YouSaid · the spoken record

Bryan Birsic

lines on the record: 35
first: 2018-08-05
most recent: 2018-08-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Sure. Yeah, so as I mentioned, I'm a repeat founder. I spent four years in venture capital investing into this space of software-enabled lending. You know, what we really think of ourselves as doing at Wonder is bringing a lot of software to an industry that we didn't see a lot of software deployed into, which is getting really compelling financing offers quickly and efficiently to as many businesses, municipalities, schools, hospitals, as we can around the country. So that's what we do. That's how we try to accelerate the clean energy industry and bend down the carbon curve. I am fairly active on Twitter at Bursik. You know, we have a lot of ways to get in touch with us on the site, so come check us out at WonderCapital.com if you're interested in either putting up solar or of course investing in one of our solar funds. And besides that, you know, folks can reach out to me really anywhere they can find me online. I'm on LinkedIn and all the typical places.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. And I'm always a fan of nerding out and going deep in an industry and developing some instincts of my own and some intuitions before getting there. So thanks for the prompt because I think it's a great question. I'm a big fan of podcasts. Green Tech Media actually has a great one called Energy Gang, a guy named Stephen Lacey, a couple of other good ones really like one called Energy Transition coming out of Rocky Mountain Institute. That's a great one. So I would look to places like Rocky Mountain Institute, NGOs that are leading some of this work. That's kind of the universe of folks that I'd probably get onto a distribution list or subscribe to the podcast. And I don't think you'd miss anything. And probably get a really good sense of the industry if you follow all those.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, knowing that, hey, I've got this big upfront cost, I'm going to build this solar system, but then I have no input costs, and I can model this in a really predictable way, at least as relates to the generation of the electricity. I don't have to worry about spikes in coal costs or violence or political unrest in places that inconveniently have a lot of hydrocarbons, which there's obviously this very inconvenient correlation between not particularly well-run governments and places with hydrocarbons, right? The well-known curse. So I think there are a couple ways to slice that up, but I do think solar benefits enormously from the fact that we get to bet on retail prices being consistent. And at least you know that portion of the market will be there for you, so to speak, if you're a technology investor or an R&D director.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And coal and natural gas than oil, although there's some correlation between the hydrocarbons from a trading perspective, although that seems to be less coupled than it used to be, I think partially because of this dynamic I'm describing, which is oil is really a transportation fuel. There's not really oil being used to create electricity, setting aside places like Hawaii and natural gas and coal are really the prices you're looking to. So something like wind or utility scale solar, right? The folks going out and building these enormous systems in the desert, they're very much impacted by those prices. You know, the other thing I'll say, and you'll obviously understand this given your background, but volatility has a cost. And one of the great things about these solar systems, and part of the reason I think they're winning some of these bids is there are not input costs once you build these systems. The sun is going to show up every morning for you, right? And you're not going to have to send it any cash for it to get out of bed. Whereas your input costs with coal and natural gas are obviously, as you say, can vary wildly and really change over time.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think, again, going back to the retail versus the wholesale dynamic, it's worth understanding that if you're a solar researcher or someone that controls R&D, all of the distributed solar, both the very large residential market and the growing commercial market, their pricing and their competitiveness is going to be based on retail electricity prices, not based on what's going on in the wholesale market. It doesn't matter what's going on with coal, natural gas, oil. You know, it's 12 cents or whatever it might be in Wisconsin. And if you make an investment from an R&D perspective that contributes towards distributed solar, the likelihood that that, you know, and again, it's the most boring graph of all time, retail electricity pricing goes up two to four percent a year. The bet you're making that in five years or 10 years, it's not going to be below 12 cents has historically been a really, really, really good bet. So I think it is worth separating something like win that only operates at the utility scale level and is enormously impacted by swings really more.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the office, right? And you opt into some program. So there's also this really interesting way in which EVs might change the dynamics of battery economics because you kind of two for one on the battery. And these batteries kind of show up, so to speak, because people are buying EVs, not because they need to be on the grid, but you can tap them into the grid. So that's the demand side. On the supply side, there are, I think, more and more signs that coal's going away. natural gas has put a little bit of pricing pressure, but frankly, even the non-climate change environmental dynamics have gotten kind of more and more challenging. And on price, they're simply not competing. And with an asset that might last 35 or 40 years, I think people are increasingly uncomfortable, including big insurance companies that have recently made announcements to this effect. But they're uncomfortable betting that there won't be some kind of carbon tax, so there won't be some kind of additional price on coal in such a way that it's not economically competitive. So, you know, the trend lines on coal.