#250 How This Company Installs Level 3 Chargers Without Utility Upgrades | Tyler Phillipi (OptiGrid)

Wow - 250 Episodes! Thank you all for being part of this journey so far. Stick with us as it’s only getting better.

Quotes From This Episode:

• "Operating an electric vehicle in your fleet is insanely cheap..." - Tyler Phillipi
• "Level 3 chargers without utility upgrades... Think garden hose in, fire hose out." - Silas Mähner
• "Amazon and Walmart... are doing the same exact thing from every portion of their fleet because it makes financial sense." - Tyler Phillipi

Announcement! We’re hosting a CleanTechies meetup in San Francisco!

• If you’re around on the 10th of July in San Francisco, join us for a friends of CleanTechies meetup! Register today as space is limited!

In this episode, we speak with Tyler Phillipi, CEO of OptiGrid. OptiGrid revolutionizes EV charging with innovative, easy-to-install units that cut installation time from 18 months to as little as 4 weeks. Partnering with Orange EV, OptiGrid tackles the fleet electrification bottleneck with a "garden hose in, fire hose out" approach, bypassing power constraints. Learn why giants like Amazon and Walmart electrify fleets for financial benefits, and how OptiGrid makes EV charging "dumb easy," driving a quiet revolution.

Topics

• 00:00 Operating electric vehicles in fleets is cheap (Cold Open)
• 00:28 Intro to OptiGrid
• 04:57 OptiGrid's technology 
• 07:52 Why fleets are electrifying despite challenges
• 12:52 OptiGrid's installation process
• 19:07 Advantages of working with Orange EV
• 24:03 Economic drivers for EV adoption
• 30:40 Corporate sustainability commitments and EV adoption
• 32:23 Grid challenges and the role of utilities
• 35:12 Supply chain and battery manufacturing
• 37:38 Tyler's thesis on team building
• 43:36 Getting the best out of people
• 44:45 Future of OptiGrid

Links

• Tyler Phillipi | OptiGrid
• Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn
• This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.

Transcript

Tyler Phillipi (00:00)
massive amount of savings is so big compared to the like just leasing one of these from us. That's kind of our focus as long as it's moral and as long as it's got an ecological focus and it's the right thing to do then it's all about dollars operating electric vehicle in your fleet is insanely cheap as long as you can get the vehicles at a reasonable price and as long as you can fuel them and so releasing that electric fuel is kind of.

Silas Mähner (00:28)
Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Clean Techies, the best podcast for clean tech founders to learn from others. I'm Silas Maynard, clean tech headhunter at Earth Tech Talent. And today I will be your host. If you've existed at all in the clean tech space for the past five years, you've probably heard some argument about electric vehicles and how there's just not enough chargers to go around. Well, today's guest is solving that. We're speaking with Tyler Philippi, the CEO of OptiGrid.

They make a three foot by three foot unit that has a battery and DC fast charger integrated into one stack, which allows anyone who has electric vehicle customers, commercial or consumer to meet charging demand. Traditionally, installing level three chargers, aka fast chargers, means you need utility upgrades, which can take in some cases years. And in some cases, you actually will just completely get ignored by the utility because they do not have capacity to get to you. Right. If you're a small player, it's just going to be very difficult.

Their product allows you to have level three chargers without any utility upgrades, all because of their integrated battery. Think garden hose in, fire hose out. If that sounds familiar, it's actually because OptiGrid is resurrecting the free wire technologies IP from the dead. After their bankruptcy, OptiGrid was formed in partnership with Orange EV to bring that technology to the market. So now armed with a lot of cash, a lot of customers and the manufacturing prowess of Orange EV, which happens to be the number one producer of class eight trucks in America.

They are ready to storm the market. guys, almost forgot one last announcement that for you. We are hosting an in-person meetup for all friends of the podcast or for friends of clean techies. This is specifically aimed at founders and investors, but if you're not a founder investor, you are still in, you know, welcome to calm because you're listening. July 10th, 5 PM at the nine zero facilities in San Francisco. We are hosting just a hangout. It's going to be a couple hours, mostly just getting together, having some pizza, having some good time and meeting other people. I've never been in San Francisco before. We've got a lot of listeners there.

So I really look forward to being able to see you guys. Check the link in the description to register. Today there are limited seats and again, share with your other climatic founders and investors and we will see you at nine zero on July 10th, 5pm. All right, back to the show.

All right, Tyler, welcome to the podcast. How you doing today? I am finest frog hair. Just enjoying a little bit of rain today in Wisconsin. It's been a pretty rainy June, honestly, for us a little bit unusual.

Tyler Phillipi (02:40)
I'm good, I'm good, how are you?

Yeah, it's pretty hot here in Kansas City. It's sunny and hot.

Silas Mähner (02:52)
It just cooled down for us the past couple of days. So yesterday we finally turned the AC off and opened the windows. Very good, man. for people who don't know, you give us a quick intro to kind of who you are and a little bit about what you're doing today and then we'll get into the technology.

Tyler Phillipi (03:04)
Yeah. So I'm Tyler Philippi. You know, I've been in the technology space for quite a while. Started off in, I didn't really call it machine learning at the time, computational recommendation engines. then IOT did a little wearable startup from around Google glass, but I was always kind of the bridge between very smart people doing very difficult things and then the average person and helping them connect. And so once I got into automotive, it kind of took off and then

Automotive turned into EV and then EV turned into energy. then now I'm kind of at that nexus of where the automotive and energy space meet. And the biggest choke point is their access to charging infrastructure and power. So it's kind where I ended up.

