The Startup Using AI To Rethink Energy Storage feat. Emma Konet ’24 and Jacob Mansfield ’16

[00:00]Brian Jackson: Welcome to Owl Have You Know, a podcast from Rice Business. This episode is part of our Flight Path series, where guests share their career journeys and stories of the Rice connections that got them where they are.

Today, I'm joined by Emma Konet, Professional MBA Class of 2024, and Jacob Mansfield, Rice undergrad Class of 2016, co-founders of Tierra Climate. Emma and Jacob met while working at Citi as they were building careers across power markets, battery storage, renewable energy and energy trading. Today, they're building Tierra Climate, an AI-powered platform helping companies navigate an increasingly complex energy landscape.

On this episode, we'll talk about the path that led them from energy professionals to entrepreneurs, what people still misunderstand about batteries, how AI is reshaping the energy industry and what they see as the biggest opportunities ahead.

First, I want to say thank you both for joining me. It's really a sincere pleasure.

[01:02]Emma Konet: Likewise.

[01:02]Jacob Mansfield:Thank you for having us on.

[01:03]Brian Jackson: Emma, I was doing a bit of background reading, and one of the things in your background, kind of, popped up and was interesting. You did a sixth-grade science fair project on global warming. I guess now, looking back, do you think that was the first sign that you'd end up building a climate technology company?

[01:20]Emma Konet: Yeah, maybe. You know, I think I've always been, basically, since that project, I've been interested in climate. I mean, that was really just about the greenhouse effect, like what happens when there is more gas in the atmosphere and sunlight comes into the Earth and becomes trapped as heat.

And I started, kind of, connecting the dots, and I was like, "Yeah, we are pulling a lot of carbon out of the ground and turning it into gas, and that has to have some effect on the world." And I think we're living through that.

I mean, I live in Houston. I live on the Gulf Coast. We get hit by more extreme storms, hurricanes. Summers are getting hotter, and I think that, like, what I saw in sixth grade is playing out in real life. I am very glad I am working in an industry to try to mitigate the effects of climate change, to improve people's quality of life.

[02:06]Brian Jackson: That's really great. So, Jacob, what originally drew you into energy and power markets?

[02:12]Jacob Mansfield: Yeah, it's a great question. I actually grew up in Houston and went to Rice for my undergrad, so I'm a Houston native and had a lot of folks in my family and just in my immediate circle that worked in the energy space. So, it makes sense, Houston being the energy capital of the world.

And when I was at Rice, you know, there were a number of things that, kind of, put me on my path, from classes and things in energy economics to energy policy, that I really knew that this was the place where I wanted to build my career because it's just such a foundational piece of all modern society.

You probably see a lot of memes or things on professional social media like LinkedIn, like I do, that there's no energy-poor wealthy countries. Like energy is just a linchpin to modern society, and where we need to go as an economy.

So, I landed on a trading floor, my first job out of college, learning, you know, drinking through a fire hose in terms of information around how power markets work, how financial services work, how I, as a little cog in the machine, fit into all of this.

And then, fast-forward, when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, I feel like it was a lightbulb moment or a flashbulb moment where, for me, it was kind of a recognition that the work that I was doing could actually be somewhat meaningful in terms of turning the tide towards obviously bringing more resources to the market and building wind farms and solar farms.

But in addition to that, doing it in a way where we are actually actively decarbonizing the grid, hopefully staving off the worst impacts of climate change.

So, for me, coming from Citibank to eventually starting my own company, I think it's definitely infused itself into the core ethos of the company that we're building, where we really want to help physical energy assets operate on the grid as most efficiently as they can and hopefully with a bend towards decarbonizing the grid in the long run.

[03:53]Brian Jackson: On the trading floor at Citi is where you and Emma met. I guess I want to know, what was your first impression of each other?

[04:00]Emma Konet: I think we actually met in New York at training. So, basically, when you start off as an analyst on any of these trading desks on Wall Street, like the Houston office trades energy, so we both lived in Houston at the time, but they send you to New York for training. We were there for like six weeks.

And it's long days, and, you know, you're in the big city, and we're just right out of college. We were so young. I have pictures of us in training, and, like, we're sleep-deprived and being, kind of, goofy.

But yeah, we immediately, kind of, became friends. I mean, you, sort of, have to quickly make friends with the folks in your analyst class, is what they call it, because you're, like, in the trenches together. I mean, it's a tough job. It's, kind of, like Jacob said, "Drinking from the fire hose." So, we, kind of, trauma-bonded, I guess, over that.

And then, yeah, we worked on adjacent power desks in Houston for several years before I moved on, and Jacob stayed. But yeah, I don't know, Jacob, you want to add anything to that?

[04:54]Jacob Mansfield: I mean, I was just struck by how brilliant Emma is. I mean, she's very charismatic. I think that she has this kind of magnetism to when she's engaging with folks and is just super sharp and witty. I think, interestingly, on a trading floor, it is a male-dominated profession. You know, even on the power trading desks that we were both on, maybe 30-plus front-office employees, and probably like three of them are women.

So, it is very much a male-skewed profession. And, I mean, she certainly held her own and was very, very smart, really capable. And I think, similarly, being on adjacent desks where, you know, we covered everything from oil to refined products to natural gas, physical and financial, and power, that helped a lot in terms of, like, bouncing and pinging things off of each other, eventually transitioning to each other's roles, working together on deals.

Like, there were a lot of different ways that we overlapped with each other, such that, fast-forward to, I guess, three years ago, when I was wrapping up my MBA, you know, I was interested in storage. I was interested in the space. And I really reached out to her initially just to learn more about the space, not with really any expectation that we would start something together.

And as we talked about it, it was like, kind of, refreshed into my mind of like, "Emma is awesome. She's stellar." I started talking to other people she referenced me to, and they were like, "Yeah, she's incredible."

And very quickly, I was like, "Okay, if I want to build something, I really need this partner that complements me, has technical capabilities that maybe I don't have." And as we started exploring it, we realized maybe there was something there. And I think, fast-forward now three years later, it's been a fantastic partnership.

[06:28]Brian Jackson: So, you're having that conversation, these things are clicking for you. When's the moment you finally say it? It's almost like popping the question, I feel like, right? Like, it takes a bit of courage, and you're like, "Okay, I guess this is it. This is the fit."

[06:40]Jacob Mansfield: Yeah, I would say, you know, having gone through business school and talked to other folks that start companies, even with people they don't even know, there is, kind of, like, this intermediate phase where you're, kind of, getting to know each other.

And the number one reason why startups fail is actually not because of business issues, but it really is because of founder conflict. The fact that these people are misaligned, they aren't able to work through issues. And so, it's really important that you have that partnership on which you can scaffold and build the business that you want to build.

So, yeah, I mean, by no means were we, like, identical people. We're very, very different people, and we found this way to really work together with a mutual respect of each other's capabilities and what we bring to the table. But I remember in January of 2023, we had talked for a couple months around stuff in storage and what eventually was the initial idea for Tierra.

And I was like, "Emma, I think you should just come up to Boston." I was at HBS at the time. We figured out some time where she could fly up. It happened to be the coldest weekend in Boston the entire winter. It was literally, like, five degrees, and Emma, coming from Houston, I don't even know if you had a parka at the time.

So, it was like scrambling to get the, like, right gear, and this cold front came in, and it was like, you could hardly even walk outside. Your, like, eyelashes were frozen to your face. But it was a good opportunity for us to, kind of, like, lock ourselves into some conference rooms with whiteboards, work through some napkin math, talk through the business, and be like, "Do we feel good about this, and do we want to pursue this?" And we eventually decided to take the plunge a few months later and start the company.

[08:13]Brian Jackson: So, if there's someone out there hearing about Tierra Climate for the first time, can you explain, like, what exactly do you do, and why was this problem the one that you chose to tackle?

[08:24]Jacob Mansfield: I would say that we are building basically an agentic power trading platform. There's been a couple twists and turns to Tierra over time, but we really settled on energy storage being this core piece of the energy transition. It's the fastest-growing asset class in the market.

