The transcription of the video is below. 

Introduction to Gareth Evans and His Mission.

Nico: Hey, Solar Warriors, welcome back to another episode of Suncast. If you’re new here, I just want to thank you so much for lending me your ears. And the only non renewable resource you’ve got that, of course, is your time. I promise it is time well invested. If you have been following the solar industry as I have for the past 17 years, you’re kind of two segments that really stand out as growth markets, residential and utility scale.

But there’s this middle market that represents hundreds of millions of square foot of rooftops and available parking space and corporate balance sheets and tax equity that is yet untapped. It’s the commercial, industrial or distributed generation market. And dozens of entrepreneurs, probably hundreds of trying to figure out how to attack that market over the years, but it always comes back to access to the customer, the business owner or the building owner and access to capital that cares about that middle market.

Cause it’s hard to scale the way that residential is and the way that utility so easily is, um, same paperwork, but your headache today’s guest and entrepreneur is committed to a mission of trying to figure out how to unlock. The business and community opportunity that this mid markets and the commercial industrial sector represents, Gareth Evans has been a leader in the energy sector and frankly, a leader in his, in, in his communities, his entire life.

From working in charity and community organizations to military operations, he has parlayed that experience into building teams for some of the planet’s greatest challenges at companies like Worley Parsons and has taken it now a step further to then just addressing problems at a large consulting firm to solving problems with the solutions they began to identify and work on for years.

I think that today’s episode is going to be a wonderful journey, especially for those of you. Who are intensely curious about the entrepreneurial process, especially if you’ve had any corporate or intrapreneurial experience. Gareth has a wealth of evidence and information to share that it’s possible for him and it’s possible for you.

I hope that if you like these kinds of conversations, and this is your first time here, that you would click that subscribe button in whatever podcast player you’re listening to and come back for more. We publish twice a week, executive profiles, just like this one with Gareth, clean energy founder stories and startup advice and tactical Tuesdays where we deep dive with subject matter experts to help you.

Further your own career or business. All of that can be found and more at my suncast. com for now, let’s get ready to tune up your skills, solar warrior, as we tune into another powerful conversation here on Sunday,

well, out of the gate, I want to give a hat tip to a mutual friend and someone who, without him, I would not be having this conversation with Gareth today, uh, Mr. Bill Nussy of engaged VC. He posted on LinkedIn about an entrepreneur that I know from a previous dinner I’ve had with him, is someone he would have included, verbatim, this is his words, I would have included this person in my book, Freeing Energy, if I’d known them at the time I was writing it.

Well, that was enough to pique my interest and I reached out to Bill and he introduced me to Mr. Gareth Evans, who we now have the privilege to listen through his conversation and journey today on Suncast. Gareth, welcome to the show. Thank

Gareth: you. It’s awesome. Glad to be here.

Nico: It is an honor. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you through the conversations that I’ve had with Bill and then.

Thankfully, his introduction to you has given me a glimpse into, uh, someone that I agree with him is, um, is working on a hard problem with a palpable solution and there’s, and it’s no doubt kind of what we’re going to impact today, why Bill believes in your business and has backed you financially. Um, I want to start out though with a quote I often like to.

Introduce and share quotes. I’m a quote hoarder of sorts. Um, and the one that I have actually printed on my computer keyboard, I did one of these, like, you know, you get the, the vinyl that goes on the back of the computer, as you can see, uh, I have, well, most of anybody who’s seen my computer says Suncastle on the back.

Well, I actually covered the keyboard with, with these inspirational quotes. And the one that stands out to me the most. Um, is wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it. So that’s David Starr Jordan. And what it means beyond what is, what is obvious to me is that there are a lot of folks in the world, in the corporate environment in particular, who get stuck in knowing what to do, but being afraid to do it.

Today we’re going to unpack how you had the courage to step out and follow your dreams. Is there a quote that you would like to share with our audience before we get started?

Gareth: Yeah, my favorite quote is, um, if you don’t live in life on the edge, you’re taking up too much space. That’s awesome. Jim Witt, Witt, Witt Kick, Tigger, uh, first guy to climb Everest.

Nico: That’s amazing. Yeah, well, as folks can see, uh, the, you like to live life on the edge. Uh, we, uh, on the cover art for this episode, we’re using a picture of you bombing down a mountain on a mountain bike. And I think it’s a bit of, it’s uh, It is the epitome of kind of who you are shortly after we met when I introduced you to some other friends.

You showed up with, uh, with a cast on your arm, um, always out looking for adventure. Um, and you, and you found it in spades, I would say, trying to start a startup in the energy. We’re going to get to the who, what, how, when, and why that came about, but I’d like to just take a look at the 30, 000 foot level for a minute at kind of what I enunciated in the intro.

That is the problem when you are hanging out with folks that just have generally no idea what you do. How do you enunciate the problem that you’ve created Vector to

Gareth: solve? Yeah, I think, um, this is the biggest opportunity in the market today is actually educating people as to the challenges, the opportunities.

I think the problem that we are addressing is the fact that for businesses and communities around the world, um, energy costs are skyrocketing. You know, we’re working with customers who have seen 40 percent increases in the last two years, how do you plan a business around those kinds of operational cost escalations?

Resilience is down. So outage rates, uh, outage rates are increasing. So 150 billion of lost productivity for businesses last year as a result of power outages and emissions are now, um, front and center of a lot of conversations at board levels, all the way down through capital markets, stakeholders, employees.

And so businesses have these three. Uh, challenges that they’re trying to juggle. And today they feel like they’re reliant on the utility to provide their energy. Energy is the lifeblood of our businesses, but there are other options. And onsite energy distributed energy is a huge financial, um, environmental and, um, sustainable opportunity for businesses and it’s, how do they get access to that?

And the biggest challenge in the market today is, Jay, you alluded to this in the intro. The soft costs associated with developing these solutions are huge over like up to 50 percent of project costs today are these soft costs, consulting, engineering, sales, marketing, procurement, contracts, negotiation. So how do we compress all that out of the system, make it really simple, understandable, give business leaders the information data intelligence they need to make really informed decisions and not feel.

overwhelmed by the fact that, um, they don’t know what to do. So it just leads to that inaction that you just described, you know, that desire into opportunity.

Nico: I love the way you described that. And I’ll, I want folks who are regular listeners to do what I like to do, which is make connections between what we’ve heard before and what we’re hearing now.

Right? So Dan Leary, who recently came on, I mentioned him to you. I really would recommend that you listen because he and you have a similar storyline. He with Dina Watts is creating a business process solution, right? He’s creating a data business that informs how businesses in particular asset owners, right?

 Introducing VECKTA and its role in simplifying decision-making for infrastructure asset owners in the energy industry.

So we’re talking about infrastructure asset owners, which is a whole other category of stakeholders, how they make decisions around not only the assets they currently own, but the ones they acquire and whether they, whether and how they operate them and repower them. It’s a, there’s a, there’s an, as this industry matures, there’s a segment required.

That makes sense of the data. I will hearken to, I’ll, I’ll liken it to, uh, we’re in a, we’re in a moment in energy that tech was in at a time when like Tableau came around, right? It’s what do we do with all this data and how can a business owner who’s, uh, day to day is involved in. Trying to come up with solutions that solve cashflow problems.

Um, trying to make sure they have highly productive employees. Trying to make sure they have a place to place all to put their goods and services. Um, they want to make sure the building is comfortable and, and improves productivity for their employees. The, the least, the last thing they have time for is to go and try to find source, uh, solutions for improving the, what is the, the biggest kind of vampire load on their balance sheet.

Their energy mix. So with all of that in mind, and at the risk of me sounding too much like a fan boy of both the sector and Vecta, would you introduce us to Vecta and why, how you’ve built this business or why what you are building is going to help. Solve this problem that we’ve just enunciated. So

Gareth: vectors, the energy transition platform, um, specializing in onsite energy.

So we support businesses around the world to baseline their situation today. How much energy am I using? Where am I using it? What’s it costing me? What’s my emission profile? What are my objectives? And then what are my options for getting there? There’s four buckets, energy efficiency, onsite energy, virtual power purchase agreements, and RECs.

And so we support them to understand what components of their energy mix can be offset through energy efficiency on site energy in particular. And so we help them prioritize across a portfolio of. Two ten hundred thousands of sites where they get the greatest value for doing this against their objectives.

We then solution agnostically and technically and financially design the optimal solution for them, considering all commercially viable technologies, solar, wind storage, gas, diesel, fuel cells, electric vehicles. And then once they’ve got a spec that they’re really excited about and a business case that makes sense for them, we’ve got a marketplace of thousands of vetted suppliers.

Who we get firm quotes from, so we’ve essentially compressed the whole soft cost of developing, planning, implementing a strategy to, um, offset these business priorities in a really integrated software. Um, and then what we also, you know, the, the future vision is every time a site is deployed, it’s monitored.

And these sites are going to be evolving, you know, they’re there for 20 plus years. And so maybe batteries didn’t pencil today, but maybe two years from now, it does have been out to them proactively. Push those insights to business leaders to say, now’s the time you can achieve these benefits by doing X, Y, or Z.

