00:00:00 · Sebastian Johnson, Alan Chang
[00:00:00] S0: Hello, and welcome to the Scaling Europe show presented by Deal. This episode is sponsored by SurrealDB, the multimodal database for AI agents. Omni, the AI analytics platform trusted by growing companies like Perplexity and Synthesia, and VentureCommets, the platform that gives startups and scale ups real time equity tracking, daily business insights, and automated management information. Thank you for joining me. Please like, comment, and subscribe. Hello and welcome back to Scaling Utopro presented by DEAL. I'm Seb Johnson. Today we are in the Fuze Energy offices Level 39 Canary Wharf joined by Alan Chang, co founder and CEO of Fuze. How are doing today? [00:00:43] S1: Yeah, good. How are you? [00:00:44] S0: Very good. Thank you for having us. Look, want to get straight into it. 2025 was a huge year for Fuze Energy. I think you finished the year on over $400,000,000,000 of ARR, 10x growth. Where did that growth come from? [00:00:56] S1: It was mainly from... Yes, we launched a supply of gas around mid of twenty five, and that was mainly from yeah, customers looking for a better energy company, so it was mainly driven by customer growth. [00:01:12] S0: Amazing. And what kind of customer acquisition tools, tactics have you been using to try and gain customers? You know, I saw when you, I think was it, you went on Harry Stebbins' podcast. People were talking about the rest of his... The rest is history and how they've seen your advert on their countless times. Like, what other channels have you used to acquire customers?
00:01:12 · Sebastian Johnson, Alan Chang
[00:01:12] S0: Amazing. And what kind of customer acquisition tools, tactics have you been using to try and gain customers? You know, I saw when you, I think was it, you went on Harry Stebbins' podcast. People were talking about the rest of his... The rest is history and how they've seen your advert on their countless times. Like, what other channels have you used to acquire customers? [00:01:29] S1: Yeah. So for us, it's mainly organic. Obviously, we sponsor... You know, the rest is politics. Yeah, plus paid referrals. [00:01:40] S0: Interesting. Okay. Are those tactics that you kind of learnt from your days at Revolut? Was there any kind of growth hacks from there that you were applying? [00:01:46] S1: Yeah, so I'd say paid referrals are pretty similar. We also introduced the game of chance in the referrals. You can win up to £150 by spinning a wheel every friend you refer. But yeah, otherwise, a lot of those learnings from Revolut. [00:02:05] S0: And is that something that, like, most customers end up referring somebody else? Do you end up with, like, power users of people who end up getting, like, 50 referrals to try and spin the wheel as often as possible. [00:02:16] S1: Yeah, we certainly have a lot of users referring like tens, if not twenties, of people, yeah. [00:02:21] S0: Amazing. And you talked about gas. How big was that in unlocking growth?
00:02:21 · Sebastian Johnson, Alan Chang
[00:02:21] S0: Amazing. And you talked about gas. How big was that in unlocking growth? [00:02:25] S1: Yeah, it was pretty big. Like, to be context, roughly 85% of households in The UK have gas. So that was roughly a 5x increase in addressable market. But for some reason, we saw more than 5x increase in growth. [00:02:42] S0: Amazing. Wow, okay. I've seen you talk about the way that you are beating or winning against incumbents is on price, product, and service. Yeah. For the customers that come on board, is there one of those three that really stands out that they're particularly convinced by? [00:02:56] S1: I mean, obviously, price is definitely number one for... Top of mind for a lot of customers. But I think price is what people come in for, and product and customer service is where people stay. [00:03:07] S0: And do you see much churn? [00:03:09] S1: Very minimal. [00:03:10] S0: Very minimal. Nice. And that was 2025. How's 2026 been? We're two months in. How's growth looking? How's the results been? [00:03:17] S1: We've already exceeded $500,000,000 [00:03:18] S0: Amazing, wow.... [00:03:19] S1: In annualized revenue. Yeah, and so far, we've grown roughly 30% this year. So we're on track for another big year this year. Yeah, and there's a bunch of new things coming 2026. [00:03:35] S0: And are you happy with the performance at the start of the year, or did you want more? [00:03:39] S1: No. No. Could be much better. Yeah? But it's okay, I guess.
00:03:39 · Alan Chang, Sebastian Johnson
[00:03:39] S1: No. No. Could be much better. Yeah? But it's okay, I guess. [00:03:46] S0: Where do you think you're leaving growth on the table then? Like, where could you have been better in the last couple of months? [00:03:51] S1: I mean, ultimately, our growth is constrained by talent. You know, I'd say like we can grow much, much, much faster if we can double or triple our engineering team today. Amazing. So we're not capital constrained at all. We're just engineering talent constrained. [00:04:08] S0: What do you look for in an engineer? [00:04:10] S1: Yeah, top engineers, know, I mean, ultimately, if you take software engineers as an example, right, a good software engineer is effectively just a good problem solver, right? And a really good software engineer can go very deep in the domain, really understand requirements, and write software that can meet those requirements. And you'll be surprised that it's quite rare to find a software engineer that can solve problems. Because in all of these big companies, as a mediocre engineer, you can get away with just... You see a Jira ticket or you see a linear ticket. You just, you know, build software against that without understanding the underlying problem. And more often than not, it doesn't really solve solve the issue. So what we're looking for is engineers that can go very, very deep, understand the domain and build against that. [00:05:00] S0: And how do you assess that in the process?
00:05:00 · Sebastian Johnson, Alan Chang
[00:05:00] S0: And how do you assess that in the process? [00:05:02] S1: I mean, it's a combination of, you know, we do a LiveCon exercise as well as we go deep on historical problems they solved and whether they actually solve the problem. And you'd be surprised. There's engineers that you ask them, Okay, what is the most complex problem you solved? And they explain to you and they actually didn't solve the problem. So I think it's a combination of life skills assessment as well as going deep on a historical problem. [00:05:40] S0: And are you seeing... You mentioned that engineers from corporates can go through their career without ever solving a problem. Are you seeing certain profiles of certain companies that are creating great engineering talent? Are you looking at like AI companies and maybe their ML engineers are great, better? Are you looking at very early stage startups, are those engineers better? Is there a profile that you've seen that it does develop great engineers? [00:06:00] S1: Actually, hasn't been a profile we've seen, right? We're finding great engineers everywhere. I mean, we are finding great engineers. For example, we hire a lot of great engineers from hedge funds or HFTs, but then there's also a distribution of good and bad engineers. This is also true for AI companies. We've seen engineers not so great working at these big AI labs. So I think it's always like there's a distribution of top engineers and mediocre engineers in every company just need to assess one by one. [00:06:41] S0: How quickly do you realise if you've hired a bad engineer?
00:06:41 · Sebastian Johnson, Alan Chang
[00:06:41] S0: How quickly do you realise if you've hired a bad engineer? [00:06:44] S1: Roughly 80% of engineers we hire, we are very happy with. Maybe closer to 90, 80 to 90. And we usually realise within a month, sometimes less. [00:06:57] S0: Yeah. There any specific traits or characteristics when they go through the recruitment process that is an immediate red flag? [00:07:04] S1: Yeah, so there is... I mean, there's two things we assessed, right? One, like, first are like the hot skills, right, which is like the engineering skills we're looking for. The second is more like, you know, the attitude towards, you know, do they... Like ultimately what we want to do is we want to hire not only great engines, but engines that care, like that deeply care. Because sometimes, you know, shit hits a fan and, you know, you just need to quickly fix something. And what you don't want to do is, like, you know, you have an engineer that's on call and just don't care. Right? And just like, okay. I'm I'm done today. I'm I'm I'm going home. So you want to hire engineers that really, really care about the problem you're solving. And yeah, we yeah, so it's a combination. [00:07:55] S0: And you mentioned problem solving for engineers. Is that like the key characteristic or trait that you look for across anybody joining any part of the business, or is there like a certain trait that you really hone in on?