Johannes Kirnberger – Delta Charge

David Hunt (00:02.005)
Mordyn Yohannes, welcome to the podcast.

Johannes (00:17.72)
Morning, many thanks for the invitation.

David Hunt (00:20.269)
Great. It’s great to have you with us. Lots of course to talk about. Really love what’s going on at the moment in the heavy duty freight space. So really keen to dig into what you guys are doing and the problems you guys are solving. But I always like to start the podcast with a little bit of, know, the, guess the entrepreneur story, your background, like most entrepreneurs is quite varied and certainly interested to hear how you came about co-founding the business. So maybe you can give a little bit of the backstory.

Johannes (00:47.95)
Sure. So I personally have a background in business and energy economics, environmental economics. And I was working in Paris at the OECD and the World Bank on energy systems. So quite broad, quite a high micro level. And at that time, data centers were the big story in terms of load growth on grid. So we worked a lot with the grid providers, the energy utilities.

Big tech, course, so the big data center providers and increasingly batteries were also coming the picture. And that time there was about two and a half years ago, my co-founder, Philip, he was developing battery systems in Taiwan. was coming back to Europe and yeah, told the story about how batteries are the next big thing. How about hardware prices are dropping rapidly, which enabled at that time,

entirely new business cases that were not possible before. So initially we focused on building out a battery developer called Delta Capacity. We focused on utility scale battery projects, kind of 100 megawatt plus, starting out of Sweden, then very quickly Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, kind of building that out into a proper company. And then about two years ago, we had a lot of requests from real estate developers.

David Hunt (01:57.613)
Mm-hmm.

Johannes (02:11.128)
that had logistics companies as their tenants, initially in Sweden. And these tenants were electrifying rapidly because Sweden tends to be a couple of years ahead in terms of electrification. And they were realizing that they’re running into grid constraints because the volumes in electric trucks, the battery capacity, when you have 10, 15, 20 trucks and you want to charge them in one place.

David Hunt (02:27.362)
Mm.

Johannes (02:37.304)
that quite quickly kind of comes to the limits of existing grid connections. So after a couple of these requests, initially we said no, because that’s not what we do. But then after six, seven of these requests, we kind of couldn’t ignore it anymore. And exactly. And really started looking into it. Spend a proper year going to every conference, talk to the big truck manufacturers, because we needed to see if electric trucks is actually a thing, if that’s really coming.

David Hunt (02:49.741)
You spot the signal? Yeah.

Johannes (03:07.434)
And after a year concluded that yes, it is coming. There’s enormous challenge in providing the infrastructure to charge these trucks, but it is also an enormous opportunity to arrive from a battery perspective and apply batteries to that problem. And fundamentally decided to spin off a new company called Delta Charge, which is we’re building right now. And yeah, really focusing on that truck logistics vertical because that’s where

Again, coming from the macro perspective where the new load growth will come over the next decade.

David Hunt (03:43.297)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s always good to have those market signals and customers knocking on your is always a good thing. talking back about to yourself then, because again, working at World Bank, OECD, lot of obviously, intellectual challenge, I’m sure a lot of exciting stuff to be done. then it’s a bit of a leap to come from kind of a policy strategy environment to actually founding or co-founding a business, even if it’s on the back of, you know, other things which are maybe a little bit established.

What was it that maybe triggered that maybe you should do this for yourself rather than maybe joining another company or again, maybe continuing in a, in a lobbying or a policy capacity, but you chose to co-found a business and maybe what’s the rationale behind that.

Johannes (04:25.966)
So to be honest, was toying with the idea for a couple of years prior. As you said, intellectually, working in this environment was a great challenge. You work with lot of smart people on kind of very complex problems. But it’s completely different from entrepreneurship, from running your own thing. I did have from my bachelor, which was a business background, I did have a lot of friends recently starting or having started their own companies.

So there was certainly kind of a lot of social interaction with that space. And you can’t help but think whether you also want to go that path because it is another level of excitement, of intensity, of working on a problem. Everything about ownership, building your own team, building out your own idea. It’s a lot more risky, but also it can be a lot more rewarding.

So kind of through that environment, was already thinking about the idea and then my co-founder Philip coming back from Taiwan, that was really the spark that set it off because it was thematically exactly my ballpark. That’s what I was working on. But kind of it was a beautiful alignment of my topic, but also from kind of the external motivation of starting a business, which then made me take the leap.

