Zach Dell on Base Power, Energy Abundance & Building a Company for Life

22:05It's really that simple. So the asset ownership model is not because we're greedy or we really just want to own things. It's because it's a way to deliver the best product to the customer. That's all that matters. Yeah, in an industry where they don't really give a shit about the customer because they're a monopoly in most cases. Yes, it's complicated. So first of all, there's regulated and deregulated states. We were talking about this before we started recording. This is really interesting. Can you explain this? So there's regulated and deregulated states in the U.S. It's kind of a history lesson here.

22:35But if you look back over 50 years, electricity is one of the few industries in the U.S. that did not get entirely deregulated. Shipping, airlines, telecom, trucking, electricity in the late 90s, early 2000s. Actually, in California, deregulation started there. And basically, Enron manipulated the market and kind of busted the power market in California and deregulation totally stopped. And Rick Perry and George Bush in Texas, like, carried the torch of deregulation. And the Public Utility Commission in Texas pushed this kind of competitive market construct. Now, it's going to get even more complicated.

23:13In Texas, 80 % of the market is deregulated. 20 % of the market is still regulated. So, Austin Energy is a municipal utility. So, we sit here in Austin in our office that is served by Austin Energy. We cannot be the electricity provider to Austin Energy. Same thing in San Antonio. CPS is a municipal utility there. Same thing in Georgetown. Georgetown Electric is a municipal utility there. There's another category of utility called a co-op or a cooperative. This is more in the rural areas, but now there's really big cooperators like CoServe, who's a customer of ours, or Petronalis Electric Co-op.

23:43That's the largest co-op in the country, also in Texas. And these are, think of them as kind of nonprofits that operate for the benefit of the members. All the members, like the cooperative, are owners of the cooperative, and their job is to lower rates. And so in Texas, you have 80 % of the market, Houston, Dallas, North Austin, Encore Centerpoint, ADP territory that is deregulated, competitive. You can sign up to be an energy retailer. You can sell power to anybody. You have the generators who operate the gas plants, the coal plants, and the nuclear plants, and they sell power to a retail provider like us directly to the consumer.

24:16And then you have the municipal utilities in Austin, San Antonio, and Georgetown. You have the co-ops, CoServe, Guadalupe Valley Electric Co-op, Farmers Electric. These are all customers of ours. What do you mean by customers of yours? So we build battery fleets for the utilities that they use in the same way that we do. So for CoServe Electric, for example, we have built them or are in the process of building them 100 megawatt and soon to be expanded fleet of batteries that they use in the same way that we do in the deregulated markets. They charge the batteries and the price of power is low.

24:46They discharge the batteries and the price of power is high. They make money on the spread. They share that spread with their members in the form of lower prices. And they're the ones installing your batteries or you still do the installations? We install the fleet for them. So we build in this fleet. So it's much like them going and saying, I need 100 megawatts of utility-scale battery. Instead of the big shipping container battery, we go put thousands of batteries on their service territory, and we give them a piece of software, basepowercompany.com backslash co-serve. They can go in, they see their whole fleet, they can charge, discharge, they can schedule behavior off the fleet.

25:13And it's a wholesale power asset that they can use to lower prices, and then they get the reliability benefit for their homeowners. Okay. And so that was going to be my next question. You're only installing right now batteries on individual homes, correct? That's right. Are you doing anything else besides that at the moment? Today, we're only focused on residential homes. Yeah. Okay. So back to the market setup, you know, in the early 2000s, you had this deregulation push. Texas really carried the torch. A couple other states in the Midwest, Ohio and Illinois and then Northeast Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, parts of New York, but it's kind of complicated.

25:45All deregulated to an extent. Not all of them, and none of them really as far as Texas. Texas is kind of the most competitive and deregulated. That's why we decided to start here. And relative to the deregulated markets, we compete with the retail energy providers, the GenTaylor's, Distro, Constellation, NRG. And then in the regulated markets, we are a vendor to the utilities and we're a partner to them. And you're totally right. They don't have an incentive to innovate and go build a factory and come up with new kinds of batteries and technology. Because that's not how they're set up to earn.

26:15They're rate regulated. Explain why they don't have the incentive to do so. Yeah. So if you had a utility that had a monopoly ownership over a service territory, for example, let's say PG &E has all of California, which is not exactly true. There's LADWP in Southern California. There's Soca Edison as well. But let's say PG &E, for the illustrative example, has a monopoly over all of California. They can just raise rates indefinitely and just like jack profits. And that would be bad for consumers. And so instead, you have this concept of the rate base, where there's a public utility commission that kind of governs the utility, tells them what they can build and what they can't build.

26:52And then they earn a return that's regulated, and it's typically 9 % unlevered, on the capex they deploy. So they go to the regulator, and they file what's called a rate case, which is like, we need to build all this stuff to meet demand and to upgrade the system. And the regulator says, yes, you can build that. And then they go build it, and they earn a return on it. And so there's no financial incentive for them to come up with new technology. Their only financial incentive is to go increase the size of the rate base and go build more assets. And so we show up and say, we are your technology partner.

27:24We are your outsourced R &D engine. We're going to bring to you better solutions so you can scale your infrastructure without increasing rates for your ratepayers. And that's how we serve the regular utility. So today our business is really one technology stack, which we can talk in depth about.

27:43that is brought to market behind two business models, regulated and deregulated. The deregulated model, we directly sell power to the homeowner. We install a battery on their home. We own and operate it. We bid it into the wholesale power market when the grid's up and running. When the grid is down, the homeowner gets that battery. That would be your preferred, if you could snap your fingers, the entire country would be like that, correct? Would that be better for your business or no? Not necessarily. I mean, we love the utility partnership model too because it has really large reach and there are benefits to, you know, working with one counterparty to address a large service territory.

28:13And there are some synergies. For example, like you wouldn't want, you know, 10 different wires going to a home, right? That would be redundant, right? So it makes sense to have the poles and wires be regulated. And look, I think there's a lot of nuance in energy markets. And so it's hard to say the whole grid should be regulated. The whole grid should be deregulated. It's a very geographically defined problem. But the dereg business is direct-to-consumer retail power and wholesale market participation of our technology. The reg business is we are a vendor to the utilities. We build in these battery fleets, and then we sign 10-year contracts with them, and they pay us for that fleet over time.

