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Dropping prices for solar panels sank many American clean tech companies. PIKA Energy, however, was able to benefit from the trend by innovating. Generac acquired them in 2019 because of their uniquely efficient home energy storage system. Bill Hetzel, former COO, tells the compelling story of this Maine Angel (and Sal)-backed success and more.
Click here to read the full transcript of this episode.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Bill Hetzel, Clean Tech Exec & Angel Investor
“The original idea behind Pika Energy was to make the world's lowest cost, highest efficiency home/residential wind turbine.”
“His wind turbines sold for around $10,000. They were sized to power part of your home.”
“Every year, as we developed our wind turbine, the price of solar dropped faster, and that means one thing to a startup, pivot.”
“…one of the great things about Pika Energy…were these power electronics and the power electronics we had had a special capability. It meant that each part of the system controlled itself without some fancy engineer coming in and programming it.”
“You mean you had a more elegant design than Elon Musk's design?”
“Well, our batteries, too, didn't come in one big, five-person carry Powerwall-sized monolith. Our models came part by part and you built them on-site for the battery as well. A solar installer felt very comfortable.”
“The business community in Maine is really human-scale... I mean, you can get to know everybody and it's very supportive. I've invested in three Maine startups.”
“I just got on the phone and I called up Ben [Ben Polito, co-founder of PIKA] and said, "I'm interested in learning more about your company." Ben and Joshua, who are like all good entrepreneurs, were willing to open up their network.”
“Pika Energy stood out as it was a small, but a seriously well-run company. Did things well, took care of investor money. It was serious about that.”
“I think one of Pika's big strengths was the ability to listen to advice, and Ben Polito, the CEO, was really good at this.”
Excellent Monthly Reporting to Investors Made Follow-On Rounds Much Easier
“And we cycled and got better with each cycle.”
“We got better at what we did and that made a huge difference when we were ready to pivot because we already had a foundation of business processes, and so our pivot wasn't the entire company.”
“We showed them [Generac] a demonstration of our product and they were just thrilled. They'd been working on it in-house to build it themselves. They had looked at competitors and they were sophisticated enough and far enough along in their own investigation of this that they recognized our patented power electronics were special.”
Angel Investing in Maine – A Strong Statewide Ecosystem
“Maine Angels tend to go out of their way to support the company, not just in terms of money, but also in terms of advice, connections, providing all of the resources that the companies need.”
Eighty Percent of Success Is Showing Up During a Maine Snow Storm
ORONO Spectral Solutions – Highly Efficient Water Screening
HighByte – Making Information from the Industrial Floor Easily Available for Analysis
Junora – Tech for Depositing Thin Film of Different Elements on Architectural Materials
VETRO – Mapping Optical Fiber Networks
“…I can say that there's a certain pride that Maine has, and the Maine Angels have that same feeling and it makes for a really close-knit community. It's really a joy to work with this group of people.”
Transcript of, “Startup Success in Maine”
Guest: Bill Hetzel, Cleantech Exec & Angel Investor
Sal Daher: Welcome to Angel Invest Boston, conversations with Boston's most interesting founders and angels. Today, my guest is Bill Hetzel, who is from the Boston area originally, but is now with Maine Angels. He was the COO of a startup which is very dear to me because it provided a nice exit for me and for Bill as well. We're going to start talking about Pika, and then we're going to talk about how Bill came about becoming an angel investor and other things and what Maine Angels does and startup investing in Maine. Welcome, Bill Hetzel to Angel Invest Boston.
Bill Hetzel: Thank you very much, Sal.
Sal Daher: Awesome, awesome. Bill [crosstalk 00:00:45] Hetzel studied chemistry at Yale and at MIT in grad school. Then, he also got an MBA. He worked for a large pharmaceutical company, Merck, and then he moved up to Maine because he wanted to work in a smaller and more environmentally-friendly company, which is Tom's of Maine. He had a senior position at Tom's of Maine. Eventually, he ended up being the COO of a company, which I mentioned before, Pika Energy. Anyway, Bill, tell us the Pika Energy story.
