CarbonSense (Decarbonization with One-Stop Green Factory Management)
CarbonSense, a green SaaS company, empowers global enterprises to achieve carbon neutrality with a digitalized carbon management system and aspires to set industry standards like “Siemens in green manufacturing”.
Jerry Huang became the youngest biker to cross the Europe-Asia route upon graduating from United World College in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
He also dropped out of Harvard College. To him, finding a pursuit worth life commitment at one’s young age is a gift.
Founder
Q: You would be graduating from Harvard College if you didn’t drop out. What led you to make this decision? Is Harvard not good enough or were you inspired by Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates?
A: Harvard is great. Inspiration from alumni was a factor but finding a pursuit worth life commitment at one’s young age is a gift. I chose entrepreneurship not just for the sake of it but because I saw opportunities to transform the Chinese manufacturing industry under China’s carbon peak and neutrality policies. I grew up with exposure to factories in their original forms. I was fortunate to attend high school in Bosnia and Herzegovina and go to Harvard for college. In Germany, I saw that a classmate’s family owned unmanned factories. A professor of mine at Harvard, Lawrence Culp, later became the CEO of General Electric. These experiences showed me the gap between China and the U.S. / Europe in manufacturing management.
In terms of why carbon management, I have always been keen on nature and sustainability. I once biked from Europe to China to experience and investigate nature and society in close proximity. Activities like hiking are my favorites.
My decision to found CarbonSense and pursue the goals of helping Chinese factories realize carbon neutrality comes down to a combination of entrepreneurial opportunities in the manufacturing industry and my passion. My alumni have also set great examples that encouraged me to start my own company here in China.
Q: As a young entrepreneur, you have built a very experienced team with members bringing rich industry insights to CarbonSense from leading global manufacturing companies like Siemens and Foxconn as well as AI giants like ByteDance AI Lab and Megvii. What’s your philosophy and approach to team building and management?
A: With talent, there is a set of guiding principles that govern the whole process, from hiring to management to promotion.
We maintain an extremely high bar in hiring. On top of industry-leading expertise, we also look for an alignment of vision and mission as well as qualities such as drive and critical thinking. The criteria would rule out many candidates but we get to take those who are on the same page, which facilitates our management.
For internal management, we enforce OKR (Objective Key Result) to align objectives and avoid filler work. We measure performance through quantitative metrics to ensure fairness and keep everyone motivated.
Promotion depends on not only individual performance but also contribution to the company’s overall success, colleagues’ feedback, and fit with our culture and values. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation.
Our approach is centered around high standards, deliberate management, and quantitative metrics.
Q: Have investors and clients challenged your qualification or capability because of your young age? How did you respond?
A: Yes, but I am not the only one on the team. There are approximately 40 of us, some of whom are experts in their 40s or 50s with over 30 years of industry experience. The founder’s age is not key. We excel at speed and efficiency. If an investor turns us down because we are a young team, we might not be a good fit anyway.
Q: Upon graduating from high school, you became the youngest biker who traveled to Asia from Europe, with a ride spanning across 83 days, 4,033 kilometers, and 8 countries. What did you see and take away from the journey?
A: A lot. Every day was a magical experience. Our official account on WeChat has many articles about it.
The biggest takeaway for me was the kindness and pureness of humanity. Some people might say it sounds naive. Society is complicated, indeed. Scams got me too on the entrepreneurial journey. Nonetheless, the bike ride exposed me to people’s lifestyles and ways of thinking on the ground. For example, I was able to use the Russian language that I learned in high school to have conversations with people in Turkey and Iran, which shed light on how rapidly these societies have been changing, both politically and economically.
Many people supported and hosted me generously. I came to see that everyone has moments of need and that the trust and generosity between people are borderless, which has convinced me to pay it forward.
Product & Company
Q: What products and services does CarbonSense provide to empower enterprises’ green transformation?
A: CarbonSense provides a one-stop, high-precision carbon footprint and carbon asset management system backed by a software + hardware approach for manufacturers. First, we collect data on factories’ real-time, multi-dimensional energy consumption and carbon emission through smart meters, water meters, and equipment PLC direct connection, etc. Second, we conduct data analysis on the efficiency of equipment and production lines, flag abnormalities, and advise on energy savings. Lastly, we educate enterprises on digitalized carbon management.
Q: What observations or conclusions led you to come up with the idea of a data-driven solution for energy consumption in Chinese manufacturing?
A: Digitalization will be the future trend. It is also an area that I’m familiar with — I studied computer science and statistics at Harvard. It makes sense for me to pick software over hardware and apply IT to traditional industry techniques, given my prior experience with coding and algorithms.
