With recent extreme weather events and other natural disasters, consumer demand for solar panels and batteries has accelerated. After the Texas power grid failure, web traffic to Sunrun (Nasdaq: RUN), the nation’s leading installer of residential rooftop solar panels and batteries, jumped 350 percent in the state. Comparably co-Founder/CEO Jason Nazar recently had the timely opportunity to chat with the company’s co-founder and CEO, Lynn Jurich, for Comparably and Entrepreneur’s Leadership Lessons series.
These insightful episodes spotlight the minds of successful leaders – from the CEOs of Zoom and Nextdoor to GoDaddy and DocuSign – as they share one-of-a kind experienced advice for both current and future entrepreneurs. And this hour-long conversation with the brilliant Jurich was no exception.
Jurich studied science, tech, and math at Stanford, where she also received her MBA, before beginning her career at venture capitalist firm Summit Partners. She was one of few female VCs there who completed investments with an aggregate market value of over $900 million in the financial services and technology sectors. But it wasn’t long before she had found her mission — “to create a planet run by the sun” — which led to Sunrun being launched 13 years ago.
As the disruptive supplier of residential solar power, Sunrun is now a national leader in solar energy, battery storage, and energy services. With more than 550,000 customers across the country and more than 8,500 employees, Sunrun has been delivering affordable, clean, and reliable energy directly to consumers since 2007.
“I’ve always been somebody who loves nature and is really committed to the environment and solving hard problems, and the biggest problem of our generation is to help figure out how to use resources more sustainably,” Jurich says. “We thought this could disrupt the entire energy industry from having to rely on big centralized power plants and move it to a more decentralized model. So, we invented what we call solar-as-a-service. We’re a SaaS company,” she jokes.
However, when trying to get the business off the ground, Jurich faced some real resistance: “The near-universal feedback I got was, ‘This is too sophisticated for you, little girl.’” This small-minded backlash only served to heighten and sharpen Jurich’s natural competitive streak.
Noting the general lack of humor that accompanies most discussions of environmental concerns, Jurich was pleased that comedian and “Real Time” host Bill Maher took time out on his HBO series to thank Sunrun for helping get his home solar setup finalized, a problem he had been trying to get solved with California officials for months. It had become a running joke on the show until Jurich’s company helped make it happen.
“The ambitions around infrastructure are there,” Jurich says of the situation Maher faced in California. “Everything is just too bureaucratic and takes forever to get done. And whenever you can add humor in our industry, it’s so much better, since we’re usually all so serious.”
Here are 12 more takeaways from Nazar’s talk with Lynn Jurich:
1) Consider anything within the realms of human potential a possibility for you. Jurich paraphrases Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius when she describes the innate drive and ambition she has harbored since childhood. “I always wanted to do whatever I did at the very highest level,” she says, which included early ambitions to be a scientist, university president, or Prima ballerina. She admits to reading almost the entire biography section of her local public library when she was younger, spending time really digging into what “extraordinary people passed on for us to learn and build on.”
2) Learn how to cold call. Jurich says her natural inclination is towards shyness, which she had to decide to willfully overcome when she started her career as a financial analyst. “I appreciate that in sales, the skills you develop there are everything,” she says. In her early days, her job was calling a lot of companies, filling quotas for the number of CEOs she had spoken to, and working on the financial model at night. She says that by putting the time in to learn those techniques, the process taught her how to connect with people and how to deal with rejection.
3) Don’t be intimidated when dealing with money. In her experience speaking with and coaching female entrepreneurs, Jurich found that women are not as comfortable with financials. “I think a lot of people are really intimidated to raise outside capital or to negotiate contracts,” she says, adding that if you don’t know what money really is you stand to be intimated by it. “I saw some of the best entrepreneurs asking so-called stupid questions around raising capital, but they weren’t intimidated by it because they saw for what it was.”
4) Consider the non-verbal part of the sale. The energy and the presence you bring to a sales call is hugely important, Jurich says – perhaps even more so than the content of the call. One needs to develop an internal mental and physical appreciation for it.
5) Don’t become too attached to a concrete outcome. If you do, you can lose sight of really enjoying yourself, and have your feeling of self-worth and success become too tied up in concrete achievements. “If you can let go of that need, it’s all a lot more enjoyable and generates more creativity and a better outcome,” Jurich says. “You don’t really know what is ultimately good or bad in terms of a long-term effect on your career, and that has really allowed me to have more freedom.”
6) You can be both young and wise at the same time. There’s no reason to wait for wisdom to accrue only with age when there is a lot of information about best practices already available out there. Jurich says having to choose between youthful energy or hard-earned wisdom is a false trade-off: “I do believe in having a conscious leadership philosophy, which is to approach challenges from a place of abundance, curiosity, and freedom versus a place of constraint and fear.”
7) Equity is a numbers thing, so use your data. Getting to pay parity and equal representation is not an insurmountable problem. Sunrun is one of very few companies who can tout an executive team that is 50 percent female. From very early on, Sunrun also committed itself to gender pay equity. “We have a big company and we made adjustments where necessary. And similarly, for people of color and the disabled community, we make sure we’re looking at the numbers and making those adjustments.”
8) A business with a positive societal impact like Sunrun will attract less of a mercenary capitalistic ecosystem. It also gives you the right foundation to attract the right kind of people with the right kind of motivations to your company. “You want to attract talent with a customer orientation versus just a capitalistic orientation,” Jurich says.
9) Don’t be too linear in your thinking when it comes to your career path. Jurich suggests people should take a long view on their career, and not attempt to frontload their early years with every achievement as if life is short. Asked what unit of time is most important to her, she intriguingly says, “generations.” “I’m 41. I’d like to work for 60 more years. Make sure to think about how much time you’ve got and the amount of skills that you can build,” she says. “You do not need to focus so obsessively on the next two or three years.”
10) Don’t bother trying to hold off life until later because it also has its own schedule. Jurich and her husband waited seven or eight years to have their first child. Despite their prudence, life had its own plans, and it so happened Sunrun’s IPO came just after she had a baby. “I had my first child about a month before the roadshow started, so I brought the baby with me and nursed for that whole 30 city run,” she says. Jurich’s second child was born just before a Sunrun earnings call, further illustrating that life is on its own unknowable schedule.
11) Emotions are real and need to be faced. Repression of emotions is not a catch-all method that can work in any walk of life, not even business. It’s best to be authentic and face it head-on so you can move on. “We often repress so much sadness and so many other things,” Jurich says. “I try to create a little more space for that in the company, but not in a cheesy or uncomfortable way.”
In terms of the future of Sunrun and solar energy, Jurich is especially excited about the commitment to carbonized energy and the eventual elimination of the use of fossil fuels. Whatever the future of energy in the country holds, she knows Sunrun is going to be an important part of it.
“Using our existing rooftops and our own cars and our own batteries in our homes, we will be able to power 30-40 percent of the electric need in the U.S. and even globally. I’m really excited to do that. The business was first just the ‘solar as a service’ product, but now we’re really building a distributed energy system. It’s like the energy internet,” Jurich says.
It’s no wonder why Jurich was named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business in 2013 and Forbes’ Women to Watch in 2015. To learn more about Jurich’s philosophical approach to leadership and the lessons she learned along the way, watch the full webinar.