Entrepreneurs are the rock stars of contemporary business.
Thanks largely to the way information technology has wrought creative destruction on many of the highest-profile enterprises in the world, the mythical figure of the lone tech genius fighting for a vision against all odds has become the new heroic figure for the old American story of progress.
The energy sector has its share of entrepreneurs, but it is self-evident that beyond the efforts of Elon Musk (his fortune established in an e-retailer and arguably as routed in marketing as technical genius), the role of entrepreneurship in energy hasn’t yet broken through to a broader public. In the public consciousness, energy is inherently a large scale operation practiced by corporations of dubious trustworthiness (in Hollywood, that sieve of American culture, the laziest way to convey evil is to make your character an oilman). Harder to get further from the heroic entrepreneur.
But it wasn’t always this way. In the first decades of the twentieth century and in the economic boom of the post-war era energy entrepreneurship was widely celebrated. Thomas Edison changed the world, but less-remembered characters like Samuel Insull or “father of shale” George Mitchell were the business rock stars of their day.
In our new era of collaboration and interconnectedness, business leaders have realized the fundamental role of communities to helping create successful entrepreneurs. Even if you work alone in a garage building your world-changing device, you need a community to help shorten learning cycles, to provide guidance and to challenge and comfort you.
Cities have taken an active role in promoting entrepreneurship through incubators and other programs, and New York City has been even more active than most. New York Energy Week itself is to some degree a child of the NYU-Poly incubator called NYC ACRE in downtown New York through the leadership of Energy Solutions Forum, which Breaking Media has worked with to put together this list of some of the city’s leading energy entrepreneurs.
If you don’t know their names yet, watch this space. These could be the business rock stars of tomorrow.
Energy Entrepreneurs
Names are listed alphabetically
Izzet Bensusan
President & CEO
Karbone Capital
Only a few years ago every out-of-work investment banker was trying to get into green finance, shortly before they realized it was more like actual work than they were accustomed to and bailed. Bensusan’s Karbone Capital was there before the green finance boomlet and has impressively outlived many of its well-funded but poorly-conceived competitors. The firm produces detailed research read by a diverse range of market participants (some of it runs on Breaking Energy) and Bensusan, in addition to speaking at almost every conference of importance in the sector, is on the board of the NYC Association for Energy Economics.
Seth Frader-Thompson
President
EnergyHub
Its a safe bet that Frader-Thompson is the only person on these lists who worked on a project to send robots to Mars. Turning his attention back to humans here on Earth, he and his cofounders at EnergyHub are going up against some of the world’s biggest firms with energy management technology solutions for utilities, service providers and even individuals. The company’s dual focus on design and data has captured the attention of publications from Time to the New York Daily News, and also garnered multiple nominations for inclusion in the New York Energy Week top ten.
Chelle Izzi
VP Innovation & Product Management
Constellation Energy, CEM
One of the key skills of being an entrepreneur is knowing how and when to exit. Izzi was noted by NY Energy Week nominators as a powerhouse in building the ConsumerPowerline business, a demand response provider that garnered financing from some of the top energy venture capitalists in New York. CPower was sold in late 2010 to Constellation Energy, where Izzi has again been vital in one of the most difficult tasks a business person and an entrepreneur can face: integrating an acquisition.
Riggs Kubiak
Founder & CEO
Honest Buildings
Kubiak’s is another one of those names on these lists that is hard to escape if you are part of the energy scene in New York. A former director of sustainability for real estate giant Tishman Speyer, he spotted the need for an innovative web platform and mobile application to improve building efficiency practices. As an enterprise builder combining energy innovation with New York City’s traditional leadership in the real estate business, Kubiak sets the standard for local energy entrepreneurs.
Angelique Mercurio
Founding Partner
Energy Solutions Forum
The fact is that New York Energy Week wouldn’t exist without Angelique Mercurio, who made time to co-spearhead the effort to build the city’s first collaborative and open gathering of all aspects of the energy sector while also running her startup firm Energy Solutions Forum. ESF has become known across the energy business for its policy research written for an investment audience, and is the official founding sponsor of NY Energy Week. Her tireless efforts launching the NY Energy Week initiative, while simultaneously launching ESF’s energy policy enterprise data product, EnerKnol, only burnished a growing profile established during a decade of experience at global banks including Barclays Capital, Citigroup and Lazard.
Jeff Perlman
President and Founder
Bright Power
It is no surprise that in a state and a region as urbanized as New York’s energy entrepreneurs often focus on ways to make the built environment more efficient. Perlman is an experienced energy auditor, energy analyst and solar-energy-system designer whose biography says he is as happy in a boiler room as in a boardroom. Bright Power has expanded swiftly since Perlman founded it in 2004, with its technology in use in more than 5,000 buildings across 48 states.
Anthony Sblendorio
Co-founder
Ecological
Some of the most prominent political and business names in New York came together with Sblendorio in 2008 to form Ecological, which still features Gov. George Pataki (whose Pataki-Cahill Group is also partaking in New York Energy Week) as a board member. Sblendorio had experience starting up a business in the sustainability space with a New Jersey landscape architecture firm Back to Nature. Back to Nature’s projects were featured in a wide variety of national media, and Ecological, which like other firms featured in this list develops sustainability action plans for real estate portfolios, has attracted similar levels of attention for its work.
Tom Scaramellino
Founder and CEO
Efficiency 2.0
We live in a world where the right algorithm makes the difference between success and failure, so that a small line of code makes a firm an industry leader or a sector laggard (or worse, out of business altogether). Efficiency 2.0 has convinced a number of sharp-eyed industry partners in utilities to utilize its energy management technology under the leadership of Scaramellino, who trained as a lawyer at Yale and founded the firm while he was there. Under his guidance, the firm has leveraged relationships with leading academic and research institutions to build its technology, and to keep one step ahead in the algorithmic race to the top.
Mei Shibata
Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder
ThinkEco
Shibata’s name came up over and over in nominations as the NYEW leadership and Breaking Energy gathered names of New York energy sector leaders. After all, who has co-authored multiple patents while building a new company in one of the country’s most competitive markets and mentoring many of the city’s newest generation of energy entrepreneurs? A Harvard Business School graduate, Shibata left the warm embrace of corporate life at companies like Pfizer and Citibank and thrived in the world of startups, blazing a path for other firms currently at incubators or building businesses.
Frank Zammataro
President and Founder
Rentricity
It is helpful to have financial experience from the big leagues when trying to get a new company off the ground, and Zammataro’s earlier role as Managing Director at Merrill Lynch gave him an unexpected expertise in developing and marketing emerging technology have him an edge in co-founding Rentricity. The ultimate in distributed energy, Rentricity’s energy recovery systems can be installed in water mains and other pipes to harness water flow to create electricity.
Various Disclaimers: Peter Gardett is the Founding Editor of Breaking Energy and a board member of New York Energy Week. The lists compiled as part of Breaking Media’s partnership with New York Energy Week would give his old statistics professor a seizure, as they have been put together with an emphasis on the qualitative but an effort to acknowledge where multiple nominations identified initially unlikely candidates or left initially nominated leaders unsupported. Essentially, Breaking Energy and ESF spoke to a lot of people and applied our editorial judgement and decades of experience to highlight leaders we thought deserving as part of New York Energy Week. Please tell us how right or wrong we were in the comments.
