964: Why the Best Energy Technology Doesn't Always Win | Sass Peress

0:00Suncast is proudly brought to you by CPS Americas. You go into a room and say, define sustainable to 30 people you'll get 30 answers. You say the same thing of the word green, green energy. What does that mean? I have plastic in my solar panel. I have cadmium in my cadmium and tellerite solar panels from first solar what is green about that. I have lithium in the batteries in my Tesla that had to be replaced after year 6. We have to replace the tires much more often on EV because the weight and the rubber shredding torque. So the key thing is that you contextualize properly and then you can properly measure. And then you can be more truthful in your claim. And the more truthful you are, the more people will stick with you. That is very important lesson for all entrepreneurs, particularly in energy. Hey, solar warriors, welcome back to Suncast. If you are new here, I want to say thank you for giving us the one non-renewable resource

1:00you've got. Of course, that's your time. The currency of the modern era is attention I intend to earn all of yours for the next 60 minutes. Give me 60 minutes. I promise we'll give you an ROI on this investment today. You know, there are two kinds of people, especially in the early days of clean energy. Those who invent technology and those who know how to tell whether or not it's going to matter, we call them those who commercialize technology. It's rare to find an overlap of people who can invent and commercialize. But today's guest has spent four decades doing exactly that, identifying the opportunities and picking the lanes where things can become commercialized. Sassaperas has lived through almost every major chapter of modern solar, from consumer solar products in the late 80s and 90s to solar manufacturing, EV infrastructure, CNI, commercial solar, energy storage. Now some of the newest technologies emerging to serve AI Data Center's another critical

2:03infrastructure. What fascinated me most about my conversation with Sass is not any particular product that Sass invented or helped to bring to market. But the framework that over the course of his career, he has developed for separating technologies that merely get you excited from those that actually can change markets. If you've ever wondered why some brilliant ideas become billion dollar businesses while others quietly disappear, I think you're going to really enjoy today's conversation. So let's tune in to another powerful conversation here on Soundcast. Sassaperas welcome to the show, my friend. It's great to see you. Nice to see you too, Nico. You've spent four decades commercializing energy technologies. Can you look back over that time period, what patterns have you learned about kind of recognizing technologies that are really ready for prime time? So I would qualify early stage technologies as bleaters and leaders. And if you look at what Apple does, they never want to be a bleater.

3:09They're actually never the first to invent a technology that gets used in their phones. They like to be second because they like the first to play the cost of bleeding. And all the learnings that you have to go through when you're first in the market is a lot of learnings about your organization, about your technology, about the applications, about the market, about the bankability, for example, in the energy industry. So you have to go through all these learning curves. And if you're not used to it, it's going to be very painful. And it's going to separate the voice and the men as we like to say or the girls from the women. And it's going to give you an appreciation for those that make it. And those that make it have to be tenacious, they have to be patient. They have to be wise in the council that they listen to. And they just have to go and stay true to their to their purpose. So I think that I've come across a lot of different companies created some myself.

4:13And you talked about four decades. My first venture in solar was in 1988. I found a solar ventilator at a hardware show in Chicago. And I said, what the hell is that? And they said solar ventilator. And the word solar just snapped. The rest of the day, the rest of the show, I could only think of that. I came back to them and said, wow, I think you found your Canadian distributor. Because that's all I was trying to be. Yeah. And from that, I learned to distinguish fiction from truth. Okay. Because over time, I realized that claims are packaging. Huh. Okay. Claims are what you want to tell people. Claims are like the first date. You know, you have three seconds in a retail store to understand what the packaging is selling you. That's the average time. And that's if you don't have kids tugging at your pants. You have more on the internet because you can take your time and read it.

5:16And that's been a great boon for solar because there's a lot of demystification that has to occur before you really understand what you're buying. And that's critical when you're launching a new technology that you think about. And this is the difference between the great salesman I've met and the okay salesman I've met or salespeople. The great ones think about the outcome they want to target. What is the outcome that you and I together want to reach? Not the pain you're trying to solve. And I'll give you a body analogy. You can have pain here, but that's not the cause of it. Yeah. That's not really what you need to solve. Because it'll come back as long as you're not taking ad filler, tonne on or any other other painkillers, which you want to get to is the root cause. And when you get to the root cause, you get to truth. So is the root cause too much storage, bad storage, too much generation, not enough generation, sporadic generation.

6:17Right. When you dig deeper than the surface, you're going to find truth. And when you get truth, you're going to buy the right product and you're even going to sell the right product. You know, because selling Mirage is unfortunately is what a lot of people did in solar over the past 40 years that I've learned. Yeah. I would agree. We were talking earlier about, we've had some conversations about some of the technologies that we've encountered together. And I think about as you were kind of going through packaging and outcomes, I think about some of the early technology attempts. You know, there's concentrating PV, there's sort of flexible PV, SIGs and other thin film technologies. I'd love to hear your thoughts on some of the early technology ideas that you came across that were brilliant, but too early. Well, solar on flexible thin film, stainless steel.

7:18Right. A company called Global Solar in 2003. The Aluminum Robert went and I started developing solar charges for the Marines. And they were jumping out of the planes with these heavy batteries and every ounce counts when you're jumping out of a plane to be mobile to be quick. So we helped them reduce the number of batteries they had to carry by having daytime charging wherever their home base was behind enemy lines. That was a great technology. But as we were talking before, energy picked up all of those flexible technologies. They did. And one swoop because they thought that's where it's going to be. The reality is this Columbia jacket was actually worn 22 years, 23 years ago, not far from where I'm sitting right now in a ski hill. And I was charging a motor roll of phone and freaking people out because I have panels on the back made by Global Solar. Yeah. That's a cool application. Yeah.

8:19Yeah, even that was in the 90s, right? Is what you're early 2000s? That was early 2000s. Yes. I remember when I was just getting into the solar industry around that time that all of the solar backpacks and they were talking about how like clothes were going to have solar embedded in them, right? Like kind of like what you're demonstrating with this jacket. Yeah, that's a great, I think that's a great example of like brilliant application and technology. Too early. And one of the reasons it was too early was simply the application of it. Not only was the efficiency too low, I'd love to hear your perspective on this, but those electrons have to go somewhere to be useful. And yeah, and in the early 2000s battery technology was abysmal. So in the early 2000s with the radio shack, if you remember the radio shack, we launched the ice sun in all of their stores and sold a quarter million units because it had a battery pack attached with 10 nickel metal batteries that were charging whenever you open

9:22the clamshell charger and expose the sun. That was a great example of an application. We got it wrong the first time. So we were bleaters the first time and then we adjusted because the first time we were going after travelers. Yeah. I traveled on a plane after 9.11 and I had this unit with me and people were kind of nervous and going, what is that? I'm saying, well, it's a solar charger because I had suction comes to the window. Yeah. So I could actually charge the batteries like in the car or on an airplane. An airplane. That's awesome. And the flight attendant came to me and said, you're making some people nervous in the plane. Could you put that away? I said, I'll put it away, but it doesn't make a difference where it is. Yeah. But I understood that it's all contextual. So I was traveling with this unit on a business trip around the world and I got home and I said to my development team, we're not selling to travelers. What do you mean?

10:22We're selling to boaters and campers and people in townships. People in townships. So we went to the World Sustainable Summit in 2002 in Johannesburg. Yeah. And we sold them to the Voda Common South Africa for the townships because people were stealing copper on the hard lines. The minute it went up, so it went up in the morning and got stolen by the afternoon because it was out of value. So they started distributing this product because it's solved. It gave people an outcome, which was what? A phone charge. Yeah. And all they wanted to do was get a phone charge because 97% of Africans had a mobile phone in 2002. Right. We weren't near that in North America. Nope. Yeah. And they were text messaging as a primary form of inter-personal communication. Correct. Very correct. Yeah. I was in Spain in 2001, in Madrid and had exactly that experience in Spain. I'm amazed to hear that a year later.

11:24I mean, it makes, it stands to a reason. But I came back from six months in Spain and I had a flip phone from Erickson and all my friends were like, where'd you get that? A 268? I think so. Yeah. So I had. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Most, I mean, a lot of people listening might not even remember Erickson as a phone brand. You have so many fun stories. And some of the things that, like threads I want to pull are around that entrepreneurial spirit. The first, and I'll come back to the others is sort of where did that come from. I know that you came from an entrepreneurial family. Yes. Can you talk about that and the lessons learned from the environment you were surrounded in as a child on how you evaluate business? So it's amazing that you asked me this question because just over a year ago, my second son I have four kids, Justin, quoted the fact that he came from an entrepreneurial family

12:29to get into the gaming industry in the way that he has. Okay. And that's a fact is that your environment affects what you're taken by as Moses to your subconscious and then drives you in ways you don't understand. So seeing my dad working on Saturday mornings and me sleeping on the desk next to his in his office because I was a young kid with nap needs at that time. I was still that you have. Do you have this kid in my family? Keep going. I get like that, but that is yes. That was the opportunity I had to spend time with him. And so by a Moses or to into the subconscious, I understood the meaning of commitment to a purpose. And my father was in the automotive business back in Baghdad because he was born in Baghdad. He moved to Canada in 1958 and started a business in 1959 or 60 and hit the ground running. And that led to an enterprising atmosphere where you understood the meaning of sacrifice.

13:33And you understood the meaning of hard work. And I would credit both my parents with the meaning of commitment. It's their married 67 years. My dad's 95. My mom's 92. They're both alive. God bless. What a blessing. They showed me tenacity. So maybe to a maybe to a point of stubbornness in some cases, because there was something in me that had to overperform. And I won't get into that, but I would say that tenacity is definitely something you want to think of until such time as you need to pivot. Yeah. They will come times in a startup where it's led by engineering. Okay. So engineering focus, focus, focus, engineer. And then you get into a sales mode. Because now you've developed your product, but you're not going to turn on a switch and go and get sales. It's a cultural shift. And you have to be led by professional people that have been selling or have the experience

14:33or understanding of the cadence of speech, the manner to approach, etc., etc. Like I said, you can be an okay salesperson and sell to pains. What is the pain I'm solving? Or you can be a great a good salesman and sell to feelings. How do you feel in my company? That's your brand. Or you can be a great salesperson and sell to outcomes. So you become aspirational. My eldest son is a engineering sales specialist. And I say to him, don't talk about the pains you're solving. Talk about where they want to go and walk the journey with them. So they need a solution by what date? Walk it back. This is when you got a designed inter-system. This is when you got a specket. This is when you got to order it. This is when you got to make it. This is when we got to ship it. So all those steps are done collaboratively. And so you're walking a journey. You don't have to have clients. You have partners.

15:34Similarly, those kinds of reverse engineering goals work in life the way they work in business. I want to achieve this goal by this period in my life. Let's walk it back. Am I on track? Am I on milestones going to get me there? When you're looking at the solar market, you have to ask who is the partner you can really trust for the long haul. That's why I hope you'll take a closer look at CPS America and see how they are shaping the industry's next chapter. The evidence is clear. Woodback has confirmed them as the number one market leader for string inverters in the US for eight straight years. That's nearly a decade of sustained dominance proving their reliability and cost leadership are unmatched. But they're not just resting on their inverter success. They've extended their leadership into energy storage. In fact, their fully integrated Gonzo ESS is the best in class platform for C&I, built

16:34for maximum simplicity and revenue generation. But the real game changer is their service. Back by one of the top rated support teams in the industry, you're equipped with premium hardware and the people who make sure your projects stay on track season after season. Ready to partner with the industry's most trusted provider? Visit suncast.media-forward-slash-cps or call 855-584-7168. Don't settle to CPS, reliability you can count on. Yeah, when you said that tenacity is something that's useful until you need to pivot, that really resonates for me. I'm probably that engineer who, or not engineer, probably that entrepreneur who has no lack of tenacity, but no stomach for pivot. There's like a, I think something I was listening to recently said, real entrepreneurs are, they

17:34are emotionless about the need to turn a corner and change direction. They recognize that the sooner you do it, the faster you'll get to the destination. Don't fall in love with your product. Yeah. Jolhe if it's taught me that in Chicago, actually, he was one of my reps. Don't fall in love with your product. That's similar to love people use things. You hear people say, I love my car. Don't love your car. If what it gives, the feeling that you and your partner have going to wherever you're going to, those romantic dinners, that's what your car is good for. It may enhance that feeling, but don't fall in love with things. Use things, love people. Sass, the other thread that I wanted to pull is, as I'm thinking about it, as an entrepreneur, just hearing some of the, you're, I don't know, classic, but like you are an immigrant success story, right? Next generation, Canadian immigrant parents coming from, you know, from the breadth basket

