Joachim Lohse – Ampcontrol

David Hunt (00:01.848)
Hello, Joachim. Welcome to the Leaders in Cleantech Podcast.

Joachim Lohse (00:05.144)
Hey David, thank you so much.

David Hunt (00:07.17)
Good to have you from your new home in Madrid by the sounds of things. yeah, hope all is going well with the settling in.

Joachim Lohse (00:15.084)
Yeah, 100%. We have good weather here, so it has been some good warm, calm first days.

David Hunt (00:21.432)
Good, good. Yeah, the weather always helps. Listen, there’s lots for us to get through and there’s a lot particularly at the moment on both technology and on policy and we’ll certainly dig into that. But typically part of this podcast is always looking at the entrepreneur story in the company as well as the of the broader context. So I’d love to dive in a little bit to your background. What brought you to where you are now? So perhaps you can just share a little bit of the genesis of AMP Control.

Joachim Lohse (00:48.268)
Yeah, I think it’s a long story and I have to go back all the way probably seven, eight years. was working as a consultant, young consultant in energy, working with utilities across Europe and mostly focusing on helping and analyzing how utilities can improve their grid maintenance, electric gas, water, et cetera.

During that time, spent most of the days really sitting with utilities in the same offices, in the same rooms. And I got lucky that during this early period of my career, I started researching a lot about new technologies, about AI, blockchain, like all these things that were really hyped in 2017, 2016. And I started blogging about it. I don’t know why I started actually writing about it and shared on LinkedIn.

I’ve never done this before and I currently don’t really actively blog, but this really pulled me into conversations that I didn’t expect at that point. So people noticed it and from the company I worked for, they pulled me into workshops with utilities where we then discussed the new technologies, with utilities about how we can apply them. And that was where I got the first idea of power management and how difficult potentially EV charging might be and also how…

much it has been ignored at that point. So we talk about 2016. I’m not today is very different, but 2016 EVs were so early that utilities or anyone in that market was not really thinking about power management. So that was the beginning.

David Hunt (02:27.16)
Okay, interesting. It’s always an interesting story how people come to be where they are. that said, again, having the interest in the technology and having an understanding or a passion for it is one thing, but then creating a company is another. So what led you to the point of actually thinking, do you know what, I’m going to create this entity and start to try and build and scan all the other fun stuff that comes with entrepreneurship.

Joachim Lohse (02:51.446)
Yeah, and at that time in 2018, I was 24-ish. So I had very little responsibilities. I was kind of in the early stages of my career. And I realized that I had a few options of either trying to help companies on building out proper energy management grid, et cetera, for electric vehicles. But I…

I also had the desire of building something and I had the desire and I’ve had friends that build companies in other markets, very different markets, mental health and similar. But I saw how much fun they actually had and they were not at that point successful in sense of financially successful, right? There were also early stages, but I saw that even at that point where you’re like one or two people and kind of trying to build something brand new was looked very fun.

So it took me, think, six and 12 months to make this decision of then actually quitting my job and just without salary just starting, started working and found a few people that were interested early on in joining part-time and we had, we were lucky that we got early stage investments in 2018 from an investor from New York and that kind of helped to start off early stage without product, with anything at the beginning.

At that time, 2018, the market was still early. VCs were not really interested in energy at all at that point. It was very interesting for them to invest in consumer tech, consumer apps, everything that was a little bit more, I wouldn’t call it deep tech, but goes into the direction of more complicated technology, more complicated regulated market was not really exciting for them. So was certainly difficult at beginning. And then over two or three years,

it changed and suddenly EV charging became bigger. It was more obvious that energy and power and grid constraints is a main issue and much more accepted also by people and openly talked about it. So we slowly got more traction and by then we had a very strong product already.

David Hunt (05:09.944)
Okay, Timing is often everything, isn’t it? think similarly, I think 2018, 2019 is when we at Hyperion started to get very active in the immobility space and we all ended up with electric vehicles very quickly. even in this short period of time, as you all know, the world has changed in terms of where and how easy it is to charge now. And even six years ago, it could be a bit hairy at times, but of course now not the case.

But you obviously, we’re going to move on to, obviously you look at obviously charging from a much different perspective from a fleet and a large scale perspective, which is really a hot topic at the moment. So keen to dive into that, but just quickly go back to your point of starting for fun, which I think we all do. And this is my second startup, if you like, or second company I founded. there is a lot of fun, but I have a very gray hair and I think the face of a 65 year old.

Joachim Lohse (05:59.832)
Hahaha.

David Hunt (06:02.944)
Yeah, it comes with its challenges. So how have you found that side of things?

