 We're back, we're live, I'm Jay Fidel here on a Wednesday afternoon at the 4 o'clock block. Rock. I think tech. Rock. The 4 o'clock rock. And we're doing Hawaii, the state of clean energy for all you people around the world who want to know what's going on in energy in Hawaii. And we have like six shows about energy. But our favorite show, our flagship show is this one, Hawaii, the state of clean energy through the auspices of the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. And we have Sharon Moriwaki, co-chair and spiritual leader of the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. Welcome, Sharon. Aloha. Okay, we have a co-host today, and that is Aizah Roka, who just happens to be the niece of Veronica Roka, with the state energy office who is out there in the wing somewhere. Hi, Veronica. Welcome to the show, Aizah. Thank you. Okay. And we have Jonathan Howery. Jonathan Howery is still an intern yet. No, not anymore. Not anymore. I haven't been an intern in a year. That's why we're talking about the migration, the migration of intern to executive, as an executive in STEM, which is Ted Glothier's company doing what, magic black boxes that connect the grid with renewables. Yeah. And he's involved in that. Wow. So we're going to examine with Jonathan exactly what it means to have been an intern, one place or another. And by the way, Aizah is an intern right now today, as we speak at this moment with the elemental accelerator down the block. So we're going to learn about that from her. And we're going to talk about the, what I'm going to call it, the interaction of internship and executive ship, okay, in energy, but in any entrepreneurial and startup activity for sure. What an exciting discussion. Great. Okay. Let me begin by asking you, Jonathan, what you did as an intern and where and how you got that and why you did that. It's a multiple compound question. Why did I do it? Why did I do it? Um, so I started out, I guess the easiest way to put it as why I did it. I got my undergraduate degree in physics and physics, yeah, physics, astronomy. I wanted to be an astronaut once upon a time, but unfortunately the where I was didn't really be on that path. And so I reevaluated what I wanted to do. And I landed on environmental science that led to conservation, which led to renewable energy. And that led me to energy storage where I am today. Okay. Well, exciting. All right. So where were you as an intern, what did you do there? So, uh, I was a, uh, in the fellowship, um, with CUPU under RISE. It was Renewable Internships for Sustainable Employment. And I was a fellowship for, or a fellow for about a year. And under that fellowship, I was, uh, working for shifted energy, which focused on actually pulling excess renewable energy from the grid and storing it as thermal energy in hot water heaters. Ah. Why did you do that? I mean, why didn't you get a job, Jonathan? Uh, at the time it was still a growing startup, so, um, uh, when business was good, I was actually promoted to project manager. You mean you got a job? I don't know. See, that's really interesting. That's stopped there for a while. You know, you come on one thing and you're an intern and happy enough to do that. And then all of a sudden it gets to be a job. You must have done something right. Hard work, hard work, determination, dedication, um, and you know, a push for a belief in a company that I also believed in. And that was big. What was, uh, what, what do you think was most persuasive to, uh, what Olden Lagann and the people you were working for that made them say, wait, stop everything. We have to make this intern into an employee, executive person. So my internship was actually limited at 15 hours a week. And I was pulling about 25 to 30 because there were tasks that needed to be done and work that was available. And I just, I needed to do it. I wanted to do it. You knew it would help you. That too. How do you think it did help you? Hard work goes a long way. Goes a long way in any business. I work hard. You're hosting the show. Look at where you are. Hard work got you where you are. I don't believe everything he says. Um, it's, it's just that many companies want to see people take the initiative. And that's something that I hold in my life. That's something I was taught to do at a young age. And that's what I exhibit in my professional career. I am 26 years old. Notice how I age that question. Stay on the legal, the legal side of things. Nice answer. Thank you. Okay. Cross-examination? Well, I'd like to know what, what sparked you into going into Coupu to begin with instead of going to, you know, a job or, you know, why, why Coupu and Rise? Well, in 2014, I was actually working at least throughout the whole year. I worked seven different jobs throughout the entire year, ranging from, At the same time? Uh, no, spaced out. At the same time, I was working for three different companies. Oh, I thought so. It was, yeah, everything was part-time base. It was hard to find full-time work in Hawaii. But that, it just kind of led me to a path where I had actually applied for Coupu the year before and was passed over. But the director at the time actually kept my resume on file because she noticed my aptitude and my potential. And that's point two. Yeah. Yeah. The next year and the next year. Keep on coming back. Yeah. Determination. Yeah. Yeah. Determination. Were you still in school or you had already graduated at that point? Yeah, I