Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#172:
Rohan Puri, CEO of Stable — Dynamic Pricing for EV Charging. More Profit with AI-Based Siting Location. Don't Sell Software to Software Companies. Relentless Focus. MIT, Harvard, and TechStars.
Podcast Introduction
Chris Wedding:
My guest today is Rohan Puri, CEO of Stable, AKA Stable Auto. Stable maximizes EV charging ROI with strategic placement and pricing solutions for those charging stations. Rohan brings experience from MIT, Harvard and Techstars.
In this episode we talked about how 70% of EV fast chargers are underperforming financially, why static pricing versus their dynamic pricing at EV charging station makes no sense, how 15% versus 5% should inform ideal charging goals for these chargers. By the way, you got to listen to figure out what that means. Wink Wink. Their AI tool for optimizing charger location for quicker paybacks to investors drawing on tens of thousands of chargers in their kind of database or network, deliberately keeping their team small, why you shouldn't sell software to software companies and how they maintain relentless focus. All right, please give Rohan and Stable a shout out on LinkedIn, Slack or Twitter by sharing this podcast with your people. Finally, one last request before we press record. Hop on over to Apple or Spotify to rate, review and follow this podcast.
I don't take any sponsors for this podcast, as you know, so this little gesture of support means a lot to me and the guests. Thanks so much and hope you enjoy it.
Podcast Interview
Chris Wedding:
Rohan Puri, co founder and CEO of Stable Auto, AKA Stable. Welcome to the podcast.
Rohan Puri:
Thank you so much, Chris. It's great being on.
Chris Wedding:
All right, so you. You bring experience from a lot of cool places that folks would say, oh, well, that guy should be trusted. So for listeners who read that, the intro here, right, You've got some time at Harvard, MIT. I mean, decent programs, not quite like Duke or UNC where I teach, but they're okay, as well as Techstars. So some great kind of boot camp work to prep you for what you're doing today. So awesome.
Rohan Puri:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
But let's go right to the heart of the matter, which is this stat which I believe is either on a website or in something coming out from you all soon, which talks about 70% of EV fast chargers are underperforming financially. We don't need investors worried about investing in this infrastructure kind of class, if you will. We need the opposite. We need the doubling tripling down. So maybe elaborate on that and how Stable's solution can help us kind of set things right, if you will.
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's no secret that some of the biggest charging companies out there, you know, Blink, EVGO, ChargePoint, their earnings reports over the last quarter have been not so good. And essentially that's because these charging stations really aren't penciling. If you look at a charging station, you want it to be used as much as possible around 15% of the day at least. You want it to be used so that you can break even on your initial investment. And the average utilization rate of a charging station today is around 5 or 6%. These are chargers outside of Tesla's charging network. From data that we have at Stable, 5 or 6% is the average utilization rate of a charging station today.
When a charger, a fast charger, costs, you know, 100 to $150,000 per charger, and you're putting 10 in a given location, spending a million to $2 million of capital in there, and 70% of them aren't going to pay back. That's not, that's not what you want. What we want is a gold rush, right? We want investors and charging networks and retailers to be out scrambling, looking to of where to put charging infrastructure. And right now it's quite the opposite. It looks risky, it's scary. And that's exactly what Stable's trying to help solve. I'm with you.
Chris Wedding:
What's the origin of Stable? How did you come upon this massive problem?
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We were working actually initially as a robotic charging company. We built these robotic arms that would plug in with autonomous electric vehicles to charge them up throughout the day. And we had deployed one of the world's first robotically operated charging facilities in San Francisco. And in that time, this is just before COVID maybe a couple weeks before COVID I remember talking to some folks at like Tri-America and were trying to figure out, you know, where should the next location go, where should the third charging location go? And how are you going to figure out what the best balance of the autonomous fleets using it and public usage would be?
So that sort of spun us off into a direction of trying to figure out where charging stations should go and us realizing that when you look at charging station usage today, this is a huge problem. They're really underutilized. And there's a couple of key strategies that some of the larger networks aren't yet implementing, namely placing them in places where utilization rates are likely to be high, which is not easy. You got to figure out where are the EVs, where are they driving far enough, where they're going to need to charge, where are the EVs driving where they don't have access to charging at home. Right. And there's not too much competition nearby. It's a multi variable problem. And secondarily, once those chargers are installed, what should you charge? What should be the price that you charge an end user?
And ideally that fluctuates with supply and demand. So what Stable does is we provide tools that help place and price chargers optimally to drive much better return on investment of those chargers so that 70% of them aren't failing anymore. And right now, unfortunately, the consequences of 70% of those sites not doing so well is that the burden of that deployment is being borne by the taxpayer in the form of grants like NEVI and you know, IRA. Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for those programs, but we can't keep doing that forever. I mean, how ridiculous would we be? Would it be if, you know, there was a new program to incentivize gas station deployment? We'd be all up in arms. Those guys have plenty of money, what's going on, Right? So it's a totally different piece, totally different game.
