800+ developers, 5,000+ investors, and why the marketplace was wrong

Jumpstart was conceived as a crowdfunding platform that would enable anyone to fund clean energy projects anywhere in the world. The inspiration came from a year I spent in Seattle. There are tons of solar panels in Seattle, and it is completely nonsensical. Seattle is the 8th richest city in the U.S., over 90% of its electricity already comes from hydropower, and electricity prices are among the cheapest in the country. At the same time, Puerto Rico had been without electricity for over a year. Electricity costs there were twice the national average and coming 98% from dirty fuels. I wanted to know whether investment interest could be directed to the places where it would actually matter.

I first tried to make retail participation work. That meant crowdfunding clean energy investments from non-accredited investors. It turned out to be nearly impossible. A broker-dealer license would have cost $500K. State-by-state lending licenses added more cost and time. Filing an S1/Reg-A with the SEC is notoriously difficult. Even under Title III of the JOBS Act, projects had to be under $1 million, and the legal costs of setting up special purpose vehicles and tax equity transfer contracts meant anything under $25 million did not pencil out. I had to drop the idea of crowdfunding entirely.

So I moved upmarket. The new shape was a marketplace connecting enterprise investors (RE100 members like Apple and Google that had pledged to offset their carbon emissions) with equity investment opportunities in vetted solar projects from developers around the world.

For lead sourcing, I targeted lists of sustainability conferences and solar ranking lists, scraped company names and executive contacts by the hundreds, and ran them through an auto-emailing script that pinged company email servers with possible email variations based on name and domain. The script sent personalized messages to the valid addresses. Within about seven months I had reached out to more than 800 solar project developers and more than 5,000 enterprise investors, built a global network of 33 solar developer partners (some of the largest solar companies in the world), and was in conversations with five Fortune 100 companies that wanted to purchase clean energy through the platform. We also went through Y Combinator Startup School F18 and Powerhouse Access Innovation during this period. I got Green-e certified so the clean energy credits could be verified by a formal authority.

Even though things seemed to be coming together, I began to get a bad feeling after doing deeper customer conversations about what it would take to commit capital. Solar developers had enough financing for the projects that were already obviously financeable. What they *needed* was an expansion of the projects that were considered financeable. They did not need more financing for creditworthy projects. They needed harder projects to become creditworthy. Enterprise investors, on the other hand, wanted safe projects, long diligence cycles, and trusted relationships. A Google or a Salesforce typically takes two to three years of negotiations and follow-on meetings before committing. Those incentives were fundamentally misaligned for a marketplace built around speed and liquidity. I realized that both sides were fundamentally looking for different things.