NYLP: Welcome to the New York Launch Pod the New York Press Club award-winning podcast highlighting the most interesting new startups, businesses and openings in the New York City area. I’m your host and New York attorney Hal Coopersmith and it’s getting colder out there. New Yorkers know that summer is over and you might be thinking about keeping warm. Lee Hoffman, co-founder of Heat Watch, has been thinking about keeping you warm too. He has developed a technology to work with your building’s boiler to keep you warm, make that boiler more efficient and save you money because odds are you are not thinking about your boiler.
Lee Hoffman: How your boilers run are typically your 903rd priority against filling apartment 3B and 6F and the leak in apartment 9J. Right?
NYLP: So even though you might not be thinking about your boiler, you will find this episode fascinating. We discuss energy efficiency and reducing the carbon footprint of a building, how complex Heat Watch’s software and hardware really is and how this technology is being adopted in New York City and in buildings around the country. But before we go to the interview if you are a fan of the New York Launch Pod please subscribe on your podcast listening app and go to nylaunchpod.com to add yourself to our monthly newsletter. So, with that lets go to our interview with Lee Hoffman.
NYLP: So, you’re trying to make boilers sexy, is that right?
Lee: Not the term that I, you know, typically use. But yes, we’re trying to make boilers something that people pay attention to because the vast majority of waste both economically and in terms of carbon output is coming from boilers in cities across the country and world.
NYLP: People were not paying attention to their boilers?
Lee: Yeah, I mean, first of all, how many people even want to go into a boiler room I think is the first answer. Even the super doesn’t want to go in the boiler room, right? I mean like the bane of most supers’ existences is, “oh God, I got to go down to the boiler room and make a change.” Right? So, by definition, it’s a thing people don’t want to deal with. Secondly, it’s extremely complex. You know, there are probably, you know, 30 or 40 people in New York City that are true, true experts on boilers.
NYLP: 30 to 40 people?
Lee: There are a lot of people who can service and do other things, but true, true experts on how to run boilers and know everything about it and really know what they’re talking about. It’s a limited set of people. So, it’s a very detailed training-oriented field that not a lot of people go into. A lot of people think it’s an antiquated technology even though if every new building basically has a boiler, central heating is still the most efficient way to run it. So, there are a lot of factors that have led it to be something that people just haven’t paid attention to historically. But that’s now changing for a variety of reasons.
NYLP: Are you including yourself as one of the 30 to 40 experts in New York City on boilers?
Lee: I actually, you know what, I know very specific things about it. I probably know more than 99.99% of people. But you know, I look at my co-founder who’s been basically doing this for 20 years and the conversations I’ve seen him have where he’ll go into a boiler room and he’ll ask a question and he’ll say, have you ever noticed that there’s condensate underneath this pipe at like three o’clock in the afternoon. And you can just see the guy’s like, yeah, how do you know that? And it’s that level of expertise and he really drives a lot of that in our business.
NYLP: And so how did you get into boilers? No one was paying attention. Why?
Lee: You know, I grew up and I was a child and I was like, you know what I want to do, I want to run boilers as an adult.
NYLP: I want to be in the boiler business.
Lee: In the boiler business. Right. Exactly how it was not. So I come from a background of tech startups. I started my first company when I was 19 years old. I’ve been doing tech for many, many years. My co-founder was the general manager for a single owner who owned 150 buildings in New York City. Very poor guy, obviously. And while he was overseeing all these buildings, he would look at the fuel bills and he would see one building would be using 20, 30, 40, 50, 60% more fuel per square foot. He went to the owner who was one of the smartest, most savvy owners in the city. And he said, why is this happening? He said, I don’t know. Go talk to the supers. The supers said, I don’t know. I just turn it up when somebody complains. And that was basically the genesis of, hey, there’s probably a problem here that nobody’s paying attention to. And you know, a short 10 years later, what we figured out is that by and large, the majority of boilers in the city are running off of a single outdoor thermometer. If it’s below 55 degrees, that boiler’s kicking on for a certain number of minutes and there’s a knob on the boiler and if you turn the knob up, it runs for more minutes. If you turn it down, it runs for less. So you can guess what kind of happens over 60 years that a boiler’s installed in a building. Mrs. Johnson from apartment four six in 1994 complained that it was too cold and the super didn’t know what to do. So he turns the knob all the way to the right and nobody ever changes it again. And that’s why most apartments in the city you go in in the winter, everybody has their windows open, which is terrible for the owner because they’re just burning way more fuel and that costs them a lot more money, which means rents are higher and it’s terrible for the city because that’s leading to a ton more carbon output.
