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David Vili, founder and CEO of SolarSpace: Each week, My Morning Routine looks at how a successful member of the community starts their day — and then throws in a couple of random business questions just for fun. Speaking to us this week is David Vili (LinkedIn), the founder and CEO of SolarSpace. Edited excerpts from our conversation:
I’m David Vili, and I’m the founder and CEO of SolarSpace. I’m a self-taught engineer. I dropped out of university when I was very young; I was in one of the top five business schools back then. With SolarSpace, we came here to the UAE as part of the US Chamber of Commerce’s greentech delegation last year, and we were later invited to become a part of the NextGen FDI Initiative by Trade Minister Thani bin Ahmed Al Zeyoudi. Since then, we’ve set up our HQ and manufacturing facility in Abu Dhabi, and an R&D center that we’re currently building in Dubai.
Sustainability has always been a very big thing for me. I see how fast we are changing the world, and we have to look a little bit further and see what progress we achieved in the last 20 or 30 years that mankind in the last 3000 years has not been able to achieve — but by the same token, we need to see how much damage we caused in the last 20 years. Each of us have to do something to be able to preserve our planet — and that was the biggest driving force for me.
But I also realize that without financial interest, nothing gets moved. Before covid-19, there wasn’t this big push for green energy that you see now. We were able to catch the wave at the right time. Now, it’s becoming mainstream, but it takes time to develop this kind of technology.
Our technology came from the University of Arizona and NASA. You know when we were kids and we had the magnifying glass to start a fire? We do something very similar — we use optical mirrors that were developed at University of Arizona and then point them to the sun to concentrate the solar light using a telescope. What we are able to achieve is around a thousand degrees celsius at the focal point — like a laser — in less than eight seconds.
We also have a second technology that was built by the NASA Glenn Research facility, and it was for the mission to planet Venus. Because every probe that we send to Venus gets destroyed in 10 minutes due to its corrosive environment, we needed something that has no moving parts. They developed a heat drive, where we take heat and convert it into sound waves, and sound waves into electrical power or cooling at very high efficiencies.
That’s on the space application side. But what do we do with this technology? We have two products right now that we’re putting on the market. The first can be used for AI data centers, where we install our technology on the roof of data centers to cool it down. This allows data centers to cut down electricity use by 60%. The second product, which we showcased at COP28, is solar desalination — where we freeze water, instead of boiling it, and drop atmospheric pressure to create a vacuum, which then makes the water evaporate, and you get pharma-grade clean water, and eliminate all the brine that’s usually dumped into the sea. You also get fully dried solids from which you can extract rear earth minerals like lithium that you can use to make batteries.
We signed an MoU with the Minister of Energy in St Kitts and Nevis Island in the Caribbean. We also signed an MoU at COP28 to use our technology to generate solar power in space — since ours is a lot more powerful and cost-effective than regular solar panels — and beam it down and link it to the grid. The way I envision it, this can later be offered [without charge] for consumers— electricity is becoming like oxygen, and I’ve suggested to the leadership here in the UAE that we build this as an infrastructure project like bridges or tunnels and provide it to the people, and they loved it.
We also started another company called RoadtoSpace to develop space capabilities. We organize space camps for Emiratis. Last year we teamed up with Khalifa University and University of Arizona to send 14 Emirati students to a space camp, where they had a lot of seminars and hands-on experiences. We’ll do this every year, and we’re also arranging for a program where a spacecraft will be jointly built by students from the UoA and UAE, and later launched into lunar orbit to search for traces of water.
I’ve been doing business since I was 15 years old, and I understand the value of human capital. A startup focused on space will have a very big capital spend, because you need smart people, and smart people cost a lot of money. We have a space act agreement with NASA that allows us to work with their scientists. We have a very similar agreement with the University of Arizona. This way, I don’t have to hire them directly, and I can ask them to work on different projects while allowing me to keep a relatively small team.
Next year, the goal is to have 30 or 35 people working at the Dubai R&D Center, and 200 people working in the Kezad facility.
My morning routine comes naturally everyday — I try to live in the present, even though I still have to plan for everything. All I do is try to maximize what I can out of each day. If I can do something today, I will do it today — I’m not going to plan to do it tomorrow.
When we are young, we have more time to do whatever we want, but we don’t really appreciate that free time. As we get older, we have less time and we cherish those little moments when we do have it. Right now, I’m at a point of my life where I simply don’t have free time. I used to do judo and then got injured, and I really enjoy reading, but I barely have any time to read.
But I’m a firm believer that if you love what you do, you don’t work a day in your life. The key thing for me is to surround myself with people I like. I don’t do anything with people I don’t know or I don’t have a connection with. I always choose friendship first, then business.
I’m a very sentimental guy. When I watch movies, I cry. My favorite is The Notebook — a classic but also a very human story.
What’s the best advice I’ve received? I’m like a sponge. When I’m next to people, it doesn’t have to be a big name or whatever — to me, everybody has a message. And for me, a lot of times, I’m looking for an answer, and then all of a sudden the bus passes by or someone talking on their phone passes by and then it clicks. So I think being alert in life and being open to ideas and suggestions is the most important thing for me.
