Episode 10: Active Listening and Grit with John Belizaire (Part 1)

Hey #cleantechers, ever hear about someone and feel at least a little bit awed by what they have accomplished in their lives? Well, we’ve got one of those folks featured in this episode of Scaling Clean.

John Belizaire is CEO of Soluna Computing, which builds modular green data centers running on renewable energy. Though he just turned 50, John has already sold two companies. In his current role, he testified before the U.S. Congress and rang the NASDAQ bell. His speaking and writing attract the interests of new and legacy media, including Cheddar News, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Plus, John is also a thoroughly wonderful human being, with an informative perspective on building and running the companies looking to grow our industry.

Our conversation for Scaling Clean was incredibly rich, so much so that our conversation ran double the normal time. When we went to cut the conversation down to our normal 30 minutes, we realized Scaling Clean listeners would benefit more if we just split the conversation into two parts. Here is the first half, in which John describes how active listening and grit are key to successful entrepreneurship.

Listen to the newest episode on Apple, Spotify, Radio Public, Amazon Music, iHeart, Google Podcasts, and Stitcher.

Overview

• Introduction
• Background and Career Summary
• First Time as a Boss: Mistakes and Lessons
• Learning from Prior Entrepreneurs
• From Insurance to Renewables

Introduction

John Belizaire:
I think that if there's one thing that I would like the listeners to this podcast who are CEOs of cleantech companies to understand is that you have to be laser-focused. Be laser-focused. You should do one thing fundamentally really well and do it better than anybody else. You don't have to do four things to be successful, you just have to do one thing really, really well.

Mike Casey:
This is Scaling Clean, the podcast for clean economy CEOs, investors, and the people who advise them. I'm your host, Mike Casey. My day job is running Tigercomm - a firm that councils companies that are helping move the US economy onto a more sustainable footing. I get to meet the people who are succeeding at building funding or advising the most successful companies in your sectors. At each show we try to bring you usable insights from these leaders so you can apply them to the business of running your business. For the first time in our show's short history, we're gonna break an interview into two parts. That's because our conversation with Soluna Computing CEO, John Belizaire was so rich that we'll devote the first part to John's thoughts on the differences he's seen working in the cleantech sector, as well as how his leadership style has changed over the years. We'll have the second half of our conversation with John in the next episode.

Hey, cleantechers.You ever hear about someone and feel at least a little bit odd by what he or she has accomplished at this point in their lives? Yeah. I've got one of those folks with me on this episode of Scaling Clean. His name is John Belizaire and he's the CEO of Soluna Computing, which builds modular green data centers that run on renewable energy. And though he just turned 50, John's already sold two companies. In his current role he's testified before Congress, he's rang the Nasdaq Bell, and his speaking and writing have attracted the interests of both new and legacy media, including Cheddar News and the Wall Street Journal. Oh, and I should probably add that he's a thoroughly wonderful human being. John, welcome to the show.

John Belizaire:
Thanks for having me. Very happy to be here.

Background and Career Summary

Mike Casey:
Let's start with your background. How would you summarize your career as a corporate leader?

John Belizaire:
So, I've been an entrepreneur now for approaching 25 years, and prior to that, I started at Intel Corporation, where I was a software architect in their very large software group. If I were to describe that several decades of professional experience, it would essentially be describing me as a professional who has been fortunate to be right in the middle of big confluences, if you will, waves of innovation going after legacy industries. I started my career when e-commerce was just taking off, the internet as people sort of barely call it now. And every single industry was touched by that innovation wave in some way. Later I went on to work on the insurance space that somehow was passed over by all of the digitization of content and decision-making and data, and they were ready to receive that. And I built a company that essentially took the big technology waves that took place in other industries and brought it to that very large industry fraught with legacy technology. And then here I am in the cleantech space and I'm bringing a big wave around computing and flexibility and crypto to the renewable energy business where they really need a problem for wasted energy. So I think the last few decades have really been an intersection, a Venn diagram where it's big innovation waves and what new industry can I learn a lot about.

Mike Casey:
If you look back, what in your upbringing set you up for this path?

