I Joined Xeal - Here's Why
Timing is everything and it's time to build the future
Things happen slowly ... then all at once. In life, timing is EVERYTHING. My wife and I always ruminate whether or not we’d be together if we had met five years earlier. We’re both hopeless romantics so we think we’d still have ended up together - but it helps that we met when we were both ready and looking for the right person - after getting our twenties out of our system. Finding your suitor, taking your shot, landing your fortunes and just about anything else in life is about timing (and luck). That’s why the time is now for me to get back to building and to catch a wave of epic proportions. I spent the last three years at Lincoln Property Company surveying the proptech landscape and when the right culmination of gritty founders, broader economic signals and burgeoning industry presented itself, I knew I was ready to get back in the operating arena. I believe we are finally at the inflection point of the electrification shift in mobility and real estate is the key to unlocking that vision.
Over the next ten years I would bet that everyone reading this will drive an electric vehicle. Every automaker is converting its production line to electric and investing billions of dollars into repurposing its designs and assembly lines. The latest battery technology has improved dramatically and costs have dropped substantially to a level of approbation. The intelligence and software side of the automotive space is maturing (self-driving features, over-the-air software upgrades, etc.) and the charging infrastructure space is waking up to the impending demand. This year alone, 2022, we will see the introduction of over 500 new models of electric vehicles hitting the road up from 19 in 2021. The product offerings will range from $20,000 Mazdas all the way to the $170,000 Lucids and everything in between. In fact, the most popular car in America is going electric. The Ford 150 will releasing its F-150 Electric and it already has over 200,000 reservations. Texas construction workers and farm boys, get ready! Sure we can talk about the carbon emission savings and the good stewardship of the environment but the fact is electric vehicles will become the norm because they’re more economical and a better experience for drivers, full stop. So how do we accelerate the momentum?
The two main reasons why most people have not bought an electric car are #1 cost (solved with the new array of options hitting the market this year) and #2 lack of charging infrastructure. The lack of infrastructure is a problem! Today only 0.5% of parking spaces have EV charging stations but yet 51% of all cars on the road will be electric by 2030, how will that compute? You can’t truly have electric vehicles populating the road until you have the energy infrastructure required to support them. You say chicken or the egg? Charging infrastructure is your chicken and we’re about to supply a whole coupe!
So where is this problem most apparent? Most EV drivers are expected to do up to 90% of their charging overnight at home or during the day at work, estimated by the US Department of Energy. Therefore, unlike a gas car, you will not pull your EV up to the side of the road and charge up unless you absolutely need to or are looking to watch Netflix while sipping a slurpie outside of a Sonic (yeah not for me!). You’ll follow the same behavior as charging your phone - home, office and once in a while a starbucks! So let’s focus on the home. Quick math for you: There are 150mm dwelling units in America and 25% of them are multi-family so therefore you have nearly 40mm apartment units in America. While a single family home can just plug in a charger and call it a day, apartment building owners are the ones that own their electrical output for their buildings and thus need to properly distribute it as a shared resource to their various residents. Unlike a cell phone charger, your car will need a Level 2 charger to adequately charge the larger batteries in a reasonable amount of time. Oh and by the way, you need to know who is using the charger, how to collect payment from the driver and many other things like reserving a space and enforcing idle parkers. Most importantly, the charging experience has to be SMART…which shockingly is not always the case and requires networking or some form of reliable connectivity. I expound to say, its not as simple as it sounds and universal access to EV charging is the largest impediment to adoption!
So in comes XEAL ENERGY. Xeal is devoutly focused on supplying high quality and highly reliable charging solutions to multi-family as well as commercial real estate buildings. Our team is fit for the job. It’s the right mix of dreamers, doers, industry experts and passion climate enthusiasts. It’s the collective team energy that will push Xeal ahead and be recognized as the clean, sleek and enjoyable charging experience everyone’s been awaiting.
Oh and then there’s the ‘do good for the world side’ that I’d be remiss not to at least cover. The Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) says it themselves that we need to move toward electrification and a new modal shift by 2050 to hit our net-zero carbon emissions target and reduce global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Electrification of mobility is crucial to these goals. Electrification is in many ways just a technical problem that can be solved with capital and effort. We need electric vehicles, we need batteries, and we need the infrastructure in place to charge these vehicles. Among other things, this has meant building new charging stations, retrofitting existing buildings, and encouraging/requiring new buildings to make provisions for a future with predominantly electric vehicles. This is our future and the money will be there.
Climate tech now accounts for 14 cents of every venture capital dollar. Mobility and Transport remains the most heavily invested challenge area, raising $58bn, which represents two-thirds of the overall funding in H2 2020 and H1 2021. Within this, electric vehicles (EVs) and low greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions vehicles remain dominant, raising nearly $33bn. There has also been significant growth in Industry, Manufacturing and Resource Use, raising $6.9bn in H2 2020 and H1 2021, nearly four times the amount raised by the challenge area in the period a year prior. (Source: PwC’s Climate Tech Report 2021)
So once again, it’s time to build!
On a personal level, as I’ve shared before in Where the Brightest flow, this is the framework for how I build my career decisions:
what do you want to learn and what will challenge you? I want to become an expert in the electrification of mobility space AND take on the challenge of building a growth machine from the earliest days of a company in an emerging industry.
Who do you want to learn it from and alongside? I want to learn the technology side from a brilliant CTO and engineering team and learn to build the business alongside a founder (CEO) that I see as a younger, but more impressive, version of myself…and do it with a group of incredibly young and hungry team members that will inspire me every day.
Once you’ve learned that, what do you want to learn next and how does it compliment or compound? I want to learn how we build a deep technology business that has broader applications above and beyond EV infrastructure AND I want to learn how to empower the people on my team to become the best versions of themselves and thrive to even further heights.
So I’m joining Xeal and I’m staying in Texas. Texas is the US state that currently produces the most renewable energy and I believe Austin, Texas specifically will be a leader in the Electric Vehicle space as Tesla ramps up Giga factory production and some of the brightest minds in the world flock to this great city and state. Texas was once known for oil & gas but its entrepreneurial spirit will enable it to thrive in the pivot to an electric mobility future.
So for the last time, it’s time to build