Josh Beck  00:00

I can tell you dozens and dozens of times I've sat in the room with a 85-year-old patriarch who slams his fist on the table and says, "Damn it, we're an oil and gas family and always will be. And then their 45-year-old daughter pulls me aside after we leave the room and says, "We're an energy family and we're going to be diversifying very soon. Right? And I think that that seems to be the sentiment across the industry of where this next phase is going to capital is going to come in.

Nico Johnson  00:22

Hey, welcome back to SunCast. I believe it or not, have said that for 11 years today. It's exactly 11 years ago. I hit publish on the first SunCast episode at a time when Latin America was the fastest growing solar market in the world. I was still working for a then well-known company called Connergy that most people have not heard of these days. I didn't really know what I was doing. Starting a podcast, I very much knew that I'd been given a privilege to peek behind the veil, inside the black box, as it were, of how the clean energy sector, in particular the solar industry, was evolving, and I'd gotten to meet some of the greatest entrepreneurs and operators of the time. And I was convinced that if I continue to have these conversations, not only would I benefit as a human, as an entrepreneur, but that I would give many, many others the benefit of eavesdropping into that conversation. And I hope that you have been one of them. I hope that you've been able to peer behind the veil, that you have become a better operator, a better person as a result. Today, I thought we'd take an opportunity to share some lessons, take away some insights of a decade plus of these kinds of conversations, and I want to introduce you to someone that I've not had on the show in a while. Our relationship in the intervening years has changed quite a bit, and I think that you will appreciate his perspective, insight, and if I'm right about the bet that I'm making, you'll hear his voice a whole lot more as well. So we're going to talk a bit about what the last decade sort of revealed through SunCast, but also just through the industry generally. Joining me is Josh Beck, my business partner here in SunCast. If you've not heard me mention that I have a business partner, it's because it's relatively new in the spectrum of 11 years. Josh and I joined forces officially in January, and he comes at this from the world of investing, building businesses with family offices. So we're going to share some of the things that have surprised us about how the industry's unfolded. We're also going to reveal some of the things that we learned at our recent SunCast Power Circles Summit that we ran alongside New York Climate Week, and the things that we're building toward next. Josh gets to ask the questions for the most part today, but I expect it'll be some healthy banter back and forth. I do reserve the right to interrupt, but Josh, first and foremost, welcome to the show. It's good to see again.

Josh Beck  02:54

Hey, thank you, Nico. Always a pleasure to be here, and it's a true pleasure to be a friend and your business partner.

Nico Johnson  03:00

Josh, we'll spare the biography, but I do hope the folks will go back and listen to the episode. Maybe we'll link to it. I have to tell Herman about that, where you shared the 10-step checklist for any founder that wants to raise a Series A, and it was back then that you said to me, Nico, there's a goldmine in the work that you're doing, and it is that so many people see SunCast as a venue and amplification channel, and they come hoping that it will help shape the narrative and the story that they're trying to put forth in the marketplace, so that they can raise money. A lot of people ask me, "Well, why did you and Josh join forces? And it's exactly that. Like we've noticed, we've noticed the the convergence of storytelling, but I wanted to give you an opportunity because you I heard you share that version of it to folks a lot last week while we were at Power Circle. How do you tell folks kind of the the work that we're about as we've merged the versions or visions of our business?

Josh Beck  04:00

Yeah, being two hard-driving entrepreneurs, right? We're always moving a mile a minute. But the one thing that I think you and I can universally agree on is that we're just we're both storytellers, and we're amplifying the great stories across our industry and the executives who are telling them and building remarkable things just from different perspectives. You're you're broadcasting this and amplifying it to the larger market, the global market, the people who are really tuning in, not only spending money and doing interesting projects, but building interesting businesses. And then I see myself as the storyteller telling it to the financial side, the the family offices that can write five and 10 and $25 million checks, the private equity teams, and the bankers who really want to galvanize behind the extraordinary entrepreneurship nature and the hyper growth that we see across our industry, but they just speak a different language than most of us in in clean energy.

Nico Johnson  04:48

Well, Josh, I'm going to hand over the reins as host to you. We'll probably co-host in some way this interview, but I wanted to give you a chance to tee it off.

Josh Beck  04:59

I've got some. Questions for Uniqa that I'm interested in hearing your answer to. I'm sure that the world is as well, but I wanted to start with some numbers. So, as you had said, 11 years of SunCast, and congratulations. the The percentage of entrepreneurs who who take a media company this long is is very slim, and you've rounded the curve, which which is great to see. Another one, another one, a big date or number is 10 six, which is Nico Johnson's birthday, and you know, so SunCast at 11 years also holds a special place for Nico and the family in terms of celebrating his birthday, and it shows you how much he loves doing what he does because he chose to do this on his birthday. Sure did. The next one is, you know, and this leads to my first question for you, Nico. 11 years in the industry makes you an OG, no doubt about it. And you've been telling these executive stories at the highest level of the highest executives. So, in 2015, we had 7.3 gigawatts of solar installed for that entire year across North America. We had 11.4 gigawatts installed just one quarter ago, one quarter of 2026. So, I guess the fundamental question I have is like, what has changed most about building a business in solar from now compared to 11 years ago?

