Five Years In: Reflections on Building Terawatt
It’s our Teraversary! As I write this, it’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since I took the leap to start Terawatt. And while the path has not been a straight line, we’ve actually been able to live up to the aspiration that drove us to start this company: to provide a path for electrification of transportation at scale, by giving fleets the “easy button" to electrify — and abating massive amounts of emissions in the process.
Half a decade in and we are building the operational platform for the future of electric and autonomous vehicles. While I’m generally not one to stop and smell the roses, it feels like a moment to reflect, so in that spirit here are five things I have learned along the way:
- Technology makes new things possible — in many cases things you could not have imagined. When I made the first public Terawatt announcement, one of the first customer calls I got was from a friend at an AV (autonomous vehicle) company seeking help with charging infrastructure. Back then, we never anticipated that this would be a major focus for us in the near term. That industry was just getting started.
Today, AVs are totally ubiquitous and a way of life in our home city of San Francisco, with a rapidly growing national and global presence. We had hypothesized that rideshare would be an important EV market segment, but we didn’t see how quickly AV would drive that transition. It’s been an important reminder to me and our team that technology has an uncanny knack for driving non-linear progress — which means there are opportunities to have non-linear impact too.
- The product will evolve. Our big vision for Terawatt was for large scale, semi-rural sites with battery and solar installations that provide power for electric semi trucks. We have built several hubs for trucks, but it turned out that demand for charging trucks is in warehouse and industrial hubs where space is at a premium. While we do have solar and batteries, we’ve had to pull back our islanded microgrid vision.
We have also seen that electric trucking has grown more slowly in the United States than other places in the world. So while it’s still the greatest opportunity to scale the benefits of electrification, including pollution reduction and overall cost savings, it will take longer for this segment to come into its own.
- The electrification transition is real. If you look beyond the headlines, electricity is powering an ever-greater share of economic activity, emissions are decoupling from growth, and renewable electricity capacity, battery energy density, and EV range continue to soar. The choices we make are important but physics is inescapable. This technology is here to stay and will get better, and rapidly. The advent of AI will only accelerate this.
- On a personal note, starting a company from scratch is hard (duh!). You can’t possibly know what it will be like if you’ve never done it before. To take this on, you need to be slightly crazy, want to win more than anything else, and be building a product you believe in and know will be truly transformative in the market you operate in. The last five years have been the best and simultaneously hardest years of my work life. I would not trade them for anything.
- Nothing happens without a great team. Working alongside my fellow Teras every day is the most fun I have ever had. Any success we are on track for has been seeded by the hundreds of thousands of hours this team has put into everything, from fleshing out our big vision to obsessing over the smallest details of our customer builds. The team extends to home too. Many thanks to the families that support us, pick up the slack when we’re working hard on building these solutions, and cheer our victories big and small.
It’s been an eventful five years moving from being a startup to now a scaleup, and I can’t wait to see what the next five years brings.
P.S. As it’s also International Women’s Day, I have to give a big shoutout to all of the women who have paved the way for female founders such as myself. We are still few, but we draft behind those who have forged the path ahead of us.