18:36of the world, but also moving to looking for better opportunity. How did you mobilize capital around your early ideas? And like you're talking about going to Johannesburg. Like, I've always wanted to go to Johannesburg and haven't been able to figure out at the moment, like just pulling my shield down a minute, but like I can't afford to go to Johannesburg on a business trip unless, unless I've got someone paying for it at the moment, you know? And either you have the capital to believe in your dream and you can take it forward, or you have to go raise other people's money, which is going to be the most expensive money you can use. Yes. And so I was blessed. I had a property, a piece of property. When I started my first company, I see Peace Solar in 1988. I had a piece of property. And I had a girlfriend that had her own income. So I wasn't, I didn't have dependence. I had myself and my business as a dependent. So I mortgaged myself.

19:37And I believed in the dream of solar very young, but then I became a bit of a disbeliever, a bit of a cynic, because it was claiming to cool the car. And I said to the manufacturer, you don't quite cool the car. He goes, well, we make it cooler by removing some of the heat. Ah. OK. So now we get into the unity of truth statement. What is the truth in solar? And I started understanding the first trade show in 1989 that I went to and every booth was telling me of X percent more efficiency. And I said, what does that really mean? Well, we can, we can turn more photons, photons, the more electron into more electrons than the next guy. Right. Under what condition? So again, it was not contextualized. It was a perfect situation. This is what I do. This is what the next guy does. Next guy, next guy, everyone was bettering the next guy by half a percent and feeling

20:41proud about that. And I said, how do you make money? How do you make money at this? Because I came from an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur environment that actually had success, financial success as this major metric. And that's something that's shifted over my time as well. And I would say that like Tony Robbins a bit focused on impact. What impact are you having on the people that are joining you on this journey? For example, an entrepreneur is going to take a family through this kind of a journey. Yeah. They really ready for it to the understand what it means to come home some days and you're thrilled because you had a successful sale. And next day is while you don't know how you're going to pay the expenses of the kids schooling the day after that. And so you have to learn to live with uncertainty. And not everyone is cut out for that. An entrepreneur, a special insolver with so many government regulations affecting the

21:41process has to live with uncertainty. And that is the ability to put it into the right place and say, this is the uncertainty of the day. How am I dealing with it? I think that solar has gone through a lot of shifts. I remember when there was a first grid tie program in Ontario and they were paying 80 Canadian cents. It was about 60-ish American. Yeah. Or in the Ontario feed-in program was insane. The feed-in program was insane. They're paying 80 cents for 20 years. Was that sustainable or was that sustainable? Then we get into the version of what do you mean by sustainable? Right? Because sustainable used to mean durable. Constant, stable. Then we turn it into this word which is really a mishmash because nobody can really define it. Right? You go into a room and say, define sustainable to 30 people, you'll get 30 answers.

22:44Yep. Then you say the same thing of the word green. Green energy. What does that mean? I have plastic in my solar panel. I have cadmium in my cadmium and tell the right solar panels from first solar what is green about that. I have lithium in the batteries in my Tesla that had to be replaced after year six. I'm now in your 11. You have cobalt in those batteries that was mined probably by 12 year olds. You have to replace it. Is that sustainable? There you go. You have to replace the tires much more often on EE because the weight. Correct. How is that? Well, and the rubber shredding torque. If you want to apply that, sure, you're at a 60 and a half seconds and it still does it. So the key thing is that you contextualize properly and then you can properly measure. And then you can be more truthful in your claim. And the more truthful you are, the more people will stick with you. That is very important lesson for all entrepreneurs, particularly in energy.

23:47Be truthful about your delivery under what condition? If it's plus 50 Celsius, plus 110 Fahrenheit, are you delivering the same amount of power? Uh-huh. Not really because solar panels hate heat, but they like light. Right? And they have that dichotomy of loving light but hating heat. When do you have a lot of light but no heat? Antarctica. Sometimes. 24 hours a day until there's until it's one hour a day. Right. So sometimes only, right? And so you use sporadic in the delivery of power. And that's when storage came into play and became more and more important. Right. So that a gasoline fuel gallon, burn it, go, store it, don't go. It does both. So it has that advantage, right? Yeah. So what I learned in energy is you can never out price the value to the user of what you're offering. So you have to use that as your prime metric.

24:50When you're saying, oh, I can create 5%, 10% whatever, when, where, how, why ask all those questions and then you get to truth. So it's going deeper than the surface. It's really understanding the user's outcome. What is it they're trying to achieve? Data centers are a perfect example. I think you mentioned, but we'll get into that when you're ready. But they're relevant now. They're actually competing with solar for farmland. That's right. Yeah. And they're also, and they have an incredibly elastic demand price. Their price sensitivity is virtually infinite elasticity. But they've gotten so cheap. They've gotten really cheap. So now they're cheaper powered than a lot of other means. The challenge is land. Yeah. But they'll pay what I mean is they'll pay $100,000 a kilowatt hour for it.

25:53They don't care because they get paid $1 million a kilowatt hour for what they deliver. I want to get into business models a bit. Your first solar venture was the attic fan or the solar ventilator. And you essentially said to them, you found your Canadian distributor. So from distributorship to product creation to when you and I met, you were running the latest version of I-SUN, which became a publicly traded company. Could you talk about the course of exploring various business models to deploy clean electrons and what you've learned about what business models work or how, as an entrepreneur, you thought about the power of the pivot in that regard? Well it comes back to the statement, don't fall in love with your technology. So sometimes I hear people introduce their company and they start with the benefits of their technology. That's not what the recipient cares about.

26:55So there's two stages you have to go through before you get to that. The confidence and the trust and their two separate things. Once you get through trust, so they get to know you through your story and they go, oh, this is somebody I can trust. When you start talking about the outcomes that you want to generate together, oh, the generate confidence because you understand me. You understand what I'm trying to get done. So it also talks about, well, the difference between success and impact. And what is the difference between success and impact? It's how you measure the outcome and what outcome you're going after. And so most recently, I'm looking more to impact because from impact, you definitely will find success. But from success, short term, you won't necessarily find impact for a long time. So you have to be very careful in understanding your life, your company's life, where you want to position it, and how it is vis-a-vis the industry.

27:56And the example of Supercab's versus Lithium ion is perfect because we started with a metric called kilowatt hour. Who gives a crap? Again, that should become a t-shirt. Who gives a crap? Because you know you got to degrade it. It's certain temperature, certain rate of cycling, certain number of events. You really have to capture the truth of that energy storage device. And what I think Western other companies are trying to do is say, wait a minute, hold on a second. Under different conditions, that's not the right technology. What do you mean? Well, you want to cycle it more than once a day. Can't use the lithium ion. You want to avoid fires like mass landing? Can't use the lithium ion. Or if you do, you have to really be careful and have a lot of fire suppression, a lot of insurance, restrict the usage, categorize it, place it in the right place, not to close together, not to far apart. So you have to contextualize the need.

28:59It's really about contextualizing the need. And when you find technologies, ensure that you are properly level set on who the user is and what they value. And so you want to match that technology with people value at the right time. And there can be different stages of time. You know, it's like there are five kinds of CEOs across the lifetime of a company. Well, the founder is not necessarily the fixer or the growth. Right. Or the manager. Right. I can only think of four right now. But my point is they're different people. And unless you are able to be a chameleon and shift your entire character and modus operandi, you're not going to allow the company to grow beyond you. You're going to limit the company by your own growth. And that is something to watch out for in the leadership of companies.

29:59You know? Like I said, you get to a stage where you know a sales company that should be led by a sales person whose experience in knowing how to listen while he speaks. I just found it. By the way, while you were talking founder, fixer, manager, operator, stabilizer, or custodian. There you go. That's cool. I actually, I had not heard that, but it's a framework. If folks want to look it up, that was outlined by bolster. So I'll see if I can find it. The five archetypes. That's fascinating. Come back to the question because I think maybe I want to ask it a different way. Over the course of the last four years, what are the types of business models you've explored and why? Like, kind of walk us through, establish for us the breadth of experience or expertise that you have that maybe gives a thread or a through line in your work with solar. So I would say, post four years ago, I was acting as an advisor, a consultant for solar companies on specific kinds of projects.

31:00An example is the ice-sun company that I sold in the US that then went on to win. The third RFP with Volkswagen, I was ever involved. I won the first one back in 2006. I lost the second one in 2019. Then I won the third one. The third one was 1850 solar carports around the world and we won the RFP. That was despite tremendous resistance internally because the company that bought me just wants to stay local in New England. And these solar carports were going to be all across North America. Well, you can't quite do that. And I think Daniel Duce quite well. That's where he and I met. Actually. And we had the same view that if the company want to stay in New England and stay as it was. But if we want to grow it beyond, we had to change the makeup of the company and the people inside it and the target. I think for reality is I got hit by a physical event about two and a half years ago.

32:05And I've had to remake myself since. And the first part of that was very painful. It led to separation and led to a break in the way I was operating. And I found out a lot about myself and this disease that I had inherited. And it's cyclical nature and it's the effect on me was I had to go out and do more than the next person. And so it created this pseudo imposter character that wasn't really who I was but was reactive to the disease that was manifesting itself. So that creates a chasm, a shift in what I want to do. And last year I woke up maybe from a stupor I call it and I said, you know what? I'm going to create an advisory of experienced energy professionals. Yeah. I'm going to bring it under the umbrella of the name of a man I respected tremendously

33:07my deceased father-in-law, 80 isenberg and NASA scientist. And I'm going to call it the 80 group. And in June of 2025, we launched the 80 group, me and my wife and my cousin. She's an IP attorney. She's experienced medical history, experienced a lot of career in that industry but she also knows a lot about people, a lot about selling and a lot about administration. So she has a lot of qualities that you want in a partnership in company. So we launched it and I had come out of an experience of the supercap company. I will not name them. We're in Dubai but I won't say more. And I would never do business like that again because I did not check technology enough before launching myself into supporting it. And it turned out that it was a fraud. They had an American dealer on the East Coast promoting the supercap wizardry of storage.

34:11But supercap for those who are unfamiliar, supercapacitor and we'll talk a bit more about the technology a bit. So I started doing that in this two year ago period. Yeah, I started thinking to myself, something is not working here. And it was actually a client on a phone call with their salesman who said your numbers don't make sense. And he saved me by calling them out because I then started digging more and digging more and I found out they actually were a fraud. So as I'm glad that you brought up 80 group, I wanted to get a better sense of kind of how as an advisory it works so that I can have a filter for not only like what kind of things that you look for but how if you know, maybe explain it to me as if I'm a founder with a breakthrough technology. Walk me through the process. I come to you and say, hey, I've solved energy. What happens next? So the 80 group is a bunch of experienced energy people that got together and said, we

35:12want to do something a little different. We want to do it differently as well. And so you know, you have rep agencies out there and consultants out there that'll charge you fees or different ways of making money and we set to ourselves, we want to kind of be in the middle. We want, we love this vendor but we really serve this customer. So at the end of the day, even though the vendor may pay your fee, the customer ends up paying the fee. So if you serve the customer first, you always win. Now if you're with an organization that cares about the customer, that's a short. But if you're with an organization that doesn't really put the customer first, then you have a challenge because you're at cross crosses. And the 80 group was founded on that premise. I went to trusted people that I have collected in my renewable energy experiences, my former CTO Dan Cohen, Robert Want of Global Solar back in 2003.