28:45It's megawatts as a service. That's what that business is. Megawatts as a service. We build 100 megawatts, 500 megawatts, 1 ,000 megawatts, or a gigawatt, and they pay us for that. They use those megawatts, and we make money on them basically buying those megawatts from us over time. Okay, wait. Say something more about that. You said these are 10-year contracts? Yeah. They're typically long-duration contracts where we build them a fleet of batteries, and they operate them for 10 years. Why is the long duration important? Well, they're highly capital intense. For you or for them? For us, because we're building them.

29:14And so the long duration contract gives us certainty of cash flows, which we can use to finance. I think I have a better understanding of your business now. Definitely for the non-regulated than the regulated. I want to talk about how you think about company building. You've been obsessed with entrepreneurship since you were a kid. You started your first company, you said in eighth grade, seventh grade, something like that? Eighth grade, yeah. Okay. Talk about like - My cousins who were in high school, they had a little more experience than me, but not much. I mean, I've been studying this since, I mean, I was a little kid.

29:41I mean, I had a front row seat to one of the guys, but one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time, still operating as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of all time. And the rate of learning, I mean, I just get to learn from him every day. And we're incredibly close, as you know. And, you know, we compare notes about, and we talk about his business, and we talk about our business. And we provide each other with feedback, and we disagree, and we argue, and it's a ton of fun. And so I've been studying the art of company building for as long as I can remember, both in that context and then also, you know, the investing roles.

30:09I mean, investing is really just trying to predict the future in the context of understanding what makes a great company and which ones are going to win that version of the future. And so it feels like, you know, it felt like to me the perfect training ground to become an entrepreneur. So you said earlier that your dad, Michael Dell, is your hero. He's one of my heroes, too. I actually talked to him yesterday. and the funny thing about that is, I mean, he's got such a friendly UI, but he's so competitive and so determined to win that there's such a, I don't even know how to, just because of position between how friendly he is and just how fiercely competitive he is.

30:44Since you mentioned him, I want to bring up something you told me one time that you called the dad terminal. Can you say what the dad terminal is? Yeah, so you joke that I'm kind of a financially minded person and the Bloomberg Terminal is obviously this incredible technology that people in the finance industry use to ask questions and get information and think and analyze opportunities. And the Dad Terminal is my version of that, where I call up Dad. And we have conversations about business topics and strategic objectives and challenges that I'm facing. And it's the most fun thing ever because, you know, He has more context than anyone but my mom probably on me and what's going on in my brain.

31:28And he's got a lot of context on the business because we talk all the time. And he's scaled a vertically integrated capital-intense hardware company, consumer-facing. There's a lot of similarities between two businesses. And so I use it as an opportunity to learn from him. And I like to think that every once in a while, he gets a new perspective or I ask an interesting question. He learns a thing from me. I was going to ask, when's the last time you presented him a situation that was new to him? I like to think it happens pretty often. You have to ask him. Yeah. But it's fun. We challenge each other and push each other.

31:58And we spend basically no time celebrating and basically all the time trying to solve problems. And you're right. He's totally competitive and incredibly focused. But he does it with a smile. And I try to do the same thing. And I think if you talk to the team here, they would tell you that I'm pretty intense and pretty competitive and quite focused. But I do it with a smile and I try to have fun. And I take the job really seriously, but I don't take myself that seriously. You mentioned vertical integration a couple of times. Why is that so important? It's only important if you're playing a cost-focused game, right?

32:29Like, it's not vertical integration because it's fun or because it's cool. It's because we're trying to compete on cost. And vertical integration is a great strategy to win on cost, right? Electricity is a commodity. The best form of commodity is the cheapest one. And if you're going to deliver that, you got to vertically integrate. So that's why we vertically integrate. When you first started the company, though, like, how do you go from this company doesn't exist to I'm going to create a, like a new essentially power company that's vertically integrated? A lot of reading, writing, thinking, and, you know, deliberation with my co-founder Justin and, you know, Jared, who's our first hire and Dana and Cole and the early people that joined the company.

33:04I think we still do this to this day. Like we, we do a lot of, you know, crawl, walk, run, a lot of iterating, a lot of testing and learning. And look, I think we started Justin and I with a belief that the energy industry was going through a paradigm shift, that battery storage was a really valuable technology in that paradigm shift and that building a battery pack, highly optimized battery pack assembly business in the U.S. was going to be a really strong position to be in. And that's about it. Why on that point? Because batteries had a lot of value and there was a lot of margin being captured by the OEMs, basically.

33:40So why is it important to manufacture it here, though? To control the supply chain. It's less about physically where it is being in this country or another country and the fact that coupling engineering and manufacturing and actually like making the thing where you design the thing and having the engineers that make the thing and the engineers that design the thing. Yeah, well, we talked, you have a lot of like, I did this episode on Elon, how Elon works. I think it's the most downloaded episode of Founders Ever. You have, there's a lot of like SpaceX culture or ideas that I hear from you. Yeah.

34:08And obviously Justin was there. Yeah. Like, yeah, I mean, Justin, Justin was there for kind of the formative years of his career, obviously Andrew as well. Jared, our first hire, was there for the formative years of his career. Same with Cole Jones, who's hire number four. We've got a lot of SpaceX people here. It's a company that I deeply admire. I've gotten to know Brett Johnson, the CFO there. Really admire him and Glenn. And, of course, Elon is the greatest technologist of all time. And I think the culture inside of SpaceX and the operational cadence and the way their kind of ability to focus on the critical path and unblock things in their path to get to their goals that are all oriented around their mission.

34:48It's super inspiring. It's something we've tried to replicate. And they're really hard to compete against Office Space. I think it was here last year or like maybe six months ago. And you're like, yeah, that building over there, we almost had a lease and then Elon came in and swooped it up. They did. Yeah, it was a bummer, but you can only look forward, not backwards. So we found a new spot. It's going to be better, actually. We're going to build a campus with manufacturing, engineering, everything in one place. Is this the one out by the airport? Yeah. So talk more about this. Yeah, so business is growing and we've got to expand our manufacturing footprint and of course the headcount too.

35:20I mean, last time you were here, I think we were just on the first floor. Now we're on all three floors. We'll soon fill up the whole thing. Dude, the growth is crazy. So I was reading through all of your company monthly reports. It's like, okay, we're doing like 1.3 a day or 6 a day and then I skipped, like I went to the end and it's like, and we have tens of thousands of these things everywhere. It's pretty impressive. It's just like you know, maniacal focus, relentless execution, and try to get, you know, a little bit better every day, every week, every month, and you can get a lot done. But yeah, business is growing a ton, and we've got to expand our manufacturing footprint, our headcount's growing, and we feel really strongly about in-person work, having everyone in the same place, you know, one team, one dream, one culture.

