Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#211:
Daniel Schnitzer, CEO of SparkMeter – $30M for Grid Management in 30 Countries. Millions of Customers Served. AI for Climate. PhD Research from Carnegie Mellon.
Podcast Introduction
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Dan Schnitzer, Founder and CEO of Spark Meter. Spark Meter offers grid management solutions that enable utilities around the world to run profitable, efficient and reliable systems. This includes customers in over 30 countries. Their investors include mutual friends at Clean Energy Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Elemental Impact, as well as strategic investment from Honeywell. Dan's prior experience includes work at DNV GL and a PhD in engineering and Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon. In this episode, you'll learn four important takeaways and hopefully lots more. Number one, how an 8th grade science project and a trip to Haiti laid the foundation for this company. Number two, why they chose to build solutions involving hardware, software and communications instead of just one or two of those pieces.
Number three, how their structured customer discovery process channeled 75 utility executive interviews and a thousand LinkedIn messages into the formation of their new product offering. And number four, why we shouldn't wait for a crisis to start building healthy relationships with mindfulness and therapy tools like ifs. Please give Dan and Spark Meter a shout out on LinkedIn, Slack or X by sharing this podcast. Wicked people. All right, before we hop in, I've got a challenge and I guess an invitation for you all. First, the background: My goal is to empower 250,000 entrepreneurs, investors and university students to tackle climate change through startups, finance and personal growth. Is that enough? I don't know. It's a lot. Maybe it'll grow. Anyway, the podcast is one way to do that. To that end, the sector needs more inspiration, tools and tips from CEOs and investors in this space.
Conveniently, as you may guess, these folks are precisely my guest on this podcast. So here is the challenge. If you and five of your friends rate, review and follow this podcast on Apple and Spotify and share your efforts with me on LinkedIn or in response to my newsletter on Substack, I'll hop on Zoom and brainstorm a climate, tech, business or investment challenge or opportunity with you. Now. Is that a reward? Is that punishment? I don't know. There it is. This is the best way for new folks to learn from the CEOs and investors on this podcast. If the process is unclear, as it was to me in the show notes, you will find a link explaining how to do this. I read every single review. So please tell me and all of us which guest insights you like the most. Thanks so much. Hope you enjoy it.
Podcast Interview
Chris Wedding:
Dan Schnitzer, Founder and CEO of Spark Meter. Welcome to the podcast.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Thanks. Great to be here.
Chris Wedding:
So we're going to go back in time a little bit. Listeners will have already learned that you're this company operating in, you know, 30 countries, including the U.S. You know, over 30 million bucks raised. But it didn't start yesterday. Tell us, tell us where this all started, Dan.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Sure. The long answer is it started with my 8th grade science fair project when I distilled apple peels, fermented apple peels into ethanol. So that was kind of the real genesis of my interest in energy was making alcohol for a science fair project using my grandma's pressure cooker, some plastic tubing and a coffee can and burning what I had made in a kerosene lamp and comparing that to some fossil fuels and seeing that this fuel that I had made as a kid kind of burned just as well as these industrial fuels. And I knew a little bit about what at the time was of course called global warming, now known as climate change. I knew that these fuels had all sorts of negative impacts on the environment on people.
And something just kind of clicked in my brain at that point in eighth grade that really set me on a path to be very interested and passionate about energy technology and energy policy, which kind of drove me throughout high school, college and to where I am today.
Chris Wedding:
So you are the first guest out of whatever 209 fan that turned Apple peels into ethanol. So kudos on that. Where, where did that idea come from for the project?
Daniel Schnitzer:
You know, I think I was just kind of like poking through the science section in the library and just kind of came across a few ideas, you know, like ideas for kids, like science experiments for kids kind of books. And I think I just came across this one and it spoke to me. I'm not quite sure why, what was going on in my 12 year old brain. Maybe it was the kind of forbidden alcohol connection and sort of, oh, this seems interesting and feels a little naughty, but yeah. And ended up really sparking a lifelong interest in energy.
