The story of an electrifying summer
There are few opportunities in life when you can devote yourself to fully exploring an idea that excites you, without the fear of failure or risk of financial loss. This summer, Adi and I had one of those rare opportunities as one of the winning teams of the TomKat / StartX Prize in Energy Innovation.
After our eight weeks of full time work on our project drew to a close, we’d like to share the full story of what we’ve been working on and to explain where we’re going from here. We’ve also written up a summary of some key insights we’ve learned about electric vehicles through this time, so check that out as well.
Starting with a cool idea
Our idea began as a end-of-class project for a course called Energy Storage Integration — Vehicles, Renewables, and the Grid, a crash course in the future of everything battery-related, taught by Tesla CTO J.B. Straubel. (We’d highly recommend the class for any Stanford students interested in energy or sustainability.) Sharing an entrepreneurial mindset, we both wanted to create something new for our final project. In a burst of insight while sitting outside the Tresidder Starbucks together, Adi mused “what if you could use one electric vehicle to charge another?” With that, our vehicle-to-vehicle charging system was born.
Essentially, we wanted to create the “jumper cable of the electric vehicle age”. The device would allow electricity to flow from the battery of one electric car through its charge port and a cable and into the battery of another electric car. We envisioned the technology being applicable to an Uber-style peer-to-peer service where you could order electricity on-demand and another electric vehicle owner would come to your car’s location to charge you up. You wouldn’t need to be present, and you wouldn’t need to take time out of your day to go to a public charging station.
Based on the positive feedback of attendees of the course poster session, where we presented an early version of the idea, we began pondering options to continue the project outside of the classroom. We heard about a grant offered by the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy at Stanford, which would fund eight weeks of work on an innovative entrepreneurial idea and provide the resources of Stanford-founded startup accelerator StartX. Although initially hesitant to apply for the TomKat / StartX Prize due to the half-baked nature of our project at that point, we were encouraged by Danica Sarlya and Brian Bartholomeusz of the TomKat Center, and submitted an application. When we learned that we were one of the Prize’s winning teams, we were eager to spend the summer developing our idea.
0 to 60 in 3.9 weeks
When we reconnected three months later to begin work, our first task was to become as knowledgeable as we possibly could about electric cars. This is a process that we continued throughout the fellowship, spending at least a half hour to an hour each day reading blogs like InsideEVs, EVObsession, ChargedEVs, Gas2, and CleanTechnica, studying the numbers on projected electric vehicle and charging infrastructure growth, and trying to get access to industry reports and the technical specifications of electric vehicle charging.
As we further developed the idea, we spent a lot of time meeting with connections made through the TomKat Center to understand the current electric vehicle landscape and where we might fit into it. These meetings ranged from EV charger designers to ex-startup founders to Stanford faculty to automotive experts, and each gave us useful insights and perspectives that slightly altered our direction each time.
Test driving
The best resource offered by StartX was access to their mentorship network, which allowed us to connect with Mark Chung, co-founder of Verdigris Technologies. Mark went through the startup process in creating Verdigris, a hardware-based building energy management company, and had a huge wealth of knowledge and advice to pass onto us every time we met with him.
Our first meeting with Mark was particularly valuable, as he pointed us toward an online course called “How To Build A Startup: The Lean Launchpad” (also available in person at Stanford) that gave us the foundations of our work in building the business. We quickly drafted a business model canvas and began testing our ideas in the real world through the customer discovery process. With a combination of flyering electric vehicles near Stanford and using contacts through friends, family, and electric vehicle forums, we booked 21 interviews with electric vehicle users.
These interviews revealed insights that would never have been possible otherwise. One of our most fascinating findings was a consistent “electric vehicle frame of mind”: most electric vehicle users define a distance in their mind that they are comfortable travelling in the car, and use other vehicles to go beyond this range. Relatively few users venture outside of this mindset and use public charging stations to expand the distance they can travel, due to a combination of inconvenience, unreliability, and lack of need.
Responses to our idea were mixed. A couple of interviewees were excited about getting on-demand charging, most were lukewarm, and others could only see themselves using it in emergency situations. We also ran into concerns on the side of finding the electric car drivers who users would pay to deliver charge to their cars. Being a charge provider wouldn’t be quite as simple as being an Uber driver, as added battery degradation and time spent recharging your car to account for charge offered to others would cut into your personal profit. In addition, electric car owners tend to be part of a better-off contingent of the population that might not be as interested in participating in this shared-economy business model. Most of our interviewees said they would be too busy to provide charge, making us think twice about the availability of charge providers among the community of electric vehicle owners.
A number of our interviewees also worried about the cost of such a service. When estimating how much they would be willing to pay, most used the cost of gas or electricity as a point of comparison, not taking into account the time spent by someone else filling up their car. As a result, we discovered that we would have an extremely difficult time finding a price point that was both acceptable to users and fair to charge providers. While the users expect the cost to be close to the price of electricity, in reality we would need to pay the charge provider for their half hour spent charging the car, and for the hardware system to perform the transfer of charge. In short, the economics just didn’t work out.
Sharp turns
Although the interviews were somewhat disappointing for our vehicle-to-vehicle idea, they did give us a new direction: urban charging. Many city-dwellers live in apartments or other housing units without their own personal garages, and therefore can’t install their own charging stations. If they’re lucky, they’ll park in a large garage with charging stations or will have access to charging at their workplace. Otherwise, their only charging options are public chargers, which can be unreliable, slow, and inconveniently located.
