Looking back at his previous ventures, Surace explains that each had a grand vision. "At Air Communications, the vision was to bring wireless access to every mobile person," he says. "At General Magic, it was that everyone would someday have their own personal virtual assistant. At Perfect Commerce, it was to revolutionize the way people shop."
But no such exalted mission animated the launch of Serious Materials. "There's a lesson here for entrepreneurs," says Surace. "You never know which company is going be the one."
Surace left Perfect Commerce in 2002. At the same time, his friend Marc Porat was on the verge of unloading a going-nowhere venture of his own. Porat, a founder of General Magic, had recently acquired a tiny business that made a soundproofing product for vehicles. At that time, peace-seeking drivers would buy special mats or floor coverings to muffle road noise, essentially putting more mass between themselves and the vibrations that cause sound. QuietCar, by contrast, was a polymer -- a liquid coating that transformed vibrations into kinetic energy. That approach was cheaper and more effective than mats. But sales were meager, and Porat asked Surace if he would like to take it over.
Surace viewed the business as a hobby: a chance to play with materials instead of software for a change. So he built a QuietCar website and signed up for Google AdWords. Soon, Google was delivering thousands of customers. Some of those customers asked whether the product would work on walls. "No," Surace told them. "But maybe we could develop something."
The concept behind soundproofing walls resembled that behind soundproofing vehicles: Just add mass. Surace preferred the QuietCar approach and began searching for an effective polymer. Retreating to a tiny lab adjacent to his office, he messed around with chemicals and powders, using a secondhand bread-dough mixer and measuring cups borrowed from his home kitchen. After extensive Internet research, he came up with a sound-dampening substance, QuietGlue, designed to be spread between layers of drywall. But contractors rejected that peanut-butter approach as too much hassle for a job site.
So Surace turned his attention to drywall itself. Drywall panels -- used for interior walls and ceilings -- are formed from wet gypsum plaster, wrapped in paper, and then dried in a kiln. At first, Surace tried the obvious tack: He created thicker panels. But their weight made them difficult to install and costly to ship. So he experimented with inserting a layer of vinyl coated with QuietGlue into the panels -- but the product was still more than an inch thick. Finally, he used a layer of galvanized sheet steel, which had superior damping power and was thin enough to keep the panels to five-eighths of an inch -- the industry standard.
That product, called QuietRock, worked beautifully. But it was expensive to make and sold to contractors for $100 a panel -- more than 10 times the price of ordinary drywall. At that price, Surace figured, it would never be a huge business. Still, QuietRock's reputation grew swiftly, chiefly through word of mouth, and within six months, orders climbed to more than 100 panels a day. "People were screaming for product we couldn't deliver," says Surace. "We had a million-dollar product almost overnight." He soon plumped the product line with doors and wood panels and acquired a window factory, whose products he redesigned to prevent vibrations from passing through. By 2005, the company -- then called Quiet Solution -- employed 30 people and had been profitable for several years.
Quiet Solution was a soundproofing business. Period. Surace thought he could expand the company to $50 million and then sell it.
Then one day Porat, who remained on the company's board, turned up at the office with a revelation. Porat had been learning about clean tech at the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit that champions values-based leadership. There, he had discovered that all those walls, doors, and windows made by Quiet Solution -- and the operation of the buildings those products went into -- were among the world's biggest energy sinks and carbon culprits. About 40 percent of the energy used to control the climate in buildings seeps out through windows and doors, producing more than 250 million tons of emissions a year, according to the Department of Energy. The manufacture of drywall releases 200 million tons of CO2 annually.
Porat presented the numbers to Surace. "Climate change should be your next challenge," he told his colleague. "What can you do to take energy out?" Over lunch at a sushi bar, the two shaped an audacious goal: to drive 80 percent of carbon emissions out of the built environment. Surace sketched on a napkin some early notes for what would become EcoRock.
What appealed most to Surace was the wide-open nature of the field. He had been drawn in to the construction-materials business by an intriguing product puzzle and found himself in an $11 billion industry that bore the onus of helping fend off a global crisis. It was also an industry populated by older companies that viewed R&D as overhead. A student of the Valley's investment cycles, Surace was confident that materials science was destined to be the next click on the wheel. Clean tech would push it forward.
