Tag: CSUN

Q & A with Freewire’s Co-Founder and CEO Arcady Sosinov

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In your words, what is FreeWire?

FreeWire is innovative, agile, and fast. In just over a year we went from an idea about mobile electric vehicle (EV) charging to production-ready units called Mobis. We talked to our customers, identified their pain points, and created a solution designed specifically to address them. Mobis allow us to perform Charging as a Service, where chargers are brought to the vehicles instead vehicles being brought to the chargers. Blocked stations, range anxiety, and charge rage are all things of the past with FreeWire. Mobis also eliminate the need for expensive, time-consuming infrastructure projects that ultimately result in underutilized assets. FreeWire is the future of EV charging: easy, scalable, and upgradeable.

What was your inspiration for starting FreeWire?

I’ve had a passion for all things automotive since I was a kid, doing my first brake job at 7 and engine swap at 11. I developed a passion for entrepreneurship about the same time. When I entered Steve Blank’s Lean Launchpad class at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, in an age defined by powerhouse software companies, I knew I wanted to start a company that made a physical product. California was in the throes of a burgeoning EV market and issues with insufficient charging infrastructure were starting to crop up. Leveraging my experience with the automotive industry and my co-founder’s engineering expertise seemed like a perfect combination to address these issues.

What did you do before FreeWire?

I spent the last five years in finance doing emerging market analysis and modeling for a large hedge fund based out of Boston. Before that I was a SQL developer for an accounting software company. I’ve consulted, worked on requirements-gathering, and even started a company selling modified exhausts for BMW M3s. I like to cast a wide net.

What are the best and most difficult parts of running a startup company?

The best parts are the good days. When you get great feedback from investors, strong pull from customers, and good publicity. The worst parts are the bad days, when you question whether there’s anyone who actually wants what you’re selling.

What motivates you to keep at it?

FreeWire is my baby. I dedicate more time, money, and effort than I should, it sometimes kicks me in the shins, and yet I love it unconditionally. Even after a streak of bad days, the rush you get after nailing a pitch and making someone else get as excited as you are makes it all worthwhile.

Where are you from originally? What brought you to LA/ California?

I was born in Russia, but I spent most of my life in Boston. After graduating from Boston University and working in the area for a few years I decided to go back to school for my MBA. I was ready for a break from the Boston winters and had a love for California from the first time I visited. Being accepted to Berkeley’s Haas School of Business sealed the deal, and I headed for the west coast.

The company being founded out of Berkeley’s Haas school, could you tell the readers a little about that process?

One of the classes I took at Haas was Lean Launchpad taught by Steve Blank, who is the father of the lean startup methodology. His philosophy is all about customer discovery, that you shouldn’t spend a dollar on product until you’ve talked to your customers. So that’s exactly what we did. We spent three months traveling all around the Bay Area talking to stakeholders, from EV drivers and facilities managers to politicians and utilities. This was crucial to FreeWire’s pivot from wireless charging to mobile charging. We hypothesized that plugging in was a major pain point which needed to be addressed, but our customers helped us realize that it doesn’t help with the real problems: boring into concrete, laying conduit, permitting, and all the other hassles associated with major construction projects.

Why did you apply to be a portfolio company at LACI?

For the network and support. LACI is the premier cleantech incubator in the United States and is an organization that we absolutely wanted to be aligned with.

How has LACI helped your company?

LACI has made introductions to dozens of potential investors and has provided great advice on a number of our key business decisions. They’ve also generated several leads on the business development side to help us penetrate the LA market. We’ve even entered into a business relationship with another LACI portfolio company, Hive Lighting, to distribute our products for the entertainment industry.

What are the best parts of your relationship with LACI?

I have a fantastic relationship with our Executive in Residence; we’ve kept up with our weekly calls since joining LACI, and amazingly each one is still valuable. Another member of LACI invested in our company personally, so there’s never been a moment to question LACI’s commitment to our success.

Tell us about some of the milestones you’ve reached as a company so far

A lot in short amount of time:

• Idea

• Customer Discovery

• Refined Idea

• Prototype

• Angel Round

• Pre-Production Units

• Production Units

What are some of your short and long-term goals for FreeWire?

