Modo Energy: Company
Principles and Culture

We are optimists. We believe AI, technology, and the electrification of the world economy will make the world better. The energy transition is one of the hardest challenges humanity has ever faced. We think it’s solvable. That belief shapes how we hire, how we build, and what we choose to work on.

Some companies let culture grow “organically.” That’s a polite way of saying “by accident.”

Accidental culture is a serious risk.

• Best case: our principles dilute but we muddle through.
• Worst case: politics, unfairness, and tolerance of underperformance, and one day there are Glassdoor reviews nobody can explain.

We don’t leave culture to chance.

What we exist to do: The world is building $20 trillion of new energy assets. We’re building the global standard for understanding and valuing them.

We want to build a company that the best people in the world would choose to work at. Where the smartest, most high-agency, most curious people, who could work anywhere, who look at Modo and think: that’s where I want to be.

Every time we build something at Modo, the first question is: where does intelligence live in this? Not as an add-on. As the starting point. A workflow that requires a person to run it is a workflow we haven’t finished building yet.

What can be automated, must be. Human involvement is reserved for high-judgment, creative, and ethical work. Everything else should run itself.

Right now that means AI, and we are all in. Ko, our AI analyst, is our primary product. Every person at Modo understands it, uses it, and makes it better. Employees don’t need to be AI experts when they join, but they are expected to get up the curve fast.

The customer is the most important person in everything we do. We win by treating them as the most important people in the room.

When you face a decision, start here: what’s best for the customer? Then work backwards.

We never sacrifice a customer for a result, a deal, a deadline, or convenience. If we’re ever tempted to, we’ve lost the plot.

The speed at which we learn and adapt is a more durable competitive advantage than any plan.

A small thing shipped and tested beats a large thing planned and delayed.

This does not mean we don’t dream big or do huge things. It means we break huge things into fast iterations. The roadmap is ambitious, but the next two weeks should be concrete and deliverable.

Ship → learn → improve. Repeat.

One exceptional person with the right tools, the right judgment, and the ability to orchestrate across a wide surface area will always outperform a room full of narrow specialists. We build, hire and reward for that.

Narrow, localised expertise — doing one specific thing you learned years ago — has always been fragile. What doesn’t go out of date is judgment, initiative, and the ability to apply broad intelligence to new problems. Right now, the tool that makes this possible is AI. The highest-performing people at Modo use AI to cover ground that used to require entire teams.

We hire and reward people who:

• Can switch context quickly and effectively
• Stay highly organised across many workstreams
• Direct agents and AI tools to do the work, rather than doing everything manually
• Apply broad intelligence to new problems rather than pattern-matching to past ones

You identify what needs doing and you do it.

You take full responsibility for your work, its quality, its impact, and its outcome.

If something is going wrong, you say so early and you fix it. Owning mistakes quickly, clearly, without defensiveness is as important as owning wins.

Regardless of seniority, you are direct and honest with everyone. You only say things about colleagues that you would say to their face. You seek critical feedback and are grateful for it.

Debate is expected at Modo. If you think an idea is wrong, say so. Make your case. The best argument wins, regardless of who made it.

If you disagree with a decision, say so clearly and argue your position. Once a decision is made, commit to it fully. Disagree loudly before. Execute wholeheartedly after.

Frankness is not cruelty. You can be direct and kind at the same time. But never sacrifice honesty.

A team locked in on three things will outperform a team spread across twelve every time.

When in doubt, as a team, as a pod, as a company, do fewer things to higher quality. Not because we lack ambition. Because focus is how ambitious things actually get done.

This is a prioritisation discipline, not a perfectionism one. The 80/20 rule applies: find the work that creates the most impact and pour into it.

Pick the battles that matter and win them.

At Modo, the best argument wins, not the most senior one. Title gives you responsibility, not a monopoly on good thinking.

In any disagreement, the question is: who has the most relevant experience and the strongest reasoning? A junior analyst who has spent six months in a specific market knows things a founder doesn’t. That expertise earns weight in the room. We call this idea meritocracy: decisions are calibrated to the credibility and track record of the people making the case, not their position on an org chart.

This is not consensus. It’s rigorous debate, a clear decision, and then full commitment from everyone.

If you have a better idea, it’s your job to say it loudly in the right forum.

The question is never “how much have we invested in this?” The only question is “what is the right move from here?”

Sunk cost thinking — staying with a hire, a product, a strategy, or a market because of what we’ve already put in — is one of the most common and most damaging failure modes in business. We name it explicitly so we can catch it.

The ability to change your mind is a sign of strength. We actively look for people who can update their views when presented with new information or evidence.

Knowing what you don’t know is a skill. When you’re out of your depth, find the most credible person on this specific topic and listen to them. Not the most senior — the most knowledgeable. Triangulate across people with different perspectives.

Families love unconditionally. Teams are built to win.

We care about each other and we invest in each other, but we do not keep people around out of loyalty, history, or discomfort with hard conversations. A team that tolerates underperformance is not being kind — it’s delivering a worse result for our customers and being unfair to everyone else in the company.

The Keeper Test: every manager should ask themselves quarterly about each person on their team: “If this person told me tomorrow they were leaving, would I fight hard to keep them?” If the answer is no, address it now. A generous severance for someone who isn’t the right fit is kinder than a slow managed exit, and far better for the team around them.

This is a culture of honesty where everyone knows where they stand.

Modo is not egalitarian. We do not incentivise average performance. High performers get disproportionate outcomes: more scope, more pay, more equity, more opportunity. That gap is intentional — how we attract and keep the best people, and how we signal clearly what we value.

In the AI era, this is more true than ever. The person who ships more with less, who uses tools intelligently, thinks clearly, and delivers real outcomes, is the all-star.

When revenue is growing, it is tempting to assume everything is working. It is usually the most dangerous moment to stop being critical.

Momentum forgives bad processes, weak hires, and poor decisions. For a while. Then it doesn’t. We take the hard questions seriously even when things are going well. Especially when things are going well.

We pay top of the personal market, not the title market. Every individual’s market value is different.

Every June and December, managers ask three questions about each employee:

1. What could this person make elsewhere? → Pay them more than that
2. What would we pay to replace them? → Pay them at least that
3. What would we pay to keep them if they got an outside offer? → Pay them that now

We avoid: blanket percentage raises, title-linked pay bands, and internal parity constraints. All of these penalise high performers over time. We don’t do them.

Apart from revenue roles, we don’t have a bonus scheme. We believe high performance is expected constantly, not just when a payout is in play.

For revenue roles, we operate a commission and variable pay structure that reflects the sales cycle and rewards commercial outcomes directly.

Share options are the best long-term incentive we have. They align everyone with company value creation. All employees receive options when they join.

We make decisions faster, build trust quicker, and do better work together in person.

Our offices: London, New York, Madrid, Sydney.

We operate a hybrid policy. In office Tuesday through Thursday as the default. Monday and Friday is up to you.

The job of a manager at Modo is not to control decisions. It is to give their team enough context to make the right decision without asking permission.

The goal is that people at every level have sufficient context about the company’s direction, priorities, and constraints that they can act autonomously and get it right.

Managers: share context constantly. Share the why, not just the what. If your team is asking you for permission on things they should already know the answer to, ask yourself what context you haven’t given them.

We operate across London, New York, Madrid, and Sydney. Time zones are a fact of life for our business. We default to written communication: decisions get documented, context gets shared in writing, and nobody is penalised for being in a different time zone if they’re responsive and clear. If it matters, write it down.

The default should be deep focus: writing, building, analysing, coding, creating. Meetings exist to make decisions and share context, not to substitute for doing the work.

If you’re in a meeting that doesn’t require you, leave. This applies to everyone, including leadership.

If you’re building a meeting-heavy culture you’re building the wrong culture.

Some rules exist because the stakes are too high:

• Moral, legal, ethical: Dishonesty, harassment, and discrimination are immediately terminable. No second chances.
• Preventing irrevocable damage: Financial reporting integrity, data security, regulatory compliance, customer data protection.