John Belizaire:
You know, I think they’re probably two things. Just growing up in New York City was a rough and tumble time where I grew up. So that allowed me to build up a lot of grit in my foundation. Being an entrepreneur requires a tremendous amount of persistence and grit. And I think living in New York in the eighties where there are movies like ‘Get Out of New York’ that were popular at the time taught me a lot about sort of how to survive in a tough environment. I think I have an incredible mother who taught me a lot about the importance of bettering myself continuously, the importance of education and really pushing me beyond where she came from. She got on a boat and went to the Bahamas to try to find me a better life, and then eventually made her way here and brought all of my siblings and we've all gone on to universities and done great things professionally.

I think the third thing is I've always had a real passion for entrepreneurship in some way. I don't know when the bug hit me, but  I'm pretty sure it started in high school. That was my first company in a way. I was taking a computer class there and this how, well you've already said how old I am, but at the time they still had many computers in the room and you had to write your program on the computer and then save it on a large floppy disc, and they gave you the first one. And when that filled up, you had to figure out where to get another one. You can either buy it from them or go source it yourself. And somehow I got this brilliant idea to save up some money with the help of my older brother and go out and find the floppy disc distributors and found one that actually made colored discs. You can get red, yellow, green, and blue. And I bought a whole pack of them and then I brought them into the classroom. And instead of selling M&M’s or grocery scout cookies, I was selling floppy disks to different grades taking the computing class. And that just never stopped after that. I was just always looking for opportunities to build a company.

First Time as a Boss: Mistakes and Lessons

Mike Casey:
Tell me about the first time you were somebody's boss. What were the mistakes that you made and what were the big lessons that you carried forward into the years it followed?

John Belizaire:
The very first time I was somebody's boss was in my first company. I was still fairly young when I started Theory Center, which was an e-commerce solutions company. And we started building our management team. Beyond our founding group, we weren't bosses of each other, we were colleagues, if you will, but we started hiring professional managers because all the VCs told us ‘go hire professional management’. And so 90% of the people we hired were older and more experienced than us. And I had a COO who we actually stole from one of our partner companies. And it's funny, the partner company eventually bought the company. This person had built a hundred-plus million dollar businesses in the US, and had built very large teams. And he always told me that he learned something from me cause I was constantly just pushing and teaching him about sort of what our business is and what we did.

But I really didn't understand what management was about. I've definitely got a real view and inkling into it. During my experience at Intel, they spent a lot of time training people how to be managers. And so I had some of that DNA in me, but one of the things I made a lot of mistakes around the fact that I didn't feel it was important, just because this person was so senior to spend time with them on a one-on-one basis and learn from them and have them learn from me. That was one mistake. The other was missing how important it is to invest time in going out and what I call doing random walks through the floor and learning from people and learning what was going on in the business and where their challenges were so that I can make best decisions in my role as CEO.

And so today I spend an inordinate amount of time making sure that people who work for me, we spend time together so I can learn from them and vice versa. We can solve problems together. I encourage them to pull me in when they really need some help solving a major issue because my role is really to remove obstacles for them. And the one key thing I've learned as a leader and manager is that managers and leaders really aren't about ticking and tying and making sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing. It's really to coach people around what they're doing and help them do it better every day. And so I spent a lot of time doing that. I spent a lot of time just randomly calling members of the team and saying ‘Hey, it's me, John, how are you doing? How can I help you? What can we do better as a company?’ So those are all things that I've learned through painful experiences leading people in different situations.

Mike Casey:
Let me follow that up with just a practical advice-seeking question here. So in a remote mostly or only team, post-pandemic, how are you walking around the halls, so to speak?

John Belizaire:
Good question. So we have lots of ways to communicate with the team. We have a Slack system, and that's how most of the interactions of the distributed team happen. We have standup meetings that happen just about every day. So people show up to a Zoom call for 30 minutes and they're just giving a sort of check-in on themselves and what the highlights and lowlights from the past day have been and anything the rest of the team needs to know. That's proven to be very helpful. And I will often slack people or text them or call them and say ‘How are you doing?’ Just check it in. How are things going? How are you feeling today? What are some of the big challenges you're dealing with right now? So I try to carve out time at least once a week to call someone. And usually, I'm doing it during my daily walks. I take daily wellness walks, I take a break from the screen, and then I randomly dial someone either directly in the company or beyond just to provide some support to folks. So that's how we do it.

