Transcript

Rapid Response: Charging toward a clean energy future, w/EVgo's Cathy Zoi

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The impacts of climate change are s being so palpably felt, it behooves all of us to figure out how we can do clean energy. And do it economically. When I was at the Department of Energy Goodness gracious. Batteries were 10x what they cost today. Solar was 10x what it cost today. With more use, more learning.

All of those costs come down. We must accelerate our use of non-carbon emitting sources as soon as possible. During the pandemic, EV go doubled in size, and we went truly national. Every new person I get to meet, I ask every single one. How are we so lucky to be able to get you to come to EV Go?

And Ninety five out of a hundred have said because I want to work someplace that has a mission that matters. It's hustle, it's fast, it's technology, it's innovation. We're helping to solve one of the world's biggest problems. And we're punching much above our weight class on how we're doing that. That's Kathy Zoy, CEO of EV Go, the fastest growing US player in electric vehicle charging stations. With the federal government passing huge new funding to address climate change, EV charging is poised to be a growing part of American society.

I'm Bob Safian. Former editor of Fast Company, founder of the Flux Group, and host of Masters of Scale Rapid Response. I wanted to talk to Kathy because while the transition to electric cars has gotten a lot of attention, an EV future also requires remaking how we fuel those vehicles, with longstanding gas stations giving way to a new formula. Kathy is at the center of this transformation, working closely with retailers, utilities, ride sharing firms like Uber, and car manufacturers. One of the pioneers of the EPA's Energy Star program for appliances, Kathy has a deep understanding of how government and business can work together to address climate issues.

She's launched several energy startups, was founding CEO of Al Gore's climate organization, and oversaw a thirty billion dollar energy investment program for the Obama White House. Kathy took the helm at EV Go in twenty seventeen and led the company to a successful IPO last year. Now all she has to do is convince Americans that filling up the car via plug versus pump Із бетерчі. And then the process accelerate an EV revolution.

F I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Kathy Zoy, the CEO of Electric Charging Network EV Go. Kathy, thanks for joining us. It is my pleasure. The US government this year has passed Two large measures that impact

Renewable energy the bipartisan infrastructure law, the new inflation reduction act, the federal government Adressing climate change This investment gets a lot of people excited. Get some people angry.

When these measures were passed, how did you react? I've been working on climate change solutions for thirty years. So this is super, super exciting to me. I mean the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions now in the United States is from the transportation sector. These particular pieces of legislation will accelerate the transition of the transportation sector to being one that doesn't emit carbon. And so that's really exciting. For the whole transportation sector, it's exciting for the US economy, and of course it's exciting for EV Go because as an infrastructure provider, we're a key ingredient to having that transition happen well. EV Go has now

Eight hundred and fifty or so Charging stations naturally. It's the largest fast charging network in the US. But eight hundred and fifty. It's still kinda small. I mean there

Hundred and fifty thousand or more, right. gas stations in the US. How should we expect the pace of EV Charging expansion to go. And what about this legislation might Adjust what that trajectory looked like.

Yeah, so we're in the early innings of this transformation. Right now we're in single digit in terms of penetration of EVs on American roads, but that's gonna accelerate. What we do at EV Go is we like to build just ahead of demand. We actually get a return on our investment because the EV drivers are using our infrastructure. So if we build too early, then we have idle infrastructure. If we don't build soon enough, then we have frustrated drivers. So what we're doing is we're matching that. What the new pieces of legislation do is they bring all of that forward. They accelerate the pace at which Companies like EV Go can deploy our infrastructure and actually get a return on our investment to cover our costs so that we can actually build more. I mean, by the time we have all cars.

as E Vs, you know, maybe that's twenty thirty five, twenty forty, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of fast charging stations and millions of level two charge ports all across the country. So again Early innings. eight hundred fifty locations, about two thousand charging stalls is what we have now, but that's going to quickly ramp up in that proverbial hockey stick way. And that ramp up, like Is it hard? Like does it take a long time to set up

