Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 10)

I continue my discussion with HP regarding management teams, and then begin to explore other challenges like incredibly long sales cycles of ERI’s business, which makes forecasting and cashflow management very complex. In fact, with 18-36 month sales cycles, it makes me wonder to what extent our VCs who are rushing to Cleantech would have

Read Full Article »

Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 9)

Finding the right team to lead a company is very important, and perhaps an area where many entrepreneurs struggle as they cannot attract the right people, or delineate responsibilities clearly or effectively. HP has had the foresight to make difficult management changes as necessary to ensure the success of ERI.

Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 8)

Coming from a strong finance background, here we see how HP and his partners make decisions from both the perspective of the investor and the entrepreneur. This makes for a very interesting study.

Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 7)

We continue to explore the foundations of HP’s involvement in ERI. The company came close to going out of business many times in the last 13 years. Somehow, however, the guys who were writing the checks – including HP himself, kept writing those checks!

Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 6)

Over the last five parts, I interviewed HP to extract the full significance of his innovation. After all, Reverse Osmosis and Osmotic Power are not exactly my own core competency areas, so I needed him to walk us through the market landscape, the ROI factors, and the general business eco-system dynamics. As I did that,

Read Full Article »

Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 5)

In this next segment I asked HP a couple of questions on what types of applications and markets he is planning for the future. As we have seen in the previous segments, HP has a firm grasp of ERI’s immediate core competency and it’s business environment. Here HP demonstrates another characteristic we often find in

Read Full Article »

Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 4)

Many entrepreneurs struggle to fully understand their business environment. Here we see that HP has a very strong grasp on ERI, and how their technology impacts governments and social needs throughout the world. Discovery Channel called the PX the most significant engineering breakthrough that you will see in your lifetime.

Serial Entrepreneur: HP Michelet (Part 3)

In this next segment of the interview, HP takes us through his view of the future market demand for fresh water with a particular emphasis on areas which ERI can address. We discover in dismay, that the water supply of California is likely to dry up in the next 40 years due to global warming.