Mike Casey:
Do your employees have regularly scheduled one-on-one times with you that occur on a set basis?

John Belizaire:
Yeah, my senior staff people who report directly to me. Do you have regularly scheduled one-on-ones with me and I make it clear to them that that meeting is really their meeting. And so if I'm lax about it or missing it, they've really got to keep the pressure on me to maintain it. Thankfully, I have a really great assistant now who helps me to make sure I maintain those. They're so important as I said, to ensuring that the team is working really well together and making the progress that you want them to make. Those one-on-ones are a great way to engage together and learn from each other.

Mike Casey:
You’ve touched on the answer to this question a bit, but perhaps this is a mixture of summary and expansion. How would you say you've changed your leadership style over the years? And are there three things that you know about leadership that you would go back in time and tell your younger self?

John Belizaire:
Well, I would say that if I went back in time to tell myself what the important things are about leadership, the first thing I would say is leadership is about people. It's not about your title. So if you're given a title and it says you're the boss doesn't automatically make you the boss or make you attractive to people to follow, you have to, as you're sort of walking and heading in that direction, you have to learn how to look back and make sure people are actually following you. So that means you've got to become really good at setting direction, communicating consistently and persistently to teams to help them understand where you're going. And then you have to become a resource for them to help them really solve the problems. Most high-performing teams and high-performing people actually find joy in their job when they're solving problems

If people come to work and there's nothing gnarly to work on or challenging to crack the code on it actually isn't a very joyful experience and it's very hard for people to achieve flow. And so as a leader, the goal is to make sure that the team is constantly challenged and is growing. And I think the last thing is that leadership is not about me at all, you as a leader, it's really about the other people. So you should always be looking outside of yourself and making sure that you’re coaching folks and helping them to grow and improve what they do every day. So looking back leadership is about people. Leadership is about setting direction. It's not about your title, it's about getting people to follow you . Leadership is about looking outside of yourself and becoming more of a coach. And leadership is about selfless servant leadership for the team, helping them to grow and expand. The more successful they are - your team - the more successful you are as a leader.

Learning from Prior Entrepreneurs

Mike Casey:
Tell me about your mentors, the most important ones, and what did you learn from them either bulk or individualized?

John Belizaire:
I've had several over the course of my career. And what I have found is in my early days, so my mentors were professors and teachers in high school. And what they helped me to do was to grow up, to find my sort of target to start the journey. So they were always pushing me to go to the best schools, go to afterschool programs to expand, like ‘Our curriculum here in the New York City public school system is just not enough for you, John. You need more to fill that brain of yours. So they would constantly push me to go take extracurricular courses, enter science programs, et cetera. And that was very gratifying for me because it really did help me find outlets for the busy mind that I had - constantly wanting to learn. As I made my way through university and started out as a young professional my mentors were really about helping me understand the business world.

What is politics, how do you learn, how do you work through the system here,  what are gonna be the important things to help you grow within this environment? And who were the key people that you should get to know within that organization? Intel was a very large enterprise, fairly utilitarian and flat for the most part, but it was really important to have cross-functional integration and mentorship was key to that. And it was a fairly homogenous, culturally homogenous organization. So being a young African-American professional in an organization like that for the first time was jarring. It was far away from home. It was the first time I actually left New York to go work someplace. And so there were a lot of personal challenges and development to work through that. 

