Gauri nanda net worth

Gauri Nanda paused to catch her breath. The 27-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) graduate student was in the midst of a P.R. blitz that was unlike anything she’d experienced in her life—articles, interviews, and television appearances that had culminated, most recently, with a spot on Good Morning America, ABC’s erstwhile morning news show. And she wasn’t finished: next on her schedule was a guest appearance on the Today Show, Good Morning America’s NBC counterpart. It was October 2005, and the foreseeable future was looking busier by the day.

The source of all the attention, the result of years of hard work on Nanda’s part at M.I.T.’s Media Lab, was an innovative alarm clock named Clocky (see Exhibit 1 for a picture). Clocky was designed for people who had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. In addition to emitting a repetitive beeping noise like a normal alarm clock, Clocky could jump off a nightstand and roll around the room, forcing owners to get out of bed to turn off the alarm and thereby ensuring a successful wake- up process. With an embedded computer chip Clocky could go in a random direction every morning, in order to keep owners “on their toes” and prevent pattern recognition.

But the flurry of media attention had come at an inopportune time for Nanda. Despite her efforts, Clocky was still only a prototype, one that had come close to not functioning during a live performance on Good Morning America. Buyers were lining up, but by Nanda’s own estimate she was still at least a year away from having the capacity to debut Clocky properly on the open market. Getting there would involve a steep learning curve, from manufacturing and distribution challenges to intellectual property issues. Overcoming these challenges and completing the production of Clocky would bring a slew of new challenges: how to best leverage the PR gained from the media attention to market Clocky, for example, and whether to partner with a large-scale retailer such as Wal-Mart or Best Buy or even to pursue co-branding opportunities with a product development outfit, like iRobot, that could make distribution easier but might require her to relinquish some control over her product.

Looking ahead, Nanda also wondered if, in the end, the rush of media exposure would prove to be a hindrance for her product and business. Would consumers interested in buying Clocky now be frustrated once they learned that the product was not yet commercially available, or would they be content to wait until Clocky reached the market? Should she make any effort to defer the current

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Professor Elie Ofek and Research Associate Eliot Sherman of the Global Research Group prepared this case. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.

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media interest, with the intention of reigniting it once Clocky was closer to completion? And how would the current exposure affect her options for positioning Clocky? Nanda was putting the old adage that there was no such thing as “bad publicity” to the test.

The Birth of Clocky

Nanda had always been interested in melding technology and entertainment. She took a job as a software engineer at Apple Computers in 2000 shortly after graduating from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Media and Music Technology. While she enjoyed the relaxed but professional atmosphere, she found that a lot of the work she was doing was entirely technical in nature and did not allow her to indulge her creative side: “At Apple, I was working as a programmer for Final Cut Pro, which is video editing software. I ended up there because that was a logical step considering my education. But it wasn’t the right place for me and I wanted to put my efforts towards work which wasn’t purely technical.” Nanda could not shake this feeling, so after one year at Apple she left the company and enrolled at M.I.T.’s Media Lab. In her second year at M.I.T., Nanda signed up for an Industrial Design course, finding the heavy dose of both real-world problem solving and creativity an excellent fit. She also discovered that she enjoyed working on projects from scratch and seeing them through to the end.

In Fall 2004, Nanda began designing Clocky as her electronics project for the course. She knew it would be a great topic—she had always found waking up in the morning difficult, resulting in multiple late arrivals and missed classes. She remembered a roommate during her undergraduate years who repeatedly slept through her alarm; for her the alarm clock had become completely ineffective, as she simply unconsciously incorporated the sound into her dreams. Nanda realized that for people like them an effective alarm clock needed to do more.

For her initial prototype Nanda fed randomly generated speed and directional values to a motor connected to small wheels that enabled the clock to move, reposition and find different “hiding spots” every day. She gave her project a dry run in her class where it was well-received, and pictures of the prototype robot were posted on the course web site. Nanda shelved her idea temporarily to finish work on her thesis, but before long, in February 2005, pictures of Clocky were raised from the depths of the web, linked into the limelight by popular gadget aficionado sites such as www.slashdot.com and www.gizmodo.com. It was not long before mainstream media outlets such as The Boston Globe began contacting Nanda to see if they could do detailed write-ups of Clocky. Calls from television producers soon followed.

