CEO Ryan Eriksen and CTO Annie Bernard founded Sol Clarity, with the help of Malav Sukhadia, to develop a way to clean solar panels in areas where water is limited. It uses static electricity to remove dust and debris, while lowering the carbon footprint and using minimal energy.
Highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Ryan Eriksen, Annie Bernard, and Malav Sukhadia
Sol Clarity: Cleaning Solar Panels with Static Electricity
Efficient Solar Panel Maintenance with Low Energy Activation
"... What we're trying to do with solar energy is to make everything carbon-free, and that purpose is defeated if you're driving around trucks to wash these panels. The EDS can also have a negative carbon print attached to it..."
The Decision Process for the Original to Current Designs
"... The vision is to have this technology anywhere in the world on any optically clear surface that needs cleaning, and cleaning is a pain point there and water is not available to clean..."
Founding Backstories
Advice to the Audience
ANGEL INVEST BOSTON IS SPONSORED BY:
Cool Way to Clean Solar Panels
Guests: Ryan Eriksen, Annie Bernard, Malav Sukhadia
SAL DAHER: I'm really proud to say that the Angel Invest Boston podcast is sponsored by Purdue University Entrepreneurship and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson. Purdue is exceptional in its support of its faculty, faculty of its top five engineering school, in helping them get their technology from the lab out to the market, out to industry, out to the clinic.
Peter Fasse is also a great support to entrepreneurs. He is a patent attorney specializing in microfluidics and has been tremendously helpful in some of the startups which I'm involved, including a startup, came out of Purdue, Savran Technologies. I'm proud to have these two sponsors for my podcast.
Welcome to Angel Invest Boston conversations with Boston's most interesting angels and founders. I'm Sal Daher, an angel investor who is very interested on how to build interesting technology companies. I focus on life science companies, but I cannot resist when I see a really, really cool technology company, such as Sol Clarity. Today, I have the two co-founders and their business development person who joined a year later. Welcome, Ryan Eriksen, CEO, and co-founder.
Sal Daher Introduces Ryan Eriksen, Annie Bernard, and Malav Sukhadia
RYAN ERIKSEN: Thank you, Sal. I'm very happy to be here.
SAL DAHER: Welcome, Annie Bernard, co-founder. What's your role, Annie?
ANNIE BERNARD: I'm a CTO, Chief Technology Officer.
SAL DAHER: Welcome, Malav Sukhadia. You're the business development person?
MALAV SUKHADIA: Thank you, Sal. Yes, I'm the head of finance and growth right now at Sol Clarity.
SAL DAHER: Okay. Let's get exactly to what problem Sol Clarity is solving, which I think is just way cool.
RYAN ERIKSEN: Thank you. It's one of the problems I think in engineering is really fascinating because you don't think about it, then once someone tells you about it, it's really obvious.
SAL DAHER: Yes, you slap your forehead. You can't do that in your microphone. You slap your forehead like this. That's a little slap to the forehead and say, "Oh geez, why didn't somebody think of this before?
Sol Clarity: Cleaning Solar Panels with Static Electricity
RYAN ERIKSEN: Yes, exactly. In short, solar panels are often located in arid regions simply because that's where there's a lot of land and a lot of sun. These arid regions tend to be plagued by dust-carrying winds and dust storms that will actually block the sunlight getting on the panels. If you're in an arid region, there's no natural rainfall to clean them normally, so you have to clean them manually or in some other mechanical way. That's really the problem that we're trying to address and then we have our technology that can remove dust and dirt with no moving parts, no water, and just using static electricity.
SAL DAHER: It's way cool, just seeing the video. Oh, do send me your demo video showing the dust just falling off the solar panel when you switch on the current.
RYAN ERIKSEN: Yes, it's a bit like magic, to be honest. I've seen it so many times. I sometimes get a little bit bored with it and then when someone else sees it and their eyes light up, I have to remind myself that it really is pretty cool.
SAL DAHER: Yes. Anyways, tell me the founding story. How did this really cool technology company come about? I'll start with you, Ryan?