Silas Mähner (03:46)
Yeah. so what tells more about your, guess we'll get into the story of getting, getting the role at OptiGrid, but tell us more about the, just like the role of CEO at OptiGrid and, and how you ended up stepping into that.

Tyler Phillipi (03:59)
Yeah. So it really was a core group of engineers that were saved from a previous company that raised a lot of money, very, very publicly to build this kind of solution. And when it imploded and they, kind of went through bankruptcy, a core group of those engineers, all the IP survived. And so what they really needed to do is kind of find a way to take all that value and that kind of positive.

technology legacy and help it live on. And so they started recruiting someone like me who could help give it a new life. And so that's kind of what I stepped into as a pretty robust engineering team and to build out the, you know, commercial and operational and all the other things that it takes to run a company other than really smart engineers. And yeah, so now we're up to, we just passed 50 people across three offices in three states, all right here in.

Silas Mähner (04:57)
That's nice. Yeah, it's a very unique situation to be able to take over something that had a little bit of the figuring out done and now you're just getting new money behind it to make it happen. So let's dive into the technology then. So in very simple terms for people who are not familiar, what is the OptiGrid kind of technology stack here?

Tyler Phillipi (05:15)
Yeah, so to put it very simple is that if you have enough power, you have enough energy coming from the utility, you can put a really big charger connected to it and fill vehicles, trucks, or cars very, very fast. The problem is that what comes out of your little socket or your big dryer socket is not quite enough to do DC fast charging. And so what you need is a lot of power. The problem is that that power isn't available where most of these cars are going.

And so they have this limitation. So they have basically up until now, they have two options. The first option was to go to the utilities. They give me a lot more power. Well, as you know, that takes a while and me spending three years on the energy space, a lot of utilities are hitting their limits. And then the time scale is not just, it was like 18 months, but now sometimes they do not answer the phone because they just can't even put you on the wait list. So there's no amount of time or money you can get to get power. So your only other option.

If you wanted to charge cars faster, charge lots of cars at a medium or slow pace is to do a battery energy storage system of that. So put a big battery connected to the, to the grid, store up that power and then dump it into chargers and vehicles when it's needed. The problem with that is you have to design and develop kind of construct the site and get all the components that are needed to do that.

And they're individually somewhat expensive. So each site would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in permanent construction, plus all of the equipment. And that equals also a lot of time. So one is a long time and questionable amount of time and money. The other one is a lot of money. And so what, what OptiGrid is, is it took the battery, the charger, the DC fast charger, the, the, the switch, the transformer, all the pieces that were there.

and we roll them into one vertical cube, one box. And so it's a battery at a DC fast charger in a box and it's UL certified. So we can just drop it down and wire it in, in a couple of days. And you have what would have taken you 18 months to two years or half a million bucks. now you have it in one box and we're actually rolling it out to where diesel generators with chargers are being rolled out. So it's solving a real problem real fast.

Silas Mähner (07:38)
Interesting diesel generators to charge your EVs. That's an interesting situation.

Tyler Phillipi (07:43)
Anybody's

interested, you can just do a Google search and there's probably, I don't know, like 10, 12 articles about just that situation. It's kind of silly.

Silas Mähner (07:52)
Yeah, so it's I guess one thing I've always wondered is our fleet still electrifying even though they knew these were challenges or were these challenge was getting the charging the challenge they didn't anticipate after they bought electric vehicles for their fleets.

Tyler Phillipi (08:05)
They didn't

anticipate it. You think about this as a fleet manager or, that's, know, the person who's been managing this for a or a facilities person, someone who's been building and managing the facilities. Well, the fleet manager has been dealing with gas and diesel. So, you know, trying to get people out there to service them and maintain them, oil changes, breaks, transmissions, and then getting them through the fueling pumps, getting them through the fueling cycles. That was a challenge. And then they see this opportunity of.

You don't really replace breaks. There's no transmission. There's, no, no, not, not as many consumables, no oil changes. And they're seeing like a 70 % reduction in the cost to manage their fleet. So they're convinced that papers for them to make the switch, but they don't understand what they're, what kind of fleet to get based on what their current fleet is doing. So they're not even quite sure which vehicles to buy. And even if they do get through that, they've never thought about fueling an electric vehicle.

And so they're really struggling to figure that. So they're just not quite sure what they need, even when they're buying the vehicles. And then the facilities person who's managing like a facility that's paid about the same for power for the last 30 years is now seeing their power costs increase. It's still 90 % cheaper than the gas or diesel you're putting into it, but it is a significant change. And none of them have ever thought of how to go and get fueling infrastructure connected to their building.

They just, were two totally separate things or how to fight for power against their neighbor, which is kind of what's happening now.

Silas Mähner (09:37)
Interesting. Yeah, because also they're just – they also might get hit with – I forget the exact terminology, surcharges for pulling power at the wrong time of day, right?

Tyler Phillipi (09:45)
facility, a commercial facility, and sometimes industrial facilities, depending on what tariff they're on, it can be a demand charge. So what your total capacity, maximum capacity is what it sets up for your costs for the year. And sometimes you can predict that. Sometimes you can actually see when it is going to be and kind of game the system. But for the most part, it's more of arming them to release the energy that's needed for this fleet.

