Origin Story

or, How Geostellar Came to Be

West Virginia. It’s not just strip mines, strip malls and strip clubs… Anymore. — The ad we placed for Butterfly.net in the July 2001 issue of Game Developer magazine that brought Breighton Dawe to the team.

It all started with a meeting over coffee, early in the Spring of 2010, at Mellow Moods in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

Richard “Butch” Deal, Jeremy Dobrzanski, Russell “Breighton” Dawe and I got together to sketch out some concepts that would form the basis of Geostellar’s “big data geomatics” platform. We drew a cartoon of solar panels, buildings, trees, utility polls and the radiance paths of sunlight over the course of a day, month and year. It looked something like this:

Initial Solar Energy “Big Data Geomatic” Model

We new a bit about modeling and simulations from our work together on previous startups.

Our HuskyLabs logo, featuring my dog Suttree. Designed by Monica Larson soon after our first date.

Butch and I met in 1993 when he was working for the Naval Research Labs, protecting their networks and systems from intrusion, and I was building my first start-up, HuskyLabs, an early web development firm. We experimented with all kinds of early Internet software and systems for such clients as the Coca-Cola Company, NPR, the Smithsonian and Times Mirror Corporation. We even produced Pope TV, one of the first live streaming events on the Internet documenting the visit of John Paul II.

The Ultraprise Logo on a polo shirt. This is pretty much my favorite logo of all time, also designed by Monica Larson, who by this time was my wife and Chief Marketing Officer.

Jeremy joined us in 1998 just as we came up with the idea to build a loan trading platform for the secondary mortgage market.

The web work was going well, but we wanted to be a platform company. Internet platform companies were raising funds from venture capitalists, getting big and going public, and we wanted to be part of it all.

We changed the name of our company to Ultraprise and raised about $20,000,000 from GE Capital, Citigroup, First Union and FBR. We figured out the financial markets, aggregated loans from small loan originators such as community banks, built the platform and attracted Wall Street securities firms including Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers.

We were preparing to go public in 2000 when the Internet bubble burst. We merged with a competitor, sold the combined company and started over. This time, in the video game industry.

We had an idea for a cloud-based massively-multiplayer gaming platform that bridged video game consoles, PC, mobile and augmented reality. We called it Butterfly.net.

Butterfly.net’s Web Page designed by Monica Larson. Isn’t she amazing? Once we were up to three kids she left the startup world and started teaching at Shepherd University, where she is now a tenured professor of communications and new media.

Breighton, who had created Paperboy, one of our all-time favorite arcade games, back when he was at Atari, moved to Shepherdstown to help us build out the platform. Soon, we had IBM and Sony on board, and demonstrated our massively scalable gaming grid at the Game Developer’s Conference and E3 with a game called Burners, set on the playa of Black Rock City during Burning Man.

After raising over $10,000,000 from Worldview Technology Partners, Cisco Systems, JVP and Walker Ventures, we bought a competitor, NDL, raised some more money and sold the combined company, now known as Gamebryo, to a Korean game publisher.

Our game technology start-up is now the industry standard for cross-platform video games.

After the game technology company, we all went our own ways for a few years. I worked for Governor Joe Manchin recruiting tech companies to West Virginia and supporting our native entrepreneurs, served as Executive Director of the National Technology Transfer Center commercializing NASA, EPA, DOD and DOJ innovations and ran geospatial solutions for Sewall, a remote sensing, engineering and natural resources company in Maine, where we modeled natural gas distribution and developed data sets to site wind farms.

I also helped out some investor friends with startups in their portfolios. At ImageTree I learned all about LiDAR, a technology that creates precise 3D measurements by timing the returns of lasers beamed from airplanes. I was recruited to Lanworth, where we developed valuable acreage and yield models using free satellite imagery that consistently beat the USDA commodities forecasts for corn, soy and wheat.

When we first got going on Geostellar, Butch, Jeremy, Breighton & I realized we had the ultimate Marvel Team-up of talents and experience in systems, simulations, applications, remote sensing, financing and business.

We use Lasers & Airplanes!

We knew we had to combine our superpowers to save the world from the worst effects of climate change by making solar energy plentiful and affordable.

Breighton wrote the algorithms to trace the Sun’s radiance path over every rooftop.

Butch built a high-powered computing array to process and distribute the data.

Jeremy put it all together into an integrated Web, mobile and tablet platform.

And I raised over $20 million dollars to bring the solar platform to market.

Our beautiful mission-style headquarters was built as a YMCA in 1908.

Today, Geostellar supports homeowners across the country from a beautiful mission-style building in Martinsburg, WV, about an hour and a half outside downtown Washington, DC.

We have a great group of software engineers, project managers, solar guides, solar designers all working toward the same goal:

Speed the transition to clean, renewable solar energy.

We hope you’ll join us in our mission.

Show us your solar superpowers by joining us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, and tag your own posts with the #solarmojo hashtag.

You might be featured on a future episode of SolarCurious!

And stay tuned, for more exciting adventures. :)