Living, Managing and Leading with Agility

Keith Ferrazzi: Hi. I'm Keith Ferrazzi, host of Shifting Grounds by TriNet. TriNet is a full-service HR solutions company, committed to empowering small and medium-sized businesses by supporting their growth and enabling their people. You can catch our new episodes of Shifting Grounds on the third Tuesday of every month on Apple, Spotify and RISE.TriNet.com.

Okay, well, let's dive into why we're here. I'm really excited about today. We've got an extraordinary space that we're gonna be covering, an extraordinary topic and an extraordinary individual, who's had an extraordinary career. I'd like to introduce you all to Jorg Heineman, who is the CEO of EnerVenue. Now, this is a company as I understand it that's not only driving but democratizing the clean energy revolution with safe and simple energy storage. Now, I'm curious. Let me just start there, Jorg. Tell me what that means first of all, because, you know, right now energy is of course foremost in so many people's minds, and I'm excited as much about the topic as I am what we're gonna learn about your management style, which we'll get there in a second. But tell me a little bit about the company.

Jorg Heinemann: Terrific. So, what we do at EnerVenue is we build energy storage. And think of that as a place to put inexpensive renewable power. Over the last decade, the price of generating electricity through solar panels or through wind farms has fallen massively to the point where it is by far the least expensive form of power generation. It's cheaper, less expensive to build new solar and new wind than it is to feed an existing coal plant or to feed an existing gas plant. Challenge is, what do you do when the sun's not shining or when the wind's not blowing? And the obvious answer is, well, let's go put it in a battery, put it in some form of energy storage. And the most common form of that, that we all know from our personal lives is cell phones, electric vehicles. Those are lithium-ion batteries whose prices are also dropping rapidly. Challenge is there's limitations to that technology. Most notably it wears out, and it also has safety concerns and so forth.

We have a unique form of energy storage. We use a technology called nickel-hydrogen and it has power characteristics that are similar to what we're accustomed to with our cell phones. We can charge it pretty quickly or slowly if we want, but mostly we like to charge things quickly when there's inexpensive power available, think while the sun is shining or while the wind is blowing and then dispatch that storage, use the battery either fast or slow, depending on whatever we need to do.

Keith: This isn't just an R&D situation. You have customer orders for the next few years, many times over. Am not I not mistaken?

Jorg: Yeah. We are wildly sold out. So, we're solidly sold out for the next four years. We have, when you add up the whole pipeline between five and 10 times, the amount of customer demand that we could possibly build, over the next five to 10 years. So, we are absolutely certain.

Keith: And you have actively engaged and customers who are thrilled by the services of today.

Jorg: Yeah. And it's been really exciting to see because what we're offering is a different form of energy storage with a different value proposition. It combines the flexibility in the power characteristics that lithium-ion has with low costs, but also safety and longevity. So, think of us as a forever battery that requires no maintenance. Our battery will last 30,000 charge-discharge cycles. That would be three a day for 30 years. And in practical terms, that's forever and that's without having to do maintenance. So my cell phone lasts... I just replaced the battery after about a year and a half and I'll probably replace it again in two years. You know, imagine if your cell phone were to last forever, and oh, by the way, if it could withstand very high desert temperatures and drop below freezing and behave in the same way without having to ever worry about it. That's what our battery does.

Keith: How did you get so lucky to fall into this technology? If I'm not mistaken, you started your career in capital markets. You've spent, gosh, your career bouncing around 20 different countries. You spent a lot of time at Accenture in the high-tech practice. Was this something that you were looking for, or is this something that found you?

Jorg: A little bit of both. So, back in 2008, I made a decision to leave high-tech and to get into my real passion, which is renewable energy. And I joined a solar company called SunPower as part of the senior executive team there. And that was at a time way before solar was obvious. So, there were a few believers that thought solar might one day become economically viable, but candidly, most of the market, most of the investors believed that without government subsidies, the solar market would fall and fossil fuels would continue to dominate. Well, over the course of the decade, you know, from 2018, through about 2012, 2015, we watched the price of solar, the levelized cost of solar drop into the no brainer range and to where it is today—where it is by far the least expensive form of generation. And that was a remarkable journey to be a part of.

