The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
01:04:32 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[01:04:32] S0: So interesting. I mean, was one of the fascinating things I discovered in my research because a lot of, I mean, you probably have experienced this because you've worked at SpaceX and Andrule, but most VCs and most software companies wouldn't be thinking about regulation, right? Totally. Not in the traditional I [01:04:46] S1: know you you talked to Sal from TrustMetrics who's a close friend and also a close partner to the company, and they're... They have an interesting kind of mandate where they're a bunch of lawyers. Sal's a lawyer by by by training and background, and he hires and has brought on a a team of lawyers, and they think about their investments from the sort of angle of... I don't wanna speak for him, but I think that they think about the sort of like regulatory unlocks or legal challenges associated with the business model, and they've been super helpful to us, as have many of our investors, on this particular topic. Sal and the team have been really helpful. [01:05:15] S0: Yeah. He was telling me about his living room. I think there's a great LinkedIn post he made about the living room where y'all started, and he was telling me back to your tinkering comments. I think you were playing with his dryer and his washing machine to test early use of batteries.
01:05:15 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[01:05:15] S0: Yeah. He was telling me about his living room. I think there's a great LinkedIn post he made about the living room where y'all started, and he was telling me back to your tinkering comments. I think you were playing with his dryer and his washing machine to test early use of batteries. [01:05:30] S1: So there was only... Yes. The only place... So our first our first office was a house, and it was his house that he rented to us that he used to live in. And the only place that 240 volt AC was in the in the washing... In the laundry room because the dryer has a 240 volt AC. And so we unplugged the dryer and plugged in some test equipment, and it was pretty messy, but it ended up being quite useful. [01:05:51] S0: Yeah. I thought that was hilarious. Before I move to RapidFi Sprint, tell me about like what's coming up for BASE? Like we're recording this in October 2026. Are you thinking about international? Are you thinking about I mean even your products? I think you've gone from like generation one to generation three or something. You've skipped products and you've killed it in a good way. What's coming up? Like what's on the horizon in '27?
01:06:16 · Justin Lopas
[01:06:16] S1: Yeah, so expansion to more geographies with more utilities and more homes in our existing markets throughout Texas, Illinois. We recently just right before this announced Georgia, we've got two or three other states now that we're in sort of final discussions with. And the way in which we monetize those and the regulatory structures with which we go deploy these batteries will be different and interesting and have some interesting things. Working on a new product right now that is, I'd say, quite relevant for energy, but it's not specifically exactly energy itself that I'll leave off of the detail list here, but that's a big focus of ours now. And we've grown quite quickly. We'll do about a gigawatt hour this year. We'll hopefully multiple x that over the next few years. But we're really focused on is like getting really efficient on how we install and deploy and source components for and manufacture the batteries, whole sort of like supply side and demand side customer pipeline. We're like, we're doing a big effort right now basically to just add efficiency throughout the supply and demand pipelines and really focus on building out our internal tools and automate a lot of the manual processes that we have today. And so the next few quarters are going to be really nose to the grindstone on just how do we get really efficient and improve our customer experience along the way. And so that's the kind of near to medium term. Long term, we want to go up and down the stack. We want to be thinking about generation and moving power through space. We want to be doing more potentially within the home and more in the energy stack and build out what you would sort of consider maybe a modern version of a power company, modern version of a utility. Also on the regulatory side, pursuing a bunch of really interesting things that basically unlock some areas of the business for us, remove red tape where it's unnecessary, run permitting, that sort of thing. We've done that in Texas, we're pursuing that in a few other states now. So, yeah, that's just on the road map. Continue to grow the company and grow the grow the product suite, but be very thoughtful about not trying to go into too many markets and too many new products. Like, we need to be very good at deploying and managing and installing tens of thousands of batteries.
01:08:15 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[01:08:15] S0: Yeah. I was gonna say, is there, like, a international market that's a clear white space opportunity? [01:08:20] S1: Actually, funny enough, we looked at Australia pretty pretty deeply about a year ago, and there's a few international markets, Australia being the top, that are the most sort of ripe for a product like this. It's a deregulated market. There's a lot of competition in the retail space, and there's really interesting ways to monetize the grid and sort of... I think Australia is the most advanced in the world in thinking about how... Thinking about sort of the quote unquote smart grid as it's referred to oftentimes in the media, but sort of the grid being a two way street instead of a one way street is, the way I'd simply describe it. So Australia is interesting. The UK is interesting, deregulated big power market. Funny enough, actually, Australia is basically like the same size as Texas in terms of its electricity demand at peak Mhmm. For the whole country. And so that's a interesting sort of corollary there. There's a few other international markets, Brazil and South America. Japan is particularly interesting. So is Germany. We're going to be in The U. S. For a while. I mean, we'll be in U. Forever, but we'll be focused only in The U. S. Certainly for the next year or two or three, just because geographic density and sort of deeper penetration into our existing markets is a key focus of ours.
01:08:20 · Justin Lopas, Vidit Agarwal
[01:08:20] S1: Actually, funny enough, we looked at Australia pretty pretty deeply about a year ago, and there's a few international markets, Australia being the top, that are the most sort of ripe for a product like this. It's a deregulated market. There's a lot of competition in the retail space, and there's really interesting ways to monetize the grid and sort of... I think Australia is the most advanced in the world in thinking about how... Thinking about sort of the quote unquote smart grid as it's referred to oftentimes in the media, but sort of the grid being a two way street instead of a one way street is, the way I'd simply describe it. So Australia is interesting. The UK is interesting, deregulated big power market. Funny enough, actually, Australia is basically like the same size as Texas in terms of its electricity demand at peak Mhmm. For the whole country. And so that's a interesting sort of corollary there. There's a few other international markets, Brazil and South America. Japan is particularly interesting. So is Germany. We're going to be in The U. S. For a while. I mean, we'll be in U. Forever, but we'll be focused only in The U. S. Certainly for the next year or two or three, just because geographic density and sort of deeper penetration into our existing markets is a key focus of ours. [01:09:23] S0: Nice. Super exciting. I want to move to rapid fire sprint to wrap this up. Before I do, is there anything I haven't asked that you want to touch on? [01:09:30] S1: No, let's go for it.
01:09:30 · Justin Lopas, Vidit Agarwal
[01:09:30] S1: No, let's go for it. [01:09:32] S0: Sweet. Is there one non work investment that you consider the best in your life? Is there a course or a hobby or a holiday? [01:09:40] S1: Investment. What do you mean by investment? Oh, just like something? [01:09:42] S0: Time, time and energy, like investment of time and energy. [01:09:45] S1: Oh, for sure. Health four years ago or so I did a, spent a lot of time on that. Still spend a lot of time on this, exercise and sleep sounds like simple and literally everyone says it, but man, that has been the best highest ROI thing I've done. [01:09:57] S0: How many hours a night would you try and sleep? [01:10:00] S1: I'm really trying to get eight. It's hard. I was just traveling a bunch was getting five and six and feeling really bad. At least seven though is probably the average. And I just, you got to just force yourself to do it and it makes you get less hours in the day, but those hours are 10x more productive, at least for me speaking [01:10:15] S0: I'm the same. If I don't sleep and if I don't eat, I cannot function. I can only have so many coffees, and they don't solve the problem. Is there one thing you wanna learn in the next six months? And this could be in a work context or outside work.