Tom Currier is only 20 years old, but that doesn’t mean he is too young to nurture an innovative company which is lifting eyebrows among investors. As a matter of fact, he isn’t too young to have begun nine successful companies, beginning with ScanBoy which he started at the age of nine to finance his research and development of magnetic attraction.
Presently, as Currier puts it, “We make really low cost death rays,” referring to Black Swan Solar, an alternative energy company that he launched out of his dorm room at Stanford University. Currier is perfecting a device called the heliostat, which already has three patents and which he hopes will “solve the world’s energy crisis.”
Currier has found raising capital for his ideas can be a more daunting endeavor than developing the ideas themselves. Since Currier’s background is technological, sometimes explaining his thesis can be a roadblock to financing.
“I thought that once you showed an investor ‘this is how the idea works,’ they’d be like ‘OK, it’s a no-brainer, here’s $20 million,'” he says. “I realized I have to get better at communicating this idea. And I have to get better at understanding at what a go to market strategy entails.”
The technology underpinning Black Swan has been under development for the past ten years, but the company only launched officially in 2010. In October of 2010 the company finished its first round of funding, and employs two engineers, Dr. Wasiq Bokhari who has over ten years of experience in the energy sector is the CEO.
“When you’re launching an energy company, you’re selling to utilities,” Currier says. “I knew that they wouldn’t really want to buy from a 19-year-old. So I tried recruiting the best CEO possible that was well-networked in the energy. And that took me to the end of my freshman year.”
And what is Currier’s ultimate dream? He says he would love to open place where he can dedicate all his time to inventing ways to better harness the sun’s energy, with his father, in New Zealand. Why go to New Zealand? Currier answers, “The beauty of solar is you go where the sun is.”
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