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When a winter storm took out the grid across Texas in 2021, Matt Popovits and his family didnt have power for four days, and didnt have heat in the record cold. We spent the night huddled up lying on the floor in our living room next to our gas fireplace, just desperately trying to stay warm, he says. And I remember looking at my wife and saying, We can never let this happen again. They started researching whole-house generators, but the cost, at around $15,000, was prohibitive. Last year, another storm took out the familys power again for several days. They relied on a small generator, but it didnt work well. Now theyve turned to a new solution: a battery backup system that they didnt have to buy. The system was installed by Base Power, a Texas-based startup thats trying to reinvent the power company. The two-year-old companywhich announced this week that it raised $1 billion in a Series C round of funding, from sources like Addition, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, an othersowns a fleet of large batteries that it installs at homesboth to help homeowners and to provide critical support for the electric grid. [Photo: Base] A new type of power company Instead of buying the batteries, homeowners pay an installation fee and a $19 monthly rental fee. Then they also choose Base Power as their electric company. The total monthly cost is often less than customers previously paid on their utility bill. Base Power can charge low fees because of the second part of its business model: it uses the batteries to sell power to the grid when utilities need it. The startups software tracks electricity prices, charging the batteries when the cost of power is low, and selling it back for a profit that it can share with homeowners. Base CEO Zach_Dell [Photo: Base] We don’t sell batteries, we sell power, says Base Power founder Zach Dell. We install the battery on your home. We own it. We operate it. When the grid’s up and running, we use it to support the grid. When the grid’s down, you get it to back up your home. The customer gets all the benefits of the power backup without the high upfront cost. And we get to deploy this really efficient asset class of distributed batteries. Dell started thinking about the need for utilities to change while working in private equity at Blackstone and as an investor at the VC firm Thrive Capital. I identified that there was a paradigm shift happening in the industry, he says. The last five decades of energy have been defined by coal and natural gas. And the next five decades are likely to be defined by solar and storage. As an investor, he watched tech companies go after slow-moving industries and quickly take market share. It occurred to me that the energy industry was really the last great part of the economy that had gone undisrupted, Dell says. If you look at electric utilities and the businesses in that category, theyre big, and not necessarily innovative, and not focused on technology and R&D. So the idea was okay, lets go build the category-defining, technology-driven energy company around this paradigm shift. [Photo: Base] A different approach to battery storage Most batteries on the grid today are utility-scalepacked in shipping containers in fields that often sit next to a solar or wind farm. Like renewable projects, they face long delays waiting for interconnection approval. Because theyre typically far from the cities that need the power, they also face challenges with congestion on the grids outdated wires. Distributed batteries allow you to circumvent the two constraints, says Dell. You dont have to wait in the interconnection queue, because you deploy the batteries where interconnection already exists. And the deployment are co-located with the load, so you dont have those transmission constraints. Other home batteries already exist, but the company wanted to offer something different. First, most home batteries are out of reach for many consumers. The home batteries on the market today are very expensive, very premium, he says. Theyre literally made of glass. They cost $20,000 and they look like an iPhone strapped to the wall. Instead of a premium product, the company decided to offer something utilitarian. Unlike other sleek home batteries, it looks more like an air conditioning unit. At 25 kilowatt-hours of storage, it has around twice as much power as some other home batteries, enough to fully power a house. Some homeowners, like the Popovits family, get two units. While they’ve only had it installed for the month and the power hasn’t gone out in the neighborhood yet, they’ve run the system in test mode. “It really does run everything,” Popvits says. “It runs your air conditioner, which is a really big deal.” Over the year and a half that the company has been installing the units, Dell says that other customers have used the batteries in thousands of outages. In some parts of Texas, it’s common for the power to go out once or twice a month. [Photo: Base] A fast way to supply power to the grid Using batteries as virtual power plants is increasingly seen as a critical tool to support electric grids. In California, two large utilities recently ran a massive test with customers who signed up to let their Tesla Powerwalls and Sunrun batteries send power to the grid; together, thousands of homes delivered 535 megawatts of electricity as proof of how the system could work when the grid is under strain. In some cases, utilities are helping pay for distributed batteries. California’s PG&E offers some customers in wildfire zones free or low-cost batteries. In Minnesota, Xcel Energy plans to deploy a network of large batteries at businesses (the companies will be paid for the use of their space, but won’t use the power directly). Some other companies also try to make it as easy as possible for customers to get home battery systems. In Texas, Sonnen and Solrite offer no-money-down batteries, though customers have to commit to 25 years; Base Power has a three-year contract. Base Power’s low-friction approach could help virtual power plants grow much more quicklyand add capacity to the grid far faster than building standard solar farms or gas power plants. The company is now making plans to expand outside of Texas. “We are in an unprecedented time of electricity demand, and we need more supply,” Dell says. The company can add supply to the grid faster and more cost-effectively than any other approach, he argues. “We’re deploying hundreds of megawatts a quarter now,” he says. “Hopefully we’ll be doing hundreds of megawatts a month.” We need to rise to the occasion and meet this massive demand.” So far, the company has installed batteries in around 5,000 homes, and has more demand from homeowners than it can currently meet. “When I did my homework and I discovered that I could lower my energy bills and have power generation when I was in an outage or a storm, it just kind of seemed like a no-brainer for me,” says Popovits, who learned about the company from a friend who also has a system installed. “The lights stay on, my bills go down, and my overall cost to get whole-house generation is just really, really small.”
