Surya Potharaju

Translating market opportunities into revenue and profitability is my passion. Creating sustained competitive advantage through the design and launch of cutting-edge products and solutions is my specialty. Leveraging my technical and product development background, I uncover, commercialize and productize billion-dollar revenue opportunities – across the full product lifecycle – and deliver outstanding business success. Truly believing that “Human Ingenuity” is the key factor for any organization to succeed, I attract, hire, mentor, lead, and align the top talent, multinational, cross functional teams that work in collaboration with all stakeholders – internal and external – to meet corporate objectives. Career notables include: STARTUPS Launched first startup while still at B-School in 2009. Acquired by SunEdison in 2013 in a deal valued at $22M+. Continued efforts to launch a market leading product two years later. Lead a team of 40 people developing microinverters from design through manufacturing and sales. STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Lead transformational strategic partnerships at a industry leading microinverter company with Tier-1 module manufacturers. Notable partnerships turned around revenue profile for the company. Company signed partnerships with 6 of the Top 10 module manufacturers. Held strategic accounts with national integrators like Sunpower and Sunrun, along with leading module companies like Panasonic, Hanwha Q Cells, LONGI, Solaria, Sunpower, Maxeon, and LG. OPERATIONS Uncovered a $45M inverter tariff exemption that boosted company profits, GM, significantly impacted market cap. Lead the effort from discovery to legal validation to execution. Uncovered tariff exemption helped company recover millions and save millions in tariff that could have otherwise never been possible. SERVICES Developed a replace & upgrade program to reduce financial impact of warranty liability owing to first generation inverters failing at 15+%/year at the inverter company. Developed the model and wrote the PRD for "power down" versions of the inverters that transformed "warranty losses" to "new revenue stream" DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION