The Entrepreneurs for Impact Podcast: Transcripts
#129:
$60M and 170 Employees in 2 Years to be the “Android of EV Charging Software” — Casper Rasmussen, CEO of Monta
PODCAST INTRODUCTION
Casper Rasmussen:
The original idea behind Monta was let's democratize charging, let everyone want to put charge points up, share them with each other and decide the pricing. Today you can drive through the entire Denmark only charging on private charge points from Monta, that's like 6,000 private charge points shared. It's very often in areas where you don't see a lot of commercial charge points, so it's on the countryside, it's close to the water. These areas where the big charge point operators are not focusing, that's where the local community figures it out itself.
PODCAST INTERVIEW
Chris Wedding:
Welcome to the Entrepreneurs for Impact podcast. My name is Chris Wedding. As a former environmental private equity investor, four-time founder, climate tech CEO, coach, and professor, I launched this podcast to share the entrepreneurial journey, practical tips, and hard-earned wisdom from CEOs and investors tackling climate change. And if you like what you hear, please, leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. This is the number one way that listeners can learn more about the climate CEOs and investors I interview. All right, let's get started.
My guest today is Casper Rasmussen, Co-founder and CEO of Monta. Monta is the operating platform powering the EV ecosystem, serving drivers, companies, cities, and the electricity grid with one integrated software solution. Based in Denmark with eight offices and over 170 employees, they are backed by leading climate investors such as Energize Ventures and Hill Blue Dot.
In this episode, we talked about how he grew his company from zero to 170-plus employees in just about two and a half years. What led investors to commit more than $60 million to his company's growth. Why Monta aims to be the Android of EV charging software. How their technology allows EV owners to optimize for the lowest power cost and lowest greenhouse gas emissions for their charging sessions. The various hypotheses, which they tried and abandoned for their current business model. How some beer among the early team at a summer house led to the core values which they have today.
02:26
What radical transparency, really trust and transparency, means for the whole team around salary, equity, and financial disclosure of the whole company. Why half of their team is focused on R&D and innovation. What led to EVs being 50 to 90% of new car purchases in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. And a whole lot more. Hope you enjoy it, and please give Casper and Monta a shout-out on LinkedIn, Slack, or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Thanks.
Casper Rasmussen, Co-founder and CEO of Monta, welcome to the podcast.
Casper Rasmussen:
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.
Chris Wedding:
So, Casper, I’d love to start with a fact that’s not about your current job, but about your prior role at Monstar Lab. As the story goes, you were managing 800-plus engineers, that’s a lot. Engineers are a very particular type of individual. God bless us. No, God bless them. What was it like, Casper, and what lessons did you learn from that, that translate to your current role at Monta?
Casper Rasmussen:
When you get to those kinds of numbers, it’s much more macro. I had like six CTOs, so I had CTOs in the big offices, which were doing a lot of the work there. It was a lot about aligning the tech stack, and how we work together, and languages, and how we hosted the files, and all that stuff. But actually, I think engineers are pretty, I would not say easy to manage, but you can structure things. You can put it down in writing, and you will actually have a big portion which reads it where I think now, I’m also having commercial teams and the creative teams where these things are not applying the same way. You have to find different ways of communicating with the different personality types. It’s was a very good learning. The culture was much more difficult than the time zones.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. So, you said something interesting, which was that out of 800 engineers, there were just six direct reports that you had. Did you arrive at six immediately, or was there some trial and error? Did you understand how many direct reports were the right number for you?
04:51
Casper Rasmussen:
In the start, there was no group CTO when we created the group management, so you’re setting your team there. I had like a regional manager, a regional CTO in APAC, in Europe, and in North America, and then you have a couple of people on your team to support you, and all that. Then we had a handful of VPs of engineering with different technology backgrounds in there, as well.
Chris Wedding:
Switching topics a little bit, Casper, folks will notice a slight accent that you have here. Where are you? And we'll go from there, as to how we connected.
Casper Rasmussen:
Yes, I'm located in Europe, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Chris Wedding:
And although you're in Europe, a reason that we share a connection is because of your investor, which maybe you can expound upon that to the following question, which is, you all grew from startup to, I think, 150-plus people in two-ish years or so. Capital helped to fuel that growth. Maybe just talk about that growth, some of your investors, and in particular, the one that connected us, let's say.
