Carlos Perea: Attracting a Motivated Team

It's easier for that first reason. It's because entrepreneurs want to have an impact and because you as an entrepreneur or as a founder or as a leader within an entrepreneurial company, that's not enough. You need to attract a team that's equally capable and motivated to want to have that impact and share in that vision. And when you have a clean tech idea, it's usually easier to have that kind of compelling reach. And I'll give you a personal example of this. Several years ago when I started at Myox, I knew I needed a really high-quality product development person, and I knew exactly who I wanted. It was somebody I had worked with at Intel, really well-qualified young man, 3 technical degrees from MIT. I did not hold that against him. It wasn't Stanford or Notre Dame, but just a really talented individual I had worked with, and I knew he had the skills and the attitude that would be critical to us at Myox. One small problem was he was already out of Intel working for a small but very high-profile, well-funded solar company. And I approached this person on a personal relationship and I said, hey, come take a look and he spent an afternoon and at the end he said, I love the technology, I really like the team, I'd really like to work with you again, I cannot leave the solar company. We're doing world-changing things and I have a positive social impact and thank you very much. It's not going to work out. Starting to from the bottom up. So I gave him one of these pens, and 3 months later, he came back and he said, hey, is that opportunity still available? I jumped at the chance. I hired him, and he's been tremendously key to our success since. But later on, I learned what had happened. He got hooked. And the way he got hooked was he went to South America with his family and lived in a situation where he did not have access to drinking water on a daily basis. His was the only family that did not get sick over a couple of weeks. And he started not only treating his family's water but that of the communities that he was in. And he saw firsthand the kind of impact that could have. So he came back and later on I actually learned that that solar company had offered him more money, but we gave him something that they couldn't, which was an even bigger emotional or moral paycheck, if you will, in the equation. And so, To the degree that you want to have an earth or world-changing idea, it's great that you can enlist other folks. And you just need to be aware of that power, because it is a really powerful mechanism. People want to make a positive impact.