Sachin and Adam
00:46:33 · Zach Dell
[00:46:33] S0: Well, unfortunately, I think it less... It's less about what's interesting to me and more about what's critically important to the country. And, you know, I think I'm not smart enough or have, you know, I don't have the foresight enough to think or to to to know what the most critically important energy intense industries are going to be over the next decade, but I can sure as hell tell you that whatever they are, they're going to be highly dependent on the cost of electricity. Yeah. And if we can drive the cost of electricity down, we're going to create the initial conditions by which the country is able to compete at the highest level with China, our main adversary. Like, let's just call it what it is. That is our... They are our our adversary. Right? And if we look at energy production, like, their chart looks like this and our chart looks like this, and that's a big problem, and we need to close that gap. Right? And, you know, for for, you know, for the camera. Right? It's like, they're here, we're here, we need to do this. Right? And so look, is it DSAL? Is it compute? Is it, you know, you know, electrolysis? Like, there's so many different things that we could be doing with abundant cheap energy. We don't actually think that far ahead. Like, it's it's it's not our job to figure that out. It's our job to create the conditions for the country to be in a position, and, you know, we we want to enable the next generation of entrepreneurs to go solve those problems. And there's tons of great entrepreneurs who are around these problems and who are working on these things, and we wanna create the conditions by which they can do that. But we have to inflect, you know, this energy production problem. And, I mean, you guys have covered a lot of this stuff. Right? Like, in quantum, in robotics, like, you know, physical intelligence and, PsiQuantum, the companies that you guys have covered, like, are highly energy intense. And if you ask them, like, in ten years, if electricity... If your blended electricity cost is 10¢ or 20¢, like, does that matter to you? They will, like, say, absolutely. Hell yes. Like, this changes everything. Right? Like, so we want to power that next generation of companies, no pun intended, and just set the initial conditions for them to be successful.
00:48:39 · Zach Dell, Sachin
So I can't tell you exactly what the technology is gonna be, but I'm a competitor and I'm a patriot and I want America to win. And I don't think we can do that without having the most capable and performing energy systems in the world. And I wanna build the company, we want to build the company that makes that happen in America. [00:48:58] S1: A lot of the concepts we've covered today are concepts that you'd hear about in traditional energy companies as well, the manufacturing of batteries, installing, the hedging strategies, but then you also describe yourself as a technology first company. So what's the actual alpha that you're getting from building new tech? Is this in the types of batteries that you're creating? Is there internal software that you're using for maybe better hedging? What is that?
00:49:19 · Zach Dell
[00:49:19] S0: Let's take the battery specifically. So home batteries on the market today, over the last ten years, batteries have been designed to be sold alongside Resi Solar. And these batteries are sold, right? And they're often financed and so when you're selling something, you have to think about like what can the consumer afford, right? So these batteries are sized and priced per kilowatt hour, right? So, you know, the the kind of, dominant home battery on the market today is like a, you know, 12, 13 kilowatt hour battery because if you sell it around, you know, you know, a thousand dollars a kilowatt hour, that's, know, 12,000, $13,000 before installation, add an installation, it's around $15,000, you can finance that and it's still really expensive, but it's like affordable for some people and this is why home batteries are like sub 5% potentially even sub, it was not great data on this, but like sub 1% penetrated across The US because it's like, who has $10,000 rolling around to go buy this thing that sits on the side of the house that they might use a couple of times a year, right? But it doesn't need to be designed or sold in that way. It doesn't need to have this premium product valence, right? The batteries, you know, the dominant home battery on the market today, it's like the Lamborghini batteries, right? It's like made of glass. They charge $20,000 for it and it looks like an iPhone strapped to the wall, but we don't need a Lamborghini batteries. We need like a Corolla, right? And, you know, or a Camry or like something that is affordable, reliable, safe, easy to install, very efficient, and designed for the use case. Right? So the way we've designed our battery, it's first of all, it's way bigger. It's like three times the size because we don't charge per kilowatt hour and we wanna deploy as much storage per home so that we can provide as much value per home as possible. So our incentives are directly aligned with the homeowner. So it's bigger, more energy, more power. It's much easier to install, how much faster to install, installs decoupled. So you don't need an electrician doing the whole thing.
00:51:02 · Zach Dell, Adam Miller
And the whole system top to bottom is re architected because we own the customer acquisition, the installation, the owning and operating, the bidding into the wholesale markets, all of that touches our balance sheet and it touches our operations and so it changes the way that we design the whole system. So the software that we build, the harder... Hardware that we build, the systems that we build around the company are all unique because of this vertical integration and that's really where the technology advantage comes in. [00:51:28] S2: Yeah. Feels more like a Rockefeller style company than like a Salesforce style company after everything you said. But Zach, something that I'm really curious to understand about you is what's inside, what's it like to be you and building this great company? Something we like to ask people is if we were to observe your internal monologue, what would surprise us?
00:51:28 · Adam Miller, Zach Dell
[00:51:28] S2: Yeah. Feels more like a Rockefeller style company than like a Salesforce style company after everything you said. But Zach, something that I'm really curious to understand about you is what's inside, what's it like to be you and building this great company? Something we like to ask people is if we were to observe your internal monologue, what would surprise us? [00:51:50] S0: I think my team would would lie. I think I'm just I'm just... I'm a very... I'm a lucky guy. I'm a I'm a I'm a happy, lucky guy. This is this is truly a dream come true for me. I'm having a lot of fun. And I think if you ask my team, they would say he's having a lot of fun. This is exactly what I wanna be doing. I mean, you know, before we started, you guys were like, hey, you you guys have like a lot of meetings on the calendar today, it's Sunday, like Justin and I have our weekly one on ones on Sundays. And it's like one of my favorite meetings of the week because Justin and I sit in here on a Sunday and we just war game and we strategize and we, you know, sometimes we go on walks and sometimes it's a thirty minute meeting, sometimes it's a two hour meeting and like, we love this shit. Like, this is our version of fun. Like, you know, we were both here yesterday. We were both, you know, it's just like... [00:52:37] S2: What does your wife think about this?
00:52:39 · Zach Dell
[00:52:39] S0: She loves it because she knows how much I love it. Mhmm. And she sees the passion that I have for it. And she loves it too. And, you know, she... And we live a couple minutes away and she's here all the time and she knows the team and, it's just a very all in thing. Like the people who work here, this is not a nine to five to them. This is their life. Like, we... They, you know, they picked up, moved from California or New York or wherever they've come from. They moved to Austin and they're like, I'm gonna be part of something big. Like, we're gonna start a movement together. And it's a lot of fun. So I'm just having fun. Like, I'm just doing what I love And it's a dream come true to be able to do it with this group. I mean, the people that I work with, and I... Again, we've talked about this before we started recording, like, I am the dumbest person on the leadership team by far. I mean, these people have way more interesting backgrounds and experiences. They're way smarter. They're way more technical. I just get to help set the mission, the vision, the strategy, and lead the way and make sure the the train stays on the tracks and, you know, look six, twelve, eighteen, twenty four months around the corner. But the the leaders across the company are effing exceptional. And getting to sit next to them all day and work with them and learn from them is... It's a it's a dream come true. And we've got just an incredible group of people here who are fully committed to the mission, the vision, and the strategy. And being able to lead that team, it's an honor of a lifetime.