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Happy Tuesday!

There aren’t many generational companies. There can’t be.

So I set a goal for myself that instead of writing about as many companies as I have in the past, I want to find the ones that I think have the best shot at becoming one of the special ones and write about them year after year, to learn and share how they operate in real-time, before history has a chance to gloss over their stories. Hopefully, by the time some of these companies have IPO’d, I’ll have basically written the book on them.

Base Power Company, I believe, will be one of the special ones. I had a hunch when I wrote about them last year. The strategy was sound and the team was killer. I have a stronger feeling now. They have executed violently over the past year, built an increasingly talented team, and raised $200 million from excellent investors. Most importantly, as they’ve tackled the inevitable challenges of building a vertical integrator in the massive, critically important power market, their ambition has only grown.

So this is Chapter 2 in what I hope will become the Book of Base. It’s a long one, so if you want to read the whole thing online or save it for a cup of coffee, click here.

Let’s get to it.

Base Power Company: Chapter Two

When I talk to LPs about investing in Not Boring Capital, one of the most common questions I get is something like, “What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made?”

I have made a lot of mistakes, so there are a lot of ways I could answer it. They might want to hear that I shouldn’t have invested in a certain company that failed, or that I was too willing to overpay for certain companies. But the truthful answer, the one I give, is this:

I didn’t invest in Base Power Company last year when I had the chance.

In May 2024, as part of the company’s public unveiling, I worked with Zach Dell, Justin Lopas, and the team to write a Deep Dive on what they were up to.

Before I started writing, Zach said that there was a $60 million round closing led by Valor Equity Partners at a $300 million post-money valuation. He asked if I wanted to invest.

“That’s a much higher price than I’m investing in out of this fund,” I said, like a dumb robot. Plus, I thought, the company hadn’t launched. It hadn’t generated any revenue. It hadn’t even installed a battery on a real customer’s home! “I appreciate it but I can’t unfortunately.”

Then I wrote the Deep Dive:

And the day after I hit send, I texted Zach something like “I get it now. Please let me invest. PLEASE, for the love of God.” And he said, rightly, something like “I’m sorry, the round is closed and we’re already getting a lot of interest for the next one at a much higher price. I wish you had come in when the round was open but I’ll let you know the next time we’re raising.”

That, I thought, was that. I could only imagine how high the price on the next round was going to be. I’d laid out the argument myself! This might be one of the most valuable startups of this generation, one of those “n-of-1” companies you hear about. Those don’t come cheap.

After the Deep Dive, Cole, who runs growth at Base, sent me a Base poster as a thank you. It’s a really nice poster. I didn’t have the heart to hang it up.

For the next 7 months, when Zach forwarded me an investor update, or when I saw a tweet about Base doing something good, it was with the mixed emotion of watching an ex who you still care for be happy with someone else. I wanted Base to do well - I like the team, I like the mission, the country desperately needs what they’re selling, and I’d look a little smarter if a company I wrote about at launch became the next SpaceX - and I was happy for them. But I was also sad to not be a part of it, and a little mad at myself for letting a rule around price get in the way of what I thought had a chance to become a generational company.

Then in early January, I was texting with Zach when he mentioned that they were raising again and asked if I’d want to participate. We hopped on the phone that night, and he told me that Antonio Gracias, the Valor Equity Partners Founder and Chief Executive Officer and Base’s one outside board member, preempted the Series B with a term sheet after the company’s December board meeting.

Although the price was a good deal higher than I should have paid less than a year earlier, I asked Zach to send me the data room.

What I saw in there was that in the seven months since I’d written about the company, and since it launched, Base had become a real business. It had installed over 1,000 batteries on Texans’ homes, signed a partnership with the homebuilder Lennar, and perhaps most importantly, continued to build out one of the most impressive teams in tech.

When I wrote the Deep Dive, the story was the company’s strategy and the team it built around it. But they hadn’t done it yet. Demand was still a question. Operations were still a question. The ability to build software to help balance load and make money from the batteries was still a question. Like any young startup, Base was a series of questions.

Now, Base had started to answer those questions and the answers looked good. In a conversation with Molly O’Shea on Sourcery, I laid out the Base thesis I’d already written, but added something new that they’d proven: “They are executing violently.”

So I invested. I couldn’t not.

Definitionally, you don’t get many chances to invest in generational companies.

The Generational American Electric Company Thesis

While intelligence gets all of the attention, I’m increasingly convinced that what we’re entering is the Electric Era. Cars, robots, flying cars, drones, appliances, boats – anything that can go electric is going electric, because electric performs better. Even intelligence is reliant on access to electricity.

