 Awesome. Well, it's great to be here. My second slush. I think my only conference that I go every year, which is great And today I'm here with Chris, which is one of our old I mean you're not old, but you're one of my oldest founders. I would say Anyways, well, I feel we could start by talking about Aurora I remember meeting you and When you were raising your seed round and you told me you were going to build the OS of the solar industry And I was like, what is the OS of the solar industry mean? So maybe you know, you can talk about what that is and yeah, what you guys have built I mean like like every industry the the solar industry has a lot of very specific challenges that needs to do and The vision was how do we build a full stack? We call operating system a suite of software solutions that allow Solar companies to accelerate the deployment of of solar Installations with the ultimate goal of putting a lot more solar on roofs and transitioning the world to a future That's in large part power powered by solar a lot of challenges are well Companies in that space face a lot of challenges back in 2014 when we started the industry was still quite nascent Well, I mean if solar industry is kind of an old industry and a new industry at the same time It's been around, you know since Einstein wrote his paper about the photoelectric effect in a way But the the new version of it being commercially Viable is quite quite recent. And so when we start in 2014 There was a still a lot of manual work going into designing these these systems People rolling trucks meaning they would drive out to to a site They would climb onto a roof and they would take take shade readings on on the roof And then they drive, you know get back off the roof some people would literally fall off I met people who landed in the bushes and then they drive back to the to the office plug in a computer and get Some ballpark estimates is very unscalable and not very accurate either and so what we said is like hey No technology can can solve this we can build a design solution that lets people design accurate systems From there from their office thereby taking out a lot of a lot of cost actually brought a Awesome quick picture of it or animation of it. You can see the software in action sort of a 3d model Of a building the sort of colorful thing you see that that's light our data So we include a lot of data sets imagery Aerial imagery light our data weather data utility rates and so forth all at the click of a button So within seconds you can really generate a a 3d model. That's that's accurate We'd run a full shade simulation. So we we simulate the Sun going through the sky We ray traced the whole scene a calculate energy production savings and so forth all with the eventual goal of helping a Installer answer the fundamental question right if you you have so long you home. I actually don't I feel bad Okay, we got to fix that but if you actually good case in point So what you do is you'd call up your local solar company and they'd ask you for two things Which is your electric bill and your address and those are the inputs to our software And at the end of it what do you want to know is what can solar do for me? How much would I save on my bill how much will it cost and so forth and that's all the calculations We do in the software. So that's the the core of it All with it with it with the goal of really streamlining the cost of solar You know one interesting thing is that the first time I you know, you you were talking about building this I was thinking initially it's all about automation. Oh that can do their job faster But I remember thinking well, this is gonna allow them to sell more stuff, right? And I wonder if that's just played out when you guys sold your product has your customers Look at the value that you provide. Yeah, absolutely. It's both it allows you to to run a scalable business really That's kind of we can tell you but the story to how we started but that that's the fundamental thing You can take out costs so in the US in particular the if you were to go solo on your home And say the system costs you $40,000 less than half of that is the equipment. Yeah, all the rest is soft costs So it's all the cost involved of getting the panels onto your roof Which is which is crazy. It's a less than a 50% efficiency if you will yeah for your dollar that you spend And so the question is how do we increase that efficiency? How do we make solar more and more cost-effective and we can do that by streamlining? Processes by driving data-driven design and it all translates ultimately into cheaper cheaper solar for you Awesome. Well, very impressive. I'm gonna rewind the clock and go back to when you start it I remember in I met you in 2013 and In 2011 Cylindra had just shut down and we came from a bunch of people in the valley investing in solar And I think nobody even wanted to take your call. I remember telling people we had invested in this solar Design company and they were like well, that's not gonna be successful for your little firm. So You know walk us through that. I think the story of I think a lot of founders in the audience that are Probably fundraising. It's a tough environment. What was that journey of you guys, you know, I guess you Little firm is not so little anymore, huh? No, we started in when was it when we met in 2013 2013. Yeah, when you were starting out we were starting out So we let me tell you a bit of a backstory So we actually didn't want to start a software business at first. We wanted to start a solar installation business At the time we were focused on emerging markets the ideas energy is an issue there It's usually unreliable expensive and yet you have a lot of Sun. It's a very simple calculus we designed a a system a pilot project for a school in Nairobi, Kenya And it worked out well, but it was a lot of work that went into it And we realized how inefficient the the process was we had this Excel Model that just kept Frankensteining out of control and just growing and getting more and more complex Dropboxing files about and it's just not a good process and it wasn't data driven But we may do But then what happened is other people started reaching out to us asking Hey, does solar make sense for me for my home for my building and we're like, well, we don't know it depends, right? It's that's the thing about solar. It's very bespoke to every every building And so we realized quickly we needed we needed software to do that We also looked at where solar was gonna go right in the world is on this massive trend this Transition to to a future that's powered by renewables and it became clear to us that something like this needed to exist For us to put, you know, put solar in the world But as you pointed out back in which by the way, I'll just stop you there for a second I think when I love that story because you know, you went on and did a solar installation And then you realize actually the problems with it So I think founders that are solving their own problems or that run into something and then decide to fix it Yeah, ultimately, you know, they build real companies. I didn't realize at a time, but in retrospect We were basically in the shoes of our customers, right? We were You were the customer. We were the customer. We're starting their business, right? And we're like, what would we want and you know, if we you know to run this business and It came clear to us that this is something we needed And then we started talking to people outside We figured this clearly must exist We talked around and it didn't and we're like, wow, okay There's a big opportunity here and it's a big need and a big opportunity to make a difference too But like you said, this was in 2013 which is in the wake of the last clean tech boom and subsequent busts. Yes And so Solyndra was the big big name that failed quite quite publicly and invisibly and So nobody was particularly interested in writing a check in solar And we try to explain the reason that these companies went out of business is the same as a reason that we We will be successful because Silicon prices dropped, but that was a tough argument to make. Well, we made it It didn't stick But we found folks like yourselves that believed in us and and our customers it to and that's what what kept us going Yeah, well, I think you raised I can't remember exactly, but around a million dollars 925 thousand dollars not even a million. So I remember every dollar was worth a lot And you didn't quite bootstrap the company, but it felt like almost you bootstrapped it Almost seven million in ARR, which was I thought it was very impressive Yeah forms kind of strong DNA at that company. Yeah, maybe walk us through our journey. We can the software is fairly complicated It looks simple, but it's actually fairly complicated. I know you had a lot of PhDs Doing a lot of science stuff to make it simple Tell us about building that initial product all the sciences goes into it when did you guys realize? Oh, we have something that an installer which is a small business is able to use and actually generate value Yeah, I mean it took took a while I started with that vision like what would we love right love to have And then you got to test that vision against the real world right as long as in your head It's like hard to tell is this something is not are you crazy? Are you not and so we we just literally called up local installers we googled sole installer Paul Walton and picked up the phone and I Was a bit, you know nervous and skeptical about it, but turns out people Pick up the phone and they love You know if you're interested in that problem and trying to try to help them And so we went to the office and we're like here's what we're working and showed an early prototype and And they're like this is great. We love what you're doing But there's always that but but you know come back when you have x y and z Because we have a business to run we need these features otherwise when we're like shoot like But okay, so we went back to the office your office actually Yes, you hosted us in the early days, and we you know sit there Right code for a couple months, and we go back and they're like great now you have x y z But we also actually forgot we need a b and c. Oh my god. So I'm back and you know we kept doing that For about a year. Yeah, and then over time objections became less and less and then at some point We got the first check. Yeah, I remember that yeah It actually got mail to the office. It was a literal check not a figurative And I walked 159 dollars and I walked to the bank and I deposited and that was our first revenue And I still have the check in the office somewhere But I was the process it just sort of you know running into walls until you know the first wall gives and then there's another wall But then that one gives and at some point you just do it just doing it Well, I think you just said 159 dollars and You know if you're a big company a giant company I would say number one company in this industry It's really hard to build a large company when the orders are small to begin with you're selling to small businesses I think us in the venture business when we hear Company selling to small businesses. We almost run away because it's so hard. So I'd love to hear even for people that are not in the solar industry. How do you build a sales machine? For you know SMB and what did you guys have to do to go from that initial 159? Dollars to seven million in ARR You know before your series a what did that take? How do you build your team? Yeah, I mean At first we didn't because it didn't matter right I guess no point building a sales machine if you don't have the the product and so you don't you know That old adage that you don't do things that are not scalable. That's perfectly fine and actually better in the early days So it was just us me and my co-founder going to the office and you know And then getting that first check and then getting a second check and the third one and it's not about being scalable It's about finding product market fit right the elusive PMF And and then you can can look at it now. What do we do afterwards? Well? We hired our first sales rep and he actually came from the solar industry So he knew the customer he actually joined because he loved the product And was excited to to be on this side and he talked to his sort of colleagues if you will and then we you know Well revenue came and more customers referred other customers I'm actually a first customer big customer went out of business and we were bummed. Yeah, that was like a maybe ten thousand dollar account licenses maybe something like that and We're quite bummed about it until a couple months later. We saw new accounts with familiar names pop up And it was the same users that went to other companies or started new companies, right? And then you know brought Aurora with them so a lot of word-of-mouth a lot of trade shows hitting that we did road shows very Unscalable things, but you know literally got there rented a car for three weeks and drove around you know the Southern California and the Northeast and just said hey we have something for you are interested and many said no but a few said yes, and then You build scale hire more folks and yeah, and then after a while you can figure out how do you optimize you go to market? And how do you go up market and you know, how do you get more metrics driven? But is in the early days it doesn't matter as much I think it's what you say the word-of-mouth that I think we've heard in other talks when you have this word-of-mouth Yeah, it's almost like a necessary ingredient even if you're doing SMB sales or sauce Okay, great. Well, maybe we can now talk about AI and solar Which I know it seems a little bit kind of You know disconnected, but we're all talking about AI and this conference And I know you guys have been using AI all sorts of AI in your products So maybe we can talk about that first. How did you guys how you guys using it in Aurora right now? And you know we can go from there Yeah, we actually started on that train quite a while actually wasn't even AI we we with a fundamental Vision and the problem right the vision was It's very very complex to design an optimal solar installation There's many steps involved you got to figure out the energy consumption of the home You got to figure out the roof structure and you know model that you got a place panels can figure it all up You got a simulated you got a run the financials That's sort of your end-to-end process and many of these things we could automate But there's a crucial part which is how do we get an accurate roof model? And the only way it was you know a human would draw it and we could speed that up But it was inherently limited by the human and so we said okay How about we automate that with computer vision and this was sort of old-school like edge detection and whatnot old-school computer vision until of course the Deep learning revolution happened we switched paths and we've been sort of on that on that train for a while And so that's what what the our pipeline does it basically it's mostly is like magic you give it an address We can stick in your address and it would basically Generate a roof model just like this in 3d Place panels automatically and it basically basically collapses that whole design process that would take a well our software already took it down from hours to Minutes and it now takes it down to two seconds. So they've I taken out the cost of Of that whole process of designing solar and make that truly scalable because to transition the world to a you know future That's powered in large part by solar There's tens if not hundreds of millions of homes that we want to electrify right across the world And so how do we do that in a scalable sort of? Specific way to each to each each home Automation is the key and I know I think part of the value that you do is not just the design But the entire sale process for your customers. They are able to manage their customers their business more scalable Are you guys integrating AI also on you know, how they're doing quoting or? Proposals, etc. Or you know, I know we're hearing a lot about that for other industries I mean so far we've been focused on the automation part was two parts. One is the Creating that that roof model right designing the building structure and then the next step is the Optimal placement of panels. So if you have a given roof like for your roof mark What's the best system the most cost effective system because you can place the same panels in say a shaded location or configure them Suboptimally and it produced less energy for the same cost. And so that's another way in which we we use sort of AI optimization tools to To help our users, but there's many more applications that you know, we haven't yet Fully explored that we're interested in right it goes across the whole life cycle. There's a lot of well Documenting takes reading reading electric bills interpreting them. We have huge data sets of energy consumption. How do you make sense of that? How do you monitor systems live and detect faults and detect anomalies across the whole life cycle? There is opportunities to embed that and have a AI first approach great awesome Well, I also know that even though you started with residential You're now doing Industrial applications. What's different about that or what are the the requirements different? How how is that process of going after that? Yeah, I can set up customers. I have a photo of Animation of that too. We have a second product called called helioscope That focuses more on the on the design of larger scale installations. So this is in this case a commercial commercial rooftop Could be a parking lot of an office building It could be a warehouse distribution center something like that Some similarities but also fundamental differences in terms of workflows a quite obvious one is Residential systems are small. Maybe dozens of panels these systems. That's probably a you know, medium-sized system But that could be even even larger could be thousands of panels. How do you design the workflow for it? How do you? Optimize the whole thing for speed and so forth. It's slightly different slightly different buyers to different dynamics One is more of a higher volume one is low volume so different approaches for different different segments, but Each one has its own its own marriage at what point did you guys decide in the history of the company? You're so focused on selling to residential is one type of sale. I'm gonna go do these projects. It's a completely different sale Yeah, at what point did you guys decide it's time now to go on you know after this other sector? But this was actually an acquisition. So one of our former Well other companies in this space We were head-to-head with for for a while But then what happened after a while is that they specialize more in the CNI space commercial industrial solar We specialize more in residential and then we had an opportunity to to partner up a couple years ago Because we just said there's so much leverage so much shared vision To well to join forces and and that's how that that happened We also launched other products though across the life cycle. So it's not just about design design is important because it's the what I think of the the core problem of solar because every system is bespoke and needs to be bespoke But there's so many more steps along the the life cycle. You need to identify a lead You need to qualify a lead. You need to sell the system. You need to design the system You need to finance it. You need to get a permit You need to manage it to install and then you have a 20 a life cycle post install And so how do you provide a you know tailored solutions across that life cycle in one integrated fashion? That's sort of how I think about it And we have other products to one from the permitting space and one in the sales Sales space. So how do we help help our customers have conversations with homeowners about going solar? So different solutions for different it's pretty impressive how broad your portfolio is I know you start really narrow and You know, that's the right way to execute, but it's very impressive Anyways, great. Well, I have one question which is about, you know, your company obviously huge success I know it's hard to build a company and I know it's it's good for the audience to hear perhaps some of the challenges that you guys had If you had any I assume you did, you know, what was tough in building Aurora or you know things that you had had to overcome Um It's funny. I had a conversation with the team not too long ago and you know, it's uh What I told him was There's always problems. Yes, right. It's been 10 years of problems Having problems not a problem like not doing something about him. That's that's the real that's the only problem And so it's it's not easy building a company right at different challenges along the way I mean the beginning it was a lot of the nose, right? How do you persist through the sort of Barrage of nose, right? You put yourself out there, you know, you have this vision you care about this and Then you're like, I know or the VC know which is, you know, love what you're doing stay in touch. We don't know anything No, you guys with a yes Others and so how do you persist right and one try thing, but it was really true was it was, you know Hey, you gotta you gotta have that passion for what you do. Yeah, right And we just felt this was such a big need this needed to exist There was sort of this I don't know irrational belief that this this should and needs to exist and then our customers they carried us Carried us through it, right because we talked to them and like this is awesome Like we'd love we'd love this we just need you know X Y and Z and so that's that's a that's a Very powerful and and motivating That was the only challenges and then at different stages come different ones and I had to personally reinvent myself along the way I feel like I I would say I haven't had one job in the last ten years I had you know, yeah five different ones and I need every every two years I need to change the way I operate and update. I think You are you know, you're totally right I think people in this audience with you listen to folks and things that everything works But you're right. There's problems all the time and how you solve them Everything always breaks from the every break, but you are like the definition of calm Especially if it goes well actually right the better it goes the more it's actually as fast as gonna break And so well you gotta I don't know look at look at it sort of with the distance and just that's the process Right and again, then look at you know take stock and say what do we need to change? Yeah, and then change that and it's gonna take a while and that's sometimes frustrating But then you you level up and then you keep you keep going and focus on the next thing and the next thing and that's That's what it is building a company and it's not not easy, but that's not easy That's the journey and it's it's very rewarding when it when it all comes together. Awesome. Well, I have a final question I think the audience probably doesn't know this, but you know, and I like soccer very much. Mm-hmm. I remember watching Byron, which is your team on my team FC Barcelona at my house. Oh, yeah, and You know or as a big company now, so I'm wondering when are you going to sponsor? Byron or is that that's that's it would be great publicity for that European market That'd be I'll talk to a marketing team about that. That's uh, it's an expert. I don't think we're quite there yet, but okay That's your aspiration though Maybe maybe one day. Okay. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay