11 - Building a startup in the energy industry with Matt Allen (CEO @ Pivot Power)

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hi, guys. Quentin here. I'm sat with Matt Allen from Pivot Power, or part of EDF Renewables. And we are, well, it's the morning after the Modo afterparty from the Energy Storage Summit.

So our voices probably sound a bit leathery. And we are going to talk about all things Pivot Power, big batteries, and what's coming next. So, Matt, thanks for coming on. And this is going to be a lot of fun, so--

Absolutely. Absolutely.

And you just come off a panel downstairs. Anything controversial on the panel?

It was a good conversation. I mean, I think there are a lot of questions around investor appetite, level of comfort, what revenue streams are looking like, the actuals we're seeing together or seeing today, which is great. But are those going to be sustainable for the future? A lot of things around CapEx increases and all that other fun stuff.

Everything's going up. And then, of course, this morning on the news, Ukraine and Russia, it's all kicking off, which is going to make things interesting. So we're not going to talk about that today. We're going to talk about uplifting stuff.

So what's Pivot Power? Who's Matt Allen? Let's do Matt Allen first. And then we're going to do Pivot Power. And then we're going to talk about what you guys are doing in the world. So who's Matt Allen?

Man, who is Matt Allen? It's a deep question, still trying to figure himself out.

Born and raised in a small little beach town in Northern California.

All that really mattered to me in life was throwing a ball, which I'm still going to make a comeback at the age of 43 and be a starting pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. So that's the next phase.

But yeah, played baseball through university. And then my arm gave out. And then I went outside the US and I decided, hey, it makes sense to go into the US Peace Corps and did development work in Southeast Asia on the border of Cambodia and Thailand for three years, came back, worked on the losing end of the John Kerry campaign.

Oh, that's--

so what was that--

this is--

we've got to dig into that. What was that like?

It was--

Did you know you were going to lose--

Interesting.

--halfway through?

Well, when I say worked on the campaign, the reality was we were ripping out as much money from the state of California so we could go by Ohio and Florida, because that's the democratic process in the United States of America. So working on the campaign is a bit loose. And we then, yeah, took all this money and rented all these vans and shoved old people into the vans to make sure that they would go vote. Of course, we'd ask them who are they going to vote for before we shoved them in the vans.

But anyway, so yeah, democracy is fantastic. I don't have a better solution, though, so I'm not going to complain about that.

Yeah, so John Kerry in the states. And then what? When did you go over come over here?

And then about 15 years ago came over here to do an MBA in public policy and the University of Birmingham. I did it there because I didn't have to take a standardized test, which I would have horrifically failed.

The GMAT.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh no.

Also shout out to Birmingham as well. I didn't realize you went to Birmingham University. Of course, Modo is Birmingham's hottest company. It's our home.

Well, I mean, with the accent, you can obviously tell I'm Brummie, first and foremost, born and raised. But yeah, after that I decided to stay in the UK, purely because the exchange rate was 2.1 and I could try to pay off my student loans as fast as possible. And 15 years later, I have an eight-year-old and a six-year-old that asked me in the morning, (BRITISH ACCENT) "Daddy, can I have some water," which is very strange when your kids don't sound like you.

Did you have to do the citizenship test, the test we have to learn about, 1066 and all these old things that even English people don't know.

I did, yeah. I passed it. I can't tell you one question that was on it. But I'm now as British as you--

Well, yeah, welcome. Welcome.

--and as Brummie as you, too.

I should do a Brummie accent for that. But anyway, all right. And then we haven't talked about energy yet. So when did you get into energy? So when did you get into (BRUMMIE ACCENT) energy?

Yeah, so I joined this very odd company that you know a bit about. I wasn't really sure, very eccentric CEO, this guy Michael Liebreich. And about a year before this company, New Energy Finance, before they were acquired by Bloomberg, and that was a pivotal aha moment for me in doing this.

You need a gong for that. Yeah.

Yeah, that this is an industry that I'm pumped about. I want to be a part of this. And it gave me exposure to a little bit of everything and helped me understand a little bit about all the disparate components and market economics and policy and supply chain and how it all comes together. And I was there for almost five years. And I headed up the global commercial sales team.

At Bloomberg BEF?

Yeah.

Oh, cool.

And then I left. I joined Good Energy as commercial director there, only lasted about a year, but then went on and worked for a small renewables developer before the feed-in tariff was cut and then laid everybody off and laid myself off. And then I joined Tempus Energy, where I met--

Shout out to Tempus for all of the capacity market stuff. And we'll just, I mean, what a history of the company, tell you what.

Absolutely. And he says with humility, Sara was great at recruiting amazing talent. And I met this guy, Michael Lawrence Clark, my cofounder and brother. And as we were leaving, I said, how do batteries work?

We're having a beer and he explained it to me.

And I actually understood it. I didn't really, but I was like wow, there's something to be said for being able to explain a complex thing, a complex thing in a way that you can understand, so--

Just need to, for anyone who's listening, yes, there's a lot of sirens behind us. But I think it's OK. Izzy, the producer, says it's OK. We're OK.

It's nothing we did.

No, no, no, no. They're not getting louder. That's what I was waiting for

And so I told Mikey, famously, that I could pimp you out, which is a very strange thing to say somebody when you want to start a company with them. But I think the big thing was--

and there was a real chemistry between the two of us. And we started meeting with--

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Your Mikey?

Yeah. And we both were very comfortable with our strengths and also our shortcomings.

And we looked at, mainly the focus was behind the meter in our first project. And about nine months later, we met our third brother, Matthew Boulton. And Matt Allen, and Mikey Clark, MA and MC, met this guy, MB.

And about 10 minutes in, I said, are you up for this? Matthew said, what? Mikey said, should we talk about this? No. A and C can only get so far. We need A, B, C, MA, MB, MC.

So are we going to do this? And he goes, is this how you make decisions? Yeah, kind of. The gods are telling us something.

Jokingly, but there was such--

and there still is to this day, the three of us. But it was everybody that came into the journey with us were just very, very comfortable. And we were comfortable at the front. We're making this up as we go.

We don't know how to do this.

So it's the three of you that started Pivot Power. Is that right?

MATT ALLEN: Yeah.

And Pivot Power, when did Pivot Power begin? Of course, it was an idea and you talked about it at the pub and things, but--

43 years ago. No.

It's a collage of your life's work.

Yeah, brought that question full circle.

We were focusing on the behind the meter stuff. And then all of a sudden, the floor fell out of the frequency response market and put those numbers into the models. I go, oh wow, negative returns. Who wants those for Christmas?

Because you guys did the--

you did the Arsenal battery, right, the Tesla, one of the biggest Tesla systems at the time, behind-the-meter Arsenal. It's a big project.

It was. It was three years literally from the day that I met Mike Lloyd--

the stadium manager I caught up with a couple of months ago for dinner--

to a conference to us cutting a ribbon at this beautiful 3-megawatt battery. I had my kids there at the time. I was crying my eyes out. And it was pretty cool.

It was pretty special. But man, it was complicated.

Do you get tickets? Do you get free tickets now?

We do. We go, yeah. We haven't been for a while. I'm not even if huge football fan, ironically. But it was so cool to make it happen. And there was a real validation of we did it.

We hadn't closed a deal. We hadn't closed a door.

But we got a project across the line. It wasn't easy. We put in a multimillion-pound system off balance sheet that's flammable and has some risks in a 400-million-pound stadium. Yeah, lawyers had a field day with that one.

MATT ALLEN: Yeah, I bet.

But we got it across the line. And right around that time, we were like, man, this is not really scalable.

And we were thinking that while there's a lot of spare capacity, the transmission system and, what, the DNOs are constrained. And how are we going to electrify transport when there isn't really much juice laying around at that level?

And it all really just kicked off with a conversation with a few incredible people at National Grid.

And it was this right place, right time. There's a lot of luck that goes into all of this stuff. But we, all of a sudden, just started running, running, running. And Downing invested in starting this new co--

so to answer your question, Pivot--

so the acquisition was about two and a half years ago and--

The EDF acquisition?