David Hunt (05:48.139)
Okay. And it’s a good environment in Munich as well. Sometimes it perhaps doesn’t get the, I guess, credit to a degree of Berlin, for example, or Amsterdam or some of the other cities where there are really cool hubs where we’re, of course, we do a lot of work, but Munich likewise has a great ecosystem.

Johannes (05:52.43)
100%.

Johannes (06:03.489)
I think especially in the energy kind climate tech space, Munich seems to the place to be. It’s an incredible just hub of talent and you can’t help run into people who work in the energy space. I’m originally from Munich, so was a…

kind of an easy sell to move back to Munich and start the company from here. Initially, we’re talking about like, thinking whether we started from Sweden or from Germany. Fundamentally decided on Germany simply because the market is about 10, 20 times the size. But we do have an office in Gothenburg, Sweden being a bit ahead in heavy duty electrification. And we definitely have that double DNA of Swedish, Philip also being from there.

of being a Swedish German company.

David Hunt (06:55.149)
Yeah. Well, there’s no plenty about what’s most of Munich as well. So let’s look a little bit of how things have grown and where things are at the moment, because like most things, I’ve been in clean tech a long time and most things kind of almost seem impossible. Even though you know the tailwinds are strong and you’ll get there, but suddenly things really go fast. So for example, obviously the battery costs have come down, but even I think three or four, maybe five years ago,

Johannes (06:58.529)
Yes, yes.

David Hunt (07:21.931)
trucking was kind things. Yeah, maybe that’s still a biofuels or molecules kind of play. It was a struggle maybe to see how batteries could cope, but clearly technology and obviously energy density, all these things have evolved. And now really, as you’ve alluded to already, there’s huge things happening in electrifying heavy duty transport. We’re working heavily there ourselves. So perhaps you can share how the last couple of years have really got to the situation where you are

Johannes (07:41.121)
Yeah.

David Hunt (07:51.885)
obviously being proactive, but clearly people are seeking you out because this is a problem that needs to be solved.

Johannes (07:57.486)
100%. I think when we started working the idea about two years ago, at least in Germany, was still, I’d say not up in the air, but people were not certain where things are heading in terms of kind of what kind of trucks will be the dominant technology. So people were still talking about hydrogen, about biofuels, kind of the whole palette of being technologically open and German technologieoffenheit. That was all the rage. I think in Sweden already at that time,

People were certain that it’s going to be electric and there’s going to be an electrification over the next 10 to 20 years. So Sweden was kind of, how do we solve this? Germany was still at a point where, yeah, people didn’t really know where things are heading. think within the last year, it has really moved from if it is happening to when and how it is happening. So the conversations we have now compared to a year ago are pretty much completely different.

A year ago, you had the first pioneers doing pilots, kind of ordering the first one, two, three, five electric trucks. But they were still testing out, testing it out. They’re learning a lot and how to operate them, how to get the energy, et cetera. I think now it’s a completely different picture. The curves are exponential. Yes, it’s still at the beginning, it’s only a couple of thousand, but the curves are really, really going upwards. And yeah, so it has moved from if to when.

and especially how do we solve the infrastructure problem, which I think is still the main roadblock. The technology is there, the ranges are there. It’s still kind of the first generation of trucks, the second generation is going to, the entire powertrain is electrified. It’s like you’ll see a lot of advances in the technology, but the current technology is already sufficient for the majority of the routes for Shorten, Midhall.

David Hunt (09:25.921)
Yeah.

Johannes (09:52.428)
easily doable, even the long hauls, like there are ways to do that electric. So we’ve seen a big shift also in mindset from the big logistics companies in the last year.

David Hunt (10:04.353)
Yeah, definitely. I think we just actually launched the saw the launch of the first megawatt charging hub in the UK actually for trucks. So obviously the Germany have a particular focus and some good policy, I think support recently towards developing this infrastructure. But perhaps you can talk a little bit about to founding the business and the entrepreneurial side of things. It’s good that you have you see the market signals, you have people saying, can you solve this problem? And you say yes, but

Johannes (10:10.785)
Yeah. Yeah.

David Hunt (10:30.657)
What’s the vision of the company for the next two or three years in this? I should say still very, very nascent, even though things are starting to move and, there’s, there’s a, acceptance that this is the thing, but how do you then see Delta charge evolving in these first couple of years while it is still in this early stage?

