Episode 19: Unveiling Leadership Wisdom from Jeff Wolfe’s Cleantech Journey
Jeff Wolfe is an "OC" – an “original cleantecher.” This entrepreneur has three companies under his leadership belt, including two that he founded. Jeff’s work has spanned solar installation, EV fast charging and investment considerations for Shell New Ventures. His current company is Veloce Energy, which offers easy-to-install EV fast charging infrastructure that's designed to speed the electrification of America's vehicle fleet.
Strap in for some well-earned wisdom on building and running successful companies.
The popular conception is the CEO gets to do whatever they want. And the reality is the CEO gets to do nothing that they want. The fact of human nature is that people will do what you want, but only to a lower level. They will do to a higher level what they want. And so the real role, the way to really succeed and excel as a CEO, is to get people to want to do what you want to do. Because when you can have them believe in the idea, even stronger than you believe in the idea, they'll perform their best work.
Overview
- Introduction - Jeff Wolfe’s Career Journey
- Early Leadership Experience and Mistakes
- Key Management Advice for Aspiring Leaders
- Habits and Practices for Peak Performance
- Impactful Mentors and Lessons Learned
- Initial Interest and Involvement in Renewable Energy
- Evolution of Cleantech and Its Effect on Business
- CEO's Role and Priorities in the Clean Economy
- Building vs. Running a Company: Challenges and Focus
- Hiring and Fostering Cultural Alignment
- Cleantech Optimism and Technology Advancements
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Introduction - Jeff Wolfe's Career Journey
Mike Casey:
Hey, cleantechers. Welcome back to Scaling Clean, the podcast that gathers company building and management tips for the most accomplished leaders in cleantech today. Today I welcome Jeff Wolfe, who is what I will call an OC or an original cleantecher. Jeff's a proud serial cleantech entrepreneur. He's led three companies, and two of them he founded. His work has spanned solar installation, EV fast charging, and investment considerations for Shell's new ventures. His current company Veloce Energy offers easy-to-install, productized EV fast-charging infrastructure that's designed to speed the electrification of America's vehicle fleet. In just perspective, you, Scaling Clean listeners, are gonna access views shaped by several multi, if you will, multi-sector, multi-region, and multi-size companies. So strap in for some well-earned wisdom on building and running successful companies. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Jeff Wolfe:
Great to be here, Mike.
Mike Casey:
Let me start with your background. We always like to do this. How would you summarize your career as a corporate leader?
Early Leadership Experience and Mistakes
Jeff Wolfe:
Summarizing is hard, diverse, a bit of a continuous rollercoaster, edge-focused, shall we say. It's been an interesting ride. My second job outta college was designing buildings. So I've designed buildings as an engineer, and then I went into solar and designed solar systems and became a contractor, installed systems, went through some consulting phases there in business and now we're a manufacturer, designing products. So my arc has taken me from designing buildings, integrating other people's products to designing the products that other people integrate. And I think that's pushing the envelope of productization. I've spent my career kind of on the edge of industry, fortunately, unfortunately.
Mile Casey:
Put a throughline on that. What would be the first few sentences of your biography if I was gonna write it?
Jeff Wolfe:
So serial cleantech entrepreneurs are focused on the built environment, driving change, and built environment is focused on addressing climate change.
Mike Casey:
Talk to me about the first time you were somebody's boss. Looking back now, what mistakes did you make and how have you changed your leadership style as a result of that over the years?
Jeff Wolfe:
Well, I didn't make every mistake possible, but I've made a pretty good share of them. One of the problems in management in America, I firmly believe that very few people are taught to be managers. You know, MBA students are not taught to be managers, manager candidates are not taught to be managers. There are very few good management schools, management training programs. Most people are just anointed managers. So management means dealing with people. And we're not very good with dealing with people often in our personal lives and certainly not in our business lives. It requires an incredible amount of honesty with other people to treat them with respect and to communicate well. So I made a lot of mistakes in terms of not knowing how to communicate well, not communicating well, not expecting people to perform to the level that they could or should or needed to, making accommodations for people where accommodation was negative for performance at the company and negative for their own performance as well.
When you don't have somebody, when you don't require somebody to do their job, you're training them to not do their job rather than setting them to do their job. So really a lot of the mistakes I made were personnel-related, I think, which is very common. Other mistakes I made were sometimes not following my gut. I've got a pretty good sense, by far from perfect, but a pretty good sense of where a business needs to go, why it needs to go there. And sometimes rather than building consensus, I let others sway against my better judgment. And it's a difficult balance to learn. When do you trust your gut and when do you listen to the great people you've hired?