Casper Rasmussen:
When we started Monta, we actually felt from the beginning that we were a little bit late to the game in the EV charging industry that it's been going on for 10 years, but there haven't been that many cars on the street. We felt that we were behind, so we were really rushing into it, and building, and launching the platform. What we figured out pretty quickl, was, to win the bigger contracts, we needed to be much more mature, much more enterprise, and look big. Like the big corporates are not signing deals with 10-people startups out of Copenhagen. That was a frog leap we had to do, but we invested a lot in the teams. We set up a lot of offices in Europe, and really just doubled down on the product all the way through. So, it's been very, very fast scaling. Two and a half years now, as you mentioned, from which started to 160 people.
Chris Wedding:
What convinced the investors early on to make that bet, and then arriving to where you are today, groups like Energize Ventures and others, US-based, but banking bet on European plays in the EV space?
Casper Rasmussen:
So I think, from the beginning, there's been some good Tailwind in this industry that, if you look at sustainable investment screens, they're attracting a lot of investments, even in this environment, the electrification, and then EVs itself, and that's some of the Tailwind which we had as well. It’s also not like a young founding team. We, both me and my co-founder, have some experience and I've been building up business before, which had helped. So, pretty quickly, we managed to utilize the investor ecosystem here and around Copenhagen areas to take in the first 5 million euros in the first six months. Then, we have been able to extend that further in Nordic, and then South Europe.
07:56
Then, Energize here is the last one in. And I think, for Energize, it's the position in the market we are trying to do, where we're doing this ecosystem replay where we build software for everyone in the EV charging industry. If you're a charging operator, hardware manufacturer, utility, they will all be running our operating systems. And then, that's our strategy, like with Android with the smartphone, that's the position we're trying.
Chris Wedding:
The Android for EV software, you know?
Casper Rasmussen:
Exactly.
Chris Wedding:
Tell us about the EV adoption context in Denmark. Is it advanced like maybe, I don't know, a Norway versus the US, or the lessons to learn from there that you bring, say, when you enter the US market, let's say?
Casper Rasmussen:
Yeah. So, when we started in the summer of 2020, 8% of the new cars sold were EVs, but six months before that, it was 2%. So, exactly that point in time, we started looking at it, was a very big inflation point here. Today, we are at 50% of Newcastle, the EV, and Denmark. And Sweden is pretty close. Sweden is a bigger country. And then, you have Norway, which is far ahead now, it's more than 90% now.
So, that's been the beauty of it, that we could look to our neighbors north and see how it's going to play out, what will happen. They have been very busy scaling with infrastructure because, suddenly, there were just so many cars on the street. While here in Denmark, and in Sweden, we had a few more years to prep. We could do it a little bit differently and now we start seeing central Europe really picking up as well. Germany have been a really fast-growing market, UK as well, so now it's all over. I think, originally, we hoped that it would be like a Nordic thing at the start, and there will be central Europe, and then the rest of the world, 5-10 years later, so we could follow the trend. Where now, it just feels like it explodes everywhere parallel, so we also need to be more aggressive and roll out now.
09:57
I know we are very far here. If you walk around in Copenhagen, you will see EVs all over. It's one out of 10 cars here in Copenhagen, but one out of 20 cars total.
Chris Wedding:
What were some of the key factors which led to the massive increase in adoption of EVs in Denmark, and maybe if you want to broaden that to Sweden, Norway, et cetera?
Casper Rasmussen:
So, I think that in Norway, there's a few things there. The state has incentivized it heavily, much lower taxation benefits. You could park for free in Oslo. You could drive in the bus lanes for a while, but also, it's a country where they have so much electricity from hydro themselves, so it's very cheap. I think that played out very well and then the same as the Norwegian economy is strong, so that was a good fit for the Tesla Model S. That was the most sold car there for a while.
In Denmark, we have a very high taxation of cars normally, and the government decided to set it to zero for electric cars. So, you could buy a Model S here for the same price as you would be able to buy a Mercedes E-Class for. So, it’s not an expensive car, yes, but it's not a luxury car in price compared to the rest. So that's been a huge incentive behind it. They're still giving incentives on the EVs, but they're trying to remove the gap now slowly.
Chris Wedding:
Got it. We've gone macro, so let's go directly to Monta. So, what's the Monta pitch? We heard it's the Android for EV charging software, but let's go one, or two, or 10 levels deeper, Casper.
