“The only thing worse than starting something and failing… is not to start at all”
– Seth Godin, Squidoo founder, author and blogger
Aug-2010: Co-Founder & VP Software Development at Verdeeco, Inc.
“In early 2010, when the advent of Cloud computing and AWS were taking off, we decided to start a company focussed on electric municipalities and Coo-ops in the US. These were an underserved market and always had financial constraints. Our entire solution and offerings were in the Cloud, and while convincing utilities that cloud was the way to go in the future was difficult, we did sell it to quite a few Co-ops. Our financial model was a huge success and we attracted private equity investment into the company.”
- Spent multiple months understanding AWS and its associated service offering and completed design courses to know all the nuances of a cloud software offering
- Developed the software architecture and the database design for our MDM product in the cloud. Other products designed were VEE as-a-service and Transformer Loading application.
- All applications were offered to our customers in a SaaS model, that is pay-as-you-go
- Our financial model was simple and widely accepted:
- Instead of buying the entire suite of software products, buy or subscribe to only the one you need, akin to buying the one song instead of the entire CD.
- Instead of paying for the entire song, pay only for how long you listen to the song in a month. Translated to invoicing the customer only for how many assets were in our system instead of their entire population of meters.
- Assisted in acquiring 600K in Series-A Angel-funding and getting the first customers.
- Assisted in getting acquired by Sensus and later by Xylem in Mar-2014 for 3.5 million USD yielding a 5x return on ROI for the early investors
Sep-2001: Founder, CEO, and President of WACS (renamed to Ecologic Analytics):
“The need for a data warehousing solutions was universally felt by all of my utility customers. While I would successfully integrate Cellnet’s AMI network to their utility network, they would toss out the 99% of the daily meter reads and only use the one read per meter per month to bill. Working closely with my utility customers, I pitched the idea of an MDM as early as in Yr 2000 and after successful trials, WACS was born. I led the company for 4 years and was responsible for selling it to Bayard Group, who then turned around and sold it to L+G”
- Key product was a Oracle 11 based data warehouse to store 10 years of meter reads from any AMI networks.
- Production Implementation of our data warehouse solution at many investor-owned utilities. Implemented it at Puget Sound Energy (PSE) where 1.2 million daily reads were being received from the CellNet AMI network.
- Four (4) years of sweat equity and personal funds of 100K went into this venture.
- Negotiated an investment with Bayard Group, who then sold this division to Landis+Gyr/Toshiba for a 9x ROI.
- The MDM solution and its associated applications like VEE, flexible routing for billing etc. are still being offered by Landis+Gyr/Toshiba to its electric, gas, and water customers.