We were lucky to catch up with Matt Cox recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Matt, thanks for joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

The first major idea for our work came while I was working a different job and frustrated by the technologies that were available and being used. The short version is that it didn’t have the sophistication required to do what it was being asked to do, and I felt like I could design something better, something that hadn’t been done before. I did but was planning on it just being useful in a research context, allowing me to answer critical questions about clean energy impacts and the energy system in a better way. My co-founder was convinced there was more here and thought we could build a business. We did! However, neither of us were seasoned entrepreneurs and we spent months trying to refine our pitch and find our first customers. It was an exciting and anxious experience, hoping there would be an opportunity to grow the dream into something bigger.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m Matt Cox, CEO and Founder of Greenlink Analytics. Greenlink is an Atlanta-based 501c3, focused on driving a clean energy transition forward as fast and fair as possible. We focus at the city and state level, having worked with over 80 across more than 30 states. We do this through a combination of expertise and technology development in policy, data science and analytics, and community engagement. Our staff have decades of experience in these areas and have helped structure dozens of more equitable policy processes, identifying pathways to avoid billions of tons of greenhouse gases and saving thousands of lives at the same time.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I have a background in music performance and academia, two industries where perfection is highly sought-after and pursued with nearly-religious fervor. In shifting to a community-driven, service-oriented operation, I had to learn that the tradeoffs and costs incurred by pursuing perfection in approach, technique, analysis, and presentation could become counterproductive. We could find ourselves losing opportunities because our users were not compelled by marginal improvements in results, especially at the cost of time and money. I had to reorient our work to heavily focus on the needs and wants of the communities we serve, then calibrate our services to fit those requirements. Sounds basic, but it’s a mind frame shift that’s been required for me and a large number of our employees coming out of research backgrounds.

Where do you think you get most of your clients from?

Word of mouth, for sure. Most of our new clients get sent our way by current and former clients!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.greenlinkanalytics.org
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GreenlinkAnalytics
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/greenlinkanalytics/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/glinkanalytics
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC24ORXVcAGe6J2i4J2AqWmg

Image Credits
Greenlink Analytics, Inc.