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Another ClimateTech Podcast
Interviews by Ryan Grant Little, a climatetech founder and investor that explore the fight against climate change through with founders, investors, activists, academics, artists, and more.
#Climate #Climatetech #Cleantech #Sustainability #Environment
Another ClimateTech Podcast
The world's most advanced portable power with Andreas Sedlmayr of Instagrid
Andreas Sedlmayr is co-founder and co-CEO of Instagrid, makers of portable power stations for mobile workforces with heavy power needs. His company has grown from €500k to €30M+ in revenue and recently achieved B Corp certification while expanding into North America.
In this episode we talked about:
☠️ Why diesel and gas generators are silent killers
🇩🇪 What it means to revive Germany’s strong tradition of industrial innovation
🇺🇸 Why hiring local leadership was crucial for US expansion and how cultural nuances matter more than you might think
💼 How to expand smartly after raising $95 million
🌱 Why achieving B Corp certification was important to prove their commitment to social and environmental best practices
#climatetech #cleanenergy #sustainabletech #batteries
🪸 Transform your company's milestones into impact, like trees planted and coral reef restored: impacthero.com/podcast
🧑💼 Growing across Europe? Grab a free consultation and hire without hassle: parakar.eu/climate
The first round was are Andreas and Sebastian the right people and do they have the right idea? And the second round was already like can they bring it to life? And the third round was can they hire the right team to expand that? And now that round was more like really looking into global expansion, into departing from being a one-trick pony and being a full solution provider for mobile off-grid electricity and in being a full solution provider for mobile off-grid electricity.
Ryan Grant Little:Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Andreas Sedlmayr is co-founder and co-CEO of Instagrid, which makes highly portable power stations for mobile workforces with heavy power needs. Theirs is a technology that could replace heavy polluting portable gas and diesel generators with clean electric solutions. Just the same way, electric cars are replacing gas guzzlers in the market today. They've just closed a huge investment and, man, do I ever wish I'd invested in their pre-seed round? I reached Andreas near Stuttgart, germany. I'm Ryan Grant. Little Thanks for being here, andreas. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, thank you for the invitation. You are the co-founder and co-CEO of InstaGrid. Can you, in a few words, tell us a bit about what the company does?
Andreas Sedlmayr:Sure, if you think about electricity, then electricity today is provided in two different ways. One is grid electricity. It can be provided by solar, by renewables, by nuclear, by coal, as soon as you go off grid, and sometimes it can only be in the middle of the street or across the street. Electricity is entirely provided by combustion technology, which is so-called generators, and those generators we're going to replace with portable battery devices that you can take in one hand, that are easy to go. You flick one switch and you're ready to power any device, and you don't have the dizzy hat from the noise, you don't have the pollution that they emit and you actually also save a dollar with it.
Ryan Grant Little:And so these are. You're targeting mobile workforces, I think I read, which have heavy power needs. So it's industries like construction, live events, film, emergency services, disaster relief, and you mentioned you can carry it in one hand. So that's a surprise to me if I'm thinking of replacing like a diesel generator that's. I mean, that's very portable and so far you've racked up 40,000 customers. Talk a little bit about who's buying them and why they're making the switch and maybe some of the more interesting use cases. Sure.
Andreas Sedlmayr:As you said already, we're tailored for professionals. So there are many camping power stations out there that you can use to recharge a laptop or that you can use to power a cup of lights, a small fridge, maybe during a festival, maybe during your camping vacation, but we are not that type. So when we started all of this, we were at a large German corporation before and I was responsible doing the small handheld batteries that go into power tools, and we saw that the larger the demand grows, the higher power you need, of course, the larger the battery gets, and at some point it's no longer working on the DC standard that we developed. So we said, okay, like those people are the ones that then turn into a combustion solution, because if the battery is too small, doesn't have enough runtime, doesn't have enough power, then you turn to a generator because you need to get your job done right. You're paid to getting a job done in a certain amount of time and then you turn to the only solution that's available on the market and then you have the generator. You already said it, it's not portable by a single person. You have to haul it around with two, three people and then you basically have to put the fuel in there. So it's a lot of fuel logistics behind it and you have to get it started. It's very maintenance heavy because it has turning parts, but it's still the only viable professional solution, at least when we started and we said, okay, let's think about these portable power stations that are there for camping and convert them into something that's most professional, that's tailoring the professional need, so to speak, a blue ocean, because camping power stations they're like I don't know 50 brands or so, whereas in our part of the business we were the first ones to start to really go into professional space because it's damn hard. We had to solve a hardware problem and I can get into this later but then you have these people and they want to have something that's carable in one hand.
