Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid

David Hunt 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the leading content podcast. Thanks for joining us again, whether you’re listening online, on one of the podcast platforms, or whether you’re joining us freshly on YouTube, if you haven’t yet visited YouTube, please do subscribe there you can watch as well as listen to the podcasts in the future. Today, I’ve got a fantastic guest that company I first met in Berlin about three years ago at an eco summit were pitching for for investment at that time. And they have a solution, which is so obvious and yet wasn’t a tour. And it’s such a an impact that they’re able to make through their solution, which is essentially off grid power. But if you’re listening, there’s some fascinating takes in different markets where you wouldn’t necessarily expect that to be providing a great solution. In terms of the battle against climate change, and all these bad things which happen at the moment. All of these technologies make a massive difference. And the entrepreneur stories are always the critical things that I love. And Andres has a really interesting story to tell Andrea several Meyer, who’s the co founder of integrate, who’s my guest today. I hope you enjoy the episode. Hello, Andrea’s Welcome to the leaves and clean tech podcast.

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 0:58
Hi, David. Thanks for having me.

David Hunt 1:00
It’s good at last been talking for some time. And it’s great to have you on the podcast at last. So lots to talk about you. I always like to start with a little bit of the backstory of yourself and CO founding the business along with Sebastian. So perhaps you can share with us a little bit of Prior to forming integrate, what was your career? Like? What did what brought you to that point?

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 1:19
Sure, of course. So yeah, I started pretty classical with an engineering degree. And it was it was medical, mechanical engineering by the time but I decided to be in something that was called Mechatronics by the time so really electronics heavy looking into this. And so I learned how to switch MOSFETs, for example, so semiconductors, what bothered me is that I didn’t know why they switched. So I decided on jumping into material science later on. And doing a PhD in nanotechnology, where I basically learn learn the basics of how atoms work together, and ions and everything. And this is my first touchpoint of lithium ions as well. Okay, and so while doing my PhD, I wanted to stay in academia. But at the same time, I was developing my first product together with a with an American company. And I was basically serving all of the professors in the US with with a new testing suite for nano material that was not existing by the time. And so giving a product to the hands of people intrigued me so much that I said, Okay, I’m going to quit academia and go really into what I call industrialization. So make sure that I’m closer to 2030 years of a product being in the market. So rather one or two years, and making sure I’m directly attached to a market. And that’s where I decided to join a large German Corporation. And I did that through a management talent track, where I was basically given the task of rotating through the company and being prepared for the leadership role, which was really great, because this was, so I came with a little bit of knowledge and lithium ion technology. And then I was given the task of, of really going through the entire product lifecycle. So I really started in material science again, which was my home base, but I was on the other side that I am today. So I was with venture capitalists, also with the corporate venture capital rating, battery startups, making sure that we invest into the right startups, and then even went away to Singapore, so to Asia and develop a product for for offering electrification in the ASEAN market, which was really interesting. And last but not least, I was one of the first to really release a traction battery to the market. So for the first Porsche Panamera, it was a hybrid electric vehicle. And we I was basically responsible for the aftermarket concept. So really, I did it from material science. How do you push ions through a lattice into how do you get them back? And how do you refurbish them? How do you recycle them? I did the entire product lifecycle, which, of course, helps me in the position that I am today as well. Yeah.

David Hunt 3:56
So what point did you then think of founding your own company or CO founding? And where did you meet Sebastian? And how did that sort of Genesis happen?

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 4:03
So in all honesty, the first time I thought about that was after my studies. So today, I have to admit that I’m an entrepreneur at heart, and I can I can say the same for Sebastian. So I thought the first time about that. The second time when I went I left academia, so when I when I finished my PhD, but at the time, I already had signed a contract with the German corporation. So So I basically had many ideas on the way and often the ideas were not the right ones. And sometimes the people that you meet that you want to find a company with don’t match, and this time it worked out both so I met Sebastian, which has a pretty similar development, so studying and doing a PhD. On my very first day, at the corporate, we’re joined the same management programme, and then we basically departed for three years. He went more into the US I went to Asia. And so we both did a lot of battery things. On my side, it was really the rural electrification. For him, it was more containerized storage for for hooking offshore power and things like that. And then we met again, and we worked three years back to back in one of the largest tool corporations in the world. So Robert Bosch power tools. And I was basically responsible for the industrialization of batteries and chargers. And Sebastian was responsible for the industrialization of the power electronics, right? So we lead the department, Aquila, the department, that was an internal supplier for the drive train. So for the DC drive train, 25% year over year growth, so it was also a little bit of a startup environment there. But it was not enough for us. So we decided to jump on our own track, which I’m sure we will discuss later.

David Hunt 5:51
Absolutely. Yeah, no, it’s it’s a good Jen. And what’s your perfect run from a technical perspective, but I’m rubbish. I know, a fantastic company, by the way, I’ve worked with them in the past, but not necessarily the fastest moving of organisations. So that must have been a little bit of a cultural difference from from being there. But it’s a cool people good company. But yeah, starting up is a bit different, right?

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 6:12
It’s totally different. Yeah. So So I mean, when you start up, you have, I always tell people, you have a blank sheet of paper that you can fill. So you, I left 135 years of heritage, which on one side, honestly, after one year, when we had a couple of people. And the night before somebody new joined, we had to order the business cards and do all of the onboarding on, on Microsoft suite and things like that. And slack. I always wished to have back the board. But at the same time, if you look into product development processes, which are great in corporates, but spend like 1100 pages or something like this, and essentially 1213 pages are used, we could really take that back to a level that suits really a company of 234 people at the very beginning and develop it from scratch and leave out everything that we found bad and take everything with us that we found good.

David Hunt 7:03
Yeah, no superberry. And we’ll return to that, by the way. But I’m keen to talk a little about the product because I’ve been in and around clean tech and solar and batteries for since 2007. So and worked with energy storage businesses, both stationary mobility storage for for quite some time. But when I sat to E cash, I must be two or three years ago, maybe. And Sebastian was pitching into the grid. And it just hit me like what, why? Why is nobody doing this? Right? This is such an obvious thing is such an important thing that people will walk past, you know, the use case and not think twice about it. And yet, there’s so much damage that’s done by not utilising a product they use it integrate. So I’ll share a little bit more than about exactly who are interested with what’s the product? What’s the solution? What’s the problem that you’re solving?

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 7:47
Yeah, thanks for pointing that out. It’s probably one of the most underrated things if we talk about getting away from combustion technology. So you see the product in the back, it’s a portable power supply. Nothing more, it’s really a socket, and it has socket, like output power. So it’s, it’s when we designed it, we looked into five criteria, we said, if it’s really tailored for professionals, which the things that we have today or not, then it has to has to have five things which is really good like power that we have, we don’t compromise on power grid like power doesn’t only mean that it’s 16 amps straight continuous, it means you have the stiffness of the grid, you have the peak powers of the grid, so it can turn any large machinery. The second one for a professional has to be lightweight. So you need to carry it in one hand, because your tool or whatever you have goes into the other hand, the third one is compact, you have to fit it into any size of trunk. And the fourth one really important, which nobody has today is robust and waterproof. So usually I’m going to talk about about the challenges that we had and why we did that in a second. But usually things are not IP rated. So you put them into rain, they’re done. And now imagine a guy like this, doing a diamond core drilling and putting the system into rain into concrete slurry. It wouldn’t work after a day. And so this was not the technology that was out there was not meant for professional use. And the fifth one, you’ve been talking a lot about range anxiety in your previous podcasts as well as Yeah, the range anxiety. So you have to have enough power to bring the people through your workday. Right. Yeah. And that were the five criteria. And we basically stumbled on upon that when we visited a lot of customers. And we saw that for small machinery. So I did the small battery packs for Bosch power tools. You could not imagine today to have a drill driver that has a cord, right, because it’s so convenient. It’s 100 watt hour battery, and it lasts the entire day. But now if you go into things like the diamond core drilling in the back, which is really hungry and needs a lot of demand, you’re left with a solution that’s from the last century, which is combustion based, which is the so called generator or genset and realising that and looking into this and thinking about why is there no solution for the 21st century and Then looking into how much of a problem is that actually, and seeing that almost 2 billion people and the work in the world work Mobley. So it’s not only construction, it’s film and media. It’s event technology. We can talk about a couple of them later, if you want to. But it’s really so these people are left with something that is inefficient, that’s uncomfortable, that’s polluting, that’s the most expensive way of generating mobile electricity. And at the same time, so what what would what would a corporation like Bosch or to name others Makita DeWalt. Milwaukee, do, they convert people on their proprietary interface. So they have, they have the proprietary interface, if you buy a Bosch battery, you’re not going to buy a Makita battery after that, because you’re locked into their ecosystem, which is great for these companies, right. And in the, in the, in the past the trunks of the service vehicles, they have been really colourful. And today they have one colour because you’re in one battery system. And so we start what we what we know. And that’s where I’m also really grateful to have received a great education with a large corporation is the economy of scale really matters. And I’ve listened to your podcast with data a while ago. And they also said they think they’re their product really like a product not like like this, like this solution approach that is always tailored, but it’s really a standardised product that reaches economies of scale fast. And this is the same thing we did, we said, we have to have something single size fits all at the very beginning. And it needs to be scalable, because you need to reach economies of scale very quickly. And at the same time, we knew that these large applications like the diamond quarter, but others, so Hilty sells 10,000 A year and another one sells 5000 a year, they all add up. So they all add up to the millions of volumes. And at the same time, they all share a common interface, which is standard socket, we calculated the very beginning there are roughly a trillion sockets in the world. And we thought that this is the best interface to go with. And at the same time, AC power is still like it’s on electricity. It’s the diesel of the world, right? So it’s so so abundant, and you’ll find it everywhere. And you can power almost anything in different segments. And that’s why we why we decided on that. The second thing is if you think about this core drill there and having like 20 kilogrammes of battery on top, you wouldn’t be able to lift it anymore. So you have to split these things. And instead of just doing what others do, like having this large container storage, we believe into decentralised storage, and that it’s better to equip each tool with a solution than having these large systems that you have to haul around. And and so that’s that’s where we started.

David Hunt 12:36
Yeah, yeah. It’s always fascinating where you see the problem and define the solution. But also, obviously, we’re returned to economies of scale as a startup. And sort of, as you said that the ability to scale the product quickly and cost effectively, but wanted to jump back briefly to the solution. Because I was at a I was speaking at an IA event in earlier this year, and the theme was around electrification of construction sites. And obviously, this is mainly with Dan Foss and talking about diggers offload as the machinery, but it’s phenomenal how much both pollution, air pollution and noise pollution is generated by construction sites around the world. And you walk through any city of course, at the moment, there’s construction everywhere, right? So the noise pollution and the physical air pollution that’s generated from construction sites is phenomenal, right? So that in itself is a massive opportunity to to solve

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 13:27
exactly, exactly. So if you talk in terms of co2, one generator, so the small below 15 kilowatts that are barely regulated one generator is as much as a problem as a as a Euro six passenger vehicle. But if you look into air pollution, and have just returned from a long trip to the US, because we’re now entering that market, as well. And after talk to card, for example, the California Air Resources Board, they are banning generators now from 2028. And starting 2024 actually already with leaf blowers and other things, because that the calculations and we have to show that with with the life project that you find a project that we have done. If you talk about air pollution, these generators are sometimes 60 to 70 times the problem of a Euro six passenger vehicle, so you ban all of them from the streets. And at the same time, you’re you’re allowing a generator next next to an iced coffee or something like yeah,

David Hunt 14:18
the noise again, shouldn’t be underestimated the actual noise pollution that these things create as well as the air pollution. It is

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 14:23
it is it is I’ve just returned from a zero emission construction site in Amsterdam, where one of our customers was is really doing zero emission. So only zero emission technology from the excavators to anything else that you can imagine. And they told us if they’re going to jump start generator there, it’s densely populated, it wouldn’t take five minutes for the first one, the first resident to come down and complain and so it’s no longer accepted. But at the same time, I also realised there that we’re still not there. So we are start just at a starting point. But when I saw the excavators and all of the larger machinery, I thought about how how economic that would be to drive them to a supercharger to recharge them and take three hours to get back. So we still have to make sure that that’s the advantage of fossil fuels, which is trading and moving them around and recharging things that we get to something similar with battery technology.

David Hunt 15:21
Yeah, yeah. Let’s jump a little bit back to the startup journey, because you’ve the clue there’s a solution, or a problem to which you find a solution. Both of you have this brilliant set of experiences, from a technical perspective to be able to solve that problem. But starting a company is tough. Again, particular, when you’re making a product that’s quite capital intensive, right? So what were some of the major challenges that you faced in the first two or three years of building the company?

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 15:47
Yeah, there were a lot of challenges. During the first years, I think the very first so how do you actually find a company? How do you get started? What do you need? We, we always say we did an MBA on the job. Because we basically never did an MBA and then said, Okay, we spent the money for the company. And, yeah, so at the very beginning, I think the first thing that you need to do, right and we successfully did is you need to realise that you don’t need people that are like you, but you need people that have different skills. So the first people that we hired, the first three people were a designer, project manager, and someone for brand and marketing, because these were the things that we didn’t have too many touch points before. And where we said, Okay, we need people. So only after the first funding round, we hired more engineers, to make sure we get into industrialization and everything is, is done correctly. But really this starting starting with with these people, and I think the first thing that we have done wrong before and that we realise that as as to enter the ASIC founders, you draw your first project plan, and it tells you half a year later, you’re basically in mass production. And then you really need people that bring you back down to earth and tell you Look, I’ve looked into this, I’ve looked into supply chains, I’ve just written it down for you. It will take one and a half years. So something like this. Yeah. And then you’re in negotiation, and then you can you can really look into something. But I think, yeah, as funders, you have to be enthusiastic, you have to be pulling, but at the same time, you you need to have someone that is pulling you back, and just just helping you to get a realistic view on things. And so so that was really something that we realised was the first project plan, and we hired a project manager, and then everything went really well on that end. Yeah,

David Hunt 17:29
I think it’s critically important to think of as just as the entrepreneurs, you need to be believing that everything can be done by tomorrow, when driving for that, but equally, it’s good to have around you those individuals, I asked employees, or board advisors, or wherever they come from, who can give that counterbalance to give some, yeah, some reality to the aspirations. Right. Yeah, and

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 17:47
I mean, a couple of things. More, I think, with a seed investment, you read all of the books like venture deals, and anything that you can imagine. And they all tell you what not to do. And sometimes you end up doing exactly the same things and learning them the hard way. And this is basically what we did with the seed round. We talked to like 30 investors. And in the end, we met all of the types, for example, that are displayed in venture deals, but we didn’t really spot them. And we were also enthusiastic. But that also brought us back down to earth. And with Sirius Adas was so much different than Series B, because it’s essentially if you aren’t a climate tech space, if you if you jump over the first hurdle, which is seed funding, then people know you. So for series A Series B, we were not really advertising, we always used ecosummit, to announce that we were looking for a round, and then things just developed as they did.

David Hunt 18:41
Yeah. Now it’s a great ecosystem to be involved with in fundraising is always a challenge. Because it’s not just the money. It’s the right money, the right VC, the right partner relationship, particularly the seed round, where you’ve got limited collateral as such a belief. So that’s a tough one. So how many rounds have you gone through? And then do you ever to share what you’ve raised to date?

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 19:00
Yeah, so to date, we’ve raised more than 40 million euros, we have gone through three rounds. First round was with high tech uniform and elite. Second round said ventures from Amsterdam and the third round was ERP. So Energy Impact partners rallied. And now we have a great consortium of investors, we have family offices, we have VCs, and we have, we have a great German peer who also joined the investors who ran SMA before so he has a good track record and background in the same field. And what was really important for us and what we really paid attention is that the investors understand our business. So it’s not too easy to find investors that understand how beautiful scalable hardware can be. Because often hardware you have the valley of death between seed and series A and we were able to go through that with without any damage, because we did a smart trick there. But nevertheless, if If you always have to explain everything again and with the investors that we have, we have really a great understanding of battery technology, how market develops, they can challenge us, they can give insights from from other angles, which is really great. And for a hardware startup, this is even more important. And that’s why we basically said goodbye to 27 of the 30 investors that we met in the seed round, because many of them were like, Okay, why can’t you just develop another app? Or is there something with AI? Yeah, of course, we could do something like this. But we are in an energy hardware startup. And and if you if you get it, then you’re in and if you don’t get it, it will be difficult. In the

David Hunt 20:39
Yeah, no, exactly. The the quality of the of the investor is so important. And we add our set ventures I’ve known very, very well and Antonacci was on the podcast recently from from from scratch, the the investor, it’s not just the money, it’s what they bring in terms of experience, and introductions, all these kinds of things, which sometimes is underestimated, particularly for new entrepreneurs who are at the seed stage. And like you say, you don’t know what you don’t know at that stage. Right. So understanding that it’s the right kind of money.

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 21:02
Yeah, I think what really helped us is the past that we had with Bosch. So we were really trained how to industrialise the product in high quality and high throughput and low costs. So we’ve already brought a lot of credibility. But in the end, you’re doing a lot of things for the first time. So always zero to one is really something where you struggle where you sometimes fall, but you get up. And we’ve obviously also done a lot of things, right? Because otherwise we wouldn’t be in the position that we are today. Yeah,

David Hunt 21:29
sure. A bit more about the the applications and of course, construction sites we’re all familiar with, we all pass we smell the fumes, we hear the noise. Yeah, that’s clearly a big market. But as you said, it’s not the only market. So what are the markets? Are you active in and UCs bringing this solution to? And who ultimately, our customers entirely through distribution? Do you deal with the contractors? What’s your kind of routes to market?

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 21:50
Yeah, so So first of all, what we did, as a as a small hardware startup, you have to know that there is a valley of death, which means in the very first place, you have to invest into a production line costs, let’s say a million, then you have to invest into toolings, cost half a million, so one and a half millions. And if you if you sell under your own brand, with no trust with no customer interface, and nothing, you’re going to end up with 100 units in the first year. And you’re going to write off the production line on 100 units, which is very bad. And this is where a lot of startups fail. And this is where we said, Okay, we need to leverage the sales force of brand partners. And that’s where we went out. So we are really well connected in a construction space. We knew when we when we went out that industrialization will roughly take two years, we knew that there is a demand, and there’s product market fit, which you were also proving with the brand partners later. So we onboard it to date, three brand partners that basically were able to to buy 10 1000s of units. Okay, so you get into economies of scale from the very first day. And this is really important to ramp up production and have it as a stable output. Because if you start with 100, you’re you’re just screwed. Yeah, so So this was really one important thing. At the same time, we saw that a lot of people were coming to us and approaching us and saying like, Hey, can we purchase with you directly. So really large accounts, like large construction companies, they always like to work with the OEM, large rental companies. And so now we’re also looking into other verticals. And just to point one out, Film and Media Technology, for example. It’s very interesting, because what happens right now, for example, in Paris, the new mayor Hidalgo, she she basically forbid generators to be used on film and media productions from 2023. So for today, there are 7000 film days planned for Paris for next year. And they don’t know where to source the energy from if they if you don’t just use cable Trump’s which is often not possible. So in that case, we’ve already started supplying our batteries to that field. I’ve been in Hollywood just recently and talked to the larger companies there they see the same demand. But now we have we’ve basically powered like, like, series like Luca, the outdoor shots and parents, for example, were powered on Instagram. And as we were speaking in the UK, the new Star Wars movie, the outdoor shots are also powered, disintegrate,

David Hunt 24:07
right yeah, yeah. And there’s a lot of filming done in Liverpool which is where I’m at the moment and actually came across this with my solar business which I formed previously when we were doing some filming for for some case studies and the production company we insisted we’re using not generators because we were a solar company and they were able to at the time, find some battery powered from you know, we use the renewables to power the battery but it was kind of we had to cobble this together it wasn’t a thing, but clearly now there is a an off the shelf solution, so to speak.

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 24:35
Exactly, exactly. And we see that this product is as it is enough is good enough for like 70% of the market and we realised that we came with a very high hurdle. So starting with construction, which which is the most abusive field, so to say, then things are usually okay for filming media for event technology. They usually ask for other add ons like fleet management, for example, we were at the very first Last year, we were approached by a company that is running large concerts in across Europe and they wanted to power an Ed Sheeran concert and wanted to have decentralised energy. We were asking them like, Okay, this is an abandoned military base, how many of them would you need? And I said, well, 1000. So so that person or that people at random, they usually don’t want to have like, 1000 people standing next to the unit looking at it, is it charged? Is it empty? So they want to have something like a fleet management where there’s one operator that can just replace units if something goes wrong.

David Hunt 25:32
And I guess there’s a rental market as well, because again, a lot of people, obviously professionals use those tools daily. But a lot of a lot of sites are just ad hoc, whether it’s filming or whether it’s construction. So is there a rental market for the product,

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 25:44
there is a large rental market so so we have just found that out when we went into the UK now. So we have the first salespeople in the UK. And it turns out the UK is a very mature market. So the UK is using battery technologies in a decade. And they have suffered from that battery technology before. So they were really happy to see our product and sometimes weren’t really able to believe what the small unit can do until we showed it to them. And and so the the go to market strategy in the UK is actually going through these rentals or so called Briar companies over there. Because they have they have 1000s of generators that work on railroad tracks that construction companies. And with all of these large construction companies having their sustainably sustainability action plans in place. The demand is basically there. So they’re asked every day, if they have a solution, and now they have one.

David Hunt 26:33
Yeah, perfect. I want to jump back on just to you for a moment. Because again, on the podcast, I think we know about 105 episodes, mostly entrepreneurs and founders, and everybody has a different route to get to where they were, you know, and I always just have this question what your entrepreneurs made, or do they happen? And you touched on before you were saying you kind of want to be in academia, and you’re obviously very much into the technology, and then you kind of discovered you’re an entrepreneur? Was that a surprise? And how did that? How do you reconcile that with your earlier plans?

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 27:00
Yeah, that’s a that’s a tough question. I have to say, maybe I didn’t reflect enough on this one. But yeah, so I think I was I was taught in a very young age already. So I don’t know if you’re familiar with with this bracelet for vessels called stents. So it’s a medical technology, where you basically can scaffold any, any artery or something like this, that’s locked. So my father basically was one of the people that started it. Okay, that business so with, with the age of five, I could explain people, what’s the shape memory alloy, which, which people of course, found remarkable. I also find remarkable today, but also when weird, but that basically also shaped my way into into doing new things, getting things done. And then at some point, I really fall in love with this with academia, when I when I when I decided to do a PhD, and I really immersed into all of that, but at the same time, then I saw you always have to see on Are you the best scientist ever? Or where can you contribute most to society, basically, and this is what I asked myself, and I didn’t find myself that the best scientists in the world, and I didn’t know whether I will ever become the best scientist in the world. But I knew that I was a person to move things. And it was already when I was a child. And when whenever, whenever I was working with people, so even my advisor in PhD, they always said, You’re a natural born leader. And actually how I got to Bosch was that one of my colleagues told me like there’s, there’s this assessment centre for engineering a greener future of Bosch, and you’re the perfect fit for that. So I thought more about that. But I’m also a person that not always thinks 10 times through, I think this is also something that founders need to have. Sometimes you need to make a decision and jump. And that’s what I did. And I have to say, I still have very good tie into into science and academia, and I talk to people frequently and all of the professors that I’ve met along, I can still sleep on the couches and discuss nanotechnology with them. But at the same time, this nanotechnology brought me to the lithium ion batteries, and I was one of the first people going out of grad school that really came out of that, that that field, and at the time companies like Bosch and others, they were basically hiring everyone that just could spell with him. And this has now changed for good, of course, but But nevertheless, so this was really this was really something that helped shape my career. And then I was intrigued by industry by industrialising things. Yeah. And so So yeah, this is my true passion.

David Hunt 29:33
Okay. Now it’s good to hear that. So you’ve been through elements of the startup journey, of course lots still to be done lots of scaling has to be done, which I know is going on at a frantic pace and more fundraising Well sure, surely follow. But you’ve got to a point now where you have obviously a viable business, you have a market place you you into new markets, and lots of things are happening. What has been the most rewarding personally? experience in the time since founding the business, I would point

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 29:57
out two of them. So the first One is the feedback from the customers. So really what we what we have, we’re using slack as an internal communication communication tool, we have a channel called customer feedback. So now I had the market side. And I always tell my, my people, when they’re out with the customers, and they get feedback, put it in there, show everyone what customers really, really do with our units and what they think about the units, be it good or bad. And so the feedback that we got, from the very first feedback showing this minimum viable product, which was an ugly wooden box, 100% larger than it is today. And Sebastian, myself were shivering, like, will it work, or will it not work. And people really looking at us like, notice, it’s not possible way, I can’t believe that I have like 10 people working on this for five years, and they have not accomplished what he did in two months. So this was really, really one of the rewarding things is customer feedback that we that we nailed product market fit and that people love the product. And so we have spent a precious amount of time talking to customers getting things right, the first product looked Apple like So Felix already signed a great job. But when we brought it to the customer, they told us like this is so nice, I would never put it on a construction site. And so really, this this product market fit, obviously, it’s also important to get the business fueled. And the second one is certainly having such a great team. So hiring the right people. And we spent a lot of time in hiring. Because at the very beginning, we also did some mistakes there. And then we reiterated and reiterated and reiterated and today we are in a stage where this is really seamless from from the first contact until a very, very detailed onboarding, to get people up to speed. And then I usually bring I have three children. So usually bring my children into school into kindergarten in the morning, right coming in here and seeing that people already work really passionate on something that you have started up, right. It’s probably the most rewarding thing that I that I can tell you.

David Hunt 31:59
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. Listen, I’m a tech nerd. And probably not as much so as you but the people side of things. Clearly you should expect running hills and in business. But getting I think a lot of startups ache. So when you get it like yourself, but a lot of companies kind of make shortcuts, when it looks at hiring and bringing people on to reactive rather than proactive in terms of hiring. But as you’ve touched on there, the importance of the team and the right people on the right mission with the right values, and the right skill set is critical to the success of any company.

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 32:28
Exactly, exactly. Especially when you scale. So we are growing 100%, year after year. So that means you have as many new people every year that you have old people so so. So you really have to make sure that they share the same values that the cultural fit is. So we always start with the cultural fit interview. And it’s pretty basic questions. Just asking people like how do you receive feedback? A wrong answer to that would be like feedback. I’ve never asked for, obviously, right. But sometimes that happens, we have spent more than 2000 people this year. And this is really important for us because we’ve we’ve also done that wrong at the very beginning, sometimes, but right now with 100 people and only three people left, we have a very good track record. In the end, we know that you always have a culture, it just depends whether you enter with your culture or with any culture if you if you do that, right. And especially Teresa, from people and culture team has spent a very precious amount of time in looking into how do we make sure we have onboard the right people. So we don’t have to let go people?