So just constantly pushing that intelligence to business leaders, such that they can create the most sustainable and profitable business.

Nico: If I’m a business owner, um, you know, whether I’m familiar with, with energy broadly or specifically over the last decade, what solutions really were in place for me to try to solve this. Prior to what you have to offer. Yep.

Gareth: The status quo in the market today is, um, consulting. So that’s the world I came out of charging hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars to come up with an energy strategy, using Excel spreadsheets, uh, given it to the customer six, 12, 18 months later.

And it’s already out of date by the time you give it to them. So that’s kind of the status quo today. We’ve automated that process. And then the other mechanism is suppliers. Selling solutions to buyers. And so something we hear a lot from the market frustrations on both sides of the fences, the energy consumers, the buyers are very frustrated because they’re being sold widgets and services all day long.

They don’t know who to trust. They don’t know who to believe. They don’t even know whether it’s the right solution for them. And on the supply side, they get really frustrated because that trying to originate these projects, but their biggest competitor is not other suppliers. It’s indecision from the customer because the customer doesn’t know whether to trust or believe them.

And so this leads to then this very, uh, constipated market, you know, and, um, it just leads to a lot of inaction and indecision.

Nico: Yeah, I’m going to quote, um, from our mutual friend, Bill. Uh, again, the, the author of freeing energy and also, uh, one of your now board members, um, from the PR, um, the press release when you announced the round, um, just to underscore what you said, the world is an unstoppable transition to clean, lower cost, reliable energy.

While large scale systems like power plants and transmission are an essential component of this transition, those projects can take years, sometimes a decade or longer to get approved, built, and integrated to the grid. Fortunately, FECTA offers a parallel path that is far faster by helping businesses build their own smaller scale on site energy systems like microgrids.

So just to kind of put a pin in what I heard, uh, energy efficiency, on site energy, VPPs, there is a, so there’s a, there’s a buffet of options. And it’s confusing and heretofore the way, um, we’ll call it like really, uh, you know, profitable cashflow positive, uh, growing growth oriented businesses, which would solve this as they bring in.

Consultants that for hundreds of thousands of dollars would provide them with a strategy. Um, and then you have to go out and figure out how to fix that, how to fix that on your own, oftentimes internally or pay, uh, that consultant to go and hire folks for you. And the hardest part of that is onsite energy, as we know, uh, especially for, cause you had to figure out the financing for it.

The recs pretty seamless market. Um, but the hard for the decision maker to know where to go and who to trust. Um, energy efficiency, thanks to, um, the, the Obama era administration, um, sort of financing options is kind of a, uh, crack nut like that one is a lot of solutions out there again. It’s how do I know who can give me the right offer?

Um, so, so here’s a question I have for you before we move on to just talking a bit about. Um, the fundraising that you did recently and some other milestones that you’ve achieved. If you think back, given, um, you’ve been working on this problem for a few years now, um, well, first, how long have you been building what is now Vecta?

And we, I don’t want to get into the details of like. Specifically, a worldly person says yet, but what needed to be true for vector to work because I think timing is everything and I’ve been in this industry for 17 years. And when I met you first, I said, dude, this isn’t a new and novel idea. So how is vector going to succeed where others don’t?

Gareth: Yeah. In terms of timing, even, even when we started was probably early, you know, we, uh, yeah. We incubated the idea of two years within Wall E that you, you alluded to. We launched November, 2019 COVID certainly didn’t help the industry for those next two years, but I’d say the reality is five, 10 years ago, the grid was Grid power was affordable.

It was reliable. No one was talking about sustainability. And so no one gave energy almost a second thought. Yeah. Um, now that’s obviously changed.

Nico: I’ll take that. And, and unlike homeowners, corporates had leverage with the utility, you know, like we’ll just use California as an example. If you’re on an E 19.

Right. You’re paying less than 10 cents a kilowatt hour on average. Yeah, exactly. It’s the demand charges that they were trying to fix then. And that’s why companies like STEM are years ahead of others, right?

Gareth: And I’d say to your point, I think what happened then in parallel to that is the cost of battery and solar came down so significantly that these systems now became really commercially competitive.

And I think the missing link now is the enabling technology, you know, the, the items you’re talking about before. Giving people access to the data, giving people access to the mechanisms to actually execute with confidence. So these were the pieces of the puzzle that kind of had to fit in place. It’s almost like Uber wasn’t possible without the iPhone.

I don’t think on site energy is possible without the vectors of the world, but you needed all these other ingredients to fall in place ahead of time, the pain points and the hardware, the services to actually do it at scale.

The challenges and opportunities in the energy service provider market.

Nico: And what about the service

Gareth: providers, right? I think the capital, the construction, the equipment exists today in the market to make huge, positive, profitable impacts.

So that’s not a problem at all. I think technology is going to continue to get better. It’s going to get, continue to get cheaper. What we need to support the industry to do is do a high volume of projects really efficiently such that it’s profitable for the businesses to actually deploy these systems.

Um, I think that’s where the industry is struggling today is you’ve got the residential side of market that’s figured it out. You’ve got the big utility players that have figured it out, but they don’t know how to convert that specialty capability into high volume, smaller contracts, uh, size projects.

Nico: Okay. So with that in mind, what is it that you sell?

Gareth: Um, so on Vector’s side, we get for the energy consumer, the businesses. We give them access to our platform, which allows them to develop their energy transition strategy as well as configure the solutions as well as use our marketplace to get, um, the right solution.

And it’s kind of incredible.

Nico: I mean, are there templates in the platform? Like when you say you have to use our platform, I’m imagining that because of your consulting days, you’ve. But you’ve made it simpler for them to understand how to sort of create their own strategy without having, uh, a million dollar direct consulting budget.

Gareth: Yeah. One of the, probably the most painful lessons we’ve learned is we launched right as COVID kicked off. So our ability to actually work hand in hand with customers and get real time feedback was tough. Go visit their building. Exactly. And we built our product in a bit of isolation initially. And it was very much heavy requirement for the user to input a lot of data.

And people don’t typically have access to that data or a desire to do so. And so now our platform is set up where if they put in an address and an industry type and an available square footage, then we take care of all the rest. Like we’ve got 5, 800 data points per location, per facility. And then we already run an analysis on.

What would be the net present value of a solution? What are the savings? What are the emissions? So then we can prioritize across their portfolio where they get the greatest bang for buck. We are firm believers in kill bad projects early and often such that the whole industry doesn’t waste time going after them.

Prioritize the really good ones and then spend time collecting some additional data, utility rates, load profiles, that sort of stuff.

Nico: I know this is difficult to do, but do you have an analogy? It’s the X of Y, you know, like I have asked you like. It seems to me like this is pretty similar to how EnergySage approaches residential, but I feel like that’s an overly simplistic way to think about it.

Is there a more apt analogy?

Gareth: Yeah, I think the one that a lot of people would just understand just from a day to day lifestyle perspective is, you know, when we go on holiday these days, we use Expedia and within Expedia, we now get access to flights, hotel, rental car insurance. We get to compare multiple packages that align with.

Some minimal data inputs by us, a location, some preferred dates, number of people, and then the algorithms do the rest and you get to choose the right solution for you versus in the past, we’d have to either do all that research ourselves, call multiple stakeholders, or we go to a travel agent, which would be the equivalent of a consultant and you pay them a bunch of money to go and do it for you.

And it wouldn’t necessarily be the solution that you wanted in the first place. So. Um, and then the supply side, um, synergy would be someone coming to you to sell you a cruise ship holiday, and you actually wanted to go climb Everest, but they’re trying to sell you the solution that they have access to.

So that’s, I’d say that’s probably the cleanest analogy and one that’s probably most understandable.

Nico: That’s very good. I love it. When we get a chance to engage in this concept of idea sex, what from other industries can we borrow? As a business model. And what I heard you say is that we’re in an inflection point in the energy sector where we could learn from the consolidation that happened in the travel sector, trying to help people identify and solve for their affinity for one versus another type of solution, um, categorization, labeling.

Sort of price vectors, um, from, uh, least time to implement to least cost to implement. Yeah. Right. Cause, cause people have different preferences and interests. Okay, cool. We’ll probably get back around to that. I’m pretty sure we will before we dive too deep into the whole technology bit of the product and your background.

I’d love to pique folks interest with some of the accomplishments. Can you give me some. Info to go off of that suggests that, you know, Bill’s not crazy for investing in, in Gareth, uh, and, and Vector.

Gareth: Yeah. From a company perspective, it’s definitely been a wild ride. We kind of came to market about 18 months ago.

We didn’t want to come to market through COVID. No one was buying, no one was talking, but we’ve had a really successful last 18 months and converted some pretty significant names. We work. We have great partnerships with Honeywell, uh, Blue Scopes Steel, Chandon, um, Liberty Utilities, one of the biggest utilities in the world, right through then down to local microbreweries, wineries, food and beverage processing facilities, car manufacturers, um, and we just helped secure a 150 million credit facility for a supplier who deploys, um, Waste heat to energy projects, and we get through our marketplace.

We get a success fee for every time they draw down on that mechanism. So it’s all about unlocking the market and really simplifying it.

