The Founding Story

Hey friends,

We’ve redesigned our website ! Now it’s easier it filter our content archive for the exact content you’re looking for. Check out a quick demo here. You can filter over 400 articles and podcasts on smart buildings by dozens of topics like decarbonization, IDL, types of software applications, and more.

Before we call the new website “done,” we realized we need an “About” page with the story of why Nexus Labs exists. So here it is, adapted from a letter I wrote our COO, Rosy, on her first day.

My Why

Since the beginning, it’s felt like I’ve been pulled into creating Nexus. It felt like a calling. I’m simply answering the call—while each day trying to hone my listening skills (so I can interpret the call correctly) and remove my ego (so I can minimize getting in the way).

Building Nexus is intertwined with my personal growth and journey. Joe Hyams said it best in Zen in the Martial Arts:

“A dojo is a miniature cosmos where we make contact with ourselves—our fears, anxieties, reactions, and habits. It is an arena of confined conflict where we confront an opponent who is not an opponent but rather a partner engaged in helping us understand ourselves more fully. It is a place where we can learn a great deal in a short time about who we are and how we react in the world.

The conflicts that take place inside the dojo help us handle conflicts that take place outside. The total concentration and discipline required to study martial arts carries over to daily life. The activity in the dojo calls on us to constantly attempt new things, so it is also a source of learning—in Zen terminology, a source of self-enlightenment.”

Entrepreneurship is my martial arts and Nexus is my dojo and that’s exactly how building this company feels to me. Continued personal growth is my first ‘why’.

My second ‘why’ is that it didn’t exist, and I felt like it should. I noticed that the industry has slow, inefficient growth due to a lack of information sharing and a lack of educational resources. I felt like something like Nexus should exist—because something like Nexus is what I’ve always craved throughout my career. So I keep taking the next step to bring it into the world. There was no predetermined plan, no roadmap.

In case it isn’t obvious already, my third ‘why’ is that inefficient growth means slower adoption of technology, which means slower decarbonization of our economy.

These three whys get me out of bed daily and keep me on the march.

Company History

Nexus officially began as the Nexus Newsletter in December 2019 while I was working at the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). For the first time in my career, I could finally share my thoughts and learnings publicly without worrying about spilling trade secrets. I was craving more depth and information from the blogs and websites covering smart buildings, so I wanted to scratch my own itch.

While I had always kept a personal writing habit (a journal and sometimes a personal blog), I was terrified to start writing publicly on smart buildings. So I took an online writing course called Write of Passage to give me the know-how and community to get it off the ground. The first assignment was to start a newsletter and set a weekly cadence. (This course was also an inspiration for the Nexus Foundations course, which came later.)

To overcome my fear, I decided to focus on learning rather than having it all figured out. After interviewing over a hundred people since then, I’ve learned that no one has it all figured out! The first newsletter issue took me over 8 hours to write and I was so scared to press publish that after I did, I ran to my bed and hid under the covers for hours. Thankfully, it’s gotten easier over time.

In the spring of 2020, right before the pandemic hit, I realized that there was a new trend. People were responding to my newsletters wanting to talk shop. And they were big time folks in the industry too. After having maybe 10 of these conversations, I realized they were too insightful not to share them.

At this point, I spent ~6-8 hours per week on Nexus while working full-time at NREL. There were around 500 subscribers, and I decided to launch a subscription offering as an experiment: were people willing to pay for my writing? Luckily, 50 people joined in the first month … this was officially a business! This was energizing and confirmed I was on the right track. Thank you, early adopters!

Then I had another idea. The Nexus Pro community was incredible, but it didn’t feel accessible to newcomers. It was the nerds, the deep experts. I needed some way to help all the other people “get it” and give them an onramp into the community. Suddenly the Foundations course came into view. I did my first quarterly retreat as a “business owner” in July 2020 and locked myself in a room at The Amigo Motor Lodge in Salida, CO to create an outline for the course with sticky notes. I started writing about this outline in the Nexus newsletter and realized folks were into it.