Nico Johnson  06:14

For episode 900, had TJ Rogers on. I think he would probably have a lot to say about what's changed the most because he was the seed money that basically got SunPower out of near bankruptcy, saved that company not once but twice. Some things that have changed in the intervening 11 years. We were all but begging the capital markets to pay attention In 2015, it was a whole lot harder to raise capital. Josh, you could speak to that better than I could. In 2015, it felt like venture capital was all over the industry, in particular the hard tech side of the business. If you had some interesting widget or technological advancement, you could raise a whole lot more capital than you could if you were trying to build a service or if you had a software approach. There were very little companies actually that had consolidated effort around building software, even as late as 2015. And today, if you you know fast forward 11 years, and certainly with the advent of AI, there is just a fundamental shift in where equity is coming from to support the the entrepreneurial journey in this industry, and the talent coming into the industry is much more mature. Have thought long and hard about whether or not this sector was ready for their sort of entry, as it were. The equity markets greatly understand how this product works as a category. Speaking specifically to solar, wind, batteries-I mean, mentioning batteries-I'm sure we'll talk a bit about that, the ability to drive the cost down, not just of the solar panel, which has dropped precipitously since 2015, but batteries, has revolutionized the business model such that something that we were building into our business plan in 2014 and 15 as project developers of trying to figure out how to get solar to be considered baseload is now factual. It's now something that businesses like Intersect and Bright Night and others are getting credit for in the marketplace, leveraging batteries and natural gas, of course, alongside it to increase the capacity factor and banking those projects, getting huge PPAs and and revenue contracts with utilities where they are considering, in fact, solar as equivalent of firm power. I mean, I remember conversations in my days at Trina and Connergy where I was just beginning to learn why the utilities didn't consider solar firm power, and and most of the developers at that time were creating backstops with natural gas and other mechanisms, so that they could try to enter into capacity markets. And we have developers now building entire projects around not just capacity markets, but real time markets where they're getting they're they're being able to finance projects based on spot market pricing, something that was wholly unconsidered a decade ago as a revenue plan for a project developer. But in that time, everyone talked in PPAs and sort of direct sale pricing. The idea that you would be able to backstop your revenue forecast with spot market pricing in the event that something your PPA didn't come to fruition just wasn't a reality. You know, there's there's a whole other conversation around how batteries. I often call it the tail wagging the dog, but I think that that the point. I've just highlighted for me are some of the biggest changes. I mentioned the talent pool, but just like the flood of amazing talent, and I will also point out that in the last 11 years, man, have we done a great job as an industry, including more diverse talent in the talent pool. When I 20 years ago, I think it was less than 5% of the industry were women or minorities, and now it's well more than 30% And the amount of leaders and and leadership development elevating females and people of color into leadership positions in this industry, where it's no longer as they say, stale, pale, and male is quite impressive. All of those things I've seen dramatically change over the last decade.

Josh Beck  10:48

So pulling a thread on one of the points that you made in terms of that talent influx into our industry being kind of a seminal kind of defining point over the last 11 years, you and I both have seen a lot of people jump over from Shell and Exxon, and you know, like these kind of salt mine types of jobs, particularly for those that might be more more into clean or renewable energy and want to be doing those things. I think it's also been fascinating to see how many really high level finance people have gotten.

Nico Johnson  11:14

Oh yeah,

Josh Beck  11:14

right. Yeah, it's one of the big differences that I can see over the last few years is we've got more people coming out of the investment banking background, who are passionate about renewables, or from a CFO position stepping in, really being able to articulate that in a in a more meaningful way, and I think it's paying dividends not only on the private side, where 11 years ago we saw about $5 billion of private investment come in from wealthy families or single family offices, the first eight months of this year we saw 22 billion company, right? And this is without the ITC. This is without all those things, right? This maturation of seeing the industry as a whole from something that fits in this weird venture portfolio into something that's core to your infrastructure and real estate plan, right?

Nico Johnson  11:56

You know, you mentioned the ITC. That's another thing that changed a decade ago. You wouldn't been able to build a solar business without the assumption that some form of incentive in the form of investment tax credit or other or production tax credit, etc. was in place, and you know we're facing a very real world now where you have to build without that assumption. It's a massive change and shift in the way the you have to think about the the financial structure of the business moving forward,

Josh Beck  12:21

yeah, and the way that you debt lever it, and the way that you talk about it in terms of is this a tax play, is this an equity play, is this a dividends play? It's been interesting to see how people can enter the capital stack in a lot of these projects or on the companies directly in a variety of different ways that didn't exist five years ago, even. So going back to one of the points that you started to make around energy storage, like you know, I wanted to talk a moment about like from your perspective that those things that you underestimated,

Nico Johnson  12:49

yeah,

Josh Beck  12:49

10 a decade ago, right? I love how you kind of phrased that as you know the tail that wags the dog, right? Because you would have believed 11 years ago that like we're like oh we're talking about solar, like no we're talking about batteries, aren't we? People would have laughed you out of the room. Yeah,

Nico Johnson  13:02

absolutely.

Josh Beck  13:03

But now we've got standalone storage developers, right? We've got you know everything around data center, particularly AI data centers, is all about the energy load and dispatch controls and being able to be a good partner to the grid.

Nico Johnson  13:18

Yeah,

Josh Beck  13:18

the solar, the energy generation is critical, but it's the afterthought about how you be, you know, how do how do you create a controllable load? So how do you see, you know, in in terms of energy storage, is there any kind of nuances within that that were particularly interesting?

