Base Power's $200M Series B Co-Led by Lee Fixel of Addition, A16Z, Lightspeed, & Valor Equity Partners

Zach Dell and Justin Lopas, co-founders of Base, discuss their recent $200 million Series B funding and their ambitious vision for revolutionizing the energy industry. Co-led by Addition, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Valor Equity Partners with participation from existing investors Thrive Capital, Altimeter, Terrain, Trust and others. As part of the fundraise, Addition founder Lee Fixel will join Base Power’s board alongside Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners. The new capital aims to unlock the next phase of growth for Base, including team expansion, market entry, and new product development. The episode delves into Base's unique approach to vertically integrating battery technology, offering both grid services and affordable, reliable power to homeowners. The conversation highlights the founders' experiences at SpaceX, Anduril, and Thrive Capital, shedding light on their mission to fix the power grid through aggressive, technology-driven execution. Learn how Base aims to become a household name and the SpaceX of the energy sector, starting with deployments in Texas and expanding nationwide. About Base Power: Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, Base Power is an energy company building a grid for the future—starting with battery-powered home energy service. The company’s mission is to advance human prosperity through energy abundance—delivering reliable and affordable power for all. Learn more at basepowercompany.com. Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOShea Zach on X: https://x.com/ ZachBDellJustin on X: https://x.com/JLopas Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 - $200M Series B Announcement 00:51 - Base's Vision & Execution Strategy 02:28 - Energy Technology & Market Expansion 03:41 - The US Energy Problem & Grid Challenges 06:30- Why Texas? Strategic Location & Market 09:32 - Founders' Backgrounds & Entrepreneurial Journey 18:24 - Early Challenges & Iterative Approach 23:21 - Vertical Integration & Cost Advantage 26:05 - Customer Journey & Installation Process 30:34 - Energy Industry Breakdown 35:16 - Texas Energy Market & Regulatory Environment 38:38 - Scaling & Expansion Plans 42:45 - Team & Company Culture 46:58 - Future Vision & Goals #podcast #investing #technology #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #siliconvalley

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Molly O'Shea?

  Zach and Justin, congratulations on your $200 million Series B announcement.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 0:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks a bunch. We're really excited.

• 0:07Molly O'Shea?

  So to start off with the fundraise, who led this round and what was the composition?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  The round was led by addition Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed coming in as new investors, and then existing investors, Valor, Thrive, Ultimeter, Trust Ventures, Terrain, and a number of other smaller investors.

• 0:24Molly O'Shea?

  What is this new capital going to unlock for you?

• 0:26Speaker 01

  It'll unlock the next step in our growth journey. We'll expand the team, we'll deploy more batteries to the power grid in Texas and beyond. We'll enter new markets, we'll develop new products, and we'll take the next step on our journey to build the modern power company of the electric era.

• 0:45Molly O'Shea?

  I really wanted to start with this question, but your fundraise was very large, so we started there. But I recently had Paddy McCormick on the pod and he did amazing deep dive of you guys. That was really authentic, like we did not plan that. But he mentioned and described BASE as executing violently. So could you just explain what that means?

• 1:06Speaker 02

  We love that. We like, we've started to use that term. By the way, that's a Paddy term, not a Nest term, although we're adopting that term now. We love that.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Our business is extremely execution oriented, putting thousands and eventually tens of thousands and hopefully millions of batteries on homes and ultimately businesses. And being a, you know, modern power company is just purely a sort of operations and technology and execution oriented game.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny, but it is true. You know, I actually think if you just read Frank Slutman's Amp It Up, that actually captures a lot of it, a book that we're big fans of. It's, you know, we set really high expectations. We prioritize speed. We try to articulate a very clear mission, vision, and strategy for the team. We celebrate wins, we celebrate losses. We ask, why can't we do it today? Why can't we do it now? We work really hard. We bring an extreme amount of focus to the work that we do. And as Justin mentioned, it's a complex coordination problem. And it requires the team to show up every day and, you know, chop wood, carry water, just do the little things day in, day out to move the business forward. So.

• 2:21Molly O'Shea?

  I will say, I don't recommend searching that on X. Looking for the clip.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:27Molly O'Shea?

  I searched that. It's not, not good results.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32Molly O'Shea?

  But that being said, Base has received a lot of hype. I've been doing pods for the last year and I was doing one with Sam Yamako of Impulse Labs. And so I was doing research in the battery space and everyone was saying, look at Base, look at Base, look at Base.

• 2:52Molly O'Shea?

  Given that, could you just describe a little bit more on the company and the grand vision that you're looking to build for?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, Base is an energy technology company with a mission to fix the power grid. We're here to provide affordable, reliable power through technology. And the way that we do that is by building hardware, software and deployment operations to deploy energy technology assets onto the grid effectively and efficiently.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  We kind of adopted this strategy of compounding cost advantage through vertical integration. So we develop battery technology. We deploy the hardware, we own it, we operate it, we sell power directly to homeowners. We install the batteries ourselves, we do the field service and operations and kind of everything, all parts of the stack to build out a fleet of distributed energy technology assets that we think is going to help bring capacity to the power grid here in Texas and ultimately to the rest of the country. So really, the mission of the company is to promote human prosperity through energy abundance. And what that really means is delivering affordable, reliable power to homeowners and eventually business owners. The way that we do that is through this vertically integrated, kind of complex coordination

• 4:05Speaker 01

  business model that requires violent execution.

• 4:09Molly O'Shea?

  So I guess the big question is, why now? Like, what is the scale of the US energy problem?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, the why now to us is quite clear. The, if you look over the last few decades, if you just look at kind of the electricity sector, load growth is what's called in the industry, or basically like the demand for electricity. Has been kind of ticking up very marginally, a percent or two a year. As there's been more population and as you know, people have computers in their homes than before that were using electricity. But you had a sort of offsetting efficiency gains of, you know, incandescent light bulbs changed to LED light bulbs and now you're using actually less electricity than before. And only over the last two to three years and what we believe of over the next few decades, that there's a knee in the curve, right?

• 4:59Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a, there's a much higher slope on electricity load growth. And the reason for that is honestly, it's maybe self-explanatory and relatively simple is that the end use of energy is moving from fossil fuels, from natural gas to heat your home to electricity via heat pump. People are getting heat pumps installed. The end use of energy in the form of gasoline or diesel is now going into electricity for EVs. And then of course, data centers and, and you know, fueled by AI are also driving this, this load growth phenomenon. And so electricity demand is, is at the sort of turning point in the US where it's gaining, gaining speed and in several percent compounding per year of growth.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  And, you know, if you, if you, if base power didn't or doesn't exist, our view is that if you fast forward, you know, a decade or two, what you would find is that there might be enough generation out there, there might be enough, you know, nuclear companies that come online or wind and solar or natural gas. And there will be a lot of new demand, but there won't be a way to connect the two, right? And that's really the problem we're solving is the thing in the middle of demand and supply, which is, which is the grid, the largest and most complex machine in the world, actually. And so why now is because there's this like growing demand and this growing supply, but no, but no good way to, to, to connect them.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  And the, the, the existing grid operators and companies that own the grid, AKA utilities, really, we don't believe have this sort of technology approach to solving the problem and frankly have operational and, and, and financial challenges. Well, and there's a there's a bit of a sort of like old industry happening here that we just don't think is prepared for this low growth. And so we're excited to add technology and ultimately sort of take place of or become or augment the existing utility infrastructure.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the energy industry is actually in a pretty similar spot that the aerospace industry or the defense industry was was in in in the last decade. The difference is that the energy industry doesn't have a SpaceX and it doesn't have an ender role. And we started based to to build that company in in the energy space.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  And we're at a unique moment in time, as Justin points out, where electricity demand in the U.S. And and really globally is inflecting. And so the need for the the kind of SpaceX of energy is greater than it's ever been and and we're here to fill that void.

• 7:29Molly O'Shea?

  And how did you pick Texas to start the company?

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Well, uh, Texas is the energy capital of the country and and really should be the energy capital of the world. It's it's in the middle of the Sun Belt, it's in the middle of the wind corridor, so you have tons of uh, wind and solar resources. But it's also a competitive market. It's a a a really great place to develop energy technology. You have price signals and kind of um, pro competition regulatory structures that allow companies to come in and innovate and take market share. That said, we think that Texas in a lot of ways is the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the country. And as a lot of the rest of the country moves into uh, a load profile that looks a lot more like Texas, the demand for batteries in those states will go up.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  And we look forward to bringing our technology to the rest of the country over time as that happens.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and maybe Molly, we can, we can, we can talk about this more later if you're interested. But uh, energy, particularly electricity, is a very sort of state by state regulated phenomenon, unlike many other industries. Uh, where there's um, sort of similar regulatory regimes on a state by state basis. Maybe it's more like insurance where insurance is very state by state. Uh, electricity is the same way. So the way in which you go to market in Texas and the way in which you monetize a energy storage or energy production.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  A piece of hardware is very different in Texas than it is in California, as an example.

• 8:54Molly O'Shea?

  From my understanding, there is an energy crisis in Texas because there's so many blackouts. Isn't that, is that a factor as well? How does that fit into this?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Certainly. I mean, all of the reasons that Zach mentioned are totally, totally right. And then on top of it, you have this problem that is not exactly explicitly unique to Texas, but is, but is a, but is definitely acutely felt in Texas. And so there's a lot of demand for more energy resources, storage in our case. Many folks don't know this actually, but there are three grids in the United States. Like if you think about like physically connected poles and wires to each other. There's the eastern interconnection, like east of the Rockies. There's the western interconnection, interconnection west of it. And then there's Texas. Texas is actually its own physical grid. It's like, for all intents and purposes, not connected to the rest of the country.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  And so what that means is that you can't like borrow from your neighbors when you need extra support. And you can't share your access when you have too much. It's kind of an island. It's like a Hawaii or Alaska or, or Puerto Rico or something where it's its own, its own grid. Also, the Gulf Coast is, has a ton of hurricanes. So there's a lot of reliability challenges, just like physical infrastructure. And as Zach was mentioning, Texas, a lot of people also don't know this, but Texas has the most wind and solar of any state, much more so than California, in fact. And that drives a lot of volatility in the supply, right? It's not always windy and it's, the sun's not always shining, state in the obvious.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  And so there is an acute need for storage to store excess solar during the day and discharge during the night and basically offset or sort of buffer this volatility by virtue of having this islanded grid.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  It's also worth mentioning, Texas is, is the eighth largest economy in the world. It's growing incredibly quickly. Some of the highest population growth cities in the country are here in Texas. It's a very good place to do business. It's a pro-business state.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  The, the regulatory environment here is very favorable to companies. It's very kind of pro-competition. So there's a lot of really good reasons to, to build a company here.

• 10:59Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah. I'm unfortunately missing South by Southwest and I've heard that's very fun.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. The whole, the whole city, it's, it's fun to go to the events and, but it's not one to like necessarily live in the city during South by Southwest. So, yeah.

• 11:13Molly O'Shea?

  So I want to go deeper into both your backgrounds. I'm not sure, and I would love to know if you guys had ever expected to start an energy company. But starting with Zach, so your career is on the investing side. You worked at Blackstone and then you were also an investor at Thrive Capital. So how did, how did that navigate you to starting this company? What did you see while you were investing that this was a massive opportunity?

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll go even further back than that. I'd say, growing up, it never occurred to me there was anything interesting to do in the world other than start companies. It was always what I wanted to do. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I started my first company in high school. I actually started two companies in high school and I started another company in college. And college was really the time where I got excited about opportunities in industry and in, in, in, in energy, excuse me. I spent a lot of time in college trying to figure out how to develop anaerobic digestion systems in parts of the rural world to convert human waste into compressed methane for people to use for stoves and lights and fans and that kind of thing. It turned out it wasn't a very good business idea, but it was a really interesting learning experience.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  And I actually went into investing because A, I needed a real job and the business wasn't working. And B, I wanted to learn what, what good looks like. And I wanted to see how the most sophisticated investors in the world underwrote businesses, how they talked about businesses, how they thought about businesses. And I think early in one's career, it's really important to learn what excellence is and what it looks like and kind of consistently redefine what excellence is. And so I ended up at Blackstone because it was the place where I thought I would learn the most, work the hardest and be around kind of the smartest people in the world as far as, you know, underwriting sophisticated business models went.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  While I was there, I got to spend time on, on energy investing, specifically an opportunity to carve out a lithium mine from a public company. And if you're going to buy a lithium mine, you have to take a view on the price of lithium. And so I spent a lot of time underwriting, you know, what is lithium, what are lithium prices going to do over the next decade? And in doing that, I really kind of latch on to this idea of, oh, wow, actually, most of this lithium is going to go into battery storage. And why is battery storage so important? Well, actually, the marginal cost of wind and solar plus storage is just going to be lower than the marginal cost of coal and natural gas. And so there's going to be massive demand for these utility scale battery storage facilities. And if you double click into those, those utility scale battery storage facilities,

• 13:46Speaker 01

  now Blackstone now owns a business called Ipa Power, which is one of the largest utility scale developers in the country. BlackRock owns a business called Jupiter Power. Apollo owns a business called Broad Reach Power. So all of the big asset managers have really started investing in this asset class. But the asset class is really fundamentally constrained for two reasons. One is interconnection capacity. So it takes five to 10 years to get a battery good connected. It's a combination of a regulatory problem, a part availability problem, there's a transformer shortage, which has kind of been well documented. And then partially just like a manual trucks and crews and poles and wires problem. The other constraint is transmission congestion. So where you need to put these big batteries is not actually where you can put them, right? Because you need storage where the load is in the densely populated city centers.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  But these are massive sites that are really construction projects. And so I first had the insight on distributed storage in 2018, 2019. And then when I left Blackstone, I joined Thrive. I got a really close look at companies like SpaceX and OpenAI and Anduril and Ramp and these companies that were scaling really quickly, building really strong teams, kind of taking big swings at large markets and was inspired to do the same. And around that time, we made a large investment in Anduril and that's how I met Justin. I went down to do a factory tour and Justin was my tour guide. And we hit it off and we started chatting and I think we both kind of subtly figured out that, that we were, you know, excited about starting a company.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  And as I started pulling the thread on this distributed energy thesis, I called up Justin. I said, hey, you know, I'm really excited about this idea. What do you think? I need a co-founder and he was like, I'm, I'm pretty excited. And so, long story short, you know, basically for three months, we would get on the phone every night at 9:00 PM and just like start talking. And, you know, during the day I would, you know, do research and start. Validating or not kind of parts of the thesis and over time, we started to pick up steam that, hey, this is actually a once in a lifetime opportunity to go build the modern energy company of our generation. And so that's kind of how it all came together for me.

• 15:50Molly O'Shea?

  It's particularly a very complex and highly regulated, capital intensive industry. So talking with Justin early on, did that help you break down those barriers and just see it as solving a problem rather than fighting an uphill battle? How did you think about that?

• 16:07Speaker 01

  For sure. I mean, when I first called Justin, the idea smelled and looked very different. You know, I think the first insight was like, hey, I think if we did really high precision pack assembly in the US, it would be really hard to lose because there's tons of demand for battery storage and the cell manufacturing thing was pretty well figured out, but the pack assembly thing wasn't. And, you know, he brought a really interesting perspective to that. And then we started looking at, okay, does it make sense to do, to go after the regulated markets and kind of sell to the utilities? Does it make sense to be a retail energy provider and do it ourselves? Should we do neighborhood batteries? Should we do, should we do them at the home? And we just kind of like maniacally kind of

• 16:50Speaker 01

  pulled apart the idea from every different angle that we could. And I think, you know, that was the early moments of our relationship where it was kind of, and it's still this way, we're kind of questioning each other nonstop of like, you know, oh, that's a good idea. What about this? What about that? And I think that together, we kind of formed the idea in those, in those months and came to something that we, we felt a lot of conviction in. And I think to both of us, it became very clear that there was an exciting opportunity that we had to go capture.

• 17:22Molly O'Shea?

  Justin, your background is more in manufacturing. So you were at SpaceX and you were at Anduril. Could you explain more about your roles there and how they apply to this business and how you're helping map out? The manufacturing vertically integrated system for base.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, certainly. So I'd say the interest from early on in my career has been kind of where technology slash engineering and operations meet, which happened to be in the case of SpaceX and Andrell, mostly in the manufacturing realm. I studied mechanical engineering at Michigan, and so had always had this passion for cars and then rockets and and sort of just like all mechanical, mechanical things. And out of school, went to SpaceX, as you're mentioning, and had basically kind of two, two roles there in my time. The first part was on the Falcon 9,

• 18:23Speaker 02

  was, was the new design for the, they called Block 5 at the time, that's kind of the latest iteration of the vehicle that was carrying humans to the space station and was basically becoming the Falcon, also the, the version of the Falcon Heavy. There was this like big assembly that we had to go stand up a whole supply chain for. There was a big metal supply chain, casting, forging, machining, and a bunch of like metals processing. And so learned a ton about how sort of the US aerospace industry and, and, and global supply chain is just so interconnected and so operationally intensive. And even if you have the exact right technology for a given manufacturing process, if you don't have the execution to back it up as a supplier,

• 19:08Speaker 02

  you're, you're, you're not, you're not doing very well. And so kind of like started cutting my teeth in sort of supply chain and manufacturing technical processes there. And then the second half of my time at SpaceX was down in Brownsville. So was, was lucky enough to be kind of one of a handful of folks that went down to the Brownsville, Texas site, now, now Starbase, but at the time was Brownsville and to a, actually just literally an overgrown field. And the, the, the ask from Elon was build a, build a rocket that can fly, can hop in the span of a few months. And so it's like everything from, okay, we need to get a tent, I think, because we need to be inside to build parts of the rocket to how do you build a big, tall steel

• 19:51Speaker 02

  tube? Well, that kind of looks like a water tower. Okay, let's like go see if we can find construction companies that build water towers to like, show us how this is done. And so anyways, there's manufacturing process, hiring a big team of welders and all that. I had just an awesome time down there, left in about 2020 and went to Andorol and was very fortunate to join the team relatively early on, it's three years into the company, but kind of the first hire that was dedicated to manufacturing and quality and parts of supply chain and all that. And learned from the great founders, Palmer and Trey and Brian and Matt Graham in particular, who I worked directly for for my time there. And just had a great experience basically building the manufacturing team from the ground up. We

