The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
00:50:23 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:50:23] S0: Yeah. So interesting. I mentioned earlier, I wanna talk about how you and Zach met. We probably should have covered that earlier, but let's come back to that. So you were at Andrel and he was at Thrive I believe. Yeah. I think the story is he was doing diligence or he and the Thrive team were doing diligence in Andrel and you were one of the people he was meant to meet for diligence and I think it just meant to be a normal diligence meeting and it was just he was going to do that and then move on. How did that turn from a diligence meeting into a co founder relationship?
00:50:51 · Justin Lopas
[00:50:51] S1: Yeah. I was like... He was asking some really good questions. Like, get... We do this now and did this a few times for the for for different people at at different firms at Androle. And we get a lot of the, like, kinda like baseline, not very in the weeds questions. They'll walk through the factory and go, wow, robots. That's cool. I don't even know what's going on here. And Zach and the partner that he was with from Thrive asked really good questions and they were like actually trying to figure out if the business worked and the technology worked and how we were making it and all this other stuff. And so it was like, wow, this guy seems quite smart. And then he was interesting because he was looking at investing in the battery space. I had just recently had a Tesla Powerwall installed on my house in California, and I was starting to get interested in electricity and I was just like, man, it seems like the... Sort of drawing this parallel between utilities and the defense primes, and how Andoril was sort of disrupting Northrop and Raytheon and Lockheed and all these others. There's lot of parallels. They're both cost plus business models. They're both heavily regulated and they hadn't attracted top talent and had top cultures. And I was like, it doesn't seem like anybody's done this in the utility space. Him and I sort of were talking about this concept and he was, again, looking at investing in batteries and he's from here in Texas. And so knew a lot about the deregulated energy markets and sort of the more financial orientation of the business. And so we're like, oh, this is some interesting ideas. You seem smart and we have very complimentary skill sets. He's strategic and commercial, tactical and more technical. And we're like, wow, we have some like sort of synergies here. Let's like ideate on this idea. And so we met almost every night for a while and he was in New York, I was in California. We're just sort of iterating on the idea. About nine months later, we just decided to sort of check enough boxes to quit our jobs and start the company together.
00:52:39 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:52:39] S0: I've heard the story, which I think Zach's recounted a few times, the weekend story, the diligence story. He wrote up, like, a very detailed paper and sent it to you, and he thought he would just be like, cool, but you actually sent him edits back, and you're like, yep. This is what we should do, this is what we shouldn't. Has that shaped your relationship even now? I love asking about... We talked about the evolution of you as a exec and base, but talk about the evolution of you and Zach as co founders because that is critical in my view above everything else, right? Like how have you worked out because I think you both I don't know Zach as well but I've listened to his interviews you both seem like very opinionated, strong willed, confident personalities so there's probably periods where you're like I'm right, I'm right How do you solve moments like that where both of you think you're right? [00:53:29] S1: Yeah. Super hard. I mean, I've not perfected it by any means. Yeah. Like, he's hard headed, but so am I. Yeah. Mean, I think, like, it starts with a baseline level of trust, which is, like, he is excellent world class at things that I am terrible at and vice versa. And I actually think it works out kind of well that like we don't have super overlapping skill sets. We're not the same people at all, Different upbringing, different backgrounds, different technical skill sets, different everything. [00:53:55] S0: Been very different. Yeah.
00:53:57 · Justin Lopas
[00:53:57] S1: And so while we have differences of opinion, well, if it's going be oriented towards the customer brand or how we're financing the business or sort of like our go to market strategy or anything else, I'm like, look, you've studied this. You've studied great companies. You know a ton about this. You've invested in great companies. Like, you have a sort of repertoire that I do not have at all on that topic. And so I'm gonna give you my opinion and I'm gonna tell it to you a few times and be very firm about it, but it's like at the end of the day, it's this call. And I'd like to think that we have a relationship that it goes... It goes both ways, where he... I have a supplier selection or something around how we build the org or some technical concept and he's, look, I don't have depth there or can learn it, super smart guy, but like sort of has just like this baseline level of trust in me. And so I think it works pretty well, but definitely we argue a ton. We argue all the time. I think we argue more than we don't argue. And I think it's quite healthy and I'm extremely thankful for him. I learned a ton from him on how to lead and how to build a team and sort of cultural aspects that he's studied in many different companies. I had the good fortune of working at two great companies, but he had the good fortune of working in two great firms and also like seeing 50, 100, 500 companies, whatever it was, and being able to pick all the good pieces from them. And so that's an experience that I haven't had and I've learned a ton from him.
00:55:15 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:55:15] S0: Yeah. Yeah. And I think by, I think everyone says like jokes aside, everyone says you're both very grounded and very realistic despite your different upbringings, right? Which I think is testament to to just your families and the way you've been raised where people probably have perceptions about him. But, again, everyone I speak to, they go, no. He is in the weeds, and he is working harder than anyone else. [00:55:36] S1: Yeah. That dude works extremely hard, knows [00:55:39] S0: Yeah. [00:55:40] S1: Basically everything that's going on, very thoughtful about the business, very curious also, like, about topics that he doesn't have a... Didn't or doesn't at the time have a lot of context on. And so, yeah, that was great. [00:55:51] S0: I heard a story in my research and please confirm this is true. Apparently you start every all hands meeting with a failure. Is that true?
00:55:51 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:55:51] S0: I heard a story in my research and please confirm this is true. Apparently you start every all hands meeting with a failure. Is that true? [00:55:59] S1: Yeah. Yeah. We've changed what we've called it, but we we reformatted it actually the last time and the time before. But yes, broadly, we used to do call it losses than wins. We called it failures. We called it like things we need to work on. We massaged the language. All hands are tough because like you want them to be a pep rally, but I think there's also a really strong cultural element to highlighting failures and having people, the person or the team leader that owned that failure telling the company about it. We also have this thing we call the hot potato, which is a straight up copy of a name from the thing that SpaceX had, which is if you're the blocker to the business, you have the hot potato, and you, like, send out an email periodically. It's, like, sometimes it's daily, sometimes it's weekly, sometimes it's more than that or fewer than that about what... Why you're the blocker and what you're doing to fix it. And we try to do the same thing in all hands, and it's a great cultural element, I think.