Venkatesan Murali would like to prove you wrong.

Murali, founder and CTO of Merlin Solar, has been working a new angle on solar for nearly a decade. He founded the company in 2016, after Solyndra’s spectacular implosion in 2011 and as Chinese manufacturers were driving panels down a vertiginous cost curve. But Murali remained fixated, though he did take a lesson from the debacle.