Bill Lenihan: 07:23
Yeah, yeah. It’s it wasn’t one event, but it was more of a journey. I, I had the opportunity when I was in private equity to join one of our operating partners at a technology company. I did that for a couple of years, and I loved it. And so I was kind of making a decision, what do I do next? And do I go back into private equity, or do I stay on the operating side? And then this company, at the time it was called Off-Grid Electric, was presented to me. And at the time, I wanted to be an opera. I wanted to continue to be an operator. I wanted to continue to be in technology. And I really, in my mind, I wanted something big and impactful. And I was pretty cool with risk. I just wanted it to be meaningful. And I got an opportunity to join this company. I was going to join the board.
And one of the smart board members, an investor in the company, said, you got to get out to Africa and see what this company is doing. At the time, the company was it wasn’t as much of a technology company as it was as it is now. It was basically the basic premise was that they were going into the rural communities in Africa, in the Serengeti in Tanzania at the time. And they were displacing kerosene. So these were farmers and people who lived. Their light source was with was kerosene. Their energy source was kerosene lanterns, and basically, they were putting in small connected devices. Lithium-ion batteries and solar panels connected because, while they had to burn kerosene, they did not.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:07
This is what we’re looking at here. Is this like an example or?
Bill Lenihan: 09:10
Yeah, yeah, that’s a that’s an example. There’s no battery there. But yeah, that’s similar to what they were doing. They were installing in people’s homes, and people could pay for it through mobile payments. That was key. So, it was technologically advanced in some ways. In some ways, these communities were not, because they were burning kerosene. Anyways, I go out, he convinces me to go out and see it on the ground. I go out, and I have this one experience where they are. They’re taking me to one of the first televisions, like the more modern, not modern, but larger-scale systems that could power TVs, lights, radios, and phone chargers. Those were the kind of killer apps at the time. And I go out, and first of all, our car breaks down. I have to walk like a mile or so. And by the way, there are no addresses. So we’re like GPS coordinates trying to find this, this, this home, and we go out, and we finally see her knock on the door and ask if we can see her new system, which is powering our television and what have you.
She says right away that it didn’t work. And, and that, that you had, you had taken my system. So they look at that. And by the way, the vision at this point, or at least the audience at this point, is like 100 kids. The mama me, who I don’t even work for the company at this point. And some people from off-grid electric, and they asked me, what do I do? And I said, I don’t know what to do at this point. What do you tend to do? And they said, well, we could check to see if this is true. They looked through the records, the data, and found that, yes, she had called. The system wasn’t working. And basically what had happened was they had taken they had repossessed the system because she did not pay for it. So they repossessed it. So it was kind of a terrible situation. And they said, what do we do?
And I said, What do you tend to do in these situations? They said, well, we could get a system out here to, to, to, to reinstall it. And I was thinking, there’s no way it took us hours to get out here and this and that. Anyways, long story short, about two hours later, I’m sitting there in this, in this, in this house. I’m playing with the kids. I’m teaching them rock, paper, scissors, and then I hear a motorcycle pull up. I see this guy on a motorcycle. He’s got a big backpack with a system. He gets off, jumps on the roof, puts in the solar panel, puts in the battery, connects it to the television, and then lights up this house. Now, at this point, it’s like seven, 8:00 at night, and I’m in a, in a, in a, in a community that has no light except for kerosene lanterns. And it lit it up. And I watched over the course of the next 2 or 3 hours, how the whole community kind of surrounded this home. All the kids came over, and they watched television.
And it was just a remarkable example of the impact that energy can have on not just a family, but on a community. And I decided at that point that I was going to go do it. I had no, and it was a leap because it was what I was looking for was something technologically sophisticated. Here I was looking for a big problem, which clearly this was. 3 billion people around the globe lack reliable, affordable energy. I was looking for something somewhat unique to solve it. This was very unique. What I just experienced here, the whole service provision, the installation, and then obviously the energy and how it gets paid and how it’s IoT was, was advanced for this community for sure. And no idea if you can build a business model around it. But I thought to myself, you know, with this type of customer experience, there has to be a way to ultimately build some sustainability in the business. And so I joined.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:14
Talk about the business.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:15
Model the evolution of the business model from when you started until now.
