15 startups in: Built for Her Daughter, Powered by Solar

Speaker A: Foreign. Welcome to today's episode. For those of you who are just joining the podcast, we are Silicon Valley Capital Collective, and we specialize in helping companies scale their revenue by using the latest AI technologies straight from the heart of Silicon Valley. So if you want to learn more, make sure to stick around. My guest today is Jan Rippingale from Blue Banyan. So I want to start with. You've built Blue Banyan around the clean energy space. What was the specific moment or experience that you've had that convinced you that this is the mission that you want to go after and dedicate your career to?

Speaker B: Oh, that's a very interesting question. I'm so glad to be here, Sarah, with you. I actually have been working in technology for about 20 years, and I spent a lot of that at Wall Street. During that time, I learned a lot of really strong technology, but I. We didn't necessarily have a lot of meaning or impact in what it was that we were doing. And when I had my daughter, who's now 10, she. I had moved to California and I had a vision, essentially that. And I came out of that realizing that I could not leave her. Problems that I wasn't willing to tackle myself. And I was essentially afraid and concerned about where things were going and why this was so. And it seemed so complex and difficult to handle climate change and renewable energy transitions and all of these different pieces. And I kind of, I don't know, a little bit of a growing up, deciding to think that I wasn't going to leave her a problem that I didn't know how to solve. And so I dove in and I did start with solar energy because I already had an existing network in solar energy. I was going to work for NASA, and I'd been exposed to solar energy as it was growing, um, from its origins, and I already had a network there, and I could just learn how to create the influence that we needed to make the change. So it was all about deploying more solar faster. And in that process, it took a lot of technology. We also made policy changes, we did tooling changes. I also am co chair of the, uh, Department of Energy's Orange Button Working Group for data standards in the solar industry. And all of these together have finally brought about changes. In the United States, we were focused specifically on soft costs. In Europe, the soft costs are like, I don't know, about 30% of what it takes to get a project done, all the permitting and the back office, uh, accounting and sales commissions and all that stuff. And in the United states, it was 65 to 72%. It was like two thirds of a solar project was actually paperwork and the back end running of that it hadn't changed for like 20 years. The hardware costs went down. We had all of these innovations in the technology on the hardware and we just weren't getting them on the software. But through our efforts in combined with the larger community, um, it finally started to come down. It's like 55% now. And that has been really satisfying. We are actually changing the infrastructure so we can deploy more solar faster. And I have learned how to coordinate with people and how the different agencies work and how to actually influence the people making the decisions, um, in all the different ways that I needed to do in addition to tech in order to actually make the change that we needed to make. So it all came out of that vision with my daughter.

Speaker A: That's beautiful um, to hear. So m. You mentioned soft costs. Does it mean software costs or do you mean administrative costs? That not ah, supply costs and things like that.

Speaker B: Um, in construction soft costs are all the back office costs permitting moving paper around. Hard costs are labor and equipment. That's essentially how that that breaks down. So the softer costs are the ones that might look more discretionary but are actually take to get the job done.

Speaker A: I think that that space can use a lot of AI to an automation and all of that.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Because it's one of the oldest industries and the least touched by technology I think. I'm not an expert but I'm just a wild guessing.

Speaker B: I feel the construction industry in general is really slow in adapting to digital solutions. Um, the people who go into construction and then do well and often become the founders are very kinesthetic and so a lot of times they're absolutely not interested in software. And a lot of the structured thinking about what does it work 80% of the time versus knowing all of the exceptions. And that kind of it's almost like their brains don't inherently don't value that and that's an overgeneralization. But because of that it has taken a long time to digitize and there are a lot of opportunities. But I think those opportunities are only going to be presented when the user interface is simple. AI is in the back end making the magic happen and they don't want to know about it. So they are not interested in making any of that sausage. They just want to have a nice meal at the end of it. And so I think that's a key thing for people who are bringing AI to technology resistant areas is it's only all and only about the user interface. They do not want to hear about the process. So a lot of our technology connections really like talking about how clever they were in solving the technical aspect of a problem. And that will be the biggest turnoff to a, uh, construction CEO that, that there is. So, and I'm mentioning that because I certainly had that problem and it's been a journey for me to grow through realizing that they don't value any of my cleverness. They just want the outcome.

