James Lee, Founder of Lysara

The phone call came at an unusual time. James was about to take a career break when the CEO of Siemens reached out: "I'm going to be leaving Siemens and joining Future Energy. They have a successful business in the US. I'm going to launch a European version. Can you have a look at the business plan for me?"

James looked at Future Energy's lighting-as-a-service model and saw something the Americans had missed. While they were running "a distributed sales model selling a mix of projects" James identified two vertical markets where lighting represented about 90% of energy costs: car parks and chicken sheds.

"FES's core business model was to take out all of your old fluorescent lighting systems and put in more efficient LED ones and then monetize the energy differential on long term contracts." Within nine months in Europe, the team signed a £30 million contract with NCP and subsequently won significant share across parking operators.

The business model delivered around 70% energy savings through equipment replacement, then added intelligence to reach roughly 80–83% total reductions. As James describes it: "If you were the landlord, you just get a massive reduction in your energy bill and next to it you would get a bill from us which would be less than the old bill."

This lighting-as-a-service work was one chapter in a 25-year career. James left university in 1997 and has since built ventures across mobile retail, security technology, and energy transition. His track record includes a failed mobile chain at 22 (he calls it educational tuition) and eventually deploying £700 million through various platforms, culminating in his current role overseeing 11 portfolio companies

This raises the question: how does James actually do it?

Through our conversation, a few clear ideas emerged. James's perspective on entrepreneurship cuts against conventional wisdom: "Traditional advice is love what you're going to do, right? Have some passion for it. And I say that's counterintuitive to me because I can't tell you that I was passionate about modulated line drivers in the security market or selling lighting-as-a-service contracts particularly."

What actually drives him is different: "What gets me going is business models that are

The rationale on the second point is pretty interesting, “If you've got a product or a service that makes a real difference where everybody in the chain benefits. Firstly, that should be easier to sell and if it's easier to sell, it's easier to gain traction."

In summary, he realized his interest was in business dynamics rather than specific products. When everyone in the value chain wins, execution becomes simpler.

Beyond business dynamics, James has always been shaped by the people he’s learned from, "My view is that if you want to talk to the best person in an industry go directly and ask, because people will surprise you."

What's interesting is how this compounds over time. When you consistently ask smart people for help on genuinely interesting problems, you're not just getting answers. You're getting access to how they think. As a side note, this is a large reason as to why I started Whitebox, let’s give everyone access to smart people.

Today, James spends the majority of his time on what he calls "talent alignment." As he explained: "An awful lot of my job is thinking about how to align talent in the process of evolving businesses and how to align it to shareholder interest. That's time consuming."

When teams fail, James offers an uncompromising diagnosis: "It's not that the business plan isn't right, it's not that the market isn't right. It's not that your product or service isn't right, it's that that team isn't right when that happens." This reframes many failures from market/product issues to team fit and execution. He brings it back to the human element: "Starting your own businesses takes up an inordinate amount of your time, and you spend more time with your work colleagues than you do family members. It helps if you like spending time with them as well."

Aligning talented people requires exceptional communication, and for James, good communication means radical simplicity. "I'm not interested in writing more than one page," he said. "If you can't explain something complicated in a very concise, elegant way, you'll never progress."

His reasoning is practical: "People that make decisions have very short attention spans. So the first thing is how do you take something very complicated and actually make it very simple. That's an art form that has real value."

The real point is alignment: "Because it brings everyone into the same level of understanding. Not everyone can have the same in-depth level of understanding of everything. If you can condense all that into something that everyone understands, then you can take everyone on a journey."

This discipline of simplification shapes how James analyzes entire businesses. Asked about Zian, one of his portfolio companies, he skipped the technology and market narrative and went straight to three levers: cost of debt, bad debt management, and insurance.

"Those things I've just described control 80% of the performance of that business," he said. "I don't profess to understand in detail what drives the other 20%, it'll be a whole host of things, but ultimately... it's about if you can get the 80% right."

The value is less in naming levers than in using them to align people: "If you are trying to align organizational strategy around something that's incredibly complex... no one in the organization needs to understand how complex that is. You can say to them, these are the three levers that move the business forward and that’s largely what matters"

This focus on essential drivers feeds into James's three-box approach to value creation, which he applies across all his businesses. Car park investments offer a concrete example of how this works in practice.

The economics as he frames them: doing box one well places you near the top of the asset class; doing the middle box can move you into higher-quartile returns; the third box can enable outsized returns because buyers may price in forward performance based on intensification.

The framework for looking ahead explains James's current focus. While many are pursuing data centers, he's looking slightly adjacent. His observation: "At the top of the value matrix in those categories is always an intersection where power plays a massive role in land values. So if you think about data centers and everyone's focused on data centers, what's interesting about data centers, you talk about what it costs to fill a data center, and everyone talks in terms of megawatts, not bricks and mortar."

Take Lysara, targeting fleet hubs for last-mile delivery, car-park-like sites that combine traditional revenue with energy infrastructure. As delivery fleets electrify, charging infrastructure becomes a compelling play.

In the end, the pattern is clear: James positions himself where value is bound to flow, whether through influential networks, overlooked markets, or the intersection of power and real estate. He doesn’t chase novelty; he focuses on being in the right place as demand shifts. Every venture since has followed that same principle: stand where value will accumulate, structure deals so everyone benefits, and tell the story simply enough for all to follow.