Building the World's Largest Flow Battery Company with Jon Parrella

Welcome to Better Than We Found It, the podcast that goes inside the minds of the leaders building our future. Difficult we do today, in the impossible we do tomorrow. I'm Josh Huggins, founder of GS2. Search for dedicated, finding the visionaries powering the most critical shift of our time, the US energy transition. So much what I do is passion driven because of those experiences. This season we trace in the unique journeys the architects of America's new energy landscape, exploring how their diverse backgrounds force the psychology, the ambition and the brutal truths required to lead in a time unprecedented change that we're going to be an entrepreneur who has taken. And you got to be able to take calculated risks. My mission is to uncover the playbook of the leaders in need. So we can all learn what it takes to build a world that's truly better than it happens. Welcome back to Better Than We Found It, the podcast where we talk to leaders and innovators building a more sustainable world. I'm your host Josh Huggins and today I'm speaking with someone whose career is a masterclass in speed, scale and execution. It's all in aid of our fourth season or better than we found it where we're shining a spotlight on those helping to shape the energy transition particularly in the USA. And today's guest is John Perrella. He's the founder and CEO of Terraflow Energy. He's just a year. His company is Skyrocketed to become the largest flow battery business in the world, aiming to solve the colossal energy needs of data centres with American-made long-duration battery storage. But John's story didn't start in clean tech. He's worked across a range of different organisations and his journey of entrepreneurship is with a common thread of spotting huge opportunities where others sometimes do or don't but having grit to build the solution from the ground up and that's what we dig into in the conversation. And we explore how John's mindset has forged the opportunity with Terraflow and the unique situation that they find themselves in. I think you'll find his energy is infectious, he's engaging, he's inspiring and if you want to understand what it takes to really build something of scale from nothing with purpose and sustainability yet is called you're at the right place. So let's dive right in. So John, welcome to Better Than We Found It. Oh, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it. Yes, very much so. My end I think I'm going to learn quite a few things today about some new technology but perhaps for the audience I've done a little bit of an intro to you but I'm sure I haven't done it justice. So the audience that don't know who you are, would you mind just giving a quick overview of yourself and Terraflow Energy? Sure. My name is John Perrallon, the CEO of Terraflow Energy. Terraflow Energy is a new company that was formed in 2024 to stand up, domestic based manufacturing of flow batteries but with a specific twist on using flow batteries for AI data centers to help with solving the volatile load issues and responsive and controllable load issues for data centers. Excellent. Well, we're definitely going to get into that in more detail and keen to hear more about it. I was fascinated when you told me about it. As you know, the podcast is around the journey of leadership as well as to current day. So I want to go back to the early part of your career before Terraflow. You mentioned to me you've built and you've exited multiple companies across trading, some SaaS products and also fabrication. We've always drawn to, as opposed to the complexities of the energy sector or was there a specific moment for you that you've realized that the energy sector was something that really picture interest or pull you in? Well, I was always intrigued being a serial entrepreneur with annuity based businesses after I kind of had my first successful exit and learned what drove, you know, valuations and exit strategies. And it was interesting because the multiples were always higher on annuity based businesses. So that's what kind of drove me into energy and software as a service and things like that. Making widgets was always something that everybody likes to do, but exits aren't necessarily always as good. So I really got driven more towards the model than electricity. But as I got to know how the commodity actually functioned and worked in the market, it definitely intrigued me and got involved in a lot of different aspects of it from the deregulation side to the physical asset side that would provide the electron. Sure. And you mentioned your first major step into energy was with discount power, which was a big success by all accounts. I think you mentioned to me some numbers from zero to 75,000 customers in 14 months. Yeah, that was a little bit more about that. Pardon? As if that was a wild ride. Yeah. I stumbled across the electric industry. I was more in construction than I was energy when I got out of college and I stumbled across it because I was at a home show and there was a broker across the aisle from me for a deregulated electric supplier in Connecticut at the time. And I walked over to him and I said, what is this? And they explained it to me, but they said they were just brokers. And so I went home and I did some research and I ended up calling the phone number on the website and I got the CEO because it was only a two-man show. And I said, well, can we meet? He's sure. Let's go meet. So I went to their office which was at a house and met with the two guys that were running the company and I said, I think I could bring you a lot of customers and you looked over on the desk and there was a pile of paper about a foot tall and it was it was enrollments that he couldn't process. And I said, well, what's the problem? And he goes, well, I need to raise money. I'm borrowing from Peter to pay a poll because of the float and this, that, the other thing. So I said, well, what if I helped you to raise the money? And he goes, well, then you could help me. So we went down the path of starting to write a business plan and a pro forma and put everything together for him, got to the closing table and we find out he had a bankruptcy in his past and it was like, could have told me that before we started. But we'd done all the work to figure it out and literally the next day this account power was born. We modified the plan to do it the way we would have done it and went about it and raised the capital and we saw what a lot of the other people were doing. We got to see the inner workings of that company and because of that, we got to see what the right way to do it is and what the wrong way to do it is. And so we raised quite a bit of capital. I think at the time I raised like 5 million of equity and like 30 million of the receivables line to float the power. And hired software developers day one to start building out a system for us internally that would allow us to manage the volume that you experience in that space if you do it right. And literally the difference that we did, you know, a lot of companies would do traditional marketing where they would go to market with, you know, flyers in your mailbox or TV advertising or radio advertising or things like that. We focused on building a network of brokers and having tiered commission structures, not MLM, but where, you know, if you had a relationship with a large organization that could get a lot of customers, they would create a residual commission for them. And so we had to build a whole commission engine to track and pay all that every month. But it was a different way of doing it and it went viral and we signed a lot of customers. And one of the