At the same time, the grid charged with delivering that Invisible Gold is failing to keep up. America is not adding new transmission lines at anywhere near the target rate the Department of Energy (DOE) set for the country.

But that’s OK, actually. So much of the existing transmission sits underutilized the vast majority of the time. We can do much more with what we have. It is clear that batteries are the answer.

Batteries, installed right where demand happens, can soak up electrons when they’re cheap and when the grid is open, and discharge them when they’re expensive and when the grid is congested.

That’s better for consumers, who get cheaper, more reliable electricity. And it’s better for the grid, because it spreads out electron traffic throughout the day. “The grid is a highway you only drive on at rush hour and no cars the rest of the day,” Trust Ventures’ Sal Churi, an early Base investor, told me. Batteries control the flow of traffic.

All of this, and more, was the basis for the strategy that Zach and Justin shared with me for the last piece – the “Diagnosis,” in Richard Rumelt’s Strategy Kernel.

At the time, I realized that batteries were important, and that they would become more important as America electrified everything and added more variable renewable energy to the mix.

What I’ve come to believe since then is that batteries are the most important piece of the American electricity puzzle, and the layer positioned to capture the most value in the transition.

Software-enabled batteries, like the one Base makes and installs, are Electricity’s Operating System. They provide the abstraction layer between generation and consumption. An electron produced at any time flows to a battery, where it can be used at any time. I will expand on this in a bit.

As I wrote last time, I think Base’s is a brilliant strategy. Not just what they’re doing, but how. When I wrote my series on Vertical Integrators, Base was the first example I used. They don’t manufacture battery cells – the commoditized and hypercompetitive piece dominated by China – but do pack assembly, so that they can take advantage of the competition-progress in cells. It does a lot of hard but achievable things, and integrates them. The integration is the innovation:

To deploy batteries and fix the grid, Base can’t just build a battery; it needs to build a vertically integrated power company around batteries.

The power company needs to excel at a whole lot of things: manufacturing, finance, distributed systems, power trading, customer acquisition, consumer software, regulatory, and installation, to start. It needs to become a Retail Electric Provider (REP) itself.

All of this remains true.

What has changed, why I am more confident now that Base will build the Generational American Electric Company, and why I was happy to pay a higher price to invest is that all of this is really, really hard, and over the past year, Base has proven that it can execute ahead of schedule against a really, really hard problem.

“Everyone,” says Mike Tyson, “has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Iron Mike’s implication is that, once punched, weaker fighters abandon the plan. Great fighters stick to it. But there’s another class of fighter not contemplated, one that feels the force and angle of the punch, learns something of their foe through it, and uses that information to improve the plan in real-time.

Base Power Company has willingly taken mouth punches and what they’ve learned in the process is that the opportunity is both harder and bigger than they initially realized.

When I asked him what’s impressed him most working with Base as their Board member over the past year, Antonio at Valor told me that, “They listen and grow fast. When you deal with young founders, you separate them quickly into people who listen and don’t, people who are open and curious, who really want to understand, who are very focused on getting better every day. They have that mindset – it’s the right mindset to win – small changes over time, whatever the challenge.”

That is what you want. A dramatically challenging endeavor that, by nature of its difficulty, means that the market is wide open to those small few who can pull it off, tackled by a team that is hungry to learn and improve. That Base is operating in the largest market there is, one dominated by sclerotic centenarian utility incumbents, at the OS layer, from which it can earn the right to expand up or down, is all the more reason to be excited about what this looks like if they execute.

I’m not alone in my excitement. There’s a reason that so many talented people are moving to Austin to build America’s Power Company. Plus, Valor’s term sheet set off a bit of a frenzy. A $100 million round turned into a $200 million round as Lightspeed, Addition, and a16z invested alongside existing investors including Valor, Thrive Capital, and Trust Ventures. Addition’s Lee Fixel is joining Valor’s Antonio Gracias on the Board. If you want to build something really meaningful, it’s hard to ask for better capital partners.

Backers like that are a moat, too. It’s hard to imagine who would even fund a competitor to Base at this point. As I wrote in Vertical Integrators: Part IV:

Among startups, I expect we’ll see much less competition. The companies that show an early ability to execute against a big and credible enough vision will attract the top talent and the limited pool of investors willing to back such hard-to-underwrite companies, sucking the air out of the room for would-be challengers.

This, of course, does not mean that this will be easy. Each Base team member and investor I spoke to was quick to point out the million things that might go wrong. It’s easy for me to write a smooth story; it’s harder for Dana Paz, Base’s Head of Deployments, to recruit, train, schedule, and manage the dozens of electricians who will install thousands of batteries across the great state of Texas this year alone, and then tens of thousands more all across this great nation in the many years to come, as just one of many examples.

