Catalyst with Shayle Kann - Watt It Takes: TeraWatt Infrastructure CEO Neha Palmer

Episode Date: July 28, 2022

We're bringing you something different today. It's an episode of one of our favorite podcasts, called Watt It Takes hosted by Emily Kirsch of Powerhouse Ventures.  We talk a lot on Catalyst about how to finance and build climatetech. What we don’t always get into are the personal stories of people who are trying to do that work. That’s exactly what Watt It Takes does. The show tells the stories of founders who are building a zero-carbon world — their upbringings, their risks, their failures, and their breakthroughs. This episode is about Neha Palmer, CEO of TeraWatt Infrastructure, which builds large-scale electric vehicle charging hubs for medium and heavy transport. Tens of millions of delivery vans and semi trucks move around the clock to keep supply chains humming. These medium- and heavy-duty vehicles make up more than 25 percent of transportation emissions in the US — even though they only make up 10 percent of all vehicles on the road. We need to electrify medium and heavy-duty vehicles to meet our climate goals. But, how do we build and operate the charging infrastructure to power them? That charging network is exactly what TeraWatt Infrastructure is building. TeraWatt develops, owns, and manages charging infrastructure for these large vehicles. The company integrates hardware, software, and grid services along with on-site chargers. TerraWatt has a growing portfolio of land in strategic locations across the country that enables it to build and operate that charging infrastructure. TeraWatt brings together a team of experts from data centers, transportation logistics, and electric cars. The more complex the high-powered charging needs, the better suited TeraWatt is for the task. Watt It Takes host Emily Kirsch sat down with Neha to learn what it takes to electrify a sector with such massive energy demand. They talked about founding TeraWatt after Neha left Google, where she was a key figure in that company's ambitious renewable energy strategy. And they discuss the unique demands of heavy-duty transportation. Powerhouse is an innovation firm that works with leading global corporations to help them find, partner with, invest in, and acquire the most innovative startups in clean energy, mobility, and climate. Powerhouse Ventures backs seed-stage startups building innovative software to rapidly decarbonize our global energy and mobility systems. You can learn more at powerhouse.fund, and you can subscribe to our newsletter at https://www.powerhouse.fund/subscribe. If you like the show, subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Antenna Group. For 25 years, Antenna has partnered with leading clean-economy innovators to build their brands and accelerate business growth. If you're a startup, investor, enterprise, or innovation ecosystem that's creating positive change, Antenna is ready to power your impact. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more. Solar Power International and Energy Storage International are returning in-person this year as part of RE+. Come join everyone in Anaheim for the largest, B2B clean energy event in North America. Catalyst listeners can receive 15% off a full conference, non-member pass using promo code CANARY15. Register here.

Hey everyone, Shail here. We're bringing you something a little bit different today. It's an episode of one of our favorite other podcasts called What It Takes. We talk a lot on this show about how to finance and build climate tech, but what we generally don't get into is the personal stories of the people who are trying to do that work. But that's what What It Takes does. Their show tells the stories of founders who are building a zero-carbon world. Their upbringings, their risks, their failures, their breakthroughs. It's hosted by my friend, Emily Kirsch, who's the founder and CEO of Powerhouse, Ventures, which is venture capital firm that invests in companies supporting decarbonization. And this episode's guest is Neha Palmer, who's the CEO of Terawatt infrastructure. Terawatt builds large-scale EV charging hubs geared toward medium and heavy transport. Nowa also led Google's energy strategy for a decade prior to Terawat. If you like infrastructure, EV and charging tech, and you want to hear stories about people rather than listening to Me, the Robot, talk about technologies, I think you'll like this episode.

