Troy Helming is clean energy and solar energy producer based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. Originally from Kansas City, Troy Helming got his start in clean energy by growing up in an energy crisis. His parents shared their frustration with him in regard to our dependence on dirty fossil fuels, including the toxins from coal plants that caused his mother’s cancer. This upbringing inspired him to be the change he wants to see in the world, and he got involved in clean energy and cleaning up the planet. He is now the CEO and founder of solar and clean energy companies and is a unicorn founder with 4 exits building his biggest company yet. The most rewarding part of his job has been seeing new solar farms go online and knowing that this is offsetting fossil fuels and lowering pollution. His company EarthGrid has invented plasma tunnel boring robots that are solar-powered, use no water, have no emissions, and can bore tunnels 100x faster at 1/10th the cost of conventional techniques. These robots are building a network of large, underground utility tunnels that improve infrastructure and rapidly accelerate the transition to 100% clean energy.
Though his efforts are well intended, not everyone agrees with a greener planet. He has faced many challenges including getting death threats from the Koch Brothers hunting club in Kansas, having his face being on the dartboard at Kansas City Power & Light, and intense regulatory investigations when he testified in 2006 as an expert witness for the Sierra Club against Great Plains Energy’s attempt to build 4 new coal plants. Through all of these companies’ efforts, Troy Helming has never lost his motivation and has never stopped fighting for a cleaner planet. His greatest success so far has been starting Tradewind Energy which ended up becoming worth more than a billion dollars.
Troy Helming has become a very successful entrepreneur and believes the keys to success are patience, perseverance, scrappiness, and having a nest egg of savings set aside so you can forego salary for as long as possible. His advice for young entrepreneurs is to save as much money as possible before leaving their regularly salaried job. Be humble, hungry, hardworking, and highly, highly self-disciplined. Practice being self-disciplined while you still have a job, doing work for your start on nights and weekends with a rigorous but life-balanced schedule for at least 6 months. If you are able to do that, you are on the road to success.
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