We had the good fortune of connecting with Sandeep Ahuja and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sandeep, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
I started cove.tool with my business and life partner Patrick Chopson, AIA, in 2017. After working at firms for a combined 14 years, we understood the impact of buildings on the environment. We’ve helped clients optimize their building performance—but we also wanted to help other design firms without the resources to develop their own in-house consulting team. I didn’t want to provide what some clients called “Lamborghini sustainability”—strategies to reduce embodied and operational energy tacked onto the end of the design process. I wanted to integrate sustainability from start to finish. To achieve this goal, we needed to add automation and decided a web-based app was best way to make data driven design more accessible. As architects, Patrick Chopson, AIA, and I were privy to the architectural design process and the needs of the industry. Still, we needed technical expertise to build an app for calculating and comparing cost and energy usage for an array of building projects. We brought in our third co-founder, Daniel Chopson, a software engineer who is also Patrick’s brother, to design the app. We created cove.tool to automate the building design process and enable firms to calculate cost versus energy and run thousands of iterations to find the best option for their projects.

What should our readers know about your business?
I’ve gotten to where I am today by following my gut and just deciding always to keep going. Building a startup is not easy. There are more unpleasant days than pleasant days because the wins come slowly, and the losses come often and regularly, at least at the beginning. So, you just have to keep telling yourself that it’s OK. You just have to pick yourself back up and keep going. I think being persistent over a very long duration of time is what’s been pretty helpful.

Also, work-life balance is critical because fighting climate change and building a startup is a marathon, not a sprint. It may feel like we’re sprinting because we’re covering a lot of ground, but it’s still a marathon. There’s still a long way to go, so I believe that having balance is important. Ever since I started this company, I’ve pretty much always worked from 7:00 am to 6:00 pm every day. I know that those are longer hours than most people work. Compared to other startup founders, it might be much shorter. But I think that if I just put in that same amount of time every single day consistently. I know that that’s something I can maintain. It gives me enough time to spend with my family, prioritize my health, and prioritize things I enjoy doing. It helps me make sure that I’m not just working all the time because I still need to reset my brain, reset everything that happened during the day, and return refreshed. That works for me.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I love that Atlanta has an endless list of attractions and things to do in the city. If a friend was visiting me for the week, I’d probably take her to South City Kitchen for brunch, head to the beltline for a walk and have lunch at Ponce City Market, and then have dinner and drinks in West Midtown. I love the drinks at Draw Bar. I’ve recently been to Puttshack and had a great time there so I’d that to the list. For the rest of the week, I’d like to take her to all of the attractions in the city like the Georgia Aquarium, World of Coca-cola, Zoo Atlanta, etc. And we would definitely have to attend an Atlanta United Game.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I’d like to send a shoutout to every single person working at cove.tool. Our talented team works so hard to fight climate change and help reduce the amount of carbon in the world. Our company and product have helped architects and designers offset more than 30 million metric tons of carbon emissions so far, and we’re not done yet. I’m so proud of the work we’re doing together.

Website: https://www.cove.tools/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cove_tool/

Linkedin: https://www.instagram.com/cove_tool/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cove_tool

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/covetool-220378738455447

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