With no further ado, NAHLPR on what it takes. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub. Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built. for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at Energy Hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure, but those

investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. as we unpack how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Emily Kirsch, founder and CEO of Powerhouse and managing partner of Powerhouse Ventures. This is What It Takes, a show about the entrepreneurs making our climate-positive future a reality. Tens of millions of medium and heavy-duty vehicles like

delivery vans and semi-trucks move around the clock to keep supply chains humming. Those medium-and-heavy-duty vehicles make up more than a quarter of transportation emissions in the U.S., even though they only make up 10% of all vehicles on the road. We need to electrify medium and heavy-duty vehicles to meet our climate goals. But equally importantly, we also need to build and operate charging infrastructure to power them. That charging infrastructure is exactly what today's guest, TerraWatt Infrastructure CEO Neha Palmer, is building. Terawat has been purpose-built to provide large-scale EV-charging. solutions for fleets. So any kind of a fleet where you have a complex charging need,

high power specific locations, we can provide that. Terawatt develops, owns, and manages charging infrastructure for medium and heavy-duty vehicles. They integrate hardware, software, grid interconnections, and grid services, on-site chargers, and in some cases, even on-site generation. They have a growing portfolio of land in strategic locations across the country that they've purchased to enable them to build and operate that charging infrastructure. There are a lot of different components, but it's very similar to other industries,

like data centers where I come from. So I think we're up for the task, but it certainly is a lot to think about it one time. Terawatt brings together a team of experts from data centers, transportation logistics, and electric vehicles. Their facilities act like filling stations and power plants at the same time.

A terawatt charging hub could look different depending on the location. Urban location would look different than something that's a little bit more outside the city limits. But you would also see multiple fleets, perhaps co-located in a location. You would see charging infrastructure, maybe some other energy elements, such as behind the meter storage, on-site generation,

everything required to really provide, again, that complex charging solution that would be for either larger battery formats or fast charging and large fleets. Railroads and highways were groundbreaking for transporting goods across the country, Now Neha and the Terawatt team are on the front lines of the latest revolution in heavy-duty transport, electricity. And the more complex and high-powered the charging needs are, the better-suited Terawatt is for the task. We need infrastructure on the scale of something that happens every century.

We had railroads two centuries ago, national highway network, you know, a century ago. And now we'll get to still use some of that infrastructure, but we need to build all of this electric charging infrastructure for that next generation of. of transit and transport. So really, we want to be on the ground floor of building that backbone here in the U.S. and hopefully beyond in the future. I sat down with Neha to learn what it takes to electrify a sector with such massive energy demand.

We talked about Neha joining Terawatt after leaving Google where, for nearly a decade, she was a key figure in their ambitious renewable energy strategy. We started with Neha's childhood in the Bay Area, growing up in an Indian American family that took every chance possible to explore the outdoors. I want to start with where you grew up, which is in the San Francisco Bay Area and Walnut Creek, which for people who don't know, Walnut Creek's about 20 minutes east of Oakland.

As a kid, I know you spent a lot of time outdoors with your family camping and hiking. Were those trips common amongst your peers and what were those trips like with your family? So we certainly were probably unique amongst Indian families in that time in terms of, you know, I think of us, all four of us learning how to ski together. My parents had never skied, so all taking lessons at the same time. We were probably one of the few Indian families on the mountain at the time. But it certainly was, you know, we had a nice tight-knit group, and we would all do our trips together. We'd go camping, hiking, skiing, just spending almost every few moments outdoors, really.

My dad in particular really loves adventure, and so he would take us on his adventures. It really is an important part of my childhood and really what I still love to do today when I have free time. Do you have a most memorable trip or a most kind of out there adventure? I do remember being really small, and my parents really love Yosemite, and we've crawled over every inch of that park now. But being really small and looking up at Nevada Falls and thinking, who would ever have the strength to hike up there? And that's now our family hike. We do that all the time. So really, you know, this transition from, wow, that's really challenging.

And my parents, you know, being immigrants, they didn't grow up hiking, to that being something that we do. as a family together all the time now. I love that. What a metaphor, too, for your life. Like, wow, that looks really hard. Oh, now I do that every day. How do you think those trips influenced you, maybe beyond that sense of your own ability?

I think it's an observation of the environment that, you know, I've lived almost all my life in California except for a few years. And so really being attuned to changes in the environment. And how does that affect, you know, my ability to do the recreation things I want to do, but how does that just make you feel as you move throughout the year? And I think we talked a little bit about winter feeling shorter these days. And I think growing up, spending a lot of

time outdoors has made me, again, really attuned to what's going on outside. I know you were exposed to the field of engineering as a kid through many members of your family, including your dad, who's a civil engineer and who started his own business when you were in elementary school. what was it like for you as a kid and a teenager to have a dad who's both a civil engineer and an entrepreneur? And what do you think you learned about entrepreneurship from your dad? I think I learned that you can do it, right? I think a lot of people get scared about starting their own business, but he was determined and he gave up some security to make that leap. And I saw him be successful at it.