Yeah, yeah. And so Pivot has been incorporated for about four years now.

OK, so you started four years ago. And we touched on it there for a second. But what was the vision when you started this thing?

Is it about building big? Is it about building fast? Is it about building with transport in mind? What are you aiming for?

I don't know who came up with this phrase. It doesn't really matter.

A distributed lithium-ion Dinorwig. And I thought that was--

Ooh, that's good.

--brilliant.

That's very good.

I thought that was brilliant. It's 2 gigawatts of batteries dotted all around the country that National Grid in the control room could play the piano--

turn this on, turn this down. It doesn't have the duration of large-pumped hydro, but it had the same characteristics and some better characteristics, the distributed nature of it and so on.

And so it was this kind of--

you get to volume, you get to scale. And then that gets really, really interesting in the control room potentially. We don't know. We're not even at that scale yet.

But I think that's where this stuff will get really interesting, is once we get to volume. How can you really use a central--

well, a decentralized asset of large disparate components to really balance the system and allow more renewables to come on the system?

So that was the battery co. And then the wire co, which as far as I'm concerned, we take a big wire and we throw it over the fence at the National Grid substation. We run it to a location. That location could be a bus depot. It could be a corporate fleet. It could be a Tesla Supercharger.

It could be any place, and because one of the biggest issues is not can we buy an electric vehicle? Can we buy chargers?

Sure. There's just not enough capacity to charge these things. So that is the big piece that we're looking to address on the private wire component.

So you guys, for people who don't know Pivot, you guys build big batteries, right, and other stuff, as you mentioned. But really your core is building a big portfolio of sites that you've got, that you're going to work your way through. You've already built a couple. Or what have you already built?

Yeah, so our first two, the first one in Oxford, the Cowley Substation, which is part of the Energy Superhub Oxford, ESO, which becomes very confusing, because not the ESO. Yeah.

And then the second one is in Kemsley in Sittingbourne, Kent. And those are now operational, online.

Lithium ion batteries built by--

Lithium, we have Wartsila and Samsung cells for those first two. We also have, as part of an Innovate UK project, an Infinity flow system that's coming online very shortly. And then the private wire component in Oxford is we have four megawatts going live early April, so two going to Tesla, two to Fastned for one of the UK's largest charging hubs at a Red Bridge Park & Ride in Oxford.

And also looking at bus opportunities very quickly around the corner in Oxford, so this Private Wire piece and Oxford coming together. We have broken ground and are currently building our next two systems.

Now, those first two were one-hour duration.

Our next two, in Coventry and Bustleholme Northwest Birmingham. We've pivoted--

that's the second one. Ding.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Dong, yeah.

It moved to two-hour duration, which was sooner than I think we expected.

But it does make sense. And we're seeing more two-hour--

not long duration storage, but longer.

And so those, we've broken ground there. Those, again, are 50-megawatt systems.

And then many others to come. I mean, that's the big, big focus for us.

I remember when you guys, when the acquisition happened, because it was big, right? Listen, I mean, of course, everyone talks about building lots of massive pipelines and big assets. No. But two and a half years ago, it was kind of novel what you guys were doing. It was novel.

And at the time, I think it was gigawatts and gigawatts of pipeline that you've got to build. And what are the numbers? What are you planning to build? And is it EDF who's going to--

is it EDF who's going to finance these?

Yeah.

The funny thing is we didn't even have a website.

And we got a website, I think, a week before this press release went out, because we got a call from National Grid that they told us that Pivot Power, after four or five months being incorporated, that we were the largest connection holder by sites in the entire.

EDF was number two, Centrica, Orsted, and, of course, Pivot Power. We had 45 or 46 at the time, which was kind of like, oh my god. What is going on right now?

And we had a press release that went out. And it said 2 gigawatts battery storage to be deployed, requiring 1.6 billion pounds for the private wire and the battery component. I don't even know how many zeros are in a billion.

And we got a lot of attention for five minutes. And it was kind of cool and kind of annoying. And then it was like, we get back to doing stuff.

