A Christmas Special: What Founders Say About Building, Luck, and Staying Grounded

In this Christmas special edition, we’ll take a look back at what founders have said about what it really takes to build, how they stay sane and grounded and moments of luck or insight.

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In this Christmas special edition, we’ll take a look back at what founders have said about what it really takes to build, how they stay sane and grounded, and the moments of luck or insight that kept them going.

Anas da Kassas, Founder and CEO of INOVUES

INOVUES retrofits a second window pane to existing windows using adhesive structural material, creating a 10x cost reduction compared to existing methods, and reducing energy inefficiency of buildings by up to 40%.

What were the make or break moments you faced in getting started?

I had quite my job in Boston and moved to Houston so spend 1 year doing my architectural Master thesis on the INOVUES idea. That got me a year to devote full-time to it, but I was not making any money. We moved in with family to cut costs to almost nothing. But after a year, I told my wife: ‘if by the end of the next month, we don't secure any funding, I'll stop and put this on the back burner and find a job.’ At that point, I was ready to give up, although it's not part of my personality or nature to do that, but it was too challenging to continue alone without any sort of funding.

My wife was fully supportive of this, it made me able to push through these tough moments. She acted as my co-founder in the early days, she was the primary person I would talk to about any challenges or pain points.

The first 2-3 years was purely R&D on a shoestring budget

There was literally blood, sweat and tears at almost every step of the process of the R&D phase. It was on a very, very tight budget, almost bootstrapping. There where moments where you spend a year or more of work then know that everything could fall apart because the next few tests are very important. And if I failed in the test, I didn’t have the money to repeat the tests. And that would’ve been a kill switch to the entire thing.

Imagine devoting time, resources and everything you have for two years, and then there's this key test that you're waiting for. And if it passes and succeeds, we're moving forward, if not, I’m going back to finding a job in the industry and starting over. There were a lot of these moments.

What’s your mantra or life philosophy?

I'm an eternal optimist. I believe in the Law of Attraction, so I'm always positive. I belief that with hard work and dedication anything is possible.

What daily rituals help to keep you grounded?

Meditation and exercise. These are very, very important to me on a daily basis. Without them, I wouldn't be able to push forward.

Together with co-founders Aslan Shamsutdin, Murshid M. Ali and Petter S. Berge, Pratik Ghoshal, CEO and Co-founder of Skyfri Technologies developed technology which could streamline and automate solar asset operations to make solar power cheaper and solar capital investment significantly more sustainable.

Pratik Ghoshal, Skyfri Co-founder

“What’s the most important thing I’ve seen in my journey as an entrepreneur? It’s that your team is your biggest asset. Most of the time you fail as an entrepreneur because you just don’t have likeminded people. You don’t have people who you can depend on. Because you alone can’t be a one man army.”

What is it about entrepreneurship that gives you that kick, and makes you go ‘yes, this is what I want to do!’?

You of course have your freedom of thought, everyone has it in a free world. But the freedom of execution to channel the energy that you have without having to stick to a frame structure which already exists is what's most interesting.

And the second thing is, at the beginning of entrepreneurship, there’s a lot of energy and that's what makes you get up in the morning, and like my wife says, I’m less of a thinker than a doer. I like to do things, so there’s no better avenue than entrepreneurship.

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Apeel Founder James Rogers

Heralding the end of plastic-wrapped groceries, Apeel-coated produce can be found in the biggest supermarkets across the U.S. and Europe. It promises an ingenious, natural solution to the single-use plastic crisis for groceries.

Sharpen your idea and talk to investors

I sharpened my idea by talking to more people, and then looked for investors. After hundreds of conversations, I sat down for lunch with a gentleman and at the end he wrote us a check for $50,000. I drove to the garage where a co-worker and I worked, gave her a hug and said - ‘we're down!’ That was almost seven years ago.

The first years were just a belief that if it was possible, we were going to figure it out, and if it wasn’t, we would be happy we tried.
After those first results, we started to think big picture; ‘how would it ripple through the system? ’Instead of food going bad in days, it could now last weeks without refrigeration. That was big.

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CLUBZERO founder Safia Qureshi

Clubzero is trailblazing solutions to the disposable cup crisis

What did it take to get your idea off the ground?

In the beginning, it starts around – is this the right solution for the market? Then, am I the right person to be doing this? Why wouldn’t it be 50,000 other people? Then it’s trying to position yourself in the market. Understanding the landscape and understanding who’s going to be on your side.

We had to build from the ground up from nothing. It didn’t exist. It meant that we have to do multiple selling to the market. We weren’t selling to end-users or potential customers. We were selling to operators so that we could set up a supply chain with those operators.

Understanding who they are and finding these operators and selling this opportunity to them - an opportunity which didn’t exist – that they hadn’t seen before - that’s a very different approach. So that was the first stumbling block.

Once you have a supply chain set up, it’s about really trying to prove the gross margins to move in from theory to reality and understanding where the true costs are.

Pitching to investors – don’t give up!

When you’re setting up a start-up for the first time, you don’t understand the investment landscape.

Now we’ve got some great investors. But funnily enough, the one that is one of our favourites, we pitched to them three times. We only got it the third time.

The first two times we were just so early in the market that they didn’t understand or see the value in investing. You’re not going to attract investment because people don’t want you to burn away their investment before the market is ready for your product or service.

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Valentin Lautier, Homaio Founder

It was the barrier to investment in the EU ETS that drove the French entrepreneur to create investment platform Homaio to unlock the market for retail investors.

What is your advice for other entrepreneurs in this space?

I’ve had a lot of successes and a lot of failures and I’m still here.

A lot of new entrepreneurs are afraid of risk. I find that strange – nothing will or can happen to you physically. The worst case scenario is that everything you’re trying to build crashes and you’ve learned a lot. You live to fight another day.

Living through the entrepreneurial cycle of highs and lows gives you perspective and toughens your skin. You can only get this with experience, there’s no shortcut.

You have to take the long route if you’re not piggybacking on already established ideas and mechanisms.

Everyone’s trying to do things the way that ‘works’ without questioning whether there’s a way to do it better. There are a lot of times where I have to accept that I’m going against the consensus. There are other times where I’m happy to compromise and accept a conventional approach.

As an entrepreneur you're always bombarded with contradictory advice or opinions and you need to know when to hold your ground and when to say ‘okay, I'm probably wrong there’.

Having intuitive knowledge of which battle you’re facing is super important because you could be fighting the wrong battle for a very long time and then just hit a wall.

Do you have any daily rituals that keep you going?

I would love to say that I wake up at 4.30 a.m. and meditate, but I don’t.

What keeps me going isn't so much a ritual, it's more that feeling that I'm working on something that's extremely hard and exciting and unique. It's going to have a huge impact and I think that is the perfect way to spend my time; that's what keeps me going.

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Thank you for reading and listening to The Green Techpreneur.

Happy Holidays! 🥂

#SparkTheTransition,

Marianne

Christmas is a season, not only of rejoicing, but of reflection. - Winston Churchill