Focused on this new problem, we began researching the possibility of delivering batteries to charge cars while they’re parked on the street or in parking garages. The battery would be delivered by truck and secured under the car. After being plugged in for an hour, our truck would return to pick up the battery for recharging at our facility. This new idea clearly went after the significant problem of urban electric vehicle charging, but also posed a huge logistical challenge of transporting and recharging these batteries. Still, we attacked the economics and discovered that the service could work with the right logistics and cost.
Around the same time as this pivot, we were invited to pitch our idea for the Tumml Urban Clean Energy Prize, which we had applied to back during our vehicle-to-vehicle focus. With our idea now shifted toward a solution even more aimed at urban areas, we were excited (and nervous) to pitch. The first step, though, was finding a name. After an afternoon of spitballing, we settled on ZenCharge, which we hoped could represent the kind of calm that our users would feel while not worrying about charging their electric cars.
Following several days of building and refining our slide deck and presentation, we pitched to Tumml. The presentation went well, and we successfully delivered the key points of our problem, idea and team. The questions they asked were tough, covering relevant regulations (an area we hadn’t yet considered) and our projected unit economics (built off of a series of spreadsheets containing a mix of formulas and educated guesses) among other areas. Still, we found that narrowing, polishing and presenting our plan was a great exercise in turning ZenCharge from a cloud of ideas into a company with a focused direction.
Regenerative braking
After pitching to Tumml, we continued developing the idea, meeting with experts, and educating ourselves on the future of transportation. What we found wasn’t particularly positive for our battery delivery plan. We realized that the advent of autonomous cars would likely alter urban transportation so radically that users wouldn’t need mobile charging. Instead, their cars would simply drive themselves to the nearest charging station when necessary, or better yet, they’d belong to a large EV ride-sharing service with its own stationary charging locations. Although we still saw mobile battery delivery as a potential solution to existing urban EV charging problems, we realized that it would probably be phased out in the next ten years as autonomous driving becomes the norm in cities.
Although our enthusiasm for ZenCharge in its existing iteration was slowly fading with the reality of autonomous driving, our excitement for the possibilities surrounding urban transportation and entrepreneurship continued to grow. We had the opportunity to attend StartX VIP Night, where we learned from the many amazing entrepreneurs in the current StartX session. It was incredibly valuable to meet founders farther along the startup path and learn from their challenges and successes. The passion in the room was palpable, and we both left feeling more confident in our desire and ability to join this community of innovators.
Meanwhile, we were also able to hold a few meetings with researchers at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC), a Department of Energy facility two miles down the road from Stanford. As it turned out, they were happy to provide facilities and connections for us to work on EV charging at the SLAC campus. When we found out soon after that we did not receive funding from Tumml, we decided to pivot once again, and take advantage of this chance to develop a working prototype of our original vehicle-to-vehicle charging system.
Although not economically feasible as a business, we still see vehicle-to-vehicle charging as a fascinating research opportunity that we would like to pursue. Despite putting the brakes on ZenCharge as a business for now, we are excited to shift our energy into prototype development. We hope to gain technical expertise from the engineering process and continue to develop our interest in and understanding of electric mobility.
The rear view mirror
Before beginning our summer experience, we both had nagging fears that it might not work out. What would happen if we gave up on the idea halfway through? (We came up with another.) Would we still be productive without a clear end goal? (Yup.) Was this a valuable way to spend our time? (Without a doubt.) Trying to build ZenCharge gave us knowledge and skills that could not have been replicated through any other experience. Here are a few of the key lessons and pieces of advice we learned through the process:
- Timing is everything. Aim to solve problems coming three to five years down the road, but being early is the same thing as being wrong. Err on the side of developed markets, but the most transformative companies build the future long before it reaches the mainstream. Although this advice seemed contradictory at times, timing is clearly one of the trickiest balances in maximizing an idea’s potential.
- Build your network, and have an ask for every meeting. Brian from the TomKat Center introduced us to many of the contacts that helped us most, but as he said, it’s often their contacts who might have the most value for us. It was important for us to be specific in our goals for each meeting, so that we were sure to make the most of these conversations and continue pushing forward to new ideas. We also learned to take advantage of every opportunity to meet interesting new people, like the US-China Green Energy Summit and StartX VIP Night.
- Focus on the team, not the product. StartX is an accelerator focused on founders rather than companies, and we’ve heard time and time again that investors choose startups based on their team rather than their idea. Similarly, our mentor Mark advised us that no matter what happened with each idea we create, our main value is in the experiential learning we gain from that creation, not the end result.
In the end, our work on ZenCharge so far has been neither fully successful nor a failure. We may not have reached any technical eureka moment or golden business model, but each iteration of our idea brought us new skills and knowledge that we will surely put toward future projects. We’d like to say thank you to everyone who has helped us this summer, especially Brian and Danica at the TomKat Center, Mark at Verdigris, Sid and Joseph at StartX, Stephen at CARS, Sila and Emre at SLAC, Professors Ram and Juan in the EE department, Mark at Khosla Impact, Brian and Matt at Stanford P&TS, Corwin at Valent Power, David at Bosch and everyone who has taken the time to meet with us, challenged our ideas and helped us uncover new directions to pursue. We’re more excited than ever about understanding the future of sustainable transportation and helping make this future possible.