Nico Johnson  13:34

Yeah, I think I underestimated the velocity that maybe not even the velocity. I just underestimated, and I think the industry did the impact that batteries and energy storage would make, and just how quickly the the tail wagging the dog, as I say often, that narrative would flip. You know, we have a great example of good friend up in New York, Emily Flanagan at Carson Power. She was the top Solar developer Borrego, she was developing a massive portfolio of solar in the New York and surrounding tri-state area, and recognized that there was a burgeoning opportunity where batteries are starting to be taken more seriously in other states like California and Texas, in particular, where the value stack, as it's often referred to, of services that batteries could offer, broadened the horizons beyond what solar was able to offer to many customers, including the ability to be able to play in the capacity markets because it's firm power that can be dispatchable that doesn't care whether it's day or night, and pretty quickly, in the last three to four years, maybe five years, we started to see developers abandon their previous sort of solar-only strategy, and if not integrate batteries, flip wholly to only batteries. That's something that I underestimated. I can genuinely say I never imagined that there would be a solar developer who, like Emily, would say, "You know what? Solar's been fun, but I'm going to focus only on batteries. There are dozens of other stories like this where people realize that it would take less real estate. You could be closer to major power centers and major metropolitan areas, and you could provide more grid hardening and grid flexibility services with batteries than you could with solar. I think the judge is still out on how, as an industry, we overcome still some of the nimbiasm that faces both solar and batteries, but the battery narrative as an energy protocol, as an energy service, is one that when I first started the solar industry, almost nobody was talking about. When I started SunCast, so that was b2 1006 when I started SunCast in 2015. Very few companies saw a revenue model that would work. We knew that, like Vivint and Sunova, and a little bit of Sunrun were playing around with this idea that they could attach batteries in places like Hawaii and Puerto Rico, but they in fact became the test bed for how do batteries provide grid resiliency services so much so that when major hurricanes and other catastrophic events hit over the last 10 years, it was those companies that had batteries that got in the news because their system stayed online. Their systems provided grid resiliency and reliable power in areas like Puerto Rico that were otherwise devastated and took weeks, if not months, to get their power grids stabilized and back to serving their customers, and the world began to see that, like solar panels, the sort of global infrastructure focused on clean energy was driving battery costs to the point where, and I would say the EV sector as well, like you know Elon and many other entrepreneurs like BYD that drove the EV adoption and and the EV sort of innovation curve helped to get us to a place where we could genuinely consider batteries as a energy technology for clean energy, like you can feed batteries with any type of grid power, but the batteries themselves would be a revenue option on the grid, regardless of the generation source. That for me was something that I woefully underestimated, to be honest.

Josh Beck  17:35

You touched on something really interesting to me, Nico. You talked about how you know these these really high talents entrepreneurs in our ecosystem, and you talked about they saw this market opportunity kind of at that intersection where they're kind of dovetailing our businesses into standalone storage in many situations. I'm curious, like clearly, this we've got really high quality leaders in our ecosystem who can see market changes and market opportunities. Right, they've got the entrepreneurial nature to kind of be able to take those risks that a utility would never take, right? I'm curious to see, like, what things have really kind of stood out in terms of those entrepreneurial qualities that you see in our industry that have really made a difference for its growth.

Nico Johnson  18:16

Yeah, you you know, you highlighted a few: the grit and the commit, the commitment, that stick to itiveness, that I think is true across most entrepreneurial ventures, mixed with our industry truly does believe in something that I maybe would refer to as like a higher power. That there's a greater driver and reason philosophically for why they're doing what they're doing that allows them to stay committed longer than we would see in software or other sectors where the stakes aren't perhaps as high. Most entrepreneurs that we know in this sector, fundamentally believe that because of their actions, we are cleaning up the environment. We are leaving the world a better place. We're not just selling widgets. We're not we're not making and selling pillows. We're changing how the world operates, and we're ushering in a new era of clean electric generation, rather than continuing to harvest power from fossil fuels, the world is going to continue to be power hungry. We're seeing that now in the data center and hyperscaler age. That the reality is, if we didn't have these new forms of clean energy, we would continue to power all of this in with our with our with our former sort of traditional energy assets, and it would continue to pollute and and endanger our world through climate change. And I think that back to your question, there is a fundamental underlying philosophical belief for most of the. I know in the clean energy sector, both back when I first got in in 2006, all the way through to today, that believe that the way we have been generating power is a is a contributor to climate change, and that if we could slow that down, we would meaningfully impact our world for future generations. I just don't see that level of conviction about the ethos of why someone is creating a business if they're running a laundromat or a mosquito spraying business, as we do in this this section, this sector of the energy sector. Josh, I'd like to flip the table there and ask you the similar question because you entered the sector around the time that I started really getting the podcast going, 2017 18 timeframe, and you've had the benefit of looking from the investors' side at how investors see this sector and and how and why not just you know the capital markets, but private high net worth investors choose to put their their most valued treasure behind specific entrepreneurial activity. What is what did you underestimate?

Josh Beck  21:10

So a decade ago, I was launching $150 million venture fund with the mission of putting five to $10 million checks into Series A, Series B companies. Then at that time they were bountiful, but you really had to sort through a lot of them, and really the deciding factor was the quality of the team, team over technology universally. I bring that up because 10 years ago, core to the thesis was that we were about to enter a supercycle where both the public utilities and the defense industry were going to come together and say energy independence is a necessity. It is no longer nice to have if we were going to maintain dominance in the economy globally and national security. Right? I underestimated that the only way to get fired from a public utility is by making a decision.

