Building a Power Company for the Next 50 Years | Zach Dell, Base Power

1. 0:00 – 6:15

   Energy Abundance & the Power Demands of AI

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      [upbeat music] So out of every single guest on the show so far, yours is the business that I understand the least. So let's use this conversation as an opportunity to fix that. Explain what you're working on, and like what your mission, and how you're doing it.

   2. ZDZach Dell0:14

      Yeah. So the grid is, is something in the power system and, and electricity broadly is a topic that a lot of people don't understand, and it's, it's pretty common. I think that's because there's a ton of nuance to it. It's a very old system. It's highly regulated, and so it's not something that is in kind of natural common zeitgeist. The truth is our business is, is very simple. We're in the business of making and delivering megawatts, and our megawatts are the most affordable and reliable megawatts in the world on the planet. At least that's our ambition. And our mission is to power human prosperity by driving energy abundance. And we look to a very simple correlation between consumption of energy per capita and GDP per capita. And the takeaway is that the more energy a population is able to consume, the better their life gets. And so if you can make megawatts, gigawatts, terawatts, uh, more affordable and reliable, it's the best way to make people's lives better. And that's a mission that we have all rallied around and gotten super passionate about. We think about things in terms of a mission, a vision, and a strategy, right? So the mission is why are we all here? We're all here to fix the grid and deliver affordable, reliable power, and promote human prosperity by driving energy abundance.

   3. DSDavid Senra1:27

      Before we go further, why-- t-explain why the grid needs fixing. What's the problem with it now?

   4. ZDZach Dell1:31

      It's not that it's broken. It's that it's too small.

   5. DSDavid Senra1:34

      How could something as important as electricity and power not be something that we can scale? Like, how did we get into this situation to begin with?

   6. ZDZach Dell1:41

      I think because, um, capitalism hasn't, hasn't been able to work its magic on the industry because it's, it's highly regulated, and the companies around it that have built it don't have an incentive to innovate. They're not, uh, they're rate regulated, and they get paid on, on CapEx, not on R&D, right? And so the amount of money that they spend on R&D as a percent, uh, percentage of their revenue is like as low as any industry you'll ever find, right? They're not engineering-led organizations. They're CapEx. They're kind of project management and, and CapEx-oriented organizations. And so there has not been a bunch of innovation in how can we scale our capacity to consume electricity? It's just like, how do we go build as fast as we can and earn a return on, on that building? We exist to change that, right? We are an energy technology company that is R&D-driven, engineering-led, and technology-focused, and we are going to build technology that allows us to scale our consumption of electricity, deliver more megawatts that are reliable and affordable, and help, help meet the moment of the inflection in electricity demand.

   7. DSDavid Senra2:39

      Okay. So that, that's-- While you were talking, that's what I was thinking. I was like, okay, so there's this huge surge and cont-it will continue. We need more, uh, power and electricity because everything going on with AI. Before that, was there any other inflection point, or did the, the, the demand for electricity in the United States just kind of grow like linearly?

   8. ZDZach Dell2:57

      Over the last fifty years, demand for electricity in the US has grown at basically the rate of inflation, so it has not really grown much. Um-

   9. DSDavid Senra3:06

      Okay, so this is the first-- this is like a once time in his-one time in history, uh, problem that's happening right now.

   10. ZDZach Dell3:12

       I think that there was underlying growth kind of coming or, or at least starting to come from the electrification of transportation, uh, and electric vehicles. Uh, but that's played out less quickly than some might have thought. I think that will continue to play out as the cost goes down. And things like, you know, electric heat pumps and electrification of, of heavy industry will, will drive electricity demand, but the, the AI infrastructure build-out has massively accelerated it.

   11. DSDavid Senra3:34

       Can you explain like how big the demand is for electricity for AI?

   12. ZDZach Dell3:38

       I mean, we don't have-

   13. DSDavid Senra3:38

       Like, I don't even know. I hear about it, but I don't know like-

   14. ZDZach Dell3:40

       Yeah, so I mean, the way to think about it is like over the last twenty years, electricity demand has grown at roughly a two percent compounded annual growth rate. And, you know, we think it'll go to, you know, somewhere on the order of ten percent, which is obviously a five X, which on a base as large as energy is, is really, really, really big.

   15. DSDavid Senra3:53

       Okay, so then go back to your-- the mission vision.

   16. ZDZach Dell3:55

       Yeah. So, so we, we think about it in terms of, you know, the mission, the vision, and the strategy, right?

   17. DSDavid Senra3:58

       Mm-hmm.

   18. ZDZach Dell3:58

       The mission is why you're here. We're here to promote human prosperity by driving energy abundance, which basically just means deliver affordable and reliable power. The vision is, what does that even mean? Like, what does that actually look like? And what that looks like is the modern power company of the electric era, right? We think that there's a generational kind of paradigm shift happening in the energy industry, where the last five decades of energy were defined by coal and then natural gas as the marginal megawatt, and the next five decades will be defined by solar, batteries, and software. And we are going to build that company that is oriented around that new paradigm. And then the strategy is how, how do we win? Like, what is our competitive approach? Uh, what is our formula for success? And I would describe that as developing a compounding cost advantage through vertical integration and technology. And the reason why that is a strategy is because energy, electricity is a commodity, and the best commodity is the least expensive, most reliable commodity.

   19. DSDavid Senra4:54

       Yeah.

   20. ZDZach Dell4:54

       Right? And so we've oriented the entire business around the fundamentals of the industry, which is to develop a cost advantage, use technology, use vertical integration, oriented all around the mission of human prosperity and energy abundance. And then, you know, in the last three years, something interesting has happened, which is a new consumer of electricity has showed up, and it's now the fastest growing and soon going to be the largest consumer of electricity in the world, and its name is AI. And so we're going to orient the company around that to serve that demand and, and meet that moment so that we can continue to expand our AI infrastructure and accelerate all the incredible advances that will come as a result of this technology, which I think is the greatest technological breakthrough of our lifetime.

   21. DSDavid Senra5:35

       So explain how you're reorienting the company around that.

   22. ZDZach Dell5:38

       Well, it's less of a reorientation and more of a using all the technology that we're already building and planning to build to accelerate the build-out of AI infrastructure by bringing the, the power to the compute, uh, and bringing the compute to the power. Uh, and, and what this means is accelerating the build-out of these centralized data centers by deploying our megawatts around those data centers and offsetting that load, so we can add headroom to the system, so we can build more of it. And then taking that compute hardware and actually bringing it to this massive fleet of, of energy that we've developed, uh, to accelerate the deployment of it.

2. 6:15 – 9:09

   How Batteries Make the Grid More Efficient

   1. DSDavid Senra6:15

      Okay. So how do you generate more power then?

   2. ZDZach Dell6:19

      So there are really two distinct things to think about here. There's generation and then there's transmission and distribution, right? So generation is, is where the new electrons come from, right? Solar, wind, gas, coal, geothermal, hydroelectric. There's tons of different ways to-- fusion, fission. There's a bunch of different ways to generate e-energy, and then you have to move it, right? And poles and wires move energy through space, and batteries move energy through time. The grid is a system by which the transmission and distribution happens, and it's built for the peak, so it's massively oversized, which means that you have a bunch of inefficiency in that it's not being used all the time. It's not being highly utilized. And when you have a system that runs at low utilization, it makes the system very expensive. Batteries allow you to increase the utilization of that system because you can charge them when demand is really low, and you can discharge them when demand is really high. And so you can take, you know, the curve of demand, and you can flatten it, and therefore you can lower the total delivered cost because the capacity factor, as it's called in the industry, or the utilization has gone up. So with our current product set today focused on battery storage, we're not making more electricity, we're just using it more efficiently-

   3. DSDavid Senra7:29

      Okay, wait.

   4. ZDZach Dell7:29

      To drive the cost down.

   5. DSDavid Senra7:30

      So if I'm understanding, we're like the optimization here is not-- you're not adding more, uh, lines and wires. You're actually just optimizing the existing system better through batteries.

   6. ZDZach Dell7:41

      Exactly.

   7. DSDavid Senra7:41

      Okay.

   8. ZDZach Dell7:41

      We're taking-- There's a ma-- like think about in the middle of the day in Texas-

   9. DSDavid Senra7:46

      Like right now it's hot as hell outside.

   10. ZDZach Dell7:47

       It's hot as hell outside.

   11. DSDavid Senra7:48

       [laughing]

   12. ZDZach Dell7:48

       The sun is high in the sky, and if you go to ercot.com and you go look at the prices, I bet you wholesale prices are really low, and that's because we have a ton of solar in the state. It's amazing, right? And so we're charging our batteries right now. Not-- I can't tell you that for sure, but like we, we are most likely charging, you know, during the solar ramp today, right? When like the prices go down. And then when the sun goes down tonight and everyone goes home and they turn on their AC from work, prices are gonna go up 'cause demand is going up and supply is going down, right? So the sun is down, the solar is no longer producing. Prices go up. We discharge the batteries. So we didn't create new electricity, but we time-shifted it.

   13. DSDavid Senra8:21

       What was happening before?

   14. ZDZach Dell8:23

       We were-

   15. DSDavid Senra8:23

       Power companies were doing nothing?

   16. ZDZach Dell8:25

       Well, we are-- we were just using the system less efficiently. So we were, you know, curtailing solar. We still are cur-curtailing solar. And there's a bunch of, uh, excess generation that's happening in the middle of the day where that's why prices go so low is because we're, we're, we're generating more solar than we can use, but we can't time shift that to be used when the sun goes down, uh, in, in, in the evenings.

