The Ledger, every show

“If you have a gun pointed to your head today, would you have done more? If the answer is yes, that means you're not doing a good job.”

“I think we could be bigger than Shell.”

“You can have low cost energy, you can have more energy, and you can have lower carbon energy at the same time.”

“So any energy company that's claiming their harm sent renewables is a complete lie. Right. They're simply buying renewable certificates, right, to claim the harm sent renewables, and it's completely false.”

“Number two is I would delete all subsidies of any kind. Because the goal for energy should be as low cost as possible. A subsidy basically means It's actually not profitable to build this project, but because the subsidy is now profitable. And who, think about…”

“I think that's a, yeah, model economy we should follow for energy policy.”

“I actually think there are not enough ambitious founders out there, because ultimately the throughput of the company, like how many parallel work streams you can take at a given time is dictated by number of great leaders you have in the company.”

“Yeah, I'd say, like, as I said before, like, this is very hard, like, this only way to do it, like, we're going against, you know, big, big, big energy companies with, like, huge balance sheets. You know, billions in revenue. The only way to win is, you know, …”

“There's nothing wrong with wanting work-life balance, but I think the only way to build a generational company is very, very strong work ethic. I just don't see any other way to do it.”

“We increase our revenue with Tenex every year since inception. First year was two million pounds, second year was 20, and then this year we're gonna end at over 200 pounds.”

“The quality of companies operating this space is not very sophisticated. Like a lot of these existing energy companies, they are not technology driven at all. They're very old school. So pen and paper spreadsheet based companies they're incredibly inefficient.”

“I would deregulate building anything physical. I would make it so easy for anyone to build.”

“Our threshold is we will hire anything above a beat. So if you get straight Bs, you'll still get an offer, but the offer will be much lower, and it could be below what you're making today.”

“I don't believe in pips. I think it's a waste of time.”

“If I, when I realize a person, if I keep giving negative feedback to a person and they haven't improved, then I just stop bothering. Then, you know, they can leave the company.”

“It was roughly where we were at a 145. About one 40 actually. And we had an oral agreement with Bolton, we'll take the term sheet. And then, but we haven't signed the term sheet yet. And then later, there was another investor that came, they came and said, I w…”

“So the company is doing over four hundred million revenue, annualized revenue,”

“I think of a trillion dollar company.”

“If you're a leader of an area in the company, Excuses don't matter. If you succeed, you get all the praise. If you fail, you get all the blame. And it does not matter why you fail.”

“I asked Nick, like, what's, what's your ambition? Like, what keeps you motivated? And at the time he's, you know, worth quite a bit of money already. So, you know, what gives us, what drives him, right? And he told me he wants to beat JP Morgan.”

“There wasn't any differentiation in product roadmap. But what differentiated between, you know, us and everyone else was basically ambition and the speed of execution.”

“Have small teams yeah, small teams operating in the independent units and give them very clear goals and let them execute. And, you know, what you should do is monitor those teams and if they do well, let them be. If they don't do well, replace the team.”

“I think one.”

“I think you have to pick your battles for sure. Ultimately, like, you need to identify the most important roles in the company and never settle on those roles. But the roles that matter less, I think it's perfectly ok to settle.”

“Once you start incentivizing against that, teams find ways to game it.”

“The issue with, the issue is like the bigger you get, I guess more scared the regulators are of you because if you succeed, they have no upside. They don't get a bigger bonus. But if you fail, like they might lose their jobs. So it's ultimately like, you know,…”

“I still don't think they realize. I still don't think the incumbents have woken up yet.”

“There's actually, A very strong correlation between how much energy you use per capita and quality of life.”

“I think we're in energy crisis already. In, in the whole developed economies, UK is in the deepest trouble.”

“So if you look at energy consumption per capita in the last 25 years, UK has dropped 25%. In the US, it's been flat. In China, in the same period of time, it's gone up by seven times.”

“One of the, so we're trying to build a power plant in the UK and, you know, one of the things council have a complete discretion over, you know, planning, especially around environmental impact. So we had to do, you know, wintering bird surveys, right, over se…”

“If you speak to any of the, you know, infra capital providers they want to deploy a lot of capital to building infrastructure. So the problem is not capital. The problem is it's very, very hard to build.”

“In China, they deploy more solar than the all Western economies combined.”

“Mac Clifford is a pretty good choice.”

“Yeah, I think it should be maximum page. Like, if Elon Musk can fill, put his CV in one page, so could you.”

“So as a company, we don't actually use any comp bands. We simply look at the grades and the higher the grade, the higher our bid.”

“So what you want to do is hire someone who really deeply cares about the company and about the mission, right? Someone who would, you know, stay up late, right? To fix this bug, right? Or stay over the weekend to get this new feature shipped. Even if you hire …”

“Yeah, we've never given a head of position to anyone we've hired. We've only given to it based, based on performance.”

“Like, what I found is, like, usually top performers internalizes negative feedback very well. They take negative feedback to heart, and they find ways to improve, right? If there are people who don't take negative feedback well, I don't think they're top perfo…”

“It's very important you have, you create a culture of truth seeking, right? And the truth is very ugly, you know, might hurt someone's feelings, you should still say it, because it'll make that person, you know, make that person better.”

“I don't even think of them as direct reports, right? I think of them as, like, you know, going back to self-guiding missile analogy, right? You don't need to manage those people. Right? Like you discuss and you debate about the target, right? But once you both…”

“Something around there. But we'll, we'll, we'll still shoot for 10. I think we can.”

“Because culturally they, I think they favor technical education and they have very strong work ethic.”

“I think if they were listed in the US, they'd probably be worth more.”

“If we ever list, I think it would be the US, yeah. I personally don't see a need to. There's a lot of liquidity in the private markets And obviously there's additional overhead being a listed company. Like, so far, like the only, like, only, only reason I see …”

“Level-Thirty-Nine is, yeah, for those who don't know, it's basically a giant, yeah, a startup co-working space with maybe over 200 startups, and Revolut was the only team that worked past seven p.m. On the weekday. So after seven p.m., the whole floor is dead.…”

“I told the team last year execution was maybe four out of 10.”

“The Americans use, you know, almost eight times more energy than Europeans and look at the quality of life.”