And I don't regret--

I remember when I saw it, it was like, man, these Braggawatt developers. That's what we've become, Braggawatt guys, like look at big numbers. We didn't have 1.6 billion pounds.

We had enough to pay our rent and our payroll for the next couple of months.

But I'm glad that we did it, because that's the language we should be talking about. If we're not talking about gigawatts and billions, we're having the wrong conversations.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Yeah, yeah. You're going to slow.

This is a transition. This is a crisis. We need to be talking about big numbers. And if this is infrastructure, those are the kind of numbers.

And so, anyway, but going back to your question, when we went out to raise the first 250 million, the request was to have that go into that top of the company to fund our first assets and then build more and build more and whatever that looks like.

This is before EDF bought you, right?

Before EDF, right, yeah. And so EDF Renewables filled out the term sheet wrong. And they suggested an acquisition of us, which was, at the time, it was like, is this the right--

that's not what we we're trying to do.

It wasn't about remaining independent. I mean, if you somebody puts $200 million in, we would have owned a sliver of it.

But it was the right thing. I'm not saying that to win hearts and minds of EDF Renewables. But it was the right place for it to be.

Three months, four months after the acquisition, this COVID thing hit. The company cares about its people. And that means a lot. They are nice. That means a lot.

And these are people, friends, family that I care a lot about. And it's been amazing to see people's careers develop in a large organization and opportunities and so on. And yeah, I mean, when you lay on your deathbed, I'll think about many other things. But I'm not going to think about how many batteries we built.

I'm going to think about, did we allow people to do amazing things? Did we believe in them? Did we back them?

Did we help support and build their careers? And so I think on that basis, it was the right place to be. I think we're in a super, super exciting place right now.

Just to come back to this, so you went out to market to raise 250 million pounds, big numbers, yeah, of course. As you say, when you were raising that kind of money, you lose your independence anyway.

Yeah, exactly, so what's the difference? Yeah.

So that's a big number, right? So you went out to raise some money on this. I assume back then you pitched to everybody, some big banks and whatnot.

What was that experience like back then? Because this was numbers that people hadn't really talked about. And you were going big and you're saying, I want it now. So how was that?

It was slightly surreal.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: And this is, what, 2017? 2018? No, later than that.

Our first investor meeting was in January 2019.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: OK, right.

And we met with around 40 institutional funds, infrastructure funds, corporate strategics. Morgan Stanley was representing us and meetings with everybody. Everybody loved it, first meeting, second meeting. It's stuff that sits at the foundation of the energy transition--

big batteries, electric vehicle charging infrastructure. They all loved it.

But the big M word came out--

merchant.

Merchant.

Merchant. And in one meeting I was told by Morgan Stanley, don't ever say that again. That sounds disrespectful and condescending. And maybe it was meant to. But I was like, what isn't merchant?

Where did the word merchant come from?

I

mean, this is so silly. Everybody says it like they know what it is. OK, we can describe it, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's about trading and it's about wholesale markets. But really, where does it come from? I never heard of it before this silly industry that we're in.

Yeah.

I mean, at the end of the day, what isn't merchant? You buy a house. That's merchant. You built this hotel. That was merchant. You built a pub. What do you think, if you only sold 70 pints that night, the government was going to buy 30 pints for you to top up your missed pint sales if it was a pub?

The barter system was merchant. We're probably have someone write in a comment and say with economics or something that says that it's merchant. I don't know, yeah.

No, look, I understand it, I mean, especially fiduciary responsibilities, pension funds and so on to protect investments. And different things have different risk profiles and so on. I mean, I think one of the personal benefits I have--

I don't have an investment background. I don't have a legal background. I don't have an engineering background.

And so I just understand a little bit of all the disparate parts. But I think what it comes down to is you can grab every single chart and support the narrative. But do you think that more renewables are going to be built in the future? Yes. Well, we've created net zero and on.

Do you think the electric vehicles are going to be rolled out faster than we ever expected? Yes. OK, so would you like to invest?

