The following interview is a conversation we had with Manik Suri, CEO and Founder of Therma, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $30 Million Raised to Build the Cooling Intelligence Category

Manik Suri
Great to be here, Brett. Thanks for having me. 

Brett
No problem. Super excited. So I’d love to kick off with just a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

Manik Suri
Absolutely. So I’m the Founder and CEO of Therma. We’re a clean cooling startup based in the Bay Area. We build technology to reduce energy use and food waste across the built environment. We’re trying to help create climate positive solutions that save businesses money and help protect and save our planet in the process. And a little bit of myself grew up in an ag town. Paul, Fresno, California, in the Central Valley. PR is south of San Francisco. It comes full circle now. We work with food businesses up and down the supply chain, trying to help them improve operations in between. I spent a while in a couple of different roles. I worked in private equity and also in government. De Shaw in the White House in the Obama administration, started a tech for good center at NYU and MIT, and then became an entrepreneur. 

Manik Suri
That’s me. 

Brett
What was that like working in the White House? 

Manik Suri
It was intense. It was busy. Definitely inspiring. I was there at a kind of a pretty significant time in the first Obama administration when a lot of policy was getting passed. This is 2011, 2012, and working with a great group of humans, very high impact and very high energy. I think one of the things I learned, however, is that policy is political. You can divorce the two. And so we at the time were trying to get a lot of stuff done in government, passing regulation and legislation, but doing that requires political alignment, and that was challenging. 2011 was the first year of congressional stalemate, so a lot of lessons learned. 

Brett
And were you a practicing lawyer ever? I think I saw that in another video that you were a lawyer. 

Manik Suri
I was never a practicing lawyer. I went to law school at Harvard, got a JD, passed a bar. So I’m admitted to the state in California. But I wouldn’t recommend myself to any friends. I have a lot of real lawyer friends for that. 

Brett
And was that the plan all along, to not become a practicing lawyer, or when did you decide to change plans and go a different route with your career? 

Manik Suri
I think it happened in the middle of the journey in law school. I’d been interested in the law for many years. I studied political science and political theory as an undergrad, and I actually applied to law school my senior year of college and had gotten in. And ultimately I ended up deferring for five years. So clearly I wasn’t sure about it, but I ended up working in the private sector as an investor and kind of came back into the law thinking I might want to work in government or in public law. 

Manik Suri
And I think after going to law school and working around a lot of folks in government, part of what I was saying earlier, that my political stalemate and seeing how difficult it was to get policy passed in DC led me to kind of shift gears and think about social change from the outside, not necessarily working in government, but helping government and helping advance public interests. And I met a woman in DC. She was the deputy CTO. She was also a former lawyer. And she was working on the intersection of tech and government and doing good. And I decided to join. Her name is Beth Novik. And we started to center focus on tech for good at NYU, at MIT. And that’s how I ended up departing from the law and the kind of law and government track. 

Brett
Trey, when it comes to founders that have really inspired you and had a major impact on you, who’s the name that comes to mind there? 

Manik Suri
Oh, that’s a loaded question. There’s so many inspiring folks out there and also very controversial folks. That’s a tough one, Brett. I guess I’m inspired by different aspects of various founding journeys. So let me come back to you on that. I’ll give it a moment’s thought and come back to you. 

Brett
Another good way to frame that, maybe that can be helpful, is if you could have a personal board of advisors. You can have three people on the board. It can be anyone, living or dead. 

Manik Suri
Who would it be? Oh, I like that. I’d put Barack Obama still living, still a source of inspiration. I’d put probably Warren Buffett. I think I put Warren Buffett on there, and I guess I put Bill Gates on there. 

Brett
All safe bets. You can’t go wrong with any of those. 

Manik Suri
Yeah, there’s a lot of people on the list. I’d have lots of people on the list of advisors, because I think there’s many things one can learn from many successful humans, but those three stand out. 

Brett
I love it. What about books that have had a major impact on you and the way we like to frame this? We got it from an author called Ryan Holiday, or named Ryan Holiday. He calls them quake books. So a quake book is a book that, like, rocks you to your core, really influences how you think about the world and how you approach life. Do any quake books come to mind? 