35:58It's not like, oh, the factory people and the office people, it's like one company, and we eat lunch together, we spend time together, and so having everyone co-located is really important. Yeah, your desk is right here. Yeah, yeah. Like in just the same as anybody else's. Yeah, of course. There's a lot of, again, like I am fascinated by the way Elon runs his companies and he has what I feel is like very simple ideas, but they all work together. Obviously, he's doing complex shit, but it's not like rocket science. Private offices are lame. Like I want to be in the thick of it. I want to be with everyone.

36:24I want to overhear stuff. I want people to overhear me. I want people to feel like they can come to my desk and ask me questions. And it's just better. It's more fun. I like, I love the team. I like being with them. There's no reason to like hide away in a private office. And also, I don't deserve special treatment. I'm on the team, just like the interns are on the team, just like, you know, the person who started a week ago is on the team, just like the third hire is on the team. And we're all on the same team together. We eat the same food. We have the same desk. We use the same tools. And I just think that's the right way to operate.

36:53And so, yeah, this new facility is going to be amazing. We're going to have everything co-located. And look, I mean, go to Round Rock, and I think you've been, you see the Dell facility. I mean, for a long time, everyone was there. And of course, now the company is at global scale and they've got offices all over the place. But I've seen that work really well for other companies and I think it'll work well for us. Okay, so talk about more of the structure. You don't separate design, engineering, and manufacturing. It's all in one of the locations? Right. Okay. And that's taking place right now across the street?

37:19Yeah, so I mean, you could walk for two minutes that way and you'll hit base factory one and you'll see there's like a little driveway here and you'll see engineers walking back and forth all day long. And most of them have scooters and golf carts and things like that. And that's where the product is made. This is where the product is designed. And so it's a walk or a golf cart or a scoot to get back and forth. And just having the ability to go design a part, walk over to the factory, see how the part is being assembled, figure out the failure mode and fix it and iterate quickly with people that you see every single day.

37:52It's just a massive accelerant and pace of execution. It's funny to me because I've read a ton about the robber barons, the Industrial Revolution. And I feel like there was a good, I don't know, 50, 70-year chunk in American history where we kind of forgot these things. But the way you're describing is exactly what Ford used to do. It's what Carnegie did. It's like what all of industry in the United States before it was moved out used to do. And it's like we kind of lost that knowledge. And now it's coming back. It's like, yeah, guys, it's exactly what they used to do. Why don't we just do it that way too?

38:20Totally. And we have a lot of the Elon companies, Tesla and SpaceX, but also Anderle. We have these companies to thank for training a whole cohort of engineers on how to build hardware products, how to scale manufacturing, how to ramp a supply chain. And we didn't like— I'm glad you brought that up. I was thinking the other day, I was like, could you imagine the deficit that America would have if Elon didn't exist in this domain? Software we'd be crushing, but this, like, there's one guy. It's the most incredible contribution I think anyone has ever made to humanity. is not just the companies that he's built, but the engineers that he's trained that have gone on to build other great companies.

38:59It's, like I said, he's the greatest technologist of all time, in my opinion. It's been a massive advantage being able to hire people that he's trained that have, you know, worked with him, that have learned from him. They bring their best practices here. And then to be fair, we adapt them, right? Like we do things in a very base way. We have all kinds of things like base pace and, you know, the turtles and the dashboards and, you know, our North Stars. Let's go into this. And all these things. Let's go into this. that are core to our culture that just kind of bubbled up out of the way that our team operates and the way that we solve problems.

39:29And many of them are inspired by companies like SpaceX and Tesla, but a lot of them are kind of organic to us. Okay, so explain some of these things today. So, look, I think we, from the earliest days, and you can go back and look at some of the artifacts and writing of this, I've been very focused on a small number of important goals that are very clear and understandable by the whole company. we've been accountable to those goals. Like we write updates every month on like, what do we do? What do we not do? What are we going to do next month? And we do that. You know, I've written one of these monthly updates now for the last, you know, three and a half years, every single month, never missed a month.

40:03Don't plan to. It's a huge, it's cathartic for me to sit down and kind of write the whole thing. And I think it's an asset for the company to have this kind of account of, okay, what happened? What's going to happen next month? They're a great recruiting tool. They're a great fundraising tool. So from the beginning, you know, we started the company with a memo, right? I think you've read it. It's 10 pages. Top to bottom, like, what is base power? Why does it exist? What is the problem that we're solving? How are we going to do it? Where'd you get the idea to write that initial memo? I'm just the kind of person that has to write clearly to think clearly.

40:31I've always been a writer. I loved writing. I love reading, much like you. And I think maybe some of the memo culture stuff comes from finance and investing and getting your ideas out on paper. But I just can't think clearly if I don't write clearly. And so I needed the memo for myself. And so you come in here, you like carry this like little notebook with you too. Yeah, I've always got my notebooks. I have like two notebooks. I have the red notebook, which is like, you know, in the business. And I have my black notebook, which is like on the business. And the red notebook I'm carrying around in the office of meetings.

40:57And the black notebook is, you know, for at home. And I'm trying to strategize and explain the difference in and on. So I think there's a concept of working in the business or working on the business, right? And working in the business is I'm blocking and tackling and solving problems that are blocking us today. And I'm, you know, trying to figure out personnel problems and product problems and, you know, acute issues that are near term. And then working on the business is thinking six months out, 12 months out and kind of strategic wargaming. and chess playing. I would love to read that notebook, by the way.

41:24It might be private if you don't want to. There's some good stuff in there. There's also all kinds of bad stuff in there. I know, that's great. I try to segment out my day with very specific, like, okay, when I'm in the office, I'm largely, almost always, exclusively working in the business. And then I leave the office basically at 9 p.m. every night. If it were up to me, I'd stay longer, but I have a wife who I love and I want to spend time with before she goes to bed. So I'd leave at 9, I go hang out with her until she goes to bed. And then, you know, 10 to 11 or, you know, 9 to 10, I'm with her roughly and she goes to bed.