Bill Hetzel: The story of Pika Energy is about accelerating clean energy. Pika founders came from MIT with experience in renewable energy, primarily in wind turbines, but it was also in the area underneath the hood of wind turbines, power electronics. The way you move that renewable energy across a circuit board and make it available for home owners and business owners to use. The original idea behind Pika Energy was to make the world's lowest cost, highest efficiency home/residential wind turbine. In the years from 2010 to about 2015, the wind turbine was developed and patented and had many cost savings and efficiency ideas.
Sal Daher: Yes. I remember being at the ACA Conference in Washington. I think it was 2010, and I remember Ben Polito walking around, Ben Polito, one of the founders, walking around with this blade that's about five or six feet long-
Bill Hetzel: Exactly.
Sal Daher: ... the turbine blade and saying, "Oh, we're going to produce this in a factory that used to produce toilet seats. It's going to become as cheap as toilet seats because it's going to be hugely mass produced and you're going to be able to have an effective wind turbine in your back yard." If you lived in a place that's... I don't think it would be allowed in Cambridge, but in places where they would allow a structure of that size, you could have one in your back yard, and the thing worked. It generated electricity and so forth.
The first idea was to build this economically accessible wind turbine, not the huge things that are super engineered and they're extremely expensive, but kind of like a human scale. How much do they sell for?
Bill Hetzel: His wind turbines sold for around $10,000. They were sized to power part of your home. They operated with both wind and solar together, which was an exciting hybrid combination and we really achieved some of those things that Ben talked about when he carried that blade around. We did mass produce that blade with an injection molding machine with a patented technology that basically had a special core inside of it. It was produced at a factory that made toilet seats.
Sal Daher: Toilet seats.
Bill Hetzel: Yes, indeed. That is a true story, and they succeeded in getting the wind turbines certified through the certifying agencies and we sold them. You had to have special things. You had to have about an acre of land. On a hundred-foot tower, if you sweep it out in a circle, it sweeps out about an acre of land, so our customers had to have an available acre of land, be in a windy spot, preferably in the Midwest, be interested in wind power and get local permitting and buy a tower and hook it all up.
While we were doing all of that and getting our blades made and succeeding in the way we thought we would, the price of solar dropped and the price of solar dropped further. Every year, as we developed our wind turbine, the price of solar dropped faster, and that means one thing to a startup, pivot.
Sal Daher: The pivot. Okay, the famous pivot from being a micro or mini wind turbine company to something else.
Bill Hetzel: Exactly, and one of the great things about Pika Energy was under the hood were these power electronic and the power electronics we had had a special capability. It meant that each part of the system controlled itself without some fancy engineer coming in and programming it. When we put wind and solar together and fed it onto the grid, the wind turbine had its own control, the solar had its own control, the inverter that converted the renewable DC energy into reusable AC energy for the homeowner, that had its own control. It was all distributed and it actually worked without the wind turbine. That was our pivot. The key pivot was we had a microgrid that could run all of these sources of renewable energy together, and we-
Sal Daher: Right.
Bill Hetzel: ... in essence replaced the wind turbine with what solar owners really needed. They wanted to connect solar to inverter, which was easy, but they also wanted to connect a battery to it so they could store it, so they could have energy not just when the sun shines, but 24 hours, and [crosstalk 00:05:46] our technology that connected the wind turbine could also connect a battery.
Sal Daher: I remembered you guys had a partnership with Panasonic-
Bill Hetzel: That's correct.
Sal Daher: ... and that you were using their batteries in a setup that competed with Powerwall-
Bill Hetzel: Exactly.
Sal Daher: ... and Tesla, yeah.
Bill Hetzel: Exactly, and our competition was a little bit different. Our technology was really an exciting breakthrough in two ways. One is it connected the battery to solar on the DC side.
Sal Daher: DC, direct current, which is the current that you get from a battery, as opposed to alternating current, which is the current that you get if you put your fingers in the-
Bill Hetzel: In the wall socket. The difference is that the Tesla processed the power three times to get it back out, and the Pika DC connection meant you only had to process it once, so it was fundamentally more efficient.
Sal Daher: You mean you had a more elegant design than Elon Musk's design?
