Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Pawlik.
Hi Chris, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
My parents escaped communist Poland with a suitcase and some hope for a better life in the USA. They landed in Los Angeles, my mom dreamed of Hollywood, and we ended up in the South Bay. I grew up in Hawthorne and Manhattan Beach, in a blue-collared beach town filled with suntanned kids and dreams as big as the ocean.
At UC Berkeley, I studied Business, Political Economy, and Slavic Languages because, well, I’m a nerd. I played water polo, helped organize Model UN conferences, volunteered with underprivileged youth, was a president of an on-campus organization, and had a job. I learned how to lead, how to fail, and how to laugh at both.
After college, I got enthralled with commercial real estate. I started before the Great Financial Crisis (‘GFC’), and worked with a team on billions of dollars in deals, asset portfolios, and all the other words that make life sound important. I moved to the SF Bay Area for a few years for work, friends, and a change of scenery.
Then, I got restless and started Energy-Producing Retail Realty (or, EPR^2 / EPR-squared) — a company that blends real estate, finance, and clean energy because the world needs a 21st century electric grid to support a 21st century economy; and, we have the people, technologies, and capital today to increase property values, improve the local economy and environment, and make the electric grid as well as the built environment more reliable and resilient.
In the end, I’m a product of my parents’ bravery, my own mistakes, and the belief that work should solve problems, not just create them. That’s my story—short, but not simple.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It definitely has not been a smooth road—far from it.
Growing up as the kid of Polish immigrants, I often felt like I was living in two worlds. At home, we spoke Polish, ate pierogi, and valued hard work above all else. Outside, in Hawthorne and Manhattan Beach, I was trying to fit into California’s sun-soaked culture. I learned early how to bridge those gaps, but it wasn’t always easy.
In school and sports, I was determined to be the best student and athlete I could be. I excelled in STEM at an early age, completed all the math classes at Mira Costa by the time I was a Junior, and had a passion for Model UN, which allowed me travel (another passion).
I walked onto the Division 1 water polo team at UC Berkeley—a humbling experience that taught me just how much harder you have to work when you start behind. Between practices, studies, and leadership roles, I learned to embrace failure, show up every day, and keep pushing.
And starting a company? That’s been the toughest challenge of all. Taking an idea like ‘energy rights’ and turning it into a company in the real world, from vision to reality, means living with uncertainty, facing setbacks, and convincing others to believe in what you’re building. There were moments I questioned everything. But the struggles taught me resilience, and in hindsight, those tough days are where I learned the most.
So no, it hasn’t been smooth. But the bumps in the road are where the real growth happens. And, the future is bright…also, fwiw, on more than one occasion, I’ve been called a pathological optimist.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Here’s our website link:
www.eprsquared.com – please check it out. we have a few videos that include a company intro, project highlights, and a client testimonial.
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Energy is everywhere in sci-fi. Starships zoom across galaxies. Cities glow like fireflies. But nobody ever asks where all that power comes from. It’s just there. Magic. Ubiquitous and unexplained.
In the real world, energy isn’t magic. It’s wires, concrete, and compromise. It’s scarce where it shouldn’t be and wasted where it shouldn’t be.
It’s transmitted across hundreds and thousands of miles through the natural environment and threaded across into our built environment. Energy powers our properties and communities, and is the lifeblood of our modern economy, our businesses and our lives.
But, deploying new technologies on existing buildings has been slow and difficult. Fraught with legacy processes, competing priorities, and misaligned interests. You fly into any major airport today and you still rooftops without solar…why is that?
That’s when I had an idea: what if we used that underutilized real estate to produce energy? Not hypothetically. Not magically. Just practically, using existing cleantech AND a real estate approach – every property has water rights, timber rights, mineral rights, oil&gas rights, air rights, cell tower rights, and…energy rights.
So, I built EPR² to develop energy rights on existing buildings and as a real estate asset class for distributed generation, microgrids, and virtual power plants.
We see the world’s unused spaces as opportunities—real estate that creates power, revenue, and resilience. It’s not sci-fi. It’s just what happens when you refuse to leave energy to the invisible.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
I’m a big advocate of giving back to our local communities and our next generations, of respect, responsibility, and resiliency, and of leaving the world a better place than we found it. Carpe Diem!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.eprsquared.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/epr-2
- Other: linkedin.com/in/chrispawlik
Image Credits
Blackline Media Group