Mike Casey:
Amen. Boy, that is well said. Very well said. Okay, I'm gonna jump ahead here because that was such a good answer. But let's say you quit your job tomorrow, you become a lecturer at a local university's MBA program. Your first lecture is going to be three pieces of management advice. Learn the hard way. How would you distill that mistake and lesson pattern you just went through? How would you boil it down to its three most important lessons for people who wanna be a Jeff Wolfe in five years, ten years?
Key Management Advice for Aspiring Leaders
Jeff Wolfe:
First, is to have confidence in yourself. If you have confidence in yourself, it's amazing what you can do. Pretty much my entire career since the founding of GroSolar, including the founding of GroSolar, was because I had enough confidence in myself to leave and go do something, to try something. And it's amazing how many people will stay in a bad job because they don't have confidence in themselves. Very talented people who don't have the confidence to just leave and go do it. So having confidence in yourself is first. The second is to learn how to communicate, learn what it means to treat people with respect, which does not mean saying thank you and you're welcome and nice pleasantries. It means treating people as knowledgeable professionals and communicating to them when they do great things and communicating to them when they do not-so-great things.
And working to have them do as well as they can. So real focus on what we call HR and I call honest relationships. And then the third is something that took me a long time to learn, which is to try to have some balance which is very hard. I had remarkably little balance at GroSolar and it aged me and, made me perform not as well as I could. I'm taking a very different tact now. I run now, which is one of the most surprising things I've ever started in my life. But it's very good for my mental balance. And make sure you continue just for yourself as you drive hard on the company.
Mike Casey:
Well, I'll tell you, Jeff, you are the one who's directing this interview because these answers just command that we go to a particular question we've got on the list here. So I'm gonna go to the last question I usually ask. So in terms of your day-in, day-out, weekend, weekend performance, are there practices, or habits that you have picked up, tried, and found really valuable for keeping Jeff Wolfe's performance at his consistently higher level as possible? Could be big, could be small. I'm really interested in collecting these things from people in your shoes.
Habits and Practices for Peak Performance
Jeff Wolfe:
Yeah, it's a hard question and I wish I was a more disciplined programmed executive. I'm not. So, the things I try and do is schedule things. If I wanna get something done, I schedule it. If it's on my calendar, I will likely do it. It's not on my calendar, I likely will not do it. So I really schedule that, and running. I have a calendar placed for dinner every night because that blocks out other people disturbing my dinner. Cause I work across multiple time zones and I make sure I have dinner. So that's probably the biggest thing, single thing I do is I schedule. I schedule my life, the parts that I wanna get done.
Mike Casey:
I'm seeing a lot in terms of the science around sleep, and there's now an emergent science around times of the day when certain individuals are best equipped to do certain things. Have you found yourself a night owl or a morning person? There's a belief in many quarters that if you get up at 5 or 5.30 in the morning, you're more likely to become a billionaire. Not sure how true that is, but have you looked at an experiment with the clock and have you found that certain things work for Jeff Wolfe in that respect?
Jeff Wolfe:
I've been a night owl my entire life pretty much. And it's sometimes hard being a night owl in a daytime world. But it’s gotten either a little better or a little worse, I'm not sure how to define it, but it used to be my best hours, my best projective hours are 10 pm to 2 am. That was when I could really focus, no disruptions, and really crank a lot of great workout. I would often reread it in the morning to make sure that was great work. But that was often my best work for the day. I've backed that off a little bit now. Evenings are still where I can really focus and tune in, and my brain seems to be most alert and aware. I can get up whenever in the morning and do whatever I need to do. But if I had to program my day and it was Jeff's world, it'd be probably from 11 am to 11 pm.
Mike Casey:
Sounds good. All right. I have experienced much the same things as you're reporting here. All right. Now go back to the top of the question list here. Your mentors, who are your most important mentors? Why were they important? What did you learn from them?
Impactful Mentors and Lessons Learned
Jeff Wolfe:
Yeah, probably one of my most important mentors who made a big impact on me was my high school science teacher long ago. Really kind of opened my eyes to science, turned me on. He was a biology professor, PhD teaching at a high school, PhD of ecology teaching at a high school in the seventies. So pretty well ahead of his time and just a great, quiet strong personality who really led me to believe in science and believe I could do science. So he was a very important mentor. I had one person at GroSolar that VC suggested that we hire him. And it wasn't a mandate, but it was a strong suggestion, shall we say. And I brought Steve in and he had been serially successful in a bunch of different industries. Things like first catalog computer sales, that kind of thing. And having his view and experience was really helpful to me. Sometimes in positive ways. Sometimes in not a negative growth way, but a negative information way. Such as the one day we were sitting in my office and he said to me, ‘Jeff, I've never seen an industry this hard. At which point I realized that it wasn't just that I was an idiot, it was actually that we were doing really hard things’.
Initial Interest and Involvement in Renewable Energy
Mike Casey:
I'm guessing you were into renewables before 90% of the people who listened to this interview. What drew you to clean energy and what has kept you in this space?