What it does mean is that Base is better positioned than any other company to fix America’s grid and usher in the Electric Era. It’s competing against itself, and against a system so mind-numbingly complex and resistant to change that it will take the best efforts of the best talent in the country to win.

So today, after hours of conversations with Base’s leaders and investors, and after getting to feel the energy in Austin for myself, I’ll share a snapshot of where Base is today, how it’s gotten here, where it might go in the future, and the size of the prize up for grabs. If all goes well, I plan to write a Deep Dive on Base Power company every year for the next decade. There are very few companies that have the chance to be generational, and I think there’s a lot to learn from studying the ones who do in the middle of all of the real-time messiness.

For this piece, now that I’m an investor, I have a main goal: I want to convince you, smart, curious, hard-working reader, to consider packing your bags and heading to Texas to build the American Electric Company. There is an ever-expanding set of problems to solve and opportunities to conquer, and the consequences of getting it right are massive. Go work at Base.

Don’t make the same mistake I did. Don’t pass on Base. In this Deep Dive, I’ll make the case.

The House

If you spend even 30 minutes in the Base Power Company HQ in Austin, Texas, you’ll hear about The House.

As in, “Back when we were at The House…” or “So when I started here, it was just a bunch of us in The House.” Having worked at The House is a badge. It says, “I’ve been here since the scrappy early days.”

The House was Sal Churi’s. The Trust Ventures Managing Partner and Seed-round Base investor, alongside Thrive Capital, had been meeting with Justin and Zach weekly for four months before they started the company. At one of those meetings, they told Sal that they were looking for an office. He joked that he’d just moved into a new house and hadn’t yet sold the old one, so maybe they could just use that. They told him that sounded perfect, because they wanted the house vibe.

“Honestly, I think they did it because they knew I’d let them do whatever the fuck they wanted,” Sal told me. “They bolted a DeWalt kit on the living room walls. They took the laundry room out and replaced it with giant inverters. They thought, ‘We can burn this house down and he’ll be OK.’”

The House was intentional. It set the tone. The tone was Thumos, the Greek term that Sal said represents “camaraderie and fighting spirit” and Google’s AI summary describes as “the spirited or passionate part of the soul, often associated with courage, anger, and the desire for recognition, and is a driving force behind action and striving for honor.” Which sounds mostly right.

Driven by that spirit, Zach, Justin, and the early Base team members didn’t burn the house down, but they did burn the midnight oil. “I’d get texts from my buddies across the street,” Sal said. “These guys never leave. They’re animals.”

That was intentional, too. A company is a reflection of its founders. “Apple,” David Senra says, “is just Steve Jobs’ 10,000 lives.”

When Zach and Justin met while Justin, then head of manufacturing at Anduril, toured Zach, then an investor at Thrive, around the defense vigintioctocorn’s facilities, they recognized that they had opposite and complementary skill sets but almost exactly the same work ethic.

One thing you’ll hear from everyone close to the company, and that you’ll certainly hear from me today, is that the Base Power Company team is stacked. Ex-Tesla, SpaceX, Anduril, you name it, and not just people who’d worked there for a year, but people who ran large pieces of those businesses.

What is harder to appreciate from the outside is just how hard those people – many of whom, on paper, probably don’t even need to work – work. How deeply the culture of The House is infused in the culture of Base. The Thumos. The fact that even big things start small, by hand.

Grand plans that seem inevitable on paper feel inconceivable in the moment-to-moment details. Dana explained:

When I started there were zero batteries in the ground... I was doing the site survey with Cole [Jones, Head of Growth] in person, driving house to house. I was hand making the permitting package... I remember Zach being like, ‘We just have to get to one a day. That's such a cool goal.’ I remember being like, ‘It's impossible.’”

It turned out, though, that it wasn’t impossible. Dana and Cole did it, one at a time.

Then Dana moved on to a bigger challenge: scaling from one to many daily installs, and from herself to a team.

“We used to have to go to every install,” she said, “and now it's like actually we only have to talk to the installer if they have a problem.”

Even if she wanted to, it would be physically impossible for Dana to make it to every install. Base is now in three markets: Austin, Dallas, and Houston. In the company’s March investor update, Zach wrote that the Base team did more than 300 installs in March, more than 15 per working day on average. On the best day, they installed over 20.

That seems like a very big number today. In a year, it will seem very small. At some point in the future, 22 installs will be a really bad hour.

Taking a snapshot of Base every year necessarily paints a too-smooth picture, because things are going well.

From practically no batteries installed last year to over 1,000 now, including hundreds installed via a partnership with Lennar, one of the country’s largest homebuilders. In March, the team grew the installed MWh by a third MoM for something that is much harder to grow by a third than software. From a small enough team to fit in The House to a team of 78 plus 20 field crew team members driving around the state installing more and more batteries every day.