things that we also figured out very quickly was how to price commercial customers not just to go after residential customers. And that obviously helped significantly grow the portfolio because every commercial customer you bring on is equivalent to 5, 10, 15, 20 residential customers. So the portfolio grew fast. We were that everybody else was doing variable products at the time. We did fixed price products for the commercial customers and that took on. So I was able to have a successful exit from that not long after we started it. And literally my phone started glowing up with everybody saying, how did you do that? And so that's where Esco Advisors was born was just doing consulting. And what ended up happening is we noticed very quickly that we were getting asked the same question over and over and over again by different suppliers. And so we started building that same software team that was with me when I was at discount power. They weren't in house. They were consulting firms. So I had them start building a platform different than the way we did it when we were there. Built it as software as a service rather than a homegrown solution. And it went viral. I mean, I literally signed 40 different retail suppliers and like by first year. And we were, we started off selling vaporware where we had a graphic artist like drop what the screens would look like and sold it and use the cash flow from that to be able to fund the software development to build it. And it worked. And we ended up growing to be one of the largest energy trade risk management platforms for deregulated electric gas suppliers where we were doing load forecasting and we got more accurate than just about anybody out there. so that when you aggregate a law, large number of customers, you could manage the volatility of the power and what it was going to do so you could hedge and back-to-back your transactions. And so that grew very popular. The problem with the deregulated electric gas market is that while it's in the new-a-day based business at the same time, it's a very small and sesetuous business and it's a, they get consolidated quite often. So you'll build up a portfolio and then that portfolio will disappear to one of the bigger guys who has more money. And then those guys will start another one and do it again. And so when you're running a software company having customers where you sign a customer and you get a new-a-day based revenue and then all of a sudden the revenue disappears because the bigger guy who's not using your software just bought them, it created some very interesting cash flows. And so we built the business up, we got that business to, I don't think we were doing like 8 to 10 million a year in recurring revenue. We were managing over 5 million meters of customers and electric and we built the solution also for gas to manage moving the gas molecule. We had a hedge fund come along and offered exit and I knew that the only way to scale that business to the next level where I'd have another level of equity appreciation was going to take more capital which meant dilution and a lot more work. So I took the exit and some of the team kind of stayed on board and kept running it. I took the opportunity to go and start something new. Sure. I'm just going to pause you there because I think it's already clear through the conversation that that title that you put in yourself as a serial entrepreneur is clearly true. But I just want to go back to the, I suppose the origination of that. Where do you think that that mindset comes from? I know you were talking to me about your father in his business. Oh my goodness. Yeah, I'd tell you more about that. I would say I learned more from being in my father's shadows than I did in school. And he was the CEO of public company for 25 years, a serial entrepreneur himself. And the company he founded it invented noise cancel active noise cancellation. So Bose headsets, for example, was in violation of his patent. They meant it's a portfolio of about 280 patents on a worldwide basis. And they had offices all over the world, such as Pan, UK, Maryland, Connecticut, New York. So he was constantly traveling. But I got to, you know, hear him all the time. He taught me how to build models, taught me how to write a business plan. I didn't learn that in school. And it gave me the drive. He was always going to work a haul like. So it was just a completely different mindset and what you see a lot of these kids today, being able to have a mentor like that that could give me experiences that, you know, I did summer internships in a lab, not, you know, working at a grocery store as a cash register. So that gave me a lot of experience and exposure to technology and business and modeling and raising capital. And, you know, when you're in a public company, you're constantly raising capital. So it was, it was a lot of fun being able to have that mentor and my, my father and I talk every day. He, you know, he's one of my best friends and we have a great relationship. So it's, it's a lot of fun. For sure. And actually, it's interesting. Not just on my drive in to work as one of us talking to my, my fiancee about this with about our two children and then we were having this conversation about schools and how they don't teach, you know, these basics that you really want them to for your children and my eldest is very good at maths and he's very into algebra and we're trying to talk to him about savings and in compound interest and all these other areas that, you know, you'd think are actually so fundamental to a good financial management. But schooling is still teaching him about the, in the UK and the, about the tutors and, you know, these things that are like the Vikings that are, I'm, yeah, I'm, it's very interesting, but is it going to set them up well for a business life beyond? So, and I suppose having that insight must have been useful not only also to see the fruits of the labor, but also I suppose his view of risk and opportunity in creating something out of nothing. The one thing that I learned very early on is if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you got to be a risk taker and you got to be able to take calculated risks. So, you have to be able to look at and, and, you know, this is where putting together a pro forma, putting together a plan, understanding financials, understanding cash flow really comes into play. So many people that start businesses that don't put a plan together in the next queue on a plan, it's the reason that they fail because they didn't understand the financial dynamics that didn't understand how do you acquire customers? What's the cost of acquisition of a customer? You know, the fundamental marketing 101. And so it, it, where I've been very successful is, is I've always been a fairly big risk taker from a standpoint of, you know, if you build it, they will come a lot of scenarios. But it's also because I knew I had, look, one of the biggest successes I've learned in life is know what you know, know what you don't know and find somebody who knows what you don't know and six degrees of separation. Those are the two key fundamentals of business. If you can find people that know what you don't know to fill the void and, and you understand how to use tools like LinkedIn or, or serial networking, you know, and not being afraid to go up and, and start conversations and, and you never know whose uncle is Bill Gates, right? Like, you never know. I've raised the more capital that way. I mean, I'm, I'm probably over 500 million dollars capital raised in my career. And, and a lot of it's just because I'm not afraid to ask, right? Not afraid to walk up to somebody and introduce myself and every conversation is, oh, what