1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julianne Zimmerman of Reinventure Capital (Part 3)

Julianne Zimmerman: I never aspired to be in the venture capital world. I started off as an aerospace engineer. I went to MIT when I was 16 because I had wanted to be an astronaut since I was 12.

I thought that that’s how you became an astronaut. It’s not the worst idea, but it’s a bit naive. This was the way I thought about it. I double majored in Literature.

I had a wonderful first career. I spent 14 years working for a tiny company here in Boston. I joined in the 1980s. This was also before we had the cultural phenomenon of entrepreneurship. This was a point in time where if you were an aerospace engineer, you went to one of the big aerospace houses.

It was alarming for friends and family that I was employee number seven at that tiny upstart company. Many people gave me advice to reconsider and get a real job. It turned out to be a really phenomenal experience because I worked not only with astronauts and cosmonauts in NASA, Kenyan Space Agency, European Space Agency but with scientists all over the world. My team and I set precedents, of which several have still not been surpassed. We accomplished amazing things and won awards. It was just an amazing adventure.

I was ultimately a finalist twice at a NASA astronaut selection process, which was as close as you can get. I was ultimately not selected. That was both a signal and also a huge disappointment. It was a heartbreaking end to a spectacular experience.

In addition to all of that, it was not just phenomenal hands-on training in entrepreneurship but also a really excellent grounding in a discipline of looking at a status quo and the established thinking, and asking questions about what is missing, and to actually prove it.

At the end of that run, I had more adventures and more professional challenges and experiences than many get to enjoy in an entire working life. I had done everything I could do to achieve my aspiration to be an astronaut.

I really felt that I had a great opportunity and privilege to think about what else would I care about doing as much as serving the global science community. After thinking and looking around, I ended up co-founding a clean energy company. This is before the CleanTech boom.

My colleagues and I spent about two years teaching more people than I care to remember. Many of whom told us that no one in their right mind will ever invest in clean energy. We were called hippies and communists. I was personally told that I was delusional.

Once again, well-meaning people told me that I should rethink this madness. Fortunately, they turned out to be wrong. We have now had a boom and somewhat of a bust. The clean energy era is unfolding.

After a couple of years of getting nowhere, that company became one of the path breakers in the heavy industry part of the world serving six-phase power generators and heavy onsite power generators. It changed the conversation from absolutely no way. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julianne Zimmerman of Reinventure Capital
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