But the path isn’t smooth or inevitable. It’s made up of thousands of little decisions and actions taken over the course of 12 hour days, day after day.

Justin was blunt, “In the day-to-day it does not feel like things are going well, honestly.”

Valor’s Antonio Gracias, who has spent more time in the guts of the country’s most successful Vertical Integrators – he served on the Board of Directors at Tesla until 2021, still serves on the SpaceX Board, and is a Board Observer at Anduril – told me that’s the nature of an operationally complex business like this.

“At any given moment, if you ask them about the biggest challenges,” he explained, “They’d point out three to four micro problems in addition to the larger macro problems – design for use, drive cost down, get distribution. How do you manage all of that to get better over time? If you do, though, that’s the flywheel.”

At this stage in the company’s life, now that the company is out of The House and into the field, that is the yin and yang story of Base. Given that it’s picked the right strategy in the right market:

• What makes it hard is what makes it defensible.

• The more challenges it identifies, the bigger the opportunity becomes.

While it might feel like things aren’t going well in the day-to-day, each pain point uncovers more potential. “The deeper we get into it, the more opportunity I think there is,” Justin told me. “And the opportunity does not stop at sending someone their electricity bill each month.”

To some extent, this is true of every company. Dealing with customers and partners exposes you to more problems to be solved than you can come up with off the top of your head. But given where Base operates in the electricity stack, it is uniquely positioned to eat very big problems.

Heads up: this essay might cut off in your email in a few paragraphs. To keep reading:

Click Here to Read the Full Essay Online

The Operating System for Electricity

I recently interviewed Julian Lehr for Hyperlegible, and when I asked him which essay of his people should read, he recommended The power of defaults. Good rec. In the piece, he provides a very useful way to look at tech ecosystems:

If you want to understand the power dynamics between different platforms, aggregators and other players in a tech ecosystem, it’s better to look at them as a vertical stack with different layers.

On each layer of the stack, companies are trying to create value and to capture value. The lowest layers of the stack are typically the most powerful. If you are able to take control of a layer, you can dictate the terms of most of the value creation and value capture that is happening in the layers above you.

As a result, you see companies trying to

A: create layers on top of their business (everyone wants to be a platform)

B: move down the stack to get closer to the base layer (to increase defensibility)

What is the base layer?

The base layer is the final interface between the stack and the end user – which is typically an operating system tied to a piece of hardware. This is why atom-based network effects are so powerful: They help companies gain control of the most powerful layer of the stack.

I swear I didn’t make the connection between “Base” and “base layer” before copying that in just now. What I did realize immediately upon re-reading that essay is that it’s a perfect way to describe what Base is trying to do.

“The base layer is the final interface between the stack and the end user – which is typically an operating system tied to a piece of hardware.”

That sounds like Base, right?

In the first Deep Dive, we covered the dizzying complexity of America’s power grid and Base’s plan to serve as an interface between that complexity and users who just want to make sure their power is always there when they need it. If you want a refresher, you should pause and read it.

Base does this by installing a battery, writing software to charge and discharge the battery as needed, and serving as the Retail Electric Provider (REP) that customers interact with to pay their bill every month.

This storage + software combination is the base layer of the grid.

Julian’s whole essay could be re-interpreted as an argument for Base. He talks about why industries that end up winner-take-all or winner-take-most historically have been atoms-based, for example.

And about “why defensibility is just about real estate.” Base would agree. A big part of the reason they are moving so fast and why they raised so much is that once you own the battery real estate on a customer’s home, you are very hard to replace.

But the part I want to focus on is this:

“If you are able to take control of a layer, you can dictate the terms of most of the value creation and value capture that is happening in the layers above you.”

Because that is Base’s strategy: own the base layer, expand down into generation and up into consumption. That is why, the more they dig in, the bigger the opportunity becomes.

Some of the things Base is discovering are things that they kind of expected coming in. Jared Greene, the Head of Software at Base, told me for the last piece that “the heavy-hitter question is: will you be able to get telemetry data faster than every 5 minutes? The answer is definitely yes. We’ll have sub-second data, minutes aren’t in our vocabulary.”

Now, they do. When I spoke to Jared in Austin, he showed me how Base has delivered on the real-time monitoring capabilities he described in our previous conversations. The system now processes data from their battery network much faster than the industry-standard 5-minute intervals, giving Base visibility into grid conditions as they happen. This capability, which Jared had emphasized would be crucial to their strategy, is now operational and supporting their power trading operations. It’s also exposing areas where the existing infrastructure is decades behind what it would be in terms of monitoring and verification.

