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Business View Magazine
70 Business View – October
Energy
was mapped out even in his days as a humble
undergrad in central New Jersey.
“I knew I wanted to be involved,” he said, “but I
didn’t know what that meant.”
In fact, Hammell was studying in the engineering
department in 2001 and signed on for a high-
tech entrepreneurship course taught by popular
Princeton professor Dr. Ed Zschau.
Part of the final coursework included composition
of a business plan, and Zschau was subsequently
instrumental in establishing the corporate
framework and setting up a meeting with the
man who eventually become the company’s angel
investor, Greg Olsen.
Energy was a hot topic of the day, so the business
got started with power-conversion technology
contract work with the U.S. Army and Navy, mainly
developing prototypes and looking at where they
could be applied to save energy in the battlefield
and on warships.
But not long afterward, the R&D focus began to
edge toward production.
The company transitioned into distributed
generation, renewable energy and energy storage/
battery products, which essentially provided a
commerce-driven re-launch for an enterprise now
“We were a technology company,
but we really focused on getting a
commercial product out.”