graduated in 2012. And then after that. After that. Well, I took six months off to travel the world, to be a little cultured and to carry it out to you. No wonder you can work hard. You definitely have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. And so when I... How important was that? Oh, traveling the world? Immensely. Immensely. I mean, I've been to 48 different states in the U.S. And I've seen the change... You've been to 48 different states. I've seen the change between each state and how they're unique and going to Europe and Southeast Asia and Australia and seeing how cultures behave and how the people are and they live was very valuable. Just knowing, like, that global diversity. You want to hire him right now? Yeah. Yeah. So, Jonathan, can you tell me more about how your internship... Do you get to where you are now? So, after my internship ended, unfortunately there wasn't a whole lot of work left with shifted energy. So, they downgraded my hours but I had portrayed or exuberated that worth ethic on where I was and that made a few of the other cohort companies take an interest in me. And that led to, you know, some interviews and sit-downs and kind of let me start off at part-time, of course, with each company I'd work with and then finally I went full-time with STEM. Was that a complete answer to your question? Yeah. It wasn't, you have to ask them a follow-up. No, it was a good answer. Was STEM one of the cohorts that you had a part-time job with or was it like a totally new company? No, I started off as part-time with STEM. Yeah, for 20 hours and then I was working with shifted energy as well for, I don't know, 10, 15 hours and then I also worked part-time with Pono Home who does energy efficiency as well. We had it for last week. Yeah. Yeah, there was a part of the cohort. So, compare that to your experience of Elemental. Yes. How does that compare? Well, at Elemental I'm kind of a summer intern so I kind of help promote Elemental and kind of our plans for how Elemental will grow the company. Okay, what do you do every day? Well, aside from co-hosts, I'm still here in Hawaii in the state of Cleveland. So, every day I just kind of come in and ask people how I can help them. I usually help plan stuff like organizing and stuff like that. Okay. Do you do a lot of writing? Yeah, I do. Mostly for myself though, mostly I have notes on what to keep in mind and what Elemental is looking for. I have found, and I like your reaction to it, that if you're in an entrepreneurial situation, that includes being an intern in an entrepreneurial situation, you have to articulate. What do you call it? Exuberate. He coined that word just a few minutes ago. I don't know how to spell it but it sounds serene. That means you do something with exuberance. Right. Whatever it is. We got it. Anyway, so you have to be able to articulate what you're doing, both in writing and orally. Somewhere in my career I became aware that if you couldn't do that, you were going to have a glass ceiling. And not everybody can going forward, all the time. So you have to train yourself. You have to train yourself to do that. You have to train yourself to use the language to be able to write. Writing does not come by some magical light from heaven. Writing comes by dint of hard work in the language. And I wondered about that in your experience. Somewhere along the line, you've got to be the kind of guy who can articulate what you're doing. Did you have to work at that or to come naturally or is it out of a bottle? So that's a good question. Actually, the more experience you get, the more you're dealing with the customers and explaining what you do over and over again, that it just comes with experience. Like the more you practice, the more you speak, the more you're able to share your mission, your vision, your values, your company's values, everything along that. The more you do it, the easier it becomes. Have you been involved in pitches? Have you been involved in pitches or pitchfests, as they used to call them? Yeah, I did during my fellowship, but not so much as long as I've worked with STEM. There'll be a time. I would say that in the world of business today, especially tech business, it's all about pitching. It's all about telling people what you're doing and trying to make them come on board in one way or another, mostly in money. I would say every networking event I've been to is a way to pitch what I do. I remember going to White Venture Capital Association meetings where they would have all kinds of pitch formats. People would get up there and pitch, and you'd work for months on a pitch that was going to last 90 seconds. Anything longer, you'd lose your crowd. Elevators, well, elevators. But the other thing that comes to me out of this, and we'll discuss this and then take a break, is that this is all about relationships. It's always everything, actually. What did I say? Real estate law is not about real estate. It's about relations. The law of physics is not about physics. It's about relations. Maybe exaggeration. No, the add-ons. You get into an intern program or an accelerator like Elemental or otherwise. You are learning from other people in the cohort. You were talking to them all the time. We would talk about money in a minute. But for now, for this part of the discussion, it seems to me that you want to have contact with people. You want a network of people who are in a similar circumstance and who can teach you