41:52And then I open up the black notebook and I sit and my phone's in another room, my computer's in another room. And I just focus on strategy and what's most important. And, you know, what are we not thinking about? And, you know, sometimes there's very specific things I need to do, which is like I need to go write, you know, an outline of a memo or of a, you know, a big thing that's happening in an extra couple weeks that I have to figure out, like a big problem. and sometimes I just sit and I have no idea what I'm going to write about and I just stare at a page until something pops into my head.

42:20And that process has yielded some of the best ideas that have come. And I think by like deliberately allocating time in the day towards working on the business versus in the business, it helps you and like actually physically having a different notebook that's like a different color. And I open the black notebook and I'm like, it's time to get creative. Like that, and I'm not in the office. I'm like at home, it's after hours. And that just has really, really helped me, that segmentation of, you know, when to work in the business and when to work on the business. Do you think there's something special about it being analog that you're actually writing with pen to paper?

42:51For sure. I've tried to move to computer and all the good ideas go away. I mean, not entirely, right? And, like, what happens is I wake up pretty early in the mornings and, you know, 6 to 8 a.m. is kind of my most productive time. But that, I'm in the morning. I'm kind of, like, doing the work that I assigned myself the night before. So I'm like, okay, I've got to solve this, I solve that. And then I open the computer and that's all on the computer. and then I'm like actually executing. But there's like this special, you know, 30 to 60 minutes in the evening with a pen and a paper and no distractions.

43:19I can't get a notification. I can't get a call. Like I'm just focused. And I really enjoy that. And I'm sure some people have the capacity to focus, you know, using digital tools. But like the analog is really clarifying and focusing for me. Deal is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players which is why top companies like ramp Shopify, Eleven Labs, Uber and DoorDash all use Deal.

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44:24With Deal enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories, and ideas to every corner of the world. Deal is trusted by over 40 ,000 businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deal.com forward slash Senra. That is deal.com forward slash Senra. Okay, so go back to this idea of North Star. This is a handful of simple ideas that you're getting the entire company to focus on. How do you describe this? It's three things that we must accomplish this year to stay on path towards our mission. So it's become the largest distributed battery fleet in the world.

45:08The fastest growing battery fleet in the world. Land the batteries at the lowest landed cost because it costs everything in a commodity business. What does land mean? Gets the batteries on the grid on a per kilowatt hour basis cheaper than anyone. And how do you affect the price of that? How do you actually do that? The bill of materials of the hardware, the installation cost, the customer acquisition cost, all the overhead and the operations to get the battery there. Okay. So it's fastest growing battery fleet, lowest cost megawatts, basically, and then financial sustainability, which is basically profitability of unit economics, right?

45:42Those are the three things. And those are the three North Stars. And if you walk in the office, in the middle of the office by the stairs, there's a poster, beautiful. It's well-designed by our design team on purpose, but it only has the three North Stars. And that same poster is in the middle of the factory. And everyone walks by every single day. And at the beginning of the year, I stand on email with the team, And I said, look, these are our three North Stars. If we get these three things done, these three things done this year, we're going to be on track towards our mission. And so people know, okay, if we want to achieve this mission, these are the three things we have to get done.

46:11And then there are goals that come downstream of the North Stars that are kind of specific things that we have to accomplish to hit the North Star. And so everything we're doing internally is focused on those North Stars. So we have these very specific North Stars. We have these monthly updates to organize the team. And then we're just maniacally focused on unblocking whatever is on critical path towards achieving those North Stars, which keep us in track for that mission. So I mentioned the turtle. So the turtle is this device that we use. And there's devices, right? There's like tools. Turtle is a tool.

46:39The metrics and dashboards are a tool. We'll talk about both of them. And the updates are a tool. The writing and the kind of organizing of thoughts. So the turtle is a literal physical turtle. Now there's actually a couple of them that goes on the desk of the person that is on critical path. that turtle can only be moved when critical path is resolved. So with turtle comes a thing called a hot potato. And a hot potato is like a squad, basically, that spins up around a problem. So we have a problem in the business. There's a part of the supply chain that, you know, there's a part that we can't get at volume.

47:11And so there's a turtle on the desk of the head of the supply chain. And there's a team of people that are all working on solving that problem. And there's a meeting every single day. And there's an email that goes out every week to the entire company, to updates at basepowercompany.com. There's a hot potato update. And it's like, hey, this is the constraint in the business right now. This is what we're doing to resolve the constraint. These are the next steps to get the thing resolved. And then when the hot potato is resolved, there's an email that goes out and says, hot potato resolved. It's done.

47:33And then those people go back to their normal course of business. And it's not like they're in a meeting every single day forever. They're in a meeting until the job gets done, right? And the turtle physically, and it's like a funny, silly thing. It's like we have, now there's like a plush turtle. There's a ceramic turtle. There's like all kinds of turtles around the office. and there's like a little version of this where we like need to unblock and it's this concept of like take your work really seriously but don't get yourself that seriously. We have freaking turtle stuffed animals all over the place and you know little inside jokes like this but they're really motivating for people and people take pride in having the turtle because it's like it's my job now to unblock the business and to move the business forward.

48:04So we'll talk about you know that's a tool right. You know every company uses metrics and dashboards but I think we do it in a really thoughtful way. So if you walk around the office which you have it looks like a Best Buy. There's TVs popping out everywhere and every TV has metrics that matter to the company on those TVs, good ones in green, bad ones in red. And we joke that every team at the company, as you noted, we all sit in kind of bullpen seating, open floor plan. Every team of the company has TVs that literally hang over their head with the metrics that matter to that team. Good ones in green, bad ones in red.

48:36And so you show up every day and you know things are good or things are bad, right? Because the TVs are telling you so, right? And those metrics are really focused and specific. And if they're not high signal, the leaders of the company, their job, and everyone at the company, their job is to point that out and say, hey, that's a bad dashboard. Like, that dashboard isn't telling us something useful. That's guiding us towards the wrong thing. Right? So if you measure something that's not useful, you're going to end up going off in directions that are not actually moving you forward. And so the metrics have to be super specific.

49:04They have to be oriented towards the North Stars. And they have to be very visible and readable. and that's been a powerful tool to get everyone focused on the right things and then onboard it quickly because if you just join the company and you don't know about the North Stars and you're just learning about them for the first time and you're like still kind of wrapping your head around our mission, vision, and strategy, these metrics that point you to very specific things for your team really help you get focused quickly and then over your time at the company, you get steeped in our mission, our vision, our strategy and I've told you about, there's a presentation I give every quarter called Engine of Success, which I'm actually giving tomorrow I'm really excited for it, which explains our formula for winning, right?

