#248 Without Federal Funding, How are Cities Deploying Curbside Charging? | Tiya Gordon (It's Electric)

Today, we’re excited to have Tiya Gordon, founder of It’s Electric, back on the pod to discuss their progress since we last spoke in early 2024. She also gives us a big update on what’s happening in the curbside charging space across the US. 

With the federal funding support being pulled, a lot of cities are facing challenges in meeting their electrification goals. It’s Electric is thriving by helping them get curbside chargers in place with ZERO up-front costs. 

As if that wasn’t enough, they also help building owners earn extra revenue. A true win-win solution. 

Tune in for some golden nuggets on what the market is doing now and an absolute master class on how to build a high-performance team at an early-stage clean tech startup. 

Links

**Tiya Gordon | It’s Electric

**Listen to the first episode we did with Tiya - $167

**#167 Urban Charging, Electrifying Cities, Pilots & Partnerships, & More w/ Tiya Gordon (It's Electric)

**Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn

**Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn to fill your feeds with educational content 

**This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.

Chapters

• 2:03 It's Electric Introduction
• 3:39 Key Innovation in Public Charging
• 5:52 Recent Milestones and Company Progress
• 7:32 City Responses to Electrification Efforts
• 9:14 EV Adoption Continues Amid Infrastructure Challenges
• 11:16 Cities Maintaining Momentum on Electrification
• 13:15 Early Traction and Market Response to Zero-Cost Solution
• 15:24 Community Engagement and Innovative Financing Model
• 20:41 Evolving City Strategies and Scaling Public Charging
• 24:36 How Tiya is Building a Team of Superstars
• 39:25 Upcoming Goals and Roadmap for It's Electric
• 41:05 Upcoming Bottlenecks

Transcript

Tiya Gordon (00:00)
In a world in which cities can no longer rely on any federal support, they're trying to find ways to help still meet their targets for electrification in their cities. So in terms of tips for selling to cities, it's really about building the relationship with the city before they even have the procurement. In New York City, there's a regulation called the Green Rides Initiative that requires Uber, Lyft and taxi to be either all electric or to be wheelchair accessible by 2030, one or the other.

and there's 80,000 rideshare drivers in New York City and there's 50 50 public chargers right now.

Silas Mähner (00:35)
Hey everyone, quick note for you. You're currently listening to the free preview of this episode. If you'd like the full thing, the full shebang, go over to our sub stack. That's cleantechies.substack.com forward slash subscribe and become a paid subscriber. Any paid subscription gets you full access to the show on the Clean Techies sub stack. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Clean Techies. I'm Plathis Manor, founder of Earth Tech Talent and today I will be your host.

Today, we had Tia Gordon, founder of It's Electric, back on the pod to discuss what they have achieved since we last spoke with them roughly a year and a half ago on episode 167. If you're not already familiar with It's Electric, they have a curbside EV charging solution that they develop in partnership with cities to help them meet their electrification goals. They structure it in a way that there is zero upfront cost to the cities, and they also offer a revenue sharing model with the buildings that are hosting these chargers. So it's a very interesting win-win-win solution.

Now, given the work that they are doing, she had a lot of great insight on how to work with cities, as well as some of the interesting insights on what's going on at the federal funding side of things as it relates to EV charging and some of the demand that we're seeing there. So very interesting things to bring up. So it's a great episode. I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. If you have not already heard the episode we did with her on 167, I encourage you to listen to that as well. However, this episode will still make sense, even if you've not heard that. So you can go and listen afterwards. All right. Enjoy the episode, everybody.

All right, welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing today?

Tiya Gordon (02:05)
I'm doing great. How are you?

Silas Mähner (02:07)
I am fine as frog hair just enjoying a rainy morning in Wisconsin.

Tiya Gordon (02:10)
also raining here in Brooklyn. So I'm right there with you.

Silas Mähner (02:13)
Yeah,

I think there's been a lot of rain recently, but it's okay. You know, we can't have sun all the time. So, well, I appreciate you coming back on the pod. Obviously for anybody who's not familiar, Tia has been on in the past. I think she came on, what was it? March of 2024 is when we released the episode. I don't know when it was recorded exactly. But in that episode, of you and Sommel did a quick overview of what you guys are doing and what It's Electric is doing. I would encourage people to check out that episode. It's 1.67 and I will link it in the show notes, but...

Today we're going talk a little bit more about what has happened since last time and where EV markets are standing. So maybe for the people who have not heard about you yet, which is probably not too many, just give a quick introduction of who you are what you're working on.

Tiya Gordon (02:51)
Sure, so Tia Gordon, co-founder It's Electric, we are working on solving the problem of electric vehicle charging specifically for cities. So what we do is we help people who live in dense urban areas be able to make that conversion to an electric vehicle. What's important to note here is that most people who drive an EV, they charge it at home and therefore it's a pretty easy transition for them to give up gas, give up going to gas stations and just putting in a charger in their garage.

But if you don't have a garage in which you park your vehicle, it's a lot harder to charge said vehicle. And you're left with public charging solutions, which have really left, honestly, the public down. So we are inventing the next generation of public electric vehicle charging in cities from Boston to San Francisco across the United States.