And, I mean, it gets more complicated than that, I guess. But you do have to believe, a bit of conviction that the rest of the stuff will come together.

But some of these things will become fundamental truths. And I don't know of anybody that disagrees, the pace and the other--

Just the Excel sheet is too complicated to put together. That's the thing that holds it up, isn't it?

Yeah, I think Mikey disconnected, uninstalled Excel on my laptop pretty early on because I would just yell at him, saying, how do the models work?

So these guys, so you were pitching to them in January 2019. And they were really excited. And then you said, well, you told them you're going to trade with these batteries. It's not going to be guaranteed revenue streams.

They're used to CFDs and all that stuff. And the, what, did they get cold feet or--

No. We had advancing other conversations with funders. But there was still a lot of concern.

And when EDF put forward, I would love to say that we had 40 offers on the table. We didn't. We absolutely didn't. There were people who really, really wanted to, but they realized their investment committees, it wasn't going to be able to go through.

So it was October 31, 2019, 4:36 PM.

I definitely didn't think it was going to happen, even at that point. It was done for a couple of weeks and you're waiting for final things to get signed. And it was a pretty cool moment.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: All right, congratulations.

Yeah, the coolest thing was going home. We had a glass of champagne.

And I went home and I picked up my kids. They went trick or treating.

And I floated, I floated, but I floated because I was able to be with them again. And for the first couple of years of their life, I didn't. I wasn't, I wasn't there.

But it was also the thing, it was like, holy shit, this very average at best, barely graduated from anything, does not understand it could pull this off.

And when it comes to kids, when it comes to company, it's like to be able to realize that--

everybody wants to say you can do anything. You can do anything.

My son a couple of years ago, he was going to be an astronaut.

And I think when he was six, and came home and he said, Daddy, I'm not going to be an astronaut. Why? And he realized the number is only 20 people that were astronauts.

And it was like wow, we do get to that point at some point when we tell ourselves that we can't be an astronaut. And that kind of sucks.

So we should all be astronauts. But it is one of those things, that there are many, many attributes and characteristics about America that grind me. But one of the things I do love is we're too dumb and naive to think we can pull stuff off.

Yeah, if it's not me, then who else? That's true, which is incredible.

So EDF Renewables came in, injected capital into the company, and you started building these assets. And so I'll ask you the question--

you know what's coming up because I asked you before--

so if you've got all these sites and you've got EDF backing you and there's such an opportunity--

we agree, we're in the space, speed, speed, speed.

Right, if you're building assets, if you can get assets built right now and you've got backers, you've got sites, you've got connections, and it makes sense, then why wait? So my question to you is why wait? Is Pivot Power waiting?

Or is it just a natural cycle of how you have to do it? You have to do one project at a time. It just takes time and blah, blah, blah. That's not a direct--

I'm not saying anything bad about Pivot Power here. I'm just I'm questioning, if you've got 2 gigawatts, why not do them all at once?

This podcast is done. I'm out of here.

No, no, no it's an absolutely fair question. I have no problem with that question.

There is, what is it, cautiously optimistic? And that's not just EDF. There's a lot of money that has been raised that is desperately looking for projects.

And there's a lot of excitement. And there's a lot of activity that's taking place.

Now, within two years--

and we had for our next two projects, which will hopefully be closing internally, that will take the kind of investment made over $120, $130 million in two years from EDF. Who knows. Could it be more? Sure.

Should it be more? Maybe.

But there is a demonstration of a commitment to build. It could be faster, but there are pieces to the whole chain, one of them connection dates with National Grid and lining those up. If we turned around and said, hey, I want to do 20 projects, 50 gigawatt tomorrow, that wouldn't be able to happen. Those connection dates, those are lined up at different stages. So we're reliant on that interface.

The supply chain, needless to say, is a bit of a challenge, whether it comes CapEx and costs and ability to deliver, timings and so on. So there are a lot of other factors that if you had the ambition and the commitment and the financial backing, run, there would still be a phasing to it. So I guess this is a long-winded answer to say I am optimistic that we will accelerate, that we will be building in volume, this kind of two per year build out, that starts to ramp up a bit.