Which is to say, there’s one opportunity to expand from the Base layer to provide utilities with hardware and software they need to actually do real-time monitoring and verification. The grid is a haystack full of shiny needles for those willing and able to dive in.

Erin Price-Wright, the General Partner on a16z’s American Dynamism team who led the firm’s investment in Base, told me that this is what got them really excited.

“We didn’t invest because we’re interested in investing in a consumer battery company,” she said. “What gets interesting is when you start to think about the way a decentralized battery storage system is a step to modernizing the grid, as a step to building software to handle grid load that I don’t see any other angle to attacking.”

There are many ways to monetize that modernization. Do you charge utilities for software that you can uniquely build because of your distributed fleet of batteries? Do you partner with them to bring batteries to their millions of customers? Do you build your own utility, backward integrating into generation and even pieces of transmission?

This is not easy, and it’s not possible to do with Base’s current assets. We talked about backward integrating into generation in the last piece, and that might be a part of this, but it might also mean moving to the pieces between the plant and the home, like transformers and substations. That adds complexity to an already complex business.

Which to do in which order is a question of timing and team and capital and strategy, but the beautiful thing about operating at the base layer, about running the Operating System of Electricity, is that you have the choice. Much as I love generation technologies like nuclear and solar, and as much as electric products like Teslas and drones just perform better, it’s hard to imagine them integrating further downstream and upstream in the grid, respectively.

It is easier for Apple to make its own chips and apps than it is for chips and app makers to own the phone’s OS.

At the risk of stretching the analogy, the equivalent graphic for Base might look like this:

Except, again, we are talking about electricity, a trillion dollar market that is going to grow even faster than many people expect as humanity pushes all work that can be done by electron-powered things to those things.

And over the past year, I’ve become convinced that the battery layer is not just complementary to the drivers of that growth – renewable generation on one side, electrified products on the other – but that it is the single best layer from which to both create and capture value in the Electric Era.

Antonio at Valor explained why Base’s position is so strong relative to the other layers. “The sun is the largest nuclear reactor we can conceive of, and it’s free,” he said. “Photons are free. What will matter is storage.”

To quote another recent Hyperlegible guest, Alex Danco, from his classic Positional Scarcity, “In conditions of abundance, relative position matters a great deal.” When photons are free, the ability to control their use over time becomes the scarce resource. It is the bottleneck, and Base is working to control it.

“If you think about the entire energy system, the battery is the limiter,” Antonio explained. “If you build the thing that’s most valuable in the system, you can integrate in either direction.”

But Yin. Yang. The more valuable the spot, the harder it is to win it.

Base has to excel at so many things at such a granular level, and then fit those pieces together, in order to gain and hold that spot. And then it needs to do more really hard things – some technical, some regulatory, some human – to expand in the way that only the base layer even has the option to expand.

The 2025 Base story is about doing thousands of tiny things consistently well – and learning when some things inevitably don’t go well – in order to win one of the biggest prizes there is.

So let’s zoom back into the little things.

How to Build the Base Layer

Here is where Base Power Company is today.

It has installed over 1,000 of its Gen 1 batteries in homes across Texas. It has hired and partnered with dozens of electricians and installers in the field to install them. It signed and has been executing against its partnership with Lennar. It also signed and is executing against its first partnership with a regulated utility, Bandera Electric Cooperative. By optimizing its trading algorithms, it’s increased the amount of revenue it can generate from each battery. It’s also discovered that utilities are willing to pay even more than the free market, because Base can save them from making expensive transmission upgrades. As it has gotten more certainty on its unit economics, it’s changed its pricing model - from ~$3,000 (the full cost of install) upfront, to $595 upfront and a monthly fee of $19 – which led to a 30% MoM increase in signed customers.

It is now working on its Gen 2 battery, which it’s currently testing in its Austin HQ, where, among other tests, Base puts the battery in a rain simulator for seven days to ensure reliability. It’s finding the right mix of in-house and subcontractor installers, between customer experience and flexibility. From Cole knocking door-to-door, Base’s growth strategy has become a three-legged stool: direct-to-consumer, channel partnerships, and utility partnerships. Through trial and error, its messaging has shifted from “the most affordable way to backup your home,” to “the only energy provider that delivers reliable and affordable power.” If it delivers on that, it will earn the right to position as “America’s Power Company.” On the software side, Base is now collecting and acting on real-time information from its network of batteries. The company can see outages as they happen, and respond immediately to help balance the grid. It uses the unique information it collects to trade power in both the real-time and day-ahead markets. As it expands from purely deregulated markets to regulated utility partnerships, it’s building software to help visualize and manage its distributed fleet of batteries as one resource. It is now competing with centralized storage solutions - large battery farms - to win utility contracts, in Texas, and now, beyond. On the financing side, its $200 million raise and early unit economics position the company to raise the non-dilutive capital it will require to grow efficiently.

