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Scaling Clean with Sean Kelly: Insights from Amperon's CEO

on • 27 min. read

Leadership Insights with Sean Kelly, CEO of Amperon

Overview

Over the last 2 years of interviewing clean energy CEO’s, Sean Kelly is our first with the background as a veteran energy trader. In fact, Sean has traded or managed traders for over 7 different companies in his career.

I brought Sean on the latest episode to speak about his background in energy trading and how that helped equip him for his role as co-founder and CEO of Amperon for the last 6 years. He describes Amperon as “the forecasting company for the energy transition.” 

Sean had some unique things to share. Here are his B3P’s (Big 3 Points):

11:31 - The clean economy sector is where everything is headed – it’s not the “clean economy” sector anymore, just the economy. Once someone starts working in this sector, it’s hard to move elsewhere because this is a good spot to be. 

18:39 - To be a great CEO means to inspire the right talent, bring them into your workplace and be a leader who demonstrates good leadership. 

29:53 - If you want to keep a high level of performance as CEO, it’s important to take care of yourself. Spend time with your family and focus on both physical and mental well-being. Release any stress outside of work so you can start each day on a good note. 

Thank you for your time, Sean. 

 

Also listen on Apple, Spotify, Radio Public, Amazon Music, iHeart, and Google Podcasts.

Introduction: Setting the Stage for Clean Energy Insights

Mike Casey:
Hey, cleantechers, welcome back to another episode of Scaling Clean. As listeners know, our show is tightly focused on interviewing CEOs to glean the best usable practices and tips on how to build, run, and lead companies. One of the things I'm fascinated by is the backgrounds of our guests. Some of them are serial entrepreneurs, some have come from finance, and others are power sector veterans with deep expertise in building and running projects.  But my guest today is an energy trading specialist,  he has traded or managed traders for over 7 different companies in his career. And now Sean Kelly is a Co-founder and CEO of Amperon which Sean describes as a forecasting company for the energy transition.  

Sean's been running Amperon for six years, and I'm interested in learning what he's learned being at the helm of his company. Sean, welcome to the show.

Sean Kelly:
Hey, thanks a lot for having me. Really looking forward to this.

The Making of a Clean Energy CEO

Mike Casey:
So let me start with your background. If we were to split screen Sean Kelly managing other people the first job that he had to do that in, and how you manage and lead now, and we were watching that sitting side by side, what differences would we see in those two video clips?

Sean Kelly:
Oh wow. It'd probably be pretty embarrassing. So I started my energy trading career in 2005, went to a smaller company, and kind of managed the real-time desk, did a really good job of trading real-time in the Southeast and MISO Midwest, an independent system operator, and in PJM as well in the East Coast. I was managing the desk and I was probably 25 years old and managing people that were significantly my elder and it was very, very difficult. I think I didn't do the correct things to demand or to earn the respect that I needed. I didn't know how to manage. I was just focused purely on making money and optimizing the desk as much as possible. 

Whereas now you look back, I mean, I'm 40 and started this company six years ago. Now, very much looking up to how to build companies, how to build people, and continue to mature people throughout their careers, I would definitely be pretty embarrassed probably to see the 24 versus 34.

Mike Casey:
Well, if you have met the 24-year-old who's an excellent manager at 24, I would like you to let me know who they are so I can interview them for this podcast because that's a prodigy right there. I'm just gonna say.

Sean Kelly:
They don't exist. They absolutely don't exist. I always look at Maslow's pyramid of self-actualization. There are no 24-year-olds at the top of self-actualization. And so that is why you're never going to find that magical 24-year-old to go manage or to go interview.

Learning from Mentors: The Backbone of Success

Mike Casey:
Okay, tell me about your mentors. Name three mentors and what did you learn from each one of them?