So that's a great example to see. It also just gave me the familiarity I needed to go into it. engineering. I don't think I actually knew much else, just given the people that I was surrounded with as a child. And so that was, again, a sense of familiarity and maybe comfort. I could see what he was doing and thought to myself, I can do that, you know, and maybe even take over the family business, which I did not do. But, you know, I think it really influenced me in terms of just having that sense of familiarity. For undergrad, I know you went to California Polytechnic State University or Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo in California and studied civil engineering with an emphasis on water engineering.

So, yeah, why Cal Poly? And then is there a why behind civil engineering beyond the familiarity? And then why water? Why Cal Poly is I had a cousin who went there, went to visit, and really fell in with a campus. So that was maybe more driven by the location. You know, civil engineering, again, was so familiar to me. And it just felt like, oh, I know what this is. I can do this.

And then the water engineering, you know, I think I didn't realize at the time, but I always had this interest in the outdoors and the environment. Things like the snowpack measure always intrigued me. And so that's obviously very tied to water engineering here in California. And again, it was the field of civil engineering that it felt most tied to being outside and the elements. So started down that path and really enjoyed what I learned from that perspective when I was at Cal Poly. And how did the program influence you and you're thinking the way you approach problems, Yeah, it's funny. I have this debate with some friends who are liberal arts focused. And, you know, I really do think engineering is such a wonderful education. It teaches you how to think in a very structured manner. It teaches you how to do hard things, you know. Engineering's hard. It's a lot of hours. You know, you have, in addition to your normal course load, sometimes you have a three-hour lab attached to every single class. And so I think it does teach you how to persevere, have a little bit of grit and kind of plug through things that are difficult.

And I think that's something I've taken away from that, even if I don't focus on water resources engineering anymore. What's the argument with the liberal arts majors? It's like you don't know how to do this. No, I think it's, you know, there's obviously things you can learn from like a philosophy major that are also critical thinking skills. And, you know, it could be even corollary maybe to things you learn in engineering. I love math. And so I think it's important to have a deep foundation there. And you might not get that with a liberal arts major. True. After graduating from Cal Poly, you worked at PG&E as a gas pipeline engineer,

and during that time you got interested in the business side of energy and joined PG&E's commodities team as an analyst. And from there, you went back to school to get your master's in finance and management from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. What made you decide to go back to school and then tell me about your thesis with an emphasis on sustainable communities? Yeah, maybe I'll tack that second one first. So at Cal Poly, you're required to write a senior thesis as part of your, you know,

requirement for graduation. And again, maybe I didn't know it at the time, but my thesis was on a sustainable community. So what were the elements required, sustainable housing, using natural materials, you know, high R-value walls so that you have, you know, better temperature control, different transit systems that were centralized and allowed less use of cars, things like that. So I will go to the library and find it one day at Cal Poly, but really focused on that. And I think that was maybe the first kernel of thinking about this is a system, right? You need multiple elements to really attack that issue of sustainability. You know, my trajectory going back to school for finance really was realizing that you need

multiple skills to do that. And so having the engineering background was great. But I really found that a lot of things were tied into transactions and really exciting around deals. And so that's why I went back and got my MBA and went to investment. banking, that maybe started to drive even more of my deal junkie tendencies. Yeah, tell me about that. I know you joined Goldman after graduating from Kellogg, as you said, as an investment banker, and help finance projects for energy companies, and then later

returned to PG&E for a few years with a focus on corporate development before joining Google as head of energy strategy, where you were for almost a decade. Yeah, how did you come to join Google? And then what was it like leading energy strategy at such a pivotal time and what was it like then versus what was it like shortly before you left? Yeah, I mean, I think everything was, I would call it a small step in the direction of heading towards Google. Obviously, having that financial background that I learned as an investment banker was super key. It also helped me realize what companies, you know, you work with a large variety of companies, what they were struggling with is they started thinking about making

their stack of energy supply cleaner. And so seeing them starting to, you know, engage with things like wind power at the time. Solar power was kind of, whoa, that is just not at scale yet at the time I was a banker. But that was the first step. And when I went to PG&E, it was, okay, now we have to do this. It was helping them figure out how to meet some of those RPS goals and seeing just that wide array of technology that was out there at the time. Power towers, concentrated solar tubes, just all kinds of interesting stuff. But starting to see how you could take that nascent technology and start to turn it into very very, very much. large projects and solutions. And that's really, I think, where I landed at Google. They realized that

their energy needs were becoming very, very large. And they wanted to be thoughtful about how they were acquiring energy and what types of energy that was. And so that was really my first focus there. And we had an amazing run. You know, when I started, you know, I remember the first time we had a meeting with the senior team. They said, welcome to Google. We have a goal to be 100% renewable. And I didn't know that was the goal when I joined. So he was like, week two, it's like, okay, here's your, here's your goal. And we already had a pretty big portfolio at that time. And then I think a few, a year later, it was like, you're doing this too slow.

This has to happen in five years. So really kind of pushing us to be aggressive in how we could solve this. And we did a great job. You know, the team was really creative in how they started working with renewable energy developers. And we did meet that goal of 100% renewable. What I think is even... 2017, right? In 2017, exactly.

And what I think is even more incredible and exciting to me was there were so many other companies that saw, hey, if Google can do it, others can do it as well. And so there was a whole corporate renewable energy movement that was seated in that time frame. We certainly were part of it. Other companies joined from all parts of, you know, tech, consumer products. And to me, that was a super exciting trajectory to see and just really satisfying to see that something that seemed like was so hard. in the beginning was just matter of course. If you have a large energy load, you're going to have a plan in place to buy clean energy. Yeah. Given what a challenging but fulfilling role that is and given how long you were there

and the autonomy and the impact that you were having and having been there for almost a decade, what made you think about leaving? Like what was happening such that you were starting to think about what might be next? Well, we did have a success of meeting. that goal. And obviously, there's obviously a lot more to do. But I started thinking about, okay, where else can we apply this to the next slug of emissions? And what is the next slug of emissions? And I think most folks who listen to this understand where most emissions come from. And the next big thing was transport. You know, it's depending on where you are, it's a fourth to a third of all emissions. And we need solutions there. And I saw that, you know, we saw

passenger vehicles starting to electrify and then the fleet's electrifying. So I really started looking at what could I do with my skills that could actually provide a big solution in that area. So that's when I started kind of picking up my head and looking around, where can I apply my skills? I started trying to think about what could be next. Yeah. And then where did the initial idea for TerraWat infrastructure come from? And what made you decide to make this totally life-altering decision to become an entrepreneur in your late 40s and join Terratwat as CEO? So, again, I was having conversations with folks and met the keyframe in Cyrus teams who had been thinking about this for a long time. You got Ben Burnbaum, Ethan Goldsmith, and John Rappapur, who got together in 2018 and had this vision that there would be a need for large-scale charging for EVs, especially for fleets.

And so they were able to put together a little bit of capital and start buying locations that they knew would be critical for this application. They didn't know when the inflection point of electrification was going to come back in 2018. It wasn't maybe as obvious as it is to many today here in 2022, but they were able to put that together and kind of keep their heads down and build a portfolio of locations that were suitable. So I met up with them in 2020 and heard what they were working on. And, you know, I actually, it was the middle of the pandemic. I got in a plane and I hadn't traveled anywhere for almost a year and met them.

in their offices in New York, and we just had this amazing whiteboarding session, and I realized, you guys were building a data center. It was the two-by-four moment where I realized, I've already done this, and this is exactly the type of skill that you need to build these large EV charging stations. And very quickly, I realized, like, this is exactly what I want to do. So I flew home and the very next day, signed up to help found TeraWat and bring this operating company and start building these hubs. when you signed and then the next day told them that you were in, was it pure excitement and joy?

Or was there a feeling of terror? Probably all of the above. You know, I've worked at big companies my whole life and come into very structured environments. And so this was certainly going to be a challenge, but just really a lot of excitement. We have so much white space here. And there's so much need for solutions that I was. just incredibly excited to be able to start moving in that direction. So I would say excitement probably overweighing out the terror.

