Bettina Hein: Founder & CEO of Pixability.com

INCUNATION: What professional experiences do you believe best prepared you for founding Pixability?

Bettina Hein: I come from a very entrepreneurial family. My grandfather made his money selling coal to electricity plants and both of my grandmothers ran their own stores. I've been leading and founding organizations since I was a teenager. Right after graduate school, I co-founded a text-to-speech software company called SVOX AG. SVOX was funded by angel investors and venture capital investors and it's grown to be the largest company in Europe in its field. When I came to the US in 2006, I knew I had to try my luck here.

INCUNATION: What is the mission of Pixability? Also, how did you sharpen this mission as you did more market research?

Bettina Hein: Pixability takes your home videos and turns them into a snazzy, Hollywood-style movie. I had seen how touched my family was by edited family movies and thought I could do the same for other families. So we went to work: we got dozens of customers to try it. Every one of them was extremely happy. This may sound corny, but most of our customers report that they cried when they received the video. We told ourselves: we're on to something here.

INCUNATION: What was the market opportunity that made it clear to you now was the right time to found Pixability?

Bettina Hein: Video editing used to be accessible only to corporations but in the last 2 to 3 years video editing software has become much more affordable. But editing video is still an incredible time-sink and it's not trivial to achieve good results. At the same time, YouTube (founded in 2005) has caused the awareness for video to increase exponentially.Most people would love to share their most precious moments with family and friends. But those precious moments are trapped in hours and hours of raw video. Pixability solves that problem by democratizing Hollywood-style editing - we make it affordable for families. Just send all the videos to us and we do the rest.

INCUNATION: How did you assemble your strategic advisors and operational team?

Bettina Hein: The first advisor to the company was Cameron Herold of 1-800-Got-Junk. I pitched my idea to him and his feedback was: "You've got to do this, this is a billion-dollar opportunity." That's not a bad vote of confidence, is it? So I started building a board of advisors and a team from there. It's been a process - I searched my network for people that had experience in similar consumer-oriented companies.

INCUNATION: What advice would you give to professionals interested in starting their own company?

Bettina Hein: Don't wait too long. Once you've loaded yourself with a mortgage, a car loan, private school tuition etc, it will be hard to find the courage to found a company. Take the risk now - what have you got to lose? You can always get a "real" job if things don't work out.

Marco Ferrara: Co-Founder and CEO of Astra Energia

Marco graduated from the University of L'Aquila with a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, focussing on Scanning Probe Microscopes and nanotechnology techniques and devices. He worked at the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnology in Rome on superconducting quantum interference devices and single electron transistors, before engaging in a second PhD program in Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT. Here, he worked on improving the control architecture and software of the thermonuclear fusion experiment Alcator C-Mod.

At MIT, Marco became involved with numerous energy activities, including the MIT Energy Club, the MIT Energy Conference and the business community in the Greentech arena. He worked on a number of venture ideas and cofounded Astra Energia in April 2008. He also sits on the board of advisors of the PV procurement company Pro-Q.

INCUNATION: Why did you decide to leave academia and work in the energy industry?

Marco Ferrara: There were a number of reasons. Mostly, I realized that the critical challenge for renewable energy now is scale. This industry needs action to deploy as much of it as we can, in order to start momentum and benefit of corresponding economies of scale. I felt that I could contribute more to society by working on implementation than by pursuing new technologies in a lab.

Moreover, there are things that academia does not teach, for example that success in business requires inspired and inspiring sales people. Speaking to this point, I am personally drawn to solar energy by pragmatic reasons, such as economic viability, industry potential, etc., but also by the fascination with this technology and the value for society at large.

INCUNATION:You have a small solar power company in an industry with large corporations. What advantages do you have being small?

Marco Ferrara: At Astra Energia we have identified services and products in the solar industry where we can remain competitive without the muscles of large corporations. Because of the modularity of PV systems, even large scale state-of-the-art projects can be designed by a small group of quality engineers. Moreover, we have favorable procurement channels and share our cost advantages with our customers. Finally, we bring to the table a great deal of experience in project management. We have also been quite involved in developing countries and in our experience there many opportunities accessible to smaller companies.

INCUNATION: What is the investment landscape in solar power from your perspective right now?

Marco Ferrara: The credit crunch did not spare our industry, however there are multiple investors partnering with quality system integrators for the realization of PV projects in countries with Government regulated feed-in tariffs. In favorable conditions, these investments can yield a return of 15-20% in 8-10 years at very low risk. Different is the case in some developing countries where political instability might discourage equity investments.

INCUNATION: What does the future hold for the solar power industry?

Marco Ferrara: Recent studies by independent experts forecast grid parity of silicon-based solar PV in 5-10 years in most countries with good irradiance. Fantastic progress of technologies with great potential for reducing costs and improving efficiency (thin film, concentrating solar power, etc.) make the future a lot brighter. An entrepreneur needs to make (informed) leaps of faith and choose his/her own mission: there is a serious threat to humankind, i.e. unsustainable energy practices, but there is also plenty of sun and many promising technologies to harness it in a sustainable way. Let's get down to work!

INCUNATION: Thank you very much for your time Marco. We wish you the best of luck with your venture!