do you do for living and, you know, and, and once I find out what they are, if there are anything of network or value that could help me, then I really dig in and start a conversation. If they're not, then I'll be nice and cordial and, and depending on what the scenario is, it either move on or, or, you know, keep going, but, you know, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a mindset in the drive and, and you've got to be driven, you know, it's, being an entrepreneur is not a 95 job. It's first one in the office, last one to leave, you know, and, and it's, it's finding those quiet times when you can actually accomplish a lot more so than, you know, the, the chaos of the middle of the day when it's whack-a-mole and you're, you're dealing with just freeing out fires all day. Sure. Sure. And, and looking back across your previous ventures prior to Terraflow, which we'll come on to, was there a particular failure or setback that you learn the most from, or that became a kind of lesson to you in how you would want to run businesses moving forward? I've had plenty of failures, but the one lesson that, that I've learned very quickly in, business is you have to be able to pivot and you have to be able to, you know, higher slow, fire fast. And so whether it's a failure of, of hiring an employee or it's a failure of a business model, I give you a great example. Right after Hurricane Harvey hit, right after I moved to Houston from the Northeast, I started a business called JDM renovations, which was getting me back into construction again. And my younger brother at the time lived in, in Connecticut and I called him up and I said, dude, pack up your stuff and come down. There's more work down here than you can shake a stick. And he was a very skilled carpenter, you know, finished trim carpenter. He was traveling the country building out retail storefronts. And I, I was like, dude, there's, there's more business down here because when you do the retail storefront thing, you travel for two weeks, work hard and then you have two weeks off and you blow all the money you just made. And so it was, it was a lifestyle that was constantly, you know, not building any value. So I started a construction company and said, look, I'll do the business end of it. I'm still doing consulting. I'm still out doing other things. I'll do the business end of it for you. You build the crew and go swing the hammer and get things done. And then we'll reinvest and he did. And we absolutely killed it and we started investing in C and C machines as building out like a man cave of toys. Well, that man cave then spun into a whole new business because people would come and be like, can you make this? And it was like, well, yeah, I got the machine right there. I can do that. And they'd be like, well, I need a hundred of them. And it was so his mass production. And it got to the point very quickly where we were making more money with the machines in the back than we were with the guys out swinging hammer because the same guy could run five machines versus swinging one hand. So that was a lot of fun. And it got to the point where we had to very quickly make a decision of do we, do we scale this business? Do we get bigger equipment? Because we were starting to pick up more and more business. And it was all word about we weren't doing any advertising or anything else. So we my brother finds this one piece of machine. This is right during COVID and and it's the size of a school bus. It's not little and it would not fit in the shop that we were in. And he's like, dude, this is the next level. This is where we need to go. And I looked at it and I'm like, okay, I'll figure out how to find it. So I went and called up a bit, you know, equipment. leasing company and said, I want this piece of equipment, my business is booming. And we bought the piece of equipment and we looked at each other and went, oh crap. Now we got to find a bigger shop. So we went out and looked and found a property that was 32,000 square feet at the time we were in 4,500 square feet. And we had gotten an EIDL loan from the federal government. So we had like 300,000 dollars cash in the bank to burn and it was like, look, go bigger, go home. And take the risk. So I found a buddy of mine that was in commercial real estate and he bought the building for us and we moved the equipment, got it set up and then we had to go find a lot more business because that building was significantly more expensive than the building we were in. And we knew that if we had the setup that we could do it. So what did we do? We threw a big party and invited a whole bunch of people to come check out the new shop that we had and sure enough that brought in quite a bit of business. But it was, you know, that's the kind of thing where you've got to take risk. Now that business struggled for a while and it was constantly pivoting from manufacturing for one client to another. But we've realized very quickly that if we could find the right clients that had repeat business and even the same thing over and over and over again, we got very good at that, got our margins up and they would come in every month. So I didn't have to sell as much every month. And that business grew and we've we partnered with companies, launched new products and built some crazy things. And we had to hire and fire clients because they weren't ordering enough or they weren't, you know, it was too complex of a product and they wanted too low over price or, you know, it was something that they couldn't pay well. And so we had to find, you know, more credit worthy clients and things like that. But now that business is 12 employees and pumping out millions of dollars a year in revenue. And we make some of the coolest things out of that shop that you've ever seen. But it took a few pivots and changing the business model to be able to get there. And so if you're stuck on one plan and you can't let go of that when you recognize early on that that's not working and be able to pivot to a different model and change quickly and rip the bandaid off. You know, you're just going to keep going and sink your life savings into it and fail versus if you pivot all the sudden something works and clicks and after the race is gone. That's literally what happened with us with Terraflow. Sure. It was a pivot. Well, I think you know, great lesson there in, you know, being, being nimble and fast to make decisions when you see the opportunity or the current business not working as you say. So talking about that pivot then to Terraflow. So explain more about Terraflow. And I suppose the crux of the core problem that you believe the business selves. Well, let me tell you how I got into Terraflow and that'll help tell the story. So I at the time that we were really at the height of Texas fabrication company, which is a DBA for JDM renovations, we rebranded. At the time, I wasn't in energy at all. I had finished my last consulting job and I was focused on really building up the metal fabrication. So we were mass production metal fabrication, making everything from aftermarket automotive parts to air boats to parts for data centers. And my mother-in-law, who's a commissioner for one of the large fire departments out here, came to me and handed me this one page flyer and said, what is this? And I said, I don't know. Let me look. And it was a company that had a new battery technology that was looking for a public-private partnership to be able to get a grant to put one of their batteries in to help them prove out the concept. Because whenever you have a new technology, you need early adopters that are willing to prove that it works because everybody that wants to buy them goes, well, how many of these do you