Speaker A: I mean outcome is what I feel like move things. But this is a pro tip for anyone who is touching the or of studying this. The construction space and the older industries, I would say the industries that have been around for a longer time, um, to kind of make sure that they understand how the um, leaders in the industry that have been around longer, um, need these technologies to be in order to be useful by them so that they will actually use it because at the end of the day they are the ones who's going to approve it and say, hey, this is good for us or this is not. So that was a great pro tip for anyone who's interested in these industries. So there's a lot of, has always been a lot of um, uncertainty around the industry that you're in, um, considering like solar or any type of renewable energy. How did you deal with these uncertainties throughout because your company is like more than 10 years old. Um, did you know right off the bat that this is going to be the clean energy space is what you actually want to build your career around? Or did you have to pivot to um, kind of find that this is your niche and how did the uncertainties had an impact on it?

Speaker B: So we literally call it the solar coaster. Right? It has been really intense and it has been really intense, particularly with the new administration. Like a lot of big changes have been happening and there's still a tremendous amount of uncertainty, which is uh, just a deal killer because FUD makes the money not work, which makes everything slow down. So it's, it has been really challenging. We have two ways that we've really addressed it. One is as I mentioned, I was going to be astronaut and president, so I worked at NASA earlier in my career. And the, I don't know if you realize or not, but the entire Apollo mission has uh, been paid for back to the United States taxpayers in the taxes on spinoffs from that Apollo mission. So when they sent somebody to the moon, they built Velcro and ballpoint pens and half a dozen different elements that enabled the, that mission to happen. And since then they got moved into other commercial applications and just the taxes on those sales have more than paid back the government for the entire moonshot. That was the Apollo mission. Yeah, it's awesome. And so similarly what we built for what it takes to get solar executives and solar M people engaged with the software had a lot of utility in the rest of the ecosystem. So we built a document manager that is particularly smart in how it moves the documents around. And we built a uh, chat, we call it a little blue chat mechanism that has tasks that you can follow up on my pet peeve about chat, but arts fixes that and we built all of these tools around that have utility across the entire platform that we're working on. And that enabled us to stabilize um, across industries, not just in solar. So we have definitely suffered because our biggest customers were in solar and several of them are now bankrupt and out of business entirely. And so we have definitely suffered the downturn. But our uh, stabilizing factors came from these spinoffs to the rest of the industry. So if you're really doing something innovative in a given space, you're going to inherently need better tools along the way like Velcro and ballpoint pens and you know, blue chat that catches on follow up tasks and it makes all the difference in the world. So I would recommend that anyone who's really innovating notice the tooling that they're building as they're going along and have a sales arm that can go sell those tools and make those spinoffs equal or greater value to give stabilizing in any vertical that you're going into. And I know that subject matter expertise is all the difference in the world for good AI systems right now. And so you're as you're building that subject matter expertise, if you can find some tool that you need that is more generally needed, not just in that subject matter tight niche, it will lend stability to the company as a whole. Because in reality we needed everybody in order to make it through these times.

Speaker A: Right. So basically the spinoffs are uh, actually something that cross industry like it can be used in more than just one industry and it's marketable to more than one industry. That's, that's actually great point. I mean another, another pro tip you guys that are listening. Um, if you're working in industries that there's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of I guess maybe dependency, um, on regulations, that's out of your control and it will probably take a longer sales cycle for you anyways, um, or Maybe just R and D projects. I mean if we can generalize it to that, then there can be products or um, you know, services that you can give on the side that can be cross industry. There's a spin off of those that can pay off. So let's make it worthwhile for once we're investing in it. Either the government or the people.

Speaker B: Exactly. And if you architect it with that in mind, technically it's actually easier because it's easier to maintain. But you do need a very separate sales team just focused on that. You can't mix your subject matter experts and the general, um, industry sales teams. One, because their contact list is super different, but two is because when push comes to shove they're going to prioritize what is their priority. And, and, and so you will lose track of the spinoff benefits unless you have somebody dedicated to it.

Speaker A: Yeah, dedicated team for that spin off part. Um, yeah. So, so what I understand is that you've from the start you've been focused on the specific industry, right? Not um, trying to become everything to everyone, even in the nearby industries, the close neighboring industries. What uh, so was, I'm assuming that that discipline was intentional from day one and you knew that this is what you want to do, or was this something that you learned over time? I think you answered that question right. It's something that, it's a little bit

Speaker B: of a combination of both. We do actually also service general netsuite kind of services, particularly for manufacturing and solar manufacturers and, and um, like ChargePoint and kind of related, you know, EV charging and, and related sections. Because we already had those networks, we didn't actively go out and sell them until just this year. We're starting to do that more. Because the solar industry has been so volatile, we were able to do that by just going a little adjacent. So our networks are still the solar networks. The people that were engaging with are still in that same area. But we did actually expand beyond just the tight solar group, um, as the interest rates went up, which is when residential solar really started to struggle in the United States.

