Chief Executive Officer and the Chair of the company’s Board of Directors, R-Zero
Jennifer delivered inflective, long-term business growth at Clorox, Zynga, and SoFi before joining R-Zero, a healthy buildings company that combines ultraviolet light and data to improve indoor health, as CEO in October 2022.
R-Zero’s four devices disinfect the air and surfaces indoors within seconds in environments ranging from entire hospitals and public venues to 100-foot spaces. Netflix, Stanford Children’s Health, the 49ers, and CANOPY are already customers; Jennifer believes Far UV technology will be as commonplace as mains electricity and a clean water supply within the next decade.
In their Journal, Jennifer shares her benchmarks for success and why she’s only interested in companies committed to the long haul.
What was it about R-Zero that appealed to you professionally and personally?
I like building companies at scale, using technology to solve problems, benefit users, and disrupt large industries for the common good–I’ve worked within several sectors where technology has unseated incumbents and historical solutions. I was asked to be on the board at the early inception before the seed round was raised. I had been with one of the co-founders at a prior company, so I was intimately familiar with the company and its products.Â
R-Zero allowed me to build a sustainable business that matters to everyone, not just early adopters. We spend so much money investing in computers and protecting our IP; why shouldn’t we protect our human capital? The opportunity to work at a mission-based company with a commercially oriented approach is pretty rare.
Please tell us a little about R-Zero’s range of products and services.
We have both a hardware portfolio and a software platform, R-Zero Connect, which we launched this June to provide intelligence to customers regarding how their building is performing. Our hardware portfolio includes four products that disinfect the air and surfaces within a space, removing 99.99% of pathogens in minutes in real time using ultraviolet light.Â
All R-Zero products are IoT-enabled to capture environmental and occupancy data—the number of people, density, airflow in a room, locations of assets, temperature, humidity, oxygen, and carbon monoxide levels—to model the real-time risk profile of a space and instantly recommend how to prevent and remediate risk to improve effectiveness and efficiency.
Hospitals have used UV-C to disinfect the highest high-caliber indoor spaces in real time for decades, but this technology previously was only affordable for some industries or even for some hospitals. No other company globally offers the combination of real-time risk modeling and Far UV to autonomously and safely disinfect spaces.
R-Zero demonstrates outcomes people care about: reduced absenteeism in schools and businesses, reduced hospital-acquired infections, and reduced community transmission for the public sector, so there’s never a patient zero.
Who and where are R-Zero’s clients?
Currently, we cover about one and a half million lives across 1500 locations globally, including the leading hospitals, senior care communities, school districts, universities, city and state public services, and corporations. Our clients in the professional sports industry are a great example of supporting important, expensive human capital as teams protect their athletes. We also support ESPN and Disney event centers. R-Zero is on the Government’s General Services Administration (GSA) contract and sold into the Veterans Association (VA); we have sensor deployments across the globe, including EMEA and LATAM.
Sustainability is a key driver for R-Zero. What does that mean, day-to-day?
Many Fortune 100s are missing their bottom line because of the rising cost of energy; companies across the board are missing sustainability targets because their greenhouse gas emissions are increasing, and their attempts to improve air quality are having a disastrous impact on the earth.Â
I’m passionate about digital health, education, and the environment, which must be protected for future generations. R-Zero is at the intersection of all three, offering sustainable, cost-effective alternatives to the other solutions in this market: substrates and chemicals, which run off and pollute water and landfill; and HVAC systems, built for heating and air conditioning, which are being run at high propensity to force air through buildings. Our products cost 120th of what it takes to run an HVAC system.
How will your sector evolve over the next few years, and how will R-Zero maintain its competitive advantage?
This year, Government body ASHRAE launched a new standard for indoor air quality that requires effective air changes per hour–a number that triples the guidance today for most spaces, fluctuating based on the occupancy and activity type in a room. Typical buildings run at a half-change or one change per hour. R-Zero delivers 12 changes per hour. The CDC also shared guidelines about the importance of indoor air quality and solutions to maintain it, including using ultraviolet light. In two years, the CDC will impose penalties on any new construction that doesn’t abide by these standards.