Nico: You give me a great example. Uh, and you can use prudence to discuss names, but examples are really good to ground concepts. Yep. Someone on your platform had been working to gain a client.

You know, I’m talking about the client ended up coming to you. And working through Vector to vet how, who would be the best supplier. Can you walk through that example to give folks an idea of how technology has evolved to provide business owners, more, more insight and control over their decision making process.

Gareth: Yep. Yeah. So this is a really great case study. It was actually one of our very first customers, um, a brewery in Northern California suffering half a dozen power outages a year. Um, seeing their energy costs going up and then wanting to be able to market that product as being sustainable. And so

Nico: they were actually does market that product as sustainable exactly for the last 10 plus years.

Yeah. And it’s a value. Many, many of you can intuit who

Gareth: it is exactly. And so, uh, they were approached by one of the leading suppliers in the market and. They were, they agreed to go on the process with them. It took them, um, almost six months to get a solution proposed to them. And then another six months to see contract terms.

And at the end of that process, the terms didn’t align with their interests. They were very unfavorable towards the buyer. It meant that, um, essentially the supplier owned all the assets and to buy out options were minimal. And so then customer and some value was referred to vector and literally within two weeks, we had.

Assessed, designed, configured the site, had the specs in the marketplace. We gave suppliers three weeks to bid. We then had six competitive quotes for them to go through using our technology. You could rate them, rank them, negotiate, and then ultimately award the work. So you’ve got. A year’s worth of lost effort for buyer and supplier compressed into less than three months, um, to have firm bids and a project ready to go.

And so that’s the power of the approach. It puts the buyer in control. It gives them the processes, workflows to ask the right questions of the market in the right language, such that they get Apple to Apple’s bids back, such that they can then compare and move forward with confidence. I love it.

Nico: It’s like a 250 percent acceleration, uh, or time can time compression.

Uh, that is a powerful example.

Gareth: Yeah. And I’d say the biggest challenge is, um, suppliers will say they offer this upfront work for free. And this is what sucks customers in is, you know, we’ll do all this assessment work for you, but you get vendor locked. And also buyers don’t realize that the cost is paid for somewhere down the line and they’re going to pay for it over the next 20 years.

10 x over. And so paying a little bill front to get you kind of insurance premium, make sure you’re in control is kind of the, the beauty of the approach

Nico: if you are in the California market. My guy was, um, anytime from 2005 to 2015, I’m pretty sure Chevron wasn’t the client that lost, uh, the brewery just now.

So, um, you’ll fine saying this like. You competed against Chevron and you watched school district after school district go with Chevron and they got in this vendor lock where, because they were working with this big multinational that had credible solutions. And was operating in, in a sort of a shared savings 

The funding milestones and the journey of raising capital for VECKTA

Model.They didn’t feel the margin creep, right? They didn’t feel that, but ultimately they got locked into contracts that five, six years later were incredibly out of market. Um, and it was because they went for safety over certainty. What about funding milestones? This is, it’s a great example. How did you guys kick this off or keep it going through the pandemic, uh, as entrepreneurs?

Did you. Friends and family around it. Like what, at what point did, did Engage come in? I’d love to hear kind of the, the, the quick and dirty milestones of like how you raised money to get to where you’re at.

Gareth: Quick and dirty is spend two years incubating the idea, entrepreneurial within Worley, realize that you couldn’t build what we wanted to build a solution, agnostic, independent marketplace within a corporation.

Obviously that goes against all, um, independent metrics. So we encourage them to give us some. Initial money to kick off the business. So that was our initial funding. Um, and then we’ve done two venture capital fundraisers since the first was with Vollerworth um, and CoFund. Two amazing funds. Vollerworth is one of the leading climate tech funds in the world, in my opinion.

Uh, with Kareem, Dabur, and Joe Goodman. Incredible individuals, hugely talented. Um, and so that was our first seed round. I must admit that was a massive learning curve for me from a fundraising perspective. I knew nothing about fundraising. I pitched to probably over 120 people over a six month period. It was tough market conditions, new market, selling a marketplace into an industry that never even thought a marketplace would exist.

So it needed me to find the volos of the world who really understood the market dynamics. And then that gave us some good runway. Our plan was to do a Series A back end of this year, start of next. But based on market conditions and… A bit of kind of uncertainty. We wanted to get ahead of that and make sure we’re in control of our own destiny.

And we were introduced to Bill and the TechSquared team, Scott Lupano and crew. And it just seemed like a perfect fit. And so we just closed a fundraiser with them, which is super exciting because of their go to market experience, their engage program, which connects startups with corporates. So it’s such a sweet

Nico: program and it fits in a nice gap in the market.

And obviously

Gareth: Bill is, uh. An expert in this space, so having his, his network, his intelligence, his experience on our side is huge.

Nico: Yeah, he, and he’s also, you know, incredibly insightful having, having the tech experience. If you haven’t listened to the. interviews on Suncast, you’ve missed an opportunity and I would encourage you to go back and listen to the three hour epic that I did with him in December 2021 when he launched freeing energy.

Um, and I’ll leave that there. Thank you, Bill, for all that you’ve contributed to our industry as a, as an outsider coming in. Uh, Gareth, I’d like to take a step back here and just get a better sense of kind of What led you to take on this crazy adventure, uh, if folks are paying attention, you clearly don’t have the same accent that I do.

So let’s start with where are you from?

Gareth: Yep. Grew up on a little peninsula called the Wirral that is nestled between Liverpool and North Wales in England. Great upbringing. It’s a, it’s a very close to Liverpool, which, you know, was European city of culture for several years. Um, it’s famous for its Docklands, the Beatles, it’s soccer teams.

And so they were kind of the things I

Nico: grew up with. Hmm. Amazing. What, uh, what kind of, uh, family background did you grow up in? I’m curious, like, what was the conversation like? Is it a very entrepreneurial family, a close knit, small nuclear family? Tell me about that.

Gareth: Yeah. Family of five. I’ve got a younger brother and sister, um, mom and dad, both were police officers.

So no entrepreneurial background at all. Um, my mom retired when she had me, my dad, you know, worked his whole career, did some amazing things, took us off to, I think his career really gave me the love for travel and experience at the age of nine, he took a job in the Caribbean where we spent two years living there.

He was supporting, uh, in Tortola, and so he was responsible for stopping drugs coming up from South America through the Caribbean chain to the U S and so. I got to experience island life. I got to see someone working under stressful conditions. Um, and so, yeah, as a super close knit family, you know, it was always about experiences rather than materialistic things.

So that kind of, that set me up for going after experiences of adventures, travel. And that’s kind of led my whole life. I could see

Nico: how your dad, uh, as with many of us is an early and personal hero for you, setting in the standard of both worth at work ethic and adventure, um, which clearly is evident in who you are today.

Uh, who else did you look at from early childhood as a personal hero?

Gareth: Yeah. In my childhood, it was, uh, Michael Schumacher, the Formula One driver. He was, uh, he was ruthless when he needed to be, he was a great leader, great team player. And he became, you know, the greatest Formula 1 driver of that era, um, maybe of all time.

And so I just loved how he could go from being this super chilled, easygoing guy to then just being helmet on. It’s go time and I’m going to do whatever it takes to win. And I can, uh, that was amazing to see. I love it.

Nico: A lot of us end up taking kind of twists and turns in our career. We’re going to talk a bit about kind of the road that led you to Vector now, but I’m curious, Is there, as you were sort of coming up as a young man and thinking about the future that you envisioned for yourself, is there ever a career that you thought you were going to sort of be destined for that you ended up not pursuing or not ending?

Ending up

Gareth: there? Yeah, actually full on, I sat in a hurry, jumped jet at the age of four in a air show and I saw I was gonna be a fast jet pilot for, um. For all the way up until I finished university, I spent many years with the air force and the army cadets all through school. So going off and doing camps and drills and learning to shoot and doing section attacks and flying planes.

And then I took a year out between school and university. I wasn’t quite ready to go to university yet. I did some charity work in South America. But then when I went to university, I was sponsored by the air force. So the Royal air force to fly planes at the weekend. So I’d study all week, fly planes at the weekend.

Um, and I thought that was going to lead to me being a fast jet pilot, but for many reasons, uh, both personal for me and for the air force, we decided that that wasn’t the right path. And so, uh, I went traveling again, did some crazy things, training with the Shaolin monks and others. Um, and that I accidentally fell into the industry that I ended up in.

But yeah, fast jet pilot was the dream. I still want to go and do a flight in a fast jet one day, but I’ve flown fully aerobatic military aircraft, single prop, super fun, crazy what they let us do at the age of 19, 20, 21.

Nico: Amazing. Yeah. And at that age, full of piss and vinegar, just not afraid to push the envelope.

Yeah, exactly. Um, well, I believe that, uh, everything we do in our lives serves as a stepping stone or a building block, whether it’s building skill sets or allowing us to develop pattern matching. I’m curious if there are any interesting other detours in your career that you feel like have really informed your career

Gareth: path.