Manik Suri
Such good questions, Brett. These are going deep. I’m kind of digging in now, I think, early on. Well, okay. I really liked, at one level, a brief history of everything, which is kind of a little bit of a short, handy book, but was a kind of book given to me when I was graduating from college. I really liked sapiens as a kind of overview of the anthropocene and human history. Recently, I really liked electrify, which is kind of more in the space around grid management, electrification, energy. I really liked. Again, I’ll go back to kind of deep books, but siddhartha was probably one of the most influential books I read as an undergrad going back 20 years. Hermann has the siddhartha, which is about the buddha and his journey. So those are a few. We’re talking about a lot of different genres there. 

Brett
Yeah, all the different categories. I love it. Let’s switch gears now, and let’s dive a bit deeper into Therma and everything that you’re building there. So how we’d like to begin this part of the conversation is really focusing on the problem. What problem does Therma solve? 

Manik Suri
Therma helps businesses manage their cooling assets much more effectively. And basically, businesses that have cooling, which is essentially refrigeration, air conditioning, for 100 years have been managing these assets, quote, dumb in the sense that those pieces of equipment aren’t connected to the cloud and aren’t being monitored or managed in real time. So, very few commercial refrigeration units or air conditioning units have real time data coming out of them or are being turned up and down and on and off dynamically. Most of these assets are still analog. They’re still manually turned up and down. Settings, if they are set, are done using kind of 1.0. Technologies like even thermostats today are primarily 1.0. What we’re doing is adding significant intelligence to these dumb pieces of equipment. 

Manik Suri
So we’re helping businesses catch failure events early and often, and we’re helping them turn these assets up and down or on and off based on weather, utilization, energy price, and need, and do it automatically for them without people having to think about it. So essentially, we’re taking a bunch of dumb piece of equipment and making them smart, and saving businesses money in the process. 

Brett
Take us back to 2019. What was it about this problem that made you say, I can’t stand it, I can’t take it anymore, I’m going to go solve this problem? 

Manik Suri
Yeah. I think it was a personal and very acute pain I was feeling at the time as an entrepreneur. The first company I’d started and was scaling at the time was focused on helping businesses with safety and sustainability in this food supply chain. So, similar problem space, working with businesses, trying to help them improve safety and sustainability. We were using a mobile app to do that was called co inspect, collaborative inspect. Burns out that what we saw was most of our users on that product, what they were doing was checking temperature all the time, like four to eight times a day. And were replacing a clipboard, a kind of paper clipboard, with a digital version. And while that sounds good, it turns out that were actually making work harder. 

Manik Suri
We were requiring people to do stuff at a certain time with timestamps and geolocation and photo uploads, and weren’t really making their life easier. They still have to check it manually four to eight times a day, just with a tablet as opposed to a clipboard. And that got us thinking about automation and sensors and led us to realize that we could use IoT Internet of things sensors to get this data out in real time. And we did that with a version 1.0 product that use radio as opposed to Wi Fi or Bluetooth. Turns out that you can’t get a signal out of the inside of a fridge or a freezer using Wi Fi or Bluetooth. Signal doesn’t carry, essentially, the side of the equipment, blocks most radiation and most signal. 

Manik Suri
So were able to use a new connectivity, using radio, essentially, to get signal out. And that’s what led to Therma, which is short for temperature, humidity, energy, remote monitoring application. 

Brett
How did you pull off your first deals of paying customers? And the reason I ask is, every Founder that I talk to, they say that’s typically very hard. And a lot of the founders I talk to, we’re dealing with, like, cybersecurity software dev tools, things where the stakes aren’t that high, but with you, it’s a. It’s a real world product. It’s something that’s physically out there. So I’m guessing that it’s really hard to get someone to say yes. 

Manik Suri
Is that fair to say I think it’s hard to get people to buy new technology in any category. I think you really have to demonstrate value, especially business to business technology, not the BTC. Tools aren’t hard to scale, but I think when you’re selling to businesses, you’ve got to demonstrate some type of value that’s measurable if you really want to get people to put dollars behind it and invest, and especially when you have no reputation and limited product in kind of a small marketing budget, I think it’s really about staying close to the customers pain and being able to show that you’re solving some problem for them in a value creating way. 

Manik Suri
What were able to do early on with Therma was work with existing co inspect customers, test our new product with them, and what we saw was a lot more pull than push. The adoption was way faster than anything we’d seen with the first product we launched. And both the speed of adoption and the demand were just so much more obvious. These early adopters started saying, hey, we’d love this in all our locations. We love to recommend this to others. Can we sign up for more sensors per location? So those kinds of signals told us that were solving a problem in a measurable, repeatable way. 

Brett
How do you find those early adopters? 

Manik Suri
A lot of different approaches, sometimes a little bit of hacking it. So I spent a lot of time going out there on the road. I think I hit over 40 states selling that time. We had almost no capital. We raised like a couple of million dollars in total over three and a half years, and very small sales team, which I was leading. And I think that talking to customers directly as a Founder is really powerful. There’s something about the emotional and personal connection that a Founder has with their products that gets potential customers excited. If you’re willing to go out there and say, I’m building this, I really want to test it with you. I’m willing to do what it takes to help you improve your business or deliver value for your clients and your customers. 

Manik Suri
A lot of people will give you the benefit of doubt. I think that’s much easier to do as a Founder early on than trying to hire people to do it for you. And I think beyond the ground game, going door to door, I think talking to industry veterans and talking to potential customers and getting feedback early and incorporating that into the product roadmap can be really powerful. Something we did with Therma, which we hadn’t done with my first company, was spend a lot of time with industry veterans, whether they were users or buyers or both and get feedback on pain points, and also not just pain points, but learning from what hadn’t worked, talking to them about other technologies and other approaches that have been taken. That’s what made us realize that monitoring refrigeration with radio could actually be effective. 

Manik Suri
We discovered that many people had tried to do this with Wi Fi, Bluetooth and Zigbee, early IoT connectivity technologies, and that the signal just didn’t carry. And so lots of businesses had tried using sensors between 2010 and 2018 and just couldn’t get reliable signal. And so no one was using sensors. Starbucks, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Marriott Hotels, people just weren’t using this technology. That opening is what would give us confidence that radio could actually work. But that wouldn’t have come from our own knowledge. We only learned that by talking to the folks in the industry and then jumping on that learning. 

Brett
Are there any critics of the use of this technology? Like, is there anyone that just says, like, it’s unnecessary or it’s unneeded? And I’m guessing if there are those folks, they may be the ones who would get disrupted by this. 

Manik Suri
Not too many people pushing back. At the core technology, I think the biggest pushback we get is why do I need this today? Do I really need to deploy this immediately? Because I’ve got a lot of problems to solve, so why should I do this today? So it’s usually a question of urgency rather than fundamental critique of the tech. What we’re replacing is basically analog manual checks, or in the case of our energy offering, doing nothing. And because we sell our products on a SaaS basis, subscription basis, we don’t charge for hardware or installation. So there’s no upfront investment. It’s not like we’re charging a huge upfront fee, which means that customers are generally ROI positive immediately. So generally the biggest pushback is prioritization. And with thermal, what we’ve been able to do is demonstrate. 

Manik Suri
This is a very simple, very obvious way to save money. Our typical onboarding in store is less than 20 minutes. You know, the saying is that a 20 year old can be set up in 20 minutes or less with no field installation required. So it’s entirely do it yourself offering. And that’s how we’ve been growing from, you know, zero to 30,000 sensors, zero to over 1000 customers in three years. Despite the pandemic, what’s your goal for. 

Brett
Customer growth this year? 

Manik Suri
We’ve been growing at a pretty fast clip, doubling and tripling year over year for the last several years. We’re trying to maintain that growth rate in 24 and trying to continue to deliver ROI for our customers and climate RoI for society. That’s the thing that I think gets me most excited, is every installation, every deployment, saves customers money, but also reduces emissions as a CO2 e benefit. And it’s measurable. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io slash podcast. Now back today’s episode. So I’m sure you’ve done a lot of annual planning. What are some of those top priorities that you have for 2024, and what are some of those areas that may be keeping up at night a bit? 

Manik Suri
Oh yeah, it’s been a good year so far. It’s a short start to the year, but I think it’s definitely an exciting time early in the year. There’s always, you know, I think, a lot of positive energy about what’s possible. I’d say we’re focused on three areas, people, process and purpose. And we’re really trying to dial in and elevate our team. So a lot of work and a lot of goal setting around people, whether that’s okrs or what we call rocks, but really kind of objectives, your results that are measurable for each person in each seat in the company, and also for each department and ultimately for the company. We’re trying to set those at a person level all the way up to the team and doing that for each quarter in the year. We’re also doing work on process. 

Manik Suri
So we’re trying to retool some of our internal the way we run the company, whether that’s changing our meeting structure, or reducing the number of unnecessary meetings, or trying to improve how we collaborate online and in person. We’re doing a lot of work to try and streamline and do more with less in terms of meetings and process and then purpose. We’re trying to get really serious about measuring our emissions reduction potential. Probably going to engage a couple of third party firms to help validate and quantify the CO2 e metrics that we’re developing and delivering in our products, and then starting to market that for our customers and ultimately to drive impact for their bottom line. So those are kind of three areas where we’re setting ambitious goals. In addition, of course, to revenue. 

Brett
Are you running eos? That sounds like EOS. 

Manik Suri
We are. We are running EOS. We started implementing six months ago. 

Brett
Nice. When I heard the word rocks, that triggered it for me. Did you hire an implementer then? 

Manik Suri
We did. We hired an implementer in December. 

Brett
Can you just give us a high level overview of what EOS is, why you decided to implement it, and what the value is that you’ve seen so far? 

Manik Suri
Yeah, absolutely. Without trying to give too much of a shameless plug for any one modality or any one operating system, I’m looking at Gino Wickman’s attraction, which is sitting on my desk right now in front of me. I first heard about eos and traction from a college classmate of mine from Harvard undergrad who became an EOS implementer a decade ago. He’s a former entrepreneur, sold his company, started working with EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system, which is a framework for running early stage and growth stage businesses effectively. And at the time, I kind of poohed it. I was like, oh, who needs this? I think I can figure this out myself. Years later, one of my mentors and a board member at thermal, this is 2023. So last year said to me, hey, maybe you should check out eos. 

Manik Suri
You might be at a point in your entrepreneurial journey where you could really benefit. So I went back to the book, which I’d had on my bookshelf for years, traction, and read it over the summer of 23. And essentially it was and is a toolkit to help entrepreneurs and teams develop more effective ways of managing and scaling their organizations. I wouldn’t say there’s anything in there that’s rocket science, but it is very straightforward. I think it’s tried and true. Thousands of companies have used the tools and the frameworks EOS offers, and we’ve been finding in the past six months since we started implementing it at thermal, we’ve been finding it’s been incredible in terms of helping us improve internal communication, collaboration, getting more done with less heartache and headache. I can’t say enough good things about it. 

Manik Suri
I don’t think it’s the only system out there, and I certainly don’t think it’s the only one that could work, but it happens to be one that’s working well for us in the early days. 

Brett
The reason I asked is we use it as well. So we’ve been running on that since like 2015, when were first founded. So I’m a big fan of EOS and just their approach in general, like you said, it’s not rocket science and I think that’s what really resonated with me. They just make it so simple and so easy. I think some of the other books I’ve read like that, they’re just so complicated and they kind of seem like they’re just written for more like enterprise scale and an enterprise level which you don’t really experience if you’re running a small team. So huge fan of that book and that the general process. 

Manik Suri
Awesome, love hearing that. 

Brett
Let’s talk a little bit about marketing. So how would you define or describe your marketing philosophy? 