But… I had zero free time to create it. 40 hours at NREL, 20 hours consulting, plus writing and podcasting. Whew! I quit NREL on 9/1/2022.

This was really the first phase of the company: Replace my paycheck. Consulting projects were the key. Thank you, early clients! But I knew I didn’t want to build a consulting business, so I kept my foot on the gas pedal and launched Cohort 1 of the Foundations Course on 10/6/2020. This was a fantastic feeling. I had replaced my paycheck, a community was forming, and I had 25 people eager to try out this new course (which didn’t exist).

The first cohort was a success. I created it as we went through the outline each week, then used the feedback I got to create a new version for cohort 2 which launched in the spring of 2021.

After Cohort 2, I started getting opportunities to teach the course to private groups, starting with Google in June 2021 and Carrier in July 2021. This was really the big break I needed to start working on Nexus full-time instead of part-time!

Fast forward another year… it wasn’t until the fall of 2022 that I clearly envisioned what Nexus might become. Instead of featuring me as the solo creator, Nexus will feature a group of creators covering many different topics under the ‘smart buildings’ umbrella. I needed to build a team to make that vision come to life.

Values/Principles I’ve followed so far

Baked into that history are the values I’ve held during these first 3 years:

• Sustainability: Our driving motivation is to address the climate crisis with innovation. Driving sustainability also means driving sustainable business value for building owners, so we focus heavily on the overall digitization of commercial real estate assets. I call it digitization + decarbonization.
• Pragmatic Innovation: Nexus is rooted in my engineering background. We cut through the fluff to what's real. We don't believe in tech for tech's sake—we believe in leveraging technology to solve real problems. That said, the status quo is unacceptable and we believe in driving change. Addressing the climate crisis requires the ambition to completely reimagine and rebuild our built environment. At Nexus, we challenge ourselves—and our partners—to act boldly and innovate quickly.
• Continuous Learning: From day one, Nexus has been about sharing ideas, gathering feedback, asking questions, and seeking insights from across the industry. The team will embody that ethos and work to support it in the community. No company has the ability to drive change all by itself. Through our partnerships and community, we’re enabling the collaboration and learning we need.
• Diversity: One of our values is to broaden leadership opportunities for women, people of color, LGBTQ+, and anyone with an experience historically underrepresented in our industry. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive, safe, and growth-oriented environment for all members of our team. [That said, we realize we have a long way to go on this front and to make real progress we need more investment moving forward.  Who-Is / I-Am  is a great first step.]
• Quality & Consistency: In a time of rapid industry change, there's a ton of extra noise, hype, and fluff. Nexus is a signal in the noise for our community. Everything we do must be worth their precious time and earn their trust to keep coming back and giving back.

You’ll notice vendor independence is not one of those values. I believe that we as a company can stay somewhat independent, but we as individuals and creators we work with will always develop opinions as we learn more about the market. Therefore true independence is impossible.

Why Stick Around

Whether you’ve just discovered Nexus Labs or were one of our first 50 Pro members, we hope you’ll stick around for the next phase of education and community building. Here’s where we’re headed very soon:

• Our  Partner Program  is assembling a marketplace of vetted technology vendors and service providers.
• Those Partners (and their customers) will help us produce free content unlike anything this industry has ever seen.
• Our Foundations course will evolve into a full curriculum of courses on decarbonizing and digitizing buildings.

See the bottom of this newsletter for how you can get more involved!

—James Dice, Founder and CEO of Nexus Labs

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👋 That's all for this week. See you next Tuesday!

Whenever you're ready, here are 3 ways Nexus Labs can help you:

1. Join our community of smart buildings nerds and gamechangers here (nearly 500 members and counting)​

2. (NEW) Our Partner Hub has officially launched! This is an opportunity to be featured on our website, get original content, and tap into the Nexus community. Visit our partner page or email us at partners@nexuslabs.online

3. (NEW) Join our Speaker Database, Who-Is, I-Am. If you haven’t had much of an opportunity to share your experience in a public forum before, and you would like to, please fill out this application form .

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