Pila Energy — Storage + Accessibility 

Electricity has become a modern necessity, a basic human right. We're solving the problem that smart energy solutions are really inaccessible for folks today. They're hard to deploy, they're expensive. So we're not scaling them as fast as we need. We're solving the problem of scaling smart energy solutions across the entire built environment with a plug-and-play solution that doesn't have all of these reasons that you can't get it.

Let's be honest, ultimately, most households are not going to buy products because they benefit the grid. We should meaningfully improve people's lives in a really understandable way on day one, so that the proposition isn't, put some random box in your house and hope that your bills go down later. No, it's: understand your energy usage today, be protected in that next outage, and be in control of how this connects into your home. 

That getting batteries onto the grid behind-the-meter is the most expensive way to do it and therefore not worth doing. No, we need everything. We need utility scale, and we need the benefits that you get by putting behind-the-meter batteries in, namely backup power, energy management, better consumer experience. So, we want to show that it works, it scales, and people actually want this tech in their home.

The biggest challenge has been deciding what and where to focus, building conviction around those things, and sticking to it, because there's lots of flashy new opportunities that come up every week, and experience has taught me that those things can come, but again, if you try and do everything at once, you're gonna stall out.

We would be in the status quo that we're in today, which is affluent homeowners would have a wide set of options to survive power outages and to manage their electricity bills, and renters, condos, and cost-conscious households would still be left in this situation where they're cobbling things together at best. They're getting these low-cost, non-integrated camping batteries with extension cords running across their home, or worse, trying to figure out how to use gas generators in the middle of storms, and are then getting their electricity bill month after month and seeing it rise. And I don't know what the ultimate outcome of that is, but I think it's probably not good for anyone involved.