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When a business is on the brink of crisis, CEOs assemble their war rooms of execs and board members to strategize a way out. But Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar says leaders may be overlooking one secret weapon in their arsenal: their employees. Sridhar learned this lesson firsthand from former Intel CEO Andy Grove, whose guidance helped pull his company out of a rough patch.<\/p>\n
It was 2009, and his energy company was just starting to manufacture. Sridhar tells Fortune that it was hard technology to crack\u2014the engineers had built everything up, but the business hadn\u2019t proven its scalability just yet. At that time, the CEO had never worked in a manufacturing environment, and didn\u2019t know the right path to move forward. Bloom Energy had hit a wall.<\/p>\n
Luckily, Sridhar, then in his late 40s, built a powerful team of confidants outside of the company to lean on, which has only grown to a larger circle today. The now-65-year-old is friends with FedEx founder Fred Smith and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, and was close to the late Tata Group leader Ratan Naval Tata, to name a few. And in that time of desperation, Sridhar tapped Grove for help. The CEO\u2019s team splayed out all their three-ring binders with all the necessary information to understand the problem, but the ex-Intel leader wasn\u2019t keen on flipping through the pages. Instead, Grove ordered all the people out of the room, save for Sridhar and Bloom Energy\u2019s board.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy entire team leaves, so I\u2019m sitting on one side, and my board and Andy Grove [are] sitting on the other side. It\u2019s almost like a firing squad,\u201d Sridhar recalled. \u201cAndy keeps asking the question for the third or fourth time, \u2018What\u2019s wrong?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Whichever way Sridhar tried to explain, Grove would simply repeat the question. And after a few go-arounds, the former Intel leader finally dropped a piece of advice that would stick with the energy CEO forever.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter the third time he asked, I don\u2019t answer,\u201d Sridhar recalls. \u201dAnd he says, \u2018Okay, very simple. You\u2019re extremely bright, you\u2019re extremely smart. You\u2019re going to figure this out. You don\u2019t need me coming here and looking at these three-ring binders to figure out what\u2019s wrong.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018The reason why you\u2019re failing here and not in your technology, [is because] you\u2019ve not walked around the floor and asked the people what is going on.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Grove told him that the best way to get to the root of the problem is to go to the staffers building his business. They have a first-hand account of what works within the company, as well as what could go sideways\u2014and it\u2019s a lesson he\u2019s lived by in the 17 years since leading the company from a pre-IPO cleantech startup, to the $65 billion energy business it is today.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018They know something\u2019s wrong, as they\u2019re building for you,\u2019\u201d Sridhar recalls Grove telling him. \u201d\u2019Go to the floor and engage with the people, and learn from them what\u2019s not working for them.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a lesson I will take to my grave.\u201d<\/p>\n
From senior NASA advisor, to the CEO of a $65 billion energy company\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sridhar may have spent more than two decades shaking up the energy industry, but his career first blossomed in academia. He became inspired to study engineering as a young teen after witnessing the aftershock of the 1970\u2019s oil embargo where Arab nations of OPEC (OAPEC) reduced production and banned exports to the U.S. and its allies\u2014which included his home country of India. Sridhar says he became determined to curb oil dependency from one single state.<\/p>\n
The CEO first launched his career through higher education, receiving a bachelor\u2019s degree in mechanical engineering at NIT Trichy in the region of Tamil Nadu. He then went on to earn an M.S. in nuclear engineering, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, both at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From there, he went on to share his expertise with budding STEM professionals when he became a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona.\u00a0<\/p>\n
During his tenure as a professor from 1990 to 1999, he directed the school\u2019s Space Technologies Laboratory (STL), where he first began rubbing shoulders with NASA officials. Sridhar became a senior advisor to the NASA administrator, assisting the U.S. space agency in researching technology that could convert Mars\u2019 atmospheric gases into oxygen for propulsion and life support. Under his leadership, STL won several competitive contracts to conduct research and development for the exploration of and flight experiments to Mars.<\/p>\n
In 2001, Sridhar shifted his focus from Mars to Earth, cofounding Ion America: an energy platform company with a mission to make clean, reliable energy affordable (for all earthlings). A year later, the company\u2019s operations moved to the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and in 2006, the name was changed to Bloom Energy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now, two decades later, Bloom Energy has deployed more than 1.5 GW of low carbon power across more than 1,200 installations globally\u2014roughly enough to power more than one million average U.S. homes at once.<\/p>\n
After all this success, Sridhar still points to the lesson Grove bestowed upon him as helping build the company to what it is today. Though the company has faced a multitude of business troubles in the process (the business has historically struggled to be profitable) it\u2019s now turning a new leaf. It recently reported a strong 2025 financial overview, with revenue hitting $2.02 billion\u2014a 37.3% increase from the $1.47 billion in 2024.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe could have died of 1,000 cuts, and there were many circumstances where things are pretty dire for us,\u201d the CEO says. \u201cBut my co-workers, my board, will attest to this: there\u2019s not a single night I went home and ever wondered about the future of this company. I knew there was only one option. You\u2019re going to succeed.\u201d<\/p>\n
#NASA #advisor #turned #billion #founder #exIntel #CEO #Andy #Grove #helped #crisis<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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