Bill Lenihan: 13:21
So there was really. There, there was, there’s been a big evolution. So at that point in time, this is now probably ten years ago. And by the way, the company had been in existence for 2 or 3 years at this point. So at this point, the business model was that we were innovating technology. We were, but we were also an IoT distribution hardware distribution company. So we were selling it on the ground to communities. We were installing it, we were financing the customer, and we were delivering O&M operations and maintenance around.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:04
Is this Bill? Like what we’re looking at here? Is this like an example of the hardware right here?
Bill Lenihan: 14:10
This is not; this is more recent.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:13
Oh, gotcha.
Bill Lenihan: 14:14
The hardware previously was much smaller. So those are batteries and inverters. Same thing, but they were much smaller because they were only powering rural farmers, where the needs were just lights and radios and phone chargers, and maybe a television. Those systems that you’re looking at here now, power C and I, that’s that was part of the evolution. So back then, we were just installing them in small homes and maintaining them in small homes, financing those customers. As we grew, we grew regionally, and we grew size-wise. So we started to build bigger systems that could power not just small rural farmers, but maybe larger homeowners in urban settings, and see, and I SMEs like retail and restaurants, and those sorts of things.
And we also grew regionally. So we took the business from Tanzania, and we expanded to Rwanda. We then partnered with EDF, which is a very large French worldwide utility. And they were our partner in West Africa, in the Ivory Coast, Ghana, and Nigeria, all the while expanding the same, the same, the same model batteries and inverters connected devices into people’s homes and people’s businesses here across these five, these five countries. And then the pandemic hit. This was the first big inflection point for the company. The pandemic hit. And that was the wake-up call that, you know, we’re a technology company. We can’t manage thousands of employees on the ground in Africa.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:48
And so is that what you had to do at the time? Were you like, we I mean, I’m giving an example of that, you know, motorcycle driver that came up. I mean, you had to employ like hundreds of those people like, hey, we need you to like drive into this village and install this stuff.
Bill Lenihan: 16:07
We had at the beginning of the pandemic, we probably had somewhere between 3 and 4000 people across these five countries that were doing everything they were selling to the customers. And by the way, think about this like this. This is selling to the country, this is selling to everybody. So it’s very distributed. And the sales that they were selling, they were financing. So they had to get credit information and underwrite that sort of thing. They were also installing, and they were maintaining. And then they were obviously, you know, renewals and expansion of leases and other services that were being sold, everything. That’s what these two to 3 to 4000 people across these five countries. We’re doing. That’s a really that’s a totally different business model than in technology. In the pandemic, when it hit, these countries shut down. So we had thousands of people who could not leave their home, which means they could not install, they could not maintain, they could not.
And now we were lucky in the sense that we had some connectivity to these systems, and that allowed us to keep them working and keep people happy and getting their energy. But that was when we, I, we just had to get out. And it was never the business we wanted to be in longer term. But that was the, you know, what is it? Necessity is the mother of invention. That’s when we’re like, we have to get out. So we sold our East or West African operations to EDF. EDF took over the distribution. We had to close our Rwandan operations because we just couldn’t operate anymore. We couldn’t attract the capital to operate this entity when nobody could sell. And so we sold the network to it to another organization that maintained it. We got out of Rwanda; we had Tanzania left. And what I did at that point was I said, okay, we’re now going 100% technology, but we’re going to start to invest whatever little money I had during the pandemic.
We’re investing in automation software for my Tanzanian operations. Okay, let’s put some, let’s put some like a CRM tool into that, so the sales team can sell more efficiently. Let’s do, let’s do a put, create an underwriting tool so we can underwrite these, not manually underwrite these things. But, but, but use some intelligence in some ways to, to underwrite. And then let’s, let’s, let’s do the same thing for installation. And oh, let’s just build that architecture. So that’s what we did two years later. We survived. And we, this, this, this automation software that we had created was doing pretty good things for the, for, for our Tanzanian operation. So I have this, like, you know, what did I have in 2023? Because this is the second inflection point. This is what the growth was. This was the now the now the emergence of ZOLA iNTELLIGENCE.
So what did I have? What I had in 2023 was a lot of data, right? I had all this data on customers. And in 15 years of underwriting and selling and all this. And I also had all this workflow knowledge, complex workflow knowledge. How do you build distributed energy services businesses in Africa? And then Chad got introduced. That was that, you know, the kind of light bulb moment that we now have a tool, a wrapper that we can deliver all of this great data and all of this workflow, and we can deliver it to others in a very intelligent way. Mass data analytics, decision making, what have you. And to me, that was the solution. Remember what I said before, like the issue before was that it was all hardware. There was no automation. But, but but it’s hard to automate if there’s not intelligence around it, particularly business models like this that are so distributed and so diverse, and communities where everything is manual, everything is manual.
