Piq Energy — Connecting Efficiently
Tom Nudell
What problem is Piq solving, and what is your solution?
The business problem that we're solving is connecting things to the grid faster. There is an incredible amount of demand to connect new large loads, connect generation, connect grid-enhancing technology, and generally transform the power grid, which means basically upgrading all of the assets, the endpoints and everything in between on our power grid. The kind of demand that we have not seen in 100 years, probably since the beginning of the grid itself.
In order to do that safely, we need to run extensive amounts of analysis on all of those different assets. How are they going to operate? Where should they go? How big should they be? How are they going to interact with each other? So we've built a platform that can automate that analysis, help accelerate human expertise that currently goes in. Unfortunately, that sort of human expertise does not scale with the order of magnitude of complexity and demand that we have.
What do you need to get right over the next 3 months?
We need to start building relationships with utilities and start communicating the value prop to the utility customer, which is the next customer segment that we're targeting. This is a lot of marketing, communication, and relationship-building. And then we need to continue building the product at the rapid, light speed that we're building, but that involves hiring a couple more people to help, and we need to nail hiring. You need to have an absolute rock-solid team.
I think that's what it comes down to most when you're building a company. Who are you building it with? It's so important, and it's one of those things that I think some technical founders tend to overlook. I have a background in electrical engineering, I love the math, I love the problem — but in order to actually solve this problem, we need to get it into the hands of the right people, which means that we need to be talking to the right people, we need to be messaging and communicating to the right people. It also means that I need to have a team that I can trust and that can work effectively together.
What is an assumption in your market that you think everybody else has wrong?
Something I see a lot of startups focused on right now is trying to replace legacy point solution tools — calculators that are used to run the simulations. I don't think we need to do that right now. I think we can keep using those tools. We need to use them orders of magnitude more efficiently. If you replace it with another point solution, you still have a point solution, and you still need to orchestrate between teams — one who's running load flow studies, one who's running stability studies, one who's running EMT studies, protection studies. It's the coordination between all of those things that is really slowing us down.
What is something your competitors underestimate about this market?
I think they're overestimating the value that you can create by building a point solution. So, the market is very fragmented, and it's very fragmented because there's lots of little, slightly disconnected ways of creating value. And that's exactly why we said we've got to build a platform that can cover all of those different things and pull them all into one, because there's a lot of common patterns. You can create a lot of value by making those connections very fluid and seamless, whereas you can only create a limited amount of value by solving one point solution.
