I grew up in a financial underserved community,
Bed-Stuy Brooklyn - Biggie Smalls grew up
there. My parents were immigrants and so we
grew up without a lot of money, but they were
pretty well educated and I was pretty well
educated. We didn't have heat in our building,
and so we would heat our apartment by turning
up the oven and opening the oven door and
opening a window to release the carbon-monoxide.
As I got older, I went on to prep school and
then Duke but always wanted to give something
back to the other kids that I'd grown up with
that didn't have my educational opportunities.
So I became a community organiser in Bed-Stuy
and the next neighborhood over, Brownsville
- which is the poorest neighborhood in New
York City - it's where Mike Tyson grew up.
And got really focused on the opportunity
to create jobs for low-income families as
the kind of solution that I thought would
really help them and help their families and
help their kids. And I'd become an environmentalist
in college, at Duke, and so it was really
important to me that those jobs be green jobs.
And so, I was thinking about green jobs and
looking for an opportunity, and it turns out
that it's greening the buildings to make the
ways that buildings are heated and cooled
in American inner cities, there's an enormous
set of inefficiencies there. There's millions
of people that are heating their houses with
their ovens or over-heating their homes with
100-year-old systems that haven't been maintained
or replaced for the last 50 years.
So there's these incredible inefficiencies
and that's the business opportunity that we
see. And it's an opportunity to serve these
buildings and serve these low and moderate
income residents in urban environments with
the most cutting-edge green energy technology
and financial tools that are available.