So anyways, that was when I said, okay, we’re going to, I raised a series A to back a company called ZOLA iNTELLIGENCE. And I embarked on building this platform. Two years later, we had the platform. This platform is, is basically it’s the, it’s all the, the same hardware batteries and inverters. There’s an agentic control layer that manages all of these units. And these networks get big in Tanzania. There are hundreds of thousands of facilities that are powered by off grid electric. So this, that control layer kind of manages all of those systems. And then there’s an application layer that walks through workflow, walks our customers through workflow. How do you sell it? How do you finance it? How do you install it? How do you own it? And it was that, and it’s that model, that technology that, that, that we introduced and we implemented into Tanzania last year. And then that was the big shift.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 21:17
That this right here what we’re looking at, like the software.
Bill Lenihan: 21:25
So that’s basically what you’re looking at: an operating center. Okay. So what, what, what if you walked into the operating center in Tanzania, what you would see is 100 people that are selling, financing, and delivering O&M to a network of hundreds of thousands of facilities, and they’re doing it with our tooling. We have a, you know, this growth agent that you’re showing here that walks the sales team through how to configure and how to price. We have a finance agent who then underwrites that customer, gives it a credit score, compares it to the millions of customers we’ve underwritten in our history, and gives it a credit score and might reprice it, bring up the lease price, or bring down the lease price.
And then there’s a fleet agent that is supporting the, the, the, the O&M team on how to manage all of these, all of these units. And so, you know, basically what it does is it takes a, a, an industry that is very hardware-centric and very manual. Everything is manual in our, in our world; all infrastructure is manual. And it supports those teams in driving automation and intelligence, and then ultimately efficiency. And that was the biggest like, you know, the biggest case study was Tanzania. We integrated this into, into the, into the, into the business, into this kind of manual business model. And we woke up in our first quarter of full integration, and two things occurred. The first thing that occurred was that NPS scores doubled for the customer.
This was just a much better service experience for the customer than that hardware-centric experience, where I got to maintain my battery and all that. And then the ROI went up substantially for the enterprise for every facility that they’re powering. And, when I say substantial, I mean substantially to the point that the ROI is now. Financeable. So you now have a, you now have a business model that’s delivering an ROI, that capital will flow into that business. And these businesses need capital because what are they building? They’re building energy infrastructure that costs a lot of money to do. No one’s going to give you the money to do it unless you have an ROI. And that’s what we saw in this in our first implementation.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 24:03
Yeah, it’s a lot of moving pieces there. I can see, you know, obviously, the people get consistency of service. And also, there may be people who wouldn’t have gotten it. So it really provides a data layer because, like some of these people, maybe they wouldn’t have financed it at all for some people because they didn’t have the data, and they don’t get the energy because of it, and because there is the data, those individuals or businesses can actually get the energy they need. Right. And also the companies. So it seems like the customer shifted to almost like the people to like then to like telecom and energy companies that can utilize your platform because they have infrastructure. Is that accurate?
Bill Lenihan: 24:50
Yeah. The easiest way to think about it is that it’s a very simple value proposition. Do you know our customers in the market? Our customers go to their customers, whether it’s a homeowner, a business, a hospital, a school, or a data center. In the future, we can deliver reliable, affordable energy to you for $10 a month or $10,000 a month. It doesn’t matter, depending on it. And that’s the value proposition. That’s a very simple, elegant value proposition to the previous value propositions. Do you want to buy a battery and maintain a battery? Do you want to buy an inverter? Okay. So that’s the end-user value proposition of energy as a service versus selling hardware. But that model needs to be enabled, and this technology is what enables that.
It enables the service offering around. It enables the customer to be mindless. Ultimately, you have to maintain this. You have to guarantee uptime. You know, PG&E here in the Bay Area guarantees 99.99% uptime. And I don’t even think about it. It just happens. That’s what we enable. We enable that service. And as you point out, we enable financing because that’s what’s required. These business models, these end users, they don’t want to buy their energy outright for the next 20 years. They want to buy it. Over time. This technology enables the our customers, the enterprise customers to finance the, the, the customer. So it enables energy as a service, which is reliable, affordable energy and reliable, affordable capital. And this model, we believe, is what enables it.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 26:42
Bill, since this is really a category and company that didn’t exist, how do you? And this is obviously what your background is in. But how do you decide what to raise in a Series A?
