Zach Dell

And I think that if you built a really high quality battery pack assembly business in the U.S., it'd be really hard to lose over the next decade.

And he was like, yeah, that I agree with.

There was so much demand coming from batteries.

It is really hard to do really high quality pack assembly.

There's not enough supply here in the US.

And that was where we started.

I had this core insight.

And then together, we kind of pulled the idea out of each other.

And for the next three months, we would get on the phone basically every night at 9pm and just kind of bad ideas back and forth.

And the thesis really evolved over time.

At one point, we were like, oh, we're going to do neighborhood batteries, or we're going to sell directly to utilities first.

Yes, we want to be a retailer in Texas.

No, we don't want to be a retailer in Texas.

We're going to start in California.

We're going to start in New York.

And we just maniacally researched the opportunity until we crystallized this more platform-like approach, vertically integrated approach, which to both of us just felt like the holy grail of company opportunities.

Justin, before Anduril, was at SpaceX, and he led manufacturing at the Starbase Boca Chica site down there.

And I think what SpaceX did to aerospace, what Anduril did to defense, BASE wants to do to energy.

go after a really large industry with a bunch of entrenched incumbents that are not engineering-led, they're not technology-focused, and they're not R&D-driven, and build the engineering-led, technology-focused, R&D-driven company in that space.

And that's really how Base was born and what Base is designed to be.