A charging station? It takes us Somewhere between four and eight weeks to actually build a fast charging station. But From idea

to when that station gets energized. Right now it takes somewhere between twelve and eighteen months to think, well, why is that? Well, because we're building on other people's parking lots. The site host that has the parking lot has to be like, Okay, yeah, you can build your stations here. The utility has to provide the electric power to those charging stations. And now what we're doing is we're building ultra fast three hundred fifty kilowatt to get geeky for a second, charging stations. Those almost always require the utility to come along and provide a what's called a service upgrade. Again, that takes some time. We do the construction process, and then before we can allow drivers to come and charge on those stations, the utility has to do a final inspection. When the flywheel is well and truly spinning, these should take maybe six months. But everybody's just getting their sea legs on how to do this fast.

I guess the rules in each place are probably a little different too, regulatory wise. The local government authorities, the same people that approve when you're gonna do a home renovation, are the folks that say, Yeah, you can build a charging station in this grocery store parking lot. Some of them have a lot of experience and you can do it all electronically. Others, they go to several different local government council meetings over a period of months to say yes to it. Again, it varies by jurisdiction. Traditional gas stations. differentiate on price or maybe on their convenience stores. When you look at like what will differentiate EV charging stations from each other? Or is the goal to make them all like commodities? Like it's so easy to have it out there.

No, EVGO doesn't believe that charging needs to be a separate destination. If you're in a metropolitan area, you should be able to plug in and charge and go do something else that you want to do. So this is why we love building our stations in grocery store parking lots, at shopping centers so that you can go get a manicure while you charge, get a coffee with a friend next to a park. What we do is we match the power to the typical dwell time. You know, you're gonna go in and shop at a grocery store for twenty or thirty minutes. The configuration of those charging stations will match that. So you can get a good amount of electrons into your car while you go do the shop. So that's one way to differentiate is sort of just be where people wanna be anyway. Another thing that we do is we add extra stuff on top. So you can make a reservation when you go to an EVGo charging station. If you know that you're going to go shopping at a particular time or your daughter has piano lessons, you can actually reserve that charger and know it's gonna be there when you get there. At some locations you can plug in and you're gonna get a really nifty coupon. From the store where that charging station is located. Амі, we piloted this.

With a grocery store chain in Northern California, which said, Hi, welcome to Lucky Save Mart. When you plug in here, come into the store, and you get ten dollars off your shopping cart. And people love that. We get forty percent click through rates with offers like that. For us, that's how we like to differentiate what we're doing. Yeah, I I I know that all your EV go stations often have names too. Some named after Star Trek characters, after Biden's dogs. Like what's the thinking behind naming the stations? I joined EVGo in twenty seventeen. I had only been with the company for a couple weeks. We went to this one charging station that we were having a little bit of difficulty with, so we called the call center, and the call center said, What charger are you where are you? And it was this long dewy decimal length code with letters and numbers that was gonna get trans I was like, This is silly. Why don't we just name our charters? Why don't we give them names that are recognizable? Because it actually makes it more fun.

And it actually helps with the user experience. So now if somebody has an issue with one of our chargers, they can say, I'm a charger Bob. It's gotten more and more fun over time. You mentioned our Star Trek chargers in Long Beach, we've named one of our stations after some of the hometown heroes, Billy Jean King, Snoop Dogg. In Union Station in Washington, DC, they are all named after first dogs. Part of the business model for EV Go Is a membership, right? And I was trying to figure out what the right way to understand this was'cause it's it's not exactly a Netflix model because you

pay for using it. So it's not like my membership at Netflix. It's not exactly like Starbucks. Although there are rewards to it. Is there a parallel that exists that you're emulating for what your experience with your charger is? To things that I might be used to. We do have a pay as you go program. You don't need to be a member. You can just drive up and charge with a credit card, with an RFID card, with our app.

If you are a more frequent user and you wanna be a subscriber, you can get a better price if you become a member and we have various different membership levels. The highest membership levels, you get free reservations on our network. maybe it's sort of like some of the airline offerings where you know frequent flyers get a few more benefits. And they may get better access to the lounge in the airport, those sorts of things. So if you're a member, every time you charge at EV Go, you get reward points. And then you get to redeem those reward points for extra charging sessions. You get reward points on your birthday, things like that. A lot of Americans can charge from their homes.

About a third of them can't Those could be two different distinctive markets. Do you have a sense yet about what the different customer groups look like, or is all that In evolution. I like to say we're moving toward a market size of one. We wanna be able to give you, Bob, exactly what you want based on your driving behavior. So we collect a lot of information about

driving patterns. I mean, in the earliest days when I got to Evigo a long time ago, we had one national price Meanwhile, we had different costs everywhere for every single driver at any time of day. Well, we now know that there are some drivers like our ride share drivers that are driving EVs. They actually are very, very price sensitive. We've introduced time of use pricing in many places so that they can get the benefit of early bird pricing that's a little bit less expensive. We did that in collaboration in California with the utilities that say we love charging, we love EVs, but we'd love to encourage your use of your network. At non-peak times. So we worked with them and we introduced pricing that would entice some of those drivers who are more price sensitive to charge at off-peak times.

Equally we know some of our other drivers who Are not price sensitive at all. It's all about is there a charging station that is right near where I want to be? And the variable pricing Based on time of day, it's sort of a reflection of the way the marketplace for electricity works in that location based on what demand is at those times. That's right. That's right.

EBGO purchases electricity from our local utilities. And those utilities have Cheaper rates at off-peak hours and more expensive rates typically at the peak hours to try to illicit. Some sort of response from their consumers. We're a consumer, and we then pass those price signals on to our drivers because again, it all benefits the integrity of the grid. Is there a point where

If you are E V go and you're buying your energy in bulk. in a certain way from those utilities that it might be. cheaper for me to go to EV Go than to plug in at my home. Well, that would be unlikely just because of the cost of our equipment. That would be like will it ever be cheaper for you to

go to Starbucks than to brew your coffee at home. Right. So I'll let me just tell you again, um quite frankly, what the costs are. So if you plug in at home into a wall, it might take you, you know, just a regular PowerPoint. It'll take you thirty six hours to charge your car from zero up to the full battery, maybe, but you'll be paying whatever your residential rate is when that electricity's getting absorbed, right? But there's no extra capital equipment. If you install a higher power charger at home, we call level two. That'll cost you somewhere between a thousand and five thousand dollars.

Right? And you'll be able to with charge overnight. Right. But you will have spent a thousand to five thousand dollars. Well, one of EVGo's charging stalls that's very ultra high power, where you'll get a charge in fifteen to twenty minutes.

That costs about a hundred and thirty thousand dollars. So that's an expensive piece of equipment. It's got two thousand components. It needs to be safe because there's a lot of power going through it. But what we need to do in that in providing that convenient service that you can charge away from home very quickly, we need to actually get The money back that we're investing in that capital equipment and in servicing that equipment. So we do need to charge you, the driver, more to be able to get our money back that we've invested in providing that convenient, reliable service. Just like when you get a latte at Starbucks. It's not simply the cost of the grounds, it's the cost of the location, the cost of the baristas.

And the lovely experience. Yeah, and and I'm not gonna pay a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to install my own charger or I I just don't have those resources right now. When you're at home. You don't need to charge in fifteen minutes, so why would you bother, right? So you mentioned your long history with climate change. You've worked in government in the energy department during the Obama administration.

In the White House under Bill Clinton, you pioneered the Energy Star program back in the day. What's the role of Government versus business in addressing climate change. And how's that balance shifted in the time you've been working on these issues? I think that the government has a role to intervene where the market is not working perfectly and again there are externalities.

We've got Carbon pollution that's wrecking the climate. There's no cost on that at this point. So the government needs to intervene to make sure that the right signals are there for Businesses. To not emit carbon.