Chris Wedding:
Well, the clear early signs you were destined for a PhD in the space, right? You referenced a spark there. Let's, let's go to Spark Meter. Give us the, give us the short version, the elevator pitch for the company, Dan.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Sure. Really what we're doing is grid management solutions to increase access to clean, affordable, reliable electricity everywhere. And what we see as kind of being a fundamental ingredient to that solution is data, and specifically data coming from smart meters. And when we looked at how smart meters were being deployed in North America, which has been going on now for 20ish years, we saw that model wasn't very well replicable to other parts of the world. A and B, the way that model worked even in the US was great for if you just want to do energy metering for billing. Not so great if you want to use those meters more as like sensors on the grid that can actually help you solve grid management problems.
So we decided to come up with a different way to do smart metering in terms of hardware, communications technology, software, and kind of integrating that all together as a complete solution to make it much more affordable and easier to use for utilities in emerging markets to kind of get them, you know, kind of at the level that utilities in North America are at. So kind of getting that boost to at least start using smart metering and then to take it a step further and developing a data hosting, data engineering and data analytics platform that could take that meter data, look at those meters as sensors and not just as billing determinants, basically combine it with a whole bunch of other data.
This treasure trove of data that the utility is sitting on from all their other systems and then actually help them solve these problems around affordability, safety, renewables coming onto the grid, large scale electrification happening at the edge of the grid and really taking a data informed approach to managing those issues.
Chris Wedding:
Got it. So I think that some listeners will either have a lot of or little familiarity with a lot of things you just said. And I want to help them kind of put you all in the proper bucket or buckets. Right. So maybe let's go one level deeper. What's a specific use case? Tell us like what the customer looks like, you know, how you get paid and how they let's say, save money make money perhaps.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Sure. So in emerging markets, it's a combined hardware and software sale. And so we sell the hardware, that's the meters. It's the communications hub that the meters communicate to. We have our own communications technology, it's an RF mesh that we call a Sparknet. And then we also have our kind of customer information management, billing software, payment integration software called Koios. And it kind of rolls everything up all together in a single solution which prevents the utility from having to buy meters from one company, communications from another company, a database from another company, cloud hosting from another company, billing software from another company, you know, on and on, and then hiring someone else to kind of integrate it all together.
So at one level, for our customers in Africa and Asia, we're essentially just digitizing some of their currently manual operations like reading the meters, billing their customers and accepting payments. So like, essentially like instantly, these utilities can go from very manual cash heavy to automated digital payments by using our system. But then we go a step further because we are both the company that is selling the meter and the company providing the software. We have a really clean integration in terms of presenting the meter data, So the utility can very quickly go into our software and if they get like a customer complaint from a customer saying, you know, hey, I don't have power, my power has been spotty this week, they can literally just click into that customer, see the voltage profile from that customer's meter, see the outage calculations for that one customer's meter, and that's even like a leg up. And what a lot of US utilities have with their metering systems, a lot of US utilities really are just using the meter data or the energy value, the kilowatt hours and it's going to the billing system. But in terms of the metering system actually talking to their outage management system or their customer information systems, it doesn't do that. Those connections just don't exist. So that's kind of some of what we're doing.
We also help these utilities, emerging markets, reduce losses, which is a huge problem. So essentially theft or unbilled electricity for various reasons, not necessarily theft. And so we have another hardware solution that gets installed on the low voltage side of the distribution transformer where we can automatically calculate the losses on, at very high resolution on every single individual distribution line coming out of that transformer. And then some other use cases that we're addressing on like the US side with our analytics software are things like transformer hosting capacity and identifying customers that have rooftop solar and where that's coming up on the grid for the utility to have that awareness and then do more coordination.
And then we also have a whole other set of financial analysis that I'm happy to, you know, dive into further if you want to get into the details of what those look like.
