Building a Power Company for the Next 50 Years | Zach Dell, Base Power
Zach Dell, founder of Base Power, joins David Senra to discuss building a residential battery company that treats the grid as an optimization problem and customers as long-term partners.
The gist
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The grid is undersized, not broken, so Base Power time-shifts cheap off-peak energy to expensive peak hours using home batteries instead of building new generation.
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Customers lease batteries rather than own them, letting Base Power trade wholesale power markets 99% of the time while cutting customer electricity bills.
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Three goals, largest fleet, fastest growth, lowest cost, are posted throughout the office so every employee from intern to executive knows what matters and why.
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Zach Dell recommends Zero to One for its counterposition framework, which directly shaped Base Power's business model.
Zach Dell uses it
"You've read Zero to One, I assume. Of course. I think I just read it for the fourth time. I just did another episode of Founders on it."
▶ Play at 55:383 creators recommend it, including Mark Pincus and Matan Grinberg.
See all on the Zero to One pageWhat they recommend · 1 pick
Zero to One
Books
"You've read Zero to One, I assume. Of course. I think I just read it for the fourth time. I just did another episode of Founders on it."
Also mentioned
11:34
Solar City
· "It was going to be EPC'd at the time by Solar City, who was doing a lot of utility scale EPC. This is..."
14:09
Blackstone
· "I show up at Blackstone and there's a bunch of people who are kind of poking around the battery industry,..."
30:58
Bloomberg Terminal
· "The Bloomberg Terminal is obviously this incredible technology that people in the finance industry use to..."
34:22
SpaceX
· "It's a company that I deeply admire. I think the culture inside of SpaceX and the operational cadence and..."
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