   17. DSDavid Senra8:46

       So that's why you're obsessed with batteries.

   18. ZDZach Dell8:48

       And I, I've been obsessed with batteries since college. And batteries have been around, you know, for decades. And actually, you know, John B. Goodenough, the original, uh, PhD scientist who, who worked on the LFP battery chemistry-

   19. DSDavid Senra9:01

       Hold on. His name was Goodenough?

   20. ZDZach Dell9:02

       Goodenough. [laughing]

   21. DSDavid Senra9:03

       [laughing]

   22. ZDZach Dell9:03

       Goodenough.

   23. DSDavid Senra9:04

       Okay.

   24. ZDZach Dell9:04

       Uh, may he rest in peace. Uh, he was a professor at the University of Texas, just down the street.

3. 9:09 – 15:34

   Early Ventures & the Insight Behind Base

   1. DSDavid Senra9:09

      Okay. So what-- how, how does a kid get obsessed with battery cell?

   2. ZDZach Dell9:13

      I mean, it's kind of a long story, [laughs] but-

   3. DSDavid Senra9:14

      We have time.

   4. ZDZach Dell9:15

      I guess we have time. Uh, look, I mean, as you know, and we talked about a bunch, I mean, growing up I was always obsessed with big, hard problems and just trying to-- And that was always what I-- my, my understanding of capitalism and company building was just organizing people around the hardest problems. And the bigger the problem, the larger the economic outcome downstream of the solution. And I watched my dad do it, and I watched him, you know, totally inflect the, the PC industry, and now what he's doing with, with the AI infrastructure build-out and the server business, and that was always my strongest motivation. I mean, he was my hero, and he's still my hero, and I always wanted to be like him, and there's, you know, uh, there's just no, no two ways about it. Like, I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I mean, I started my first company in eighth grade, uh, and I started my second company my sophomore year of high school, and I started my third company my sophomore year of college, and basically none of them worked, but I was just learning stuff and just trying to get out there and solve problems. And in college I was working on a business to-- and, you know, business in air quotes is more of a science project. It was not really a good commercial idea, um, to convert human waste into compressed methane or biogas that could be used as a source of low cost electricity in the rural world because I was obsessed with this idea of, um, providing people with access to low cost power that didn't have it because it was this obvious way to make their life better. And around that time, I was just-- I was really kind of, you know, nerd sniped, for lack of a better phrase, by solar. I thought solar was the coolest thing ever, and solar was great, but the problem with the sun is that it goes away, uh, unless you're in space, and so you need a mechanism by which you can use that energy that's produced when the solar-- when the sun is out at times when the sun is not there, and batteries are the, are, are the answer. And battery technology, you know, most of the batteries in the early days, you know, you had a lot of different chemistries out there, and you had iron air, and you had solid state, and then you had this kind of NMC high nickel el, uh, lithium-ion chemistry catch a lot of steam. And most of the EVs in the e- early EV build-out were this high nickel NMC chemistry, and only in the last five years or so, this low nickel LFP chemistry, which, um, is really better for stationary storage. It's safer, it's longer duration, started to emerge. When I was in college, I was really excited about solar, really excited about batteries. In fact, I tried to put together a deal as a, you know, twenty-one-year-old college kid to go lease a piece of land on, uh, the big island of Hawaii, which has really low cost land and really high cost electricity, build a solar array. Actually, it was gonna be EPCd at the time by SolarCity, who was doing a lot of utility scale EPC.

   5. DSDavid Senra11:38

      This is before they sold to Tesla?

   6. ZDZach Dell11:40

      Yes.

   7. DSDavid Senra11:41

      Okay.

   8. ZDZach Dell11:41

      And sign a power purchase agreement with Hawaii Electric, which is a twenty-year BPA, and then go finance the whole project at, uh, you know, ninety percent loan to value and, you know, earn a twenty percent lowered IRR. And I, you know, in college- So, you know, after I'm working on this project in India, I end up going into, to finance, uh, you know, down the intern... Basically, it was like, "Okay, this business isn't going to work. Before I start another company, I need to go learn about good businesses. And so I'm gonna go to the place where I can find the smartest people that work the hardest, and I'm just gonna sit next to them and just work my butt off and try to get smarter, basically, and build tools for my toolkit."

   9. DSDavid Senra12:14

      But you knew no matter what you were gonna be an entrepreneur.

   10. ZDZach Dell12:16

       For sure.

   11. DSDavid Senra12:16

       Okay.

   12. ZDZach Dell12:16

       There's no question. I never-- There's no-- I was never like, "Oh, I'm gonna be a private equity partner at Blackstone one day."

   13. DSDavid Senra12:20

       No, but you are one of the one, you know, 'cause we talk a bunch also, but you are one of the, uh, of all my founder friends that talk the most like a PE guy. [laughs]

   14. ZDZach Dell12:30

       You take the kid out of Blackstone, but not the Blackstone out of the kid, I guess. I, I, I do love-

   15. DSDavid Senra12:33

       Yeah.

   16. ZDZach Dell12:33

       I'm very quantitative and I'm competitive.

   17. DSDavid Senra12:35

       Yeah.

   18. ZDZach Dell12:35

       And I love, I love markets and companies, and I think that's because I grew up studying companies and markets and-

   19. DSDavid Senra12:39

       Yeah.

   20. ZDZach Dell12:40

       Uh, like any good, you know, young Jewish boy, I took my bar mitzvah money and put it in the stock market and, you know, tracked companies and it's like, you know, still manage a PA that I have a lot of fun, you know, following companies.

   21. DSDavid Senra12:50

       Yeah.

   22. ZDZach Dell12:50

       I, I just love studying businesses and what makes good businesses. And like you-

   23. DSDavid Senra12:52

       Okay

   24. ZDZach Dell12:53

       ... you know, a big fan of, you know, the Berkshire letters and, you know, the Amazon shareholder letters-

   25. DSDavid Senra12:56

       Yeah

   26. ZDZach Dell12:56

       ... and, you know, the Constellation letters, and would devour those things. And, and so it was more of I, I'm so interested in finance and accounting and investing and capital allocation because it is a necessary skill to be a great CEO of a capital-intensive business, right? And that was always why I, I've been interested in, in those things. And so long story short, I'm in college and I go, you know, intern at Blackstone, I get the return offer, I'm back in college before going back to Blackstone, and I'm like, "Oh, I know how to use spreadsheets now," and whatever. And so I build a model, a memo, slides for this like solar project, and I go to New York and I go get in touch with a bunch of, like, project finance teams at these big banks, and I go pitch them on my, you know, thirty-million-dollar loan that I want to go build the solar array in Hawaii. And they're all like... And you know, I, I get some meetings, and it's nice people will take the meeting with this college kid, and I present my model and my memo, and they're like, "Who's gonna run this project? Like, like, where's your team?" I was like, "Oh, I am. Like, I'm gonna-- What are you talking about? I'm gonna just do it, and I have everything figured out, and here's the, the memo." And they're like, "You're gonna go be an analyst at Blackstone. Like, this isn't..." And I got basically laughed out of the room by everybody. But I was dead serious. I was like, "This is the, the math pencils." And I think that would've been a great investment and it would've worked. Uh, but, like, was very bullish on solar economics back then. And I show up at Blackstone, and there's a bunch of people who are kind of poking around the battery industry, the supply chain. You know, we, we, we looked at carving out a lithium mine, which I spent a bunch of time on. Uh, the firm ended up buying a business that's now one of the largest utility scale battery developers in the country. And I got really excited about what was happening in the battery space. But there was this obvious issue with utility scale batteries. And when I say utility scale batteries, I mean big shipping containers in a farm field somewhere. And you can probably think about what that looks like, and you've seen pictures of that. And that's been a really good asset class over the last decade or two. And there's, you know, basically every big private equity firm has a utility scale battery platform, Apollo and KKR and Blackstone, Oaktree, and all these guys, Ares, Brookfield. They all own these assets and they, you know, they're highly levered and they're, they're a nice return, but they're fundamentally constrained really by, by two things. One is interconnection capacity. So there's not enough places on the grid to go put these big shipping containers. And the second is transmission congestion. These big load pockets like downtown Austin, downtown Dallas, downtown Houston, where you need the power, that's not where you can put the shipping container battery, right? And so you have transmission congestion, which shows up in pricing, and you're unable to get the power where you need it at the right time. And so that really showed me or kind of brought to light the insight around a distributed architecture. Deploying batteries, deploying at the-

   27. DSDavid Senra15:22

       Inside the actual house.

   28. ZDZach Dell15:24

       Where the interconnection exists, where the load is.

   29. DSDavid Senra15:26

       Got it.

   30. ZDZach Dell15:27

       Right? And so you don't have to, to, to worry about the, the transmission problem, and you don't have to worry about the interconnection problem.
4. 15:34 – 22:25

   We Don’t Sell Batteries. We Sell Electricity.

   1. DSDavid Senra15:34

      said that.

