Roberto Flores has a very simple definition of a good life. Live where you can be useful, surround yourself with people who make you feel good rather than important, and feel that the place where you are really is your home.
That idea of usefulness appears several times during the conversation and also explains why he ended up dedicating more than ten years to the world of energy.
Curiously, it didn’t get there by engineering. He studied International Relations and his first venture was a Mexican restaurant in Miami. It didn’t work, but it left an unexpected consequence: he became interested in energy efficiency just when LED technology was just beginning to become widespread.
By selling light bulbs he discovered a much bigger problem. Sustainability existed as a discourse, but implementing it remained too difficult.
“I felt that sustainability could be easy. The problem was that there were too many actors in the chain and good ideas ended up poorly implemented”
That intuition ended up becoming first Energy Cloud and, years later, EC.Data.
Complexity is the real problem
For years, Roberto worked as a consultant implementing projects for banks, mining companies, airports and large retailers in different Latin American countries.
There he understood that almost everyone faced the same challenge. Buildings are full of systems that don’t talk to each other.
• What did you see in the market that led you to create EC.Data?
“We realized that we added all the value, but someone else was left with the margin and the final decision. We said: now we are going to do it ourselves”
The change came during the pandemic. Roberto stopped building solutions for third parties and decided to develop a platform…
…own capable of integrating the entire operation of a building: from design and implementation to monitoring and artificial intelligence.
The thesis was simple. If a shopping center works in a similar way in Chile, Peru or Mexico, then that knowledge can also become a scalable technology.
“Technology serves to solve replicable problems”
That’s why EC.Data specialized in buildings, hotels, supermarkets and large facilities: industries where the same problem can be repeated hundreds of times.
Building a company is also building processes
If there is one word that Roberto repeats throughout the interview, it is process. After working with corporations like IBM, he says he understood that startups can improvise for a while, but not forever.
• What learning from those projects do you continue to apply as a founder?
“You can have the best technology and the best people, but if you don’t have a process, nothing is useful”
That logic also changed his way of leading. For Roberto, all decisions go through three elements: processes, technology and people.
When one of them is the weakest, the CEO’s job is to identify where to strengthen the company.
But he acknowledges that the most difficult challenge has never been technology. It has been the responsibility.
«The pressure is not to work. The pressure is knowing that there are people who believe in your decisions and that their well-being depends on them.
He experienced that pressure especially during the pandemic, when he even sold his house to finance the company and keep the project alive. He says that those moments forever change the way we do business.
Passion also needs humility
Today EC.Data uses artificial intelligence to anticipate failures, interpret energy consumption data and translate technical information into simple decisions for those who operate a building. But Roberto insists that AI is just a tool.
“Artificial intelligence is a great calculator. The important thing is how you use all that information to make better decisions”
After more than ten years of entrepreneurship, he assures that the biggest mistake he made was neither technical nor financial. It was arrogance.
• If you could go back to the beginning, what would you say to Roberto who was building his first company?
“Don’t be arrogant. Humility gives you perspective and allows you to better manage people and projects”
I would also tell you something else. That starting a business is not worth it if it is lived solely as a job.
«If it feels like work, don’t do it. It has to feel like building your dream.”
That’s why, when he talks about EC.Data, he never starts with a possible sale of the company or an exit.
Talk about staying. To continue building a company that makes sustainability simpler and that demonstrates that technology can also solve invisible problems.
Because, for Roberto Flores, energy efficiency was never the ultimate goal. The goal was always to make easy something that for too long had been unnecessarily complex.