You would say, look, the actuals, the out turns, real financial numbers, they're amazing right now. It's a no-brainer. But then you look at it, it's like, well, is that going to be the case for the next 20 years? No.

It feels a bit like we're in Las Vegas right now. And it shouldn't. It shouldn't. Next year may not be a great year for batteries.

I hope it's not. Obviously, I don't think it will be. But there is a lot of volatility inside of volatility. Volatility, we rely on volatility in terms of--

There's probably a mathematical equation in there somewhere.

Yeah, two negatives make a positive? Not that volatility is a negative.

VIX or something, I don't know. Yeah.

So you guys, you do roughly two a year. It's like 100 megawatts, 200 megawatts, something like that. That's the plan?

When moved to--

well, yeah, 100 megawatts, 200 megawatt hours, which we're building right now. And then looking at the same this--

we have more projects that we're advancing through the pipeline. And also a very, very interesting trend, not just for us, but for others, is looking at colocation, hybrid with a lot of our connections, so looking at solar plus storage.

And so we have a couple sites back end of this year that will be going to investment committee. And that model is being finalized. But that seems to be a big trend, whether it's retrofitting of existing generation with storage or new build, generation plus storage, mainly solar, solar plus storage.

It's funny, it's a different model, isn't it? Because there's two ways to think about it. You've got a big battery and you've got to put--

the way that I feel we talk about it as an industry in colocation is we've got a solar farm and we're going to put a battery on it to smooth the solar farm and dispatch it later in the day however.

In my head, and I haven't thought about it and speaking to colleagues, I feel like it should be the other way around, which is we've got a big battery. And we're to use solar to charge the battery cheaply, rather than we've got a big solar park and we're going to use storage to solve the solar problem. It's kind of the other way around.

Electricity supply chain to your battery is derisked and to zero--

obviously the cost of capital, blah, blah, blah, blah, boring stuff. But you get the idea, right? I just wonder, how are you thinking about the hybrid colocation model?

The way that you described it--

and I would love to build an online simulation, gamify this whole thing. But if you think of SimCity and you were to build a city and then you have to build the energy infrastructure stuff, you would dot a bunch of batteries all around the city, all different corners and so on. And then you'd start putting some generation to charge up those batteries. And then you get this virtuous circle of how that all comes together.

So I agree with your approach. I guess it really, a lot of it comes down to some of the regional aspects of [INAUDIBLE],, different charges in where that network, that node is, but also wholesale prices during those periods, and then some of the products and services, ancillary or other, that you can do with the battery. So it may pivot over time, number three.

Dong. Is it ding? Is it dong? Why am I saying dong? It's ding, isn't it?

Yeah.

Oh jeez, oh.

It was a late night.

It was a late night.

But yeah, but I think that it can--

I mean, it's funny, when we came up with the name Pivot, it was Matthew and I, not you, Mikey. And we're like--

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Burn.

--oh my god, Pivot, Pivot. Originally it was going to be Paradigm Power. Like oh my god, that's terrible. And Pivot Power, it was like wow, there's no way that's available.

And we went on Companies House and it was.

But it's like, man, what better [INAUDIBLE],, because we were pivoting away from behind-the-meter storage into big utility-scale stuff. But that does describe our industry, battery storage and even the generation stuff. We could have called it Floor Power, Predictable Revenue Power, Government Subsidy-Backed Power. But it's Pivot Power.

Positive NPV power.

Yeah, so I want to get a couple more questions in, because I know you have a lot of opinions in general on everything. So what's going on in the--

OK, two things, what do you love that's going on at the moment, big change in the energy industry that's going on, particularly in our world? And then what really pisses you off? Let's do the love first, though, and then we can double down on the--

we can edit this long pause, because I'm just going to fill this long pause with--

I think part of the issue is that we surround ourselves in echo chambers from, obviously, from a work perspective, and from a--

actually, most of my friends I work with. Maybe I should get some friends. I don't know.

That feeling when you're like, I'm only 31, but I've been told there's a point in your 30s where you look around and you go, I don't actually have any friends. It's just people I work with.

