Ahmed Badruddin

Last September, YPIN was kind enough to select me to be on their board. In my application, I expressed my interest in organizing a GreenTech event to raise awareness of the innovations in the field. I am passionate about using technology to help improve energy efficiency, reduce our carbon footprint, and I felt YPIN was the ideal non-profit organization in Seattle that could make such an event happen.

In talking to other new board members,  I met Benjamin and we quickly discovered we have similar interests and started brainstorming for the event. Amber and Philippe joined the team right after the first board meeting and that was how the YPIN event “Innovations & Careers in the GreenTech Industry” was born.

Since then, there has been no turning back. We put together a dream-team panel of GreenTech experts in Seattle. We’ve done a lot of promotion through social networking and have been able to reach thousands of young professionals in Seattle. We booked a fabulous venue, Pravda Studios. We even have a book signing by one of our panelists Kevin Wilhelm, CEO of Sustainable Business Consulting, and we have past winners and organizers of the CleanTech Open, an organization that fosters entrepreneurship and clean technologies, to help aspiring entrepreneurs in the audience learn more about how they make their ideas a reality.

What I am most excited about is the impact this event, I feel, can have on Seattle’s Green economy. We’re going to have a panel with leaders of Seattle’s GreenTech industry, and an audience of about 200 young, ambitious, professionals, looking to make a difference and wanting to learn how. During the panel, we’ll hear stories about how each of these leaders got into the GreenTech industry and got to where they are today, and we’ll get firsthand access to their insights on where the industry is heading, and where the innovations and opportunities of the future are. During the networking time, we are putting together a couple of hundred ambitious young professionals in an environment where they can share ideas and learn from each other. They might find their next business partner for a GreenTech venture, a lead to a job at a GreenTech startup, or learn about an area within this industry that will eventually become their passion. And any of those connections or realizations are going to influence the direction Seattle’s Green industry is headed. I truly believe Seattle is going to be a leader in the Global GreenTech industry and events like this are further proof of how committed people in Seattle are to this effort. Four of the Global CleanTech Top 100 companies are based in Washington state, and one of them, Infinia, will be at our event.

At a personal level, this event helped me confirm that GreenTech is what I am truly passionate about. My energy level skyrockets whenever I think about, read about, or work on anything related to Green technologies. And this was instrumental in helping me make the decision to start a GreenTech company back in Toronto.

Thanks for reading, my friends, and I hope to see you there! I’m sharing the event details below.

When? February 23^rd 2010

6pm – Doors Open

7pm to 9pm – Panel Discussion and Q&A

9pm to 11pm – Post event networking

Where? Pravda Studios, 1406 10th avenue suite 200

Price? $8 for YPIN Members, $12 for Non-members

Panelists:

• David Leonhardi (Moderator), a Business Strategist at Boeing
• J.D. Sitton, CEO of Infinia, a global CleanTech Top 100 firm developing solar power generation systems.
• Kevin Wilhelm, CEO of Sustainable Business Consulting, delivers solutions to help clients meet profitability and sustainability goals.
• Bryan Guy, Managing Director of Cypress Venture Group, a startup developing smart grid solutions
• Clare Nordquist, Director at Cascadia Capitals, an investment bank for sustainable technologies
• William Einstein, Manager, Emerging Technologies & Climate Change department, Puget Sound Energy
• T. Ron Davis, Chief Marketing Officer, Vu1, a Seattle-based startup developing a new technology for energy efficient lighting

Link to event flyer with panelist bio’s and details

I was recently contacted by Microsoft Hohm to write a guest blog. Here’s a link to my blog entry on their site, where I talk about the role of Design thinking in energy efficiency. Check it out!

http://blog.microsoft-hohm.com/news/10-02-17/Design_Thinking.aspx

In the past few weeks, I have been brainstorming business ideas for my business venture. A challenge I have run into is that my list of ideas is in the hundreds and I don’t have a quick way to evaluate all of them. I do extensive market research on ideas that excite me the most but there’s no science or analysis behind why I picked those ideas.

There’s a couple of things I learned very quickly:
1) Many of the ideas can be grouped into a meta-idea. E.g. if I have ideas on technologies that can help homes optimize their energy consumption, they all fall under Home Energy Management Solutions and that way I can do market research for all of them simultaneously and it also allows me to see the big picture better
2) Rather than focusing on what idea excites me I need to think about ideas that I think will work in the market, or will excite others . But that means I need some sort of framework that allows me to do that analysis in less than 1 minute for this to be feasible.

I then came up with this simple framework, assigning points to each factor. Each idea has to add up to a certain minimum before I would take it any further.