Silas Mähner (03:39)
Great, great. And then just so people are kind of get a visualization, you know, what is the really kind of big innovation in your technology? Like what specifically do you do differently when it comes to public charging?

Tiya Gordon (03:50)
Exactly. most chargers, I should say in the world of charging, let's take it one, let's take it back one step in the world of charging. There's basically two main categories. There's, level three or fast charging DC fast charging, and then there's level two. So we are a level two solution, but what we do different or better is that we don't require utility connection to power our chargers. So in a city like New York, we have around 50, five zero public curbside chargers. Those are all utility based connections.

Connet paid for those and it costs around $13 million to install. And that's because they're all making these what's known as interutility connections where they're basically going out into the street, they're trenching seven feet down, they're connecting to high voltage, they're down converting that power. And that altogether is a lot of work and a lot of time in terms of permitting and expense. What we do instead is we look at using existing power from buildings.

So there's already the right power needed for level two chargers in every building in every city. And most buildings have what's known as spare capacity. So we harness that spare capacity. We run a small conduit below the sidewalk. We put a charger up. It's a public charger, and it's powered by the building that's right next to it. The power is already down stepped. We avoid all of that down conversion. And therefore, we can install in less than a 200th of the cost.

of others that are trying to do main utility connections for curbside here in the US. And one thing that's a little bit different about us is that we're the only detachable cable solution in the United States. So we have our UL certification on our units. This is really important because cables are the first component that break on public chargers. And so what we're putting in is just these small bollards that sit on curb. There's no gangly cables that lay off of them. And it really creates a really seamless opportunity for drivers to park and charge where they're already leaving their cars overnight, every night when they go to bed.

Silas Mähner (05:40)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I appreciate you kind of giving the quick run down there. Again, if you want to learn more, encourage you. You've been on a lot of other podcasts as well. Just check out what you guys are doing. But we're here to talk a little bit more about kind of what's transpired since then. So I guess give us a kind of a quick summary of what are the big accomplishments you guys have had since, what was that, almost a year and a half ago.

Tiya Gordon (06:00)
Yeah. So when we first spoke with you a year and a half ago, we were still in this position of winning cities over, really trying to convince them of the solution that we had. The reason why we found it to be beneficial for their particular municipalities flash forward a year and a half later, the first curbside chargers in three major cities across the U S with more coming. And it's really created a nice little sort of groundswell of movement where

I know that one of the things that we're going to talk about, I hope today, is sort of how things have changed in regards to the new federal administration and the way that's impacting the industry, right? So in a world in which cities can no longer rely on any federal support or any subsidies or any grants from the U.S. federal government, they're trying to find ways to help still meet their targets for electrification in their cities. And so our model at It's Electric has always been that we're free to cities.

And so it's really been time appropriate that our model is effectively taking off now when there's still a tremendous need for this infrastructure in cities across the U.S. But the funding has really been put on a very high shelf and will be kept in the courts for years until cities can reaccess that from the federal.

Silas Mähner (07:13)
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting situation because if you can give it to them for free effectively and it just gives the opportunity for people to use the chargers and they're going to be paying for it, that is kind of still a no-brainer, right? It does help them move towards their goals. What has been, I guess, speaking of this pushback from the federal government side of things or this delay, if you will, what has been the reaction from cities? Are they still really pushing for electrification broadly or have they just slowed down mainly because of the money? Is the intent still there?

Tiya Gordon (07:41)
I mean, every city is different. So I can't unfortunately say, you know, like this is a general statement across all cities, but as generalist as I can be, cities are still incredibly aggressive about their goals and they're finding new ways to meet their targets. So for example, Boston, where we deployed their incredible mayor, Mayor Michelle Wu, wants there to be a public EV charger within a five minute walk of every Bostonian. Boston has one of the highest levels of sea level rise.

for any city in the country, right? So they have real issues that they're working to help abate. And the way that we have to get there is through the reduction of greenhouse gases. And with transportation being the second largest sector for that in the US, it's a no brainer. So you can keep the whole part about Boston and sea level, but I'll pick it up from there. So cities that did receive federal funding, that funding was then basically put on a very high shelf as the best way to categorize it right now. It depends on what phase of the funding, if it was contracted versus awarded.

And so cities, for the most part, are not clear on where they stand. So you're right, Silas, in that it will just slow a lot of things down. But other cities don't want to wait, and they're trying to actively move the needle while the federal dust settles. And that's, again, where we can really come in and work closely with cities to keep everything moving at pace, even without that federal funding, because we fund our charges ourselves.

Silas Mähner (09:05)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. From what I've understood, and maybe you correct me if I'm wrong on this, I don't know if you'd have the exact data on this, there's still a lot of people buying EVs, right? That hasn't slowed down as much as people kind of claim to, but it's just the issue is getting the charging infrastructure built up. Is that correct?

Tiya Gordon (09:20)
That's correct. In 2024, worldwide, going across like Latin America, Asia, Africa, one in every four vehicles sold was electric. Here in the US, it's one in 10. So we're still moving. We're not moving as fast as rest of the world. And that's because of the fact of infrastructure and the secondary cost. Sorry, the secondary issue of cost of the EVs, right? Most of the world can access very low cost EVs coming out of China. we can't.