Bill Hetzel: The power electronics under the hood were patented breakthrough control technology that worked on the DC side that was much more efficient. That was one thing that was really important, and that's what we demonstrated with the wind turbines, even though we weren't using them anymore, that under-the-hood technology was there.
The other thing that was a breakthrough is when we worked with Panasonic, we didn't create a liquid-cooled dishwasher-sized automotive-ready battery the way an Elon Musk might. Instead, we used a solar mentality that fit well with a solar installer. We had separate battery modules connected into our system just the way we connected solar modules into our system. Solar installers were really used to that idea. You don't put an array solar panels already prebuilt on a huge truck onto the roof. You get modules and you build them one by one on the roof.
Well, our batteries, too, didn't come in one big, five-person carry Powerwall-sized monolith. Our models came part by part and you built them on-site for the battery as well. A solar installer felt very comfortable. They built up the solar modules, connected them in on DC. We built up the battery modules, connected them on DC. This elegant solution was what Pika did in its pivot, taking its fundamental value, this power electronics value, and seeing how it could fit into the changing solar-plus storage environment.
Sal Daher: Fantastic, fantastic. Your involvement came because you were going up to Maine and you met Ben and Joshua, the founders, and you hit it off with them. You signed on as the Chief Operating Officer for Pika Energy.
Bill Hetzel: It's actually a good story and it's a good way to bring someone into a startup. I read about Ben and Joshua on Maine Biz. It's a local business magazine that's published in Maine. It talks all about the entire business climate, but they focus on startups and commercial real estate in certain segments. Main Biz was a great connector. I saw story about Ben and Joshua and Maine is a small enough state.
Sal Daher: The business community in Maine is really human-scale... I mean, you can get to know everybody and it's very supportive. I've invested in three main startups. One was Pika, which was a nice exit, the other one is doing well, and the third one I just invested in, I'm very excited about as well. I have very, very good memories of angel investing in Maine. Please continue.
Bill Hetzel: Maine Biz, this magazine, is a key part of this ecosystem. Maine, as you said, a very friendly ecosystem. The Maine Angels are part of it. There are other state agencies and investment agencies, but a very small collegial group and you can just get on the phone, but this is probably approachable even in the Massachusetts area in the right circles. It's not the whole state. It's more the Boston area or the Cambridge area or that kind of thing.
Sal Daher: Well, I mean, Portland, Maine, is like 90 minutes from Downtown Boston. It's like a long commute for some people.
Bill Hetzel: Exactly.
Sal Daher: That's why I would invest because I wouldn't invest outside the region. I'll invest out of Providence, I'll invest up in Portland. Please continue.
Bill Hetzel: I just got on the phone and I called up Ben and said, "I'm interested in learning more about your company." Ben and Joshua, who are like all good entrepreneurs, were willing to open up their network. They created some prototypes and some technology, and so they were ready to have someone come in and offer some help in that area where I had the background. I called them and talked to them. I went out and visited. I saw the wind turbine out in their test field. I think I spent many hours talking with them. I even looked for a factory location for the company before I was hired just as sort of a way... They were talking about factory locations, and so I did a project and looked at some of the options and did a little project for them just as a way so that we could work together. We really clicked.
Ben was a mechanical engineer and a brilliant designer and a money raiser, leader of the company. Joshua was a technologist. He was the power electronics guy. He was the engineer behind everything. I was everything else. I was minding the factory and sweeping its floor. What is this human resources thing? What is compliance? What do you do there? How do you pay a payroll? How do you hire someone? What system do you put the inventory in? I basically was everything else. It was a great fit for the company. They were ready to take the next step and start to commercialize.
For me, wearing many hats, figuring things out, doing things just well enough to make it through to the next stage and do the next thing was really my sweet spot. For me, it was that great position of really liking what I was doing, really liking whom I was doing it with, and really liking the mission and the work that we were doing for the environment. That was really an easy way to put your energy into a startup.
Sal Daher: I've invested at this point in about 60 startups. Pika Energy stood out as it was small, but a seriously well-run company. Did things well, took care of investor money. It was serious about that. I mean, it's a very mature company, albeit small. Frequent reports that tied from one report to the other and it made sense. "Last time we said this, and yeah, this is what happened. Now, we're doing this and so forth." Most of these reports, sometimes they disconnected. It sounds like the person writing the report didn't read the previous report they sent. I mean, the company was well run. How was it you achieved that maturity in this young company?
Bill Hetzel: I think one of Pika's big strengths was the ability to listen to advice, and Ben Polito, the CEO, was really good at this. He'd gone through a main top gun program and he demonstrated that for everyone who worked there. We all took advice very seriously. We didn't think we knew it all, and as a result, through several rounds of investments with the Maine Angels and then on with some venture capital that came in on subsequent rounds, we had terrific people come onboard who really helped us and who we listened to. Our Chairman came from the Maine Angels. His name was Paul Farrow and he was an active Chairman. He spent a day a week working with us, sleeves rolled up.
Sal Daher: That's impressive, yep.
Bill Hetzel: Other advisors, we had another advisor from our venture fund who helped with sales and marketing and he worked a day a week with us.
Sal Daher: Which was the venture fund?
Bill Hetzel: It was The Clean Energy Venture Group out of Cambridge.
Sal Daher: Oh, okay, yeah, so a CEVG out of Cambridge?
Bill Hetzel: Yes.
Sal Daher: Okay, yeah. You're describing the quality of coachability. That's a horrible work but it's a very useful word.
Bill Hetzel: I think Ben demonstrated it in spades, and Paul especially. He was really small but not really complex. He was very experienced and boiled things down and said, "It's really important to do some things. If you have some investors who already invested in you, those will be the people who are most likely to invest in you again. They are your best candidate to reinvest and, therefore tell them what you're doing and communicate."
Sal Daher: Oh, this is such great advice. This is such great advice.
Bill Hetzel: It wasn't complex. It wasn't create a digital transformation of communication and spend all of your time on marketing, it was every month, tell them how you're doing versus your budget, what the challenges, what the accomplishments were. We had this bulleted newsletter. We put some nice pictures in it every month and we said, "Here's what we accomplished. Here is what we were challenged with and here's how we're doing against the budget."
When we came back for follow-on rounds, the Maine Angels were, and our other angel investors and other investors, were very quick to say, "I know what's going on. That makes sense that you need capital now. I'm excited to keep investing." It was huge and Paul also advised us on how to create a mission. It wasn't a big complex process with consultants.
Sal Daher: Would you spell out Paul's name for benefit of the transcriber? This will get transcribed as well into text.
Bill Hetzel: Okay. It's Paul Farrow, and that's spelled F-A-R-R-O-W.
Sal Daher: Okay, Paul Farrow, and Bill Hetzel is H-E-T-Z-E-L. You know, it amazes me how so many founders take for granted their existing investors, which is their best constituency because they're yet to acquire a lot of customers, and so they don't talk to them. Believe me, all of these things are even more problematic in the life sciences. I had one life science founder tell me, "Why should I send out these updates? Only 50% of the emails get opened."
I was like, "Oh, no, but the point is that even if they don't open the email, they see your subject line. Put your message in the subject line because people are busy. Get your point across. You are acquiring mind share, you're reminding them that you informed them. Later on, they will go back and look at this when they're trying to decide if they're going to invest in you again and so forth."
You've got to do it, and monthly reporting is really powerful because it also serves as a management tool for you. That is something which, as a matter of fact, Bettina Hein, a founder of a very interesting startup called Pixability, she actually did... I think there's a video somewhere of her in a board meeting and it became a case study at Harvard as to why it was important. She valued board meetings as an opportunity for management, which is a similar thing with an investor. I mean, reporting to the investor is an opportunity for you to have a plan. This is so great and this is how this company really succeeded in a very, very difficult field. Clean energy is not easy.
Bill Hetzel: Recycled and got better with each cycle. You know, the first newsletter wasn't nearly as good, the first budget wasn't nearly as good. We refined our mission. We got better at communicating and developing new leads. I think that there was definitely an improvement process and we got more disciplined as we commercialized. We started selling these wind turbines and these power electronics. Then, we began to close each month financially and have some control, so we began to document the bills of material in a system and have some change controls. We began to keep our software in a vault and began to... Everything scaled with every cycle of the month.
