Mosaic

In the 1990s, Ghanaian biologist Veronica Bekoe sought to replace the common, germ exposing, way of handwashing...using a communal bowl. After some research and prototyping, Bekoe created the Veronica Bucket: an aluminum container that could be filled with potable water and soap and released from a tap. This simple yet effective solution would offer the equivalent to running water for just $18 dollars. Bekoe's innovation offered households across Ghana a cheap solution for clean handwashing that would prevent the spread of cholera, diarrhea, and now COVID-19.

Veronica’s success story is rare in the developing world, but we believe it doesn’t have to be. Tessera's making it easier for aspiring entrepreneurs to access quality educational, community, and financial resources through our app Mosaic so they can transform they innovative ideas into impactful social ventures.

In 2015, the UN outlined the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to identify and address the world's most pressing problems. Since then, many are not on track to meet their targets. What will it take to put the SDGs back on track?

Social entrepreneurship may offer a meaningful way for countries to better address the SDGs. Take Sulley Abubakar, a social entrepreneur whose startup Zaacoal is addressing climate change by offering a more efficient charcoal created with a sustainable resource – coconuts. Innovators like Sulley, or Veronica Bekoe, are creating impactful enterprises aimed at improving their local community, while also addressing the SDGs. 

However, success stories like Sulley's or Veronica's are rare in the developing world. Despite high levels of early-stage entrepreneurship, as measured by the early-stage-entrepreneurial-activity (TEA) score, one GEM poll found that nearly 90% of aspiring entrepreneurs say they haven't received training, community, or finance support they need to growth their enterprises. 

If Tessera can bridge the gap between resources and entrepreneurs, transforming innovative ideas into impactful enterprises will become more common. At scale, this translates into thousands of more social entrepreneurs across the globe working to put the SDGs back on track. 

The question, of course, is how.

Tessera believes the solution starts with accessibilty. Mosaic, Tessera's free-to-use app, seamlessly integrates knowledge, community, and capital under one roof, thereby bridging the gap between aspiring social entrepreneurs and critical resources. 

Mosaic is designed with the recognition that not every aspiring social entrepreneur will have the same opportunities or understanding on how to grow a social enterprise. That's why every Mosaic user starts with Roadmap. Roadmap is a project-based course where users apply key skills taught via virtual lecture towards developing an early stage social venture that focuses on one of the SDGs. 

Upon completing Roadmap, the user has opportunity to grow their venture into a successful enterprise by engaging with Mosaic’s community platform to make meaningful connections with other social entrepreneurs and mentors. Additionally, Mosaic makes it easier to access to financial resources through an in-app chatbot designed to connect the user to industry-related financial resources.

The end product is a scalable and accessible platform that supports a global ecosystem of ventures and entrepreneurs who have gained the relevant skills, support, financing, and confidence to improve community resilience and address the SDGs. 

Tessera believes everyone has the ability to contribute an innovative idea, perspective, or approach that addresses challenges within their communities. We especially believe individuals within marginalized and low opportunity communities have the highest potential to deliver innovation because their everyday life constantly requires reinvention and tenacity. Our target market focuses on young individuals living in low- to mid-income communities who have the initial spark for entrepreneurship, but do not have access to quality entrepreneurship training and support. Generally, this includes individuals between 16-27 with some educational background and access to a mobile device.

Imagine the impact that 100 Sulleys or 100 Veronicas would have on a community. Not only would they produce success for themselves through a successful enterprise, but they would also improve their community’s ability to respond and adapt to pressing issues and challenges. Mosaic offers a unique pathway for aspiring social entrepreneurs to dramatically improve their own lives by gaining self-efficacy, a suite of experience-validated skills, a supportive community, and funding. It also offers a path to create a social venture that can improve the lives of their families, neighbors, and country. 

The ability of a community to foster and support an ecosystem of innovation is essential if it seeks to fulfill the SDGs. Innovation, especially when applied to the SDGs, offers the chance to grow new enterprises, improve the resilience of the community, and expand economic opportunity. Tessera sees the first step towards addressing the SDGs by actualizing previously underserved social entrepreneurs through improving access to critical resources and support. Through this improved accessibility, offered by Mosaic, communities will be able to develop a local base of innovation necessary to address not just the challenges of today, but of tomorrow.