What's fascinating though and something I love to think about is obviously the, I mean, by the time this episode goes live, who knows what will have happened with Tesla next, but.

Silas Mähner (09:57)
Yeah, you never know. You can never predict anything. You got a few seconds of accuracy right there.

Tiya Gordon (10:01)
Exactly. So for the few seconds of accuracy that you're affording me right now, we do know that Tesla stock is dropping. We do know that people are where they can afford to selling their Tesla in favor of purchasing a different brand of EV. So what's happening is the secondhand market is being flooded by affordable Teslas. You can go right now and you can buy a secondhand Tesla for around $15,000. So people that were previously limited

in that access to an electric vehicle now finally have access. So it's really kind of interesting and an unintended consequence, I think, of Elon's behavior to see where this will lead.

Silas Mähner (10:42)
Yeah, it'll be interesting because maybe more people will end up adopting it, right? And then they'll give it a shot, right? Because it'll be interesting to see also the political, I don't want to get too far into it, but the political, the different groups of politics, like if you want to identity, put it into a pool of people, they might try out a Tesla or they might try out something because like, I like Elon now. And then for all you know, it's going to get more people to buy EVs. Because I've been trying to convince my uncles and my conservative family for ages about EVs.

And they're like, no, this doesn't work. And once they try it and they see that the maintenance costs are lower and everything, probably be sold. So we'll see. There are interesting side effects that might come. But are there any correlations with the cities that you're working with that have still kept the pressure on to move forward? Because you mentioned Boston has had the highest sea level rise. Are they just more particularly motivated because they're seeing the effects of climate change more? Is there a correlation between electrification push and the climate effects?

Tiya Gordon (11:34)
That's a really interesting question. I can't speak on behalf of cities, but I will say that the cities that are having the most aggressive targets are the ones that are seeing the impacts, right? So Los Angeles following the fires, not to mention the fact that there's other external pressures that also exist, like the LA 28 Olympics are less than three years away at this point. And there's a lot of pressure in terms of how do we make sure that

we have clean transportation for all of the people movement that's going to need to happen for that event. And I think the World Cup is happening a lot sooner as well. Here on the East Coast, I believe there's some championships as well as the World Cup that's also going to LA in 2025. So there's a variety of external pressures. the thing that you have to of remind yourself in all of this is that the United States is not trying to do something as a first. We're actually behind the rest of the world when it comes to this transition.

And it's a question of cities wanting to be on par with their international peers. When we can see the decongestion that happens, the decarbonization that's happening in cities like Paris, we also want to be on the global map in terms of what we can do. And it's embarrassing not to be able to do so. So I think cities are doing so not only for the health of their citizens, but to make sure that they remain relevant as major leading cities in world.

Silas Mähner (12:53)
I'm curious, know, when these challenges come up with lack of funding, for example, from the federal government to the cities to help electrify, oftentimes there's companies that emerge that have a solution to still help them achieve the objective, you know, for a much better financial outcome. seems like it's electric would fit into that bucket of, hey, we're not going to charge you upfront to do this. We're going to handle the cost on the back end. If anything, like, you know, again, it's been a relatively short period of time, but have you seen any acceleration in your solution? Because, you know, in a market of many solutions, if yours is

zero upfront cost, could assume, or I would assume, that you would have a lot better success in selling to those cities.

Tiya Gordon (13:29)
I mean, I have no way of measuring, you know, what cities are weighing, but I'm incredibly proud of our team because based on the solutions that currently exist in the United States and the time that we've been alive and the fact that we are the brand of choice to be the first curb side chargers in some pretty major cities in the US, it seems like those do all align. And the fact that our model of being low cost, low impact. And also we didn't get to talk about

you know, ways that we also differentiate is that we're, we do something called community requested charging where anyone who's in a city where we're already active, where we have permission to operate in that city, they can go to itselectric.us and they can sign up and they can, as a property owner who wants to host a charger in front of their property, they can sign up or as a driver, they can say, don't own a property, but this is the block that I want to be able to park my car on overnight.

And then we take on the responsibility of reaching out to properties in that quarter mile vicinity to find a property that wants to host the charger so that that driver can charge. Because it's a win-win. ⁓ If I didn't mention it earlier, because we're using building power, we have a separate meter. So that building's electricity bill never goes up, right? What we do instead is we revenue share back to that building. So we're bringing in free infrastructure. We're bringing in revenue share.

And we're bringing in clean transportation. We're reducing emissions. We're reducing pollutants. We're reducing the emission of carbon in the atmosphere. And from someone who was sitting on their bike behind an idling truck today on my way to work, I can tell you that I long for the day when we have all clean transportation in New York City.

Silas Mähner (15:08)
Yeah, it's definitely not fun being behind those. No, that makes a lot of sense. mean, this is really, to me, this is just like the absolute best example, like what you guys are doing. There's other companies who are doing things like this where it's a complete win-win situation for everybody involved. There is no downside. You're giving extra revenue to buildings. You're making it easy. I am really curious how you've managed this community side of things because I've heard of other businesses who they develop a mechanism to get the market to pull the product out of their hands.