RYAN ERIKSEN: Such a long story. It's hard to simmer it down to a short section. I guess the short answer is Annie and I started working together at Boston University in a lab back in roughly 2015. She was a grad student I was a postdoc. We worked on that for about five or six years and then COVID hit. BU basically closed down the labs and said we couldn't come in to do any work. We figured the only way to actually continue on was to actually found a company. We actually joined the Cleantech Open that year, that's 2020. Went through the Cleantech Open Accelerator, founded the company a little bit later.
SAL DAHER: Where is that accelerator?
RYAN ERIKSEN: They're national. There are regional cohorts of it, so we're in the Northeast Boston cohort.
SAL DAHER: Ah, okay. This is interesting. The campus of Boston University was closed because of COVID. You guys had this really, really promising technology, so you went to this accelerator, that's a little bit virtual, and you moved your technological ball forward into creating a company. Then how did you connect with Malav?
RYAN ERIKSEN: The Office of Technology Development at Boston University had a program to hook up MBAs with engineering groups that were looking to do this. We've been talking to that office for a while, and Malav was one of the team members. I guess I can maybe have him give a little background about how he found us from there.
SAL DAHER: Yes.
MALAV SUKHADIA: I always wanted to get into solar. I pursued chemical engineering to get into solar, but I was not a great engineer. No one would hire me then. I moved to the US to get an MBA. Got an MBA in finance and entrepreneurship at Boston University, and then that's where I met Annie and Ryan through the OTD, the Office of Technology Development at BU, and was absolutely instantly clicked on the mission and the technology what they were developing at the next level of solar and water.
SAL DAHER: You did your MBA at BU?
MALAV SUKHADIA: Yes. Yes, I pursued my MBA--
SAL DAHER: What had you worked on before?
MALAV SUKHADIA: I started my career as a quality engineer in India in a water purification company. Shortly thereafter, I also had an entrepreneurial venture. I built a product nobody wanted. I learnt it the hard way. Then I had to hone my business. That's when I decided to get an MBA at BU.
SAL DAHER: All right. Now explain the technology a little bit more. How it is that you magically get dust particles off of a solar panel?
ANNIE BERNARD: I can actually take that question. The EDS or the electrodynamics screen, which was a research product at Boston University. When I joined the lab, it needed a lot of vigorous testing. What the technology does is it has conductive, transparent electrodes that sit on a flexible surface. When you pump voltage, pulsed voltage through these electrodes, they are capable of charging dust or any particle that sits on top of them.
You transfer the charge to the particle. Because light forces repel, the dust lifts off and momentarily it is levitating in the air. Through these electrodes, we're also able to have a traveling electric wave, or we call it a curtain, an electric curtain. The dust really jumps from one electro to the other until it goes right to the end of the panel.
SAL DAHER: You should see the video. The dust just magically flies off. It's so cool. It's like you guys have harnessed static electricity. In the wintertime in Boston, you zap your friends and so forth with that. Now you guys have created something useful for it. There's this wave that travels across the surface of the solar panel. The dust particles just fly off.
ANNIE BERNARD: Yes. We call it a flip-of-the-switch device. All of it happens fairly under a minute.
SAL DAHER: Wow. How frequently do you anticipate that you need to clear a solar panel like this? I just want to get an idea of the energy load. How much energy are you spending versus what the solar panel is producing?
Efficient Solar Panel Maintenance with Low Energy Activation
ANNIE BERNARD: We like to say the energy actually that goes into activating this device is minimal or negligible. This plays across helping us with our cost of selling this product, because we don't really need too much energy to activate this. As for frequency of activation, you can actually activate it as many or less times as you want.
Certain solar fields need to be cleaned, say, early in the morning, just once, until they hit a point where there's so much dust that it's not cost beneficial or it's not doing the plant any good to keep reducing at that dust level. You can activate the EDS again. In a minute you will have over 95% of the dust cleared.
SAL DAHER: Wow. Wow. I suppose you could have a sensor on the panel that tells you how much light is getting through, and then if you see a diminution of that light coming through, you zap it and you get the dirt particles flying off. Great.
RYAN ERIKSEN: I can add a little bit to that. Just to give some numbers, we use about a watt per meter squared. That's a number that we use. Also, that's an overestimate. We don't know precisely. It depends a little bit on what's the actual energy input. The solar panel itself is generating 300 to 400 watts. It really is negligible like Annie is saying.
SAL DAHER: Do you have any idea of how much you save? Of course, it's labor. You're saving labor or people running their solar panels dirty. Do you know what the economics are, how much you're saving people by providing this technology?
RYAN ERIKSEN: Malav has done some work on that, actually.
MALAV SUKHADIA: Yes. It depends a lot on the regions where the plant is located. There's a need for this technology wherever the global aridity index is less than 0.5, say, sub-Saharan belt, the Southwest US.
SAL DAHER: Okay, the global aridity index. How dry the place is. If a place-- if it's above 50?
MALAV SUKHADIA: Less than 0.5.
SAL DAHER: Okay.
MALAV SUKHADIA: The sub-Saharan belt, India, Southwest US, which are dry regions. They can have monthly losses if you're not cleaning them in a month, about 10% every month. That's the energy side of the product. Our mission is also to save water for each cleaning. We have done customer interviews where they had to locally drill a well near the plant to extract--
SAL DAHER: Another slap on the forehead. Yes, arid zones. You don't have water to wash the things with. Not only don't you have rain, you don't have water to spray.
MALAV SUKHADIA: For the total, like the capacity where we need to clean the panels right now, EDS can save around 4 billion gallons of water each year. That's enough water for around 20 million people or the population of Mali annually.
SAL DAHER: That's for, if it's everyone who has a solar panel in the arid zone is using it, you're saving enough water to supply 20 million people?
"... What we're trying to do with solar energy is to make everything carbon-free, and that purpose is defeated if you're driving around trucks to wash these panels. The EDS can also have a negative carbon print attached to it..."
MALAV SUKHADIA: That's the number of solar panels that are already installed right now.
SAL DAHER: In those regions that are lower than 0.5 in the aridity scale?
MALAV SUKHADIA: About 590 gigawatts of solar capacity that is installed in those regions right now.
SAL DAHER: Yes, and those are the areas where solar panels are the most valuable. You've got all this sun and no clouds?
RYAN ERIKSEN: Yes, exactly.
ANNIE BERNARD: On the topic of saving, I do also want to add that it's not just water and labor or electricity that we're saving. Each truck that travels to clean these solar panels also has a carbon emission attached to it. What we're trying to do with solar energy is to make everything carbon-free, and that purpose is defeated if you're driving around trucks to wash these panels. The EDS can also have a negative carbon print attached to it.
SAL DAHER: Yes. I was reading something. The electric vehicle by Volvo, they did a study and they found that because of the amount of carbon that has to be expended, or it has to be put into the atmosphere to produce the batteries, you have to drive the car 68,000 miles before you break even in terms of carbon. This is a burden that you have with these vehicles, but this solution is absolutely genius, because it completely eliminates people driving to these remote solar panels to clean them. This is so cool.
RYAN ERIKSEN: You really want to brag about technology. There's even the safety and the automation feature as well. That this is something you can run less frequently, you don't have people out in the field in these hot environments. You don't have people out there that can potentially be damaging equipment. That was another concern that we've heard from customers as well.
SAL DAHER: Right. Now, are there any drawbacks to this, electrocuting any mice or something like that, or rare mice?
[laughter]
SAL DAHER: Desert rats being electrocuted by this.
RYAN ERIKSEN: No rats. On occasion, undergrad maybe, but yes.
SAL DAHER: No, those are expendable. No, no, no. Rats, no, no. But an undergrad, no problem.
[laughter]
SAL DAHER: Except at the university, because they pay cash tuition.
RYAN ERIKSEN: I guess I should add to that, no undergrads were harmed in the making of the EDS. Everything we've done, we've been deliberately perfectly safe that there's like-- No one's hurt.