Joachim Lohse (06:08.726)
think building a company, no matter how big it is, it really doesn’t matter if you think about how big companies like Tesla or Facebook also started, or if you think about building a small company like a restaurant or anything like that. It’s really difficult and the difficult times usually feel much more intense than the good positive times. As an example, when we win an important deal and we get

selected by a company, even today, by let’s say a large corporate, maybe worked 12 months for that and did a whole procurement process. And then we get the message of we got selected. Now we go into contract negotiations. It feels great. And everyone decided it goes away very quickly because suddenly, especially as a founder, you get pulled into all the things that need attention. And they usually were difficult situations. Could be product issues. It could be.

could be team issues, it could be maybe deals that you lost, right? And it doesn’t matter which stage you are, it always feels very painful. And that’s, think, something that you have to get used to. The pain at the beginning is very different because when you’re young and an early stage company, your responsibilities towards customers, towards employees is much smaller. Maybe you don’t have employees, maybe you have like a couple, and you have like a couple of customers. So your responsibilities

still small, you have responsibility, but much less than what we have today where you have many customers relying on us, their customers relying on us, cities relying on us. And we now work with large operators that serve schools and logistics and ports. And I think they’re a pressure for anyone in the team, not just for the founder, but also for anyone in the team is very high. And the difference is the team is bigger, so you kind of can spread out the responsibility.

But I would say the challenges are more impactful, maybe less frequent because you have more people and you have more stability. But challenges are very impactful potentially.

David Hunt (08:16.76)
Yeah, I guess there’s two things. The first, I should say, when you are dealing with something which is critical infrastructure, like you say, the responsibility is greater than if you were selling Mars bars or baked beans or whatever. The other thing is, which I talk about a lot of people is that’s the CEO, you only tend to find the worst of the problems that get kicked in your direction because nobody else wants to handle those, The easy stuff and what’s going well, your team tend to handle and that’s no disrespect to the team, of course, that’s important. Yeah, but it tends to be the sticky problems that end up on your desk.

Joachim Lohse (08:45.55)
I think one thing I’ve learned very, soon is you have to have really good partners on board, either as a co-founder or early members or on the management side that really know their things very well. As an example, we have great people on the technical side, on the operational side, on the product side. So I don’t really have to really think about those things every day.

They are better than me. They’re better than me in operating. They’re better me in understanding how power management works. They’re better me in how to build software and manage an engineering team. I will not, least in this life, be at their level. That’s the most difficult part to do. If you have those people, then you can focus on what you’re strong at. And then life gets a little bit more comfortable and you share responsibilities, of course, in that case.

David Hunt (09:43.416)
Yeah, we’ll certainly return to team and culture because obviously from our perspective, that’s critical to the success of any business. But let’s talk a little bit about the technology because again, thinking of the audience, just to share, like I say, yesterday I mentioned in the introduction, was the clean tech for Europe policy push or lobbying for making sure we don’t roll back on the 2025, 2035 mandates for zero emission vehicles. There’s a lot of

political and the regulatory challenges as well as technology changes as we start moving heavy duty electrification. So perhaps you can just share a little bit firstly of what is the sort of the product and the technology that’s that control is offering and is built on.

Joachim Lohse (10:24.536)
Yeah, so we basically are primarily serving fleet depots and charging depots. So those are customers that have multiple chargers at one location. It doesn’t have to be fleet, but of course, many of them are buses, trucks, taxis, commercial fleets, but they could also be large public charging sites, technically. And we help them focusing on solving three problems. The first one is how do we overcome

constraint of a grid. So the electricity grid is constrained in the sense of you cannot just simply install 20 chargers and connect them to the public grid and get started next day. There’s a lot of processes that need to happen before that and very often you have a physical constraint of not enough or not thick enough wires or not enough transformers or panels etc. And that’s a constraint that’s very difficult to solve and we help solving them with our solution.

The second one is usually uptime. So how can we make sure that the charger actually work? Even though over the years, the charging hardware got much significantly better and the uptime makes it got significantly better. Our customers expect a 99 % uptime of their infrastructure. That means we have to be 4, 9, 5, 10 % available on our software monitoring side and optimization side. And the third problem is how can we…

optimize energy costs once it’s installed. So once we overcome all the other issues, it’s working, it’s reliable, we overcame good constraints, how can we ensure that it’s as cost efficient as possible? For that basically we provide a full solution of power management on the local and cloud site that then allows us to optimize for charging in real time, but also predictively by using vehicle information, route information.

David Hunt (12:17.654)
Yeah, I think that’s one of the challenges I share in an easy world. You would just put more copper in the ground and you’d connect everything to the grid. But we know the grid connections and just putting that physical infrastructure is far from easier. And that’s where a lot of the delays and issues come from. So how is the software able to overcome some of those challenges?

Joachim Lohse (12:39.138)
Yeah, so we basically connect to the charging stations, we connect to the vehicle data, telematic data, route data, we can connect to price data, solar, batteries and similar. And in simple words, we basically would create some sorts of virtual power plant or some sorts of microgrid. To explain it a little bit more simpler is we identify what’s the best time to charge vehicles and how fast should we charge them.

David Hunt (12:49.868)
Mm-hmm.

Joachim Lohse (13:09.472)
It doesn’t have to be complicated. We have locations that purely have charging stations and nothing else. But we also have customers that have distribution centers with solar on the roof that want to install batteries because they don’t have good capacity. And they have routes that are planned for the vehicles multiple days in advance. And then it’s getting more complicated. So we then directly control the chargers and ensuring that the vehicles are ready when they have to be as efficient as

David Hunt (13:18.902)
Yeah.

Joachim Lohse (13:38.829)
and as cost-efficient as possible without that we hit certain physical constraints of a grid. And that’s a difficult part. always say our uptime is the most important features. everything has to work, of course, and everything has to work well. And we cannot fail in our functionality. And that’s most challenging part, especially as a young company. When we started six years ago today, of course.

David Hunt (13:50.861)
Mm-hmm.

Joachim Lohse (14:09.036)
we have that reliability for many years now.

David Hunt (14:12.588)
Yeah. So is the customer base primarily CPOs on one side and then the corporates who have their own fleets? So what’s the of, guess, the makeup of the type of customers that are relying on your services?

Joachim Lohse (14:25.646)
Yeah, so very often we work directly with a fleet operator. So this could be a bus operator. This could be a food and beverage distributor that has either their own sites. Sometimes they have partners, sometimes they have partners on the vehicle side. We might work with ports where you have then the tractor terminals, the terminal tractors. So this is one type of…

of customers we work with. In other cases, we work with solution providers. And what we mean with that is typically companies that use our platform, side control of a cloud system, plus they offer their own services that may maybe they install and maintain charging stations. Maybe they offer charging as a service. That means you get everything from the planning to the execution to the operation. And they bring a huge value into the market because

customers often cannot buy software from one company, charger from another company, the maintenance and O from another company, and then somehow have 10 people available that understand how to operate the whole system. So in that case, we then also work with solution providers that either work on specific markets and countries or even globally.

David Hunt (15:44.01)
Okay, okay. So let’s jump back a little bit in terms of, as we said, the sub-oak markets have evolved very, very quickly, right? So when I first drove my EV, I was the only person in the neighborhood that had one, and now everybody is driving, or not everybody, but there’s obviously a huge uptake as we know in terms of from private transport. But I think even a few years ago, a lot of people were still doubting trucks, buses, heavier duty, still talking about hydrogen, still talking about biofuels, this kind of stuff. The conversation, of course, still goes on a little.

Joachim Lohse (16:08.419)
Yeah.

David Hunt (16:11.92)
But think now we’re seeing the electrification of heavy duty is happening and is feasible and will become more so. So was that a decision early to focus on fleet? So did that evolve as you saw the market changing?

Joachim Lohse (16:26.766)
I think it’s a very good question and I think the majority of the things that we do today was something that evolved. And I haven’t seen many companies who came up with something smart and then never changed what they did. We started early on with focusing purely on the energy management. We didn’t even think about freeze. We just said the biggest problem in market is how power is being managed with electric vehicles. Yes, we focus on constraints. We focus on energy prices. I think that’s still the same.

But we targeted charging point operators, targeted utilities, we targeted residential, we targeted anything because it was at early stage, our focus was energy management. We didn’t think too much about how to think about uptime, how to integrate vehicle data, over drivers. We just purely thought, okay, we need to build the best algorithms in the market. Looking back, that was one of the best decisions because now we basically

benefiting from that because we started seven years ago. So seven years ago when the problem wasn’t as big, we already started thinking about the solution. So now we went through so many iterations that we have a very, very robust solution. But then over the time we identified two main things. First, why the utilities are responsible very often for the grid and are those who are in charge of increasing grid capacity, et cetera. They’re usually not the ones that

need to solve a problem because they are not responsible to deploy chargers necessarily. They’re not necessarily the ones that have to think about ARIs of charging depots for logistic vehicles, right? That’s usually the food and beverage company. So we identified the utility might not be the number one target for us that will benefit from what we’re doing, even though they’re really important in this chain. And the second part is we identified that fleets

have one thing in common is that they all operate the best if they’re highly efficient. So that means if they optimize the processes, optimize how they use workforce and similar, that electric vehicles are great for them, and of course, people who work there are generally excited about it, it disrupts everything they build the last 20 years.

