Emily Reichert is the CEO of Greentown Labs. Photo courtesy Greentown Labs
The worst grade Emily Reichert got in high school was in chemistry — funny, because she’s quite the accomplished chemist.
Her trajectory changed because of her high school chemistry teacher, a woman who took Reichert aside and said to her, “I know you have it in you. Just focus.”
At the time, like most 15-year-olds, she was more interested in socializing with her lab partner than getting a good grade. But she cleaned up her act quickly after hearing those words from a woman she respected. Reichert, who was raised in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, spent her entire early life planning out how to get to California. So when it came time for college, she attended University of Redlands, a small liberal arts school in southern California, to study biology.
Quickly after she started taking biology classes, however, Reichert, who is now the CEO of cleantech startup hub Greentown Labs, realized the subject didn’t do it for her. It wasn’t enough of a challenge.
So she returned to chemistry.
Her organic chemistry professor was Dr. Barbara Murray, a short younger woman with white blonde hair. She always wore black jeans and smoked cigarettes, and she swore in class, all the time. The students adored her. It was another strong female role model that inspired her to take on the challenges that came with the field.
“She took me under her wing, told me I should consider doing grad school in chemistry when I never had,” she said.
After a summer working at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, Reichert was hooked on research. She liked the community aspect of science labs, and took a particular interest in physical chemistry and quantum mechanics. After that summer, Reichert attended the University of Wisconsin for graduate school, where she worked as a teaching assistant while she earned her PhD in physical chemistry.
“It was about getting to be hands on and playing with a lot of fun toys and making things,”she said. “That was what attracted me to physical chemistry versus organic chemistry. In the end, organic felt ore like stirring something on a stove, not knowing what was going on but trying to figure it out.”
Working to figure things out is what Reichert has always been good at. So it’s not a stretch to imagine where she is now — since 2013, she's been the CEO of Greentown Labs, a well-known coworking hub for hardware clean tech startups based in Somerville, Massachusetts. Though the company was started several years before she arrived, Reichert played an integral role in taking it from four startup founders working in an empty warehouse to a 33,000 square foot facility with more than 40 companies and a growing network of cleantech leaders.
Before this adventure, though, she worked as a chemist for many years. After college, Reichert worked at Arthur D. Little and then at Tiax, where she was a technical consultant for the Department of Defense and large corporations, helping them solve technical problems like developing a water sampler to sense if bio agents were put into water after 9/11, or building advanced chemical protective suits for workers.
Five years into her career, she had that moment that most people do at least one point in their lives. She looked in the mirror and asked: “What impact am I having?” For Reichert, after 21 years of education, she woke up everyday, wondering if her job was all there was out there for her. She was making an impact at one company, helping them make a marginal profit and living well for herself. But she wanted something more.
While she was questioning that, someone introduced her to the field of “green chemistry,” which Reichert said is simply chemistry that's done in a way that is better for the environment — less wasteful, less energy intensive, using less toxic chemicals. She researched it heavily and became so passionate about what it could do for her company that Reichert started a program for green chemistry there and led the team herself.
“That was a great experience in the power of bringing people together to behind a common cause, and helping people to understand what they’re doing is synergistic,” she said. “All these people were working on these things but didnt realize how they were all connected.”
About two years later, Reichert joined a startup that focused on green chemistry as one of the first 10 employees, and it grew to 42 people in two years. She started to realize how much she liked entrepreneurship. So she went back to MIT Sloan School of Management and earned an MBA, so she could have a more solid grounding in investing, finance, and business.
In 2012, a friend introduced her to that collection of guys who worked in a grungy basement — the original Greentown Labs headquarters in South Boston. It was a turn-of-the-last-century factory, hot and dusty with no ventilation. But the community, mostly recent MIT graduates, blew Reichert away. They were all clean tech companies that needed a space to build prototypes, whether that was sensors, or compressors, or models of their high altitude wind turbines. This was a space they could do it in for cheap.
But they were practically working on top of one another, trying to build their startups, but the founders shared tools and equipment, all working toward a common goal of making the environment a better, more efficient place to be. And they needed someone to lead them.
It took Reichert about six months to apply for the job. She worked in venture capital for a few months, but quickly realized she didn’t want to be on that side of the table. She started hanging out at Greentown Labs, helping the founders with prototypes and giving them business tips. After a while, they asked her to be executive director.
“We had no money to speak of, and it was up to me to raise enough money to pay myself, but I had an understanding spouse who was gainfully employed, figured any time I was going to do something [like this], it makes sense to do it now,” she said.
Her first task was getting Greentown Labs out of their warehouse and into a new office in Somerville, which they achieved only hours before finally being evicted. The new place has prototyping space, shared machine shop tools, office space, event spaces, software, and even marketing and PR training for its companies. It also has a rapidly growing network of investors, technologists, lawmakers and more in the Boston area and beyond, and hosts events in the community fairly regularly. The startups that apply must have already raised a round of seed funding, and be ready to grow a company. Many come from other startup accelerators and want to focus solely on hardware in a community that truly understands what they're trying to achieve in a difficult market.
The challenge for Reichert and her team now is how to replicate the Greentown model in other places. There are hubs all over the world that focus on startup accelerators or first rounds of funding, but Reichert said she wants to continue to focus on clean tech as a maturing market that can have a meaningful impact. She sees it beyond the hype that follows solar power and create a real business structure that can handle clean tech startups.
She sees Greentown as a catalyst. And in a similar way, Reichert has been a catalyst herself throughout her career for the companies and teams she’s worked with.
“Instead of helping one company as individual contributor doing clean tech, I’m enabling 40 different companies to solve problems,” she said. “From a portfolio perspective, even if one of those is able to make an impact on environment, [or start] solving big global problems...my odds are better because I'm working at Greentown.”