Andreas Sedlmayr:So you pick it up it's a very personal device and then you have your tool in the other hand. You go, you do your job, you get out, you get more jobs done per day. You don't have the friction in getting to the central electricity system, yelling at someone to get the key, getting 20 meters of extension cord and after all, realizing you don't get the key, you have to go out, power your generator. You don't have to do that. So it's really like getting people peace of mind with a system that can be carried in one hand. That's compact, so it fits any size of trunk. It's robust and waterproof, so you can put it into concrete slurry, into rain.
Andreas Sedlmayr:It will power most of your applications for a full workday. And the most important one and that's why we're called InstaGrid is the instant grid, so we don't compromise on grid power. If you see a socket, you associate a certain power that this can deliver right, and this is not the same with camping power stations. You can run small appliances, but you cannot run a serious welder or something like this. You actually can't run any welder, and that's what you can do with our system.
Andreas Sedlmayr:And just to give you an idea, since we have just touched the welding, so railroad track building is one of the applications we power a lot. They do a lot of grinding, they do welding, they do like pressure deformation and usually they had a couple of people that hold the generator along the track the whole day and needed to make sure they have a spill kit with them. So if fuel spills they have to soak it up and make sure there's no harm to the environment, they have a fire extinguisher with them and after all they put 12 to 15 dollars per day into that, into that generator worth on gasoline or diesel, and the same guy now can recharge the battery overnight for less than a euro or less than a dollar. Take it in one hand, take the welder into the other hand, walk along the track and just do one welding after another and gets home without a dizzy head, gets home without a lot of poison in his lungs and actually still can save a dollar.
Ryan Grant Little:You're also a very good salesperson for this and I'm sold. But I mean, I know power systems. Over the past couple of years I've gotten familiar with EcoFlows and Blue Eddies and Jackeries and things like this, and a 2.6 kilowatt Delta Pro Max from EcoFlow is heavy as hell. I mean I guess you can carry it as one person, but it's definitely not going to do that kind of heavy lifting. So what's the secret? What are you doing that they're not?
Andreas Sedlmayr:Nice to talk to someone skilled in the art, that's really cool. But it's actually exactly that. So we see people that lift like the other brands, and then they lift ours and say, well, that doesn't make sense. So how can that happen? After all, it's some people would sell it to you as first principles. But after all, what we did is we looked into the space. We saw it was broken, it's powered by combustion and we looked into how do people try to solve it now and then we figured out why this is broken, so why this doesn't work for professional power solution. And then we just looked at it and we said, okay, people are doing this with a different mindset. So everyone that has tried that before was doing this with an industry mindset.
Andreas Sedlmayr:So, really coming from large industrial converters, and we were looking at it from a consumer perspective because we were in this consumer space before and I sometimes explain it like what Google and Amazon did to mainframes in the 2000s, when they always had to go back to IBM or to Gray to buy larger mainframes to upscale all of their server farms. At some point they thought about well, we get the same computing power for a fifth of the cost at the Best Buys. So why don't we go there and stack them all together and write a software to do the job? And that's basically what we did. So we basically took a hardware problem and converted it into a software problem.
Andreas Sedlmayr:So what others do with hardware. We now have half a million line of software code doing this thing and with this we were able to really like shrink the conversion part of a battery. So a battery is a, is a dc system and but it ac goes in for charging and ac goes out for discharging, so that ac, dc, dc, ac conversion we were able to really shrink by a factor of 10 and also lower in weight by a factor of 10. And that's what you feel when you pick up our unit and when you pick up the other units that are at 2.6 kilowatt hours.
Ryan Grant Little:Oh, wow, okay. I mean that makes a lot of sense, so you're saving by not converting it twice, basically, but okay.
Andreas Sedlmayr:By having a better way of converting. Yeah.
Ryan Grant Little:I see One of the applications. I didn't see there but where I can imagine it works. A lot is defense, and I know that my friends on the front line in Ukraine are very reliant on generators and things like eco flows, which is how I got to know about all these kinds of things. Is there an application there for you as well?
Andreas Sedlmayr:Oh, certainly there are also applications in defense. We're looking into anything that we can imagine because, after all, the mission is to decarbonize the off-grid energy system and, of course, if you think about military, about how much fuel they spend is one of the largest pollutants. So we're also looking into this. We are very cautious on that side, of course, because we don't want to be trapped in the wrong spot, but of course, this is also an application we're looking at. We're more looking at the humanitarian side of it, to be honest.
Andreas Sedlmayr:So we've, just a couple of months ago, when earthquakes happened close to the Turkish-Syrian border, we've equipped the Red Cross with our systems Because, if you imagine, you get there and it's pitch black, everything is broken, people are screaming and you need to get to people that are below large buildings with concrete and steel and everything, and then the first thing you have to do you haul a generator and you put it on. It disturbs the whole silence. You don't hear people scream. So, with us, you really go there. It's silent, you can concentrate on what really matters and you can still power a jackhammer for almost a full day and an angle grinder to get these people out, and you're much more focused with this, and that's the more the humanitarian side that we look at.
Ryan Grant Little:That makes a lot of sense. I want to talk a little bit about the kind of other aspects of the impact side of things and it's more kind of on the environmental. So you know at first glance it makes total sense anyway that something like this is going to be far, more, far cleaner than gas and diesel power generators. But can you put that in numbers? So maybe for you know the individual units, but also from a company perspective like what do you hope to offset with this?
Andreas Sedlmayr:Yeah, of course I can. So, first and foremost, we're talking about carbon dioxide, but there's also a lot of other pollutants that impact our health. So we still have 100,000 of premature deaths in Europe alone by bad air. To put it into the terms of the CARB, the California Air Resources Board, you can. Such a small portable gasoline generator emits the equivalent amount of local air pollutants while driving a passenger vehicle for 250 kilometers. It's everything that's below 19 kVa. So 19 kilowatts is barely regulated because people have not gotten to it. And now it only starts with the bands of generators. With looking closer into this, everyone was on the mobility side and this problem was often overlooked. But there's still 50 million of these engines brought into the field every year. It's the so-called non-road mobile machinery, or the CARB calls it. Sorry, small off-road engines and the fleet size in the whole world is estimated to be between one or two billion that are humming every day, polluting our planet.
Andreas Sedlmayr:And what we look at? We not only look into the use phase, which would be an easy thing to do, right, but batteries are also not where they should be. But batteries have only been started. So lithium-ion batteries the first commercially sold battery was available in 1991, where the combustion engine was already almost a century old. So we still have a way to go. But we are much earlier in the game and batteries will get much, much better over the next decades and have been getting much better over the last decade already. So we look at what, in a car term, you would say it's cradle to cradle. So we really look into from when this starts getting ores out of mines into manufacturing something, into using something, into recycling something. So we look at the full model.
Andreas Sedlmayr:One of the first 10 people that we hired was an environmental engineer and we have today our own certified lifecycle analysis. So we want a large EU grant and with this EU grant we want to prove that we improve the air cleanliness in urban environments. So we took 100 units, we equipped them with an IoT module and we took them out with our customers and let them run, and at the same time we did comparisons with a generator. So where you have the drive cycles in a car, something like this was not existing for us, so we had to come up with our own drive cycle and that's what we have today. It's certified by a certification institute, by a large, recognized certification institute, and today we can say like we're taking up to 97% of the CO2 equivalents of a generator.
Andreas Sedlmayr:It always depends on are you charging from the grid, what's your grid mix? Are you charging from solar? From where are you charging? But the baseline is very, very positive, mostly because batteries are much more efficient than generators. So what I told you before you can recharge our battery for less than a dollar, because it's two kilowatt hours and you basically have a round-trip efficiency of 93%. At the same time, you pour gasoline or diesel into the generator and the generator is idling a lot. So if a battery idles, it doesn't consume anything. If the generator idles, it consumes, and that's why you have to put $10 to $15 worth of gasoline into the generator every day, but most of it is just getting into polluting and not actually powering any of the tools, because you have idle times all of the time.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, I wanted to ask you about the lifecycle analysis because of course, with batteries you're sourcing precious metals through mining and that type of thing and recycling can be hard. But it's so interesting, you're doing full LCAs on this and presumably publishing results of what that looks like and how it stacks up to generators.