• 20:33Speaker 02

  did a bunch of acquisitions and just learned a ton about both the operational and technical side of the business and had a passion for energy throughout that. I found a lot of the technical challenges that the company had were around energy storage, energy solutions, the Century Tower that's down on the southern border has a big solar array and battery system attached to it and was very, very interested in that. And so it's always been sort of interested in these foundational problems that fed into, you know, other solutions, right? Energy is basically the bedrock of essentially every other technological advancement that humanity has ever done. And so, yeah, when I met Zach and he was thinking about batteries, it was like, wow, this is pretty interesting. There's a lot

• 21:13Speaker 02

  of technology operations and economics kind of wrapped up into this, into this problem space and just was like very intellectually stimulating. And I think we found that we had very complementary skill sets for solving this sort of problem. So yeah, that's how it came to be.

• 21:29Molly O'Shea?

  What was the transition like to actually starting your own company though in essentially a green field with batteries? Like, what are your biggest challenges that you had to overcome early on?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think like this is, this sounds, this sounds really dumb, but honestly, like one thing that I've told a few people that are like leaving companies and starting, starting their own company is like you, you take for granted having structure. And like, you know, you show up to work every day and you kind of roughly know what you're doing. Like, yes, you're making decisions along the way. But like, okay, I'm, you know, an engineer designing a thing and, you know, I'm kind of like, that's a constrained problem. Show up to work day one, uh, you know, incorporation in June of 2023 and it's like, okay, what are we doing? Uh, and like, I, you know, there's no, no one to tell you, tell you that it's like, well, like, okay, I guess I'll ask myself that question then, you know? Um, and so it's just, it's sort of a funny, funny, funny anecdote, but, uh, I found that to be actually a, a, a sort of like

• 22:25Speaker 02

  personal challenge to overcome. It's just like, okay, like literally everything that I'm going to do today, I am both doing and planning. And, and that's, that's still the case today, you know, a little under two years into the company, um, that kind of, uh, joke with the team, kind of making it up as, as, as we go. Obviously there's some more thought than just like, you know, than, than it might sound, but, um, that's been, that's been a big challenge. I think we could talk about some of the, some of the regulatory challenges, some of the business model challenges. How about going anything, you know, in, in depth, or maybe you can mention some stuff, but anyways, that's kind of just the way I thought about it, like day one, what are we doing?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think that a big part of our approach since day one has been just constant learning and, um, having the humility to know that we don't know all the answers, but we have a big ambitious mission and, and vision. And we'll start to form the strategy as, as we go. And I think the way the company was started was literally as I described, like Justin and I hopping on the phone every night. And just like, running it down and answering questions and figuring things out and talking to experts and just kind of like maniacally trying to understand all the parts of the problem. And, um, you know, Paki wrote about this in his, his piece, uh, that he wrote around our product launch, but, you know, we, we started every two weeks, we would write these

• 23:43Speaker 01

  updates that were our learnings and it was, uh, we're going to do this. No, actually we're going to do this and we learned this thing and we're going to do that thing. And I think we still take that approach to everything where we say, okay, we think that this is the right thing, but let's go run it down and let's go understand it better. And let's quickly figure out if we're wrong so that we can adapt. And I think if you have this approach of like constant iteration. And just kind of like aggressive learning mentality, you'll end up in a really good place. And that's really how we got off the ground. It's like, we want to build an energy technology company. We think batteries have a ton of value on the grid. We don't know exactly how to capture that value. Let's go figure it out. And that was how we got started. And I think we still take that same approach today.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  And we have a bit more of a clear strategy and a long-term vision, but I think that we'll continue to iterate and and adapt that that that mission, vision and strategy. Well, not not the mission, but the strategy in particular. As we grow and we encounter new problems and learn, learn new things about the about the problem space.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think one thing, and this is something that our, our founding engineer Jared has, I think, taught both of us is the approach of basically trying to delete parts of problems such that you can, you can go faster, but also to like learn the next problem has been really important for us. So as an example, on the hardware side, you know, there's a version of the company where we go away in the lab for two years or three years and design the most awesomest, you know, battery ever that goes on homes. And then we come out to the world, we say, yep, we have the best product ever. Or there's a version of the company, which is the one that we're doing, which is iterate on hardware. So we take bits of off the shelf pieces and combine them with bits of custom pieces

• 25:22Speaker 02

  and then get more and more custom and more and more vertically integrated along the lines of manufacturing and supply chain over time. And that allows us to build out the team, understand what customers care about, jump through all the regulatory hoops to even sell power on the Texas grid, start meeting with regulators, like all of those things were unlocked by virtue of us launching, launching a product. And the way to launch a product faster was to not go away in the lab for three years and design the most, you know, the most custom thing. And so we're generally taking that approach to, to the, to as much of the business as possible is like, what is the minimum viable product? In order to get into market to learn and then basically get to the next problem to solve.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  And learn about it.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  I, I, I think, you know, Jared and Dana and Cole and some of our earliest team members brought this approach of, hey, we have to earn the right to learn the next. Set of problems and you can't, you don't know all the things that break when you have a hundred batteries in the ground until you have a hundred batteries in the ground. And so just sprint like hell to get a hundred batteries in the ground. Same thing with a thousand, same thing with 10,000. And so we, I think, you know, installed our first battery, you know, a couple of months into the company. And, you know, got to a hundred pretty quickly. We now have over a thousand batteries in the ground and we've kind of earned the right to unlock new problems that we have to go figure out. And I think had we taken the approach of let's get the perfect home battery dialed, it'll take us two, three years, we'll raise a bunch of money, we'll be in R and D phase for a long time.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  And then we'll like, ta-da, we did it. We wouldn't have earned the right to solve all the problems that we've kind of earned the right to solve by executing quickly and iteratively. And that approach, I think, has really helped us.

• 27:01Molly O'Shea?

  Executing violently.