SAL DAHER: They used to have elephants in circuses and then there are no more elephants. There're no more circuses, because they discovered that elephants have this whole interior life and they were very unhappy being in circuses and so forth. I think someday, research will grind to a halt because they'll discover that undergrads actually have feelings. Now you're not allowed to hurt them, so then research will stop.
RYAN ERIKSEN: Oh, yes, especially the technology research.
SAL DAHER: Oh, technology is entirely reliant on hurting the feelings of undergrads, yes, but anyway.
RYAN ERIKSEN: To answer your question, so the device does have a 98% transparency. You are putting on a film on top of the solar panel, and so the film right now is 98% transparent. Most of the light, it's going through, but that's one reason why Malav is saying why, earlier, that these make sense in markets where you have soiling. If you don't have soiling, then there's no need to take that loss.
SAL DAHER: Right. Oh, very interesting. You've really done the economic calculation for all these different situations. Where are you in terms of implementing? Do you have any kind of pilot programs that you're working, that you have this installed somewhere?
RYAN ERIKSEN: We have deployed two field trial units, we call them. These are set up to have about six of our prototypes on there, one to the Arizona State University, and one down to Chile. Those are smaller scale. Those were only about, roughly, a foot by foot, 27 by 32 centimeters. We currently have a pilot site lined up to do 14 full-size panels in California, and that's going to be-- Our goal to be is installing that about one year from now.
The Decision Process for the Original to Current Designs
SAL DAHER: All right, so it's still pretty early in terms of actual installations in the field and you're liable to discover a lot of things between now and then. What is it that you're working on right now that's the big thing? You're looking to have more and more of these trial situations?
RYAN ERIKSEN: Yes, we're always looking for more sites to collect data, and more opportunities to test different dust, different levels of soiling. That's something that we're always looking to do, to deploy more of those field trial units. We're also looking to be scaling up. It's interesting. When we first started doing this, and Annie, you can probably talk more about this, but we were making this small five-inch by five-inch samples by hand. By hand, I mean, really, Annie was making them.
There's only a limit to how many Annie can make in a day. The big challenge for us has been going from a lab to the scaling up and getting ready to actually make a full-size panel and be able to make not just, a few or a handful, but dozens or even hundreds or thousands. Now, Annie, do you want to talk a little more about some of the early stages of how we're actually making them?
ANNIE BERNARD: Sure, absolutely. We had a couple of designs in mind for the perfect geometry to come about. We used laser etching technologies, screen printing to figure out which design works best. When I say design, I mean, the electrodes themselves, which ink, what width, what material are we using this on?
Once we finalized on what works best, what is scalable in terms of material and cost, we went on to a material supplier who now does a roll-to-roll printing of this EDS device for us. In terms of scaling, we went from a five-inch cross five-inch sample to what is now a foot by a foot, or 12-inch cross 12 inch. Scaling up even more for the California test site would be how to apply this on a full-scale solar panel, which I think is around 62 inches cross 48 inches.
SAL DAHER: 62 by 48. Five feet by four feet.
RYAN ERIKSEN: Yes, some of these even get a lot bigger than that. There are some solar panels in utility fields that are one by two meters. There's no standard size for solar panels, unfortunately.
SAL DAHER: Very interesting. What is the intellectual property behind this? If you developer market for this, how is it that it is not just going to be copied by a whole bunch of copycats just imitating what you're doing?
RYAN ERIKSEN: There's some irony there. You're asking you how we're going to protect it, and then you want us to talk about this in the podcast you're going to share on the internet.
SAL DAHER: It's a great secret, okay?
RYAN ERIKSEN: Yes. Well, I can talk a little bit about it. I'm just pulling your leg a little bit. There, obviously, is a patent behind it. There's Boston University, and we're in the process of doing that license from Boston University. There are other trade secrets involved as well. There are some components, some aspects of the technology that, again, we won't publicly talk about because this is a high demand. We do want to be a little bit careful about that.
SAL DAHER: Right. Really fascinating. What do you envision this company becoming? I mean, what's the business model that you have in mind? Not that you have a reason to know what it's going to be. I'm sure you've done some modeling and speculated what it could be.
RYAN ERIKSEN: Malav, do you want to take that one?
