How Endera closed a 7-figure deposit before building a single bus | John Walsh

**John Walsh** (0:00)
There's a seven-figure deposit, and then they said build it, and I didn't even have a bus.

**Brett** (0:07)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by frontlines.io, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.
Our guest today is John Walsh, Founder and CEO of Endera. John, thanks for being here.

**John Walsh** (0:45)
Thank you for having me, Brett.

**Brett** (0:46)
Let's imagine that you're on a flight and you have a chatty person next to you and they ask you, what do you do? How do you respond to that question?

**John Walsh** (0:54)
Well, I'm the founder and CEO of an auto company, and we build specialty buses for the government, but more than just being an entrepreneur, you really have to be a good manager of people and learn how to really make everybody who are on the same boat go in the same direction, which is easier said than done.

**Brett** (1:16)
I have a two-year-old and one of her favorite things to do is say, bus, bus, bus, every time we go by and she sees a bus, she gets so excited. Was that you as a two-year-old or you're just dreaming of buses from the early days?

**John Walsh** (1:26)
No. If I had a conversation with my 18-year-old self and said that you'd be a bus manufacturer, I'd say you're crazy.

**Brett** (1:36)
What's it like being a bus manufacturer? I would imagine it's hard. Doesn't it sound like one of those things where you meet a founder and they tell you what they do? I'm like, I don't want to say anything's easy. But that sounds pretty easy. Bus manufacturer sounds like the scale of hard, pretty high.
Yeah.

**John Walsh** (1:49)
And they're like, wow, I wouldn't have guessed that. What do you think I am, like a software guy?

**Brett** (1:59)
What does that take then to manufacture buses, maybe take us inside of the manufacturing plants?

**John Walsh** (2:03)
It takes a high pain tolerance. You have to seem to like pain and suffering. But yeah, I mean, there's just a lot of moving parts, physically and metaphorically.
And there's a thousand things that can and will go wrong.
And a lot of coordination, a lot of people that you have to manage. And you have one part that doesn't arrive on time and you can't deliver the product. And I remember a couple of times I had like $10 million worth of buses that I couldn't deliver because I had a windshield wiper that didn't arrive on time. It was like sweating. But you flush it out. But we're in the middle of Ohio, which is manufacturing headquarters kind of the country, or at least it used to be. It's considered part of the Rust Belt.

**Brett** (2:53)
I grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, so not too far from me.
And what is the origin story? To go back a little bit there, how'd you end up in the space? You didn't grow up thinking about buses, we covered that. When did you actually start to think about this?

**John Walsh** (3:05)
So I left college, and I knew I wanted to start a company. I'd started a couple startups when I was in college, and I got farther with each of them than I did the one before, but they failed by all intents and purposes. And part of it was just not doing things in the proper order, but I got a job in private equity, and I was on auto teams that were messed up, something was wrong with it. And I was on the diligence teams at first, and then I joined the operations team, and got to learn the ins and outs of auto manufacturing, industrial manufacturing, and then I was assigned to an electric bus company, and got to learn the ins and outs of EV, and I just saw transportation be really fascinating. It's like every deal was the price of a Malibu home, but there was very little regulation from the sales side, but it's super old school, a lot of handshake deals, but I saw an opportunity on EV, and that's how we originally started, and after about a year of being the side of that company, I left, and then I started Endera, and really it was a consultative approach. I went to a pilot customer, and I said, I'm not going to tell you what you need, why don't you tell me what you need, and let's build this together, and flew that operator to Canada, China, the Midwest, and I wrote on a spec sheet what they said they wanted, and then they cut me a deposit, it was a seven figure deposit, and then they said build it, and I didn't even have a bus. I just wrote what they said they wanted, and then they cut me a deposit, and I was just sweating, I was like, oh my God, what I just do, and because I actually now had to deliver it, but the good thing was that I knew exactly what to build.