9 learnings from his journey becoming a community-focused entrepreneur.
Kit Wu loves talking to every person in every community.
His childhood passion of serving others and his interest in the energy industry inspired him to create Laminar Collective, which helps communities install more affordable, environmentally friendly heat pumps. Before then, he picked up an Economics degree from Harvard, improved data at Oscar Health, and supported supply chain for Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Inspired by companies like IKEA, Costco, and In-N-Out Burger, he aims to create great customer experiences at affordable prices.
Below are 9 key learnings Kit picked up on his journey so far.
Harvard University, oldest university in the U.S.
Student
Cambridge, MA
2013 – 2017
Lesson 1: Economic principles provide good frameworks to run businesses.
“When I founded my startup, all the Econ lessons that we learned came back, like transparency, pricing, negotiation power, information asymmetry, and market for lemons. With heat pumps, there’s no price transparency because contractors arbitrarily price, and there’s not a lot of reliable information about what constitutes quality.”
Lesson 2: The energy sector has a lot of new business opportunities.
“I was an Environmental Science and Public Policy concentrator for the longest time. I was an energy guy, and I did electricity market research for Professor Michael Aziz’s lab. Electricity prices fluctuate. Typically the price is high when the demand is high. If you have a battery, you can arbitrage the price of batteries from one point in the day to another. Creating a model of electricity grids that calculates profitability of certain battery configurations.”
Oscar Health, aims to reinvent health insurance
Data Scientist, Network Analyst
New York, NY
2017 – 2022
Lesson 3: Technology businesses are not always the right solution.
“At the end of the day, sometimes starting a company is not the best way to solve problems. Sometimes the biggest problems are policy problems, especially in healthcare.
I felt like I got a Masters in public health. Insulin pricing was way too high for a good period of time because of the existing legislative framework. It wasn’t because of a lack of technology, it’s because three major players were functioning as an inefficient market with no competition – they were preventing biosimilars.
That is a policy problem. You can’t start a tech company and solve that problem.”
Lesson 4: Despite policy problems, great interfaces can still improve the consumer experience.
“Software engineers and great designers delivering a smooth consumer experience are going to win out. Oscar Health has pushed the industry towards user-friendly interfaces. With better user interfaces, you can start nudging users to doctors and providers and hospital systems that offer better services at lower cost. And maybe if you hire a data science team, you can start ranking doctors by cost and effectiveness. Ultimately, this is really hard to do within the existing framework of the US healthcare system. I wouldn’t say that we’ve solved the problem here.”
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, building commercial fusion systems
Supply Chain
Cambridge, MA
2022 – 2023
Lesson 5: Organizational culture can very much affect the overall work experience.
“Oscar was a company full of 20-something designers and software developers who just moved to New York – a very classic, fun New York experience. CFS was heavy on people from aerospace, with a lot of families. CFS was much more focused on execution and running a tight ship, and it was a lot more hierarchical. Really different from Oscar, despite the fact that they’re both mid-stage startups.”
Laminar Collective, heat pump deals for communities
Founder
Cambridge, MA
2023 – present
Lesson 6: Founders need to be able to make decisions.
“Sometimes you have to put your foot down. Inevitably, there’s gonna be some disagreement, and I consider myself to be very much a consensus driven person. For the longest time, that worked. Being a founder is very different from that. I’ll try to make sure everybody on the team feels heard, but eventually decide, ‘this is what we’re going to do.’”
Lesson 7: Doing what you love is exhilarating.
“On a day-to-day basis, I’m functioning as a community organizer right now, and I love it. Part of the big motivation that has led me to start Laminar Collective is the fact that I could essentially visit every single small town in Massachusetts and talk to people from every single community.
I always wanted to try a consumer facing role. I like talking to people, engaging with people, engaging with communities. But to make it my full time thing was a leap into the unknown. I can confidently say, ‘yeah, I do like it.’”
Lesson 8: Balancing entrepreneurship and personal life is extraordinarily difficult.
“Now’s the time. It’s my late 20s. I don’t have kids yet, family commitments. So I actually have the flexibility to try to start a company. A year in, I can confidently tell you that I will not try to run a startup when I have kids. I can’t imagine fully putting myself into a startup experience and also fully being a parent at the same time.
I sometimes think about this period as my alternative take on Business School. Instead of spending money on tuition, I’m learning all the lessons and making a little bit of money.”
Lesson 9: Career dream is to balance profit with mass adoption.
“For some people, charging high prices is a validation of how good of a businessman they are, and I disagree. From a social and a policy standpoint, if we want to actually achieve our goals in mass adoption, we need to be able to find a way to make these things a lot more affordable.
I’m very much a person who, left to my own devices, would try to make as little money as possible so that it can go to the company, but my cofounder brings a very healthy balance to that. I now have a much better understanding of the need for healthy business margin.
IKEA, Costco, and In-N-Out Burger are great companies that have somehow cracked the code. They’re able to deliver incredibly affordable prices and people love them. It shows us it is possible to do this in the world, and I’m excited about that.”
All photos courtesy of Kit Wu.