The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Andrew Bittner, CEO of Home DAO Interview

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Andrew Bittner, CEO of Home DAO Interview Thehomedao.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here we've got an amazing guest who's going to enlighten your mind, broaden

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People love that thing. Things crazy over there. Anyway, guys, today we have another amazing gentleman and CEO on the show. Adam Bittner is on the show with us. He is the CEO of HomeDow, and he is a successful and innovative entrepreneur in the energy stability and financial space. Andrew is currently the CEO and founder of Guarantee Clean Energy, leading Ohio in a clean energy revolution. Andrew's newest adventure has led him to become the CEO of Homedow, an innovative utility company we'll be talking about today, whose mission is giving the power back to the people. It is evident that Andrew

believes in abundance. He believes that this entire world already has all the tools, technology, people, and processes to make the changes we really want as a society. His purpose in building and his purpose in business is to help to connect all the dots and apply this principle of abundance to the energy efficiency and renewables field and fundamentally change the strategy in the world around energy use and function, which is probably important now if you've seen gas prices. Welcome to the show, Andrew. How are you? It's great to be here, Chris. Doing real well this morning. Thank you. There you go. And give us your dot com so people can find you on the interwebs, please.

You got it. It's thehomedow.com. So Dow is spelled D-A-O. D-A-O.com. There you go. And what is Home Dow? What spelled D-A-O. DAO.com. There you go. And what is HomeDAO? What does DAO refer to? Yeah, so a DAO is this new thing that's happening in the Web3 and cryptocurrency and blockchain space. So a DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Oh, wow. So what that really means is that I'm not the actual CEO. That means I've had a business develop and everybody is part of this. The

whole point of what we're starting with our non-utility company here is to decentralize the ability for everyone to own power. You no longer have to be a king or be a millionaire to be able to get into energy infrastructure business. This is the beautiful thing about our new decentralized world. Decentralized organizations are essentially the evolution of companies so that you no longer have to have these traditional structures and you really can have something owned by a multitude of people. And it's an unbelievable invention. We're at the cutting edge of it. And I think humanity is going to be extremely thankful 100 years from now that some really intelligent people have put all this stuff together for us. Oh, wow. That's wild. So what does HomeDAO do? So our function in the DAO world, in the Web3 world, is to take something that is utility monopolies and break that up and decentralize that and give access to everyday people to get into the renewables world and decentralize our basic needs.

So HomeDAO's major function is to take care of planet Earth. That's the home in the DAO. You can picture in our logo, the O is planet Earth. And we actually worked with NASA, Chris, to get the most beautiful picture of Earth. And we said, what's the most beautiful picture that has ever been taken? And they knew exactly which one. They call it the Blue Marvel Sphere. So we worked with NASA to get them to open up the licensing for us to be able to use that in our logo. They overwhelmingly approved that and sent that over

to us and allowed us to do that. So our goal is truly, though, always planet focused, but in all reality, we're sustainability people. So it's truly about how do you find profit? How do you build something for the planet and for people to where that triple bottom line comes into play? And we really can build something beautiful that is good for all of those, which kind of enables this emergence of something greater to come out of the middle and out of the in-between. We've known about the law of three for a long time as human beings. So we are playing on that abundant principle and truly building out this organization to be able to drive down the cost of building renewables, but also make it way

more feasible for developers and people who want to build sustainable things, whether that be clean energy or sustainable farms for communities, anything that fits in the sustainability bucket. We want to hear about it and figure out how to help them make it come to reality and actually build it on planet Earth. Okay. So this has a little bit of aspect in, well, and aspects in the blockchain and NFT and token and stuff. But let's talk about what sort of renewal energy is the focus of what you guys are doing? Is it putting up solar panels or what sort of, is there a specific thing to the renewable energy? Renewable energy in general, but certainly right now in the marketplace, the things that are most financially viable are solar, wind, and hydro. So we are