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amounts of new electricity capacity build that we haven't seen since the early days of the industry and people electrifying various industries. So I think that is a huge lever as to what the grid looks like and the demand side looks like over the next 10 to 20 years. And you mentioned Tesla earlier, but we've seen, I think, some pretty compelling signs last two to three years from other automakers that they think the industry is going electric over a 10 to 20 year time frame. We think there's some real possibility there. And it's also worth pointing out that these EVs are batteries on wheels. And when they are sitting in different places, you can use them as storage in a way that incrementally people aren't actually paying for, which is to say if you go and buy a Tesla Model 3 when they finally make the base model for 36 grand, you're not pricing into that the value of a battery in the grid's midday usage while you're parked.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Electricity consumption have been divorced, and this is obviously going to the macro level. But you have seen energy efficiency take a bit of a cut into the growth of total electricity demand. And we think that'll roughly continue. We do think the low-hanging fruit on energy efficiency has already been had, and therefore each incremental decrease, there's probably some kind of flattening of the returns to those kinds of spends. But the other huge question, and this definitely also gets to what kind of strain there's going to be on the grid at different times of day, do electric vehicles penetrate in such a way that you see the energy consumption that's currently focused on oil transition to the electricity grid. And if you look at just pure energy units, transportation is roughly the size of the entire electricity grid. So that moving in a significant way onto the grid would create a need for literally an unprecedented”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. Yeah. So, I mean, on the demand side, you're obviously right that there's some distribution through the day. People leave their homes if there's not people staying in the home, then that goes down. But then they light up 30 minutes later at their office. And so that kind of bidirectional network that I described before should be able to fairly easily handle kind of pushing power around to where people are. We all need to be cooled and kind of fed and occasionally wash our hands and all the good stuff have light wherever we are. And so they're actually across the whole grid, as I'm sure you know, from the wholesale markets. There's not a wild amount of variation besides that driven by weather and hydrocarbons deal with that as well, right? That's why we have natural gas peaking plants that have to spin up. I think on the demand side, what's interesting and somewhat unprecedented is for the first time ever, GDP growth and”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Behind the meter? Is it avoided cost? Did they think of building this portfolio with that asset in mind, doing things like not putting systems on really old buildings that are crumbling who someone might not move into, not putting systems on specialty real estate that are a lot harder to fill, i.e. a brewery than general real estate, i.e. commercial office space that is easy to fill? So I think these are the kinds of questions that investors should be interested in if they're interested in solar, because the reason I think you get excited about solar is because you believe going back to that real estate comp that there's this asset sitting behind it that has some really nice characteristics and some really good early data that in this next credit cycle, we think and project will benefit from a flight to quality not be hurt by it. At least we think that's what the fundamentals will show.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Solar City published the first public data that I'm aware of in 2014 and their first public securitization. So they took, I believe it was a 2011 portfolio and securitized it in 2014. And we took it out to the market successfully in three different issuances. And they reported on their recovery value. They call it contract reassignment because they have original contract and then they reassign it to a new homeowner. If it's broken the first time. But they reported 81 cents on the dollar recovery with these assets, which is fairly spectacular, in my opinion. If you have 10% default rates, which would be relatively high on any kind of credit worthy portfolio, and you're only seeing 2% loss rates because you're getting 80 cents on the dollar back, that's a very strong place to be, I think, in the next credit cycle. So this goes back to if you're going to dig into this space, I would suggest that you really understand what these portfolios value is and where it comes from.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And do you believe that will lead to a positive outcome in a credit cycle? I think combined with how much cushion based on adopting a relatively new asset class. Your loss rate math is default percentage multiplied by recovery value equals loss rate, right? And I would not make the argument that solar is somehow special in that we're going to have lower default rates than you'd see in other places that have assets behind them because no one wants to default on something that they've already paid off some principal on defaults are going to be not strategic defaults, but actual I don't have the cash to come up with it kind of defaults. And if that's the case, it should, you know, solar should have some huge advantage. I think where you want to focus your attention is on those recovery values. What is the most recent data we have as to when someone defaults on the original contract, whatever form that took, the financing entity has to take ownership of the system, what kind of recovery has been achieved?”