Mosaic’s innovation comes from its integration of knowledge, community, and capital into an accessible and scalable app specifically designed for underserved markets in the developing world. At present there are multiple organizations that offer training, community, or capital resources. Common organizations include Echoing Green, Acumen, Kauffman Foundation, the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), or more regionally, the Ghana NEIP. 

However, none of these organizations offers the comprehensive integration and accessibility specifically designed for  our target market. In fact, when searching for "entrepreneur" in the Google Play story, none of the above competitors offer an app or mobile version of their programs or materials. 

Further, Mosaic’s approach includes one of the first virtual project-based learning courses designed for entrepreneurship, Roadmap. Instead of passively viewing lectures, users apply the skills they learn in a virtual lecture towards a project. Upon finishing their Roadmap, the users have gained an experience-validated skillset, a mini-venture they can continue to grow using Mosaic’s community and resource tools where they can be connected to business resources, mentors, and other entrepreneurs. More critically, Roadmap's emphasis on building a mini-venture grows self-efficacy, an often overlooked yet crucial need for any resource trying to help social entrepreneurs grow.  Most if not all virtual learning platforms aimed towards entrepreneurship do not have this degree of value or focus on experience, which we believe is a critical in transforming an aspiring social entrepreneur into a successful social entrepreneur.                                                                                               

Mosaic’s central design principles are accessibility, personalization, scalability, and quality. To best serve our target market, many of whom have limited internet access, Mosaic draws upon already existing technology and methods to offer a unique blend of resources and experiences for underserved customer segments. Mosaic is designed to be “mobile-first” to accommodate users without access to a laptop, which is a commonly overlooked problem when serving our market. Existing community platforms like PeopleGrove do not offer a mobile app, making it difficult to access our market. Mosaic, though, will be capable of running in several different modes depending on data accessibility as well, including an offline version.

Our user experience is also optimized to consider key external factors such as cultural differences, educational levels, and other demographics. As we grow our user base, Tessera’s backend AI Ravenna measures user performance and tracks key metrics to identify insights on how to improve our curriculum for different user groups based on prior experiences of similar users. It also optimizes the community experience to suggest similar entrepreneurs to better induce collaboration and partnership based on prior user interactions. 

Roughly, Mosaic's core technology can be divided into three key areas:

1. Project-Based Learning designed for mobile access

2. User-experience optimization using Ravenna

3. Resource aggregator that connects user to industry related financial resource. 

All three of these core technologies live within Mosaic. While it is difficult to find an analogous infrastructure, each of these core technolgies draw from already existing and proven designs found in different spaces. 

Online learning has seen a renaissance over the last five years. Advances in offering video and other material has made it possible for users with limited service to still use the platform. Examples of a similar technical platform is Coursera, which offers reduced functionality in a low-service environment since 2017.

Ravenna is a deep learning AI that collects user data to optimize user experience, whether by offering different curricula that has shown to increase engagement with the app or to improve connections and networking between entrepreneurs. This optimization protocol is commonly used by social media organizations like Linkedin or Facebook to offer favorable content. Further, deep learning is being used by learning-management-system companies like Docebo to offer administrators insights on how to improve curricula and the instructional experience. 

Finally, our resource aggregator is a simple chatbot that links users to relevant financial resources based on their question. Chatbots are commonly used by websites to offer quick links and resources. 

In all, none of the core technology Tessera is using is novel, but its integration and application to our target market is. 

Whenever we talk about our theory of change, we always start by using a mosaic as a metaphor. Mosaics are made up of tessera, or tesserae. Alone, these tesserae are just small tiles of stone or ceramic. Perhaps they have an interesting color, or a unique shape, but their value, when brought together creates a beautiful image.

Our theory of change follows the idea that global impact emerges from thousands of individuals working to develop their own unique ideas to address a common goal. In our theory of change, these individuals address the goal just a bit differently. Some might be different "shapes" and different "types", but it is in their diversity where something truly great forms. 