36:13And a number of others that I, a Colonel Mark Schonberg, I met several years ago when he was exiting the military and he went to go into data centers. And I met him through another colleague. So a number of people, Mohan Joyce, you was in the New York City Department of fleets. And they were electrifying their fleets. And of course, I made a pivot in 2011 into EV. So I said to myself, let me go see what their appetite would be for helping new technology come to market in a manner that is more prudent than I used to do it. And that's all you get gray hairs. You hopefully get more prudent. And that's what I would say, characterize the founding of the 80 group. He was named after Dr. Adi Zember, a famous NASA scientist who was one of the top 100 chemists of the world, happened to be my deceased father in Laudgarde bless him. And therefore, when you take the name of someone so dear, you have to treat it with the utmost

37:19respect. And you have to always keep that at the top of mind. I don't just represent SAS Perez. I represent Dr. Adi Zember. And my wife, God bless her, allowed me to use the name. Yeah. And said, hey, I'm going to join too, but part time when I can. And I said, no problem. I would appreciate that. Yeah. SAS, how do you as a 80 group evaluate who you will and who you won't work with? What qualifies or disqualifies a technology as worthwhile? Interesting question, because we had a rule at the board level of unanimity. What does that mean? It means if somebody brought forth a technology that that he or she thought would be worthy of us representing it or advising it, it had to be unanimous. And if it wasn't unanimous yet to come back and come back and come back, at some point you're going to stop coming back. And depending again on your character, how tenacious you are, and how much you believe

38:22in it, and how vetted it is. So we are now looking for technologies that have a scientific background that can be proven. So you can prove your technology. But now the next thing to do is look at the management and say, are you sustainable as a group? Or do you recognize the peer principle, which is you're going to get to a level where you're just not relevant anymore? You're still talking about solving pains or whatever, but you're not moving as the needs of the organization really needs. And so it's important to vet the management as much as you're vetting the technology. I'm curious if you are able to put words or frame around the biggest mistakes that you see, particularly engineering-led businesses make when they're trying to commercialize their breakthrough technology. Back to loving your technology.

39:25And so I invite the people who come along with me to stop talking about the technology on the first two calls. Don't talk about the benefits. Don't talk about the features. Don't talk about the specs. They need to get you to know you way before they got to get to know your product. Because if they trust you, they're much more likely to trust what you're telling them about your product. And then they're going to see it inspect sheets and testing reports etc. Go down if you need to go into, if you're going to infrastructure, you need certification. And you can't leapfrog certification. You have to follow whatever it takes you. But have people experienced in certification, lead that initiative, pay the price because the time they're going to save you is invaluable. And that might make the difference between you getting to market and someone else getting to market. So the U.L. certification process is a long process by its nature.

40:27But it is subject to various hoops that you have to jump through. And problems you'll face. And whether it's your group of experienced people that know how to solve these problems, it's going to be really the telling tale whether you make it or not. You can't be part of the interruption, but I wanted to just let you know how much of an impact you have on Suncast. Yeah, you thank you for clicking play. Without you, this show is just me shouting into the void. But there's still people who don't even know about Suncast. I know I can hardly believe it myself. But that's where you can help me yet again. There's a simple way that you can show some love and help others discover the show. If you cruise over to www.ratethispodcast.com forward slash Suncast, I'd love it if you would leave a five star rating and enthusiastic review.

41:28That's possibly the single kind of thing that you could do for me today. So if the show has helped inspired or even entertained you at all, I'd love it if you would head over to rate this podcast.com forward slash Suncast and give me a virtual two thumbs up. All right, back to today's episode. You mentioned earlier having been sort of swindled in this deal with an earlier earlier group focused on supercapacitors. That for many is enough to say I'm not going to deal with that sort of segment. It's not ready yet. Why did West in particular stand out to you? What convinced you? What convinced me is myself. What I mean by that is that I don't think that they were targeting the right target to begin with because a supercapacit nature is super fast. Maybe why don't we back up a second and explain what a supercapacitor is for people who are on from there?

42:29I'm not an engineer. I couldn't explain supercapacitor to someone else. I'm a pseudo engineer at best. Okay. You're step ahead of us. Take me from White Bell to Brown Bell to Yellow Bell. So supercapacitor has a lot of power and it's very rapid. It can go with speeds. Some of them up to 20 C, which is the chart. I'm sorry. It has power from what? Where does it from? Where does it derive power? You charge it. You have to power it. You have to give it. Supercapacitor is a battery. Yeah, it's a kind of storage device. Okay. Exactly. So, we can start today, west amongst them, a supercapacitor that can retain energy. So it doesn't just shoot out the moment you want it. It actually does it over a period of time. Now you have the ability to do bridging. So we know generators as backup devices take time. And they do, they have a lot of voltage fluctuation. We know grids have a lot of voltage fluctuation. So load smoothing, those kinds of services are the right services.

43:30So I use the term horses for courses, pick the right horse for the right course. And in some cases, the optimized supercap is the right horse because you could use it for a period of time. There's a longer than most supercaps, shorter than most lithium. And more environments. So extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme speed, extreme cycling, all of those different kind of parameters, which is why I go back to the kilowatt hour measure and I go, was it really measure? Was it really tell you that I can use it in this context? No, it doesn't. It gives you a standardized kind of contact, perfect context. This is the KWH on the name plate. So very similar to generation by solar, sound by RMS, MPG of the car. You have to qualify the measure that's being used to your own need. And that is what I would watch out for when you're trying to put forth a new technology.

44:37Make sure that you're being honest with yourself about where it really is best. And what is the timing? Is it certified? Are you getting it certified? Are you running too fast? Are you running too slow? You have to also in parallel do that business development part and then shift to business development. And that shift is the toughest, I would say, divider between success and non-success is are you able to shift into a sales organization with different metrics of success or impact and different personalities and characters needed? You then become, okay, sales led, I need experienced sales people. And that's why the 80 group kind of comes in and says, we're not sales people. Actually, none of us has, except maybe myself, has done sales as a metric of success. As a profession. We have engineers, we have military, we have administrators, we have government people,

45:40we have all kinds of people grouped around and I would say to you that to a last person, I trust them. So that became the metric of coming on board. Again, we are representing AD in name. Therefore we're representing more than us, more than technology company. And we have to be careful with the people that join us as a result. This is sort of my understanding, my take on it, like a big tank of water holds a lot of water but takes a long time to fill it and empty it. Let's call that a battery. A bucket doesn't whole much but you can fill it and empty it basically instantaneously. That's like a, if you explain it to me like I'm five, understanding of what a super capacity is and understanding. It's a fountain. It's a fountain. A fountain, that's interesting. Okay, you push the button, water comes out, you let go of the button, water stops coming out. The water is coming from a reservoir, but the water is coming from a reservoir. Exactly.