Good, good. So I know TaraWat was legally formed in March of 2021 after you joined a CEO, and you've raised 100 million through the private equity firms that you mentioned, Keyframe, Capital, and Cyrus Capital. What was already in place when you joined? And then what were your first moves as CEO when you joined about a year ago? So we had that really great head start of the portfolio of locations. That can be a long lead time item in finding and developing charging hubs.

So that was a really great head start to have. But my role was to build this company. So start hiring the expertise we needed to start building at these charging hubs. And that's everything from finance, business development, development, operations. And so, yeah, really starting this company from scratch from the operating side, which has been amazing. You know, we've been doing it for a year now, and it's really nice to think back where I was about a year ago,

sitting alone at my desk in my house, and, you know, where we are today. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity, but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full pit. picture, from near real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification

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by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital, as I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects. Together, we and unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Tell me about the underlying technology behind TerraWat. There's obviously the sites and the site development, but then there's so much complexity to enable this kind of charging

for medium and heavy-duty fleets. What's the technology that is the underlying force behind what you're building? So we are hardware and somewhat software. We know that there are fleets that are going to have specific preferences when it comes to hardware and specific hardware requirements depending on their type of vehicle, their operations, et cetera. So we're really trying to be a platform where anyone can come. So you might have multiple fleets at one location and able to integrate those fleets so they can operate in harmony at one location and maybe optimize as a result of variable charge patterns. So our technology is really enabling all of those types of things.

Can multiple fleets come in charge at one location? Can they exist and can we optimize that site for those different fleets? We'll have to build some tech around this and how do you organize even just traffic patterns might be what an aspect of this, but also the technology in terms of integrating the charge management systems that those fleets might want to engage with, with the hardware, with our on-site elements like energy, storage, etc. So the technology will help integrate all of those things. In terms of the scale of what you're building, I know ultimately we're talking about the equivalent of what railroads were and what highways were.

And I love that analogy. And what's next is the buildout of electric vehicle charging infrastructure. When you talk about the scale of sites anywhere from half an acre to 10 acres or more, in terms of megawatts, what are we talking about given that power is one of those two commodities alongside space? Yeah, this is actually a debate at the beginning. of a terawatt of what should we use to measure our sites? I think we think megawatts does make sense. It's the maximum charging capacity you could have online at one time at a location. So in urban locations, it could be in the 5 to 10 megawatt range.

And more, you know, looking at larger format batteries, you could be in the tens of megawatts, call it 40, 50 megawatts of demand in one location. So really depends on the location and the type of vehicle. But again, these are looking like data systems. And there was really large energy-intense infrastructure, again, which is hard to cite. And so obviously, I need lots of folks focused on this challenge. And those large-scale infrastructure projects, this is what you've done your whole life. You did it as a gas pipeline engineer at PG&E.

You did it at Google with data centers, and now you're doing it again for electric vehicles. Absolutely. I think, you know, again, the two-by-four moment where it seemed really familiar to me, this is large infrastructure. And I think that's maybe a new perspective on that in the market. EV charging has been focused on passenger vehicles and individual consumers. This really is a step function change in how we're approaching what needs to be built to power these fleets. And so, yeah, the large infrastructure is maybe alongside the deal junkie tendency to me as something that's really attractive about what we're working on here.

I know Terawatt already has a couple customers signed on. Can you give me a sense of who those customers are? And then what exactly are they paying Terawatt for? Yeah, so we're super excited to have these first customers. You know, what we're finding is there's a huge demand in the urban area for charging services, so they are more passenger light duty type fleets. And they're paying us for, again, that full stock solution. We have the real estate, the interconnect, all the charging elements,

and so they're paying for space and power. And for those at no data centers, that's a very common commodity in that business as well, but they need a place to know that they can come and charge. And then they need that charging as well. So we're providing both of those elements to these customers. And so they're literally paying for the energy or that's how you're charging them. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a space component as well, which depending on the location can actually be quite critical.

And then, you know, just as other companies charge for charging services, very similar to that as well. Got it. And then back to that earlier question of what would someone see if they were at a site or what would a customer, what would a customer's experience be if they're a customer of Terawat walk me through what that would look like? Absolutely. So they're going to be able to come into a site.