Nico Johnson  22:02

Yeah, which is one of

Josh Beck  22:04

my favorite quotes that someone from FERC told me once.

Nico Johnson  22:07

That's funny.

Josh Beck  22:07

The the the other side of it was just that conservative nature. Like I was expecting, I think a little bit more pressure and proactiveness of saying, "Hey, listen, we've got aging bridges, roads, utility grids. We got to replace them. We got to reinvest here. It's been slow to come, but the biggest underestimation was I really thought that we were going to see Department of Defense step in by this point and say, "Listen, it's just too dangerous for us to have these gigantic centralized facilities. I really anticipated a faster proliferation of distributed energy generations, particularly those with energy backup,

Nico Johnson  22:41

yeah,

Josh Beck  22:41

I still believe that the next decade is going to see this next supercycle, particularly with what we're seeing with the the Russian Ukrainian war and now emerging kind of in Iran as well. But particularly with what we're seeing with drone strikes, you just can't have it. You can't have everything centralized. I think that we're going to increasingly see more distributed generation at a commercial industrial operation with co-located energy storage. So that was my biggest one. I was 10 years too early into that curve.

Nico Johnson  23:08

I often wonder why a good business struggles to find capital, as do many of the founders that come onto SunCast seeking capital. What do you think energy founders, in particular, in the clean energy sector, most often misunderstand about the capital that they need or who should provide it. The

Josh Beck  23:26

first one is people need to understand that the the ditch is littered with the bodies of companies who had amazing world beating technology, but they they didn't have the ability to play nice in the same sandbox, create partnerships, and really kind of onboard a team that was going to help them take that next level, right? So I think that that was the big, the the one big decider. Always bet on team technology is an afterthought. If a team can pull it off, they can pull it off in a lot of different directions. Yeah,

Nico Johnson  23:52

yeah.

Josh Beck  23:53

In in terms of your core question of capital allocation, I think that there's a misunderstanding that asking for less is easier to get, right? Oftentimes, it's much easier these days within the way that the capital markets are flowing to ask for larger checks. It allows groups to syndicate, just like we're seeing consolidation by some of the big players in our industry right now through mergers and acquisitions, right? We're also seeing that within the capital market space. You don't necessarily have to go to a J.P. Morgan or or a BlackRock, right? And ask for $100 million check for them to pick up for the phone, but you do need to have a very sophisticated understanding. And I think that the biggest misunderstanding is like, well, I was really successful in my early stages. I raised $10 million in 25 and $50,000 friends and family checks, and I'm sure that the next round where I'm asking for 100 million is going to go exactly the same way. It's a completely different storyline. It's a completely different level of sophistication that someone writing a $25 million check versus a $25,000 check is looking for. And if you don't dot every i and cross every t and really map it out, just like you would with anything, you know, it's it's like looking at computer code. You got to get in the heads of the finance people. They're looking for reasons to say no and move on to the next deal. So then, sequentially having the information exactly like people can digest it is critical.

Nico Johnson  25:11

We mentioned earlier that we're coming off the heels of not just New York Climate Week, but what I would consider to be a very successful second annual SunCast Power Circle Summit, and I found that there was a particular issue that surfaced that was it was insightful for me, honestly, and it came from a couple of the EPCs in the room where we brought these energy leaders and investors together, and they talked about the competition for resources needed to build the future that we all envision, and it was one of the first questions that was posed to the room by a member: was how believable is the 474 gigawatts of power in demands requests in the Texas queue? Approximately 90% of that, by the way, from data centers. It's more than five times the state's record peak demand.

Josh Beck  26:05

Unbelievable!

Nico Johnson  26:06

You know, we talked a lot about as a group the realities of whether or not that would be built. There are some hypotheses. I think Jigger has said he thinks only something like 30 or 40 gigawatts of it would be built, and I thought it was really funny that one of the business leaders there, who is part is from a generations old construction company, he said, "Look, it doesn't matter how much people think will be built because the labor shortage alone will prevent even half of it getting built. And the irony is, not only do we not have enough people to build the power plants that are being projected to be built, solar or otherwise, but the hyperscalers building their big concrete buildings and moving all these racks around are themselves overpaying because they can for the same talent, the same hands that we would need to be out in the field building these solar parks and wind farms and natural gas plants, etc. and I and it raises for me. It's not a question that we have an answer for, but it is something that we've been talking about a lot on the podcast, and I'll continue to explore. And that is if we believe that we need to accelerate clean energy, and that we believe that we need to accelerate the infrastructure build out broadly to support this critical infrastructure of data centers that has become a national mandate. Where is the focus and the investment on automation and robotics, and how how quickly can we accelerate that? You know, we just did an episode a couple of weeks ago on one of the critical factors, sort of the critical weak links in the automation process, and that that being like exactly how hard it is for a robot to clamp

Josh Beck  27:46

a module to the rail, but but we've got to solve the automation and assembly line process in the field. If in fact we simply don't have enough skilled labor in the field to do the work for us, and like what a mind-blowing concept that we've only got about less than a third of the actual manufacturing domestic manufacturing capacity that's needed for our industry, not for like projected need for people like I will give you a purchase order and a deposit payment today if you can guarantee it, right? And and I think you and I are hearing both crazy things in the market: five to eight year lead time for gas turbines, three to five year timeline for a substation transformer. Right? I mean, these are things where I think that it is clear that of that demand that you mentioned, only 30% of that currently today you can put a purchase order down for them to begin to get near to you and start manufacturing.