what they are learning and what they are teaching. And that's the modern way of creating a company, isn't it? You can do it all by yourself, but that's slower. In any other company now, you have to move. You have to be quick. There's no time to waste. Your competitors are nipping at your heels. The way to keep ahead of the pack is to talk to your peers. Am I right? No, you're very right. Eventually, once you make enough contacts and you're in a very stable position, that gives you the opportunity to pass it forward. So people who are looking for employment are looking for opportunities. I do, yeah. I founded one of my organizations just to do that as well. That's what John... I'm walking this in, the one in the Central Pacific Bank, John Dean, he created an organization about paying it forward, about helping people. Just the way somebody else helped you. Do you see that happening in Elemental now? Yes. Elemental helps kind of create these resources for people so they could learn how to articulate and how to communicate with other people so they could help go the resources that they need for their company. Okay, you know what? It's almost time for a break. And I was hoping, I said that you would announce the break as my co-host in this, our co-host. Could you do that? Okay. Okay, look at camera one over there. Announce the break. It's time for a break. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii, which streams live on thinktechhoai.com, uploads to YouTube, and broadcasts on cable OC16 and O'Lello 54. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Living in this crazy world. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, and I'm the host of Shrink Rap Hawaii, where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this, we must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Yours? Okay, we're back. We're live. And guess what? Sharon Moriwaki is going to take us back. Yay. I just want to remind people that we have Hawaii Clean Energy Day. It's our ninth annual. And this year, we're looking at pathways to transportation, clean transportation. On August 28th, the YWCA, from 9 a.m., 9.30 a.m., to 6 o'clock all the way to the Pauhana Power Party. But in between, we have quite a few speakers. We've got the Portland Metro consular, Craig Dirksen. Portland is great. It's a great place to learn. And it's beautiful because he's going to take us from their vision to actually executing on a transit system that works. It's very energy efficient. And we also have Dr. Eric Sunquist, who is from Michigan Sustainable Transportation Institute. And he's going to talk about measures of success. How do you know that you have a good transportation system and you're actually lowering your use of energy? And we have all of the local experts from the Energy Office to the Department of Transportation, all of the counties, all coming together to look at how we can be more energy efficient, use renewable energy sources for our transportation system here in Hawaii. Very important program. August 28th. August 28th. HawaiiEnergyPolicy.Hawaii.edu. Please join us. Yeah, pretty good. Very good. Yeah, come down. It would be great. This is important. It's a lot of work to be done. Very important. And speaking of work to be done, STEM, right now. What is it doing? Because I'm giving him a chance to pitch. Well, we have our one megawatt of storage distributed at NAHE Storage across the entire island of Oahu. We are finishing up one of our projects. It's called the 400 Power Monitor Project where we deliver real-time energy data to all Hawaii DOE schools. Next steps, we're actually planning on expanding that, as well as we have quite a few projects in the pipeline on our business development side, which is a hush-hush at the moment on who? Oh, you can tell us. Oh, you can tell us. Make them tell us. I'm like, nobody's recording or anything. Nobody's recording. Nobody's listening to this live. How about you? What are you doing all day? Well, I wear multiple hats at the company. Of course, you wouldn't expect nothing. And I love having that flexibility, too. But I work anywhere from accounting and invoicing to project management and handling the electricians and installations, coordinating there, to new business development and market analysis. So I'm all over the place. Okay, what about the technology? Tell us about STEM's technology. So the technology behind STEM is the way I like to describe STEM as we're a software company with energy storage solutions. So we work in the commercial industry on either selling or leasing out our energy storage and focusing on peak demand management and demand reduction. So what do you think, guys? That's pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. We also work closely with Hiko. Why did you bring him down, though? You brought him down for a reason. I'm not entirely sure, Jay. I'm here for the face value. So what's it like when you have all these cohort companies around and you are engaging with all these people? What's it like? How do you get them to talk to each other? You know, it's nice to see kind of how a team works and how the company works in general because I'm still kind of like in that process where I'm learning about renewable energy and kind of seeing in what part of renewable energy I would like to work in. But for these companies, I just kind of ask them about what they're doing, ask them about any new projects in the company, and I kind of say, oh, this