Hopefully it's very clean, neat, and organized, and it's very clear if it's a multi-tenant location where their corner of the site might be, they're able to pull into a spot and know that they will have a charging port if they are in a time crunch. They won't be waiting.

They will be able to pull right up and start charging right away. Look at the full power level that they signed up for, something that might be a little bit more common amongst public charging is to have a little bit lower power than expected, which results in a slower charging time. So they would know exactly what they're going to get and how long it's going to take when they pull up to charge. And then they would have, you know, if they need other amenities on that site, you know, they might need to clean a vehicle. They might need to do some other things. They could do that there as well. It would say it depends on the fleet, too.

If you have larger format vehicles, that might be there longer. There may be a little bit different experience, but what we really want to make sure that the customer has is clear line of sight to having that access to that charging capacity at the time that they needed. And then I know you said these sites, they can be in urban environments, rural environments. It's wherever they need to be for fleets to get the power they need. How big are the sites? Like, give me a sense of, you know, if it's in an urban environment, I imagine it's smaller, but what are we talking in? terms of just, you mentioned space as one of the two commodities, space and power? So certainly urban locations are harder to find large surface parking lots.

If anyone has one, I'd love to talk to you. But yeah, so it could be as small as an acre, depending on the location. And, you know, in more ex-urban areas, it could be tens of acres. So it really depends, again, on the type of fleet that will come there and what they want to do there. Some fleets may want to have a little bit of room for operations, and so they would have maybe some non-charging space that they need. That's probably going to be more well-suited to locations that are not in tight real estate markets within the urban core. But urban core might be a place where they might be moving through on a faster basis.

The first sites that are operational, where will they be and when will those be online? Yeah, so they're going to be where our customers are demanding them. obviously California is always going first with everything, and that is true for electrification as well. So a lot of the demand is in California just given incentives that we have at the state level, just fleets are also tend to be a little bit more innovative within the California area. And we have these really enormous ports. The port of Long Beach takes the most freight in the U.S. And so they'll be in the California market.

but we see kind of that spreading out from California over time. Certainly with transport, you're transporting goods that need to go everywhere and they need to leave California. So we will be branching out past California pretty quickly here. And when you look back at the past year being CEO of Tarawatt, what would you say has been the easiest part and what's been the hardest part? I think the easiest part is just coming to work every day. It's so fun, right?

There's always a new challenge. but it's amazing to be able to see that line of sight to something that you're doing and solving a really big problem. So that's really exciting to me. I think the challenging thing, you know, is it can be lonely sometimes, right? And you don't always have a roadmap of exactly what you need to do, especially in really nascent industries. And so, you know, you have to make hard decisions and you have to do that quickly sometimes without perfect information.

So I think that's probably been the thing that I've had to get my arms around the most. But again, really outweighed by this excitement of coming to work every day and working on a really fun complex thing to solve. I know there are many people in tech who we get to speak to who are thinking about making this move into the climate space more directly and maybe working at a startup. And I know you've worked at large corporations and utilities your entire career at PG&E and Goldman and Google.

What advice would you have for people that are considering making that change and going from one of the biggest companies in the world to a small startup? You know, we need every single ounce of brainpower to solve all of the issues we have with climate. So open arms, we invite anyone who's interested and passionate about this to join. You don't need previous expertise. So I'll say that about the industry itself. But about moving into startups, I think I have surprised myself. I think I believe that to make a really big impact, you had to be in a really big place.

And I've realized, and this may have started when I was at Google, seeing some really interesting solutions on the data center side that smaller companies were able to provide really big companies. You can make a really big impact, even as a startup. And so I think that's the advice I'd give to people. Yeah, there's things that are very different from a big company, but your ability to make an impact is actually bigger, maybe in a place like a startup because you're solving something that no one else has done

and you can't do that in every single type of corporate situation. Really well said. When you look back, I know you had that aha moment when you decided to join when you said, I've done this before, like this is a data center. How did you know how to do this? Did you feel like you would know what you would need to know in order to build the company to be successful? So I do believe in pattern recognition.

And so I helped build out that team at Google. I have seen how companies scale. And so there's things that I can take even from one of the largest companies in the world and apply here in terms of how you think about scaling large infrastructure over time. Some of it's a leap of faith, though. You have to really believe in yourself that you will be able to make those hard decisions without perfect information. So it's a little bit of that pattern recognition. And I am an older founder. So I have maybe some years under my belt of that pattern recognition.

but also just having faith in yourself that you can do this. If you could go back to day one of you being CEO of Tara Wat, what advice would you give yourself? You think you need to move fast and move 5X as fast. There's so much that you learn from trial and error, especially in nascent industries, that you cannot underestimate the benefit of learning things fast. And so I would say to anyone who's sitting day one in their new company,

speed is everything. And so I would tell myself, you think you're going fast, go faster. Yeah. What are the other biggest takeaways in building the company? I think sometimes entrepreneurship, if you're not in it, the world of startups seems opaque. And it's just unclear, like, how do you actually do it? And so for those that are maybe thinking of starting a company

or thinking of joining a company as CEO, how would you describe your process to them in terms of what do you do to actually build a team, build product, you know, in your case, acquire these sites. How would you summarize that experience if you can? Build a plan and work the plan. I mean, you have to put it down on paper. Was it Google long enough that I'm steeped in something called the OKR process?

You know, I think you absolutely have to have a plan and build to it and be able to shift that plan. Again, if you're moving fast enough in learning, you may have to change that. And it's not even just a pivot. It's just a refinement of what that plan is and where you're going to put forward. focus, but you absolutely have to be structured in how you approach it. Maybe this is tying back to my engineering tendencies, but how do you solve this problem? Step one, get the data. Step two, run some analysis. Step three, try to prove out your thesis in real life, you know, physical,

if it's a physical solution. And then step four, you know, refine over time. So I think putting it down on paper and just going as fast as you can. A question I ask, our guests of all races and genders is what it has been like being who you are in your case as an Indian American woman, leading a company and industry that is not reflective of the diversity of our state or country, you know, overly represented by white men. Yeah, can you speak to that experience? Yeah, I think it's been the common experience for my whole life. You know, I'd sometimes be the only female in a class in college, so it's not unique. I think for me, it's been, you know, I'm hiring a lot. I'm thinking about this new industry and who gets to participate and thinking back to my tech time,

you know, that's an industry that has been catching up in terms of representation of, you know, non-traditional folks in that industry. And for me, being on the ground floor, being in a position where I'm hiring lots of people, I really want to make sure, obviously, there's equity in what we're building and where we're building it, but there's equity in who gets to participate in this new industry. And I think about that a lot in making sure that people realize, I'm not a unicorn. Other people can come do this and be a CEO if you're an Indian female or whoever you are, but also making sure that we're thinking about diverse perspectives from the beginning of this industry.

So those are the kind of things that percolate my mind and making sure that I'm taking the steps to help promote that. I know you are married and have two kids. And another question that I ask, our guests of all genders, is what is it like in your case being a partner and a parent and a CEO all at the same time? and what advice would you give to people that are in that same position? Certainly it's a juggling act. It certainly requires a lot of negotiation with various members of the family at different times. But I think it's understanding that there'll be ebb and flow. And I think I've known this even before I was a CEO.

You know, there's going to be periods where you're really busy and you can't focus on, you know, spending a lot of time with your family, but there'll be times when you have more leeway. And so really remembering those moments when you're, you know, stressed out and you're really focused on work that you'll make the time when you have a little bit of a leeway. And so thinking about more as seasons as opposed to, you know, thinking that's going to be like that way forever. I know today, TaraWatt has about 22 people on the team and you've, yeah, signed several customers across sites in 18 states. If Terawatt succeeds, what does the company look like in a decade and what does the electrification of? And what does the

electrification of medium and heavy-duty transportation and fleets look like? Well, we have to be successful because it is critical for so many reasons. So I hope that, you know, in a decade, we have dozens, hundreds of sites all across the U.S., maybe global, where, you know, fleets are coming and really effectively charging and, you know, having a way to charge that doesn't impact our operations, and it's a really great service that they love. That's the vision. It is a giant portfolio of these charging hubs.