Casper Rasmussen:
So, Monta is the software suite for EV charging. It's a platform where we connect charge points and give a CM system access to set pricing, et cetera, for operators, but also all the way out for EV drivers to start charging, then pay, et cetera, on the street. So, really like end-to-end software for charging.
12:00
Chris Wedding:
Let's pick a couple of examples. Let's pick the end user. The retail customer, the owner of EV, or maybe the other end, let's say of a utility, perhaps. How does your software serve both of those example customers?
Casper Rasmussen:
So, let's take the EV driver first. If you are lucky enough to have a charge point at home, then you can connect that to Monta, and it will give you the features to smart charge when the price is low or CH2 level is low, you can share it with your family. Keep insight on how much you're using, when, and why, and you could also open up to your neighborhood. So, when you are away, you can share it, and guests can come and charge, if you have a garage set up for that.
But when you are out driving as well on the streets, every charge point here in Europe will be on there. So, it doesn't matter what operator is behind it, you will be able to charge through Monta, so that's the only one experience you need as an EV driver. And if you're looking at the other end of the scale, so here you pick the utility, like the companies which are actually putting the charge points up, and investing into that, that might be a utility, could be a charge point operator, could be a site owner. But a utility, they normally sell into their existing user base, so that means a domestic home charge points, they sell that to existing customers.
They might want to connect them so they can help with support. They can help with reimbursement of electricity taxes and stuff like that. They might also have semi-public customers like for corporate parking, for fleets, where they need a bit more advanced setup. Mostly family homes their software is very unique as well and all the way out to public charging where they could put the charge points up at the highway, at the supermarkets, et cetera, in the local area. So, that's a very common case here.
Chris Wedding:
You mentioned the possibility of homeowners sharing their charging infrastructure at home. How does it work and how common is it through your own software?
Casper Rasmussen:
The original idea behind Monta was like let's democratize charging, let everyone want to put charge points up, share them with each other and decide the pricing. We figured out that it was a subset of the users who really wanted to do that, but today you can drive through the entire Denmark only charging on private charge points from Monta. That's like 6,000 private charge points shared through and I think the interesting part is, it's very often in areas where you don't see a lot of commercial charge points. So, it's on the countryside, it's close to the water. These areas where the big charge point operators are not focusing, that's where the local community kind of figures it out itself.
14:49
Chris Wedding:
You also mentioned that your software can optimize charging time based on, I think I heard the cost of power and the relative carbon dioxide emissions, let's say per megawatt hour, perhaps. How aware, or maybe the answer is there's no need to be aware, but how aware are your various customers of how the optimization works? Then maybe related, how often are they at odds that you can optimize one, but not the other at the same time?
Casper Rasmussen:
I would say that a couple of years back, you didn't see this feature that popular. It was the few who really were into doing this, but here the last 12 months, we had very volatile energy pricing in Europe. It could 10X from the cheapest to the most expensive of the day and suddenly it was part of the news in prime time, what is the energy pricing tomorrow, all that stuff and got very much top of mind.
I think for us what we can see it's really picking up on massive options that when you do it in a very high user-friendliness. So, for us today, it's about you just put in your cable when you're at home, it will figure the rest out. You don't need to go into our app and make a decision and see the charges and all that. It will know when you need the car tomorrow, we know what the state of charge is from your car. You need 32 kilowatts, the cheapest window for you, depending on the configuration you decided, would be 1:00 a.m. The algorithm does all.
Chris Wedding:
What does the variation in carbon dioxide emissions look like, let's say, whether it’s Denmark or other countries where you'll operate out? How much variation is there by time of day or maybe it's by month of the year?
Casper Rasmussen:
It varies quite a lot. So, the countries I would say are at least a hundred percent different, depending on where they buy their energy sources. Like here, that I could just say about Denmark, where we are very dependent on wind, so you will have days where there's like 99% green energy, 98% green energy. Then you will have days where we have to buy it on the market, and you'll be down at 60%, and then you start seeing a CO2 footprint, which is pretty high. So that's a big impact, but on average here in Denmark, we are around 70% renewable energy. That means you're around 150, 160 grams of CO2 [inaudible – 00:17:17].
17:18
Chris Wedding:
Got it. Okay. Let's change topics a little bit. With Monstar Lab, you talked about one of the harder parts of the job was managing, let's say, time zones. So, folks in lots of different countries. I believe the same is true with Monta, where something like 45 or 50 different nationalities are present. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean different countries, but maybe talk to us about how spread out or diverse your team is, and maybe why, perhaps.