have installed? So very quickly, we, I called the guy up on the flyer and I said, what is this? And he goes, it's a flow battery. And I said, what the hell is a flow battery? And he explained it to me and they happened to be the chemical manufacturer for a revolutionary new chemical for flow batteries, which was called an organic instead of using vanadium. And so he walked me through it and he said, we make the chemistry. We don't make the balance of plant. We're going to buy the balance of plant from overseas, from Europe, from another manufacturer where flow batteries are way more prevalent. We're going to, it's a vanadium flow battery. But if you put our chemistry into it, it works. And I said, okay, I said, well, why aren't you making it yourself here in the United States? And who's writing the software to control it? Because at the time, I knew how Erkott worked very well in Texas. So he said, well, we don't have the skillsets to make it here in the United States. Well, guess what? I owned a mass production metal fabrication company. So I could make just about anything. And we didn't just do metal fabrication. I mean, we built trailers and all kinds of stuff. So we were doing electrical and plumbing and everything else already. So I looked at him and I said, why don't you come to my shop? Because the guy was in Houston. And let's show you what we do. And maybe we'd be interested because I had the background in energy software. I had the background in how all the regulatory worked. And I now had the background in manufacturing. I said, why don't we talk about maybe becoming your domestic-based manufacturer of these batteries? I didn't have to understand that the science behind it or the PhD or any of that because they already did that. All I had to do was build the rest of the operation unit to make it function as a battery here in the United States. And there was a lot of incentive to do that. Domestic-based manufacturing is a very hot topic right now. So we did that. And then one of my former investors that invested in my software company, Eskid Advisors, called me up and he owns a very large retail supplier that I helped him start. And so we were friends and he called me up and he wanted me to come be the CEO of his energy company. So he could go do something else. So he asked me, he goes, well, how would you maintain my portfolio and grow my portfolio? And I said, batteries. And he said, what do you mean? And I explained it to him and he went, I'm not going to hire you as my CEO, but we're going to start that company and here's $2 million to get it started. And I went off to the races we go. And so that was the first $2 million. Within 60 days, we raised five and a half million. So we raised some more from friends, family and strategic partners. I begged some of my former co-workers at the last business I was at to come help me because it's not something I could do on my own. So I got my CTO who became a founder at the time. I got my development partner who actually was my landlord for the building that we bought in out in Belville for Texas Fabrication Company. And a couple others and I said, here's what I'm doing. We're going to use the shop that we built. We're going to make the parts, make the batteries and we're going to make a lot of money. And I showed them the modeling and the planning that I had done and they went, yep, we're in. And so I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money. And I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was going to make a lot of money and I was manufacturing is the end thing. So we were in critical infrastructure for energy, domestic based manufacturing, like all the right places which made it really easy to raise capital, then we realized very quickly with a flow battery, you can actually charge and discharge them simultaneously. So when you start looking at the different ways you can use these, because they're engineered differently than a traditional battery. So it's a liquid battery. So it's really great for large scale stationary batteries, not portable batteries like a cell phone or or something else. The use case for grid support got really big, but then we realized this AI data center boom was going on. And the previous company we worked with did a lot with power optimization and controllable load resource for Bitcoin mining data centers. So we had a background and power optimization for data centers already with the crew that we built. And so we very quickly realized that if you use this battery for an AI data center and you use it as a replacement for the UPS that all of a sudden it opened up a lot of benefits to the data center. What do I mean by that? Well, when you look at a UPS, traditional UPS for data center is about a 10 minute, maybe 15 minute battery. And the UPS has to solve a lot of problems, which is dealing with AI data centers have extremely volatile power usage, especially when they're going through like learning a training mode. So you'll see a third to half of the data center power swings. If you have a gigawatt data set, you're talking 300 to 500 megawatts swings 12, 14 times a minute. Well, the reality and I'm talking up and down the reality looks like a sawtooth when you when you have that kind of volatile power. The Generation assets out there, even the fastest natural gas generation assets take 30 seconds to ramp up a ramp down That's the fastest, right? You start talking combined cycle. It's 30 minutes The grid has rules as to how fast you can ramp up a ramp down So that volatility has to be everybody's turning to storage to solve the problem But they're either using lead acid lithium ion or nickel Okay, let acids big heavy and and not very pretty lithium ion has thermal runaway characteristics and nickel is very expensive well It's it's roughly in the million dollars per megawatt range Well our battery is about two and a half to three million dollars per megawatt, but we qualify for IRA which cuts it half So now you go from a 10 minute battery to a 10 hour battery Okay, well when you have long duration like that now all the sudden you have flexibility So you can take a data center that wants five nines of reliability and you can actually disconnect it from the grid for 10 hours and run it off the battery and still have five nines of reliability So that became very interesting and then all of a sudden talk about right place right time Texas launched what's called Senate Bill 6 Well Senate Bill 6 requires any large load that's interconnecting to ERCOT to be a controllable load And that puts you to the top of the bid stack as far as you know interconnection approval What that means is that the grid can tell you within I think it's 30 minutes notice I have to go back and look That they need you to turn down Well, when you have a data center that you want five nines of reliability you don't want to turn off at all ever so They have to find ways to allow either backup generation or energy storage or something like that to allow them to do that Well our battery replaces the UPS it absorbs all the volatility and deals with that it eliminates harmonic distortion feedback to the grid It eliminates the redundancy you need in backup generation it opens up additional land spots where you could build these because you don't need as much utility reliability So there's all kinds of really cool benefits you get out of it and allows you to operate the way the grid of the generation asset wants to operate because if you did a large swing like that very quickly You're going to break you're going to trip breakers at either the generation or the substation and create catastrophic failure which means it just dominoes right I don't know if you remember the northeast