49:41It's like, how do we win? It's our super top secret, you know, like this is our formula for success. This is how we beat the competition. And it's a lecture effectively that I give to the whole company. And it's really designed for the new cohort of people that joined in that quarter. Because I want everyone from the interns to the most senior people to understand like, how are we going to do this thing? What's the plan, right? I think a lot of companies, when you join them at our scale, 500 people and growing really fast. They're like, hey, here's your desk. Here's your computer. You're working on this very small part of the thing.

50:09Like, good luck and do a good job. I really care, Justin and I really care that the leadership team here, we all really care about everyone understanding why we're here, what we're after, and how we're going to do it. Because we want people to come up with all kinds of good ideas on things that are not necessarily directly in their scope because we want to hear them. Good ideas can come from everywhere. And so, and then you have more context on the specific thing that you're working on and how it impacts the broader business. And so we teach these things. And it's Really, my job, and I'm kind of like a coach and a teacher to the company, in a lot of ways, is a big part of my job.

50:40It's like writing these monthly updates, giving these quarterly presentations, really clearly explaining these North Stars, making them the right North Stars, putting them on a poster, making sure all the metrics are right, guiding us in the right direction. That working on the business so that people working in the business, which I also work in the business every day, and I love doing that, can make sure they're working on the right things. Yeah, I've heard you describe your role, you view your role as like a player coach. Can you say more about that? Yeah. So I think the coach side is the working on the business.

51:06And, you know, also there's a personal element to running a company, which is, man, we are grinding. Like, it is hard. Like, this group hustles. I think you've seen that working with the team and meeting the team. And, I mean, it is busy here at 9 p.m. It is busy here on Saturdays. And it's stressful. And so there's a lot of, you know, helping the team and the people, the humans, do the best work of their career. And that's a lot of the coach side and working with them and trying to, you know, I studied psychology in college, which definitely doesn't make me an expert, but like, you know, I've read all kinds of behavioral psychology books and it's a topic that I really enjoy learning about.

51:40And I love helping people become the best version of themselves. And then, of course, guiding the company towards the right North Stars, the right metrics, the right quarterly goals, focusing on the right things. That's really the coach side. And the player side is I also want to be a world-class IC. and there are things that I can do day to day in the business to unblock the company, to help go put points on the board, you know, to use a sports analogy, I'm a big basketball player. Like when the game's on the line and the team needs a bucket, they can give me the ball and I can go score, right?

52:13And I can also guard the best player on the opposing team. And I also know if I'm double teamed, who to pass it to, right? And it's like, you gotta be able to draw up the play and help, you know, motivate your teammate when he misses a big shot. And also, if your team needs a bucket, like, you got to go get a bucket. I interrupted you earlier. You were saying some insights you drew about entrepreneurship from starting out investing. What were you going to say about that? I mean, I think investing, and maybe this was just my perspective of it, is the art of studying good businesses. What makes a good business and what makes a bad business?

52:45And how do you predict which ones are going to be good and which ones are going to be bad? I'm quite competitive and quantitative, and I'm interested in things like accounting and capital allocation and capital markets. You'd be shocked at how many of the robber barons like started out accounting, you know, like Rockefeller. I mean, it's the language of business, right? You have to be steeped in it to understand what makes a business tick and what makes a healthy business and an unhealthy business. And so, and there's a lot of also the study of people too, back to the psychology point. And, you know, I think this is one of the things that makes Josh, our mutual friend and who I used to work for at Thrive, world-class at his job is he's just an incredible identifier of talent and he's really good at understanding like who's going to be a good CEO and not, and what's a good leadership team and not.

53:25And so my interest in and passion for investing was largely driven by this is a place where I can pick up a lot of skills to become a great entrepreneur. I can learn accounting. I can learn capital allocation. I can learn what makes great leadership teams. And I still love thinking about businesses and thinking about investing primarily as a means to the end of learning how to be a great entrepreneur. Like, the companies I want to invest in are the ones run by entrepreneurs that I want to emulate and I want to learn from. Tell me some of the entrepreneurs you want to emulate. That's interesting.

53:57I mean, my dad's at the top of the list. But I really admire Patrick Collison and John as well. But the Collison brothers, I think the way that they've run that business is really impressive. The culture that they've built, the pace of execution, and the way that they've continued to kind of evolve the company over time as it's gotten bigger. Obviously, they started serving startups. Now they're serving enterprises. is they're doing a lot of interesting things with kind of emerging technologies like stablecoins. I really admire Eric and Kareem at Ramp, who obviously are close friends of yours as well.

54:24And the way that they have built an incredible talent magnet in a category that on the surface is maybe not all that sexy. And then they've turned that category into something really sexy. And they've built an incredible suite of products and tools for companies that are incredibly useful in an area where you wouldn't have otherwise thought that that was possible, or at least I I wouldn't have. And they're just great operators. They're incredibly customer obsessed. They're really focused on the product. And they want to drive outcomes for their customers, kind of back to the point of, like, you care about affordability, reliability.

54:54They care about saving you time and money. That's all they care about, right? And, you know, that's why they're able to differentiate in that space. And so those are two different companies. You wouldn't think that a company like Ramp could build a great brand in, you know, what many people consider, like, an unsexy category. I feel you, base is actually, it's the only brand, in power that I can even think of. We talk about building the first beloved brand in energy all the time. And you think about just consumer products, I think there's another thing, like studying businesses, being an investor, and the value of that, and the path to being an entrepreneur.

55:29I think that brands are one of the most underrated moats in business, right? Coca-Cola, Nike. These brands are so, it's hard to put a dollar amount on how valuable they are. You've read Zero to One, I assume. Of course. I think I just read it for the fourth time. I just did another episode of Founders on it. And, you know, he was talking about all the ways to build a creative monopoly. And in that book, it's a funny thing. He's like, well, brands won. He goes, I just don't understand it. To your point. It's so valuable. And there really aren't any beloved brands in energy, which makes the opportunity even bigger because it's counter positioned.

56:01It's unique. Right. And so if you're able to do a thing that no one has ever done in your space, you stand out. Right. And so being able to build a beloved brand in this category has become a huge advantage for us. Are there any other entrepreneurs that you like emulate or you study? I mean, obviously you mentioned Elon a few times. Yeah, I mean, Elon is obviously one of the greatest of all time. And I think I've more so learned from the people that I've worked with that have come from his companies and the way that they operate than Elon himself. What have you learned from the people that worked for him?