Joachim Lohse (18:49.696)
If you are, let’s say, logistic company or part, and for 20 years, you spent time and money to optimize your operation for combustion vehicles. And now suddenly someone comes around and says, hey, that’s great, guys. Now you’re super efficient. Now let’s change everything to electric and everything changes for you. Like the idle time of vehicles, drive range of vehicles, even the training for people. And those two things really impacted how we thought about the market and identified that the fleet operators are the ones that A,

care the most about the problem because they need to be competitive, they need to be cost efficient, and they need to be reliable. So that’s exactly the things we can try to solve. And they are the ones that are willing to look for solution and truly care about making it work. And after testing it out, and this was probably like four years ago, we identified that’s valid. And over time now we see it keeps being true.

David Hunt (19:28.216)
Yeah.

David Hunt (19:47.796)
Okay. So some of the drivers, guess from what you’re saying there, if you sort of simplify things to a large degree, people are either interested in you solving a technical problem, how do we physically do this thing? On the flip side, of course, one of the key things for logistics company, course, is TCO, is the efficiency and cost benefit. is there a particular when you’re selling to customers driver, which is more primary or?

Joachim Lohse (20:14.06)
I think, and it’s really easy to forget, especially, I’m an engineer, I’m excited about tech, and lot of people in our company are also engineers, so it’s very easy to forget the TCO side, right? Because even if something makes sense on the technology side, but it doesn’t make sense on the TCO side, you probably will not be able to implement it. For fleets, TCO is critical because they need to think long-term, over 10 years or more.

Part operators have to think about for 30 years. Bus companies have usually site agreements for eight to 10 years, sometimes a little bit shorter. But usually you make investments of a vehicle or site over multiple years. So you might make more than $1 investment, but you have to think about, what happens in the next 10 years with that vehicle or with that site? So why we technically don’t increase the TCO heavily, right? Sorry, we are not a

David Hunt (20:57.261)
Yeah.

Joachim Lohse (21:12.206)
a heavy investment compared to let’s say a truck or charger because generally software and software systems are not as expensive as an actual physical truck or charger. We need to make sure that whatever we provide as a solution helps them to make the electric truck, electric bus, electric vehicle financially a good investment so that they can see the payback in the time range at least equivalent to the combustion vehicle or better.

No one expects that it has to be significantly better because as long as it’s better or similar, it’s worth for them doing the investments because it helps them to get new concessions if they work with cities, right? To make their customers happy by delivering groceries with electric vehicles without combustion emission and by keeping the city clean. And it helps the drivers to not be surrounded by fuel and exhaust systems.

So as long you get them to a similar or slightly lower TCO, it will work.

David Hunt (22:17.568)
OK. Now, I assume that the case is to say a lot of us forget that because we’re so interested in the tech. And I’m so excited about that and with good reason. So I will dive back into the tech because, we are nerdy about these things. So, again, it’s been talked about for long time, V2G, and how that plays a part in energy management and, obviously, the sort VPP of batteries in vehicles. There are starting to be some…

Joachim Lohse (22:22.956)
Yeah.

David Hunt (22:43.074)
trials, but of course we’re still a long way from that being the mainstay. But how are you seeing that and is that something which you feel given back to energy management being your core is something that you’ll be doing more of and in what sort of timeframe?

Joachim Lohse (22:58.798)
Interestingly, the last 12 months we have been seeing an uptake of those requests. 12 months ago we’ve seen a couple of those every month, but now it’s really every single time we have a conversation the question is being asked, how can I connect batteries? How can I connect solar? How can I use it for virtual power plants? The main difference is that in Europe specifically we see

more logistic food and beverage providers electrifying primarily something to do with a TCO cost being more viable. trucks got cheaper and now expect to get even cheaper in next one or two years. So they’re now all planning to execute on a larger scale. We also know that those operators, so logistics, ports, trucks are working at existing sites. So they’re brownfield sites. You cannot just simply move your distribution center.

So you have a very limited availability, sometimes no availability of additional power. So they have to sometimes start completely with zero kilowatt additional power. And they have to think about solar batteries or backup generation, et cetera, from day one. So this becomes a pretty big trend across anything that’s to do with trucks and logistics and ports. On the transit side, we see similar positions as well. It really depends a little bit on their…

site agreements, concessions, et cetera. But it is a really big trend. We now have multiple sites now with batteries and solar already live today. And we have a few that actually come this year. And all of them are either using solar and batteries or at least using solar for their sites.