How did you come up with this idea to offer people the opportunity to request it? And how do you make sure that you get the word out there to keep it engaged so that people are looking for, let me sign up for this?

Tiya Gordon (15:49)
Yeah, I mean, so we at the end of the day are a business, right? And we have to make money to survive. And our business is based off of utilization model, right? We make money and we share that money with buildings when those charges are being used. If no one, if we put a charge on the ground and no one ever uses it, then, you know, we're not really successful. And so the, the community requested approach is really almost a backstop in a lot of ways to ensure that we're going to go to where we're going to see that utilization. Cause we know that there's high demand.

One of my favorite, I have a few different stories, but one of my favorite stories about this is that our very first person who charged on our first charger in San Francisco when we cut the ribbon in April, had signed up for our wait list. I'm not kidding, about two years ago. And it took us, you know, a good period of time for not, not because actually SF moved really fast, but it took us that period of time that we had to wait for SF to determine that they A, wanted to do curbside charging, B, determine their process for procurement.

C to determine their permitting process and then D to actually do the procurement. And so that all took a lot of time. And during that time, to answer the second part of your question, we tried our best to kind of just like keep a warm beat with everyone on our wait list, let them know. People get different responses from us based on, know, are you in a city that we're currently active in? Or we get signups sometimes from like, you know, know, Manitoba, Canada, where we're not active. You know what I mean? Or we get signups from, you know, various sort of, what was Tombstone, Arizona, you know, like

places where we're, you know, we, it sounds amazing, but it's not that sort of dense city that we're that we're that we're currently focused on. So we try and keep relationships up with everyone to let them know, hey, we're not going to be in your study in the next year or two, or there's a good chance it will be there by 2027. And then as you know, things kind of heat up, we keep them posted. So that's exactly what happened in SF. So when we knew that we had to bring someone in to do that first charge, we reached back out to our very first sign up in SF and said, Hey, would you be

Would you do us the honor of doing the first EV charge on this curbside charger? And he did. It was a really special moment.

Silas Mähner (17:56)
I just want to highlight this to any other founder that there's this kind of mechanism you can develop in your products as well to keep the community engaged, especially if it's a consumer-facing related product, just to make sure that you're getting buy-in from people, Rather than trying to sell them something if they already want it, it's much, much easier. And I can assume it'd be a little bit easier also on the fundraising side and the financing side and on the selling to city side to say, we've got all these people really interested in our product and it makes it little bit more compelling, especially if you're going through an RFP process.

⁓ I don't believe you guys talked about this in the last episode with you and SoMil. How do you guys finance these? Because if you're charging nothing to the cities, did you guys raise a debt facility or something to finance the chargers? I'm just kind of curious how that works.

Tiya Gordon (18:39)
We will be raising debt down the road to scale, but for our first tranche of chargers, we raised a good amount of non-dilutive through at the time, federal, state, and then private grants, which we then stockpiled to use to prove out the model. And then once we have that, we're going to go after larger debt facilities to help us scale that. you know, a lot of this was through some amazing accelerators and incubators like Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator.

That's how we're funding a lot of our chargers in LA. And then there's other groups like Acela cities, which is how we're funding our chargers and Yonkers. Uptake Alliance is how we're funding more chargers and Yonkers. So we really worked diligently while we were doing our venture raise to also raise as much non-dilutive as we could to help offset all of that capex. So we really focused our venture into our opex and then we really segmented and said this funding doesn't get touched until we can.

put charges on the ground and then we pay for it with this. And that was because as you probably have seen, it's actually really hard to raise a lot of funds for hardware-based solutions. So we really wanted to prove the model and then also learn from it. We've already learned a lot and we know that our next round of chargers, for example, we found ways to reduce the bill of material costs. We're finding ways to reduce the installation costs because you only learn by doing as much as you can kind of paper it out when you're in the real world. We learned about things such as winter moratorium permits in Boston because the ground is frozen. ⁓

And then of course, there's things that you can't predict. We were supposed to have chargers moving a lot faster in Los Angeles, but the LA fires at the start of the year. And the deficit that the city is carrying respectfully requires us to kind of let them refocus where their attention needs to be. So it's been an amazing year and a half since we last spoke, going from here's what we're doing, here's what we're raising for, to here's what we've done. Chargers are in the ground.

And here's how we're learning and changing a little bit here and there to meet the needs of cities and of drivers as we keep moving.

Silas Mähner (20:40)
⁓ Yeah. Out of curiosity, what is it like selling to cities? Like have you learned any particular tricks or tips or things that you would share with other founders? And also is there any benefit of once you've gotten the first pilot or a couple of chargers in, does it make it a lot easier to just continue scaling?

Tiya Gordon (20:55)
Every city is different. and I don't like to use the term necessarily selling to cities because, you know, again, we're, they're not, they're not outlaying any, any capital for us. But what we are doing is we're winning, we're winning competitive RFP and I totally 100 % believe that we're showing the ease at which we can install and we're learning quickly in terms of how to overcome any kind of sort of slowdowns that can happen. ⁓ and

You don't know those until you're in the actual city so that we can then show how the model can speed up and speed up and speed up the more that we put the more charges we put in the ground. So in terms of tips for selling to cities, it's really about building the relationship with the city before they even have the procurement. So we were having conversations with dozens of cities when curbside charging was perhaps just a thought. I noticed there was something that was on their roadmap and they were very transparent with us about that. said.