56:29Mostly this maniacal focus on critical path and resolving constraints. And I've also learned a lot of this from Antonio Grazias, who's on my board and has worked very closely with Elon for decades. It's the first year or two of working with Antonio, basically every conversation I had with him, and still to this day, this is the main focus of all of our conversations. Every conversation was the same. Hey, Antonio, how's it going? Good, how are you? What's up? You know, Zach, what's your constraint? Like, what's the constraint of the business? And I would just answer the question and that's all we would talk about.

56:59That's it. What's the constraint? What's the constraint? What's the constraint? Like, if we agree on the mission, the vision, and the strategy, okay, we're good there. What's constraining us? to get to that. Let's just focus all of our time and energy on that. And that kind of flows into all of the little things in process and kind of how people operate that show up kind of in the day-to-day with the metrics and the dashboards and the hot potatoes and the turtles. Like all that is, is just trying to get to what is constraining our business and how do we resolve those constraints that are on the critical path on the way towards our mission.

57:31There's a weird idea here. I've said it a few times on the other podcast, but I'll just say it here. It's like, I'm obsessed with things that last for a very long time. And so I looked, I was like, okay, what human-made things last longest? It's just like, well, countries last longer than companies. Like companies can last a long time, but countries last longer than countries. What lasts longer than countries? And it's just like, well, is there anything human-made that lasts longer than religions? And I actually think there's like a lot companies can learn by studying religion. And just a few of these ideas, which is like, well, first you mentioned earlier, like whether it's an intern or the CEO, I want everybody to have a shared base of knowledge.

58:03Religions do this excellent. Usually it's a book. We all agree on it. We all own it. We don't like, we read one week and we meet together next week. It's like, oh, no, we're done with that book. No, we go back to that book over and over and over again. We have the same conversation over and over again. We find places to gather with like-minded people, just people that believe the same things we do in regular intervals. Even if they believe different things, religious have these parallels or these similarities that I think companies should use. So I love this idea that this is what pops in my mind when you're talking about, hey, I'm on the phone with this guy all the time over two years and it's just the same conversation over and over again.

58:39Explain why that's valuable though. Because it's focusing and it just forces you. It's kind of the uncomfortable thing. It's like, we don't want to talk about like all these fun strategic things and all these bets we can. It's like, what is constraining us towards our mission? Let's just focus on that. It's incredibly clarifying and it's uncomfortable at first, but over time it becomes very comfortable. Wait, why would it be uncomfortable at first? Because the natural tendency is to talk about all the different things that are going on and all the different opportunities available to you. And the hard thing is to focus and just focus on the most important thing that is the constraint in between you and your goal.

59:16It's kind of like a cope, if you will, to talk about the other stuff. Cause it's like, oh, yes, there's this constraint, but like there's all this other stuff going on. It's like, no, no, no, focus on the constraint. I think my co-founder, Justin, is very, very good at this. Like Justin and I, every Sunday, you know, our one-on-ones are on Sundays and we have these kind of strategy conversations on Sundays and we don't ever talk about what's going well. Like, you know, we got a lot of work to do, but I think could largely say the last three years have gone like reasonably well. You would never know it by tuning into the conversations that Justin and I have on Sundays because there's no benefit to that.

59:52Like that's in the past. We're only looking forward. What problems can we solve? What things are we worried about? What constraints can we relieve? That is really the only thing that matters. And all the other stuff is kind of just noise. Yeah, Munger and Buffett have a great line on this. They're like, tell me the bad news because the good news takes care of itself. Exactly. Is there anything else that you think is beneficial to these conversations? Like how many times, whether you're talking to a board member, your co-founder, how many times are you, is it just helpful to organize your thoughts with somebody else?

1:00:22Like, do you know, Charlie Munger has this thing called the orangutan theory. Have you ever heard of this? No. Okay. So he says that an intelligent person could sit down and they can have a one-sided conversation with a orangutan for, you know, 30 minutes, whatever the case is, right? Get up, leave. The orangutan obviously says nothing. And the person that had that one-sided conversation actually benefits. Just being able to organize your thoughts out loud. This is the notebook, right? Okay. This is the notebook, right? This is the monthly updates. This is like write clearly to think clearly. It's like, and my team, you know, when I have a good idea, like I write it down first and I put it in front of them.

1:00:52I'm like, hey, I wrote this thing. What do you think? And it's like, oh, I disagree with this. I disagree with that. And we debate the writing. Right. It's like, that's why every night I sit down with this notebook and I, I, I stared it and I kind of forced myself to write stuff. Uh, cause it just allows you to gather your thoughts. And then, you know, I, I, I chewed things over with Justin. I chewed things over with Jared, with Dana, with Cole, with Dino, with Zena, with my dad, with my, with Lee, with Antonio, with, you know, other friends that, you know, like Zach and, you know, other people who are, you know, around the business have a lot of context, have a little bit of context.

1:01:28have expertise on the topic and I think writing I mean how many times have you gotten just like a document from me? What do you think about this? That's just my way of communicating ideas and that is how I get my thoughts out of my head is to write. I came across this other thing the other day it's called like rubber duck programming where a programmer would sit there they'd have like kind of like your turtle thing it's like the rubber duck is sitting here and I'm explaining the code I wrote and why I did it this way to the rubber duck and just hearing me put, it's like saying it out loud. It's like very helpful for clarifying thoughts.

1:02:01I do this all the time because obviously my other podcast is a solo podcast. And I'll sit down to record and I'll be thinking, oh, I understand why this guy did this or what happened here. And then I hear myself talking like, I don't actually understand this. I have to fucking sit with it for a little bit longer. Like it's fascinating how helpful just having like even a soundboard that doesn't speak back is for your thoughts. And we were talking about the cap table and our investors and you know most of, if not all of my major investors. and this is, I mean, I'm constantly sending them things that I write and calling them in early hours in the morning and, you know, late hours of the evening.

1:02:33I'm just trying to brainstorm and just kind of chew on things with them. And it's incredibly - Who do you think's been the most helpful out of any of your investors? I mean, honestly, our mutual friend, Zach - We can't say his last name. We can't say his last name. Who is not even one of our major investors, but it's just like a, you know, very close personal friend and is a base investor, is one of the best business strategists I've ever met. I think probably the best investor of our generation, one of the best company builders of our generation. But he doesn't consider himself an investor. I'm seeing him later on today, but I've got to tell you a story about this.