• 27:05Molly O'Shea?

  I want to go into the vertical integration piece of that. So could you just walk through the process from the very base of base to the customer? So can you just walk through how you're manufacturing to getting this out the door?

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, first, let's talk about why vertical integration.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  The way that we describe this is we are working to develop a compounding cost advantage through vertical integration. And what that means is by doing everything, by designing the batteries, making the batteries, installing them, doing all the logistics and warehousing, the deployment operations, selling power directly to the customer, doing the support, the maintenance, everything. It allows us to take costs out of each step of the equation and ultimately drive down the price for our customer. At the end of the day, electricity is a commodity, right? There are no sexy electrons, as we say. People want their lights to stay on and their bills to be low. No one wants to pay more for power.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  And so we take the view that we have to develop the technology and the operations to eventually be able to sell power to our customers cheaper than anyone on the planet. And the only way to do that is to take cost out through vertical integration. There's no magic sauce that we can, you know, drop on the business that, you know, gives us this like cost structure advantage other than. Vertical integration and building technology across each part of the stack, whether it's the way that we design the batteries, the way that we manage our logistics and warehousing, the way that we manage the operations. And by doing all these things, you're able to affect other parts of the problem. So by designing the actual packs, we can lower the cost of the installation

• 28:48Speaker 01

  because you can design the battery for a faster install, for a de-skilled install. So you don't need a very expensive kind of master electrician to be out there for four hours. You can have someone who has a little less experience doing the stacking and then you have a qualified electrician come in and do all the hot work and you kind of shorten the time that you have the higher wage person out there. And so by controlling all pieces of the puzzle, you can drive cost out and ultimately drive prices down for the end consumer, which we think is critical in a commodity industry. Maybe, Justin, if you want to talk a little bit about the hardware strategy and how we take a battery from our design all the way through installation and then serving the customer.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we have today, we have basically three generations of hardware that we're either deploying or in process of deploying. And again, kind of back to the prior point, we're iterating on hardware going more and more custom over time. So Gen 1 has a bit of custom mixed in with off the shelf. Gen 2 is a lot of custom and Gen 3 is fully custom. Gen 1 is primarily outside manufacturer. Gen 2 is a combination of contract manufacturing and us manufacturing. And Gen 3 is fully us manufacturing, or for the most part, fully us manufacturing. And so basically, the customer, maybe take you the customer journey is perhaps the easiest way to think about this chronologically.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  So the customer comes into the website or is referred to us somehow, you know, basically comes to us. We talk to them, we offer them our product and they sign the contract. Now it sort of starts the clock on getting the battery installed. And as Zach was mentioning earlier, this timeline, this total timeline from when the customer says, "Okay, I'm ready to go. I'm interested," to battery is operating on their home, providing them backup and serving the Texas grid. We want that time to be as short as possible. And this is kind of my background in manufacturing as we think about that whole problem as a manufacturing problem. Every step is like a station in the line. There are specific skill, skill sets of people at each station that have specific documentation and tooling and work instructions and all that.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  And so while it's a combination of digital and distributed physical process, it's not like all happening under one building necessarily. Like a manufacturing line is we think about this whole deployment processes as a manufacturing problem to solve. So customer signs up. We go into a process by which we get photos from the customer. They send us these photos for us to basically check their eligibility of their home and do what's called a site layout. That site layout is done internally by software that we've developed primarily for the most part automatically. And then that site layout is and permit package is sent to the local city if the permits

• 31:39Speaker 02

  required and to the utility what's for what's called interconnection agreement. Once those things come back, we then pack the kit at the warehouse or we have packed kits already. So we own all of the warehousing. We receive in all the, all the goods. We do all of the assembly onto the pallets. And then day of install or the day before the install, we send our truck out there, drop it off. And then we have our electricians come in the next morning and do the install. And that install is done in less than a day. The customer now has backup protection. They have their, you know, their, the app on their phone where they can check the status of their, of their battery. They're also being served by us as their retail electric provider, meaning we sell them electricity every month based on what they use.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  So we have a bill that we send them every month for that electricity used. And then right then and there, we're, we're, we're operating that battery in the wholesale markets here in, in Texas through the ERCOT market. And we can talk a lot more about that if you're interested later. That's kind of the chronology of the, of the customer. And as we get further and further vertically integrated, we do more and more assembly and manufacturing of the hardware. And we're doing more and more of the installs ourselves. We started with some contract labor. We're now bringing that in-house. We started with contract warehousing. We're also bringing that in-house. And we kind of take each station in the line, so to speak. We think about it in terms of what is the value that we can add by doing it ourselves? How can we drive down costs?

• 33:08Speaker 02

  How can we drive up quality? And, and, and very importantly, drive up the, the experience that our customers, we call them members, our members have. And so, for instance, by virtue of us doing our own installs as opposed to having a third-party contractor do it, we now have this personal, you know, face-to-face relationship with our member that is a base employee. And they're able to provide the member a really, really thoughtful and thorough experience installing and showing them their, their new battery.

• 33:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, the benefits to that are, are, you know, we talked about the cost side, right? By doing everything, we can take cost out of all parts of the equation. We build software and automations to manage a lot of the process. But also for the, for the member, you don't have to communicate with a bunch of different counterparties to, to get a battery or a backup solution on your home. So the status quo today is you buy a battery or a generator from an OEM. You, they then pass you to an installer that you have to work with to schedule your installation and do the permitting and do the interconnect agreement. And then you go have to find a, you have to go find a separate retail electric provider. Maybe they will give you a, a better rate because you have a battery, maybe they won't. And you have to manage all of these parties yourself.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  By doing it all ourselves, we can directly interface with the customer across all parts of the, of the equation, which allows us to shorten the time for installation significantly. So today, if you go buy a home battery, it's probably going to take you two to six months to get that battery on your home. We can get a battery on a home, you know, it varies by permitting requirements from the local municipality, but on the order of two to four weeks. And, and, and there are certain parts of Texas where we can get a battery in the home the next day. And that's just not possible if you're not able to vertically integrate all these steps.

• 34:47Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, that's impressive and super fast. I was actually really curious, the more that you explain the process out compared to, let's say, like, the greater energy landscape. If you're seeing base as like the SpaceX, the Anduril of energy, how do you see where the value is accruing in the broader part of the industry? Like, who are the players? And why is it so slow?

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a relatively broad question. I guess to break out the energy industry, or maybe the sort of like the electricity market, you've got kind of these three broad categories. You have generators, people that own and operate plants that produce electricity, whether that's nuclear, wind, solar, or natural gas. You have the poles and wires companies. They own substations and transformers and poles and wires. And then here in Texas, you have what's called REPS, retail electric providers, and they sell power to homeowners. REPS will buy power from the generators, pay the poles and wires companies to get it to them, and then sell it at a retail rate to the homeowners. And that's the Texas market. I think it's important to explain that because it's not, it's not

• 36:04Speaker 02

  something you think about every day. And that's specific to Texas, as I just outlined it. In certain other areas like California, or honestly, a lot of the country, you have utilities that are vertically integrated. So they generate the power, they transmit the power, and they sell the power. Here in Texas, these things are relatively separate. And what you find in the market is that especially the utilities that own the poles and wires, the sort of utilities in this traditional sense, they, if you squint a little bit, they're kind of similar to the defense primes, actually. So coming from Anduril, this was kind of a realization we had as we were talking about the company, you know, the idea for the company.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  The incentive structure is interesting, actually, for these companies in that they are typically financially incentivized to spend money, not to save money. So in defense, this is called cost plus. In the utility world, it's called rate making, or rate basing. Basically, if you spend a dollar, you can earn a return on that dollar as a utility. Similarly, if you spend an engineering hour on a fighter jet, you can earn a return on that via the cost plus model in defense. And so the incentive structure is like, not great for consumers. And also somewhat similar to the defense primes, there's not a lot of technology in the existing sort of landscape.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  So, you know, one major thing, that kind of how we're thinking about the grid, is the utilities today think about it as a one-way street. That one-way street runs from the generator, through the poles and wires, and to the home. And with distributed assets, distributed generation and storage, like we do, the grid is now a two-way street. You can have power flowing back from what used to be the load, or what is the load most of the time, up to the substation and around to other homes. And this small thing, enabled by technology, is like a big change in fundamentally how the grid operates and the grid works. And I think that's like, a sort of key difference between how we think about the future of energy,

• 38:13Speaker 02

  and how maybe the incumbents or the existing players in the market think about energy. It's more of a network rather than a, you know, single, single direction.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I also think that the existing companies in the space have just thought about the problem differently. The home battery companies and the generator companies have thought about selling premium products at a high gross margin. And you sell a battery, you sell a generator, and then you make your gross margin, and then you move on. And then it's on the customer to go schedule an install with an electrician, and then find a retail electric provider. And we have a very different business model. We do not sell batteries. We sell affordable, reliable power. And by bringing to market that different business model, it incentivizes a different product, right? We actually care about deploying as much storage per home as possible. And so we want to build bigger batteries with more storage, with more power.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  We want to manage the whole thing ourselves. We want to take costs out of all parts of the equation. And it just makes for a much more kind of efficient system when you have a product that fits into the business model. And you don't have to fit the business model around products that are not designed for it. The other thing I'll say is that by doing it all ourselves, we can offer a really compelling product to the regulated utility. So actually, just today, we announced our first utility partnership with Bandera Electric here in Texas, which we're super excited about. And you'll see over the coming months, we'll announce more of these that we're working on in Texas and outside of Texas. Where we partner up with the utility and we say, hey, we'll deploy storage in your service territory really fast and really cost effectively for you.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  And then we'll give you a fleet of storage, 10 megawatts, 50 megawatts, 100 megawatts that you can use to lower your costs. And pass those savings on to your customers. And if you're a utility before base, your options were go find an OEM, go find a software provider typically called DERM, Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems. Find someone to do the installation and then staple all those systems together. They typically don't talk to each other very well. And so utilities have tried to do this. The uptake hasn't been that that strong. They've kind of stopped doing it and we show up with a totally integrated product and say, hey, we can deploy storage in your territory really fast and really cost effectively. And they seem to be very excited about it. So this works in the deregulated deregulated market where we can

• 40:33Speaker 01

  go directly to customers and deploy these things and be a totally vertically integrated, you know, gen tailor.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  But it also works in the regulated markets where we can show up with a kind of out of the box solution for utilities to deploy flexible capacity in their service territory. Really fast and really cost effectively.

• 40:49Molly O'Shea?

  So I want to talk more about Texas and why it's so special, particularly on the regulation standpoint. So if you could just break down the regulatory hurdles across the country that make Texas attractive to you to expand this business.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we call the Texas energy market or electricity market deregulated. It's a bit of a misnomer. It's very heavily regulated still. But what it fundamentally means and what most people, when they sort of say Texas is a deregulated energy market, what they actually are referring to is what's called retail choice. So if you're a homeowner or a tenant in Houston, Dallas, just north of Austin here, a lot of the southern and western part of the state, you can and actually you have to choose who you buy your electricity from. So if you live in Northern California and you want electricity at your house, you have one, you know, one option, which is in that case PG&E. And here in Texas, you have over 100 options.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  And those companies are called REPS, retail electric providers, as I was mentioning earlier. And they are responsible for selling you the power that they buy from the generator companies. Then they pay the poles and wires companies to get to you. So the poles and wires companies in Texas are deregulated, meaning they can't own generation assets and they also can't sell you power. So that's like one very sort of specific thing that is very Texas centric. I think there's the broader point about Texas, the regulatory environment in general, is it's very pro-business, right? So there's relatively low regulations around permitting of manufacturing facilities,

• 42:33Speaker 02

  around, you know, taxes and sort of like state oversight in various, various sort of business operations. And so Texas in particular is just very inviting to businesses in general, not just businesses, not just electricity companies or energy companies like us, but it's inviting to businesses just in general. And I think that in combination with the challenges that the grid has, in combination with this deregulated or retail choice electricity market, really sets up a company like us to really sort of take market share. And we're just, we're very happy to be here, here in Texas. And I think it's like a perfect, perfect fit for what we're doing.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think Texas is the perfect place to start. And this goes back to the iterative approach that we talked about, where we can get in market fast, we can get a batteries on home quickly, we can sell power to customers quickly, and we can start learning. But the rest of the country needs the same technology, right? Like load growth is happening in all parts of the country. You have massive data center build out in Northern Virginia. You have electrification of transportation and heavy industry in California, in the Midwest, in the Northeast. And so we think that the entire country needs distributed energy technology. Texas just happens to be the place where we can move the fastest and we can execute the most violently, to use Paki's terminology.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  But we want to bring affordable, reliable power to every neighborhood in America. And you know, the partnership that we announced with Bnder Electric is the first example of us partnering up with the regulated utility and, and, you know, bringing to market our technology through that business model. And you'll see us pursue opportunities like that in states outside of Texas and hopefully all 50 states in the coming years. And so while Texas is the perfect place to start, actually, the entire country needs this technology and we think is well suited for it.