   2. ZDZach Dell15:34

      So then I started studying the distributed battery world and the residential battery world, and I looked at every company in the space and, you know, read the 10-Ks and, uh, the S-1s and, you know, talked to the analysts. And you learn that, you know, the, the publicly traded companies and, and, and, and, and all the companies in the space, they're all selling a high margin premium product. It's a twenty-thousand-dollar home battery or a twenty-thousand-dollar home generator that they sell you outright, they make a gross margin on and, and they're done. And they're not, they're not actually building it like infrastructure. They're not u-utilizing it like infrastructure. And so it was this aha moment of like, oh, the distributed architecture is the answer. And all the companies that are around that problem, they're focused on the wrong business model. They're focused on high margin upfront sales. And then I start getting really excited because I'm like, oh my God, if you're gonna take on an incumbent, my view is the best way to do it is to have a counter-positioned business model. Because if I showed up and said, "I have, you know, the best home battery on the market or the best home generator on the market, and I'm gonna sell it to you for ten percent below the big guys," your margin is my opportunity, right? Like, these, these big guys are just gonna compete on price. They're gonna, first they're gonna copy my product if it's better, then they're gonna drop their price and they're gonna run me outta business. But if I show up and say, "I don't sell batteries, I sell electricity, and we're gonna install this battery in your home. When the grid's up and running, we use it. As a result, you get cheap electricity. When the grid goes down, you use it. And because of our different business model, you pay one-twentieth or even one-fortieth of what you'd pay to own it outright," then I can win. And if you wanna compete with me, and you're one of the incumbents, you've gotta completely change your business model. Which as you know, for a public company is very hard, right? Because you go to Wall Street, you go to Wall Street and you say, "We've been making money this way for the last decade, and now we're gonna make money in an entirely new way," typically, Wall Street doesn't like that very much. So I got really excited about this setup of this distributed architecture, this counter-positioned business model, and then the opportunity to really put it out in the universe and, and go after an opportunity that not only was large in scale, but in importance and impact on the world. Uh, back to the point around human prosperity, energy abundance, energy consumption per capita, GDP per capita, and that correlation.

   3. DSDavid Senra17:38

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   4. ZDZach Dell20:56

      The way that I thought about the business model, and Justin and I, the way we, we thought about it from the beginning, is it just starts with the customer and what they want, right? If I ask you, David, "What would you like out of your power company?" My guess is you'd say something like, "I want my bill to go down, and I want to never lose electricity." Is there anything else you want out of your power company?

   5. DSDavid Senra21:14

      No.

   6. ZDZach Dell21:14

      No, right? And so how do we deliver that outcome for you? Well, if I sell you the battery, you're not a wholesale power market participant. You're not a qualified scheduling entity or a load scheduling entity, and you don't have a hedging team and a trading desk, and you're not thinking about commodity prices, right? And so you can't actually use that battery ninety-nine percent of the time when the grid is up and running to your benefit. You can't use it to lower your power prices, right? It just sits there on your home, and then when an outage happens, awesome, you have backup that you paid twenty grand for, and you probably feel like you overpaid a little bit, but, like, you're happy. By us owning the battery, we can use it the ninety-nine percent of the time that the grid is up and running as a wholesale power market asset, and then we can leverage the value of that to lower your bill, to drop your price, 'cause we're creating value. It's like we have a box on your house that is going to generate money, and we're gonna share the money with you in the form of a lower electricity bill. It's really that simple. So the asset ownership model is not because, you know, we're greedy or we, we really just, like, wanna own things. It's because it's the way to deliver the best product to the customer, and that's all that matters.

   7. DSDavid Senra22:17

      Yeah, in, in an industry where they don't really give a shit about the customer because they're a monopoly in m- in most cases.

   8. ZDZach Dell22:22

      Yes. It's complicated.

5. 22:25 – 30:44

   How Base Works With Utilities & Competes for Customers

   1. ZDZach Dell22:25

      So first of all, there's, you know, regulated and deregulated states.

   2. DSDavid Senra22:29

      We were talking about this before we started recording. This is really interesting. Can you explain this?

   3. ZDZach Dell22:32

      So there's regulated and deregulated states in the US. If you look, it's kind of a history lesson here, but if you, you look back, you know, over fifty years, electricity is one of the few industries in the US that did not get entirely deregulated. Shipping, uh, airlines, telecom, trucking, uh, you know, electricity in the, in the late nineties, early two thousands, actually in California, deregulation, uh, started there, and basically Enron manipulated the market and kind of busted the power market in California and deregulated-- deregulation, like, totally stopped, and Rick Perry and George Bush in Texas, like, carried the torch of deregulation, and the Public Utility Commission in Texas pushed this kind of competitive, competitive market construct. Now, it's gonna get even more complicated. In Texas, eighty percent of the market is deregulated. Twenty percent of the market is still regulated. So Austin Energy is a municipal utility. So we sit here in Austin in our office that is served by Austin Energy. We cannot be the electricity provider to Austin Energy. Same thing in San Antonio. CPS is the municipal utility there. Same thing in Georgetown. Georgetown Electric is the municipal utility there. There's another category of utility called a co-op or a cooperative. This is more in the rural areas, uh, but now there's, there's really big cooperatives like CoServ, who's a customer of ours, or Pedernales Electric Co-op. That's the largest co-op in the country, also in Texas. And these are-- think of them as kind of nonprofits that operate for the benefit of the members. All the members, like a cooperative, are owners of the, of the, of the cooperative, and their job is to lower rates. And so in Texas, you have eighty percent of the market, Houston, Dallas, North Austin, Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP territory, that is deregulated, competitive. You can sign up to be an energy retailer. You can sell power to anybody. You have the generators who operate the gas plants, the coal plants, and the nuclear plants, and they sell power to a retail provider, uh, like, like us. Directly to the consumer. And then you have the municipal utilities in Austin and San Antonio and Georgetown. You have the co-ops, uh, CoServ, Guadalupe Valley Electric Co-op, Farmers Electric. These are all customers of ours. And-

   4. DSDavid Senra24:25

      What do you mean by customers of yours?

   5. ZDZach Dell24:27

      So we build battery fleets for the utilities that they use in the same way that we do. So for CoServ Electric, for example, we have built them or are in the process of building them a hundred megawatt and soon to be expanded fleet of batteries that they use in the same way that we do in the deregulated markets. They charge the batteries when the price of power is low, they dis-discharge the batteries when the price of power is high. They make money on the spread. They share that spread with their members in the form of lower prices.

   6. DSDavid Senra24:52

      And they're the ones installing your batteries, or you still do the installations?

   7. ZDZach Dell24:54

      We install them-

   8. DSDavid Senra24:55

      Okay.

   9. ZDZach Dell24:55

      We install the fleet for them.

   10. DSDavid Senra24:56

       Okay.

   11. ZDZach Dell24:56

       So we build them this fleet. So it's much like them going and saying, "I need a hundred megawatts of utility scale battery." Instead of the big shipping container battery, we go put thousands of batteries on their service territory, and we give them a piece of software, basepowercompany.com/coserv. They can go in, they see their whole fleet, they can charge, discharge, they can schedule behavior of the fleet, and it's a wholesale power asset that they can use to lower prices, and then they get the reliability benefit for their homeowners.

   12. DSDavid Senra25:19

       Okay. And so that, that was gonna be my next question. They're-- You're only installing right now batteries on ho- individual homes, correct?

   13. ZDZach Dell25:25

       That's right.

   14. DSDavid Senra25:25

       Are you doing any- anything else besides that at the moment?

   15. ZDZach Dell25:28

       Today, we're only focused on residential homes.

   16. DSDavid Senra25:30

       Okay.

   17. ZDZach Dell25:30

       Yeah.

   18. DSDavid Senra25:30

       Okay.

   19. ZDZach Dell25:31

       So, so back to the, to, to the market setup. You know, in the, in the early two thousands, you had this deregulation push. Texas really carried the torch. A couple other states in the, in the Midwest, Ohio and, and Illinois, and in the northeast, Pennsylvania, uh, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, parts of New York, but it's, it's kinda complicated, all deregulated to an extent. Not all of them, uh, and, and none of them really as far as, as Texas. Texas is kinda the most competitive and deregulated. That's why we decided to start here. And relative to the, to the deregulated markets, we compete with the retail energy providers, uh, the gen tailers, Vistra, Constellation, NRG. Uh, and then in the regulated markets, we are a vendor to the utilities, and we're a partner to them. And you're totally right. They don't have an incentive to innovate and go build a factory and come up with new kinds of batteries and technology 'cause that's not how they're set up to earn. They're rate regulated.

   20. DSDavid Senra26:16

       Explain why they don't have the incentive to do so.

   21. ZDZach Dell26:19

       Yeah. So if you had a utility that had a monopoly ownership over a service territory, for example, let's say, you know, PG&E has all of California, which is not exactly true. There's LADWP in, in, in Southern California. There's SoCal Edison as well, but let's say PG&E for the, for, uh, the illustrative example, has, uh, um, a monopoly over all of, of California. They can just raise rates indefinitely and just, like, jack profits and, you know, that would be bad for consumers. And so instead, you have this concept of the rate base, where there's a public utility commission that kind of governs the utility, tells them what they can build and what they can't build, and then they earn a return that's regulated, and it's typically, you know, nine percent unlevered on the CapEx they deploy. So they go to the, to the regulator, and they file what's called a rate case, which is like, "We need to build all this stuff to meet demand and to upgrade the system." And the regulator says, "Yes, you can build that." And then they go build it, and they earn a return on it. And so there's no financial incentive for them to come up with new technology. Their only financial incentive is to go increase the size of the rate base-

   22. DSDavid Senra27:19

       Yeah

   23. ZDZach Dell27:19

       ... and go build more assets. And so we show up and say, "We are your technology partner. We are your outsourced R&D engine. We're going to bring to you better solutions so that you can scale your infrastructure without increasing rates for your ratepayers." And that's how we serve the regulated utilities. So today our business is really one technology stack, which we can talk in depth about, that is brought to market behind two business models, regulated and deregulated. The deregulated model, we directly sell power to the homeowner. We install a battery around their home. We own and operate it. We bid it into the wholesale power market when the grid's up and running. When the grid is down, the homeowner gets that battery.