Bill Lenihan: 26:57
Well, that was an easy one because it really was. How much money do I need to build the platform? I wasn’t going to market yet. I just needed to raise. I, you know, you’ll raise as much as you can, but, you know, I think you and I talked about this before that, that raising capital, building a scaling business, scaling capital is the hardest thing to do in emerging markets.
And scaling capital, I would say, is harder. So the series A was really how much can I get? But then what’s the key use and the key use for me in the series A was the was building the platform. What you’re looking at here is the hardware layer and the, and the agentic software layer. That was the need. So that’s what I raised. I was lucky enough to raise. We raised 25 million, and that’s what I needed to build this platform.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 27:47
Talk about selling into enterprise. Obviously, you know, some of these telecom and energy companies are great partners for you because they have some infrastructure. But how do you get into conversations with these people in the first place?
Bill Lenihan: 28:04
Well, that’s what I’m learning now because we weren’t an enterprise technology company until we launched the platform. We were almost B2C or B2B to SM. So, you know, it’s been a, it’s been a learning. And again, so we had one case study that we closed. We thought it was, you know, pretty compelling ROI, to increase NPS for our customers. And then we just took it on the road. And, you know, the learnings have been. We have two customers, two types of customers. Both types of customers ultimately need to. We. They need to want to become an agentic energy as a service company.
That’s what we’re kind of calling this category: Agentic energy as a service. And they cut in two ways. They’re either energy distribution companies like Off-grid Electric. They’re already selling batteries and inverters and diesel generators, and they want to convert that business from a hardware sale to an energy-as-a-service business, energy service company, or telecom provider.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:10
So it’s like an additional revenue stream because, like, off-grid electric is really just selling hardware, and you’re like, hey, we could turn you into essentially a software management company with this stuff.
Bill Lenihan: 29:24
Yeah, we can convert you into a service company.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 29:26
Yeah.
Bill Lenihan: 29:27
So, it’s like, you know, think of SaaS before you used to buy your software, now you’re renting your software. It’s the same thing with energy. You know, before we used to sell you your energy as hardware. Now we can rent you the energy. So it’s a conversion from a hardware business, kind of an IoT distribution company to a, to a services company enabled by this technology. So that’s the one customer segment. The other customer segment is telecom. And that’s been a key learning in the last 6 to 9 months here that so in our markets in emerging markets, telecommunication providers are the most the biggest companies here.
And why are they the biggest? Not only have these countries already leapfrogged land data.
Connectivity is all mobile. So the telecom providers provide that, and they do a very good job of it. But they’re also the payment rails, the banking rails, and all payments are made. Mobile payments are way more prevalent in these markets than here. So, they control capital flows, and they control data and connectivity. And what we’re finding is they want to sell energy alongside it. And what’s simple for them is all they need to do is integrate our technology into their current digital rails. And not only do they have a new revenue stream and energy services, but they can bundle right there.
The energy service customer can pay on their payment rails. So there’s massive efficiency. They’ve already built the digital infrastructure in these countries, and all they’re doing is integrating a new digital infrastructure in the form of in the form of energy. So that’s become, if I look at our pipeline now, you know, that was maybe 10% of the pipeline when we first launched the enterprise initiative, and now it’s more than more than 50%.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 31:18
Going back to Bill, like getting in front of these people, right? Because they’re, you know, running big telecom companies. So I’m curious what, and again, it may vary from company to company, person to person, but I mean, what angle do you take that at? I mean, there’s a making money angle, but there’s also an impact angle, and maybe some of both. Or maybe it’s something that I didn’t say. What do you find is compelling for them? We need to take this meeting with Bill to talk about building this out.
Bill Lenihan: 31:50
It’s so hard, man. I, you know, the, the it is, and we’re learning, and we’re getting better. I hired a so we, I built a BD team. I have a group covering GCC, like the Middle East, believe it or not, this is this, this model can absolutely work in that market, 1 in 1 in sub-Saharan Africa. And then I had one person in, in, in Latam really covering the Caribbean. And I just sent him out to go find customers. Here’s one point: this product, this vision, and this business model, energy as a service, energetic energy service, it has to be sold at the highest level. It’s a CEO level decision. And then and then it’s it starts at CEO and then it gets pushed down to maybe COO or CIO and then down to the, to the, to the, to the manager level. But it starts there. So that’s the key. The key on the sales side is.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:50
That’s not easy.
Bill Lenihan: 32:52
What’s that?
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 32:53
That’s not easy. I’m saying like the CEO of a big telecom company, right?
Bill Lenihan: 32:56
No, it it is, it is it is not easy. So, so it was it’s it was hard. You know, we were starting with like LinkedIn Navigator and all that kind of stuff. And that was a disaster. I was asking my team, and we were going through the pipeline. I’m like, how much time do you spend on lead gen? And they’re like 80%. I’m like, okay, so you’re spending 80% on on leads and, you know, or hoping to build leads and 20% on actual customers, that’s not very good. So that obviously was the issue. The issue was getting to building leads, building connectivity at that CEO level.
So now we’re working on some other things, ways to get my team more focused on our pipeline so they can work with existing CEOs and teams to try to convert and build energy as a service companies. You asked us a really good question, like, how do you get to read it as like, how do you get to vision match with a CEO once you were in the room with them?
And you know, once we’re in a room with them, we have a really interesting story. You know, it’s kind of like a movie in a lot of ways. And so the key is really explaining the journey where we started, where we are now. I mean, these are all, you know, kind of titans of their country, of emerging markets. And they are not aware that this is an opportunity. So it’s kind of walking them through that journey, and then it’s showing them how it’s worked in Tanzania. Like I can show them, like Tanzania today. Off-grid electric is the second largest energy service provider in the country, behind the grid. It’s growing way more rapidly than the grid is declining. It’s massively increasing. It is solving problems on the ground that that that have not been solved for a century for everybody, for for rural communities to big to, to, to big business.
So it’s having that impact, and it’s delivering a great value proposition to the customer, and it’s delivering an ROI. And so you, you cannot get away from that. You have to deliver. You know, people are like, well, we, we, you know, we buy solar panels here in San Francisco. I go, yeah, because it’s throwaway money, but to, to, to, to the impact is great, but it’s only worth so much. It’s nominal. You have to deliver a value proposition to the customer and to the company. Otherwise, it’s not going to scale. So so once we’re now showing them that that’s starting to take hold and we’re about we’re, we’re about to launch our first telecom customer.
And that will be a wake-up call when we can announce this publicly. And we talk about this telecom, and what it is, it’s a telecom data infrastructure company. We’re integrating into existing data rails, including AI rails. And this big company is going to sell energy alongside minutes and payments and everything else. And they’re going to do it well, they’re going to they’re going to solve the problem. So that’s what I need. I need a compelling story to convince CEOs. I feel like, you know, after, you know, this company’s been around for 15 years, and after ten years of me being at the company and founding it three years ago, I feel like we’re starting to make traction there.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 36:19
It’s, it’s pretty amazing what you’re doing. And there is a super compelling story around it. But I’m curious, some of your mentors in business throughout the years that you’ve learned from. It could be investors, it could be advisors, it could be distant mentors to like, oh, these are my three favorite books in business or whatever it is. Besides John Wooden, I know you went to UCLA. I’m a big John Wooden fan.
Bill Lenihan: 36:46
John Wooden. John Wooden was the reason I went to UCLA. I met him, I, I was a swimmer, so not a, not the most important sport, but I was a swimmer. I was on my recruiting trip, and one of the guys was like, Hey, you want to meet John Wooden? I’m like, heck yeah, I want to meet John Wooden. And I, so I met him. We talked for like ten minutes. He knew that we had had a good season last the team I was a senior in high school that UCLA talked about. And I thought to myself, Oh my God, John Wooden knows about the UCLA swim team. I’m coming.
I’m coming to this, to this, to this school. So, but I would say, you know, maybe, maybe Bob Bob Jones was the founder of Fremont Partners. And that was the second. So when I got out of business school, I worked for Goldman Sachs in their private equity practice, and then I moved to Fremont Partners. Fremont Partners was the Bechtel family’s private equity firm.
Bechtel runs Bechtel Construction. It’s one of the largest construction companies in EPC companies in the world. And the family is amazing. They hired Bob Jones to run their private equity practice. Bob was an operator. He was not a guy like me, coming out of Wall Street. Bob was the president of Sara Lee. He started his career at Procter and Gamble, kind of tradition that that traditional kind of operating growth path back in the day. He was amazing. I joined that firm because of him and not because he was a good investor, but because of their approach, their operating approach. And then when I joined, he was kind of my I didn’t know what I knew about evaluating operations as an investor? I knew nothing. He was my mentor, and he’s the one who taught me. But he also was the one who spurred my interest in, in, in, in operations, in running a business.