definitely working with projects that can go and make this work for communities. So for example, this morning I was on the phone with the school district in Michigan. We're looking at putting a $20 million solar array up for their school district. And it is literally cheaper for them to purchase their power from their own power plant and build the entire thing than it is to use their existing utility monopoly structure. And so that's the, I think, most exciting about this industry today. 12 years ago when I got started in it, it was mostly me and a bunch of tree huggers. And I love them because they were so interested in it. And obviously that's a lot of where my heart is. But in reality, we had to make sure that when we rolled this out, that it had to be good for both tree huggers and for people that are hugging the green in their wallet. I'd say two or three years, Chris, to where overwhelmingly at any size scale over a $2

million infrastructure project, clean energy is literally cheaper than the grid. So now it's all about how do we band together all these people to streamline the resources to make it faster, more efficient, more effective. And the biggest barrier was funding mechanisms. And so that's where HomeDAO has really placed a lot of our emphasis. We brought on some of the best bankers in the country. We brought on some of the best renewables people that understand banking in the country. They're working together with us on our DAO. And then you bring in this entire area of blockchain and what's happened over the last two years in decentralized finance, or what's called the DeFi movement.

And you combine all of these unbelievable things that have happened in timing. And all of a sudden, you start to realize that there's a pretty beautiful picture of what the future could be if we could get blockchain and Web3 to work with renewable energy and DeFi and new understandings of funding mechanisms. And that's really what we've done is connecting all those dots on Dow. And so for those people that are worried about climate or worried about, you know, hey, it looks like we're never going to be able to solve this problem. As the CEO of a private company and as head of business development here at Dow,

I can tell you that this is the largest single change I've ever seen in climate in my 12 years in the industry. From here on out, it's just built. I think we've got everything in place. Yeah. I mean, it's scary what's going on with the climate. We recently saw the flooding in Yellowstone. There's like 2,000 cows that died in Kansas from the heat wave. It's kind of crazy

what's going on right now. And of course, energy prices around the world are going up. It doesn't help with the Russian war. For those of you who are wondering what I'm talking about 10 years from now, if you're watching this video, but in 2022, we got a lot of energy problems and a lot of lakes that are empty. I mean, I've lived in Las Vegas for 20 years, seeing the Lake Mead empty. You know, there's a lot of environmental stuff going on. So you guys are the first ever DAO with a DeFi platform backing tokens. You guys are going to be tokens and I think some NFT stuff. Tell us more about that and how it works.

Yeah, so we are the first to ever back our tokens by real world renewable energy assets. So that is one of our claim to fame is that our goal is really to bridge this real world to the crypto world. For a long time, cryptocurrency has been all about speculation and people have been investing in dog coins and looking at all kinds of different memes that have popped up in the form of coins. And although we're huge fans of the OG stuff like Bitcoin and Ethereum, realistically from our development side, we want to legitimize blockchain. We want to legitimize Web3. And the reason that we came to this space is for the utility of it.

It's for the transparency of it, is to decentralize it and give it back to the people. This is not in any way, shape or form about making a quick buck. Our entire process is about how do we find the most efficiency? How do we bring real world assets to this marketplace and streamline that? And so that's always been our goal, and we want to last 100,000 years. So you build differently when you're building to last. And we think by backing tokens with real-world assets, that is the game changer that I think also will help the entire blockchain and Web3 market change over and be legitimized by the everyday people.

Because that's where this needs to go for it to all work for everybody. And my dad is in his late 60s. He doesn't care if his son is in some cryptocurrency, but he does care if he can understand it and he can say, oh, wait a minute. So your cryptocurrency is actually backed by things that I can see in the real world, like a giant solar array that produces energy and produces revenue. That makes sense. I can get behind that. So I noticed you have a Discord on your site, too too for people to join so they can follow the movement. Is that correct?

