Biography
Lou serves as coach, mentor, and thought leader at Clean Energy Ventures. He seeks to identify adoptable innovations to make rapid and large climate impacts. He has been learning and revising targets for profitable decarbonization for over 30 yrs. Lou helps form theses about investable segments, diligences opportunities, and works with portfolio companies. Now that clean energy ventures has such a strong investment team, he can focus more on empowering the team to find and execute great strategies.
Lou is trained as a physicist with broad exposure to particle, space, bio, nuclear and many other words people put in front of “physics”. He left his PhD program at Cornell to teach high school. Five years of communicating complex ideas to smart curious people who lacked technical background, developed skill in explaining novel technology to general and business audiences. Several years inside GE gave Lou experience in how gas turbines and other conventional power generation equipment work, are sold, operated, and make money. Lous role at GE looking at disruptive technology gave a deep appreciation for the need to prepare users to adopt disruptive innovations. Lou learned about rail, industrial systems, plastics, truck fleets, digital twins from work inside GE. He ran the GE SOFC program managing over 100 people in several countries and time zones. Lou ran a product line at MTI micro and learned about military procurement. He has been an investor for twenty years in early stage, growth equity, and project finance.
"A business provides a product or service to customers with money who are willing to pay more than it costs. Always think about the customer before how important the problem is or how cool the tech is.”
Lou lives the values that the people are point and collaboration is needed to solve the climate crisis. He is active serving on advisory boards with the National Academies, Venture for Climate Tech, and Trellis. He regularly participates as a panelist and mentor with Greentown Labs, Village Capital and ongoing coaching and mentoring of innovators in the ecosystem
Lou has worked in five very different jobs from home base in upstate NY where he is daily reminded by his grandson and the rest of his family how urgent the work is.