Manik Suri
Yeah, you know, I think our marketing philosophy or our marketing strategy is largely driven by our go to market strategy more broadly. So today, because we’re B2B company that sells primarily to mid market customers. So the mid market segment, we’re focused on marketing strategies and channels that can support selling to that type of customer. So generally we’re doing a couple of things with marketing. First, we’re doing kind of what I think of as kind of company level marketing, which is a combination of pr and comms or communications. At that level. We’re working on thought leadership. We’re working on elevating the company in the space around energy management and climate technologies. We’re trying to be visible to potential investors and potential team members as well as potential partners. So there’s some work going on and some investment around public relations and comms. 

Manik Suri
Then there’s what I think of as product marketing. So we have an initiative underway around product marketing where we’re using a combination of content and collateral to drive sales and to support sales. And the product marketing efforts are really a combination of developing collateral, developing training materials, building tools such as ROI calculators and interactive websites, and one pagers and downloadable white papers and case studies, stuff that can help sales deliver the message and convert prospects. And then we have a growth marketing team which is focused on driving leads and bringing traffic inbound. 

Manik Suri
And our growth marketing team is using a combination of SEO and SEM and advice to drive some organic efforts, but trying to drive traffic to a series of landing pages and helping build top of funnel, helping us to find prospects, get them engaged, get them through the stages of awareness and intent, and then ultimately transferring or helping those folks find our salespeople that can take it forward. So those are the pillars for our marketing efforts. PR comms product marketing growth marketing what about your market category? 

Brett
So I introduced you as a cooling intelligence platform. Is that a category that you’re creating. 

Manik Suri
It is. It’s funny you say that. That’s exactly the intent, is to create a category around cooling intelligence. First time anyone’s ever asked me that. But that was the intent. When we announced the cooling intelligence platform was to kind of build a new space. And that’s really something we’re doing at, I’d say, at the kind of executive level and the Founder level. We don’t have kind of a formal marketing budget around that, around category creation, but we are trying to position ourselves in a growing ecosystem around the built environment transformation thesis, and we see opportunities there. 

Brett
What’s the competitive landscape look like today, and what are you doing to rise above all the noise outside of the marketing playbook that you just ran us through? 

Manik Suri
Yeah, I mean, I think there are a lot of folks in the built environment transformation space, many technologies around taking dumb assets and making them smarter. There’s a plethora of IoT companies that use sensors, and data comes off of those sensors, and then there’s a whole bunch of energy management companies that have been around for 10, 20, 30 plus years. So those are the two big sets of competitors, folks that monitor the built environment and folks that manage it. We’ve been finding, I think, opportunity to differentiate inside the cooling category cooling, specifically, refrigeration and air conditioning in cooling, for a number of reasons, there are fewer players using either IoT or data science to transform, you know, quote, legacy dumb assets into intelligent dynamic loads. So a lot of that has to do with technology challenges historically. 

Manik Suri
As I was saying earlier, Brett, you can’t get a signal through the inside of a fridge or a freezer reliably. So very few people could get commercial traction with generation one IoT devices in the cold chain. For example, with H Vac, the heating, ventilation, air conditioning, the generation 1.0 technologies didn’t use data science. They weren’t using real time data to turn things up and down and on and off. At most, they were using presets, which is what most smart thermostats can offer today. So I think there’s a significant opportunity in cooling for modern tech forward players like us to deliver value, partly because we’re starting with a newer tech stack. We started the company using long range radio, and weren’t required or didn’t have to go through an entire upheaval of transitioning from wired or generation one IoT to a new tech stack. 

Manik Suri
We started with the latest and greatest same thing with our algorithms. We’re using a series of techniques to turn equipment up and down and on and off. That’s powered by several machine learning algorithms, and those are algorithms that we developed in house. We filed multiple patents around them. Because we’re starting with a relatively clean text, we can take advantage of the latest data and data sets. There’s a lot cleaner and easier to ingest data available today around things like historical utility bills, weather patterns and weather prediction, energy prices and energy price prediction, historical consumption of energy by asset. There’s just a bunch of variables and data sets that we can get access to that are cleaner and better structured today that make it easier to build better algos. 

