Chapter 4 - Solar Reach
Solar Reach was not impressive when I joined. It was a struggling clean-energy startup in a cramped Bay Area office with broken chairs, donated monitors, aging laptops, and a bathroom sink that made a sound like a dying animal every time someone washed their hands.
The founders had vision and almost no money.
I had a doctorate, debt, and a newly emptied place inside me where parental approval used to live.
That turned out to be useful.
I worked like someone no longer waiting for applause. I redesigned battery management models. I rewrote failure simulations. I argued with suppliers, slept on office carpet before investor demos, and once spent thirteen hours in a rural test site trying to keep a prototype alive with a flashlight between my teeth while coyotes screamed somewhere beyond the fence.
We failed constantly.
Batteries overheated.
Inverters fried.
A pilot system died during a community demonstration while the mayor stood there smiling like he wished he had never met us.
Twice, we packed boxes because payroll looked impossible.
Then, one evening, a small village lit up after sunset for the first time.
Not with one generator coughing behind a clinic.
With steady power.
Lights came on in homes, then the health center, then the small store near the road. A grandmother stood under an electric bulb and cried without covering her face. A child opened a book at 8 p.m. and did not need a candle.
That night, I sat behind the equipment shed and cried too.
Not because my parents had been wrong.
Because the work was real even when they were absent.
More communities followed. Then clinics. Then island districts. Then disaster recovery sites where our microgrids kept medicine cold and phones charged after storms.
By 2026, Solar Reach was valued at more than $420 million.
Reporters called us innovative.
May you like
Investors called us visionary.
My parents still called Derek the successful one.
