The hypothesis that the sun can be a renewable source of energy has been proved to be true. Solar panel manufacturers and developers have been operating successfully under this assumption for years. Today startups and new companies are building new business models and technologies on top of solar’s basic assumption that the sun can create electricity.
One of the entrepreneurs is Rich Matsui, a 2003 graduate of Punahou School and CEO and co-founder of kWh Analytics. He and his team
at kWh Analytics have collected the largest repository of solar project data in the U.S. Their secret sauce is the smart software they’ve built to perform analytics on data that help financial institutions track and optimize the performance of their investments. Their belief is that solar needs data to become “bankable.”
“At McKinsey we were taught that at any given time you should have a hypothesis,” said Matsui, a former management consultant at McKinsey &Co. and founding member of McKinsey’s Global Solar Practice. “There’s even something called the Day One Hypothesis. It means as you walk into a client’s office in an industry you know nothing about, on Day One you should have a hypothesis around what the right solution to the problem is — even if you know nothing about it.
”This is important because you need something to prove right or wrong. Many times your first hypothesis will be wrong, and you need to kill it off and start something new. But at the very least you’re making forward progress because you’re coming up with an even better idea and putting it forward.”
While at McKinsey’s Taiwan office from 2007 to 2010, Matsui developed a hypothesis that solar needs data to be bankable. And by bankable, he means trusted by the financial community.
“I was in Asia seeing all of these solar panel and inverter manufacturers claiming to be No. 1 in quality, but none of them had any data to back up their claims,” he said.
Recently kWh Analytics, one of the 42 companies in Energy Excelerator’s portfolio, announced it had raised a $5 million Series A round of funding — showing that investors believe in the company’s value — and launched a new product line for insurance companies. Energy Excelerator is a Honolulu-based nonprofit company that funds innovative startups to create a 100 percent clean-energy future.
Bringing on new investors and growing a startup does not come without the burden of expectations. And it takes a human being who thrives in uncomfortable situations with all eyes on him or her to be optimistic in the times when most would be cynical.
“You’re taking money from investors that want their money back and want to make a return,” Matsui said. “You have employees counting on you, entrusting their careers with you because there are a thousand Silicon Valley companies (that) a skilled software engineer could join, and they took their bet on me when it wasn’t obvious that this was going to succeed.”
Simultaneously, Matsui has been testing hypotheses for his personal life.
After graduating from Punahou in 2003, he attended Georgetown University, where he started out as a business major planning to run the family pet store, Petland, after graduation.
Some talk about entrepreneurs being born with a special gene or learning to thrive in the most uncomfortable situations. Matsui calls it “fostering a delusion. … I read once that starting a company is way harder than anyone thinks. But if you knew how hard it was, would you have started this company to begin with? And the answer for many people, myself included, would probably have been no. The world, to some extent, depends on the delusion of people thinking that they can really put a dent in the way things are currently being done. And without that delusion nothing happens.”
Lauren Tonokawa is head of the communications team at the Energy Excelerator. She’s a graduate of the University of Hawaii. Reach her at laurentonokawa@gmail.com.