Johannes (10:48.781)
So as you said, what we saw was an infrastructure problem, kind of the traditional problem that you have in electric mobility. You don’t build the infrastructure unless the vehicles are there, and you don’t buy the vehicles if you don’t have the infrastructure to charge them, so the classic chicken and the egg problem. Us coming from the battery space, we actually saw a way to solve the chicken and the egg problem, which for us means

We built hybrid sites. Yes, the charging, and that’s where the data charge, the part of the name comes from. The charging is a big part of it, but we do come from batteries, and that’s where our expertise really lies. And we think applying battery storage to the problem has a number of advantages. that’s where we add value as a company. That’s what ultimately we want to build out. We want to build out a network of

fundamentally hybrid assets, so battery charging combined assets across Europe, starting from Germany and Sweden, but the ambition is very much doing that European wide. And that being an infrastructure problem, it’s going to require infrastructure financing as well. We did start out as a spin-off. We do have a VC investment of about 4 million that we just announced a couple of weeks ago, which helps us

built out the kind of the initial team, the initial technology. But clearly where we’re heading is large volumes of infrastructure finance. And there’s a lot of money out there that wants to invest in clean assets, that wants to invest in bankable and secure clean assets. And as a company, I think the big challenge of bringing that of scaling it at speed is combining the startup speed that we have in the kind of in the fundamental company.

But combine that with large scale asset financing because that’s what gets you the speed and the scale and also the impact you can have on the problem. You’re not going to solve it by doing individual projects here and there, but you’re going to solve it by building a large network of connected assets that fundamentally deliver and that’s the big vision we want to have at the company. We want to provide secure, predictable,

Johannes (13:11.596)
kilowatt hour prices to the logistics companies because that’s the one thing that the companies need to calculate their TCO, their total cost of ownership. And that’s what gives them the security to invest in the rollout of electric trucks.

David Hunt (13:14.252)
Yeah.

David Hunt (13:25.741)
Yeah. Clearly it’s a company, you’re not a, obviously not a battery manufacturer, but what part of the system and the solution is proprietary? Are you purely a systems integrator or do you manufacture any hardware, software? What’s the, I guess the secret source for Delta Charge?

Johannes (13:30.454)
Yes.

Johannes (13:42.241)
We do not manufacture any hardware. Those are tier one suppliers, both on the battery and charger side. I think that problem has been solved. There are some fantastic companies out there. And quite frankly, think we would be five to 10 years late to the party. So we are very much a system designer, a system integrator of the hardware.

And I’d say the core USB, the core IP of the company are the algorithms to optimize energy flows on those assets. In our case, that means it’s hybrid sites. We do behind the meter optimization and we do front of the meter trading. And that orchestration of the energy flows on the side that is solar capacity, you have heat pumps, you have the truck loads, kind of when different energy flows go to the battery and from the battery.

And then the excess capacity of the battery, how do you trade that on the flexibility markets? That is the core IP. We need that to size sites, so to understand how big a battery has to be and could be. And the same algorithms then are used to the onsite optimization and energy trading.

David Hunt (14:54.668)
Well, these things are quite complex because it’s quite early. We talked, I think, when we spoke previously about the V2G mark and how that’s clearly going to be quite instrumental, but still very much technically and certainly policy-wise at its infancy. So it must be quite tricky to, I guess, future plan or build or know the revenue stacking opportunities on any given site when things are moving so quickly. yeah, how do you go about, mean, for example, what’s your business model? talked, I think, on your website and when we talked previously about sort of

fixed price charging. So what enables you to be able to offer that?

Johannes (15:30.06)
Well, the short answer is batteries because they are ultimately a tool for flexibility. What you buy with batteries, and yes, you can model that. You can model now a business case for the next 10 years, but what we know for certain is that it’s not going to look the way we model it. What we know for certain is that you buy flexibility and you can meet the market demand for flexibility in many different ways. You have the kind of behind the meter optimization that basically means you optimize your existing solar.

or additional solar that comes in. It is peak shaving, it is energy arbitrage, yeah, quite easily by low or sell high. And it is the participation in the flexibility markets, kind of the traditional way that batteries make money. What now comes on top of the traditional ways of how batteries make sense is the truck charging component. That is a huge

David Hunt (16:09.442)
Yeah.

Johannes (16:28.254)
new load that’s going to come. It’s quite predictable because the companies know when their trucks and how long the trucks are going, when they’re going to come back, when they need to charge. Yes, there’s some variety to it, but fundamentally it is predictable. And that predictability allows us to hatch it through the battery and then putting the batteries together into a virtual power plant, hedging it over a large portfolio.