NYLP: And the Earth.
Lee: And the Earth, yeah. It’s bad for the world. And so, that’s the problem we stumbled into and have been working for the last 10 years to fix.
NYLP: What was the first thing that you did? How did you change this technology that was based on an outdoor thermometer?
Lee: Yeah. I mean, so the first thing, it was a series of probably 9 or 10 major iterations, but the first thing was just building a website that would tell you which of your buildings were performing inefficiently. And we sold a little bit of that, but it was kind of like, okay, great, this one’s performing inefficiently, what do I do with it? And then we kind of made the transition to, okay, well there’s these old school computers from the 1970’s that have phone lines attached to them in the buildings. What if we could pull the data off the boiler to tell you why it was performing inefficiently? So we used to go in and we would run phone lines and we had like, it was a very complex maneuver just to get a stream of data that we would analyze. And we’d say, this is why this building’s performing inefficiently.
NYLP: Like a regular phone line?
Lee: A literally straight up 1960’s phone line. Right.
NYLP: And one of those modems too?
Lee: And one of those modems, yes. Banks of modems, we were like running banks of modems and you know, that got us a certain distance. But then again it was like, well great.
NYLP: And what year was that?
Lee: That was 2007 basically. So we then iterated that and we’re like, okay, technically over the same phone lines, you can actually control these computers from the 70’s. I wonder if we could do that. And basically what we eventually iterated to, is we need to have our own computer. And what we do is we put a computer on the boiler and we put wireless temperature sensors in the apartments themselves. And then we essentially use machine learning to learn how the building responds to different temperatures outside to make sure that the apartments are super comfortable at all times, but to minimize the amount of fuel usage being used to do that.
NYLP: So it sounds to me like a similar technology as Nest or Ecobee with the thermostat temperatures in each individual room or apartment and then you apply that to the boiler.
Lee: So, you can think of it as a building wide Nest that’s a lot more complex. So the Nest, it’s really simple, right? Turn A/C or turn heat off for this apartment or house, you know, based on a temperature. It’s a lot more complex when you have an 85 unit building where there are 85 different apartments and you’re generating steam or hot water in one central place and you’d see it’s either on or off, right? And so you don’t really have complete control over every single room. So you really have to learn how to turn that boiler on and off the most effective way to make sure that even the coldest apartments are getting heat, but you’re not overheating the hottest apartments. And that’s requires a bunch of fancy algorithms that have taken many years to figure out. It also requires having proper sensors in all of the different spaces. And basically learning the profile of that building and how it responds and how it loses heat over time.
NYLP: Well, I was going to say, it sounds incredibly complex. How the hell did you do this?
Lee: Yeah. You start simple, you start really simple and you make improvements. We have an entire engineering team that, you know, is working on this and every year we’re rolling out small updates and we’re like, how do we get an extra half a percent or 1% savings in these buildings while maintaining good apartment temperatures? And it doesn’t sound like much when you’re saying a half a percent, but when you’re talking about thousands of buildings that we’re controlling the heat in, that could be millions and millions of dollars a year and thousands or millions and millions of pounds of carbon output reduced.
NYLP: And how much does this product cost?
Lee: So it depends on the size of the building. A typical install could be anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 install. And then there’s a recurring SAS fee per year per building.
NYLP: What’s that fee?
Lee: That looks like somewhere from, you know, 1,5-600 up to 5,000 a year per building.