blackout that occurred in the United States, but that was a domino effect right um So the the requirements for data centers are getting more and more stringent because they're building the the way that that's going is mega campuses There you know now you're hearing 11 gigawatt campuses That's a lot of power and if you have that big of a swing on a campus that big There's no power infrastructure that can support it other than a battery so We found a more elegant solution to do power orchestration power control Responsive load controllable load using a battery and it happens to be the safest cleanest battery with no degradation in cycles that you know You don't have a limitation on cycles they last 20 30 years the reality is the last longer than that but no one's ever had one longer than that Um, and we started with the proven technology so we we're started with uh uh the nadium RIP is more in the how do you do it? How do you run the battery in a ups mode Uh, and how do you do it using what they call large tank format? So it was really Taking what used to be triple a model which is lots of little ones and putting them together to get a big one to making one big one Uh, with large tanks so that's that's really where we've we've uh grown terror flow and and what we're doing is now standing up domestic Grace manufacturing Vertically integrating the construction of them because our batteries are an entire building not just conics containers Um standing up softwares of service to go to operate maintain and monitor the batteries and dispatch technicians and then Operations and maintenance would be you know dispatching the batteries into the grid or or determining when to charge discharge and maintain them Sure lots to lots to digest a fan. Thank you for explaining it so uh so articulately and a few things to follow up with then So for firstly, I suppose in that journey when was when was the moment that you've realized The scale of what you're on to here and you know that kind of moment that made you really recognize what this could be It happened really quick. I mean we're growing it such a fast-paced scary. I mean terror flow is literally 12 months old right now Uh, we started the company in June of 2024. We closed on our first capital October of 2024 So to give you an idea we're coming up on 12 months from raising capital and a little more than 12 months from starting the company to begin with um What ended up happening was everybody we talked to was a positive meeting. I had no nose We go to a meeting we'd explain what we had before we even figured out the data center side of it Everybody was like yep energy storage domestic manufacturing checks all the boxes and they were pulling their wallets out at the meetings Uh, which was why we raised money so quickly Um, and that was at a lower valuation obviously when we first started so we then like quadruple their valuation We were still able to raise money. We're like holy cow. Okay. This is really something big um And and so the valuation was literally almost doubling monthly um Uh To be and and not running in the obstacles to raise money um So it got to a point where it was like okay Here's the roadmap and so we went and said we got to go we we we've got a proven concept We started bringing on some really really big partners with multi-billion dollar balance sheets That wanted to vertically integrate that said You're doing flow batteries the right way We then found partners that were in the flow battery space and and really where We hit it and we realized holy cow now is the right time to commercialize flow batteries in the United States Was when we found companies that made all the parts that were the complex components of making these things that I didn't have to make Or have the engineers to figure out how to make Right, so the way of flow battery works is basically large tanks pumps and what's called the stack Which is a it's the reactor or a few wills where the electronics change happens between the chemistries and What was interesting was when we found companies that for 20 years had been making stacks and They had like the Ferrari of stacks they figured it out they've refined it and gotten it to the point and now They've got a multi-billion dollar balance sheet where they said well if you order enough for these i'll stand up a line dedicated to you and I was like I'm your huckleberry. Let's go So we we very quickly got to the point where We realized that the supply chain was available now at a scale that would support the growth that we thought we were going to experience and What happened is we went and presented to once we figured out how the data center worked From a power perspective and how to implement the battery the right way We went to a couple data center companies that were like some of the top 10 in the world and we presented and they went Oh, yeah, no, let's let's play that into our next campus and we went oh crap Because now I'd stand up a factory to meet that and they're all like yep. I need this in 36 months or less because there's a race and I went Oh, so now I've got to go not only design a product But I have to design a giga factory to deal with I mean what we're getting right now for orders is gigawatt scale orders that are multi-billion dollar orders Dude on 12 months old. I haven't even built a factory yet So it's a it's a very like Oh crap moment a few times over because it keeps getting bigger and it's exciting You know, it's it's more money than I've ever raised before so the I'm having to bring on people that know what I don't know to help me And and not not be too proud to say that I've never done that before so I need to find an expert that knows how to do that Um, then the key comes into how do you find the right people Uh, you know and and so um It's been a wild ride. It's a we're having absolute blast because everybody walks in and goes holy cow Is just excited right and and and when people are like I want in and we have to turn people away that can't write a big enough check But they want a writer check. Yeah, that's that's a I'm on to something. Yeah, I'm sure as I think it as you say as an entrepreneur you're always naturally positively you have a natural positive disposition to things because you get behind them and you want them to be successful But when you're doing that and it really does have this opportunity I suppose it's like a perfect match and so I know you mentioned you've you've trademarked the term Long duration uninterrupted all power supply or LDUPS LDUPS yeah um, so we we tried to come up with a product name that fit what we were doing um, and You know, we've got some great patent attorneys. We've you know that they've helped us a lot With protecting our IP and and making sure that we're thinking about What we can present when and how and what we keep is trade secret versus patent and um, and so it it's been An interesting ride learning that side of it. I the beauty is I got a lot of experience from a dad that had 180 patents worldwide So I knew a lot about patents and I already had a few patents in my name because he would kind of force me Into that role to be like okay, you came up with something with patent it and and taught me that um, so we filed a bunch of patents uh, uh, which in the flowbattery space is not easy to do because Phenetian flowbatteries have been around for over 40 years. So there's a lot of patents out there that you have to navigate. But we found some patents and we figured out things that nobody else has done because we're outside the box thinkers. We're not PhDs. We looked at it from a different perspective. We tried to design a battery that worked the way the regulatory market wanted it to work, not the way all the PhDs were