I fell into the environmental arena, you know, that’s why I’d studied through university environmental science, just because I had a passion and love for geography and environmental science. That was almost my backup plan without me realizing it. So I ended up, um, finding myself in Canada after some travel and, um, I became an environmental consultant, cleaning up old oil and gas well sites all through the Rockies.

So I spent most of my life living out remotely in the field with. Um, big construction crews, digging up old well sites and remediating them back to forestry land. So that was super, super rewarding, but I always wanted the next big challenge. And so random gas emissions, I’d be nominated to go and put on big scuba suits and go monitor gas.

I put my hand off when the opportunity came up to go and support the oil and gas industry to move into Iraq after the Gulf war. And that was the real turning point for me where. Here we were unlocking the biggest oil and gas reserves in the world for our Energy thirsty, um, economies. And yet the local team that was supporting me on the ground was surviving on two hours of power a day.

Their infrastructure devastated, 

 Gareth’s journey and the experiences that led him to develop a passion for energy and infrastructure.

um, 120 degree heat during the summer. You can’t do anything without access to energy and especially in those conditions. And so that became at the time a very pivotal moment and I didn’t realize it would lead to me having a very strong passion for vector, but it made me realize that access to.

Energy is necessary for us surviving and thriving community.

Nico: So you’ve actually had, uh, that’s a, that’s a very interesting path to learning about energy. And as I alluded to before, um, lots of folks I’ve talked to in the sector, either through direct military conflict and being a part of our armed forces or as contractors seeing, uh, just sort of the disparity in energy access around the world, come to the realization that.

Our infrastructure is broken and needs fixing and there are, you know, very physical infrastructure solutions and there are, you know, leveraging the digital solutions, the tech solutions like you’re doing, um, you know, we mentioned Worley a bunch. So why don’t we talk a bit about Worley Parsons, but there are probably a fair amount of people that don’t know what it is.

How did you get involved in Worley and why is that, um, uh, you know, how has Worley sort of informed. Your viewpoint of, of the world. I mean, it took you around the world. Yep.

Gareth: Our Wally was incredible. Do you know, I joined this small environmental consulting firm back in 2004 and then two years into my career there, um, Wally acquired us.

Wally is. Today, the largest energy engineering firm in the world, headquartered out of Australia, 50, 000 people around the world. They acquired half of Jacobs a few years ago. And uh, they’re incredible. Every time I wanted a new challenge, I got to do it. So spend many years in Canada, two years in the Middle East.

Then I went off to Perth, Australia, where the LNG and mining community was going gangbusters. So built 150 person consulting business there. And then I had an amazing mentor within the organization that said, you need to get more broader experience. So he got me into strategy roles, commercial pursuits, contracting.

So I got to see the full holistic picture of how these projects are developed. How you win the work, how you execute at scale, how you manage these incredibly large budgets. And then that then brought me back to the US to transition what the skills I’d learned there to North America. Then, uh, an amazing individual called John Rodey, um, who I believe, you know, he works over at Rez.

He, uh, he hired me into a business development role and that’s how I really got into the power industry. I was selling. Uh, power consulting services to utilities and commercial industrial business owners throughout the country. And then the guy who is leading the consulting practice wasn’t performing.

Um, because I was the one who was seeing the industry for what it was, I was asked to step into that role. So my last few years within Worley was leading their global power consulting business for distributed energy and renewables. So that’s where I got real great insights into the industry opportunity.

And I got to meet amazing people that ultimately helped us frame the concept of Vector. And I think coming back to your last comments. The reason why I’m so passionate about distributed energy is because we’ve seen, especially through the likes of COVID and others, the centralized systems that we operate under today are easier to build and operate initially, but there is so many points of single points of failure.

And I think our communities and our businesses around the world have lost faith in the global leadership. And so how do we empower more people to take control of their own destiny versus relying on those top down centralized systems?

Nico: Can you give me a three to five minute version of the entrepreneurial journey at Worley of.

Incubating this idea and how, when you realized I got to spin this out, like that’s a big question for a lot of folks that I, I would argue there’s somebody listening today that they’re doing the same thing inside of a big company and they feel like they’re running up against a wall, but they don’t realize that they have other options.

Kind of paint the picture for them, what it looks like for you for them to find, to find freedom for their project.

Gareth: Yeah, I think there’s a few keys to this. Uh, I’d spent a lot of years at the organization, so I built up a lot of. Corporate credibility and good stakeholder support. And so there’s an amazing individual called Tony French and who came in to run the global new energy business.

He was someone who worked for Dow chemicals and others for many years. And he understood that you couldn’t keep operating on the selling people hours as a business to go and change the market. And so he supported myself and a few other individuals like Owen Quinn and others who. Went off and built their own internal business units to take some risks.

I was lucky enough that within the consulting business, I ran, there was some incredible individuals, one called Tristan Jackson, the other one called Andrea Rutolo, and they were real distributed energy experts. And so the first thing we did is we. Started manually doing this work for customers and we started seeing a repeat theme of there is a need what we are doing is broken and slow and painful spreadsheets.

Don’t cut the complexity of what is needed in the market and to your comment before, even if you give so on this glossy report. They’re still going to go and execute it and they don’t know how. So we’re seeing this repeat theme. So then we applied through the innovation council to get some initial funding.

We won like a 10, 000 award.

Nico: This is an internal

Gareth: council at Worland. Exactly. Yeah. So we won like a 10, 000 award. And instead of using it in the traditional way of going and building a product or vetting it, we actually rented an Airbnb in San Diego and we brought together 10 people from around the world within the business.

Operations, construction, consulting, finance. Um, and we did that also with an optimization specialty team in the, in the industry, Zendi. And so we really tested, could this work? And we built a business plan. We then pitched it to what’s called the CAC, the, I think it’s the commercial committee. And, um, and we said to them.

We believe there’s a huge opportunity here, but it’s not one that can be built within Worley. And we’d like, you know, we strongly believe that we need to spin this out and are you interested? And because of the, the processes we’d gone through, this was a two year period. We had made a commitment, proven it, tested it, got the buy in for it.

And we’d done that half a dozen times over that we had to support them when the big ask came. Um, that we didn’t get a huge amount of pushback and this was a big deal for Wally. They very rarely invest, you know, millions of dollars into concepts that are then spun out. You know, this is quite a unique opportunity.

It actually created some challenges downstream because A lot of people in the venture community don’t like seeing strategics on the cap table. And so I think that’s what made it so hard raising money. The first time is we had a very unconventional cap table for me. It was an amazing way to get my entrepreneurial start with the backing of a big corporation, but then going on the journey of transitioning away from being under that umbrella and being a completely standalone company and having the autonomy to run it as needed versus operating within the bureaucracy and processes that are.

Very hindering to doing innovative work within an organization. I’d say the last thing is, um, I’ve always been anti process. And so even within Worley in the early days, I created a group called the Mavericks. And this was, this was a group that was to break process, disrupt the business. And so I’ve never been a big fan of following the rules.

And I think it requires that sort of personality trait to get stuff done within a corporation. One stakeholder management to pushing the limits, three speaking up. And to your point before, just being willing to ask a lot of people just don’t even ask. They just, uh, they’re too fearful that the answers no, but.

But that’s okay. Uh, we got plenty of no’s along the

Nico: way. A lot of thoughts in my head right now of how to follow on to that. I remember in an interview with Patrick at Pies and, um, and Nick Engerer at, um, Soulcast, um, both of which were spun out, uh, interestingly, Pies was spun out of, um, of, uh, a big Southern California, uh, enterprise that folks are well aware of and, um, and Soulcast was spun out of.

A university in Adelaide, I think. So there’s two examples for folks. If you want to go listen to two other episodes of folks who kind of go into the entrepreneurial process and, and the IP process of getting your idea out of a bigger entity, especially university, which is some of your, uh, which is some of your cases, but who advised you on the, the how of spending it out?

Cause that’s not something I would expect that there are experts in Worley that were kind of looking over your shoulder going, okay, this is how we’re going to

 Challenges and Assumptions in Building VECKTA

Gareth: do this. Yeah, we made a lot of mistakes, honestly, you know, we just, we learned by doing and it was my first kind of true venture. And so I was leading it, but I certainly wasn’t the expert.

And we had a few people around those who had done it before. Wally did have a venture team led by Roy, Roy Brown. And so there was support, but we certainly, you know, reflecting on it, we got the structure wrong. We didn’t have the right legal support. We didn’t get it set up right in the first place. And so we’ve spent.

Multiple iterations kind of unraveling a bunch of that, you know, we’re all so excited to just get this thing launched that we probably didn’t think about the structure and the commercial model and all this sort of stuff initially. And so, um, they were huge lessons learned. I’d certainly advise anyone to get the right external legal support early.

We tried to use internal counsel who had no expertise in startups. And, uh, it didn’t, didn’t go as well as it should have done. I think we

Nico: should probably do a whole episode on that. Yeah. So, uh, we covered the business model is basically a SAS model where you have platform fees, not unlike, um, you know, other SAS models.

Is there any differentiation? Uh, in SAS model that you’ve tried to incubate or introduce.

