The future of SUSTAINABLE energy | 10 MINUTES TO INSPIRE with KR Sridhar

Angelo, thank you so much for having me here. It's such a great event, Tech Emotion, so thank you for having me here. So my story: look, I came to the US from India just carrying a suitcase and a few hundred in my pocket, pre-Google days, when you didn't even know what the country was and what to expect, right? What brought me there? I came to study nuclear fusion to create energy abundance, but I saw that that's a little farther away, so I went back to my original passion of mechanical engineering and space science and Mars missions. What was the idea there? We as humankind are still living in the cradle, in the crib. One day we will go to other places, and when we go there we need to learn how to live off that land sustainably. So I was studying sustainable technologies of producing oxygen, water, electricity, heat on Mars. And then when you saw 50 million people every year coming out of abject poverty to middle class, wanting the same things that we all want, I realized if we don't find cleaner ways to do these things, this single pale blue dot called Earth will not sustain 10 billion people. So I decided to quit my tenured faculty position. I decided to give up my advisor to the NASA administrator and start a company, not because I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but because of the mission to make abundant energy available for everybody on the planet without the false compromise of either you have energy or it's not affordable or it's not clean. Why not? And the genius of that is what I wanted to create. That was the mission of the company.

So, two things there, right? Our good friend John Doerr was my early investor, and he asked me would I want to be just the CTO because I brought the technology, or would I want to be a CEO. I said to start with, it's a technology company, let me be the CEO, and every day, every year, we'll figure it out. The moment I am the impediment to the growth of the company, I wouldn't want to be the CEO because the mission is bigger. And I didn't know whether I would like being a CEO, but as time went on, I enjoyed that as much as I enjoy the technology, and here I am. I just continue to be. And the question on taking risks: this is the big mistake or misunderstanding people have about entrepreneurs. The risk I took was in the very early days of believing energy should go from being centralized to distributed. In the future, energy should become more abundant, and there's a way to make affordable, clean all that work together. That was a leap of thinking. I kind of went up the mountain and saw what was on the other side, and that's the world I wanted to build. Once you make that big leap, on your execution side, you have a plan A, B, C, D, E. So you never fail. Failure is not an option. You give everything you got because that mission is so much bigger. You don't take those kind of risks. But on technology risks, you're willing to shoot for the fences. But you always have plan A, B, C, D. Failure is not failure. Failure is just a stumbling down. It's about the getting up. It's not about the falling down. It's about the getting up and keep going.

You know, yes, the humility the man has after having accomplished so much in so many fields, where he never pretends to know more than you do on your technical subject matter. He never pushes you in a particular direction, but you respect him as a human being who has seen so many patterns. So what he brings to the table every single day is pattern recognition. I have seen at this stage of a company these are the kind of issues you will deal with. If you need help, here are the advisors I can bring to bear. And if any particular crisis comes along, I've seen a page in so many other companies where I've watched the crisis unfold. Here's a right way to do it. Here's a wrong way to do it. It's up to you. But let me offer that to you and offer people that can help you with it. For example, we talked about the Andy Grove story a little while ago. He was the one who suggested, 'Shall we bring Andy Grove in?' Andy and I became really good friends till Andy died because of that. That's a good example of somebody. But I've had the fortune of having tremendous mentors. As you know, General Colin Powell was on my board till he died. He served on Bloom's board for 15 years. At least two times a week he and I spoke. He adopted me like a son. And I have to pinch myself as an immigrant coming from India to the United States to have that kind of caliber of people mentoring you, advising you, and how fortunate. And I think the reason why you have had those incredible figures as mentors has led you to be not at the head of an industry but at the head of a movement. I mean people like you, Al Gore, John Doerr, and a few others became the founders of this great movement that will actually make Earth sustainable.