Chris Wedding:
Let's go back to a reference you made to an RF mesh network. Some listeners may get that, most will wonder what that's all about. Maybe just define what that is.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, an RF mesh is a communications network that allows the nodes on the network to directly communicate with each other and relay messages through each other back to some kind of a hub. So your cellular phone is not a mesh. It's a point to multipoint. Your phone doesn't directly talk to other people's phones. Your phone and other people's phones talk directly to a cell phone tower and data gets routed through that cell phone tower. Kind of like it's like a hub and spoke almost. Whereas with our mesh we don't need every single meter to communicate to our hub, which we call Nova. The meters can actually relay their messages through other meters to get their reading or to receive a reading to and from that hub.
Chris Wedding:
And how early in the kind of commercialization of this did you start giving each solution a clever, maybe trademarked name?
Daniel Schnitzer:
Pretty, pretty early on. I think sometimes we'll start with like not so clever abbreviations, like our data hosting platform we used to just call UDMS and I think internally we still sometimes call it, which is utility Data Management System. And then we gave it a name, which is Praxis.
Chris Wedding:
Much cooler. Praxis is much cooler. Tell us about the profiles of the ideal utility customer, and maybe there, I'm sure there are multiple profiles at the least, you know, kind of a US versus an emerging market, but of all the various types of utilities you could serve, who are the best ones to be customers, partners of yours?
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, I think it's any utility that is interested in doing more with the data they already have or in the case of in emerging markets, doing more with their data from our smart meters than just doing energy readings for billing. And so and we do sometimes talk to customers in Africa and Asia where you know, we just kind of get the sense that they just kind of want a meter, a smart communicating meter instead of a manual one just to help them with their billing issues. And we're like okay, you know, maybe you're not a great fit for us. And so really the ideal profile is a utility that wants to go to that next level, that want, that is saying I want to do a better job of managing my grid assets.
You know, I want to make sure I'm getting the best possible life out of my transformers. I want to do capex deferral, I want to look at non wireless alternatives. I want to look at how batteries can help me reduce costs and improve resiliency. I want to understand, you know, if customers are adding solar PV and what impact that's having on my network, what's it, what impact that's having on my economics around in my grid. I want to improve outages, I want to reduce my losses. And I think where we get excited is being able to talk to utility to say yeah, we can work with you to solve a lot of those problems using the systems that you've already purchased, that you're already paying for.
And what we can do is we can bring all those data sources together, curate them and actually give you a data hosting platform that not only are we going to use for our analytics software, Gridscan and Gridfin are those are our clever trademark names for the analytics, but also that you'll now have access to in a way that you've never ever had before. So utilities who can get excited about that story are the ones we want to work with.
Chris Wedding:
And how often do you find yourself selling the full suite if you will, the one stop shop, you know, hardware, software, communication protocol versus the utility has these meters already. so you're selling maybe just the latter two.
Daniel Schnitzer:
In emerging markets, I'd say at this point pretty much a hundred percent of our sales is the full suite. So it's the hardware, the communications and it's the, at least the, what we call Koios which is that you know, customer information management, billing, payment and some basic analytics. So we sell that, yeah, pretty much 100% of the deals we do in Africa and Asia. And then in North America, we've recently signed our first few deals with North American utilities and those utilities who either already have smart meters installed and who are big believers in, you know, the story that shared with you in terms of what they're excited about in terms of using that data to do more, or it's a utility that is just about to start their smart metering rollout and where they're thinking, okay, let's do this right from day one.
You know, let's have the right data hosting, the right data engineering, right analytics from day one, and not have that be an afterthought that we have to come back to after we're, you know, halfway or fully the way through the installation.
Chris Wedding:
Tell us about some of the pivots you've had to make along the way. I think this is, if I'm right here, 11 years, plus or minus on the SparkMeter journey. Yeah. What, what are some of those big shifts look like versus thought would be the next phase?