During my entrepreneurial period, it was really about learning from prior entrepreneurs. Most of my mentors were people with scars and experiences in both successful and unsuccessful companies. And I would spend a lot of my time just talking to them. In my first company, I didn't know how to raise capital. It was a lot I didn't know, literally knew nothing, which is no surprise. It was my first. And you know what I did? There was a Cornell Directory. I went to Cornell undergraduate and I looked up the directory and I found every single CEO in the Boston area, that's where a company was based. And I just cold-called them and I said ‘Can I please have 15 minutes of your time, I'm a  Cornell alumnus, and I'd like to pick your brain. I'm starting to run this company and there's so much that I don't know, and I think I can learn a lot from you’. And many of them called me back actually. And I learned a tremendous amount from those conversations. I would go to their offices and first of all, I would be like, wow, this is what a company actually ultimately looks like. This is exciting. And then they would tell me about their challenges and I would learn from them. And today a lot of the mentors that I work with are either teaching me about the industry that we're in, so there's a lot I don't know about renewables. And so I really work with folks who are experienced professionals in this space. You are among the, Mike. And I also work with one very successful public company CEO. And I've really gone to him to help me with my personal mission and to grow as a leader and to really understand what it means to run a large successful public company. So that's the tour of my mentors.

From Insurance to Renewables: Discovering a New Industry

Mike Casey:
I like it. The mentor museum.

John Belizaire:
Yeah.

Mike Casey:
What drew you to renewables? And once you got there, how have you found that running a clean economy company is different than leading companies in more mature sectors, or at least sectors that aren't disrupting an incumbent sector within a mature industry?

John Belizaire:
So the first question, I got into renewables when Michael Toporek, our parent company CEO invited me to become the CEO of the early form of Soluna. And the early form of Soluna was a development company. We were focused on building vertically integrated projects in northern Africa. We had a really large wind farm. The project was stranded, it had a 70% capacity factor. So for our listeners that know what that means, you know what I'm talking about, that's a lot of energy firepower, but it was stranded. There was no way for the electrons to go and we had to figure out how to monetize the energy until the grid had made it there. And computing was the solution we came up with. So I was asked to become the CEO because Michael, trust me, had worked with me before he saw me learn industries I didn't know anything about.

And I believe he realized that the company that they now were focused on was a technology company more than an energy development company. Once I got here, though, I didn't know much about the industry, I was excited to learn something new. I had just finished building a successful company in the insurance space, and I really didn't want to go back to doing InsureTech things, even though the industry has just exploded since I left. And I wanted to do something new that must be something about my DNA I'm always super interested in building new things. And what I learned very quickly was how unbalanced renewable energy and its penetration on a global basis is, and how hard it is to do here versus elsewhere. And the last thing I learned, which is kind of similar to my past experience, it's a huge industry, massive, I mean, it has a global reach, an amazing amount of capital goes into it, and it actually drives a lot of the economy of the planet, more than we realize.
But it's a very small community. If you know one person, you probably know 50 people. It's such an integrated network of people who are pushing to build things in a tried and true way. So your question about what it’s like running a cleantech business in an industry that looks like what I just described, it's actually very challenging because you're playing the innovation game. I've been playing the innovation game, as I said, for 25 years. And in that game, what you're trying to do is  reshape people's perception of the world. Things like this now have changed the way the energy space is going to look in the future, it is gonna be different than it does look today. And the technology elements to that are going to be important.

The keys to success have completely shifted on you. And if you wanna stay in the game, you've gotta shift the way you are looking at it. This concept of reshaping people's views and helping them understand that the game has changed is good. A buddy of mine, Andy Raskin calls it strategic narrative where you sort of help people understand how things have changed and how you are doing it is the right way to do it going forward. The interesting thing is that in industries like cleantech, there's just so much jadedness, I'd say, around new exciting technologies that could reshape the industry. And people tend to not attach to those very quickly because there have been so many failures and the industry has evolved quite well without the benefit of some of these things.

And I've experienced that before in the insurance space. They have the luxury of pretty much existing for over a hundred years now and never really going out of business as an industry because what they do is so important to the global economy. And so if a new wave of technology comes, it's hard to convince them that it could kill their industry, even though it very well can. And you as an entrepreneur in an environment like that, and like the renewable space, you really have to focus. So what you're doing has to be clear. You have to advance, make small inroads, and then build on those inroads and really have to do that 1% a day. And over time it becomes a snowball essentially. And you never ever stop. You have to keep pounding in that there's this problem. And if you don't solve it the industry will have an issue.