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, totally. One of the unfortunate things about being a relatively new asset class is that a lot of the times, even though there's some data on the last credit cycle, the portfolios in the industry is kind of apples to oranges relative to nine years ago. So unfortunately, or one of those asset classes that is young enough that we haven't been through a couple. And like I say, talking back to that 10% per year price decrease, you go back to 2009 and some of the portfolios that they were working on then might have been built in 2006 or 2007. We're talking about literally something like two to three x more expensive solar. So the financial burden on those systems relative to what they were producing was literally two to three x more. And so it's really hard to try to back into and also the volume was literally orders of magnitude less. So there's not a lot of great data. It's a lot of do you believe this series of positions or pieces of data?”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no reason that blackouts. That's insane. That's like a rolling blackout on the internet. Like, what? You know, like, what is it? Are you kidding me? Like, you've one point that if it fails, like 20,000 people don't have power. That's crazy. That's not good. And the kind of grid that we think we're going to have in 2050 would not have those kind of characteristics because of its dynamism and multinatal dynamics. So the question we think is that the future that we start seeing in 2020 because folks are kind of thoughtful and progressive in a literal sense, not a political sense, about the new resources we have and reimagining the grid for that purpose? Or do they stick to what they've always done in a relatively state industry for 100 years? I worry it's the latter.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Field way outside of town relative to all of us as funny as it sounds, having little coal facilities on our roofs is pretty compelling, right? When you look at hydrocarbons. When you look at solar and moreover, as you look at batteries, they scale down beautifully. There's actually not a lot of, they actually kind of have diseconomies of scale almost in the sense that a couple of panels that you buy relatively cheap and throw up yourself on your roof because it's a really simple job can actually be cheaper on a per kilowatt basis than one of the big commercial systems we do. So both of those things scale down beautifully. And if the costs are relatively similar, what you want is lots and lots of places generating power, lots of places that are capable of storing lots of trading and information flow between them, something that looks a lot more like the Internet of Energy. And that is the kind of grid that would accelerate the adoption of renewables and storage. And by the way, blackouts.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there's a lot of power concentrated in not so many hands on the regulatory and on the large utility and large independent power producer front that can accelerate or decelerate solar's adoption and growth and more broadly renewables adoption and growth by keeping what we think is an inevitable transition of the grid from a very fragile top-down centralized unidirectional network to a multimodal flexible bidirectional network. So as a network theorist, if you look at those two models, it's very, very clear which is more appealing. And the only reason we've had this centralized, incredibly fragile model is because the economies of scale are burning enormous amounts of coal in the middle of a”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if that is to occur, I think there's a really fair question to be asked about why we seeded our early lead in solar to China, who has done a spectacular job predicting this growth, getting ahead of it, supporting that industry, and getting to the economies of scale that allow you to win on the cost front and that Trump's pretty worthless subsidy aside, U.S. manufacturers are very unlikely to get to at this point. We're likely to be simply consumers of this technology, not the manufacturers.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Answer is that there's a lot of confidence. And I think a lot of track record to suggest that solar will be in a decade dramatically cheaper. In fact, already you're seeing solar beat out hydrocarbons with regularity at the utility scale in places where it's quite sunny. So that day is already here. And what we see looking forward on that cost curve going back to your question about subsidy is that By 2022, which is when the current subsidy at the federal level is set, step down meaningfully, not actually expire fully, but step down meaningfully by that date, we believe that 50 states, all 50 states in the US will be cost effective without any subsidy. So we are within five years if you continue that cost curve per our analysis of solar standing on its own two feet.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are quite a few states that would be cost effective without any subsidy. But I think the broader question is, what kind of confidence can you develop that this will be the solution in the future? And I think where that confidence lies for me is in a curve that looks a lot like Moore's Law and semiconductors. It is on an algorithmic graph incredibly straight from about 1978 to today. And that's the cost of solar modules decreasing in price roughly 10% a year for 45 years. I think the answer to the question about why do we not stick with fossil fuels, partially because we know eventually they're going to go away and we would prefer not to go back to the Dark Ages when that painful transition occurs. Hopefully it's not so painful if we can scale up renewables. But I think the shorter term.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The wind starts to pick up wind blows more at night as the wind starts to die down, the solar picks up. So I do think that wind and solar can complement each other in helpful ways. You can actually do a decent bit with high voltage transmission lines. Western Europe is the best example of this, but the sun is obviously distributed quite a bit across Europe and North Africa. And if you can make kind of allow those markets to talk to each other, so to speak, you can push around when someone's earlier in the day and later in the day and kind of help a little bit with that. But fundamentally, I think that might get you maybe only to 75% renewables penetration. I'm not sure if that gets you all the way there.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's a really good question because obviously we do a lot of things when the sun's not up. And we have never really had cost-effective storage except for the best that we have right now anecdotally is pushing water up very large hills and then releasing it down onto turbines when we need the power. That's our most cost-effective storage option right now, which is interesting, but requires a very unique geography that most places don't have. So it's not very scalable. The short answer is that you really do need to figure out the storage problem if solar is going to be a complete solution or a near complete solution. The somewhat longer answer is that wind and solar in a really amazing way complement each other. There's a great kind of heat map that showed through a 24-hour cycle when wind and solar produced. And it's almost perfect in that when solar starts to go down.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An average in the US might be 10 cents per kilowatt hour. You might have some kind of demand charge, and that does not change. And so when you're thinking about the avoided cost to power of that idea of having, hey, I used to pay the utility 100 units, now I pay them only 20 units for 20 units that I might use at night when my solar isn't producing. To your point, though, if you look at the wholesale price of power, the utilities are dealing with on the wholesale level, both purchasing power from the grid, which is kind of what you're referring to, but even just the pricing of the hydrocarbon inputs into their natural gas peaking plants, into their coal plants, et cetera, that is incredibly volatile. And so when you're sending power back to the grid in the middle of the day, you're actually participating in a wildly different market, right? Than you're participating in when you've avoided power consumption, which, as I say, is retail. So that's actually a great lens through which to explain why I think investors into solar portfolios, if that's something investors are starting to do.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Retail cost of power is not a liquid market at all. In fact, it is often set on an annual basis between a public utility commission and the utility. So the avoided cost of retail power is incredibly consistent. You'll have a rate card.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure. So California has been experiencing this a little bit recently because of solar and Texas has it occasionally because of all the wind in West Texas. But effectively, there are costs associated with grounding power. You have to do something with this electricity once you generate it. And so if you have meaningfully more supply of electricity than demand, then you actually have to pay someone to do something with it. A lot of the time to literally sink it into the ground. So that is, there's a market for that. And when that market kicks in, the price of electricity at the wholesale level goes negative. Back to the conversation we were just having, it's a great way to describe probably in a more clear way the difference between avoided cost and sending power back to the grid. Because if you're talking about avoided costs, you're talking about the avoided cost of retail power. And as you know, the”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Across the portfolio, you should have some nice dynamics as it relates to in real estate. You're getting a lot more projected yield than you would get in real estate because solar is a relatively novel asset class.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's structured a lot in different ways, is the long answer. The shorter answer is that there are people structuring it in such a way, in most cases, whereby if those systems, however their finance, continue to pay, there is some cash flow stream or waterfall such that people are getting paid out on the other side. So it's generally not this kind of corporate guarantee at some holding company level. It's generally tied to what is the performance of a given portfolio of projects, whether they're huge ones on the desert or lots of small ones that are homes. Now, again, that manifests in lots of ways, but I think the reason that we get excited about, I think the comparisons to real estate, which is obviously a really big and liquid financing market compared to solar, you have this dynamic whereby almost irrespective of who's on the other side of the transaction, you have some kind of asset that if you did your work well,”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is taking as your collateral when you're doing your lending, basically the electricity generation and therefore the cash flow, like I say, if you can go sell it, that's associated with that system. And so basically we are betting on things like will they continue to pay? And then will that system continue to hold value? Because it can produce power that's cheaper than the utility power in that area. So basically that is, you know, we're not betting on our investors aren't in our portfolios who's going to take market share or who's, you know, which hardware is going to win out. This is really just about who's on the other side of this contract, who's purchasing this power from the start. And then is that a solid kind of both asset and economic situation, right? A place where power is kind of expensive, such as solar can offer a discount, let's say. And so those are the sorts of things we're analyzing. So it just has a very, very different risk profile.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Generate cash flow as long as there's a customer to consume them. And they also don't have a lot of complexity, not a lot of moving parts, not a lot of braking, and therefore they tend to last a really long time. Good solar panels being put up now have 25-year 80% production warranties, which means they're warranted to produce 80% of their headline number on day one on year 25, which is, I think, kind of amazing. So anyway, the analogy that we like to make is think of betting on the solar cities, the vivins, et cetera, of the world. Of course, Solar City is now Tesla Energy, excuse me, think of those folks as who's going to build those homes, right? It's the Ryan homes or whoever the comp is in the residential home space. Whereas what we're trying to do is figure out how to invest in that ongoing cash flow that is the rent that that house could generate, right? And the solar project equivalent of”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think folks are probably familiar with some of the solar stories, the positive ones and the negative ones in the public markets. And if they're not, there's plenty written about it. So this is a market, of course, that you can go out in the public equity markets and the public debt markets in some cases and participate as an investor. The analogy that we like to use is akin to real estate. And the reason we use real estate is both real estate.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if you're in a cutthroat commodity business, which you kind of have to assume at some point, some markets might look like that, can you support a lot of these extra expenditures? I don't know. I don't know. I worry about that pressure. So that's how I think about it. But I love what those folks do. And I think, like I said, they're really authentic and making that the focus of where they find purpose, not the thing that they make.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do something that I think we all believe is positive. So we finance solar projects. If more solar gets built, because we have great financing packages, that is a positive. And there's really no way to divorce that. Whoever's running Wonder. Warren Buffett has that great quote about build a company or invest as if monkeys are running it because eventually they will or something. Maybe that's Munger. That sounds a little ornery. That sounds more like Munger maybe. But there's a great Berkshire Hathaway founder quote anyway along those lines. And I think companies that inherently by what they do do something positive just are a little more sustainable in the sense that like I said, as long as we're financing solar, we think that's positive. There's not really any way to get around that. Whereas, you know, I do think some of those things are luxury items, so to speak, for a corporation that you can afford when you're growing or you have a defensible.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that that's really authentic and true for them. And I applaud their focus on really not the products that the engine creates, but the engine itself, right? To use that analogy. And I think there's some examples of wonderful companies doing a lot of good whose product really has very little to do with that impact. You know, I think what I worry about is what happens when that market commoditizes and your profit margins don't support a bunch of things that actually aren't core to what you do right or what happens when to choose one of my favorite companies and entrepreneurs, when Yvonne Shenard, God forbid, eventually passes like we all will, does Patagonia continue to spend on things that do they have to if they were maximizing profit margin? I'm not sure. So what I like about what we do, frankly, relative to some of those things is inherently in our business, we”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sacrifices to know exactly why you're doing it and be really excited about the impact you can have if you solve the problem you're going after. And then from a purely kind of Machiavellian standpoint, and I tell this to VC sometimes when they're worried about us being a nonprofit in disguise, that today across hiring, across marketing, having an authentic and compelling story about why what you're doing above and beyond the economics is exciting and enduring and impactful, we think is a huge advantage, you know, irrespective of how you feel about those things just from a pure, as I say, Machiavellian standpoint. And it's not why we do it, but I do think there's a good arguments to be made. It's actually a huge economic advantage as well. So, yeah, in a lot of ways, Wonder was us, as I say, taking that passion, combining it with things we knew about in the case of our CTO Solar, in the case of me, software-enabled commercial lending, and putting it together.”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Took what they believed in changes they want to see, problems they were excited about solving and combined it with a background in technology startups and how to build them and how to raise capital and how to build scalable software and attract teams and all of those good things. And so I wonder where it was really an outgrowth of us trying to take our backgrounds and combine it with our passions. And we really feel as though, A, as people that are, of course, a part of the company and have to go out and build the startup, the ability to throw yourself into it and get up on a hard day or do that extra leg of travel or get another no from a venture capitalist with a smile and go right back to work is so much easier, frankly, for us and just comparing this company to some previous companies that I've been involved in. We think it's just a lot easier when you're making these hard”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More than a few struggles along the way, as always. Yeah, so it's interesting that you started the interview around the topic of passion because wonder actually was birthed from three serial founders in the technology startup space that all were looking for something that”
2018-08-05 · We Study Billionaires · TIP202: Renewable Energy Investing w/ Bryan Birsic (Business Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT