This week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Sam White, one of the original founders of Greentown Labs. We discussed the early days of Greentown Labs, hopes for the future and his work at Promethean Power and WrightGrid. Over the course of his career, Sam has learned a thing or two about entrepreneurship and he was gracious enough to share some advice with me.
When Sam founded Greentown Labs with a group of entrepreneurs, he was trying to solve the problem of high rent payments for postgrad students building prototypes. The amount of collaboration and camaraderie that came from solving that problem was astonishing. The collective input of a few passionate entrepreneurs lead to greater things than they could have achieved on their own. Sam was impressed by the enormous impact a group of “ragtag” entrepreneurs can have on the cleantech community at large. This success has led him to believe in the ability of small groups of dedicated entrepreneurs to drive dramatic change.
Sam is still constantly amazed by the progress of Greentown Labs. If you asked him five years ago where he saw the company going, he could not have imagined its current scale or the achievements that have come out of the incubator. Sam attributes the success to the excellent staff and the culture of professionalism they have curated. In the early days of Greentown, the founders found themselves overwhelmed by managing a space with so many companies. The organization and business acumen of the staff have provided a critical level of organization and support to members. When Sam walks in the door every morning, he does not see the same company; he sees a well-oiled machine that will bring forth global change.
Sam is the founder of Promethean Power, one of the original members of Greentown Labs. In fact, he found the very first space on Charles Street in Cambridge which he then invited Jason Hanna’s company to share the rent. His experience and the lessons he has learned along the way can provide important insight not only to members, but anyone building a startup. Critical to Sam’s success is the notion of struggle and the knowledge he gained from having to pivot. Today, Promethean Power has served over 17,000 rural farmers, but that level of achievement was not always a given, just as Greentown was not a given when it came time to commit to a 2-year lease on Summer Street in Boston, Greentown Labs’ second location.
Sam’s greatest passion and interest is providing access to critical services and technologies that would typically not be affordable to the customers he aims to serve. He loves the puzzle of aligning financial interests to make projects affordable and impactful. Sam has learned that putting the pieces of these puzzles together is an enormously challenging task. In fact, it took several years and numerous prototypes to find the perfect match between function and cost. However, he is grateful for this struggle (even though he admits the memory of being in steaming hot trains in rural India is better than reality). Producing something new without a blueprint inherently involves some level of failure, something Sam believes makes you stronger as an innovator and a citizen of the world. Without learning to adjust and persevere, the thousands of people Promethean has supported would not have access to the company’s life-changing technology today.
Today, Sam is part of another startup, WrightGrid, also focused on solving issues in rural third world communities. WrightGrid produces advanced phone charging and wifi emitting stations powered by solar 
panels. Their devices provide people living in off-grid communities with charging capabilities and connection to the web. The skills and reputation Sam has built are critical to building credibility with the new relationships he’s making at WrightGrid. Sam believes that experience can be a double-edged sword, however. People performing the same task have a tendency to create habits and develop one single way of thinking. For this reason, Sam is grateful the product and business model of WrightGrid are introducing a whole new way of doing business in Africa.
Diving deeper into his career, I asked Sam for one piece of advice he’d advise all entrepreneurs to consider. He says to avoid the “build it and they will come” strategy. Sam encourages innovators to identify a need and find a way to solve that particular problem instead of building a cool technology without a market. People tend to be overly polite when hearing an enthusiastic pitch during “market research” which can skew your perception of the viability of your product. Sam believes entrepreneurs should be honest with themselves when asking if their technology is actually going to resolve a specific problem because it’s easy to get sidetracked with potential customers saying they would buy something you are excited about.
When considering how far Greentown Labs has come, Sam becomes even more optimistic about the future. Looking ahead, he hopes Greentown maintains the same community that defines it today. In fact, the word incubator seems almost too professional for him because at its heart, Greentown really is a community of like-minded individuals bonded by their desire to solve the world’s problems. In 50 years, he hopes Greentown Labs will still be a group of hardworking, passionate, rule-breaking, industry-disrupting entrepreneurs.