My team built large-scale solar power plants all over the world. Very fun, very motivated workforce. We went through a lot of challenges and things, but it was super fun. Towards the end of it though, I realized that that was only half the equation. So, cheap generation's great, but what do we do when the sun is not shining? Well, the answer is we need a battery. And I think when the renewable energy wave began to take hold in the late 2000s, investors believed, I think a lot of the market believed that battery technology, energy storage technology would also take off at the same pace as solar panels. And tons and tons of investment funding went into many, many different types of batteries—nearly all of which failed, a lot. Many languished and a few have succeeded.

And so, after eight years at SunPower I decided, "Well, I wanna do something different. I wanna go, you know, work on that other half of the equation—the energy storage piece." And I worked with... I went looking for, where's a battery play that's different from lithium-ion, different from these electric vehicle batteries that might compete longer term, that would have these flexible power characteristics and also last forever. And I spent three years with different companies and then had concluded that that just simply wasn't gonna work. And I had just about given up when I got a call regarding this company.

And then I realized who was behind the company. Our founder is Professor Yi Cui at Stanford. He's perhaps the premier material scientist on the planet alive today. I said, "Well, I think I should at least meet him and talk to him." And candidly, I thought I was gonna be convincing him why his battery play wasn't gonna work. And then he showed me what the company was up to and what now my team has been doing. And I realized that even if we achieved just a fraction, say 80% of what he claimed we could do, I knew we'd have a winning product. And as it turns out, we've been able to far exceed that.

Keith: Beautiful. Congratulations. Well, look, what we wanna do is we wanna learn today from you and some of your managerial techniques and tactics. In the radically volatile world that we've been living in in the last years and frankly, I would say decades, the principle of living with agility, managing with agility, leading with agility has never been more important. In fact, I look back on the pandemic and I would say we were living in agility. I call it crisis agile. Waking up every day and asking what in the world can we get done today, reassessing at the end of the day and setting our next sprint, whatever that happens to be. Now, I'm curious as you hear the word agile, how do you define it personally? And particularly in context with your team and your organization?

Jorg: I define agile as reacting. Think quickly and being flexible and adjusting fast as circumstances change. So, as we observe and learn, we adjust and the way we get stronger as an organization is by doing that cycle, that plan-do-check-adjust cycle over and over again. To learn from the things around us and candidly to learn and adjust from our mistakes—treat problems as opportunities for improvement.

Keith: So, could you bring it into some... bring us into the weeds of some of the critical agile place that you've had, places where the pivot really came to life of importance, where reassessment and readjustment made a big difference in your organization and how that worked?

Jorg: Sure, sure. I'll give you a good example. So, the original business plan for the company I had set up and said, "All right, we're gonna front-end load the risk and we're gonna back-end load the investment. And let's adjust there. So what we don't, you know, we invest a minimum amount of time to figure out, does this battery work? Does the material actually work and the adjustments we've made? And then we'll scale it and we're gonna scale it by going after large power plant type energy storage applications. So, we're thinking the big market, the great scale market, selling to the major utilities around the world. And I specifically ignored the residential market. So, think homes, businesses and so forth. I said, "Okay, we don't wanna chase those because it's just too hard." You have to go after, you know, selling to individual homeowners, you know, the cost of sales, etc. It's just too, too high.

And one of my team members, the gentleman leading product marketing at the time, he kept saying, "Oh, we should be chasing—residential is a great market that the average selling price is so much higher. And, you know, that should be our focus. And candidly, I was ignoring and dismissing it to the point of almost getting obnoxious about it. But it stuck in my mind and how can we capture this, you know, relatively high sales price, but avoid being a "me too." I was concerned about the cost of sales, of competing with the many solutions that are trying to get into a residential home and pair batteries with solar, etc. And then we started doing safety testing on our technology and we realized that our battery really is unique. And it's unique to the point where you do things like, if you heat up a battery normally if you heat up a lithium-ion battery, it catches fire. And that fire can spread and eventually get an explosion and bad stuff happens.

Well, turns out with our energy storage, just the opposite happens. It can't catch fire. And if you heat it up, if you throw it into a fire, we call that the barbecue test, eventually it'll reach a temperature where the battery releases a bunch of steam. It basically becomes like a fire extinguisher. And so, it occurred to us that, well, wait a minute, that's a feature that allows us to do something nobody else can do. What if, you know, we think we now have a battery that can go into a structure, be placed inside a home, think in a crawl space or in an attic or in a high ceiling area, anywhere there's dead space in a home and without risk. And nobody else can do that. Because the combination of safety and zero maintenance, install it and forget about it for three decades, that's unmatched in the industry. So, what went from, "Hey, let's ignore residential." Now we’re thinking, hey, actually we think our long-term market can be building integrated energy storage. Let's go create a new category of energy storage and go chase that.

Keith: What was the individual's name who kept harping on the consumer market in the first place? The home and the business market.

Jorg: Let's call him Tim.

Keith: Okay. Let's call him Tim. All right. So, you talked about your obnoxiousness of being defeating to Tim and his ideas. What did we learn from that? And how did you maybe even adjust your agile process? Because, look as a business owner myself, there have been more than enough times that I've deferred ideas that might have come up early because they just didn't fit the mental model that we had for the business or that we had for the go-to-market strategy. You know, how do you keep the aperture open so that an organization can hear and truly even crowdsource some of those ideas more readily and with more velocity. Any ideas on that, Jorg?

Jorg: Yeah. Well, I think it, you know, it starts by setting an example. So, I'm trying to be transparent. I try to share with my team, what am I thinking? And that includes telling them when I'm thinking, "Hey, I know I've been pushing you aside. And these have been my assumptions. Oh well, guess what, we've got new information now we need to adjust." And what do we do in light of the new info? And that new info in this case was, "Hey, we've got a capability here I think we can exploit." In other cases, it's, hey, you know, a particular direction may be working or it's working much better than we thought, but, you know, let's change. Or the market's shifting.

In our case, the market has shifted massively in our favor. We've got huge tailwinds in terms of pricing because there's so little supply of batteries on the market relative to the massive growth that we need, you know, across the planet to capture all the renewable energy. All those things require adjustment. And what we're doing as a company is trying to scale up incredibly quickly. Our constraint is factory capacity. That requires many, many learning cycles really quickly. And a fundamental component of our success is how fast can we learn from both the good... things that went well and the things that were problems or challenges and didn't go so well.

Keith: Yeah. Let's double-click into that. I've heard of even organizations before they start the project doing a hypothetical retrospective relative to identifying risks before they even happen. How are you learning from repeated experiences, whether that's mistakes, successes, etc. What processes have you put into place that our listeners might be able to do in their own businesses?

Jorg: Yeah. Well, you described one of them, which is a failure mode effect analysis. Basically, let's go think through all the things that could go wrong, anticipate those, etc. However, candidly, as smart as we might be before we actually try something, odds are, there will be things we're gonna miss. And the only way we're really gonna learn is by doing it. And then the real challenge happened. So, you know, for example, we had an issue of building the first version of our commercial viable product. And we wired it up, we energized it and we had a problem. We had a short circuit that caused, you know, that caused a problem that had to be fixed. Now, a common reaction when there's a problem when something fails is to go start looking for who to blame. Like, "Well, whose fault is this?" And then everybody gets defensive, "Well, it wasn't my fault." You know, R&D says, "Well, that was not my issue. It's the guys that designed the product," and they're blaming the operations folks who built it, etc. And you end up in this circle of blame.

And what we work really hard to do as a leadership team and what I'm very passionate about with my team is, let's take this opportunity to go figure out what to do differently. We have to learn from it. It's about figuring out what went wrong without blaming. Let's learn. Then let's figure out how to adjust and then let's take whatever the fix is and go implement it, both for this particular situation, as well as anywhere else in the company that that same fix might work out.

Keith: And how regularly do you and your executive team go through that process around critical initiatives?

Jorg: You know, essentially every time there's a hiccup or a challenge or whatnot. It can be something around the core product, it can be around for example, our hiring process on the people's side, as we're, you know, we're in a war for talent right now around the world, trying to find the top engineers, etc. And sometimes we're very successful in landing the folks we want. Other times we get to the finish line. We've got an accepted offer and the candidate decides to go someplace else. Well, that's an opportunity to look at what did we do in that hiring process. Did we have enough contact with them? You know, for example, we had one individual leave the company where looking back on it, the reasons that individual left the company were things that were, I think completely and totally preventable. With improved communication at the team level and a better understanding of kind of the big picture of what we're doing as a company and how things work, we could have headed that off at the pass.

Keith: I love your thirst for that degree of curiosity, right? That sense of constantly double-clicking. Let me add one little best practice, that when working in a team doing that kind of an assessment using a simple breakout room, whether it's... if it's in a virtual meeting, you send people in groups of three and have them do that analysis that they would be doing in the main room, have them open a Google Doc and enter their thoughts, or even just turning to a single person in the room physically if you're there. It breeds a whole different degree of psychological safety and you make sure that you squeeze the juice of insight out of every person instead of having groups of eight, 12, whatever it is on the executive team. So, just something to think about for the next time to make sure.

Jorg: I think that's a great suggestion. And when we've tried things like that in the past, it's been super useful. I'll build on that for a second. It is another process thing I found works pretty well and that's for me to actually step out of the room. So, I'll give you an example. So, we went through a process which initially I was reluctant to do probably based on my 20 years of consulting. And that is mapping out a set, you know, a clear core purpose, a mission and a set of core values for the company. And I think from 20 years as a consultant, I've walked through so many companies where there's a poster on the wall showing values that everybody ignores and they really aren't part of the fabric. So, I resisted it, but the team said, "Hey, Jorg, we gotta do this. We really need to be clear about who we are and what we're doing." And the process we used specifically was we had, you know, one of our team members go one-on-one to everyone and get their input. They knew what my input was already there. I'd given that, but rather than have me sit in a room where I'm listening to everybody else and perhaps overly influencing the discussion, let's go one-on-one. Then we brought it together. She showed me the results. I gave it a bit of an edit. We discussed it as a group. She went back and reworked it with the individuals and then we got back together as a group.

So it eliminated that group-think mentality that often drifts with whoever's speaking the loudest or who's the most senior person in the room. You know, we all need to agree with Jorg because he's in charge. And we got to, I think, a, a significantly better answer than we would've in a perhaps more traditional way.

Keith: I don't know when you did that exercise last, but I'll give you another little tip. Recently I was working with the team that had one of those posters on the wall that you're talking about. You and I have both seen those, too many of them. I turned it into a diagnostic questionnaire and I said, "Where are we dot, dot, dot on a scale of zero to five?" And I had the executive team do a diagnostic of its own core values and behaviors. And we were able to show how hypocritical we were to the diagnostic, against the core values. So, it might be something you do regularly with your team, which is revisit it, but do it in the form of a simple diagnostic, an anonymous diagnostic that they take. Are we actually living up to this to bring it to life?

Jorg: Yeah. And to what degree, because I think most of these, certainly the ones we've said for ourselves, boy, I'm gonna be working every single day to, you know, to hit them and I know there'll be a gap. It's a question of how big the gap is. We need to be thinking of it as an aspirational goal, but yeah, absolutely.

Keith: When it comes to agility, let's talk a little bit about the type of individuals that you look for in hiring. What is an agile associate? What is an agile worker? What is an agile employee? And what are you looking for when you're assessing somebody that has those qualities and characteristics?

Jorg: Yeah. In EnerVenue's case, the number one thing that I'm looking for is someone who can think and build for the future, as opposed to for today. And in the energy storage market, the majority of people are those that have been in that... in the energy business for a long time and they understand today's market. They understand what sells, what a customer wants, what can be monetized, what an energy storage project looks like, etc. However, they may have trouble imagining, you know, what do I do in the future? For example, in the battery world, in the energy storage world, people talk about duration of storage and about five years ago, people would talk about, "Oh, if I have a one-hour battery, a battery that will last one hour, here's what I can do with it. I can peak shave in a commercial setting. I can shift a little bit of load and, you know, monetize it in that way. Oh, now my battery, if I had a two-hour battery, here's what I could do." Or four hours for a couple of years was kind of the metric. "Oh, I can shift four hours worth of daytime energy, daytime solar generation and push it into the evening hours."

So, it's this kind of hour-driven mindset of our battery, our storage allows customers to charge and discharge as often as they want. They can go to whatever duration they want. And we believe the market's gonna turn into one of where we're gonna want energy storage for homes, for businesses, for power plants to work just like our cell phones. Charge it fast whenever you can and then use it fast or slow, depending on what your need is, and do that over and over again. It might be three times a day, it might be four times a day, it might be once, might be once a week. And that kind of flexibility, that's a different economic model. It requires a different way of thinking. It requires a different way of building. And we need people who can think ahead, who can kind of see around corners as to where the market will likely end up. So, that ability to design and think about the future versus necessarily today is crucial. The other one is flexibility and ability to adjust and learn and personally go aside in favor of how do we learn from our mistakes and globalize them and use them as opportunities to make ourselves stronger.

Keith: I would imagine like any business that the interdependencies of your business are as crucial as any single function. And yet you've got a lot of really big-headed technological smart people who may not necessarily be the most collaborative or the most communicative of individuals. I'm only making hypothesis. But I think all of us as business leaders face that same issue of managing interdependencies and managing in the matrix. What have you done there to particularly when you may be digging out of a natural competency that might not be there in some instances?

Jorg: Yeah. You know, I think it's a good observation and we certainly have that. We really have a fundamental culture clash, where our R&D organization, research and development folks have mostly worked in very small companies and research labs, doing fundamental R&D on very small teams. And often in situations where they could practically, you know, read each other's thoughts without speaking. And, like, the notion of why would I do a staff meeting is, you know, it's ridiculous. Why would I get together as a group? Because we talk every day and we spend all day interacting with each other. And the other part of the company, the more operational folks are typically ones that come from large organizations or large operational teams that have scaled and created big factories. And it's almost like a military model. It's command and control and there's lots of systems and lots of structured ways of communicating because it's the only way to communicate efficiently amongst a large team. Bring those two together. And you can just imagine the friction, right?

So, to the R&D folks, everything seems ridiculously slow and bureaucratic. And why do I need this? Why do I need this meeting? Why do I need this form? Why do I need this? Can't you just go buy the thing I'm asking for? And on the other hand, the folks on the ops team want, you know, all right, "Tell me how to build this thing. Show me the specification. Map it all out in detail. And I'm not gonna move until I've got my detailed instructions and all the inputs I need." And what we need as a company is, you know, neither of those extremes works. We've gotta find a way of bringing the teams together so that we can, you know, find the right point in the middle and cut out the waste of the I'll call it overly bureaucratic operational way of thinking, yet adds sufficient structure so that we can have, you know, consistent change control and some sense of sanity in our design and engineering processes.

Keith: You know, we always talk about cultures and similar to those values on the wall, I find that practices really define cultures. There's a wonderful phrase that says, "You don't think your way to a new way of acting. You act your way to a new way of thinking." So, I'm wondering if there are some interesting practices that you have found that creates more effective matrix synergies, etc. One, while you're thinking about it, one of the interviews we did, there was a process brought up called bulletproofing where somebody would give a report of their status, a sprint report. And at the end of the sprint report, everybody would go into breakout rooms and be forced to be critical. They'd be forced to give feedback on what challenges did you just hear? What innovations would you offer? So in a sense, taking culture and turning it into an assignment in the room. And you could even do that more broadly for large groups, not just executive teams, like the top 30 in a company. Can you think of any distinct practices that you're proud of that you think help in a sense coach a better culture?

Jorg: Yeah, I think the single biggest one I think that makes a difference for us is our goal-setting process. And this... it's something I've blatantly copied from my former boss, Tom Werner, the CEO at the time at SunPower. And what we do is for each year, we set a set of goals that are company objectives for the year. And they're the things that we need to accomplish. It's, you know, typically less than 10 specific things across each area of the company sales, operations, R&D, clear milestones. And they're determined by what we need to achieve our investors' objectives to meet our overall business plan. And that's how I measure it. So, my bonus is determined based on did we achieve those? And then every quarter as a team, we decide, what do we need to do for that quarter to make sure we're on track for that year's goals.

And, you know, it takes a little bit of time. Basically, we get together in a room and simplifying a bit and then we figure out, okay, what's the goal need to be? And then each person decides what do their teams need to do and it cascades through the company. So, once a quarter, there's this process of let's look back at last quarter. See how we did relative to our goals. Let's figure out what we need to do this quarter to stay on plan for the year. And let's make sure every single person in the company knows what their focus is in support of those goals. And then we put incentives around that, at our company, we do it at an annual level. Two-thirds of every individual's bonus payout is based on to what degree we achieve those company goals. And then one-third is based on individual contribution and there's a threshold. So if there's, you know, zero bonus paid, unless we hit a certain minimum percentage of that company target. And that exercise, that quarterly checkpoint, you know, quarterly look back, set the goal, make an adjustment is, I think the single best key to success that I've come across in my career at making sure that the team stays focused and everybody knows what they're doing—what the priorities are, etc.

