Zach Dell

I think lithium is interesting.

I think energy is interesting.

There's an opportunity in battery storage.

This is 2018.

And he's like, okay, yeah, sure.

This is like not something the firm was super focused on.

It was a project that was getting tossed around.

And long story short, when I came back full time the next year, the project had become real, basically.

I became the analyst on the deal.

If you're going to buy a lithium mine, you have to take a view on the price of lithium because you're going to own a lot of it.

I spent a couple of months trying to figure out what is lithium going to do?

What's the price of lithium going to do over the next decade?

And in doing that, it just became obvious to me that battery storage was going to be this incredible source of growth, really for no reason other than the marginal cost of solar plus storage was just going to be lower than the marginal cost of coal and natural gas.

And so incremental capacity on the grid was going to largely be solar and storage.

And it was clear that we had really underbuilt storage.

So we started looking at distributed storage platforms.

And after I left, Blackstone ended up buying IPA Power, which is one of the largest utility scale developers in the country.

Around that time, I kind of had this insight of these two constraints, the interconnection constraint and the transmission constraint that utility-scale storage faces.

Towards the end of my time at Blackstone, I was introduced to Kareem, who you've had on the pod, who's a partner at Thrive Capital.

Him and I hit it off, and he introduced me to Josh, and Josh introduced me to Vince, and Vince introduced me to Gaurav.