Hydro Energy Entrepreneur Wayne Krouse (Part 3)

SM: So let’s go back to the point where you were seeing this in the Middle East. How long did it take you to jump ship and start your own thing?

WK: I also read a book, Atlas Shrugged, at the same time I was making those trips.

SM: I was 16 when I read that book. It changed my life.

WK: That is exactly what I tell people. Not only that, but it helped give me the confidence to just do it. It is an incredible book. That was part of the impetus to try and do it on my own. I read that in the summer of 2001 and started the company in 2002. We did not officially incorporate until early 2003. I was working on the patent in 2002 and I quit on December 14, 2001.

SM: What was quitting like? Was is scary?

WK: I was actually fired. I was getting a lot of pushback from the Europeans on a particular product. In Europe the approach is to be very cautious, manage relationships carefully, and not push customers to do things that are not proven yet. They had tried one or two projects which were not nearly as successful as what we had done in the US. Long story short, I felt the whole period I was doing international business development they were sandbagging me and did not want to help push this technology out to the marketplace. It was making it difficult to get sales in Europe.

I approached some folks on Wall Street to form a company to back me in buying that technology from Nalco/Exxon and try and run it on my own. I had gotten very far into negotiations with the global marketing manager, Sandra Stewart, and I got to the point where I needed them to give me a letter of intent so I could start putting the money arrangements together. I had the meeting with her and then several weeks went by with no action. She then went out of town, as did my boss, and one of the other global marketing guys came in and said “pack it up, you are out of here now.”

SM: They thought you were a troublemaker?

WK: They thought I was going to be a bigger troublemaker than I already was. I had no apologies for being a troublemaker. I like to push people. I don’t believe in comfort zones and I don’t think people make progress sitting in a comfort zone.

The hydrokinetics idea had already started coming together, and I had been thinking about it. It coalesced in the spring of 2002 at my mother-in-law’s house in one of those ‘eureka’ moments. We were at the pool and I jumped up and went in and started working for three or four hours straight. After that we filed patent applications and I spent a lot of my own money trying to travel around and pitch the idea.

There were only one or two cleantech funds in the US at that time, so I may have been ahead of the market. It was a terrible time to do anything, the market was completely locked up. I spent a lot of my money and it got to the point I was tapped out and had nothing left in late 2003. I told my wife if anything happened with the patent we were going to take this thing on and keep on going. If nothing else happened, I would go back to work for the man. It was in the end of 2005 that the patent came out.

SM: You were on your own this whole time?

WK: I was; it was a long journey. People say it is lonely at the top, and it can be. To run a company and start it from nothing can be very isolating from family and friends who want your time for various reasons. Some people just do not understand. It is hard to even explain it or put it into a context they can relate to.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Hydro Energy Entrepreneur Wayne Krouse
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