Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#201:
Hudson Hollister, CEO of HData — AI for Energy Regulatory Reporting. VC-funding and Techstars. Ex-SEC Lawyer. Benefits of Open Data. How to Recover from Addiction.
Podcast Introduction
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Hudson Hollister, CEO and Co-Founder of HData. HData provides software solutions that streamline regulatory reporting and data management for the energy industry, focusing on utilities and regulatory bodies. They are a Techstars startup with two rounds of venture capital financing. Prior to HData, Hudson served as an attorney and advisor at the US Securities and Exchange Commission where he advocated for data transparency and financial and regulatory disclosures. He also founded the Data Coalition, a nonprofit organization focused on advancing data transparency in government. He's widely recognized for his work in promoting open data standards and leveraging technology to improve regulatory compliance and efficiency. In this episode, you will learn four important takeaways. Number one, how they turn unstructured energy regulatory data into business intelligence.
Number two, the benefits of raising capital via a safe versus convertible notes for founders. Number three, why most crises are not existential threats. What a relief. Number four, his recovery from alcoholism and what it means for his company culture. Please give Hudson and HData a shout out on LinkedIn, Slack, or X by sharing this podcast with your 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 guests 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:
Hudson Hollister, Co-Founder and CEO of HData. Welcome to the podcast.
Hudson Hollister:
Hello Chris. Thank you for having me.
Chris Wedding:
So it is bright and early for you, I know. As we, as we rescheduled this, you're like, I don't know, how about 7 o'clock central on Friday? That sounds perfect. Yeah, you're almost a half a cup of coffee in.
Hudson Hollister:
Well, one of the nice things about Entrepreneurs for Impact and the work that you do, Chris, is that you've got this great sense of empathy. And you could tell that I had a crisis going on when we originally scheduled it and you graciously offered to reschedule it. Of course, by just about every crisis, it turned out not to be existential. I could maybe learn that after several years of doing this, that crises are not existential. Or most of them aren't. But anyway, thank you for allowing us to go to 7:00 am Friday.
Chris Wedding:
Wonderful. Well, I have the benefit of this being, of course, 8 o'clock Eastern, so I have at least one child out the door to the bus, the other, you know, a teenager who doesn't need me to do anything. Hey, got his own car. Thank you very much. Here we are. So I'm going to start by asking a question that some of your friends on LinkedIn would ask. How in the world do you have 60,000 folks who love what you say, Hudson? How do you build an audience?
Hudson Hollister:
Controversial answer. I don't think they're real. You may never have anybody else with a lot of LinkedIn followers say this, but I don't think they're real. When I was running this nonprofit in D.C. all about regulatory data 10 years ago, over the course of a short time, I suddenly accumulated all these LinkedIn followers and I have never seen my posts actually get the engagement you would imagine from 60,000. And so I suspect that there was some experiment at LinkedIn. Maybe if any listeners work for Microsoft, they can go find out. I expect there was some experiment for LinkedIn to automatically direct a bunch of followers in. That happened around 2014, 2015, 2016 and they discontinued it, but I wound up with these followers. I don't know who they are. If you are one of them and has never engaged before, please like a post.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I'll tie this to our CEO group at EFI. One of my filters for the CEOs who joined, among many others, is, you know, are folks humbled enough to know they still have things to learn, which certainly includes me and everyone you know in our group. What a great demonstration, Hudson. Like 60,000, nah, they can't be real. They must be bots.
Hudson Hollister:
I wish I could claim that I jammed it and I intentionally planned on my LinkedIn content and I had a content calendar for my personhood, but I did not do that.
Chris Wedding:
Nice. Okay. I will also joke that the real purpose of having you on the podcast is so that the world can listen to your laugh. In our in-person groups last, well, not last week. A couple weeks ago in New York. The booming melody of the happy Hudson laugh. A nice addition to our group.
Hudson Hollister:
Thank you. I'll try to do it, but it's going to have to be planned, spontaneity.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. There you go. There you go. All right. So Hudson, what is HData? Give us a short version to start with.
Hudson Hollister:
All right. The boring version. We'll make it more interesting as we talk more. HData is a platform for regulatory information. Our platform grabs regulatory data and regulatory documents from all sorts of jurisdictions and lets our customers file and analyze and access and make decisions based on regulatory data. In the energy industry and in climate tech, it's crucial for us to understand what different jurisdictions are doing. What a state utility commission, how a state utility commission might feel about net metering rules, for instance. And our platform helps our customers do that.