And that's the issue is that regardless of how much the energy costs and how it gets there and, all that is that for them to wait in line to fuel fleets that they already decided what was going to be electric because of cost savings for them to get blocked by this is just kind of silly. And if you look at what all the utilities and even, you know, independent service operators and all these folks is they're trying to move power generation to a roof, you know, rooftop solar or

to grid storage in a battery. I mean, you can see that all throughout California, Kaizo, you know, they're shifting stuff to battery storage. We're just enabling an individual site to not really worry about the energy and power where it comes from. You just give us a call, we'll take care of it. We can either just finance the unit and you can just pay for charging as a service or we'll lease you the unit and you can mark it down on your facility costs or we'll sell you the unit and we'll go.

to find, install, and get it rolling in days or weeks rather than years. And we just are looking to be a partner to help solve this for you and not overly burden you with all the kind of tough decisions.

Silas Mähner (11:20)
Yeah, what's the space constraint too because I a lot of times I've understood that charging takes up so much space if I remember from past podcasts like how does that work with you guys because I always see the pictures of it looks very looks very compact

Tyler Phillipi (11:33)
Yeah, and compact is always a relative term, know, like it is three feet by three feet, but relative to a home charger that's a little box on the wall, I mean, it might seem big, but when you're talking about a transformer that can be, you know, six feet wide or a switch gear that can be like four or five feet wide, what we're into replacing is if you go to like EVgo, Electrify America, any of those fast charging spaces, all those big boxes, metal boxes making the humming noise.

Silas Mähner (12:18)
Okay, got it.

Tyler Phillipi (12:28)
Instead of developing a site for going from 1 % of your fleet electric to 50 % of your fleet electric, we can just roll out one and then add one next week. If you need more, we can add one the week after that, or we can do it in whatever stage you want. The idea is that it's modular, that it can grow as your needs grow, rather than these big capital expenditures that kind of bloat people's books.

Silas Mähner (12:52)
Tell me more about the deployment because you mentioned it just takes a couple days. I'm envisioning just like a standard electrician who come hook this thing up. What does that look like?

Tyler Phillipi (13:02)
Yeah, that's it's standard electrician because whatever power is there just comes straight from straight straight from the panel and wired directly. And there's nothing that there's nothing to be added. You don't need any permitting to do that. And almost every situation we've run into. Yeah. It's, kind of like if anybody's had an EV charger added to their home, how they just pull from one of the breakers and they go out and they create you an email plug that you plug into, or they just pull it and wired it. That is it. So it's ours. We tell people it takes days just cause

It is higher voltage. You want to make sure that it is a good electrician, but we will go take care of all that. And all we do is we go there. We find that we check out the site. We make sure that it makes sense. We drill eight holes. put in bolts with epoxy, and then we set the unit down on it with a forklift and it bolts in. So it's a very lightweight physical install and then any electrician can wire it. But we help take care of that for any.

Silas Mähner (13:55)
Yeah, interesting. I remember, you know, I talking about this with some folks and they were wondering, I wonder what the construction management team needs to look like. And I was like, I don't think there's a construction management team. I think it's probably.

Tyler Phillipi (14:06)
of a

template that they set on the ground and they drill the holes where the holes are in it. They put epoxy in and then they shove the bolts in. It's pretty, we also have a version of it that we're getting ready to demo. That's like on a skid. Like, the unit is like 3000 pounds. So it's a big, heavy battery with all the charging stuff on top of it. And then when you put it on like a thousand pound skid, you know, a piece of metal that's a couple of feet wider on each side.

And then the Ballards, you know, the Ballards that they stick out to run into it. Then you can kind of install it without having to install it. You just set it down and wire it in. So, mean, we're trying to be as modular and lightweight and flexible. Flexible is one of the key things, know, fast deployment, flexible and affordable. Cause cause of all our financing options.

Silas Mähner (14:55)
And who are the kind of core customers you guys are growing after? can imagine you can place these anywhere, but like what's the initial focus?

Tyler Phillipi (15:02)
It's, it's less about the customer and more about the demand. So if you've got electric vehicles showing up and you don't have the ability to charge them, we're perfect fit. So if you're a commercial industrial REIT who owns lots of buildings where you've got your tenants are electrifying, whether they be residential, commercial, industrial, whatever you got, EVs will come do that. If you're, you know, a fleet owner and you're electrifying and your facilities has limitations, we can come to you.

But those are the two main constraints. Do you have electric vehicles coming and do you have power constraints? We'll bring you something to fix it.

Silas Mähner (15:39)
Hey guys, Silas here. Getting the right talent in place is absolutely critical to the success of any clean tech startup. But most search firms charge way too much for cash strapped startups to afford. And that's why I launched Earth Tech Talent to help clean tech startups find, attract and hire the absolute best talent. And the kicker is we only charge about half of what other search firms charge. And the reason we do that is we are deeply committed to seeing clean tech startups win. And we know what we're doing too. We've made over 70 placements in the last five years and some of our recent partnerships have included charge gate.

where we built out their entire leadership team. And also today who we're talking to again, OptiGrid, where we're building out a majority of their sales team and a couple other functions as well. So if you're hiring, reach out today by going to earthtechtalent.com forward slash contact. That's earth with no A, ERTH, tech talent.com forward slash contact. And we look forward to partnering with you. All right, back to the show. Now, one thing I'm curious with this solution is are there any other, I guess, kind of edge benefits or things that aside from solving your charging problem,

that you typically view customers will have like they, know, maybe their building does have big power needs and they'll be able to use it as a backup battery to get some kind of demand response programs involved or is that part of this at all?