Andreas Sedlmayr:We do. We have an annual impact report that we launch every year around April time and happy for everyone that listens is interested to just go to our website, download it, read through it. We try to stay in very, very easy numbers to make sure everyone can understand what we're doing and we don't try to hide anything. And if we only look into, like, the production phase, the use phase is a differentiator in the thing. But looking only at how a generator is manufactured, how a battery is manufactured, we're, even so, a generator and a battery of our size, they're, they're basically flat when it only comes to that part. But then if you go into the use phase, then it's getting really, really good on our side due to the efficiencies.
Ryan Grant Little:I just want to go back to the use case of the people who are working with generators on things like construction sites right now. And you talk about this air pollution as being a silent killer for workforces, and I wonder, especially here in Europe, where workers' rights are considered kind of down to the last dotting of the I and crossing of the T, why do you think this is overlooked so much? I mean, it makes sense that if you're working next to something that's basically an exhaust pipe all day, that this is going to cause health problems. Why have we overlooked this?
Andreas Sedlmayr:Well, it's difficult to answer why we overlooked this, but I think it's interesting to see that other parts of the world don we overlook this, but I think it's interesting to see that other parts of the world don't overlook this. So the California Air Resources Board is, of course, very progressive in what they're doing, but they were the first ones to get that up and now that we're going into the US, we see that this is a general thing, right? So we talk to people in New York, we talk to people in Atlanta. They all get it and everyone is talking about breathing clean air, and I think we may have overlooked that in Europe because we don't have these mega cities, right? So I was living in Singapore and we had large projects on indoor air quality, on clean air outside in the street.
Andreas Sedlmayr:So all of these mega cities were suffering the last two decades already on bad air quality, which I think we have maybe Paris or London, where you have some days of bad air quality, but I think it's not as existent with us, but nevertheless, the new mayor of Paris she has banned generators in 2024 from the streets. So all of the film and media shots that have been done there with Netflix, tfr and all of the other companies they have been out of power. So we were able and lucky to get into the Clean Mobile initiative with Netflix and Disney and power some of their shots there with very, very good results, because people are more flexible, they don't have to like muffle or silence the noise from the generator next to the set and it was just amazing for them to see how they can improve their work and how they can do things that they couldn't even do before the company that you worked for before is Bosch, and that's, of course, one of Germany's kind of largest and most storied electronic and engineering companies.
Ryan Grant Little:And I want to contextualize Instagrid a little bit more as a German manufacturing company, because there's a long tradition of building high quality equipment in Germany, but a lot of that comes from that reputation comes from companies that were founded well over 100 years ago, so Bosch and BMW and companies like this and if you look at the news today, you see Germany is expected to underperform the Eurozone overall for at least the next couple of years. And then right now, as we're talking, you hear about the impending failure of one of its most ambitious hardware and potentially climate tech companies, the electric vertical takeoff and landing company called Lilium. Can you talk a little bit about what it's like to be a manufacturer in this space in Germany right now? Am I cherry picking, just bad news here, or are there causes for concern?
Andreas Sedlmayr:I would say both. First of all, we are not really a manufacturing company, so we have external contract manufacturers. So hardware is damn hard. As a startup, it's really like the hardest thing you can do. It's the most rewarding thing if it works. That's what I have realized, at least for myself. And at the same time, if there is no process that you need to own, if there's nothing that sets you apart with manufacturing, you shouldn't do it. You should play what we call the Apple model. You should look for your Foxconn and you should do everything on the design, on the certification and the sales and the marketing in-house. But you should outsource manufacturing to people that can do that better. Just to give you an idea, if we would have been the ones looking for screws, the right shape, the right size, the right cost, the right time at the right place in the very beginning, as a startup you see this as a beehive we wouldn't have been able to manufacture a single unit with this and we needed 10,000 units in the first year. So we really had to concentrate on people that really know how to do this. But there are enough companies in this, I think.
Andreas Sedlmayr:On the other topic, tides have changed, so we had this German Gründerzeit in around 1900. We had Robert Bosch and Gottlieb Daimler, and BSF was founded at that time as well, which you rightfully said. During that time it was a very confined space, so robert bosch was starting in stuttgart, he was working in stuttgart, his customer were close to stuttgart. We're much more global now, right, so we are really really good in germany in getting ideas right, but really, like an innovation is only an idea that's brought to life and marketed. So I think where germany is lacking right now is the marketing talent that you, for example, find in the us.
Andreas Sedlmayr:Right, so they might have other things that they need, but on our side, we're still having a lot of ideas here and I see it with pride in the companies around what they're doing, but at the same time, I sometimes wonder and struggle to believe that they couldn't get this to fruition, and it's mostly talking about it, advertising it, marketing something, because if nobody knows you have a great solution, how are they supposed to buy it? And that's basically what I think Germany can do better in the future. There are other things that will probably take the whole time of this podcast to discuss, but if there's one thing, then we have to bring these ideas to life again.
Ryan Grant Little:I think that's really well put and very interesting. Take I work with a lot of German startups in the climate tech space and a lot of the work is about simplifying the messaging and getting away from kind of like the engineering talk and more about kind of how are you solving a customer's problem? And one of the ways that I put it when I'm talking about this is look, a car is complicated, but when you see a car commercial you're not seeing. You know it's very rare that they lift up the hood and look underneath and go through kind of all of the dimensions and specifications. You talk about the user experience and then, once you've got people kind of connected to that, then you can go into like the due diligence on it basically, which is the kind of deeper side of things. So focusing on solving the customer's problem and then diving into why this is the right solution to do that rather than just starting with here are the technical specifications.
Andreas Sedlmayr:It's heartwarming, it's my talk. It's the PMF product market. Fit is the most important thing, and customers change. Large corporations can't change that fast, right? So my son's 10 years old now he's thinking about a car like a rolling iPhone. Okay, so he's not thinking about the gaps and everything has to be the same gaps, and so what Germans are really proud of? That manufacturing is no longer that important for the new generation. They want a rolling iPhone.
Ryan Grant Little:That's brilliant, I like that. So you've recently I guess maybe not recently, but at the beginning of this year closed a cool $95 million Series C round Congratulations, that's a huge round. It's maybe the largest round closed by anyone on this podcast so far. Talk a little bit about what that process was like. It's not the easiest fundraising environment.
Andreas Sedlmayr:I see the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund and my own old stomping ground in Canada participated. What was the process like? Well, first and foremost and I think advisors will not like that Sebastian and myself have done the fundraising ourselves all of the time because we think you have to be very close to that process Eventually. People always want to talk to the founders, want to hear their story, how they think about it, what they envision, and at the same time, we often laugh and say, okay, this is part of the MBA. We never did so.
Andreas Sedlmayr:Running a company and doing the fundraising is an MBA on the job, basically, and it's actually really fun doing this. So, understanding the other side, how capital flows, what you need to hit in order to get a certain company valuation, In other words, to get access to cheap capital and I think with the Series C it was very easy. So the first fundraisers are very hard because nobody knows you, Nobody has trust in you. You will have to prove product market fit and that's the first thing. You have to have paying customers show traction. There are other things you have to make sure you show during the next rounds, but it's basically the first round was are Andreas and Sebastian the right people and do they have the right idea. And the second round was already like can they bring it to life? And the third round was can they hire the right team and to expand that?
Andreas Sedlmayr:And now that round was more like really looking into global expansion, into departing from being a one trick pony and in being a full solution provider for mobile off-grid electricity.
Andreas Sedlmayr:And the funds that we were talking to, we knew them already. So you have events like the Eco Summit, like the Energy Tech Summit, where you meet those people and, at the same time, the investors you already have. They have other investors that they talk to. So when we put a long list up for that financing round, it was very easy to put that long list up and then we were already in contact with many of these. So you don't show up all of a sudden. You already tease that quarter by quarter, show them the new results, how everything is growing, so you keep on their radar. And then we basically started with the fundraising round and had a very good discussion with a lot of investors and then decided for the two new investors that we thought put most value on the table for us, which is not only monetary but which is also now we're moving into the US, how much access can we gain to relevant customers and to relevant regulators and everyone in the US, North America, Canada, Mexico, and that has been working really, really well.
Ryan Grant Little:So keeping in touch with potential investors maybe even people who have passed that on earlier rounds but could be a good fit for later rounds building that relationship, showing momentum, leading the process yourselves as founders and then, when the moment's right, choosing the ones who are most strategic for your business in terms of opening new markets or whatever it may be. So those are maybe three tips that I would pull out of that for other founders who are leading rounds. Anything else you would add?
