Driving Solar Growth Through Financing: SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive (Part 2)

SM: When did you come to the US?

LR: I came to San Jose in 1998 to play in the World Championships of Underwater Hockey representing South Africa. I fell in love with the Bay Area, and my brother was already here working for a company that was later acquired by Compaq in 1999.

One of his responsibilities was to set up the IT capabilities of remote facilities. In doing this he realized that he needed to develop technology to enable him to remotely support the various PCs. My brother is the guy with all the technology brain in the company. Peter is a genius when it comes to understanding process and applying technology to streamlining a process.

SM: Is Peter your older or younger brother?

LR: He is my older brother by three years. He left when he was 17 to go to Queens University in Canada, where he studied computer science. He knew I had business experience and he had the technology background to start a company called Everdream. It was a software company.

SM: What were you trying to do with Everdream?

LR: The name certainly could have used some improvement, but the idea was to create a company with a support organization to manage hundreds of thousands of computers remotely without having access to the network infrastructure. In order to do that we had to develop a ton of technology to address all the variables that could go wrong with these computers. We created some incredible technology. We raised a fair amount of money, $106 million in venture capital. Draper Fisher Jurveston gave us our first check of $2 million to go start this.

SM: What year was this?

LR: It was 1999, the peak of the bubble. We had proven our model for a year on our own. We had customers, which gave us credibility to get more customers even at our young age. I was 22 and may have been the youngest person they ever funded.

We managed that company to grow and support hundreds of thousands of computers over the next eight years. We got the company to a point where we could leave and Mark Hoffman came in around 2005.

SM: Had you raised $106 million by then?

LR: I raised $86 million by then. We did another $20 million round when Mark came in.

SM: Who funded you with all of this money?

LR: We had many investors. DFJ, Rho, New World Ventures, Siebel, HP, and many others.

SM: How far did you get the company through 2005?

LR: Very far. We got all the technology, and we had recurring revenue streams although we had still not crossed the profitability line. Before we left we established our relationships with IBM and Dell. Those relationships worked well. Dell’s activity started increasing.

SM: What was your relationship with Dell?

LR: They were deploying our technology on more and more computers. They started realizing that we had good technology so they acquired the company in 2007. It was a good outcome.

Peter and I left the company in 2006 after running and managing it. After doing 80-hour weeks in enterprise software for eight years we were just not as excited as we used to be. We wanted to do something that had more of an environmental change.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Driving Solar Growth Through Financing: SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive
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