You read about a lot of big ideas in business these days, and especially in Silicon Valley. Companies and founders talk a lot about culture, values, and mission. What do these things really mean, and how do they look in action? What makes a company mission-driven as opposed to profit-driven…

As climate change continues to be a global issue requiring a coordinated worldwide solution, new technologies are empowering more bottoms-up impact at the corporate and local level. Unfortunately, climate change isn’t everyone’s top priority. Even as we’ve understood more about the severity of climate change, it’s struggled to emerge from…

The year 2013 will always stand out for me as the time I learned my most painful and important investment lesson. The world’s fossil fuel driven energy system was something that I thought couldn’t practically be disrupted yet so my effort was spent trying to reform. …

When I was 12 years old, I had a very illuminating conversation with my father about my future career plans. We were discussing my radical drive to learn about and solve the problems of nuclear fusion. Rather than discourage my ambitious goals, he offered some advice. He said, “Even if…

I like to joke that flying cars and the Internet were patented in the 1800s. The ideas were there, but they were far too early to be practical. Inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been a hero of mine since I read his book “Age of Spiritual Machines” when I…

Early on in life, I recognized I had an addictive personality. No matter how much I engaged in whatever I was into, I could never be satisfied. When I became interested in something, it could develop into an unhealthy obsession pretty quickly. For example, like many young people, I would…

At a young age, I became hyper-aware of pollution. I grew up in Toronto, which is a relatively clean city. It’s certainly not Beijing or somewhere people walk the streets with medical masks on their faces. …

For the past century, inefficient and unintelligent systems have been dictating energy consumption within most buildings in the world. Most rooftop HVAC units, for instance, have generally only operated at one speed — full blast. If the building needs to change the temperature of the air, the motor in the…

To solve a problem, you have to understand it. I certainly didn’t pick the easiest challenge when I got into clean energy, but I do have a habit of starting with the hardest problems and working backward (which is a story for another time). My path was set at age…