Chris Wedding:
Okay, great, good start. The pain. Describe more the pain that you were responding to create HData.
Hudson Hollister:
Our customers very often have to figure out how a particular utility stacks up against the other ones. Like what's its renewable generation mix and what's the cost of renewable generation as a percentage of the total, for instance. Or like I mentioned, what does the utility commission in Wisconsin. What's the history of utility commission in Wisconsin dealing with net rules where Madison Gas and Electric. And it's very hard to do either plucking those numbers from where they live in the forms and then transcribing them into a spreadsheet. And then if you ever want to change your peer group, it takes a week, is difficult. Or figuring out which documents to look at and how to read them and sourcing them is difficult. We find that we can reduce the amount of time our customers spend doing those things.
Hudson Hollister:
We also find that once all of the information is easily to hand, regulatory can be easy, and the decisions that our customers have to make based on all of that foundation get better.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. So really it's a how do you find the right filings and then finding the number you need in a PDF and then taking that to it, say Excel, to manipulate to make an actual decision? Something like that. Yeah.
Hudson Hollister:
I'm going to make it a little messier. And also explain that our platform has a compliance solution on it too. It also lets regulated entities file their forms. And if you are wondering how we fit the workflow of understanding all this regulatory information into the workflow of submitting it, please tell me, because it's a complicated customer set, we do think that the nice part of this is we can help our customers do all sorts of different interactions with regulatory information, whether it's filing, exploring, analyzing, or making decisions.
Chris Wedding:
And is your all's solution replacing any existing software being used to do any of these things, or is it all replacing manual work, spreadsheets, et cetera?
Hudson Hollister:
We've got peers in the industry that also file the forms. They don't really do the intelligence or the analytics. We've got some peers in the industry that might pull some of these numbers, but there's nothing else comprehensive. And the generative AI that we have put into our platform doesn't really have analog elsewhere in the industry.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, that helps. Okay, let's go to the customers. So you've referenced some of these customer types. Let's, maybe the most, needy is the wrong word, dominant customer types that they come to you guys for help.
Hudson Hollister:
We've got a core of the core and the core of the core of the core is regulatory affairs at regulated energy companies like the regulatory affairs office of an investor owned utility. And the reason why is because they've got the most burden here. They have to sign off on those filings. They have to develop the financial analyses that dictate their relationship with their different regulatory agencies. They need to prepare for all of these different regulatory proceedings that are crucial in the regulated energy industry. It's what kinds of energy industry? It's electric, it's oil and gas pipelines and recently a little bit of water utilities as well, which maybe we can get into. I'm fascinated by that. Regulatory affairs at utilities, like I mentioned is the core. The people who do those kinds of jobs often go elsewhere in the industry.
Sometimes they go to work for regulatory agencies and they become the regulator of what they were. Other times they go found nonprofits and the nonprofits participate in this regulatory picture and the nonprofits might intervene and try to stop rates from rising or try to change policy. And sometimes they go to other parts of the energy industry that might not themselves be regulated but are interacting with the parts with the companies and the infrastructure that are and then need the same skills there.
Chris Wedding:
Got it. If those customers don't have a solution like HData, what happens? I mean you mentioned the friction, the kind of, you know, human time, productivity loss. But what's at stake, I suppose.
Hudson Hollister:
If they don't have a solution like HData then their ability to get the job done is real limited. One of the reasons for this is if you're in regulatory affairs in energy and you lose somebody from your team if they leave to go to one of those nonprofits or if they leave to go to KPMG and be a consultant to you, then how do you replace them? You've got to find somebody who has that expertise and that pool is really small. The right technology can mitigate that can make it possible for somebody who might not come from a regulated energy background to get up to speed fast.
Chris Wedding:
I'm with you. If folks go to your old's website they're going to see this very entertaining joy filled photo at the bottom of your page with you and maybe your co-founder, big smiles, thumbs up, et cetera where I think it's you all winning maybe are being selected as part of the Techstars Alabama cohort. So I think most listeners when they're hearing you talk, they would not have said, oh this must be a startup out of Alabama. So maybe elaborate that.
