00:15:29 · Zach Dell, Adam Miller, Sachin
We jammed you know, twelve hours a day, all day long, like... And it was just clear that we were both, like, singing the same song. We were both kinda maniacally focused on this opportunity, and we never looked back from there. And it's been an incredible journey, you know, it's been an absolute pleasure building the company [00:15:46] S2: with him and we're we're truly just getting started. Zach, you've raised over $1,000,000,000, in such a short amount of time and put together one of the best teams in the world and convinced them to move across the country to Austin. How would all these people describe you as a leader and why did their tech just bet on you? [00:16:02] S1: I think you'd have [00:16:03] S0: to ask them, I don't think all that much about that, I just try to show up every day and do the best work I can do, But if I had to describe it, would say I try to be a player coach, right? I want to be on the field, you know, still in icy roles in places where I can drive the most value for the company. But I also need to be helping people scale themselves. And talking [00:16:25] S2: about commercially at the moment?
00:16:25 · Adam Miller, Zach Dell
[00:16:25] S2: about commercially at the moment? [00:16:27] S0: It could be everything from go to market to finance, business operations, supply chain operations, really anything the company is doing where I have some kind of competitive advantage, like I wanna go, make things happen and help the team execute. But at the end of the day, my job is to set the mission, the vision and the strategy for the company, communicate that very clearly to everybody and make sure we're all singing the same song marching in the same direction, use whatever metaphor you want to use. But being a player coach in the sense that I can, you know, if there's two minutes on the clock and it's a tie game, like, I can take the ball and go get a bucket and we can win the game. But if I'm double teamed and the defense collapses, I can pass it to somebody else and set them up to score. Right? And I can go to that person and be like, you're gonna score. I know you're gonna make it. You're the person. This is why you're so great. This is how we're gonna do it. Ready, break. And like when the play happens and the defense collapses, they get the ball and they score like that is way better than me getting the bucket. Right? So like I just want to win, and you know, and I've got a bunch of playmakers around me who can who can help do that. And so, you know, I want be the best player coach possible, and really be the person who sets the mission, the vision, the strategy and creates the kind of initial conditions, for our incredible group of people to do the best work of their career.
00:17:48 · Sachin
[00:17:48] S1: Something that was felt sort of unique about studying this company was that it feels like it's a company that the world particularly needs. This is not an incremental company, it feels particularly revolutionary, it feels like it's a company that could literally save lives. Can you sort of describe in your own words why Texas needs a company like Base and sort of why eventually America's gonna need a company like this?
00:18:10 · Zach Dell
[00:18:10] S0: Yeah. I mean, energy is the input to everything, right? And, you know, I could quote all kinds of stats and charts and data around energy consumption per capita and GDP per capita and the correlation between the two and how decreasing the cost and increasing the availability of power makes people's lives better, right? And intuitively it makes sense. If power is less expensive and more reliable, things become easier, right? But if we take a step back and we look at the big picture of energy and we see what's happening in the world and we look at places like China who are just, you know, countries like China that are massively scaling their energy production and what that's going to allow them to do, the investments that's going to allow them to make, the bets that's going to allow them to take over the next many decades. We see a pretty grim future if we are not able to place those same bets, right? If we're not able to take those same risks, if we're not able to make those same investments in our future and if we don't aggressively try to inflect our capacity to generate and consume electricity in The US and, you know, looking further out in ten, fifteen, twenty years, we are not going to be able to compete with the nations that do. So it's going to become a national cons... National security concern. So it's actually less about... Look, we could talk about Texas. Right? Texas is an island grid. It's a massive consumer of electricity at as high renewables penetration. Why? Well, because it's in the middle of the Sunbelt and in the middle of the wind corridor. So there's a lot of solar and there's a lot of wind. Right? That means there's a bunch of volatility, which means you need a lot of batteries. The batteries are coming. A lot of them showed up in the last couple of years. That's muted volatility while demand is continuing to grow, load is continuing to grow, more shoreline wind are coming online, the volatility is likely to come back. There's gonna be more barriers to get built built out. We can talk about the the fuel mix and the load growth and all of these fun things that all of the grid wants like to talk about. But the more important point is we have to set ourselves up for the wonderful abundant future that we all want in ten, twenty, thirty, forty years.
00:20:21 · Zach Dell
And if we don't make investments today in establishing a platform level energy technology company that can usher in this kind of abundant energy future, we're gonna get left behind. Because the paradigm, it's... If you look at the energy companies of America today, there are some big companies. There are some very powerful strong companies, but they're all oriented around the old paradigm. Right? They are oriented around coal and natural gas. They're not oriented around solar and storage. And some of them have dipped their toes in certain things, but they're all already trying this old paradigm. And they're also not engineering led technology focused R and D driven companies. And that's the most important point. Right? And if America is going to lead in energy, we must have an American engineering led technology focused r and d driven energy technology company or else we're screwed. Like, it's just it's just not going to happen. And you, you know, Anduril, this this is same thesis. Right? It's like, if the greatest defense technology company in the world is going to get built, it better be built in America. Right? As as I feel the same way about energy. If the greatest energy technology in the world, the greatest energy technology company in the world is going to be built, it better be in America. So why not us? Why not Texas? Why not now? And that's that's kinda how we get here.
00:21:40 · Adam Miller
[00:21:40] S2: I feel it. I I love your storytelling. We're gonna go into the Jen Taylor model in a second. But before, I wanna circle back to something you said. You said Josh helped you kind of psychologically get over this chip on your shoulder. I want to understand that a little bit more, but also what he saw in you to lead your seed round and to go after this big mission.