Gareth: So, well, it’s platform access for the buyer. Um, but then the suppliers get free access to our marketplace ecosystem and then they pay a success fee when they win work in the market. So we already capture value when value is created for everyone in the process.

Yeah. Um, in terms of our differentiators, I’d say the biggest one is we are buyer centric. The whole market is designed to support suppliers to sell more products. So modeling tools, procurement tools. So we’ve supported the buyer to be in control of the process to remove that information asymmetry that exists in the market today.

We have the ability to work on electrical and thermal issues, which a lot of companies can’t, they can either do one or the other, and we can consider all commercially viable technologies like we discussed before, which is very unique. So it’s our ability to technically and financially support the customer to configure the right solution, but then almost more importantly, is how do you then take that to market in a really succinct way?

So our marketplace workflows of how do you put a request into the market and ensure that the buyer is thinking about all the key items that. As a, because they’ve never bought an energy system before, they’d never know to ask what are the contract terms? What are the warranties? What are the commercial models I want to consider?

Is it self financing energies of service debt financing? What do each of them look like? How do I do it? Who’s responsible for what? Do you know, uh, is the supplier responsible for project management, construction, permitting, interconnection, civil works, da, da, da, da, or do you have someone in house that wants to take care of that?

So all these key questions that the framework is set up to very simply handhold them through it and then ensure that they get really like for like bids back such that they can make an informed buying decision versus getting stuck in that indecision again, because you’re comparing. An energy as a service opportunity versus a self financing and they’re completely different, completely different technologies, suppliers.

So we want to make sure that it’s vetted suppliers for the right opportunity based on location technology type commercial model. So that the customers get access to the right people. Cause these are long term partnerships. Yeah,

Nico: it is long term and partnership is the key, right? So one of the things that you see a lot of folks struggle with over the years is they want to go and build a tech stack, uh, usually try to grab stuff off the shelf.

Um, I mean, Smartsheets as an example, and Wrike, like they just, uh, adapt existing infrastructure to try and, um, make decisions faster, um, rather than build their own software, which is something that you’ve been working on. Um, but they realize that the real constraint and limiting factor is relationship.

This is a relationship business and you need, um, you need referrals. You need people, uh, becoming aware of the product. So getting to that situation, you know, a lot of folks just abandoned the software development piece. Um, and they focus on brand awareness and building relationships, which is not something the vector has focused on.

You focus very much on how do I build this solution? I have two questions. Yep. The first, because you have focused on building a software solution that incorporates this intelligence. How does that become? Uh, self referential or self healing, how do you leverage AI or ML to ensure that as you get new inputs, new learning gets incorporated into the process so that the system itself as a platform, uh, creates better value for the relationships that get injected into it.

Gareth: Yeah. So we apply a lot of data science. Especially around the buying experience. And so like we touched on before, there’s about 5, 800 data points per project that we source, whether that’s from our own marketplace data. You can imagine every time a supplier bids on a project, it’s anonymized, but we get access to real time intelligence around how much of these project costing, how much is the cost of solar storage, et cetera, in that region.

So we’ve got our own marketplace data. We’ve got public data for fuel prices, utility rates, demand charges. Solar radians, wind speeds, all this super important information, outage rates, and then, um, we use all that to configure the solution in the first place or prioritize the portfolio. And then once a system is deployed, we’ll get real time monitoring data that will ensure that the system is performing as designed.

And if not, why not? And how do we improve it? And then how do we feed that back into the learning curve for next time? So with every project, we expect the industry to get more efficient each time. And we want to share those learnings with suppliers and buyers in the market, you know, suppliers who don’t win work.

Why aren’t they winning work? Isn’t it price? Is it experience? Is it so building all this credibility all the time and becoming that central source of truth and, um, the fulcrum point for everyone to operate around. And from an AI perspective, that’s only going to get more better all the time. Do you know where we really want to get this to is.

Customers being able to have their base case optimized solution, but then being able to play around with their own scenarios. What happens if fuel prices change? What happens if interest rates change? How does that impact my solution? When should I buy? Why should I buy? Who should I buy from? Really driving that proactive intelligence all the time.

I think a new feature that we’ve just created, which is really exciting around the inflation reduction act is where across a customer’s portfolio, can they qualify for energy communities and low income communities? Cause these really provide additive, um, tax credits. And so really it’s always about how do you maximize the opportunity for the customer?

Nico: All right. If you’re watching on YouTube, then you’re going to notice that Gareth’s background is different. We’re both wearing different shirts. Uh, it’s, it’s by design. We like to just, you know, spice it up. Yeah. Spice it up. We thought let’s take an intermission and then, uh, and come back with different clothes.

Nope. It’s another day, but that’s, you know, such as a life of entrepreneurs. We’re picking up on the conversation. And if you’re listening on the podcast. Um, we may have edited this out, but if we didn’t, this is how real creativity works is sometimes you go, uh, you have to find time in the margins to carry these conversations forward.

Gareth, thank you for the extra time because I really didn’t want to shortchange folks on getting deeper into the conversation about VECTA. Now you’ve spun it out with Worley Parsons and the conversation so far about becoming an entrepreneur, creating the Mavericks, which is such an amazing. Insight into just the way your brain thinks and how counterculture you’ve been in your career.

I want to dig in to the creation of. Vector, first and foremost, looking back over the last four years, what assumptions did you have to challenge in the first couple of years of business to really get this thing off the ground? Yeah, it’s actually been

Gareth: a really interesting journey because we came into this believing that the market was actually, we knew it was early, but we didn’t realize how early and we didn’t realize how little people actually knew.

And how unprepared businesses are for the energy transition in terms of their access to key resources, access to information, access to data. So because we launched in COVID hit, we didn’t have the ability to do a lot of real time testing with customers to know that aspiration of starting a business, sitting around the boardroom, a whiteboard, innovating, ideating with the team all day, every day, that evaporated overnight.

And the ability to speak to customers and get real time feedback evaporated overnight. 

Building the Early Team and Navigating Product-Market Fit

And so we built the initial product a little bit in isolation. And we build it with a view that our customers would come into the product. They’d input a bunch of data, they’d get some results, they’d play around with it, and they’d be really interactive.

And what we’ve really learned is they don’t want to do any of that. They just want the outcomes. They want the outcomes quickly. They want it efficiently. They want to have confidence to act. But they don’t actually want to be hands on tools. Uh, they want to run their businesses. They want to maximize what they do.

They don’t want to become energy experts. They want to get the outcomes that will move the needle for them. And so, what we really have to try and adjust is, how much of that heavy lift up front in terms of access to data can we do such that it minimizes… And we touched on yesterday now for every site, we’d pull over 5, 000 data points for every location that they input into the system.

And so we do a huge amount of heavy lifting in terms of providing initial insights before even needing them to interact with the product.

Nico: It’s super interesting. Uh, and if we’d think about, like we talked about pulling, extracting concepts from other sectors or industries. I was having a conversation with With, uh, my friend, Lisa Ann Pinkerton, she’s been on like a year and a year or two journey of being a digital nomad where she and her partner bought an RV and they bought a brand new RV and they travel around the US and she said, I said, what’s your biggest regret?

And she says, buying a brand new RV. I said, why? She said, because just like boats, um, new RV buyers, Are in fact product testers. That’s all we are. We spend the, for, we spend two years telling Winnebago all the things that are wrong with this product so that they can send out a better one two years later.

Yeah. Super interesting. Right. And lo and behold, um, as a new RV owner, she’s not particularly satisfied with the product because she resists, she resents being product tester when she wanted to just buy a really nice RV. That’s what I get from my aha moment. There is. Customers want outcomes. They don’t want to help you build the product.

They really don’t. They want to know that they can trust you with their data. They want to know that you can give them an outcome. And that’s where you see a lot of folks in, you know, we deal a lot with storytelling and marketing. They’ll talk about the inputs. They’ll talk about the journey rather than the destination.

And it’s completely wrong from a storytelling perspective. Right? Yep. You’re a mountain biker, you aren’t gonna sell someone on an epic, uh, single route, single track by talking about the total climb required. Yeah, exactly. Right?

Gareth: At all.

Nico: No. If you’re like, yeah, there’s 2, 000 feet of climb, it’s epic. There’s this one gap that is a hundred feet wide, and people will be like, oh man, I don’t know, I don’t wanna think about the details.

Tell me about… Like, right?

Gareth: It’s in Tahoe. Yeah, exactly. Afterwards,

Nico: we’re going to have beers at this amazing restaurant.

Gareth: Yeah. Right? I’m in. Done. Totally. No, you’re so true. Um, one of our, one of the customers said to us the other day, he said, um, tell me the pathway to value. Literally, like, put on a slide, what are the inputs you need?

What are the steps I take? And what’s my simplest pathway to value? Done. Give me your answer. Yeah, exactly. Tell me your answer that you gave him. Uh, so this is what we’re really nailing down now. I think our products in a really exciting spot. We’ve got an amazing team set up and now it’s fine tuning the offering because we know we create huge amounts of value at the front end in terms of how do you manage your portfolio?