"... The vision is to have this technology anywhere in the world on any optically clear surface that needs cleaning, and cleaning is a pain point there and water is not available to clean..."
MALAV SUKHADIA: Yes, absolutely. We don't talk about it a lot, but the technology can also be translated to any optically clear surface that needs cleaning. That includes, for example, car windshields, architectural glass in buildings. The vision is to have this technology anywhere in the world on any optically clear surface that needs cleaning, and cleaning is a pain point there and water is not available to clean. To have this technology implemented and facilitate a cleaning there.
ANNIE BERNARD: I'd like to add to that. Malav touched on the tough point, which is the optically clear point. Basically, even if you have medical equipment that needs cleaning, and especially right after COVID, we've all become sensitive about manual touching of surfaces. This technology can be applied on any surface, opaque, transparent, you name it, and we can have it. What's really cool about this is there's already papers being published by NASA since they've tried implementing this on their mars rovers and on spacesuits. No one's going to go up there and clean anything with anything.
SAL DAHER: Right. Similar technology, your technology is being looked at by NASA?
ANNIE BERNARD: The person who worked under the NASA ground is also our PA or the person who headed the lab back in Boston University. He actually is named as the researcher, top researcher of the patent. It has been experimented with. There's infinite number of applications for this technology. The real pain point is trying to apply it to solar panels and save all that water that can be repurposed.
SAL DAHER: Yes, I can see that.
RYAN ERIKSEN: I can say, even as CEO, Malav and Annie, you're running off in every direction about all the applications for it. I do want to refocus that we are looking at solar market. That's something that not only is--
SAL DAHER: It looks like the low hanging fruit for you.
RYAN ERIKSEN: Yes, low hanging fruit. Malav mentioned earlier also about the water demand. That's actually a mission-driven side of it for us as well. That's an area where there is a lot of need.
SAL DAHER: We're talking about the base camp that you're going to and then you have the summit. The summit is all these other things. Very interesting. Is there anything else that you want to add on the side of the company, of the business and so forth? In the second half, I just like to get into a little bit how two of you in particular, Annie and Ryan, came to this. We have a little bit of the story of Malav. Maybe we can get a little more into it.
I want to get your backstories, how you came to the point that you did, because it will probably inspire a few founders. Is there anything else that you want to say at this point about the company, where you are, where you want to be? If you want some help with things, who might be helpful to you at this point? Help from above. You just heard some thunder.
Founding Backstories
ANNIE BERNARD: That's me.
RYAN ERIKSEN: I was letting that thunder pass before saying anything.
SAL DAHER: Great.
RYAN ERIKSEN: One thing I might add a little bit is different ways to bringing the technology to market. When we first started doing this, and when I say first started doing it, I mean, when Annie and I were at Boston University. We really thought that the way to do this would be to go to a solar panel manufacturer and try to convince them of the technology and try to get them to adopt it. One thing we actually did was also talk a little bit about is Boston University did a lot of training for Annie and I on how to do customer interviews and how to reach out and how to go through that process.
That was actually exceedingly valuable for us. They set us up really well for the Cleantech Open and for every accelerator we did after that and really just starting the company. One thing we actually found in our customer interviews is that the people who are feeling the pain of soiling right now are really people who already have solar panels in the field. It's not the ones that are installing new solar panels. The people who have a solar site that's downwind of a rock crushing plant or downwind of a cement factory or a mining operation.
Those are hypothetical examples of the people we've talked to. They have a major pain for soiling, and they want a solution now, which would be like a retrofit. We did a pivot relatively early in that way to look more at the retrofits approach and find the technology with the goal, obviously, at some point in the future being working with a PV manufacturer and trying to incorporate into the initial manufacturing process.
SAL DAHER: This is classic Clayton Christensen. What is it? Innovator's Dilemma. The incumbents are not interested in the new technology because it doesn't really make them more money. They're making plenty of money as it is, and they don't want the distraction. You're going after non-consumption, people who don't have any options right now. There's a demand, but it's not being met by anyone. That's what you'd be addressing with the retrofit market. Very interesting.
I'm going to ask listeners if they could just go to Apple podcast and leave a rating, five star rating. I'm always ambitious and also a written review. It doesn't have to be much, but a few sentences will get the attention of the Apple podcast algorithm, and we'll get this episode shown to a lot of people, and so this really, really cool technology will be talked about among many, many people.
As I said, this podcast is sponsored by Purdue University, which is very, very supportive of entrepreneurs. I'm really glad to hear that BU is also falling in that track, because some of our biggest universities are not like that. Even the ones here in Boston sometimes fall short. Anyway, now let's get a little biographical. Annie, tell us your story. Where do you come from? How did you get involved with this?
ANNIE BERNARD: Absolutely. I'm originally from India. It goes without saying that water for such a huge population is always going to be scarce. I grew up with water scarcity. Right about during my high school period is when I started showing interest in solar. It started through solar mirrors, being able to help women in the tribal areas cook without having to inhale the smoke.
SAL DAHER: Oh, yes.
ANNIE BERNARD: That translated to solar lanterns. My high school project was also called Sunset Alarm, that would help the solar panels charge the batteries and so that in the evenings, you don't have to spend electricity to have electricity. That interest went on into undergrad and that's when I discovered Professor Mazumder's work on cleaning solar panels without water. It just tied both my passions together.
SAL DAHER: Would you say the investigator's name again?
ANNIE BERNARD: Professor Malay Mazumder
SAL DAHER: Malay? How is that spelled?
ANNIE BERNARD: It's M-A-L-A-Y M-A-Z-U-M-D-E-R.
SAL DAHER: Okay.
ANNIE BERNARD: I applied to the lab for my master's degree, fortunately I got picked.
SAL DAHER: The professor is where?
ANNIE BERNARD: At Boston University.
SAL DAHER: Okay, so this is a PI that you were mentioning.
ANNIE BERNARD: Yes, that's true.
SAL DAHER: Primary Investigator. PI is a primary investigator. He's the king of the lab.
ANNIE BERNARD: Yes. Very inspiring person. I got to work as a master student. Once you see the technology work, you are never not going to be enthralled by it. I went on to do my PhD in the same technology. Year one which is 2015 is when I met Ryan Eriksen as a postdoc. We had a lot of headbutts going on in the beginning. It was an interesting-- I guess every solid relationship starts that way.
You have to have your differences sorted out before you can make things work, and it just clicked. Ryan and I had similar interests of bringing an impactful technology to market. I just cannot give up on my dream of trying to save so much water for not just people back in India, but people all over the world. That's how this company came about for me.
SAL DAHER: Excellent. That's a great story. Ryan what's your story? How did this come about? This is the kind of like Bridge of San Luis Rey. All these different people that went through this bridge it collapsed, and then we have wonderful stories behind them. How did you come to this?
RYAN ERIKSEN: I always wanted to work on technologies or something that was going to have a positive effect on society. I tell stories about how-- I'm realizing now that more and more my childhood was probably fairly lucky. We had 10 acres of forest behind our house that we would-- that trailed to and we'd go through. I remember going on walks with my dogs after school through the woods when I got home, and that was like my tradition.
SAL DAHER: This is where?
RYAN ERIKSEN: This is actually in Massachusetts. It's about an hour North of Boston.
SAL DAHER: An hour north. What town is that?
RYAN ERIKSEN: It's in Tyngsborough, Mass.
SAL DAHER: Tyngsborough. Oh my gosh. My first mortgage processor was up there. Tyngsborough, I remember driving up there to deposit a check in Tyngsborough.
RYAN ERIKSEN: Yes, small town. If you've ever driven up route three into New Hampshire, you've driven through Tyngsborough and you never even noticed. The last town before New Hampshire. I had a joke that I never knew Massachusetts had sales tax growing up because we always went shopping in New Hampshire.
SAL DAHER: New Hampshire. Why do my parents leave perfectly good supermarkets in Massachusetts and go for New Hampshire to shop? This strange people. You just wonder why?
RYAN ERIKSEN: That's where all the stores were because that's where it was closest.