Factors included in this framework (in no particular order):

1) Market Opportunity – Will people pay for this product? How does this impact people’s lives? My personal preference is a consumer facing product.
2) Revenue Potential – How much will people pay for this? The greater the value proposition, the more people will pay for it. I prefer a direct sales model so I am currently ignoring ideas that rely on advertising for revenue
3) Environmental Impact – How will this idea improve the environment?
4) Technical Expertise – Can I easily prototype this idea? The answer to most software based solutions is yes, it just gets tricky when there’s hardware involved as I haven’t done any hardware design since University
5) Innovation – Is this idea bringing something novel to the market? A quick test is to see how long it would take to develop. If it’s something that can be developed in 2 months by one person, it’s just a hobby software, not a real game-changing innovation which are multi-year projects.
6) Competition – Since GreenTech/CleanTech is a new industry, it’s easier to identify niches with less competition. A metric I am using is working on something I don’t see anyone else working on for at least one year. I also want to avoid directly working on areas that the big players (Microsoft, Google, GridPoint, etc..) are pursuing. But there’s many ways to complement what the big players are working on to satisfy niches. I find that over 70% of the time I think of something, I’ll do a quick Google search and find a startup already working on something similar, or the exact same thing I had in mind. The challenge here is to determine whether to continue to go after that idea but think of ways to differentiate, or just move on. I think it depends on how high the idea scores in other areas. If so, it’s actually worth going after, despite the competition.
7) Cost of entry – Can I sustain this business with my own funds till at least Alpha release, or ideally Beta or V1?

I am curious to know what your thoughts are.

Towards the end of every year, I do a recap of how the year went and plan what’s next for me. In my annual planning, I spend a lot of time thinking about my personal goals and breaking them down by career, health, social, community, self development, and financial. A lot of that has been taken by learnings from books by Steven Covey and David Allen. I then make a powerpoint presentation, with slides for each area, goals, action plans, accountabilities, schedule, the whole nine yards. I don’t share that powerpoint with anyone. Once all my goals are locked, I just go at it, and perhaps look at that powerpoint file once every 2-3 months. This allows me to focus on execution through most of the year and allow life to take its course after I have defined the initial direction.

This has served me well in the past few years. I look back at 2009, and it’s been a great year. What I am most proud of in 2009:

Towards the end of 2009, I sat down to think about the next year and how I was going to push myself even further. This was also at the same time I was really getting interested in Green/Clean technologies – technologies to help us become more energy efficient and sustainable. It started off as something I was just interested in and would tweet about here and there, to something I got really passionate about and started going to green networking events and organizing my own GreenTech Panel event, to something I would think about day and night. I began to see so many possibilities and ways software and technology can be used to increase energy efficiency and optimize energy consumption.

Somewhere  deep in those thoughts, the entrepreneurship bug bit me. My childhood dreams of starting, owning, and running a company were reawakened and they took over my 2010 planning. My 2010 plan was condensed into the following statement - To Dream, Dare, and Deliver. Dreaming of possibilities, daring to go after them, and delivering on them.

Dreaming in itself isn’t enough. Without action, we can’t realize our dreams. Hence, the need to dare. It takes a lot of courage to quit a great job and comfortable life to start a company. That first step requires tremendous strength and conviction. Daring by itself isn’t enough either. Strong planning and execution is required to go from where you are when you take that first step to where you dream to go. Therefore, the need to deliver. And that has the most unknowns because there are so many factors beyond your immediate control.

I think there are a lot of opportunities to build novel technologies that can improve people’s lives and reduce their carbon footprint. Over the next few blogs, I will write more in depth about the problem space I am targeting and at a high level, some solutions I have in mind. As people are becoming more environmentally conscious, the market is shifting and our culture is evolving. Every change and evolution creates new business opportunities and unfulfilled consumer needs. I want to be part of that first wave of solutions and innovations that will transform how we consume energy.

I am excited and scared at the same time. Excited because there are plenty of opportunities out there. Scared because there is an equal number of ways I can fail to realize my dreams. I don’t know how I will fare but I won’t know unless I try. What excites me is impacting and creating value for society. Ultimately, that is how we will be remembered, how we build the legacy we leave behind. When we create businesses, we create jobs, we expand the economy, we satisfy a customer need, we create value.  It’s real. And one of the best feeling is taking an idea and bringing it to life. There was a time when people risked their lives to open new frontiers of knowledge and sciences for mankind. We have evolved to a point where the amount of risk we have to take is far less than what our ancestors had to take. We don’t risk religious or political persecution anymore when trying to innovate or proposing new ideas and ideologies. Taking those times as a baseline, we’re fortunate to live in the times we do, and have the opportunities we do. We have little excuse not to take some risk to seize opportunities.

I will be moving back to Canada to start the company which I am excited about. However, this has been the toughest thing I have had to do. I made some of the best friends I have ever had in Seattle and I really love Seattle for all that it’s given me. I’m sure I will visit many times, there are many memories attached to this city. The plan is to start heading back sometime in March.

I am also aware of the sacrifices needed to live the life of a tech entrepreneur. I will live a more frugal lifestyle. I will barely get sleep. There will be many emotional ups and downs. I might fail and lose all my life savings. But.. it will be worth it because of my strong belief in the following:  as long as you work hard, love what you do, and create value for others, good things will happen.