Vantage Spotlight on Kyle Gillis of Iconic Air
Can you share with us a brief background of Iconic Air and what led your team to create it?
Iconic Air is the embodiment of “Startups don’t die, they quit.” We started in STEM Education and over two years pivoted into helping enterprise companies reduce emissions more quickly.
Catalyzing environmental change where it matters most for our planet — Iconic Air has developed a unique SaaS-based data-analytics focused on environmental performance for the world’s energy intensive industries. How does your approach differ from solutions currently in the market?
Many solutions in the world today for Carbon Accounting and Analytics are very generalized. They try to be a lot of things to a lot of industries. We focus very specifically on energy intensive industries. This allows us to create more sophisticated tools and help the planet make cuts to emissions where it’s needed most.
What are some of the obstacles you had to overcome as an entrepreneur?
Learning how to cut away all the “fluff.” From the outside looking in, it seems sexy and that entrepreneurs are doing one hundred things. The best ones in early stage do less, way less. They find customers and build product. Everything else is “fluff.”
Entrepreneurship is infamous for being hugely time-consuming and very uncertain. How did you keep going with resilience?
We just couldn’t imagine doing anything else. Building and learning about the worlds we delved into wasn’t “work” to us. It was exactly what we’ve always wanted to do.