problems, the fearlessness to think big, the audacity to believe that we can achieve the impossible. These traits exemplify every single one of my colleagues at XPRIZE, every one of our competing teams, every one of our donors and sponsors. They make me feel the same excitement I felt as a little girl building kites out of shades, only now I have found my band of fellow tinkerers always looking for problems to solve.
A long time ago, as I fled my country and came to the US, and then again during the past few years as I watched the geopolitical situation of the world worsen, I lost hope in the ability of governments to find solutions for us. But I have never lost hope in the ingenuity of the human mind and goodness of the human heart. That’s why I love XPRIZE—we tap into the both of these treasures to solve humanity’s greatest challenges toward building a hopeful, equitable and abundant future for EVERYONE.
I am proud of every single person who works at XPRIZE, I am eternally grateful to every donor and sponsor who has made it possible for us to continue our quest toward this better future, and I am in awe of the heroes who make up our teams of innovators who solve these problems with their skills, perseverance and unwavering passion.
I am hopeful that you will find the work we do as important as I believe it is, and that on this Giving Tuesday you will find a way to support us, in any way you can, as our continued work depends on it. Please act today and help us find the solutions to the challenges that our world is facing.