The Exchanges

Q Did you put a battery too or so?

A Yeah, we did. And, um, and the, the idea was how do we extend the hours in the classroom? How do we give that school the ability to educate women? Because women are fetching water till about noon every day. And so we put solar on 2750 schools in 17 countries. Um, as I went back to those schools and visited, kind of made me sad. Because, um, there's a lot of guys that plug their cell phones into these schools and go figure women don't want to sit in classrooms till seven o'clock at night when they've been fetching water till noon. So now what GivePower does, we still do schools, but we also build solar water farms, and it's some pretty cool breakthrough technology. Each container allows us to provide around 75,000 liters of water every single day.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, we did. And, um, and the, the idea was”

Q So, so you, you talked a little bit about your background where you, you, you weren't the A student and you had a chip on your shoulder. Like, what, what were you good at that enabled you to build these things? You wanted to think about big ideas, but what's, what's, what's your, what's your ability?

A Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably a few things I, I've got some talent in. One of them, one of them is the ability to identify talent. You know, I have the ability to really read a person, understand what they're good at, get them in their swim lane, inspire them to do a great job. So what I found was to win the execution competition, You've got to win the talent competition. And I had the ability to kind of identify talent, recruit that talent to come on board, and because of my learning differences, I had compassion and empathy for, um, you know, other people coming in and, and also, in addition to that, celebrating their talents and surrounding myself.

AI assessment note: “One of them, one of them is the ability to identify talent.”

Q Along with giving them the water, is there something you want to do culturally to inspire them to solve their problems or learn, or how do you think about that?

A Yeah, the hard part is education, so you want to educate them. Imagine, you've got hundreds and hundreds of years of these people that have gone and fetched water at the river where cows urinate, and I mean, it's just, it's awful. So you have to change the education cycle to go, look, when you drink this water, you feel better. You're healthier. And so part of it is we just need to educate these people in these communities of the importance of healthy water. Then the other piece is I want to completely flip the model on women empowerment and these women that have gone in fetch water that have not been in the classroom. Now there's a way for them to drive, uh, economic viability for themselves and the village. And so we compensate the women to deploy the water Uh, within the regions, and it's a, it's a really beautiful cycle that starts to take place.

AI assessment note: “the hard part is education, so you want to educate them”

Q So you, you obviously learned about the market being in the market. What were the most important things you learned about culture or product or how to build a company that you then quickly apply? Cause this thing has grown really fast. You must have taken some, some notes from, cause you were working with some pretty good people too, even though you learned yourself a lot too, right?

A Yeah, absolutely. I think, so if you think of kind of buy now, pay later, point of sale technology platforms, if Affirm, Klarna, Afterpay, they were very focused on kind of a digital solution that eliminated the credit card at 18% interest, where you could very quickly buy a Peloton bike. Um, and, and my insight was, let's design the technology for the sales professionals. Let's really understand that conversation in a retail store, whether it's a Home Depot or a Lowe's, All the way to what's the conversation at the kitchen table? And if you can design that technology in a way that allows those banks to have access to that financing, that provides that instantaneous three-second approval at point of sale, but provides the salesperson to do the job in a much easier fashion, that would enable the marketplace. And what people don't understand is, you know, you have to create kind of all of this in a digital first solution on a phone where those salesperson Professionals can manage their entire life, their pipeline, all their business.

AI assessment note: “and my insight was, let's design the technology for the sales professionals.”

Q And you know, a lot of, I'm concerned a lot of young people who think about clean energy and who are excited about it are also kind of living in a state of fear today. A lot of them say, I don't want to have kids because the world's so dark and everything is broken. What would you say to those people?

A I would say, don't be so dark. I mean, this is, this is one of the greatest entrepreneurial opportunities in the history of the world. It's a 50 trillion dollar global opportunity. It's a 10 trillion dollar US opportunity. To completely rebuild how we power our lives. And it'd be one thing if the banks weren't there. You know, like, 15 years ago, Joe, I would meet with the CEO of some of the major banks, and they'd say, Hayes, man, we love the energy, love the optimism. We're just not ready. We don't understand the asset class. We can't take the risk. Today, the CEOs say, Hayes, we're there. How do we finance more? I can't afford not to take the risk. My shareholders, my constituents demand that I start financing these asset classes at scale. How do we get access to it? So think about it. Where the capital flows, whether it was 1995 and it flew into the internet and the information age in the Silicon Valley or the industrial age, you know, at some point before that, we're on the impetus of this amazing transformation of how this planet will be powered. And so if you're an entrepreneur, it's a great category to look at. You know, there's, and look, you got Tesla, there's whatever, the top 10 most valuable companies in the history of the world right now. We've proven that these companies can create massive enterprise value. So there's no trade-off for your ability to create wealt…

AI assessment note: “I would say, don't be so dark. I mean, this is, this is one”

Q hard as, as, as you guys were, because it's one of the kind of most intense places, there obviously have to be trade-offs you make, and You're a, you're a very empathetic person, and, and, uh, and Elon's a really hard-charging person. Like, are there, are there different trade-offs that you would make to complement each other differently, or, or, or ways in which you do things differently as leaders?

A No, I mean, look, I, I think we complemented each other really well. He was very focused on the product. I was very focused on the human capital and the leadership within the organization for, for the business to grow. When I joined SolarCity, we had around, Uh, you know, 1200 employees. We grew that organization to 17,000 employees. And we were hiring about 500 people a month, to give you an example. And we had 40% market share nationwide. There was no number two, Joe. We had, uh, the next 80 companies combined didn't equal our market share. So we were doing things at the time that no one else had ever done before. A couple 100,000, uh, systems a month throughout the country. We had a big military division. We had a big utility scale group, commercial organization, um, that, that were, you know, allowing us to deploy these solutions at meaningful scale.

AI assessment note: “He was very focused on the product. I was very focused on the human capital”