Sean Kelly:
Let's see, I had someone. I went to Texas A&M which is a giant networking school. It's also a cult, but if you admit it's a cult, it's then not a cult, which is great. My wife calls us Lord of the Rings. And so if you know any Aggies, you know what I'm talking about. And there's a guy named Patrick Williams who was unbelievable. And he just really encouraged me to go out to these different leadership organizations. He helped me through my job process. And so I was very involved when I was at Texas A&M in a bunch of student organizations and went to class on a semi-annual basis, about as often as Nordstrom runs a sale.

And so with that, I had a big Rolodex, but I didn't have the three, or eight that I wanted to go and be an investment banker. And so he introduced me to all these different people and said, hey, what are you doing? Are you happy where you're at, et cetera? So I met someone from the government office of accounting, met a hedge fund trader, met a whole bunch of different people. I met a guy in Forest Lane at Tenaska who ended up hiring me and that was my first job.

So Patrick Williams is definitely one. Number two, kind of back to that Aggie network thing is just a guy named Bob Harvey. He was an EVP at Reliant Energy. And I sent him a cold email and said, Bob, you're the best Aggie in energy. What should I do when I grow up? And he took me to lunch. I rolled up in my $60 suit from Foley's, as nervous as could be. And I was like Mr. Harvey, he's like, Bob, we had breakfast. 

Last month, so this is 20-ish years later but he was the first one that was kind of under his wing. Unbelievable. He just stepped down as CEO of Greater Houston Partnership. And so we still, we've been working together on helping bring the tech community to Houston, which is actually going quite well. So those are two.

Mike Casey:
And Sean, let me ask, what's the most important thing you remember learning from Bob?

Sean Kelly:
I mean, Patrick and Bob are both amazing networkers. The thing that I learned from Bob is the fact that some little snot nose, I guess, probably a 21-year-old kid with acne went in and he took the time out of his day to take me to a nice lunch and spend time with me. Every single Aggie, I'm about to probably get a lot of inbounds here. But every Aggie who emails me, I reply back to. Because he was just paying it forward. If someone of that caliber tells me to pay it forward, that's all I'm going to do. And so I've been doing that for the last 20 years. So that's definitely what I've done. And it's come back. A very nice ROI on paying it forward from him. 

The last person I would say is probably Cody Moore. Cody was my boss at Eagle, which became Lehman, which became EDF. He is one of the most upstanding individuals in the whole business. I don't know how he literally was a great family man, great at running the trade floor, involved in church, and did like 400 things. Somehow he was given 36 hours every day. And all the rest of us are stuck with 24. And so I think that was another mentor who just taught me how to work hard. He gave me the opportunity to do the integration of Nine Mile and Ginna to nuclear power plants up in New York and a bunch of other great opportunities. So I would say those are three that changed a ton - Patrick, Bob, and Cody as well.

Evolution of Leadership in Clean Energy

Mike Casey:

Nice. Okay. I'm often interested in how a CEO's background has helped or hindered them when they moved into the CEO role. You're the first veteran trader I've interviewed and I'm really interested in how your work in energy trading equipped you or maybe it handicapped you in learning to lead teams. Were there advantages and disadvantages that you found when you moved into the CEO role?

Sean Kelly:

Yeah, I think the advantage is you make quick decisions. When you're trading, I trade what we call, I was a cash trader. So basically, I was looking at next month in, but I was trading a lot of literally intraday. And so you're looking at all this different information, and you're trying to analyze all that information. There's no magic, anything you can put it into, and then spit out a decision. As CEO, it's the exact same thing. In our company, in January of 2022, there were 12 people. In January of 2023, there were 28 people. And I think we have 65 today, I'm not sure. It's somewhere around that number. So being able to take in a whole lot of things, process it really quickly, and then spit it out is definitely massively helpful as CEO. 

On the counter side of that is the fact that sometimes you rush decisions. So literally the same thing that's a strength also becomes a weakness because sometimes you rust decisions, don't sit down, take the necessary things into account, and gather as much information as possible because you're used to making these like split-second decisions So yeah, the greatest advantage is also one of the strong weaknesses.

The Clean Economy Transition: A Personal Journey

Mike Casey:
I love that. Thank you. Okay. You've done thermal generation and you've worked in the more mature parts of the energy sector. At what point in your career did you move into a clean economy? And I guess a couple of follow-ups are what drew you to the sector and what's kept you there. So when did you move in? What prompted it? And what's kept you here?

Sean Kelly: 
I never moved in, I started. In 2005, I was at Tenaska, and I had this annoying schedule that I had to change every hour. It was a wind farm called Buffalo Gap. I was like why do I have to change this thing every hour? This is so annoying. All the rest, you just set it and forget it. And they're like, Sean, that's wind. And I was ‘What?’ And they're ‘yeah, it's a wind farm. It's a half a megawatt big giant wheel. Now we're looking at three, five off-shores or 15 megawatts. It was half a megawatt back in 2005 out in West Texas. There were 2,800 megawatts when I started the industry. There are 38,000 megawatts just in Texas of wind capacity. So you look at that jump, I never got into the clean economy. I started in the clean economy. It just didn't actually become the clean economy until I was already here.

Mike Casey:
Interesting. So why do you stay here? What do you like about it?

Sean Kelly:
I mean, we're finally the cool kids. It took 17 years to get here.

Mike Casey:
Alright, I gotta make sure I tell my wife I'm cool. Thank you. And Sean Kelly says so, so I'm in.

Sean Kelly:
I mean, it's just where everything is headed, right? I mean, this is what everyone's talking about. The fact that electricity is now an actual conversation at the dinner table. And the reason it's a conversation at the dinner table is it's not because it's famous, it's because it's infamous. I mean, Winter Storm Uri in Texas, everyone knows what that is. I definitely know what it is because I live in Houston and we lost power for 72 hours. My wife was six months pregnant, so that was fun.

You look at this, the fact that a hurricane hit California, that's not a thing. Wildfires in Boulder are also not a thing. I mean, all of these different events that we're going through, we have a one-in-a-hundred-year tail event every at least six months. And so that's why it's not the clean economy. It's just the economy. It's just what we have to be doing. And so I'm here because this is the only option. It's if you realize it's the only option or if you don't realize it's the only option. That's really the only way I look at it. And so it's all coming. 

We just launched our Scope 2 product and did a really cool press release with a company called WattTime nonprofit that we're overlaying their data onto our hourly electricity demand data and then with that, pushing out Scope 2 emissions, it's still in beta phase, as again, we haven't even gotten government oversight and certain to what that looks like, but it's coming. It's gonna look like what RECs were. And I remember hearing about RECs the first time at a Texans game in the suite and a guy from the London School of Economics came over. He was ‘We're trading RECs’. I was ‘T-Rex or what are we doing here?’ He said ‘renewable energy credits’. This was 2009. No one knew what that was. Now everyone trades RECs.

Carbon is the next market. I love markets. My first market was baseball cards. And now it's electricity and carbon and all the other fun things. So the clean economy, it's just the economy now in my opinion.

Networking: A Catalyst for Clean Energy Leadership

Mike Casey:
You may have kind of answered this next question, but I'm going to take a run at it anyway. In the interviews you've done in the past that I watched to prepare for this one, you've talked about being a really active networker and perhaps that's us, Irish people's gift of gab. I imagine you've been able to observe the experiences of other people who are leading companies in more mature sectors.
Based on those observations, do you see leading a clean economy company as different than leading companies in more mature sectors? And if so, how so?

Sean Kelly:
A company is a company. It's just what you do. When I was in school, we learned about widgets, right? That's the analogy everyone uses. I think the biggest difference is B2C versus B2B. And we're completely B2B. But I think a company is a company. One of the things I think I do, and if anyone thinks my advice is pertinent, this is the one piece I would listen to, is just surround yourself with the people that you want to be and the people that are also going through the same thing that you are. 

