Sasson (Sass) Peress  00:00

You go into a room and say, "Define sustainable to 30 people. You'll get 30 answers. You say the same thing of the word "green, green energy. What does that mean? I have plastic in my solar panel. I have cadmium in my cadmium telluride solar panels from First Solar. What is green about that? I have lithium in the batteries in my Tesla that had to be replaced after year six. You have to replace the tires much more often on an EV because the weight

Nico Johnson  00:27

and the rubber shredding torque.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  00:30

So the the key thing is that you contextualize properly, and then you can properly measure, and then you can be more truthful in your claim. And the more truthful you are, the more people will stick with you. That is very important lesson for all entrepreneurs, particularly in energy.

Nico Johnson  00:49

Hey, solar warriors! Welcome back to SunCast. If you are new here, I want to say thank you for giving us the one non-renewable resource you've got. Of course, that's your time. The currency of the modern era is attention. I intend to earn all of yours for the next 60 minutes. Give me 60 minutes. I promise we'll give you an ROI on this investment today. You know there are two kinds of people, especially in the early days of clean energy: those who invent technology and those who know how to tell whether or not it's going to matter, we call them those who commercialize technology. It's rare to find an overlap of people who can invent and commercialize, but today's guest has spent four decades doing exactly that: identifying the opportunities and picking the lanes where things can become commercialized. SASPERS has lived through almost every major chapter of modern solar, from consumer solar products in the late 80s and 90s to solar manufacturing, EV infrastructure, CNI, commercial solar, energy storage, and now some of the newest technologies emerging to serve AI data centers and other critical infrastructure. What fascinated me most about my conversation with SaaS is not any particular product that SaaS invented or helped to bring to market, but the framework that, over the course of his career, he has developed for separating technologies that merely get you excited from those that actually can change markets. If you've ever wondered why some brilliant ideas become billion-dollar businesses while others quietly disappear, I think you're going to really enjoy today's conversation. So let's tune in to another powerful conversation here on SunCast. Sas Perez, welcome to the show, my friend. It's great to see

Sasson (Sass) Peress  02:38

you. Nice to see you too, Nico.

Nico Johnson  02:40

You've spent four decades commercializing energy technologies. When you look back over that time period, what patterns have you learned about kind of recognizing technologies that are really ready for prime time?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  02:53

So I would qualify early stage technologies as bleeders and leaders. And if you look at what Apple does, they never want to be a bleeder. Yeah, they are actually never the first to invent a technology that gets used in their phones. They like to be second because they like the first to play the cost of bleeding, right? And and all the learnings that you have to go through when you're when you're first in the market, is a lot of learnings about your organization, about your technology, about the applications, about the market, about the bankability, for example, in the energy industry. And so you have to go through all these learning curves. And if you're not used to it, it's going to be very painful, and it's going to separate the boys from the men, as we like to say, or the girls from the women, and it's going to give you an appreciation for those that make it, and those that make it have to be tenacious, they have to be patient, they have to be wise in the counsel that they listen to, and they just have to go and stay true to their to their purpose, so I think that I've come across a lot of different companies. Created some myself, and you talked about four decades. My first venture in solar was in 1988.

Nico Johnson  04:16

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  04:16

I found a solar ventilator at a hardware show in Chicago.

Nico Johnson  04:21

Yeah, and I

Sasson (Sass) Peress  04:21

said, "What the hell is that? And they said, "Solar ventilator. And the word "solar" just snapped. The rest of the day, the rest of the show, I could only think of that. I came back to them and said,

Nico Johnson  04:31

"Wow, I

Sasson (Sass) Peress  04:32

think you found your Canadian distributor because that's all I was trying to be.

Nico Johnson  04:36

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  04:36

and from that, I learned to distinguish fiction from truth, because over time, I realized that claims are packaging.

Nico Johnson  04:50

Ha.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  04:51

Okay, claims are what you want to tell people. Claims are like the first date. You know, you have three seconds in a retail store. To understand what the packaging is selling you, that's the average time, and that's if you don't have kids tugging at your your your pants. You have more on the internet because you can take your time and read it, and that's been a great boon for for solar because there's a lot of demystification that has to occur before you really understand what you're buying, and that's critical when you're launching a new technology. That you think about, and this is the difference between the great salesmen I've met and the okay salesmen I've met or salespeople. The great ones think about the outcome they want to target. What is the outcome that you and I together want to reach, not the pain you're trying to solve, and I'll give you a body analogy. You can have pain here, but that's not the cause of it.

Nico Johnson  05:51

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  05:52

that's not really what you need to solve because it'll come back as long as you're not taking Advil or Tylenol or any other other painkillers. What you want to get to is the root cause, and when you get to the root cause, you get to truth. So, the root cause too much storage, bad storage, too much generation, not enough generation, sporadic generation. When you dig deeper than the surface, you're going to find truth, and when you buy, when you get truth, you're going to buy the right product, and you're even gonna sell the right product, you know, because selling mirages, unfortunately, is what a lot of people did in solar over the past four years that I've learned.

Nico Johnson  06:32

Yeah, I would agree. We were talking earlier about we've we've had some conversations about some of the technologies that we've encountered together, and I think about as you were kind of going through packaging and outcomes. I think about some of the early technology attempts. You know, there's concentrating PV, there's sort of flexible PV, SIGs, and other thin film technologies. I'd love to hear your your thoughts on some of the early technology ideas that you came across that were brilliant, but too early.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  07:09

Well, solar on thin on flexible thin film stainless steel, right? A company called Global Solar in 2003. Colleague of mine, Robert, went and I started developing solar chargers for the Marines, and they were jumping out of the planes with these heavy batteries. And every ounce counts when you're jumping out of a plane to be mobile, to be quick. So we helped them reduce the number of batteries they had to carry by having daytime charging wherever their home base was behind enemy lines. That was a great technology, but as we were talking before, energy picked up all of those flexible technologies.

Nico Johnson  07:48

They did in

Sasson (Sass) Peress  07:48

one swoop because they thought that's where it's going to be. The reality is this: this Columbia jacket was actually worn 22 years, 23 years ago, not far from where I'm sitting right now in a ski hill, and I was charging a Motorola phone and freaking people out because I have panels on the back made by Global Solar.

Nico Johnson  08:10

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  08:12

that's a a cool application. Yeah, even and yeah,

Nico Johnson  08:15

even that was in the '90s, right? Is what your early 2000s?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  08:18

That was like that was that was early 2000s, yes,

Nico Johnson  08:22

right. I remember when I was just getting in the solar industry around that time that all of the like solar backpacks, and they were talking about how like clothes were gonna have solar embedded in them, right? Like kind of like what you're demonstrating with this jacket. Yeah, that's a great. I think that's a great example of like brilliant application and technology, but too early, and one of the reasons it was too early was simply the application of it. Not only was the efficiency too low, I'd love to hear your perspective on this, but those electrons have to go somewhere to be useful. And bingo, and yeah, and in the early 2000s, battery technology was abysmal.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  08:58

So in the early 2000s, with Radio Shack, if you remember the Radio Shack chat, we launched the ISON in all of their stores and sold a quarter million units because it had a battery pack attached with 10 nickel metal batteries that were recharging whenever you open the clamshell charger and expose it to the sun, that was a great example of an application. We got it wrong the first time, so we were bleeders the first time, and then we adjusted because the first time we were going after travelers.

Nico Johnson  09:33

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  09:34

so I traveled on a plane after 911, and I had this unit with me, and people are kind of nervous and going, "What is that? I'm saying, "Well, it's it's a solar charger because I had suction cups to the window, so so I could actually charge the batteries,

Nico Johnson  09:50

like in the car or on an airplane.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  09:52

An airplane,

Nico Johnson  09:53

that's awesome.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  09:54

And the flight attendant came to me and said, "You're making some people nervous in the plane. Could you put that away? I said. I'll put it away, but doesn't make a difference where it

Nico Johnson  10:02

is.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  10:02

Yeah. But I understood that it's all contextual. So I was traveling with this unit on a business trip around the world, and I got home and I said to my development team, "We're not selling to travelers. What do you mean? We're selling to boaters and campers and people in townships, people in townships. So we went to the World Sustainable Summit in 2002 in Johannesburg.

Nico Johnson  10:32

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  10:32

and we sold them to the Vodacom in South Africa for the townships because people were stealing copper on the hard lines the minute went up, so it went up in the morning and got stolen by the afternoon because it was had a value. So they they started distributing this product because it solved it. It gave people an outcome, which was what a phone charge.

Nico Johnson  10:53

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  10:53

and all they wanted to do was get a phone charge because 97% of Africans had a mobile phone in 2002.

Nico Johnson  11:00

Right,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  11:01

we weren't near that in North America.

Nico Johnson  11:04

Nope. Yeah, and they were text messaging as a primary form of interpersonal communication.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  11:10

Correct. Very correct.

Nico Johnson  11:11

Yeah, I was in Spain in 2001 in Madrid and had exactly that experience in Spain. I'm amazed to hear that a year later. Actually, I mean, it makes it stands to reason. But I came back from six months in Spain, and I had a flip phone from Ericsson, and all my friends were like, "Where'd you get

Sasson (Sass) Peress  11:32

that? A T 68?

Nico Johnson  11:34

I think so. Yeah.

Speaker 1  11:35

So I had,

Nico Johnson  11:36

yeah, yep, that's amazing. Yep. Most, I mean, a lot of people listening might not even remember Ericsson as a as a phone brand. Sass, you you have so many fun stories, and some of the things that like threads I want to pull are around that entrepreneurial spirit. The first, and I'll come back to the others, is sort of where did that come from? I know that you came from an entrepreneurial family.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  12:05

Yes,

Nico Johnson  12:06

can you talk about that and the lessons learned from the environment you were surrounded in as a child on how you evaluate business?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  12:13

So it's amazing that you asked me this question because just over a year ago, my second son, I have four kids, Justin, quoted the fact that he came from an entrepreneurial family to get into the gaming industry in the way that he has.

Nico Johnson  12:28

Okay,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  12:28

and that's a that's a fact is that your environment affects what you take in by osmosis to your subconscious, and then drives you in ways you don't understand. So seeing my dad working on Saturday mornings, and me sleeping on the desk next to his in his office because I was a young kid with nap needs at that time. Was still that young. I

Nico Johnson  12:50

have, but I have this kid in my family. Keep going. You have a kid like that, but that is yes.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  12:55

That was the opportunity I had to spend time with him. Yeah. So by osmosis or into the subconscious, I understood the meaning of commitment to a purpose. And my father was in the automotive business back in Baghdad because he was born in Baghdad. He moved to Canada in 1958 and started a business in 1959 or 60 and hit the ground running. And and that led to an enterprising atmosphere where you understood the meaning of sacrifice, and you understood the meaning of hard work. And I would credit both my parents with the meaning of commitment. If they're married 67 years, my dad's 95, my mom's 92. They're both alive. God bless them.

Nico Johnson  13:43

What a blessing! They

Sasson (Sass) Peress  13:43

showed me tenacity, and so maybe to a maybe to a point of stubbornness in some cases, because there was something in me that had to overperform, and I won't get into that. But I would say that tenacity is definitely something you want to think of until such time as you need to pivot,

Nico Johnson  14:03

yeah. Okay. So

Sasson (Sass) Peress  14:04

there will come times in a startup where it's led by engineering. Okay. So engineering, focus, focus, focus, engineer, and then you get into a sales mode because now you developed your product, but you're not going to turn on a switch and go and get sales. It's a cultural shift, and you have to be led by professional people that have been selling or have the experience or understanding of the cadence of speech, the manner to approach, et cetera, et cetera. Like I said, you can be an okay salesperson and sell to pains. What is the pain I'm solving? Or you can be a great, a good salesman and sell to feelings. How do you feel in my company? That's your brand. Or you can be a great salesperson and sell to outcomes. So you become aspirational. My eldest son is a engineering sales specialist. And I say to him, "Don't talk about the pains you're solving. Talk about where they want to go and walk the journey with them. So they need a solution by what date?

Nico Johnson  15:09

Walk it back. This is when you got to design the inter-system. This is when you got to spec it. This is when you got to order it. This is when you got to make it. This is when we got to ship it, so all those steps are done collaboratively, right? And so you're walking a journey. You don't actually have clients; you have partners. Similarly, those kinds of reverse engineering goals work in life the way they work in business. I want to achieve this goal by this period in my life, let's walk it back. Am I on track? Am I are my milestones going to get me there? Yeah. When you said that tenacity is something that's useful until you need to pivot, that really resonates for me. I'm probably that engineer who, or not engineer, probably that entrepreneur who has no lack of tenacity, but no stomach for pivot. Right? There's a there's like a I think something I was listening to recently said: real entrepreneurs are they they are emotionless about the the need to turn a corner and change direction. Right? Like they they recognize that the sooner you do it, the closer, the faster you'll get to the destination.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  16:24

Don't fall in love with your product. Joel Heifetz taught me that in Chicago. Actually, he was one of my reps. He goes, "Don't fall in love with your product, and that's similar to love people use things.

Nico Johnson  16:35

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  16:36

you hear people say, "I love my car.

Nico Johnson  16:38

Uh huh.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  16:38

Don't love your car.

Nico Johnson  16:39

Right.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  16:40

Love what it gives-the feeling that you and your partner have going to wherever you're going to, those romantic dinners.

Nico Johnson  16:47

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  16:47

that's what your car is good for, and it may enhance that feeling. But don't fall in love with things. Use things. Love people.