And the fact that some of the biggest players out there are looking like they're tanking is not a good sign.
Chris Wedding:
All right, maybe you've already answered the question, but if there's more to add for listeners who are newer to the EV space, EV charging space, further explain, if you could, why there's only a 15% utilization rate and not there only 5 and not 15. And maybe why 15 is the goal?
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, absolutely. So charging stations make money by selling energy or selling units of energy called kilowatt hours. And they charge a price for that, say $0.40 per kilowatt hour that they dispense into your vehicle. So the more kilowatt hours they dispense, the more money they make. But it takes time to dispense that. So a fast charger takes, you know, 30 minutes to fill a tank, the average tank from 0 to 80%. So you know, you want to make sure essentially that your charging station is being used as much as possible in the 24 hour period, that it's, people are there and pumping electrons as much as possible to make as much money as possible. So the rough target for that is 15 of the 24 hour period. Want to make sure that this thing is used. The average usage rate is 5%.
Basically what that means is most charging stations aren't being used enough to pay back on their initial investment. And that usually is a, you know, basically where that comes from is that, you know, you probably put them in the wrong place or your price is incorrect, that nobody is showing up. So, or you've built just way too early that in this place there just hasn't been enough EV growth yet.
And so it's, you have to be a little bit more measured and calculated with how you place and price those chargers effectively to make sure that okay, maybe you might be a little bit less than the 15% target, you're at 10%, but you're assured that the growth in that area will be enough over the next eight to 10 years that charger is going to be in the ground, that it will pay for itself and turn a profit one day. Right.
Chris Wedding:
So you have this nice alliteration in your kind of summary of the company to place and price, right. These chargers in a smarter way. So can you comment on which of those is more material in the underperforming of these assets? Because maybe I'm anomaly, but if I think about, you know, placing versus pricing, I don't know that I've ever really thought much about what is the price per kilowatt hour. Given I'm not charging publicly very often, I think where's the most convenient location to where I'm going and what can I do while I wait? Perhaps with a child in a car, let's say. So place versus price, which one tends to be more important and why?
Rohan Puri:
You know, you'd be surprised. So, so I mean if you play it forward a little bit. And you think about gas stations, right? Why do you choose one gas station over an alternative gas station? And if you really think about it, you know, the pumping experience is all about the same. The retail experience at those are all about the same. Right? You get the same goods at every gas station, roughly. The pumping experience is about the same, really. The way you choose a gas station today is on what's a convenient location, even, you know, what's on my side of the road to some degree, and what has a better price, to the point where they put the price, advertise it on huge now digital, you know, billboards to advertise price. And that's how you optimize for where to fuel.
And so that's our bet as well, is that these are the two biggest drivers of profitability of a charging station. Which one is bigger is a tough question because it can depend, you know, on a highway, perhaps place is more important than price. Right? You may be well placed on the highway is means that, you know, by the time vehicles are coming your way, they're almost always depleted, meaning they'll pay any price to be there. Whereas if you're in a more competitive location where there's plenty of alternatives, maybe price is a bigger driver. I think what we're showing, and we can do this because we have real charger utilization data from almost 40,000 chargers across the United States and 70,000 charges across Europe. So we know the actual utilization rates of charging sites.
We've seen which ones are not used so much, which ones are. Are used a ton, and what their prices are. And we use that to understand what makes a good site good. Right. Place and price. And so when we take a look at that data, we start to understand that exactly what you're saying, Chris, is that some places they're very sensitive to price. Other places they're totally insensitive to price. But what we often see in the. In, you know, the newspaper and things like that these days is more of a focus on cost and not on revenue. Right. So we focus on. Let's put battery packs at charging locations to help, you know, minimize energy costs. Right. There's this thing called demand charges out there, which can really hurt your economics at a charging station.
If you have big spikes in demand at your site, you pay a lot to the utility. There is what's called peak shaving, or demand charge mitigation, Right. Just chargers sort of artificially slowing down the charge for you to make sure they're not paying a crazy fee to the utility. So There are all these techniques about managing costs, but there's almost no activity out there on managing revenue. So back to your original question. It depends not, maybe not a very satisfying answer, but the focus on the revenue side and getting as many customers as possible at the right price is what we're focused on at Stable.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I think it's a great distinction you make between cost and revenue for sure of these. On the revenue side, how do investors think about, I don't know, pick your metric payback period, you know, internal rate of return, et cetera. What's that look like for an investor in EV charging infrastructure?