So that could be done with a carbon tax that turns out to be politically not viable in America for whatever set of reasons. But they can also put carrots in place, so tax incentives to do things to Engage in business behaviors that don't emit carbon. Or tax incentives to buy an electric vehicle. rather than to buy one that causes pollution by burning fossil fuel.

Since we've organized ourselves in civil society, government has tried to affect human behavior to get to good public outcomes. And again, the environmental arena and climate change is just one of those. How has it changed over time? Appliance efficiency standards where we got rid of the biggest energy hogs have been around for decades. And those continue to be effective.

grant programs that actually support businesses to invest in earlier stage technologies That are carbon friendly, those have been around for decades and continue to be very, very important. The new infrastructure bill is gonna provide a whole bunch of resource that creates a safe haven for capital. The investors might have looked at fossil fuel investments and now they're saying Wow, actually?

I might be able to get a decent risk adjusted return by investing in solar or wind or efficiency or E V. There's lots of tools at our disposal to accelerate the economy toward one that is not only environmentally friendly, but is thriving economically You worked in government, you worked on Al Gor's

Alliance for Climate Protection, which I think is now called Climate Reality Project. It's in nonprofit world. You decided to go into the business world. Right. Why did you make that shift? Why did you think that was the right place? I've had this charmed career where I've always been able to apply my energy to meaningful outcomes and meaningful work. And I sort of fancy myself as a business person mindset with a public sector heart.

And so by working on climate change solutions, I can actually the engineer in me, the multitasker in me, the move fast and take a chance In me. Can contribute in a way, but always with an eye toward what is the public policy objective. And it's interesting, you know, Bob during the pandemic, EV Go doubled in size, and we went truly national. It's a superpower to be able to hire the best talent anywhere they live. But one of the things that we do is every new person I get to meet

I ask every single one, how are we so lucky to be able to get you to come to Evi Go? And ninety five out of a hundred have said Because I wanna work someplace that has a mission that matters. And I think that that increasingly is important to people and evigo, like you know, it's hustle, it's fast, it's technology, it's innovation, but we're also helping to solve one of the world's biggest problems. And we're punching much above our weight class on how we're doing that. A lot of people go into government because they wanna have a big impact and they feel like the scale there can have impact, but

It doesn't have the reputation of being someplace that moves particularly fast. But but but but but the I think you can have a huge impact in government I taught for at Stanford for a number of years and I would always ask my classes on the first day of what are you gonna do when you're finished? Okay, who's gonna go into business? And again, everybody wanted to be the like the next sort of Mark Zuckerberg type Lotta hands went up.

Almost no hands went up. And I said, Well, look, one of my jobs during this course is to help change your mind. Because even if you go into government service for just a few years. It is so fulfilling. It's so meaningful. It's different. There's gonna be different breaks on your maybe the pace at which with you can deploy things. But the rewards when you make a policy change that cuts across an economy. Wow.

Wow. You worked alongside President Biden in the Obama White House. What's it like now when you Go back to the White House when you interact with government as a CEO. I think because I've been in their shoes and I understand the opportunities and the challenges of being in government, like we can just have a really good conversation about

policy design or the political challenges of getting support for something new. Look, I just love it. We take very seriously here at EV Go to try to be a thought leader to help public policy officials. We initiated a program last or two years ago now called Connect the Watts, which is brings together all of the players in the charging ecosystem, auto manufacturers. state governments, local governments, federal government, vendors, and charging companies to try to outline what's best practice А мітинс в електріфікацію систем.

And how can we all learn from each other? And so we really, really think it's important to be collaborative. And I think, look, I think it's working, I think we're making progress. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity. When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years building.

Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative plating dot com slash masters of scale. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford's CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode.

I hope to see you there. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. There's gonna be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi.

And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Before the break, we heard EV Go CEO Kathy Zoy talk about the massive changes underway in remaking transportation for an EV future.

