The following interview is a conversation we had with Astrid Atkinson, CEO and co-founder of Camus Energy, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $20 Million Raised to Build the Future of Grid Management
Astrid Atkinson
Thanks, it’s great to be here.
Brett
Yeah. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Astrid Atkinson
Yeah, absolutely. So prior to co founding this company almost four years ago now, I was at Google for quite a long time. So I joined Google in about 2004 and was really fortunate to be part of the team that was building their early internal cloud computing platform. So we did a lot of work on pioneering the cloud computing model. My area of specialty is distributed systems reliability. If it means anything to folks, I was a founding member of the Google site reliability engineering team and did a lot of work on developing Google’s approach to reliability and massively distributed systems and went on to go had a bunch of software infrastructure teams as well.
Brett
How big was Google at that point when you joined in 2004?
Astrid Atkinson
It was just under 2000 people, including the contractors.
Brett
Wow, that’s crazy. And was Eric Schmidt CEO then or was he not involved yet?
Astrid Atkinson
Eric was the CEO then. Yeah, it was just after the IPO.
Brett
Wow, that must have been an amazing time to be part of the company.
Astrid Atkinson
Yeah, it was really a very special time for Google. This is about two years before I actually looked up the first public incidence of using the term the cloud. It’s about two years before it was first used publicly when were rolling out Google’s internal cloud platform. And it was really a very transformational approach to managing large scale computing, in addition to it just being a really wild time in terms of company growth and diversification and really the opportunity to be part of a lot of very groundbreaking technological work.
Brett
Yeah, I imagine. Is there a specific lesson that you took away from your time at Google that you’ve applied to your current company?
Astrid Atkinson
Absolutely. I think the biggest one is one of the privileges of being part of something as big as Google from the time that it’s relatively young is the opportunity to see how the work of individuals impacts and transforms both the organization but also the broader world over time. And to me, the biggest revelation of that journey with Google was understanding how profoundly impactful the work of a single person can be in that kind of context. It was just kind of coming to this slow realization that basically everything in the world, the entire world as we see and encounter it, is the work of a large number of individuals just working hard at one particular thing. And that was really transformational for me. Right. The idea that one person can, in the right position, really shape the institutions of the world around us makes sense.
Brett
And that is interesting because you would think at a big company like Google or the big companies like Facebook, that it’s easy to forget that there’s people behind these companies working very hard at these companies. I think I just tend to view it as hundreds of thousands of employees. You forget there’s people there.
Astrid Atkinson
Well, it was one of the reasons why I was looking to start something and branch out on my own. I’d had the privilege of working at Google when it was small enough that I felt like my work was individually very impactful. And while I continued to feel pretty good about the work that were doing, especially because I was working on search and kind of other core things, which I think was a pretty good argument about their value in the world, it wasn’t clear that my presence mattered at all anymore. And I wanted to feel like I was working every day at something that mattered to the outcome.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense and a couple of questions to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder. Is there a CEO and team that you’ve really studied the most and tried to learn from?
Astrid Atkinson
I had the opportunity to observe a lot of Google’s early inner workings from the time that it was very small. So I really think that one was very profoundly impactful to me. Of course, I’ve been part of and around many Silicon Valley success and failure stories as well. The early founding story of Apple is also one that I think about a lot, but the opportunity to see how something really huge gets put together, that really meant a lot to me.
Brett
And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had the greatest impact on you as a founder? And this can be a business book or could also be a personal book.
Astrid Atkinson
I was joking about this with a friend this morning, and from a business perspective, there really were two, I think, that were very impactful as were putting the company together. One of them was Crossing the Chasm, which is a classic for a reason, discusses the ways in which you can establish a transformational product as a small company and establish a beachhead and kind of scale outward. Another is Play Bigger, which I’m sure is familiar to you, which is the book from which ideas about category creating companies are drawn. Those were both very helpful as were thinking about what we wanted to be doing. But the thing I was joking about with my friend this morning, I was a really big fan of Lord of the Rings when I was young. Read it a bunch. And part of the reason that we started this company was really mission driven, right?
