Abid Saifee

Abid has years of product management experience at top tech companies. Now he’s working at OnSwtich, building the simplest way for commercial buildings to switch to solar. Abid’s turning point was an exercise in honesty, writing down his unfiltered opinion about climate change. In this interview we cover being an active citizen, how being an investor helped him find his current role, and what it’s like living in alignment with what’s important.

You have years of experience at well-known consumer tech companies: Zillow, Microsoft, Amazon. What was the turning point that made you focus your career and time on climate solutions?

It’s something that has been in the back of my mind for a long time. The first consciousness I had of climate change was way, way back when I read Al Gore’s book, Earth in the Balance in high school. Back then what stuck with me was that we couldn’t just keep going on like this, that there was no free lunch so to speak.

I started my career in management consulting and got into tech around the turn of the millennium. I was sort of concerned about climate change and at the time but it seemed like we were on a good track. The Kyoto protocol looked like it was going to happen. Al Gore was the vice president and well...

… The people who are meant to be doing something would do something?

Exactly! The idea of the ice caps melting seemed implausible because the grownups obviously wouldn’t let that happen! Now I am a grownup, I have two kids, and in 10 years I will have to answer to them for what’s happening now.

Early in 2018, I was really struggling with the cognitive dissonance of knowing there’s a climate crisis and at the same time needing to go to work and pretend everything is ok.  One evening I decided to write out on paper what I really thought about climate change, just for myself so it would be uncensored, almost as if written by an alien with no stake in the outcome. Putting that on paper and removing my own desired outcome helped me accept the situation and, having accepted it, move on to how I wanted to respond to it.  For me, it feels better to try to make an effort to improve things, regardless of the ultimate outcome. I think that’s true for most people once they really understand what we’re facing.

I started by reaching out to a guy on LinkedIn, who was working for Al Gore on the Climate Reality Project. I wanted to at least connect with someone to start learning. Based on his recommendation I ended up getting involved with Citizens Climate Lobby, that was my first step toward action.

“Removing my own desired outcome helped me accept the situation and, having accepted it, move on to how I wanted to respond to it.”

What is the Citizens’ Climate Lobby and what was your experience like working with them?

The Citizens' Climate Lobby is advocating for a carbon fee and dividend. So you put a price on carbon, but then when you collect the revenue, you cut checks to people. The goal is to solve the price problem, not generate revenue. That's intentional: to attract Republicans and Democrats. A bipartisan approach is pretty rare right now in politics which appealed to me.

Organizationally, at the state level, it is made up of grassroots groups with a strategy going to every single district, Republican or Democrat, to establish a relationship and find some common ground to get consensus around the policy.

During the summer that I joined, there was an initiative to get carbon pricing on the ballot in Washington state. It was an all-hands push. We were going door to door canvassing. I got my daughter involved. It was something, just getting involved and going door to door. I hadn’t done it before. 

A lot of tech people struggle with grassroots organizing because they don't believe it's scalable and high impact. My perspective is that one-to-one conversations are some of the highest impact work you can do. What would you tell a tech audience about the experience of organizing?

What it’s about is day in, day out, going to do the unsexy stuff that moves the needle on a policy. It takes a lot of energy and it isn't easy. When you find the one or two people that are interested, and they turn to support the policy, that’s when you feel like you did your job. It is really changing people's minds and just like any kind of sales or marketing activity and it takes dedication.

I was motivated to do the work because we had an opportunity to do something big in our state, we had an initiative on the ballot. A ballot has a short time horizon to it, so it’s an all-out push. You can't not get involved in that! It was also invigorating because it was a David and Goliath situation. These oil companies come in with 30 million bucks and you've got people trying to go door to door without a lot of money. How can you not want to help? It didn’t end up passing but we gave it a really good shot.

Are you getting involved in the 2020 election season?

I'm still figuring out my involvement but I’m interested in the Environmental Voter Project. Nathaniel Stinnett did a bunch of data mining to understand the voting behavior of environmentalists. They found that people who rank the environment as their top issue have a crappy voting record. They just don't vote. And if you don't vote, then you're not polled. Nobody cares what you think. 

So they are not going to try to convince people that aren't interested in the environment to care. Instead, they are going to just convince people that are interested in the environment to vote.

Let’s talk about your experience of moving from big tech to a solar start-up, what was it like shifting your career that way? 

It all goes back to my initial journey of wanting to do something about climate change. The first thing I did was get involved with the political action side of things. I also found an angel group that was focused on cleantech in the Seattle area called Element Eight (E8). I joined them to learn about cleantech and build my network.

I wanted to do the work and needed to figure out where the entry point was for me. My background is in product management. I have a lot of experience building software. The advice I got from people in E8 was to transition using something I already know, so I looked for companies that were building software related to climate.

Onswitch is one of the portfolio companies for E8. I had a conversation with the CEO of the company where he said he was interested in my background with Amazon and wanted feedback. I turned around and offered to help him grow the company. I sort of talked my way into a job. Moving into cleantech is different from finding a job at Amazon or Google, they are much smaller companies with less defined roles so you have to be proactive. You have to have a little bit more motivation than most and take action. It’s not about maximizing salary and position, it's about making an impact.

“They are much smaller companies with less defined roles so you have to be proactive.”

I want to ask a question about that. Transitioning to something impactful can mean leaving a lot of money behind. I certainly found it hard even though I was working in the climate space for 18 months. What was your experience with it?

Yeah, there's money. There's also a question of do you know what you're doing? It’s a new area and all those tools and experiences you had that made you super successful may or may not translate. 

Ultimately though, it is about energy and passion. You have to be passionate about what you are doing day in and day out. I wasn’t passionate about what I was doing and everything in my head was saying climate. So yeah, you may leave money behind but you get all this energy, excitement, and motivation. It’s also a longer-term game. Maybe it feels like leaving money behind now, but I am going to be working in this space for the next 10 to 20 years. I look at it as an investment, not as a loss. 

What is different for you now compared to where you were five years ago?

The biggest thing is that I have alignment between what I care about with what I'm doing. It is not a part-time thing, I am fully committed to it. Honestly, I just feel better. There is always a little bit of temptation where a lucrative job pops up but it’s fool’s gold. Because if I take that I would be unhappy and back to square one. 

You talked earlier about being a parent. Was being a parent the biggest driver of change for you?

It's a part of it, but it's not the driver of it. For me, this is just the biggest problem to solve, period.

The thing is with skills like mine in product management or marketing you have a choice to make on where you put your skills. One of the market failures is that the most talented people are not incentivized to work on the most important problems. There are all these people working in tech, going crazy working on making it easier for you to buy a house or click a link. It’s baffling to me.

I’m totally with you on that. Some of the brightest minds of my generation are optimizing ads. Anything else about your story that you want to share?

I had a lot of angst before diving in and doing something different and it turned out that it wasn't remotely as hard as I thought. 

I have this analogy, we moved into this new place next to a lake. I have never swum in a lake before and I was kind of fearful. But a couple of weeks in, I was jumping in without a second thought. I would encourage that you get out of your head and don't be too fearful. 

The other thing is that people will help you. I found that if you tell people what you want, they show up to help because it is all for the greater good and the benefit of everyone. You network, you get referrals. All you have to do is start.