There is no single path to success at Modo. We have two:

Individual contributor (IC) track: doing exceptional individual work: deeper scope, harder problems, greater technical or domain authority. Some of the highest-paid people at Modo are ICs. That will always be true.

Management track: leading teams, owning hiring, driving organisational outcomes, growing people.

Impact matters, not headcount. Choosing not to manage is not a ceiling — it’s a legitimate and equal path.

Three criteria, all required:

1. There needs to be a big enough job. We don’t inflate titles. If it’s a Head of role, we don’t call it a Director.
2. You need to be a superstar in your current role. So good you’d get the job externally too.
3. You need to be an extraordinary culture carrier. Someone who works in a way that is inarguably Modo: honest, direct, high-agency, and selfless with their knowledge.

We develop people by throwing them at hard problems with brilliant colleagues. We don’t run formal career planning or rotation programmes.

High performers are self-improving. Our job is to make sure the problems are hard enough and the feedback is honest enough.

If you need to learn something, learn it. AI has made this faster than it has ever been.

Every new hire must raise the bar of the organisation. Every hire should be harder than the last.

The test: Can you imagine this person being an inspiration to you in the future? If not, they’re not right for Modo.

We want people with genuine spikes. Exceptional at the things that matter, and honest about their gaps.

• Mission alignment. They genuinely care about energy transition and about Modo winning. It’s not a job they happen to be in. It’s something they chose.
• Intellectual curiosity. They find energy, finance, and AI genuinely interesting, not professionally convenient. They read widely, ask deep questions, and are excited to be in a domain that matters. Curiosity is a performance multiplier.
• High agency. They don’t wait. They act. They identify what needs doing and do it without being asked.
• Generalist with AI leverage. They use AI to cover ground quickly across many areas. They are not defined by one narrow skill set. They think broadly and execute through tools and agents.
• Context-switching ability. They can manage multiple workstreams without losing quality or organisation. They stay on top of many things without dropping any.
• First-principles thinking. They reason from scratch, not from templates. They design from the problem, not from their previous playbook.
• Direct communication. They get to the point. They say what they think, not what you want to hear.
• Emotional maturity. They take feedback without defensiveness. They own their mistakes. No drama.
• Chaos tolerance. They thrive in fast-moving, high-growth environments where things change quickly and the playbook is still being written.
• Techno-optimist. They are genuinely excited about where AI and technology are taking us. They see the opportunity, not just the risk. Anxiety about the future is not a virtue here — optimism backed by clear thinking is.

Good interviews are not enough because smart candidates can perform in interviews.

• Work test (required for every role, no exceptions). A time-boxed piece of real work, something Modo actually needs answered. We grade it blind. If the output is vague, generic, or low-effort, it tells us everything we need to know.
• If the hiring manager can’t define the work test, they haven’t defined the role. Fix that first.
• First-principles live question. We give candidates a novel Modo-specific problem they couldn’t have prepared for. We want to see how they think, not how they present a rehearsed answer.
• Self-starter question. In every interview: “Tell me about something you built or shipped that nobody asked you to.” If someone can’t answer it, that tells you what you need to know.
• Coachability check. “Tell me about a time your manager told you you were wrong and they were right.” Defensive or blame-shifting answers disqualify.
• Reference calls, done properly. Call who they listed. Then ask who else worked closely with them, and call those people too. Ask: “Would you rehire them?” and “What does this person need to succeed?” The second question gets honesty.

Skills and experience matter, but who someone is matters more.

We hire for character. Everything else can be learned.

Character means honesty, accountability, directness, and emotional maturity. Are they trustworthy? Do they own their mistakes? Do they make the people around them better? That is what we are looking for.

We assess people on their choices, their work, and their character. Full stop.

We do not make judgements, positive or negative, based on traits someone was born with. That includes race, gender, nationality, background, and any other inherited characteristic.

Positive discrimination is discrimination. Giving someone an advantage based on inherited traits is no more fair than penalising them for the same reason.

Everyone earns their place here.