Of course, those numbers matter only if Serious Materials sells a lot of product. So for two years Surace has been on a capacity-building tear, snapping up factories around the country, with the goal of owning 20 or 30 in a decade. To date, the company has purchased four plants, three of which were on the verge of failing -- most notably Republic and Kensington, both in 2009. The publicity that sprang from those acquisitions, coupled with a growing industry reputation for innovation, have provided Surace a vast stage and rapt audience. He has become a regular at big-brain forums, such as the TED conference, where his message blends Al Gore's grim factual ballast with vaulting entrepreneurial can-do-ism.
It's an unfamiliar role for a guy who just a few years ago was trundling around town in a Lexus SUV. (He now drives an electric Toyota RAV4.) But few are better suited for it than Surace, who has found a cause as boundless as his energy. While other entrepreneurs sprinkle a pinch of green into their product lines, Surace's phalanx of the climate-change army is waging a war -- a "third industrial revolution," in his characteristically exalted vernacular. Territory gained is measured in dollars, BTUs, pounds of carbon dioxide, and American manufacturing jobs saved.
"Kevin has become a real celebrity in the green industry," says Paul Holland, general partner in charge of the clean-tech practice at Foundation Capital, an investor in Serious Materials. (Netflix is among Foundation's other portfolio companies.) Holland says Surace stands out from other CEOs in that he is both a deep-dyed engineer (don't get him started on viscoelastic damping polymers) and a natural showman. That combination, says Holland, gives Surace "the potential to be the Larry Ellison of Green. He's that passionate. He's that good."
A Cassandra armed with PowerPoint, Surace folds his lean body across a table in his uncluttered office and clicks through an apocalyptic weather report. The Amazon burns. Oceans exhale CO2. Methane escapes from permafrost. Hydrogen sulfide poisons the air.
"We're adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere so fast, it would be unbelievable that we could stop it as low as 550 parts per million," warns Surace. "A good case would be to stop it at 750. That would be a 12-degree-Fahrenheit rise. That is so dramatic, you understand, that much of humanity wouldn't survive. That's the good case."
Such pronouncements are typical of Surace. As colleagues past and present attest, he is also a tornado of activity: setting and meeting outrageous deadlines, pinballing from appointment to appointment, revering the on-time ship. He once reoriented an entire company from a business-to-consumer to a business-to-business focus in just two weeks. "If you work for Kevin, you are running a pretty intense marathon every day," says Jane Lalonde, who was vice president of marketing at that company, Perfect Commerce. "People say, 'I've been here a year, but it feels like seven, because it's in dog years.' That's the pace he sets."
It's a pace appropriate to the demands of inexorable environmental catastrophe. "If we don't execute quickly, one of two things will happen," Surace says. "Someone else will execute, and we'll be dead. Or no one will execute, and we'll be dead."
Surace inherited much of his intensity from his father, a retired Army man and longtime General Electric executive who adapted the rigor-and-results focus of both those organizations to running his household. After graduating from high school (he played percussion in the marching band), Surace earned an engineering degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology and began his career working for large companies: IBM, Seiko Epson, and National Semiconductor, which relocated him to Silicon Valley. There, he joined his first start-up, Hestia, a maker of chip technology. Corporate bureaucracy had frustrated Surace's do-it-yourself instincts; at the perpetually just-scraping-by Hestia, he became something of a human Swiss Army knife, handling finance, marketing, sales, engineering, and production. "I started to understand the mechanics of operating a real business," says Surace. "And I wanted to start my own."
In 1992, Surace did just that. Air Communications was in the wide-area wireless game. Surace trucked around to 50 VCs before landing his first round of financing. He got the money, but the investors required he step down in favor of an experienced CEO; they later sold the technology and closed up shop. From there, Surace became vice president of network services at General Magic, a highflier in handheld communications. Surace came in with a concept for a voice-activated interface that would fetch e-mail and voice mail and perform other tasks over a cell phone. He led the team that developed Portico, a human-sounding "assistant" that could understand 20 million phrases and speak several thousand; it was incorporated into General Motors's OnStar Virtual Advisor.
In 1999, Surace launched Perfect Commerce, which began as a shopping site and morphed into an auction-based system for corporate procurement. "Kevin decided we could not raise our second round as a consumer play, so in just two weeks we shifted," says Lalonde, whose branding firm, Match Design, now works with Serious Materials. "We changed the mission, the business model, the website. It was like a speedboat crashing into a wall." In 2002, Surace orchestrated a merger with a Web-based supplier network called eScout. The combined company relocated to Kansas City, Missouri, and Surace decided not to join the exodus.