We got better at what we did and that made a huge difference when we were ready to pivot because we already had a foundation of business processes, and so our pivot wasn't the entire company. It was the product line, but it wasn't the entire company, and I think that makes a big difference. It seemed like a big pivot, I think, looking externally, but internally, the work we were doing day in and day out, the processes we were using, they didn't pivot. We were on solid footing when we moved from wind turbines to batteries.
Sal Daher: Even in that pivot, you were basically focusing more on one aspect of your product and less on another one and sort of the emphasizing the wind turbine, but focusing on the thing that you had built, which is the core of the technology. A very nice story. Please continue the narrative.
Bill Hetzel: Then, the narrative moves on to we know have the storage-plus-storage product. We're selling it well, but now we need to get more fuel into the system. We need to start to increase our manufacturing and our inventory and working capital. We need to hire more people to sell. We have all of these scaling issues and we went out for capital. We had to develop a new investment group to fund this and we were looking at all different opportunities. We were looking out in Silicon Valley for investors, we were looking at venture debt as a way to keep more of the equity in-house.
We were looking at follow-on investments from our current investors, and we were also always talking, always taking networking meetings with other battery manufacturers and with companies like Generac, who had a similar sort of space. We talked to Generac in 2018 and met some connections and gone out there and visited their factory out in Wisconsin. Lo and behold, a year later they called us up and said they'd like another meeting. We, of course, took that meeting because we were really open to talking to all potential partners.
At that meeting, they said, "We're really interested in solar-plus-storage, especially the storage aspects of it." We showed them a demonstration of our product and they were just thrilled. They'd been working on it in-house to build it themselves. They had looked at competitors and they were sophisticated enough and far enough along in their own investigation of this that they recognized our patented power electronics were special. I think one of the key learnings that came out of that was that Generac had their own vision of how they were going to sell and market a battery and how their skill in building markets could work because they built markets for the home standby generator.
They brought a lot more than investment to our game. They brought a vision of our market. They had their own idea of how to best launch our product and it wasn't the exact market and pitch that we were selling to investors. Because they were an acquirer, they could basically ignore that part of our pitch stack and focus on the technology, and that was a real eye-opener for us for them to say, "We're independently interested in your storage technology besides what you're using it for. We have our own vision." That made for a really exciting time when we started those talks with Generac about how we could potentially work together because they brought a lot to the table.
Sal Daher: Would you flesh out a little bit how your vision differed from their vision?
Bill Hetzel: Yeah. I think our vision of how to grow the market was much more traditional. We were talking to all of the local installers and trying to get them interested in it and showing them one by one how to install it and how to use it and even how to sell it. Generac has built up an incredible business in home standby generators by doing some unconventional things. They've developed a way of using infomercials, a way of marketing, a way of building up tools that they can provide to installers that allow them to do technical data and proposals and in-home consultations.
They have an entire successfully proven large-scale platform for building markets and building share that we couldn't touch as a startup. We were so traditional and maybe an advertisement in a magazine one month when we were feeling flush. We just weren't on the same level.
Sal Daher: What Generac had was a good product, but a product... There were other products in the market, but it was very, very good at building its market and finding its customers and connecting with them and explaining the value proposition to them better than anybody else in the market and that's why they grew so much. Then, you combine that with a technologically advanced product, your marketing side was a beginner's effort compared to Generac's. They're the pros, and so you combined that cutting-edge technology with a very advanced platform for explaining the value proposition to customers in an economical way, and so that's where they saw the value.
Bill Hetzel: Absolutely, and they saw the value of the clean energy market. It was very close. I mean, the idea of making energy from solar and storing it in a battery for use when the power isn't available is really close to the idea of using natural gas and running an engine and delivering electricity when the power isn't available, your core business. It was an exciting opportunity for us because it wasn't what Generac was already doing, it was just adjacent to what Generac was already doing.
It was part of their growth strategy, not just a simple repetition or something like that. It was great. It was the biggest compliment a startup can have to have a company like Generac come in and say, "We value your technology and what you're doing and we think we could help you do it bigger, faster, better."
