Domain Knowledge Wins: Larry Goldenhersh, CEO of Enviance (Part 1)

Larry Goldenhersh is the founder and CEO of Enviance, a software supplier with solutions for greenhouse gas management, carbon accounting, regulatory compliance and sustainability. Prior to founding Enviance, Mr. Goldenhersh was a partner at Irell & Manella, a Los Angeles firm of more than 150 lawyers, where he served on the firm’s management committee. Mr. Goldenhersh specialized in complex commercial litigation, including intellectual property litigation and environmental/resource disputes. Mr. Goldenhersh has published regularly on trends in environmental compliance, carbon risk management, carbon accounting, software as a service and supply chain environmentalism and has lectured at Duke University on performance-based compliance organizations. Mr. Goldenhersh holds a bachelors degree from Duke University and a law degree from the University of Virginia.

Sramana: Larry, let’s go back to the beginning. Where does your story start?

Larry Goldenhersh: I am from St. Louis, Missouri. I did my undergraduate at Duke University and I went to law school at the University of Virginia. After that I clerked for a federal district judge in Colorado. I then spent the next 16 years practicing law in Los Angeles before I started Enviance.

Sramana: When did you start Enviance, and how did your legal background become the bridge to what became Enviance?

Larry Goldenhersh: I started Enviance in 1999. My legal background and experience played directly into the founding of the company. I was a strategic advisor to very large companies for 15 years. During the course of providing that kind of advice I came to understand that large companies are not monolithic robots. They are looking for an economically viable pathway to embrace sustainability. This experience was really seared into my mind during my representation of the H. G. Heinz Company when they decided to take their tuna subsidiary, StarKist Foods, and make it dolphin safe.

I was the West Coast lawyer for Heinz at the time, and I watched the reaction of the decision makers when they were first told that the use of bad nets to catch tuna resulted in the needless slaughter of thousands of dolphins every year. That had a very serious environmental impact because of the type of fishing gear used. They were told that the switch to long line was probably economically neutral. As soon as that news washed over the decision makers, the conversation shifted to the dolphins. That was an instance where a Fortune 50 company made the decision to terminate the use of bad nets around the world. They were one of the top two providers of tuna in the world, and they essentially changed procurement policy globally based on information that gave them an economically viable path to sustainability.

It was that type of experience that taught me that companies are looking for economically viable pathways to sustainability. In 1999, the Internet was coming of age and I had experience with resource and sustainability issues as a lawyer and advisor. I saw the Internet as a great democratizer of computing. It was something that would allow companies and government organizations to purchase computing for the first time that they were previously unable to afford. I set out to leverage the Internet to provide companies and government organizations with a system to provide them an economically viable path to sustainability.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Domain Knowledge Wins: Larry Goldenhersh, CEO of Enviance
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