Nico Johnson  28:42

Yeah, the

Josh Beck  28:42

biggest question mark is going to be: Will the investment for continued enhancement of these gigasites, these these big sites like where U.S. domestic manufacturing is happening for a lot of product, continue to happen over the next kind of I'd say 24 months? I I often wonder, Nico, and I'm curious to hear if that's like, hey, if you don't have your U.S. to manufacturing already set up here within the next two years, are you going to be left out in the cold? Are the incumbents going to kind of reign over it and just expand their existing facilities under existing permits?

Nico Johnson  29:13

Yeah, I I don't have an answer for that. I do know that just in the last two weeks, I discovered two factories that I didn't even know about, Goldie and and Fortified Solar, that are building right here in neighboring states. I'm in North Carolina, Goldie's in Virginia, and Fortify is in South Carolina. So I think that there are more. There's more activity happening than press releases about it because

Josh Beck  29:39

yeah,

Nico Johnson  29:40

time and time again, I talk to these founders, and the answer for why they built this factory is they already had an off taker, they already had an agreement set up. Their their production line can't produce enough to satisfy the contracts coming in for them now. And I tell you, if we talk about things I'm misunderstood or under. If you'd asked me in 2015, would we ever see solar panels manufactured in the U.S. again? I'd said absolutely not. There's no chance. Right. That that era is gone. Now, granted, I had just come out of a tour of duty at Trina Solar. I had a pretty good understanding of what the Chinese industrial complex was building around, driving the cost of solar down, and just what a glut of product in the marketplace there was already from Southeast Asia. I never would have believed that Q cells would come back to the U.S. I never would have believed that my then colleague Jim Wood would be found a company that, being Seg Solar, that would become the largest solar panel manufacturer in the United States. I never would have believed they would dwarf by volume someone like First Solar who'd been here all along. Right, but you know we are in a true industrial revolution once again here in the United States, and not just for solar panels, but for batteries and for all of even critical minerals. I mean, the world the world has fundamentally shifted. The return of reshoring and nearshoring these products is something you know. I know you've had a lot of experiences, Josh, because you were part of the early stages of Next Tracker bringing steel manufacturing back to the United States and and BCI was one of the big steel manufacturers that was a part of it. I'd love to hear your perspective on it.

Josh Beck  31:25

I love that question, Nico. Thank you. And and this dovetails into the question you were asking about where the capital is coming from. You know, BCI was a family that had international manufacturing around the world started to onshore it at the behest of these renewable energy kind of tracker manufacturers. They needed to consolidate. Before that, this was even before the trade wars. This was all just about hey, we need to consolidate our supply chain to have a more efficient and responsive logistics operation. But you asked about where the money is going to continue to come from in here, and and to give everyone the frame of reference in North America, there's about 6000 families worth more than $250 million liquid. Wow! The fascinating thing about this is, yes, that's where that's the pot of money that about 22 billion of that is going directly into solar project investments, energy storage investments, those things, because it's just a it's a it's a great investment from a real estate play. But the critical point for everyone to understand is that over the next five to seven years, we're going to have 5000 repeat 5000 new North American families worth $250 million, and a lot of these are think prototypical midwestern, upstate New York, those type of locations, family-owned, multi-generational, family-owned manufacturing operation. Dad is well past wanting to retire. The kids don't want to take it over. Hey, it's time to sell the family business. It goes to private equity. It goes to a large holding company. It's consolidated into an existing operation for manufacturing, and it's just then new investment flows in, new ownership flows in new talent on the executive team flows in, and then really kind of doubles and triples those operations, right? So my thesis is that a lot of these 5000 new families that are going to be new $250 million, those are going to be funding at the technology scale. Those 100,000, 500,000 million dollar checks at the earlier stage. I think that we're going to see a lot of investment go into critical materials recovery, continuing to double down on all the real estate. Like so, for example, the family buys the patch of land, partners with the developer, then they own and operate the asset via a third party. I think we're going to see a lot more of that happening. But the point being is that what we're seeing is the remaking of a new generation of wealth deployed, wealth, right? It looks very different than what we've seen. Like I can tell you, dozens and dozens of times I sat in the room with a 85 year old patriarch who slams his fist on the table and says, "Damn it, we're an oil and gas family and always will be. And then their 45-year-old daughter holds me aside after we leave the room and says, "We're an energy family and we're going to be diversifying very soon, right? And I think that that seems to be the sentiment across the industry of where this next phase is going to capital is going to come in.

Nico Johnson  34:08

I wanted to highlight something else that was I feel like it was illustrated well and and brought to light by one of the members that was at our summit. A lot of AI is essentially taking over what might be considered like junior level work in a company. It is that early career work that is the apprenticeship that allows people to form opinions, form pattern matching. I fear for my children and the next generation, and where they're going to get that skill, because we are automating through AI a lot of the basic thinking that early your early job in your early career roles teach you. It's the trial and error that your boss. Doesn't help you through. It's the learning to research. It's learning to write effectively that AI all but eliminates in the modern era, and that fundamental skill building is what helps create judgment. So, for automating out that junior work, then how do we actually develop and cultivate pattern matching and judgment in the human capital that we so want to give jobs? And a lot of folks are asking, you know, what do we automate first, and what do we protect? I'm asking, you know, how do we preserve that that sense of apprenticeship for early careers, even in the energy sector, when we're intentionally automating out the decision-making process.

Josh Beck  35:48

I mean, it's the multi-trillion-dollar question, right? And it's gonna us navigating this. I think as a generation of professionals, kind of coming up into senior management roles and leading organizations, have to define this. My personal take on this one is: in order to navigate this curve as an industry, and I think as a society in general, we have to reconstitute the way that we as executives kind of look at apprenticeship and coaching. Right? You're absolutely right. That like those mistakes that I made in my 20s and early 30s, like you know, your scar tissue. Right? You always learn the most from your scar tissue, yeah, and I, you know, I remember being chewed out by bosses for different times for not doing something correctly or making a mistake that cost money, and you don't forget those mistakes. So, giving young people the opportunity to fail, fail early, quickly, and have that coaching, I think that what it probably looks like, Nico, is that as AI frees more time up in our day to day. That must be replaced with coaching of probably that next generation coming up. That's probably the only way that we as a society can kind of navigate that that curve.

Nico Johnson  36:52

Yeah, short of something that is matrix esque, where you can sort of plug in and have a download of all the knowledge, which you know must must be working on for Neuralink, we will need more focus on that basic skills training and patience inside of an organization to help cultivate. I mean, like you just can't replace the the. I don't know. Maybe you can. How do you replace the the in the trenches learning that develops pattern matching because that is how you rise in any industry or any organization is because you're able to see things though that people can't see through the actions through the many iterations that you've personally experienced.

Josh Beck  37:34

One of the commonalities that I found with salespeople in particular in my career has been those that came out of college or or early in their career, and and spent time just kind of like in a soulless like phone like phone call factory type of environment where people are just hanging up on them constantly and really refining their tool on on that word choice. To your point, like how do I how do I phrase this? It's like wow, like I can't even get past word eight when I start it like this. What if I try it this way? That create a problem solving and and learning how to deal with rejection, right? Yeah, learning how to deal with a hard note versus a soft note. All those things that just that's muscle memory. Yeah, I tell you, AI

Nico Johnson  38:13

AI won't solve it for you.

Josh Beck  38:14

It won't solve it. Yeah, that's right. That's not going to be part of it. It's always going to be the same generic response, and it's going to be increasingly people are going to be able to sniff out AI really quickly. Yeah, so it's going to take that human touch. So, Nico, I've got a question for you that I'm curious about. As your friend and partner here, you spent 10 years building a business. You decided within the last 12 months that you needed a partner to take it to the next level. So, what was it? What what was the tipping point that you felt like you needed a partner at this stage versus another employee?

Nico Johnson  38:46

Running this business is no different than running virtually any other business. The truth for any founder at as you try to achieve this sort of escape velocity is that it's lonely at the top. It's hard to make choices about the business, if you don't have particular skill sets, and not every founder, myself included, has the architect and visionary capability wrapped in one. I've struggled over the last decade with how not just to create relevant content, but how to create a business that creates value in the industry beyond just a conversation that can be recorded. Several years ago, a mentor said to me, "If you want to make money, you got to follow the money, and I never could figure out exactly how that applied in my business as a media company until I met you, and in a conversation that we had, which became a recurring conversation, I started to realize that I had a lot of folks coming to me that had questions about capital and capital allocation and formation and approaching investors and. The thing that they thought they needed or wanted from me was help telling their story to the marketplace, and the thing that they really needed was help telling their story to investors. And those are two different audiences. So, yeah, a fundamental answer to the question is: I needed someone on the team that could speak to the audience of the investor, and and it was something that you and I had talked about for a long time. Now, why not just another employee? Well, the answer is we tried that, and what Josh and I found, what you and I found, is that Josh brought way more to the table than just sort than just a consultant approach of how to build a you know how to help raise capital for SunCast or how to help tell the story for our customers who wanted to approach investors. I needed someone who was able to help manage cash flow and was able to step up and actually help with business development. It's a skill that I have, but there is a certain element of architecting a deal that you and I look at from two different perspectives. Often, yours is a much grander vision and and bolder ask than I am perhaps willing to ask, and the raw, simple truth for those who maybe don't understand how my business has worked for the last decade is that I, in many ways, have been a starving artist. I've created something that many people consider beautiful, but I haven't really been able to conceptualize the best way to commercialize it. And Josh, when you and I began having conversations in the fall about whether or not it'd be feasible to raise capital and build something that felt like a real media company, I began to really respect your perspective on what we were selling and who we were selling to, in a way that felt like we were pulling equal weight, and the conversation eventually migrated to well. What would this look like if we collectively focused our effort not just on how to inform and inspire the clean energy sector and amplify that message, but how to actually inspire more capital to pile into the sector and how to find those entrepreneurs that were worthy of that capital and prepare them for the conversations they were going to have with private family office, with the Rockefellers and Morgan Stanleys of the world. It became very clear to me that in order to take step change in the business that I used to call my business, in the business that I had been building, I needed to open the sort of the cockpit and allow someone else to get into the driver's seat, not just the jump seat, but to help navigate where the industry is going and and what a media company could look like.

Nico Johnson  42:59

And I tell you what I tell you, Josh, and all those listening what I've said many times over the last two weeks of folks that you know got a chance to really hang out with us in person, despite the many fears that one has about you know partnership or or sharing the wealth. The reality is that choosing to partner with you has been the best decision I've ever made in my business career, bar none. I made some pretty bad decisions in my business career, frankly. You and

Josh Beck  43:36

me both.

Nico Johnson  43:37

Yeah, and I think that the 300x or 300% 3x growth year over year is testament to the reality that we've been better together. So, yeah, I publicly thank you for helping expand what's possible for SunCast, and I'm very excited about what we are building together.

Josh Beck  44:01

Thank you. Me as well, Nico. Me as well. To the moon and back. To the sun and back, Nico. You just mentioned that continuity of communications and collaboration, right? Within the last, and I wanted to kind of dovetail that into what what we're building with Power Circle, because that really is at the heart of what we're doing, getting that top 1% of executives across the industry together, so that they can creatively solve challenges together, collaborate together. And I know that the thing that I'm most proud of of what we what we coordinated was last year at Latcher's event. I think we had nine deals that came out of it.

Nico Johnson  44:36

This year, I'm certain we're going to have double or triple of that in terms of new collaborations or joint ventures or or strategic commercial agreements, but you know to fill a room with 34 CEOs and 18 family offices looking to fund them is no small feat. Can you tell those in SunCast what we are building with Power Circle and why it matters for maybe the inner like the middle. Three to five years of building SunCast. I was an executive coach. Those who listened for a long time know that I would often put an ad in the podcast saying that I had an opening. I have had the great privilege of coaching some of the most intrepid founders I've ever met, and a few of them threw exit in this sector, which is a rarity, but I couldn't figure out how could I provide something that felt like entrepreneur organization or YPO, but for our sector, for the founders that really do believe that it's lonely at the top and they have nobody to share their questions and concerns with, or their bright ideas with, or to ask, like how did your investor think about that, or what was the multiple on that exit, or do you know how these deals came about? These closed private conversations often happen in rooms I didn't have access to, so I started curating these dinners. And Josh came along a few years ago to bring many of his investor community into these dinners. And last year we rebranded our annual RE Plus SunCast Executive Dinner, a Power Circle dinner. It was it was fortuitous and convenient. We happened to have contracted a circular room. The theme fit after the fact. I had a number of people come over to me and say, "Wow, the name is perfect, including some folks that I quite highly regard, and we knew that we needed a peer community where founders, operators, capital providers across the energy spectrum could have these closed room, private conversations with the confidence that they didn't have to re-explain how the energy sector works. They didn't need to explain what a power purchase agreement is or how the investment into this kind of the particular hard tech is different. So we started exploring it at last year's summit whether folks would be interested in something that felt like Vistage or YPO or you know there's a new group as well called Hampton that sort of aspires to provide an alternative to Vistage, but specifically for the energy sector. So Power Circle aspires to be that gathering of you know Josh often refers to as the top 1% I don't know how we define the top 1% but I I usually say Power Circle is the definitive gathering and peer community for the founders and leaders of the energy transition.

Josh Beck  47:24

Yeah, and that confluence, right? There needed to be this confluence of where capital and the best entrepreneurs could meet in the same space, right? In a in a trusting atmosphere, in a peer atmosphere, where it's not. I mean, listen, there's lots of places you can go to get pitched, right? No one wants to be pitched. People want to be around peers who are building something special, and and that's really cross-cutting. One

Nico Johnson  47:44

of the things that a lot of folks say: What are the outcomes? Targeted introductions, because we understand our members' needs and we understand where their businesses are going. That spans across not just capital conversations, but commercial introductions. Yes, how we address specific constraints within members' businesses and across the ecosystem. How do we focus working experiments like how robotics is going to actually roll out in the industry? We don't we don't pretend to have a particular programmatic approach to sort of revolutionizing the industry, but we do believe that the right room changes everything. And so, you know. For those who are unfamiliar, the kind of what we're talking about with Power Circle is creating not just a room where that can happen, but curating the people in that room. And it's something we've been doing for you know all of our careers, frankly, but certainly the last five years. I think that we're creating something that will be within our sector as well regarded. I expect it will be as as YPO and EO have been for the last few decades.

Josh Beck  48:48

Well, and here is my 10 year prediction on Power Circle, Nico. I'm going to make a bold assertion here and say that in 10 years, those within Power Circle are going to be responsible for 30% of all new deployed renewables in in North America, and 20% of all source capital. I think we I think we're well on our way there.

Nico Johnson  49:11

Yep. The

Josh Beck  49:12

it's it's fascinating to see the coalition between partnerships with the Rockefeller family all the way to Morgan Stanley Investment Bank. It's amazing to see how capital is really galvanizing around the entrepreneurs that are supporting SunCast and right at the the center of our industry.

Nico Johnson  49:28

I love it, Josh. I'd love to. I think that you and I we should probably do more of these sessions because I think we go. We planned originally just to record for about 30 minutes, and we're I think we're a few a few minutes over that, we probably should bring probably should bring this anniversary episode to a close. But I did have a question as we close here that is kind of like a finish the sentence. I thought it'd be fun since we're exploring and we're only you know like seven eight months into our newly formed partnership. Finish the sentence and and I'll do the same. One thing my partner convinced me of is is

Josh Beck  50:03

to not grow a beard. No, no. One thing, one thing that my partner convinced me of is the power of unbridled enthusiasm to drive positive change.

Nico Johnson  50:20

Yeah, and one thing that my partner convinced me of is the need to ask better questions in better rooms and be more bold about what that ask is when I get a chance with the right person. I've really been impressed with how just how bold and unbridled you are in your conviction and confidence that we can deliver on a promise made to a customer or a prospect. You always say you got to go up the food chain, so I think you've convinced me that we are all, as entrepreneurs, capable of more than we believe we are, and that we should ask for what we need and want, not just what we think is their number that they'll say yes to.