If that seems like a lot to throw at you in a couple of paragraphs, imagine doing all of it, and working to make sure it all fits together seamlessly, even as each individual piece grows in scope and complexity.

But I told you we would zoom in. That’s still zoomed out. That zoomed out painting is pointillist, made up of thousands of little dots. To make the painting, nail the dots.

What Base is building is a vertically integrated system, not a single product, which makes it hard to write about. “Move one thing here, and something else changes there. Move that and something else shifts.” But there is a rough order: sell a battery to customers, make the battery, then install it, grow the customer base, then connect all of the batteries with software, then do new things that you can only do once you’ve done all of the others, like partner with regulated utilities.

To understand how all of that happens, I flew down to Austin to spend time with the people responsible for each step in that journey and see the magic for myself. This is what I learned.

Growth

The counterintuitive thing about a company like Base – a company that has to do so many hard things right, in concert – is that the biggest chunk of uncertainty might actually come down to a question every business faces: how do we get customers to buy our product?

Most of the Vertical Integrators we talk about – including SpaceX and Anduril – sell to a handful of very large customers, often government customers. They can sell on specs to customers who need certain capabilities. Tesla is different; it has to sell to individual customers. But even those customers were going to buy a car; Tesla’s job is making it sexy to buy their electric car. Starlink is different; but Starlink gets to sell as a SpaceX product now that SpaceX is SpaceX.

Base, on the other hand, is selling energy storage to customers who probably weren’t in the market for energy storage, who might have a generator but almost certainly don’t have a battery, who pay bills to a power company but at the very least don’t love it, and who’ve never heard of Base Power Company.

“This is a harder one; it requires consumer behavior change. It’s net new tech to an average homeowner,” Terrain Capital’s Willem Van Lancker, who worked with Zach at Thrive and whose firm has invested each round since Base started, explained. “Consumers don’t think about power, which is a blessing, but Base wants to say, ‘Hey, that’s something you should consider a little bit more.’”

As with almost everything Base does, on the other side of the challenge lies an opportunity.

“There are few categories as large as energy that lack a definitive consumer brand,” Willem said. “It’s a wide open space.”

And as with almost everything that Base does, turning the opportunity that the team and its investors see to one that it actually captures, takes hard, day-in-day-out execution.

In the last Deep Dive, the Strategy Deep Dive, we talked a little bit about the potential for Base to build a brand consumers love, and mentioned that Cole Jones, who worked as a Senior Product Growth Manager for Starlink at SpaceX, was on the job. Starlink did $7.8 billion in revenue selling hardware with a service to 4.6 million customers last year. That’s exactly the experience you want to bring to bear on this problem. As big and sexy as Starlink is though, building an entirely new category from the ground up takes an entirely new set of tricks. It takes hitting the actual ground.

“My first year goal,” Cole told me when we spoke in Texas, “was to find product market fit. Zach wrote the initial memo, he’s like, ‘Hardware + software, we’re going to disrupt this large, undisrupted industry,’ very Zach-level, strategic thinking. So I had to figure out, ‘Okay, hardware plus software. What does that mean to a customer? How do we translate that into something?”

That meant turning a complex technical system into something that made sense to customers, like he’d worked on at Starlink: “Internet, anywhere.” For a pure software company, maybe you’d A/B test a bunch of copy and see what worked. For something that was going to go onto peoples’ homes, though, Cole needed to go to peoples’ homes.

“My first week, Zach and I door-knocked,” he remembered.

“Get out into the field, go to customers – the Stripe model – and a lot of what I learned doing that I use today. You have ten to fifteen seconds to make an impression, often less. Most people don’t answer the door for you. Some people answer with a gun and they’re a little frightened by you.” This is Texas, remember, but Cole assured me that no one had ever pulled a gun on him, even if they weren’t shy about having one holstered. The point is, though, that “you have to make a trusting impression immediately.”

Specifically, in case you’re planning to door knock in Texas, after you knock, you need to step back, put your hands in front of you, put a slight smile (not too big) on your face, and look not directly at the door but off slightly to the side. Then you have to get two nods.

“Are you aware of the rising volatility on the grid?”

Nod.

“Have you seen your energy costs rise?”

Nod.

“Well, we have a solution to fix both of those things. I’m Cole. I’m a local entrepreneur…”

And then you have a conversation, where you learn what resonates and what doesn’t.