46:40So it is a combination, it is the manner in which the reservoir acts. So what they've done is they funneled the water through a funnel tube and they've made a button as an activator and said when you push that button, the reservoir is going to empty. But it's going to empty in a very directional and very thin manner. And for short. That's really good visual. Okay. And for a short time, so you take the finger off, no more water. There's in the tank. Put the finger on. Water comes out and you have different kind of water for your bottle, pushing, no, water for your drinkers up. I'm standing in the airport now watching you talk about this. I'm like, this is brilliant. I love it. So water provides the analogy for the electrons. How are the electrons direct? That's great. How quickly are they directed? How volumetric are they in their direction? Okay. And what stops them and what starts them? Yeah. So it's not a battery per se. It's a delivery mechanism of electrons. Well said. It's a delivery mechanism similar to fuel.

47:42What you have to do with fuel is spark it. Once you spark it, it pushes the piston. Until you spark it, it's just sitting in a tank. Correct. Oh, this is, oh my gosh. This is, this is like what Jensen Wang said about open claw. Did you have you seen this? He said, he said, open claw is the most important development of AI in the last two years. Not because, basically, explicitly because it is the vehicle that AI needed. Okay. AI is needed to be harnessed in the same way that, right, I needed to be harnessed. So open claw gives each individual, and we get a little off of the tangent here. It means a way for each individual to say, okay. Now go do this for me. Take me to this destination. You can't, in the way, in the way most companies and even the big LLMS were sort of interacting with and developing AI, it is an intangible source for most people to harness.

48:43And open claw gives it a vehicle that you can get into and drive it somewhere, right? So now you're getting to intention. You're getting to intention. Yeah. What is your intention? And so as an example, currently, we're taking West through a California Energy Commission process, partly because of mass landing and the fire and the famous stuff that happened there. And what we're saying is, again, pick the applications where this is going to really work well. Well, where this, where this, the application of a super capacitor. Yes, correct. Correct. Correct. The only context I have up till now of somebody talking in real-world terms of using a super capacitor was in charging EVs, which you know tons about. And in like the exact application was like a sort of where you could drive over an induction charger and a super capacitor with fill your car in the time that we normally associate with filling a car, minutes rather than hours. Correct. That is the exact.

49:43So if you look at truck EV charging right now, we're working with certain people around the world that are looking at models of how to integrate a super cap to take in power over time. Yeah. From the grid, from solar, from wind, from whatever. Right. And then deliver it in a time short enough that the truck driver has in a waste of time. Yeah. Because again, they're, they are measured based on how they get to destination in time. That's correct. How fast they get there. And the problem, the problem is not actually the electron delivery. It's the heat involved, right? So you're managing heat, you're managing electron delivery, you're managing more than one metric at the same time. And that's when I talk about contextualization of energy. You have to take all those contexts and say, what is the best thing it's going to work as a compromise? You're never going to have, let's say you have five metrics, perfect delivery on all five. If you could have three, you're already winning big time. And then you have a compromise.

50:43So what are you going to compromise on? Heat, heat, size, degradation, the need for fire suppression, the need for air conditioning. Where is your compromise going to come? It's always going to come to someone. This is beautiful. It's like back to that conversation you were having with the guy when he was like, we cool the car. This is great. We cool the car. We don't really cool the car. So we make the car less hot. Thank you. That was precisely the search for truth. And I wasn't very good at the beginning. I will have looked at that. I sold a lot of them like a crap ton. I sold more in Canada than the distributors sold in the US. So then that company made me distributor in the US. And then I started going after sharper image and real goods, John the founder and other people like that because I found off grid was the right target. And so the same thing for supercars to bring it to today is there are proper, the data center groups. They are the right target because they need power fast.

51:46Well, everybody say that AI is creating more demand. Yes. That's the wrong question, right? It's not AI creating demand. It is the electrons thriving the AI that is creating demand in the manner in which AI pulls on them. So you have inference, you have different kinds of AI pulling on power in different ways. And latency, which used to mean proximity, is not as important as power now. So people are putting data centers in Utah. We know shark tanks, Kevin O'Leary trying to put a big, big, big campus in Utah having a lot of push back and Alberta. And Alberta. And he's finding some of the push back as false. So he's got Chinese bots targeting him to the town halls and the communities and saying, bad, bad, bad, power is going to be drained. Water is going to be drained. The emissions are going to be created with a lot of disinformation. So not displaying defense. And what I'm saying to data centers is play offense.

52:47Go into a community as a friendly neighbor. Think yourself as a part of the community and not distinct. And how does that change your thinking? Will you walk in and say, how can I help you? Right. You don't. Let's see outcome. Not, they're not facing any pain right now. You want some space in their community. You want to be welcome. How can I help you be better? And that is something that the 80 group is currently focused on bringing other technologies or offerings to the data center world that continue to exquisite to accentuate that the data center is not an enemy. It's a partner. Right. I mean, we need data centers for our phones. That's right. We've been talking about this a lot actually on the show. Like, probably got now six or six or eight episodes going back to even episode 913. Did you listen to the episode that we published with John Perella? No, Terraflow. I know you should listen to me. Yeah, the title is the real toll AI data centers are taking on the grid and how to fix it.

53:49And John enunciates a similar sort of a similar understanding of the impact data centers take on the grid, harmonic distortion, the demand of a data center is actually very arrhythmic. It looks like an echocardiogram rather than a baseline of power. And so I'm curious actually John works for work. It runs a company called Terraflow. Their architecture is basically a flow battery, which is a great application as the interface between the grid and a data center to be the shock absorber for that. How would a super capacitor work in that same in that example, right? Like maybe. So in the box. So I'm going to call it in the box between the box outside of the box, right? Correct. And the box is the data center, the box is the data center. Right. This is great. And anybody who's listened to that episode would totally understand this visual.

54:50It's good to go. You have a 800 volt architecture. Yeah. And you have a UPS. Yeah. And what is the service of the UPS? It's to balance that load, which is getting spiky demands in the millions, not in the hundreds of thousands or the tens of thousands, but in the millions. And they're very short events, right? But they're millions of them. And fuel cells do not react as quickly as a proper amount of, you know, optimize supercars. So fuel cells are great stabilizer like that. It's a great provider and a stable environment. But in the meantime, we've got this thing making servers crazy because they need a stable amount of power. You're looking at quality of electricity, not just volume. And so when you start to measure, again, the metric of successor impact is what is the quality of the electrons? Are they being generated in the speed needed for the time needed and in the manner needed?