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, I think, you know, we have a number of investors that are our customers today, including large charging networks, underwriters, people who are financing charging infrastructure. So we have a lot of interesting people to talk to about this. Roughly speaking, you want a fast charger to, you know, typically a fast charger is in the ground for about anywhere from eight to 10 years before you need to replace the thing. Right now chargers have a bad rap right now about being unreliable and breaking down. And that is true.
Chris Wedding:
Right.
Rohan Puri:
But they hope they don't have to dig it up again for another eight to 10 years. So typically what you want is a payback in the second, third, fourth year, anything before 10, so that you can make a profit on that site and it's not just a net break even point. And so the IR can really vary quite a bit because that depends on, you know, for example, grants that you might qualify for and the like.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, fair point. On the pricing piece you gave the comparison to, you know, the gas station infrastructure and you have these whatever, 30, 40 foot signs with giant numbers indicating price. What's the equivalent for EV users searching for the best price for chargers?
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, so right now that price shows up in two ways. Either your Google Maps or Apple Maps app. Right. You might see some price information or in your, in car navigation you'll see it layered on the map. In fact, Tesla vehicles will tell you the price of this charge and will sort of automatically find you the best, most convenient charger, best price at that site. What's I think surprising to people is that the price of EV charging stations is relatively fixed right now. So if you look at EV charging networks right now, like EV Go Electrify America, some of the bigger ones, the price per kilowatt hour dispensed is the same no matter what location you go to. Definitely within a state, but sometimes even across the entire country it's the same price.
And the price of that Charger, it doesn't even vary throughout the day. They may update prices quarterly annually. Right. To reflect what the market is. But what's crazy is that the price of the electricity that's going to that charger changes 2 to 5x throughout the day. Right. It's more expensive to sell electricity for the utility. It's more expensive to distribute electricity at say 5 or 6pm than it is at midnight, because at midnight there's no demand for it. So what's surprising is that this is a very easy way to start to optimize the economics of your charger. If you can balance the, you know, if you know what the supply cost is of that electricity and if you know what the demand or the market's willingness to pay is for that site.
And to know what the market's willingness to pay is, you have to understand and predict, you know, when are vehicles likely to show up at my location? You know, is there enough competition nearby? What's my current elasticity to price? Are people insensitive or sensitive to price at this location? And then you decide what that price should be and what the price the consumer will bear. But the hope is that it actually gives consumers more choice. So when they're back in their in car nav and they're in Google Maps, they can actually choose a site that is cheaper or choose to wait to charge at a time when it's cheaper versus just hey, it's fixed price and wherever I can get it, I'm going to get it.
Chris Wedding:
So Rohan, the thousands of listeners we have on the podcast, they believe that I create this podcast for them. And that's true. But I also created for me to learn new stuff. I had no idea, and I kind of live in this space. I had no idea that what you just described was true. Right? That all these charging stations, regardless of location, and we know power prices vary dramatically across the country regardless of time of day, and we know the cost for utility to produce power varies dramatically over the day, results in zero change in price at the EV charging station. That's, that's mind blowing.
Rohan Puri:
It's pretty crazy, right? We're starting to see them now do it. So Tesla is now doing this. They have time of use pricing which would, you know, vary throughout the day at some locations and different locations might have different pricing. Electrify America recently announced something similar. I don't know if it's fully implemented yet, but it's still early days. Isn't that crazy? These charges have been in the ground for some of them eight Years already. And it's been the, you know, they update the price once a year just on inflation and things like that.
Chris Wedding:
Thank goodness for disruptive startups. Rohan. Yeah, let's go. Let's switch from pricing to placing to the sighting. You've, you've given us a few variables for how you would optimize sites, so maybe elaborate further on how you help customers pick the best sites. And then after that, we're going to switch to a new product you all launching later this month in January as we record this.
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, that sounds good. So when we place charging locations, basically give our, you know, customers who are charging companies, people who are taking direct risk on the deployment of a charging station, we give them an AI model that can predict what the utilization rate of a charging location will be. So you punch in an address and it will tell you 7%, 12%, 25% utilization. And the way that it does it is we use utilization data. This, you know, almost 40,000 charges worth of utilization data. As we know that, we take the historical performance of charging sites so far today and we correlate it with a bunch of different factors related to those locations. So we say, okay, we know this location in, you know, wherever. Let's say in Chapel Hill, right?
We know this location in Chapel Hill has a utilization rate of 8% last year. Also last year, the EV penetration rate in that location looked like X. The average driving distance was Y. The demographics and income levels were Z. Right. And the, you know, even things like the housing type. But, you know, people in those areas have access to a garage where they're likely to charge more at home. Right. So we throw tons of different variables at this, lots of geospatial data sets, and we let the model figure out which one of these factors influences utilization, is most correlated with utilization. And depending on the, you know, situation in a highway location, for example, the local EV penetration rate might not matter at all, whereas for a normal ruined site, it might matter a lot more. And so that's what makes this so challenging.