Short-term: promote EV adoption using our Mobi Charger and reduce reliance on diesel generators using our Mobi Gen. We have commercial-ready products that earn revenue today and be used to fund our long-term goals.

Long-term: create an ecosystem for second-life EV batteries and be the preferred partner for OEMs. We have the creativity to find innovative solutions to the problems people are currently facing plus the business and engineering skills to execute our ideas. The OEMs are sitting on a valuable asset and we can be the ones to help them unlock it.

How do you see your company having an impact on society at large- environmentally, economically, socially or in other ways?

FreeWire’s contributions to the environment are obvious:

• Reducing reliance on fossil fuels through increased EV adoption, facilitated by increased charging capacity.

• Reducing reliance on fossil fuels by replacing diesel generators with battery-based alternatives.

• Stabilizing the grid by pulling energy at off-peak times and delivering it at peak times.

But there are several social components as well:

• Reduce range anxiety (people being worried about driving an EV because they don’t know if it will have enough range to get home) by providing more charging in more locations, including EV rescue charging.

• Reduce charge rage (people unplugging each other, sitting in EV charging spots all day even if they only need to charge for an hour) that stem from limited charging capacity.

We’re working to make EV charging as much of an afterthought as filling a car with gas.

Learn more about FreeWire
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A Future So Bright: 10 questions with Pick My Solar Co-founders Max Aram and Chris Blevins

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Since Max and Chris started Pick My Solar in 2013, they’ve taken the company from a two-person operation out of a studio apartment in Northridge to being named 2015’s Small Business of the Year by Mayor Eric Garcetti.

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Read on to learn more about Max, Chris, and Pick My Solar’s story – and the bright future ahead for these LA-based entrepreneurs.

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In your words, what is Pick My Solar?

Max: Pick My Solar is an online marketplace that connects homeowners to solar installers through our online bidding platform. We create competition between installers to get the best deals for our customers. As you might know, the solar industry is suffering from a lot of noise that is preventing people from getting the best information. We want to disrupt this market and help homeowners go solar with confidence. The best part is that we don’t charge our customers anything– our service is completely free.

What inspired you to start the company?

Chris: Directly before starting Pick My Solar, I was working in the solar industry in sales, and I found that solar was getting sold for double, sometimes triple what it should be sold for. Salesmen are trained to manipulate and outright lie to homeowners, resulting in a lot of people getting ripped off. At that point, I realized that something needed to be done.

Max: When I started my Master’s degree in Germany, I was exposed to renewable energy and sustainability in general. I came to the US and I realized that the solar market here was very fragmented and totally different from Germany. I knew there was great potential for solar technology to shape the future of our energy model. When I met Chris, we hit it off from the first moment and I realized that he was the partner I needed to start the company I was envisioning.

Where are you from originally? What brought you to LA?

Chris: I’m from Long Island, New York. I went to school in upstate New York, got a mechanical engineering degree, and after that I moved to New Zealand. That’s where I first started to become more of an environmentalist, getting in touch with taking care of the planet because that’s so ingrained in New Zealand’s culture. When I came back, I got a civil engineering job and started a few businesses that were online customer connection services. I flew out to California in 2013 with the hopes of eventually starting a business, but didn’t have a set plan. I crashed on my buddy’s couch for a week, got a job working in solar, and met Max not too far after that.

Max: I left Iran in 2009, 10 days after the fraudulent presidential election. There was chaos and I got into some problems being a student activist. I went to Germany to get my Master’s in global production engineering with a focus on solar. After a few semesters, I had the opportunity to come to the US and I think I made a really great choice. I don’t think an immigrant has the opportunities available here in the states anywhere else in the world. I came here August 2010, landed in Burbank, took a bus to Northridge, and continued my Master’s at CSUN.

How did the two of you meet?

Chris: We met at a solar training course – where solar companies train salesmen, teaching them different tactics before they’re sent into the field. I was there as part of my job, Max was there researching how solar is marketed and sold. Three months later he invites me over to his apartment, tells me the idea he had for a business and we stay up all night talking about it. I didn’t sleep at my house for a week, I kept crashing at his place so eventually I just moved into his apartment.

