Now we’ve started doing more acquisitions to support our growth. Then we paused for a couple years to sort it all out. We did five acquisitions in seven months. It’ll feel like chaos in the beginning but you’ll get the benefits more quickly.” Otherwise, you’ll perpetually in integration phase. Not only did they agree, they said, “Why don’t we do all these acquisitions at the same time. Then I found a private equity partner called Rubicon to back me on this. So I realized there was a billion dollar gap in the market, and I put together this carefully thought out plan of buying different companies in the space over a few years. We've got these big companies, they're going to be around for decades, but they don't give us the innovation we need.”Īnd so I said, “Okay, well, if I go and get the best of all the small innovators, and I put them together into this big billion dollar business, will you buy from us?” And the answer from our customers was a resounding YES. Now, you guys are really good at innovation, but your balance sheets are scary to us we have to make bets on the future of this market. I was excited about that, and was talking to these guys about it, and they basically said, “Here's our problem, we're stuck between buying from little guys like you (at the time we were a $40 million business), and these big billion dollar companies over here. They really set themselves ambitious targets. And our customers courageously stepped up and said, we're going to decarbonize by 2030, 2040, and so on. Over the last five years or so, there's been a rapid awakening of the need to do this. A few years ago, I met with them and we talked about the need to decarbonize. I get together with our 15 smartest utility customers twice a year to talk strategy together. That key to that accelerated growth in the last 2 years? Collaboration. And then it took two years to go from $100 million to almost $2 billion. Tuck: It took 10 years to make this business worth $100 million. Can you speak more about becoming a Unicorn via acquisition, how and why you did this? And you’ve had an unconventional path to building a Good Unicorn, in that you’ve accelerated the journey by acquiring something like half a dozen companies into the portfolio of energy efficient products you supply to utility companies. There are 3000 utilities in the US, and we’re proud to have built trusted relationships and work with 85 of the largest already. And utilities are highly motivated to innovate because they have decarbonization goals that they have to meet according to government regulation. Tuck: We’ve always thought that if you're going to solve a problem, like climate change, you need to go to the people who already have scale, who already talk to millions of customers and help those millions of customers get better at what they do, as opposed to signing up one customer at a time that there isn't enough time left to do that. Tsai: It’s so interesting that you don’t go direct-to-consumer with your tech and instead your customers are utility companies. Our technology is a suite of 15 energy efficiency products that we supply to utility companies. Today, 85 of 200 of the US’ largest utility companies use Uplight’s technology to help millions of Americans have cleaner energy and save money. Here’s the reality: we have 98 months left to solve this problem of climate change. The way we do that is by working with the largest utility companies in the United States to help them meet their decarbonization goals with a whole suite of highly innovative energy-efficient products for their customers.
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