In fact, if I weren't already clear, the fact that 70% of these sites today are underperforming kind of tells you that human intuition about where to put chargers is not very good. Maybe one day, if you assume all gas vehicles are electric, human intuition would match up. But right now it's pretty complicated. When these assets are 100, $150,000, you got to make sure you're being really careful about where you're putting your chargers.
Chris Wedding:
I mean, look, I, I love numbers. I Love data. What you just described sounds like a dream, right? 37/,000 EV charging sites and you can look back and say great. Well, based on it's only a giant. If this then that statement, you bring up two good points at least, right? That if the charger is located near highway eating penetration for that zip code doesn't matter because they're not coming from the zip code. And then the let's say percentage of residential units that are single family detached with the garage, well that matters a lot. They can charge at home versus mostly being multifamily. Super fascinating.
Rohan Puri:
Exactly. And I think this is why when these companies, when they come to us after having the pain of seeing this firsthand where they said, wow, we deployed a bunch of chargers, they're not doing so well. What can we do to get smarter here? And it's pretty similar what you would do in solar, right? You don't deploy a solar panel without doing a quick model of how much sunlight falls in this location. Solar panel probably in London is not going to do as well as it would in Phoenix. And you do that basic analysis, even things like shadows are factored in for solar, right. If the shadow is going to block it and therefore you're not going to make as much, you know, energy at that time. So we're just offering that same level of diligence for charging.
It's just the difference of charging is all this data is moving all the time, right. There's more EVs on the road next year than there are this year. So you have to retrain the model and you have to re benchmark it and you have to tell, you know, we have to tell our customers how accurate are we. But if you place and price these chargers. Well, I'll tell you, even just the pricing portion of what we do, you know, we've been able to boost revenues by 20% in just a few months. 20% by just changing a number versus all these other things that we're trying to do, like putting battery packs and solar panels at the site. You know, just get the basics right, location and price.
Chris Wedding:
So let's go to where I said we would go, which is this new announcement you guys have coming up. And in that process also let's talk about, maybe it's obvious to listen, but how do you make money?
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, that sounds good. Well, so the announcement we're making soon is around a new offering we have called Stable dynamic pricing. And it's something that we've been actually operating for quite some time now. But essentially it's a service that plugs into a charger's back end that automatically sets the price of those chargers in real time to optimize it based on, you know, supply, demand, competition nearby, all that good stuff. And it sort of takes the. The calculus of trying to figure out what the optimal price is out of a customer's hands. And it's just overwhelming. Right. You've seen they haven't changed it that often. They don't know what the price is. If you ask them, how do you set your prices today?
Most often the answer we hear is, well, we take our energy price and we charge a margin on the energy price, and then we probably shouldn't charge more than our competition. That would be silly, right? Because then everyone's going to go to our competition. But it turns out it's not the case. In fact, competition right now is a good thing. It leads to better utilization rates for all chargers when there's a competitor that deploys nearby. Now, what that means, likely, is that you should be raising your price and not lowering your price. So it's a little counterintuitive. So the goal of this and this service is it helps set the price in real time so that you can sort of set it and forget it. Let your chargers be treated as an asset class that really is just out there to provide this.
This energy and hopefully you don't have touch it too much and it really just returns on itself. And that's. That's ultimately where most people want these things to go. Of course, they care a lot about the driver experience and things like that, but that's ultimately where it goes. Does that make sense?
Chris Wedding:
It makes a ton of sense. And before you get to how you make money, I just want to point out the obvious, the beautiful oxymoron that is the name of this tool. Right? Stable, yet dynamic.
Rohan Puri:
Yes.
Chris Wedding:
Pricing.
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Chris Wedding:
That's fun. Yeah.
Rohan Puri:
Yeah. And we, you know, Stable actually has a couple different meetings there too. I mean, we talk about, you know, how we want to bring stability to the planet and get us to fully electric. You know, we got to think a lot more about the infrastructure, too. The cars are making money or on path to. The chargers are just on the opposite complete path. But we also think about Stable as in, you know, where did the first form of transportation go? You know, horses, we kept them in the stable. That's where they went to recharge. And so a couple double Meanings there, but I love it. Yeah. Stable and dynamic.
Chris Wedding:
All right, tell us how you make money.