1:03:05Yeah, go ahead. A friend of mine was having an issue. He's got two companies. He couldn't figure out, should I sell one? Should I focus on another? And I had my own opinions on this, obviously, if I could focus on one thing. And I just arranged for them to sit down. Very predictable. Yeah, exactly. And I arranged for them to sit down 10 minutes later. It took all of 10 minutes of our mutual friend identifying exactly what's wrong. And then the guy I connected with texted me. He's like, he got to the heart of his shoe right away. I was like, yeah, that's why he's so fucking good. He just is a brilliant business strategist and operator and has seen a lot.

1:03:39And he listens really well. I think he's very patient and thoughtful. And he's been incredibly helpful. My dad is near the top of the list. Well, we talked about this when we were on the phone yesterday because I was supposed to see him last night. And I was like, dude, I got to get some sleep. None of the conversations with him is going to be five minutes. if you're his friend. It's going to be like three hours. And it's going to be incredible and you're not going to be able to sleep. I was like, I got to get up at five the next day. I'll see you tomorrow. Totally. Yeah. And so I'm very lucky to have a lot of people, you know, like Josh, who I worked with for a couple of years and is obviously a major base investor.

1:04:08Brad Gerstner is a great thought partner and is someone I call all the time with crazy ideas. Lee Fixel is, you know, his firm addition is our largest investor. Antonio and his partner, John Shulkin, are super helpful in this regard. But if you had to only pick one? I mean, it's my dad. It's the truth. There you go. Yeah. Okay. Well. He knows me better than anyone. He's known me longer than anyone, except my twin sister, technically. I was talking to him yesterday, and one thing that we said, it was just like, one thing I respect about you is like, you're just, you're effusive praise and admiration for him.

1:04:41You know, it was really cool. But I was like, listen, Zach thinks that he loves you. I go, Zach doesn't know what love is until he holds his first child in his hands. And your dad laughed. He's like, he's absolutely right. Like the way you feel about him, I promise you, it's a thing. Love flows down the generations of humanity. Like he feels that way a thousand times more about you. And you'll understand, you'll fucking appreciate him even more. Hopefully, maybe later on tonight, you start working on the baby. But whenever that happens, like nine months and one day from now, you're like, fuck, David was right about this.

1:05:11And then you're going to appreciate your dad even more, which is going to blow your mind. I'm looking forward to that for you. I'm so excited to have kids. I'm one of four and I have an incredibly close relationship with both of my parents. And my mom, I mean, if you think my dad is competitive, my mom is on a whole other level. I mean, she is a— I saw the picture in your dad's office. Your mom's a beast, like an athlete. She's an incredible athlete. She's a world-class endurance athlete. She's done the Ironman World Championships. Didn't she do some crazy shit for your birthdays, where it's like every birthday, she's like, I'm going to ride like 100 miles plus your age or something?

1:05:40She, every year, would ride 100 miles plus our age for all four kids. Not because we asked her to, but because she wanted a challenge. And she wanted to kind of commemorate the birth giving, if you will. And she's just an intense person with an unbelievable amount of love and affection and care. An amazing mom, an amazing wife to him. And I think, you know, he constantly talks about how, you know, she's the secret weapon. And it's really true. And she's the, she is the engine of the family and the kind of cornerstone. We're definitely a matriarchal family that kind of revolves around her in the best way.

1:06:16I'm just so lucky to call her my mom and to get to learn from her. and I continue to be inspired by her every day. I mean, she's a force of nature. I'm going to switch gears real fast because I saw a factory tour of yours. What is this cube? Can you explain, like, the evolution? I went through all your company updates and I saw the evolution of what you guys were installing, how you were making batteries, the lessons that you were learning. And now this is kind of like the next generation, your latest product. Can you explain, like, all the learnings I went into and why it looks the way it does?

1:06:46Yeah, the core. So it's called the base core. I'm sorry, the core. It's called the base core. Did you call it the Cube? It's okay. It looks like Cube. All right. My bad. It looks like Cube. It's called the Base Core, and it is our custom-built battery. And it is the output of the last three years of learning how to install, operate, and manage tens of thousands of distributed home batteries. It's completely designed by us from the ground up. It's manufactured over there across the street, a supply chain that we entirely control and manage. And it's purpose-built for the use case. It's lower landed cost bill of materials.

1:07:20It installs much faster. It switches over much cleaner. It has more power output, more energy duration, and it's really designed to be a grid resource. And it is the kind of embodiment of our strategy. We talked about mission, vision, strategy. Strategy of compounding cost advantage through vertical integration and technology. This is the vertical integration and technology coming to life. And so now our business goes from, you know, good economics installing off-the-shelf hardware to incredible economics with this vertically integrated cost structure and a product that we can scale at an order of magnitude greater than the previous product because we were tapping out our existing supplier.

1:07:55Like, we were buying all their stuff, and they couldn't make batteries. I mean, we're sold out through November, and it's August, right? So we cannot meet the demand with the supply chain that exists today. We have to do it ourselves, right? And so we're building factory one. We're building factory two. We're bringing on modular lines and inverter lines as fast as we can to meet the demand. And the only way to do that is with vertical integration. And the base core is the embodiment of that strategy. Explain why, though. Because when you rely on suppliers, you're kind of at the whim of their execution.

1:08:25And when you do it yourself, you control it. You control your own execution. And you can kind of rise to the occasion to meet the demand. And you can invest the capex to, you know, you have the conviction. If I go to the supplier and I say, we're going to be the fastest growing energy company of all time. Three years ago, if I said, we're going to be the fastest growing energy company of all time. We're going to install tens of thousands of batteries in the next three years, and then hundreds of thousands of batteries in the next five years. And we need you to go invest hundreds of millions of CapEx to build a manufacturing capacity to meet our demand.

1:08:51They're not going to do it. They're going to be like, get out of here, kid. Like, what are you talking about? Like, send me the PO, and then we'll talk. And so we got to do it ourselves. We have to put up the CapEx. We have to build the execution capabilities and expertise to actually go do that stuff. And then when you do it, you have a better cost structure because that OEM that you were buying from no longer collects a margin. That's your margin to keep. and you have more control over the scalability and you can go make those kinds of forward investments to bet on future growth. How deep can you take this vertical integration?

1:09:21Like when you were just speaking, again, I had this like, you know this through our conversations, like I'm not really thinking about Zach and base. I'm thinking about like, oh, this reminds me of, Henry Ford took vertical integration way further than you could even think that somebody's manufacturing cars. To the point, he bought his own railroad because he was annoyed at, he couldn't get his raw materials like fast enough. So it's like, I can actually run a railroad better than you guys, and I will prove it. And you wind up running it, optimizing it, and I think you sold it for like a$30 million profit, too.

1:09:47So how far can you take this? So there's a lot to say here. I mean, we could take it. We could go buy a lithium mine and start refining lithium and make our own cells. All the way down to mining? Sure, you could, right? Call Travis. Call Travis. We could do that, but I think it's how far do we want to take it and win, right? And over time, you know, there's kind of like diminishing, but not to zero, maybe plateauing or asymptoting returns to a certain level of vertical integration. And then once you reach a certain scale, it makes sense to vertically integrate further and then further and then further.

1:10:16And based on our current scale, we like the position of final assembly, test and pack. We design everything. The fabrication is largely done by third parties, our suppliers. We get all the parts, we stick everything together, and we test it, we pack it, and then we go install it, own it, and operate it. Over time, we could reach a scale where you get economies of scale and you get benefits, basically, that outweigh the cost of making the cell, refining lithium, mining lithium. That has to excite you, though. I was going to say, the way you are. Of course, but this is a multi-decade, 50-year journey that we're on.

1:10:51And in year three, it doesn't make sense for me to spend any of my energy and brainpower thinking about making cells. Correct. In year 30, it almost certainly will. Okay, do you think you're going to get to year 30? And I don't mean that the company's not going to be successful. I love your fucking competitive nature. Of course. No, what I mean about this, like, there's something, there's no other word that I have for this. It's just fucking perverted in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. I hate that there's even an entrepreneurship, like, industrial complex. It's like, that's run largely by investors, which I fucking can't stand, which is start, scale, sell.

1:11:28And I'm like, no. Like, then what are you going to do? Like, your exercise should be death. So I've had two founders on recently where we talked about this. Like, you know Scott Wu. Yeah. Like, they're throwing billions at this kid. Billions. And he's saying no so far. And I hope he holds on. But his whole thing, and I think he will because he's already rich. And I believe, and he's super, super competitive. And then I just had Torsen Real, who's the founder of Helsing, who it's not out yet. But he's just like, he's, I think, started the conversation because his whole thing is like, Europe needs its own way to defend itself.

1:11:57this is not a fucking business. This is a mission. He goes, we're not selling this for any amount of money. What's your opinion on this? Look, you said it. It's, what are you solving for? Are you solving for the mission? Are you solving for a paycheck? I think you could probably guess based on where I come from that I'm not solving for a paycheck, right? And the way I talk about the business and the way we act and the way the business is run, we're here to achieve a mission. That mission is kind of never ending, right? Human prosperity, energy abundance, affordable, reliable power. Whenever like, well, we did it.

1:12:25Like we did the affordable, reliable power thing. Like what's, what's next, right? Like that will, that is a mission that will live on forever. Probably I'll outlive the company, outlive me. Hopefully the company outlives me. And then, and then the mission will go on forever. And eventually, you know, either, either, you know, the, um, something will take out the earth that will kill the company. Right. This company is going to last to the end of the universe. That's the plan. Right. And like, um, and so your dad has a great line about this when he was fighting Carl Icon and like, why don't you just start another company?

1:12:55He's like, I'll care about this company after I'm dead. Well, you asked me, like, what would it require for your dad to stop working on Dell? And I told you that you'd have to kill him. Yeah. Right. And so it's about the mission. It's about, like, I get to, it's the honor of a lifetime, of a fucking lifetime, blessing of a lifetime to get to come wake up every day and get to work on this mission with this group of people and come into this building. And, you know, when I'm not here, I'm, like, wanting to be here. Right. And I'm wanting to think about it. And like, I'm, you know, I'm constantly obsessing over moving this mission forward.

1:13:26And that'll never change. And your point on vertical integration, like, you're three, you're 30, you're 50. Like, the problems ahead of us or the opportunities that we can go after that will move us closer to that mission will change, right? They'll look more capital intense. They'll look like, you know, vertical integration or, you know, going deep, going wide. Like, that'll all change, but it's all about the mission and always will be. And the reason why, you know, we're focused on other things right now other than making cells and refining lithium and mining lithium is because there's a bunch of other opportunities across the stack that we want to go chase that are all aligned with the mission.

1:14:05At a very high level, energy is four things. Make, move, store, and sell, right? You have to make it, generation. You have to move it, transmission, distribution. So, you have to generate electricity. You have to move it to where it's made. Store, battery storage. You have to store it because it's not always used when it's made, right? You have to move it because it's not used where it's made. You have to store it because it's not used when it's made. And then you have to sell it. Make, move, store, and sell. Generation, transmission, distribution, storage, and retail energy. And all the things around the software and all the things around selling energy.

1:14:33We started with store and sell because we thought that was the best place in terms of scale and return on capital to enter the market. But we have ambitions across make, move, store, and sell. because if we are oriented around the mission, which is affordable and reliable electricity, and electricity is four things, if you want to have the biggest impact on the mission, you got to do all four things, right? So rather than deeply vertically integrate in year three on store, I'd rather go build great solutions to drive down costs and drive up reliability in the industry in make, move, and sell. And then over time, as opportunities present themselves to get better at make, move, store, and sell, we'll do that.

1:15:12whether that means refining and mining lithium or not. And then there's this new kind of interesting angle where we take that stack that we've developed and make, move, store, and sell stack, and we point it at the largest and fastest growing energy consumer in the world, which is AI, which we talked about at the beginning of the conversation. Okay, so this is your last company. Absolutely. Okay, since you're going to be doing this for the rest of your life, I'm going to be doing what I'm doing for the rest of my life. I'd love if you come on every like six months, whenever you want. We'll have more conversations, and then over time, over the next few decades, we'll have like an ongoing live history of base.

1:15:42I love that. I mean, I love every conversation with you. You always push me to think bigger, push harder, really analyze why I'm doing things, draw comparisons to other entrepreneurs throughout history. And I always learn something in our conversation. So I'd love that. Thanks for making the time, man. Appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review and make sure you listen to my other podcast founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work.

1:16:11Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.