NYLP: And what sort of ROI can a building expect?
Lee: Yeah, the ROI is pretty ridiculous. The average payback period, meaning if you put down x dollars, you will fully be paid back on that investment is about 13 months.
NYLP: 13 months?
Lee: 13 months. So every year, almost in a year, you’re basically paying back your investment and then you’re making 100% on your money every single year after that.
NYLP: Are you a nonprofit corporation? Why is the ROI so ridiculous?
Lee: So, you know, our goal is to basically provide an extremely valuable service. It’s why we’re growing so quickly. And you know, our point here is not to, if you’re saving $10,000 a year, take all the $10,000. The goal is we’re a service provider. We can provide this service at a really good, healthy profit margin, but we can also make you a lot of money. And the payback is very fast.
NYLP: You said that the growth has been very accelerated. How accelerated has that been? Can you quantify that a little bit?
Lee: Yeah, we’re growing about a hundred percent year over year. And it’s definitely, things are trending upwards recently largely because this is becoming a focus of the city and there’s been a series of pieces of legislation that have completely changed how owners and managers think about heating and carbon output.
NYLP: Well, I was going to allude to that, particularly in New York, new legislation the green law, energy efficiency has to be increased by 20% or that the energy output has to be decreased by 20% in certain buildings.
Lee: Yeah. So there are two pieces of new legislation that were passed in the last year and a half. The first one is called Local Law 33. And it’s a really simple one. It basically says every building over 25,000 square feet has to have an energy grade starting next year on the front window, front door. So just like a restaurant, you walk up and there’s an A, B, C, D, F same thing that’s going to happen in every building that’s over 25,000 square feet in the city. And a large part of that is how you run your boiler. So that has been enormously helpful because you know management, when you run properties, there’s a million things going on. There’s a leak in this building, the toilet’s over flooding here. This unit needs a new tenant. We got to find one. The last thing you’re typically thinking about is how efficient is my heating system. Now, it’s going to be front and center. When every single person walks in and out of that building, they’re going to see a big D or F on that building. That’s not good. So, that’s been really helpful to us. The other major piece of legislation and the really big one is what’s called Local Law 97 or the Carbon Mobilization Act. And this is a sweeping, groundbreaking piece of legislation that’s setting carbon caps on every building over 25,000 square feet in the city. And so that goes into effect in 2024 and there are a lot of buildings that are going to be hit with massive, massive penalties. So, a huge piece of that is how efficiently you run your boiler. So, it’s almost effectively becoming law that you have to run your building more efficiently. And every year after 2024, those caps go down. So, you know, we’re very strongly encouraging people to make the upgrades that are very cost effective and have a high ROI now for two reasons. One, you don’t want to get hit with gigantic fines. The cost of our product is probably one 10th what the violation you might pay the first year is right. The second is even if you’re on a good path through 2024 if you don’t put in the low hanging fruit now you’re not going to know what you have to do for 2028, 2029, 2030, 2031 and so you might get to 2029 and find out all of a sudden you have six months to replace every single window in the building, put in a completely new boiler, change the roof. That’s a bad place to be from a capital budgeting and expenditure perspective.
NYLP: Yeah. Particularly for building owners who want to plan and understand their revenue.
Lee: Correct.
NYLP: So it seems like you’re in the right place, New York, at the right time where all this legislation is coming in and people are thinking about greenhouse gases and energy efficiency more. You’re growing very rapidly. How has it been doing business in New York? I can’t imagine a place with more boilers per capita than New York City.
Lee: Yeah, I mean New York is, there’s definitely some luck to having us being in New York to spot this problem. But I do want to actually point out that this is not just strictly in New York. We actually have an office in Boston. Same thing in Boston. There are tons and tons of buildings. Chicago, DC, Philadelphia, Ohio. I mean anywhere that it gets cold, there are buildings that have boilers and they’re all running inefficiently. So it is a nationwide and actually global problem. Same thing in Europe. So you know, New York is definitely a great place to start but we’re very excited about, you know, our expansion into Boston and other areas as well.