Tyler Phillipi (16:52)
Yeah. mean, so for the last three years, I was working with a company that the whole job was to do demand side management of EV charging. And it was trying to make it easier on the grid, reduce strain on transformers, try to generate cash from, you know, ELRP and demand management, demand charges and stuff. And that is, that is a great value. The other piece that is for more of a commercial facility is removing demand charges. I mean, I think you brought it up earlier, but.

That is all secondary. So the main thing is that EVs pencil from a financial reason for all the justification to go out and get a fleet of EVs. And the massive amount of savings is so big compared to the like just leasing one of these from us. That's kind of our focus. All those other benefits of having a partner that can help you manage the, you know, do the energy management for you.

Is an added bonus, but it's not the main motivating reason. I would say that the biggest thing that anybody who's looking to do this, who's trying to pick between is it just pick someone that's not trying to overly sell that because if they're focused so much on energy management to make the cost structure work, they're probably missing the whole game.

Silas Mähner (18:08)
Yeah, that makes a lot of

Tyler Phillipi (18:10)
And the best, like other bests that are just the best, know, the do facility backup, power backup and that kind of thing. Yeah. They're good in an emergency and they're good under those situations, but on a day to day, it's, not super critical. you, do you hear my baby in the back?

Silas Mähner (18:28)
Yes I do. That's alright though.

Tyler Phillipi (18:31)
home

office and yeah, it's a little, it's towards the end of the day. So.

Silas Mähner (18:35)
My daughter's made a few appearances too. Don't worry about it ⁓

Tyler Phillipi (18:38)
Okay,

I got two under two right now. So, you know, I typically try to do these at work, but you know, it's,

Silas Mähner (18:45)
It's

been tough scheduling lately, ⁓

Tyler Phillipi (18:47)
Late day scheduling. So if anybody wants to know that's Arthur, he is eight weeks old and he is growing like a champ.

Silas Mähner (18:56)
Nice man. Yeah. mean, if, people can do the math, it seems like you've had, you've had a very busy kind of few months here with moving, moving to this. We'll talk about that in a second. Actually. I did want to ask you before we move on to kind of the story of taking this and what convinced you is I want to know what's it like, cause you guys have a partnership kind of, you're involved with OrangeDB. So I'm curious, what are some of the benefits that you have working with somebody who's been around for a while like that? I know they have a lot of manufacturing capabilities in Kansas city.

So what are some of the unfair unfair advantages that you consider the OptiGrid has?

Tyler Phillipi (19:27)
Yeah. I mean, the, the two biggest challenges to the, the previous model that free wire was running with that these battery integrated charging solutions had were. Manufacturability. Can you manufacture this affordably at scale and serviceability? Can you service this affordably? And if you can solve those two, it's, mean, there's people lining up on around the block, so by it, well, other than giving the engineers time to go in.

resolve a lot of those challenges from their three generations of product that they've launched and been able to learn from was working with Orange EV, who's been profitably selling electric fleets, class eight electric fleets to the largest customers in the world, like DHL. you know, they're already, they're testing some with Amazon. They've got, 300 plus customers, including three PLs. They have been making trucks profitably at scale for a long time.

And they've been manufacturing their own chargers. People don't know that, almost every truck that ran out there, especially for the first like eight years, it only came with an RNGV charger. And so they've really figured out this kind of supply chain and manufacturing right here in Kansas city. And so when we're comparing against other folks is other than the IP and then the hard work of engineers for the last decade, working on some of the components inside of the unit is the manufacturing prowess for someone.

doing that at scale for over a decade, whose customers and the requirements that their trucks have with their customers is insane. So their trucks uptime is like 98 % plus and their chargers uptime is like 99 % plus. So the requirements of that space of that fleet customer are so high that it makes the early customers that are buying this through Orange EV and they have a whole white label solution version of this is making us harden the equipment.

The average use case for a non-class eight trucking or a non-port or a non, you know, industrial facility, when this hits them, they're going to be blown away at the quality and the uptime and the total cost of ownership, how low it'll be.

Silas Mähner (21:34)
Interesting, yeah, so that's really fascinating. I find this interesting that I had only really heard about Orange UV recently when I heard about this opportunity.

Tyler Phillipi (21:43)
If you don't own a port, if you don't own a trucking facility, if you're not doing drayage or running hostilers or yard tractors, I mean, you don't do, but if you go to ACT, everyone's going to tell you about Orange UV. So yeah, it's, very interesting. Like, you know, I had a friend who had worked with them through black and beach. And, you know, when I was poking around with this, I was like, mentioned them. Can you give me a white paper? Can you give me stuff? And, know, he sent me over stuff that just clearly pointed to them being the best in their niche.

But I mean, that's what you find all over the place is that someone's out there winning the fight against gas and diesel. And it's not through subsidies. It's not through incentives. It's because it just straight up works. makes dollars. So it makes sense.

Silas Mähner (22:27)
Yeah, it's just so fascinating to me. Somebody I was talking with recently was pointing out a whole bunch of these other niche markets within kind of the EV vehicles for tractors and all sorts of things. And I just thought it was fascinating how some of these – like nobody talks about them, but everybody's talking about Rivian and Tesla and it's like, well, somebody found a good way to make good money in a different area, right, where there's – you don't have to deal with the ups and downs of the general consumer market. I find it quite fascinating, especially being made in the US. That's really, really cool.

Tyler Phillipi (22:56)
Yeah. Well, one thing I'll throw at you too, is that some people don't think about is the affordable gas vehicles really took off when they could hit multifamily housing, right? There's a lot of those middle to low income folks who quickly adopted ICE vehicles when they became affordable. And that's what created the massive migration of folks. the increase that came from all that industrialization really hit the ground running when people could move about very freely.

So we're about to see the same things. We're seeing like six and $8,000 EVs that are four-year-old Nissan Leafs. So these aren't Chinese EVs. These are just used American cars. And that the only thing blocking the average middle and low income American and multifamily housing is charging. There's just no charging there. There's a bunch of people going after it in different ways and stuff. But the moment we get overnight and fast charging into multifamily housing, we're going to see the same sea change of affordability. Because for a low income person,

cutting 70 % off their gas bill, their daily travel bill to and from work, that money's gonna go right back into the economy.

Silas Mähner (24:03)
Mm-hmm. No, that's a really good point. This is why we won't talk too much about politics today, but I just never I never quite understand why this seems that a lot of people are very against EVs when they're just clearly good for the economy, but

Tyler Phillipi (24:14)
I don't ever

pay too much attention to it because if you ever talk to anybody about business, you will not be able to tell what their political ilk is because they don't care. To be honest, I mean, a lot of it's virtue signaling, a lot of it's posturing and you know, maybe it's happening at the board level because of what they think their constituents or their whatever is. But as long as it's moral and as long as it's got an ecological focus and it's the right thing to do, then it's all about dollars. That's it.

So most of these companies couldn't care less about the real ecological impact or the political impact or anything. They're doing it because it saves their company money that they can put to work growing. And that's nothing but good for the economy.

Silas Mähner (24:58)
I mean, it's evident by the fact that these class eight trucks are the core area where the Orange EV is crushing it because a of these companies, I can imagine, have probably very few sustainability people in their board. Maybe there's some of them that have like sustainability focus, but most of it is just, hey, how can we save money? And that's the truth, right? And that's why we're seeing such a big adoption. So I think it's fascinating.

Tyler Phillipi (25:19)
I mean, if you, if you ever talked to people about like, why are like a light rail trains in the city, electric versus gas or diesel? they'll tell you why. Cause it's a, that's a dumb technology that's wasteful. That's polluted. it, you know, it doesn't make sense, but when it comes to their personal car, this, this love of muscle cars, I was a muscle car guy. was in, I was in automotive way before EVs were taking off and I still love driving, you know, a dirt bike or a snowmobile and stuff.

but it just doesn't make sense in almost every class from motor pool through first and last mile delivery all the way through. I mean, there's a couple of places where it depends on what the solution is, but in almost every type of fleet, it a hundred percent makes sense from a financial reason to go electric and all the inertia that's there from doing things the way that they've been doing.

is the only thing that you have to get past. And so if we can help remove some of that inertia by making it really dumb easy to do charging as a service, you just pay us a monthly fee, we'll take care of it. If it saves you more than what you were gonna spend on fueling, then it pays for itself.

Silas Mähner (26:30)
Yeah, it's like the only the only remaining, you know, let's call it fleet that needs to keep the ice vehicles is the the fleet that cares about the sounds

Tyler Phillipi (26:37)
If you just eliminate

all road noise from engines, mean, just think about how quiet it gets.

Silas Mähner (26:42)
It would be great. Cool. Well, let's talk a little bit more about then this journey. So you've been CEO and founder a number of times in your career. You know, what convinced you to move from Seattle to Kansas for this? Talk a little bit more about like how you decided this is the right thing.

Tyler Phillipi (26:55)
Well, I don't want to miss out on all my friends who live in Vancouver, Washington. And some people may not know that there is another Vancouver and it's not in BC, Canada. It's in like a suburb of a suburb outside of Portland, Oregon on the Washington state side. So I'm already in the weeds, but I loved it there. I mean, the, temperature, the climate, the, people, my friends and my family and stuff. The reason why I chose to move my entire family across the country.

Isn't just because OrangeDB are wonderful people and they've been very nice and supportive. That would probably be the number two reason. The number one reason was I could clearly see the opportunity that this specific solution was solving for. That the problem was so blatant obvious that it just needed to be executed correctly and it needed to be done with like a lot of care and attention to reliability, uptime and cost.

And so that's the opportunity is, is what made me move everything. And just for the listeners, we were here for, I think it was less than three weeks when my second, my, my son, Arthur was born my second. So we moved at a very inopportune time, but it was because it was such a good opportunity. couldn't, I couldn't pass it up.

Silas Mähner (28:12)
Yeah, I remember passing your name along to the headhunter who was running the search and I was like, there's no chance he's going to take it right now. It's not a good timing, but I'll put him there anyways. And it worked out, man. But so far, what is your favorite part about Kansas City?

Tyler Phillipi (28:26)
people

have been really great. And you know, when you're starting to go down the kids path, when you're in the West coast, you know, the costs and the, you know, the implications of it and stuff. So people wait a little bit longer. And then when you're having kids on the West coast, you're like one or maybe two kids out here. Three kids is like the starter package. I've seen five and six kids. mean, golf carts full of kids driving around the neighborhood, you know? So, I mean, that's been really great. And there's a lot of transplants here.

And like our neighborhood is a mix of somewhat older, newer, newish and brand new builds. And I haven't met a single person from the Midwest. They're all coming from all over. And it's because it's great schools. It's all the rest, like a ton of restaurants have like pickleball courts and areas for kids to play. think it's cause space is really cheap and land is cheap. So you can build a big space as indoor play facilities and stuff. But I mean, just in general, it's been a wonderful place to like really start growing my family.

Silas Mähner (29:25)
Yeah, I've had I've actually had a bunch of friends move to Kansas City recently So then really not now that I've now I'm kind of working with you guys a little bit I'm I'm very excited to make a very good reason to come come visit

Tyler Phillipi (29:34)
You

can help me keep bringing more. We got a lot of open roles right now.

Silas Mähner (29:38)
Especially if there's a free pickleball court everywhere. This is one thing that's very nice about the Midwest enough to pay for pickable

Tyler Phillipi (29:43)
26

miles from my house, there's a pickleball court in our neighborhood. And then there's one at the far end of the neighborhood too. So I mean, it's also chicken and pickle. It's literally, they sell fried chicken and they have pickleball courts. have like rooftop DJs and like all this stuff. it's a hundred percent aimed at kids until like a certain time at night. And then it's 21 and over. it's like the whole city is geared towards people with three plus kids.

Silas Mähner (30:11)
That's amazing. Yeah. I don't know you know this or not. I'm the oldest of eight kids. So I think that's a place that a lot of my friends would like to know.

Tyler Phillipi (30:17)
oldest

of eight kids so you you had enough kids under the you ended up helping parents.

Silas Mähner (30:22)
Basically, yeah. So when we had our first, wasn't too difficult to get the hang of. I was much less nervous than my wife.

Tyler Phillipi (30:28)
Yeah, you

get when you're around kids enough, you realize that it's hard to break them. You know, with our first, we did everything you could possibly imagine. Like we got every gadget and gizmo and tool and stuff. And then for the second kid, we're like, thanks.

Silas Mähner (30:40)
Exactly. You chill out a little bit on the second, right? Earlier we talked about how lot of fleets are still electrifying, of regardless of what it seems like, the media is talking about the pushback against climate, et cetera. What are the core things that you're seeing outside of more of the commercial use cases? Because I've always wondered about the big corporates like Amazon and Microsoft who seem to still be going the way of their sustainability commitments, but they're not talking about it much. Have you seen any changes really kind of through the new...

with the new administration at all, is it pretty much business as usual?

Tyler Phillipi (31:12)
I think a lot of their signaling was just to satisfy, know, public sentiment and all that kind of stuff. mean, it's just so, so Amazon right now has an RFP open to do 500 class eight electric trucks, which would be like 20 % of the total buy for 2026. And they're for sure going to fill it. I hope it's R &DB that wins it. And I'm rooting for them. If they get a slice of it or the whole thing, I mean,

The point is, that it's, it's that's happening across the board. Walmart, you know, again, I just mentioned the two biggest companies in the United States. They're fully committed and it's not for, I mean, Amazon and Walmart couldn't be more polar opposites from their ownership and political backgrounds and stuff. And they're doing the same exact thing from every portion of their fleet because it makes financial sense. Cause that's something that no one can deny is that.

operating an electric vehicle in your fleet is insanely cheap as long as you can get the vehicles at a reasonable price and as long as you can fuel them. so releasing that electric fuel is kind of the last big bottleneck that we're trying to open.

Silas Mähner (32:23)
And so we also talked about the challenge with the grid. you foresee, you some people might say, you know, this is a great solution, but it'll just plug the hole while, you know, while utilities work out the, you know, the great congestion issues. Do you foresee that ever actually happening or is it just going to continue to get worse with, you know, other energy demands like AI data centers, et cetera? ⁓

Tyler Phillipi (32:43)
I mean, if you think about what utilities have faced for the last 30 years up until, you know, five, 10 years ago, for the 30 years before that consumption has been flat because for every electron we consume with more devices, your tube TV went into a flat TV. You know, your, your, your microwave got really efficient, like everything got really efficient. And so it's been really flat. And so they haven't had to make those investments in transmission and, and distribution grids and stuff and generation.

And then over the last 10 years, especially last five years, it's been ramping and they're making a lot more money. So they want to continue the ramp. They're part of the ones pushing for full electrification of everything inside your home and outside the home commercial industrial. And they're really happy to be making more money. So they're going to keep growing generation, but what they're doing also is that they're creating programs and incentives for you to do onsite storage for you to lower your peak demand requirements for you to.

build energy efficiency. I even when we were kids, they were trying to get the energy efficient light bulbs or even like your faucet to save water. I mean, they've been trying to do that for a long time. They want to increase efficiency, but they don't want to stop people from consumption. So you'll see programs like where we see a lot of them where they're, they're incentivizing people to have a battery energy storage system or have rooftop solar. Cause when it's local and it's on site, you don't have to upgrade the transmission or distribution system. So they'll keep encouraging that.

And I also think the commercial and industrial facilities, you'll see them shift from energy is something that we buy to energy as a commodity that we manage. So they'll more and more start storing and, creating their own energy to the point where they're going to start, you're going to start seeing some of the largest corporations in the United States start joining the independent service operators groups and be sharing and transacting energy. And we're just a step in that direction. And again, this is.

version one of product one of the new company. So we see more on that path ahead of us.

Silas Mähner (34:44)
That's interesting. I'm gonna have to I've had noodle on that. I think you just said that's quite interesting. I'm gonna have to think about

Tyler Phillipi (34:48)
the

Silas Mähner (35:12)
Yeah,

that's kind of what we talked about with ChargeScape not too long ago. One other thing I am curious about is the supply chain. if you guys, if there's a huge push for electrification kind of everywhere, a lot of people have been having a hard time getting transformers. Is that something that you guys have to deal with in the supply chain of what you're building? I don't know if you can share too much about it. Or is that a pretty well-secured item for you guys? So if you can sell it, you'll be able to deliver it.

Tyler Phillipi (35:38)
Yeah. I mean, the biggest constraint that everyone faced a while back was batteries, but there are so many players now. I mean, they're reading Panasonic is building a big battery manufacturing plant here in, Kansas city. So I think that because the demand is so high and because everyone can see this coming a mile away, you know, because the residential EVs, the consumer EVs have woken people up.

But that just makes it a lot easier for everyone who's doing this commercial side to operate. mean, supply chains are getting more, more onshore and more vertical for every OEM. mean, I think it's only going to increase. think the tariffs and stuff caused some hiccups and issues, but I think in the end, you know, I don't think it's going to be able to hold it back. There's too many businesses building too many versions of this to, to, to kind of stop.

Silas Mähner (36:30)
Hey guys, welcome to the talent tidbits part of the show sponsored by Earth Tech Talent. You're about to hear Tyler share his thesis around hiring and team building as well as how he motivates people to do their best work. And as you know, by now, the way I pay the bills is by running Earth Tech Talent, a headhunting consultancy that costs half the price of what other search firms charge. We specifically work with clean tech startups. And recently we've had a very heavy focus on EV charging and energy tech startups. We're currently helping OptiGrid build out a bunch of their core team.

and currently we're looking for a marketing manager, a product manager, and we'll soon be kicking off searches for sales managers and account managers as well. So if you're interested in being part of this incredible company, please reach out today. And if you are a clean tech startup who liked our support building your team, get in touch today by going to earthtechtalent.com forward slash contact. That's earth with no A, E-R-T-H, tech talent.com forward slash contact. And we look forward to partnering with you. All right, back to the show. Yeah, okay, interesting. So you guys are hiring

going to be hiring a lot obviously and I'll be helping out with that a little bit. But tell people about your thesis on team building. I actually don't think I've asked you this. Maybe I should have already, but tell it publicly.

Tyler Phillipi (37:38)
Yeah, I mean, the most important thing to me is a desire and a drive to contribute around the goal, the, the, the, the role that we're hiring you for and the goal that we're chasing together. So I have, I have a strong feeling that pretty much anybody who's motivated can learn how to do most things and that you're never going to find a way to motivate someone extrinsically. So it has to come from inside.

And that's the one thing you can't like teach. So that's the main thing I hire for. If you're aligned with our mission and vision to, you know, unlock fleet electrification, to fuel the future fleet electrification, if the role that we're hiring for is actually something you want to do, you're passionate around it. And if, you know, you're a good person and you have a strong moral compass and you like to have fun, you know, enjoy yourself a bit, then, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna get along just great.

And if in the course of your career, you want to change, that's the other thing is that I'm very much supporting of people changing their stars. You start off in a technical role and you want to get into sales and biz dev. Have at it. you're, if you're in a, you know, a marketing role and you want to get into product, we'd love for you to kind of shadow and learn and stuff. If you want to move up or you want to stay where you are, we're happy to support you. Cause I think that how people want to evolve in their careers, one of the fringe benefits that we can give you.

in this kind of organization where we're growing and evolving quick in a new space. And we need people to be flexible and interested in growing rather than rigid and just cashing a check.

Silas Mähner (39:10)
Yeah, I think this is a move that I really hope people take more of of treating genuinely treating each person as their individual kind of they can they can manage their career how they want to because everybody expects certain things out of Talent, but it should be up to the individual because nowadays the the standard norms of what it what it meant to be You know a company person for you know 20 30 years that's already changed And there's a lot of there's a lot of hangover that has come with that that needs to go away and allow people to say hey listen I'm okay with this level, and that's what I want to do. I want to

I want to have my family and live a good life. I don't want to always pursue to the next level per se, right? And I appreciate the way you approach that.

Tyler Phillipi (39:48)
Let me ask you a question, Silas. How did you learn how to do what you do? Did you teach yourself for the most part?

Silas Mähner (39:56)
With recruitment, got somebody took a bet on me, right? They thought I was just a country bumpkin and they said, hey, this guy probably can sell. Let's give a shot to him in New York. And they moved me out to New York to start working in recruitment.

Tyler Phillipi (40:07)
Well, there you go. So it, went from not being able to do it to doing it very well. And now you're asking one of your, your partners and customers come on your podcast and you're doing a great job. So, I mean, if, if there's no other indication that, you know, we're right, is it that, and you start throwing a bunch of agents and, and learning tools like YouTube and lots of tutorials and people being self-motivated. I mean, I think the ability for people to learn something from, go from zero to a competent.

is so fast now and it can be self-driven at nights and weekends. And for it to go from competent to successful and profitable in a bunch of different things, Rolls-Royce here. So if you believe that too, come join us and then you tell me what you want to do.

Silas Mähner (40:51)
Yeah, it's also just very fulfilling to really treat the human with the respect and you're putting the human above the business, right? Which is the whole idea of most of the people who trying to work in-

Tyler Phillipi (41:00)
make money. Again, my altruism and my faith in humanity and my wanting people to grow. As long as the ROI of what you're doing today makes sense, then you can spend time doing other things. Like, well, I don't want to speak specifically about this current company, but in the last company, you know, there was an interest of someone going and getting involved in product. And I was like, come like they were a junior engineer. They wanted to learn more. I had them sit in on calls and meetings. I had them participate in different stuff and they found out it wasn't for them. But you know,

That is a very easy thing to do is if someone wants to do extra work outside of their expertise to learn about something or they want some of your time, I've literally never not taken a meeting with someone who reached out to me on LinkedIn because they wanted to learn more about like some specific thing that I'm focused on or, some skill that I have that they're trying to learn. Like almost everybody I've ever reached out to at any level, even like people on public boards have given me time and spent the time to do it because.

It's so rare that people are actually interested in kind of growing and changing and willing to be shot.

Silas Mähner (42:05)
Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. I also, there's a lot of talk about how AI is going to replace jobs, but I've found, I've thought about this perspective that there's a lot of people who maybe were low skill, but now they can be much easily, much more easily. They can become high skilled people because it's so quick to, like you said, to learn and to get the hang of them because you have all these, all these support tools, right? That did not exist not that long ago. So.

Tyler Phillipi (42:29)
There's going be a lot of people building small businesses and you know, what they call lifestyle businesses, which basically mean that you can cover your own costs by the small businesses you build. So I think that's also going to be the revolution too, is it's going to be a lot more people. The work from home shift happened and then people realize they can get just as much done at home and they don't have to commute. And that also armed people with the ability to build a side hustle. And, know, I think, I think that's just going to keep evolving and people will be able to sit by a pool and have their little robot do.

heavy lifting for them, but everyone's going to be making more money and there's going to be more money in the economy. So rising tide lifts all boats. Order more stuff on Amazon. I hope that it is, you know, loaded from the ship to the rail cars and to the trucks using orange EV trucks and charged with Opti-Grid chargers. And then it's delivered with, ⁓ know, last mile EVs charged with Opti-Grid.

Silas Mähner (43:04)
Yeah, exactly.

Exactly, exactly. You got a plugin everywhere, One thing you may have already mentioned this sort of, I guess what is your, how do you believe that is the best, how can you get the best out of people in roles?

Tyler Phillipi (43:36)
You know, you tell them what you need the result to be and you don't tell them how to do it. And then you just provide them with enough resources to get there and not worry too much about how they did it. I think if you think of a micromanager being involved in how are you thinking about solving this? What's your approach to solving this? Let me give you feedback. How are you doing on solving this? Where's the results? And then you're being, you have someone looking over your shoulder. No one ever does their best work. They need to be able to use the eraser. They need to be able to double back.

They need to be able to bring a draft in and have it be edited when they want it to. And so it's really kind of hiring smart people and giving them autonomy and then just providing them support and resources. mean, you don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. If you're hiring really, it's not smart people, but they're highly motivated. Then it might take them 10 times as much time to get the job done, but they'll probably work 10 times as hard.

And if you're paying them one 10th as much, then you, there's an ability for people of all skillsets to get involved in the same company. It's just, you know, how, how much passion and commitment and drive.

Silas Mähner (44:45)
Yeah, okay. So I guess as we wrap up here, what did the next kind of 6-12 or 24 months look like? What's the future for you guys?

Tyler Phillipi (44:53)
Sales

fulfillment, installation success. So really it's about, you know, in the first couple of articles that we had released, we've already had inbound directly to our website, basically telling us that they've been looking for something like this. People that I've known for years that saw me on the fleet side and on the energy side were like, I didn't know you're doing this. You should have told me. I'm like, I've only been here for eight weeks. I told you about as soon as I could. And honestly, I feel like there are 10 million DC fast chargers are needed.

quickly. And so I think we're going to be able to supply a lot of them and not have them wait on. don't know. Now my toddler is running around. I think that it's going to be the need is bigger than our ability to supply it. And that's my biggest focus is getting everyone aware of what we have to offer and then fulfilling the need that's already present in front of us.

Silas Mähner (45:47)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and and you guys are currently building building out the the full manufacturing facility for this because some of it's already being done correctly correct by or not you're building on

Tyler Phillipi (45:56)
Yeah,

it's, it's, I'll have to do a virtual update of there's units being built in three states right now. So.

Silas Mähner (46:04)
Okay, interesting. It's been really fun to have you on. I'm very fascinated by how this continues to move. I'm very motivated too to see one particular area of clean tech that is just absolutely cruising. And it seems to be, you know, not slowing down anytime soon because that's going to really continue to carry the entire, the entire industry, if you ask me. So any, any last things where people should reach out to, to get in contact.

Tyler Phillipi (46:25)
If you own a fleet or you own a commercial or industrial facility and you have power constraints for your fleet, call me.

Silas Mähner (46:36)
Sounds good. We'll make sure we link everything. And again, if you guys are interested in looking at joining the team, reach out. They're going to be doing a lot of hiring in the coming month. All right. Thanks, Silas. Thanks for tuning in, everyone. If you like this episode, please do share it on social media. Drop us five stars on your favorite podcast platform. And if you're feeling extra generous, give us a subscribe on YouTube. We are trying to get to a thousand subscribers so we can become monetized. We also would love any feedback. So do drop your comments on the sub stack.

or on social media or reach out to Somail and I directly on LinkedIn, especially if it's a negative feedback. Don't put that stuff publicly, man. Come on, give us a break. We always love feedback though, for real. Any guests you want to hear in the future, topics you want to hear more about, just drop them to us and we'd love to hear. And also, if you do leave a review and you leave your favorite episode, we will let you know. We read every single one of those. So thank you so much again for tuning in all this time, for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Thank you and we'll see you next time on Clean Techies.