Please tell us more about ThinkEco, and what helped you develop the idea behind this company? 

ThinkEco is a NY-based early-stage company that is developing disruptive energy-efficiency technologies. We are very much a R&D-driven organization and believe that embedding bleeding-edge science and sophisticated technologies into our solutions will grant users the ultimate ease-of-use that will help make mainstream energy conservation a reality.

Our first product, the modlet, is a patent-pending hardware/software solution for monitoring and managing electricity for plugged-in appliances, many of which waste electricity even when no one is using them. The modlet provides users with real-time information on actual energy use of their appliances and smart-home like control of those appliances at a fraction of the price of other systems.

We came up with the idea about 2 years ago because we were frustrated consumers, unwilling to unplug everything around the house every day, but being bothered by the fact that we waste so much energy through our inaction.

I am the Chief Business Officer, which means that I wear many hats. I work on fundraising for the company,  try to enhance our marketing and media visibility, establish corporate partnerships, and run the day-to-day operations of a small business.  And of course, I help to guide the overall business strategy for the company.

Before this, my career was all over the map – I did equity research on Wall St., I led the strategy business unit at an ad agency, I worked at a giant pharmaceutical company, I almost became a biomedical engineer, and I did strategy consulting for healthcare, financial services and Internet companies.  Through it all, I’ve always been drawn to specific projects and activities that had the potential for having the biggest and most immediate impacts.  But I never lasted long because I would constantly be on the lookout for bigger problems to solve. So when we came up with the idea for ThinkEco and thought of the gravity of the environmental problem that we were hoping to tackle, I knew at a gut level that I had found the perfect match.

Most importantly, HBS taught me to make decisions. Running a start up is all about executing, so it’s an important skill to be able to take in all data points, quickly synthesize or judge them, and make decisions on a regular basis.

The biggest opportunity in cleantech from a societal-benefit standpoint is energy efficiency – as unsexy as it is, that’s what provides the biggest bang for the buck, if you will. Bottom line is that we have to stop using as much resources today so that we can give renewables a chance to make a difference tomorrow.  But said another way, this also reflects the challenge of cleantech.  The best way to grow a sector is to take a portfolio approach to investing in it – have a mix of short-term, mid-term and long-term projects so that every year along the way, there’s some pay-off towards a cleaner future.  The problem today is that interest is lumpy towards the long-tail, futuristic projects with a  decades-away benefit, so this makes me worry about how much actual progress we will be able to realize over the next 3-5 years.  

From a career-opportunity standpoint, I think the best way to view cleantech is that it’s an industry vertical that has significant government interest/regulation and many intermediaries that make the goods/services and the money flow in somewhat non-obvious ways.  So while “cleantech” may seem new, the basic market dynamic within it is very much like other sectors that have been around the block longer, like healthcare or even financial services.

So I think there’s a tremendous opportunity for HBS graduates to transfer their skills and market-savvy from other sectors and apply it to cleantech.  I am optimistic that the more talented professionals we have in cleantech, the better off our children’s futures will be.