Professional Documents
Culture Documents
What is the title on your business card in 5 years? Ask any student and very few will know.
Ask a student that same question weekly for an entire year, and he might come up with
something. That is exactly what my research professor did to me. It forced me to orchestrate a
future that I control rather than falling into something that someone else chooses for me.
Exploring the question further, led to the question, What do you like? If a student can answer
this question leaving college, they are one of the very small percentage fortunate enough to have
found it at a young age. Loving ones career adds a very meaningful aspect to life that would
otherwise become trivial with mundane tasks. I personally answered the question of what I like by
sketching out a Venn diagram, with three core content circles: 1) buildings, 2) energy, and 3)
technology; and three support circles: 4) people, 5) business, 6) marketing. Realizing my
multidisciplinary interests, I paired my existing Architectural Engineering education at Penn State
with Information Sciences & Technology. Looking towards and beyond graduation, not one
company impressed me with their building technology solutions. Inspired by the lack of a great
solution, the title on my business card in 5 years reads: Co-founder of Smarc (Smart Architecture,
a tech start up that serves the building industry). Its mission is to shape the interaction between
people and building environments through the efficient use of energy and technology. After living
and breathing this idea, Ive become convinced that a person succeeds in life & business by
Asking the Right Questions to the Right People. What are the right questions? You dont know.
Who are the right people? You dont know. The rules of getting and keeping customers and
clients in How to Become a Rainmaker by Jeffrey Fox gives insight into not only how to become a
lucrative salesman, but also how to find the right questions and the right people. Several vignettes
surround the theme of discovering a business through questions. Ultimately, this is a story of the
beginning stages of what I hope to be a successful business one day.
Onionize. [Market ]
The Rainmaker cannot turn the customers need into a want until he or she knows how to
put value in the customers desired state. Just as a sous chef peels an onion layer by layer, so,
too, the Rainmaker helps the customer get to the heart of the matter. Rainmakers are akin to
investigate. This vignette reminded me of my first investigation into this business market
discovery; lets rewind three years to my research and questions. Americans spend 90 percent or
more of their time indoors. Why does the typical consumer know more about their car than their
home? Why do my parents complain about their energy bill at the end of every month? Why are
there only movies about smart homes, but no such thing? Buildings are in fact the top consumers
of electricity and contributors of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and have been for decades.
In the information age of today, building modeling has become increasingly popular and globally
necessary to understand how a building is operating and where inefficiencies can be resolved, but
nothing is simple enough for consumers to understand. Through countless discussions with
professors, I came to the heart of the matter in summer 2009: The energy efficient smart home as
yet to exist will only be possible with advanced information sciences and technology, at which time
I decided to double major. Existing building modeling, automation, and controls solutions are
overly complex and outdated, leaving the building industry a decade behind most with respect to
technology and collective advancements. Buildings have similar systems to that of a human body:
structural (skeletal), lighting/electrical (nervous), HVAC (respiratory), and plumbing (digestive).
But, unlike the human body, there is no brain that acts as the central control point between all
systems. Last spring, two years later, the Architectural Engineering Department was awarded
$129 million by the Department of Energy, the largest grant ever given to Penn State, to lead an
initiative developing the next generation of energy efficient building technologies, designs, &
information systems. Timing couldnt be more perfect; the national spotlight is now on the
department. Setting up my dual major education in anticipation for such an opportunity wouldnt
have been possible without asking the right questions to peel back the layers of how a building
1
Josh Wentz IST 440W How to Become a Rainmaker 12/8/11
Asking the Right Questions to the Right People
works. Rainmakers use onionize as a memory trigger to remind them to keep probing, to keep
asking questions.
customer (a building or home owner)? It was impossible for me to have the intuition to answer this
without a few experiences. The summer out of high school, I was a software intern at ANSYS Inc.
(an engineering simulation software company with customers such as Toyota, NASA, and Siemens
and profits soaring to $172 million). It was here that I learned the incredible potential of computers
as yet to be leveraged within the building industry. Having been a part of the testing team, I
learned the amount of time that goes into testing software before going public with it. Rainmakers
always test in private what they are going to sell in public. Later, I researched under Dr. Jelena
Srebric in the Penn State Architectural Engineering Department in collaboration with Harvard
University on an Urban Energy Model Simulation Platform. Here, the envisioned product of the
developing company shifted to something strictly building energy simulation based. Last spring, I
was one of twelve students chosen in my major to become a part of a new multidisciplinary
Building Information Modeling (BIM) studio. Here, through struggling with technology to design
every system of the building collaboratively, it opened my eyes to a product that could serve the
entire Architectural Engineering Construction (AEC). It wasnt until this past summer at GE Energy,
working on a web 2.0 development project deployed to over 5,000 employees, that something
clicked. The building industry is on the verge of a great change in building software. Current
information transfers are inefficient. While competitors have building engineers and IT people who
are trying to understand each other as they focus on older development languages, I hope this
newly discovered company will surpass them through a new fully collaborative online, web 3.0
(which some are predicting to be the complete convergence of the virtual world and the physical
world) 3D building modeling software. Ive intertwined the topic of my fifth year architectural
engineering thesis with this idea of creating initial value for such a product. Once fully developed
and tested, I have no doubts that such a solution will create value far beyond existing building
software solutions. Question the value to the customer by first testing it yourself.
by past Penn State IST grads who have gone on to found start ups, the hackathon gave me a
chance to meet some extremely successful people well connected to venture capitalists. Asking
interesting questions led me to both customers and a team. Listen carefully and do so on high
receive.
A theme can be a strength. And a strength can be a weakness. Im a strong believer that
time is our greatest asset. Im spending a great deal of my time on this dream, yet the risks are
extremely high. Realizing and reflecting on the fact that a business may not happen immediately, I
have created relationships with professors at two graduate programs (including Carnegie Mellon
and Penn State) willing to fully fund my masters work.
Inspired by a few of the points in the last vignette 10 Things to do today to get business, I
decided to end on 5 Things Ive done within this past week to develop a business.
Being curious is one of the best ways to question how things are currently done and
synthesize something new. I ask a lot of questions, am obsessively organized, and encourage &
appreciate objections to the building industry, but the author of How to Become a Rainmaker [Fox]
stressed that what matters over everything else is the Rainmakers ability to ring the cash register.
Were a part of the start up generation, yet there are many businesses that fail for not being able
to make money. I have every intention of using nearly all vignettes on my journey to a lucrative
building technology business. Asking the right questions to the right people allowed me to learn
the market history and the potential for a unique business. Throughout history, building modeling
has progressed from hand drafting, to 2D computer drafting, to 3D computer modeling. Today, new
web technologies have the functionality to create this same 3D building information modeling
experience through a web browser. This new company will do just that, allowing full collaboration
among the design team, providing an online model for the owner throughout a buildings life, and in
essence create the smart nervous system of a home. Ive met a laundry list of people throughout
asking questions and discovering something new, doing what I love most: working with people and
buildings towards a greater goal. What will the title on my business card be in 5 years? Time will
only tell.