David Hunt 33:27
Yeah, absolutely. You either create the culture or the culture gets created. And you want to make sure that you’re in control of it. Right. So

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 33:32
yes, yes. Yeah, that’s really important. And I think yeah, so you always have to have and we make sure. So usually, as a tech founder, the first, the first thing that you do wrong is you hire a lot of Minimes. So people that are like you that speak the same language. And that’s what we explicitly did not do and what we always make sure today is, are you if you’re to like Sebastian or myself, then we will probably not hire because we like this multitude of opinions. People also need to have the courage to tell Andreas, you’re wrong. Yeah. And and so so if we don’t have this multitude of opinion, if we are in a meeting at the very beginning, and we say, Okay, everyone goes this direction, everyone screams here. I’m a little frightened. Because if there is no discussion, and we have not sorted out, it’s really hard to believe that this is the right thing to do.

David Hunt 34:19
Yeah, I was always brought up with a theory that if there’s three people in the room, and you agree on everything, two of you aren’t needed. Yeah, but that aspect of diverse I think is really important. Because again, we do as an industry, I have a little bit of a diversity issue in terms of gender and ethnicity. But to me, gender is not just those things, which are critically important, but gender is about different thoughts, different experiences, different opinions, different different ways of looking at problems, right. So I think that’s critically important. I say don’t hire Minimes you get a very diverse workforce never yet in every sense.

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 34:48
Exactly. We paid a lot of attention to that. I don’t have the actual figures in mind. But we saw saw the 100 people speak over 20 languages. They come Also from over 20 countries, in the end, they we have the youngest person is 20, the oldest person is 61. And we have probably a share of 40% women. So a lot of corporations would kill for that. Absolutely. And we really paid a lot of attention to that to just have the right mix. And we see that coming to fruition now, with all of the diverse skills that people have.

David Hunt 35:25
Right, right, perfect. So we’ve been talking for how long I thought we had, we had, it’s been fascinating. But before we go, that we’re kind of in a situation where there’s a little bit of a perfect storm, there’s the horrendous war in Ukraine, there’s there’s climate, things happening everywhere. We’ve got, obviously cop going on at the moment. But on the flip side, some of that silver lining comes from that is that there are people making decisions now about banning vehicles, combustion vehicles, and of course, now banning combustion generators. So to some extent, there’s a bit of a perfect storm, even though the backdrop is sometimes a little bit scary. What do you see as the next three or four years like for Instagram? Where do you hope to be what what are your aspirations to see the business evolve in the next two or three years.

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 36:03
So what we can clearly see as the first product really nailed it. So today, if I, if I would just look into our order backlog, we would be safe growing 100%, year over year until the end of 2025. And we have not, I have not considered all of the people standing in line waiting to get a product with us. So that’s that’s perfect. But being this this industrialization, person by heart, I know that this is always an S uptake. So we are at the very beginning of this s uptake. And now we need to make sure that we look into what’s the next big thing, right. And so we also made a decision, we have a lot of tool corporations, as our brand partners, we are never going to be tool corporations, or we’re never going to develop tools or something like this. Our expertise is really in high power, high energy density batteries. And so so we are really the ones that want to electrify off grid. So really anything that is that is an off grid. And there’s a strong dogma. So in the in the past, electricity, stationary electricity was provided by utilities. And the mobile electricity was provided by combustion, and that parts are mobile electricity and combustion, we really want to replace that. And that’s we’ve just come from, from Bama, which is the largest fear of construction in Munich. And we’ve just introduced a product there. That’s called 0387, which is, which is the large size storage where again, we thought the products on the market are not as good as they could be. So now we’re applying our technology and putting something that people usually put into 10 foot containers into a canopy system that you can haul around. And that has the capacity and the power for, for example supercharging, caterpillars and other machinery, right instructions.

David Hunt 37:45
Perfect. Well, it’s good to see the evolution of the business what we’re doing, make sure on the episode page, we’ll share links to the various social media platforms to the website where people can see and more and there’s some cool stuff on the website to share a little bit about that product. But for now, it’s been brilliant to talk to you. I look forward to seeing hopefully, maybe you are some rationality or something next tune in. But in the meantime, good to catch up with you. Thanks for joining us.

Andreas Sedlmayr – Instagrid 38:07
Yeah, thanks a lot, David. Thanks for having me.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai