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.
00:54:03 · Sachin
[00:54:03] S1: When we've talked about why energy is important, we've often contextualized it in terms of competitiveness and sort of competing against China, and this is important for America's future, but energy is also a very personal thing, and I something think that shows that was the twenty twenty one Texas crisis. People died, a lot of people went through a lot of suffering. The sort of the future of Texas for a moment sort of hung in the balance, what was actually going to happen to the grid. Are there any personal stories related to the energy crisis or to Base that you sort of think of when times are tough and that really make you remember like why you're building this
00:54:37 · Zach Dell
[00:54:37] S0: in the first place? The Winter Storm of twenty twenty one sticks in my memory and sticks in the memory of a lot of people at the company who were in Texas or had relatives from Texas around that time. But the company, the mission, the vision, the strategy is about a lot more than my story or Justin's story or the story of Texas. It's about the story of energy technology and the future of humanity. And the fact that if we are going to live in an energy abundant, incredible future of the world, we have got to start solving these core constraints today. And energy is that core constraint that we have to unlock. And so we think a lot about these kind of moment in time energy crises and problems that occur, you know, 2021 in Texas. But there are other examples of this, you know, Europe, right, in the last couple of years, what's happened in the Russia Ukraine war and Germany and the nuclear plants and, and, you know, what's happened to gas prices. And, there are examples of this all across the world. So we think a bit bigger and think about the societal impacts of if we don't do this ten years from now, twenty years from now, what will this country be? What will, know, what will Texas be? What will The United States Of America be? Where will we be positioned relative to China, relative to other players? We cannot afford not to do this. We cannot afford not to fight like hell to inflect energy production in America. And it's it's it's bigger than Texas. It's it's bigger than than just The US, but that's kind of how we think about it.