   24. DSDavid Senra27:56

       That would be your preferred-- You would-- If you could snap your fingers, the entire country would be like that, correct? Would that be better for your business or no?

   25. ZDZach Dell28:02

       Not, not necessarily. Not necessarily. I mean-

   26. DSDavid Senra28:03

       Why?

   27. ZDZach Dell28:03

       We, we, we love the utility partnership model too because it has really, uh, large reach, and there are benefits to, you know, working with one counterparty to address a large service territory, and there are some synergies. For example, like, you wouldn't want, you know, ten different u- wires going to a home, right? That would be redundant, right? So it makes sense to have the poles and wires be, be regulated. And look, I think there's a lot of nuance in energy markets, and so it's hard to say the whole grid should be regulated, the whole grid should be deregulated. It's a very geographically defined problem. But the, the, the dereg business is direct to consumer retail power and wholesale market participation of our technology. The reg business is we are a vendor to the utilities. We build them these battery fleets, and then we sign ten-year contracts with them, and they pay us for that fleet over time. It's megawatts as a service. That's that business. It's megawatts as a service. We build hundred megawatts, five hundred megawatts, thousand megawatts or a gigawatt, and they pay us for that. They use those megawatts, and we make money on them basically buying those megawatts from us over time.

   28. DSDavid Senra29:00

       Okay, wait. And say something more about that. You said these are ten-year contracts?

   29. ZDZach Dell29:03

       Yeah. They're, they're typically long duration contracts where we build them a fleet of batteries, and they operate them for, for ten years.

   30. DSDavid Senra29:08

       Why is the long duration important?
6. 30:44 – 32:22

   Learning From Michael Dell: The “Dad Terminal”

   1. DSDavid Senra30:44

      since you mentioned him, uh, I wanna bring up something you told me one time that you called the Dad Terminal. Can you say what the Dad Terminal is?

   2. ZDZach Dell30:51

      Yeah. So you, you, you, you joke that I'm, you know, kind of a financially minded person and, and, uh, uh, the Bloomberg Terminal-

   3. DSDavid Senra30:59

      Yeah

   4. ZDZach Dell30:59

      ... is obviously this, like, incredible technology that, you know, people in the finance industry use to ask questions, and get information, and think and analyze opportunities, and the Dad Terminal is, is my version of that, where I call up Dad, and we have conversations about business topics, and strategic objectives, and challenges that I'm facing. And, uh, and it's the most fun, it's the most fun thing ever because, uh, you know, he has more context than anyone but my mom probably on, on me and what's going on in my brain, and he's got a lot of context on the business 'cause we talk all the time, and he's scaled a vertically integrated capital intense hardware company, consumer facing. Uh, there's a lot of simulators between our two businesses, and so I use it as an opportunity to, to learn from him, and I, and I like to think that every once in a while, you know, he gets a new perspective or I ask an interesting question, he learns a thing from me. It's a lot of fun.

   5. DSDavid Senra31:46

      I was gonna ask, like, when's the last time you presented him a situation that was new to him?

   6. ZDZach Dell31:50

      [laughs] I like to think it happens pretty often. You'd have to ask him. Uh... [laughs]

   7. DSDavid Senra31:54

      [laughs]

   8. ZDZach Dell31:54

      Yeah. Um, but it's fun. We challenge each other and push each other and, um, and it's... We spend basically no time, like, celebrating, you know, and, and basically all the time trying to solve problems. And you're right, he's totally competitive and incredibly focused, but he does it with a smile, and I, and I try to do the same thing. And I think you talk to the team here, like, they would tell you that I'm pretty intense and pretty competitive and quite focused, but I do it with a smile and I try to have fun, and I take, you know, the job really seriously, but I don't take myself that seriously.

7. 32:22 – 39:34

   Vertical Integration & Lessons From SpaceX

   1. DSDavid Senra32:22

      Uh, you mentioned vertical integration a couple of times. Why is that so important?

   2. ZDZach Dell32:25

      It's only important if you're playing a cost-focused game, right? Like, it's not vertical integration because it's fun or 'cause it's cool. It's because we're trying to compete on cost, and vertical integration is a great strategy to win on cost, right? Electricity's a commodity. The best form of commodity is the cheapest one. And if you're going to deliver that, you gotta vertically integrate. So that's why we vertically integrate.

   3. DSDavid Senra32:45

      When you first started the company, though, like, how do you go from this company doesn't exist to I'm going to create a com- like, a new essentially power company that's vertically integrated?

   4. ZDZach Dell32:54

      A lot of reading, writing, thinking, and, you know, deliberation with my co-founder, Justin, and, and, you know, Jared, who's our first hire, and, and Dana and Cole and the early people that, that joined the company. I, I think we still do this to this day, like, we, we do a lot of, you know, crawl, walk, run, a lot of iterating, a lot of testing and learning. And look, I think we started, Justin and I, with a belief that the energy industry was going through a paradigm shift, that battery storage was a really valuable technology in that paradigm shift, and that building a battery pack, you know, highly, uh, optimized battery pack assembly business in the US was going to be a really strong position to be in. And that's about-

   5. DSDavid Senra33:32

      Why? Why on that point?

   6. ZDZach Dell33:34

      Because batteries had a lot of value, and there was a lot of margin being captured, uh, by the OEMs, basically.

   7. DSDavid Senra33:40

      So why is it important to manufacture it here, though?

   8. ZDZach Dell33:42

      To control the supply chain. It's less about, like, physically where it is being in this country or another country, and the fact that coupling engineering and manufacturing and actually, like, making the thing where you design the thing, and having the engineers that make the thing and the engineers that design the thing work closely together-

   9. DSDavid Senra33:56

      Yeah. When we talk, you have a lot of like, uh... I did this episode on Elon, how Elon works. I think it's the most downloaded episode of Founders ever. You have-- there's a lot of, like, SpaceX culture-

   10. ZDZach Dell34:05

       Yeah

   11. DSDavid Senra34:06

       ... or ideas that I hear from you.

   12. ZDZach Dell34:08

       Yeah.

   13. DSDavid Senra34:08

       And obviously Justin was there.

   14. ZDZach Dell34:10

       Yeah.

   15. DSDavid Senra34:10

       Like-

   16. ZDZach Dell34:11

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

   17. DSDavid Senra34:50

       And they're really hard to compete against office space. I think it was here last year or, like, maybe six months ago, [laughs] and you're like, "Yeah, that building over there, we almost had a lease, and then Elon came in and swooped it [laughs] swooped it up."

   18. ZDZach Dell35:00

       They did. They did.

   19. DSDavid Senra35:01

       [laughs]

   20. ZDZach Dell35:01

       Yeah. It was a bummer, but, uh, you can only look forward, not backward, so we, we found a new spot.

   21. DSDavid Senra35:07

       Okay.

   22. ZDZach Dell35:07

       It's gonna be better, actually. We're gonna build a, uh, a campus with manufacturing, engineering, everything in, in one place.

   23. DSDavid Senra35:12

       Is this the one out by the airport?

   24. ZDZach Dell35:13

       Yeah.

   25. DSDavid Senra35:14

       So talk more about this.

   26. ZDZach Dell35:15

       Yeah. So business is growing, and we've got to expand our, our manufacturing footprint, and of course, like the, the, the headcount too. I mean, last time you were here, I think we were just on the first floor. Now we're on all three floors. You know, we'll, we'll soon fill up the whole thing.

   27. DSDavid Senra35:25

       Dude, the growth is crazy. So I was reading through all of your company, uh, like monthly-

   28. ZDZach Dell35:29

       Yeah, monthly-

   29. DSDavid Senra35:30

       ... reports.

   30. ZDZach Dell35:30

       Yeah.
8. 39:34 – 44:53

   Writing Clearly & Making Time to Think

   1. ZDZach Dell39:34

      of organic to us.

   2. DSDavid Senra39:34

      Okay, so explain some of these things to me.

   3. ZDZach Dell39:36

      So look, I, I think we from the earliest days, and y- you can go back and look at some of the artifacts and writing of this, have been very focused on a small number of important goals that are very clear and understandable by the whole company. We've been accountable to those goals. Like, we write updates every month on like what do we do, what do we not do, what are we gonna do next month. And we do that, you know, I've written one of these monthly updates now for the last, you know, three and a half years, every single month. Never missed a month. Don't plan to. It's a huge, it's really cathartic for me to sit down and kinda write the whole thing, and I think it's an asset for the company to have this kind of account of, okay, what happened? What's gonna happen next month? They're a great recruiting tool. They're a great fundraising tool. So from the beginning, we, you know, we started the company with this, with a memo, right? B- I think you've read it. It's ten pages top to bottom, like what is Base Power? Why does it exist? What is the problem that we're solving? How are we gonna do it?

   4. DSDavid Senra40:25

      Where'd you get the idea to s- to write the, that initial memo?

   5. ZDZach Dell40:29

      I'm just the kind of person that has to write clearly to think clearly. I've always been a writer. I loved writing. I loved reading, much like you, and, and, um, I think maybe some of the memo culture stuff comes from finance and investing and, and getting your ideas on paper. But I just can't think clearly if I don't write clearly.

   6. DSDavid Senra40:42

      Okay.

