Jessica O. Matthews had a celebrated invention, media attention, and a compelling social-impact story. Then she spent $150,000 raised from friends and family on an effectively unusable prototype: a four-pound version of the energy-generating soccer ball that had put her company on the map. She could have treated the failure as evidence that the idea was wrong. Instead, she recognized a deeper problem: the company was trying to solve a hardware problem without understanding its own development process. She pulled prototyping in-house, rebuilt the product operation and, more consequentially, stopped defining the company around a soccer ball.
That distinction eventually changed the scale of the business. Uncharted Play became Uncharted Power. Its technology moved from energy-generating toys toward embedded energy and infrastructure systems. In 2016, the company raised a $7 million Series A led by the NIC Fund with participation from Kapor Capital, Magic Johnson Enterprises, BBG Ventures and Lingo Ventures. By March 2020, Uncharted said it had raised $12.5 million in total financing. That figure represents capital raised, not revenue or valuation.
The strategic move was recognising that the invention was an entry point, not the enterprise.
The Soccer Ball Was Never the Business
SOCCKET was ingenious because it made an infrastructure problem tangible. The ball captured kinetic energy generated during play and converted it into electricity that could power a light. Matthews developed the concept after experiences with unreliable electricity and diesel generators in Nigeria.
But an invention can generate attention without generating a defensible business.
By 2014, the limits were becoming difficult to ignore. SOCCKET had encountered durability and manufacturing problems. Uncharted later acknowledged serious problems with its Kickstarter campaign, while reports documented balls breaking and customers complaining about product reliability.
The strategic question was no longer: How do we build a better soccer ball?
It was: What business are we actually in?
Matthews’ answer changed Uncharted.
“It was never about the Soccket. It was about solving a problem I knew existed every time I visited my family in Nigeria.”
— Jessica O. Matthews, Forbes interview
After Harvard Business School, Matthews chose to expand beyond play products. The company developed MORE, or Motion-based Off-grid Renewable Energy, as a platform for embedding micro-generators into other products and eventually infrastructure. By 2016, WIRED described plans to take the technology underlying SOCCKET and PULSE into applications spanning consumer electronics and infrastructure.
The risk was substantial. SOCCKET was easy to understand, visually demonstrable and media-friendly. Infrastructure technology was harder: longer sales cycles, government and corporate buyers, technical certification, regulatory constraints and far more complicated deployment.
Matthews exchanged a memorable product for a harder market because the harder market more closely matched the original problem.
That is the defining move.
In 2016, the company raised $7 million. By 2018, it had rebranded as Uncharted Power and was pursuing system-level solutions involving energy generation, transmission, and storage. Disney subsequently invested an undisclosed amount after Uncharted participated in the 2018 Disney Accelerator.
By 2020, cumulative funding had reached $12.5 million.
The capital did not validate the original soccer ball. It validated Matthews’ willingness to graduate from it.
Think Small, Protect the Problem
Three repeatable rules emerge from Matthews’ decisions.
Enter a Massive Problem Through a Small Behavioural Wedge
When the ultimate problem is too large to attack directly, build something small enough to test how people interact with the problem.
Matthews did not initially attempt to rebuild an electricity grid. She attached energy generation to an existing behaviour: playing football.
“The trick to thinking big is to think small. Especially when you don’t really know where something’s going to go.”
Source: Professional Troublemaker interview with Jessica O. Matthews.
SOCCKET gave Matthews a manageable experimental unit. It demonstrated energy harvesting, generated user reactions, and created commercial and institutional attention without requiring her to begin with power stations or utility infrastructure. Later, when she understood more about the problem, the company expanded the technological thesis.
This is not “start small” as a motivational slogan. It is de-risking through problem compression.
Be Loyal to the Problem, not the Flagship Product
A founder should be willing to destroy the identity of the company if that identity has become narrower than the problem being solved.
SOCCKET made Uncharted famous. That made abandoning the “soccer-ball company” identity psychologically harder, not easier.
Matthews nevertheless concluded that unreliable infrastructure—not recreational products—was the actual problem.
“We aren’t a soccer ball company, we are a tech company.”
Source: Matthews’ Forbes interview on Uncharted Power’s pivot.
Uncharted moved from SOCCKET and PULSE toward MORE and eventually smart infrastructure technology. The 2016 financing was explicitly intended to expand the underlying renewable-energy technology into a broader platform.
The important founder discipline here is product detachment. Products expire. Problems can support generations of products.
Execution must Produce Evidence
Ideas only become strategically useful when execution generates new information.
Matthews studied psychology and economics rather than engineering. Her operating advantage was therefore not pretending to possess every technical answer. It was repeatedly converting hypotheses into prototypes.
“Ideas are great. But… they’re meaningless if they don’t actually make a difference in our lives.”
Source: Freakonomics Radio, “A Good Idea Is Not Good Enough.”
When external product development produced the disastrous four-pound soccer ball, Matthews did not merely commission another presentation or redesign. Forbes reported that she brought prototyping in-house, began using a 3-D printer, and reassessed the operation.
That transformed failure from an expense into information.
The $150,000 Lesson in Outsourced Ignorance
Matthews’ most revealing failure happened before the large funding round.
She raised $150,000 from friends and family and hired a vendor to develop the soccer ball. What came back was a four-pound prototype. Matthews later described the expenditure with unusual clarity:
“Threw it down the toilet for a four-pound soccer ball a vendor developed for us.”
The financial cost was $150,000. The strategic cost was worse: a young hardware company had outsourced a process it still needed to learn.
Matthews responded by bringing prototyping inside the company and using 3-D printing.
Product problems did not disappear immediately. SOCCKET later faced manufacturing, shipping, and durability complaints, and Uncharted publicly acknowledged serious failures in its Kickstarter execution.
But the company eventually changed its operating model. By 2016, Inc. reported that Uncharted had been profitable for three years and that gross profit margins had doubled year over year.
The lesson is more precise than ‘learn from failure’: do not outsource a capability that is still central to your learning.
Outsource scale after understanding. Do not outsource understanding itself.
Capital, Credibility and Access
Matthews’ network became strategically valuable because different participants supplied different forms of leverage.
Backers: The NIC Fund led Uncharted’s $7 million 2016 financing, alongside Kapor Capital, Magic Johnson Enterprises, BBG Ventures and Lingo Ventures. Disney later became an investor. By 2020, Uncharted also listed investors including Backstage Capital and CoPeace.
Magic Johnson: His value went beyond capital. Johnson joined Uncharted Power’s board, with the company explicitly saying he would advise executives on market growth and help expand programs in U.S. communities. His business career in urban and multicultural markets gave Uncharted something particularly valuable for an infrastructure company: market-access expertise.
Institutional access: Matthews was appointed to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Electricity Advisory Committee in 2021 and was again listed among committee members in 2022. The committee advises the Department on issues including electricity reliability, resilience and security. That placed Matthews inside a policy and industry forum directly adjacent to the grid problems Uncharted was addressing.
Protégés: The Harlem Tech Fund was established with ambitions to help create 100 startups and take 10,000 Harlem residents through technology training over several years.
The network therefore worked in three directions: capital to build, institutional credibility to enter difficult markets, and community infrastructure intended to widen the talent pipeline.
Steal This: Write a Product-Problem Separation Memo
Before your next strategy meeting, create two columns.
In the first, write: “What we sell today.”
In the second, write: “The expensive problem customers still have after buying it.”
Then ask one uncomfortable question:
If our current product disappeared tomorrow, would this problem still exist?
If the answer is yes, map three other products, services or business models that could attack the same problem.
That is what Matthews effectively did. SOCCKET was a product. Unreliable, inflexible energy infrastructure was the persistent problem.
Founders frequently protect the thing they created because customers recognise it, employees understand it, and investors have heard the pitch. Matthews’ career suggests another approach: protect the problem worth solving and force the product to continually re-earn its place.
There is an important 2026 coda. Matthews has since moved into a new phase. Her current venture, Lived Labs, describes her as Founder and Chief Inventor, and her official letter says SOCCKET began a nearly two-decade career across energy and infrastructure. A current professional biography states that she sold Uncharted’s energy-generating technology business in early 2026.
The soccer ball was never the endpoint. Apparently. Neither was the energy company.
FAQs
How much money did Jessica O. Matthews raise for Uncharted Power?
Uncharted Power said it had raised $12.5 million in total funding by March 2020. That figure should not be confused with revenue, company valuation or Matthews’ personal net worth. The total included a $7 million 2016 financing round involving investors such as the NIC Fund, Kapor Capital, Magic Johnson Enterprises, BBG Ventures and Lingo Ventures.
What happened to Jessica Matthews’ $150,000 prototype investment?
Matthews told Forbes that she raised $150,000 from friends and family and spent it on a vendor-developed prototype that became a four-pound soccer ball. After the setback, she changed the development process by bringing prototyping in-house and using 3-D printing, making the failure an important turning point in how Uncharted developed hardware.
What was Jessica O. Matthews’ most important business pivot?
Her most consequential pivot was redefining Uncharted from a company centred on energy-generating play products into an energy and infrastructure technology business. Instead of treating SOCCKET as the final product category, Matthews focused on the underlying intellectual property and the larger problem of unreliable infrastructure, eventually developing broader embedded energy and smart-infrastructure applications.
Who invested in Jessica O. Matthews’ Uncharted Power?
The company’s 2016 $7 million round was led by the NIC Fund and included Kapor Capital, Magic Johnson Enterprises, BBG Ventures and Lingo Ventures. Disney later became an investor after Uncharted participated in the 2018 Disney Accelerator. Uncharted subsequently identified additional supporters including Backstage Capital and CoPeace.
What can entrepreneurs learn from Jessica O. Matthews?
The strongest lesson is to distinguish the product from the problem. Matthews did not allow the visibility of SOCCKET to permanently define Uncharted. When manufacturing failures exposed weaknesses, and the larger energy problem remained unresolved, she changed both execution and company strategy. Entrepreneurs can apply the same logic by repeatedly testing whether their flagship product remains the best vehicle for the underlying customer problem.
What is Jessica O. Matthews doing now?
As of 2026, Matthews is building Lived Labs, where she is Founder and Chief Inventor. Its stated mission is to make invention more accessible beyond traditional institutions. A current professional biography says Matthews sold Uncharted’s energy-generating technology business in early 2026, although the publicly available sources reviewed here do not disclose the buyer, sale price, or transaction structure.