That's great. We just want to introduce our model, let you know how it works. And again, this is going almost, you know, this is ancient times at this point. This is like 2003 when we were pre-seed company, when we had just our first pilot in New York City with Hyundai. And it took really the capacity of a city to understand that we were really designing this solution for them and for them to understand how we could really work to be a partner in the work that they were doing, as opposed to a vendor that they're just sort of like.

buying equipment off of and then having to figure out how they're going to own and operate and run a charging network.

Silas Mähner (22:24)
Yeah, because they probably do not want to add more things to their plate of operational challenges to deal with, That's an interesting model. Yeah, so I guess that's helpful. Have you seen now, I guess I don't know if you've engaged newer cities because it sounds like you're focused on the most dense areas, but have you noticed that it seems most cities now have a plan for curb side charging or they've got an idea of how to go about this because it seems as though when you were starting, they were still figuring this out and there's probably a lot of back and forth on, how do we want to structure this?

Is it more common for people to be like, yeah, we've got that roughly in place and let's just go through the RFP process?

Tiya Gordon (22:59)
To answer that, I'll say that not all cities need curbside charging. So we don't ever try and sell, quote unquote, our idea to a city that is never going to need it. In our early days, when we were again, what people say is called kissing frogs. We were just having all these conversations and seeing what turns into something. Someone thoughtfully made an introduction to Vegas. And we were like, OK, I really doubt we'll ever need to be in Vegas, but let's have the call. And we had the call, and we were like, I don't think we're right for you.

I don't think we're ever going to do curbside charging. Because there's so much space opportunity, there's so much vertical parking, there's so much at home charging that it's really not a great, it's not a great market for us. ⁓ So in terms of cities, we don't want to electrify curbs in every city across the US. We only want to go where that is preventing the conversion of drivers from moving from gas to electric. And that's not as important. That's not just private vehicle drivers.

That's also ride share. That's also taxi and livery. And that's also fleet, right? A lot of people take fleet vehicles home at night. In New York City, there's a regulation called the Green Rides Initiative that requires Uber, Lyft, and taxi to be either all electric or to be wheelchair accessible by 2030, one or the other. And there's 80,000 rideshare drivers in New York City. And there's 50, five zero public chargers right now.

Silas Mähner (24:23)
That is a very small number. Wow. Yeah. You mentioned that before and it makes it a little bit more of a contrast when you mentioned how many vehicles there are, right? That's ⁓ interesting. Well, very cool. I think we can move on from that a little bit. Now it's time to shift to our talent section of the show, sponsored by Earth Tech Talent, the most affordable headhunting service for clean tech startups in the U.S. I am curious about talent. you mentioned a little bit about how important it is to find the right people in the first episode you did with Stonemail. So I'm just kind of curious to get your thesis on team building.

Tiya Gordon (24:53)
Yeah. So when I chat with So-Meil, we were in a very different stage of hiring. At that point, we were just hiring what we now have as our directors team. And the way that we hired them was very, it was very, it was very fun. So we didn't write a very specific job description. We wrote a much broader JD, and I covered this in the last episode, so I won't dwell on it, to really kind of attract interesting and talented and intelligent people as opposed to.

filling a very, very, very specific role. And then we met all these people and we kind of put them into these different buckets of talents. And we built the team based on really finding exceptional people that we then built roles around that helped us scale the company. So we built a policy role, we built an urban planning role, and we built a partnerships role. And that together became like the trifecta of our directors team. And then after that,

We started posting more specific JDs that are more common to what you would normally see. But as it would always happen is you kind of meet someone and you're like, like, they're not perfect for this specific role, but I really, really like them. And, know, normally you send sort of like a warm rejection that says, you know, but we'd love to keep in touch for future opportunities, but we, we really meant it. And we went back out in particular to, to someone and we said, okay, we want to write the job description that is basically suited for you.

⁓ And here's the JD that we wrote. We think you'd be obviously perfect because we kind of wrote it with you in mind and It's really a really great process for startups Because the one thing that you cannot do at a startup is wear just one hat I'm doing that's my one job and I've done that one job and it's 445 and I'm logging off of slack like like that's not gonna fly at all. So you need someone who can do their

poor job, but also have an eye to everything else that's happening in the team and be able to lean in and support other people at that same time. we still now vacillate between doing these very bespoke roles versus saying, okay, we need something that just does this one thing very, very well. And then that gives us a wider pool. We did that, for example, we hired like an urban planner recently. It was very straightforward. But then other times, you know, we'll say we could either get what we need

by making it a role that specializes in A, or we could get what we need by making it a role that specializes in B, and then wherever the gap is, the leadership team will cover. So we'll bring in the specialist wherever we find the strongest candidate. And if they have a gap in their ability, then someone from the directors will step in to fill in that absence. But it's really allowing us to meet our mandate of really only hiring superstars, because

it's really hard to function at its electric if you're not a superstar because everyone is kind of running at a hundred miles at any given time. ⁓ And so you want someone to be able to keep up with that pace of the team.