NYLP: And what’s the lifespan of a boiler?
Lee: So boilers typically can last 40, 50, 60 years. I mean most are rated for 30 to 40 years. But when you look at a lot of these boilers from the 1960’s 1970’s a lot of them are still going and they’re working pretty well and actually decently efficiently.
NYLP: And what’s to stop one of these boiler manufacturers from including this technology in their new boilers. They say, you know what, this is a new area that we want to take over and these guys at Heat Watch are doing this but we’re big boiler and we’re going to take them on.
Lee: So what we see, you know, I always look at like macro trends, right? But what I think is happening in the building equipment space is what has already happened in more advanced technologies spaces. There is a fundamental shift occurring from a hardware product driven market to a software driven market. So just like there were six or seven dominant companies that made cell phones and they were really good at like designing physical plastic enclosures and like putting antennas on and those things like Nokia, right? And a whole bunch of others, Ericsson, you name the company. And then there was this moment which happened in 2007 where Apple came along and was like, mm, it’s not going to be like that. It’s now all software. And really what drives the evolution is, how well you can write software and how well you can provide service. And that is a completely different industry with a completely different set of people that are required to do that well and software is eating every industry. It just hasn’t come to the building industry yet and it’s now happening. And so you have a lot of these companies that make these industrial controls and they’ve made their business off of a model of we are a great manufacturer of electronic equipment and we sell this equipment for millions of dollars and then they disappear. That is not how it can work anymore. We go in and we sell our equipment, but we do it at a very low cost. And our business model is very aligned with the property owners’ incentives. We make our money by you staying around for the next 10 years. That means that if we don’t do a good job and we don’t actually deliver results every single year, you’re going to stop paying us. We’re not going to make money. So there is a huge impetus to make sure our software is amazing and every year we’re making better and more efficient software and it requires teams of software engineers, data scientists. This is a whole new field that the industrial control people in the boiler companies just do not understand and very likely will never understand.
NYLP: So, what technology differentiates a boiler from 2019, 2020 from a boiler from 1990 something like that?
Lee: Yeah, I mean there have been substantial innovations in the boiler space. I mean boilers can get, you know, probably 50%, can be 50% more efficient in how they combust. What we focus on though is a very simple thing. It’s literally just turning the boiler on and off. It works with old school boilers. It works with new efficient boilers. It is wonderful. If you want to make your building more efficient, fantastic. Upgrade your boilers, buy new ones that’ll cost you 1 million bucks, 2 million bucks, and you’ll get an increase of efficiency by 10, 15, 20 percentage points or you can spend 10 grand and you’ll get an efficiency increase of 20 to 30% in a month. So that’s really where our sweet spot is. It doesn’t matter how efficient or lack of efficient the boiler is, you will run better if there is technology controlling the on off states of those boilers in the most efficient manner.
NYLP: Once someone has Heat Watch technology installed on their boiler and they’ve been using it for three years, you say that you are trying to make it more efficient and show that efficiency, but winter temperatures change. One season can be different than one a few years later or a few years before. How are you able to communicate that efficiency to your customers to say, you know what, actually it was a colder winter, you’re more efficient even though you spend more on fuel?
Lee: So, it’s one of the biggest pieces of education that we have to do for our customers because very often we’ll install a control and let’s say it’s a co-op board, somebody on the co-op board will think about it a year later and they’ll be like, I wonder how Heat Watch did, let me go look at the fuel bills from this January versus last January. Now you can imagine what the problem is with just looking at the fuel bills this January versus last January, right? First of all, this winter might’ve been 40% colder or warmer, right? So first they might, by definition we might’ve saved them zero in theory and we might look like cockeye geniuses because you know, the winter was so much warmer this year that it was 40% less. So we try to explain. So first of all, the first thing we do is we put on the site a savings in real time. So you can see month by month what we’re saving. But the way that we do it is we adjust by something known as a degree day. So a degree day is a standard unit of heating measure in the industry, it basically is 55 or 65 minus the temperature. So let’s say you’re using 65 as the base. If it’s 40 degrees out, there are 25 degree days in that period. So what we’ll do is we’ll add up all the degree days for one winter versus another and we’ll adjust for those number of degree days. It’s not a perfect measure, but it’s a pretty good measure to standardize across different seasons where one heating season will be freezing and the other one will be very mild.
