Allen Tsai

Entrepreneur

Absent Father of the Year

I want to prove that doing well and doing good are not mutually exclusive.

Kiva, Charity Miles, Tile, Dyson

Walking the fine line between: Tenacity and stubbornness. Conviction and flexibility. Vision and tactics. Chicken and egg.

Making decisions with a limited dataset and no clear "right" answer. The combination of being data-driven and gut-driven when making pivotal calls is scary and exhilarating.

Not dreaming big enough.

1) It is all about the people. Hire people who are smarter than you and empower them to do their best work. If you are the smartest person in the room, there's a problem.

2) It is just as important (if not more) to motivate employees with an aspirational vision as it is to write them a nice paycheck.

3) Don't be afraid to tackle big, hairy problems that people think you're crazy for attempting. "The difficult we do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer".

Allen Tsai is the Founder and CEO of Pani, a smart-home company inspired by his volunteer experience building water wells in rural Nepal. With a professional background in the Internet-of-Things, Allen took lessons from a lifetime of water conservation to create Pani to usher in the convergence of technology with water sustainability and efficiency. He’s spent nearly 20 years in the consumer electronics industry, having shipped over 175 million units of connected products through global brands such as Sony, Microsoft XBox, Panasonic, and HP.  His previous startup, Ekata Systems, won Android’s coveted “Innovative Developer” award and their work was featured at Google I/O. When he’s not thinking about how to leverage technology to usher in the era of “decentralized water,” he spends his time with his wife and three kids, playing music, riding his motorcycle, and singing in the shower.