Nico Johnson  16:56

Sas. The other thread that I wanted to pull is as I'm thinking about it as an entrepreneur, just hearing some of the you're. I don't know if it's classic, but like you are an immigrant success story, right? First generation Canadian immigrant parents coming from you know what you know from the breadbasket of the world, but also moving to looking for better opportunity. How did you mobilize capital around your early ideas? And how, like, you're you're talking about going to Johannesburg. Like, I I've always wanted to go Johannesburg, and haven't been able to figure out at at the moment. Like, just yeah, pulling my shield down a minute. But like, I can't afford to go to Johannesburg on a business trip unless unless I'm I've got someone paying for it at the moment, you know.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  17:43

And either you have the capital to believe in your dream and you can take it forward, or you have to go raise other people's money, which is going to be the most expensive money you can use.

Nico Johnson  17:52

Yes,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  17:53

and so I was blessed. I had a prop, a piece of property when I started my first company, ICP Solar, in 1988. I had a piece of property, and I had a girlfriend that had her own income. So I wasn't. I didn't have dependents. I had myself and my business as a dependent. So I mortgaged myself, and I believed in the dream of solar very young, but then I became a bit of a disbeliever, a bit of a cynic, because it was claiming to cool the car, and I said to the manufacturer, "You don't quite cool the car. He goes, "Well, we make it cooler by removing some of the heat. Ah, okay. So now we get into the unity of truth statement. What is the truth in solar? And and I started understanding the first trade show in 1989 that I went to, and every booth was telling me of X percent more efficiency. And I said, what does that really mean? Well, we can we can turn more photons photons to more electra into more electrons than the next guy, right? Under what condition? So again, it was not contextualized. It was perfect situation. This is what I do. This is what the next guy does. Next guy, next guy. Everyone was bettering the next guy by half a percent and feeling proud about that, and I said, "How do you make money? How do you make money at this? Because I came from an entrepreneur environment that actually had success, financial success, as its major metric, and that's something that's shifted over my time as well. And I would say that, like Tony Robbins a bit focus on impact. What impact are you having on the people that are joining you on this journey? For example, an entrepreneur is going to take a family through this kind of a journey. Yeah, are they really ready for it? Do they understand what it means to come home some days and you're thrilled? Because you had a successful sale, and next days, well, you don't know how you're going to pay the expenses of the kids schooling the day after that, and so you have to learn to live with uncertainty. And not everyone is cut out for that. An entrepreneur, especially in solar, with so many government regulations affecting the process, has to live with uncertainty, and and that is the ability to put it in its the right place and say this is the uncertainty of the day. How am I dealing with

Nico Johnson  20:33

it? Ah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  20:36

I think that solar has gone through a lot of shifts. I remember when there was the first grid tie program in Ontario, and they were paying 80 Canadian cents, which is about 60 ish American, yeah, right, or a little less. The

Nico Johnson  20:51

Ontario feed in program was insane. The feed

Sasson (Sass) Peress  20:53

in program was insane. They're paying 80 cents for 20 years. Yeah, was that sustainable or was that sustainable? And then we get into the version of what do you mean by sustainable, right? Yeah, because sustainable used to mean durable,

Nico Johnson  21:07

yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  21:08

constant, stable, right? Then we turned it into this word, which is really a mishmash because nobody can really define it.

Nico Johnson  21:16

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  21:17

right. You go into a room and say, define sustainable to 30 people, you'll get 30 answers.

Nico Johnson  21:23

Yep.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  21:23

Right, and then you say the same thing of the word green, green energy. What does that mean? I have plastic in my solar panel. I have cadmium in my cadmium telluride solar panels from First Solar. What is green about that? I have lithium in the batteries in my Tesla that had to be replaced after year six. I'm now in year year 11.

Nico Johnson  21:43

You have cobalt in those batteries that was mined probably by 12 year olds.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  21:47

You have to. Is that sustainable? There you go. You have to replace the tires much more often on an EV because the weight.

Nico Johnson  21:55

Correct.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  21:56

How is that? Well,

Nico Johnson  21:58

and and the rubber shredding torque.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  22:01

And if you want to apply that, sure, you zero to 60 in two and a half seconds, and it still does it. So the the key thing is that you contextualize properly, and then you can properly measure, and then you can be more truthful in your claim. And the more truthful you are, the more people will stick with you. That is very important lesson for all entrepreneurs, particularly in energy. Be truthful about your delivery. Under what condition? If it's plus 50 Celsius, plus 110 Fahrenheit, are you delivering the same amount of power? Not really, because solar panels hate heat, but they like light, right? So you have that dichotomy of loving light but hating heat. When do you have a lot of light but no heat?

Nico Johnson  22:49

Antarctica.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  22:50

Sometimes, 24

Nico Johnson  22:53

hours a day until there's until it's one hour a day. Right,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  22:57

so sometimes only. Right, and so you're sporadic in the delivery of of power, and that's when storage came into play and became more and more important. And the realism that a gasoline fuel gallon, burn it, go, store it, don't go. It does both, so it has that advantage, right? Yeah. So what I learned in energy is you can never outprice the value to the user of what you're offering, so you have to use that as your prime metric. When you're saying, "Oh, I can create 5% 10% whatever, when, where, how,

Nico Johnson  23:37

yeah, why,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  23:37

ask all those questions, and then you get to truth, so it's going deeper than the surface. It's really understanding the user's outcome. What is it they're trying to achieve? Data centers are a perfect example, I think you mentioned, but we'll get into that when you're ready. But they they're relevant now. They're actually competing with solar for farmland.

Nico Johnson  24:01

That's right. Yeah, and they're also and they and they have a an incredibly elastic demand price. Their their price sensitivity is in is virtually infinite elasticity,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  24:19

but they've gotten so cheap. They've gotten really cheap. So now they're cheaper power than a lot of other means. The challenge is land. Yeah,

Nico Johnson  24:26

yeah, but they'll pay. What I mean is they'll pay $100,000 a kilowatt hour for it. They don't care because they get they get paid a million dollars a kilowatt hour for what they deliver.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  24:37

Bingo,

Nico Johnson  24:38

SaaS. You we could get into. I want to get into business models a bit. Your first solar venture was the attic fan or the solar ventilator, and you essentially said to them, "You found your Canadian distributor. So from distributorship to product creation to when you and I met, you were running. Of the latest version of ISON, which became a publicly traded company, could you talk about the course of sort of exploring various business models to deploy clean electrons, and what you've learned about what business models work, or like how, as an entrepreneur, you sort of thought about the the power of the pivot in that regard?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  25:20

Well, it comes back to the statement: Don't fall in love with your technology.

Nico Johnson  25:24

Yeah.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  25:24

So sometimes I I hear people introduce their company, and they start with the benefits of their technology. That's not what the recipient cares about.