How do you prioritize? What should you build? Where should you build it? Who should you build it with? All that is incredible value. You know, up to 50 percent of project costs today now being compressed into single digit thousands. So what we said to him was all we need from you initially is. Addresses, industry type, and then we do the rest in terms of pulling all the data that you need around outages, utility rates, demand charges, solar radiance, gas prices, all this sort of stuff.

We’ll come back to you with a prioritized portfolio, that’s step number one, so your input level is literally minutes. At that stage we’ll prioritize some sites, what we need from you to then is to give us access to your utility API. And then after that, um, what we need you to do is review the business case, which is a couple of hours of your time, and then go through our RFP generator workflow and your pathway to value is three check in points.

And then you get firm bids and that’s where the money really hits the road. Because once you’ve got the system built. That’s so simple.

Nico: Yeah. Brilliant, Gareth. I’m really digging learning more about how you bring the product to market. And I’d love to know. As a founder, what did you learn most about filling out the early team?

You mentioned at Worley that you had two really key team members that really understood the DG space. Um, talk about building that early team in the process of getting the product market fit. And what you learned about the right fit, the wrong fit, kind of mistakes or successes in hiring that got you to the place

Gareth: you’re at now.

Yeah, this has been a really good experience. Good lessons learned. I think there’s a lot here for people to dig into. Um, when we created Vector, one of the team that we’d built this with or attested it with within the corporation, Tristan, came with me into Vector. Andrea stayed within the corporation, that was their request, such that they didn’t lose all their talents on that side of the, of defense, in hindsight.

I wish she’d have come into the business as well and I wish I’d have pushed harder for that because she was the real kind of strategic brains behind it. Um, a lot of the thinking. Um, so those two were awesome in terms of framing. Here’s the market opportunity is the pathway to value, but they weren’t necessarily implementers.

So sent like Tristan came into the business with me. But we since agreed after we got the business off the ground, he wasn’t the right guy for startup world. He was nervous about fundraising. He was nervous about. You know, future survival, um, he was not an implementer. He was, um, you know, a visionary. So we agreed to wind him out of the business.

Um, in the early days, we felt like we needed a really strong CTO. One of our board members recommended someone who actually built one of the biggest marketplaces in the world today that we all use the Apple app store. Um, he came into the business, he’d come from a culture that was on the, on the Steve Jobs and others, apparently extremely toxic and he brought that with him into the business.

Very, you know, very siloed, very central control, nothing passes through the business without it passing through that individual. Um, very aggressive in, in a stance and especially in this day and age, and especially being remote and especially based on our culture and values, none of that aligned, so it took me a year to actually get him out of the business.

Uh, we essentially lost a huge amount of time and progress doing that, but since CTO, so he was responsible for building the product. Um, so yeah, that was a massive lesson learned. And I think in hindsight, I saw some of the warning signs. I didn’t necessarily want to believe them because I thought, you know, here’s this guy, big brand name.

We’re trying to raise money. We need someone with this. But in reality, it just accelerated our business. Once we removed it. Also

Nico: imposter syndrome. I imagine of like, who am I to question a board member and this guy from Apple? Yeah. Right? I’m missing something. Surely I’m missing something. Yeah. Mm

Gareth: hmm.

Yeah, so that was a really, um, painful period. Stressful period.

Nico: Is there something looking back on it that would have been, now, advice you’d give me as a founder? Things that you can put in place? Or sort of perspectives to have to avoid missing the early warning signs that would have triggered more confidence in yourself or in me to make those decisions as the founder.

Like, I’m wondering in particular if there are simple, maybe not so simple, but like cultural norms. Being very specific or aligned on the way that we do things or organizational structures. Is there anything that you’ve thought about that would have helped you either ferret out the warning signs early and be able to take action on them, or it would have given you more confidence as a founder?

Gareth: Yeah, I think the biggest regret is because this person came recommended from someone who is trusted within a network. 

Learning from Hiring Mistakes and Understanding Personality Types in Building Teams

They hadn’t worked with him for 10 years, but they’d had previously good experiences and they’re aware of him and they recommended him based on that. Because of that, I didn’t do as an aggressive amount of due diligence as I should have done.

It was like, he’s being recommended, his resume is incredible, but I never really dug into who are you? What do you believe? What’s your background? What are your personality types? You know, I do that for every hire, but I think because this was such a senior person. So I’d say, regardless of who it is, regardless of who recommends, always do your due diligence, always do your reference checks, always dig into what motivates them, what their values are, are they aligned?

And then within the business, I’d, I’d say, listen to the team intently.

Nico: How do you do that? How do you structure it so that you can listen, so that you have audience? Exactly. And they feel

Gareth: it’s trust. Yeah, one of our biggest core values is, you know, empower co creation, adapt to purposely. And my expectation is always in terms of challenging limits, that also includes challenging, like there’s no hierarchy when it comes to challenging limits.

If someone is doing something that is outside of what we would expect to be best practice, it needs to be called out and challenged. Some people started to speak up and it was ultimately because they brought it to me that I was able to act because in those situations with those types of individuals, you don’t see it because they’re controlling everything.

And that’s, that’s the danger is it becomes very, it’s also almost

Nico: by design, right? Exactly. Yeah. fiefdom in some cases. So, uh, you said the core core value of Empower Code Creation and then Adapt.

Gareth: Purposefully. Yeah. So our three core values, challenge limits. Adaptive purposefully, a power of co creation and the core to now everything we do that drives my life drives the business and we live by it every Friday I do a summary of how the week went, we celebrate against those values, we call out where we need to improve against those values, we give awards against those values, so that kind of underpins everything we do.

Nico: I love that so much. I want to dig into. More around that, uh, perhaps next time we get to hang out in person, you can share some of those precepts and the, and the way that you, I think it’s really important the way that you can sort of indoctrinate. Um, the cultural values that you want in your company, because that’s super important.

I’ve got, um, a friend drew, um, in Utah who he’s really, really, um, proven very good at that. Um, a relatively small business that he’s building. You’ll meet him when we all hang out in Vegas. Um, he’s gotten very good at kind of working himself out of the business by being very clear about the cultural values and ensuring that his leadership understands how to tie those back to.

The actual outcomes in the business and as you said, reward cultural acculturation to the right types of norms that you want to see in the business. That’s really, that’s super important. One of the things that you pointed out, I feel like, I feel like we’re, there’s something else you want to say, but I want to, I don’t want to miss this opportunity here before we move into the next sort of element of this.

You pointed out personality types, and this is something that I key in on a lot with leaders, and I don’t see enough companies really trying to understand communication style, and they see this whole, like, personality types thing as a rigorous boxing of someone’s, uh, sort of type, rather than a communication protocol.

Can you talk a bit about what you’ve learned about personality styles? The types of tools that you use and how you integrated it into your management of the business.

Gareth: Yeah, this is a really interesting one. I’d say what’s been exciting since that, I suppose, false start with the CTO every hire since has been incredible.

And we’ve got a really balanced executive leadership team. When I think about like the desk profile, each of us sits in one of the four quadrants. Um, so I would sit in the I quadrant. So I am by design visionary and empathetic. So it’s all about the people, but it’s about the vision and the execution. And I think understanding where people fit in terms of.

Their preferences, their comfort zones, how they like to be communicated is super interesting. For instance, our engineering manager, I know that she is an S in the DISC profile, which would mean that she’s more task orientated, but still more people orientated. But in a meeting, if you put someone like that on the spot, they don’t want to voice their opinion because they haven’t had time to process.

So the key for that is speaking to them beforehand. Here’s what we’re going to discuss. I need you to think about this. I need you to review the data. And then I want you to be able to come into the meeting with the ability to share your opinion. Whereas if you spring it on them, you never are going to get those insights.

And so understanding and then share the people who are aggressive. Um, data driven, um, they’re the people who are going to interrogate everything and get lost in the data instead of trusting the gut in the app. So it’s very interesting kind of balancing all that and I really like, even in a sales call, very quickly trying to figure out where is this person in the quadrant based on how they respond.

You know, for instance, if someone comes into a sales call, like, what’s this about? Why am I here? You know, that you need to get to the point quickly. You need to paint a picture of the vision. If someone comes in and goes, yeah, what’s this about? Like, I’m quite curious. Can you share some information? You know, the more on the, the data driven side, so then you can’t paint the big picture vision.

You have to take them on. Here’s what the data is saying. Go away and process the data and come back tomorrow and let me know whether you’re interested. So I like exploring this, this journey.

Nico: Is there any resource that you’d point to that helped you? Um, dig deeper or maybe even, um, how do you, I have some that I often recommend, but how do you test for personality style in particular with disc?

Where do you send, how do you do that?

Gareth: Yeah, I can share a link afterwards for sure. Nico, I actually learned this through, uh, I’m part of a CEO network group called Vistage. And I think one of the big best advice I went to the Vollerworth symposium earlier this year, one of our investors, and they brought a bunch of their LPs.

And one of the guys who has built one of the biggest solar businesses in the world, his His advice when asked if you could do it all over again, what was the biggest lesson learned? And he said, to have a CEO group that you can lean on because it’s lonely, you need people who have been on it, going through the same pain points.

And so through this Vistage group, we just had a speaker come in, in the last few months and talk all about the disk profile, share some insights, share some information. He runs the profiles for us. That’s super cool.