Yeah, yeah.

And the reason I was positing is because everybody's optimistic that this is happening. And there's a different feeling of optimism in that this is--

that we can do this and this transition is going to happen and so on.

But I don't know if that's just the people that I work with that are in this industry, because the rest of the general public, which actually is the second part to your question, is this is a climate crisis. And this needs to be a participatory sport that everybody is on the pitch involved in playing.

And we can't have people on the sideline. And it can't be us talking about--

it's always squiggly lines and complicated stuff. It needs to be understood by the masses. The reason I loved that Arsenal project and where I feel like the heart of it came from was the first meeting that I had was I pitched an idea to this guy at Arsenal, which was about putting solar on the roof for battery in the basement, but said you could either fund it yourself or we could get a private equity firm to fund it.

But there's a third option. He said, what's that? I said we get the fans to own and operate it--

not operate it, to own it and be a part of the direction of travel of energy independence and sustainability and so on. He's like, that's cool. Let's do that.

I was like, oh shit. I don't--

was this a crowdfunding platform? I didn't know what I was doing. But he loved that. And I loved that he loved that.

And it snowballed into it.

Downing, who funded it, there was the Downing crowd. So it was a realistic concept. And we could refinance it as a bond. But we pivoted--

fourth--

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: Ding dong.

Ding dong.

QUENTIN SCRIMSHIRE: I'm doing both there.

And what I loved about that was the opportunity to bring people on the journey. And if you can have a father son or, assuming a football match, have a conversation under the jumbotron, a big iPad screen of a battery and showing how it was filled up prematch time and how it's being dispatched, and if that child had 100-pound bond that was given to by a grandparent or whatever, that becomes really, really, really exciting. And right now, this whole transition, it's like us, the people working in this industry. But the rest of the people are kind of, hey, industry, I hope you pull it off.

Yeah, yeah, it's too complicated, because there's too many complicated words. And there's things like, I don't know, the whole--

our whole energy industry is crazy complicated, and in many cases just to serve itself in being more complicated.

MATT ALLEN: Absolutely.

And we need to be able to communicate it to everybody.

Our relationship with it is very basic. I mean, we walk up to the wall and we press a button. It goes on.

It's very predictable. We don't have to deal with outages much, knock on wood.

But not saying it has to be deeper. It's not the most interesting, exciting concept. But that's one of the only links, commonalities that Arsenal has with its fans, electricity.

So how can you use those things to create those connections, that understanding, that awareness?

Delusional people go to be entertained and see guys run around and kick a ball. But if that conversation can happen for 10 seconds about, huh, that's interesting, there's a battery in the basement. It's filled up with wind and solar and it's used during the match. Oh, OK, cool.

Oh, and that's how it makes money. It fills up during cheap times and pushes out during expensive times. It's a big sponge, fills up with cheap water and pushes out expensive water. That's actually really all I understand. Other people explain it to me.

But it creates a level of intuition, which you don't need the complicated, long paragraphs to explain it. It's an intuition thing. It's pub chat, right?

MATT ALLEN: Yeah.

It needs to be pub chat to really get the hearts and minds of these people.

Pitch it to a parent. That's my mom, when I was explaining to her what a crazy delusional thing her son was doing, I mean, she said, so yeah, the wind doesn't always blow. The sun doesn't always shine. So we need batteries.

And I've told that story 100 times, because yeah, that's basically--

it's not wildly more complicated than that. It's pretty basic in its concept, but that's why we need this stuff.

Not particularly sexy either.

Oh my god.

Oh, you know, when the sun goes away, that's when we do this thing.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, going to our first, yeah, site, it was double-stacked 40-foot shipping containers. So it's like wow, it's beautiful. What's going on, Mikey, Adrian? How does this work?

But it's not a big wind turbine and 50 acres of solar. It's a bunch of boxes in a field.

The containers thing's funny.

It's become normal and we think about it as a normal thing. But, I mean, it didn't have to be this way.