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E-Commerce
There are many reasons why someone may have a second job or some kind of side gig when theyre working for you. They may have financial needs that are greater than what you can pay. They may have expertise that enables them to consult or engage with other businesses. They may have a passion project or startup that theyre nurturing while they work for you. Whatever it is that is driving your employees, their other line of work can affect their performance for you. It is valuable to understand what your team members are doing and the impact it is having on their responsibilities for you. Some workplaces (like mine) require explicit declarations of conflicts of interest that include any outside employment. Even if that is not a requirement, you may want to encourage members of your team to keep you apprised of their other commitments (including their work with nonprofits that might burnish the image of your organization). Ultimately, it is important to know three things about any outside employment of your team members: the drawbacks, the synergies, and the potential for an exit. The real and perceived drawbacks When you find out that someone working for you has another job as well, that can be disconcerting. It may even feel like a betrayal. It is important to separate the actual drawbacks of this arrangement from your feelings. Clearly, one problem with an employee who has a second job is that they may not be spending enough time on the primary work you need them to do. If your organization has a formal policy around the number of hours an employee is working, then you need to ensure that they are actually putting in the time. This can be particularly difficult to do when your workforce is remote. But, if you have concerns about the hours and effort, then have a conversation with your employee and and develop a system for accountability. Another significant problem is the potential for conflicts of interest. For one thing, your employee may be taking information or client engagement and siphoning it off to their other venture. For another, they may want to bias their work in directions that benefit their other venture. It is important to create clear documentation of the way your team is making decisions and to require that employees be transparent about their other jobs to ensure that decisions are not being made in ways that benefit the secondary engagement of your employees. That said, you also dont want to penalize your employees from doing other work. You dont know their personal situation, and an extra income may be crucial for their survival. In addition, the modern workforce gives employees no reason to believe that the organization will be looking out for them if times get difficult. So, employees should not be punished for looking out for themselves. Be sympathetic to your employees’ needs and ambitions rather than taking it as a person affront. The synergies A less obvious aspect of secondary employment is that it may benefit the organization or your team members performance. Some industries recognize this explicitly. For example, I have been a faculty member for over three decades. Universities often encourage their faculty to consult or do work for other companies. Often, faculty can work up to one day a week for an outside entity. At times, faculty members have split appointments in which they have named roles at companies as well as faculty roles at the university. These arrangements allow knowledge and expertise developed at the university to benefit the broader community, bring prestige to the university, and can feed back positively on a faculty members research. These outside engagements also create opportunities for students and solidify connections between the university and prospective employers of graduates. Similarly, your employees are developing additional skills in their secondary work. These skills may help them to bring new perspectives to the work they are doing for you. You are prone to think of the ways that employees are siphoning time and ideas from their primary employment to second jobs. Dont forget that the flow of knowledge and skills can go in the other direction as well. Is the second job an off-ramp? Another reason to track the other jobs and side-gigs of employees is that they may reflect a passion project of the employee that they are hoping will become a full-time source of income and fulfillment. Knowing your team members goals can help you to plan for the future. You want to hold onto your productive employees, but the more advance warning you can get of an employees departure, the more that you can do good succession planning. Indeed, if you suspect that one of your supervisees is working to create an alternative career path, engage them in conversation. Support their efforts in exchange for getting a longer runway to find their replacement. Having a few months before a key employee departs enables you to hire someone new and let your new team member get trained by the old one. In addition, your employees side gigs are often in the same neighborhood as the business youre in. Treating your employees well gives you the best possible relationship to the new firm they join or create. You never know when that positive relationship can be turned into a mutually beneficial collaboration in the future. Give your support without expectation of a return, but recognize that your good deeds may very well pay off down the line.