Daniel Schnitzer:
Two big ones I can think of. One is that we started with our own meter hardware design. And that's because we started the company, you know, ten years ago, roughly. And at the time a smart meter was this thing that you would buy from GE and it costs, you know, 200, 300, 400 bucks. And so were like, oh, well, you know, if we want to make this work in emerging markets, obviously we have to do some value engineering and we have to design our own smart meter. That's going to be, you know, a tenth the price for what GE or Itron or elsewhere are selling their meters for. And then a few years later, you know, GE I guess saw the writing on the wall, and they sold off their metering division to Aclara.
And then pretty soon after that, you started hearing about these metering companies in China that were making a basic but extremely low cost smart meter. So very limited functionality, really, just bringing the energy data back just to do billing. And so what we ended up doing was partnering with one of those metering companies. And we basically said, your meter is great. Like you clearly know what you're doing. You've designed a very effective low cost meter. And then what we decided to focus on was more on the edge analytics. And so we have a contract manufacturer that makes a module, we call it a communications and computing module. And that module runs our proprietary software stack,
and then we ship that module to our partner in China, they put our module into the meter and that module is talking to the meter multiple times a second, acquiring data directly off of it and analyzing the voltage, analyzing the current, looking for outages, calculating more complex tariffs like time of use tariffs. So doing a whole bunch of stuff that the processor that's on that meter added off the shelf would not be able to do on its own, even if you ran the software on it, the processor, you know, itself couldn't keep up with it.
So that was one major pivot was moving from our own designed hardware that were manufacturing to kind of this third party hardware, which I think is also just like, it's just a much more scalable, kind of fun model where we, you know, hope to be able to go to utilities, more utilities in emerging markets and say, yeah, you can buy the meter from us, but we're also working with these other low cost metering vendors who can work with our system. And then the other big pivot was the data hosting and data analytics side. And what were learning in emerging markets was that our customers that were selling to were pretty small, kind of micro grid, mini grid utilities. And to start selling to upmarket to some of the bigger incumbent utilities in Africa and Asia, we needed a more complete solution.
So I ended up doing a ton of market research. We sent a thousand LinkedIn messages from my account to utility executives in 40 countries. I did about 75 hour long interviews asking these executives about their pain points, about their procurement process, you have their technology roadmaps. And a few trends started bubbling up that were able to identify. And our takeaway was, okay, if we want to start selling our metering system to these upmarket utilities in Africa and Asia, we need a system that does more.
And then that's kind of what led to the overlap with what we saw as the needs in the North American market and why at the end of the day we decided to just kind of like bring these new offerings to the market kind of to both the North American market and our emerging markets utility customers at the same time.
Chris Wedding:
I love the just pedal to the metal grinding nature of what you just described. You know, a thousand messages, 75 hours of phone calls to learn. Right. Beta is just information. It's not, you know, good or bad, I mean, kind of it is, but anyway, it's information to inform where you guys should go. I liked it a lot.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, structured customer discovery.
Chris Wedding:
There you go. Yeah, much better phrase. You described how the first pivot led to you all partnering into contract manufacturing with partners in China. Were there ever instances where you or the board thought, hey, look, we have kind of IP things to manage, therefore, it changes or impairs our ability to kind of go to market like this or was that not really an issue at all.
Daniel Schnitzer:
So just to clarify, it's not a contract manufacturing relationship in China. It's really more of a partnership because that company with the contract manufacturer, you would give them a design. So it's your design, it's your IP. In our case, what we're doing as a partnership is we said, yeah, your design is great. We would like to buy a bunch of your meters. A condition of buying it is we need to work together to integrate this module thing that we have from Korea, that needs to get integrated into your existing meter. And once that integration is done, we're going to be a great customer. And in fact, with our partner there, I think that we are their biggest customer. So it's been a great relationship for both parties.
And then, yeah, I mean, in terms of IP protection, we certainly look to have certain parts of our system be separate from that process. Right. So, like, our communications hub has nothing to do with any aspect of integrating the communications modules into the meter. And we make our communications hub actually in North Carolina with a contract manufacturer. Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Okay. My backyard, metaphorically speaking. Let's go to your both, I guess, partnership and strategic investment from, I think it's both, you can clarify, from Honeywell. Not a small task. Clearly a great validation for what you guys have done and can do. I guess some founders, some entrepreneurs dream of strategic investors, but also maybe have occasional nightmares as well around do I give up options, control, et cetera in the process. Just describe how you think about what this partnership looks like going forward.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, I think we, from pretty early days in the interaction saw just really strong alignment with the team there. And that team came from an acquisition that Honeywell had done 10 years ago of a company called Elster. And Elster is one of the oldest metering companies in the world. And I actually think that they were founded before, like the age of Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse. I think that they started out doing water meters and then they got into electricity metering. I think at one point Westinghouse owned them. And they went through all sorts of different structures and ownerships over the course of the 20th century, and then they ended up at Honeywell, and it's now called Honeywell Smart Energy, it's no longer called Elster.
And I think where they were coming from when they were looking at working with us was what they had identified was kind of what we've been doing all along, which is this idea of the best way to make a competitive differentiation as a meter provider is by making it as easy as possible for your utility customers to take that data and do more stuff with it. Right. Like if you're selling something and you're saying, here's the latest version, it creates even more data than our previous version, but your customers don't have any way of actually making that data useful. why would they buy it from you? And so I think they kind of had this model and there's stuff out there about their platform, which they call Forge Performance plus for utilities.
That's their trademark, you know, clever name for this thing was all about this idea of hey, you know, meters can provide a lot more valuable data than just energy readings for billing. It can help solve a bunch of other problems, especially runs related to integrated renewables or EVs or everything that's happening at the edge. The meter is sitting right there. It should be able to help you with this stuff. The challenge was of course that they're a metering company, not a software company and not analytics company. And they're also not a grid technology company. Meters occupy this one little niche on the grid. It doesn't really have anything to do with the stuff that's upstream of it.
So that's where I think were able to demonstrate to them that we had this novel approach to how to pull all these different data sources together from across the utilities, different IT systems. So the billing system, the customer information management system, the GIS system, the engineering analysis system, bring all of that contextual data together along with the meter data, curate it and then, you know, provide access to these analytics that were really fueled by the meter data, but really only possible by combining it with these other data sets. So I think that just really resonated with the Honeywell team and you know, we felt like it was the right partner to go to market with.
Chris Wedding:
Great. Let's go back to the beginning again, or maybe kind of comparing where you are now to the beginning. You know, they say that naivete is a blessing, otherwise we would have very few first time entrepreneurs. What's an example of maybe one or two examples of things that were way harder than you thought to get to this stage when you just first launched SparkMeter?
Daniel Schnitzer:
Sure. Another, another couple of expressions that I really like along those lines that I have carried with me, for many years is, for every one hacking at the root, there are hundreds hacking at the branches. And another one, of course, is the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And you know, I think I was very conscious of that, especially as I started working in Haiti on energy access, seeing how many well intentioned projects, people there are, you know, getting involved in emerging markets and developing countries to try to help, but where, you know, if they're not kind of working on it the right way, it actually causes way more harm or just ends up being like a waste of resources. But, you know, in terms of, you know, your point about what was a lot harder than expected.
Yeah, I think probably from the beginning we thought it would be a bit easier to just sell the metering system that we had been selling, to mini grid companies, to bigger utilities, and we just found nothing was sticking. We were not getting headway, we're not making traction. And that's where we decided a couple of years ago to take this big step back and do that structured customer discovery. And so, yeah, I think that was definitely a case of naivete and us kind of thinking like, oh, you know, if this system is a great solution for utilities at the small scale solving these problems, why wouldn't it be a great solution for these utilities at the larger scale also solving those same problems? So that was a pretty big learning for us.
Chris Wedding:
Looking forward now, how do you all think about where the majority of your revenue will come from? That is to say, you know, emerging markets versus the US or other quote unquote developed markets?
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, I mean, just on like a magnitude basis, generating hardware revenue tends to be a larger top line number in the context of selling to utilities. So, you know, the hardware itself carries such a larger price tag that I think that our hardware revenue will continue to outpace our software revenue for at least the next three or four years. But we're seeing the software revenue now starting to accelerate at a much faster rate compared to the growth in the hardware revenue, in particular due to the fact that we're now picking up customers in North America that are not only much larger in terms of the number of meters they already have installed, but also because those are just software contracts. So we can actually get that revenue in faster than getting the revenue in from selling the meters and then the associated software.
So software will grow faster, but I think hardware will continue to dominate the top line for another few years.
Chris Wedding:
And is there anything about the election in the US that changes the kind of attractiveness of your all's offering?
Daniel Schnitzer:
I guess we'll see. It seems like it might be currently a little hard to tell in which direction things will go at the federal policy level. But on the other hand, I don't think anybody is imagining much of a slowdown in terms of the load growth or a slowdown in terms of interest that utilities have in the demand side being more flexible, which means that they want to have more visibility into their assets on the grid and how those assets are behaving and how much life those assets have left and how to better manage them. And then also on increasing renewables in some cases just because of purely economic reasons or in front of the meter grid scale batteries, you know, still can accommodate way, way more growth and penetration. Yeah, I think those trends feel pretty independent from the results of the election.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, true. We talked about in the very beginning how you all have raised considerable capital through your A to build what you built. What are some lessons learned in raising the eyes of the, the amount at the various stages or from the kinds of investors you've raised capital from. You know, friends. Lots of mutual friends at Elemental or Breakthrough Energy or CEV.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, and we've had the most wonderful investors, so feel really lucky to have the board that we have and the investors that we have. You know, incredibly supportive of the work that we're doing. So I think one is just like picking good people to work with and you know, also addressing uncomfortable moments when sometimes you're clashing with an investor or a board member and kind of facing that head on in a sense. You know, if you find yourself disagreeing with your board, I think at the end of the day, you're kind of better off, you know, kind of working in the direction that the board wants to see you move in.
You know, there's a lot of wisdom there, but I think in other cases, if there are kind of actual conflicts, that are, that are coming up to try to address those as quickly as possible. But we've been very lucky for the most part to have a very helpful and dedicated board instead of investors.
Chris Wedding:
Do you, do you have any tips along the lines of when there is tension between the founding team and the board, just steps for how you found best to address that head on, to not let it kind of, you know, fester, if you will. Is it. Who knows? Is it one ones? Is it a structured kind of conversation with a third party? What's that look like?
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, I've taken a few different approaches over the years that have worked. One, I remember going to one of my other board members asking, you know, how can I better, you know, work to work on the relationship with this other board member? And, and I remember his advice was, it was so devastatingly simple. He, he said, pick up the phone, call him and ask him the question of, just tell me what I can be doing differently. Tell me what I can be doing better, you know, what would improve our relationship. And it was like so simple. And I immediately followed his advice and we ended up having a, a really great conversation with the, the person I ended up needing to talk to.
And we worked through some things and over time, you know, we're able to kind of heal, you know, whatever the issues that were there. And then another thing I feel like I've been really lucky to have is an excellent coach, management coach. And this is something that one of our investors at the time that they participated in our series A, I think they were encouraging a number of their new teams that they had invested in to do, not just to look into, but to really do. And so I've been working with the same management coach now for about five years. And so having that person to go to as a trusted resource for advice and coaching and mentorship has been super helpful in that context.
Chris Wedding:
Excellent. Let's switch Dan, as we do, to the kind of personal side of the podcast. Got three questions here. The first is what are a couple pieces of advice you might give emerging professionals or maybe your younger self?
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, I think probably the big one is I was referring to those kind of sayings for every one hacking at the roots, there are a hundred hacking at the branches, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions, is to just kind of, you know, get enlightened, you know, do some research, talk to people in the industry, make sure that what you're working on, you know, if this is important to you, which I'm assuming for someone who wants to be, in fact, impactful, how do you assess the impact that a particular solution is going to have? So is that a financial impact? Is it a community impact? Is it a pure, you know, kind of science impact? So how do you measure impact?
And then how do you set up a process or a structure through which you can have some assurances that the work that you're doing is going to have the intended impact and not be kind of a waste of time, waste of money, waste of resources, or, you know, actually do harm?
Chris Wedding:
What are ways that maybe you have found useful to make sure you're hacking at the root, not at the branches. Are these certain, I mean, obviously someone like an executive coach is a good idea. Obviously the board is there partly for that, but maybe more personally. What does it mean?
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, so when I was starting off, I did, I was a big fan of kind of the cold call mentor outreach. So I'd like find some publication be like, wow, that was really good. Who wrote this? And then contact the person who wrote it, you know, over email and asked them if they were local or I was going to be near them, you know, could we get coffee or lunch or something and otherwise, you know, get on a call with them. So yeah, I think that's usually a good start. You know, talk to someone who knows more than you do.
Chris Wedding:
For sure. Yeah. A funny story maybe related in like seeking mentors that you don't know, but you're impressed with their work over the years, maybe 20 years ago, I started following the work of Amory Lovins of the, of RMI, you know, was seeing when he came to speak at events here in RTP and you know, for a few years, Hey, look, would you be up for, for mentoring me? Said, sure. I said, well, I was thinking about maybe like a monthly call and you like. I mean, weren't in the same room at the time. He must have fallen out of his chair laughing like, look, I don't talk to like a lot of my direct reports that often, so hell no I'm gonna talk to you that often. I was like, that was a silly request. I'm now in my place.
But I'm also appreciative.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yep.
Chris Wedding:
Yep.
Daniel Schnitzer:
But like, yeah, a phone call or a lunch, you know, to dispense worldly wisdom.
Chris Wedding:
That's right. That's right. Let's go to the next one. Tell us two or three habits that keep you healthy, sane and focused.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, I think a big one is just practicing healthy relationships and communication. So you know, for the thing about, you know, say this thing about therapy is don't wait for a crisis to start therapy. And you know, sometimes it's some points in your life you might need it more times than others. I, I'm in particular a fan of a method called internal family systems therapy. And there's a, a New York Times bestseller that came out that kind of made people more aware of it, called No Bad Parts, came out a couple years ago. So I think just learning how to have healthier relationships, how to have healthy communication, you know, big part of both is practicing mindfulness.
You know, when you have that kind of impulse of rage, you know, to send that angry slack message or email or whatever it is, you know, that's probably, it's probably fine to write it's not okay to send it. And so being aware of what your triggers are. But I think the thing that I really like about my experience with IFS was the idea of healing the parts of you that are causing those triggers in the first place.
And as the title of the book would suggest that those reactions that you're having and those feelings that you're having aren't necessarily bad or there's a part of you that is having that reaction and if you can learn to accept it rather than to shun it or feel shame about it, you can probably kind of heal the way that you're feeling when you're triggered a little bit more effectively. So that one's been big and then the other is, you know, peer groups and mentors like I've mentioned elemental accelerators. Peer groups are amazing. And so just having I think a practice of talking to your peers, getting advice from your peers and hearing from them. So I'm very lucky that there are a bunch of other clean tech CEOs who I can text or call to get their input, and then hobbies.
I've got my hobbies and you know, if that's something that you're interested in, that kind of keeps you sane. Definitely worth the time to carve out time to spend on them.
Chris Wedding:
So what are they and how do you carve the time out?
Daniel Schnitzer:
Big ones are woodworking and art, you know, watercolor, and I mean how do you have the time? I don't know. You just, you just got to do it. Just say I'm gonna have this thing. You know, if there's a motivation there, I think you'll find the time for it.
Chris Wedding:
Thinking more back on your comment around what was it? It was kind of the mindfulness and then essentially waiting to whatever cool off, let's say, to be using your, your, our, you know, prefrontal cortex versus our amygdala kind of fear based response. I'm listening to the book Antifragile right now and he gives this anecdote around one of the stoic philosophers and it sounds awful in today's terms. But that's part of the kind of the lesson's important, but it's so awful in kind of the way the story is told. So the stoic philosopher would say, look, instead of just beating my slave immediately when they messed up, I choose to wait 24 hours before deciding to do that. And I was like, what? Wow, like, great lesson, but where do I start to begin with the flaws with what you just said.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Glad. Glad. Mindfulness has been around in one form or another for a few thousand years.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, there you go.
Daniel Schnitzer:
And yet it is. It is something that we need constant, you know, reminding to practice it. But I think that's where IFS can kind of come in and work one level down from that is to not just do the mindfulness, but then to also kind of inquire within, why am I having this reaction? What is this part of me? Where does that reaction come from? And then being able to kind of work through that, eventually you can kind of move past, you know, having that feeling that you kind of previously needed to be mindful of before because you just kind of gotten over whatever that baggage was.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I think that's lovely. I think some listeners may be familiar with Vipassana meditation, you know, AKA inside meditation, where you're, you are trying to look at what's going on inside of you. Or Tara Brach, the kind of Buddhist.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Total crossover with her and IFS practitioners.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, yeah. She has this acronym, which I'm sure you've heard, RAIN, which is, I might get it wrong, but you can help me, Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture, I believe.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Right, yes, that investigate and nurture part. Yeah, that next step.
Chris Wedding:
Wonderful. Let's go to the last one. So share one or two books or who knows, podcasts, tools, quotes, I guess you gave us two good quotes. Anyway, other resources that listeners may benefit from.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Yeah, I read a ton of books that have helped over the years. One that's just kind of more practical is called Venture Deals by, I think, Brad Feld. You know, I did not have an MBA. I, you know, was new to, you know, being a CEO, so, you know, the idea of seeing term sheets of convertible notes and price rounds, you know, half the stuff, I had no idea what that was. So Venture Deals is just like, it's like a textbook for navigating a term sheet. And so that's been great, it's a great reference for anyone who's starting out And I think the biggest thing there is like don't be too reliant on your lawyer. Like don't expect your lawyer to kind of take care of all of the deal terms. You should have an opinion on all of those terms as well.
And to have an opinion you need to be informed. And so that's been great. And then a few others are Work Rules by Laszlo Bock, the former head of people operations at Google, The Phoenix Project, which is kind of a great primer for a non-software, you know, kind of expert. So especially someone who's in the CEO position who maybe doesn't have software experience to kind of learn about, you know, what are best practices when it comes to software development. And of course Andy Grove, High Impact Management, fundamental text.
Chris Wedding:
Well that is such a great homework list. I'd also say that for folks that are curious to hear more spoken word if you will, from Brad Feld, the author of the first book Venture Deals. He was a podcast guest, I don't know, 80 podcasts ago. So to hear him talk about what he's learned from his many years in venture, applying it to, you know, kind of climate innovation was pretty cool to hear as well.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Awesome. I'll, I'll check it out.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Well, hey Dan, so great to hear more of the story again. Going back to 8th grade all the way through, you know, partners like Honeywell and you know, 30 plus countries, millions of customers, you all are supporting. Hey man, rooting for your all's success.
Daniel Schnitzer:
Thanks so much. Yeah, I appreciate it.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, thanks for listening. And if you're not sick of hanging out with me just yet, then please join over 20,000 entrepreneurs, investors and innovators who get our 3 minute newsletter about changing the world through startups, finance, humor and wisdom. Or at least four attempts at the last two. You can subscribe on Substack or at our website entrepreneursforimpact.com. You can also come check me out on LinkedIn where I share 5 or 10 posts each week with commentary on climate tech startups, impact investing, better habits, and perhaps too many references to lessons from Buddhism that may apply to our work here tackling climate change. Okay, that's all y'all make it a great week because it's usually a choice. And P.S. If you're curious, that is not my kids favorite thing I say to them most mornings before going to school. But it's still true.
All right, take care.