• 44:24Molly O'Shea?

  And you guys are in Austin, Dallas, Houston with this $200 million in fresh capital. You're gonna, I'm assuming, expand further into Texas and then hopefully across the United States. So like, at what scale are you deploying new units each day? Like, what, what exactly are you looking to hit? Like, what would be the goal for deployments a day?

• 44:51Speaker 01

  I think we, I think we did 19 installations today. So, you know, on the order of 15 to 20 installations a day. That number's going up, obviously, you know, by the week. We want to be the fastest battery developer in the country. And we're kind of already on a megawatt per month basis, right in line with the fastest battery developers in the country. By the summer, we'll be deploying at twice the rate. So we'll be the fastest battery developer in the country in, in, in the next, you know, three months. And, you know, we want to grow exponentially. So, you know, we'll go from 20 a day to 50 a day to 100 a day. And eventually, hopefully, we'll be doing, you know, thousands of installations a day in the coming years as we go from Texas, you know, to the rest of the country.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe just to deep dive on that real quick. So battery developers, basically no one or very, very few folks are doing battery development, meaning putting batteries on the grid and offering grid services to the grid in a distributed model, meaning behind the meter. And so there are other companies of which Zach mentioned a few previously that a lot of the big PE firms own that buy and basically construct these sites, think like a shipping container on from some farmland. And those take many years to deploy, but once they're deployed, you have hundreds of megawatt hours. The size of a battery is measured in either kilowatt hours or megawatt hours.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  And so if you take your 100 megawatt hours, it took you five years to deploy, you did 20 megawatt hours a year. We are measuring ourselves against that rate, basically. How fast can we get storage onto the grid? Because if you're a utility like Bandera Electric, like many of the others we're working with, they're concerned about the load growth that is happening now, not that is happening five years from now. They're worried about getting more capacity on the grid today or next week or this month. And so because we can take this much faster approach, we think that's a very compelling, compelling offering for utilities. And so the distributed model, we're proving out now and we're hoping to continue to prove out as just a far more effective way to put the incremental storage onto the grid.

• 47:01Molly O'Shea?

  In terms of the go to market strategy, you mentioned a couple partnerships. I'm really curious, does seasonality affect that as well? Like, I would love to just break down the go to market strategy, like, is it A, like partnerships and then B, like also seasonality? Or are there other components maybe that you're riding off of?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  I would say it certainly does, right? When it gets really hot in Texas, people are super focused on the power grid. When it gets super cold in Texas, people are super focused on the power grid. When there are outages, obviously people are really focused on backup power. But really, in any month, people want to save money, right? So we offer two things. We offer outage protection and we offer lower monthly electricity bills. And so we find that there are definitely spikes in demand around outages and extreme weather events. But we see pretty consistent demand from customers who are looking to save money on electricity. We have, we think about customer acquisition in really two ways. There's a direct channel and the indirect channel. The direct channel is mostly referrals, direct mail, paid advertising, you know, word of mouth,

• 48:05Speaker 01

  field marketing, brand marketing, those kinds of things. And then the indirect, sorry, yeah, the indirect channel is partnerships like what we've announced with Lennar, one of the largest home builders in the country. If you're buying a Lennar home in select communities in Texas, now I think it's 25 communities across the state. When you go to buy a Lennar home, you have the option to sign up for base at kind of effectively checkout. So that when you move in into your Lennar home, your home is base powered and you have a battery in your home and where your electricity provider. And we're working on additional partnerships with other home builders and, and other home adjacent companies to bring base to more, more customers, more members throughout the state.

• 48:43Molly O'Shea?

  And how does the business model work?

• 48:45Speaker 01

  We're an asset owner, so we're really a battery developer. So we install our battery on our members' homes. When the grid is up and running, we use that battery to support the grid and that's how we make money. So we bid the battery in the wholesale electricity markets. And when the grid goes down, the customer gets that battery to, to back up their home. So we make money really in three ways. One is by monetizing the batteries for grid services. Two is by charging a monthly fee. So you pay $4.95 upfront, which is another source of income and then 17 bucks a month. And then we sell power to the homeowner and we make a margin on that as well.

• 49:20Molly O'Shea?

  Given all of this and how fast you guys are moving, I want to know more about the team behind it all. So could you explain more about how you've composed the team?