Casper Rasmussen:
So, even though we have a lot of nationalities in the team today, and we are located at eight different offices, the smallest offices we have is like one or two persons. Then we have 120 people here in our headquarters in Copenhagen, and then we have a bigger tech hub in Berlin as well, with 20 people, and then 10 each in Paris, and then in London. So, it's actually only two time zones right now in Europe, so it's very manageable.
We have decided to do this way because of our hyper-scale, that we have enough complexity already. So, we don't have a full remote setup yet. It's a hybrid working setup everyone has, that they can come to our office when it's needed. We have our physical limit to actually test the product, and so, you need to have a real EV, and you need to be at a site where there are charge points we operate. So that was a big limitation in the start, that we tried to have a few remote people sitting in other countries, and they could never just jump out to one of our cars, and drive out, and then tested it, which was annoying, but we're getting there. Now, we can simulate, I would say, 99% of our charging experience at the office today, but now and then, we need to be out in the car.
Chris Wedding:
Got it. Let's talk about the kind of Europe versus US Delta, let's say. You talked about some of the drivers for EV growth in various countries, the Nordics, et cetera. What are some lessons you think that you all have learned for what works there? And to the degree that you have studied the US market, what may translate well versus not translate well, to have a greater adoption here, I mean, selfishly so that you all can better jump the pond and serve the US market, but really, just more broadly to get better EV adoption here?
19:40
Casper Rasmussen:
So, if you can look at it right now, I would say like where US is at this point, there’s a lot of talk about public charging infrastructure, fast chargers on the highways and that's where it starts. But pretty fast, we'll figure out that like 70 - 80% of the charging is not going to be done there. Maybe even 90% is going to be done at people's homes, at their office buildings, at semi-public sites, and that kind of changes the mindset completely, both of how big is the charging infrastructure market and the software required to run this in scale, but also for EV drivers itself.
I'm very rarely at a gas station in my Tesla. It’s when I have to wash it more or less, otherwise, it's always 100% fueled up, or 90% fueled up, for the most part. And I think that is the first thing to accept, is going to play out differently than the petrol stations probably hope. Then, I think the next thing is like, can you allocate enough AMEs out to the sites, where you actually charge? So, this is the biggest bottleneck that is in Europe, is when they then decide to put 40 fast chargers up somewhere, how do you allocate thousands of AMEs?
The grid providers are happy to do it in the start, but now there's more than 14 months queue on it here, that slows down everything. So, it's not even the permits, which is the slowest now, it's the allocation of AMEs. And the same for fleet, we have postal services, et cetera, which needs 80, 100. That's just AC charge points on the side to charge at night. How do they get 400 AMEs, 500 AMEs extra, that takes a long time now. The way it works with the grid here is they don't really upgrade it before there's a concrete issue. There's no real forecasting of now we do all these things in these areas and now we need to put up extra supply. So, it's very delayed.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Utilities do not have unlimited AMEs to just hand out, pass around. So, a bottleneck in getting that kind of capacity. You talked about the private chargers in Denmark, where especially more rural areas, coastal areas, less density, that these private chargers probably play a bigger role. I wonder if you think that given the geography, the size of the US, and I think what's true is a large percentage of the country is less urban, would you guess that as you all enter the US market, there is a bigger role to play for the sharing private chargers?
22:19
Casper Rasmussen:
It's a thesis we've talked a lot about that also the culture is a lot about sharing the same assets. You see, we were sharing services, like a car park sharing service, and another in the US already so we have high hopes for that. But I think the go-to-market we are looking at right now is like, what state is the best entry point for us? Then in the European countries, we have been targeting the electricians in the start, smaller companies, faster to decisions and are the gatekeepers of all these installations. Right now, we are assessing if that might be a really smart way to enter the US or a horrible way, yet to be found out.
Chris Wedding:
That sounds like an experiment and we know that growing businesses are full of experiments. The public, the outside only sees usually the fraction that succeeds. Tell us a story about an idea you all had, a theory you all had that didn't work out. I'm sure, as in most startups, there are many that are tried and don't work out.
Casper Rasmussen:
Once, I [inaudible - 00:23:3] go to market, when we decided to start looking at commercializing it a bit, was to go to the car dealerships and see if we could get them to sell charge points, when they sold an EV, and then pre-install Monta with that. That was a horrible strategy because the car dealerships, they have very large agreements done through importers on group level, on country level. So, the car dealership, down at the local street, doesn't make these decisions themselves. And that took us a couple of months to realize that. We figured it out pretty fast, and then went to the second car [inaudible - 00:24:08] dealerships, but their EVs are not as rolled out yet. So for sure, that was a huge mistake and we spent months on that.