And I don't know, if you asked me 10 years ago what's a grid-scale battery going to--

well, I probably wouldn't even be able to describe it. But I wouldn't have said it comes at a load of shipping containers that you stick in a field. But hey, ho, that's the world we live in now.

Last question, Matt, and I'll put you on the spot here. Anything you want to get off your chest?

This is not a confession, by the way. It's not.

But is there anything that you want to raise?

You can actually file a formal complaint with Modo right now if you want. No, is there anything that you think we need to discuss or talk about more or something that you've been pondering? The answer no is also OK.

I don't know if this is an age thing or being a parent thing or a deep level of imposter syndrome, maybe a combination of all of them. But I'm not trying to lecture, but play to your strengths and be proud of those things. And own the shit out of your weaknesses, your shortcomings, things you haven't done, probably never will do.

And it's funny, because, I think that with Mikey, Matthew, and myself, and in everybody that came into it, we never talked about it. We never wrote down, this is what I'm good at and this is what I'm not good at and then you tried it. But in building a company, I think that that's an ingredient that's just so important.

And I think if we all did that from a society standpoint, just think how much better we would be. I'm good at some things and I'm not good at many things. And that's OK.

I actually did this at the start and things I'm good at. And I had four or five things. I was like, decent chat, kind of confident, American accent.

I've worked in this industry for 10 years so i know a lot of people. I haven't screwed people over so maybe I could activate my network, whatever that means. And then I had four sheets of things that I wasn't good at. And I was like, oh wow.

Let's do it, Matt. Let's go today.

Yeah, yeah. But in meeting Mikey, and I went back and looked at it, and Matthew and everybody else, and now I'm perfect. I am absolutely perfect. Please don't cut that out as much as just I am perfect, but--

That would be the sound byte we put on LinkedIn. We need to do this at Modo. We should probably get everyone to--

we should just cry and write down all the things we're not happy about ourselves. And maybe we can just get it all out.

Yeah, yeah, the team has seen me cry far too many times.

But I think that, yeah, let's be honest. Let's be vulnerable. Let's all these things that I think that--

and I've really enjoyed--

if you met me five years ago, I'm very different. I think Pivot allowed me to--

it accepted me for everything, and in return we them.

And it was just really cool to see this acceptance. We celebrated mistakes.

And we pick each other up and say, awesome. I used to have people come up with ideas. Mikey forgot to sign a grid connection or something like that and he was super worried.

We had an intern and she sends Outlook invites to Mikey. Would somebody else grab a whiteboard and write down all the dates? And I was sitting there, like wow, that's--

they didn't want Mikey to mess up again. And it was like, we have back, buddy.

And it was so cool to just see--

there's been so many other times I just been sitting there watching--

I love when things go wrong because people put on their Superman, Superwoman capes. And I'm like, Jesus, look at this. Can I get you a coffee or anything?

Yeah, the good out of everybody turns up.

Yeah, and it's just, it's so powerful and special to be a part of.

We were either the best equipped or worst equipped for lockdown.

I just loved being in that environment with those people every day, where I used to try to get there early to make the coffee.

That was just, I loved doing that. I didn't tell anybody. But it was just to try to be there to support people and give them high-fives and tell them we can do this.

And so, anyway, that wasn't getting something off my chest. I didn't want to get that--

well, anyway, maybe because I feel early-stage startup companies, you really, and it does start with the person who's running the show.

You're a very talented guy, I have no doubt, but I'm pretty sure you have some shortcomings. And I hope that your colleagues know that.

Yeah, no, I think we have a pretty firm understanding of many of those.

Good. Good.

All right, cool.

Matt, I just want to say thanks for coming on. I know you got other people to meet today. And finding time to do this is very generous of you. So thank you.

I'm just going to fall asleep on your sofa.

Yeah.

Someone actually stayed on the sofa last night. That's a long story.

Well, we'll be keeping an eye on Pivot Power. I guess if people want to know more about Pivot Power, we'll put the website in the comments.

Let us know, if you're watching this, what you think. If you've got any more questions, I'm sure we can pass them on. And see in the next episode. Thanks, Matt.

Thank you very much.