Astrid Atkinson
It was really looking to take what I am best at and what I’m great at and what the folks that I most respect are really good at and put it to work in the service of a problem that I really care about a lot, which is climate change. And I think some of those ideas about serving the greater good in the ways in which you are called probably got into my head when I was young and got stuck there.
Brett
Nice, that’s awesome. Well, let’s talk about what you’re building today and what that mission looks like. So can you walk us through the origin story behind the company and then what’s the high level pitch that you’re making to customers?
Astrid Atkinson
Yeah, so like I mentioned, a big part of the genesis of this work was really asking the question where in the climate and energy space is there a particularly high value for someone or team with expertise in the space of distributed systems and large scale software infrastructure? In parallel, I’d been asking myself a different question, which is for the things that I and the folks I know best are great at. Also, is there an opportunity to put something together where we could take that show on the road and kind of get the band back together in some sense? And those two ideas really came together in the area of grid infrastructure. So what my company builds is software for managing the electric grid, in particular, managing the transition from the sort of centrally managed, centrally planned electrical grid of today and transitioning to the two way, heavily customer involved decarbonized grid of the future.
Astrid Atkinson
So that’s what we built.
Brett
And who are the target customers that are using the platform?
Astrid Atkinson
We sell mostly to utilities and utility like entities which can include anything from independent power providers to California’s CCAs.
Brett
In terms of crossing the chasm to tie it back to the book you mentioned, where are you right now? Is this the early adopters and the visionaries or have you started to cross yet?
Astrid Atkinson
I think we’re still really mostly in the early adopters and visionaries, but we have begun working more and more with folks who really don’t identify themselves as quite in that visionary category. They’re sort of more looking to solve current and future problems in cost effective ways. So I would say we’re probably right on the edge there and that’s a segment in our market that is growing pretty rapidly.
Brett
Got it. And in terms of category, to reference the other book you mentioned for Play Bigger, I’m sure that inspired some ideas I introduced you as a grid management platform. Is that correct in terms of your category or are you thinking about something else and positioning in a different category?
Astrid Atkinson
That is how we describe what we do. That is not a category that currently exists within the utility software space. There’s a number of really specific categories, each with its own acronym in the utility space that currently sort of describes the set of system capabilities that you would need to operate a grid. So everything from the energy management system used by our large scale transmission providers to the advanced distribution management systems used by distribution utilities, outage management system, advanced metering system, metered data management system you get the idea. There’s a lot of existing categories within the current space, but there isn’t really, today an idea of a category that ties those areas of functionality together to support doing new things.
Brett
And what types of activities are you doing right now to really build that category and define that category?
Astrid Atkinson
There’s a few approaches that we’ve taken to this. One of them is engaging with folks in the utility space and really trying to understand how they define their forward looking problems. And then we’ve done stuff like put together blog posts that sort of catalog those problems and then talk about wraparound solutions to solving them. We’ve worked with our existing customers to talk about how they see what we do. Now I will say that we’ve been iterating through a few different ways to describe what we do because there isn’t really a good name for it currently and we’ve been looking for ways that do sort of help really define in our industry the set of functionality that we’re looking to provide. So if you were utility, I would tell you that what we actually do is provide a distribution system operation platform which is the set of capabilities that’s required to manage the local grid similarly to the way that our large scale transmission grids are managed today.
Astrid Atkinson
But if you’re not in the utility industry that probably means nothing to you. So that’s actually been a bit of a challenge for us, is coming up with the right generalizable nomenclature.
Brett
Yeah, I feel like that’s always the challenge.
Astrid Atkinson
Yeah.
Brett
And if you’re looking at the utility industry, I think you’re the first guest we’ve had on from this space. So could you just talk us through what’s it like selling into the utility space?
Astrid Atkinson
It’s interesting because when I first started looking at working in this space, I feel like a lot of people warned me away from it. What I heard, both from people who were familiar with the industry and from ones who were less so, like investors and so forth. I heard a lot of concern that folks in the utility space were pretty slow moving, very conservative, very resistant to change, perhaps not very much fun to work with. And those things can be true in some places and in some ways. But it’s actually been an incredibly pleasant surprise that the vast majority of people that we work with and interact with actually really amazing. Our current customers are generally early adopters but they are so creative and so dedicated to demonstrating models of dramatic change in some of the areas we need it most around decarbonizing our energy supply and decarbonizing the grid.
