We need to talk about “Tech Bro” inventions for a second.
As a generation, we have been pitched some absolute nonsense. We’ve been sold $400 juicers that squeeze bags you can pop with your hands. We’ve been sold apps that disrupt “walking.” We are constantly bombarded with “solutions” to problems that don’t actually exist, usually founded by a guy in a Patagonia vest who just wants a quick exit.
But every once in a while, a founder comes along who isn’t just trying to build a hype cycle—they are trying to actually fix the world. And they do it by pulling a fast one on us.
Enter Jessica O. Matthews.
While the rest of the tech world was trying to figure out how to make us click more ads, Matthews was at a family wedding in Nigeria. She watched the power go out—a regular occurrence there. Immediately, the loud, toxic diesel generators kicked on. The fumes were terrible. The noise was worse.
But she noticed something else. While the adults were dealing with the blackout, the kids outside were still playing soccer. They were running around, kicking a ball, burning massive amounts of kinetic energy for free.
Matthews, who was a junior at Harvard at the time, had the kind of lightbulb moment that makes you wonder what you were doing with your college years (I was mostly playing Halo and eating ramen).
She thought: What if we could harness that energy?
She invented the SOCCKET. It looked like a regular soccer ball, but inside was a pendulum mechanism. You play with it for 30 minutes, and it stores enough kinetic energy to power an LED lamp for three hours.
It was brilliant. It went viral. She was on magazine covers. President Obama kicked the ball around at the White House. It was the perfect viral gadget—a feel-good story with a cool prop.
And if the story stopped there, it would be a nice little anecdote about a cool toy.
But here is where Matthews showed the difference between a “maker” and a CEO. She realized that a soccer ball, while cool, wasn’t going to solve the energy crisis. It was a toy. It wasn’t scalable infrastructure.
So, she pivoted. Hard.
She treated the soccer ball as a “Trojan Horse.” It got her foot in the door. It got the meetings. It got the funding. And once she was in the room, she unveiled the real plan: Uncharted Power.
She took the tech inside the ball and put it into the ground.
She realized that if a soccer ball can generate power, so can a sidewalk when thousands of commuters walk on it. So can a speed bump when cars drive over it. She moved from making toys to building “smart cities.” She’s now cutting deals with governments to install kinetic energy pavers that generate renewable electricity just from people living their lives.
Most of us get stuck on the “shiny object.” We fall in love with our first idea. Matthews was smart enough to use the shiny object to distract everyone while she built the real empire in the background.
It’s a masterclass in the Pivot. She didn’t just want to make a cool gadget for a few kids; she wanted to rewire the grid. And she used a soccer ball to trick the world into letting her do it.
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