David Hunt (24:48.022)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes sense. It’s good to see obviously for the ecosystem as a whole that we’re decarbonizing all elements of the process. Again, things have evolved in the sense of there’s now far more electric trucks and vehicles, large scale vehicles like commercial, but also the bigger vehicles coming on stream. I think there was quite a lot in show in Berlin last week. What are you seeing?

Or what are you planning for around that scaling of the truck and fleet market across Europe? What’s exciting you? What do you think are some of the risks in that growth?

Joachim Lohse (25:29.134)
Yeah, so I think there are two parts of that market. The first one is the first, first middle mile and last mile, which is everything below maybe 400 kilometers of traveling. The majority of those vehicles stay at a depot overnight. Even if they don’t stay, they don’t have to drive between two locations for more than 400 kilometers. And then there’s the other side, which is long-haul trucking. So we obviously have a first group.

is much more active right now electrification is more feasible. And there’s actually no real technical reason why someone shouldn’t electrify or start thinking about electrifying. What excites us right now the most and that’s something we didn’t expect. And again, that’s again something with companies in the market. It’s really hard to anticipate that. We identified that the second biggest problem is not anymore, the second biggest problem after energy management is

How do I charge my vehicles at a site with limited number of chargers, but increasing number of vehicles? So a problem now becomes much more of a scheduling problem. What I mean with that is you’re a food and beverage company or you work at a port and you have multiple partners that come with vehicles. You don’t even operate those vehicles, but you provide them charging infrastructure. Since they deliver goods or take things from your warehouses.

How do you now coordinate which vehicle arrives at what point and has time and capacity to charge based on solar battery, power availability and the other vehicles? And now suddenly the problem statement is not anymore the energy management by alone, but now combined with a whole scheduling of that fleet. And that’s for everyone right now on the team, very exciting. We’ve started working on those many, many months ago and we are now having those part of a product’s life.

But it’s kind of that product phase where it’s still in the early stage, where the market is still very early, where every single customer has slightly different opinions of what they think they require. And it’s not where you come in and you say, OK, I need to solve my grid constraint, my solar, my battery. You come in and you have a rough idea of what the problem is, but no one can really tell you today, that’s my problem statement. And you can repeat this for every single other customer. And that’s kind of the part that excites most people in our company, because it’s

David Hunt (27:37.848)
Yeah.

Joachim Lohse (27:57.771)
It’s challenging to solve a problem where a customer cannot really describe a problem today or every customer has a slightly different description of that problem.

David Hunt (28:06.796)
Yeah. No, that’s interesting. You say in terms of return to the depot, it’s relatively, I say relatively straightforward, but when vehicles actually say are charging on other people’s sites, whether that public or private or stuff. So, yeah, it’s fascinating to see, but just exciting how fast things are growing. So again, I maybe ask you a little bit of your, to put a head into a crystal border a little bit, but how do you see the rollout of this larger, longer distance, trucking essentially or transportation?

in the next few years and what potentially are the barriers to that happening.

Joachim Lohse (28:43.042)
Yeah, so I’m pretty sure there are people in the market that have more data in front of them than me. But from my perspective, the biggest challenge has always been the capacity of the batteries and the price of batteries. So you have a truck that has a certain size and a certain weight it can have. you physically limit it in terms of size and weight, how much battery cells you can put on this truck.

So of course people get creative, you put like batteries on the trailer and so on and battery swapping and these kind of things, but it’s still a very challenging solution. That’s for long-haul trucking, the biggest issue. Now the trend has been, and quite steadily, the battery prices have been reducing. So financially it’s makes more viable. The battery capacity has been improving with different kind of chemistry and manufacturing processes, etc.

So there’s a very clear tendency that both problems will be solved financially and size and capacity-wise. And even the charging speed and duration of the charging is also being solved, because the charging infrastructure and megawatt charging has been improving. And so fast that it’s really hard to keep up, even if you’re in the market and you work on this every day. But we see more more companies offering megawatt charging, are planning to install megawatt charging. We see…

battery companies are being more more innovative, more battery manufacturing, which reduces the price. And there’s a very, very clear trend that those problems will be solved. And I don’t think we are very far away from that. I think I wouldn’t say we will have a huge order of long haul trucking next year, but it strategically can make for a lot of companies make sense to start.

building their electrification or decommunization strategy around long-haul attractive trucking. Since you already have infrastructure for the shorter haul trucking up to 400 kilometers, the infrastructure will be there and you have majority of the problems then solved already. So it’s a very, very clear pattern and we are not very far away from it from my perspective.

