By PAUL SCHWARTZ //
Building a network is critical to any business’ success – consider ThermoLift, which wouldn’t be where it is today without this foundation of entrepreneurism.
Network-building is about trust and mutual respect, and it’s not an easy process. ThermoLift’s launch, and the company’s important introduction to the Long Island angel-investor community, was heavily influenced by key introductions made through my personal and professional networks.
While attending my nephew Jake’s bar mitsvah on the East End some years back, I ran into my father-in-law’s cousin, Gary Fishberg. We stood waiting for our drinks at the bar, making small talk: Paul, how’s it going? Gary, how are you?
Fishberg had long known me as an entrepreneur, with an interest in technology dating back to my stockbroker days. He’s invested in a stock or two, over the years, based on my advice. I started telling him about my new business opportunity, this amazing clean-gen energy-efficient HVAC technology.
Paul Schwartz: Networking executive.
Professor Peter Hofbauer’s breakthrough science was solid, I noted. We’d contacted Stony Brook University to inquire about access to the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center. Hopes were high.
“But the person I really want to meet,” I told Fishberg, “is Bob Cattell.”
Catell, the former National Grid and KeySpan chairman, was (and is) the AERTC chairman of the board. His impressive résumé covers decades of high-profile energy and sustainability work, from a 1950s start at Brooklyn Union Gas to the forefront of today’s offshore-wind industry. Obviously, he’d be a terrific advocate for ThermoLift, if I could just get in his ear.
“Bob Catell?” Fishberg said. “I know Bob Catell.”
Turns out Catell is especially popular across Garden City, where Fishberg’s law firm, Cullen and Dykman, hangs its shingle. And Fishberg, who’d just played golf with the energy-industry legend a couple of weeks earlier, did one better than the standard e-mail intro: A week later, we were all having breakfast at the Garden City Hotel.
Sometimes it happens like this – an auspicious connection through a mutual relationship. But why did Fishberg follow through, when most people usually don’t?
Gary Fishberg: Teed it right up.
Perhaps it was our not-unsuccessful previous ventures. Perhaps it was my commitment to ThermoLift, which was a primary objective, not a hobby. Perhaps, with the right connections, this one would really take off.
Catell is a man of great integrity and humility, and his words carry a lot of weight. At breakfast, after introductions and a briefing on ThermoLift’s natural gas-fueled technology and startup status, the energy icon spoke words that shine like the sun in my memory.
“I have been looking for a gas heat pump for 40 years,” he said.
That moment unlocked access the AERTC, Stony Brook’s Clean Energy Business Incubator Program and the capital support of the Long Island Angel Network (Catell also graces the LIAN board). Catell and Fishberg would actually be ThermoLift’s first investors – a small investment, just enough to incorporate, travel to Germany and recover a circa-1980s protype locked in a university closet.
That prototype paved the way for a $1.6 million Series A funding round.
Your network is your calling card, and the depth of your network measures your opportunity to succeed. That network can be anyone, anywhere – decades-long business relationships, the contractors redoing your kitchen, the accountant who does your taxes. We don’t know who can open which door, or how or why, until that opportunity unlocks.
Protect your relationships. Respect their purity. Be available to those in your network, however you can be, and be prepared to call on your network when the right opportunity arises …you never know how it might unlock your future.
And Gary – thanks!
Paul Schwartz is cofounder and director of Stony Brook-based ThermoLift.