Hudson Hollister:
In 2021 were selected to be part of the Techstars Alabama Energy Tech Accelerator which is based in Birmingham, Alabama. I'm from Illinois, I'm a co-founder. Yuval Lubowich is in Georgia, he's from Israel. Originally being selected for that Techstars accelerator jump started everything about our company, and participating in that cohort for a three month period in the fall of 21 was, this is not an exaggeration, it was the best professional experience I have ever had.
Chris Wedding:
Wow.
Hudson Hollister:
Where I realized that my profession wasn't regulatory lawyer, which is what I thought I had been doing for the past 15 years before that, my profession wasn't regulatory lawyer. My profession is founder and so is Yuval's. Being alongside the other CEOs in that very early stage startup program, working on empathy and opining on each other's work and sharing in some of the struggles of trying to get the first institutional capital in was so reassuring. It combated the loneliness that I didn't even know that I felt. And the accelerator, it also made me really bullish on Birmingham and on these small to medium sized tech ecosystems that exist all over the United States. In Birmingham the scene is small enough that you get to know everybody.
It's big enough that there have been a couple of successful tech exits and you get to know those people and they are excited to meet you because you're in Birmingham. And our recruiting, oh my goodness. We were able to recruit folks that we probably shouldn't have been able to recruit being as early stage as were because they were in Birmingham and because they love the fact that we were.
Chris Wedding:
You, you mentioned your co-founder. How did you guys meet?
Hudson Hollister:
Yeah, divine providence. Yuval and I are opposites in many ways and have had this co-founding relationship for the last three and a half years. But I found him on LinkedIn. I was looking for a founding tech leader and we made a post on LinkedIn and got a bunch of responses. So this is not. I don't feel like I had any special skill to find a co-founder as well suited to task as Yuval is. He has a natural language processing background. He and his family emigrated to the United States when he was part of an acquisition of a natural language processing company. He is a former CEO. He went through Techstars before I did and he has since developed and had and recruited a team to develop all of the technology that I'm going to hopefully talk about a little more in this podcast.
But I don't feel like I had special skill to find him. One thing that did stand out when Yuval and I were having our first conversations is that Yuval very quickly detected all of our vulnerabilities and he was honest about them. At that time, we didn't have great technology. We were partnering with other companies to white label some of the technology. And he said, you really haven't built anything, have you? Why should I even consider this? And yet, and yet he got so interested. It was like pessimism plus sneaky optimism. And I think that's exactly where a co-founder ought to be. I'm so grateful that he found us.
Chris Wedding:
I love the tough look before saying, yes.
Hudson Hollister:
It's the tough look, it's this pessimism. But let's dig into it, shall we?
Chris Wedding:
I think many listeners are working on something to launch and thinking about how to find a co-founder. I think hearing that you found them on LinkedIn is interesting, but beyond credentials, right? How did you know that the,
Hudson Hollister:
This one of the 60,000 turned out not to be a bot?
Chris Wedding:
How did you know that, you know, kind of culture, character, etc were a fit beyond, you know, NLP expertise, you know, prior Techstars, role, etc.?
Hudson Hollister:
I don't have an easy answer for you. You can't engage culture in just a series of interviews. I mean, you can gauge culture in interviews if the interviewee makes a big mistake and reveals themselves to be an egotist. But people usually have some empathy at least, and you find out later on. All right, I don't have a satisfying answer for you.
Chris Wedding:
No, no. That's that. We don't want fake answers. Real answers are best. That's good. Let's go back to the product. So how do you make money?
Hudson Hollister:
We make money by selling software licenses, sir. We sell subscriptions of the HData platform. We've had a couple of different pricing models in our history. We sell subscriptions at the HData platform to these customers, energy companies, folks that sell to energy companies, regulatory agencies, and we price based on the value of that platform. We try to calibrate the price to the amount of time that people will save by being able to get easier answers and regulatory information or by filing automatically. And we also, when we price, we also think about the value of making better decisions at the end. Of course, saving time is an easier thing. to gauge. We got plenty of anecdotes. Saving time is an easier thing to gauge than the value of actually making better decisions.
Hudson Hollister:
I think we're only ever going to have fun examples of the actually making better decisions part. I don't think we're ever going to be able to quantify that part.
Chris Wedding:
No, it takes someone with experience making bad decisions to appreciate the value of what you just described. Right?
Hudson Hollister:
Yes.