It sounds maybe crazy, but really that is the need that's out there if we truly electrify all transport across the world. So that is my hope. I think we're on a good trajectory to get there. I think more broadly, I think there'll be lots of solutions out there for charging. And so I hope that we have figured all of that out again because it's critical to solve this electrification challenge. we have. Let's move into our high voltage round. As you know, quick questions, quick answers,

quick like a few seconds or a few words. Starting with, Neha, if you were an animal, what animal would you be? And why? An elephant. My maiden name actually had the same letters as elephant. And I love that they have long-term great memories, something that I pride myself on. I love it. That's my favorite, too. And they're matriarchal. There's so many things to love. Yes, exactly. What inspires you? I think that we have a lot of opportunity to make change and do great things for the environment. And that's what keeps me going every day. If you had to start a new career tomorrow, what would it be? I love the deep technology, and there's so many cool things happening.

And maybe it's not totally different, but some of the battery technologies that are coming out would be really fun to get super detailed and focused on one aspect of that. Definitely. Other than yourself, to whom do you attribute your success? My parents. Tell me about a specific time that you failed. I do think when I got to college, it was challenging to get to that really intense level of having to study so much harder than you do in high school. And it took me a while to get the hang of it. So my first couple of semesters might have been a little more challenging than I would have liked.

What is the best investment you've ever made? My relationship with my husband. He's my best supporter and definitely critical to everything I do. Oh, I love it. What animal would he be? Oh, gosh. Something gentle and kind and nice. I don't know what animal that is, but an animal like that.

Love it. What's something that you thought was true that you no longer believe? I think what we talked about earlier, that you have to be at a really big company to make a big impact. Who has had the biggest influence on your life and work and why? My dad. Because I'm almost exactly like him. He must be cool. What is your best trait?

I can flex into lots of different roles and topics pretty easily. What is your worst trait? I'm very impatient. If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be? I think that oftentimes, especially today, people see things as like a very distributive, zero-sum game. And I think it's, you know, I used to teach negotiations. And you expand the pie. Like, we should think about ways to expand the pie.

If there was just one person who was going to hear this podcast, who would you want it to be? My kids, two of them maybe. Finish these sentences for me. Companies fail because they don't move fast enough. If you really knew me, you would know. Pretty goofy. I love it. I love it.

As somebody who also identifies as goofy, but I don't think anyone would think that of me unless you really know me. Yeah. I resonate. Success is. addressing this really big challenge we have to address the climate. If I could have done one thing differently, I would have... I would have taken a gap year, maybe to be a ski bump. No, I mean, there's always different things that you can do,

but your path is your path, and that makes you who you are, so it's hard to say what that would be. Totally agree. If the world knew me for one thing, it would be... Being able to drive really elegant, nice solutions, for really big problems. I'm most proud of. My family.

Last question. To build a successful startup, what it takes is... Grit, perseverance, and just wanting to do it with every bone in your body. Wow. What a way to end. Neha, I am so grateful that you are doing what you're doing and that you took this leap into entrepreneurship, given everything you've done.

I can't imagine a person who's better positioned to make this company a success. So honored to know you and really grateful for you for sharing your story. Thank you, Emily. Neha Palmer is the CEO of TerraWatt Infrastructure. Join us for new stories each month of founders who are building our climate positive future, their upbringings, their risks, their failures, and their breakthroughs that are transforming our world. I want to thank our exclusive What It Takes sponsor, BakerBots.

To scale your clean energy business faster, reach out to their global team of lawyers. Visit bakerbots.com. What It Takes is produced by BaxterSports. Powerhouse with support from PostScript Media. Powerhouse works with global corporations to help them find and engage with startups that have the technology that they're looking for. Powerhouse Ventures backs entrepreneurs building the digital infrastructure for rapid decarbonization.

You can learn more at powerhouse.fund. That's powerhouse.fund. Follow us on Twitter at Join Powerhouse. And you can follow me at Emily Kirsch. If you enjoyed this show, I would love it if you gave us a rating or review on Apple or Spotify. we read and really enjoy receiving them, or send this episode to a friend or colleague who you think would enjoy it.

Our executive editor is Stephen Lacey. Dalvin Abawaji, Anne Bailey, and Sam Wolforth help produce this episode. Sean Marquand and Greg Ville-Frank are our engineers. I'm Emily Kirsch. This is What It Takes.