And when I joined Switch Lighting, which was the first technology company I joined with one of our operating partners, he was the one who encouraged me. He’s like, Bill, you’d be a great operator. And I was like, I’m in private equity at the time. I’m like, are you telling me I’m not a good, you know, not a good investor? And he’s like, No, I’m not telling you that. I’m telling you. You, I feel like you have the gear to do it. And I think you’re going to like it. So Bob not only developed my investment skill set, but he also helped me develop my operating skill set at an early stage. And then when I jumped to the operating side, he was the I didn’t work with him anymore. But once a quarter, we would get together, and we would go have breakfast at Buck’s, and together, and we would talk, you know, and we would always talk about life and family and kids. And we would also talk about, you know, business. And so he continued, but unfortunately passed away. Not too long ago, it was a real loss for.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:32
Sorry to hear that.
Bill Lenihan: 39:33
And for me. But he was. He’s the guy for me. He was the guy.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 39:38
Are there any specific books or podcasts that you’re reading with your team, you’re like, oh, this is a must-read, or, you know, some people who ask you for business advice?
Bill Lenihan: 39:54
You know.
Bill Lenihan: 39:55
No, no, I mean, I don’t read business books. I like fiction. I so, so or, or some biographies, but not business-oriented. So no, I would there’s no, there’s no books. You know, I’m, I’m, and podcasts, you know, I, I, I listen to the podcast I listen to are specific to, to software and artificial intelligence and kind of the evolution of it. There isn’t really one that I would, I would strongly suggest, I think is worth your audience to go to go listen, to go listen to, because mine become their almost bespoke, oh, this is a, you know, this is like software for grid. I’ll go and listen to that just to kind of get my mind around, oh, this is AI for infrastructure or.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 40:52
Or on topics than podcasts specific to podcasts.
Bill Lenihan: 40:55
Yeah, yeah. So, so, so no, I, you know, I don’t, you know, I would say if I, if I’m trying to learn, I’m going to my board, I’m going to my mentors, I’m going to, you know, the great thing about where I live is there are a lot of very, very smart people and a lot of I can get a lot of guidance not from a book because books are like, they’re, they’re latent. There’s latency in books like, like what’s going on in AI right now, by the way, I’ll just tell you, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s accelerating in terms of its innovation. And so you almost have to go to the source to learn something about it. That’s who I end up going to, to, to, to train. Yeah.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 41:35
Here are some of the board members. I don’t know if there’s any specific advice that sticks out to you. I know you have a lot of partners like Tesla, GE, and EDF. You mentioned any specific advice from any of the helpful board members?
Bill Lenihan: 41:50
I’ll give you the advice for your audience on how to utilize something like this. So go, go up to the go up to the first layer here. So like, and by the way, Bob, John me this, you know, and this was unique in private equity. You don’t put a bunch of private equity guys on the board. You put people on the board that have experience in the, in the, in the opportunities and the risks in the company because you want the CEO and management team to have access to that experience. People who have already made those mistakes and people who have already had those successes. Who are you? So that’s kind of what I did here. So David Hatfield built a company called Pure Storage. David is a very he’s a great operator. He’s very strong in going to market. So I was an enterprise sales guy, an enterprise go-to-market person. He’s my enterprise go-to-market person. I go to him whenever I have a question. Ben Fried, who was the CIO at Google. Obviously, I’m going to Ben on thinking through sort of, and my engineers are thinking through technology evolution. Where is AI going? Where is automation software going? If you go down, Nancy Pfund is the finance person. She started a company called Double Bottom Line, a private equity venture capital firm. So she’s kind of my capital person. Herald Chen ran KKR Technology Investing. He also built a company called AppLovin. He’s kind of a utility player. I go to him for everything. Lyndon Rive built. SolarCity is the largest solar company in the world. Bespoke distribution like our company used to be. So like, if I’m going to give anybody advice, surround your company with people like this, that’s what you don’t as a CEO, there are a lot of things you don’t know. I promise you, there are so many things I do not know. So then what do you do? You bring people around the company who know it, and then you access them, and you learn.
Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 43:52
Bill, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing the journey of what you’re doing and changing lives all over the world. Everyone can check out ZolaIntelligence.com or episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time. Bill, thanks so much.
Bill Lenihan: 44:06
Jeremy. Thank you.
