When a business is on the brink of crisis, CEOs assemble their war rooms of execs and board members to strategize a way out. But Bloom Energy CEO K.R. Sridhar says leaders may be overlooking one secret weapon in their arsenal: their employees. Sridhar learned this lesson firsthand from former Intel CEO Andy Grove, whose guidance helped pull his company out of a rough patch.
It was 2009, and his energy company was just starting to manufacture. Sridhar tells Fortune that it was hard technology to crack—the engineers had built everything up, but the business hadn’t proven its scalability just yet. At that time, the CEO had never worked in a manufacturing environment, and didn’t know the right path to move forward. Bloom Energy had hit a wall.
Luckily, Sridhar, then in his late 40s, built a powerful team of confidants outside of the company to lean on, which has only grown to a larger circle today. The now-65-year-old is friends with FedEx founder Fred Smith and JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, and was close to the late Tata Group leader Ratan Naval Tata, to name a few. And in that time of desperation, Sridhar tapped Grove for help. The CEO’s team splayed out all their three-ring binders with all the necessary information to understand the problem, but the ex-Intel leader wasn’t keen on flipping through the pages. Instead, Grove ordered all the people out of the room, save for Sridhar and Bloom Energy’s board.
“My entire team leaves, so I’m sitting on one side, and my board and Andy Grove [are] sitting on the other side. It’s almost like a firing squad,” Sridhar recalled. “Andy keeps asking the question for the third or fourth time, ‘What’s wrong?’”
Whichever way Sridhar tried to explain, Grove would simply repeat the question. And after a few go-arounds, the former Intel leader finally dropped a piece of advice that would stick with the energy CEO forever.
“After the third time he asked, I don’t answer,” Sridhar recalls. ”And he says, ‘Okay, very simple. You’re extremely bright, you’re extremely smart. You’re going to figure this out. You don’t need me coming here and looking at these three-ring binders to figure out what’s wrong.’”
“‘The reason why you’re failing here and not in your technology, [is because] you’ve not walked around the floor and asked the people what is going on.’”
Grove told him that the best way to get to the root of the problem is to go to the staffers building his business. They have a first-hand account of what works within the company, as well as what could go sideways—and it’s a lesson he’s lived by in the 17 years since leading the company from a pre-IPO cleantech startup, to the $65 billion energy business it is today.
“‘They know something’s wrong, as they’re building for you,’” Sridhar recalls Grove telling him. ”’Go to the floor and engage with the people, and learn from them what’s not working for them.’”
“That’s a lesson I will take to my grave.”
From senior NASA advisor, to the CEO of a $65 billion energy company
Sridhar may have spent more than two decades shaking up the energy industry, but his career first blossomed in academia. He became inspired to study engineering as a young teen after witnessing the aftershock of the 1970’s oil embargo where Arab nations of OPEC (OAPEC) reduced production and banned exports to the U.S. and its allies—which included his home country of India. Sridhar says he became determined to curb oil dependency from one single state.
The CEO first launched his career through higher education, receiving a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at NIT Trichy in the region of Tamil Nadu. He then went on to earn an M.S. in nuclear engineering, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, both at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From there, he went on to share his expertise with budding STEM professionals when he became a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Arizona.
During his tenure as a professor from 1990 to 1999, he directed the school’s Space Technologies Laboratory (STL), where he first began rubbing shoulders with NASA officials. Sridhar became a senior advisor to the NASA administrator, assisting the U.S. space agency in researching technology that could convert Mars’ atmospheric gases into oxygen for propulsion and life support. Under his leadership, STL won several competitive contracts to conduct research and development for the exploration of and flight experiments to Mars.
In 2001, Sridhar shifted his focus from Mars to Earth, cofounding Ion America: an energy platform company with a mission to make clean, reliable energy affordable (for all earthlings). A year later, the company’s operations moved to the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, and in 2006, the name was changed to Bloom Energy.
Now, two decades later, Bloom Energy has deployed more than 1.5 GW of low carbon power across more than 1,200 installations globally—roughly enough to power more than one million average U.S. homes at once.
After all this success, Sridhar still points to the lesson Grove bestowed upon him as helping build the company to what it is today. Though the company has faced a multitude of business troubles in the process (the business has historically struggled to be profitable) it’s now turning a new leaf. It recently reported a strong 2025 financial overview, with revenue hitting $2.02 billion—a 37.3% increase from the $1.47 billion in 2024.
“We could have died of 1,000 cuts, and there were many circumstances where things are pretty dire for us,” the CEO says. “But my co-workers, my board, will attest to this: there’s not a single night I went home and ever wondered about the future of this company. I knew there was only one option. You’re going to succeed.”
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