Sal Daher: Excellent. You are still at Generac after the acquisition?
Bill Hetzel: That's right. It's been about 18 months since the acquisition and we've continued to grow and it's been an exciting time and continued to hire. Working with another company that Generac acquired at the same time called Neurio Technology up in Vancouver, making the monitoring and metering and a lot of the software infrastructure that's required on today's sophisticated products. We combined together with them. We have a large group of people working in Maine and Wisconsin and Vancouver now helping with this clean energy work. It's really an exciting time.
Sal Daher: Cool. Such a great combination. A wonderful story. Bill, let's step back a little bit. I came to investing in Pike via John Goodrich, was a friend of mine who's a Maine Angel. Then, I saw Ben at the ACA Meeting with his turbine blade and so I decided to write a check. Let's talk a little bit about what the angels did for Pika Energy, and then let's talk about your angel investing now. How did Pika get funded originally?
Bill Hetzel: Pika started funding originally with some founders' money, friends' money, small amounts. It was really bootstrapped for quite a while. In 2012-2013 period, we got some good advice from local Maine attorneys and legal help and became a Delaware C corporation and had our first seed round. It wasn't a huge round, but at that time, our burn rate wasn't very high. Very little salaries going on, really self-investing in the company. What we needed to do was be able to buy some additional tools. We combined that seed round with other funding from Maine organizations like The Maine Technology Institute, The Maine Venture Fund, a number of groups in the ecosystem. Over and over again, we went to The Maine Angels starting with that seed round and they provided us a series A and follow-on rounds, and also the expertise that we talked about earlier.
The Maine Angels were an ongoing group. We went back to them repeatedly, told them about our progress, pitched to them for new funds, and brought on new Maine Angels so that there was a large group of them by the time we exited. Through multiple rounds, more and more Maine Angels had joined investing in us and had become an important ongoing supporter for the company.
Sal Daher: Tremendous, tremendous. That kind of takes us to talking about angel investing. I understand that after the exit, you joined Maine Angel as an angel as a result of the sale to Generac of Pika Energy. Tell me a little bit about Maine Angels, their activity, what they invest in. I understand that there are two meetings that are going on.
Bill Hetzel: The Maine Angels have been around for several decades, growing their investments, growing their membership over the years. The characteristic of The Maine Angels is they really encourage each of their members to be volunteering into their strengths and helping where they have strengths. I was able to go through their standard process of attending a few meetings as a guest with confidentiality and learning what they do and seeing. Throughout the entire process of pitching, screening pitching, due diligence, follow-ons, they really have developed processes. They're not finished processes. They're always improving and I think there's a lot of pride in Maine.
While The Maine Angels consider investments all over the region, they really do focus on Maine, growing employment, growing the ecosystem, partnering with The Maine Venture Fund and The Maine Technology Institute, and The FAME Financial Group in Maine that offers a tax credit. All of those things come together in a group that is really pretty dynamic and a lot of new members come in and join diligence teams, join screening teams. It's very exciting and it feels like there are ways for me to help. They ask me for help in clean energy deals for looking at maybe how the startup finances work or things like that. Other members have expertise where I don't in biotechnology or other areas. It's really a good blend the way that The Maine Angels work.
Sal Daher: The thing that stands out for me with Maine Angels, the two things, tremendously talented people tend to go up to Maine to have a quieter life, to not necessarily retire, but semi-retire, have a saner life. You get some very, very talented people who are willing to volunteer and do the kind of work that is required of an angel group. Consequently, my impression is that companies that get investment from Maine Angels are very strongly supportive.
Maine Angels tend to go out of their way to support the company, not just in terms of money, but also in terms of advice, connections, providing all of the resources that the companies need. The impression I have is that if the company has a chance to succeed, Maine Angel makes sure that it does because it's not as if there are hundreds and hundreds of companies that they're investing in. They tend to invest in fewer companies, but they tend to be very attentive to those companies. That's the impression that I have, albeit a small sample, but I can tell you Pika Energy is a very mature, very serious company from early on.