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For us, energy and carbon are still relatively new themes facing less competition. For enterprises, reducing carbon emissions and energy consumption is a responsibility that they can no longer shy away from. It is rising as an inelastic demand as the Chinese government enforces the national agenda of carbon peak by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.
Q: CarbonSense has enabled factories to cut carbon emissions by 10% to 15%. Where do you sit in the industry with such results? What’s the long-term goal?
A: It’s an industry-leading position. We are also expanding overseas and just registered a subsidiary in France last week. Our long-term goal is to become a global digital solution provider that helps enterprises achieve carbon neutrality. CarbonSense has only been around for two years. I’ll be in my 60s in 2060, still able to work. It might take 50 years to get there but we will be supporting the industry’s net-zero transition along the way.
Q: How much time does your team spend on visiting factories? Have you observed anything surprising or counterintuitive there?
A: A lot. It was quite shocking at first to see that factories with hundreds of workers were still placing orders with pen and paper. Later, the question became how to enable connected systems to better communicate with each other for improved accuracy and functionality. We also witnessed how the importance of energy consumption control picked up over time at factories. The power cuts imposed by the Chinese government last September made some public companies pay a price for having no system in place to address the issue. The new bottleneck has brought opportunities for decarbonization digital solution providers like us to empower enterprises to allocate carbon quotas and utilize energy supply more intelligently.
Q: CarbonSense has founded its own green institute, committee, and R&D teams across China, the United States, and Europe. What was the intention?
A: What we aim to achieve cannot be accomplished by one single company. CarbonSense Foundation is our nonprofit organization arm. The nonprofit nature has the appeal to better connect enterprises, talent, academic institutions, and many related resources. We built the platform with the hope of giving back through facilitated learning for youth and peers.
The global nature is driven by the fact that carbon neutrality is a global concern that calls for wisdom from the world. Restricting our focus to China can only allow us to tackle local challenges but there could always be a better solution out there. Europe is ahead of us by 10 years. Some parts of California and the northeast of the U.S. are ahead of us by 5 years. Tapping caliber from these places and bringing global talent to build a green future together is our goal.
Market
Q: CarbonSense has done extensive research on carbon policies and technologies. Which sectors have the biggest room for decarbonization?
A: The automobile industry chain, from upstream parts suppliers to downstream OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), steel, building material, cement, and chemical are our core business partners. We are trying our best to minimize their carbon emissions.
Q: Carbon neutrality has gained a lot of traction in recent years, becoming an increasingly crowded space. What is CarbonSense’s niche and core competence as a startup?
A: Our specialized expertise in the subsectors that we choose to focus on, versus the broad industry coverage by big companies. With roughly 30 experts on our team and 40 clients, we hope to become the best vendor in these areas and build high barriers to entry with our combination of OT (operating technology) and IT (information technology). We plan to leverage our familiarity with the industry to integrate carbon data across the supply chain for the decarbonization transition. Like with Tesla, not only are its cars carbon neutral but also are its bumper and screws.
Q: What kind of role do you expect CarbonSense to play in the context of China’s 2060 carbon neutrality plan?
A: We are just one tree in this giant ecosystem. CarbonSense has its own ecosystem too but similar to industrial digitalization, green manufacturing is like the Internet where a single company can’t make up the whole platform. Growth takes decades. Being the industry leader in providing a digitalized, software + hardware carbon management system is our sweet spot. We also need to partner with other parties in the ecosystem for collective efforts.
Q: Compared to western manufacturers, what opportunities and challenges can Chinese factories expect on the road ahead?
A: For Chinese factories, efficient supply chains, talent flow into manufacturing, policies, technologies, and intellectual property are our core strengths. Increased capital inflow from the investor community and attention from the government is setting the stage for future growth. Meanwhile, the availability of data has brought unprecedented benefits of more accurate algorithms that can help cut costs.
Q: You look up to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, hoping to keep scoring goals. What’s next for you after CarbonSense?
A: I think CarbonSense will be my lifelong career because it’s not only a company but a journey that carries our entire team’s longing for a green future. Frankly, it would be quite an accomplishment if we could nail down even one of the industries mentioned earlier. Growing CarbonSense to be the No.1 in the industry, like Siemens in green manufacturing, is my most important priority.
We also hope to define the industry. Third-class companies make products; second-class companies build brands; first-class companies set standards. We need to work on not only the software but also carbon training and knowledge centers to form an ecosystem, pulling multiple strings as needed to be a comprehensive and meaningful contributing force to digitalized carbon management.
On a personal level, I will continue to bike, work out, go camping, and interact with nature.
Q: What’s the next destination for your bike tour?
A: From Chengdu to Lhasa on national highway 318.
