Article Written By Justis Earle, SNAP CLIP Founder / Silicon Valley IPO

To my knowledge, Tigo Energy is the first company to put internet-connected electronics inside solar panels. As of May 2023, Tigo became a publicly traded company with a peak market cap of $1.5 billion. I started at Tigo in 2009 before the term ‘IoT’ was popularized (nerd lore).

In 2008 I graduated college in the worst economy since the great depression. Shortly after graduation, I had a bike accident that left me with a broken ankle and no job, quickly followed by the foreclosure of our house. And no, I am not plagiarizing a country song.

This was one of the most painful seasons of my life

A close friend of mine got me an interview at a curious new startup in Los Gatos next door to Netflix, but it was for an entry position helping his team pack boxes. I had just pushed myself to the brink of sanity earning a STEM degree, so the prospect of laboring away in a small windowless room didn’t match the romantic expectations of a new grad.

My interview was awkward and it became clear my degree in Biology and Environmental Studies wasn’t directly applicable to building green technology. Other than my teenage skills of making tattoo guns from Walkman motors and guitar strings, I had no formal tech background. So I rolled up my sleeves and began this journey by packing boxes.

Little did I know this would lead to my reinvention and Tigo’s unlimited scalability.

When I started in 2009, Tigo had almost no paying customers. By the time I left in 2017, I had led an innovation that enabled our product’s unlimited scalability, managed the software and firmware releases for four million smart solar panels across all seven continents, and project-managed joint ventures with many leading companies in solar.

I am not a trained engineer - so how did I do this?

I felt out of place around so many brilliant engineers when one of them told me, “Someone with a good idea can always hire engineers to build that idea”.

This advice was life-changing. I have lived by this ethos ever since.

1. Follow Your Joy

I was unfamiliar with the technology that comprised Tigo as well as the operational aspects of a product company. I realized nobody is born with knowledge, but we are all born with innate curiosity. So I chased my curiosity.

I invested extra time outside of office hours and treated this environment like a cutting-edge university that was solving global problems in real time. My investment in the company became an investment in myself.

I believe curiosity is joy in movement. When you apply discipline to this joyful movement, it becomes fulfillment. Your best opportunities lie at the intersection of your fulfillment and the world’s needs.

I made this in Canva. I may not be a professional engineer, but I am certainly a professional graphic designer.

2. Build Relationships

When I started we had a dozen people, so getting to know everyone was easy. Eventually, I started welcoming and assisting new hires, bridging gaps in their understanding of our product and company culture. There was no formal position for this blend of technical and cultural onboarding and I enjoyed it.

Helping others and making connections was rewarding, and it also helped me build rapport when I needed to solve problems and collaborate on cross-department innovations.

Building genuine relationships is the most important thing you will ever learn.

3. Constantly Replace Yourself

I found myself outgrowing old ‘job titles’ but still being responsible for the old duties. At one point I gave our lunch guy an unauthorized job interview and convinced an exec to hire him to take over my old duties. It worked, but it was not a popular move with everyone.

A colleague who started before me saw me advancing and made snarky comments about me publically. I pulled him outside and privately asked him to stop talking trash. I also encouraged him that there were enough opportunities for everyone.

Create a culture that rewards innovation, not just long hours.

4. Ask and You Shall Receive

Going to Europe was one of my lifelong dreams - going to Hawaii, Canada, and China were unexpected, wonderful adventures. I expressed a desire to travel and willingly accepted non-sexy destinations early on to prove I was committed to building the company, whether that meant going to Bakersfield or to Paris.

The old-school mentality of “work hard and someone will notice you” had very inconsistent results in this environment. I consistently sought exciting opportunities by asking.

Speak up, as even those close to you don’t know your desires unless you ask.

Me in China. I’m convinced this was Yao Ming’s chair.

5. Take Big Risks (and aggressively mitigate them)

We landed a huge project in France. This 5,500-panel system was going to be the biggest smart solar system in the world and they needed our answer fast. I knew we could pull this off, but I also knew if we didn’t solve our issues with scaling, this project was going to be a nightmare.