Yeah, we do. And we'd love for people to come on. And we've found so many passionate people in the clean energy, renewable, sustainability, and climate change spaces, and just business development. I mean, if you're a smart business development person and you're connecting the dots at the same time as you're hearing this going, oh my gosh, this is the intersection of renewable energy, which is a trillion dollar business. We completely change over the grid. This is WEMP3, which is one of the most exciting spaces in business development growth. And then triple bottom line that fits with ESG. I mean, right now we're

talking about three of the largest sectors that people realize they need to pay attention to. So if you're that person all the way down to an inventor who has an amazing energy technology that you've never been able to get out because you thought that big oil was just going to buy up the patent. Guess what, guys? There's a new way to do things. That's the other part of this as well, too. So hop on our Discord, start a discussion, and let's start figuring out in grassroots efforts how to change the world.

There you go. So you guys are going to be launching, and people can sign up for the news on your website here. You guys are going to close that off and there's only going to be 1,111 of these NFTs go out. And so it's a very exclusive drop and we're working with a Dutch artist named Rulika. And I've personally been working with Rulika now for the last two months in putting together this collection. And she has done an absolutely fantastic job. She's a traditional artist. We wanted to feature her talent as she was going through this transition from the real world to bridging into the digital world, because her story

is much like our story as the DAO. We're bridging real world assets to the digital world. And she's always worked on canvas and paint. And so she was transitioning to become a digital artist. And she's just an amazing story. I hope so many people get a chance to meet her. You get a chance to follow her and you can catch her through our discord, through our telegram, through our Twitter is the easiest place. And and actually just put up an awesome video today from her and just an amazing story and an amazing artist that we are so excited to feature but the collection that she's built is stunning she took 11 great people that we felt were just super fundamental to the building blocks of what enabled HomeDAO to exist. And so this is people like Satoshi Nakamoto, who's our decentralized creator of Bitcoin,

to people like Elon Musk that have really furthered sustainability in people's mindsets today so that people have this open mindset to it because before it wasn't necessarily that way but then also people like leonardo da vinci who were trying to come up with efficient energy solutions way back in his day and so there's so many cool people that are part of this collection and she was able to bring out the essence of these people in this digital art. So this is way more than pixelated JPEGs. That's not what we wanted our collection to be. We wanted it to really be this celebration of an artist, celebration of digital art.

And I think Riluka just absolutely just blew us away with her talent. So for the art itself, let alone all the OG stuff that you get for being part of our community, this is a really cool collection to be a part of. There you go. And then I noticed on your website here, I'm looking through this as we go, the HomeDAO difference. The HomeDAO. I've got to get used to saying that.

It says you guys have over $200 million worth of projects ready to go and stuff, which makes you different than most DAOs. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, so again, this is our passion, right? So we didn't want to just come to Web3 and say, hey, we have this great idea. Support us and maybe we'll use all your money wisely and maybe we'll create something a few years from now. When we came to Web3, we wanted it to be about real world functionality

and utility. And let's put it to work right away. So we have been building this DAO for five years before we launched it. So the last five years, this has been a group of people that truly care about this mission. And we've been collecting developers that truly wanted to make a change, not only to their bottom line, but also for people and for the planet, artists, business development, people, advisors, mayors, superintendents of schools. I mean, this is an amazing collection of people that truly just care. And so we have worked together with cities, we've worked together with school districts, and we're bringing $200 million worth of signed agreements from municipal type great credits. So these are either like cities or school districts or very stable clients that have committed to using the clean energy that we're able to build through this infrastructure. And so this is the real deal. This is no ideas. This is idea meets let's go do it and let's go do it as soon as possible. And so in your pipeline, you have the ability to work with developers,

projects that are already in place, developers, of course, being on future infrastructure projects. And let's go into some of your background or origin story that gives people an idea that you've been working in this space for quite a long time. Tell us your origin story, if you would, or give us a compact version of it. Yeah, I'll try to do that in a compact way. So I grew up in a really tiny town of Westfield Center, Ohio. There's about 900 people at night, and then there's about 4,000 people during the day because one of the larger insurance companies in Ohio was in my hometown. And so from the very beginning, both my parents who worked for Westfield Group Insurance taught me everything that there is to