NYLP: So you’d have some form of advanced analytics that you’re communicating, but you brought up something that I also want us to talk about is that sales process getting into a building, particularly in New York and other commercial buildings, it seems like the technology is best for larger buildings. How has that sales process been? Because you started up, I imagine day one, you have these modems that you’re doing and then you know what you say, this is something that you property owners should use. It seems to me it has to be a difficult sales process, at least when you’re starting off.
Lee: Yeah, it’s absolutely a brutal sales process because of the nature of this industry for a couple of reasons. And it’s funny because if you think about it, if I came to you Hal and I was like, all right, I have an investment opportunity for you. You give me $100, I’m going to give you $100 back every single year forever.
NYLP: You sound like Bernie Madoff to me.
Lee: Right? You’d be like, are you crazy? Like that’s the best offer I’ve ever heard of in my life. That’s literally what we’re saying to property owners. And yet it takes months, months for the average single sale to close. Our average completion of getting the entire portfolio for anybody is about two to three years. And the reason is, is that there are thousands of companies saying they will save energy in this city selling services. I can count on my hands the number that actually do it. So every single property owner has been hit with so many of these pitches that this level of skepticism is beyond belief. So the way that we’ve countered that is every one of the large owners we work with, we do hundreds of related buildings, hundreds of left racks buildings. How did we get into them? The same way. We went to them, took us several months to convince them, give us a couple buildings, just two buildings. If you don’t like it, we’ll give you your money back after a year. Give us a couple of buildings, we take the buildings, we save them a tremendous amount of money. And then at the end of the first year, they’re like, okay, we assume this wasn’t a fluke. We’ll give you 10 more. And then we do the same thing again the second year. And then by the third year they give us the rest of their buildings. So it’s a very long sales process. There is a lot of skepticism. And it’s, you know, it’s just persistence. It’s constant. We have an amazing head of sales and a great sales team and you know, they’re just super persistent. They keep following up. You have nothing to lose here. There’s no harm in trying it, give it a try. Let’s see what happens. You know slowly but surely you get to having thousands of buildings using the technology.
NYLP: And you’re saying that the proposition is that part of the business plan, that it’s too good to be true or almost too good to be true, that it will give you your ROI back in a year or two and say, you know what, this is why you should do that? Is that it?
Lee: It’s part of it for sure. I mean, it’s, you know, I mean every type of investment you make, there’s risk reward, right? So like the reward here is substantial and the risk is that somebody who’s never worked with us before, doesn’t have any guarantees that it’ll work. So it’s certainly helpful that we can go in and say there’s pretty much very few other investments you can make that will give you an ROI like this one.
NYLP: And so what’s been your biggest challenge in terms of getting this up and running?
Lee: The first is just the sales side that we talked about. It is extremely, it’s like the sales process is long. There’s a skeptical customer base. You know, there’s an inherent resistance and everybody’s busy. How your boilers run are typically your 903rd priority against filling apartment 3B and 6F and the leak in apartment 9J. Right? So that is a very difficult aspect of this industry. The other major I’d say difficult part is that we are in an enormously complex business. If you look at Instagram, their business is a software company, they make software. That’s all they do. That’s what it is, right? Not saying it’s super easy to be Instagram, but you’re making a software business. We have a software business, right? We have the software that runs it. We also have a hardware manufacturing business and hardware is so inordinately complex. Like you put hardware in after a year and a half, you find that 1.5% of the buildings spontaneously, randomly the computer reboots. Why does that happen? It takes you six months to figure it out. Finally you figure out that some weird electrical arc off of some random types of boilers are causing some kind of interference on your hardware. So now you know what the problem is, you have to build a revision of the hardware, then you have to test it for three months from now, 9 to 10 months into it. Then you have to go through FCC and UL approval, 50,000 thousand dollars another x months. Then you have to go to manufacturing another four months, right? And then you have to put in a million, $2 million of inventory and you have all the product that’s being shipped and has to be assembled. So like that’s a gigantic business unto itself. We have to do that. And the software business and on top of it we have a service and installation team. You have skilled laborers that are going into boiler rooms. If they don’t put the sensor in the right place the right way, the algorithms can’t work. If they forget to do, you know, check something before they leave, they have to go back. The algorithms don’t work. So you have three really complex businesses with a lot of moving parts that all have to work perfectly for this to go right. And it’s really truly taken us over 10 years to get that to be reliable and work well every single time.
