Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to?

Martin Manniche: 2005. Then the first new thing for me was that I was no more working for myself. I was joining a big company. I worked for Cisco Consumers Group where I eventually became the CTO. That was an interesting journey – coming in as a Senior Director and working your way up through the organization to become the CTO. I had no knowledge of networking.

Normally Cisco likes to see their CTOs have an MBA or a doctorate degree. I was an aberration, but as I said to the executive team, I have a lot of MBA experience of building companies for many years. I felt I’ve done my MBA many times. I was with Cisco for four and a half years. Cisco had a tremendous amount of talent. I would say that my strength is being passionate about what I do and get people to be as passionate as me.

Sramana Mitra: 2010 was when you left Cisco?

Martin Manniche: 2009.

Sramana Mitra: What was the next move?

Martin Manniche: Right after that, I founded Greenwave Systems.

Sramana Mitra: What was going on in the industry that gave you the idea that Greenwave was the right opportunity for your next move?

Martin Manniche: When you are in technology, the key point is executing a foundation that will be an income stream for your company. Another point is maintaining enough freedom in your engineering team to build your roadmap. On top of that, you have maybe 20% of the time to do future thinking. When you start a company, you are focusing on the last two. I believe, at that time, there was nothing called IoT.

In that time frame, the economy was not doing very well. I normally say that you start when the market is tough. All the guys will say, “This doesn’t make sense at all. Why are you doing that?” Companies were laying people off. It was easier to hire. As there was a depression in the economy, it’s also important to figure out the big trends.

At that time, the big trends were energy optimization and making sure every device became connected. It was time to figure out how to build a horizontal foundation that can scale in volume, in devices, and can go to all these different segments. What was very unusual with starting Greenwave was we actually spent four to five months doing nothing else but architecture. Normally when you are a startup company, you have an idea and you do some proof point. Based on this, you try to raise money. We raised money extremely fast. We actually raised $6 million for our A round and it took less than 10 days.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Scaling an Energy Management Venture: Martin Manniche, CEO of Greenwave Systems
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