Events
Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg: Donnel Baird, Founder & CEO, BlocPower
Bloomberg, Cornell Tech, and Tech:NYC invite you to join us for the latest installment of the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Speaker Series, featuring Donnel Baird, Founder & CEO of BlocPower, in conversation with Caroline Hyde, host of Bloomberg Television’s flagship daily technology show.
The child of Guyanese immigrants, Baird grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn in an apartment without well-functioning heating and cooling systems. The experience of huddling around a gas stove for heat – and his background as a community organizer – surfaced what he saw as an urgent problem: The impacts of climate change will hit low-income communities and neighborhoods with aging building infrastructure hardest.
Those early realizations led to the inception of BlocPower, a climate technology company founded in 2014, that finances and installs green home and commercial building upgrades. In 2021, BlocPower inked a partnership with the City of Ithaca, NY, to retrofit its entire building stock of more than 6,000 buildings by 2030, making it the first large-scale, citywide electrification initiative in the U.S. Last year, the company announced a similar retrofit project for 10,000 buildings in Menlo Park, CA, as well as several other large-scale decarbonization initiatives in Denver, Oakland, and San Jose. BlocPower also recently expanded its AI-powered software platform, BlocMaps, for use by municipalities and utilities to analyze and plan data-driven strategies for sustainability initiatives.
In addition to its retrofitting technologies, Baird has also designed the startup’s growth model to be an engine for workforce development. In 2022, the company won a $108 million contract with the NYC Office of the Mayor to train 3,000 New York City residents for green economy jobs. Last fall, BlocPower opened two new training facilities in Brooklyn and the Bronx to kickstart training and job placement programs for 1,700 workers.
We hope you’ll join us for this conversation, in which Baird will discuss how his childhood apartment inspired his founder’s journey, the tech sector’s role in accelerating emissions reductions goals in cities, how to make tech tools accessible to low-income communities, and what it will take to “green up” urban infrastructure nationwide.
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AGENDA
5:30 PM – Cocktail reception begins
6:00 PM – Doors close, conversation starts
6:45 PM – Audience Q&A
7:00 PM – Networking and hors d’oeuvres to follow
7:45 PM – Last Call/Bar Closes
PLEASE NOTE: Seating is limited and registered attendees will be seated on a first-come, first-served basis. Doors close promptly at the top of the hour. Individuals arriving late may be turned away from the building. No walk-ins will be allowed.
Speaker Bio
Donnel Baird is the founder and CEO of BlocPower, a climate tech company based in Brooklyn, NY, that analyzes, finances, and installs clean energy and decarbonization upgrades in buildings in underserved communities. BlocPower creates local jobs for qualified low-income workers, energy savings for building owners, reduces carbon emissions and asthma rates, and provides financial returns to investors. In 2021, the company announced a historic partnership with Ithaca, New York to decarbonize 100% of the city’s buildings – the first such project in the United States.
BlocPower is backed by Kapor Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, and Volo Earth Ventures. Baird is a graduate of Duke University and Columbia Business School. He spent four years as a political and community organizer and two years managing a national initiative to leverage American Reinvestment and Recovery Act energy efficiency investments in underserved communities.
He is a member of the board of directors of several organizations, including the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s Second District Advisory Council, the Climate Reality Project, and the Coalition For Green Capital. He also serves on the SEC Small Business Capital Formation Advisory Committee.
He has been named Columbia Business School’s ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ in 2021, the National Venture Capital Association’s ‘Startup Innovator of the Year’ in 2022, and TIME Magazine’s inaugural ‘Dreamer of the Year’ in 2022. In 2022, BlocPower was named the #4 Most Innovative Company in the World by Fast Company; one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Companies; and the 42nd Most Disruptive Startup in the world by CNBC.