Josh Beck  51:17

Yeah, that's right, and and I am not offended by the dozens of people I've had conversations with this year who have said, "Oh, well, Nico did that for me for free last time, and I hope you're not offended by me saying like that's not going to happen anymore.

Nico Johnson  51:30

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Josh Beck  51:33

Life's about choices here. So my question, closing this out, is: What is one thing that you wish you would have done sooner in life,

Nico Johnson  51:42

it's hard in the moment to know what it should look like. But I learned what I think is far too late in the entrepreneurial cycle: what it means to productize a business and a service. I really, you know, Josh, you and I just had this conversation today about something that we're currently trying to productize. We often have sort of the inkling of an idea, and we try to figure out how would somebody pay for that, and then we create a product around it. In this case, it was like the easy way for me to sponsor or to keep doing the podcast was to just get sponsors, but it didn't occur to me that I was learning how to share a message, and that part of sharing that message is how I became a known quantity, a known entity in the in the industry. I didn't pay enough attention early on to how I was gaining sort of traction or success in a way that I could start thinking about how to productize the things I was learning and teaching others how to do it in the form of monetizing that service. So I wish that I had done the skills inventory earlier in my in my journey to be able to recognize that I had a particular sort of knack for storytelling. That I had a knack for marketing and social media and brand building and personal brand in particular. I wish that I had taken more time, because as an entrepreneur, you never feel like you've got time. That I just taken time to take a step back at a more frequent cadence and observe what I was working on on a daily basis and prioritize my time better, because I did feel like sometimes the business was just pulling me along rather than me putting the business in a cart and pushing it forward.

Josh Beck  53:43

Oh, that's an interesting analogy to think of it like that perspective. Yeah, and isn't that something that we all universally can relate to as entrepreneurs and business owners and founders? Is that just that that absence of time, right? Just and the disoriented nature of like once you find yourself with five extra minutes, you're like, "Oh my God, what do I do with it? These there's 30 things. It's almost more overwhelming to have an absence of something to do because you can see all the things that you need to do.

Nico Johnson  54:10

Yeah,

Josh Beck  54:10

yeah. Whenever I think about that, Nico, like you know, for me, I think learning about. I wish I would have learned more about the power of really understanding personality types of the people around you earlier understanding yourself, right? You know, I think that many of us grew up with this kind of whole thing of like, you know, do unto others as you want done to you, right?

Nico Johnson  54:29

Yeah,

Josh Beck  54:29

that's categorically untrue, right? Like, you know, like my love language and your love language could be very different. The way that we want to be communicated with, the way that like we respond to sternness versus support is very different, and no, you're raising three boys, I'm raising two girls, and yeah, the level of feelings was not abundantly talked about in our households. I don't think when we were growing up. So I think that I wish I would have known in my 20s, like, wow, okay, if I just communicated with this person in this way, I would have been much more effective, or this would have relieved the. Lot of tension within that project that we were working on together, so it's something that I spend a lot more time kind of focused on now. And we're all in a process of self improvement, right?

Nico Johnson  55:10

Well, Josh, I'm thrilled to be on the journey with you now. I'm happy that you are on the bus, to use the Jim Collins term. I do believe that you have to get the right people on the bus, and I've spent a lot of time, money, energy over the last 10 years trying to find the right people to get on the bus. I'm so privileged that so many people have come along on this journey, not just those that have said yes to being on the other side of the camera and the microphone and being guests, I'm eternally grateful to them. Without them, we wouldn't have the 970 plus episodes that we have now in the in the canon. But literally dozens of people who have called themselves SunCast team members around the world, from Chile to North Macedonia. We've had folks, you know, contribute to this thing that has slowly created itself as a as a business. Something that has not only contributed to my own personal time freedom, if not financial freedom, not yet, but time freedom to be with my family. Something which was my ultimate driver. That was why I started the business 11 years ago. Is I wanted something that would allow me to have more time freedom with my then young, very young kids. My my 10 year old doesn't know life without dad being an entrepreneur and running this thing called SunCast. So I'm grateful to the guests, to our team, to everyone who has taken something from all of these conversations and put it to work, you've helped make these 11 years possible and worth it. If you've been inspired by the conversation and you believe that your story is one that we should tell here on SunCast, or if you're at all curious and eager to learn more about Power Circle, both of those can be accomplished by emailing team at suncast.me. If you want to know more about Power Circle, put Power Circle in the subject and tell us what it is that you're building and what's standing in your way. If you'd like to be a guest, put Guest on SunCast in the subject, and let us know what it is that you're building and why you think we should tell the world about it, and and and why your entrepreneurial journey is unique in some way. And if you'd just like to reach out to say thank you or to get to know Josh or I, our team can help make that possible too through the same email. I hope that we do get a chance to connect with you in the not too distant future. We'll be at RE Plus. In fact, we'll have our first ever booth doing a pro studio recording live from the show floor, not the Power Up Live stage this year. You'll hear more about that in an upcoming episode. I want to thank you for spending part of your journey with SunCast, and I want to just say thanks. And here's to what we're building next. Thanks to the companies that have supported us, like CPS. Brian Wagner and his team are tremendous. Thanks to all those who help pay the bills and keep the lights on. All we ask you to pay is attention. Josh and I are both grateful that you have done that over the course of the better part of the last hour. Remember, you are what you listen to. Thanks again for showing up, Solo Warrior. It's half the battle.

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