Keith: How do you then influence people's capacity to feel they can influence? How do you give them a line of sight of two-thirds come from enterprise goals, and yet they... do they have a voice, do they... what's the sense that they can actually guide those and when it's not their swim lane.

Jorg: I love the question. That's the constant friction is, "Hey, I'm being bonused on something I don't control." And the way we handle that is similar to what Tom Werner led successfully at SunPower, I thought is be really clear about what the goal is. Make it transparent. Make sure the entire company knows what we're doing. And, you know, adjust the level of detail based on who the audience is, but everyone's gotta know what we're doing and then everyone has to know their part. And then lastly, we have to reward the teamwork. So, yes, it's hard. My bonus, once we realize that, okay, my bonus depends on all of us succeeding, then I as an individual contributor am much more likely to find a creative solution with my teammates to get to the goal than I am to worry about, oh, how did Jorg do as a person? How smart was I or what creative unique thing did I have? I'm worried about what matters is the team's success regardless of the individual?

Keith: Well, what I love about that is a word I created for high-performing teams. I call them co-elevating, where the shift is from each of us making ourselves successful to a group committed to a mission and each other's success with shared accountability, with a sense of, you know, in fact, I would imagine that that kind of compensation bonus plan would force people to take risks and speak up when they see things.

Jorg: Absolutely. I love that description. Co-elevating is a great way to think about it. It's, okay, let's make sure the entire team knows the goal and then they will lift each other and find ways of getting there.

Keith: Let's talk a little bit about the emotional commitment of your team to each other. Are you hybrid, mostly physical, more and more remote? What's the way of working and how have you, during the pandemic held the team tied together?

Jorg: It's been really interesting. Short answer is we're hybrid here. However, we're a company that started during the pandemic. I think we launched almost right after the initial lockdowns. So you can imagine trying to build batteries while that's something that requires on-site presence. We've been mostly on-site for at least the R&D folks, the operational folks, since the very, very beginning. We've had all of the supporting team members, folks like finance and HR and so forth being nearly 100% remote for that duration. And it's been, I'd say hard. I mean, because even when we were on site, we would sit at our desk to do Zoom meetings and that sort of thing. However, what we've done is we've learned that we can operate in this hybrid structure and now we're using it to our advantage. And we're working hard to maintain a hybrid workforce. So, our headquarters is here in the Bay Area. The folks that have to be in the room physically to build batteries, whether it's on the ops side or R&D to do the research work required, you know, they come into the office every day or most days. On days when they can work remotely, that's okay. They're measured on results, not based on how many hours they are here.

The other parts of our team, our commercial team is 100% virtual. They're distributed around the country. Our CFO and the finance team are largely based in Arizona. We'll be opening a very large factory in the Midwest. There'll be a huge concentration there of both operations personnel, production personnel, as well as additional engineering talent and so on. And I'm passionate about doing that because we know our workforce values the flexibility it brings and we know we can get better value for our headcount investment in different locations.

Keith: I opened a marketing organization during the pandemic in the Philippines and they're extraordinary, just extraordinary contributors and they're working on our time zone. But one of the things that I'm gonna actually shift to this and I wanna use the pun. We created a little practice called an energy check, which I'm sure you'd appreciate and maybe it's something you can use. But I want our listeners to get to know you a little bit better. As a part of all of our interviews, I ask the following question, what is dialing up your energy these days and what is bringing down your energy these days? And it's a wonderful way to tap into vulnerability among a team. And it's a wonderful way when we're hybrid and we're not having that walk in from the parking lot or the stop-off in the lunchroom. So, it's a wonderful way to go deep, but more purposefully. And I'm curious why don't you talk a little bit about either personally or professionally, what's dialing up your energy and what's bringing it down.

