Internal Documentation

Happy Thanksgiving!

November 22, 2024 (Review of Week EOY-6)

Growing up, Thanksgiving was always my favorite American holiday - it’s some of my favorite food and it was the holiday that my grandparents spent with us.

But it’s hard to ignore the fact that Thanksgiving is a truly American and totally weird holiday. This Thanksgiving in particular, I feel the tension between the warm-fuzzies of food and family and the history that is in the making all on around us right now.

So, I’ll wrap this one up super corny: I’m thankful for folks who have held on for dear life and bent the arc of history toward justice, even when that effort seemed too small to make a difference.

Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.

Metrics

  • Unique Buildings: 5,793 (October, +104 MoM)
  • Annual Run Rate: $1.3M (no change MoM)
  • Monthly net burn: $82K (average over last three months)
  • 2024 Transaction fees to date: $49,736 (+$1,252 WoW)
  • Outstanding invoices as of today: $145,850 (includes $21,901 in transaction fees)

Last Week’s Highlights

  • Out on the town: We tabled at the Harbor Climate Collaborative event on Monday, Marc presented at Urban Tech Summit and Bomee was at the SEEN 50 event on Wed. (BJ)
  • Release 85 is out, with both user visible improvements shown in the release notes (recent energy data, three new measures, cleaner reporting of Building Performance Standards - or BEPS to expand nationally), and seeds ready to grow (rent roll parsing, calc service direct access to DB). (FH)
  • Marc and I had a good discussion with NYSERDA about the terminal unit app they want us to build. They are planning to move faster than we previously thought–including both PTACs and sleeve ACs in the mix–which greatly increases the market size for this, and they liked our initial thinking. Next step is on us: finding time to develop a proposal for them to respond to. (JB)
  • I caught up with all the current CPC CFHF initial project scopings that were in our court. (I’ve been doing them manually while we work on automating this part of the process for them.) I haven’t been able to keep us quickly as I had hoped, but so far they are very happy with how much faster this process has been than the previous version of bringing in a separate energy auditing firm. (JB)
  • The Acacia bid got one step closer to closing. 4 buildings in this bid represent about 700k worth of construciton and therefore close to 50% of all the construction volume we have bid out in our pilot work. Through this work, we have gotten some learings around what it takes for owners to say “yes” to larger more complex projects as opposed to the 10k - 50k projects that we had previoulsy bid out (MZ)
  • Two major RFPs came out. The first is for a program to accelerate retrofits across thousands of buildings in NYC. The second is for a program to accelerate retrofits across thousands of buildings nationally through GGRF. I am sticking these in highlights because IMO, this is a blank piece of paper moment for our industry and it was not a given that these RFPs would come out in a way that was consistent with our world view. But as a result of a lot of effort in 2024 to shape how the industry in general thinks about the role of tech in multifamily decarb, reading the RFPs made me very happy. Here is an excerpt to give you a flavor:

    The (NYC) Program Implementer will develop and maintain a dynamic and interactive User Portal accessed from the Program website that allows both (Owner/Manager) Program Users and Service Provider (Users) to create user accounts and profiles and access a decarbonization action planning tool…The decarbonization action planning tool will integrate both planning and action to assist Owner/Manager Users in identifying and planning potential decarbonization projects for their building and connecting those projects to Service Providers offering solutions, incentives, and financing that can move the project toward implementation. (MZ)

  • One step closer to taking on NYSERDA 5701, the statewide-BKB RFP. We got more clarity from NYSERDA on what they’re looking for, and it seems aligned with back-end work that we will want to do for national/NYC. We’ll continue negotiating! (BJ)
  • We are a certified B Corporation! We have now joined a global community of 8,000 certified B Corps that hold “high standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.” Our certification was based on the following impact areas: Governance and Workers (both deal with how we run our company and treat employees), Community, Environment and Customers (all of which corncern our business impact). We don’t need to certify again for three years but we will need to keep track of our metrics annually. (EP)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Slack comments.

Crow’s Nest

Looking out for icebergs: What are the risks on the horizon that we’re watching for and navigating around?

François’ List

  • This week again the release was late. Part of the delay is due to a choice we made to accelerate the push of a complex change (calc service connection to the database) because it unlocked a lot of goodness for our users - a tricky bug, fresh energy data for old team buildings, and the new elevators measure -. I’m glad we powered through this yellow light, but look forward to releases that are both on-time, and packed full of new features.
  • The NYSERDA RFP 5701 (data platform) is back on our lap. Our lap is pretty darn full, yet we’ll have to make space for this, because beyond the additional revenue, this RFP aligns with our ambitions to have the best building data possible in NY and beyond.
  • UoB. We’re constantly uncovering new gifts from the current building data: this is expected, because this stuff is complex and evolved fairly organically. We have a few caves to explore fairly quickly, and in particular development modeling. We haven’t always done great with caves.

Jason’s List

  • How and when can we experiment with parsing unstructured data supplied by users? Contractors and auditors are busy and have little-to-no interest in spending extra time submitting data to us in the methods we’ve provided so far.
  • We’re entering the end of the year with what feels like an advent calendar full of RFP potential. RFPs for CPC’s GGRF data collection platform and the long-awaited NYC Accelerator just dropped this week, on top of the OFN GGRF RFP that was already submitted and more GGRF RFPs expected in the near future. Which doors will open onto transaction revenue for us?
  • More news headlines => more sadness and worry

Marc’s List

  • Good news: RFPs that are highly aligned with what we are trying to build. Bad news: Competitors will all now say they can do something like Momentum. So the stakes are really high to win!

Erika’s List

  • I’m sitting in on the 360 feedback sessions and will be taking note of the conversations - the goal is to see how we are providing feedback and how we are defining our work plans. Without the information, it is difficult to pinpoint the trends and understand how we can improve the process as we evolve.

Bomee’s List

  • Communication gaps on product are still really hitting us where it hurts (time!). Jason and I feel like we “emit” a lot more information than is “received” by developers. Something for us to retro around.
  • We’re trying to do a lot of stuff…at the same time….
  • Personally, I’m a bit stretched thin as I get back more into helping Jason on the product side.

On Deck for This Week

  • Bomee and I will spend a few hours reviewing the CPC CFHF workflow and generic project workflow side-by-side to assess where there are overlaps, where there are gaps, and how we want to align the two. (JB)
  • RFPs! (MZ)
  • NYSERDA 5701 - I asserted that we’d give them some preliminary schedule ideas before Thanksgiving! (BJ)

  • Kickoff this week with Chelsea Yost, our HR expert via the CEN program. As our first project, we will be working on the structure of our onboarding and integration processes so that information is more easily retained and employees set up for success, over the next couple of weeks. (EP)

  • Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

Please Leave Feedback

Please note your reaction to this update in the Slack channel. It helps us to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!

  • What are your highlights / lowlights?
  • Did we miss a highlight? Something else you want to react to?

Naina (Generalist) Nov 26th at 10:24 AM

Thanksgiving is super American! It’s weird because I like to listen to a British radio station and they are so hard on Christmas already, which is so different from here there are lots of exciting things coming up RE RFPs and things like that, and lots of exciting things happened last week (so so glad elevators is out, the first major project I worked on as an intern, since January!)

Jeremy (Contract Coder) Nov 26th at 7:11 PM

Finally got around to reading it. All sounds very exciting. And I’m hopeful about finding and fixing the coordination/communication issues in the dev team! :muscle::skin-tone-2: