The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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.
00:56:50 · Vidit Agarwal
[00:56:50] S0: And maybe that connects to what I said at the start is how do you... Like, again, to different people. I I think this has been one of my learnings is I'm similar to you where I expect people to be like me or challenge me, but some people are not like that right they just want to come do their job and they want to they re not going to challenge you and they want to be told what to do and they take the task and they be really good at it. How have you this is more about your own self development how have you learned to manage different I I use manager loosely like maybe they don't report to you but you they look to you for guidance how have you learned to get the best out of them where they might be the complete opposite of you they don't believe in going to the gym they want to sleep for nine hours they want to take the weekend off but they're really good performers, but they don't have the view of the world that you do.
00:57:34 · Justin Lopas
[00:57:34] S1: Yeah. I mean, I think the single biggest lesson that I've learned in leadership or management or whatever is that there is not one size fits all. You have to play to the room. People hear things very... The same thing in totally different ways. Some people for instance are very motivated by positive feedback and some people are motivated very much by negative feedback. I'm motivated by negative feedback. Positive feedback goes one in... Goes in one ear and goes out the other. Doesn't take a stopover like, great, thanks, whatever. Let's talk about the actionable things. But some folks on the team, have learned that it's like you want to reinforce the good and then don't talk about or at least don't spend a lot of time on the bad or at least the things for them to improve on. And they'll just do more of the good thing. Right? Ultimately, you want more of the good thing and less of the bad. And so you either do... You either get both pieces of feedback or you get more of one and less of the other. So that's one example. Look, I mean, we have almost 800 people now. I don't talk to all of them every day, obviously. But for the people that I do talk to very regularly, it's like, I think you, a good leader mostly listens and understands what the pain points are in the person's daily life, whether it's team oriented or scope or role or technical or whatever else, and like just focus on those. And like people don't have to work every hour of the day, they don't have to go to the gym every morning. It's fine, people are very different. And I think bad leaders will try to force their teams to be like them. And good leaders will morph their leadership style and their body language and what they say and what they focus on to to the individual across from them. And this is why I think like one on ones are super helpful. There's some leaders that think one on ones are bad. Totally disagree. I think they're extremely powerful and helpful if done right. They're not just like a check-in on how things are going. Like I have all my direct reports send, like, a weekly update that has that. And so we use the one on ones for much deeper conversation or problem solving or ideation sessions or whatever else and not like the, what is happening on x y z? Like, you can just do that async.
00:59:35 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[00:59:35] S0: Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think that's been... I'm always amazed. Like, I often meet CEOs of, like, big enterprises. Like, I met one recently, and his team said to me he does not do one on ones. And I said, that is incredible. Like, maybe they're just at such a scale where the CEO doesn't have to do one on ones with his, like, C suite. They were like, yep, he does not. And this is like a company you would know really well. And the CEO does not believe in one on ones. I was just blown away by that. I was like, that is very interesting. [01:00:00] S1: Yeah, mean, there's, like I said, there are many paths to Nirvana and big successful companies can be built in infinity number of ways, but my view is that personal time with individual employees to the extent you can, you should do. I spend many hours a week on one on ones and I think that they're some of the best hours that I have.
01:00:00 · Justin Lopas, Vidit Agarwal
[01:00:00] S1: Yeah, mean, there's, like I said, there are many paths to Nirvana and big successful companies can be built in infinity number of ways, but my view is that personal time with individual employees to the extent you can, you should do. I spend many hours a week on one on ones and I think that they're some of the best hours that I have. [01:00:18] S0: Yeah. I totally agree. I wanna touch on a topic within BASE, we're coming to wrap shortly, is regulatory. And people say you have... This has been an area that you've learned. Like, you have just jumped in and learned all about it. And I think it's one of the underappreciated parts of BASE, right? Because most SaaS companies don't ever think about this, whereas you've got software hardware, but then also dealing with government in The US, and I'm sure at some point overseas as well. So my understanding is that Texas is deregulated, like the energy market, so that gives you a bit more flexibility, but I think some of the other states you're looking at, I don't want to name them because maybe you've not publicly announced it, I think some of the other states you're looking at have a slightly different regulatory mix, but then all the folks I spoke to said that you have just rolled up your sleeves and become a legal expert within the company. Can you talk about that learning journey? Like how have you gone about is it like engineering where you can just put it out on paper and learn it?
01:01:17 · Justin Lopas
[01:01:17] S1: Yeah, found this fascinating and I surprised myself. I couldn't tell you how a bill becomes law. It's funny when we first, when we hired our first regulatory person, she's excellent still with us a few years later. She was in the Texas legislature for a little while. And I was like, hey, okay, can you just tell me how a bill becomes launched? She's like, let's go watch Schoolhouse Rock. And and so anyways, it's... Yeah. To answer your question, I actually think that there's lot of parallels between legal policy, regulatory work, and engineering. And it's the nice thing about all of those, well, at least the legal side of it, the regulatory side is it's... If you're just trying to figure out if you... If the law works for you or what to change in the law, it's like... That's... It's all just very logical. It's like, what does the word say? Does it allow for us to do this or does it not? Where it becomes totally non engineering oriented and completely different, and I've surprised myself about finding this to be fascinating and interesting, is like how to get a law changed. And so I've learned a ton. We have an excellent team internally led by Zena, who is our chief legal officer and has legal regulatory policy in her purview. I've just been sort of on the sidelines cheering her and her team on now and and hopefully helped in a little in a little ways, but I've found it to be really interesting. To answer your question on the state thing, so there's a few things to know here. Electricity is mostly regulated at the state level, not the federal level. There are some federal regulations that FERC has, but for the most part, especially in our business, most things we care about are at the state level. And states are interesting. So there's two broad categories, deregulated and regulated, as you said. Deregulated means you can interface directly with the wholesale markets and you can sell power into individual homeowners. So if you live in Houston or Dallas or Chicago as an example, you can choose who you buy your power from. We're one of those options. We use that to also bid into the wholesale markets and monetize our batteries. That's go to market motion A, so that's B to C directly. In the regulated markets, and so actually Texas, so Austin and San Antonio and other parts like outside of DFW are regulated, those are a B2B2C model.