So you get more and more certainty at scale that you could never do by yourself. Kind of both the algorithms and the market participation do not make sense for one side or five sides or 10 sides. It makes sense for 100, 200, 500 sides. And that’s the win-win that we offer. We aggregate the sides. We do the optimization on-site, but also we do the trading kind of collectively. And that’s what allows us to then offer a…

low guaranteed kilowatt hour price, which is what the operator wants and needs.

David Hunt (17:28.151)
that certainty absolutely. So you then will be building, operating and owning the infrastructure.

Johannes (17:36.256)
Yes, at the moment, couple of different ways that we operate. We have some customers that want to buy the infrastructure themselves. That is fundamentally fine for us. What we always do is the operation, so the energy optimization. To us, it doesn’t matter too much if we own the infrastructure or it’s owned by the customer. What matters to us is that we can do the aggregation and we can do the optimization.

because that’s where the win-win happens. then the logistics market runs on very thin margins. A lot of the customers do not want to invest or can invest huge sums for infrastructure. So there we’re happy to do the financing ourselves. But fundamentally, it’s about operating the stack.

David Hunt (18:27.469)
Seeing as you’re involved in all aspects, that background with batteries and understanding of the grid is fundamental, but you talked also at the beginning about the chicken egg in terms of the OEMs first building the trucks in order for people to buy them. So how are you seeing the market evolving there in terms of all the moving pieces? Are they keeping pace enough to be able to see the transition go as quickly as some of us would hope and think it may do?

Johannes (18:39.903)
Yeah.

Johannes (18:54.315)
From what we can tell, and we do talk to all the big truck manufacturers, also for the future, because there are a lot of exciting partnerships that you can imagine, they do very much want to scale it to a point where they can do it really at large scale. MN, for example, has a target of doing half of new truck sales by 2030 electric, which is of course a big target and you need to

Operationally, that’s a huge task. But they certainly have these targets and they’re building the internal operations to meet them. Of course, that could be, as always, could be off by one or two years, but fundamentally, that’s where they’re going. They’re going into a large-scale platform electrification, scaling the operations to go there. And also for them, the missing piece is infrastructure.

and especially grid infrastructure. That’s why, and that might be a self-serving argument, but I do not see many other possibilities in the current grid environment. And it doesn’t look like it’s getting better in the next five years than to put batteries storage in between. the grid, exactly, Just from the German example, German has about 870 DSOs, so local grid operators.

David Hunt (20:09.449)
It’s not unique to Germany or Sweden either, that situation, of course.

Johannes (20:22.155)
When you look at the map, you’re really surprised. And of course, they’re doing their best, but they have not been historically set up to meet the extremely high demand of assets that want to connect to the grid. So from the German example, extending your mid-voltage grid connection can take five years, it can take 10 years. Nobody is able to tell you when it’s going to happen. So you might as well.

David Hunt (20:48.215)
No, exactly.

Johannes (20:50.828)
install a battery storage that also earns you money and to circumvent that problem.

David Hunt (20:56.877)
What’s the plan then in terms of sighting? You talked about clients and obviously larger real estate companies with logistics. Tenant’s been some of the early signals that this was the market for you. But also there are, and we touched on this, think companies like GridServ, which is of course for passenger vehicles, not heavy trucks, but building these hubs, which are again, battery, solar renewables hubs. But how much of the infrastructure do you foresee being actually on a logistics site?

Johannes (21:06.015)
Yeah.

David Hunt (21:26.221)
or owned and or even if it’s leased or whatever the model onsite versus things like motorway service station-esque type of things for trucks if you know what mean. So hubs which are not attached to any particular firm. Did you see or how do you see that mixed?

Johannes (21:36.383)
Yeah.

Johannes (21:42.54)
That’s a really interesting question. think it’s definitely going to be a mix. You will have the milances of the world offering kind of highway charging for customers that need it. You will never be able to match the kilowatt hour prices that you can get in your depot. It’s many times that. And for a majority of our customers,

because it is business critical and they need predictability and planability. They want to do, if not all, but the majority of the charging in the depot. Especially if you run a depot where you can do overnight charging, that gives you lot of flexibility when to charge the trucks and then through the battery of really bringing down the cost per kilowatt hour. I think there’s going to be a lot of cases where it’s kind of semi-public. So a depot that’s not going to open it to everyone.

because again, you need predictability. You need to be able to charge when your truck is there. But you might want to open it up to maybe your neighbor, maybe to your five neighbors that also have a lot of predictability in their operations. So I think it’s early days and there a lot of different business models. the logistics companies need to, they’re beginning to understand that it’s an enormous opportunity to have that on site because you can open it up to third parties.

Maybe not to everyone and maybe not at all times of the day, but certainly kind of that semi-public use case.

David Hunt (23:17.559)
another revenue stream potentially.

Johannes (23:19.787)
100%.

David Hunt (23:22.189)
So what’s the policy environment like, firstly in Germany and also then perhaps broadly more as you expand across Europe in terms of supporting infrastructure rollout, particularly for heavy duty fleet and trucks?

Johannes (23:35.059)
Yeah.

Johannes (23:39.155)
It’s a big challenge and a big question. we do spend a lot of time monitoring and also understanding and then also explaining the policy environment to our customers. think especially on the grid side, it is an interesting cluster problem. It starts from the European level, where neither the European Union nor the member states have clear responsibility. It’s not either or.

funny mix of European responsibilities and national responsibilities. And then Germany of the added benefit of these 870 DSOs that apply to their kind of to their local circumstance. I think what is clear, again, what we talked before is that flexibility is going to be a major asset. For example, in Germany, the NetSendGalter, so the grid levies.

They will certainly be, there’s a big reform for 2029 where it’s going to be kind of a new system for how they’re to be applied. And nobody can tell you today how that’s going to look like because there are about 10 different models that you could use. like, it’s extremely murky. What is certain is that it’s going to be dynamic and it’s going to benefit people who can flexibly up and down their electricity consumption. Now,

for most German SMEs, your typical industrial SMEs, they can’t scale up and down their production to the market sickness of electricity prices, of course, unless they have a battery in between. But you can’t flexibilize production that much. I think for logistics, it is a big advantage. If you can, again, provide flexibility, you will be able to meet these flexible charges. We can’t tell you exactly how.

But it will be coming and it will be a major advantage.

David Hunt (25:35.799)
Okay. Are most of the customers at the moment logistics companies which are within country for like, because of course there’s a big inter-country, inter-continental logistics issue. In fact, I think the first electric truck came through the channel tunnel through EuroStar last week. So that was approved, which is cool. But yeah, so obviously how much at the moment is kind of in country where there’s a little bit more, I guess, certainty to a degree?

Johannes (25:43.242)
Mm-hmm.

Johannes (25:54.356)
Yeah, yeah, I saw that. Yeah.

David Hunt (26:05.823)
versus when we start getting into cross-border logistics.

Johannes (26:12.234)
So the majority of our first projects are very much short and medium-haul and they’re within the country. So classical examples, we work with a couple of breweries, which is a nice use case, very close to my heart, but also interesting just from a business case, they have their classical distribution routes where they go to the different restaurants that they serve and then they come back to the depot and they can charge overnight.

David Hunt (26:26.037)
Immunic thing.

Johannes (26:40.456)
I think that’s where electrification will start also in the next two to three years. That’s where the majority of investment, the majority of pilot kind of projects will be. But then of course, also in the conversations with the bigger logistics companies that we have, it’s going to be cross border. also we as a company, we need to be able to serve beyond Sweden and Germany. have a small office in Prague and will soon be active in Switzerland and Austria.

We will be expanding from the core, Germany, Scandinavia, to more more of Europe. But also it’s going to be a lot about what we talked before, the hybrid case, where maybe you don’t build out your entire portfolio with the full charging capacity in every single depot. But there will be alliances. There will be aggregators on the charging side. Also a couple of really interesting companies from Munich.

that will help to bridge that logistical gap that maybe you don’t want to as a company completely finance your own, but you want to share with other companies as well.

David Hunt (27:49.677)
which is fundamentally why as we started the conversation talking about sort the large scale infrastructure funding and finance is so integral to the whole growth of the sector.

Johannes (28:00.434)
100%. And again, I don’t think you get very far with piecemeal and doing a project here and there, which is exciting. But what is more exciting is finding a vehicle to do that at scale and to do that at scale for very large companies with hundreds of sites. And then these companies can start thinking about their own Bilanzka as kind of their own energy system. Because again, when you get up into certain volumes,

it does make sense to do smart energy trading and optimization kind of on a fleet level that can be across Europe.

David Hunt (28:38.829)
Yeah, I guess the good news on that is there money does seem to be these days in the ecosystem generally towards infrastructure, large bets rather than the VC market, which has been a bit more challenging issue. I should know even with a small raise recently. So that’s clearly a very positive sign that there’s no shortage of capital available. It’s going back to, I guess, some of the policy support to do that. In terms of the future expansion, because clearly Delta charger going through great

Johannes (28:48.254)
Yeah.

Johannes (28:58.442)
you

David Hunt (29:07.564)
start-up growth and expansion at the moment. You touched on a few countries there. Is it particularly the dark region, which obviously has both language and sort of other cultural similarities that are supportive? Or are there policy signals in the different countries that make you choose those countries? What’s the, I guess, the growth plan? Where will we see Delta Charge in the next three, four, five years?

Johannes (29:31.978)
So like in the next year, I think certainly as I said, it’s going to be Dach and Scandinavia. We have a super exciting project in Norway and Sweden. Then Germany is the core market and Switzerland and Austria. The ambition is very much to build a European wide kind of portfolio of assets. You can call the industrial or the battery backbone of logistics and logistics is European wide.

And so I think the natural expansion is to go where the big logistics companies are, where they operate. That could be Poland, that could be France, definitely Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark to bridge our target markets. So that’s very much the ambition. And there is tremendous opportunity for growth. There’s tremendous amount of capital needed to finance and build out the infrastructure.

So the opportunity is enormous. But as always, it’s about scaling it fast, it’s not a B2B SaaS business that you can hyperscale to ridiculous amounts. It needs to be somewhat healthy as well. You need to build up the project teams, the engineering teams, the software teams, to properly manage that growth as well. Because it is.

David Hunt (30:40.238)
Yeah.

Johannes (30:53.897)
we’re building real projects. not a software business that we’re in. We’re building hardware and it gets complicated. Every project is different. But the ambition is very much there.

David Hunt (30:58.081)
Yeah, proper infrastructure.

David Hunt (31:08.077)
In terms of the growth, again, because there are so many moving parts that need to support the rollout, how do you, from a commercial, obviously I know you’re doing a lot of the commercial sales, as I we found that should in the first instance, but how are you seeing, or how are you targeting the marketplace? Because again, are you talking purely the logistics companies, the real estate companies, the Stadwerke and sort of the DNOs, DSOs, how are you?

targeting the market, guess maybe all of those things, what’s the sort of, guess, where are the quick wins if there are such things as quicker wins at least.

Johannes (31:40.905)
Definitely all of these things. We were in the kind of up until now very fortunate position that we had more requests than what we could serve, which was actually a big kind of a big motivation to raise VC money. The kind of the other option that we thought about a year ago was to purely finance it out of cash flow. But then the amount of requests and also the amount of the challenge and the opportunity of growth.

was so big that we felt there’s opportunity to accelerate it, which is why we did raise venture capital. Also why we chose the partners, the funds that invested, Virio and Rethink Ventures. One very much focused on logistics, the other one focused on electrification and kind battery storage. Exactly the two topics that we tackle as a business.

And they have been an tremendous, like enormous help to scale things. And I think, yeah, going forward.

We’ll see how fast we can scale things. But there are a of multipliers that you can use to scale. The big real estate developers often have hundreds, many hundreds of sites. And they tend to lease everything. They don’t really own much, but they lease a lot. Word of mouth is a tremendous growth lever. Kind of the first projects we’re doing.

Everyone has 10 friends that I’ve heard about. The batteries are quite visible when they stand in the depot. So we have a lot of avenues for growth and clients. We’re still struggling to meet all the demand that is incoming. But also going forward when comes about building large pipelines, there are a lot of multipliers, big logistics companies, big real estate developers that we can work with.

David Hunt (33:24.205)
Yeah, right.

David Hunt (33:50.679)
Yeah. And first or early mover advantage, certainly, as you say, because these things are very visible and very much talked about, is kind of cool. Let’s touch a little bit back, Johannes, on your journey, because we said intellectually it’s challenging to look at strategy and policy and things, but now we touched on founder selling and things. So how have you adapted from that small helicopter mindset, which you clearly still have, you need to have, but actually getting into the execution?

Johannes (33:54.451)
Yeah.

David Hunt (34:19.974)
how has that, been for you? How, what’s have been the highs and lows, if you like, of that, of that transition.

