Business in Vancouver's “How I Did It” feature asks business leaders to explain in their own words how they achieved a business goal in the face of significant entrepreneurial challenges. In this week's issue, David Helliwell, co-founder and CEO of Pulse Energy, talks about how changing the company's business model and a contract with VANOC for the 2010 Winter Olympics helped propel the energy software company onto the international stage.
“Greg Kerfoot [former CEO of Crystal Decisions Inc.] is the other co-founder. The two of us got together and wanted to start a company together in the energy space. He's a software guy and I'm an energy guy, and it took us nine months to figure out we should do energy software.
“We wanted something that was going to make a real environmental impact, and we wanted to do something that could scale quickly to cover the whole world. Hardware gizmos are pretty hard to do that. Software is a nice model for that.
“Our first two customers, before we even had a product, were [the University of British Columbia] and the Village of Hartley Bay. They needed help with energy management, so we basically developed the first version of the product with them. In general, it's identifying where energy is being wasted and helping them find ways to operate more efficiently.
“The [2009-2010] downturn in the economy wasn't bad, for a couple of reasons: when things get tough, people work harder to save money, so efficiency is worth looking at, and also there was a ton of stimulus money that went into smart-grid projects.
“2009 was a really big breakthrough because we signed up BC Hydro, we got the B.C. ICE [Innovative Clean Energy] Fund, which funded $2.5 million, and we got another $2.5 million from Sustainable Development Technology Canada.
“Late that year, VANOC came to us to do the energy management for the 2010 Olympics. That got us onto the home page of Businessweek, and the Los Angeles Times had a story on us. Cisco came to us wanting to use our software for their new energy offerings.
“That [the 2010 Winter Olympics] is what made us first get some visibility in the U.K. I've got to give credit to the City of Vancouver and also the B.C. government, who organized some great business events around the Olympics. And through those connections, one thing led to another, then [we] ended up having people in the U.K. reaching out to us to have our technology in the U.K. market.
“We pushed hard ... but the business wasn't growing as fast as we had hoped. ... So in 2011, we refocused the entire company on just selling to utilities.
“We sell to utilities and then utilities offer our software to their customers.
“Early this year, we officially launched our British Gas deployment. British Gas has 15 million customers, so it's almost 10 times bigger than BC Hydro and they're using us for all their business customers. [Australia] is the fourth country we're launching in [with Ergon Energy]. So there's Canada, the United States, the U.K. and now Australia.”