Then, another one, was a couple of features where we were way too early in the market. We have a feature for smart queuing. So, if you have five charge points at your corporate parking, they're all busy, you can join a queue, a virtual queue. And then we will make sure that we inform you, when there's a free charge point and we keep a fair queue virtually. There was not an issue at all for the first couple of years because there were plenty of charge points compared to cars. So, that feature is starting to be adopted now, like two years after we built it. But you have some of those, where you've been thinking in the lab, this is a need everyone has, and in reality, it's less of a need.
Chris Wedding:
That's really helpful. I think, it's very easy for listeners to see the massive growth, the massive amounts of capital that companies like Monta have raised and think, “Oh, well, they just know exactly what they're doing all the time.” Look, if you're right enough, then shit works out, but to hear that you all tried the car dealership model for months, didn't work out, or that you still have theories to test about entering the US market, is it to go through electricians? I think I heard you say they're smaller, quicker to make decisions, but they control budgets and technology when they do these installs. Anyway, it's real.
25:36
Casper Rasmussen:
It is, and I think you do a lot of these bets, and you learn a lot on the way. I think the key is also just to test it out, and just so be happy to walk away. So, the smart queue, for example, we spent a couple of weeks doing it, pushed it out and saw no one used it, like, okay, let's try something else. These fast iterations, for us it's been fast to go to the market. That's why we could really iterate enough the adoption of EV drivers is still not that big. So, we need really to push it out to the real users, to see how it's going to be adopted.
Chris Wedding:
Let's go to, maybe, the level of your beliefs here, Casper, how they've influenced how you shaped the company, or the culture of the company, perhaps. Tell us about one or two beliefs that are important to you, important to maybe your co-founders, and how they've shaped the direction of the company, or they’ve shaped the culture of the company; that means that people with great talent want to come work for you, and stay there, working for you.
Casper Rasmussen:
One of our core values we introduced very early on. We were sitting in a summer house with the first couple of people, the team, and designing the app. And then, we would spend like one or two hours out in the sun with a beer, talking about, “What values do we want the company to have?” And a lot of them are still around, and one was called, ‘Trust and transparency.’
So, we have the books completely open to all our employees. They can see my salary, they can see everyone's salary, they can see what is on the bank accounts, what's the exact ownership of everyone. And that, of course, comes with a lot of trust. But I think, the most important thing is actually, it keeps us on our toes. We need to be able to argue why this person is worth this, why this person is worth that, and not be embarrassed about it.
27:26
The same, if you, as management, start taking higher salaries than your employees, why is that, right? How can you explain that? It was a little bit of experiment, when we started. Can you actually do that, all the way through? And we still do it. There's been some situations, where some team members were not that good at handling, “Why is my colleague getting 2% more than me? We are doing the same job.” But at the end of the day, it keeps us on our toes in aligning all these problems, and making sure that we take the right decision right away, instead of just raising a person’s 10% because they want to quit. Then you throw that, or you kick that can down the road. You know it will backfire one day, but it might take a couple of quarters. Now, that will be visible to everyone, the day after it. I think that is probably a very large one.
And then, I would say, we have invested heavily in technology from the start, and I think that's also one of the biggest areas where we do it differently than most competition in Europe, that more than half of our organization is sitting in R&D. We are shaping the technology for the industry, instead of just following in. And that costs a lot of money, but it also really makes us into the default leaders and I think it's worth it. The culture we have at the office is that, “Can we solve it with technology?”
Chris Wedding:
Well, I think, on that first point in particular, Casper, for the majority of our listeners, which are in the US, I think they just stopped the car, or stopped the run, and hit rewind to make sure they heard you properly. On the trust and transparency. I think having a company -- maybe a small company, perhaps, but a company with 170 people, where everyone knows every detail of the financials, the salary, the equity, et cetera, I think it's pretty mind blowing to many here.
Casper Rasmussen:
I think this will be the norm in 5 - 10 years. We're seeing the first steps now in Europe. It's actually getting into -- not just best practice, but law, in terms of, we need to put in the salary ranges on job descriptions when you post them now, from 1st of January. I think these are the baby steps into where we are, this transparency around it. I can only recommend it. It requires a little bit more adjustments, and it's important to have this talk with new folks starting about how to deal with it, and how to handle situations where it's not dealt with. But at the end of the day, it did really align to us very, very well.
30:03
Chris Wedding:
It's interesting that you mentioned how there is now some legislation in certain parts of Europe around publishing salary ranges for positions. There's a member of this climate Mastermind peer group that we run at Entrepreneurs for Impact, and she runs Women in Climate Tech, Helen Whiteley. They recently did some survey work in the climate tech sector to see, well, is there a gap in pay between men and women? And the answer is yeah, there still is, despite all of the other hopeful enlightenment or mission alignment of the sector, there still is a pay gap.
One of the reasons it sounds like is the lack of transparency on what salary ranges are. And if salary ranges were published, maybe that gap would start to close. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that topic, Casper.
Casper Rasmussen:
So, information is always one of the, I'll say dimensions of it and I think that's of course important. There are other companies that are doing it like this, and there's also public institutes where you can't see exactly what you're getting paid, but you can see the increases year by year and covering a big back.
I think in Oslo, you can see it on the text papers, pretty precise, what everyone is getting, the public. So, I completely agree that information is a portion of it, but I think there's also other things like that. We have a heavy shift towards electronic engineering, backend engineering, where there's just a lot fewer females in the industry, and that goes both ways. I’ve also seen them come straight out of uni, and then get paid a lot higher just to balance it out in another company, but it's for sure still a problem this year today.
Hey, it's Chris. Just a brief message from our sponsors and we'll get back to the show. Just kidding, we don't take sponsors. On the other hand, I do have the privilege of leading the only executive peer group community for growth stage, CEOs, founders, and investors fighting climate change. With monthly group meetings, annual retreats, and one-on-one executive coaching calls, our members help each other boost revenue, impact capital raised, clarity, confidence, work-life balance, and team effectiveness. Today's 30-plus members represent over $8 billion in market cap for assets under management for climate solutions. If you're interested, go to entrepreneursforimpact.com and join the waiting list today. All right, back to the show.
32:53
Let's switch from Monta to Casper more directly here. So, Casper, if you had some advice to give your younger self on how to be happier and more effective on this path here, whether the path be career or not career, what are a couple of pieces of advice?
Casper Rasmussen:
I think, in my earlier career, I was extremely, I'll say, motivated to move on and exceed, and I was also a pain in the ass to work with because I expected everyone else to do the same. I remember that it's almost like one day I woke up in the morning and said, “No, actually, I'm going to be happy at work now and just enjoy it, and then it's going to go 5% slower, but at least I'm going to enjoy the time on the way.” I think that completely changed how I felt about work, but also how my peers and employees felt about working for me. That now, at least, we were running fast, but we were having fun. I was angry and mad, and I'll say, I didn't feel they were moving fast enough.
Chris Wedding:
I was just talking with another podcast guest recently, Al Subbloie, at Budderfly and he was talking about how earlier in his career, he had a phrase, which was, I think he called it, “Let's rhino this,” as in the animal. Just hard-charging right through it, and reminds me a little bit of what you're saying right now. Then someone said, “You know, rhinos are one of the dumbest animals on earth, right?” That's one more reason I should change my perspective here.
Casper Rasmussen:
I think, if you want to work with smart, creative people, you've got to make sure there's a good energy around you. Then I think, another message learning, is you need to figure out what gives you energy, and then make sure that's a big portion of your job. That if you end up doing all the things you don't like doing, that’s not a good job and it's not going to be productive for anyone.
So, for me, it's still like that, I really enjoy spending time with the products. I am still coding. I enjoy that, that is a massive hobby. If I have two hours in the evening, I will open the editor and then start programming something. I'm not allowed to do a code in parts of Monta anymore, but there are moments where I can contribute.
Chris Wedding:
That reminds me, there's a company called HubSpot, a very large company in the CRM kind of marketing space, and their co-founder and CTO, Dharmesh, I believe is his name, this is a massive organization now, but he still loves to code, still loves to get his hands dirty on the tech. And so, often he has these side projects, which he'll talk about on these podcasts. Anyway, a similarity, perhaps.
35:40
Casper Rasmussen:
We have a new division called special projects. It sounds a little bit the same, where you can test out various things.