Speaker A: Yeah. So that brings me to my next question that actually I'm very curious because there's a lot of founders who talk about scaling during good times and all of that. You have openly spoken about navigating uncertainty. Uh, and we touched on it in our previous question. What did leadership look like for you during those times? Um, because you were leading this whole uh, journey with this whole. There's a lot of different pieces into it. How did it look like for you

Speaker B: so leadership was really challenging going up and it's been really challenging coming down. But the lessons I learned as we scaled up have served me very well. As we've been um, as we've been scaling down to. We are starting to hit our curve, which is great. But I, when I first was moving from, I wanted to go from 10 million to 20 million. And at that point in time you need a leadership team that can't you, you just can't power through that yourself. And I didn't hire what I'm now calling, batteries included. So I hired people or I promoted people who had potential to lead in the way that I wanted them to lead and had intention and aspirations to do that, but may or may not have done it yet themselves. M. And I think that's a common founder mistake because when you're starting, you just want people who are willing to lend you some energy and get something going and, and their heart is into it and you're going to make it work. And that does not work. As you're scaling, you want to be able to hire only people who have already done the job before, preferably two or three times. So that they have taken multiple companies from 10 million to $100 million. They've taken multiple companies or uh, they've taken multiple teams through their transitions so that they're. You need them to have actually gone through the journey because they still need to be hands on at $10 million. They can't just like go up in some ivory tower. So we got Ivy tower people who had great resumes but they'd never actually done, done any work, so they couldn't, they had no idea why they moved from ten to a hundred million dollars. But they had run a hundred million dollar shops before so they figured they knew it all. They didn't. You need people who have gone from ten to a hundred multiple times so that they scale the right level of process at the right time, that they're able to articulate what it is that makes a difference versus what is just some bureaucratic rule that they had in the past. And those people are different people. So you, it's not enough to just get somebody who's run a hundred million dollar company. You want somebody who's got 10, um, to 100 million two or three times already. Those are the leaders that you want to get to manage that transition. And I wasn't clear enough about that. So I made every, every mistake I have mentioned I had made, I made that journey. So no judgments. Um, and it's helped Me a lot. We hire batteries included now, and it is so much more fun and so much easier. And you can tell that you did it right, because within the first week of hiring somebody who is authentically batteries included, it will lighten your load. You will experience lift. If you don't experience lift in the first week, you made a mistake at the leadership level and maybe all of them, actually. But if you made that mistake, you should start correcting it sooner than later because you should experience that lift the first week of the right person joining, because they'll come in and say, I see the three things you were doing right and the eight things you're doing wrong, and let me fix those five of those eight things and then build on the three that you had and they'll just like, be a breath of fresh air. That's how you know you're doing it right.

Speaker A: I think I didn't do just in, uh, kind of giving, um, you the opportunity, uh, to talk about the company and what it actually does. So maybe let's do this now. I mean, better. Better now than never, right?

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: I want the audience to know exactly what the comedy does and how you, because you touched on NASA and you have been working with technology teams and, um, all of that. And now you have built other companies before this one. So I want to know that journey, um, and more about the company for the audience to be able to learn more.

Speaker B: So Blue Banyan is a company that runs on NetSuite. So we're in a full NetSuite solution provider. And we built Solar Success, which is a layer on top of Netsuite, that is software for helping solar installers run their businesses. And that software is intended. The solar installers are the people who are on the ground actually making all of the physical changes needed. And so we wanted to empower them to be able to deploy more solar faster. We saw them as the crux of, of the segment of the market that we needed to put most of our energy into. So we have software that's done that. Launched Solar success in 2018, and by 2022 we had five of the 10 top residential solar contractors in the United States were on Solar Success. And a lot of them were in that list because they moved from one, moved from five to three to one, and stayed there for a couple of years. And others moved into the top 10 because they were able to scale with much improved operational efficiency, um, due to their Solar Success backbone. So that has been a spectacular, wonderful journey for us. During that process, I learned a lot and I was able to apply a huge amount of my background, so everything that I did that was so. Blue Banion is actually my 15th startup. I came up through the dot com era and actually did a bunch of startups, um, in a, in a row there for a bit. And I. None of my startups actually worked out. I wasn't the CEO at all of them, but I participated in all of them and none of them actually, you know, worked out enough that they became profitable until number 11. So if anybody is at 10 and thinking that, oh, my God, this just doesn't work for me, it was number 11 that actually worked and generated profit and was acquired, that funded, um, 15. So that is, that is something that I want to let people know to, to stay in the game. Persistence is pretty much how you win, as far as I can tell, because whatever it is that knocks you out, you will have learned and then the next time you'll do it, you'll be that much better at it.

Speaker A: That's fascinating. Um, um, it, it does, it does require the kind of grit as well. Like, you gotta have the grit and you gotta have to also have a huge belief in yourself that you can do it. And, um, um, the way you talk about it is pretty contagious. So I'm already, I'm already of kind of feeling that I can do. I can still run. I had to start up before this as well. I was like, okay, let me just refresh, um, my mind about what's possible to do. Was it always in the energy space or was it in other industries as well? The startups that you had before the

Speaker B: other 15 startups were all over the map. Um, everything from data warehousing to healthcare and smoking apps. Um, we did Food and Drug Administration with the FDA to identify fraudulent meals that were served to children. It was all over. Um, and that breadth of that industry experience really helped me. I also had a year or two where I worked for Ernst and Young, and that really helped me apply, you know, generally intelligent business concepts to a wide variety of industries. And one of them was with Chase, um, Millen Shareholder Services. And we were in charge of the IPO for MetLife. And it was the largest IPO by shareholders ever done in history. And we were in charge of the data. So we literally took data from shoeboxes that people had receipts from, like the 1890s saying how many MetLife shares they had to figure out what was actually going on.

Speaker A: Fascinating.

Speaker B: Um, it was, it was really amazing to see. Yeah, the technology growing from all of the different Things, and we ended up solving that problem. We, we had to consolidate the data and find duplicates. And we ended up solving it by producing this report that took three sheets of paper to do sideways. And then we got yardsticks. And people would go down and say, you do or do not. Humans would validate. You did or did not have duplicates in these different sections of people with a yardstick. So one of the things that I learned at NASA, um, that was absolutely fascinating is they would set us to have different challenges and give us very minimal resources. So one of the challenges they told us, is that somebody's choking and you don't know what's going on. And this is what you have is what's in the room. And they're choking and they're going to die in 30 seconds. What are you going to do? And, um, it. It sounds terrible, but we realized we had a ballpoint pen and we actually, from like a James Bond movie, we did like a little thing underneath where we thought they were choking and we choked, put it in there. We didn't actually have to do it, but that was. We had to come up with the answer. And so we, we used this pen that somebody had from some movie that they watched to solve a problem. And I cut it through.

Speaker A: I mean, was that the solution to.

Speaker B: Yeah, the solution is actually just to, to poke it through and create a,

Speaker A: uh, just a kill event fast.

Speaker B: Well, it might, if you do it badly, it could kill the person faster. But it, um, but it, it shouldn't kill a person faster. They need oxygen before they're going to need blood, even to their brain. And. And so, yeah, you had to do it in the right way and, and not kill them. But it was a journey to look around the room and figure out something that would have a solution. And that really taught me a lot about agency. Like, if you're in a crunch, and I was born in Montana, and so maybe I've got this in my deep DNA. But if you're in a crunch and you just have to solve the problem, you use whatever resources are available to you. So just like somebody grabbing a pen because they saw something in a James Bond movie, it was a great thing. It saved somebody's life. Right? And in that same way, the yardstick and the manual people evaluating and confirming that we did do the redundancy checks correctly made all the difference. It, uh, saved that project. And MetLife had their IPO on time. And I expect that the people who will have the most fun with an AI in their Business. And working with this will be people who utilize all the technologies and all of the solutions. That AI is one of the tools, and it's an important key one. And supplement it with whatever you need. Yardsticks, pens, paper. What is it that actually creates the experience that people need, that they can confidently move forward with the work with less effort and higher quality.

Speaker A: That. So it's basically another pro tip that, okay, you have built this amazing tool, these founders out there that have put a lot of effort into finding a solution that's AI, centered around AI, but then there are other things that you can use too, that doesn't have to necessarily be AI. What out there is possible to add it to this toolbox to be able to serve your clients or your customers better. It doesn't have to be 100% AI, because right now there's a lot of noise, uh, around AI and that people are, like, forgetting that we're, um, humans. And a lot of times there has to be, you know, other ways to be able to tackle a problem with a human. And loop. You always need the humans in the. I, uh, don't know if it's called in the loop. There's a technical term for it. When I'm not technical, I'm just. But I'm a heavy user of AI tools. Um, yeah, so that was. That was very. That was a very, um, you know, good thing to always have in mind, I guess. Yeah. So if you want to say, um, something for young founders right now, if one thing for young founders, um, a habit to practice on a daily basis, for example, what would that. What would that be? I know that you said persistence. What else is it that characteristics that you think founders need to practice, um, daily to be able to be eventually successful other than academic.

Speaker B: So I do this discipline religiously. I have three MITs, most important tasks, and every day, every night, I look at my MITs and I set up new MITs for the next day. And a most important task cannot take more than 30 minutes. It needs to be a small task, but you know what's most important, and you get it done, then you can move on, and you will make progress and you will not get consumed by busyness. So. So it is an absolute discipline, but it is a lifesaver for me. And I was not as disciplined with it when I started. But as the business succeeded and it became complex and I could be busy all day long and maybe not ever move the needle, I needed to get super clear every day about what are my three needle movers. And I will get them done. And then everything else is just gravy because it's a little chaotic. If you're running a growing business, there's, there's always more that can be done that you're going to have hours or energy for in a day. And so clarity of uh, your three most important tasks that you complete with confidence that you can trust yourself, you're going to get these done. That is the only path to, through that I have found through the chaos to actual effectiveness.

Speaker A: So persistence plus MIT most important task. And uh, you do it every night before you go to bed. That shouldn't take more than 30 minutes. And you are a hundred percent sure that you can do it. And you put it on top of your list when you get up in the morning. And that's a great tip for founders who want to be successful. One last question, one to last. Is there anything else that you wished that I would ask you, um, to cover uncover, you know, um, any aspect of uh, you know, the com, the conversation. I don't know the word uncover was redundant. But um, any other thing that you wanted to mention and talk about?

Speaker B: I, I hear a lot of fear and I uh, hear there is legitimate fear around AI. Like it is tough to be an entry level person right now because people really do care about subject matter expertise. And being able to gauge whether or not an answer is good or bad depends a lot on that subject matter expertise. And the reality is old people, older people know how to make things actually work for them. And people are, humans are always going to value convenience. And so if you can think about the first principles about even if they can do it, they just don't want to like or this is just faster and easier for them to do it a different way. Like if, if you can trust and rely that humans will continuously want more and more convenience solutions, answers, products, values delivered to them, then you can have some faith that we're not going to become obsolete, that we're not going to be useless, that we still have purpose. And all of those kinds of existential questions that I feel out there. I feel like it's huge amount of FUD fear, uncertainty, doubt around this kind of issue. And the first principle I'm coming back to is that everybody wants convenience. It's always been the service that fundamentally we've been providing is time to value is speed is just another word for convenience. And that's not going anywhere.

Speaker A: Beautiful. Mhm.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So FUD was fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Speaker B: Doubt.

Speaker A: That's what we as human beings is kind of natural for us to have, but we shouldn't be giving into it. And we were always going to be needing humans to um, just live a human life. Um, and my last question for you is, if you hypothetically had a magic wand and there was one thing that you wanted to fix for your business right now that's either holding you back or slowing you down, what would that one thing be?

Speaker B: Wow. If I had a magical wand, to be honest, there's a whole lot I would love to have a brain computer interface that it uh, would make it easier to make sure that I understood where people's head spaces are because we work all remotely and that they could understand me. If we had some sort of empathy transmitter where we could kind of see things from each other's perspective and then help us be better listeners. Not just me, but like my whole entire team. I think we could, you know, we, we actually do focus on this. So this does help us remove friction. But if I had a magic wand, I would love to just be able to transmit kind of the worldview that we're bringing with the emotions and the struggles and whatever and then have people um, transmit theirs back to me so we could get to better understanding faster. That would be my magic wand. How's that for?

Speaker A: I love it. Empathy and being able to kind of communicate that empathy and understanding and consciousness so that everybody's consciousness can actually grow. Um, when a one human being or group of human beings are actually becoming more aware and being more connected. I love that. So if you ever um, found that magic wand, please sign me up.

Speaker B: So if anybody's got, knows that, just email me. I'm totally into it.

Speaker A: Yes, please do. Um, where, how can people find you? Um, um, what type of um, organizations or people would you want to approach you and how could they find you?

Speaker B: So certainly we absolutely want to talk to anybody running a solar installation business, residential, commercial or kind of developer utility scale. We are all about how to help them deploy more solar faster. And I would love to talk with people who are also interested in data standards and how we can use our digital information infrastructure to improve the world and make tangible physical changes. I would love to talk to people who are really engaged in, have a passion in that area and the best way to connect me with me is actually on the website bluebanion.com B L U B A N Y A N Our uh, blue has no E. It's, it's kind of the hip version of blue and there's a contact us form that, that I would see. And then you can go to my email, which is jrippingalewbanion ah.com and since rippingale is hard to spell, it just need to be in the show notes or something.

Speaker A: I'm definitely going to put these on in the links in the, um, descriptions. This was great. I learned a lot and I'm sure everyone who's listening, um, learns a lot from this. Thank you so much for giving me your time.

Speaker B: Thank you so much, Sarah. This has been a pleasure.