Astrid Atkinson
They’re willing to put their money where their mouth is in terms of adopting new technologies and really pushing the envelope. They’re really responsive to the needs of their community. And I think the thing that was a little surprising to me that is what underlies those positive traits is that in general, the utility industry is very focused on the idea of serving the broadest community. Just this idea of the utility as a public good where they’re providing infrastructure that’s kind of fundamental to everybody’s life and that obligation to do so in an even handed, generalized and universal way is like kind of something close to a sacred duty in their minds is really potentially transformational. So that’s been very pleasant.
Brett
And is there a major player that really controls the software market and utilities? Like, is there a sales force in this space or is it super fragmented?
Astrid Atkinson
There totally is. So the biggest players in the space that we currently operate within are companies like Gemens, Schneider Electric, ABB Hitachi. There’s a couple of others, but those are really the very big players. They are very entrenched, it’s many billion dollar industry and they are currently sort of very much at the top of that stack.
Brett
And how are you competing against them and what are you saying to customers to get them to take a chance on a technology startup? Is there anything specific that you’re seeing just really resonate? And what are some of those lessons that you’ve learned in that sales process?
Astrid Atkinson
Well, I think any moment when you’re looking at really transformational change in the industry that you’re working within is a really interesting moment for a startup to engage because all of those incumbents, it’s true, have a nearly unbeatable advantage in serving the grid as it exists today. But they really don’t have software that manages or serves the grid as it needs to be. Which means that they’re starting from nearly as much of a blank slate as we are. In addition, a lot of the technology approach in the utility space because it has been broadly more conservative and in general more slow moving, is I would say honestly, pretty significantly behind the times in terms of technological approach. And what I mean by that is almost all utility software is on prem today. So there’s really not a lot of maturity around like cloud scale technologies or really big data approaches or cloud scale machine learning or AI type approaches.
Astrid Atkinson
And those things are difficult for an entrenched incumbent legacy provider to adapt to. It’s not necessarily their forte to do all that kind of thing makes sense.
Brett
And in terms of that traction and adoption, are there any metrics you can share?
Astrid Atkinson
I can share that we’re currently working with seven utility scale customers, which it might not sound like a lot, but utilities tend to be slow moving and individual utility contracts are quite large. So that’s actually pretty significant in terms of utility engagement. The utility space more broadly has been slowly starting to think about what the future might look like from a technology perspective. But in the meantime, the ground is changing under them pretty quickly. So while they may have been able to more or less, kind of keep tabs on and even control the growth of things like rooftop solar and its impacts on the grid, the more we see consumer sided technologies becoming part of our everyday energy landscape, particularly electric vehicles, where it’s not like you have to apply to the utility to buy a car. The more the change that’s happening on the grid sort of outpaces their ability to manage the rate of its growth or the rate of its change.
Astrid Atkinson
And so there’s sort of the question of traction within our engagement with the utility market, but I’d say there’s also the bigger question that we sort of ask, which is what’s the traction within the utility industry of a deep and immediate realization that change is needed? And that’s really the thing that we focus on more. So it’s kind of less about us individually and more about the growth of the ecosystem.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense, especially if you’re creating a category.
Astrid Atkinson
Yeah, and it’s also something where it’s come up often a question of whether we would work with sort of this other new technology utility facing company, or clean tech company or whatever. And I pretty much always say yes, I would like to have a conversation about that because in my mind, success for us isn’t whether we beat out another fledgling software company, it’s whether we can grow the market enough for all of us to be successful together.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense, and I think that’s a valuable lesson for founders to learn too. A lot of the founders that I speak to really do view the competition as the enemy and they go out of their way to prevent them when in reality, if they were working together, it would probably better for the industry. That’s at least the case. I think if you’re creating a category, maybe it’s different if is it just a challenger position or a disruptor position?
Astrid Atkinson
Yeah, I think there’s something really to that. I talked to a lot of people before starting this company and I remember one person that I talked to basically gave me the advice. He’s like, you don’t want to build software that you’re selling to utilities. That’s a bloody ocean. It’s all tooth and blood. If you’re just fighting the other vendors for ownership of the existing space. He was like, go find a blue ocean space, find a way to do this that doesn’t involve fighting tooth and nail with incumbent vendors.
Brett
Makes sense. And climate tech funding has obviously been booming over the last couple of years, which is good. What have you done to really rise above the noise and capture that attention and confidence of investors?
Astrid Atkinson
Well, the fact that we have taken a bit of a different approach has been really helpful for us, actually. The attempt to sort of define the category in the way that we think it’s most useful to engage in it has been a starting place. When we talk with investors, there are a set of existing companies that do some pieces of what we do, whether that’s looking at managing consumer side energy resources or utility scale battery and solar or whatever, or grid data. And it’s actually been really helpful to go in and say, look, we’re really looking to build the software capabilities that will empower and enable the utility of the future, not necessarily the utility as it stands today. And so we can have a conversation about why that’s necessary and when that’s necessary, and it’s automatically and straight away a different conversation than many of the other companies in our kind of broader space will be having that’s really helped us to stand out, actually.
Brett
And have you had any potential investors push back and say, hey, category creation is cool if it works, but it’s a long journey and I’m not willing to take that risk? Have you had that at all?
Astrid Atkinson
We’ve definitely had a number. I mean, certainly we’ve had a number of conversations with investors who didn’t find the pitch appealing for whatever reason, and I think that goes with the territory. I think the only one that we’ve had where they explicitly were like, get out of here with your category creation was actually a conversation with Gartner. They were interested in talking with us about categories and where we fit and were like, actually, we think we’re in a new category. And they were like, if I had a dollar for every time a startup company told me that, they’re like, no, go away, we don’t want to hear from you about your category. So I thought that was really funny. Actually.
Brett
That’s funny. I do this show and I record probably five to ten episodes per week and I would say 80% of the founders that come on do say that they’re creating a category. But I know there’s not that many categories out there. So I do wonder that sometimes if one that’s really going to all combine together and when some of that’s going to become a reality.
Astrid Atkinson
Yeah, I think there’s a little bit of danger in sort of the hubris of deciding that your entire existing industry is wrong about what it needs and that you’d be really better served to start over. But the flip side of that in my mind is also just thinking about my experience with Google, right? Not just for Google itself, but also for building any number of infrastructure products or internal products. There often are times when the existing solutions don’t serve the needs of the market, whether that’s an internal market or an external market or some combination. And eventually those changing needs really shape the solutions that succeed. And I don’t think it’s crazy to try to redefine your problem space in a way that lets you tackle something really big and new, but I think that it makes the most sense in contexts where there really is a very big change in the environment that you’re working within.
Astrid Atkinson
Does that make sense?
Brett
Makes sense. That is super helpful. And if we zoom out into the future, there will be two parts to this question so what’s the future of the grid going to look like, let’s say five years from now? And then what’s your vision for the company? What does that platform look like five years from today?
Astrid Atkinson
Well, one thing that’s interesting to think about in the context of the grid and the rate of change is that, technically speaking, according to IEA international Energy Agency net zero by 2050. Working plans. Industrialized economies like ours are supposed to be fully decarbonized by 2030, maybe 2035 at the latest, which I’m not sure is a number that’s in anybody’s head at the moment. But several of the utilities that we work with today have set 2030 decarbonization targets, and I’m really excited to work with them to establish the model for what that could look like and try to make that go faster. The decarbonized grid of the future is one in which we can leverage the resource, the platform, represented by the existing physical connectivity of the current grid. Basically use that in ways that allow us to connect a number of disparate energy sources from renewable to hydro to nuclear to whatever’s coming down the line to flexible demand in a way that’s really smart allows us to get much more out of our existing network and allows us to really leverage the flexibility of consumer demand to flex the supply and demand balance of energy and the grid against an increasingly variable renewable supply.