Tessera is building a Mosaic of Impact first by working to actualize social entrepreneurs. By improving access to the resources they need, aspiring social entrepreneurs will be able to grow stronger and more impactful enterprises. With scale, this will result in thousands of new innovations, enterprises, and social entrepreneurs contributing to the emergence of real impact across the globe. 

In order to actualize aspiring social entrepreneurs, we believe that education, experience, and funding cannot be separated from one another. To do this, our app must go beyond simply disseminating information or just offering a short bootcamp. Instead, it must offer a comprehensive ecosystem that supports the social entrepreneurs throughout their journey towards transforming their idea into a successful venture. By offering a project-based educational program, a supportive community, and funding support, Mosaic can help the user through the entire process of identifying, validating, prototyping, and scaling their venture.  

With this comprehensive level of support, we believe that it will become more common for aspiring entrepreneurs to develop social enterprises that make an impact in their community. By scaling this process, we will create a global Mosaic of Impact.

Having officially incorporated as a nonprofit in February, Mosaic is currently in its validation stage, with our Mosaic MVP to be launched by August 2020. At that point, the MVP will trial 50-100 users through a test version of the experience we hope to grow in the coming few years. Within 5 years we expect to have 2025 ventures across 5 countries created through Mosaic’s Roadmap program and anywhere between 1500 to 2500 users actively engaging with Mosaic’s community. 

At a strategic level, Tessera is in the first Phase of our 2025 Ventures initiative, which seeks to have 2025 SDG related ventures created through Mosaic by 2025. 

Phase I is focused on validation by piloting the Mosaic MVP and testing core market assumptions in our test market of Ghana. The Mosaic MVP will be initially hosted on Mighty Networks, a community platform that offers an app feature, so we can focus our attention on iterating the experience and not invest in software development too early. We’ve selected Ghana both because it offers a target market and audience that is reflective of other developing countries and due to its relatively strong base of mobile phone users. Ghana is also personally important both of Tessera’s founders. Major goals in Phase I include launching the Mosaic MVP in August and working towards launching Mosaic 1.0 by the end of 2022. 

Mosaic 1.0 will depart from Mighty Networks and be built in-house so it can offer more features and be capable of integrating Ravenna, our AI platform that optimizes the user experience. The launch of Mosaic 1.0 will begin Phase II where we will seek to expand the platform and scale operations into several two other strategic markets: MENA and East Africa. In both of these regions we will start in Lebanon and Kenya, two markets that represent similar economic conditions to Ghana in terms of innovation development. Phase II will end in 2025 when we have reached 2025 projects completed through Mosaic. 

Tessera’s primary barriers relate to our ability to engage with our customer segments and then scale Mosaic to appropriately meet their needs. These barriers consist of customer acquisition, team-building, and financial sustainability.

We expect most of our core assumptions will require more customer discovery. That is why Phase I is focused on rapid prototyping a lean Mosaic MVP. The Mosaic MVP offers a limited version of our longterm vision for Mosaic, providing users with a Roadmap “beta”, a resource aggregator, and a community feed. We are utilizing Mighty Networks as our platform for the MVP, which gives us enough freedom to run various assumption tests and learn how our users engage with our content without investing in software development. Additionally, successful customer discovery requires partnering with already existing institutions within our target market to help us represent Tessera and communicate our message while also building a team that can effectively collect and leverage this data to build Mosaic and its features.

Once we’ve effectively iterated the Mosaic MVP and have built an engaging audience, the next layer of barriers is associated with developing Mosaic 1.0, integrating Ravenna, and scaling our operations to meet the associated demands. 

Our objective during early Phase I is validating our Theory of Change by prototyping the Mosaic MVP and engaging potential users for customer discovery. To develop our audience, we’re establishing a media campaign in partnership with a firm in Ghana that funnels prospective users into a Facebook Group where we can more directly interact with them to learn about their challenges, interests, and needs.  The associated costs are low and have been covered by prize-money.  Capturing data about our theory of change will help make the case to donors and contractors that Mosaic can deliver a serious impact. Additionally, Tessera is developing a volunteer team from RPI, UAlbany, and partners in Ghana to start developing Ravenna and other key technologies required for Mosaic 1.0.

