Thinking About Risks.
August 18, 2024 (Review of Week
EOY-19)
I thought Marc’s Friday Brownbag video last week was a great choice for a number of reasons:
- Life as a VC-backed startup is all risk management, and personally, I’m feeling it quite acutely
as I’m planning this Seed Round.
- Going after GGRF is a risk-reward situation: On the one hand, we know that it’s going to cause
to think about more than one thing at a time, and if we’re not careful, we might not do
any particular thing very well, which could risk the company. One the other hand, it may be
a once-in-the-company’s-lifetime opportunity to establish early leads nationally.
I’d love to hear what folks are thinking about in the way of:
- Probablity
- Consequence
- Vulnerability
- Exposure
as these relate to either of the topics above.
Metrics
- Unique Buildings: 5,444 ←- as of 8/1
- Annual Run Rate: $1.3M ←- no change
- Monthly net burn: $94k ←- as of July close. Still looking into this number.
- 2024 Transaction fees to date: $6,257.34
- Outstanding invoices as of today: $41k ←- WHOO!
Last Week’s Highlights
- Congrats on Release 74 and the rollout of the Beneficial Electrification Credit to all users!
- Prep for Related’s bid went on at a brisk pace last week, with Martine taking the lead and Jeremy, Jason, and me pitching in. Fingers crossed!
- Investor coffee with Blackhorn that was supposed to be half an hour went on for an hour and 15. I think that’s a good sign, and the investor gave us a LOT to think about in a way that felt pretty supportive. All the signs say it’s going to be a slog, so it’s nice to have these bits of encouragement.
- Our investors have rolled up their sleeves on helping to prep the round. It’s a huge difference to be able to just ask friendly investors questions that we would have just debated internally, and none our friendlier than our own! Megan and TC are both reviewing material, and even some of our angel investors are helping out!
Did I miss any highlights? Pls share in comments.
My Watchlist
- Generic Project: cautiously looking forward to GP v0.1 this week(?)
- Tech Recruiting: We’ll all need to pitch in as we head toward hiring. Slack channel is #ops_diverse-talent.
- Cash. Mid-year re-forecast of the budget still pending. Nearly there, tho.
- Dev pipeline: Still so much to do after GP.
- Partnerships: Many, many conversations: Accelerator, GGRF. None of them are (thankfully) very demanding at the moment.
- Onboarding: Incremental improvements to tooling and process. Will need more! Looking to Martine and Kate for their inputs on process improvement as the year wraps up
- Metrics: Not actively working out new metrics, but something to keep on the board.
- Don’t be a series of small businesses: ~Marc and I are shopping for some founder coaching to make sure we’re staying on a venture-scale path~. We put this on the back burner. We don’t have time to engage right now.
On Deck for This Week
- 🏃♂️Related Companies LL97 bidding is penciled in for Wed. Kudos to Martine for keeping it moving last week!
- For me, Seed Round Prep. I’ve still got a few things pending as far as prep – but you’re welcome to look at the communication plan, data room, teaser deck, and round faq.
- AC bill follow-ups. I may need to ask Jason to keep an eye on this for the next few weeks.
- And then I’m out of pocket starting Wed!
And here’s what’s on my radar screen - what am I forgetting?
Please Leave Feedback
Big thanks to the folks who dropped a note last week! 🎉 🤝
which I will eventually move to the md.
Please note your reaction to this update in the Slack channel. It helps me to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!
- What are your highlights / lowlights?
- Did I miss a highlight? Did I miss something that should be on my watchlist? Something else you want to react to?
Naina (Generalist) Aug 19th at 9:20 AM -
Risk and consequence is always a really interesting thing to think about. In the Alex Honnold documentary he says something along the lines of free soloing being low risk but high consequence, in that he knows his skills and the risk of him falling is low but the consequences if it happened are high. I wonder if that’s a thought that applies here - we trust in our skills and outreach enough that the risk is low, but if it goes wrong there’s high consequence? I also might not understand how GGRF or any of this works at all and this doesn’t apply :grimacing:
Enjoy your holiday Bomee!
Jason (BuildSci Lead) Aug 19th at 10:03 AM -
I know the GGRF thing is big. And it will likely require a ton of product development, maybe some of it in parallel to deliver what they need. But from what I’ve read in the RFP responses so far, it’s very much in sync with what we want to do anyway (much more so than the recent NYSERDA data RFP in my mind). We’ll need to think carefully about how to deliver value incrementally and not go into hiding/development for too long.
François (HOE) Aug 19th at 2:37 PM -
Does the GGRF bid translate in short-term changes to the “love letters” we send CPC that would be more aligned with the direction of the bid? E.g. water usage impact, incorporating planned dates of implementation in scopes and their calculations, etc?
The balancing act we’re running of keeping existing customers happy, going after national, competing in RFPs, makes the sequencing of new features and their incremental delivery super important to avoid spending weeks of dev time on something we don’t finish.
Enjoy your well deserved break Bomee!
Bomee Aug 19th at 2:55 PM -
IMHO, I think keeping CPC happy should be #1, getting real utilization #2, and then alignment w GGRF #3. I think there are some things that might rise to the top if you apply all three filters
Jeremy (Contract Coder) Aug 20th at 4:12 AM -
I’m finding these reports helpful just to know what’s going on in the company as a whole. Sometimes I get narrowly focused on my little bit, and it’s good to get the global view.