   7. ZDZach Dell40:42

      And so I needed the memo for myself. And for Justin-

   8. DSDavid Senra40:45

      And you, you come in here, you like carry this like little notebook with you, too. [laughs]

   9. ZDZach Dell40:48

      Yeah, I've always got my notebooks. I have like-

   10. DSDavid Senra40:50

       Yeah

   11. ZDZach Dell40:50

       ... two notebooks. I have the red notebook, which is like, you know, in the business, and I have my black notebook, which is like on the business. And the red b- notebook I'm carrying around in the office and meetings, and the black notebook is, you know, for at home, and I'm trying to strategize and-

   12. DSDavid Senra41:00

       Wait, explain the appreciation

   13. ZDZach Dell41:01

       ... think about big ideas and on. So I think there's a concept of working in the business or working on the business, right? And working in the business is I'm blocking and tackling and solving problems that are blocking us today, and I'm, you know, trying to figure out personnel problems and product problems and, you know, acute issues that are near term. And then working on the business is thinking six months out, twelve months out, and kind of strategic wargaming and, you know, chess playing.

   14. DSDavid Senra41:21

       I would love to read that notebook, by the way. [laughs]

   15. ZDZach Dell41:24

       [laughs]

   16. DSDavid Senra41:24

       It might be private if you don't want to, but like-

   17. ZDZach Dell41:25

       There's some good stuff in there.

   18. DSDavid Senra41:26

       Okay.

   19. ZDZach Dell41:27

       Uh, there's also all kinds of bad stuff in there. Uh [laughs]

   20. DSDavid Senra41:29

       [laughs] I know. That's great.

   21. ZDZach Dell41:30

       But it's, it's... I try to segment out my day with very specific like, okay, when I'm in the office, I'm largely almost always exclusively working in the business. And then, you know, I, I leave the office basically at nine PM every night. If it were up to me, I would, I would stay longer, but I have a wife who I love and I wanna spend time with her before she goes to bed, so I leave at 9:00. I go hang out with her till she goes to bed. And then, you know, 10:00 to 11:00 or, you know, you know, 9:00 to 10:00, I'm with her roughly and she goes to bed and then I, I open up the, the black notebook and I sit and my phone's in another room, my computer's in another room, and I just focus on strategy and what's most important and, you know, what are we not thinking about. And, you know, sometimes there's very specific things I need to do which is like I need to go write, you know, an outline of a memo or of a, of a, you know, a, a big thing that's happening in the next couple weeks that I have to figure out, like a big problem. And sometimes I just sit and I have no idea what I'm gonna write about and I just stare at a page until something pops into my head and that process has w- yielded some of the best ideas that have, that have come and I think by like deliberately allocating time in the day towards working on the business versus in the business, it helps you. And like actually physically having a different notebook that's like a different color and I open the black notebook and I'm like, "It's time to get creative." Like that, and I'm not in the office. I'm like at home. It's after hours. And, uh, that just has really, really helped me, that segmentation of, you know, when to work in the business and when to work on the business.

   22. DSDavid Senra42:46

       Do you think there's something special about it being analog that you're actually writing with pen to paper?

   23. ZDZach Dell42:51

       For sure. I've tried to move to computer, and all the good ideas go away. [laughs] I mean, not entirely, right? And like what happens is now I wake up pretty early in the mornings and, you know, 6:00 to 8:00 AM is kind of my most productive time but that, I'm wa- I'm in the morning, I'm, I'm kind of like doing the work that I assigned myself the night before. So I'm like, "Okay, I gotta solve this, I solve that," and then I open the computer and that's all on the computer and then I'm like actually executing. But there's like this special, you know, thirty to sixty minutes in the evening with a pen and a paper and no distractions. I can't get a notification. I can't get a call. Like I'm just focused and I really enjoy that. And I'm sure some people have the, have the capacity to focus, you know, using digital tools but like the analog is really, uh, clarifying and focusing for me.

   24. DSDavid Senra43:34

       Deel is how the best founders turn the world into their talent pool. I've been studying how history's greatest founders operate for a decade and one thing they all have in common is they understand that recruiting and hiring the very best talent is your most important priority. A players recognize other A players which is why top companies like Ramp, Shopify, Eleven Labs, Uber, and DoorDash all use Deel. Many of the top founders I know have personally invested in Deel after using their product and what they discovered is that Deel is the best company in the world at building infrastructure for global hiring. Deel will help your business hire, pay and manage any worker anywhere in the world so you can retain the best talent anywhere and spend the rest of your time focusing on what you do best, delivering value to your customers. The founder of Eleven Labs has a great description of the value Deel can give your company. He said, "We built Eleven Labs to break down language and communication barriers. With Deel enabling us to hire and support exceptional talent anywhere, we can accelerate our innovation and bring more voices, stories and ideas to every corner of the world." Deel is trusted by over forty thousand businesses. Learn how they can help your business today by going to deel.com/senra. That is deel.com/senra. Okay, so go back to this idea of North Star. This is a, a handful of simple ideas-

9. 44:53 – 53:55

   North Stars, Turtles & Relentless Execution

   1. ZDZach Dell44:53

      Yeah

   2. DSDavid Senra44:53

      ... that you're getting the entire company to focus on. How do you describe this?

   3. ZDZach Dell44:56

      It's three things that we must accomplish this year to stay on path towards our mission. So it's become the largest distributed battery fleet in the world, the land, the ba- the fastest growing battery fleet in the world, land the batteries at a l- at the lowest landed cost because cost is everything in a commodity business. And then-

   4. DSDavid Senra45:15

      What does land mean? Um, habit- install cost?

   5. ZDZach Dell45:17

      Get the batteries on the grid on a per kilowatt hour basis cheaper than anyone.

   6. DSDavid Senra45:22

      And how do you affect the price of that? How do you actually do that?

   7. ZDZach Dell45:26

      The bill of materials of the hardware, the installation cost, the customer acquisition cost, all the overhead and, and the operations to get the battery there.

   8. DSDavid Senra45:31

      Okay.

   9. ZDZach Dell45:32

      So it's fastest growing battery fleet, lowest cost megawatts basically and then financial sustainability which is basically profitability of unit economics, right?

   10. DSDavid Senra45:42

       Mm-hmm.

   11. ZDZach Dell45:42

       Those are the three things and those are the three North Stars and if you walk in the office, in the middle of the office by the stairs, there's a poster, beautiful, it's well designed by our design team on purpose, but it only has the three North Stars and that same poster is in the middle of the factory and everyone walks by it every single day. And at the beginning of the year I sent out an email to the team and I said, "Look, these are our three North Stars. If we get these three things done, these three, these three things done [laughs] uh, this year we're gonna be on track towards our mission." And so people know, okay, if we wanna achieve this mission these are the three things we have to get done. And then there are goals that come downstream of the North Stars that are kind of specific things that we have to accomplish to hit the North Star. And so everything we're doing internally is focused on those North Stars. So we have these very specific North Stars. We have these monthly updates that organize the team and then we're just maniacally focused on, on unblocking whatever is on critical path towards achieving those North Stars which keep us in track for that mission. So I mentioned the turtle. So the turtle is this, this device that we use and there's devices, right? There's like tools. Turtle's a tool. The metrics and dashboards are a tool. We'll talk about both of them. And the updates are a tool, like the writing and the, the kind of organizing of thoughts. So the turtle is a literal physical turtle, now there's actually a couple of them, that goes on the desk of the person that is on critical path. That turtle can only be moved when critical path is resolved. So with turtle comes a, a thing called a hot potato and a hot potato is like a squad basically that spins up around a problem. So we have a problem in the business, there's a part of the supply chain that, you know, there's a, there's a part that we can't get at volume and so there's a turtle on the desk of the, the head of the supply chain and there's a team of people that are all working on solving that problem. And there's a meeting every single day and there's an email that goes out every week to the entire company to updates@basepowercompany.com that is a hot potato update and it's like, "Hey, this is the constraint in the business right now. This is what we're doing to resolve the constraint. These are the next steps to get the thing resolved." And then when the, when the hot potato is resolved there's an email that goes out and says, "Hot potato resolved. Done." And then those people go back to their normal course of business and it's not like they're in a meeting every single day forever. They're in a meeting until the job gets done, right? And the turtle physically, and it's like a funny silly thing. It's like we have, now there's like a plush turtle, there's a ceramic turtle, there's like all kinds of turtles around the office and there's like the little version of this where we like need to unblock and it's, it's this concept of like take your work really seriously but don't take yourself that seriously. Like we have freaking turtle stuffed animals all over the place and, you know, little inside jokes like this but they're really motivating for people and people take pride in having the turtle 'cause it's like it's my job now to unblock the business and to move the business forward. So we talk about, you know, that's a tool, right? You know, every company uses metrics and dashboards, but I think we do it in a really thoughtful way. So if you walk around the office, which you have, it looks like a Best Buy. There's TVs popping out everywhere, and every TV has metrics that matter to the company on those TVs, good ones in green, bad ones in red. And we joke that every team at the company, as you, as you noted, we all sit in kind of bullpen seating, open floor plan. Every team in the company has TVs that literally hang over their head with the metrics that matter to that team. Good ones in green, bad ones in red. And so you show up every day and you know things are good or things are bad, right? Because the TVs are telling you so, right? And those metrics are really focused and specific, and if they're not high signal, the leaders of the company, their job, and everyone at the company, their job is to point that out and be like, "Hey, that's a bad dashboard. Like, that dashboard isn't telling us something useful. That's guiding us towards the wrong thing." Right? And so if you measure something that's not useful, you're gonna end up going off in directions that are not actually moving you forward. And so the metrics have to be super specific, they have to be oriented towards the North Stars, and they have to be very visible and readable. And that's been a powerful tool to get everyone focused on the right things, and then onboarding quickly. Because if you just join the company and you don't know about the North Stars and you're just learning about them for the first time, and you're not-- you're, like, still kind of wrapping your head around, you know, our mission, vision, and strategy, these metrics that point you to very specific things for your team really help you get focused quickly. And then over, over the time of the, uh, over, over your time at the company, you get steeped in our mission, our vision, our strategy. And I've told you about, you know, there's a presentation I give every quarter called Engine of Success, which I'm actually giving tomorrow. I'm really excited for it. Which explains our formula for winning, right? It's like, how do we win? It's our super top-secret, you know, like, this is our formula for success, this is how we beat the competition. And it's a lecture effectively that I give to the whole company, and it's really designed for the new cohort of people that, that joined in that quarter, because I want everyone from the interns to the most senior people to understand, like, how are we gonna do this thing? What's the plan, right? I think a lot of companies, when you join them at our scale, five hundred people and growing really fast, they're like, "Hey, here's your desk. Here's your computer. You're working on this very small part of the thing. Like, good luck and do a good job." I really care, Justin and I really care that the leadership team here, we all really care about everyone understanding why we're here, what we're after, and how we're gonna do it. Because we want people to come up with all kinds of good ideas on things that are not necessarily directly in their scope because we wanna hear them. Good ideas can come from everywhere. And so, and then you have more context on the specific thing that you're working on and how it impacts the broader business. And so we teach these things, and it's really my job, and I'm, I'm kind of like a coach and a teacher to the company i-in a lot of ways. It's a big part of my job. It's like writing these monthly updates, giving these quarterly presentations, really clearly explaining these North Stars, making them the right North Stars, putting them on a poster, making sure all the metrics are right, guiding us in the, in the right direction, that working on the business so that people working in the business, which I also work in the business every day, and I love doing that, can make sure they're working on the right things.

