ClimateTech Chronicles: The Story of Building My First Climate Tech Startup and Everything in Between
My journey from Cleantech 1.0 to Wall Street to backpacking South America and back to launch my first company in the climate space.
The Backstory.
After graduating college in 2011 I got my first real job in the solar industry. I was brought on as their marketing manager (and really the only marketing employee at that point). They were ultimately looking for more leads for their sales team. The company was just a handful of people. It was my first experience at a startup. It figures because 10 years later I’m still in the climate tech startup space - maybe it was meant to be? One of the first things I did for them was setup a Google Adwords pay-per-click campaign and before long there were more leads coming in than the sales team can handle. I liked marketing (hate being marketed to), I went to school for business after all, but I really wanted to work on the engineering/tech and project development side of the house. I just wanted to build, I’ve always been that way. So after automating myself out of a marketing job, the CEO let me move my desk next to the engineering and project management team. Before long I was drafting engineering designs for residential solar systems, getting professional engineering sign-off, acquiring permits and submitting projects for interconnection approval with the utilities. I also got involved in getting projects financed, hiring/managing contractors & construction, coordinating project development, grid interconnection, inspections and final commissioning of projects. This is where I wanted to be - getting things built.
Right around this time I had an idea for a road-based platform that could recover otherwise-wasted energy from vehicles. The idea came about after learning about regenerative braking in electric vehicles - a process that recovers kinetic energy as the vehicle slows down, turning it back into electricity that returns to the cars battery. During regenerative braking, an EV’s motor works in reverse as the car brakes and effectively becomes a power generator. It’s sort of like how a wind turbine can also become a large fan if operated in reverse. The regenerated electricity is then transported back into the cars battery ultimately extending its range.
The problem was that 99.99% of cars on the road at that time were not electric and weren’t capable of recovering any of their kinetic energy. In addition, internal combustion engine (ICE) cars are already very inefficient. Less than ~20% of the energy stored in fuel is actually converted into power at the wheels. The rest is wasted mainly as heat. The aha moment came when doing some back of the napkin math that included the number of global ICE vehicles on the road multiplied by the average amount of energy wasted via braking and deceleration (which is close to ~6% of total energy in the fuel). The estimate showed the wasted energy was roughly equal to 1 gigaton (a billion tons) of carbon dioxide wasted annually around the world. Thats over 2% of global CO2 emissions. Converting that to kWh (energy usage), thats enough wasted energy to power ~125M average sized U.S. homes for an entire year - just from cars braking and deceleration around the world - crazy.
This was during a really creative time for me. I was in college and wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do with my life but had lots of ideas for businesses, products, inventions, etc. Around this time I was filling up notebooks with invention ideas of all types. Many of them were hardware related and included military systems & equipment, robotic vehicles (both air & ground based), passenger/commercial vehicle subsystems like suspension and propulsion and clean energy generation systems. I’ve always been interested in hardware, infrastructure, vehicles, energy, propulsion and complex mechanical systems. I’ve always considered myself born an engineer that went to school for business. I grew up building things. Growing up everyone called me MacGyver. That wasn’t too far off my actual last name (McIntosh) so it worked. I read lots of books on mechanical engineering, robotics, physics, etc. I also spent lots of time taking things apart and putting them back together to understand how they worked, fixing things, and modifying all kinds of machines/equipment. I consider myself a self taught engineer with lots of hands on experience building things since being a kid including a skateboard powered by a weedwacker engine. Stay tuned for a post on all the cool things I’ve built.
My first “business” - a robotics company?
Around this time I was exploring a number of different inventions and potential business ideas on the side of working full time at the solar startup. There were a few that I kept revisiting including an open-sourced wearable upper-body exoskeleton suit; a robotic tracked vehicle w/ an innovative suspension and steering system; and the roadway kinetic energy harvesting platform mentioned earlier. The latter idea was to build something into the roadway that could recover otherwise-wasted kinetic energy and convert it into electricity that can either be used by nearby infrastructure or be exported to the local utility grid. I couldn’t pick one (something that still plagues me today) so ended up working on both the robotic vehicle and road-based energy system simultaneously - multiple projects lead to multiple successes, right?