know about backing assets with security, which is insurance. And that if you could back something with a guaranteed insurance policy, then that built fundamental trust in the financial sector. And so having that mindset from age like three to 18, when I lived with them over and over again, insurance safety planning, insurance safety planning, I was able to take that then into the financial world and then into the energy. So out of school, I was a broadcast major, but then found my real love was understanding the financial world. But I didn't want to be a financial advisor. And so I played with that and really enjoyed it. But I found energy contracts about 12 years ago

and fell in love with the energy world because I didn't realize how much people actually need. And I was love with the energy world because I didn't realize how much people actually utility bills. And I was working with businesses and I remember walking into a supermarket and the supermarket was not that big. It was like a local supermarket in Dayton, Ohio. And their utility bill was $120,000 a month for electricity alone. Holy crap. And I said, oh my God god this is why the cost of milk

is three dollars a gallon you know it doesn't cost hardly that but when you have all this overhead and all these other things that energy is cost it was amazing and then i started working with schools and i didn't realize that the third largest budget behind people and benefits for school districts is energy. And so one of the biggest expenses that we have for anything in our society is this underground hidden tax called electricity and energy. And there's got to be a better way to make that more efficient, make it more effective and lower those costs so that the everyday person

can have a chance to start their own business and succeed and build and do amazing things. And so this understanding of insurance and financial background and trying to drive down energy really was my foundation. And then six years ago, I had an opportunity to convert a business of mine that was, we were one of the first people in the state of Ohio to play with deregulated energy. And as you can imagine, we built an insurance policy and modeled our model after an insurance company. And so I kind of revamped that model again to start a company that worked purely with public entities to serve the public sector of school districts and municipalities called Guaranteed Clean Energy. the incentives, find the most efficient and effective way to help people in their communities reinvest in infrastructure and find ways to do clean energy projects. And so six years ago, when we started doing this, our average project size because of the incentives and programs was like $300,000 total. And today, because of all of the different advancement and sustainability

and the bipartisan infrastructure law that was passed in November, our average project size now went from about $300,000 to $20 million per project. Holy crap. You're talking about that's the difference just in six years of the viability financially for us to be able to recommend projects to our communities. And we only recommend projects to communities that make sense on the ballot sheet first, and also then that are designed to help people in Flannan. And so that shows you that evolution. So if you're listening to this and going, hey, that guy, he's got his head in the clouds and he's talking about sustainability like it's actually possible. I've been in that world. I've seen it. I looked at getting solar five years ago. If you looked at it five years ago, the world is

totally different than it is today. And I think that that's a big part of our mission as well, too, is just letting people realize, Chris, this is actually doable now. And the role of HomeDao now is this transition to make the funding possible. Because that was the other big problem that we had. Once we had all of these $20 million projects, it was like, okay, we can go do that. But the banks are literally sitting on these projects for six to eight months. Wow. And if you're in real estate or you ever develop or pay for construction, you know that six to eight months is just lost money.

You're still paying your people. You're still got equipment. You still have to do all these things. And so that barrier is huge. And we said, if we do this with the home Dow, I think we can get this done in about 14 days. Maybe eventually we could get it down faster. And now we've got it down to 48 hours.

They can turn around a project. So literally talking about from six to nine months before Web3 to being able to do this in 48 days, streamlined, decentralized, all through the home DAP. So wild changes in efficiency. That's welcome to the future. There you go. That sounds amazing. And you guys, you've got the experience from the past in it. It's, you know, adapting to a whole different thing.

People are in the Dow when there's, you said it's decentralized. Is, does everyone share in the income or the profits or something? So we have a structure and because of the current language of the FCC in the United States, I need my attorneys to actually speak about specifically how that's done because it's so challenging in these podcast formats to be able to do that. But in general, when you're talking about a DAO, everything is owned by the community. So when projects are used and built by the community, the community actually has an opportunity then to embrace all of the benefits that happen as they come through. And that's the whole point of this.

