Zach Dell

And I started meeting the Thrive team, and I was just struck by them as people and their strategy as investors.

The way that I saw it was high conviction, high concentration, high involvement.

So make very few investments, have very strong conviction in the business.

And then when needed, actually really help move the needle for the company.

That was the kind of investing that I always wanted to do.

partially because I really wanted to be an entrepreneur and I wanted to be close to entrepreneurs and I wanted to actually help entrepreneurs, but partially because I think that diversification is the enemy of returns and all that matters as a growth stage or startup investor is like identifying which companies are actually going to be part of the S&P 500 and then owning as much of those companies as possible and not selling.

I ended up joining the team at Thrive.

And I was there for two years and just have a ton of admiration and respect for the people there and really grateful for the time that I spent there.

And really in the second year I was there, I spent most of the year picking this battery storage thesis back up with the idea in the back of my head that I might start a company in the space.

As I picked the thesis back up, we made a large investment in Andoril.

And I went down to do a factory tour as part of diligence.

My tour guide was the head of manufacturing at the time, who's now my co-founder, Justin.

We spent a day together.

He showed me around the factory.

I was peppering him with questions all day long.

And at the end of the day, I was like, man, that is one of the smartest people I've ever met.

And he is a machine.

And so we hit it off and we exchanged numbers.

We started texting and we started talking about big ideas.

And a couple months later, I called him and I was like, hey, and I think the line I used was, I want to start a company.