building the batteries. Sure. Yeah. I got that. So it definitely changed a perspective for us by being taught as a serial entrepreneur or not to be stuck in a box. Yeah. For sure. And when you bring in people that don't have the PhD in the background, it definitely also helps to think about the side of the box because they don't even know how with the box the fuck definition is that they and I suppose to kind of link to that then because you've obviously built and had the successful ventures before. But this, yeah, admittedly, as you said, is on a different scale to that. So how do you think about leadership? I suppose differently now. Along with the experience that you've had, but also given the scale of this to earlier on perhaps in your career. Ah, well, there's finding talent is not easy. Finding people that want to work as hard as you are as you do as an entrepreneur is you never going to find them. I'm a big believer in alignment of interest. So not being greedy, not having to own 100%. I'd rather have a small piece of something absolutely massive than a big piece of something that's small. So we instantly created an employee stock option program to be able to compensate our employees with stocks so that they're motivated. It creates a more sticky environment, good benefits, things like that. The funniest thing though is finding talent hasn't really been our issue yet because when you have a really exciting story and like where I'm really good is being passionate and being the evangelist and telling the story and being excited all the time. That's a little bit ADHD and a little bit just, you know, experience in doing this a few times. But having that excitement, when you get in a room with an investor and you're, you can talk to talk, you can walk the walk, you can, you can prove things to them. You've got a plan and they see that. That's where it makes it a lot easier to raise capital and and or to find really good talent that's willing to put skin in the game. So as a startup, you're only capital that you've got a stock, right? When you're first starting something, but you also want to be very careful who you give it away to or how you give it away because you don't want to give it away to somebody that then leaves you six months down the road and leaves you high and dry. So first recommendation I could have is make them vests. Don't give them just stock. That way they have to put skin in the game and stick around to help you because I've had a partner in the past where we started a business and like literally three months after we started the business, he went and said, I need to go make money and what left us and still had the stock because once you give it to me, can't take it away. So vest your stock with employees through options and find an attorney that knows how to structure that properly. But when you align your interest with people, then they're all rowing in the same direction and then you need to be able to make sure that you could divide and conquer not micromanage. So it's how do you create the rules and responsibilities and the figure out how to work with those people to be able to make it so that you can scale faster. What we've gotten very good at here with the team that I've built is everybody's dividing and conquering and doing their own things that they need to do. We check in frequently and make sure you need my help. Do I need your help? Whatever to be able to accomplish more. But I don't have the same person by my side at every single meeting. It's like, okay, you go do your stuff. I'll go do my stuff and we've brought a lot of capital in. We've brought a lot of projects in. We've been able to accomplish a lot. So finding people that can be independent that you can trust is also extremely important. My right hand, understanding finance is very important so you can watch the numbers, understand what's going on, figure out what your run rate is and figure out how much time you have to raise more capital if you're in that kind of business. But attracting talent, when it comes to C-suite, most of what I went to was my role of decks to find people that I worked with before that I knew were same mindset as me, same work ethic as me. And then just told them my story and luckily everybody was like, "Yup, no, I'm in. This is going to be the next big thing." What's interesting now, I have people from competitors that are coming in telling me their whole life story and what's going on at my competitor. And the fact that they want to jump ship because I'm way more exciting than they are because I'm growing faster than they are. The way I'm doing it is the right way to do it. So that's always a good, you know, out of boy or a valid ancient, if you will, that we're on the right track. And when you look, obviously there's people within your network who, you know, perhaps you know of or recommended to you and there's an angle there. But then there are always individuals who are completely unknown. Maybe you don't have any mutual connections. What would be some of the specific traits that you look for on an organization on this journey that you would be sort of assessing through an interview process? So especially if I'm looking for somebody more senior, you don't want to see a resume where they've jumped around a lot. You know, they're a year or two years at a company and then they went to the next thing. Because those people are constantly always chasing the money or there's a problem where they don't fit in with the culture or a work environment. Two is that, you know, when you get them on the phone, a lot of it's going to be personality trade. Are they going to fit with the culture that you're building if they organization your building, right? Do they have the same attitude or they are they too serious or they're not serious enough? You know, those are always important things. And then a lot of it comes down to before you go higher, having the right roles, responsibilities defined that are realistic, right? You see, so many of these job postings are like, oh, you have to have 10 years of experience doing this. And I know from when I went to go apply for jobs, you know, I learned really fast. I'm very technically savvy, all these other things. And when I was before I started to care for when I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next, then I go look at these job postings and be like, oh, that'd be a cool job. And I wanted to pivot from the deregulated side of it to the physical asset side of it, like renewables or batteries or generation assets or things like that. Everybody looked at it said, well, you have no experience in this. So therefore you're not qualified. I don't look at it that way at all. And some of the best people I've hired have been pittits, right, where they jumped industry. Really what I look at is what was the role if they were filling them, what were they doing? And I mean, I'll give an example. I'm recruiting for someone to go like, I do a lot of the speaking right now, but I don't want to, I don't have time to do it everywhere. And I've got to go build brand awareness and I've got to go out and be at all these conferences. So I'm looking for someone right now where I need to make sure that they can command a room that they can gain attention and everything else. And so, you know, I meet with this one guy and he's shy and timid and he's got a phenomenal resume, which resumes are as good as the paper they're written on. But you look at it and go, man, if I put you up on a stage to present my stuff, I just don't see it. And I interview this one woman and it was like, holy cow, and I was blown away. And you could tell instantly that she was the one, right? So it's interesting when you go through