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, so these two tools, placing chargers is a SaaS tool. So it's a SaaS subscription basically that our customers use scales on the scale of their deployment. So we align ourselves up to where our customer success are. So if they're deploying a lot of chargers, you're going to need more credits essentially to use our software. Stable dynamic pricing is also priced on the success of our customers. So we have fees that we charge on a per charger basis. Right, Just recurring fees from managing the pricing. It's not just managing the pricing, by the way, it's also propagating that price. So making sure that price shows on Google maps, Apple Maps, plugshare.com, wherever else, that's our job as well. And we do revenue share of those chargers. So make sure we're aligning incentives correctly such that we're setting the price.
That of course will help us too. Now, it's usually a pretty small proportion. We don't want to, you know, ruin these folks's own margins on these things and especially when they're already struggling. But that way we keep those incentives aligned. And that's why we're proud to say, you know, the average boost across the sites that we run pricing on today, just three months was around 20%. We've seen upwards of 40% revenue boost in those three months just in getting smarter about the price. And it's pretty clear that, you know, Tesla and others will do this. Right? But I think the vast majority of charging companies out there are not software companies, they're not data scientists, they're not people who had experience in AI. They're infrastructure specialists.
They know how to get the permits, they know how to get the construction done, they know how to make sure that it's handicapped accessible and getting the power installed in that location, that's what they specialize in. So leave the data part to us.
Chris Wedding:
So you mentioned Tesla, I think is starting to do this. So maybe a question a listener could be thinking about is, wait, do you want to compete against Tesla and, or are they just a likely buyer for your company? Whichever or both of those you choose to respond to would be great.
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, I mean, well, I got this advice from one of our investors one time, which was advice that he had actually gotten too, from somebody else. So it's passed down the chain. I'll pass it on to you. Try not to sell software to software companies and likewise, try not to sell AI. To AI or data science. To data science companies. Because even if your product is better, they will always think they can do it in house or they should do it in house. It's much easier to sell software to a hardware company. It's much easier to sell data science to a company with no data science expertise because then the alternative is, you know, staffing up a team and starting from scratch and it's just not there. So likewise with Tesla.
We know they love to do everything in house, right from the cars to the batteries to the chargers to the software on the cars to the self driving component, everything Tesla does on their own. And we know that they're an AI data science company. So it's not to say that they couldn't be a customer of ours. I just think it's a taller order. Right where they have the capability in house. We're out there trying to bring that same capability or better to all the other guys and hopefully spawn a lot of other smaller charging companies. So there's more competition. We don't have one dominant entity out there. We have other people who are even smarter. That's the goal.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I like the words of wisdom you shared in the beginning of that. Don't sell software to a software company. I get it. You also referenced some of your investors, which include some of our friends at Congruent Ventures. Maybe describe what convinced, you know, you can describe them, but really broadly. What, what got investors, do you think, excited about this? What was your process like for raising capital? I'm sure it wasn't a breeze. Maybe just elaborate on the process for getting to. Yes. To back your old growth.
Rohan Puri:
Yeah. You know what's funny? I think, you know, investors always fall in love with teams, but I think there are some investors out there who fall in love with problems. And you know, everyone, you know, investors always have advice. You know, you want a big problem in a big market with the right team and you have magic. But when you really focus on the problem or when you really deeply understand a problem, it just makes it a lot easier to get on board and it makes it easier for us to find the right partner. And so went out fundraising. You know, this was early 2022. This is still, you know, heyday of, you know, market's still thriving. This was before anything really started to turn down.
But I remember speaking to some investors who knew the EV charting space quite well, you know, including, you know, Congruent, but there's, you know, quite a few out there now that are in clean tech or green focus. And they had been looking at companies serving fleets like the fleet charging market, right? Because they're like, okay, fleets are big commercial, you know, Pepsi trucks, they need charging icl, that's a big high margin business where optimizing the fleets is a big need for efficiency, etc. Etc. When we talk about when we serve the public charging market, regular old consumer charging, at first they're taken aback, like those guys are really struggling not making any money. You know, how are you going to serve a market like that?
And it's pretty easy to say, well, hey, guess what, it's about 100 times larger than the fleet market is today. There just aren't that many electric fleets out there. And the fact that they're losing money is a huge problem. Do you think all public chargers, you know, all companies who are deploying publicly operated chargers will lose money forever? Probably not. They're probably going to make money. Yeah, I hope not. They're probably going to make money. And the fact that they're losing it is a big problem, a hair on fire problem that they're looking for solutions for. And here we are saying we can help. And so I think that the, you know, investors that ultimately lined up well for this understood that and were able to flip on their opinion on the positioning of the market and say, oh yeah, I guess that it.
I guess the exact reason I was maybe not thinking about this market, maybe the reason I should think about this market and inevitably this is not going to be a huge business. It's going to be a relatively low margin business. Right. Just like fueling is today. But there's so many kilowatt hours being pumped across so many stations across the world for every vehicle that it can be a huge business on its own. It's just low margin. And the funny thing about low margin businesses is the willingness to pay is even higher. I mean, how much does Boeing or Airbus pay for like a tiny optimization? And maybe Boeing's a bad word these days, but Airbus is a tiny little optimization on, you know, the wing curvature to make it like 1% more efficient. Right. It's huge for them.