Astrid Atkinson
So that future grid, it has a ton more participants, millions to billions, instead of kind of thousands of active participants today. It’s clean, it’s decarbonized, it’s a lot more efficient, and we kind of need to get there really quickly.
Brett
And one question, or one last question here for you. Are we on track or do you think that we have hope of achieving net 00:50 I’ve had a couple of founders on and I’ve asked them that question. What are your thoughts?
Astrid Atkinson
Well, I think the tech industry has proven that a few years can be a really long time when you’re going through a period of technical inflection. On the other hand, you can make very little progress against big goals in 20 or 30 years if you’re looking at things like fusion research or generalized AI. And so I think it depends a lot about the choices that we make right now. I think technically speaking, civilizationally speaking, we can do this. Of course we can. There’s a really good JFK quote that no problem of human experience is beyond human solutions. Maybe misquoting him a little bit, but it’s something like that. This is a problem we created. It’s absolutely a problem we can solve. We can do this, but we have to make our choices.
Brett
And how much of that problem comes down to the choices of consumers and how much of that comes down to the choices of businesses and corporations?
Astrid Atkinson
I do think that this is a large scale structural problem. It’s a systemic problem that is really much more about the structures of the industry, structures of regulatory and policy incentives, the structures and the nature of large scale public support for big changes. I think there is a role for government and policy in driving this kind of large scale change. I think without that there is a relatively limited amount that individual consumers can really do. So I’m not really a big fan of focusing on kind of changing individual habits like recycling or plane flights or whatever. I really think that we need structural, large scale, systemic solutions that are better and cheaper and cleaner or we’re not going to get this done.
Brett
Yeah, I was reading an article about that and that’s why I asked and it was basically saying that there’s this societal myth right now that the individual can make an impact, but the reality is that individuals really can’t. It’s really on the corporations. So I was curious to hear your thoughts and it sounds like that may be accurate.
Astrid Atkinson
I do think that individuals can make an impact. I believe that really deeply. But I don’t think that your impact is limited to recycling more efficiently. I think that the most profound impact that any person can make is by taking what they’re great at and trying to put that to work. And that might be as simple as like advocating locally for policies that improve access to transit and therefore lower transport emissions or looking at public policy in the areas where they live or the way that the company they work for is engaging with energy infrastructure. There’s a lot of things that individuals can do, but I don’t think it’s about their consumption habits.
Brett
And why do you think that the industry is focused so much on consumption? I feel like I see a new startup every day that’s trying to help people manage their carbon footprint or reduce their carbon footprint. And that seems to be like the general narrative that just is being said a lot in the media. Why do you think that is and how do you shift that to really change that?
Astrid Atkinson
I do think there’s an important role that individual choices can and will play in making the energy transition happen. And these are in places where the needed change is about changing people’s consumption habits. So if you’re asking the question of how do we get away from oil driven vehicle infrastructure, well, people do actually need to either choose to use transit, which can then be electrified, or switch to an electric vehicle. That is a consumer choice. So I think focusing on consumer behavior, consumer technologies in places where there is a consumer choice to be made or changed makes a ton of sense. That’s really appealing because it fits the tech startup and venture startup model really well. Also has a large addressable market. It has a sort of understandable business model, whereas when you look at things like systemic change, it becomes much more complex quickly.
Astrid Atkinson
And there are definitely ways to engage with that as a business and even as a startup, but they have to be really targeted.
Brett
Got it. Take a note of sense. And unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where should they go?
Astrid Atkinson
Oh, such a difficult question these days. You can always find us on LinkedIn under Camus Energy, which is Camus I’m. Also there under my name, which is Astrid Atkinson. We have a website which is Camus Energy. Those are both really great places to look. I also am on Twitter and you’re welcome to follow me there, but I would start by googling my name if you want to find it. Awesome.
Brett
Well, thanks so much for taking the time to chat and talk about what you’re building and share your vision. This is super exciting and wish you the best of luck in executing on this vision.
Astrid Atkinson
Really appreciate it and have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much.
Brett
You too.
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