Nico Johnson  25:34

No.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  25:34

So there's two stages you have to go through before you get to that: the confidence and the trust, and they're two separate things. Once you get through trust, so they get to know you through your story, and they go, "Oh, this is somebody I can trust. Then you start talking about the outcomes that you want to generate together. Oh, they generate confidence because you understand me, you understand what I'm trying to get done. So it also talks about well, the difference between success and impact, and what is the difference between success and impact? It's how you measure the outcome, and what outcome you're going after. And so, most recently, I'm looking more to impact because from impact you definitely will find success, but from success, short term, you won't necessarily find impact for a long time, so you have to be very careful in understanding your life, your company's life, where you want to position it, and how it is vis-a-vis the industry. And the example of supercaps versus lithium-ion is perfect because we started with a metric called kilowatt hour. Who gives a crap? Again, that should become a T-shirt. Who gives a crap? Because you know you got to degrade it. It's certain temperature, certain rate of cycling, certain number of events. You really have to capture the truth of that energy storage device, and what I think West and other companies are trying to do is say, "Wait a minute, hold on a second. Under different conditions, that's not the right technology. What do you mean? Well, you want to cycle it more than once a day, can't use lithium ion. You want to avoid fires like Moss Landing, can't use lithium-ion, or if you do, you have to really be careful and have a lot of fire suppression, a lot of insurance, restrict the usage, categorize it, place it in the right place, not too close together, not too far apart. So you have to contextualize the need. It's really about contextualizing the need, and when you find technologies, ensure that you are properly level set on who the user is and what they value. Yeah, and so you want to match that technology what people value at the right time, and there can be different stages of time. You know, it's like there are five kinds of CEOs across the lifetime of a company, well, the the founder is not necessarily the fixer or the growth, right? Or the the manager, right? I can only think of four right now. But my point is, they're different people, and unless you are able to be a chameleon and shift your entire character and modus operandi. You're not going to allow the company to grow beyond you. You're going to limit the company by your own growth, and that is something to watch out for in the leadership of companies. You know, so like I said, you get to a stage where you're now a sales company that should be led by a salesperson whose experience in knowing how to listen while he speaks.

Nico Johnson  28:50

I just found it, by the way, while you were talking: founder, fixer, manager, operator, stabilizer, or custodian. There, that's cool. I actually I had not heard that, but it's a framework. If folks want to look it up. That was outlined by Bolster. So I'll see if I can find it. The five archetypes. That's fascinating. I want to come back to the question because I think maybe I want to ask it a different way. Over the course of the last four years, what are the types of business models you've explored and why? Like, kind of walk us through, establish for us the breadth of experience or expertise that you have that maybe gives a thread or a through line in your work with solar.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  29:27

So I would say, post four years ago, I was acting as an advisor, a consultant for solar companies on specific kinds of projects. An example is the ISON company that I sold in the U.S. That then went on to win the third RFP with Volkswagen I was ever involved in. I won the first one back in 2006. I lost the second one 2019, and then I won the third one. And the third one was 18 150 solar car. Ports around the world, and we won the RFP,

Nico Johnson  30:04

right?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  30:04

And that was despite tremendous resistance internally because the company that bought me just wanted to stay local in New New England, and these solar carports were going to be all across North America. Well, you can't quite do that, and I think you know Daniel Deuce quite well. That's where he and I met, actually, and we had the same view that if the company wanted to stay in New England, it stayed as it was. But if we want to grow it beyond, we had to change the makeup of the company and the people inside it and the target. I think the reality is I got hit by a physical event about two and a half years ago, yeah, and I've had to remake myself since. Huh? And the first part of that was very painful. It led to separation. It led to a break in the way I was operating, and I found out a lot about myself and this disease that I had inherited, and its cyclical nature and its its its it the effect on me was I had to go out and do more than the next person, and so it it created this pseudo imposter character that wasn't really who I was, but was reactive to the disease that was manifesting itself, so that created a chasm, a shift in what I want to do. And last year, I woke up, maybe from a stupor, I call it, and I said, "You know what? I'm going to create an advisory of experienced energy professionals. I'm going to bring it under the umbrella of the name of a man I respected tremendously, my deceased father-in-law, Adisenberg, a NASA scientist, and I'm going to call it the Adie Group. Yeah. And in June of 2025, we launched the Adie Group. Me and my wife and my cousin. He's an IP attorney. She's experienced medical history, experienced a lot of career in that industry, but she also knows a lot about people, a lot about selling, and a lot about administration. So she has a lot of qualities that you want in a partnership in company. So we launched it, and I had come out of an experience with a supercap company, I will not name them. They're in Dubai, but I won't say more. And I would never do business like that again because I did not check technology enough before launching myself into supporting it. And it turned out that it was a fraud. They had an American dealer on the East Coast promoting the supercap wizardry of storage. Yeah,

Nico Johnson  32:50

Super Cap for those who aren't in from their super capacitor, and we'll talk a bit more about the technology a bit.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  32:55

So, so I started doing that in this two year ago period, and I started thinking to myself, something's not working here. And it was actually a client on a phone call with their salesman who said, "Your numbers don't make sense, and he saved me by calling them out because I then started digging more and digging more, and I found out they actually were a fraud.

Nico Johnson  33:20

Saz, I'm glad that you brought up Adie Group. I wanted to get a better sense of kind of how, as an advisory, it works, so that I can have a filter for not only like what kind of things that you look for, but how if you know maybe explain it to me as if I'm a founder with a breakthrough technology. Walk me through the process. I come to you. I say, "Hey, I've solved energy. What happens next?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  33:45

So the Adie Group is is a bunch of experienced energy people that got together and said, "We want to do something a little different. We want to do it differently as well. And so you know, you have rep agencies out there and consultants out there that'll charge you fees or or or different ways of making money, and we said to ourselves, we want to kind of be in the middle. We want we love this vendor, but we really serve this customer. So at the end of the day, even though the vendor may pay your fee, the customer ends up paying the fee. So if you serve the customer first, you always win. Now, if you're with an organization that cares about the customer, that's assured. But if you're with an organization that doesn't really put the customer first, then you have a challenge because you're at cross crosses. And the Adie Group was founded on that premise, I went to trusted people that I have collected in my renewable energy experiences. My former CTO Dan Cohen, Robert Wendt of Global Solar back in 2003, and a number of others that a Colonel Mark Schaumburg that met several years ago when he was exiting the military, and he wanted. To go into data centers, and I met him through another colleague. So a number of people, Mahan Joyshi, was in the New York City Department of Fleets, and they were electrifying their fleets. And of course, I made a pivot in 2011 into EV. So I said to myself, "Let me go see what their appetite would be for helping new technology come to market in a manner that is more prudent than I used to do it, and that's all you you get gray hairs you hopefully get more prudent, and and and that's what I would say characterized the founding of the Adie Group. It was named after Dr. Adie Eisenberg, a famous NASA scientist who was a one of the top 100 chemists of the world, happened to be my deceased father-in-law. God bless him, and therefore, when you take the name of someone so dear, you have to treat it with the utmost respect, and you have to always keep that at the top of mind. I don't just represent Sass Perez; I represent Doctor Adzeberg, and my wife, God bless her, allowed me to use the name,

Nico Johnson  36:12

yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  36:13

and said, "Hey, I'm going to join too, but part time when I can. And I said, "No problem, I would appreciate that.