Andreas Sedlmayr:No, no, it's exactly that, and I think you have to be aware of your own skills. So somebody once said, like you're investment bankers, so we probably have a couple of talents, but that's one of them. If you don't have the talent, you shouldn't do it right. You should get an advisor, but that's usually something that your board will discuss with you in later rounds on how to structure that. But those are basically the three things I would say. And then I mean, we've read all of the books Bradfeld, venture Deals and everything and there are lots of things that are advised not to do and we still did some of them right. So you can't. If you don't put your hand over the kettle, you don't know it's hot right.
Andreas Sedlmayr:So a little bit of it a little bit of it always happens. But it's good to talk to other people. I've talked to a lot of founders on fundraisers, on I mean, we also. It's not only that the new funds want references for us, so they always call Bosch and other. We also call their founders, that they back and ask them about the funds. How is it working with them? What does do the board meetings look like? So it's a due diligence that's both sided.
Ryan Grant Little:One of the questions I asked an investor when I was a founder back in the day, at an investor that was interested in investing in us is what's your least successful investment so far? And then he answered that and I said can you introduce me to the founder, because it's very interesting to see how you know? And then I talked to the founder of that and he was like, yeah, yeah, I mean we didn't have product market fit, it didn't make sense for a number of reasons, but they were great all the way through and that's I mean. That says a lot more when, when there's success, it's easier to be the good guys, right?
Andreas Sedlmayr:yeah, I mean success has many parents. You say right. So whenever you're successful everyone knew whenever you're going through a hard phase and I mean I think any startup has have lots of experiences where you're close to death then you survive and you survive again. You just mentioned Lilium, of course. So there have been lots of companies in the last 12 months that we looked at and said like, oh my God, another hardware company going down. But not only hardware companies.
Andreas Sedlmayr:Also the climate tech sector makes it much more difficult now to get investments. But also, especially in the climate tech sector, it's important that you have a solution that's not only a wet dream in the next 30 years, but something that you can action now. And that's what we offered our investors. We said it's something that you can have today. Right, and the teachers? They have 250 billion under management and they have some of the largest airports with them and they show the product in the due diligence to their people and they say, well, we can use it tomorrow, we can work faster, we can save money, we can increase productivity and we basically stop polluting the environment and, at the same time, we take the pollution away from our people and keep them safe. So if you have something like this and you're actually earning money, you show there is a market already. That's the route to impact, because before you have environmental impact you will have to have financial impact, because without that you're not going to get the funding to get into environmental impact.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, well put, that's not the only feather in your cap, this funding, but you've also become a B Corp recently, and so that's a way of cementing your commitment to social and environmental best practices and also measuring and reporting on these, as we kind of talked about why now and what was that process like?
Andreas Sedlmayr:Well, first and foremost, you need to be able to get that certification, so the likelihood has to be high.
Andreas Sedlmayr:So don't get me wrong, but it's really going through.
Andreas Sedlmayr:A B Corp certification is really a hard thing that we were willing to do and happy to do, and we're totally proud today because if you talk to these people that work here, they're basically all driven by environmental stewardship right.
Andreas Sedlmayr:So that's really one of their core goals and social fairness is one of them. So if that's the common denominator, then it is very, very essential to become a certified B Corp and to just prove that we are not only saying something but we are doing something. And we decided to do that in a time where we had a lot of other things to do as well, because we're growing another 100% and growing from 500,000 revenue to a million revenue is not the same like growing from 30 million to 60 million but we felt now is the time to do that, and now we are ready to do that. We have everything lined up in a way that this is a smooth transition, but nevertheless, I'm really happy also to say that they didn't give us an easy time. It's really, if you go through that, you can rightfully say that you're doing the right things and doing the things that a B certification basically claims.
Ryan Grant Little:That's great to hear. Yeah, you're also expanding very quickly right now into North America, probably learning a lot about differences between North America and Europe in terms of business climate, how things are done, how deals are done. Any observations there that you could share for some other founders who are about to make that leap?