   12. DSDavid Senra50:59

       Yeah. I've heard you describe your role, you view your role as, like, a player coach. Can you say more about that?

   13. ZDZach Dell51:03

       Yeah. So I think the coach side is the working on the business and, you know, also there's a, there's a personal element to running a company, which is, man, we are grinding. Like, it is hard. Like this, this group hustles. I think you've seen that working with the team and meeting the team and, I mean, it is busy here at nine PM, it is busy here on Saturdays, and it's stressful. And so there's a lot of, you know, helping the team and the people, the humans, do the best work of their career. And that's a lot of the coach side and working with them and trying to... You know, I studied psychology in college, which definitely doesn't make me an expert but, like, you know, I've read all kinds of behavioral psychology books and, and it's a topic that I really enjoy learning about, and I, I love helping people become the best version of themselves. And then, of course, guiding the company towards the right North Stars, the right metrics, the right quarterly goals, focusing on the right things. That's really the coach side. And then the player side is I also wanna be a world-class IC, and there are things that I can do day to day in the business to unblock the company, to help go put points on the board. You know, to use a sports analogy, I'm, I'm a big basketball player. Like, when the game's on the line and the team needs a bucket, they can give me the ball and I can go score, right? And I can also guard the best player on the opposing team, and I also know if I'm double teamed who to pass it to, right? And it's like you gotta be able to draw up the play and help, you know, motivate your teammate when he misses a big shot, and also if your team needs a bucket, like you gotta go get a bucket.

   14. DSDavid Senra52:29

       I interrupted you earlier. You were saying some insights you drew about, uh, entrepreneurship from, um, from starting out investing. What were you gonna say about that?

   15. ZDZach Dell52:39

       I mean, I think investing, and maybe this was just my perspective of it, is the art of studying good businesses. What makes a good business and what makes a bad business, and how do you predict which ones are gonna be good and which ones are gonna be bad? I'm quite competitive and, and quantitative, and I, um, I'm, like, interested in things like accounting and capital allocation and capital markets and-

   16. DSDavid Senra52:55

       You'd be shocked at how many of the robber barons, like, started out accounting, you know? Like Rockefeller-

   17. ZDZach Dell52:59

       I mean, it's, it's, it's the language of business, right?

   18. DSDavid Senra53:00

       Yeah, exactly.

   19. ZDZach Dell53:00

       It, it, it's, you, you have to be steeped in it to understand, uh, what makes a business tick and what makes a healthy business and an unhealthy business. And so, um, and there's, there's a lot of also the, the study of people too, back to the psychology point and, you know, I think this is one of the things that makes Josh our mutual friend and, and, and who I used to work for at Thrive world-class at his job, is he's just an incredible identifier of talent, and he's really good at understanding, like, who's gonna be a good CEO and, and not, and you know, what, what's a good leadership team and not. And so my interest in and, and, and, and passion for investing was largely driven by this is a place where I can pick up a lot of skills to become a great entrepreneur. I can learn the-- I can learn accounting, I can learn capital allocation, I can learn what make great leadership teams. Um, and I, I still love thinking about businesses and thinking about investing primarily as a means to the end of learning how to be a great entre-- great entrepreneur. Like, the companies I wanna invest in are the ones run by entrepreneurs that I want to emulate and I wanna learn from.

10. 53:55 – 56:27

    Learning From Great Founders & Building a Beloved Brand

    1. DSDavid Senra53:55

       Tell me some of the entrepreneurs you wanna emulate. That's interesting.

    2. ZDZach Dell53:57

       I mean, my dad's at the top of the list. Uh, but I, I really admire, uh, Patrick Collison and, and, and John as well, but the Collison brothers, I think the way that they've run that business is, is really impressive. The culture that they've built, the pace of execution, and the way that they've continued to kind of evolve the company over time as it's gotten bigger. Obviously, they started serving startups, now they're serving enterprises. They're doing a lot of interesting things with kind of emerging technologies like stable coins. I really admire Eric and Karim at Ramp, who obviously are close friends of yours as well, and the way that they have kind... Built a inc- an incredible talent magnet in a category that on the surface is maybe not all that sexy. And then they've turned that category into something really sexy, [laughs] and they've built an incredible, uh, suite of products and tools for companies that are incredibly useful in an area where you wouldn't have otherwise thought that that was possible, or at least I, I wouldn't have. And they're just great operators. They're incredibly customer-obsessed. Uh, they're really focused on the product, and they wanna drive outcomes for their customers. Kind of back to the point of, like, do you care about affordability, reliability? Do I care about saving you time and money? That's all they care about, right? And, and, you know, that's why they're able to differentiate in that space. And so those are, are two different companies-

    3. DSDavid Senra55:02

       Yeah, you wouldn't think that-

    4. ZDZach Dell55:03

       And founders that come to mind

    5. DSDavid Senra55:03

       ... a company like Ramp could build a great brand in, you know, what many people consider, like, an unsexy category. I feel you- Base is actually, it's the only brand, like, in power that I can even think of.

    6. ZDZach Dell55:15

       We, we talk about building the first beloved brand in energy all the time.

    7. DSDavid Senra55:19

       Yeah.

    8. ZDZach Dell55:19

       And, you know, you think about just consumer products, like, I, I think this is another thing, like studying businesses, being an investor, uh, and the value of that and, and the path to being an entrepreneur. I think that brands are one of the most underrated moats in business, right? Coca-Cola, Nike, um, you know, these brands are so val- it's hard to put a dollar amount on how, how valuable they are.

    9. DSDavid Senra55:38

       You've read Zero to One, I assume.

    10. ZDZach Dell55:40

        Of course.

    11. DSDavid Senra55:40

        I, I think I've read, just read it for the fourth time. I just did another episode of Founders on it, and, you know, he was talking about all the ways to build a creative monopoly. And in that book, it's a funny thing, he's like, "Well, brands one," he goes, "I just don't understand it." [laughs]

    12. ZDZach Dell55:51

        Yeah.

    13. DSDavid Senra55:51

        To your point.

    14. ZDZach Dell55:52

        It's so valuable, and there really aren't any beloved brands in energy, which makes the opportunity even bigger because it's counter-positioned. It's unique, right? And so if you're able to do a thing that no one's ever done in your space, you stand out, right? And so being able to build a beloved brand in this category has become a, a huge advantage for us.

    15. DSDavid Senra56:11

        Are there any other entrepreneurs that you, like, emulate or you study? I mean, obviously you mentioned Elon a few times.

    16. ZDZach Dell56:16

        Yeah. I mean, Elon is obviously one of the greatest of all time.

    17. DSDavid Senra56:19

        Yeah.

    18. ZDZach Dell56:19

        Um, and I think I've, I've more so learned from the people that I've worked with that have come from his companies and the way that they operate than, than Elon him- himself.

11. 56:27 – 1:06:26

    What’s Your Constraint?

    1. DSDavid Senra56:27

       What have you, like, what have you learned from the people that worked for him?

    2. ZDZach Dell56:29

       Mostly this maniacal focus on critical path and resolving constraints, and I've also learned a lot of this from Antonio Gracias, who's on my board and, and has worked fairly closely with Elon for decades. The first year or two of working with Antonio, basically every conversation I had with him, it's still to this day, this is, you know, the main focus of all of our conversations. Every conversation was the same. "Hey, Antonio, how's it going? Good. How are you? What's up?" Um, you know, "Zach, uh, what, what's your constraint? Like, what's the constraint of the business?" And I would just answer the question, and that's all we would talk about. That's it. What's the constraint? What's the constraint? What's the constraint? Like, i- if we agree on the mission, the vision, and the strategy, okay, we're good there. What's constraining us to get to that? Let's just focus all of our time and energy on that. And that kind of flows into all of the little things in process and kinda how people operate that show up kind of in the day-to-day with the metrics and the dashboards and the hot potatoes and the turtles. Like, all that is is just trying to get to what is constraining our business and how do we resolve those constraints that are on the critical path on the way towards our mission.