Max: At the time, we both had full time jobs and said, “ok, this idea is going to be the solution this industry needs. We’re going to disrupt the solar market”. We quit our jobs to dedicate our lives to building Pick My Solar. I had a 600 square foot studio apartment in Northridge, we used boards from IKEA to divide work space from living space. We worked out of there for about 10 months until we joined LACI.

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Why did you apply to be a portfolio company at LACI?

Max: Before joining LACI, there were two of us. We were two young kids with a great idea. When we joined LACI we started gaining more attention and respect from the industry and partners. The introductions that LACI has made for us have directly contributed to many of our achievements as a company.

How has LACI helped your company?

Chris: The mentorship is fantastic. We don’t have the experience of growing a company, but our mentors at LACI have been there and done that. Every single question we had – from how to write a proper business email to which strategic direction was best for the company – they had a meaningful answer.

Running a startup company can be a challenging experience. What motivates you to keep at it?

Chris: Our concern for the environment definitely plays a key role. Additionally, I was disgusted with the way the solar industry was bullying homeowners and trying to rip them off. Time and again I saw well-intentioned homeowners throw up their hands in frustration and give up on going solar. It was messed up that salespeople were destroying this new technology’s image by selling it the wrong way. We wanted to change that.

Max: Personally, since my childhood, I’ve loved to build things. My brain works in a way that when I face a problem, I can’t get over it. Either there’s a solution out there that I have to find, or else I have to create one. The solar industry had a problem. Making the impact on the environment and on people’s finances is something that motivates me every day. Every time we receive an email or on a phone call from a happy customer that appreciates our service, that keeps us going.

How do you like doing business in the Los Angeles area?

Max: As an immigrant, the reason I chose LA is because of the diversity – people are very open-minded. That doesn’t just apply to how people interact with each other, but also to their willingness to accept new ideas. It was easier for us to offer such a different solution and have people embrace it. That’s a great part of this culture in LA – we are blessed to start a company here.

Chris: I think it’s great that a lot of people aren’t from here. Everybody has the same attitude – we all came to LA for a reason, to experience something new – and that really builds off of what we’re trying to create. Our solution resonates well with Angelenos. Of course, the weather is great and electricity rates are extremely high – which makes even more sense for solar.

Tell us about some of the milestones you’ve reached as a company so far

Max: At the end of Q4 2014, we closed over a million dollars in generated sales. We’ve also provided over 15,000 Californians with solar pricing data from our no-obligation online solar price calculator. These were major milestones because they validated our concept and proved that the price of solar on our platform is lower than the market leaders. We were also named 2015 Outstanding Small Business by Mayor Garcetti, which was a big deal for us, showing that the City of LA values our contribution in helping to make it a world leader in the Green movement.

Chris: We recently won a grant from the Department of Energy to develop a first-of- its-kind app called PVimpact. PVimpact will be a universal tool for all solar homes to connect to the information grid. The technology aggregates three pieces of data: the homeowner’s electricity use, solar system production, and contractual details of the solar system. PVimpact will provide homeowners with their system’s true savings in a completely software solution, while providing utility companies assistance in demand side management. The app will be rolled out to all Pick My Solar customers this summer, then expanding to the rest of the U.S. residential solar market in the fall.

What are some of your goals for the company?

Chris: Solar is such a cutting edge technology, but it is predominantly sold the way aluminum siding was sold in the 1960’s – door to door. We are firmly convinced that solar deserves to be sold with the leading technological resource of our era – the internet. We really want to change the way that solar is sold, and the way homeowners think about going solar.

Max: Our long-term goal is to become one of the biggest solar companies in the nation without a single boot on the ground. We don’t need installation crews like these vertically integrated companies. What we’re doing is creating an online market place – a bidding platform that brings homeowners together with the best local installers. We have all seen this model work across numerous business segments, and we know it will become the norm for the solar market.

Learn more at www.pickmysolar.com
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