Bill Nussey is a partner at Tech Square Ventures, where he invests in energy tech, sustainability tech, and hard tech. DG Matrix and VECKTA are building the future of the distributed grid and local energy. Blue Frontier, SkyCool Systems, and GlacierGrid are each going after the enormous cost of cooling. Rheaply, Cloverly, and 4Earth are sustainability tech. And Stellar Scale Nano Fabrication is working on fusion energy. Bill also leads the sustainability and energy working group at Engage, Tech Square Ventures’ enterprise accelerator and fund.
Bill spent most of his career as a technology CEO. His first company, which he co-founded in high school, made graphics software for the early text-only microcomputers of the day. His second, Da Vinci Systems, started out of his college dorm room and grew to serve millions of users across 45 countries. He later spent several years as a venture capitalist with Greylock, leaving the firm in 1998 to run one of its portfolio companies, iXL, which went public and grew to nearly $500 million in revenue. After iXL he became CEO of Silverpop, a cloud marketing company that reached almost $100 million in recurring revenue and became a global leader in its category. IBM acquired Silverpop in 2014 and made it the foundation of the IBM Marketing Cloud. Shortly after the acquisition, Bill was promoted to VP Corporate Strategy, working out of IBM’s world headquarters in New York and helping set global strategy for the company’s CEO and senior vice presidents. Bill’s companies have created thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in value.
In 2017, Bill left IBM to pursue his passion for clean energy. It started with a TED Talk, grew into more than 100 articles and then the #1-ranked renewable energy podcast, and — after 320 interviews over four years — became a book: Freeing Energy: How Innovators Are Using Local-scale Solar and Batteries to Disrupt the Global Energy Industry from the Outside, an Amazon #1 New Release in three categories. The book lays out a faster, cheaper, and more equitable path to clean energy, along with the trillion-dollar business opportunity to help deliver it. Its core ideas focus on decentralized (or local) energy, novel business models, and new approaches to ownership and finance.
In 2018, Bill co-founded Solar Inventions to commercialize a series of scientific breakthroughs for improving the manufacturing of solar cells and panels. In 2022, he joined Engage and Tech Square Ventures.
Bill received a degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He holds several patents, has published three books, and sits on several commercial and non-profit boards. He and his family are involved in projects providing off-grid, resilient electricity in places like East Africa and Puerto Rico.
Freeing Energy Media
Media kit (photos, CV, book covers)
Bill’s LinkedIn
Bill’s energy-related presentations
Solar Inventions website