NYLP: And not to mention you need rocket scientists to do these algorithms.
Lee: Right. You need very, very smart people doing the algorithms. So it’s, it’s very hard. Yeah.
NYLP: And I was going to ask how hard is it to work with different types of boilers? Because I have to imagine there have been many iterations of different types of boilers over a 30 year lifespan that these things can be operable?
Lee: For sure. And not only are there different types of boilers, there are different types of heating systems. You have hydronic, you have steam, you have vacuum systems, three-way valve, like there are just, you have city steam. Like there are tons of different types of systems that are out there. And even within that variety, every building has its own weird unique characteristics. This return line is in this weird place and it’s hard to identify. There’s some kind of weird wiring going to the boiler that we haven’t seen before. So like there’s a lot of complexities to that as well.
NYLP: And what about having Internet in the boiler room? You need internet, right?
Lee: You need Internet, right. And not only do you need internet, the Internet needs to be reliable. You know, like think about your cell phone, how flaky it can be from time to time on signal. Now imagine trying to do that reliably in a boiler room two stories down underground, right? So you know, it’s taken us 10 years to figure out a very specific type of modem that’s reliable to know how to position an external antenna in just the right way to get a certain number of bars to have software that’s checking before the service tech can leave that the number of the signal strength is sufficient that with variations and things that can happen, it will always have signal. Then on top of it, we had to, we’re controlling the heat, the boilers in thousands of buildings throughout the city. You can imagine what a security vulnerability that could be if that’s not done correctly. So we don’t even run our technology over the public internet. We built a private network where all of the data is sent over the private network and never goes out onto the public internet. So there’s a lot of moving parts on that as well.
NYLP: You built your own network?
Lee: We built our own private network, it runs over Verizon’s network and then directly goes into our private cloud. Never hitting the public internet.
NYLP: Well, I was going to ask about that as well because as a real estate attorney, I know that there’s the warranty of habitability for residential and obviously in commercial people are paying rent and expecting a certain temperature. What happens if the boiler goes and has that ever happened?
Lee: We can’t control whether a boiler is working right. We can turn the boiler on and off more effectively. But if your boiler goes down, what we will do is tell you about it faster than you would have known otherwise. But you still have to send somebody out to fix it. And that can be a mess. A part of running boilers the right way with the right algorithms is you reduce wear and tear. So you reduce the probability that you’re going to have boilers go down. And there are a couple of people in the space who run boilers very badly. Their controls run algorithms that what’s called short cycling, turn the boiler on and off constantly which causes major problems, wear and tear causes boilers to die much faster. So a lot of what we’ve spent time doing is making sure that we’re optimizing this not only to save fuel and provide optimal apartment temperatures, but to make sure that the boilers are running in a way that’s going to make maximum lifespan for that boiler.
NYLP: Has a boiler ever faulted because of your technology?
Lee: I mean I’m sure there are, there have definitely been, you know, times where something has gone wrong, the boiler has run too much or not enough but we’ve built many, many systems in place over the years to make sure that if anything is going wrong that we identify it quickly. The other thing that we do that’s very unique is we have a team of boiler monitors whose only job is to be watching the data coming off these boilers so that when something does go wrong, not even with us, usually with the boiler itself, they will literally pick up the phone. If somebody is not responding that there’s a leak or that the boiler is not on or that somebody bypassed our control, they will keep calling the super. If the super doesn’t answer, they’ll call the agent. If the agent doesn’t answer, they’ll call the general manager to make sure that it gets addressed and that’s a very critical piece of our service because if the facilities and the operations of the system are not running correctly, it doesn’t matter how effective our control is. It’s not going to do anything.
NYLP: And you’ve been at this for, it seems like over 10 years. It’s a long period of time. It seems like from the outside you’re really in a good place right now, but were there times where you were thinking about this where you’re thinking, I’m in the boiler business and it’s taking so long and all these problems and all these things that can go wrong and I don’t want to build my own private network for the Internet? It must’ve been so hard to get to this place.
Lee: I have never started a technology company where I have not had that feeling at least a thousand times at some point, you know, throughout the journey. You know, one of the things that I look for having done this so many times now, is that there has to be some undying belief or passion you have for what you’re doing. Otherwise, you will never get through the hard times and there will be hard times. We had a couple years ago, Verizon, somebody on the Verizon side made some kind of error and they disabled all of our modems in the city. And the best part of it is we were like, okay, well first of all, it took us four hours to figure out why that happened. Right. And then realized that Verizon had messed up and then..
NYLP: And it was probably in the winter too, right?
Lee: It definitely was in the winter. I was in a boiler room in a crawl space while this was happening right at 10 o’clock at night. And we find out that it was their fault. They figured it out and they were like, okay, great. We’ll just restore it. They’re like, okay, but you’re going to have to manually go and reset each modem one by one after we do that. So you know, you’re talking about thousands of things, right? Like you’re talking about thousands of buildings now that we either have to send our service techs out to and be resetting modems or call the super get the super to do it, which isn’t always as easy as it sounds, right? So you know, there are brutal, brutal moments, right? If you don’t have some undying belief about why you’re doing this and why, like you care, you will never get through it. The thing that I think keeps me going is that when you look at what we’re doing, we’re on, on average across our 2000 plus buildings. We cut fuel by 21% means we cut carbon output by 21% on every building we touch. That’s the equivalent of taking five cars off the road. We’re taking 10,000 cars off the road and we’ve just begun to hit it. We’re in a couple of thousand buildings, there are 50,000 buildings in New York City alone. There are 5 million in the continental United States, 40 million globally. You know, the impact that we can have is just unmeasurable, like we will be in three or four years the largest reducer of carbon output probably on the planet. So like that to me is on the shitty days when Verizon messed up or something else happened and I’m not meaning to shit on Verizon, they’re actually really great and their technology is amazing.
NYLP: You’re not calling the general help line.
Lee: But like, you know, you need to have something that when things go wrong and like the world is against you, which it often is in the startup world. You really have to have some undying belief in why, what you’re doing matters.
NYLP: So what is your belief? Is your belief environmentally focused? Is it profit focus? Is it a double bottom line? What’s really kept you going in those times?
Lee: It’s a rare time where you get a business where you have some measurable good that you’re doing that also is directly correlated with the business growing financially. Every building we take on grows the business financially and also cuts carbon outputs. And that’s just like a magical thing. It’s very rare that you get to work on a company like that and I feel very lucky that I have that ability.
NYLP: That is a wonderful note to end things on. Lee Hoffman, thank you for stepping onto the New York Launch Pod and sharing your time with us.
Lee: My pleasure, Hal. Thank you for having me.
NYLP: How do people learn more about you, Heat Watch, the perfect building size?
Lee: Yeah. We’re available at heatwatch.com and you can find me at lee@heatwatch.com if you want to email me for whatever reason.
NYLP: And if you want to learn more about the New York Launch Pod, you can follow us on social media @nylaunchpod or visit nylaunchpod.com for transcripts of every episode, including this one. And if you’re a super fan of the show, Lee are you a superfan?
Lee: I’m a super fan of the show.
NYLP: If you’re a super fan, like Lee Hoffman, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It is greatly appreciated and does help people discover the show.
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