About CTLR’s #HumansOfCleantech
Modeled after the New York Times' Humans of New York series, this is an idea by Peter Kelley and the RenewComm team for us to showcase our members!
Follow #humansofcleantech on LinkedIn for more in this series. #climatetech #energytransition #cleantechleadersroundtable
“26 years old, living in New York City with 3-year-old twins, it was time to get out. We could move to New Jersey or we could move to Hungary. Luckily, my wife is a great adventurer.”
“A couple months later, we rented the apartment out and moved to Hungary to run this business. I was passionate about the company—this technology for treating wastewater in a botanical garden, and you can put it in the middle of a community.
“I grew up in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, 10 minutes west of Philadelphia. Both my parents were educators. They might say I was always a planner, and strategic planning has been a pervasive part of my career.
“I was pretty into sports, and basketball was my favorite. When I was in seventh grade, Kobe Bryant went to my school.
“He came to the basketball court where I played every day. I was 5'11" and was forced to guard him.
“I remember I fouled him pretty hard and he went down on his knee. He got up and for the rest of the game just destroyed me.
“Going into my junior year, I spent a summer in Israel on a program called Masada, where I worked on a kibbutz.
“Back then, it was mostly an agricultural community. I worked in the fields, doing assembly, and in the kitchen.
“They were growing their own food in excess. That was part of the way the kibbutz survived and sustained; distributing the food to others as well.
“When I graduated, I got a job as an oil and gas analyst and was traveling all over Texas and Arkansas, going to these frack sites when they were first figuring out how to frack, and seeing with my own eyes the devastation to the planet that occurs from some of these actions.
“This was all happening when my twin daughters were born, and I just hated myself, seeing this emerging cleantech industry, and knowing what I was doing.
“That was a pretty transformative period in my life. The day I paid off my loans from school I said, ‘The rest of my career, I'm paying back this debt to the planet that I accrued.’
“Because of my startup experience, I was hired to run the private investments in a fund focused on water and water technology. One day, one of the founders called me up and said, 'How'd you like to move to Hungary?’
“You meet all these expat families, and you tell them, ‘We're going to be here for a year,’ and they're like, ‘No, you're not.’ Everybody says that. We did not expect to be there for four years!
“I knew from being a cleantech investor: We have technologies that we need to save the world. The problem is deploying and implementing them.
“It’s Einstein’s rule: If we keep designing things the same way we have for the past, nothing will change.”
Ari Raivetz is the founder and CEO of Transcend Software, a generative design SaaS company helping the world change how it designs, from manual to generative, to design infrastructure that can address climate change. Previously, Ari was the CEO of Organica Water, a wastewater treatment technology provider.