Kevin Surace, CEO of Serious Materials

Listen to the podcast...(30 minutes+)

• Buildings are the big kahuna. 40% of the world’s CO2 is tied to their operation on a world wide basis and 12% to the manufacture of building material because they are the biggest most massive things we make every year.  And lastly, just in comparison to that, cars are only about 9%...That was really my inspiration. That is when I woke up and said “Now that I know, now that I understand what's going on from a climate perspective, what are my kids going to say about me in 2050 and I want them to say ‘Dad did the best he could.’”
• We think it is all about energy, energy is the high order bit...address the energy and the CO2... We look at how to save energy in the operation of buildings or how do we save energy in the manufacturing of materials.
• All of these products have to pay off, so for us the most important part of green is the green the costumer saves.  If they are going to save money using our products and services then they win and we win.  That’s what they have to see: fast pay back in two years or three years.
• Our Serious Energy Manager Platform which is an energy efficiency platform to monitor and manage and control buildings...  [is creating] savings of 15-20 and some buildings even 30%, without changing anything, but changing the way the buildings get used and controlled... we have seen people get their money back in three months.
• Innovation is about letting people know that they can take risks.  In fact, we want to encourage people to take very big risks...Risks equal innovation. Corporate America has a problem with that.  They have fallen a little bit into non-disruptive innovation... We need to stay innovative- disruptively innovative.
• A big challenge for us, for all of our teams, is that people are so busy.  To take time out to do the innovative stuff is hard...we’ve got a business that has grown almost 100% year over year... We have doubled our employee base and doubled our revenue in a year, it's absolutely crazy.  So amidst all of that craziness, we’ve got to get these six new products out this year.  How are we going to do that? How are we gonna innovate?  How are we going to take the time to give the thought that has to put around it?
• Disruptive innovation probably has to come from the top... I think that at the core of being a disruptively innovative company is that at the CEO level you should know your technologies, you should know them well.  You should be able to take risks. You should be able to convince your people that those risks are worth taking, that we may not succeed, but they are worth trying. And you should support that innovation all they way down the line to the janitor.
• We think that all buildings can easily save 40-60% of their energy usage with just 3 or 4 low hanging fruits with the technologies coming out in the next few years.