Chris Wedding:
I like that. I like the, that the advice to focus on a hair on fire kind of problem and to assume that even though what describes a sector today, it flashing forward and ask can that continue to be true? Right. And if the answer is no, you've got a big market, in this case, a much bigger market than folks think about. And a hair on fire problem.
Rohan Puri:
Exactly.
Chris Wedding:
Let's broaden out a little bit. So thinking about the EV charging sector more broadly, aside from this placing and pricing, what do we have to get right as we massively scale up EV charging in this country?
Rohan Puri:
I think the obvious thing and the thing we hear a lot about, you know, for the listeners here who aren't familiar with the EV charging space as much, is the reliability issues we see with charging stations today. They're always breaking down. The payment terminals don't work well, the touchscreens fail. You get in, you plug your car and it charges way slower than you thought at the, and it says it will charge faster, but it's not. And that's causing a lot of frustrations for drivers. And it's why Tesla has won over so much of the market. The charging experience is far superior. So I think getting that reliability component is well understood in the industry to get right. The second thing that we're seeing and there is movement happening there, I think, you know, again, play it forward. Will charging stations always be unreliable?
No, of course not. Right. We figured it out with gas pumps we can figure out with charging stations, it will get there. It might take some time. Of course there's some pain, but you know, play it forward. Eventually they will be reliable and we're going to sort those out. I think the second thing that people think a lot about is the installation time. If you didn't know this, it takes anywhere from at the low end six months and at the high end, 18 months from the day you decide you want to put a charger at this parking lot for it to actually come online. And the biggest reason for that time lag is usually one of two things. The permit to get a high powered charging location in a parking lot is, you know, permit plus even, you know, the utility coordination.
So asking the utility to upgrade the power at a site and then the second thing which is decreasing now a little bit, is supply chain issues of getting the actual hardware, the transformer gear, all that stuff. So if it takes 18 months again, that's another sort of like 18 months where you're renting a plot of land and doing all this surveying and stuff on it. It's not making money for you. So that's another thing that's being solved right now, which is like expedited permits, utility coordination programs where they're incentivizing deployment of charging stations where they know there's enough power already and they don't have to do an upgrade. Efficiency maps, things like that.
So I think that's the, the second thing, I think the third thing that people aren't talking about so those first two things people are talking about a lot in our industry but the third thing that people aren't talking about so much is data sharing of data. Of course I'm going to say this, but we need to actually know what is the reliability of a charger today and we need those stats. We need to know what the utilization rates are of chargers, we need to even know what price they're charging. Surprisingly, you might not be able to find out the price of a charger until you get there. Right.
The, the way that the data is connected up into MAP systems is not perfect yet and they're all on riding on different standards and I think there's a little bit of hesitation in the industry right now. They, I think everyone network thinks they're very special and unique and have a unique offering but the reality is that I think the consumer doesn't care so much. They just care like are there good amenities nearby? How fast is this charger and what is it going to cost me? And if those three things check out and my battery is low, I'll charge there.
So if that data can be on, you know, big platforms like the Maps platforms, Apple Maps, whatever, we're going to find a lot more success than each network having their own app where you have to download their app to get their experience, have a subscription to that network, etc. So yeah, just letting more open access and more data availability.
Chris Wedding:
Well, great points and hopefully listeners get some other ideas on where to build businesses or invest in businesses solving big problems in this space. But first there's a brief message from our sponsors. Just kidding. We still don't take any sponsors, but did you know that 100,000 plus CEOs belong to CEO peer groups? And if that makes you feel a little FOMO and if you're a CEO or founder, then you're in luck. I have the privilege of leading North America's top peer group Community for growth stage CEOs founders and investors in climate, tech, clean energy and sustainability. Today's members are creating billions of dollars of market value and millions of tons of greenhouse gas reductions. With our monthly group meetings, annual retreats and one one executive coaching calls.
Our members help each other, most importantly help each other boost revenue, impact, capital raised, clarity, confidence, work, life balance and team effectiveness. If this sounds interesting, please go to entrepreneurs for impact.com and join the waiting list. Today let's switch as we do from stable to Rohan. So Rohan Give us a couple of pieces of advice you might pass on to a younger Rohan or think you're maybe back in the classroom lecturing, you know, an undergraduate class, let's say.