I ended up making the most progress on the robotics project and learned a ton about design, engineering, troubleshooting, product development and project management. The project ended up turning into two separate robotic vehicle projects - one that resembled a small 50lb robotic tracked "‘army tank’ platform and the other was a 4-tracked tank with 4 way suspension and steering dubbed: QuadraTrack. At this point these projects were meant to be for fun and learning. There weren’t any plans to start a business - but that fire was beginning to build up inside of me. I finished the smaller robot first (see image below) and it worked really well. I thought “huh maybe I can go into the robotics business, sell these to hobbyists and eventually the military some day”. I whipped up a website, a bare bones landing page and added an “add to cart” feature to gauge interest and validate the market. I also ran Google Adwords at a few hundred dollars per month to drive site traffic. When someone clicked “add to cart” a popup would appear that said the vehicle was out of stock but to leave your contact info to be notified when it would be back in stock. This was a way to see who wanted to buy it without having to build and stock it. Over the course of a few months I think I received just 2 submissions. I also listed it on eBay and various robotics/hobbyist forums but there wasn’t any meaningful commercial interest - or so I thought.
First big lessons learned: If you build it they will not just come.
After not seeing much interest or action I got bored and assumed nobody wanted what I built. Looking back its obvious that I gave up too soon and way before reaching out directly to potential customers and running a real discovery and market validation process. On top of that I was never full time on it - it was always a side hustle while working a full time job. Maybe things would’ve been different if I was all in on it? Ah what could’ve been?
The beginnings of RoadPower.
After that experiment I started looking for the next thing I can invent, build and try to sell. I thought, “okay I gave this robotics thing try. Let’s go with the kinetic energy harvesting idea for my next at bat.” The timing felt right with sustainability and clean energy beginning to go mainstream. By then I’ve worked at an early-stage solar energy startup and tried launching my own robotics company in parallel. I thought I had a decent foundation going into my next venture. This was around 2014.
This was also right around the time I got a job offer to work at J.P. Morgan as an IT business analyst i.e. a liaison between engineering and product end users. How was I going to work full time at one of the worlds largest investment banks and start a hardware company in the clean energy space simultaneously? I already had somewhat of a roadmap for how to side hustle a hardware startup into existence as a solo founder. But how would I manage this while working 60+ hour weeks at J.P. Morgan?
I started by allocating one hour here, a few over there, first to get the idea out of my head, onto paper. From there I worked on refining the design for the first prototype, came up with an initial list of materials & parts and began building version 1.0. This was all being done in my first apartment that I moved into as a result of getting a job at J.P. Morgan and moving out on my own closer to Manhattan. I was in Jersey City at this point. I rented a 2 bedroom apartment and turned one of the bedrooms into an office + workshop. To this day every one of my apartments has had a spare bedroom with this type of setup. Guests slept on the couch.
During this time I was able to get prototype v1.0 to around 25% built. I just wasn’t able to put in the time that a project like this required to take off. Working full time was gobbling up all my attention and energy. My limited social life, on top of that, left me almost no time for the project and it started to gather dust in my spare bedroom/office/workshop/bat cave. Before long I abandoned it and started adapting to the “9-5” lifestyle - and it was slowly eating away at me.
Backpacking South America.
After about a year and a half I decided to quit my cushy Wall Street tech job and left to travel South America for 6 months. Admittedly this was influenced by Tim Ferris’s ‘The 4 Hour Workweek’ and subsequently “Vagabonding” by Rolf Potts (also recommended by Tim). It was the mini-retirement I needed. I visited 8 countries and 50+ cities from November 2015 to May 2016. It was the most incredible experience I’ve ever had, and if i’m being honest, I’m mentally still on that trip. There were two main reasons for the trip. The first was that I was absolutely miserable with my 60+ hour/week corporate job in an industry and discipline that I had no interest in. I needed to get away. The second was because I wanted to use that time to figure out what I really wanted to do next with my life. I had all these business/product ideas and wanted to clear my plate and figure out what I really wanted to do with a fresh perspective.
