SOLAR TODAY - May 2011 - Innovative Design
SOLAR TODAY - May 2011 - Innovative Design
SOLAR TODAY - May 2011 - Innovative Design
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innovators | Peter and Lyndon Rive, SolarCity<br />
SolarCity<br />
In February, California’s SolarCity purchased the residential-installation part of the blossoming,<br />
Vermont-based groSolar. The acquisition put SolarCity solidly into the Northeast market and made<br />
it the largest integrator of photovoltaic systems on the continent.<br />
A family business leads<br />
One would normally associate this kind of market penetration with a large corporation. In fact,<br />
SolarCity is a family-run company, the creation of two brainy South African brothers and their brainy<br />
the installer universe. cousin. Because their mothers are identical twins, it might be said that genetically, they’re closer than<br />
cousins — more like half-siblings.<br />
The family story begins with Joshua Haldeman, D.C., a Minnesota native who became a prominent<br />
By Seth Masia<br />
chiropractor in Regina, Saskatchewan. Haldeman was also an accomplished pilot, and when, in 1950, he<br />
moved his young family to Pretoria, South Africa, he packed along not only his two-year-old twin daughters<br />
Seth Masia (smasia@solartoday.org) is deputy editor but his single-engine Bellanca. Haldeman flew the plane as far afield as Norway and Australia, and spent<br />
of <strong>SOLAR</strong> <strong>TODAY</strong>.<br />
hundreds of hours air-searching the Kalahari Desert for signs of lost cities.<br />
Meanwhile the twins <strong>May</strong>e and Kaye grew up, married and<br />
launched careers in modeling, nutrition counseling and cosmetic<br />
sales. <strong>May</strong>e’s kids were Elon, Kimbal and Tosca Musk.<br />
Kaye produced Russell, Peter, Lyndon and Almeda Rive.<br />
The older boys all gravitated to computers, and to Silicon<br />
Valley by way of North American colleges and grad schools. In<br />
1995, Elon and Kimbal founded Zip2, an elaborate database of<br />
businesses and services used to create content for newspaper<br />
websites. Russell worked for them. In 1999 Zip2 was sold to<br />
Compaq’s Altavista division for about $350 million in cash<br />
and stock. Elon used his share to launch x.com, which evolved<br />
into PayPal, which was sold to eBay late in 2002 for $1.5 billion.<br />
Elon went on to found Tesla and Space-X, which now<br />
markets private satellite-launch services to clients as significant<br />
as NASA.<br />
While all this was going on, Peter attended Queen’s University<br />
in Kingston, Ontario, and young Lyndon attended high<br />
school back in Pretoria. In his final year, Lyndon took on distribution<br />
for a line of organic cosmetics his mother was selling,<br />
and within a few months had a thriving business. Not yet out of<br />
high school, he’d earned more than his first million and taught<br />
himself the essentials of marketing, sales and distribution logistics.<br />
The high school excused him from classes and let him sit<br />
for final exams, which he passed. He was also swimming for<br />
South Africa’s national underwater hockey team, and visited<br />
San Jose for the World Championships in 1998.<br />
The following year, Lyndon and Russell founded Everdream.<br />
Peter joined them later. The company offered a turnkey<br />
solution to running distributed data networks, focused<br />
on corporations running a few applications on thousands of<br />
computers, at hundreds of locations. Key clients were FedEx,<br />
UPS and a number of airlines. Elon came in as an investor in<br />
the fourth round of venture capital financing.<br />
Lyndon recalls the seven years at Everdream as a slog. The<br />
partners barely weathered the dot-com crash of 2000, and had<br />
to rebuild. Like a lot of family businesses, there was an outside<br />
guy, Lyndon, specializing in sales, marketing and investor relations,<br />
and an inside guy, Peter, specializing in operations, production<br />
and fulfillment. “We’re athletes, though, and we tend<br />
to think of ourselves as offense and defense,” notes Lyndon,<br />
who as the outside guy naturally handles press relations. “I<br />
Peter and Lyndon Rive in SolarCity’s offices in San Jose, Calif.<br />
make the promises, Peter keeps them.”<br />
22 <strong>May</strong> <strong>2011</strong> <strong>SOLAR</strong> <strong>TODAY</strong> solartoday.org Copyright © <strong>2011</strong> by the American Solar Energy Society Inc. All rights reserved.