Johannes (34:27.401)
So it definitely was a bit of a challenge in the first couple of months to switch gears. I think very clearly it is a different cadence in terms of pure hours. think at the moment it’s certainly kind of 90, 100 hours per week. But also the intensity of work. I think from a policy kind of high level strategic view, you have a lot more time to think things through.

which you need to do and it’s, as I said, intellectually rewarding. But I think that the main difference is really the cadence and the intensity of work combined with, and I think that’s also true of most startup founders, you just suddenly have 10 different jobs that you do simultaneously at the same time. It does get better because we hire people that are better at their jobs than we are, kind of for their areas of expertise.

But I think that was also the key learning to give away some of the tasks that do in the early month, kind of the first year, because you do have to do everything yourself and then find people who can take over these areas. And you can really build an organization, also the process, you can build a team behind them. One of the key things that we look in when hiring new people is have they done that before and are they capable of building a team around them?

As we do hire a bit more senior, a bit more experience, because again, those are big projects with high volumes. It needs to be serious people who know what they’re doing. So I think that was the key difference between before and now.

David Hunt (36:09.293)
That could be one of the challenges, kind of, we’ve talked on this before about hiring people who are, can do now, but can do the future, which obviously typically means they cost more because they’re more experienced and everything else. it’s, that’s one of the challenges for a startup of, yeah, which we talk, we obviously work with a lot of startups is where do you pitch the hire? Because if it’s, if it’s too low, then they quickly outgrow or the company outgrows their, their capabilities. But in order to attract.

Johannes (36:16.669)
Yes. Yeah.

100%.

Johannes (36:33.551)
Exactly. I think in the kind of business we do, we need to strike a balance between innovation and speed, yes, but there’s a big trust component. You do build kind of multimillion dollar projects that are critical infrastructure. They stand on someone’s side for 10, 15 years. It’s like you’re not selling a box and then you’re gone in three years. It requires a high degree of trust.

David Hunt (36:42.359)
Mm-hmm.

Johannes (37:01.007)
in everything you do and the people you hire, the people you interact with. So I think compared to most startups that lean a bit more kind of on the scale from innovation to trust, that lean more on the innovation side, there you can afford to hire more junior to break things, kind of to move even faster. We need to strike a bit of a balance between innovation and trust.

David Hunt (37:23.662)
Yeah. Yeah, makes sense. And again, we’ve talked on this before, perhaps a little extending from that conversation to what perhaps you wish you knew when you started the business that you know now.

Johannes (37:39.911)
I think I would have wished to, we certainly had to adapt how to pitch to venture capitalists. So kind of my background from OCD and Wealthbank, were like big numbers, like very complicated Excel sheets, like proper financial engineering, same for Philipp and same from the Delta Capacity story.

where we were raising from large infrastructure funds, hundreds of millions for big infrastructure projects. think pitching to VCs and selling the story, the whole fundraising process, was a very different thing because they look at different aspects of the business. I don’t think there’s a better or worse, it’s just a different way of looking at growth and scaling companies. And that certainly took…

took a couple of months to adapt the language, also the messaging, and to make them understand why a VC case in this business also makes sense. Because we certainly did grapple with the question, is this a pure info case? Is this a VC case? Is this a PE case? I think now we made a very convincing argument why this is both a VC case and an info case. But it certainly

that take a lot of thinking and adapting around that. think, kind of me a year ago, that would have been a great thing to know.

David Hunt (39:04.941)
Okay, yeah, no, it’s always a challenge that fundraising for many different reasons, not just the fact that obviously it’s a little bit more challenging to access money these days, but actually, as you say, finding the right partner. I know the guys at Vrio and Felix very well, they’re good people. But yeah, finding the right VC that understands the case, that they’re investing with the right mindset and understanding of the growth trajectory of what it could be. But yeah, that’s always a…

Johannes (39:14.204)
Yeah.

Johannes (39:23.034)
Exactly.

David Hunt (39:32.587)
A challenge building teams, of course, is a challenge we’ve talked on. What are the other things, I guess, that have not kept you up at night so much as the things that have taxed you intellectually, you thought, actually, these are problems in terms of building the businesses that have, again, give you the most headaches, but also the most reward, perhaps, you get it right?

Johannes (39:52.381)
Yeah. I mean, scaling a team, as you said, that is, it takes a lot of time, but it’s, it’s incredibly rewarding. think it’s, it’s one of the, I mean, the whole thing is probably the coolest thing I’ve done so far in my, in my professional life. It is extremely rewarding. seeing, to grow a team. When we discussed like handing over tasks to someone who does it better and who comes up with ideas that you never thought of that is, that’s extremely cool to see.