like a lot of it is, is don't interview one person, interview more so that you can see what the pool looks like. And then if it's a serious role, I have five people interview them, not just one. So I'll have my CTO, my COO, you know, other people. And then that way they get to interact. There's different questions asked. And then we come together and we sit down and say, we're going to have to live with this person. It's an important role. Do you think that that person has the qualifications? What did you see that I didn't see in everything else in collaborate? So it's a combination of depends on how important the role is. Depends on what you're trying to accomplish out of the role. Is this a role where you're trying to find something that knows what you don't know? So in those situations, I would go to research so that I could at least ask questions that would get them to talk about the parts that I don't know, to see if they know what I don't know. Yeah, sure. But that is a common trait of a challenge of an entrepreneur going into areas that they don't know when you're hiring for it. Actually, technically, you're supposed you're not qualified to test that technical knowledge. So do you, how do you come about that? Or do you actually move away from the technical side completely and just focus on the traits you're looking for and hope that that's right? Or what do you do in different areas? So there's one other important thing that I've been doing recently, which has been actually proving to work quite well. I call it try before you buy. And so in a lot of the roles where they might be like a C suite, I might hire them as a consultant for a few months just to see if they're fit or not. And so I'll say, look, I'll hire you part-time as a consultant because I want to see how hard they're going to work to earn the job and not have to give them any stock as a consultant. And even though it cost me money to do that and it may not work out and I may waste a little bit of money doing that, it's a lot better wasting a couple months of consulting dollars than it is hiring the wrong person. Of course, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. did a lot of work and research into the study of the cost of a bad hire and in, you know, particularly a startup scale up organization where, you know, one person in a, you know, a 20 person business is 5% of your culture. It's such a important part. It's different when it's a thousand people or 10,000 people. One person still has big ramifications, but in a smaller business, even more so, the cost of that, the training, the onboarding, the cultural engagement your team have, when you make that hire, it doesn't go to plan. Actually, it's a far more costly, and as you say, two months consulting gig. So, I, yeah, I see a lot of organizations do that, that sort of thing. And one, one follow up question to the point around the consensus that you have with your other stakeholders, what work do you do up front before the hire's made to ensure you're on the same page with what you're looking for? Or do you leave that to after the meetings have happened to then come back in debrief? How do you approach that? No. So, I mean, it depends on the role. If it's, if it's someone that's going to work underneath someone else, obviously, they have the bigger stake in it. And I'm just the, I'm the additional people that interview them before they get hired. I let the owner of the division make the decision ultimately, because you gotta, you gotta instill value in your team and have the confidence that they can make intelligent decisions. So, if my COO needs an ops person to help him, he's the one that has to write the job description and put together kind of the plan and the salary requirements and everything else. And most of them, we are using recruiters for some of the higher level positions. So in those situations, they'll go out and then they start getting a talent pool and they'll look at and go, are these the resumes I was expecting based on the job description or do I need to tweak something? And if they are the resumes you're expecting, then again, sifting through coming up with your top five or so and then bringing them in for interviews and then weeding it down to two that you want to circulate with the group. Sure. I see. So it's, it's a process, but really the job description and the quality of the resumes that you get when you get 10 of them, you get a better picture of the quality of the people versus just looking at one resume. Yeah. The reason I ask is it's interesting how how how comedy approaches and actually how I and GS2 we approach this over time is evolved and changed. We actually now have a proprietary piece of software that allows us to benchmark and assess different stakeholders view of the type of person that you're wanting in the in the post. So nothing technical, but purely around kind of cultural ad, we call a cultural ad rather than cultural fit. You're looking for what do the different stakeholders look for? We can show it to our clients in a graphical summary and then we can create an actual benchmark of that type of person that every external candidate goes through the same tool and it uses AI to contrast and compare the profile of the candidate versus your profile and it flags areas that we that need to dig into in more detail to really understand is that the table characters the powerful tool these days, man. It's it's really wild what you can do with it. Yeah. That's that's really useful. Whether the second one actually that may be useful in the situation where you need more of a sort of sales type person or a kind of outgoing individual or you're looking for a particular style is we use a video shortlisting tool. So rather than just relying on the two dimensional resume, which as you say, particularly with AI now can be, you know, the people can put the job descriptions in and they can use AI and they can create the best result looking resume in the world. But actually when you then interview them and they're completely different person within two minutes, you know, they're not going to be right. We use video shortlisting. So candidates have to answer a couple of questions that get presented to you alongside their resume. So not only do you get to see this resume, you actually get to hear and see from them before you even meet them. And that's been a big game change for our clients. It's reduced the time. We do a lot too with LinkedIn. I mean, I'm the power of LinkedIn and like first degree, second degree, third degree connections. If we're looking at a candidate, we first look to see is there any connections that we've got and we'll call those people and say, before I interview this person or anything, I need to know, is this person worth worth a crap or are they? And that also helps as well. So, and so I suppose looking forward then, 12, you know, there's lots happening. It sounds like on a daily basis. But if you're looking out, sort of maybe 12, 18 months, what does the future look like for Terraflow energy in terms of, you know, the factory hiring, the actual delivery to clients, what's on the roadmap? We have two commitments now for Gigawatt data centers. So we have a lot of of field the hay. We have in the works three factories right now. One is our prototype factory, which is about a hundred thousand square feet to make a small quantity of them and learn. And then we have two gigafactories, one in Houston, one down in the port of Victoria that we're building, that are in planning phase right now. One of them is about 1.5 million square feet. The other one's about three million square feet. So a very large scale, very quickly spread out. And as we sell more data centers, we'll have to build more factories because we want to build hyper local to the data center and minimize transportation costs. So those are going to take 18 months to build. I mean, basically with the commitments we've got right now, we've got about 36 months window. So we've got to, and the data, the Gigawatt commitments are not all at once. It's phased over a period of years. So it's, it's, get the factories up and running. You know, some of the positions we're hiring now for factory, the future automation, things like that and get things really cranking. So it's, it's onboarding, I mean, we anticipate probably 2,000, 3,000 employees between these two factories. So it's, it's a lot of onboarding, a lot of recruiting, a lot of, now some of that's assembly, some of that's industrial engineering, some of that's, you know, other forms of engineering, software development, and then, you know, energy operations and running a knock and dispatching and settling the batteries that we manage or batteries of service as we get into that in the future. So for us right now, it's, it's, we have a lot of brick walls to run through, but I've got a great team doing it. We've got a bunch of hires to make in the future, but I've been trying to bring on kind of the executive team that will then build out those teams so that I don't have to do every one of them. And it's going to, I mean, it's going to grow mind of its own and naturally grow. And, you know, produce quality product and, and really just scale the business until somebody big enough comes and writes a big enough check that says, we want to buy this. Sure. And what's your, how do you see terraform energy playing? I suppose in the larger grid scale storage and battery industry in the whole of the US and also I suppose maybe even globally. Well, I mean, when you build gigawatt scale data centers, they can be flexible loads. Those are assets to the grid, not liabilities to the grid. That changes the game of the grid. Because what everybody doesn't realize is yes, the grid infrastructure needs to be upgraded for peak power, but there's plenty of off peak power available so that if you can shift the peak, you can fit a lot more on the grid. And that's really what these longer duration batteries give you is you can take these large loads completely out of the picture during the day and, and run them all more at night. And that's that opens up a lot of capacity. So that's what we're trying to do. And, and unfortunately, I've got other meetings starting to pile up. So I'm going to have to hop here soon, but yeah, yeah. I get that. I think I'd really appreciate your time. My last question then, I suppose coming back to the essence of the podcast, better than we found it, it's about ensuring, I suppose, that when you step back from your working career or whenever that does come, what you hope your legacy to be, and it feels like TerraFlanity is a kind of legacy and career defining opportunity for you. Absolutely. What would you hope that would that would look like in summary? I'm a big believer of leaving this planet better than I entered it. So a lot of what we're trying to do is create cleaner, safer technology, enabling cleaner power. And so what's interesting is that the batteries we've got that we're building right now, the factories that we're building are actually the largest flow batteries in the world, which makes us technically the largest flow battery company in the world, which is a daunting statement in and of itself. So being able to say that I pioneered that is obviously a huge legacy thing that I pioneered flow batteries here in the United States is the and helped make the US the leader instead of China. That's a big legacy thing for me. But my dad always instilled into me giving back and helping people. I'm actually a reserve deputy for the Harris County Sheriff's Office because I like helping and giving back. And then I'm involved in the numerous philanthropic programs or ventures. And so a lot of it is being able to give back and really try to help as many people as possible. So everything from putting better power infrastructure in place to support the grid to building safer batteries, creating a lot of jobs and having the ability to say, you know, I did that. I built the largest one or the first one in the United States. And so I'm going to make him a long, like any long musk and build it bigger, better, than I did, but I did it first. for sure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the plan sound so exciting. And I've no doubt with your passion and resilience from your career that you're going to make it a success. So we've really appreciate you taking the time today. Join if people are listening who want to hear more about the business are interested in getting involved in some capacity or want to collaborate in some some way. What's the best way for them to reach out or to engage with you? The website, we actually just released our new website yesterday. So Terraflow Energy dot com is there's a contact us form and that goes to a number of people in the organization. And we've got job postings up there and things like that. So we are recruiting, we are growing and most of you know, find me on LinkedIn. I'm very active there as well. So you know, no, I Josh, I appreciate the time. Had a lot of fun on this and by all means it's been interesting and fun and you know, different. So yeah, yeah, thank you. I haven't done a lot of podcasts yet because we've been so busy getting this started. So you're one of the first to get my time before I get too busy to even do them. Great. Well, I'm glad I did that. So look, thank you so much for your time. I have to check in again at some point to see what's going. But thanks for stopping by and good luck with everything. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. I hope you found John's story to be a powerful lesson in modern leadership, particularly in a sector as demanding and in the spotlight as renewable energy. I think it's one thing as an entrepreneur to have a vision for your company like Terraflow, but it's another thing entirely to focus on taking it from an idea into execution at the speed and scale that they have. And I think the thing that really stands out to me in the conversation with John isn't just about the technology. When it's about his focus on talent, knowing the traits to look for and being confident and assured enough to know where you don't know and finding somebody to do it, that for me is really one of the ultimate test of leadership and how when you focus on an industry like this, you really can leave it better than you found it. So thank you so much for listening to Best Then We Found It. I'll leave all of the links in the show notes and is this or another conversation sparks an idea and interest in GS2 or in Terraflow? Then please feel free to reach out, share it with a colleague or friend or someone you think needs to hear it as it's the best way to support the show. So until then take care and a little forward to seeing you again soon. Thank you for listening to Better Than We Found It. These conversations are a powerful reminder that while emerging technology is crucial, having leaders with the conviction and resilience to see it through is the only way it will deliver what is required. This podcast is powered by GS2 where our mission is to build the leadership teams, the shaping future. I'm your host Josh Huggins and the conversation doesn't need to end here. Please connect with me on LinkedIn and continue the discussion and if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe to the show so you never miss what's next. And until next time let's all work to leave our world a little better and we can have it.