Now she talks about what people most misunderstand about EV charging and how taking her company public changed her job as CEO. She also sharons about the importance of partnerships in scaling a new technology and why competing against Tesla and Elon Musk isn't as fraught as it might seem. Among the other big players in EV charging stations is Tesla. And a lot of people are curious, what's it like to compete? With Elon Musk.

Well, we don't actually compete with Elon. I mean, we're the only charging company that Tesla allowed to put native Tesla connectors onto our charging stations, and that's because Tesla didn't have enough charging infrastructure. To service its network because they were so successful at selling EVs. So Tesla's got a closed network at this point, only charges Tesla's. We charge everybody. And we need more charging infrastructure writ large. So frankly, we like having more players in the market. We have again, I think about fifteen percent of our traffic in Phoenix, for example, is Tesla drivers. So we're happy to be helpful there and happy to obviously earn the money that comes from Tesla drivers charging on EV Go.

What do people most misunderstand about the transition? to to E V charging. What are the things that you feel like people miss? I think that there's so much education that needs to happen. Each individual EV has almost like a fingerprint a thumb print that's unique to its model type

That is the maximum power with which that car can charge. And What's the rate at which it charges over the charging session? So that's called the charge curve. Now The typical

Old EV like the old bolts. The maximum power that it could take a charge was about fifty kilowatts. And it could only take fifty kilowatts for a few minutes but So even if that bolt would drive up to one of our ultra fast three hundred fifty kilowatt chargers, it could still only take fifty kilowatts. So sometimes we would get the driver saying, Your charger's not working because my bolt's only getting fifty kilowatts. Like that's about the car, not about the charger. What I would like to do is develop

Basically a really simple tool that says We know that Bob that you drive a particular kind of car that has this charge curve And you say to us Hey Kathy, hey Evie Go. I've got fifteen minutes and here's where I am and we say

Go here. And you're gonna get eighty miles. over that time period. You don't need to know what your charge rate is or what the power of the charger is or anything. You just know that like, okay, if I show up here, it's gonna be available for me. I'm gonna get a hundred fifty miles in twenty minutes.

That's the world that we're moving toward. We're not there yet. And the idea that at some point all of the vehicles will be standardized. In some way. Maybe, but it it's not likely.

Well, s no, I don't think so, because again, look, a big heavy car is gonna have room for a bigger battery, but it's also gonna need more battery capacity to move that heaviness. A mile. So right now the average like little car, little EV can go four miles on a kilowatt hour, but the bigger SUVs that are coming out are closer to like three. The Porsche Tay Cam, which is a very fancy, you know, big engine. Under three, somewhere between two and three kilowatt hours per mile. So it depends. That's not gonna get standardized because The cards all gonna be unique.

What will become standard though, I think, is Is the plug. the shape of that PowerPoint. So right now there are three different standards that exist in the market, right? There's the CCS, which the GM and the German cars have, there's the Chathamot, which the old Japanese cars have, but even Nissan is moving to the CCS. And then there's the Tesla, which has a different plug shape. Those are likely going to converge onto the uh C C S standard over the next few years.

That'll happen on its own. Which w I guess will simplify things for the chargers and for you guys in building your stations. They can be more simple as well. But one other plea we have to the automakers, Bob, is could they put the port in the same place on the vehicles? Some of them are in the back and the middle, some of them are in the back left side, some of them in the front. So what that means is our cable lengths And the configuration of the s parking spaces.

Oh my goodness, it has to accommodate all this. And then you now have the entry of like the big pickup trucks that are charging. And you need really long cables. When you match really long cables with really high power, the really high power requires liquid cooling. Those cables get heavy. So again, over time, we're probably gonna have to have

Overhead charging using gravity where the cables come down. Look, it's really fun. It's these are fun engineering issues. But w what we always have in mind, all of us in the sector What's gonna make it easy for drivers? And that's what we need to keep up with.

So You became CEO in twenty seventeen. EVGO went public in early 2021. What changed about Being CEO of a public company.