company is like similar. Maybe she talks to them. You're the connector. Kind of, yeah. Yeah, that's good. It's all about connection, isn't it? Yes. What about funding? Are you getting any money from anybody these days? How are you being funded? Well, the one megawatt project was funded by the Elemental Accelerator and that kind of helped us solve the chicken-of-the-egg problem coming out here to Hawaii and trying to recruit customers to adopt energy storage, which we have the largest behind-the-meter energy storage system in Hawaii, which I find fascinating. What does that mean behind the meter? Behind the meter is just that. We work behind the meter, like HECO's utility meter attached to Switchgear. We install behind that to be able to basically export energy when the customer's load is at the highest point. So we're cutting off that little peak and evening out their load and distributing that energy. And the benefit to the community? Saves money to the customer directly. It makes the grid more efficient. And we also work closely with the utility on deploying any energy in the battery storage towers that isn't being used to actually help level off the grid. So do you have to get the consent of all the customers? We do. You process everything? Yeah, all of that's in our contracts that we can work with grid services. So we always make sure that the customer comes first. So they get first access to the battery and the energy stored there. And if they're not using it, then HECO can use it or any utility can use it. You're in an area that's changing so fast. It's a rapid industry. And there are people coming into that area because they see there's a benefit to being there and they're your competitors. How do you deal with that? Do you sleep well? I do sleep well. I think the industry is changing and energy storage is a unique industry to be in in that we want more competition because more competition will actually open up the market quicker and Tag Glauthier, who is VP of Operations for STEM, he helped co-found the Distributed Energy Resources Council of Hawaii, which gets all of the players in the room working on policy to actually help open up that much. Leslie Colbrooks. Well, what do you think? Is he in the right place? Is he going in the right direction? What do you expect him to do going forward? You think he'll stay there a long time? Of course, because... How long are you here? I can't really say, but... Seems like you're doing a good job. I am really happy where I am. Sharon can't hire you away from the Energy Policy Fund. Okay, cross-examination, Sharon. So what would make you stay in STEM or other opportunities that you can use your skills and you have quite a few to move on and where would you be moving on? What is your passion? Well, I started out in astronomy and physics. I moved to environment and conservation, restoration, renewable energy, and landed on energy storage. So I've actually found my niche where I like working. Really? You're not going back to physics, then? I like the energy side. I like the energy side. But my passion also lies in just bringing people together and talking. I think there's more conversations that need to be happening, not just in Hawaii, but all around the world. So do you think your passion with the interaction, collaboration, working with people, what part of that does technology play or is it now moving to sort of a new dimension than experimenting and finding new technological solutions? It's definitely expanding and growing and I can't really say sure where that's going to lead, but I just am excited for where the future is heading. Good answer. Good answer. Really, I mean, our discussion has been very helpful for me to understand what it's like to be in a situation like you're in, and I suggest that my intuition tells me you'll be a good CEO someday soon. Well, I did help co-found and am vice chairman of the Sustainable Leader Network. We actually are a professional development network working on getting either recent grads or people just entering the working world, just opportunities and skills to advance in their career. How about the money? Are you looking for big bucks? I'm actually not in it. You want me a zillionaire? No. More money, more problems. That would be interesting. Money complicates life. I'm in it for the community and making a positive impact on society and that's what I've seen has been lacking and I think we need to change that and we need to make more positive choices. This is a new generation, isn't it exciting? You don't sound like Donald Trump at all. Never mind. Okay, it's time to wrap up. Isaac, can you wrap up for us? Give us a summary of what's happened and give us your impressions. Okay, so we've learned about what Jonathan does and kind of stems from projects and kind of discussing what kind of future plans for STEM and what to expect. All right, valuable conversation. And the characteristics of being exuberant and knowing your passion and being able to move forward with it and luckily in the renewable energy space. That's the story. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Sharon. Thank you, Isaac. Thank you, Jay. Wonderful to talk to you guys. Aloha. Thanks for coming down. Aloha and good luck for the future. What? For the future. Sign up for the thing on the 28th of August. Oh, yes. Come to Plea Transportation. Get into that space, too. Yeah. Talk about networking. I wouldn't let the network there. Don't do a space.