Chris Wedding:
It's one of those things where it's like, all right, did I get a linear amount of value every month but relative to the subscription cost for that month? Well, no. Right. Because some months it's going to be this dramatic spike that's 100x, you know, the subscription cost. But it takes experience to, to see that.
Hudson Hollister:
Yeah. Always trying to collect as much knowledge as we can about what our customers are doing. We are excited to see our customers enthusiasm for using technology to solve regulatory questions. We see their enthusiasm in the numbers that we track about usage and is your subscription.
Chris Wedding:
Is it just a. Is it. Is it pay monthly? Is it annual, is it upfront plus annual? How does it work?
Hudson Hollister:
Our accountants love this. We try to stick to annual subscriptions, paid upfront and paid annually. That makes it easiest for us to run the financial part of the business. That is not where it always ends up. There are some truly unholy invoicing arrangements that I have with some customers and boy, is that hard to remind myself and different team members of every time we have to remember this invoice has to get reissued. And here's the cadence. This ricocheting back and forth between the huge big picture like what we're talking about and the weekly invoicing meeting that I have where we make sure that all the invoices are getting issued properly. That ricocheting is one of the hardest parts of the job.
Chris Wedding:
Yes, but I thought spreadsheets never lied. That's. What are you talking about?
Hudson Hollister:
We have a. A conurbation slash jungle of Google spreadsheets that run the business alongside the proliferation of startup oriented SaaS platforms that we found ourselves subscribed to. And aren't there so many? I'm sure a lot of our users are getting pinged all the time by SaaS, platform serving startups. Some of them are good. I feel like there's a lot. Anyway, we have this conurbation slash jungle of all of that stuff. If you scratch hard enough at any of the spreadsheets, you find that there's a place where mystery begins, down at the very deep.
Chris Wedding:
That begs many more questions, but we're gonna move on.
Hudson Hollister:
I mean, well, it's. And it's a beautiful thing. When we started out, I remember when we had a few customers and the first time that we had somebody working on customer success as a job, we had a spreadsheet and the spreadsheet was called Customers. And we tracked customer engagement in that spreadsheet that was called Customers.
Chris Wedding:
Nice. Yeah, that's about my level of sophistication for EFI, I think. Let's go to. Look, you're a software business, you got all this tech you're developing from scratch. So you've raised capital. You mentioned Techstars as the starting spot for this. Maybe describe to some highlights of what's allowed you guys to raise this asset capital to build a team to create a product like this.
Hudson Hollister:
Well, here's some things that I did that I wouldn't recommend. I started out this business actually before, I started this business wanting to go into regulatory, before it was energy regulatory. My background is I used to be a lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission in D.C. And I worked on trying to digitize regulatory forms, originally in financial services. In 2018 I set out to start my own business here to automate regulatory information. And at that point it was not specific to any vertical. I came in and fell in love with Energen later on. In 2020, I raised a friends and family round for this rather vague regulatory automation idea. I would not recommend to anybody that they raise a $250,000 priced friends and family round with lawyers working on it. It's not worth the legal fees.
However, in 2020, I did not know what a safe note was. So for those who are perhaps contemplating founding Google Safe Note, that's a much easier and cheaper way to raise capital than issuing stock. Pricing the stock based on a pre money and a post money valuation and selling it to investors with the help of a battery of lawyers. That is what we did. We then, I hired a couple of people, we worked on regulatory automation. When I was a nonprofit leader, I had helped to work on persuading the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to adopt a new data format for the forms and that became the opportunity that we pursued as a company. And numbers extracted out of the forms are to this day. That's the core of the Data set that HData maintains and harvests from all the regulatory filings.
On the basis of that, we kept ourselves alive with a convertible note and then got into Techstars and we raised our seed round out of Techstars and we have since raised A in a Series A capital height. We ain't, but there is so much value that can be gained from making life easier for the people that have to deal with regulation that we at every stage we have found the growth and there's been a, I think a slightly different category of investor that has gotten interested at each of these stages.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. And I think it'll be great at this moment to reference Allison Myers at Buoyant Ventures who was your all's Series A lead and a friend of mine and connected us X months ago, and here we are. Here we are. As I'm telling your own story.
Hudson Hollister:
Well, I can't say enough about Allison's leadership. Allison Myers, co-founder of Buoyant Ventures, got connected to us when were working on raising Our Series A. 2023 was a really bad time to be working on raising the Series A. Allison used to help lead Accenture's utility strategy practice and she herself had dealt with the problem of how hard it is to compare utilities using regulatory information. She has a story about sitting in the lobby of a Hilton Garden Inn at 2am trying to make sense of the numbers that pertained to the utility she was going to meet the next day. If she'd had HData at that time, then she wouldn't have had to be up at 2am as an Accenture consultant. Allison saw the value because of that background.
And as a result we're so grateful for Allison and for her co-founder Amy Francetic for a buoyant leadership of our 10 million dollar Series A which happened earlier this year. But I, I now that I've gotten on it, I need to keep talking about a couple of the other things that Allison has done. It's not very common that one of your investors and board members will take five sales trips with you in 10 months. But man, find a board member who will do that. Because a lot of our growth has come from the fact that our lead investor knows our industry so well and also knows a lot of our prospective customers and has helped us meet them.
Chris Wedding:
Well, that's a good illustration of the fact that look, all capital is not created equal, it's not fungible and that founders should care about the people who would be on their boards, not just the firm who would be investing. Firms, I mean obviously Amy is awesome as well, but in bigger firms, right, depending on which partner, which director, which VP, et cetera could be on your board can be different in culture, personality, approach.
Hudson Hollister:
I want to talk back about that a little bit because how on earth are we just, that's another dimension. How do you select the people? I've talked to a lot of founders who would say I would just be happy if I resolve. this fundraising slog that I'm on. And some of these things we can't control. It's hard to figure out what we can control and what we should invest our time in and what we cannot control, what we should just allow to happen. I have for sure, on the fundraising journey, I have for sure just allowed things to slide in because I didn't have time to try to smartly design it.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, well, it's especially true right now, right. Raising capital in the last, whatever, 18 months and probably for the next, I don't know, I'd love to say six months.
Hudson Hollister:
I want to push back on that too, though, because here's the optimistic view. People have been saying that it is hard to raise capital these days for three years. At some point this is just going to become normal and it is truly possible to raise capital in this environment.
Chris Wedding:
Love it. Keep the optimism alive. We were discussing before press and record that this podcast used to be called the Climate Torch, as in like light in the darkness. Folks, there's plenty of bad news out there. Doesn't need to be all bad news all the time. Let's go to what's hard Hudson. So give us, I don't know, a couple of stories about the hardest part of building HData.
Hudson Hollister:
I think I'll go general and then specific. In general, those in our audience who are working on their own ventures or their own startups or their own nonprofits will understand this. There's truly nobody that can fully understand all the things there. It is so truly isolating. I'm so grateful to have a co-founder who was a founder previously and does understand. Before Yuval came along, I did not have that. And there's many dimensions where there's nobody who understands. You'll find that there's nobody in your life who really gets it, even though you probably have wonderful people in your life who really try to. It is so isolating, and that is just how it is. Another big general thing that's hard is that the successes do not make you happy and the failures make you really sad.
When you raise capital or when you close a big customer or when the technology does something right, you are very briefly euphoric. And then the clouds come back in. To get specific, I would say probably the one favorite low point, and maybe it's favorite because we worked on it and fixed it is I had one phone call in February 24, this past winter, where one of our largest customers told us that they were not going to subscribe anymore. The funding that we have been led to believe was going to come through for the subscription to the HData platform was not there. And we had just raised the Series A. It created a gigantic hole in the budget that were planning out for the year and forever forward. And it created the gigantic question mark about whether our platform was valuable at all.
Chris Wedding:
But it was all,
Hudson Hollister:
It was one phone call. And then I had to go from that phone call. And my next call was an interview with a new person that were recruiting to join the team. And I usually maybe try to not do this with the people that you're trying to recruit, but I had to admit it. I told the person, we just lost a gigantic customer. I can't act like everything is shining and happy. I am sorry, but I feel terrible right now. And then I shared some of what was going on. That person ended up joining the company.
Chris Wedding:
Well, it's this challenging role that CEOs have to lead right, between being candid and honest with their team members, but also instilling hope in the future. So that's a good example of kind of walking that line, maybe the authenticity one, and honesty.
