But Gross has always been a climate tech entrepreneu. He's just had to wait for the world to catch up with him a bit.
"You only could buy five dolars of gasoline per day. And I remember that my mother couldn't buy enough gasoline to drive me to school," Gross told CNBC in a video interview earlier in the fall. Gross went to the library after school to read about alternative renewable forms of energy like solar energy and wind energy in the likes of Popular Science or Scientific American magazines. He got excited about the idea of renewable energy, had just taken trigonometry in school, and used his newfound knowledge of both to make a couple of devices based on the idea of catching the sunlight and concentrating it.