    3. DSDavid Senra57:31

       There's a weird idea here. I- I've said it a few times on the other podcast, but I'll just say it here. It's like I'm obsessed with things that last for a very long time, and so I looked, I was like, "Okay, what human-made things last the longest?" It's just like, well, uh, countries last longer than companies. Like, companies can last a long time, but countries last longer than countries.

    4. ZDZach Dell57:47

       Well-

    5. DSDavid Senra57:47

       They last longer than countries. And it's just like, well, is there anything human-made that lasts longer than religions? And I actually think there's, like, a lot companies can learn by studying religion. And w- just a few of these ideas, there's like, well, first you mentioned earlier, like, whether it's an intern or the CEO, I want everybody to have a shared base of knowledge. Religions do this excellent. They usually, it's a book. We all agree on it. We all own it. We don't like, we read it one week and we n- we meet together next week. It's like, "Oh, no, we're done with that book." No, we go back to that book over and over and over again. We have the same conversation over and over again. Uh, we find places to gather with li- with, uh, like-minded people, just people that believe the same things we do in regular intervals. Like re- even if they believe different things, religions have like these, like these, uh, parallels or these, um, like ki- like similarities that I think companies should use. So I love this idea that this is what pops to my mind when you're talking about, "Hey, I'm on the phone with this guy all the time over two years," and it's just the same conversation over and over again. Explain why that's valuable though.

    6. ZDZach Dell58:41

       Because it's focusing, and it just forces you... It's kind of the uncomfortable thing. It's like we don't wanna talk about like all these fun strategic things and all these bets we can make. It's like what is constraining us towards our mission? Let's just focus on that. It's incredibly clarifying, and it's uncomfortable at first, but over time it becomes very comfortable because-

    7. DSDavid Senra58:58

       Wait, why, why would it be uncomfortable at first?

    8. ZDZach Dell59:00

       Because the natural tendency is to talk about all the different things that are going on and all the different opportunities available to you, and the hard thing is to focus and just focus on the most important thing that is the constraint in the, in between you and your goal. It's kind of like, um, uh, a cope, if you will, to talk about the other stuff. 'Cause it's like, "Oh, yes, there's this constraint, but like there's all this other stuff going on." It's like, no, no, no, focus on the constraint. I think my co-founder, Justin, he's, he's very, very good at this. Like Justin and I, every Sunday, you know, our one-on-ones are on Sundays, and we, we have these kind of strategy conversations on Sundays, and we don't ever talk about what's going well. Like, you know, we got a lot of work to do, but I think could largely say the last three years have gone like reasonably well. You would never know it by, by tuning into the conversations that Justin and I have on Sundays because there's no benefit to that. Like, that's in the past. We're only looking forward. What problems can we solve? What things are we worried about? What constraints can we relieve? That is really the only thing that matters, and all the other stuff is kind of just noise.

    9. DSDavid Senra1:00:03

       Yeah. Munger and Buffett have a great line on this. They're like, "Tell me the bad news 'cause the good news takes care of itself."

    10. ZDZach Dell1:00:07

        Exactly.

    11. DSDavid Senra1:00:08

        Is there anything else that you think is beneficial to these conversations? Like how many times, whether you're talking to a board member, your co-founder, how many times are you, is it just helpful for, to organize your thoughts with somebody else? Like, do you know, um, Charlie Munger has this, this thing called the orangutan theory. Have you ever heard of this?

    12. ZDZach Dell1:00:26

        No.

    13. DSDavid Senra1:00:27

        Okay. So he says that an intelligent person could sit down and then kind of have a one-sided conversation with an orangutan for, you know, 30 minutes or whatever the case is, right? Get up, leave. The orangutan obviously says nothing, and the person that had that one-sided conversation actually benefits. Just being able to organize your thoughts out loud.

    14. ZDZach Dell1:00:42

        This is the notebook, right?

    15. DSDavid Senra1:00:43

        Okay.

    16. ZDZach Dell1:00:43

        Th- this, this is the notebook, right? This is the monthly updates. This is, like, write clearly to think clearly. It's like, and my team, you know, when I have a good idea, like, I write it down first, and I put it in front of them. Like, "Hey, I wrote this thing. What do you think?" And like, oh, I disagree with this, I disagree with that. Then we debate the writing, right? It's like, that's why every night, I sit down with this notebook and I- I- I stare at it, and I kind of force myself to write stuff, uh, 'cause it just allows you to gather your thoughts. And- and then, you know, I- I- I chew things over with Justin. I chew things over with Jared, with Dana, with Cole, with Dino, with Zena, with my dad, with my f- with Lee, with Antonio, with, you know, other friends that, you know, like Zach and, you know, oth- other people who are, you know, around the business, have a lot of context, have a little bit of context, um, have expertise on the topic. And I think writing, I mean, how many times have you gotten just like a document from me?

    17. DSDavid Senra1:01:34

        Yeah.

    18. ZDZach Dell1:01:34

        It's like, "What do you think about this?" Right?

    19. DSDavid Senra1:01:35

        Right.

    20. ZDZach Dell1:01:35

        Like, that's just my way of- of communicating ideas. And- and that is how I get my thoughts out of- of my head is- is to write.

    21. DSDavid Senra1:01:43

        I came across this other thing, uh, the other day. It's called, like, rubber duck programming, where a programmer would sit there. They'd have, like, kinda like your turtle thing. But it's like the rubber duck is sitting here. It's look- and I'm explaining the code I wrote and why I did it this way to the rubber duck, and just hearing me put, it's like saying it out loud. It's like clarif- uh, very helpful for clarifying thoughts. I do this all the time, 'cause obviously, my other podcast is a solo podcast. And I'll sit down to record-

    22. ZDZach Dell1:02:05

        Yeah

    23. DSDavid Senra1:02:05

        ... and I'll be thinking, oh, I understand why this guy did this or what happened here, and then I hear myself talking. I'm like, "I don't actually understand this. I have to fucking sit with it for-"

    24. ZDZach Dell1:02:12

        Right

    25. DSDavid Senra1:02:12

        ... "a little bit longer." Like, it's fa- it's fascinating how- how helpful just having, like, even a- a- a soundboard that doesn't speak back is-

    26. ZDZach Dell1:02:20

        Right

    27. DSDavid Senra1:02:20

        ... for your thoughts.

    28. ZDZach Dell1:02:20

        And then we were talking about the cap table and our investors and, you know, you know, most of-

    29. DSDavid Senra1:02:24

        Yeah

    30. ZDZach Dell1:02:24

        ... if not all [laughs] of my- my major investors. And this is, I mean, I'm constantly sending them things that I write and calling them in early hours in morning and, you know, late hours in evening. I'm just trying to brainstorm and just kind of chew on things with them, and- and, um, it's- it's incredibly-
12. 1:06:26 – 1:11:02

    Base Core & Taking Control of Manufacturing

    1. DSDavid Senra1:06:26

       switch gears, uh, real fast, 'cause I saw a factory tour of yours. What is this cube? Can you explain, like, the evolution? I saw the, I went through all your company updates, and I saw the evolution of what you guys were installing, how you were making batteries, the lessons that you were learning, and now this is kinda like the next generation, your latest product.

    2. ZDZach Dell1:06:42

       Yeah.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:06:43

       Can you explain, like, all the learnings that went into it and why it's looks the way it does?

    4. ZDZach Dell1:06:46

       Yeah. The- the Core. So it's called the Base Core.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:06:48

       Oh, sorry, the Core.

    6. ZDZach Dell1:06:48

       It's called the Base Core.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:06:49

       Did I call it the Cube?

    8. ZDZach Dell1:06:50

       It's okay. It looks like a cube

    9. DSDavid Senra1:06:51

       Oh, all right. My bad. The Core.

    10. ZDZach Dell1:06:51

        It looks like a cube.

    11. DSDavid Senra1:06:52

        [laughs]

    12. ZDZach Dell1:06:53

        It's called the Base Core, and it is our custom-built battery, and it is the output of the last three years of learning how to install, operate, and manage tens of thousands of distributed home batteries. It's completely designed by us from the ground up. It's manufactured over there across the street, a supply chain that we entirely control and manage, and it's purpose-built for the use case. It's lower landed cost bill of materials. It installs much faster, it switches over much cleaner, it has more power output, more energy duration, and it's really designed to be a grid resource. And it is the em- kind of embodiment of our strategy. We talk about mission, vision, strategy. Strategy of compounding cost advantage through vertical integration and technology. This is the vertical integration and technology coming to life. And so now our business goes from, you know, good economics installing off-the-shelf hardware to incredible arc- economics with this vertically integrated cost structure and a product that we can scale at an order of magnitude greater than the previous product because we were capping out our existing supplier. Like, we were buying all their stuff, and they couldn't make batteries. I mean, we're sold out through November, and it's August, right? So we cannot meet the demand with the supply chain that exists today. We have to do it ourselves, right? And so we're building factory one, we're building factory two. We're bringing on module lines and inverter lines as fast as we can to meet the demand. The only way to do that is with vertical integration, and the Base Core is, is the embodiment of that strategy.

    13. DSDavid Senra1:08:17

        Explain why, though.

