Internal Documentation

Short and Sweet Memo

December 6, 2024 (Review of Week EOY-4)

This week, we’re just bringing you the facts.

Metrics

  • Unique Buildings: 5,890 (November, +97 MoM)
  • Annual Run Rate: $1.29M (-$10K MoM)
  • Monthly net burn (accrual basis): $71K (average over last 3 months, -$11K from last month)
  • Monthly net burn (cash basis): $124K (average over last 3 months)
  • 2024 Transaction fees to date: $49,736 (no change WoW)
  • Outstanding invoices as of today: $148,278 (-$117,298 WoW)

Last Week’s Highlights

  • It was great to see some energy and affordable housing folks at CPC’s 50th Anniversary event. 🤞 we get to do more work them on their GGRF program! (JB)
  • Rel 86 went out on time! (JB)

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

  • End-to-end testing: as we continue transfering building science responsibilities to the back-end, fundamental usage scenarios are no longer testable through tests either in the momentum or calc-service code bases. Loading and saving a building, for instance, now involves non-trivial interactions front-end<>back-end. I’m concerned this can cause us trouble as we run yellow lights to meet agressive goals. Time to scrutinize those Sentry errors even more to pounce on problems that slip through testing, until we can invest in better safety nets.
  • Taking the plunges: we’re in the middle of or about to get started on three complex projects - modeling development, time-bound measures / business-as-usual modeling, and AI for guessing building characteristics. They will start in the back-end, but will quickly require application development work. There’s so much on our plates that I’m worried some of this will get stuck in the limbo zone of half-finished projects - we’ll have to find good iterative approaches to deliver these features to our users.

Jason’s List

  • I think we’re making some progress with application development, but I’m still concerned about issues with communication. We had multiple long conversations about the new building details page this week, and some aspects kept coming back up. How can we make the feature information handoff smoother?
  • The rest of this month will require a lot of time spent on two big RFP responses, both which are critical for our GTM strategies within NYC (NYC Accelerator RFP) and in the rest of the country (CPC’s GGRF data collection platform).
  • Testing out AI to parse unstructured data supplied by users–it’ll be time to try this out soon enough.

On Deck for This Week

  • R-F-P-T-O-G-O: Chappell Roan’s hit song about proposal writing (JB)
  • Wrapping up year-end compliance, HR items and FinOps items, I just need folks to continue to be responsive to prompts and requests over the next week. Thanks! (EP)
  • We have a couple of new metrics that we are including in the weekly memo and company radar (net burn on a cash vs accrual basis). I’ll be sharing in the company radar and in our finops documentation why we are looking at these metrics in this way so we’re all on the same page (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?

Jeff (QA) 12-12-24 at 10:01 AM

@Bomee @Erika (Growth Lead)

Monthly net burn (accrual basis): $71K (average over last 3 months, -$11K from last month) Monthly net burn (cash basis): $124K (average over last 3 months) Does this mean- we’re improving on net burn, but we’re waiting on invoices to get paid to actually say we improved by -11k? (edited)

Bomee 12-12-24 at 10:23 AM

@Erika (Growth Lead) cash burn should be YTD? I think right now, you said ~60k (edited)

Erika (Growth Lead) 12-13-24 at 7:58 AM

@Jeff (QA) and everyone else who might be wondering… I wanted to take a moment to explain how we calculate our net burn. However, the original message was just way too long for Slack, so I created a doc and also added a link to it in our handbook. In general, if there are any other financial terms, metrics or aspects of our finances that do not make sense let me know! We should all understand how the pieces of this company fits together and our financial literacy is a part of that. Also, thanks @Sara Vasilovski for helping to make this explanation succinct (even though I made it longer again:weary:) (edited) Ugh, I just noticed that I accidentally deleted my comment on the YTD net burn average. What I was saying was that: I noticed that calculating YTD net burn skews the net burn average too low, because expenses for the month have not yet occurred. We should, instead, be looking at YLM (year-to-last-month), where we have complete data. Updated YLM numbers will be calculated and shared here. Moving forward, they will also be included in the weekly memo and on the company radar.

Jeff (QA) 12-13-24 at 8:34 AM

Thank you @Erika (Growth Lead)

  • (sorry if I’ve caused the extra work of making a doc for it, oops- but I appreciate it- it’s super good to understand)

Jeremy (Contract Coder) 12-13-24 at 9:50 AM

I haven’t commented here yet - not because I’m ignoring this. I set a reminder to read it on Tuesday after the dev team finishes out sprint. Again, not ignoring :slightly_smiling_face: