About Us
It started over coffee. Family members asking about the AI headlines, friends wondering what it could mean for their businesses. As we started shipping our own internal tools and saw how it changed the way we ran our own companies, we wanted more business owners to experience that for themselves.
That's why we started Sapling.
Joshua Lasker
Managing Partner
Joshua has always been an entrepreneur at heart, selling his first business at 17. At Colgate, he was an active participant in the Entrepreneurship & Innovation program and has continued to invest in up-and-coming student founders as an alumni mentor. He worked in strategy and growth at an early-stage startup and at Procter & Gamble before co-founding Sapling Energy with Colin, which has been cash-flow positive and growing for 10 years. Having built over 20 apps for personal use and his own businesses from the earliest days of AI coding, he comes to every engagement with a unique read on what actually works and what can genuinely help business owners like himself.
Josh Ho
Managing Partner
After graduating from the University of Southern California, Josh started his career on the front lines of SaaS sales and customer success at Dropbox and several early-stage startups. Even then, he was a data and systems nerd, constantly pushing for better tooling and automation over manual workarounds. That instinct pulled him into business operations and systems design, where he eventually led the entire BizOps function at Roadster, an automotive ecommerce platform that was acquired for $360 million. At Sapling, he turns disparate data and broken operations into scalable systems, giving customers the foundation they need for AI to deliver ROI.
Colin Shipley
Managing Partner
Colin is an experienced GTM operator who has built revenue engines across energy, consulting, and now AI. Before co-founding Sapling Energy with Josh Lasker, he consulted for Abu Dhabi's Masdar Institute on carbon-zero strategy and worked in clean energy across three continents, including a stretch in Patagonia. Under his leadership, Sapling Energy became cash-flow positive by month four of operation and now has nearly 5,000 residential energy assessments under its belt. He studied economics summa cum laude and is a three-time award-winning speaker.
Ready to chat?
The first call is free and there's no pitch. We'll ask about your business, give you a straight read on where AI fits, and tell you if we're not the right match.