Now, everything I've just described is actually no different than in other industries. It's just that other industries tend to be more wired for accepting innovation because the competitive environment in that space requires it. Like the finserv industry is constantly looking for the next great technology that will give them an edge, right? Because their whole business is driven around doing the moonshot thing that drives their financials and gives them alpha and so forth. And so when we were selling into the enterprise, that was really what our pitch was. You can gain an edge over your competitors because this technology's going to give you that edge. And so that key difference is the DNA of the industry. You have to sort of understand what that DNA looks like and then change your approach to how you drive innovation in that industry as an entrepreneur.

Mike Casey:
So I'm hearing two interesting things. One of them - a primary difference of running a clean economy company is the greater proportion of CEO time and energy investment into delivering strategic narrative on a constant basis. Is that correct?

John Belizaire:
Absolutely. Yeah.

Mike Casey:
And then the second one, which is really interesting, is despite this industry or really these many sectors that make up this new industry you are encountering an adherence to conventional wisdom. And one would think, well, you're relatively new and you are disrupting, you're not a new industry, you're a new sector within industries dominated by very mature sectors that can see you coming, can manage the disruptive threat that you are. You are still encountering conventional wisdom, is that correct?

John Belizaire:
Absolutely. I was in a conference in Austin and I was on this panel and we were talking about how to deal with the challenges of renewable energy, congestion on the grid and curtailment, all of these things. And we had a great moderator and he sort of set up the question for everybody. I noticed two things immediately. Number one, this was not the first time that this topic was on deck for the conference. And it was sort of an eerie reminder of conferences I've been to in the insurance space where the industry talks about their back pain persistently. And the second thing I noticed is that everyone went to the default solution that everybody's sort of well aware of, right?

That batteries and transmission are the only solutions to their problem. And when I introduced what we were doing at Soluna, it was almost like I was introducing the cure for cancer, and it was completely hard for people to fathom that. But once they got it, it was sort of ‘how could we not have thought about this?’ And I've got lots of folks becoming my fans after the deck. But I think it's just because I don't come from the industry, so I'm not biased or shackled by the perception about what can and can't be done. And that's why innovators are unique, that's a unique role we play, right? Especially folks who don't come from the industry. And the role we play is we take a fresh look at things.

Mike Casey:
And there, I suppose, one more subtlety I wanna draw out, which is, I'm hearing you say that the source of conventional thinking by definition cannot be the long-standing tradition of that conventional thinking, because most people in the industry haven't been in it for very long, and the industry really isn't much older than 20 years even generously defined. So what I'm hearing you say is from what you can observe, the conventional wisdom that people gravitate towards groupthink is more derived from painful failures of companies that they have witnessed within their sector more than, well, we've always done it that way, because they’re always not that very long in cleantech. Is that accurate?

John Belizaire:
Yeah, you're right. People gravitate to the safe choice, the choice that's not gonna get them fired. And there's always something new and shiny that comes up that says it's gonna reshape and change the world, and sometimes it doesn't. And that leaves a bad taste in the mouths of the existing companies and incumbents and so forth. And that could have knock-on effects for future innovation that could be successful, it just keeps making it harder and harder as the industry matures. As I said, people become more jaded and so they will rely on conventional wisdom, which their peers can accept and support. And that's the modus operandi for these industries. And 20 years is long enough to have built up that, some of that callus, calluses if you will, and knee-jerk reaction to just dismiss new, innovative opportunities. So as an innovator, you have to recognize that the Lindy effect, which is this concept of - the longer something is around - the longer it will be around, and it actually multiplies every year that it's around. And so if you have a piece of technology that's been used for a certain number of years and the longer it's being used, the harder it's gonna be to replace that technology cause people just assume that that's just the way you do things and innovation is really hard to overcome that.

Mike Casey:
Our thanks to Soluna Computing CEO, John Belizaire. We'll have the second part of our great conversation with John in the next episode. This is Scaling Clean a production of Tigercomm. And I'm Mike Casey. Thanks for joining us. You can subscribe to our show for free anywhere you get your podcast. And while you're there, please leave us a rating and a review. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.