How Opower, sold to Oracle, has helped save $3 billion in energy bills

In this weekly series, CNBC takes a look at companies that made the inaugural Disruptor 50 list, 10 years later.

Before Alex Laskey launched an energy efficiency company in 2007, he was primarily working on political campaigns, “almost exclusively losing campaigns,” he told CNBC in a phone conversation in June.

Towards the end of his early run in politics, in 2006, Laskey worked in public opinion research and political polling about voter sentiment on, mostly, environmental and energy issues, and that work catalyzed Laskey’s awareness of and sense of urgent desire to respond to climate change.

The…