Jorg: Yeah. Dialing up my energy at work, it's a few different things. Number one is walking the halls and looking at what the team is doing, having them show me, oh, here's the next generation of our battery selling, how it's working. Here's our first in our inner station, which is the first commercially viable product in the backyard. Here are the things that seven months ago were a cartoon on a PowerPoint slide and are now real and actually outperforming what we ever thought they possibly could be doing. That's incredibly energizing to me dialing up my energy.

In a meeting setting, it's when there's interaction in the group, particularly when there's, vocal feedback, even controversy, you know, positive as well as negative. Yeah. Here's what we can improve. Here's what we learned from this. This is so good. Jorg, here's what you can do better. I mean, even, I think it's really hard to get upward feedback like that as a CEO. And I value that, you know, very much.

And on the dialing, is dialing down energy or, you know, what's the opposite? What drags me down is particularly in a meeting situation, if it feels like it's a monologue, if I'm talking and, you know, going through my points and I'm not getting the interaction, I'm not getting the, "Yeah, I like that. That makes sense." Or "no, that's stupid" or, you know, I like a good argument. I like it to feel lively. And if it feels like, okay, we're all in listen mode and just reacting and perhaps distracted, that's a drain on my energy and I think on the rest of the team as well.

Keith: Well, as we begin to wrap up our conversation, I've really appreciated the insight and the peek into not only a thriving company but a thriving company that can constantly utilize the agile process, looking around corners, reassessing, institutionalizing that curiosity in some very distinct practices. I am curious though, as you look out, what's making you the most excited right now for the future?

Jorg: I think as a people, as a planet, we're very focused on what I call the energy transition or the clean energy revolution. In order to solve manmade climate change, we need to fundamentally shift our way of thinking about energy from fossil fuels to renewables. That's hard. And any way you look at it, you say, "Okay, well, what's happening to our planet? The longer it takes us to get there, the more dangerous it's gonna be for the coming generations, for my kids, for their kids and so forth." However, I'm energized because we have economic gravity on our side. The same investors who were building gas-fired power plants and coal-fired power plants a decade or two ago are now pouring all their money into renewables. And the technology that we have there, you know, solar and wind, those [inaudible] to zero in terms of marginal cost. The amount of money going into storage, the innovation in terms of electrifying the world, and what that means is fantastic. And we will get there. We can get there. It means though that we're gonna see the single largest economic transformation that we'll see in our lifetimes, in my view.

So with the electric power industry, think about what it takes to get electricity to the wall outlet in our rooms here reliably, consistently at ridiculously low cost. It's been that way for nearly 100 years. It's been almost unchanged in that time. Everything about that value chain is about to get turned on its head. And there'll be winners and losers and all of us are gonna... we're gonna learn to cook with electricity, and yes, it does work. We're gonna stop going to the gas station, we're gonna plug in our cars, we're gonna have solar panels everywhere like wallpaper, you know, on all sides of a house. You know, the amount of change related to this is massive, but I'm absolutely, you know, incredibly energized and excited about, you know, what that means for us as a company, for me as an individual and for the coming generations, in terms of new career potential.

Keith: Well, and for all of us as investors, you've awoken a number of individuals I'm sure, both for themselves and how they think about the energy in their own homes. But I'm so sure also a number of us looking around corners for opportunities like yours for investment. Where are you these days on your investment cycle?

Jorg: Well, we raised an incredibly large series A, around $125 million back in September of last year. That'll take us a long way, we're actually in another fundraise period right now because in the battery business, it's all about going big. And with, you know, with the customer orders that we have and the massive customer demand pipeline behind that, we need to build some very large factory capacity and there's a lot of capital required. So we're in active discussions with, and perhaps will be for as soon as we finish the next round, we'll be on to the one right after that.

Keith: Well, congratulations. And it's wonderful to see somebody who has found their passion project with such great success. Thanks, Jorg, for joining us today. And for our listeners, our podcast Shifting Grounds by TriNet, it's committed to helping small businesses and their leaders with timely and relevant business content. Shifting Grounds drops the third Tuesday of every month. We hope you'll continue catching our new episodes on Apple, Spotify and RISE.TriNet.com. Jorg, what a pleasure to get to know you. And I've just bought a house up at Twin Peaks in San Francisco. Maybe we'll see each other physically sometime.

Jorg: Sounds great. Great to be with you, Keith. We can help with energy storage for your home.