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. The team is the most valuable asset at the company by far. I think, you know, building a complex coordination business like this that is vertically integrated, you need expertise in hardware, software, operations, and kind of everything in between. And so we've been able to recruit some of the best and brightest engineers and operators in the world to, to help us build this. We're about 80 people now.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  And we've, we've got a really strong group of people who have, I think, seen the, the mission and the vision. And actually, many of them come to us and said, hey, what you're working on is super important. It looks hard. It looks meaningful. I want to be a part of that. And, you know, I think almost half of the team has relocated from some other part of the country to Austin to come join the mission. And look, you know, we, we talked about the violent execution joke kind of, but what we do is, is hard. It's intense. It's painful at times and is not a nine to five. It's not a place to, to come, uh, just hang out. It's, it's a place to do the best work of your career, the most meaningful work of your career.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  And, you know, we've had top engineers from companies like Tesla and SpaceX and Anduril and Apple and and of all, you know, many of the, the top technology companies that folks know, reach out to us and say, hey, I want to be a part of that mission because that's super meaningful. And this is something I'd be proud to tell my family that I'm, I'm working on. So I think both of us have been, uh, very pleasantly surprised by the amount of really exceptional individuals who have come to us and said, hey, what you're working on is important and I, and I want to work on that. So, um, it's, it's, I, I speak for both of us. I think like it's an honor of a lifetime to get to lead this group and be a part of this team and work with these folks every day. They work incredibly hard. They're incredibly smart. They're incredibly focused and driven and, and mission aligned.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  And, um, all the success we've had is, is due, is, is credit to the incredible team that's come together around this very challenging problem.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think the only thing I'd add to that is the, um, the sort of, the fact that the company is so vertically integrated and has such a variety of different challenges to solve, brings in a ton of different sort of personas and profiles and folks with very, very different backgrounds and experiences and, uh, and skillsets. You know, we have electricians that, um, have, uh, mastered the craft in a, you know, over, over a career, uh, and are coming to work on, uh, sort of new technology as it relates to home electrification. Mixed with folks that are doing creative work for brand marketing, uh, mixed with, uh, your, uh, sort of.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  Like PhD software engineer who is developing algorithms for bidding our batteries into the wholesale markets, mixed with hardware engineers and all of these, all of these various disparate disciplines need to work cohesively on this sort of, yeah, this complex coordination machine. It's been really fun to sort of meld these sort of cultures and backgrounds together. It's not your traditional, you know, SaaS company where you have some, you know, growth folks and some, and some software engineers. There's like so much variety in terms of the backgrounds of folks. That it's just been, it's, it's really cool to see folks come together and like, it all starts with the mission. Folks that are mission aligned will be able to work with people that are doing a totally different thing.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  They have no idea or background on how to do and collaborate really effectively. And I guess one thing that I'm, I'm quite proud of is, is just the, folks who've been able to attract and the ability for folks from these very disparate disciplines to work, work very closely together.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think, you know, for anyone out there listening that wants to fix the power grid, wants to be a part of the, the modern power company of the electric era, wants to solve hard problems across hardware, software, firmware, operations, finance, marketing, sales, wants to work in person, five days a week, in an office, high ownership, low bureaucracy, move fast, focused execution. Please reach out. We're, we're growing the team here in Austin. It's an incredibly fun place to work as well. I think that's important. We like to have fun. We like to laugh, high five. Work should be a place that you enjoy being at. And, and we think that's really important. We cater lunch and dinner every day. It's delicious. It's healthy. It's,

• 53:47Speaker 01

  it's, it's, it sounds silly, but it's really important. It's like people gotta want to be at the office. And, you know, we, we, we, we focus a lot on like creating an environment that people want to be a part of. Doesn't make it, doesn't mean it's easy. It doesn't mean it's kind of laid back. It's like certainly not that. We are executing violently, but you can execute violently and have a lot of fun doing it.

• 54:07Molly O'Shea?

  Selling, selling pretty well. I will say, I will say that I, I think you'll attract some very highly qualified people and talented people, especially if they made it this far in the pod.

• 54:23Molly O'Shea?

  The, the meals do help though, I will say. Well, so just to close out, I'm really curious on your take. If you had unlimited resources, what would base power look like in five years?

• 54:36Speaker 01

  I'll give you where I think we will be in five years and not because we have unlimited resources, but I think we, look, we have a group of investors behind the company that have a lot of resources and also see the long-term vision and see that this is not a company that, you know, is designed to be around in five years and then get bought and, you know, go do like, we want to build a company that endures. We want to, we want to be part of the S and P 500. We want to be around for 50 years. We want to build critical infrastructure for the country. And what that looks like is being in all 50 states, going up the stack into, into utility infrastructure, going down the stack into the, into the home and building more products and services to lower costs and increase reliability

• 55:20Speaker 01

  for energy consumers, whether that's homeowners or business owners. And you'll see us do all of that over the next couple of years. And, you know, we're, we're honored and proud to partner up with firms like Edition and Adressan and Lightspeed and Valor and Thrive and Altimeter and Trust and folks who see the long-term vision, have the resources to support us as we go from, you know, an 80-person company in one state to, you know, hundreds of, you know, eventually thousands of people in all 50 states and hopefully, you know, touching a, a material percentage of the, the country's power demand.

• 55:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would, I would frame it maybe a little bit differently. It's like, it's less about kind of resources constraining the speed of execution and more the ability to bring on the talent and execute and have that talent execute on the, on the problem rather than a like, you know, put one more dollar in and get, you know, one more incremental sort of second of, of, you know, of, of, of progress. You know, the thing I'd add, I agree with Zach and all that. I think the thing that I would add is basically. Becoming a household name and being an energy brand, I think is a very important and

• 56:35Speaker 02

  sort of next big step for us. You know, we spent a lot of time thinking about how we appear in front of our prospective members and think about reliability and they think about electricity. We want them to think about us as a company. And we want to establish a really solid foundation of a brand. We think that's really important to the to the business. We think that's a bit of a moat to the business, so to speak. And so that'd be the only thing I'd add to what Zach said is in, you know, five or 10 years, we want to be sort of a household name in terms of electricity, not just here in Texas.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we want to answer the question of what if your energy company was a technology company, right? Like, you know, we want to be America's power company. And that's a very ambitious goal, but we think we have the the resources, the capital, the team, the strategy to get there. And it's going to take violent execution. But we're really excited for the path ahead. And, you know, it's going to be a lot of hard work, but a lot of fun. And, you know, extremely meaningful work that we get to do. We're very lucky that our members trust us to to serve them power to deploy these assets onto their home. And we're excited to take our services from Texas all across the country.

• 57:53Molly O'Shea?

  I will say, your branding is beautiful. Your comp team is wonderful. Your website is sick. And to mark or to quote Paki, you're building a generational company. I would caveat that because someone actually commented below that and said, multi-generational.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 58:11Molly O'Shea?

  That's probably the mark.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's the idea.

• 58:16Molly O'Shea?

  Well, Zach and Justin, it was wonderful to have you on. Thank you so much for sharing more about Base.

• 58:24Speaker 01

  Thank you for having us.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  Thank you.