12 Tips for Startups from Cleantech Entrepreneurs

The second meetup of Ultra Light Startups Boston, the "Economics of Cleantech" went very well and we attracted around 100 attendees. The panel included 4 panelists from Resolute Marine Energy, GreatPoint Ventures, SunPoint, and the Northeastern University Centure for Renewable Energy Technology.

Here is some advice they offered for entrepreneurs and the cleantech industry:

Ben Jabbawy
Associate, GreatPoint Ventures

1. "Assemble a gold plated management team who are able to vet the technology and facilitate quick adoption." Commercializing new technologies is difficult, so its important to bring in industry experts, scientists, and engineers to gain feedback and understand how the business model will fit into the larger ecosystem.

2. "Start with a need in the marketplace opposed to finding a technology and then finding a need later." They took this approach with one of their recent portfolio companies, AltaRock. While doing research, the GPV team discovered that drilling oil holes is very expensive. Each one costs about $10 million and takes 4 months to drill. "There's gotta be a better way to do that." Explained, Ben. They discovered a solveable problem first and then went to universities and researchers to see if anyone was working on a new technology that could be applied to reduce costs.

3. "Always choose experience over attitude when building your team." Although, GPV works with young entrepreneurs, too. They primarily strive to build teams of experts that have many years of experience in the field or market that the startup is entering. Young entrepreneurs usually have a positive and strong attitude in terms of persistance and work ethic, but they should always look to bring on team members that have experience to balance the equation.

4. "Find an investor who is really going to help you with your first company."

Bill Staby
Founder, Resolute Marine Energy

5. "Never do product development without a customer who you can work with to develop the first product." This will reduce risk and help you to produce a product that is more valuable and attractive to the customer rather than guessing what the customer actually wants.

6. "You learn most from you mistakes, not from your successes." Its okay to fail and its part of the process. However, you need to look at them as opportunities to learn from your mistakes and pick yourself up quickly.

7. "Make sure you know yourself really well. You need to be a certain type of person because it will always take longer than you expect. There will be plenty of ups and downs, so you'll need to be able to pick yourself up.

Forrest Liau
Co-founder, SunPoint
Co-founder, RallyPoint
Renewables Winner, MIT $100k

8. "Look for funding in unconvetional places." Most entrepreneurs jump to pitching venture capitalist first. But, there are many other places such as business plan competitions, applying for research grants, and government loans such as the stimulus package.

9. "Look towards nature for solutions." When thinking about solar planels, Forrest became inspired by how plants and flowers naturally follow and point themselves to the sun to increase their efficiency. By asking a simple question, "how could this be applied to solar panels without using moving parts," Forrest began looking at different types of materials. He came up with a prototype that attaches itself to the bottom of a solar panel. When its heated by the suns rays, it bends to point the solar panel directly at the sun and then tracks the sun as the rays changes its course.

Sanjeev Mukerjee
Professor, NUCRET

10. "Don't fall in love with your startup and have an emotional connection...eventually, its out of your control.

11. "We need to excite a whole generation of students at a forefront of entreprneurial development."

12. "There's 3 main areas of opportunity in cleantech: reducing environmental impact, reducing our dependence on imported resources, and working on economic imperatives such as new technology development and increasing efficiencies."

[We're planning on doing our next event on tech transfer and looking for panelists. If you're interested or would like to get involved, shoot me an email to collegemogul2@gmail.com]