Chris Wedding:
You also mentioned this idea of working maybe 5% slower but having a good time in the process. It reminds me of this book, The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz. I mean, the book really is about why more options are actually bad for us, as individuals, or for customers, because we get overwhelmed, we just don't make good or quick decisions. But in the same book, he talks about optimizers versus, I think he calls them satisficers. Not really a word, of course.
What I realized recently was, I tend to be an optimizer. How can I make a perfect decision, the perfect investment? But the reality is those folks are often less happy and they're often second-guessing their decisions versus the satisficers are like, “Yeah, that's a good decision. Now move the hell on to the next thing.” Anyway, there are pretty some similarities.
Casper Rasmussen:
I think that thing, and I think if you work with bigger teams, the optimizers are not necessarily the easiest ones to work with. This thing where just computers are very different than humans, that if you try to optimize from 99 to 100%, but you lose three of your employees on the way, you made it down to 90% again and that thing, it's not worth it. That's what I figured out.
Chris Wedding:
Good point. The next one here, tell us about some habits or routines, daily, weekly, monthly, et cetera, that keep you healthy, sane, and focused.
Casper Rasmussen:
I would say we have a road biking team here at Monta where we are on the roads, Wednesday afternoon biking around Copenhagen. So, that's a new sport I picked up on maybe three years ago, which I enjoy a lot that you are multiple hours on the bike. But it’s also at a pulse where you can still be social and even talk to some friends or maybe even just listen to a podcast and actually be able to pick up on all of it.
37:52
I used to play a lot of tennis. I still play paddle tennis. It's a very popular sport here in Europe now. It's a lot of fun. If you haven't tried it, definitely try it. But I think besides that, I try to balance work and family. That's the top priority I have these days. So, I think my routine is very much, get up in the morning, I wake up early. My oldest son is a morning person, like normally 5:00 a.m., 6:00 if I'm lucky. Then I live close to the office, so I can just walk to work and go to the kindergarten with my son on the way. So that's a very nice morning routine.
Chris Wedding:
So, your son is already in the 5 a.m. Club, as they say?
Casper Rasmussen:
Yes.
Chris Wedding:
Destined for productivity in the early mornings.
Casper Rasmussen:
Yeah. I was like that when I was a kid, as well, and then there were a lot of years where I turned around. Then, when I became a dad myself, I got right into it.
Chris Wedding:
A boomerang. How about, what are some recommendations for books, tools, podcasts, quotes, that you think listeners may benefit from?
Casper Rasmussen:
After university, I didn't read that many books. A lot of coding is available through tutorials and things like that, but I think lately I have been listening a little bit to a podcast called 20VC with this guy, Harry interviewing a lot of different startup, like founders and VPs, et cetera, which it's very diverse, both from product to business to fundraising, which I enjoy a lot.
Chris Wedding:
It's a good one. Yeah. Plus one, for sure. Plus his accent and enthusiasm are contagious, I believe.
Casper Rasmussen:
A little bit annoying in the start, but yes, you get a little bit into it.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, good stuff. Well, Casper, it's been great to talk and share your story with hopefully a lot of new folks mostly in the US and Canada. Is there a final message you'd like to leave listeners? A call to action, the kinds of future employees, potentially customers you want to hear from, what's your final word here, Casper?
39:53
Casper Rasmussen:
I would say to everyone which are driving cars today that you should really try to sit in an EV. I tried to explain to my father the first time, it's like going into an iPhone. The user experience is just so different and everything is for his fault different than a petrol car and all these rumors that you will be spending hours and hours in queues for charging and all that, it's just not true. Like I had an EV now for almost six years, it's been painless. It's just generally a good experience. Oh, I would recommend everyone to try that.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. I have no surprise. I second that. I would say actually it's more convenient to own an EV. I mean, you're not taking the time it takes and the smell and whatever it takes to go to the gas station. Yeah, I think for many folks that haven't tried an EV, even if you ignore the environment motivations, they're just usually better cars to drive.
Casper Rasmussen:
Yeah, and we expect that in a few years, they will also be cheaper and hopefully it gets a complete no-brainer for everyone.
Chris Wedding:
Casper, love it. Hey, we're rooting for you-all’s success at Monta. Talk soon.
Casper Rasmussen:
Thank you very much and thanks for having me.
Chris Wedding:
You got it.
Thanks for listening and if you want more intel on climate tech, better habits and deep work, then join the thousands of others who have subscribed to our Substack newsletter at entrepreneursforimpact.com or drop me a note on LinkedIn. All right. That's all y'all. Take care.
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