RE+ out in Vegas was unbelievable for the simple fact that there were so many CEOs there and got to hang out with all these cool CEOs who had been there before. I probably hung out with 30 of them and all of us are dealing with the same exact things and we ran a really good VP of Finance program or campaign and got a great VP of Finance. But guess what? I have like five other candidates that if I had shown up to the board weren't that bad. They would have been completely fine with it. 

So we all trade candidates. We all say, let's do this, let's do that. So I definitely think a company is a company and I learned from people on the outside, we don't just hire energy. Our company is split down the middle. It is half tech and half energy. I will say on this side, you don't want to have an energy company that does tech. You want to be a tech company that does energy. And so there's a lot that we can learn from that. And that's why we have Abe as my co-founder, he knows the tech side extremely well, like one of the best New York data engineers. And then on my side, I have a great network of energy people and we've combined those two to make a really successful company in Amperon.

Mike Casey:
Can you say a little bit more about that? That's fascinating. You want to be a tech company that does energy rather than an energy company that does tech. Why?

Sean Kelly:
Because I donated a lot of bonuses to big energy companies trying to do tech. Worked at a couple of big utilities, but it just did not go well because people came in. And this is why we are outsourced. Not us as a company, but if we go into said large company, and we have six, seven of the top 10 retail energy providers in Texas use our platform.

We do one thing and we've done it now across 100 different companies. We're good at what we do. If they try to build it internally, it doesn't work. The other thing, too, you can't bring that type of talent. It's not about dollars. Every utility has more money than we do. We announced it last week. We raised $20 million. Every big oil company's market cap is more than $20 million. We have people who want to come here. They want to make a change. They want to work on fun stuff. I can let them go play with wind. And then the next day, I can let them go to Australia and work on the electricity demand forecast there. And then I can let them go play with carbon. And then I can go let them work on a casino on the Vegas strip and a whole bunch of different things. And so they can't, a big utility can't recruit that type of talent because they'll get bored. We're not going to lose our employees to them. We're going to lose our employees to Google, Amazon and Microsoft.

And so that's what we look at. That's what I think is definitely interesting. And then you have those big tech people come in and teach you these principles. My Chief Revenue Officer, Alex Robart, was Chief Commercial Officer of Sustainability at Microsoft right before this. He knows exactly how big tech works. And he has put in so many best practices for us, but yet has still run startups. And so it's a good mix between the two. So if you can blend tech and energy, that's where this is going to work. You can't just start a tech company trying to do energy. You can't start an energy company attempting tech because you just wind up giving away a lot of your employees' bonuses, which is what happened to me for multiple years.

The Blueprint of an Effective Clean Energy CEO

Mike Casey:
Got you. Okay, you quit your job tomorrow and you become a lecturer at NYU's business school. Your first lecture is describing the role of the effective CEO to your students. What are the parts of the job and how would you rank them in relative importance?

Sean Kelly:
That's a great question. I spend a lot of time with students. I'm on the board of the Trading Risk Investing Program at A&M, and we do a lot with Booth, UChicago as well. And on this, the job of the CEO, if you're doing instead of leading, there's a serious problem. And that starts with before the person even comes to your company. You need to inspire them, you need to have them fully on board.

The people that we hire are coming from other jobs. They are highly sought after. I like it when they have multiple offers. I like to have a good fight, not too hard on the compensation side, but still, I want someone that everyone else wants, right? And so if you can lead from that very beginning and then continue to lead. One of the things I learned, had an executive hire that didn't go as well as it could have, and then talked to a great CEO and buddy of mine he said, ‘What do you do, man? I know you've had some hits, I know you've had some misses. Go in, get in their business for three months, and then let them fly or let them go’. And so I think that's really the effective job as CEO is to go in and inspire people, get the right people in, and then let them go. I'm not a micromanager, possibly to a fault. I very much believe in putting together the dream team.

And what we're doing right now with whom we're hiring, we're releasing our employees now and getting to know like, welcome to the team on LinkedIn. And it's just humbling every day to see the type of people and the type of talent that we've been able to bring in. That's what gets me out of bed every morning, knowing that all these people made a decision to put, I guess, their and their families' well-being in my hands. So that's what I think the role of the CEO is just to go out there and inspire people, lead people. If you're doing all the little things, man, it's not just a repeatable process. It's not scalable. It's not a venture company. It's a one-man band.

