Meet CleanTechnica’s First Outside Investor

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Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to another climate warrior and regular CleanTechnica reader, Rob Simon. Rob is an entrepreneur, changemaker, frustratingly mediocre ex-golfer (his words), father of two, EV driver, concerned climate citizen, and overall good dude who showers in heat pump heated water that is powered by solar panels.

He also happens to be responsible for the fact that CleanTechnica even exists — well before he became our first investor two weeks ago, and it’s why I wanted him to be our first investor. More on that in a minute.

Rob and I go way back. As it goes, men tend to not make as many new friends as women do as we age, which has positives and negatives. One of the positives is that we tend to stay in touch more with friends from important periods of our life. Rob was my best friend from an important era of life — high school — and we’ve stayed in touch our entire adult lives.

Rob invested $15,000 two weeks ago and officially became CleanTechnica‘s first outside investor. But his connection to the company (that he now owns a piece of) is far deeper than that. It requires a little backstory. At age 17, I took a physical exam as part of a high school requirement for playing varsity sports. The routine exam returned a non-routine result: my cholesterol was well into the mid 300s. The doctor suggested strongly that I get on a daily cholesterol-reducing pill, something I would have to take for the rest of my life to manage the cloggage in my arteries. My parents were terrific, but they were also pretty “normal” for that period of time, and to them, this suggestion from a doctor was simply the best we could do and not something we really needed to think more about.

But there was something that didn’t quite sit right with me about being 17 years old and having to get on a pill that I’d have to take daily for the rest of my life to manage my cholesterol. In all the pharmaceutical commercials of the day, cholesterol drugs always seemed to be for people with a lot of gray hair. So it just didn’t feel right. Luckily, I had one friend in high school who I thought might have another idea for me, and that was Rob. Rob was always the kid who brought his lunch while the rest of us wolfed down several slices of microwaved cheese pizza and washed it down with a couple of cartons of chocolate milk. And then when I went to his house and tried to find a snack, I … couldn’t. I would open the fridge at the Simon house and wouldn’t recognize a thing. There were no bags of chips, no cans of Coke, no cookies. … There were no … brand names, really. At least none that I recognized. There were, however, lots of baggies and glass containers with vibrantly colored things in them. Leaves. Roots. Stems. Fruits. Mushrooms.

See, Rob’s family ate a macrobiotic diet. It’s not vegan, but not far from it. They ate seaweeds. They ate lots of vegetables. They cooked in cast iron and nothing in their house had teflon. Many of the things in their fridge and cupboards had the words “Organically grown” and “Fair Trade” on them. They stored things in glass containers, not plastic. They often had things soaking on the counter … little sprouts growing sometimes, and other times, grains or legumes/beans tripling in size in a few hours before being transferred to a cooking implement and cooked.

This was in the 1980s. These people were wayyyyy ahead of their time. And thankfully, Rob knew enough to listen to my situation, and suggest to me, “Sure, Scott, you could take a pill every day for the rest of your life … or you could just eat some f**king oatmeal.”

That moment started my sustainability journey.

Rob and his amazing family took me in for a week-long stay at their house, where they taught me how to live better. They taught me about how to buy ingredients in bulk at the health food store. They taught me how to think about my meals in advance so that they’d come out scrumptious while also being full of healthy ingredients. They taught me to take a breath before just starting to chow down. They taught me to chew my food and the importance of digestion. They took me for walks after dinner instead of just moving straight to cake or ice cream.

I felt it immediately. Even at 17, when you’re kind of indestructible, you can tell a difference in how you digest and how you feel when you eat better and eat with intention. And the Simons imparted a lot of knowledge of how our food is grown, and how broken the food system was (and still largely is) that feeds us a bunch of processed and refined stuff, and subsidizes incredibly unhealthy things to keep it so that we can buy a fast food burger for 99¢. They gave me a few books, including Diet for a Small Planet and Diet for a New America, which I voraciously read.

I went back to my home and proceeded to declare to my nervous parents that I was going to eat this way. Fearful I would shrivel up to nothing, my incredibly loving and well-intentioned Italian mother tried to talk me out of it, suggesting I just keep a little meat, cheese and, especially, milk, in my diet every day to stay healthy. But I was 17, I knew everything, and I was having none of it. At the end of her rope, my mom did something that was probably the most ‘unlike her’ thing she’d ever done. She cut me off. She told me that I would have to start not only making all my own meals, but also doing my own shopping, paying for my own groceries, and cleaning my own dishes. I’ve never been one to back down from a challenge, so I said OK, and proceeded to become more or less a vegan macrobiotic high school senior in a pretty rural part of southwest Virginia. The kids of course couldn’t get enough jokes in, the cafeteria staff snickered, the teachers just shrugged … but I soldiered on.

And thankfully, I didn’t shrivel up to nothing. If I had tried to do it on my own without the Simon family’s support, who knows what would have happened? Instead, I flourished. I lettered in multiple sports as a high school senior, making second team all conference in football at the outside linebacker position, and easily making the wrestling team without even trying to lose weight. After a few months of eating healthy, I had become lean and muscular, and full of fuel that athletes nowadays are starting to recognize gives a distinct advantage. And by the end of my senior year, I gave my first environmental talk, with some of the more curious teachers getting me a chance to do a presentation in front of the entire school about the multiple problems associated with our agricultural system as well as the incredible benefits of eating better and more eco-friendly.

Rob changed my life. I would actually strongly argue that Rob and his awesome parents, Murray and Leslie, saved my life. Who knows what would have happened had I continued with bleached white pasta, meatballs, and everything covered in cheese — and washing it down with all the bovine growth hormone–laden milk I could handle. But more than that, the Simons gave me a purpose in life. It’s a gift that I have tried to repay my entire life by giving back, leading by example, and educating others.

On my LinkedIn profile (feel free to connect, by the way), you’ll see me listed as CleanTechnica‘s founder, former CEO, and current COO, but I didn’t actually start CleanTechnica. At least, not the website. I actually acquired the website that you’re reading right now. At that time, it had about 100,000 readers a month (nowadays, thanks to Zach, Derek, Jo, Danielle, and the incredible team of journalists we have, it’s well into the 4–5 million range). The previous owner just didn’t see a path forward. He burned out, and wanted to do something else, so he had planned to fire everyone (including Zach, can you imagine?) and just let Google search keep sending traffic to the site’s older articles while the site eventually wound down into oblivion. It would have continued to drive some revenue just from the Google ads on the site, and the previous owner had planned to use that money to bridge him into his next startup. I looked at the revenue projections, got on the phone with Zach to ask him about his plans, and decided to buy the guy out, giving him the money up front and continuing to employ Zach and some other great writers to grow the site.

None of this would have happened if I didn’t have a purpose. And Rob, bless his frikkin heart, gave me that purpose. That purpose saved CleanTechnica, which has, since then, published more than 60,000 articles and educated more than 161 million different people about climate solutions, many of whom cite CleanTechnica as the reason they bought EVs, solar….

I love you Robbie! Look at the difference you’ve made. Louis and Zoey Paloma will live in a better world because of you.

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CleanTechnica is raising a round of investment to ramp up our production and reach a billion people. Want to invest and become an owner of CleanTechnica? We’re taking investment now, with a minimum of $10K. Sign up here, and I’ll be in touch.