While on the trip I managed to completely drain my savings account, including the money I had set aside to fund whatever next business I decided on while “finding myself” in South America. Because of this, when I got home I had to find a job, if only to replenish my savings. So what did I do? You guessed it - I went back into investment banking IT - this time as a combined product/project manager. I actually added the trip to my resume and it was all that the recruiters/interviewers were interested in. The pay was incredible and before long I had replenished my savings, built back up an emergency fund and had enough leftover to begin funding the next venture. I ended up staying with the company for almost 3 years while working on my next startup on the side. I converted to a part time consultant during my last 6 months so that I could focus more on the startup. Looking back I’m grateful that they were willing to allow me to convert to part time consultant - if only for a few months.
This was right around the time that I decided to go all-in on the road-based kinetic energy recovery & energy harvesting project described earlier - the project that just wouldn’t die. Michael Jordan had a quote that went something like: “whatever you spend the most time thinking about is what you should be focused on in life”. Im probably way off on the wording there but that was the gist.
I couldn’t stop thinking about harvesting energy from vehicles on roadways so I blew the dust off of the abandoned prototype I started building a few years earlier.
The company needed a name and I needed a cofounder to help me evolve the project into a real company. I came up with the name RoadPower - pretty self explanatory and made SEO quite easy. There was solar power, wind power and now there was RoadPower. I thought the name could be looked at like how Xerox or Google became verbs in their respective areas. Even if copycats came along the original verb for road-based power generation would be RoadPower for the whole industry - that was the thinking at least.
Finding a cofounder & our first incubator.
Fast forward a few months I found a cofounder through Stevens Institute of Technology’s Venture Center (The SVC) and got the company accepted into their incubator program. A masters electrical engineering student with a passion for sustainability, became my CTO after several interviews and conversations. We were also neighbors which made the apartment-based prototype development process a bit more workable.
The SVC incubator helped us figure out the business side of the venture and all the planning, forecasting and strategizing that would be required to go from an idea to a viable business. We also had access to mentors and university staff, including engineering professors that were able to help on the technical validation and feasibility analysis. The biggest milestones we were able to achieve via the SVC was the development of our first bench-scale prototype and signing up our first future pilot customer.
After graduating from the SVC we were accepted into the NYC Economic Development Corporation (EDC) backed FutureWorks incubator focused on urban tech and hardware based technologies that could benefit NYC. Futureworks ultimately got us prepped and positioned for our first official fundraise. Up until this point I was completely funding the business out of my own personal savings and income. We hadn’t raised any money to date. At this point, early 2019, I officially left my consulting job in IT and decided to go all in on RoadPower.
Our first HQ.
We went on to become members at New Lab - a Brooklyn-based co working space for frontier tech startups with an impressive set of prototyping facilities and rockstar staff across all functions of what startups need to thrive. I couldn’t recommend New Lab enough. We're still there today - more on that later.
Fundraising.
In mid-2019 we began our pre-seed fundraise. This was the first time I set out to raise money for anything in my life. Up until that point I had regularly heard that fundraising for a startup is a full time job and boy we’re they right. All that meant was that now you get to work ~200% of what you were doing before. It was a slog. Our goal was to raise a $750K-$1M round. By the middle of September we got a lead investor in for $350K and soon after a family office for $50K for a grand total of $400K raised for the round - not bad for a first raise over just a few months. The timing couldn’t have been better. I personally had less than 2 weeks of personal runway in the bank when the investment officially closed. I was running on fumes. If we didn't get that investment I would’ve had to put things on hold and get a real job. Only a few weeks earlier I refreshed my resume and posted to the major job boards just in case we weren’t able to raise money. It was really tight but the startup gods were smiling down on us. (FYI: This wasn’t the last time something like this would happen to me.)
Lesson learned: hunger is a major motivator.
The funding allowed me to bring in my cofounder full time and pay ourselves official salaries. It was a surreal moment. Up until that point I was the only full time employee. My cofounder was working a full time job in the solar industry and once we closed that funding he quit to come onboard full time. The top target milestones for that funding, apart from building out the team, was to develop the technology from bench (i.e. basement) scale to v1.0 full scale and to deploy it with multiple pilot customers - a tall order for a large, complex hardware startup with the relatively small amount of funding we raised.