Jeff Wolfe:
I'm guessing I was into renewables probably before 90% of the people were born in this interview. Sad to say. I first got into renewables in the early seventies. My first real hardcore experience was when I built a hot water solar collector in 1973 in my sideyard as a young teenager. It's a response to the first Arab oil embargo. When I said, ‘Why are we importing oil and having it misshape our political process at that time even for oil from this foreign country, why don't we make it ourselves?’ And the hot water collector didn't work well at all. But that was my first foray in 1973 into solar. And that's why I became a mechanical engineer. Back in that time, you became a mechanical engineer or a chemical engineer to go into solar. Cause you made either coatings for hot water, solar collectors, or you made hydraulic systems for hot water systems. So I became a mechanical engineer because of that.
Mike Casey:
What are the biggest changes that you've witnessed in this space since you started?
Jeff Wolfe:
All of them.
Mike Casey:
I mean, that's why I used the word biggest.
Jeff Wolfe:
Mike, when I started, we were selling solar systems, PV systems, and hot water systems. We were selling PV systems, residential PV systems. Everything had a battery, a large system, a system we celebrated over was half a kilowatt. And we sold systems for $18 per watt cash upfront. So, the arc of cost reduction has been staggering, just staggering. I bought panels at great prices, $5 a watt, and then we got them at $3 and 30 cents a watt. You know, what are they now? Somewhere between 35 and 50 cents a watt. The price curve decline has been staggering. The technology efficiency increases have been incredible. We bought some of the best panels on the planet, 75-watt BP Solar panels which now look like arm bracelet charms. Yeah, and the whole installation process, I mean, everything has become much more productized. It's part of what's really driven us to Veloce that we saw the productization of solar. And one of my co-founders was very involved in that, at First Solar as well. And so it's been the productization of energy systems and the product position of the built environment village. I think we have revolutionized a lot of different industries as well as renewables.
Evolution of Cleantech and Its Effect on Business
Mike Casey:
The changes you've seen in this space, the big trend lines, how have they affected the job of clean economy companies?
Jeff Wolfe:
So, the job of running clean economy companies has got, I think, more operationally focused as we've different prices down. You know, halfpennies matter now. And when halfpennies matter, you really need to look at operational efficiencies, not just product efficiencies. And so the job has become much more detail operationally focused. You've got to be a great operator in order to really succeed. You can't just have a great idea.
CEO's Role and Priorities in the Clean Economy
Mike Casey:
Go back to that classroom that we discussed, and in this hypothetical course, your second lecture is called, ‘What makes up the role of the successful clean economy CEO?’ What are you gonna tell your students?
Jeff Wolfe:
Well, the first thing I tell my students is that the popular conception is the CEO gets to do whatever they want. And the reality is the CEO gets to do nothing they want.
Mike Casey:
That's the money quote right there. We're gonna lead this interview with that quote. That's great, Jeff, continue.
Jeff Wolfe:
The fact is that many CEOs feel like they're dictators and they mandate and they direct.
The fact of human nature is that people will do what you want, but only to a lower level. They will do to a higher level what they want. And so the real role, the way to really succeed and excel as a CEO, is to get people to want to do what you want to do. Because when you can have them believe in the idea, even stronger than you believe in the idea, they'll perform their best work and the company will do best. So the role of the CEO really is to not lead so much as it is to create leaders who want to follow the vision of the company.
Mike Casey:
What proportionality would you assign to culture, setting, operations, sales, marketing, the raising money? What proportion would you assign to the various parts of the CEO's job?
Jeff Wolfe:
Well, it really varies a lot from company to company. I mean one of the fun things about being a CEO is that the job changes a lot, usually over time. We're very fortunate at Veloce to have a team of four co-founders. And that's given us all the strength and it's allowed me to really focus on fundraising. So in Veloce, I spend probably a little bit less now cause our Series A is finally coming together. But at times most of the time at Veloce has been around 75% or more of my time on fundraising. Huge percentage, but that's what's driven our ability to actually raise funds pretty quickly. The rest is coordinating and making sure that everybody else is on point, on vision, executing their roles, and occasionally providing advice and counsel to the other consummate professionals whom we have on the team.
Building vs. Running a Company: Challenges and Focus
Mike Casey:
Is building a company or running an existing company the more challenging job?
Jeff Wolfe:
Depends on the status of both of them. They both have their challenges. They're very different. When you're building a company, you're less worried about all the details. You need to build the hull of the boat before you can polish the chrome on the top deck, whereas when you're running an existing company, you've got to keep patching that hull while you continue to polish the Chrome on top. A lot more detail work in running an existing company, paying attention to a lot more details. Not that the details are going to evaporate when you're starting a company, but you've gotta build that foundation first. Personally, I'm much more of a builder than an operator. I have operated, I can operate, I can operate well. It doesn't give me the pleasure that building does.