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, well, I think the first one kind of came out earlier, which we talked about already, which is, you know, don't sell software to software companies, which has sort of a bigger implication. It's really like, think about your buyer, and it's not just about whether they have the problem and whether your solution can fix that problem, but whether or not it's strategically valuable for them to solve it with you. And it comes to their bottom line, there's always somebody internally at the company that can get a huge win for their own professional career if they can solve that problem instead.
And so, you know, when we are trying to sell our software, if we are trying to sell to, you know, a team of data scientists who have already built a model and are happy with the model and it's helping them, it's just much harder for us to sell our product, obviously. But if you're selling to people who have struggled with that model or don't have that team, it's going to be a lot easier. And that's where you should focus. Especially as a startup when you have limited sales resources, you can't just talk to everyone all the time and try and convince them. You need the person who's been waiting for this. That's easier to see. That's one. It saved us a lot of time when we've just done that. Just go to the people.
We don't even have the data scientists don't even have the analyst yet. They're too early or they don't. You know, maybe they're even thinking about, do I need to hire for this role? And we're saying, no, you can just subscribe to our software. You don't need analyst now. Just give us an address and we'll tell you the best price, rest, location. The second thing is around focus. I don't think, you know, I don't think this is surprising for many other founders to hear, but I think relentless focus is probably the number one thing that has driven our success at Stable and sometimes. And what does focus really mean? Focus means choosing one thing to do, choosing one thing to improve, one thing to work on, and not saying this and this.
And the reality is, of course, you might be doing a few things in parallel, but at least it's clear what the top priority thing is to work on. And if that Ever becomes vague, you'll have all sorts of problems. So for example, let's talk about something tactical. Setting a company level goal. If you set two company level goals, top line goals, inevitably you will have a question, a frustration come up where somebody's like, which goal matters more? Because by spending time optimizing for this metric, I'm not optimizing this other metric. So it actually is helpful and often best to just choose one goal and that's probably just revenue. For most companies, our goal is to hit this revenue target and not other metrics so that you can just stay focused on that.
I think the other thing that where focus matters is like what to build and what to work on. One way you can sort of game this yourself is sort of deliberately keeping your team small. And you find that when you add people, you tend to add more process and you tend to have more hands to do things. And so you start to say yes to more things. Oh, we have bandwidth, we might as well. But actually sometimes it helps to like for everybody to be working one or two things than for everyone to be spread across four or five things. And when you keep the team small, you're sort of forced into that because there's just not enough bandwidth. So you can, you know, the team is smaller than it needs to be and you're act, you're hiring reactively versus proactively. Right.
If you're doing that effectively, then you will be forced to talk about it in your standup or in your Sprint meeting and say, we can't do all of these four things. We can only do one. Which one matters most. And that conversation that happens on which matters most is the most valuable conversation. Then it's like, okay, which one drives revenue? Which one drives revenue sooner? Right. Which one's easier? You have that conversation.
Chris Wedding:
Whereas they say if you have many priorities, you don't have a priority.
Rohan Puri:
Right, exactly. Exactly. Right.
Chris Wedding:
Let's, let's go to the next one. So describe any habits or routines that keep you healthy, sane and focused on the entrepreneur's journey.
Rohan Puri:
It's a good question. So one thing that was helpful for me is to find out. I think there's lots of advice on like, you know, hacks for productivity, hacks for entrepreneurs and founders out there. There's so many things you can do. I think what you have to do is you have to figure out where you are most productive. Like what is the scenario in which you are most productive? Maybe it's a time of day, maybe it's a Certain cafe, maybe it's a certain day of the week that you find yourself to be most productive and protect that time at all costs or get as much of that as you can. So for me personally, you know, I am after 3 o' clock in the afternoon, my productivity just plummets in terms of doing like very tactical, highly, you know, analytical work.
And so what I do is I budget time in the end of the day to do things like, you know, paying bills, administrative work, whatever that happens usually in the, at the end of the day, in the beginning of the day, I block off up until always until 11, sometimes 12 in the morning to do all of my like thinking time, which is anything from like broader strategic things to how we want to position a new product to what we should build, any of that. And I block it off on my calendar. And I know that because the morning is just when I'm most productive. Had my coffee, it's quiet. I'm on the east coast, we have a big substantial portion of the team on the west coast, so nobody's messaging me on Slack.
So whatever I can do to guard that time, protect it for myself, is better. And so I think you have to figure out what that is and then be like really uncompromising about doing that. For me, it's just block off my mornings hard and keep anything that's sort of more administrative. Don't do that in the mornings, do that in the evenings when you don't need the brain power.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I like how you use the word uncompromising about the scheduling. I think the description I like for my own calendar is ruthless. Right. And I follow a pretty similar plan that up to 11 or 12 to try not to take outside calls, but do what I know is important, the highest value work and agreed later in the day. I've used up a lot of my bandwidth for mental processing, for sure. What you also described really gives permission, I think, to folks, rightfully so, who are, say, night owls, right, to realize, oh, wait, so I don't need to join the 5am Club to be a productive CEO. Although God bless those folks who are. How about this last one? Rohan, tell us a few books or podcasts, maybe tools, quotes, et cetera that you find useful, inspirational, et cetera.