Silas Mähner (27:56)
⁓

Yeah, this is really fascinating. So a lot of people, think this is an underrated skill that you've clearly figured out is keeping your talent engaged because you're trying to find kind of sort of missionaries, right? Have you done anything particular to stay in touch with them or is it because of the constant presence since you have a consumer-facing kind of component of the business that you're constantly out there and getting pressed so that it makes more people interested in working with you guys so that, hey, maybe you reach out six months, a year later.

Maybe they've already taken another role or maybe things are going still well at their job, but they're still willing to come back and engage with you.

Tiya Gordon (28:32)
Unfortunately, the time spans haven't been that long. Okay. And the scale of the number of the individuals that we're hiring, you know, we're still we're just we're just we're a nine person team right now. So it's not like I'm keeping that level of warm going. But my background is also in operations as well as design. So I've done this at a variety of other institutions before I started it's electric. And the answer is, yeah, you're playing long game with like

those top candidates, you're courting them, you're building that relationship. And I will say, I I've never had it happen as the recipient, but I can imagine it's pretty flattering to have a company that you once applied to reach back out and say, actually, we wrote a job description just for you. And we want to tailor it to be what you excel at. And we want you to excel here at it's electric.

Silas Mähner (29:22)
Yeah, I think it's really, really, I mean, from a talent perspective, I think it's kind of a master class, honestly. I would really give you kudos for that. Not a lot of people understand this intuitively. They oftentimes view talent as a sort of commodity. And as a result, you know, they just, it just ends up bleeding through to how you treat people, right? And that's not exactly what we want to pursue, right? But what are some of the other, I big lessons that you've learned from team building? Because it seems like you've done this also in other companies.

Tiya Gordon (29:46)
I mean, it's something that you should never take for granted. You're nothing without your team. And I never take credit for anything without crediting the team here at It's Electric. And I'll use this platform to do it again. It's truly my co-founder Nathan, it's Shannon, it's Judy, it's Ethan, it's Becky, it's Karen, it's Dante, who are all working tirelessly to make our work look easy. ⁓

It's also really hard to obviously do that when you're distributed. have most of our team headquartered in Brooklyn, but then we have people distributed throughout the country because obviously we're deploying in eight different cities across the US, so everyone cannot be in Brooklyn. It's very inconvenient and there's way too many flights that are required if you have to do it that way. ⁓ it's really about, and I often, I think one of the questions that you had for me is like, what do I fail at? And I often fail at kind of helping

the whole team understand what we're running for week by week by week, because things are so busy. And I'm busy. I'm the one who's working seven days a week, 14 hours a day. But how do I kind of surface up? Here's the most important thing that we're all focused on this week. Here's that one pitch that we are heads down on. Here's the one opportunity that we're really excited about.

Here's the one problem that we have to fix. I'm kind of allergic to standups because I think that, I mean, I kind of like, I came of age when standups really started and they were cool for a minute, but then they became really rote where people stopped listening to what people were saying they were doing that week. And I feel like the purpose of them really kind of fell off. So

Silas Mähner (31:32)
do you manage that then?

Tiya Gordon (31:34)
I don't, I'm going to say that that's my one fail is that I, I really need to work on ways to make sure the team is engaged and really wanting to hear what's going on at our weekly standups. And I probably suck at it. Does it stem?

Silas Mähner (31:51)
Does it stem from, I guess I've always been curious about the mind of the founder. Like, it stem from you having usually, I mean, you're literally thinking about this all the time, right? Does it stem from the fact that you know what's going on and you know it needs to be focused on so that you just kind of sometimes assume the rest of the team is also aware?

Tiya Gordon (32:07)
100%. Also, you don't want to count your eggs before they hatch. You don't want to have a stand up and say, we have this really great opportunity, everyone. You know what I mean? Because then if it doesn't come through, and then you kind of repeat that week after. When you've been on teams that have focused on business development, not here at Slechik, but anywhere else, the wins don't outnumber the losses. When I used work in architecture,

You know what I mean? You're constantly pitching, you're constantly bidding, and you'll win a big one and it'll keep the company busy for three or four years, but you don't want to kind of highlight every single loss.

Silas Mähner (32:46)
Yeah. Now that's interesting because you got to keep the momentum, right? And you got to keep people like in the right headspace because some, you know, if you're not the founder and you're not as like, this is not your life's like work, then it's a little harder to keep, you know, bashing through walls. Yeah, that's an interesting balance. I appreciate you sharing that. How has it been with, you know, having a team that's somewhat distributed because you have a bit of a hybrid situation. How do you try to manage like keeping the culture there? It's obviously only a 10, you know, said nine person team.

maybe a little easier while it's small, what are some of the kind of tricks that you guys have had to keep people growing together and becoming more close with each other?

Tiya Gordon (33:23)
Yeah, God bless Slack, honestly. Like, what would we do without Slack? Seriously.

Silas Mähner (33:30)
It's

a it is a really great product. I mean, honestly, I most of my friends I keep up with on Slack in this day and age.