Hudson Hollister:
I noticed this a couple weeks ago, and I was in a conversation with a team member and things were looking good about our sales. And a couple weeks previous, things had been looking really bad. Of course, everything's relative. Relatively bad went to relatively good because some good conversations happened, et cetera. And the team member said, you know, a couple weeks ago, you said you weren't worried. I didn't. I couldn't figure out why you weren't worried. But now I see why you weren't worried. And I thought in my brain, oh, contraire. I was jumping up the balcony a couple weeks ago, but I just didn't say so. Yeah, at that point, I wasn't honest about being nervous, but maybe it was good that in the previous meeting I hadn't said anything. It is hard to find that line, figure out where.
Where the stress should be expressed and where the fundamental optimism that you have because you started the thing and because you really believe in it and because you see all these indicators that it will work, where you express that.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I'm just making notes here. You know, there's this expression, which I'm sure you've heard. But you know, only the paranoid survive, right? Which is like, you know, maybe founders, CEOs, C suite, always have or should have some fear about things going wrong. I think that this conversation ties back to where we started, which is your words, right? Most of the crises were not existential. Are not going to be existential.
Hudson Hollister:
I wish I could learn that. When you and I were talking a few days ago and I asked to reschedule this call, the thing that I was worried about was a thing that, it's proper to note, but it was not a thing that's going to ruin the business. And at the time, in the moment, this is three days ago, in the moment, I was thinking about curtains.
Chris Wedding:
All this also reminds me of the, this EFI, you know, huddle on sales strategy we had yesterday. And one of the CEOs are saying like, you know, the solution to losing a client here or there, which is totally normal, is volume. Right. If we are, I'm not saying you're too dependent on too few, but if we are too dependent on too few prospects clients. Yeah. When one falls out, it's. It feels pretty bad. His response is yeah, we've been there. But now our pipeline is so big that helps smooth out the uncertainty. So anyway, it happens, right? It happens to lose customers. And some of it is actually I wonder what percentage is, it's about them, right. Not you, right. Their budgets, their reorg, et cetera. Versus does, is this an awesome product that meets the midterm need? Yeah.
Hudson Hollister:
Yeah. We're doing a new thing in HData's case, it's using technology to help people deal with regulatory information. And you asked about our competitors a while back and I mentioned that we have some. But for the most part, understanding regulatory information requires going to a website, transcribing a number, putting the number into Excel, and then running Excel formulas or downloading a bunch of PDFs and reading them. And so we're competing with Excel and PDF like Excel and Adobe, which is a very common thing for early stage SaaS companies to say. And so we're doing a new thing. The way that people interact with technology to resolve these problems is new. We're introducing people to a new UX and new ways of doing stuff in addition to trying to convince them to Pay for a SaaS subscription in order to do that.
And it's a lot. It is so exciting to find and meet the people that benefit from this and that themselves, get excited and start to explain it to their organization. We get to host our customer conference next week back in Birmingham, Alabama. We have over 100 people coming in from as far away as Paris in order to get a little glimpse of the next generation of the AI technology to address and resolve regulatory problems. I can't wait to put those people together because they're going to get separate value from meeting each other. It's not even going to be from HData. They're going to meet each other and they're going to discover that there are folks like me at my energy organization elsewhere that also are trying to use technology for this thorny thing and they're going to feel the empathy.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, 100%. I mean, look, that's kind of what, you know, EFI is. That you CEOs who are so lonely at the top get together like, oh, that person gets me. To the core immediately.
Hudson Hollister:
Yes. I mean, just when I met you for the first time after Allison Myers of Buoyant introduced us, I got that within the first 10 minutes. And you have built a community that is also like that, where there isn't any judgment. I've been to a lot of roundtables of tech companies. There's not a pretense. There's not pretense, at least so far as I can tell. Maybe there's. Could there be opposite pretense? Could be putting themselves down further than they actually need to. Could there be performed humility, Perhaps the opposite problem. But it's been amazing to get to know the other CEOs in entrepreneurs for impact and feel that empathy.
Chris Wedding:
Here here. Yeah. Glad you're glad you're part of it. Let me ask one last business question. Then we're going to switch to the personal side of the pod. Five year vision. Hudson, what do you see with each data and the thousands of regulatory folks and others that you're supporting today?
Hudson Hollister:
HData is in eight regulatory ecosystems. And by that I mean there's eight different jurisdictions where our platform is used by more than one participant in regulatory proceedings. Like where we're being used, where our platform is being used by the regulated utility and also by the state utility commission. They're both using it. Or where data is used by the utility and also by one of those organizations that intervenes in the proceedings. We watch those regulatory ecosystems a lot because we provide the most value where there's more players in the rate cases or the proceedings or the arrangements for regulatory. Where there's more players using HData, this is because we ultimately will also work on connecting them, where we build a digital environment for regulatory work to happen.