SAL DAHER: Listeners not in Massachusetts, Massachusetts has sales tax, New Hampshire does not. Everybody who lives close to the New Hampshire border, New Hampshire border goes up to New Hampshire to shop and they have liquor stores. They don't have any taxes either, so they bring back booze and food.
RYAN ERIKSEN: Growing up, I'd go walk the woods and I always wanted to try to-- I had this connection with nature going forward and the environment. I always wanted to have some effect to try to help preserve them and protect them as much as possible. For a while, I was actually technology agnostic. I did my PhD in high temperature electrochemistry, so I did some work on fuel cells, some on chemical sensors, some on Thermoelectrics that's taking waste heat and turning that into electricity.
Then I ultimately landed at the lab. I got the postdoc where-- under professor Mazumder. It's where I met Annie. Solar always had a special place. It's a no brainer, I guess. You use the sun to generate electricity. There's plenty of potential there. The fact there was a postdoc and a solar lab was really exciting to me and I joined up, met Annie and I guess the rest is history.
SAL DAHER: Excellent. It's funny. Annie, you mentioned that you butted heads as postdocs with Ryan. There's a little precedent for this. There's a company called pilot.com which is a startup in California. It's a venture funded unicorn. One of the founders is Jeff Arnold. He's now the COO of the company. The CEO is Waseem Daher, no relation to me. The co-founder and CTO is Jessica McKellar.
The three of them have founded now three companies together. It was only after I think the second company they founded that Jessica went through this program, I want to say at Dropbox, that taught her to appreciate different work styles and so forth, that she came to appreciate Jeff Arnold's skills. Jeff is different. Jessica is a very vocal person, understands things. Jeff's kind of a dry person and he's not the most accessible, but he's extremely, extremely brilliant.
He's the guy who came up with the technology of the original company that they founded and so forth. It wasn't until, I guess, their second startup together that she came to appreciate him. It's an interesting observation to me, but this is public knowledge. He actually made this observation in an interview in a podcast.
I guess it's to the credit of Dropbox that they had this training that allowed a co-founder to appreciate her co-founder more. I think that's a very hopeful thing for humanity that we can understand each other better. If two postdocs can come to understand each other better then I think there's hope for humanity.
RYAN ERIKSEN: Hopefully, it takes us less than two startups to get there.
[laughter]
SAL DAHER: Exactly. Great. At this point, I'm glad to open the forum to you if you guys want to communicate whatever is on your mind. Our listeners are principally founders and angel investors, also people who work at startups or people who're interested in startups. Are there any thoughts that you want to get across?
Advice to the Audience
RYAN ERIKSEN: Yes, I think, again, as CEO, I have to give a pitch for Sol Clarity. Now we are actively hiring right now, and I'm sure we'll be hiring in the near future. At the moment, we're focusing on growing especially the engineering side. Last year has been focused on de-risking the business and the next year has to be focused on de-risking the technology and the engineering. That's definitely an active area for us. I'd encourage people to come to check us out in that way and share if they know anyone who's interested.
MALOV SOKOVIA: Going into that, if this mission resonates anyhow to you, please feel free to reach out to us. If you want to see the magic happen in real-time, you can visit us at Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts. We have our space there. You're most welcome to visit us.
SAL DAHER: Any thoughts, Annie?
Annie Bernard: I just wanted to touch on the mission and Malav beautifully put that in the words, so I'm pretty good right here.
SAL DAHER: Ah, okay. Very good. I will then express my gratitude to the listeners for downloading and listening to this really fascinating podcast. You can rest assured that because of this trio, for Boston University, solar panels are going to be cleaner in the future. They're not going to have as much dust and it's going to be very economically and very cleverly. Ryan Eriksen, Annie Bernard, and Malav Sukhadia, I'm very glad that you made time to be on the Angel Vest Boston podcast.
RYAN ERIKSEN: Thank you for having us. It's been an honor and pleasure . Thank you very much for the opportunity.
SAL DAHER: Thanks for listening. I'm Sal Daher.
[music]
SAL DAHER: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme is composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.