Wow. That was a lot of change. That was a change that I didn't fulciate until I started becoming a CEO of the company. I spend a lot of time talking to Wall Street analysts and investors now. And I enjoy that. And I really enjoy it. I love

though the stage of the sector right now. There's no playbook for what EVGo is doing. So I love the invention of the businesses and the business models and the emerging technologies. And quite frankly, being CEO of a public company, I have a little less time at my discretion that I can spend on those sorts of things. Good news is we have a great executive leadership team and we have a great staff of employees that are all doing that. It's just that for my own self satisfaction, I miss it a little bit. Are there

different pressures that you feel as a woman CEO. And do women leaders face different hurdles in government versus your experience in business? Sadly, I think it's harder being a woman in business. Like I I never f was conscious during my time at public service of being a female leader. Just really wasn't conscious of it. I became more conscious of it when I moved out, left the Obama administration and came back to Silicon Valley, which was even in the clean tech space, was extremely email dominant and very boisey, if you will.

It doesn't phase me. I mean we just have to keep going. There's lots of good work to be done, but I would note that of the hundreds and hundreds of Calls that I've done with Wall Street analysts since we became a public company. Probably Ten to fifteen of those hundreds have been women Wall Street analysts on the sell side or the buy side. It is still a very, very male dominated kind of sector. Why does that matter? Like I just think more perspectives.

Eve Go has a big diversity, equity, and inclusion program. And we are actively always seeking to Diversify our employee base across verticals, across functions, because we feel like our outcomes and our outputs and our progress is going to be that much better. Because again, we're delivering Electric for All. Амі абсолютно и візерфан.

And how can we possibly deliver on that mission if we don't have the perspectives of the entire population in our ranks? The investor landscape that you're dealing with doesn't seem to have that same priority or at least you're not Interacting with it that way. I haven't seen it as much, and particularly on the analyst side.

I think on the investment banking side, probably more so, but on the analyst side, no. On on you know, it's still It's I mean look, lots of enthusiastic fellas. The energy that I get from an Eevee Go Is From utilities, not all utilities are sourcing all of their energy from renewable sources. Sometimes they're coal based and other

How do you Manage that and Is there any relationship that you have with the utilities to Encourage them to move faster in that direction. Yes, so there is a well established market for renewable energy certificates, and I pioneered one of these programs when I was living in Australia many, many years ago. What we do for every kilowatt hour we consume.

We purchase a renewable energy certificate, which ensures that renewable electrons went into the grid to match our demand. And those renewable energy certificates can only be purchased once. So there's no double counting. So electrons, once they're in the grid, you can't differentiate from whence it came. So what we do is we provide that incentive To have renewable energy enter the grid by buying those what are called rec. So that's how we handle that. Over time, as you point out, more and more utilities are going to be going one hundred percent renewable energy, and that's great, but we're not that patient. We wanna make sure that we're jump starting the market by financially providing an incentive for more renewables to enter the grid as soon as possible. Yeah, it's been a tricky time lately because as energy prices have

Shut up suddenly. sources that maybe were less Palatable. People are saying, Oh, well, maybe in the near term, you know, we need to continue to rely on some of those sources. You're grimacing a little bit. Like That's a bad idea.

I just think that The impacts of climate change are s being so palpably felt. It behooves all of us to figure out how we can do clean energy. And do it economically. When I was at the Department of Energy

Goodness gracious, batteries were 10x what they cost today. Solar was 10x what it cost today. With more use. More learning. All of those costs come down. So I think that we have to take it as a given. We must. accelerate our use of of non carbon emitting sources

As soon as possible. So that's why I was grimacing. So what's at stake for EV Go right now? We have to build as fast as we can. We need to get all of the players in the EV ecosystem.

from eighteen months down to six months because we have so many E Vs coming to market. I mean the next twenty four months it's like another hundred or so EV models. Used to be that Tesla was completely dominant. Great vehicles. That market share is going down, not because Tesla sales are going down, but because there's so many other choices. So we need to build as quickly as possible, and we need to do it across the country. Are there lessons Going through this transition

that you have learned that might be useful for our listeners and other businesses that are Dealing with their own kinds of transformation? One of my theses when I came to EVGo, like I didn't found the company, like the company was in existence. our team was going to site host one by one and getting individual contracts. I said, Oh, if we're gonna scale, what we need to do is sign agreements with big companies because it's gonna be much faster. The big grocery store change like Kroger and Albertson's and Whole Foods.

It's gonna be faster. Guess what? It's not. Because those big companies have bureaucracies. I mean they're not government, but they're companies that have bureaucracies and the decision making is is a bit fraught. So What our site developers find is that sometimes

The one off grocery store mom by a mom and pop is faster. than the big companies. Now That doesn't mean we're don't want to keep working with the big companies. It just was not intuitive to me. That the bigger companies might move more slowly. So that's just sort of a lesson that we're taking on board as we think about scaling. There's a zillion different lessons.

Being a good player in the ecosystem has been really, really important for us. We partner, we partner with car companies, we partner with governments. We partner with site hosts. If there's an issue or a problem, we say We don't know the answer to it. Let's figure it out together. I would advise my colleagues that are trying to scale.

T put the bravado off to the side. And just say, look, let's roll up our sleeves and get this done together because it's too important. So Philosophically that's something that we bring. to the party, I think. Oh it's it's fascinating that sort of that the smaller players sometimes

Are easier to work with than you can work with more of them more quickly than the big ones. I guess you have to find Partners who have the same mindset as you do About the urgency of the situation you're in. If you're a student of organizational behavior and institutions

The middle managers have to be empower to say Yep, let's go. And that's a really unusual large organization that truly has that empowerment. Right. And again, I'm talking about the new tech companies too. They are no different from the old guard.

Like once a company becomes big, it's like ooh ooh. How much autonomy do I have in saying yes to something? All of the business books I've read over my whole career it's sort of like there are companies They hold up companies that allow that autonomy, but it's very, very difficult in practice to maintain the financial discipline and the rigor. And allow total autonomy.

In the early years when we were inventing when I was inventing Energy Star, like and that started with personal computers. That's the first And we were working really closely with Intel, and Intel was inventing a super energy efficient chip. You know, and they were really excited about it. In fact, in these early days, they etched an energy star logo onto that little tiny chip.

And they were so much fun to work with. And they were already a pretty successful company. This is probably the late eighties. And I said, Wow, you know, what is your guys' organizational structure? It's like, Oh, we change it so frequently we never even write it down. And I remember that being so like, wow, I'm gonna aspire to do that to run a company that way. Well, now that I'm running a company and we're only three hundred people, there's no way we could function if we didn't have an organizational structure of some sort. So it's just the practical reality of decision making is, you know, we want it to be faster, but we also want it to be disciplined. And I think some of these large companies that are Their core business is not even charging, their core business is providing groceries. It's not necessarily the person with the power base that can say, Yeah, let's go build charging station.

Hm and as you think about How do you help Maintain that Flexibility, the idea that

the structure doesn't get in the way as you grow. Of being able to move fast. The innovations that we've tried to do is come up with standard templates so that every time we go back to one of our grocery store partners It's not a brand new thing. It's like this is just like we did here, here, here, and here. So getting to Yes Easier, we make it as easy for them as possible. The utilities are are the long pole in the tent right now in terms of timing for getting a station live.

We often provide the engineering design off of our nickel and say, look. This is consistent with what you wanted, but here we go. We Come to them with our build plans eighteen to twenty four months out and say, We've looked at your grid. And so here's where we'd like to build, does this work for you? So what we try to do is help them help us. And that's proving to be quite effective.

Well, Kathy, this has been great. And I wanna thank you for Sharing and taking the time to be with us. Well, thank you for the opportunity, Bob. It's a great show. I love it. Masters of Scale Rapid Response is a Wait What original. It's hosted by me, Bob Safian, Masters of Scales editor at large.

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