Well, y’all, we’re on the other side of a historic election week. It’s taken me the entire week to start to come to grips with the election outcome. I’m still stupendously angry, but we all gotta get back to work (because what else is there to be done about it?)! TLDR for us is that nothing much will change for the short-term. We’ll still focus on completing our national platform and on the key procurements, as we have been. In the mid-term, it makes it less likely that we’ll raise VC in spring 2025, which, in its own way, is helpful to know – we can now focus just on the customers. We will still have a ton of challenging work to do! As we already noted a couple weeks ago, we are back in bootstrapping mode and will minimize net burn.
On a more fun note, I encourage you try to learn and deliver the short “lay person” teaser pitch debuted at Verge. I’m curious what you think of it and what questions you’re left with!
Any missing highlights? Please share in Slack comments.
Looking out for icebergs: What are the risks on the horizon that we’re watching for and navigating around?
There are a lot of uncertainties that could affect our ability to grow the business over the coming years. We might as well start thinking about them!
Effect of Trump economic policy on multifamily rehabs: Tariffs on imports could make it more expensive to do construction all around, while keeping interest rates high (via fiscal policy to combat inflation and also bond yields rising in response to gov’t debt). This would mean it’s more expensive to borrow money AND more expensive to do work, dampening the growth in construction spend. This doesn’t mean that the $65B rehab market will dry up overnight, but it may mean that more owners ask for accommodation for financial hardship under LL97, and the over-all growth of the national market may be slower. Short-term in NY: Possibly little effect; Mid-term nationally: slower growth?
Exacerbating housing burden: In general, Democratic policies tend to put more money in the hands of people who tend to use the money for basics like housing, whereas Republican policies (post ‘86) have tended to benefit richer people, who tend to invest or save because their basic needs are covered. Policies like deducting pensions from Social Security (a proposal) would mean, for example, that seniors on fixed income would have less to spend, and since seniors are disproportionately low income and health-burdened, it could mean more housing insecurity. Similarly, inflation generally means the eat-or-sleep tension is greater – also exacerbating housing burden and housing insecurity. Multifamily landlords serving lower end of the market are still struggling with the effect of Covid rent losses – in NY, the rent stabilized segment in particular is precarious even today, with Covid having compounded the effect of laws that made it nearly impossible to increase rents based on doing capital work. How this shows up in ways that affect our work is hard to know, mainly because…
Local policy is where it’s at (again): Built environment policies have always been solidly in the hands of state and local governments. Federal money can always help, but it’s local policy (and economics) that drives what happens with buildings, from codes to BEPS to incentives. This means that the places where climate action enjoys broad support will continue to make their climate-forward policies, though pull-back or slow down of federal resources will make it harder to go faster. And, in places where local leaders find it expedient to stand up as foils to the federal government may do what NY did after Trump 1: move faster. That said, I don’t think we can take it for granted that NYC and NY will be at the pointy end of the spear this time around – there are just too many cross-currents in local politics right now.
I think my take-away from all this is that politics rather than policy is going to be a BIG DEAL over the next 4 years. We should think about:
We expect to get some further insights into what Climate United is planning on doing with their upcoming tech-focused GGRF RFP (MZ).
Please note your reaction to this update in the Slack channel. It helps us to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!
I’d love more details about how the Clean Fight will be using Momentum. Do we need to do anything product-wise for this?
Quick question about the “Unique Buildings” metric. Is this buildings that are undergoing work through our platform? Or just buildings that have had scopes generated? Or buildings in the Building Knowledge Base (BKB)? I’m also curious about the strategy of phasing the work around the Building Details Page, but I’ll take that to a more appropriate channel.
Is this video shareable? I see it’s on YouTube, but is it listed and public and stuff?
Re: Unique Buildings. This is the count of distinct buildings that have been created by users (excluding C1.5 employees) in Momentum, aka TeamBuildings. You can see the code here.
Annual Run Rate: $1.7M (+$340K MoM) @Erika (Growth Lead) this looks like the gross revenues, not subscription run rate (which is what this metric is meant to be). Can you pls fix? It should be lower now because we have L+M churn Monthly net burn: $98K (average over last three months) Still too high. We need to curb expenses. Folks pls work with Erika to make sure that a) vendor invoices are coming in on time and b) vendor spend is within the planned amounts I’d love more details about how the Clean Fight will be using Momentum. @Jason (BuildSci Lead) in theory, no new work here. They’ll use advanced search. But famous last words! We always end up coming up with something. All to be negotiated. Is this video shareable? @Jeremy (Contract Coder) it is a hidden link. Anyone with the link can view, but it’s not listed publicly.
Is it OK for me to share that video? I.e. post it on socials, etc? Or is it considered confidential, for internal eyes only? (edited)
Eh, you can share it to folks in your personal network, but I’d rather not put it up on socials where anyone can view.
Re: thinking about where outside of NY that local leaders would be aggressive on climate I know we’ve had MA and Atlanta in our sights for the next phase of growth. Wondering what are reasons we would or would not consider seriously looking at the West Coast at this point given that things are pretty blue there. Would it be easier to get traction in places like that where there might be less friction?