In the case of FineTune Learning, in which I'm an investor, Maine Angels was very instrumental in bringing in a CEO who helped re-found the company and to take the very, very strong intellectual capital that had been built into the company and to put it on a business footing. I attribute that to the fact that people spent a lot of their time. Volunteer, they just kind of roll up their sleeves and spend a lot of the time in getting FineTune Learning going and so forth. I would say if you're a Maine company, you should really, really be trying to get funded by Maine Angels because there's no better funding source. Or even if you're not, if you can somehow inveigle Maine Angels into supporting you, you're going to find that that's a very supportive group.
Bill Hetzel: Yeah. I would second that from both sides. I kind of have an unusual vantage point that the startup world, I was the recipient of Maine Angels funds and especially Maine Angels expertise, and now it feels like I'm able to give back a little bit and be on the other side. I really admire some of the leaders of The Maine Angels have stepped up and really invested in improving processes and running the group.
It's great to see there's been some successions, people who have stepped away and other people have taken their place. I think that's really healthy for an organization to be part of that from both sides, to be both the recipient and now part of the team is really exciting and it's good to give back and try to see what can help out other entrepreneurs in the ecosystem. In fact, one of the things that I've tried to spread is the Pika Energy monthly newsletter, the format and approach to that.
Sal Daher: Excellent. The fact that it's monthly, I love the monthly reporting. I love that.
Bill Hetzel: There are other Maine startups right now who are using that exact same format, so where it fits it makes some sense for companies. They take it on and I think it will help them in the long run.
Sal Daher: Tremendous. Tell me a little bit how you work the fact that you have two different meetings because Maine is a huge, geographically very large state. Not highly populated, but geographically very, very large. You have one meeting in Portland, which is Southern Maine, and then there's another meeting up north.
Bill Hetzel: The Maine Angels are primarily a Portland-based group. There has been a Bangor Angel Fund, several funds that have come out of Bangor that will typically up on Maine Angel due diligence. Now, there is a side car fund called The Dirigo Fund that is doing that that's really anchored by some Bangor folks. There's always been a close correlation between the Portland group and the Bangor group, but technically it's not really split in two.
Sal Daher: I think they have some members in common.
Bill Hetzel: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, and then, when I was at Pika, I remember pitching for The Bangor Angel Fund Group. It was an incredible snowstorm and Bangor isn't that far a drive, so ordinarily I would make it a day trip, but I saw the snow coming in and I booked a hotel room in Downtown Bangor and got there early.
The snow just piled up and piled up and I was so lucky. I got to the pitch at about 5 PM and, of course, it was dark that time of year and the snow's just everywhere, but I only had to drive a couple of miles from my hotel to get there and most of the members were remote. You'll remember at this time, this was long before COVID, Zoom, and everybody was [crosstalk 00:33:50]-
Sal Daher: Oh, no, no, no. Everybody had to drive home.
Bill Hetzel: This is a new thing. This video thing was a new thing, but no one could get out in the snow, but the Pika guy made it there, made his pitch, and they gave us a six-figure check-
Sal Daher: All right.
Bill Hetzel: ... and I don't know whether it was because they really liked Pika, or whether it was because-
Sal Daher: Because you showed up.
Bill Hetzel: ... they were just so amazed that I made it through the snow. I must really need it or want it or be passionate about it or something, but it was definitely a Bangor snowstorm experience. That tradition continues on, and so the Bangor group is really strong.
Sal Daher: Good. Yeah, Woody Allen's secret of success, 80% of success is showing up. That's great. Would you care to talk about your angel investing you're doing now in Maine Angels? Particular companies that come to mind?
Bill Hetzel: I'm relatively new to The Maine Angels, having been there for a year, and so I have made four small investments in companies. The space that I feel most comfortable investing in is primarily based on the team leading the company and some aspect of technology that stands out as being uncomparable to anything else out there and not easily attainable. Those are pretty simple precepts, so I've invested in four companies through The Maine Angels.
The first investment was Orono Spectral Solutions, OSS, a company obviously in Orono, Maine, that has a unique water filtration testing product that instead of going through some crazy chemistry, this company can use an off-the-shelf FTIR spectrometer device. Basically, they've made a way to use a common laboratory device to do some incredible water screening. I think they're really on the right track.
Another company that I've invested in is called HighByte, and they are a software company that basically translates data from the industrial floor making it easy and replicatable and scalable to tag that data and make it available for analysis. Some pretty exciting and diverse technologies like that really give a sense to the Maine flavor of entrepreneurship is really very diverse. There's numerous companies in aquaculture using the Maine Coast. There are companies in renewable energy, and of course, the software and other technology companies as well.
Sal Daher: Have you run across RockStep Solutions? I recently invested in them.
Bill Hetzel: I have. I considered them as a Maine Angel. I didn't happen to invest in them, but they were one of the really successful pitches that came across The Maine Angels this year.
Sal Daher: One of the reasons that I invested is that there's a founder here in the Boston area, Mike Singer, who I regard very highly, and he is an investor. He's invested in some extremely interesting companies and very successfully, and he was very excited about RockStep. Even before that, I was kind of intrigued by RockStep and that kind of helped put it over, and also the fact that it's a Maine Angel company.
That's a good recommendation in the sense that I know the company's going to support it. It's not going to be kind of like in the out in the wilderness if things don't go just exactly according to plan at some turn. The team is tremendous. They're very serious, excellent complementarity between Chuck and Julie. I'm really very excited about it.
Bill Hetzel: The other two companies that I invested in also had really strong leadership teams. One of the companies is called Junora, and they make sputtering targets that allow thin films of different metals and elements to be deposited, say, on architectural glass or an [inaudible 00:37:38] application, so a very niche manufacturing industry, but incredibly valuable to put down thin layers, deposit thin layers of precisely deposited elements.
Then, the other company is called VETRO Fiber Solutions, and VETRO is mapping software so that you know where your cables and your fiber are laid and-
Sal Daher: Oh.
Bill Hetzel: ... and creates basically... I come from a manufacturing world where you want to know exactly where all of your inventory is, and I think the analogy is if you're in the mapping fiber world, you want to know exactly where all of your inventory is-
Sal Daher: Yes, yes.
Bill Hetzel: ... and so both of those companies really spoke to me because of their strong leadership teams.
Sal Daher: Yeah. Strong leadership and probably not a lot of competition in the space. It's not like they're the fifth company that has mapping [crosstalk 00:38:28]-
Bill Hetzel: Correct.
Sal Daher: ... technology for fiber optics.
Bill Hetzel: They're building markets, they're building products, and mapping them together. The Maine Angels can support that and can help them with all of the business processes.
Sal Daher: Yes, excellent. Bill, as we wrap up this conversation, are there any thoughts that you'd like to leave my audience with? Audience of founders, angel investors like you, and also people who work at startups, people who may be considering founding companies. You've already given us a really golden advice about reporting. Any other thoughts?
Bill Hetzel: I don't presume to have any advice, but I can say that there's a certain pride that Maine has, and The Maine Angels have that same feeling and it makes for a really close-knit community. It's really a joy to work with this group of people. The whole Maine startup ecosystem, wanting our startups to succeed, having that pride and having groups like The Maine Technology Institute and FAME and NDF and the Bangor groups and The Maine Angels coming together to make that happen, there's something really special about Maine. I'm really pleased and happy to be a part of that.
Sal Daher: Well, I think, yeah, it attracts people like you and Ben Polito, a combination of tremendous smarts, but also openness to learning, to listen, which it's so powerful in building a company. Well, Bill, I'm very grateful to you for making time. I learned quite a bit from you today, but I also loved reinforcing some of my positions here. I said, "Yeah, someone said monthly reporting. Yes, yes, another supporter of monthly reporting." That's a [inaudible 00:40:13]. I mean, some of the founders that I've talked to, they resisted very, very strongly, so I'm really grateful that you made time. If you're down here in Boston sometime when we start having face-to-face meetings, let's get together.
Bill Hetzel: That would be great. Thank you so much, Sal. It's been a pleasure.
Sal Daher: Excellent. This is Angel Invest Boston. I'm Sal Daher.
I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodward-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.