So long way of saying within 5 years I believe that we're going to be in most of the different regulatory ecosystem in the United States and we're going to assist regulatory players interacting with each other, with the utility proposing its integrated resource plan in a shared environment where the intervenors and the reg nator can engage with that proposed integrated resource plan, ask their questions, get AI driven answers, some of the questions get bubbled up to the regnated utility, the whole thing works faster and then that's good for the massive work our society is doing on the energy transition. Because one of the biggest holdups in the new infrastructure that's needed, in the renewable generation infrastructure and in the incredible amount of transmission infrastructure that's got to be built, one of the biggest holdups is regulatory.
Hudson Hollister:
The regulatory proceedings happen faster because of shared information and the infrastructure gets built and deployed faster. My hope over the next five years is that we will move from eight to 50 plus jurisdictions where eight is used by more than one player. We will digitally connect the players in those jurisdictions and the machinery of regulations get to move faster.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I like that. We were just having a faculty meeting at Duke, at the business school around, you know, climate topics and I raised this issue of permitting queues. Well, queues, but partly related to permits and otherwise. And I think, you know, these numbers too would like, you know, three, six, seven years, that great, you know, clean energy projects sitting in queues before they can actually be built. So what I hear is you all shortening that to allow gigawatts of new, you know, clean power, for example, to get on the grid.
Hudson Hollister:
Yes. And shortening other things. There are lots of proceedings that tie up everybody's time and prevent whatever change people want to make from happening. And I always think that the cost of delay is hidden and the cost of delay is profound. And by deploying and helping people get these answers fast out of regulatory information, we can slightly mitigate the cost of delay.
Chris Wedding:
Yep. All right, let's switch to the person here. Hudson, what are a couple of pieces of advice you might give an emerging professional or someone switching into climate about building a career that matters?
Hudson Hollister:
I actually want to make sure I say something important one at a time. Two and a half years ago I went into a recovery program for alcohol abuse and I am very grateful for that. And the community that I am part of in the Celebrate Recovery organization, in what it's called, has become a very close community. And I resisted that for so many years. I resisted admitting that I was abusing alcohol and I resisted any scrutiny on it. And then finally I got to a place where I really needed to. I wish it had happened so many years earlier. And I am so grateful that there's a point where there doesn't need to be any shame over it.
And I would counsel anybody who's listening, if you think you might have a problem with alcohol or with something else, with compulsive behavior, you probably do. And it is okay. You're still alive. You're still here. There are people that you can come alongside. There is freedom that you can pursue. So if anybody listening is looking for a signal, this is it.
Chris Wedding:
What. Best answer ever to that question. Tell me the name of the organization, Celebrate Recovery, was that it?
Hudson Hollister:
It's called Celebrate Recovery. It is Christian. It has a 12 step program that's similar to the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step program. And so for those that are part of the Christian faith, I highly recommend Celebrate Recovery. There are a lot of programs out there for people who might not want to dig into the Christian faith at the same time.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I mean, I guess, first of all, congratulations. Excited that you made that choice and are still, you know, on that path. What else would you say to folks who are asking that question? Am I addicted to something? Should I make a phone call to learn more? How should they know when the answer is yes?
Hudson Hollister:
If you're asking the question, the answer is probably yes. And if the answer is no, then still go because you might be encouraging somebody else.
Chris Wedding:
Love it.
Hudson Hollister:
You might save somebody's life by sitting in a meeting.
Chris Wedding:
And yeah, this is way more than how do you build a career, but how about save someone's. Save someone's life instead?
Hudson Hollister:
And these things are interrelated because we talked a lot about dealing with the stress earlier in this podcast. But in order to raise capital and in order to sell and in order to recruit folks, you have to project optimism. It's real hard to project optimism on the one hand and have honesty on the other. And one place where that can affect things is it's awfully hard to admit vulnerability or shortcomings or failings in your personal life that trying to project success all the time makes it harder in the professional life, makes it harder to do anything else in personal life.
Chris Wedding:
Well, you beat me to my next question, which was how has this experience maybe influenced the culture of HData? Is there more you would say about that?
Hudson Hollister:
I try to share the same thing. The thing I just shared when folks joined HData and I hope that's helpful.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I'm sure it is.
Hudson Hollister:
We have a. And we have values of kindness and empathy that we could always better at, you know, because there's always pressure to push harder, harder. And so it's not. I wouldn't hold us up as a beacon of figuring out values perfectly, but we do put kindness as the first value on our list of values and I have addressed it from an HR standpoint when folks aren't kind.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I this podcast is not a commercial for LinkedIn. However, I did notice one of your LinkedIn posts recently where you were calling out in a good way one of your team members for exhibiting right showcasing, highlighting that virtue of kindness in the organization, which I thought was rarely seen, perhaps on a post like that, but love that.
Hudson Hollister:
Yes, Britt Cohen, who just left our team as VP of Customer Success and is heading on to some really exciting things, has lead with kindness as part of their LinkedIn profile. And I have never seen somebody who had a slogan on their profile for their values and then actually followed it so well. And I hope that we're able to keep doing that after Brit's departure.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I'm sure you are. Let's switch a little bit. Are there habits or routines beyond Celebrate Recovery that keep you healthy, sane, and focused building HData?
Hudson Hollister:
I wouldn't say I do this all that well. I would say that one thing that comes to mind when I go to church, I always come up with great business ideas which I would not exactly recommend because when you're in religious services, you're supposed to be worshiping, you're supposed to be meditating, you're supposed to be focused. But I think that does illuminate an interesting thing. When we get over ourselves a little bit and we are focusing somewhere else, then we're at our most healthy when we have the ability to come up with good ideas. When I'm worshiping, I am at my most relaxed and I find that sometimes good ideas just bubble up. And so I try to have a daily practice of prayer as well. Not from the Christian background, but one of our EFI CEOs just recommended.
The Surrender Experiment by Mickey Singer, it tells a story of business leadership while also maintaining a Buddhist spiritual practice. And Mickey explains that he was able to recognize the voice of anxiety in his head and be separate from that. And I think when I, when I worship God, I am doing that. And so I try to have a daily practice of that and I find this helps. I think I do a very good job of it.
Chris Wedding:
There it is. Humility again, Excess humility. Too much. Just kidding.
Hudson Hollister:
Hopefully it's not performative.
Chris Wedding:
About good ideas in church and kind of getting over yourself makes me think of this other definition I heard of humility, which is it's not thinking less of ourselves, is thinking less often about ourselves.
Hudson Hollister:
I think C.S. Lewis said that.
Chris Wedding:
You're right. You're right. That's who it was. Yeah. What a great distinction. What a great play on words there. Yeah, I think I mentioned to you offline, but I met Mickey at his kind of, you know, I don't know, camp headquarters, temple, etc, near Gainesville, Florida. And, and I told him, I said, look, your work is influencing these CEOs building companies that matter and kind of try to find equanimity balance along the way. Anyway, so thumbs up from Mickey to you and the other folks. Readers, I suppose, of books of his out there.
Hudson Hollister:
Yeah, yeah. The imperative to find something worthy of focus that's not myself. And am I measuring up? Oh no. A much bigger question than the company.
Chris Wedding:
That's probably a great lot to finish on actually, Hudson. Are there any other messages that you want to leave with folks who may be curious about HData or curious about climate tech? Final words here.
Hudson Hollister:
I don't have a pithy way of saying it, but if you have an idea that keeps you up nights, if you have an idea that you keep coming back to in different jobs, then you will lose nothing by pursuing it. So please do.
Chris Wedding:
Lovely. Yeah, I can picture getting out of bed at 2:30 in the morning for my first startup idea. It failed, but boy, it was fun building it for a little while with a good friend.
Hudson Hollister:
Anyway, do you regret it? It failed. Do you regret it?
Chris Wedding:
Oh, no, no. Someone agree with me. That's right. That's right.
Hudson Hollister:
Yes.
Chris Wedding:
Hey Hudson, this has been fun. We're all rooting for the success of HData.
Hudson Hollister:
Thank you so much, Chris. It's been a great start to my day to work on this podcast with you.
Chris Wedding:
Hear, hear. 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 too. You can subscribe on Substack or at our website, EntrepreneursforImpact.com. You can also come check me out on LinkedIn where I share five or ten 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.
Chris Wedding:
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.