And they could be business or even more interesting. Not business.
Rohan Puri:
Yeah, I mean, I guess on the productivity side, which we just spoke about, and protecting your time. I've been using clockwise a lot if you're familiar with it. It's like a AI calendaring thing And I know there's lots of those right now. What I love about clockwise is you can mark certain meetings as flexible meetings. So these are things like one ones, regular syncs and check ins that don't necessarily have to happen at a certain day at a certain time. And it will automatically, as long as the other person also has clockwise, it'll automatically move those meetings around to sort of optimize your schedule, meaning, you know, protect the mornings or like lump meetings together instead of having them spaced out every hour or something, squeeze them together to give you more continuous blocks of focus time in between.
That's one thing I like about it. The second thing I actually really like about it, which I think is underestimated or understated even, is, you know, everyone has sort of their calendar booking thing clockwise has a calendar booking link as well where you can find a time to meet with me. But what's really good about it is it gives you a bunch of times and then it actually uses the word like best time under one some of the time. So it's, you know, I'll say 3:30, best time you can meet at 3, but 3:30 would better. And it just says like better for me. And it actually sort of encourages people to use the best time and even hides. Yeah. So you can even put like, you know, urgency levels on things. So you know, I protect that focus time.
And technically on some days you can book over my focus time, but it's hidden, it's like collapsed. So there's a bunch of times listed that are not in the morning, they're in the afternoon. But if you expand it then you'll see the morning times. You don't see it at first. They use like UX to sort of encourage people to book when it's most favorable to me, which sounds very selfish, but it's much better than sort of hard blocks. It allows my calendar to be more flexible, you know, due to like things come up or things change or my flight got delayed. Now what do we do? Right.
Chris Wedding:
I, I'm just back from two days in Austin, Texas where we had our most recent climate CEO retreat for this peer group that we run. And I can only imagine if I knew about this tool then how many of the CEOs would be salivating to just stop the meeting and go check it out and have all their team at it to their calendars. That's really fascinating.
Rohan Puri:
It's great, it's great. And then the only other thing is a sort of a short like Quote that I've always liked. It's actually by somebody in my high school. And I don't know why I remember it, but I say it all the time, which is, it's your job as a founder to keep your chin up in the bad times and your nose down in the good times. And I've always liked that because, you know, chin up is sort of self explanatory. You have to sort of. We call it at Stable. We have a value about being exothermic. Right. Giving off energy and making people feel better about themselves. But it's also, you know, keep your nose down that when things are going really well, there's always something we could do better.
And it sort of keeps you humble versus saying, we got it, we're crushing it. You know, we're doing the best we can. It's like there's always something more we could have done or we can still do well.
Chris Wedding:
I love that. And it actually sounds somewhat similar to a book I was reading last night. I think it's called Empty Hand by the mother of one of our CEOs, JW Postal, and his mom, Susan, to book on her work as a Zen Buddhist monk, I suppose, priest. And she was talking about how as Zen practitioners make some progress, they get some insights, and they get a little proud of those insights. And they call it the Zen stink. Because maybe your teacher or your fellow Zen practitioners can smell that lack of humility when you start to realize some of these insights. I like that. Keep your nose down.
Rohan Puri:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
Hey, Rohan, this is awesome. I've learned a ton about both pricing and placing. We're rooting for your own success. It needs to work. Got to have a lot more investors bring their money in this space, huh?
Rohan Puri:
I hope so. And I think, you know, the sign of if we're being successful is if you see these earnings reports go the other direction. If you see more charging companies deploy, if you see chargers going in faster and faster every year, that means the industry is bullish on them. That means we've started the gold rush. That means we're keeping that gold rush. And, you know, we, of course, we give the picks and shovels for that gold rush. That's the whole point. So we're just trying to give them the treasure map right now. Here's the treasure map. Here's where you can find the gold.
Chris Wedding:
Gold.
Rohan Puri:
And here's how to mine that gold and go get the gold, and hopefully everyone wins as a result.
Chris Wedding:
Nice. It's a great analogy. Great call to action. All right, man. Talk soon.
Rohan Puri:
Thank you so much, Chris.
Chris Wedding:
Thanks for listening. And if you want more intel on climate tech, better habits, and deep work, then join the thousands of others who subscribe to our Substack newsletter at OTTCHBO entrepreneurs for impact.com or drop me a note on LinkedIn. All right, that's all y' all. Take care.