First-time CEO? Here's What You Need to Know

Mike Casey:
Six years ago, you were the first-time CEO. If you were approached by a front of yours who was stepping into the corner office next month, what are some of the things you would advise him or her to do?

Sean Kelly:
Let's see. So I'll caveat this a little bit. I had another small company before this, but it wasn't venture-backed. It was me and another trader doing consulting for commercial industrial clients. We went in electricity procurement, natural gas procurement, LED, rooftop solar, things like that, had like 30 grocery stores throughout New York, a couple of hospitals in Chicago. That went fine. We had an exit. But I think this time as CEO I would say - just surround yourself with the people that you want to be. The thing that I did that definitely helped me grow into a great CEO. In the energy space, there are two companies that again I looked up to. One of those was Opower and the other was EnerNOC. And so I had two independents on my board. I've got an amazing woman, Catherine Flax. She was a Chief Marketing Officer at J.P. Morgan. She's on the board of ISO New England now. She's awesome. 

And then I had another opening. I wanted just a hard-nosed CEO who had been there through everything, started a company when it wasn't cool, all the above. And so I got Tim Healy in. And he pushes me harder than anyone's pushed me. And we have a great relationship. But I would definitely say he ran a good company and he ran it way before energy was cool. Essentially, for those of you who don't know EnerNOC, the simplest way to say it is he invented demand response, which is what's keeping the lights on for especially those of us in Texas. So having someone who is founder and then CEO for 17 years, that's a lot of battle scars. That's a long time. I'm six years in. I’ve got 11 to catch him.

And so I think you just surround yourself with all those people who've been there before. And people who are honest with you and have that right group of friends and colleagues and accountability, they're going to tell you that they learned a whole lot more from the things that didn't go well than the things that did. And so the way I look at it now is having 65 employees. I have by proxy worked at we'll call it like 400, 500 companies. I don't know. 

So I now get to know what 500 companies by proxy, by one degree of separation, one degree of Kevin Bacon, what they did correct and what they did wrong. So that's what I think I would definitely tell someone as a first-time CEO - go in and tell me what I'm doing right, tell me what I'm doing wrong. Every single person I onboard, I don't onboard them via the computer, that would never work, but I sit down with them in the first couple of weeks and literally say ‘Tell me why you're here. Tell me what was attractive on Amperon. Tell me what you see that's right. Tell me what you would approve of. Know that my door is always open. So as you see something come in, then let me know’. 

And a lot of them take me up on that. And it's a great way to understand what's going on at your company, but also them saying ‘Hey, I was at this company that exited for X hundred million and you're doing everything right, even better than what they did.’ And I'm like ‘Oh heck, yeah, this is great’. So that would definitely be my advice. Cause if you can learn from 500 companies your odds of hitting are really high.

The Art and Science of Hiring in a Remote World

Mike Casey:
Nice. Broadly speaking, hiring is always cited as one of the most challenging parts of leading companies. You touched on this already, but what have you learned about making new hires? And I think it's particularly worth noting you run a fully remote company. So I think I've got to figure that your hiring process has a little bit more at stake than perhaps in-person remote hybrids.

Sean Kelly:
Yeah, 100%. I would say one of the things, is just to build a good network. Not everyone has the advantage that I did of just starting to network when you're 19 years old and doing it pretty well. Not everyone likes networking and everyone's outgoing and that's totally fine. Nobody would get a word in if the entire world was just full of me. And so I look at this, I mean building a network and just having that reference check is important. 
We had somebody we almost hired and then I backchanneled to someone that I knew that they had worked with and they were like, ‘Really nice, doesn't like to work’. And I was like, ‘All right, that just made it a lot easier’. And all the references that they offered came back clean. But it was a backchannel reference. References are so important.