Tiya Gordon (33:36)
Yeah, I mean, it's amazing how much like a little emoji goes. You know what mean? It's amazing how much a little comment goes, you know, just like sending, you know, and, we, and we, and we keep the water cooler Slack to a minimum because otherwise you're just spending your whole day trying to find the perfect gift. And that's not helpful for anyone. Someone who's guilty of that. So, you know, you, you really want to use, you know, we use Slack for all of our interim communication. And honestly, people don't know everything that's going on. So we do encourage people to over communicate. you just.

resolve this bug, great. Please share it so that we're aware that this was even a bug. Because only half the team is on the software side, right? And the other half is on the hardware side. So it's important for everyone to kind of know what's going on.

Silas Mähner (34:21)
I think a really good point. It's very difficult. Some people find it native to be talking and more, you know, voiceless in a text format like that when you're remote. And I find that if you don't, it's just like the silence can be definite because there could be great things going on, but, you know, half the team is not aware because they're not in the same channel that's talking about that piece, right? You also don't want to inundate them with, you know, a thousand messages that they have to, you know, constantly be checking in. So I do find this a very difficult thing that to me is an underrated problem to deal with.

companies that people don't necessarily think about, they just kind of let it go. And, you know, a lot of times they get by, but it could elevate their work and the morale of the team substantially if they find a way to manage it properly.

Tiya Gordon (35:02)
Yeah, no, I agree. And it's also chemistry. know what I mean? Like people who understand workflows together. And I also love when we can get everyone together for an all hands. try and do that, you know, once a year. I wish we could do it more, but you want to make that time actually meaningful as well. ⁓ you know what I mean? It's time is, time is, time is incredibly precious to a founder. So right at the, you know, at the renting out, know, the Uber, the Uber level size.

Silas Mähner (35:25)
Exactly. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. So one other thing I'm always curious with clean tech is there's so many that the problems that you're solving are not, know, from a particular industry user. So where do find the talent comes from most of the time? Is it kind of like one or two core buckets or is it all over the place?

Tiya Gordon (35:47)
When you say talent comes from, what do you mean? Oh, that's where it's really interesting. mean, like as a non-SAS startup, like I'm not out there, you know, hunting for developers. Thankfully, you know, we are building a product that is rooted in urbanism. So that's why we have someone who's focused on government policy. We have someone who's focused on urban planning. We have a former architect and my background is in, is in public facing technology and design.

Silas Mähner (35:49)
What kind of industries are they coming from?

Tiya Gordon (36:16)
So it's kind of like my favorite thing to do that I've always done at every company I've been at is like building this unique team of just special ops where everyone has like this really distinct key ability to do one thing incredibly well and five things pretty darn good. And when you blend them together, we're a well-oiled machine. So we have open job postings where we get a lot of inbound, we get a lot of referrals.

and then I guess going back to your talent point, one thing that we do, there's inbound, there's referrals, but we put on our careers page a role called your role at blank. And it allows for people to self apply and describe a role that they would do for us here at it's electric. It's a lot better than getting 800 like random LinkedIn's because it actually gets centralized. And then we have a quick little system where everything gets hashtagged and sorted.

So that in the future, if I'm like, God, you know, I wish I knew someone that was really good at growth marketing. I can kind of go through there, find people that are already interested in us, know our product, understand our mission and are really freaking good at growth marketing. And I have a very quick conversation and I can move them into a consultant role really quickly, as opposed to me having to go out into the world, find someone and then have to, you know, kind of teach them what we do. It really just sort of steps down.

three steps of the process for me. So that's another big hack that we use. ⁓ And we've hired from that pool in the past as well.

Silas Mähner (37:48)
That's a really good one. I think that's a super underrated because you always have to be recruiting, It's something that a lot of people say. Not a lot of people do well. Very cool. then I guess I think we talked about pretty much everything, but are there any core things in town that you find like, this is really what makes somebody quite good is being able to see, you know, they've got this one characteristic about them. I would not be hired by you. Let's put it that way.

Tiya Gordon (38:08)
spellcheck.

You'd be surprised how many people do not use spellcheck these days.

Silas Mähner (38:15)
Yeah, no, that's a, I've heard a lot of people reference that and I've never quite understood it because I'm always like just going a hundred miles an hour. And sometimes I, I wonder, you know, is spell checking in age of AI, is it going to be as valued because maybe people think it's an AI, but if you've got a mistake in there, it's probably not AI. Yeah. Yeah. I also just wanted to re-highlight that there's one point that, know, not all the people you've hired necessarily come from EV charging per se, right? They come from the industry that you're selling to. no one, right? So this is a fascinating thing that happens a lot in clean tech is a lot of the

Tiya Gordon (38:39)
maybe.

Silas Mähner (38:44)
companies I work with, they'll want to find somebody coming from the specific industry. And I get it when it comes to sales, right? You need to have somebody who knows how to sell to the certain customer. But I think what's more important is just understanding the customer broadly, right? Whether it's product, whether it's policy, whatever it is, understanding that end user and in your case, know, urban development, urban planning, you know, is kind of a core focus, it seems like, even though you're selling EV charging. So just maybe, you know, for other founders listening, would just keep that in mind. That concludes our Talent Tidbit section, sponsored by Earth Tech Talent.

If you're a cleantech startup hiring US based talent, reach out today to find the best person for your team. We charge about half the price of what other search firms charge, allowing you to preserve cash while still finding the absolute best talent in the market. All right, back to the show. All right, so looking forward, what's next for It's Electric? What are you guys working on in the next six to 12 months?

Tiya Gordon (39:30)
All right. So it's June, 2025. We are working on going live in our next five cities, which will meet our mandate for the end of the year. We're working on finding ways to help cities make our curbside charging successful once we're on the ground. A lot of that is through finding ways to make sure that those spots are enforced. We have a really sort of strong mandate to be what's we're calling people's neighborhood charging solution. You know, these are the chargers that are in your neighborhood. So.

Do you prefer in this city to pay by the hour or do you prefer to pay by the kilowatt hour? And really kind of customizing charging to meet the needs of a specific community, which we're able to do really fluidly. And it, again, like is the opposite of sort of this sort of, you know, top down approach to EV charging that how it existed before where you get to the charger, it's usually broken. You're not sure how to pay when you do pay. You're not sure you're at what rate, keeping it all really transparent.

And then keeping really open, clear data with our cities. You know, we're excited about the future of electrification for the U.S. I'm excited about things like Slate and Telo, you know, bringing and bringing in really low cost, lightweight electric vehicles to the United States. And if we have that being solved on on the commerce side and we're solving the infrastructure side, I think we're going to get there and we're going to catch up to everybody else really fast.

Silas Mähner (40:58)
Yeah, I mean you guys have all the right things in place to be able to do this. I'm very excited to see what the future comes for you guys. know, one last thing I always like to ask people is what is the biggest bottleneck that you see in front of you? How are you approaching it? Because as a founder, it's like basically life is solving bottlenecks.

Tiya Gordon (41:14)
I mean, always, time and money, and the two are pretty transferable at this point in time. So, you know, the bottleneck is how to do as much as we possibly can in the time that we have, in the runway that we have, so that we can prove out all of the points that we promised our investors, that we promised our cities that we would do, and then to set the net, and then to solve the next set of problems after that. And so it's great to be on like that next level of problem solving, but there's always going to be that.

that next year.

Silas Mähner (41:44)
It's

always the next year. Yeah. Do you tend to keep in touch with your with your VCs from a perspective of the next round? what it takes to get to that point? I'm also curious what that is like because you guys are at seed stage right now, right? And you're gonna be eventually going to it So like what does that look like then?

Tiya Gordon (41:59)
Yeah, I mean, we try and always, I mean, we love our investors, honestly. And so we have obviously updates that they receive quarterly and with then some interim updates when we have exciting news. We have phone calls with key investors all the time. And then we do a lot of in-persons with them as well, where they're inviting their LPs to a lot of our events as well, because we're really trying to prove out.

the pace at which we're solving the success and to keep the excitement not only felt by us here at the company, but I want our VCs to feel that and I want their LPs to feel that. It keeps going. And when you can kind of get that excitement and make it palpable across those ranks, that's when I think that's where a lot of the momentum can happen.

Silas Mähner (42:47)
Yeah, I just keep thinking if I was in your shoes, the purpose of making sure that, like you said, momentum is being felt so that they can understand when it comes to the next round that they're ready because in a role, in a company product like yours, getting a certain mass of users, eventually once you prove out the basic, this is our unit economics for whatever, then you can just scale it very quickly, right? Because as soon as you get it figured out,

And it's like, this is basically a no-brainer. We know we're going to make money. It's just a matter of getting through the RFP processes with cities. And then, boom, you can just go to that next level. And I feel like, speaking with you now, it seems like you guys are very, very close to getting to that kind of massive 10x, 100x kind of situation. again, very excited about what you guys are doing. I think these types of solutions are what we really need to see in a time where federal funding is not guaranteed by any means. ⁓ And in a way, know, ⁓

Obviously, I like to look at the positive side, maybe a silver lining is that it forces companies to figure out ways to solve the problems while still dealing with a lack of funding, right? Because in a case like yours, now we see cities being able to save money on their charging infrastructure build out while, you know, and they can allocate that to other areas of climate perhaps, right? So it's a very interesting thing. But I guess last thing is where should people reach out if they want to learn more?

Tiya Gordon (44:05)
Yeah, so we're most active on LinkedIn. We post updates there pretty frequently. Again, if you are a property owner or an EV driver in San Francisco, in Boston, in LA, in Washington DC, in Yonkers, in Jersey City, in Alameda, California, definitely reach out. If I said Boston, I'm not sure. I hope I did. And someone on our team will get back in touch with you.

Silas Mähner (44:29)
Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on Tia. It's been a pleasure. ⁓ Thanks so much for tuning in today. If you enjoyed the episode, be sure to leave us five stars on your favorite podcast player wherever you listen and share this with anyone that you think will find it valuable. Really, this is the only way the show grows is through word of mouth. So if you do enjoy it, please spread the word as there's so many golden nuggets in here from Tia and that we'd love to be able to share with everybody else. All right. Thank you so much and we'll see you next time on Clean Techies.

Tiya Gordon (44:31)
Thank you, was great to be back.