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You've Been Heard

396- Building IT From Scratch in a PE-Backed Startup w/Dana Kline

You've Been Heard

Philip Howard

Tech News, Technology, Business, Management, News

0.00 Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2026

⏱️ 39 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Dana Kline built an IT team from 1 to 11 at a PE-backed energy company. Then he created a vendor scorecard so tough that an Oracle VP said 'nobody ever measures us like this.'

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Dana Klein, everybody, welcome back. So Dana, why not you introduce yourself, you introduce yourself, and we'll go from there.

0:16.2

I'm Dana Klein. I'm the chief information officer and vice president of information technology

0:22.7

for Cordia. We are a three and a half year old district energy company that owns district

0:28.6

energy and microgranted assets that are much older than three and a half years old. Some of our

0:34.6

assets were built in the late 1800s actually with steam systems and I've been doing

0:40.2

IT work for 35 years and and I can't seem to myself retiring anytime soon and we're really enjoying it

0:50.6

awesome many people say that and they wouldn't have the answer if they wanted to retire retire anyways, they wouldn't know what to do. So I guess that's okay. So you have some silos that

0:58.8

predate 1900. What's the oldest piece of infrastructure that you guys have? Are we even allowed to say,

1:05.7

is that top secret? No, no. I mean, so we have two steam systems. So one is in San Francisco, it was built in the late 1800s, first started.

1:14.1

And then went from coal to oil-fired boilers to now natural gas boilers.

1:20.6

And we have a plan to phase those out and replace them with electric boilers powered by renewable electricity.

1:28.3

But that has been providing steam heat for downtown buildings for a very, very long time.

1:34.3

And then we have a similar system in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

1:37.3

Same thing, steam heat.

1:38.3

It's transitioned over the years and is now run by natural gas boilers.

1:43.3

Let's reverse backwards. First of all, the company's fascinating, just the idea of kind

1:48.3

of the energy, maybe just, even though this is an IT podcast, maybe just explain a little

1:54.6

bit about how you guys are delivering energy. And I found it to be very fascinating.

2:00.3

Or a good model. Let's just say good business model.

2:03.1

It is a good business model. And that's why the business has been around in some communities

2:07.6

for a very long time. And we're a much bigger district energy in Europe. I think where maybe things

2:12.5

were done for more community good than community greed. But in the United States, they have these systems all over the place.

...

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