Tessera’s business model will evolve to meet the financial demands of the organization. During the early stages of Phase I, Tessera’s overhead is low and can be met through a small donor network and competitions (like this one). We are actively planning a series of virtual events to engage potential donors. However, as we grow our user base and expand our team, costs will rise. To compensate, we’ve identified several key revenue streams (discussed in the business model section) that we believe can help us achieve financial stability. 

We currently have 1 full-time and 4 part-time employees. We also employ a part-time contractor in Ghana focused on marketing/customer acquistion.

The Tessera team comes from different walks of life, but is unified in our pursuit to actualize the ideas of aspiring entrepreneurs into social enterprises that make a meaningful impact. 

Nicholas Carey, Tessera's President, is a recent graduate from RPI with a degree in Applied Physics and a concentration in Complex Systems. Nicholas worked as an undergraduate researcher at the Tetherless World Constellation, where he completed his senior thesis that studied the response of an entrepreneurial ecosystem to natural disruptions. Nicholas is passionate about actualizing innovation because he believes it plays a crucial role in making communities more adaptive to complex challenges. He is spearheading the technical development of Mosaic. 

Tony Chedrawee, Tessera's VP of Operations, has long seen entrepreneurship as a path towards prosperity. Born in Lebanon and raised in the US and Ghana, Tony's life goal is to offer a better path for these communities to grow and prosper. Tony has worked with organizations such as the UN and Deloitte on improving entrepreneurship in low opportunity regions like MENA. Tony is spearheading our customer acquistion strategy and community platform on Mosaic. 

Additionally, Tessera has a small team of volunteers of Human Development students from the University of Albany who are assisting in the development of Roadmap. 

While we understand that goals are ambitious and that we have a long road ahead of us, we believe that our team has the right mixture of experience, idealism, and ambition that can bring Mosaic to fruition. 

We are currently pursuing partnership with Ghana & Beyond, a media firm in Accra focused on highlighting successful entrepreneurs and innovators in Ghana. Our hope is to work with them to engage with potential users of Mosaic and to hone our message to a Ghanaian market. 

Tessera offers underserved aspiring entrepreneurs access to key knowledge, community, and capital resources. Through our app Mosaic, aspiring entrepreneurs gain access to the relevant skills and community they need to grow a venture without having to leave their geographic region. Our customer segment is young individuals with an interest in entrepreneurship, but unsure on how to access the support they need to start. 

Broadly, Tessera engages in two activities: customer acquistion and app development. Customer acqusition requires strategically partnering with media organizations and existing entrepreneurial communities to funnel an audience into Mosaic, where they will engage the app and its consitutent services. Broadly, Mosaic offers three core services:

1. An educational program aimed at entrepreneurial skill development. 

2. A supportive community that fosters collaboration and mentorship. 

3. Financial assistance by improving access to industry specific resources. 

Both customer acquistion and app development will require strategic partnerships with both regional and international organizations to help offer valuable mentorship, marketing, and software development. 

During Phase I, Mosaic will be relatively inexpensive to operate. However, as we seek to expand its functionality and scale it to other regions, development costs will rise. Tessera's primary expenses will be hiring a staff capable of acquiring users and developing/maintaining Mosaic's tech stack. 

Mosaic's services will offer government organizations seeking to promote entrepreneurship a tool to develop local entrepreneurship while also measuring potential gaps in the region's entrepreneurial ecosystem. These services, among others, can be converted into revenue streams as discussed in the next section. 

Initially, Tessera will rely on donations and grants to cover costs related to developing the Mosaic MVP. However, in order to meet the costs of developing Mosaic 1.0, additional revenue streams will be required. As our userbase grows and our theory of change is validated, we have identified two potential revenue streams that can provide a path towards financial sustainability. 

1. Mosaic offers government organizations seeking to grow their regional entrepreneurial ecosystem an inexpensive yet scalable platform. As Mosaic is virtually based, it reduces the need to build entrepreneurial centers or other costly programs. Tessera is seeking to develop partnerships with organizations like Ghana's NEIP to sell access to Mosaic for their entrepreneurial community. 

2. Mosaic will be cultivating a rich portfolio of ventures across the developing world. This can become two revenues streams. First, we can strategically invest in successful ventures. Second, we can offer VC firms seeking to enter emerging markets access to our portfolio, creating a marketplace for VCs and entrepreneurs in developing countries. 

COVID-19 has and will continue to wreak havoc on our target audience and their communities. As found by the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute (GEDI), weak economies cannot support strong entrepreneurial ecosystems, thus exacerbating the challenges and problems we discussed earlier in the application. We see rapidly deploying Mosaic as a means to reduce this economic disaster.

By applying to Solve we hope to inject the needed resources to help us develop and deploy a quality service to those desperately in need of it. That includes financial assistance, but more importantly, mentorship and a network who can rapidly help us validate, grow, and deploy Mosaic across the globe.

We are seeking to build up a strong Board of Advisors from a range of different backgrounds including economic development, education, entrepreneurship, venture capital, AI, and sociology. Our hope is that this group can help guide/mentor us towards deploying a successful MVP in the coming months. 

Additionally, we are interested in partnering with specific organizations to help us offer resources and mentors to our Mosaic community. A key part of Mosaic is building a network of mentors, companies, and other resources who offer value to Mosaic users. We would also like to partner with telecom and technology firms to offer important technology resources for our community.  

There are several organizations we are interested in partnering with to offer the best experience for Mosaic users: 

1. Microsoft - To help further build out and design Mosaic's mobile first UI, implement Ravenna, and offer Mosaic users access to platforms like Microsoft Office 

2. Capital One - To offer microgrants and other forms of capital to promising ventures forming in Mosaic. 

3. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - To provide assistance in user acquisition in strategic countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. 

4. MIT Colab - To help refine our Roadmap curriculum to offer critical skills and experiences necessary to build a venture. 

5. Leap Ventures - To offer venture capital resources to our Mosaic community. 

In September 2019 my cofounder and I met to discuss a series challenge we knew Tessera would face. Mosaic's educational program, Roadmap, is designed to offer users an experience to learn and apply skills towards building a venture. Our concern was that the user would not engage with the curriculum and, depending on their background, may find it diffcult to use. Simply, our target audience is too diverse to offer a single cookie-cutter Roadmap curriculum. 

We knew that Roadmap would be virtually based, meaning we could collect behavior data. We also knew that users who grow a venture on Roadmap will still be engaged with the community and captial components of Mosaic, so we could track their experience and path after the program. Specifcally, we could measure if the user continued to grow their mini-venture they produced in the program based on usage and interactions with our community. So we go thinking, what if we could optimize the Roadmap experience towards completion and engagement with the platform? 

Since September we've been covertly working on Ravenna, an AI platform we believe will be a gamechanger in the entreprenerial world. Ravenna will collect and learn behavior that leads (and doesn't) to a successful project and engagement with Mosaic. With this data Ravenna will suggest changes in the curriculum (e.g users from background X tend to only reach Module 3 of the Roadmap program because they find it difficult to engage the lecture material to the applied experience assignment). As more users from different demographics, we can optimize different Roadmap pathways for that specific group. 

Ravenna can also be used to optimize our community experience. An entrepreneurs network is a critical part of their development, often formed based on random chance and occurance. Ravenna will study our community network and, based on previously successful interactions, optimize the user experience to connect to meaningful connections. 

But Ravenna also has another key value. As more users enter Mosaic and great social enterprises that are addressing the SDG goals (see the Problem question), we will be collecting a portfolio of innovations and entrepreneurs. In effect, we can analyze this data to better understand the process of adapting to such challenges. As more users suggest and test innovative ideas to the world's most pressing challenges, Ravenna can learn particular strategies that have worked or have not. It is already doing this to optimize the Roadmap curriculum (as it seeks to create a curriculum that increases the chance of success for a particular group or challenge). Consequently, Ravenna is building a knowledge graph of focused around innovations that prove to address a challenge. For policymakers or communities, having access to such data will be immensely impactful.