Nanda received permission from her advisor to put her thesis on hold, and dove into the process of turning Clocky into a viable prototype that would be ready for “prime-time”: initial designs had the device connected to an external circuit as if on life support. As she was soldering circuit boards and sculpting Clocky’s skeleton from foam and wood, Nanda continued to field media inquiries, making for many late nights.

Design Choices

In developing Clocky’s “look,” Nanda attempted to evoke a warm, friendly reaction from consumers, similar to how they might view a household pet. Said Nanda, “Clocky is like your hungry pet cat. He’s going to wake you up and get you out of bed and he’s cute. The only difference

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is that he gets you up at the right time. I used to have kittens that would get me up and although they annoyed me at first, I couldn’t help but be amused by them, especially since they are so cute.”

One of the first design decisions Nanda made was to determine Clocky’s gender. She explained, “Some people ask me why I decided to make Clocky a he. Since I couldn’t have him genetically tested, I just decided that Clocky felt more like a him, like a male character.”

While Clocky’s physical design certainly set him apart from most other run-of-the-mill alarm clocks it did not necessarily strike many as more aesthetically pleasing—one reviewer went so far as to note that he resembled a “swiss roll on wheels.”1 Another observed that Clocky bore an uncanny likeness to the alien Tribbles of Star Trek fame.2 Despite these reviews, Clocky’s shaggy appearance represented a calculated effort to emphasize the object’s inherent “cute factor.” For Nanda, cute and funny-looking weren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. However, Nanda noted these comments and realized she may need to consider changing the design in the future so that Clocky’s look would appeal to a wider audience.

Sleep: Clocky versus. the Snooze Button

Neuroscientists who studied sleep found evidence that stealing an extra ten or twenty minutes of sleep in the morning had little restorative value; it was instead detrimental, often making people drowsier during the day. This was due to the interaction between two types of chemicals in the human brain: orexin, a protein produced by “wake-up” neurons, and acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter produced by “activity” neurons. One expert noted the crucial role that these two neurons played in the brain’s wake-up process,

The activity-neurons send back positive signals to [wake-up] neurons. So in other words, they are mutually reinforcing ... sort of creating a positive feedback loop between these two groups of neurons. When your alarm clock rings in the morning and you stay in bed and keep pushing the snooze button, you start to be active but you’re not physically or mentally active, so you do not complete this mutually reinforcing positive feedback loop.3

In this respect, Clocky’s morning activities presented consumers with a way to save themselves from the snooze button. Such a “positive feedback loop,” or mutual stimulation of the two types of neurons, was achieved in the case of a Clocky owner by getting out of bed and walking across the room to turn off the alarm. This made it more difficult for the brain to go back to sleep, waking the user more effectively and promoting superior wakefulness throughout the course of the day. No matter how restful it felt to remain in bed and slap the snooze button several times, getting out of bed constituted a biologically superior alternative. Unfortunately, statistics told a tale of a work force that frequently gave in to the snooze alarm: according to a national sleep survey, one-third of adults who used the snooze button hit it at least three times.4 25- to -34-year olds represented the biggest offenders, as 57% of them hit the snooze button daily, compared with the fastest risers, those in the 65 and older age group (only 10% of which regularly used their snooze button).5

The wake-up difficulties of Americans were due in part to a population-wide sleep deficiency, the consequences of which were considered grave by academics and medical researchers. Scholars found, for example, that children who did not get enough sleep were at greater risk for obesity, learning disabilities and an array of other health and psychological problems.6 In adults, one study linked lack of sleep to hypertension,7 and another found that it impeded physical recovery for athletes in training.8 Another found that a single sleepless night had the same effect, in terms of reaction time, reduced coordination and judgment, as consuming the recommended amount of alcohol for an entire

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507-016 Clocky: The Runaway Alarm Clock

week all at once.9 Finally, an additional study found that every two hours of sleep subtracted from the recommended daily minimum of eight hours effectively reduced a person’s IQ by two points, meaning that, by the end of the week, a worker who otherwise felt fine might be operating as if their IQ were as much as 15 points lower.10

While many sleep-deficient Americans managed to avoid these particular debilitating consequences, at the very least their lack of sleep made it much harder for them to wake up in the morning. Although sleep needs varied across age, gender and personality, human biology generally demanded nine or ten hours of sleep. Adults in Western nations, on average, allowed themselves seven hours.11 Young adults, 18-to-29 years old, averaged about 6.8 hours of sleep a night, the least of any group.12