Patrick O'Shaughnessy

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Hello and welcome, everyone.

I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best.

This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.

If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing.

You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolossus.com.

My guest today is Zach Dell.

Zach is the co-founder and CEO of BASE.

BASE is a modern power company building a reliable and affordable home energy service powered by distributed batteries.

We explore one of the most underappreciated machines in our world, the electrical grid.

Zach walks us through the complex world of electricity infrastructure and explains why the 100-year-old grid is woefully unprepared for the explosion in demand coming from AI, electric vehicles, and industrial electrification.

BASE's approach involves creating a distributed network of home batteries that provide backup power to customers while serving as grid resources, elegantly solving infrastructure bottlenecks that plague traditional utility scale projects.

We discuss energy as the fundamental enabler of human progress, scaling distributed energy assets, and the vertical integration strategy driving BASE's unit economics.

Please enjoy my great conversation with Zach Dell.

Thank you.

so zach when we first started talking about everything that you're building and doing your whole background it reminded me of this book i think the book was called the grid if i'm not mistaken and it's one of these books kind of like the box which teaches you about shipping containers which sounds so boring and then you dig in and you realize this thing is responsible for so much innovation and infrastructure in the world and i knew nothing about it and i'm embarrassed and now interested

The grid feels like something similar, like anyone listening, like, oh yeah, the grid.

I know the grid's important.

I would love to actually just begin our conversation with you teaching me and us everything you've learned about this thing that powers our whole life and world, why it's so important, but what it is, literally, because I think we think of it as this thing that brings us power, but we don't really know what it actually is.