Andreas Sedlmayr:Well, a lot, and I think we need another podcast for everything. The most important thing is something that I learned already with my old company If you have a business in the US, or if you have a business in any Asian country, but if you have a business that you can't relate to as easily, but sometimes you think you can, you should let this run by someone that's skilled in the art. So I was in the US. I was doing a three month trip getting product market fit right, interviewing customers, getting all of what we have done here to lay the groundwork for huge success. But then I handed everything over to a US CEO. So I brought in someone that is a US citizen, has lived in the US for most of his life, has worked in the clean energy space before and can just do the talk right. So he has been at a university there. He's played in a football game Everything that I can just do the talk right. So he has been at a university there. He's played in a football game everything that I can't do. So I'm still there.
Andreas Sedlmayr:I'm flying over frequently to support and I'm help closing the deal, pushing customers and getting them happy, but the day-to-day work, the day-to-day operations are run by a US person and the rest of the team is also US. That's really important. That can be a struggle if you think about culture. So how do you end up with a culture that shares the same values? I just talked about environmental stewardship and social fairness.
Andreas Sedlmayr:So this is really what we try still to have and that's why we're also flying over frequently and rich here today. So we have very, very frequent discussions. But that was one of the first things to do and I've seen a lot of founders that didn't do that. So a lot of founders said, okay, I'm moving to the US, I'm going to solve this and I've seen this with my old company that we were not gaining market share and every three years another expat was flown over to solve this right. But if I would have been in charge, I would have tried to take a local person and see how that works and maybe it would have worked better. I can't tell you now, but it's at least our approach on how we do this.
Ryan Grant Little:And do you think it's because of the relationships that they've built over time? Or the nuance, the cultural nuances, like you said, having played in a football game?
Andreas Sedlmayr:Yeah, I think so. I mean it's like I've lived in Singapore and in Asian culture you often say yes, but some yes mean no right, and you've only arrived if you can interpret which yes is a no, and so something like this is also in the US and the US is more difficult because we look like Americans, so we look like white Americans, and first and foremost you would say, okay, then we can do the talk. But it's often not like that right, and if you go in somewhere we've just toured the West Coast of the US and you go in somewhere and Rich comes in with his Bengals shirt, people already start discussing with him on the Bengals, how they played against their team. This is like a level that you don't get easily. If you're German and say, oh, I know the 49ers, that's not going to work right and that's really one important thing.
Andreas Sedlmayr:Also, as a founder, it's damn hard to let things go and to trust people, but that's really really important to do this. You can start this in small portions, but eventually you important to do this. You can do this. You can start this in small portions, but eventually you have to do this. If you don't do this, I think what many founders don't understand. They're not scalable. You can't scale people, or a single person at least, and so that's really where you have to build a very, very strong team. And that's also in the last financing round, I think Sebastian and myself, we were still really important to central people.
Ryan Grant Little:But without that team and without getting the proof point, we've hired the right people to lead these and I would ask how did it go? Great, great.
Andreas Sedlmayr:They kept saying interesting and I said oh, if they're saying interesting, that means they're definitely not interested.
Andreas Sedlmayr:Yeah, right, and that's what you have to read, right. And other than that, I think it's the whole spirit. So the US has problems of their own, but when it comes to business they are really everyone is like venture driven so and people we talk to them, be it in Texas, be it in California, they're open to test it and say, well, we just try it. If it works for us, it works, if it doesn't work, it doesn't. So getting that sentence from a European customer is much more difficult In the US. They're much more open.
Andreas Sedlmayr:But of course you then also have to follow up and make sure the value proposition is right and everything. But getting value proposition is right and everything but getting that first risk. So, okay, it's a $3,000 battery, I'm still testing it. If it works, I'm going to buy 10 of them. That's really something that you get more easily in the US because people know what's at stake. People have been working with bad battery solutions and a lot of combustion, much more combustion than we had here in Europe, and that's really cool to see how this is picking up and how we have, like, large utilities already asking for quotes of 500 units because they want to replace a whole fleet of 500 generators.
Ryan Grant Little:Andreas, what can people do to help with your mission right now? Are you hiring? Are you expanding into additional markets? What can listeners do if they want to help?
Andreas Sedlmayr:Yeah, I think right now we're pretty good stuffed in many positions, but of course we're now looking into growing into other countries, into other territories. So we are mostly hiring on sales functions right now and they should be open on our website and that's basically the game for next year until we release a new product in the year after.
Ryan Grant Little:Amazing Andreas. Thank you so much for talking today.
Andreas Sedlmayr:Hey, thank you, Ryan.
Ryan Grant Little:Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.
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