“I’d start talking about this cool new technology that’s going to be cooler than Tesla and cooler than Starlink, engineering-led,” Cole makes fun of himself, now, “and no one gives a fuck! They don’t trust you! They’re like, ‘What do you mean a free battery with your neon text? None of that makes sense to me.’”

What’s cool is that you can see the results of Cole’s door-knocking right on Base’s homepage.

Here’s the website a year ago, pre-launch, courtesy of The Wayback Machine:

And here’s the website on launch day last year:

Do you see the neon? Look at that customer quote: “Finally, an energy company that actually innovates.”

Look at the website now:

It’s subtle. If I hadn’t talked to Cole, I wouldn’t have noticed the differences. But I did talk to Cole, and he shared that, “Our marketing tries to make an impression in five to ten seconds, and to convey something that Texans can agree with in a way that can be trusted and is community and local feeling.” Do you see the 4.9 out of 5-star rating on Google? Did you notice that the house looks more like something a normal person would live in? That instead of putting the battery front and center, Base puts it in the shadows? That it puts the focus on the people in a well-lit house instead of on the battery, and has people in the house at all, as compared to the empty pool house in the old version? In place of the innovation quote, Base highlights five media organizations that Texans recognize, some national, some local. Even the messaging is different. “Cut your costs, not your power” focuses on what Base does for the customer, instead of trumpeting Base’s spot as “the reliable & affordable power company.”

This goes beyond the website and into the field. Cole directed me to a recent Houston Chronicle piece that featured a Base installer, Chris Link, front and center, wearing a Carhartt jacket and a dark green Base hat. As we’ll discuss in a bit, the brand experience can extend to the home as Base vertically integrates its deployment team.

“A lot of companies say they value brand and design, because it sounds good, but when the time comes, they fail to follow through,” Willem noted. “Base has gone the opposite direction: leaned in harder and has made it core to their customer experience.”

The same thing that Antonio said makes Zach and Justin special – that they’re willing, hungry, to listen and learn – is characteristic of the entire Base team. That means listening to and learning from investors like Willem, and it also means listening to and learning from customers. Door-knocking is one example, but now that the Growth team is bigger than Cole, there are many.

“The two things I preach to the team,” Cole said, “are speed to first, which means how quickly can you try something, and then depth and speed of iteration, so how quickly can you take lessons from what you tried and then try something different enough that’s not just a local optimum.”

I asked for an example, and he gave me a big one.

When Base launched a year ago, part of the value prop was that while companies like Tesla made customers buy the battery at a healthy margin, which meant costs of $15-20,000, Base would only charge the install cost of around $3,000. At that point, Base had a waitlist and a good idea that customers would buy, but not the dollars in the bank and batteries on homes that would serve as proof. Within weeks of launching, they did.

Over the past year, Base has grown very fast for an early-stage, vertically integrated company. “This is an extremely operationally intensive business with a lot of room for error,” Erin at a16z explained when I asked why she invested in Base. “This is a very Elon Musk problem, an operational problem you use tech to solve. And the reason you can tell they’re doing that well is that they’re meeting and exceeding every goal that seemed crazy when they set them.”

Base’s growth numbers were good, Cole agrees, “but we wanted them to be great. And the most obvious thing to do is to spread the cost of the battery over a period of time.”

So they tried it, quickly. Speed to first. “But we originally tried it in a way that was just like, ‘Get a 10-year payment plan on our cheapest battery backup.’”

With the offering in-market, Cole and the team realized, “No, we’ve got to step back and really rethink this.” So they did, quickly. Here’s Cole:

So we got together on a Sunday for eight hours, with ten people being like: here are all of the decisions we have to make across product, pricing, positioning. We decided all of these more macro things, and then we rewrote our entire backend, rewrote our entire frontend website in three days and shipped it that Wednesday.

We got the first thing out, then we got feedback that it was kind of shaky, so then we got the correct thing out just in time for Houston to launch and for us to build a long waitlist without having to launch ads, which Justin’s happy about, because he doesn’t love spending marketing money.

Now we have a long waitlist of people in Houston, and I think it can largely be attributed to getting the first thing out, and then deeply, deeply getting the next thing out as quickly as possible.

This membership-based pricing model is even more attractive to customers: they pay just $595 upfront, and then $19/month for the 10-15 year life of their battery. By soaking up energy when it’s cheap and discharging it when it’s expensive, Base may even be able to save customers that $19 each month on their bill.

And the numbers back up Cole’s notes on the membership-based pricing model’s success. In a recent update, Base wrote that 90% of customers opt for the membership-based pricing model, and that it contributed to 30% MoM growth in signed customers ready for installation from February to March.

There are more fun experiments, too.

One day in early February, Cole was having lunch, trying to take a break from work, and complaining about the thing that a lot of Texans, and every Mavs fan like him, were complaining about in early February: the Luka Doncic trade.

