Unlocking the Road to Energy Abundance with Base Power CEO and Co-Founder Zach Dell

**Elad Gil** (0:05)
To Dan No Priors, I'm joined by Zach Dell, the founder and CEO of Base Power. Base just announced a $1 billion fundraise from folks like Addition, Thrive, Andreessen Horwitz, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Valor, and myself. Zach previously was at Blackstone, working in different private equity, and Thrive doing investments in various AI and software companies. Very excited to talk to him today about not only his company, but also more broadly about the energy industry and how energy is an input into literally everything that we do and consume. That's AI data centers, that's the pencil you're using to write, that's your computer, that's mining, that's basically everything in the world. Energy is a major input. So very excited to talk to Zach today. Zach, thank you so much for joining me today on No Priors.

**Zach Dell** (0:49)
Thanks for having me.

**Elad Gil** (0:50)
Energy is an input into everything in the world that's produced, right? It drives data centers, it drives electric cars, but it also drives all of manufacturing, it drives the internet, it drives basically every aspect of our lives, and it's a key cost input into everything. So if you have very cheap energy, everything else becomes dramatically cheaper, and that opens up entirely new spheres. You've been working on base energy, excuse me, base power for a couple of years now. Can you tell me more about how you landed on what you're doing and what base actually does?

**Zach Dell** (1:16)
Yeah, our mission is to lower the cost of electricity for all, and we think that is the most powerful thing we can do to promote human prosperity. So to create a world of energy abundance where power is less expensive and more reliable. So I got here by way of finance world. So I started my career at Blackstone. I was on the private equity team there. I spent a couple of years at Thrive Capital investing in technology companies and then left Thrive ultimately to start the company with my co-founder, Justin. I think at those firms, I was able to see a lot of the industry, the value chain of energy of different kinds of technologies like solar and storage, and see this paradigm shift unfolding. Where if you look at the last five decades of energy, it's really been defined by coal and then natural gas.
It seems pretty clear now that based on where the cost curves are going, the next five decades of energy are going to be defined by solar and storage. There's really no energy technology platform company built around that thesis. That is really the vision, the idea around which we started the company a couple of years ago.

**Elad Gil** (2:15)
You just closed literally a billion dollars in new financing, which I think brings your total over time to 1.3 billion. What is that money going to go to? What products do you provide? What services? What are you currently doing?

**Zach Dell** (2:25)
Yeah. The capital really is going to accelerate our vertical integration, which allows us to ultimately lower costs for consumers. Our strategy at the highest level is to develop a compounding cost advantage through vertical integration. We design batteries, we make them, literally manufacture them, we install them, own them, operate them, and we sell power directly to a homeowner. To answer your second question specifically, when you sign up with Base, we become your electricity provider. Today, we're only available in Texas. Now, we sell power to deregulated customers who can choose their electricity provider, and then we do sell our technology to the deregulated utilities in Texas, and then they offer our services to their customers. When you sign up with Base, we install our battery on your home. When the grid is up and running, we use that battery to serve the grid. When the grid goes down, you get that battery to back up your home, and we're able to save our customers on the order of 10-20 percent a month on their electricity. As we invest further, as we build new generations of the technology, our costs will go down, our returns will go up. We'll be able to share those returns, so to speak, with the customer in the form of lower and lower prices, driving the price of the electron down, driving the availability or the reliability of the electron up, which is really our mission.

**Elad Gil** (3:31)
And so you basically have these batteries you install in people's homes. It's sort of smart battery, so it can interact with other batteries across the network, and it basically responds to different power availability and fluctuations, and allows you to then make money off of that. Exactly.