The High Flyers Podcast with Vidit Agarwal
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.
01:10:15 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[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. [01:10:28] S1: Yes. I want to learn... Well, there's a bunch of different technical topics that I want to learn. I'm really interested in learning a lot more about the regulatory space that we operate in. I've gotten a sort of crash course in it over the last few years, and also in particular how to operate within it to change the rules of the road. We've passed a bill where we had... Well, I guess we passed a few bills and advocated for a bunch more, but like what is the sequence of events and what is sort of like excellent look like in the change the laws space? Basically, like, if your sole goal in life is to change a law in favor of free markets and better customer experience and lower cost for people, which I think I think are the sort of fundamental things that we support, how do you do it? What is the playbook? And how do you get the excellent of that in the same way that we're excellent in installing batteries? I think we've come a long way. We've learned some, but I really wanna learn more about it. [01:11:19] S0: Is there one interview question you love asking prospective candidates in a hiring process? [01:11:25] S1: Yeah. If you were the CEO for a day or a week or a month of your company, what would you change? [01:11:30] S0: CEO of Vase? There was
01:11:30 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[01:11:30] S0: CEO of Vase? There was [01:11:32] S1: CEO of Vase? No. The company that they work at. [01:11:34] S0: Right. [01:11:35] S1: Because we're interviewing them. Right? And the... Then a a non answer is bad. It's like, no. I don't really have anything. It's like, no. There's definitely something you would change. There's also another bad answer, which is like, well, I'd fire everyone because I don't like them. Or there's like, you can tease out the interpersonal things. Or if you're like, well, I would change the strategy or I'd change the way in which we, whatever, designed this piece of hardware or whatever. That's a much better answer. [01:11:58] S0: One thing you've learned from your wife? [01:12:02] S1: Resiliency. She's extremely resilient. She's had a lot of challenges building her business. She's raised a lot less capital than we have at Base Power, and she has been extremely tough and resilient and just stuck through a bunch of difficult periods in the business building. [01:12:16] S0: If she's taught you resilience, she must be tough as nails because you are very [01:12:21] S1: no she s way tougher than me. Wow, [01:12:25] S0: wow, I would love to meet her one day because if she s wow, I am just blown away by this comment. Last two, is there one, like I love asking about habits and routines, is there a tool or an app that has given you a lot of efficiencies recently?
01:12:25 · Vidit Agarwal, Justin Lopas
[01:12:25] S0: wow, I would love to meet her one day because if she s wow, I am just blown away by this comment. Last two, is there one, like I love asking about habits and routines, is there a tool or an app that has given you a lot of efficiencies recently? [01:12:39] S1: Yeah. I've been playing with Grokbot over the last whatever month it's been, and man, totally transformational. It preps me for meetings. It proactively helps burn through the inbox. It summarizes stuff that happened in Slack. There's just so many channels now. It's hard for me to keep track of it. It is like an information funnel in the best way possible. And I've trained it. I've got a bunch of different bots. I got one that also like tracks my calories or whatever because I'm a health nerd. And so, that is a world class tool in my opinion. [01:13:07] S0: Yeah, I agree. And last one, I ask every guest if you want to recommend a question I should ask the next guest. Of course, you don't know the next guest, but anything I should include in my prep? [01:13:16] S1: I really like the upbringing thing. I think most people don't, most interviewers don't ask about that because most of the person's public life is in the recent past. And like how somebody was brought up is I think very indicative of them as a person and shaped who they became or becoming in recent times. And so I would say ask more of that. That is a great set of... A great line of questioning that most people don't ask.
01:13:16 · Justin Lopas, Vidit Agarwal
[01:13:16] S1: I really like the upbringing thing. I think most people don't, most interviewers don't ask about that because most of the person's public life is in the recent past. And like how somebody was brought up is I think very indicative of them as a person and shaped who they became or becoming in recent times. And so I would say ask more of that. That is a great set of... A great line of questioning that most people don't ask. [01:13:42] S0: Yeah. This comes up. I'm glad you said that. This comes up every time. The most consistent feedback we get is, hey, I've known Justin for ten years and I didn't know half these stories. I didn't know about him as a person because I know his work identity. So, that's exactly. I said at the start, I'll give you feedback and you'll give me feedback. My feedback is you're great. I thought I have to come into this and I have to work really hard and you wouldn't give me much, but you were great. Big thank you. I really enjoyed this. What's your feedback on me? [01:14:09] S1: I would say something similar. You've been great, very thoughtful questions. Yeah. I think you you asked so much questions basically that I wasn't necessarily either expecting or at least was not was not like, you know, haven't answered before. I have a canned answer to the how do we go to market and that sort of a thing. And so... No, man. This is this is great. I'm super excited to see what the end result is.