    14. ZDZach Dell1:08:19

        Because when you rely on suppliers, you're kind of at the whim of their execution. And when you do it yourself, you control it, you control your own execution, and you can kind of rise to the occasion to meet the demand, and you can invest the CapEx to... You know, you have the conviction. If I go to the supplier, and I say, "We're gonna be the fastest growing energy company of all time," three years ago, if I said, "We're gonna be the fastest growing energy company of all time. We're gonna install tens of thousands of batteries in the next three years and then hundreds of thousands of batteries in the next five years, and we need you to go invest hundreds of millions of CapEx to build the manufacturing capacity to meet our demand," they're not gonna do it. They're gonna be like-

    15. DSDavid Senra1:08:53

        Yeah

    16. ZDZach Dell1:08:53

        ... "Get out of here, kid."

    17. DSDavid Senra1:08:53

        Yeah.

    18. ZDZach Dell1:08:53

        Like, "What are you talking about? Like, send me the PO, and then we'll talk." And so we gotta do it ourselves. We have to put up the CapEx. We have to build the, the execution capabilities and expertise to actually go do that stuff. And then when you do it, you have a better cost structure because that OEM that you were buying from no longer collects a margin. That's your margin to keep. And you have more control over the scalability, and you can go make those kinds of forward investments to, you know, bet on future growth.

    19. DSDavid Senra1:09:19

        How deep can you take this vertical integration? Like when I, when you were just speaking, I was... Again, I had this like, you know, this, through our conversations, like I don't- I'm not really thinking about Zach and Base. I'm thinking about like, oh, this reminds me of Henry Ford took vertical integration way further than you could even think, that somebody's manufacturing cars, to the point he bought his own railroad 'cause he was annoyed at, he couldn't get his raw materials, like, fast enough.

    20. ZDZach Dell1:09:40

        Yeah.

    21. DSDavid Senra1:09:40

        He's like, "I can actually run a railroad better than you guys, and I will prove it." And he wind up running it, optimizing it, and I think he sold it for like a thirty million dollar profit too. Like, so how far can you take this?

    22. ZDZach Dell1:09:48

        So there's, there's a lot to say here. I mean, we could take it, you know, we could go buy a lithium mine and start refining lithium and, you know, make our own cells and-

    23. DSDavid Senra1:09:55

        All the way down to mining?

    24. ZDZach Dell1:09:56

        Sure, you could, right? I mean-

    25. DSDavid Senra1:09:57

        Call Travis.

    26. ZDZach Dell1:09:58

        Call Travis.

    27. DSDavid Senra1:09:58

        [laughs]

    28. ZDZach Dell1:09:59

        Uh, we could do that, but I think it's how, how far do we wanna take it and, and when, right? And o- over time, you know, there's kind of like diminishing, but not to zero, maybe plateauing or asymptoting returns to a certain level of vertical integration. And then you, once you reach a certain scale, it makes sense to vertically integrate further and then further and then further. And based on our current st- scale, we like the position of final assembly, test, and pack. We design everything. The fabrication is largely done by third parties, our suppliers. We get all the parts, we stick everything together, and we, we, we, we test it, and we pack it, and then we go install it, own it, and operate it. Over time, we could reach a scale where you get economies of scale, and you get benefits basically that outweigh the cost of making the cell, refining the lithium, mining the lithium.

    29. DSDavid Senra1:10:42

        That has to excite you though.

    30. ZDZach Dell1:10:43

        Hell yeah, it excites me.
13. 1:11:02 – 1:16:19

    A Lifelong Mission & the Last Company He’ll Build

    1. ZDZach Dell1:11:02

       right?

    2. DSDavid Senra1:11:02

       Okay. Do you think you're gonna get to year thirty? And I don't mean that the company's not gonna be successful. Oh, I, I love your, I love your fucking competitive nature.

    3. ZDZach Dell1:11:08

       What the fuck do you think? [laughs]

    4. DSDavid Senra1:11:10

       [laughs]

    5. ZDZach Dell1:11:10

       Of course.

    6. DSDavid Senra1:11:11

       Um, no. What I mean about this, like there's something... There's no other word that I have for this. It's just fucking perverted in the entrepreneurship ecosystem. I hate that there's even an entrepreneurship, like industrial complex. It's like that's run largely by investors, which I fucking can't stand, which is start, scale, sell. And I'm like, "No." Like, well, then what are you gonna do? Like, your exercise unit should be death. So I've had two founders on recently where we talked about this. Like, you know Scott Wu.

    7. ZDZach Dell1:11:37

       Yeah.

    8. DSDavid Senra1:11:37

       Like, uh, he's-- They're throwing billions at this kid, billions. And he's saying no so far, and I hope he holds on. But his whole thing-- And I think he will 'cause he's already rich. Um, and I believe-- And he's super, super competitive. And then when I just had Torsten Reil, who's the founder of Helsing, who it has-- It's not out yet, but he's just like, he's, I think, started the conversation 'cause his whole thing is like Europe needs its own way to defend itself. This is not a fucking business. This is a mission. He goes, "We're not selling this for any amount of money." What's your opinion on this?

    9. ZDZach Dell1:12:03

       Look, you said it. It's what are you solving for? Are you solving for the mission? Are you solving for a paycheck? I think you could probably guess based on where I come from that I'm not solving for a paycheck, right? And the way I talk about the business and the way we act and the way the business is run, we're here to achieve a mission. That mission is kind of never-ending, right? Human prosperity, energy abundance, affordable, reliable power. We're never like, "Well, we did it. Like, we, we did the affordable reliable power thing. Like, what's, what's next," right? Like, that will, that is a mission that will live on forever, probably out- outlive the company, outlive me. Hopefully, the company outlives me, and then, and then the mission will, will go on forever, and eventually, you know, either, either, you know, the, the, um, something will take out the Earth that will kill the company, right? [laughs]

    10. DSDavid Senra1:12:45

        [laughs] This company's gonna last to the end of the universe.

    11. ZDZach Dell1:12:48

        That's the plan, right? And like, um-

    12. DSDavid Senra1:12:51

        And so your dad has a great line about this when he was fighting Carl Icahn, and they're like, "Why don't you just start another company?" He's like, "I'll care about this company after I'm dead."

    13. ZDZach Dell1:12:57

        Well, you asked me like, what would it require for your dad to stop working on Dell? And I told you that you'd have to kill him.

    14. DSDavid Senra1:13:02

        Yeah.

    15. ZDZach Dell1:13:02

        Right? And so the, the, it's about the mission. It's about like I get to... It is the honor of a lifetime, of a fucking lifetime, blessing of a lifetime to get to come, wake up every day and get to work on this mission with this group of people and come into this building. And, you know, when I'm not here, I'm like wanting to be here, right? And I'm, I'm wanting to think about it and like I'm, you know, I'm constantly obsessing over moving this mission forward, and that'll never change. And your point on vertical integration, like year three, year thirty, year fifty, like the problems ahead of us or the opportunities that we can go after that will move us closer to that mission will change, right? They'll look more capital intense. They'll look like, you know, vertical integration or, you know, going, going, going, uh, deep, going wide, like that'll all change, but it's all about the mission and always will be. And the reason why, you know, we're, we're focused on other things right now other than making cells and refining lithium and, and mining lithium is because there's a bunch of other opportunities across the stack that we wanna go chase that are all aligned with the mission. At a very high level, energy is four things: make, move, store, and sell, right? You have to make it, generation. You have to move it, transmission and distribution. So you have to generate electricity, you have to move it to where it's made. Store, battery storage. You have to store it because it's not always used when it's made, right? You have to move it 'cause it's not used where it's made.

    16. DSDavid Senra1:14:22

        Yeah.

    17. ZDZach Dell1:14:22

        You have to store it 'cause it's not used when it's made, and then you have to sell it. Make, move, store, and sell, generation, transmission, distribution, storage, and retail energy, and all the things around, you know, the software and all the things around selling energy. We started with store and sell because we thought that was the best place in terms of scale and return on capital to enter the market, but we have ambitions across make, move, store, and sell because if we are oriented around the mission, which is affordable and reliable electricity, and electricity is four things, if you wanna have the biggest impact on the mission, you gotta do all four things, right? So rather than deeply vertically integrate in year three on store, I'd rather go build great solutions to drive down cost and drive up reliability in the industry in make, move, and sell, and then over time, as opportunities present themselves to get better at make, move, store, and sell, we'll do that, whether that means refining and mining lithium or not. And then there's this new kind of interesting angle where we take that stack that we've developed, the make, move, store and sell stack, and we point it at the largest and fastest growing energy consumer in the world, which is AI, which we, we, we talked about at the beginning of the conversation.

    18. DSDavid Senra1:15:26

        Okay, so this is your last company?

    19. ZDZach Dell1:15:28

        Absolutely.

    20. DSDavid Senra1:15:29

        Okay. Since you're gonna be doing this for the rest of your life, I'm gonna be doing what I'm doing for the rest of my life, I'd love if you come on every, like, six months, whenever you want. We'll have more conversations, and then over time, over the next few decades, we'll have, like, an ongoing live history of Base.

    21. ZDZach Dell1:15:42

        I love that. I mean, I love every conversation with you. You always push me to think bigger, push harder, really analyze why I'm doing things, draw comparisons to other, uh, entrepreneurs throughout history, and I, I always learn something in our conversation, so I'd love that.

    22. DSDavid Senra1:15:54

        Thanks for making the time, man.

    23. ZDZach Dell1:15:55

        Appreciate it.

    24. DSDavid Senra1:15:56

        It's awesome. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over four hundred biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders. [outro music]

Episode duration: 1:16:19