Nico Johnson  36:20

Yeah, Sass. How do you, as Adie Group, evaluate who you will and who you won't work with? What what qualifies or disqualifies a technology as worthwhile?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  36:30

Interesting question because we had a rule at the board level of unanimity, and what does that mean? Means if somebody brought forth a technology that that he or she thought would be worthy of us representing it or advising it. It had to be unanimous, and if it wasn't unanimous, it had to come back, and come back, and come back. At some point, you're going to stop coming back, and depending again on your character, how tenacious you are, and how much you believe in it, and how vetted it is. So we are now looking for technologies that have a scientific background that can be proven. Yeah. So you can prove your technology, but now the next thing to do is look at the management and say, are you sustainable as a as a group, or do you recognize the Peter Principle, which is you're going to get to a level where you're just not relevant anymore. You're still talking about solving pains or whatever, but you're not moving as the needs of the organization really needs. And so it's important to vet the management as much as you're vetting the technology.

Nico Johnson  37:46

I'm curious if you are able to put words or a frame around the big the biggest mistakes that you see, particularly engineer engineering led businesses make when they're trying to commercialize their breakthrough technology.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  38:01

Back to loving your technology.

Nico Johnson  38:03

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  38:04

and so I invite the people who come along with me to stop talking about the technology on the first two calls. Don't talk about the benefits. Don't talk about the features. Don't talk about the specs. They need to get you to know you way before they got to get to know your product, because if they trust you, they're much more likely to trust what you're telling them about your product, and then they're going to see it in spec sheets and testing reports, etc. Go down if you need to go into if you're going to infrastructure, you need certification, and you can't leapfrog certification. You have to follow whatever it takes you. But have people experienced in certification lead that initiative, pay the price because the time they're going to save you is invaluable, and that might make the difference between you getting to market and someone else getting to market, so the UL certification process is a long process by its nature, but it is subject to various, you know, hoops that you have to jump through, and problems you'll face, and whether it's your group of experienced people that know how to solve these problems is going to be really a telling tale, whether you make it or not.

Nico Johnson  39:23

You mentioned earlier having been sort of swindled in this deal with an earlier earlier group focused on supercapacitors. That for many is enough to say I'm not going to deal with that sort of segment. It's not ready yet. Why did West in particular stand out to you? What convinced you?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  39:41

What convinced me is myself, and what I mean by that is that I don't think that they were I don't think they were targeting the right target to begin with because a super cat by its nature is super fast, right?

Nico Johnson  39:56

Maybe maybe why don't we back up a second and explain what a super capacitor is. For people who are unfamiliar, even myself, I'm not an engineer, so I don't think I could. I couldn't explain supercapacitor to someone else.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  40:05

I'm a pseudo engineer at best. Okay, so I'm going to do my best. Step

Nico Johnson  40:09

ahead of us. Take me from take me from white belt to brown belt to yellow belt.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  40:12

So super capacitor has a lot of power, and it's very rapid. It can go at speeds, some of them up to 20 C, which is the charge rate? It

Nico Johnson  40:22

has power from what? Where does it from? Where does it derive power? You

Sasson (Sass) Peress  40:24

charge it. You have to. You have to power it. You have to give it.

Nico Johnson  40:27

Capacitor is a battery.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  40:28

Yeah, it's it's a kind of storage device.

Nico Johnson  40:31

Okay,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  40:31

exactly. Now there are today west amongst them a super capacitor that can retain energy, so it doesn't just shoot out the moment you want it. It actually does it over a period of time. Now you have the ability to do bridging. So we know generators as backup devices take time, and they do. They have a lot of voltage fluctuation. We know grids have a lot of voltage fluctuation. So load smoothing, those kinds of services are the right services, so I use the term horses for courses. Pick the right horse for the right course, and in some cases, the the optimized supercap is the right horse because you could use it for a period of time that is longer than most supercaps, shorter than most lithium, and more environments. So extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme speed, extreme cycling-all of those different kind of parameters. Which is why I go back to the kilowatt-hour measure and I go, does it really measure? Was it really tell you that I can use it in this context? No, it doesn't. It gives you a standardized kind of perfect context. This is the kWh on the nameplate, so very similar to generation by solar, sound by RMS, MPG of the car. You have to qualify the the measure that's being used to your own need, and that is what I would watch out for when you're trying to put forth a new technology. Make sure that you're being honest with yourself about where it really is best, and what is the timing? Is it certified? Are you getting it certified? Are you running too fast? Are you running too slow? You have to also, in parallel, do that business development part, and then shift to business development. And that shift is the toughest, I would say, divider between success and non-success. Is are you able to shift into a sales organization with different metrics of success or impact, and different personalities and characters needed. You you then become okay sales led. I need experienced salespeople, and that's why the Adie Group kind of comes in and says, "We're not salespeople. Actually, none of us has, except maybe myself, has done sales as a metric of success as a profession. There's we have engineers, we have military, we have administrators, we have government people, we have all kinds of people grouped around, and I would say to you that to a last person, I trust them.

Nico Johnson  43:22

Yeah.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  43:22

So that became the metric of coming on board again. We are representing 80 in name, therefore we're representing more than us, more than technology company, and we have to be careful with the people that join us as a result.

Nico Johnson  43:39

This is sort of my understanding, my tank, my take on it, like a big tank of water holds a lot of water, but takes a long time to fill it and empty it. Let's call that a battery. A bucket doesn't hold much, but you can fill it and then empty it basically instantaneously. That's like a explain it to me like I'm five understanding of what a supercapacitor is. Understanding,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  44:00

it's a fountain.

Nico Johnson  44:01

A fountain. That's interesting.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  44:03

Okay, you push the button, water comes out. You let go the button, water softs coming out. Yeah, but the water is coming from

Nico Johnson  44:08

a reservoir. But the water is coming from a reservoir.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  44:10

Exactly. So it is a combination. It is the manner in which the reservoir acts. So what they've done is they've funneled the water through a funnel tube, and they've made a button as an activator and said when you push that button the reservoir is going to empty, but it's going to empty in a very directional and very thin manner and for a short

Nico Johnson  44:32

really good visual. Okay,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  44:33

and for a short time, so you take the finger off, no more water, water's in the tank.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  44:38

Put the finger on, water comes out, and you have different kind. Now you have water for your bottle pushing. No water for for drinkers up. I'm standing

Nico Johnson  44:46

in the airport now watching you talk about this. I'm like, this is brilliant. I love it.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  44:51

So water provides the analogy for the electrons. How are the electrons directed? That's

Nico Johnson  44:56

great.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  44:57

How quickly are they directed? How volume? Metric are they in their direction, and and and how what stops them and what starts them?