The average person is never going to be able to own a utility monopoly, right? You're essentially local elected kings when you get that contract 100 years ago. And we wanted to change that. And so now everyone can be part of that. Everyone gets to be part of that success in every way, including financially, as well as being able to vote, as well as being able to be heard, as well as being able to give feedback and also truly share and embrace an economy. And there's been so much work done recently on circular economies and how we can keep dollars inside of communities. That's a big

thing that we want to do as well. That's awesome, man. Well, this has been pretty insightful. Is there anything we haven't touched on? I've been going to your website and just reading and going through everything. It's a great resource people can take a look at. You know, I think the coolest thing, just talking to people in general and having an opportunity to share some beers with people and talk about the projects is the fact that everyday people now can be part of real change.

And I think that's the biggest thing that's happening with these online communities. And a DAO is nothing more than an online community like a Facebook group, but it has a shared bank account. And that's what makes it so impactful. If you're in an online Facebook group, inevitably you guys have something in common, but inevitably you're also going to start complaining about it because there's nothing you can do. And you're just going to complain about entities outside that are causing all the problems. And DAOs truly enable you to have this shared bank account to go solve the problem with resources. Wow.

And I think that's the coolest thing that's ever happened. Our DAO is all about solving the planetary issue of needing basic power needs, basic food, being able to set yourself apart and take care of yourself. It's 2022, Chris. And a hundred years ago, people were more capable of taking care of their families and themselves than they are today. A hundred years ago, we didn't rely on centralized food, right? We didn't rely on centralized everything. And now today, it's more likely to have a run on a supermarket. Look what happened with paper products during COVID. If that happens with food, how many Americans can take care of themselves?

That happens with electricity. How many people can take care of themselves? We want to help communities so that the communities truly have this ability to join together and take care of themselves. So I think it's just one of the most amazing innovations in people being able to truly be autonomous and be able to be responsible and accountable for their very own community. So it's a whole new development of an opportunity to be responsible locally. There you go. And it's the future.

It's on Bitcoin, NFTs, and the Web3. So that's very exciting. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs and learn more about you guys. And what's the best way to reach out to you and interact with you, whether they're a consumer or whether they're someone who's looking to get solar, you know, getting involved in the projects? Give us some of that data. Yeah, the easiest way right now for everybody to get in contact with our 20 plus team members

is through our website. So it's thehomedow.com. We've got a really easy contact portal there. Actually check it. It goes to human beings. We actually care. So you can write as much of your story as you'd like through there. And then you'll contact our team directly. You can

find out all about our NFT launch right off of our website as well. And then most of our broadcasting is done through Twitter. So that's at the home Dow on Twitter. And we'd love to engage with conversations. We'd love to talk to you about any crazy, fun, sustainable ideas that you may have. And you definitely get involved and get in on the whitelist. This is going to be, we have a legit chance to be one of the largest utility entities in the world.

And this is the first time people have ever had an opportunity to be part of our organization. So we're just now launching. You can be one of the first thousand OG members of this organization right now. So it is an amazing time to pick up an NFT and be part of our community and prove that you were here. It's also just an amazing time to be sharing direction and ideas for something this new

because we're listening and we want to make sure that we're representing those communities that we're trying to serve. There you go. There you go. Well, it's been wonderful to have you on the show. We really appreciate it, Andrew. Thank you for coming on. Chris, hopefully your audience has learned something here and, you know, it's a pleasure. You ask such great questions, provide such an amazing outlet for people to learn about some new and innovative things. So love your podcast and really appreciate you having us on. Thank you. Thank you very much.

We certainly appreciate it as well. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. Go to youtube.com, 4ChessChrisVoss. Go to all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and those crazy places the kids are playing. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.