55:50And when you start doing that, you're really getting into the crux of the challenge and therefore the opportunity. So the outcome that you want is a stable power source for the servers that are going like this. And they don't pull evenly. The pull stop, pull stop. And those things can be random or they could be significantly similar, but they're going to be very, very sporadic in nature and they're not going to be conscious. That's why we talk about spiky loads. And recently a fuel cell company approached us and says, look, you may have something that I can't do. I may have something that you can't do. What is the definition of a perfect partnership if you work it together? And I will say that for marriage or I will say that for corporate America, if you find people that compliment you, they're not the same as you. They have different ways of seeing things, but the values are the same.

56:51And that's when we talk about the unity of truth. The values of delivering what we promise is the same because that's what you can't play with. And when you do that, you're going to be a solution provider to a lot of people because they're going to trust you and they're going to have the confidence in your technology as well. Also, when you get into data centers, you opened up a whole rabbit hole for me because Governor Abbott three days ago says you have to bring your own power if you want to be a data center in Texas. And currently all that means is gas turbines, like most people are thinking. And there's a three year weight on New Turbine with Elon Musk buying a crap load of them for his XAI data centers and others that picking up crumbs or refurbish or reused or whatever trying to show you the referencing coal plants. Exactly. And so people are scrambling for power. I would say there's new technologies in power generation coming.

57:51I don't want to give away too much, but there are new technologies coming that might as well, I can't say what I can't say. I am bound by my agreement with my partners. And I will respect that. So the technologies that we're looking and they may solve the problem is the ability to self generate on site without the need for grid. What do you do? You take care of the fear of the community and you may even provide to them. I mean, there is a major hyperscaler that I found out this morning is bought land is not putting the data center. They want to put a power plant. They want to do it in reverse. They used to seek powered land. Now they just want land. They're going to care of putting the power. They're going to buy the power and maybe supply the grid with it on a PPA until they're ready to put a data center there and all of the conditions are right for the data center

58:53meaning what they what Kevin and Lee are unfortunately didn't take care of upfront. They are going to take care of friend. They're going to make sure this community sees them as friendly to the neighborhood. And they're going to say, by the way, we're going to bring the power and we're going to finish it all you guys at a price for this price for 20 years. Wow. Who's going to say no to that? And we're not going to use your water. We're not going to pull your air and not create noise. Okay. They're going to start listening. So if you take the approach of what are you giving before you get? Yeah. You always win. What do you think has changed the most about selling energy technology in the last 40 years? Stop selling. Stop selling. Stop selling. Talk. Say more. Stop selling. In other words, remember Colgate Pomol has put out an ad virtually spotless. Many, many decades ago and people didn't know what the word virtually meant. So therefore they thought, oh, my dishes are going to come out spotless.

59:56And when they came out with spots, spots, wait a second. Well we said virtually. Yeah. That's selling. Yeah. Turn it around and ask yourself, would I buy this? Yeah. Why would I buy this? What outcome am I providing to somebody to use my technology? Am I doing so better than the next person? Yeah. Because we live in a competitive market. So selling has changed. Selling is buying, buying is selling. Yeah. If you put yourself on the other side of any argument, any debate, you're going to understand the other party and you're going to argue less. Yeah. You're actually going to debate less because you're going to come to a place where you say, huh, you just want to feed your family. I just want to feed my family. You need to feed your family. I need to land to feed my family. You need water. I need water. You come to agreement by doing that. And I would say that selling has changed radically since people realized that you don't sell to benefits. You don't sell to features.

1:00:57You don't sell to pains. You sell to outcomes. And then you join people in a journey. So who's the salesperson? The buyer of the seller. You have a provider and you have a user. But you don't really have sales in it. Now contrary to my previous statement, it doesn't mean that a sales culture should not take over at a certain stage of a company. It means you stop investing in this and you start investing in this. People that understand the cadence of speech. People that understand when to say what and where. People that have some level of psychological emotional quotient so that they can read people and what they need in the moment better than other people. Typically, it's not a lawyer, it's not an account. Right? Typically it's not a data center person. Like one of the things that I've said about data centers is you have a lot of digits and digital minds walking into a community.

1:01:58Well the community is feeling it here. They're not so much feeling it here because once you get through the fear and you show them, it's really not this much bad, not that much bad. We're going to do this. Again, the outcome. We're going to do that. Then they become your friend. The best way to get rid of an enemy is to make him a friend. That's what's something that you've changed your mind about. Me. Okay. If you change your mind about who you are. Yeah. If you don't evolve, you're going to go away. Either in a group or in life. And so I would say keep growing, keeping open to new ideas, keep challenging yourself and accepting that the people in your life who are there to challenge you are the gift givers. They care. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference. Indifference. And so you have to manage the manner in which you approach the opportunity and you have

1:03:00to always keep yourself on the side of the person seeking the solution. Seeking the outcome. So that way sales stops being selling. You know, I know there's titles for sales people, VP sales director of sales, head of sales. I actually don't really like those titles myself because they invoke that you're trying to get me to do something that might not be good for me. My son is an engineer. His title is sales engineer. I said to him, I hate your title. Who knows why? I said because you don't want to sell. You want to create revenue for your company. I get that. But you don't want to sell. You want to walk the walk with the customer and say, let me help you get to where you want to get to. What's the alternative title? Chief demystifying officer. Okay. I'm going to amoeil that one's it. It's my title. Yeah.

1:04:01It sounds, I mean, a lot of what I'm hearing from you in the last several moments here would qualify likely in my, in my opinion as like advice that would have saved you years. Anything that you would add to that? There is nothing like experience. Yeah. So go get it. Go get it. Exactly. I don't be shy to bring it on board. You know, I'm entering at university at startups. And I said, not your coach. I'm not your parent. I'm not your chairman. I'm going to be a mentor. I'm going to try to give you insight into what you're not seeing. And it's only not because you're not intelligent enough to see it, but you just haven't been through the pain of not seeing it. Yeah. There's pattern matching that comes from the experience. Right. Exactly. Now, as someone who is mentoring, what advice would you give to someone seeking men? Mentor, ship. The same as my dad, Gaby decades ago, but I didn't listen to.

1:05:05Uh-huh. Someone else's mistake is the cheapest lesson you could ever learn. Oh, yeah. Learn from other people's errors. Yeah. Learn from their mistakes because you're not paying the price, but you're getting the lesson. I would say so when, when I have a whole bunch of mentors in a room with me mentoring someone I listen as much as they speak. Because I'm going to also capture some of what their experiences taught them. And so to pass that on to someone who's just starting their career, there's nothing more exciting. You really want them to succeed. You're in it for their success. Yeah. A chance to mentor some folks here of the continue further virtually mentoring. Is there a book that you routinely come back to that you've gifted a bunch or that you've read more than once? Has really impacted you? I wish I read all the books that I've been bought for me on my life. Uh-huh. Well, that's not the question I asked. No, I know. There is no book. No. I'm sorry to say I don't have a book in mind.

1:06:08Okay. I'm still trying to get a starting on the Elon Musk book. Okay. Which is bought for me many years ago and still sitting on a table. So, unfortunately I've not become a book reader yet. However, I just bought a book called Planetology. And you should get up and link to it. It's a pretty smart writer about how everything is interlinked on our planet. I think that's key thing that if you're going to read something today, look at how things are relational. We can have things work together. Sure. There's a Japanese statement I learned in 2003 when I was going to visit Kanekka who's making a thin film solar at Osaka. Yeah. Kanekka remember that. Right. And it was Ishone Gumbanyu's show, which means we are stronger together. So, keep that top of mind in your most challenging times. Yeah. Right? I love that I can geek out with you on this stuff because I have the career that you have. Meaning 20 years in the industry, like I remember Kanekka, they made a basically a printable

1:07:10tent that had solar on the outside of it. They sold to the military. There's one of the many things that they did. But they were like thin film company that was mostly selling military applications because there were lightweight solar applications. Fantastic ideas that were way ahead of their time. SAS, I wish we had more time. And I'm certain that some folks listening are going to want more than just this virtual membership. Maybe they are founder would break through ideas and they want the 80 group to tell them if it truly is commercializable. How can folks reach you in that case? I think I'm the only SAS Perez on LinkedIn. Yeah. So that's ASS. And it's you see it in the title. It's spelled SAS Perez and SAS is very active on LinkedIn, very responsive to folks reaching out to them. So definitely encourage folks to do that. Is there a place where they can learn or follow along? Are you writing elsewhere besides LinkedIn or is there a website that you can go to learn more about? I've started to get on Substack as well. They can look up my name on Substack.

1:08:11We're not so active on the website. It's really most of more of a poster for who are we? Who's in the group? But really I would say Substack on LinkedIn I would too. I've actually virtually given up on social media being Facebook and that kind of stuff because I find it such a suck of time. Right. So it is. And the unintentional outrage that is being created on social media is probably a subject for a different podcast. But I would say LinkedIn and Substack are good places to go meet new people and learn new things. Yeah. I've been really impressed with LinkedIn with, sorry, with Substack and the intention that they're building around community. So much more so with their notes, the application and whatnot. Then I'm seeing with LinkedIn and I wouldn't sleep on Reddit. So I think that you would have a lot to give there. It's another yet another place to dig in. But the Reddit community is by far the most active community of what I would consider

1:09:15to be social media in terms of questions getting answered in a multiplicity of ways. The way I kind of expected Kora to be and never really arrived at. I didn't even write. Sassy, as we round the corner here, I have one more question for you. Future career helping technologies cross that gap between invention and adoption. What's the biggest mental shift that the next generation of clean energy entrepreneurs in particular would need to make if they want their ideas to change the world? People are going to check what you say in two seconds. Yeah. So say what you know to be true and verify, check yourself when you're making statements against other potential fact checkers, if you will, right? Which I think AI is a pretty active and accurate fact checker. And I think that allows you to see AI in my mind doesn't create anything.

1:10:16It verifies things. And so I would say if you're going to go out and create something and you want it to be something that helps people ask yourself what journey are they on, what is the outcome they value and how does my technology get that to that outcome faster, better, cheaper or more often? Also the warriors, that is an incredible way to wrap this episode's asparagus. Thank you so much for the tremendous knowledge, transfer and mentorship that we've all gained in the last hour. Thank you very much for having me, Nikuts. A great pleasure to be on your show. You know, going into this conversation, I thought that we were going to spend a lot of our time talking about technological advancement and we did things like super capacitors and certainly we touched on those. Somewhere along the way I think the conversation really landed on a theme much bigger than that. Talked about the difference between leading and leading edge, I think that actually is

1:11:16one of the things that among the many that I'll stick with or that will stick with me, how do you separate your claims from the packaging from the evidence? Knowing when tenacity is your greatest strength and when the leadership move is to actually pivot. But I felt like SaaS kept coming back to us the responsibility we all have to tell the truth as we understand it. One thing that SaaS said right at the end here, you know, say what you know to be true. In an industry that's moving as quickly as ours is, that's a remarkably simple and challenging standard to live by. I think that we all are so prone to, to sell and over sell. And in many cases, what we can deliver. As my dad would say, don't let your mouth right-check you but can't cash. So if this conversation made you think differently about how you commercialize your product, about your leadership or the future of the energy infrastructure we're all about building, I'd

1:12:19encourage you, please share this with someone in your community who is helping us build this next generation of the energy infrastructure. These conversations are exactly why we make Suncast and you showing up all the way through to the end are what get me out of bed. Thank you. Smart people like you tune in to Suncast so that they can not only identify other leaders like SaaS who are on the front lines with us fighting a good fight, but so that you can equip yourself with the tools you need to persevere, persist and win on this race. I thank you for joining us in this journey. It's like to start sponsors who do something that I've never asked you to do, which is they help to pay the bills, they keep the lights on. I just ask you to pay attention, which you've now done for the better part of an hour, a promise at the beginning that we give you a return on that investment. If in fact we've done that, please, please just hit the like button, share the episode,

1:13:19give us some digital token of appreciation to pay it forward. That is how all of the algorithms that support on the various platforms tell other smart people like you how to find us and join our community. Until next time, remember you are what you listen to. Thanks again for showing up, Solar Warrior. It's half the bat. Here's Solar Warrior.