Nico Johnson  45:05

Yeah, so it's not a battery per se; it's a delivery mechanism of electrons.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  45:09

Well said. It's a delivery mechanism similar to fuel. What you have to do with fuel is spark it. Once you spark it, it pushes the piston. Until you spark it, it's just sitting in tank,

Nico Johnson  45:22

correct? Oh, this is oh my gosh, this is this is like what Johnson Wang said about Open Claw. Did you have you seen this? He said he said Open Claw is the most important development of AI in the last two

Speaker 1  45:38

years. Okay,

Nico Johnson  45:38

not because basically explicitly because it is the vehicle that AI needed.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  45:45

Okay,

Nico Johnson  45:45

AI is it needed to be harnessed in the same way that right? It needed to be harnessed. So, OpenFlow gives each individual, and we get a get a little off of the tangent here. It needs a way for each individual to say, "Okay, now go do this for me. Take me to this destination. You can't in the way in the way most companies and even the big LLMs were sort of interacting with and developing AI. It is an intangible source for most people to harness, and Open Claw gives it a vehicle that you can get into and drive it somewhere. Right. So now you're getting to intention.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  46:22

You're getting to intention. Yeah. What is your intention? And so, as an example, currently we're taking West through a California Energy Commission process.

Nico Johnson  46:31

Okay.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  46:31

Partly because of Moss Landing and the fire and the famous right stuff that happened there. And what we're saying is, again, pick the applications where this is going to really work well, and well, where

Nico Johnson  46:44

this, where this, the application of a supercapacitor.

Speaker 1  46:47

Yes, correct.

Nico Johnson  46:48

Okay, correct. The only context I have up till now of like somebody talking in real world terms of like using a supercapacitor was in charging EVs, which you know tons about, and in like the exact application was like a sort of where you could drive over an induction charger and a super capacitor would fill your car in the time that we normally associate with filling a car, minutes rather than hours.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  47:13

Correct. That is the exact. So if you look at truck EV charging right now, we're working with certain people around the world that are looking at models of how to integrate a supercap to take in power over time.

Nico Johnson  47:27

Yep,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  47:28

from the grid, from solar, from wind, from whatever. Right, and then deliver it in a time short enough that the truck driver hasn't a waste of time. Yeah, because again, they're they're they are measured based on how they get to destination in time,

Nico Johnson  47:42

correct, and how fast, yeah, how fast they get. And the problem, the problem is not actually the electron delivery; it's the heat involved, right?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  47:50

So you're managing heat, you're managing electron delivery, you're managing more than one metric at the same time, and that's when I talk about contextualization of energy. You have to take all those contexts and say, what is the best thing that's going to work as a compromise? You are never going to have, let's say, you have five metrics, perfect delivery on all five. You, if you could have three, you're already winning big time, and then you have a compromise. So, what are you going to compromise on? Speed, heat, size,

Nico Johnson  48:20

yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  48:21

degradation, the need for fire suppression, the need for air conditioning. What? Where is your compromise going to come? It's always going to come somewhere. This

Nico Johnson  48:30

is this is beautiful. It's like back to that conversation you were having with the guy when he was like, "We cool the car. This is great.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  48:35

Cool the car. Full circle. We don't really cool the car, so yeah, we we make

Nico Johnson  48:39

the car less hot. Thank you.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  48:41

That that was precisely the search for truth, and I wasn't very good at it in the beginning. I will admit that I sold a lot of them, like a crap ton. I sold more in Canada than the distributors sold in the U.S. So then that company made me distributor in the U.S. and then I started going after Sharper Image and real goods, John the founder and other people like that because I I found off grid was the right target and so same thing for supercast to bring it to today is there are proper the data center groups they are the right target because they need power fast well

Nico Johnson  49:18

yeah I mean everybody's everybody's saying that AI is creating more demand. Yes, that's the wrong question, right?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  49:24

It's not AI creating demand. It is the electrons driving the AI that is creating demand, and the manner in which AI pulls on them. So you have inference. You have different kinds of AI pulling on power in different ways, and latency, which used to mean proximity, is not as important as power now, so people are putting data centers in Utah. We know, you know, Shark Tanks, Kevin O'Leary trying to trying to put a big, big, big campus in Utah, having a lot of pushback, and Utah

Nico Johnson  49:55

and Alberta and Alberta,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  49:57

and he's finding some of the pushback is false. He's got Chinese bots targeting him to the town halls and the communities and saying bad, bad, bad. Power is going to be drained, water is going to be drained, missions are going to be created with a lot of disinformation. So now he's playing defense. And yeah, yeah. What I'm saying to data centers is play offense. Go into a community as a friendly neighbor. Think of yourself as a part of the community and not distinct. And how does that change your thinking? Will you walk in and say, "How can I help you? Right. You don't. That's the outcome. Not

Nico Johnson  50:35

yeah.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  50:35

You. They're not facing any pain right now. You want some space in their community. You want to be welcome. How can I help you be better? And that is something that the Adie Group is currently focused on bringing other technologies or offerings to the data center world that continue to to to accentuate that the data center is not an enemy; it's a partner, right? I mean, we need data centers for our phones.

Nico Johnson  51:02

That's right. We've been talking about this a lot, actually, on the show. Like probably got now six or six or eight episodes going back to even episode 913. Did you listen to the episode that we published with John Parella? No, Terraflow. I know you should listen

Sasson (Sass) Peress  51:15

to me. You said yeah. The

Nico Johnson  51:16

titles, the real toll AI data centers are taking on the grid and how to fix it, and John enunciates a similar sort of a similar understanding of the impact data centers take on the grid, harmonic distortion, the the the demand of a data center is actually very arrhythmic. It looks like a an echocardiogram rather than a baseline of power. Yeah, and so I'm curious. Actually, John works for work. It runs a company called TerraFlow. They are their architecture is basically a flow battery, which is a great application as the interface between the grid and a data center to be the shock absorber for that. How would a supercapacitor work in that same in that example, right? Like maybe

Sasson (Sass) Peress  52:09

so in the box. So I'm going to call it in the box, between the box, outside of the box, right? Correct. Different than the box is

Nico Johnson  52:15

the data center. The

Sasson (Sass) Peress  52:16

box is the data center. Correct. Inside the box. This is

Nico Johnson  52:19

great, and anybody who's listened to that episode would totally understand this visual. It's good. You have

Sasson (Sass) Peress  52:22

an 800 volt architecture, yeah, and you have a UPS, yeah. And the what is the service of the UPS? It's to balance that load, which is getting spiky demands in the millions, not in the hundreds of 1000s or the 10s of 1000s, but in the millions, and they're very short events, right? But there are millions of them, and fuel cells do not react as quickly as a proper model, you know, optimized supercap. So a fuel cell is a great stabilizer like that. It's a great provider in a stable environment. But in the meantime, you've got this thing making servers crazy because they need a stable amount of power. You're looking at quality of electricity, not just volume. And so, when you start to measure again, the metric of success or impact is what is the quality of the electrons? Are they being generated in the speed needed, for the time needed, and in the manner needed, and when you start doing that, you're really getting into the crux of the challenge, and therefore the opportunity. So the outcome that you want is a stable power source for the servers that are going like this, and they don't pull evenly. They'll pull, stop, pull, stop, and those things can be random, or they could be significantly similar, but they're going to be very, very sporadic in nature, and they're not going to be causes. So that's why we talk about spiky loads. And recently, a fuel cell company approached us and says, "Look, you may have something that I can't do. I may have something that you can't do. That is the definition of a perfect partnership. If you work it together, and I will say that for marriage, or I will say that for corporate America. If you find people that complement you, they're not the same as you. They have different ways of seeing things, but the values are the same, and that's when we talk about the unity of truth. The values of delivering what we promise is the same, because that's what you can't play with. And when you do that, you're going to be a solution provider to a lot of people because they're going to trust you and they're going to have the confidence in your technology as well. Also, when you get into data centers, you you opened up a a whole rabbit hole for me because Governor Abbott three days ago says you have to bring your own power if you want to be a data center in Texas, and currently all that means is gas turbines, like most people are thinking, and. There's a three-year wait on new turbine with Elon Musk buying a crapload of them for his XAI data centers, and others left picking up crumbs or refurbish or reused or whatever, trying to people refurbishing coal plants exactly, and so people are scrambling for power. I would say there's new technologies in power generation coming. I don't want to give away too much, but there are new technologies coming that might result. I can't say what I can't say. I'm bound by my agreement, my partners, and I will respect that. So, the technologies that we're looking, and they may solve the problem, is the ability to self-generate on site without the need for grid. What do you do? You take care of the fear of the community, and you may even provide to them. I mean, there is a major hyperscaler that I found out this morning is Botland is not putting the data center. They want to put a power plant. They want to do it in reverse. They used to seek powered land. Now they just want land. They're going to take care of putting the power. They're going to buy the power and maybe supply the the grid with it on a PPA until they're ready to put a data center there, and all of the conditions are right for the data center. Meaning, what they, what Kevin O'Leary, unfortunately didn't take care of up front, they are going to take care up front.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  56:31

They're going to make sure the community sees them as friendly to the neighborhood, and they're going to say, "By the way, we're going to bring the power, and we're going to furnish it all you guys at a price for this price for 20 years, wow! Who's going to say no to that? And we're not going to use your water, and we're not going to pollute your air, and not going to create noise. Okay, they're going to start listening. So if you take the approach of what are you giving before you get,

Nico Johnson  57:00

yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  57:00

you always win.

Nico Johnson  57:01

What do you think has changed the most about selling energy technology in the last 40 years?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  57:06

Stop selling.

Nico Johnson  57:08

Stop selling.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  57:09

Stop selling.

Nico Johnson  57:10

Talk. Say more.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  57:11

Stop selling. In other words, do you remember Colgate Palmolive put out an ad, virtually spotless, many many decades ago, and people didn't know what the word "virtually" meant. So therefore, they thought, "Oh, my dishes are going to come out spotless. And when they came out with spot spots, wait a second. Well, we said virtually. Yeah, that's selling.

Nico Johnson  57:35

Yeah.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  57:36

Turn it around and ask yourself, would I buy this? Yeah. Why would I buy this? What outcome am I providing to somebody to use my technology? Am I doing so better than the next person? Because we live in a competitive market. So selling has changed. Selling is buying. Buying is selling. Yeah. If you flip, if you put yourself on the other side of any argument, any debate, you're going to understand the other party, and you're going to argue less. You're actually going to debate less because you're going to come to a place where you say, "Huh, you just want to feed your family? I just want to feed my family. You need land to feed your family. I need land to feed my family. You need water. I need water. You come to agreement by doing that, and I would say that selling has changed radically since people realized that you don't sell to benefits, you don't sell to features, you don't sell to pains, you sell to outcomes, and then you join people in a journey. So who's the salesperson, the buyer or the seller? You have a provider and you have a user, but you don't really have sales in it. Now, contrary to my previous statement, it doesn't mean that a sales culture should not take over at a certain stage of a company. It means you stop investing in this and you start investing in this. People that understand the cadence of speech, people that understand when to say what and where,

Nico Johnson  59:05

right?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  59:05

People that have some level of psychological emotional quotient, so that they can read people and what they need in the moment better than other people. Typically, it's not a lawyer, it's not an accountant, right? Typically, it's not a data center person. Like one of the things that I've said about data centers is you have a lot of digits and digital minds walking into a community. Well, the community's feeling it here; they're not so much feeling it here because once you get through the fear and you show them there's really not this much bad, not that much bad. We're gonna do this. So again, the outcome. We're gonna do that. Then they become your friend. The best way to get rid of an enemy is make him a friend.

Nico Johnson  59:49

Sass, what's something that you've changed your mind about?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  59:51

Me.

Nico Johnson  59:52

Okay.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  59:53

If you

Nico Johnson  59:54

you changed your mind about who you are.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  59:56

Yeah. If you don't evolve, you're gonna go away. Either in a group or in life, and so I would say keep growing, keep being open to new ideas, keep challenging yourself, and accepting that the people in in your life who are there to challenge you are the gift givers. They care. The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference,

Nico Johnson  1:00:22

indifference,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:00:23

and so you have to manage the manner in which you approach the opportunity, and you have to always keep yourself on the side of the person seeking the solution, yeah, seeking the outcome, so that way, sales stops being selling. You know, I know there's titles for salespeople: VP sales, director of sales, head of sales. I actually don't really like those titles myself because they invoke that you're trying to get me to do something that might not be good for me. My son is an engineer. His title is sales engineer. I said to him, "I hate your title. He goes, "I said because you don't want to sell. You want to create revenue for your company. I get that, but you don't want to sell. You want to walk the walk with the customer and say, 'Let me help you get to where you want to get to.

Nico Johnson  1:01:17

What's the What's the alternative title then?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:01:19

Chief Demystifying officer.

Nico Johnson  1:01:22

Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna let that one sit.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:01:30

That's my title.

Nico Johnson  1:01:31

Yeah, it sounds. I mean, a lot of a lot of what I'm hearing from you in the last several moments here would qualify, likely in my in my opinion, as like advice that would have saved you years. Anything that you would add to that?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:01:48

There is nothing like experience.

Nico Johnson  1:01:52

Yeah, so go get it. Go get

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:01:55

it. Exactly. Don't be shy to bring it on board. You know, I'm mentoring at university at startups, and I said, "I'm not your coach. I'm not your parent. I'm not your chairman. I'm going to be a mentor. I'm going to try to give you insight into what you're not seeing, and it's only not because you're not intelligent enough to see it, but you just haven't been through the pain of not seeing it,

Nico Johnson  1:02:21

yeah. There's pattern matching that comes from the experience,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:02:24

right? Exactly.

Nico Johnson  1:02:25

Now, as someone who is mentoring, what advice would you give to someone seeking mentorship?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:02:33

The same as my dad gave me decades ago that I didn't listen to.

Nico Johnson  1:02:37

Uh huh.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:02:39

Someone else's mistake is the cheapest lesson you could ever learn.

Nico Johnson  1:02:42

Oh yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:02:44

learn from other people's errors. Yeah, learn from their mistakes because you're not paying the price, but you're getting the lesson. I would say so. When when I have a whole bunch of mentors in a room with me, mentoring someone, I listen as much as I speak because I'm going to also capture some of what their experiences taught them, and so to pass that on to someone who's just starting their career, there's nothing more exciting. You really want them to succeed. You're in it for their success.

Nico Johnson  1:03:15

Yeah, chance to mentor some folks here to continue further virtually mentoring. Is there a book that you routinely come back to that you've gifted a bunch or that you've read more than once? Has really impacted you?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:03:28

I wish I read all the books that have been bought for me all my life.

Nico Johnson  1:03:31

Aha!

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:03:32

Well, I haven't.

Nico Johnson  1:03:32

But that's not the question I ask. No,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:03:34

I know, I know. There is no book. No, I'm sorry to say I don't have a book in mind. Okay, I'm still trying to get a starting on the Elon Musk book, which was bought for me many years ago and still sitting on a table. So unfortunately, I've not become a book creator yet. However, I just bought a book called Planetology, and you look it up in LinkedIn. It's a a pretty smart writer about how everything is interlinked on our planet. I think that's the key thing. That if you're going to read something today, look at how things are relational. Look at how things work together.

Nico Johnson  1:04:10

Sure.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:04:11

There's a Japanese statement I learned in 2003 when I was going to visit Kaneka, who was making thin film solar in Osaka.

Nico Johnson  1:04:18

Yeah, Kaneka. I remember that.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:04:20

Right, and it was Ishoniga Medina Show, which means we are stronger together. Yeah. So keep that top of mind in your most challenging times.

Nico Johnson  1:04:28

Yeah.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:04:29

Right.

Nico Johnson  1:04:30

I love that I can geek out with you on this stuff because I've got half the career that you have, meaning 20 years in the industry. Like I remember Kaneka, they made a basically a printable tent that had solar on the outside of it that they sold to the military. It was one of the many things that they did, but they were like you know thin film company that was mostly selling military applications because they were lightweight solar applications. Fantastic ideas that were way ahead of their time. Sass, I wish we had. More time, and I'm certain that some folks listening are gonna want more than just this virtual membership. Maybe they are founder with breakthrough ideas, and they want the Adie Group to to tell them if it if it truly is commercializable. How can folks reach you in that case?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:05:15

I think I'm the only SaaS press on LinkedIn.

Nico Johnson  1:05:18

Yeah,

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:05:19

so that S

Nico Johnson  1:05:19

A S S, and it's you can see it in the title. It's spelled Sass Perez and and Sass is very active on LinkedIn, very responsive to folks reaching out to him. So definitely encourage folks to do that. Is there a place where they can learn or follow along? Are you writing elsewhere besides LinkedIn, or is there a website they can go to learn more about?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:05:38

I've started to add on Substack as well. They can look up my name on Substack. We're not so active on the website. It's really most more of a poster for who are we, who's in the group. But really, I would say Substack and LinkedIn are the two. I've actually virtually given up on social media, being Facebook and that kind of stuff because I find is such a suck of time, right? It so is, yeah. And and the the unintentional outrage that is being created on social media is probably a a subject for a different podcast. But I would say LinkedIn and Substack are good places to go meet new people and learn new things.

Nico Johnson  1:06:20

Yeah, I've been really impressed with LinkedIn. With sorry, with Substack and the intention that they're building around community, so much more so with their notes application and whatnot than I'm seeing with with LinkedIn. And I wouldn't sleep on Reddit, SaaS. I think that you would have a lot to give there. It's a it's another yet another place to to dig in. But the Reddit community is by far the most active community of what I would consider to be like social media in terms of like questions getting answered in a multiplicity of ways. The way I kind of expected Quora to be, and and never really arrived at. At any rate, Sassy, as we round round the corner here, I have one more question for you. Since your career helping technologies cross that gap between invention and adoption, what's the biggest mental shift that the next generation of clean energy entrepreneurs, in particular, would need to make if they want their ideas to change the world?

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:07:20

People are gonna check what you say in two seconds.

Nico Johnson  1:07:24

Yeah.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:07:25

So say what you know to be true, and verify. Check yourself when you're making statements against other potential fact checkers, if you will.

Nico Johnson  1:07:37

Right.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:07:37

Right. Which I think AI is a pretty active and accurate fact checker, and I think that allows you to see AI. In my mind, doesn't create anything; it verifies things. And so, I would say, if you're going to go out and create something, and you want it to be something that helps people, ask yourself, what journey are they on? What is the outcome they value? And how does my technology get them to that outcome faster, better, cheaper, or more often?

Nico Johnson  1:08:08

Well, solar warriors, that is an incredible way to wrap this episode. SaaS Paris, thank you so much for the tremendous knowledge transfer and mentorship that we've all gained in the last hour.

Sasson (Sass) Peress  1:08:22

Thank you very much for having me, Nico. It's a great pleasure to be on your show.

Nico Johnson  1:08:27

You know, going into this conversation, I thought that we were going to spend a lot of our time talking about technological advancement, and we did things like super capacitors, and certainly we touched on those somewhere along the way. I think the conversation really landed on a theme much bigger than that. Talked about the difference between leading and bleeding edge. I think that actually is one of the things that, among the many that I'll stick with, or that will stick with me. How do you separate your claims from the packaging from the evidence? And knowing when tenacity is your greatest strength and when the leadership move is to actually pivot. What I felt like SaaS kept coming back to is the responsibility we all have to tell the truth as we understand it. One thing that SaaS said right at the end here, you know, say what you know to be true. In an industry that's moving as quickly as ours is, that's a remarkably simple and challenging standard to live by. I think that we all are so prone to to sell and oversell, in many cases, what we can deliver. As my dad would say, "Don't let your mouth write checks your butt can't cash. So, if this conversation made you think differently about how you commercialize your product, about your leadership, or the future of the energy infrastructure we're all about building, I'd encourage you please share this with someone in your community who's helping us build this next generation of the energy infrastructure. These conversations are exactly why we make SunCast, and you showing up all the way through to the end are what get me out of bed. Thank you, smart people like you tune into SunCast so that they can not only identify other leaders like Sass who are on the front lines with us, fighting the good fight, but so that you can equip yourself with the tools you need to persevere, persist, and win on this race. I thank you for joining us in this journey. Thanks to our sponsors who do something that I've never asked you to do, which is they they help pay the bills, they keep the lights on. I just ask you to pay attention, which you've now done for the better part of an hour. I promised at the beginning that we'd give you a return on that investment. If in fact we've done that, please, please just hit the like button, share the episode, give us some digital token of appreciation to pay it forward. It is how all of the algorithms that support on the various platforms tell other smart people like you how to find us and join our community. Until next time, remember you are what you listen to. Thanks again for showing up, Solar Warrior. It's half the battle.

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