I discovered an innovation, but we didn’t have a 5,500-panel system to test it on…nobody did. I led the R&D and maniacally tested it with all the resources we had available and worked closely with the relationships I had built across five departments. I went to France to personally oversee the design of the project.

When you are first, there is no roadmap. We took a huge risk and it went flawlessly because we went equally huge in mitigating the risk.

Me in France. One of these men had a questionable haircut, the other lived in a French castle.

6. Promote Yourself

Our founders routinely said things like, “If you see something that needs to be done, do it”, “Don’t worry about making mistakes,” and fascinatingly, “Promote yourself 20% of the time”.

When I got back from France I took self-promotion very literally. I created my own department and wove this new scaling innovation into every single element of our architecture. This allowed Tigo to build any size system that we could sell.

WE ACHIEVED INFINITE SCALE, BABY!!!

Culture starts at the top. I am forever grateful for the opportunities I had in this environment of high risk and extreme grace created by our founders.

Intersolar San Francisco. I was honored to be representing our first-to-market electronics integrated into solar panels. We saw this as becoming the ‘Intel Inside of the Solar Industry’.

7. Have Fun

People come from all over the world to be a part of what's happening in Silicon Valley and our culture reflected this diverse background. Ironically, this resulted in an unintentionally ‘non-politically correct’ culture which made for an open, honest, and hilarious environment.

The company had lunch together every day, we went on group walks to Philz coffee, we celebrated holidays and birthdays in the office, and we hung out after work. We played ludicrous pranks that the founders pretended not to see (it’s hard to ignore a cubicle fulled to the top with packing peanuts, or an office plastered with partially nude pictures of David Hasselhoff).

The one thing that all cultures seemed to agree upon, was that we Americans are too sensitive. How dare you.

Conclusion

We spend a third of our lives working. For startups, it’s often more. It’s easy to overwork to compensate for a lack of knowledge, a lack of direction, or a lack of a meaningful life outside of work. It’s also easy to treat people transactionally to achieve your personal goals.

Your life will feel soulless if you don’t have a sense of purpose along with healthy, fun relationships in your work environment -- balanced by enjoyable pursuits outside of work.

Finding purpose starts with following your innate curiosity. Honor your curiosity by applying discipline to become excellent in something that serves a greater good.

About Tigo Energy

Occasionally my job was to ‘prove’ our technology to our biggest potential customers. I went to China and designed a side-by-side system for the largest solar panel manufacturer in the world and our system returned a 24% energy harvest over the control system. Today, Tigo reports that their average customer benefits from a returned energy harvest of 37% up to a staggering 44%.

Tigo Energy software monitors the performance of each panel with greater granularity than any competitor (this was true during my entire tenure). We also comply with the National Electrical Code’s safety requirements of rapidly shutting off voltage at each panel in an emergency. To my knowledge, only a few companies in the world can do this.

Q3 of 2023 saw the stocks of many in the solar industry take a significant dip which included the TYGO stock going much lower than our $1.5B peak. This is what the industry calls the ‘solar coaster’; a tough industry that occasionally faces turbulence.

One thing is 100% certain: green energy is here to stay. This is clearly demonstrated by 193 UN member nations' commitment to sustainable energy. Since 2007, Tigo has proven itself more tenacious than any turbulence and will unquestionably come soaring back into the three commas club.

About Me

I was deeply inspired by Tigo so I launched my own tech company. Using these seven principles, we created SNAP Ring, the first wearable media ring. It debuted in Selfridges London, voted #1 best department store in the world. We then scaled our next product from a few local stores to delivering 55,000 units to Best Buy within a year. SNAP CLIP is now available in 600+ Best Buy stores across the US.

2008 UCSC - Just a happy little hair farmer smiling right before my life imploded. 2022 - It was surreal seeing one of my inventions in our Santa Cruz Best Buy. I wore my gold teeth and the sickest hot pink Jordans ever.

I believe your work should serve you and society, not the other way around. We aspire to create lives we don’t need a vacation from and a culture that fosters a daily sense of purpose, joy, and laughter.

And most importantly, I aspire to have the confidence of a naked David Hasselhoff covered in puppies for a Cosmopolitan Magazine photo shoot.

See David Hasselhoff's Puppy Picture