Category:
E-Commerce
Around 70,000 Discord users may have had images of their government IDs stolen, according to an update from the company. Last week, the popular chat platform notified users that the third-party vendor the platform uses for customer service was hacked, affecting Discord users who had interacted with the apps customer support or trust and safety teams. Discord initially announced last week that an unauthorized group gained access to a small number of government ID images. That includes images of sensitive documents like drivers licenses, passports, and potentially even selfies of people holding those documentsa common way to verify identity for online accounts. On Wednesday, the company updated its blog post, estimating the number of affected users to be 70,000. While that is a small sliver of the chat apps 200 million monthly users, its still a large swath of people who now have very good reason to be worried about identity theft. Beyond government ID images, the hackers may have gained access to Discord users names, usernames, emails, contact information, the last four digits of credit cards linked to accounts, IP addresses, and messages with customer service agents. Discord emphasized that full credit card numbers and CCV codes were not compromised, nor were passwords or messages on Discord that werent with its third-party customer support provider. As soon as we became aware of this attack, we took immediate steps to address the situation, Discord said in a newly updated blog post. This included revoking the customer support providers access to our ticketing system, launching an internal investigation, engaging a leading computer forensics firm to support our investigation and remediation efforts, and engaging law enforcement. The hacking group stole the documents explicitly in an effort to extort a financial ransom, Discord disclosed in its blog post. Age verification comes with its own risks Discord emphasizes that this wasnt a breach of its own systems and servers, but rather one that succeeded in compromising an external vendor the company uses. That distinction is important: Discord hosts a massive trove of chat logs and private conversations for its hundreds of millions of monthly active users. This hack is still very bad news, particularly given the nature of the images that were stolenthe very images people rely on to establish the legitimacy of accounts around the web. Still, Discord users should know that server logs and private chats werent part of this hack. Discord says that it is in the process of contacting users affected by the ID document breach with an email from noreply@discord.com. Discord did not name the vendor in its public statements, but signs and initial reports seem to point to Zendesk, which handles customer support for the platform. In a statement to Fast Company, Zendesk said that its investigation indicates this incident did not arise from a vulnerability within Zendesk’s platform and that its own systems were not compromised. Discord also uses the age verification provider k-ID for automated facial age estimation and identity document verification, though the company states that neither company permanently stores ID documents or the video selfies users upload to verify their age. The hack is the latest example of the risks companies take when they collect sensitive personal data from users. As age verification laws spread, companies like Discord are increasingly requiring users to upload their passports and drivers licenses to prove that they are adults. In July, Discord announced that it would make changes to comply with the U.K.s newly enacted Online Safety Act. That law requires platforms to shield young people from pornography and content promoting self-harm, eating disorders, or suicide through the implementation of age gates. While the Online Safety Act and similar U.S. state-specific age verification laws may have noble goals, they have faced pushback from critics concerned over their efficacy, privacy implications, and the broader risk of letting governments decide what people are allowed to see online.
Category:
E-Commerce
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