Zach Dell - Powering the Future

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
Something I speak about frequently on Invest Like the Best is the idea of life's work. A more fun way to think about it is that I'm looking for maniacs on a mission. This is the basis for our investment firm PositiveSum, and it's the reason why I'm so enthusiastic about our presenting sponsor, Ramp. Not only are the founders, Kareem and Eric, life's work level founders, certainly maniacs on a mission, they have created a product that is effectively an unlock for founders and finance team to do more of their life's work by streamlining financial operations, saving everyone their most precious resource, time. Ramp has built a command and control system for corporate cards and expense management. You can issue cards, manage approvals, make vendor payments of all kinds, and even automate closing your books all in one place. Speaking from my own experience using Ramp for my business, the product is wildly intuitive, simplistic, and makes life so much easier that you'll feel bad for any company who hasn't yet made the switch. The Ramp team is relentless and the product continues to evolve to save you time that you would never have dreamed of getting back. To me, there is nothing more interesting than technologies that reduce friction for other entrepreneurs to be able to build the thing that they want to. So much attention has gone to cloud computing, APIs, and other ways of making life easy for founders. What Ramp has done and is doing is build yet another set of tools in this category. To get started, go to ramp.com. Cards issued by Celtic Bank and Sutton Bank, member FDIC, terms and conditions apply. Ridgeline is hosting their annual Base Camp Conference this September 22nd through the 25th in Deer Valley, Utah. I will be there on sole over 50 top investment management firms from around the country. Now in its fourth year, Base Camp has become where the future of investment management is created. Ridgeline gets the most influential change makers in the same room learning and sharing ideas about the latest innovations that are drastically altering how this industry operates. It's truly a must attend event for anyone who wants to understand and be inspired by what's coming next for investment management. Again, I'll be there, but space is limited and attendance is curated. You can request an invitation by heading to ridgelineapps.com. Ridgeline gets me so excited because every investment professional knows the core challenge that they solve. You love the core work of investing, but operational complexities eat up valuable time and energy. That's where Ridgeline comes in. It's an all-in-one operating system designed specifically for investment managers and firms are flocking to Ridgeline for good reason. You don't have to put up with the juggling multiple legacy systems and spinning endless quarter ends compiling reports. Ridgeline has created a comprehensive cloud platform that handles everything in real time. Visit ridgelineapps.com to schedule a demo. I'm excited to introduce our newest sponsor, Arcana. Arcana is the world's most advanced portfolio intelligence platform trusted by institutional investors managing trillions in assets under management, including market-neutral, long-short, long-lonely, and capital allocators. Arcana enables portfolio managers, risk teams, analysts, and CIOs to drill into exposures and IDEO, construct optimal portfolios, and decompose performance at incredible granularity. Arcana is the only real-time, intraday system in the market with extensive live scenario analysis, custom screening and tagging, and a slate of one-click, lightning-fast portfolio construction tools, mock portfolio trackers, reporting, and single-stock crowding. This is the kind of tool I wanted when I was managing public equities, and I'm sure you will benefit from the insights the system has to offer. Visit arcana.io to request a demo and learn more.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus Review along with all of our podcasts at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:54)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of PositiveSum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUMVC.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (4:23)
My guest today is Zach Dell. Zach is the co-founder and CEO of Base. Base is a modern power company building a reliable and affordable home energy service powered by distributed batteries. We explore one of the most underappreciated machines in our world, the electrical grid. Zach walks us through the complex world of electricity infrastructure and explains why the 100-year-old grid is woefully unprepared for the explosion in demand coming from AI, electric vehicles and industrial electrification. Base's approach involves creating a distributed network of home batteries that provide backup power to customers while serving as grid resources, elegantly solving infrastructure bottlenecks that plague traditional utility scale projects. We discuss energy as the fundamental enabler of human progress, scaling distributed energy assets and the vertical integration strategy driving Base's unit economics. Please enjoy my great conversation with Zach Dell. So Zach, when we first started talking about everything that you're building and doing your whole background, it reminded me of this book. I think the book was called The Grit, if I'm not mistaken. And it's one of these books kind of like The Box, which teaches you about shipping containers, which sounds so boring. And then you dig in and you realize this thing is responsible for so much innovation and infrastructure in the world. And I knew nothing about it and I'm embarrassed and now interested. The grid feels like something similar, like anyone listening, like, oh, yeah, the grid. I know the grid is important. I would love to actually just begin our conversation with you teaching me and us everything you've learned about this thing that powers our whole life and world, why it's so important, but what it is literally, because I think we think of it as this thing that brings us power, but we don't really know what it actually is. So maybe just start at the highest level, there's this interesting thing out there everyone's heard of, no one knows how it works. Explain it to us.