I think what is always challenging is to decide as a company, especially as an early stage company, what to build yourself and what to not build yourself. Because theoretically, the whole value chain of what we’re doing, you could go all the way and build the trucks as well. And you can build the hardware and you can build the whole thing. Theoretically, if you control the entire energy flows from the grid to the truck, that is the biggest optimization that you can do.

But it’s been a challenge. And I think by now we figured it out pretty well. What to build in-house? What is business critical? What doesn’t exist? Just one example, what does exist is a CPMAS, a charge for management system. That is a problem that has been solved. That’s a problem we don’t need to invent again. That’s a problem where we have partners that we can work with that work super reliably. They’ve done that for years. That’s a problem that has been solved. I think that was one of the biggest challenge really in the first year.

to map out that ecosystem, map out the value chain and then decide strategically what are we going to build and where are going to partner with someone.

David Hunt (41:27.617)
Yeah, I think we’ve seen some very big cases, obviously, but you should look at Norfolk in terms of getting that decision wrong in terms of what you do yourself and elsewhere. It’s interesting. There’s another podcast we did with a company called Ember who were building buses and trucks. You probably know of them. And again, some elements they’ve decided to specify or even start to build themselves, but that’s kind of, as you say, those challenges of what fits for your business and for your business model and for your clients.

Johannes (41:33.404)
Yeah. Yeah.

Johannes (41:40.636)
Yeah.

Johannes (41:50.866)
Yeah.

David Hunt (41:52.791)
Cool. Well, listen, we’ve spent a lot of time talking. I really appreciate your time to share what’s going on at Delta Charge and your broader thoughts. We’ll share on the episode page links so people can see a little bit more of the projects you’re involved with and maybe beef up the inbound conversations for you, which is always nice to have as a startup. But one of the things I used to do earlier on the podcast, that’s Johannes, and I stopped doing for a while, and maybe just because I had too much of a pile to read. But do you have any…

Do you read much? Is there any sort of book recommendations or books that you’ve read that either from a business or from a climate or technology perspective have helped you or inspired you on the journey?

Johannes (42:31.88)
That’s a really good question. And we could do a whole other podcast, both through my studies and then also the work at OCD and World Bank. A big part of the job was to read a lot, like 50 to 100 books per year. Can I send you a longer list of recommendations to put in the show notes?

David Hunt (42:58.167)
Definitely.

Johannes (42:58.194)
But I think a bit of topic, but what really interests me at the moment is geoengineering, the politics of geoengineering. Not to paint too bleak of a picture, but we did reach the 1.5 target. We are very much in track to reach the 2D retarget. And I think it’s almost inevitable that at some point there will be discussions about solar geoengineering entering the chat. Because when you’re that deep into the problem,

David Hunt (43:03.871)
Mm-hmm. Okay.

Johannes (43:28.24)
somebody will want a quick fix. So I think it’s really fascinating. There’s a fantastic book by Neil Stevenson, kind of a climate fiction on geoengineering. And just to think about these problems that are probably going to show up in five to 10 years time is really fascinating. But I’ll give you a long reading list of my favorites for the show notes.

David Hunt (43:47.187)
Yeah, if there are two or three, then it’s always good. Not too many because my pile at the moment is already overflowing, but appreciate that. But listen, it’s really, really great to talk to you. Super space that you’re in and great to see what Delta Charge are doing. And we look forward to seeing where you are in a few years time.

Johannes (43:53.094)
Yeah.

Johannes (44:06.982)
No, thank you very much for the invite. It was great to talk to a professional about these things. Because it is quite complex, but it is an exciting space to be in. Because also back to the gloomy, doomy part of climate, it’s like energy is one of the areas where things are actually moving forward because of the economics work. You don’t rely too much on policy, but you do rely on economics. And when the economics work, then…

least in the current system that’s a path to change and that works.

David Hunt (44:39.949)
better, cheaper tech is, yeah, I guess the easy thing. I say the easy thing, but we’re getting there makes life, as you say, less dependent on other factors. cool. Well, listen, really appreciate the time and look forward to sharing the podcast and having some feedback and to speaking again in the future.

Johannes (44:42.866)
Yes. Yeah.

Johannes (44:50.471)
Exactly.

Johannes (44:58.248)
Thank you David.