David Hunt (30:57.154)
That’s good to hear and aligned with what we’re seeing elsewhere as well. Just looking at then the asset company internationalizing, one of the things of those of us who work within the clean tech sector broadly is there’s always an element of political and regulatory, both opportunity and risk, which also affects somewhat where you choose to expand and do your business. So perhaps you can share a little bit about which are the countries in which you’re most active. And again, any thoughts on

Joachim Lohse (31:14.222)
Mm.

David Hunt (31:26.904)
how policies and regulations can support the industry broadly, not just of course your own company.

Joachim Lohse (31:33.506)
Yeah. Yeah. So.

Joachim Lohse (31:39.353)
I’m a big fan of having predictable policy and predictable regulation. The worst that can happen, we’ve seen it multiple times now, is if policy changes every few years, it creates uncertainty for companies to make investments. And since we talk about long-term investments, it’s not different than thinking about stock markets or thinking about bonds or large investments. No one will make a bet on something if they don’t have certainty.

So you will not buy stocks of a company if you feel that every two years it’s going to be a great year or a bad year. if you don’t have this kind of certainty, it’s really hard to get companies to commit on something. So that’s the first thing I always think. So a country at the end can either decide to heavily support decarbonization or states.

and that course that can potentially accelerate, but it doesn’t help if it does it every two years differently or every four years differently, right? And that has usually been the biggest issue. A very good example for that is the toll, the tolling benefits in Germany. And I don’t have the details, currently they’re discussing of extending the reduced tolling or free tolling for electric trucks.

until 2031. And we talk right now with companies that literally just wait until that approval because otherwise they don’t have certainty about what happens with tolling, which is a big part of the operation costs under 2031. And if it’s being extended until next year or for the next two years, it’s not helping them and they’re not going to electrify the trucks because they don’t have a certainty what happens two years later. So I think that’s a very, very important part to always keep in mind. And there a lot of countries that have done this really well.

In Scandinavia, since these countries are usually smaller and also wealthy countries very often, it has been easier for them to create those steady and reliable regulation and then we see the results. And other countries have started really strong and maybe are now a little bit shaking or like kind of looking for what happens next. And you can think about the United States, about Germany, about the Netherlands. They been starting with very strong incentives and…

Joachim Lohse (34:03.66)
Regulation or other situations can very quickly then stop certain electrification processes. They might just stop them temporarily, of course, and then people, again, once you have steady, steady regulation, it helps sometimes more than just subsidizing.

David Hunt (34:10.936)
Yeah.

David Hunt (34:21.88)
Yeah, yeah, I think it’s always the case a bit of certainty like you say because these are big investments Generally both in capex but also op ex in particularly when you’re talking about fleets as well Let’s talk a little bit about because we’ve been talking for a while and we could go on forever But i’m keen to talk about a couple of things one of which is uh the team and the culture The other which is of course at the end of the month you host your own fleet management Uh events so perhaps you can share that’s quite a bold thing to some degree to for you know, it’s still a relatively young company to be

hosting events which are industry-wide. So good to hear your thinking behind that and what the event is going to be looking like.

Joachim Lohse (34:56.482)
Yes, our team has always been excited about sharing learnings. So we have always had a strong focus on writing articles as a team. And I’ve been doing this for many, many years now. We have various reports and shared reports with nonprofits. And I’ve been doing webinars for quite a while. And last year, we started hosting the first events. We’ve done one event in New York. We’ve done one event at the Port of Long Beach.

David Hunt (35:22.498)
Mm-hmm.

Joachim Lohse (35:26.446)
And this year we said, well, we have to do one in Europe and we are hosting the EV Fleet Summit in Rotterdam end of the month. And it’s a significant effort. Everyone who has been organizing physical events know they’re 10 times more complicated than a virtual event. A lot of things go into it and we have people that don’t do nothing else than focusing on those experiences. In the past, what we’ve seen that

Those who joined usually appreciated two things. First, of course, they can listen to the speakers, the panelists can learn, can ask questions and have really good conversation. What I think people really enjoy most is the conversations in between and afterwards. When we have drinks, we have food, et cetera, and we actually go deep and have sometimes 30, 40 minute conversations in a group of like two, three people that maybe have never met before, but work in the same markets.

And that has really been helping to just connect with people. And people have been really enjoying those in the past. So we’re really excited about that one. We will host it in Rotterdam since we think Rotterdam is one of the core centers for logistics, ports, transportation. Netherlands is one of the key countries in Central Europe that have done huge steps in electrification, have been really leading it in Central Europe with their…

David Hunt (36:26.285)
Yeah.

Joachim Lohse (36:52.408)
path to electrification and it’s really important for them. They have one of the biggest, the biggest pot in Europe, one of the biggest pots worldwide. They have the, they’re very close to Schiphol, they’re very close to the largest flower district in Europe, which all leads to emissions and that’s why electrification for them is critical and everyone is on board with it.

David Hunt (37:00.728)
Yeah.

David Hunt (37:12.886)
Yeah. Yeah. Now we’re looking forward to being there and obviously we will share the link to the event on the episode pages in case people can join you also. We started talking about your journey a little bit into creating the company. Now that you’re a number of years further down the line, perhaps you can share a little bit of some of the joys and the challenges from a leadership perspective and from building a team and a culture. Perhaps firstly, you can just share what the culture is in your mind.

Joachim Lohse (37:40.792)
Yeah.

David Hunt (37:42.112)
and then how you’ve managed to create that and some of the upsides and downsides of scaling a business from that side of things.

Joachim Lohse (37:49.315)
Yeah, I think my biggest joy is when I compare how we operate today compared to where we operated four or five years ago. Four or five years ago, I usually went to bed and woke up always with the concern of, hopefully everything works out. Hopefully I don’t wake up in the morning with messages from customers because we were so early that we had maybe a handful of people. of course, every day was a challenge of maintaining the uptime, maintaining the…

functionality delivering to customers. And today when I go to bed or when I wake up, I never have that feeling. I know the product is working. I know the team is there. I know we have availability 24×7 in case customers need help. And that’s the joy because every time something goes bad and we have challenges and the daily challenges come up, it’s very easy then to remind myself

about what actually we’ve built in the last seven years and how reliable it becomes. And then when I talk to customers or visit their new sites, and many of them have been working with us for many years now, and then they talk about our product and talk how they use it and how happy they are about the new functionalities. But then I see how they’ve been using it for three, four years, then I realize we actually built something that created extreme value. So no matter what will happen in the next years in terms of…

company, the growth, etc. I know that we created this really, really big value that helped not only us to hire people, to build a team, to give jobs, to pay salaries, but more importantly, we actually helped an entire industry to achieve what they wanted to do and them to build what they wanted to do. And that’s usually the fun part. The day-to-day challenges are changing, of course, and usually challenges can be quite difficult because the more you have customers, the less flexible you are.

So suddenly we cannot just change our decision every two weeks, right? And we cannot change product every two weeks and so on. So that’s sometimes challenging that you now have to make more bets that you can’t reverse so easily. So you have to talk a lot more, you have to discuss a lot more, you have more opinions, of course. I think it’s also a fun part, but it of course creates a lot of challenges if one customer wants one direction, the other customer wants the other direction, then you have to find…

Joachim Lohse (40:16.076)
either good middle or you have to also explain one side maybe, hey, there’s another reason why you should look the other direction potentially and think a little bit different about that.

David Hunt (40:26.486)
Yeah. You’ve talked a few times about the team and obviously the various things that you, whether that’s on the event side or on the technology side. And again, just kind of, guess, to get a flavor of as an entrepreneur, starting with like either just myself on the laptop and then you’ll see suddenly things change. So how have you learned or what have you learned over the years from a leadership or from a people management perspective?

Joachim Lohse (40:49.538)
I would say I’m still learning. think every week, every month, I realize something that I need to do different or better. I have people that report to me where I can learn from a lot. They bring experiences that I don’t have. The most important learnings is what I mentioned before. If you find people that are leaders themselves, it will help the company a lot.

It’s very difficult and sometimes impossible to do that at the beginning because leaders are usually experienced. usually cost money more than getting an inexperienced employee. But if you can, it’s always a very good decision. I think that’s one thing. The other thing, I would just, I think you can read in every single book about startups and building a company to hire very slow. It’s, it’s,

Everyone get it taught very early from the investors, from their mentors. But when you are actually in the situation where you have certain deadlines, customers expect something and you see, okay, I need more engineers, need more salespeople, I need more support people, doesn’t matter what you need. And you have that pressure of, need to deliver and now I need to look for someone. in times where we had times in the last seven years where it was really hard to get people since we were very small.

market was just settled, we had like very low unemployment rates, then it’s even tough to even get people to look at you as a company and then you have times where it’s much easier but then you have a very large group of people. And then it’s really important that for the leader to really stop the team sometimes and then think twice about certain decisions, about whether you want this position, about whether you think these are the right requirements and also

is this right person? From technical skills, it’s usually easier to qualify, but it’s much harder usually from the culture perspective or habit perspective. And that’s usually something that’s really difficult. And even though we now have, I would say, larger team, we’re close to 30 people, it’s still challenging. I think probably even when you get bigger, it’s challenging because once you’re…

Joachim Lohse (43:13.582)
Once you have more leadership, of course, you have to make sure that they also have that approach. What I really enjoy about our team is that we are very international. We have people from all over the country and the world, from the United States to Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Argentina, and beyond. And I think that’s a lot of fun. It creates a lot of dynamics. It’s fun to see how people talk to each other. have then…

in-person off-sites where we can really meet all together, even though we have also offices in different countries. These off-sites then really bring everyone together and we see that they bond much stronger. They are really becoming a little bit like a family where you know if something maybe is challenging for them as an individual or they are maybe less happy than they were two years ago, that you know they will bring it up and you find a solution of how you can solve.

David Hunt (43:45.751)
Yeah.

Joachim Lohse (44:10.2)
maybe the way how they work or the way how a team works. like this, the more you overcome these small challenges, it’s like a relationship between a lot of people or like a marriage at the end. The more you overcome the challenges, the stronger you get. And then maybe the team becomes so tight that you get supported. It’s not anymore that you need to support as a leader, but they actually support you sometimes in situations where you need support in terms of handling multiple challenges.

David Hunt (44:14.444)
Yeah.

Joachim Lohse (44:39.214)
talking about problems that you see coming from company and then again you learn from them the same way they can maybe learn from you.

David Hunt (44:46.678)
Yeah, and I’m a big fan of Offsites and I’ve written about it quite often in terms of that how to build and maintain a culture as you scale, which can be a huge challenge but incredibly important. I echo your first point, by the way, as much as obviously we’re in the business of hiring, I think people can sometimes hire too fast and also just not hire strategically. Sometimes you find people that they think they need something and then they hire it. And then it’s almost like buying a star striker and you need a defender kind of thing. Sometimes it’s like.

Joachim Lohse (45:11.628)
Yeah.

David Hunt (45:12.248)
Yeah, so I think thinking through exactly what it is you need and why and how you want to deploy that talent and how you’re to look after that talent. so, yeah, I always say it’s better to hire to plan to hire rather than hire to plan, you know, so be strategic about what it is you’re looking for.

Joachim Lohse (45:20.46)
Yeah.

Joachim Lohse (45:28.064)
Yeah, and as you say that, I think there’s one thing I realize is the first part of the first part of your company, you have to hire much broader with broader skill sets. So as an example, when you look for an engineer and you hire someone, you cannot just look for an engineer with the skill sets that you need right now because you will pivot. You will pivot at some point, either in six months or 12 months. And pivoting doesn’t mean you have to change entirely industry and product, but

you will pivot in different direction. And if you have people that are very skillful in one area, but have basically zero skills in another area, or not even interested in expanding that, then it’s challenging. typically those that perform the best in our company are those that joined early on and had either very, very wide skill set and high intelligence, but then also the excitement to learn something different.

didn’t come with a mindset of I’m gonna do this thing because I’ve done this for a very long time and I’m really good at it. Because once you pivot away from that, they see that, they realize it, maybe not immediately, but they really realize that what they actually like and want to do is maybe less relevant now for the company. And those who actually have a much broader skill set or broader interest and doesn’t have to be skill set, they just jump on the next new thing and then suddenly come up with something that you couldn’t even think of and…

they suddenly realize how much they enjoy the other side that they haven’t done before. And that’s something that all of the company gets less important gets because you pivot less, you change lot less direction. It’s still important, but the first part of a company building, it is really, really critical to hire for that.

David Hunt (47:01.122)
Yeah.

David Hunt (47:15.126)
Yeah, no, absolutely. think that mindset of control and having the mindset of being in control of themselves, but also that point of curiosity. We always look for curiosity when we’re interviewing people for our clients, for ourselves. Always wanting to adapt or learn more and that, I should say, agility that’s needed in any startup in those early years is critical.

Joachim Lohse (47:26.818)
Yeah, yeah.

David Hunt (47:36.866)
Cool, listen, it’s been great for you to share your journey so far and your thoughts on the marketplace and thanks for joining us on the podcast. I’m looking forward to rotter them. And yeah, if anyone wants to find out some more, of course, we’ll post onto the various channels, podcast and YouTube channels access to TAM Control. And yeah, we’re keen to see the journey continue for you guys. And of course, for the broader truck and the fleet electrification, it’s an exciting place to be in.

You can see that from the smile on your face and the passion you have for your business.

Joachim Lohse (48:08.07)
David, thank you so much and also thanks for having me today. I’m really excited for you guys to come as well to our conference. And yeah, I really enjoy what you guys are doing and I hope it benefits a lot of people.

David Hunt (48:22.029)
Thanks very much, Chokin.