Our most significant innovations are threefold. Our patented form factor R-Zero devices deliver UV-C efficiently and cost-effectively compared to solutions offered by our competitors and market alternatives, translating to single dollars per day or pennies on the dollar for an employee or student. We use Far UV, a new technology not widespread in the U.S.; R-Zero products are also IoT-enabled and collect real-time data to model risk so customers can react to the environment as it changes throughout the day.
What are your long-term projections for the coming decades?
When any new technology disrupts an industry, it doesn’t happen overnight. There’s a spotlight on air right now, as we’ve all learned that people get sick from airborne droplets and surface transmission. I would imagine that, in 10 years, indoor air quality will be delivered through UV-C technology, and people will expect air to work in the same way we take electricity and clean water for granted. We need to use technology to solve problems instead of chemicals and manual labor or expensive alternatives that only some businesses and companies can afford.
What inspired you to build R-Zero within CANOPY’s coworking spaces?
R-Zero was founded in early 2020, and while we had offices in San Francisco, people got used to working out of their houses during the pandemic. San Francisco is a ghost town right now–so many office buildings are empty–and after we had a break-in, I decided we needed facilities that were fully open and full of people.Â
In May, I signed up for hybrid memberships for Jackson Square in the city and Menlo Park at Springline on the peninsula, where our investors and production facility are based. Our team members hotdesk in communal areas for up to 10 days every month, where they can have conversations and build rapport. We use the conference rooms for planning and board meetings, and the spaces are lovely for gatherings, especially those outdoors. We want to be in a bustling, vibrant place for people coming out of their homes to be around people, go out to eat, enjoy amenities, and so forth.
What is the best advice you’ve been given?
When I was in business school, professors told us that the classes we’d remember and respect would not be in finance or accounting but in human capital and change management. Recognizing what you gain from every experience and translating that into the next is important. Early on in my career, I was told not to pigeonhole myself: to take the skills I have in growing businesses to many industries, which I’ve done across gaming, fintech, consumer packaged goods, and digital health.
What’s one thing you’ve learned in the last month?
I’m unfortunately dealing with a very sick close family member. I was in the ICU this weekend with her, and I was watching many of the hospital workers–not the doctors, necessarily, who are fantastic, but the nurses, the ambulance aides, and the attendants… They are amazing people who see so much and are here to help others. I had never experienced that at that level, and it brought home the importance of human life and how we’re all here on this earth to be kind to others.
Do you have a favorite podcast, book, or album you’d like to recommend?
My favorite podcast is How I Built This, a series on how entrepreneurs and angel investors started and grew companies. It began on NPR and has been around for a long time–I just listened to the Tory Burch podcast, which I believe was its 500th episode. Â
I recently listened to a compelling TED talk about the power of siblings and how our parents leave us too early and our kids come along too late, so our siblings are the only ones with us along the whole ride. There’s a really important message there, in the value of shared experiences.
What’s a skill everyone should master?
It’s essential to know your super strength. Mine is grit. I just had this conversation with one of my board members: it’s not necessarily the smartest or the most pedigreed people in the room, but hard work that counts. The VC community asks startup founders to do amazing, unheard-of things, and perseverance and work ethic separate successful entrepreneurs from middle-of-the-road talent.
What’s your greatest source of inspiration?
I have a pretty hard time self-moderating–I’m interested in growing my businesses, and I get a lot of self-satisfaction from working–so I would have to say my greatest source of inspiration is my three girls. They’ve never known their mother not to work, and I appreciate that, as young females, they see that you can be a successful entrepreneur, a successful executive, and also have a family and appreciate the things that both your personal and professional life have to offer.
What’s your favorite thing to do in the San Francisco Bay Area?
We get perfect weather year-round, so I love taking advantage of any opportunity to be outside, whether going for a walk in the city or enjoying the bay. My family has a place in Northstar, and we love going up to Tahoe in all seasons to enjoy the lake or the snow.