Abe, my co-founder, has some of the best reference questions. And he just dives in and I don't even have them all. I know that he's going to reference that way. So I reference a little different way of kind of trying to understand what drives the person, things like that. But the references are so crucial, especially when running a remote company. One of the things we always talk about is agency. The ability to just get crap done. And that's something that we always look at. 

And I had Elliot on my team come to me and he goes ‘Every single review you had, like you mentioned, you put the word agency in there somewhere’. And I was like ‘Wow’. And so for running a fully remote company, you just have to have some core values. One of our core values is fill in the blanks. And so you've literally got to have that ability to go in and do that. And that really helps with remote. Cause there're days that are hard to get out of bed for everybody and not a fully remote company, you can kind of get by on that for a minute. So I definitely think that reference is the best advice you could possibly do when hiring.

Mike Casey:
Do you have a go-to interview question or two or three? And if they are, what are they and what do you learn from asking them?

Sean Kelly:
If it's like a very early interview, I ask them what they know about Amperon just to see what kind of homework they did. They'll be like ‘Hey, listened to some of your podcasts, like this, you do this’. That really tells a lot about how much they actually care about the job or not. Cause someone really wants it. They're going to freaking gut the internet out. And then if they're kind of like ‘Ah, I've got three interviews today at school’. I think that's definitely one that I look at. 

And then I definitely want to know where someone wants to be in five years. When we just hired someone, uh, and he came in and he's been a founder before and I'm like ‘Why are you here?’ He goes, ‘I want to learn how to be a founder better. The first one didn't work. So like, ‘Let's do this’. I was like, ‘Awesome’. 

So like if you're here two or three years, like one of the things back to Tim Healy, he's got like some absurd number. I'm going to totally butcher this. There are 2,700 employees and there are 30 or 40 that are C-suite or CEOs now out of his family tree. So I'm like ‘If you want to come here, do two years of startup bootcamp and figure it out, and then behold, go start a company, that's great to know.’ You look at that person differently than one who wants to go into management or thinks this is their last job and things like that. So I think understanding what makes people tick.

Those are the two things that I definitely lean into. Like how much you actually care about this job, why Amperon? And then the second piece of that is where do you want to be in five years? So then I know how to empower them and to drive them. Are they more driven by vacation? Are they more driven by cash? Are they more driven by equity? Are they more driven by cool projects? Like let me know and I can probably make it work.

Mike Casey:
Sean, talk to me about firing people. What have you learned about having to let people go?

Sean Kelly:
It sucks. But do it quickly. It doesn't help either party to let it drag out. It helps both people to know that this isn't working and they're gonna be completely great for someone else. They're just not completely great for you. I mean, people quit, right? That's them firing you. It's the exact same way. So I think do it quickly, whether you like it or not, but it's not fun. The first couple were definitely hard. At the end of the day, what you're doing is, if it's done correctly and done thoughtfully, it's actually going to be better for both parties.

Personal Growth and Leadership Balance

Mike Casey:
Okay, I like to close with these two questions. The first is, are there habits or practices that you have picked up along the way to keep your performance as a CEO as high as possible on as many days as possible? And if so, what are they?

Sean Kelly:
Yeah, I think definitely taking care of yourself is something that I could do a better job as I record this with a broken foot from stepping off a curb. But I think just the overall health thing, like I like to box on Saturday mornings. It's a great way to just blow off steam from the week. So I go to a boxing gym here in Houston. So that's definitely something that I like doing. Being around just like intellectually stimulating people is super helpful. 

And then the one thing that I do that most of my team knows is from like five to eight in the morning, I've got a two-and-a-half-year-old. And so when he wakes up, I do that. And so I try not to schedule anything before like 9 am. There are a lot of exceptions, but that's my goal is to go and hang out with him. He goes to school at 8.30ish. So good to do that. School’s down the street, just walk him. So just spending time with him, that's why I work, right? Why I work is to set him up, it’s for him. He's inspiring. I want him to think I'm the best dad possible. And so for me, my performance, my wife's awesome too, but my son, just him being two and a half and having him to look up to me, I think that's really the biggest thing that gets my performance up to the highest bar because he sees what I do. He sees if I yell at somebody, he sees everything. And that's only going to get more and more as he gets older. So I would definitely say that's the habit and then like the highest accountability that I definitely have.