Enter Covid.
Fast forward a few months and the pandemic is just starting to pickup steam. The co-working & prototyping facility we were based in was forced to shut down and the world went fully remote. The thing with hardware startups, unlike software, is that you really need to be in person, in the lab, to develop the technology. There’s really no way to effectively build physical products when your team is fully remote and your facility is locked down. Good thing I had the second bedroom/workshop. I also got my landlord to let me build a small workshop in the basement. It wasn't ideal but it helped.
Cofounder breakup.
A few months later our facility was beginning to allow teams back onsite via a ‘return to work’ pilot program that we applied to participate in. We were one of the first teams back in the building and we more/less had the entire workshop to ourselves. We had fallen behind on product development progress so had lot’s of catching up to do. My cofounder had alot of anxiety around leaving his home and returning to the facility. This was a huge point of contention for us. He wanted to remain fully remote but I needed him in the workshop. We were developing hardware after all and he was our only credentialed electrical engineer. Within a few weeks of being allowed back into New Lab, my cofounder quit. I think the pressure of needing him to be with me in the workshop during such a crazy and scary time early in the pandemic was too much stress for him. He had a few roommates who were all working remotely and he was worried he would bring the virus home to them. It was unfortunate. Looking back I probably should’ve been a little more understanding and flexible and figured out an effective hybrid approach. I wasn’t completely on my own. We hired a part-time super talented mechanical engineering consultant once we raised funding. The problem was that he was also fully remote and he had several clients.
Spread too thin.
Now my time was split between literally every role you can think of as the founder and sole full time employee for a recently funded hardware tech startup. By day I’m talking to customers, interviewing potential hires and talking to investors and by night I was in the workshop welding steel and fabricating the full scale pilot prototype. It was rough but I made it work. I got to feel what blood, sweat and tears actually meant, literally. Can we add pain to that list to make it a bit more accurate?
It went on this way for several months until I found my cofounders replacement - a super talented electrical engineer with a Masters from Columbia University in both electrical engineering and physics. The recruiting demanded even more of the limited bandwidth I had left. At this point we had about 9 months of runway remaining in the bank and were way behind schedule against the milestones we promised to hit as part of our pre-seed fundraise. With limited funding remaining we had to prioritize and figure out how the rest of the money would be spent and we had to run leaner than planned.
The Pilot.
When we first raised our pre-seed round we were targeting $750K-$1M as mentioned earlier with the main goals of developing our technology to the early pilot scale and deploying with multiple pilot customers. By the end of 2019 we ended up raising a total of just $400K from 2 investors. Not long after, Covid-19 became a household name, and trying to raise money for a hardware startup focused on sustainable transportation when everyone was isolating at home, and vehicles weren’t visiting the customer facilities we were targeting (e.g. like shopping malls) became almost impossible. This led to us not being able to fill out the rest of our funding round. We had to make the $400K work. We had to run lean.
Overall we were able to sign up 3 pilot customers but it was unlikely that we had the funds to deploy with all three. We figured that in the least we would have to develop at least one pilot if there was going to be any chance of raising a follow-on round once/if Covid blew over. The clock was ticking and the cash register was ringing (not in a good way). At this point I was spending over half my time in the workshop fabricating our prototype. I did all of the mechanical fabrication myself. Our new director of electrical engineering was focused on getting the electrical side built out in parallel. Our focus was to finish the first version of the full-scale MVP prototype and test it before the end of 2020. And on Dec 30, 2020 we did just that at our facility.
This was a great milestone but we still had an official pilot to deploy with a customer onsite at their facility and we were down to just a few months of financial runway. The customer we decided to prioritize was the Brooklyn Navy Yard. At this point we had already established a relationship with their transportation and pilots team and these talks were furthest along and included an agreed-to project scope - so thats what we did. We worked tirelessly to refine and dial in the prototype to get it ready for the pilot. At this point we were testing it out in the parking lot around once a week in between engineering refinements. This was much harder than it sounds. Because of the sheer mass of the prototype, and all of its subsystems, it was quite the effort to get it from the workshop out to the parking lot and back into storage with only 2 people. Below is part of the setup we had to regularly transport back and forth. It was backbreaking work. The “ramps” on the right weighed over 350 lbs and we had to manually lift them off that 10 ft long custom dolly and onto the roadway - and back again. We invented a special kind of “deadlift” that integrated those purple straps and we got our reps in.
Ideally we could’ve left the unit installed out in the parking lot but we couldn’t get authorization for that. So every time we needed to run a quick test it was essentially a full day effort for the entire team.
Fast forward a few months and we’re just about on track to deploy the official customer pilot before spring. By now we were able to validate and dial in our tech a bit further and felt conformable sending it out into the wild and officially demonstrating it to outsiders. We had to be. There wasn’t much time left. We were literally running on fumes.
In the last week of March ‘21 we officially deployed the pilot. We had a number of potential investors, journalists and friends of the company come out for the combined demo/pilot at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The pilot was the subject of several media stories - one done by CleanTechnica. Below are some of the shots from the several days and locations we deployed the pilot at the facility.
Check out the demo video here - don’t mind the noob iMovie skills.
In the end the energy generation performance results of the pilot were underwhelming but that wasn’t unexpected. This was our first full-scale unit that we were just beginning to test with frequent vehicle traffic. The system was made up of over a dozen subsystems that all themselves needed to be developed, integrated and refined. Getting them all to play nice with each other and function end-to-end is what we were mainly focused on at this time. The refinements/enhancements regarding dialing in the energy generation performance was going to have to wait until we raised a follow-on round of funding. The initial $750K-1M fundraise target was meant to go towards dialing in the performance but since we only raised $400K we were only able to do the integration and early unit testing work. Our current investors at that time weren’t having it. They’d apparently “seen enough” at that point and wouldn’t follow-on or bridge us . We were advised to “just wind it down”. We tried to get other investors in the hope that if we could’ve brought in new funding our current investors would potentially join the round but we never got that far. Internally we thought that we made an incredible amount of progress with only 2 full time employees over 18 months with only $400K. We went from an idea to a full-scale customer pilot over that time against challenges that included Covid, a cofounder breakup, and raising less than half of the funding we needed - not bad right?
The loss of conviction.
At this point I was loosing conviction by the day in our ability to raise more money, but also in the techno-economic viability overall. I guess I let all those investor “no’s” and their reasoning get to me. What we really needed was ~18-24 months of additional R&D and no VC was willing to fund that. We were still in the ‘science experiment’ phase. In parallel, we were applying for R&D grants but weren’t able to secure any. We were down to weeks of runway at this point and there wasn’t any light at the end of the tunnel.
We just couldn’t get the stars to align.
Could we pivot? What could we do? There just wasn’t enough time. We decided to try and sell the company and/or the IP and made one last push in that regard. We were able to get conversations with several corporate development/M&A teams at some well known publicly-traded companies in the sustainability and clean transportation space. We went through M&A due diligence with a few of them but in the end we were just too early for them. They were looking for something close to, if not already, commercially ready/viable. They were’t willing to fund 1-2 more years of R&D just to prove the concept any more than VCs were willing to fund our follow-on round.
In the end I ultimately decided to wind everything down. I fully lost conviction and was ready to move on. I was completely burned out at this point. You put in all this effort and in the end it just wasn’t meant to be. It hurt. I was crushed. I had failed and it sucked. Almost 18 months later it still triggers me to think and talk about RoadPower and what happened. The 6 months following the shut down I was in the ultimate funk (to say the least) and really just withdrew from the world. I went into my cave and before long I was beginning to noodle on what would come next. It was back to the drawing board, this time with much more experience and insights (more on that in a later post).
In the end I began to realize that its only a failure if you didn’t learn anything from it and boy did I learn a ton.
So maybe it wasn’t a failure after all.
Ryan thank you for sharing your story in such a detail and toughtfull manner. It is not usual to read about people “failures” this transparently, although from what you Shared, I am also sure it was not a failure at all.
The world Just needs more people like you, keep the great work and I hope it will inspire others to do our part.