Manik Suri
So we’re taking advantage of the fact that we’re kind of a newer player in a relatively less crowded corner of whats otherwise a very large ecosystem. And I think theres a lot of tailwinds. Electricity and energy prices are higher than ever. Climate is hotter and more worrisome than ever. Theres a lot of margin pressure because inflation and high labor costs as well as high food costs have meant that businesses have had to do more with less for a number of years. So theres a lot of focus on bottom line and cost reduction. And I think all of those factors are tailwinds for thermal. 

Brett
As I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over 30 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey? 

Manik Suri
So many things. It is absolutely a skill. It’s something I think we can get better at with practice. Many people describe fundraising as a sales motion. I think of it very much as a sales motion in terms of the kind of the fundamental process. Developing a lead list, identifying the ideal targets, building set of materials, developing a cadence, outreach, first touch, second touch, follow ups, making sure that you’re diligent and responsive. All of those mechanics, all of the kind of nuts and bolts of how to run a good sales process, I think they apply very much to fundraising. So I’d say my hit ratio and our hit ratio has gotten a lot better. The first time I raised capital in 2015, I think were trying to raise 700,000. On a convertible note, I’d never raised a dollar in my life for anything before. 

Manik Suri
Even in high school student body elections, I never raised money. I think my parents gave me some money to buy signs and postcards for running for class office, but I think discovering that doing the work to build a good process and to run a good process can save a lot of time and effort, that was one of the biggest learnings. So I think we’ve gotten a lot better. And I’ve gotten a lot more efficient with each subsequent route since then. And also, I’d say fundraising is largely about storytelling, and storytelling is often as much about emotion as it is about reason. So it’s important to have good command of the facts and figures. 

Manik Suri
But ultimately, especially with early stage fundraising, I think you’re selling a dream and you’re selling possibility, which requires, I think, really elevating one’s own thinking and kind of harnessing that internal emotion, that passion. 

Brett
Did storytelling just come naturally for you, or how did you really hone in and improve that skill or master that skill? 

Manik Suri
Well, I do like to talk when I was three or something around that. My mom said to me, I talked a lot as a kid. I think she said to me, you better get a job one day where they pay you to talk. So it was going to be either a lawyer or entrepreneur. So, yeah, I’ve always loved to talk. I think in high school and college, my friends thought I was going to go into politics when I was older, probably because I studied political science and law and light government. But I’d say storytelling is very much craft, and I’ve come to appreciate how one can really work at it. 

Manik Suri
I think I have a decent storyteller, but I recently attended Ted AI, for example, a conference in San Francisco a few months ago, and I got to listen to eight TED talks back to back these ten minute talks. And these talks were so exceptional. Each talk was so well crafted, so well curated and so well delivered that I felt I was kind of in the JV league, looking at the varsity players. So I think that one can get better and better with practice and effort. 

Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision that you’re building? 

Manik Suri
We’re trying to transform one of the most important and underappreciated sources of warming into a ray of hope for a cleaner and cooler future. Cooling today is responsible for roughly 8% of all global warming, which is a crazy number. 8% of all warming from all sources. That’s like a huge number. It’s as big as, like, many massive drivers. Almost no one knows that, and very few people seem to care because it’s kind of unsexy and not really thought about. And we think there’s a huge opportunity to build technology that can save people money and help them reduce their emissions footprint. 

Manik Suri
So the vision here for me and Therma is to scale, and to scale rapidly to save businesses money and help them do more with less and to do it in a way that actually has a significant dentist on the broader challenge we face, which is much broader than cooling alone, and that is the climate change underway. 

Brett
Amazing. Love the vision. All right, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go? 

Manik Suri
We’ll love to connect. Please reach out. My email is manik@hellotherma.com. Hellotherma.com. I’m also on LinkedIn and Twitter Manik Suri, and the company is Therma hellotherma.com. Thanks, Brett. 

Brett
Thank you. Really appreciate it. It’s a lot of fun. Likewise, this episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.