I started OPOWER with my good college buddy Alex Lasky in 2007.
Here in the US the thing that we do worst is emissions.
We’re actually on the scheme of things okay with our national parks et cetera.
So I was looking at that and everyone else
is focused on the supply side – on solar, and wind, and biofuels,
all of which are super important
to our long-term environmental success plan if you will.
But no one is focusing on the other side, the easiest side, the demand side.
How do we just use less energy in the first place?
Instead of building all these fancy technology to make it carbon neutral.
So I started looking there and we got lucky
we found the research of Professor Robert Cialdini
who is one of the world’s leading behavioral psychologist
that it shown some of the ideas that we have had naively
about how to make energy information more accessible.
Like neighbor comparisons how do you stack up to people like you.
But this simple approach has really have a big impact on people’s energy use.
We got our first customer and we started trying out these approaches
and the stuff has really worked.
and now we have a very sophisticated platform
that provides many services – many information services to customers,
online, offline, text messages, with very sophisticated statistical analytics.
All to the same point of making it easy for people to get better information
about their energy use and to reduce their usage,
and the cool thing is that it works.
and has been working for 3 years now
and we’re excited for it to work for the next 30
and for us to get all across the globe and continue to help people save energy.
I love working at OPOWER, I love the people that I work with,
I work with some of the best people I’ve ever worked with in my life.
I love the passion we have here.
Everyone is enthusiastic about our mission and we have a very clear mission
and uniquely it’s a measurable mission so it doesn’t get short shrift.
We measure our impact on the environment
just as clearly as we measure our economic bottom line.
OPOWER is all about giving people better information
to help them reduce their energy use.
So we work with utilities across the United States
and now moving internationally to help them take advantage
of all the energy information they have to combine it
with all sorts of other consumer relevant information like weather data,
demographic data, and use that to get people very targeted
and actionable recommendations about how they can reduce their energy use,
which means that we’ve opened up a whole new avenue
for delivering energy efficiency and emissions reduction.
and what we’ve done is we’ve shown that information in it’s own right
can really help accelerate the adoption of efficient appliances and behaviors.
I’ve been asked is the US the best place to start a company or what country
is best to start a company.
In my experience is only US based, what makes it a successful place
to start a business here is a couple of things.
We have great access to capital to start company
as very thriving venture capital industry that is supportive,
where we access capital for our company.
There is an employee base that’s open and eager to join start-ups,
people here in the US think it’s an exciting thing
to do to start a company or to join one.
It is also scary the risk people are willing to take.
and then you need customers and buyers who are willing to do the same –
willing to buy products from new company.
Those are the things that we definitely have here in the United States
and it has made it possible for us to build a business like OPOWER.
What’s innovative about OPOWER
is that we finally made energy information accessible to people.
People know better car efficiency if the car uses a lot of gas or not.
But people don’t know the first thing about their home energy use,
even the basics, am I using more than I should be,
and what we’ve done innovative is we’ve used a whole host
of very sophisticated analytic methodologies,
behavioral science techniques to put together a platform that makes it very,
very easy for people to understand.
Understand their energy use and understand what they can use to reduce their usage.
and these things allow people to save energy on their bills.
Right now, you got high bill you have no idea why,
you don’t even know if it is high.
Now you find out from us, actually you’re using 50% more than average,
and it’s mostly coming from your conditioner,
and that’s how people are actually saving money
and saving energy with our services.
By the end of this year we will have saved over 150 Gigawatt hours of energy
and by the middle of next year we will be providing enough energy
to be the equivalent of providing a power to 100,000 homes across the United States.
Fundamentally, what we do is good for the world.
We are exclusively focused on building a business
that directly leads to reductions and energy consumption
which is reductions in emissions which is helping
to solve the issue of climate change.
That’s cool, we’re really having a big impact,
and it’s directly attributable to the works that we’re doing here and it’s fun work.
It’s software work, it’s direct marketing, and it’s sales,
it’s all these things that our people here love to do and we love the fact
that we can point directly at the impact that we’re having.