Mike Casey:
You're the second cleantecher I've met who does combat sports as a release. But you, Stephanie McClellan, she used to box and I do jujitsu, so anyway.

Sean Kelly:
I like it. It's a blast. I started in New York with a buddy of mine. He was a broker back when I traded. He's like, ‘You want to meet me here? I'm like, ‘I don't know’. He's like, ‘I'll bring you hand wraps and stuff and I'll give you gloves and everything’. I'm like, ‘This is awesome’. I started boxing. It was called TITLE in New York. There were a couple of gyms. I think I started back in 2017, so I've been boxing for like six years now, and it is just great stress relief. It is just an hour of just going at it.

Mike Casey:
Yeah, not a lot else is stressful after you do that. That's for sure.

Sean Kelly:
You can't focus on anything else. You are just focused on one thing, and that is swinging as hard as you can and trying not to kill yourself.

Strategic Focus: The Key to Success in Clean Energy

Mike Casey:

Okay, last question. Looking back over the last six years, is success in a business more reliant on what it chooses not to do or what it chooses to do?

Sean Kelly:
Absolutely what it chooses not to do. Much love for the consulting industry, but every software company out there is going to be asked to do a million things. If you're really good and they know you have a really smart data science team and a really smart engineering team, they will ask you to do all sorts of crazy chaos. It is only beneficial to them, which I understand everyone should have their business's best interest at heart, but that's not my business's best interest. So the only reason we lose clients is because we don't do everything. Because one of my very, very first pitches, I was in New York, a big hotshot venture capital firm and we walk in there and I was like, the grid is screwed. Agreed. So we need a better electricity demand forecast. Awesome. Then everyone should be: you've got an EV, I've got a rooftop solar, he's got a battery. Everyone should be on a different price. Totally agree. And then we got to tell the customer, we got to get to them, blah, blah. And he goes, so three companies, he goes, how much are you raising? I said, 500K. And he goes, you're going to start three companies with 500K. And I took a breath and I go, that is the dumbest thing I've ever asked anyone. And so that's what's made Amperon successful. We are the best forecasting company in the world. We've won every competition we've entered since inception.

We don't lose on accuracy. We don't do everything. We're not a complete bag of tricks. We're not a consulting shop. But when it comes to accuracy in forecasting, that's what we're good at. So we started with demand forecasting. Great. Then we went to wind and solar. We're the best at that. What a concept. Then we add in scope two, which actually is just layering carbon data on top of data we already had, and then last is price forecasting, which I'm very excited to see as it's being built right now.

But again, we just do forecasting. So Elliot, who runs our product, he says no to so much stuff, but it's always in our best interest. I'm like, ‘But there's 50K here’. And he's like, ‘Are we really building a business for 50K?’ And I was like, ‘We are not building a business for 50K’. He's like, ‘Great, so we shouldn't do this’. I'm like, ‘We should not do this’. And so it is absolutely success in a business is what you do not do as opposed to what you do do.

Mike Casey:
Sean Kelly, this has been an awesome conversation. It has gone by very quickly and we're gonna have trouble fitting it down to 30 minutes because you got a lot to offer my friend. So I wanna thank you for what you're doing. I thank you for coming on this show and sharing your secrets. I think a lot of people we talked to have been in that corner office for longer than you have. And I think the perspective you're bringing as someone who's six years in is really useful to a lot more of our listeners because they're closer to where you are than say Dan Sugar at NEXTracker. So anyway, I want to thank you for it. Thanks for what you're doing for a clean economy. Thanks for coming on the show.

Sean Kelly:
My pleasure, thanks for having me, Mike.

 
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