How we operate

We’ve got a lot of work to do, we need to do it fast, and we need to be able to sustain that over the long run. How are we going to do that? 5 key pillars:

  1. Technical focus 
  2. Work fast 
  3. Focus 
  4. Reason from the ground up
  5. Stay in the game 

Technical focus 

We’ll spend high on R&D, and run lean on S&M. Most companies run out of cash because it costs them too much money to sell their product, with margin they don’t have. Large S&M teams outstrip demand and burn cash. For us, we must instead always try and stay in a state where demand outstrips production. This is a way better problem to have.

Therefore we will (1) invest heavily into an amazing product that has significant margins to reinvest, and (2) focus on lower-cost S&M resources that compound overtime without further resources. Currently, we can manage a really large volume of revenue with only a tiny team based on how our machines are deployed. In-time, when we cross-the-chasm from £m to £b with direct-to-customer selling, we’ll focus on WOM, partnerships, PR, waiting-lists, demo event’s, and success stories as the backbone to our S&M strategy – essentially everything revolving around how good the product is. Technical team, low-S&M as % of revenue.

The product is the marketing.  

Work fast 

Lots of tawk about why speed matters but very little explanation why. Here are the 4 reasons why it’s important for us: 

  1. Once you’re ahead, it’s hard to catch-up.  Imagine you’re on a bike going at the same speed as another cyclist next to you. Slowly, they speed up a little – just 10% faster. In the short-term, that doesn’t change things a whole lot – after all you’re still cycling at your current pace. But with every metre they cover, they’re getting further and further ahead of you – even as you keep peddling. If you were previously both moving at 10mph and they’ve sustained their new pace for only 1 hour, they’re now 2 miles ahead of you (out of sight). What do you do? For you to catch them up over the next hour, you would have to not only make up the 2-mile delta, but also the added distance they would have moved whilst you caught them up. All in, you need to accelerate by 30% just to catch them, and then keep up your prior speed just to maintain pace again. The faster the other cyclist accelerates, and the longer they maintain that pace, the less chance of you ever catching up. This also doesn’t account for you ever stopping.

    If you think instead of 2 (or more) companies, it’s easy to see why some achieve escape velocity and others, despite their best efforts, wither and die.
  2. Speed compounds. It’s very difficult to see the impact if you had of done something faster than the speed you actually did it as we live in a single version of reality where we can’t see different outcomes. Easy for us to forget something we cannot see. In reality, if we do something faster today, it has a knock-on chain reaction effect down the line. We might not see it today, or next week, or even in a year, but a small task done faster that propelled other events to move just a little faster compounds dramatically the longer you stretch it out, more initial actions there were, and the faster they got done in the first place. If the small things are done fast today, you’re in a very very different place even a week from now – let alone a decade. 
  3. Speed begets speed. If we things fast today, we’ll be inclined to do them fast tomorrow. We’ll then do other things fast. Other people will then do things fast. Before long, everything is fast!
  4. People like fast-paced environments. Great people love to do great work surrounded by things that are moving fast and an intense environment. It’s energising! 

Counterintuitively, we must also pair speed with a great deal of patience. Move very fast in the short-term whilst looking decades ahead.

Focus 

The quickest way to get great work done is to focus on a small amount of things, with intensity. Cut all the peripheral items that get in the way, and get what matters, done. 

Usually this doesn’t happen because either there’s a blurred understanding of what actually matters, or we subconsciously drift to topics that we have the highest competence for but don’t actually move the needle (as it’s psychologically easier work to do).

Instead, we can simply ask “what is the most important thing I must get done this month?” and work on nothing else until it’s done. Everything else can wait or be removed. Those items that remain are likely the most fulfilling, but also the hardest things, to work on. 

Reason from the ground up 

Pretty much everything we’re doing is going against the grain. The way we deploy solar, the hypothesis we have for the world in the next 20 years, the machines we’re building against the status quo, and so on. Therefore, it’s important we never get swayed by the popular narrative and stay the course on what we believe is fundamentally true. 

This requires us to challenge conventional wisdom, find the root cause of why something is the way it is, and have the courage to do things in a different way. “There are only the laws of physics, everything else is made-up”. 

This also builds internal vs external confidence. Lots of people and companies get caught up with the external confidence that might come with a hype-cycle or a new funding announcement, but lack the fundamental internal confidence that comes with sound reasoning of what you’re doing from the ground up. We only care for the latter! 

Stay in the game 

This is really just a culmination of the above 4 principles. Opportunity favours the brave and the people that are around to capture it. Stay lean whilst building the best product, do things fast with a clear focus, and reason against popular held beliefs. This is how we’ll stand a chance of capturing that opportunity. 

Thinking about that another way, if we believe in what we are doing, every problem we hit is a good thing. With every problem, another competitor drops away as they run out of cash or resilience or {insert_any_other_of_the_immense_amount_of_issues_we’re_up_against}. However, the inverse happens with the opportunity size. As more companies succumb to the inevitability of those issues faced, and we instead are able to stay in the game, we will be granted a larger slice of the prize. 

If we can bring all of these things together, we can create a great place to do amazing work. Interestingly, if all of these are together they also de-facto explain how we think about holidays, incentivisation, management etc. If you’re working on something that matters to you and have a large amount of accountability, urgency, clear focus, and resources – everything else is just noise.

TLDR: Cut the fluff, set clear expectations, work really hard, try and build something great that helps people.