Hiring and Fostering Cultural Alignment
Mike Casey:
A previous answer kind of led to this question about hiring. I hear from every guest we've talked to so far without exception, that hiring is one of the most challenging parts of running a company. What have you learned about hiring, particularly at the C-suite level?
Jeff Wolfe:
So hiring at any level, the biggest challenge that I think people have in general is they don't make it a priority. People are more willing to complain about not having enough staff than they are to make it one of their top three priorities every day. To go out and find the people, interview people, moving through the process. And so the first thing at any level is to make it a priority to execute on. If you need the person, it has to be one of your top three priorities. You need to work on it every day. It's not a side thing you need to do when you're free. It's one of your important pieces at the C-suite. Yeah, I think before you even got to hire another member of your C-suite, you've gotta make sure your culture is ready and that you understand the culture. And we really lead with the culture. And people sometimes say, well, ‘Yeah, Jeff, what if there's a great candidate who doesn't agree with some of your philosophies, well, don't they're a great candidate for somebody else?’ If the team doesn't have a common culture, whatever it is, they're not gonna be a team. And if they're not a team, they're not gonna function at the level that they need to.
Mike Casey:
When it comes to running a company, what is more important, what you choose to do or what you choose not to do?
Jeff Wolfe:
Absolutely both. I mean, there's no way to pick one of those, depends upon the day and the situation. If you never do anything, then that's a disaster, right? And if you do everything that comes into your brain that's also a disaster. What important is to not get locked into an action, especially in an early stage of a company, not get locked into an action and feel like you can never change your mind. You can always change your mind. And sometimes it's really important not to change your mind and sometimes really important to change your mind. And not to revisit every decision every day, but it is important to have the mindset to question even fundamental decisions as you're building the company.
Mike Casey:
In your conversations with suppliers, with customers over the years, and those vendors and customers who are working in more mature companies, not in a clean economy, what's been your observation about the difference in running a clean economy company versus a company in a more mature sector?
Jeff Wolfe:
Well, most of those mature companies are larger. And so most of the people you deal with are simply doing their job. It's rare to find a large company that has a great culture of mission and vision other than delivering a product on time every day. I mean, that's not a vision, right? That's a job. And so it's very hard to find suppliers who are kind of culturally aligned and have the same priority, same drive, same motivations.
Cleantech Optimism and Technology Advancements
Mike Casey:
So in terms of cleantech, not climate solutions, but just cleantech, are you a cleantech optimist or a cleantech pessimist and why?
Jeff Wolfe:
So cleantech, I'm a huge optimist on technology. The technology advances I've seen and some of which I've helped to drive in my career have gone far faster than anybody predicts. I read analyst reports, not a lot, but I read some, I read summaries, and I don't read them to know what the numbers are this year. I read them year over year to know what the first derivative is, so to speak. What's the speed of change of the analyst numbers? Because in cleantech one report over another report next year, they’re always increased in their projections for speed. How fast do they increase in those projections? If you look at electric vehicle adoption you look at EV charging which we're in. A few years ago Bloomberg was predicting 82% of all charging happens at home.
Well, I'm quite sure that's wrong. And they're finally becoming convinced of that. Their number of home chargers is going down, the number of public charges going up, the speed of adoption of EVs is through the roof compared to what they were predicting five years ago. And so it's that rate of change of prediction that I look at to see what the future is for I've been in cleantech since 1998 and before in some ways, and the rate of change has never met expectations. It pretty much every year always exceeded them. So from a technology point of view, we don't have all the tech we need, but we have most of the tech we need and we have plenty of tech to keep ourselves very busy, very gainfully busy while the other tech comes forward. We don't need a silver bullet. We need a silver buckshot, and we've got most of that silver buckshot in hand already.
Mike Casey:
Nice. Well, Jeff Wolfe, I wanna thank you for coming on this show. I have found you to be every bit the wonderful guest as you have been a private conversationalist with me over the years. I think this sector owes you and people like you a lot. I think Tom Weirich's book was really kind of a flag planter that we have people like you in this sector that were standing on their shoulders, and it's what's really cool about the sector is we get to be among the people who've really been at it for a long time, mixing actively with the new entrance. So I'm just grateful to you for the work you've done for the leadership in the industry. And thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us. I know this is gonna be one of our better episodes.
Jeff Wolfe:
Well, Mike, it's always a pleasure to chat on or off the record. And it's great to see new people continue to pour in at ever faster rates into cleantech. And I too stand on the shoulders of giants. You know, I didn't invent this whole thing by any means. There are a lot of people who came before me who helped put us where we are today.
Mike Casey:
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.