Nico: We talked about product market fit broadly. Um, you gave great example in the very beginning, but can you tell me how.

And maybe you aren’t, you aren’t, don’t feel like you’re fully there, but how or when did you feel like you finally had something that was nearing product market fit? Was there anything that you as a CEO were looking for that you can enunciate that other CEOs might be able to go, Oh, okay, that helps a lot.

I’m looking for like advice from you on generally what we know to be true, which is you’ve gotten to a series a, um, kind of series B is. Just pouring cash on top of the, on top of the growth engine. Right. So I presume that you’re right at that point where you think you kind of have a good idea of what PMF looks like.

You talk about

Gareth: that a minute. We’re definitely getting close. Like I said to you before, I think the thing we’re really refining now is around how we communicate the offering and especially with the market being where it’s at and the level of the

product market fit is definitely come in the form of. You know, to sign up big global enterprise businesses like the Honeywells of the world, where these are extremely sophisticated organizations and they don’t make buying decisions without doing their due diligence. And that gives me the confidence because.

When you’ve got businesses like that saying, we really like what you’re doing, we’re willing to put money into this and we want to use it to enable our business to do better. That’s for me, kind of the game changing moment, you know, having the ones and twos and the single individual projects is great, but it doesn’t prove to me that this is, this is it.

Let’s now double down. Now converting these larger enterprise customers, that’s, that’s a game changer. And it also makes it harder because you know, these sales cycles for these big customers is really painful. And so then managing stakeholder expectations around all this opportunities there, but it’s going to take us a while to get the deals closed because you’ve got to take a village on the journey versus a single

Nico: individual.

Raising Capital, Terminology Challenges, and Mentorship in the Energy Sector

Well, that’s why you have to go get, uh, money from people like Bill. Exactly. What kind of pipeline, uh, broadly speaking, did you feel, uh, became necessary in order to raise that Series A? Because there’s certainly a point where you have the confidence to go out and raise money. And there was a point before that where you’re, you’re thinking.

Okay, I think that by the time I get to X, I’ll be able to do the series A. What did that look like for you?

Gareth: So we called it actually a seed two. So we haven’t actually officially done a series A. Okay, I apologize for saying series A. No, it’s okay. I’d say you could probably call it a small series A, seed two.

I think the terms all get blurred these days. But, um, for us, it was having good pipeline of projects. So we’ve got over 500 projects in the platform now. Um, again, some big customer conversions. I think that was the real trigger. Oh,

Nico: that was overwhelming to a lot of people. You realize that Right. Gareth 500 projects in the pipeline feels overwhelming for most folks that are in our game.

Right. But

Gareth: when you, when you imagine Nico, um, a single customer could have 200 sites.

Nico: And so Okay, so project for you could be 200 of one customer. Okay.

Gareth: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So this isn’t five. Yeah. I wish we had 500 individual customers. Uh, not yet. Uh, in the future. Yeah, so we think about a project being an individual site and so, you know, when you think each of those sites has an opportunity associated with it, but it may, it may not be a high priority opportunity today.

So this is the long game that we need to play is going on this journey and converting projects at the right time for the customer.

Nico: Is there any particular, uh, key player? That without which you wouldn’t have been able to get this far or even maybe type of player given that we’re just

Gareth: a team member or as

Nico: in, I mean, maybe you define this like I’m asking generally when you think about your journey over the last, let’s say 12 months.

Maybe 18 months, if not for the decision, this hiring decision, we wouldn’t be where we are, or maybe it’s a series of them.

Gareth: Yeah, well, it’s definitely, um, many. Yeah. Do you

Nico: talk about individual, like, I don’t expect you’re going to talk about individuals. I don’t want you, you know, you to call out any one particular person unless it makes sense to do so.

I’m more thinking broad strokes around the pieces that you recognized were missing, that when you filled them in, things started to work.

Gareth: Yeah. So if I’d have done this all over again and started today, I’d have hired our head of sales on day one and I’d have gone out and sold a product without having a product.

And then I’d have built it on the fly based on the customer feedback and I’d Yeah. Very

Nico: American instead of very European. Exactly. Id had this

Gareth: call, I’d have done it all manually. Um,

Nico: yeah, the, uh, David over at PV case was saying, he said one of the saving graces of PV case is that we built it. With a European mindset and an American sales mind, right?

Cause this co founder is an American and, uh, and a European. And so they built it like a Mercedes and sold it like software.

Gareth: Yeah, that’s awesome. But the great thing about salespeople is they, they don’t have the technical answers. You know, we, we tend to not hire energy experts from a sales perspective because.

Energy experts will go in and try and come up with a solution. And the whole point of having the technologies, you remove the emotion, you remove the manual mechanics of it because there are hundreds of thousands of variables that influence the project. So all of us come into a situation going, Oh, this could be solar.

It could be storage, but actually it ends up being a gas solution or it becomes a fuel cell. And so the whole frequency drive, exactly. And so the beauty of having non technical salespeople is they have to listen. They have to learn. They have to bring the ideas back to the team and then that enhances the product.

And so, uh, that’s. I think it’s been one of the biggest learnings for me. I genuinely

Nico: hope that more people have listened through this far in the interview than statistics would suggest. Because, uh, I mean, we’re going to have to take what you just said that last three minutes and kick it out as a, as a YouTube short, more people need to hear it, uh, Gareth, like I could, that’s like mic drop moment right there for me.

Um, Jeff, uh, Greenfield grew a business for 17 years. And, um, I mean, this is one of those indelible moments that people ask, like, what have you learned in 600 plus episodes? Um, Jeff Greenfield said to me, I wish I’d raised money sooner and. Um, and I said, why? And he said, cause I could have given my kids better Christmas presents.

I could have had fewer stressful nights. I could have, uh, uh, I could have taken vacation. Uh, I build it on a shoestring and I didn’t have to. And what I know now looking back is I should have just raised money, given up more of my own personal equity and saved more of my personal wellbeing and my family, less strife.

And I would put that on the same shelf. As hire salesperson day one,

Gareth: right? Yeah. Yeah. And on that investment front, I’m very lucky to have a really diverse board and I’ve got some really pragmatic board members who are all about no one wants massive dilution, but at the same time, let’s be really realistic about this.

If we want to grow and we want to be the platform that every business in the world thinks about when they think about energy, we’re not going to do that without putting fuel on the fire. And to do that, you need money. And so let’s go and raise some money. And, uh, especially in these market dynamics, that was the conversation we had is, do we wait and do our series there when we expect the timing to be perfect?

Or do we do this C2 bridge type round? Because who knows what the market’s going to do? And let’s make sure we’re positioned by my prediction is 2024 is going to be quite flat, but the IRA is going to be coming into fruition 2025. The market’s really going to take off. And I think unless businesses are preparing through 2024 for that real kick, then they’re going to be left behind.

And so I see this as being still for every business in the world, a bit of a survival phase, a bit of pre positioning, a bit of making sure that they’re ready to really go between that 2025, 2028 period, where I think the market’s really going to turn. A couple of quick

Nico: questions for you. What terminology do you use?

Did, uh, you have to learn, uh, or continually you have to teach inside of your team for new people, uh, around the lexicon of the product in the, in the sector.

Gareth: Yeah, I think, um, because we’re creating a sector, we are every day trying to double down on the same terms, being consistent, educating the market. So we used the term on site energy.

Some people say microgrids, distributed energy. On site energy, we believe, is the all encompassing, simplified version of all of that. A microgrid sounds really complex. A customer doesn’t want to buy a microgrid, but if you can generate some energy on site and reduce your costs and your emissions, then that sounds really achievable.

And so, I’d say it’s been enough to take customers on this journey of what is an on site energy system. What is the energy transition? What is the inflation reduction? These are all terms that all day, every day, are coming up. And, uh… People don’t know a lot about,

Nico: I love it. It’s almost as though you’re reading my notes.

Cause my next question was, what terms have you created or reinforced to capture mindshare you don’t see used in the marketplace enough? Cause it’s one to say like, well, we need to continue to teach people what distributed generation is. And so we talked to customers about DG and microgrids, and then the marketer’s mind, which you clearly have goes, wait a minute, these are terms.

This is like an old way of thinking. Let’s create a, a term. Um, let’s drive mindshare around terminology and for you, that’s onsite energy. And I, um, not surprised every time I get on the phone with you, it’s like we’re reading from the same book here. Um, so thank you for that. Gareth, let’s turn towards home base here.

Um, we’ve packed a lot, 10 pounds and a five pound sack on this one, but. I want to know if there are any particular salient lessons or takeaways that you glean from early mentors and leaders that had either a profound impact on you and or things that you now pass along to your team as you mentor and train them.

Yeah,

Gareth: definitely some incredible mentors and I’d say for anyone going through their careers, the best advice I had was build your network, find the people who can sponsor you through the industry, through the world, through your company. Yeah. Um, Brad Andrews, Tony, Tony Frenchman was the guy who really supported us to Launch Factor.

He was the guy that I rocked up to him within the corporation, and on the first week of his job said, are you ready to write a big check? I’ve got an idea for you. And he went on the He said that? Yeah. And, uh, he, he bought into it and he, that’s awesome. Fought for us. And he helped, helped us get it done. Um, but he was always about have your plan, work your plan.

You don’t know when the results are going to come. So have the discipline to just, you know, grind it out and have the persistence. I think that’s really key to all of this is. Just take those steps every day. 

The importance of discipline and consistency in both personal and business life. 

The discipline comes in the form of not knowing when the results are going to really show up, but they will if you’re doing the right things consistently.

Nico: Fascinating. What do you do consistently that has given you leverage in the business and your personal life?

Gareth: Yep. Personal life, I have an amazing morning routine. Up early, I do my workout first thing. What’s early? Uh, like 5. 30. I do, uh, Waits or indoor ride or run. I do a cold plunge. I do my meditation. I then walk my son up to school.

So that’s our together time. We hang out for 20 minutes. I then jog home from dropping him off at school. And so then by 8 o’clock I’ve done everything in my personal life that I wanted to get done that day such that now is business focus time and I block off my mornings for My flow time, so that’s where I do my deep thinking, my strategy, my

Nico: marketing.

How much is that block? That, that deep,

Gareth: deep thinking? Two, two one hour blocks. Um, Okay. With a 15 minute kind of coffee break. And then I keep my afternoons open for them meetings and all that kind of, the stuff that in theory should require less of my brain. Cal Newport

Nico: is so proud of you. Really?

Gareth: Yeah. I mean, he

Nico: wrote deep work, right?

So there’s a, there’s a philosophy in Silicon Valley, uh, floated by many Cal being, um, you know, one that, that purports, um, the importance of, and I’ve done this in my career as well. Uh, the early, uh, the early block, like. When is your most creative, right? Like I know for me interviewing before 11 AM, I’m going to get less advantage.

Um, so I usually start about 11 AM. Um, unless I’ve gotten up and got, I mean, I’m always incredibly impressed. By, uh, folks who are super consistent with their morning routine. It’s one thing to have one, it’s another to be disciplined with it. Um, so you’re, what, what percentage hit rate do you have with your morning routine?

Gareth: If I’m at home, uh, a hundred percent, but you know, this week I’m on the road and. It’s a very slippery slope, you know, I’m up late drinking, I’m up early going to meetings, I’m drinking coffee all day to stay awake and then it all leads to bad outcomes and so I’ll finish this week feeling exhausted, bloated.

How long to recover when you get home? Yeah, it’ll take me definitely a good few days, but I’ll try and get straight back into the routine to try Make myself mentally feel good again. Otherwise, I feel really, really sloppy. So I know

Nico: that you are an iron man. I know that you and your wife both are avid cyclists.

Um, you just are recently healing from broken bones. Outside of energy, what do you nerd out about?

Gareth: Mountain biking, motor biking. That’s kind of my real passion. Hanging out with the family. My son’s nine, so he’s into soccer and rugby. Uh, luckily he’s into more of the European sports than he is American sports, which I still haven’t got up to speed on.

Um, so yeah, hanging out with the farm, doing anything adventurous, camping, hiking, biking. But I have a big KTM Adventure off road motorbike and that’s kind of my real, real, you know, free ride, you know, get out of my head, go and

Nico: adventure. That’s super cool. We need to put together. A like a solar motorcycle tour, right?

Like just solar CEOs where we just go on a cycle, a motorcycle tour. Yeah. More of like an Enduro tour. Um, what book or books have either most inspired you and or been on your most recommended list? Yep.

Gareth: Um, the one I actually recently gifted to our head of sales down because he’s in a really good spot in his life right now where he’s finished his MBA.

He’s got a few young kids, he’s bought a house, renovated a house. So now he’s like ready to really smash this. I bought him, uh, The Monk That Sold His Ferrari. I don’t know if you’ve read that one, but that’s one of my favorites. You know, all about mastering your mind, following your purpose. Yeah. Living with discipline.

So I’d say that’s, that’s probably one

Nico: of my favorites. That’s great. Is there anything, um, from a, and that does have business principles. It’s a spiritual fable about fulfilling dreams. Um, and really reaching what you’re capable of. Um, is there anything kind of along the lines of good to great, that’s like a business book that has really given you firm strategy or, uh, ability to build a business as an entrepreneur?

Gareth: It’s interesting. I actually prefer podcasts these days. So I really like listening to Diary of a CEO, High Performance. Um, they’re probably two of my best go to’s. Um,

Nico: the guy is killing it. Diary of a CEO has crushed. It’s the number one business podcast in Europe and most Americans don’t know it. Their YouTube channel is amazing.

Yeah.

Gareth: And Hormozy as well, obviously from a sales perspective, I’d encourage everyone to kind of follow his, his strategies. That’s super

Nico: interesting. Yeah. I mean, his latest launch is a course on how to grow business. And a hundred million dollar leads is a book that, um, I would, I would highly recommend. I think actually

Gareth: you recommended that too.

And I read it and I loved it. And I, yeah, that’s part of why we’re challenging our offering right now.

Nico: Yeah. A hundred million dollar offers is a fantastic book that you can buy for 99 cents on What I love about his business is that he gives away education. His goal is to educate as many entrepreneurs as possible and get them to 10 million so he can invest in them.

That’s cool. I love Alex Hormozy, our team. I mean, if people are watching right, like this is a little bit of behind the scenes, but if people are watching over the next 18 months and can’t see like Alex, Alex Hormozy’s thumbprint on, on Suncast. They are then tell me, right? Like, tell me that you are like, why aren’t you doing this?

That or the other? Cause, uh, Graham on my team, like all he does is watch, uh, Alex Hormozy videos literally. And I turned all my team onto these, this guy, cause somebody told me about it. Diary of a CEO. I found out about from somebody else turned my team onto it and they’re all like geeked out about it. Uh, Chris, who’s our editor who’s from Australia and moving to London.

He’s geeks at, he geeks out about diary and he was like, Oh, I can’t believe you watch it. Because it’s so popular in Europe and not really here. Anyway, I’m all about modeling success. Because success leaves clues. Um, is it, in that, to that end, I’ve never asked this question, but is there someone, um, or, or something that you have modeled as a successful, um, blueprint?

Yeah, there’s

Gareth: actually a bunch of people I, you know, I went through a process. I had a bit of a coach at one point a few years ago where I felt like I needed to really figure this out, especially being in a CEO role. And we actually mapped out who are the people I look up to and I like their attributes.

And so Gary Vaynerchuk is a big one. Elon Musk aspects of him, Branson, Schumacher we talked about, my mom, my dad. And so then I actually came up with my own mission statement to align with some of those key values. Things that I liked about them vision, confidence, motivational, respectful, decisive. And so I came up with this mission statement that said to.

My mission is to create a survivable and thriving future for all, starting with energy. Vector will be the platform that simplifies and unlocks the energy transition and becomes the biggest energy enabling company in the world. I’ll achieve this by being confident, fearless, and when required, ruthless.

I’m calm, assertive, and decisive. I lead an incredibly passionate and talented team that is the envy of the industry. And I lead by example, motivate others, and I hunt, kill, or will die. So that’s my, uh, what I write every morning. I try and, uh, stay in the zone, and that’s kind of the outlook on life.

Nico: You write to every morning, there you have it, folks.

Gareth Evans is the founder of Vecta, a company that you will hear about and should have on your radar. Gareth, I’m honored to have had the opportunity to meet you. I know for sure why my friend and mentor Bill Nussie invested in your business. And such a privilege to be able to tell more, uh, Solar Warriors.

About the journey that you’re on, thank you for coaching us for the last 90 minutes.

Gareth: Nah, it’s been an honor. Thank you for all you do. You produce amazing content with amazing guests and I. I’m privileged to have been a part of it. All

Nico: right. Solar warrior. Well, that is a wrap on this insightful conversation with yet again, another entrepreneur from across the pond.

How do you like these? Well, I’m hoping that you do enjoy episodes where we’re broadening our horizons and perspectives, bringing in folks that have done quite a bit more travel than your average solar warrior, at least more than me. Uh, I’ve really enjoyed the conversations that we’ve had with Martine.

With David and Jake from PB case, and now with Gareth learning more as well about how the solar software sector is growing and how technology is helping us truly accelerate the transition to cleaner, renewable fuels and a more sustainable future for our businesses. What did you learn? I’m eager to hear, and I know that Gareth is as well.

So you, my fellow phylo math. Can jump on over to the show notes page where you’ll find both the LinkedIn connection to Gareth, as well as to myself, which will easily take you to one of the posts that we have made about this episode, drop your brain droppings right there in the comments. Tell us what it is that is your key takeaway from this episode or tweet at Nico Mayo.

I don’t. I don’t know exactly what Gareth’s Twitter or X handle is, but I’m sure that it will be in the show notes as well. MySuncast. com is your home for all of that information. You click on the episode notes page and it’ll give you everything you need. And if it doesn’t, and you need something that’s not found in the episode, but you’d like to rather instead talk with me or find out how you could partner with us on Suncast, well, click on the work with Nico tab and we’ll see what we can do for you.

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