JP Reilly, the growth engineer on his team, realized there might be something there. “We’re in Dallas, we’re in DFW,” he said. “We should pull off a Luka billboard that goes viral.”

The Lakers were coming to town to play the Mavs in three days, so they had to move fast. At lunch, they came up with the concept, then they went back to JP’s desk, started a Slack thread where “the best copy won,” handed off to Victoria, Base’s one-and-only designer, to whip up a design, then over to Gabe, who leads marketing, to call the out-of-home advertising company and secure a billboard at the border of Dallas and Fort Worth, right in their target area. They got the billboard up the day of the game, asked their field service team to reschedule a fix to go take a picture of it, and got it online.

Some people on the team (Justin) weren’t happy about it. Justin, remember, doesn’t love spending money on marketing, even though, at the time, Base was in the middle of doubling the size of its inbound fundraise to $200 million, and even though the whole thing only cost $6,000.

But sometimes, you gotta hire talented people and let them cook. They cooked. Online, the image got millions of views.

And then one week later, 400,000 people in DFW lost their power. “Many of them are now a little more brand aware,” Cole said, “Which is the exact motion you want: shine a light on the fact that Base = backup, and then a bunch of people in Dallas lose power and our numbers are exploding.” Plus, they hired an electrician who saw the ad.

It’s just one billboard, but I think it says a lot about Base. Cole was able to convince Justin that it was a worthwhile use of resources. They moved fast and had fun with it. And while it was fun, it did exactly what Cole said Base’s marketing should do: get Texans nodding their heads along with a local brand that they trust.

In a year, Cole has gone from door-knocking to using billboards to get customers banging down Base’s door. There are currently over 1,000 on the waitlist awaiting installation. An even bigger change, though, is that the direct channel, which was the only leg of the stool last year, is now one of three legs, or one of three heads in what Cole calls Base’s “three-headed go-to-market monster.”

Leg two is homebuilders. In December, Base announced a partnership with Lennar, one of the nation’s leading homebuilders, through which Base installs its batteries in new homes within Lennar communities as part of the homebuilding process. Already, Base has installed hundreds of batteries to back up Lennar homes in Austin and DFW, with thousands more expected this year.

Leg three, one we’ll talk about more later, is regulated utilities, starting in Texas. Last month, Base announced a partnership with Bandera Electric Cooperative (BEC), a member-owned Texas cooperative, to offer batteries to BEC’s customers at no upfront cost for a low monthly fee. It’s the first of what Base hopes to be many partnerships with regulated utilities in Texas and beyond. From BEC’s perspective, they get to bring storage online quickly, “enabling it to aggregate and operate the batteries to enhance grid and market operations through Apolloware, its real time, energy management platform.” Importantly, better managing the existing grid means BEC will be able to save on expensive grid upgrades and additions.

I asked Cole when he knew that Base was working from the go-to-market side, and he answered that it was when they added those two legs. “When one of the legs is more seasonal or isn’t working,” Cole said, “you always have the other two. And suddenly our whole motion becomes stronger.”

That said, he doesn’t think they’d be able to serve homebuilders and utilities as well if they hadn’t started small and direct: “Go direct-to-consumer, figure out what makes the product work for one. Make sure it's providing value to them, and then see if they talk about it. And then develop every motion around it: deployments, support, all of that stuff. All of that gets you the credibility to develop the second and third legs of the stool, the channel partnerships.”

Of course, the more legs the growth team sets running, the more batteries the rest of the team has to make and install.

Manufacturing

Dino Sasaridis had just signed up to join Base when I wrote my Deep Dive last year. I wrote, “Dino Sasaridis spent 13 years at Tesla, where he worked on the original Roadster and most recently led mechanical engineering on Tesla’s Powerwall 3. He will lead engineering on Base’s battery.” Just a couple sentences that mask the challenge of even getting someone like Dino to join the team.

Sal at Trust Ventures said that people like Dino, leaders at companies like Tesla, represent “scaled hardware’s crown jewels,” and that he spent four hours trying to close him.

The thing was, Dino didn’t want to do batteries again. He’d done batteries. Instead, after more than a decade working for someone else at Tesla, Dino wanted to do his own thing in solar.

First, he planned to disrupt Enphase by making better micro-inverters for solar panels. As he dug in on solar – climbing up on his own roof to install panels, “turn every nut and bolt and feel the pain to get to know the problem” – he realized two things. One: mico-inverters are dumb. He didn’t want to eat Enphase’s lunch, because he thought Enphase was eating the wrong lunch. Two: the process of installing solar panels is still built on the premise that solar panels cost more than gol