And with it, there are a lot of organizations that are deploying energy storage resources, either to manage their own load or their own exposure to power, perhaps for capacity reasons if you're looking to interconnect a data center. So, we're going to see this huge wave of batteries come to the market.

Now, the challenge is that batteries are fundamentally different than conventional dispatchable resources like fossil fuels, like natural gas plants or coal plants. But they're also very different than other renewable resources like wind and solar.

So, they are this kind of unique in-between. They're like a Swiss Army knife of the grid. They are highly flexible, highly deployable, very responsive, but very complicated. And so, we need a software system to interface with those assets.

To date, you know, we've gotten agreements in place with anything from Fortune 50 companies to, you know, top commodity trading houses, so a variety of different players that are approaching the problem of how do I interact with these physical assets on the grid, and what are the software solutions that I need in place?

So, in short, what we do is we forecast market conditions, we provide optimization solutions to manage those resources, and then we also provide AI-powered analytics so that you can understand the decisions that are being made and go deeper into the black box of understanding, you know, why did I forecast what I did? Why did my asset make the decision that it did?

Literally being able to ask the models and receive responses and answers, and trying to, kind of, lift the hood, or enable folks to peer into the models and hopefully marry human traders and operators with these really complex systems and algorithms.

[10:14]Brian Jackson: And I think that's how I understood it. Like, the human element's not totally removed out of the process here, right? You rely on it.

[10:22]Emma Konet: Yeah, no. My experience at the bank, and Jacob's as well, was that, you know, the kind of human in the loop is really important. I think it's unlikely that humans will be entirely replaced, even with the advances we've been seeing in AI. I think that it's an industry that, you know, still relies, for example, on brokers in a lot of ways. Like, you know, my husband's a natural gas trader, and a lot of the deals that he gets done are actually through people who are making those deals happen, the buyers and the sellers matching up, and it's not, like, algorithmic trading on a screen.

So, yeah, what we're trying to do is basically make the complex models that, you know, Jacob, kind of, dreams up, these, like, grand visions, and then I'm the one that goes off and builds it. And a lot of the stuff that we've built is, like, quite complex math. I mean, my background is in mathematics, so these are complex math problems. We're doing forecasting with machine learning models that are hard to understand if you're not a coder. And what we're trying to do is make all of that really accessible to people that might have a view in the market but might not be technical experts in software or engineering.

And we've done that through, kind of, this AI LLM layer on top that can take a lot of unstructured data that spins off of these models and actually turn it into usable insights that our customers can actually use to action and improve the value of how they're dispatching their energy storage assets.

[11:39]Brian Jackson: It seems like the target customer here would be, like, the mid- to small-size IPP who doesn't have some of the complexities that the big guys have.

[11:47]Emma Konet: Yeah, that's definitely one segment that is, kind of, a customer profile of ours. Folks that have assets, that own and operate them, but don't have a fully-fledged market operations team, and don't want to invest in building a fully-fledged market operations team.

What we're trying to do is create a software layer that allows you to be really effective with a very small team, like maybe one trader across a fleet of batteries, and that reduces cost for these IPPs and just makes them more effective and allows them to better use their time on building infrastructure, right? Like, that's what they do. They go out, and they raise capital, and they build batteries.

That's just one customer profile. I think that there are others, and I think Jacob touched on it a little bit earlier about top commodity trading houses and even corporates who are perhaps standing up energy desks but don't have the capabilities to really model out the complexity of energy storage problems.

[12:37]Jacob Mansfield: I would like to think of Tierra as, sort of, giving those, you know, individual traders or asset operators superpowers, where they don't have the luxury of scaling up their team linearly based on the number of assets that they're rolling out.

And so, there's going to be this gap between the deployed capacity of their shops or their businesses and their individual capabilities to manage all of those systems, and that's where software's going to fill that gap.

On the other hand, though, for larger players, I think that the value of a platform like ours, and just applications of AI in general, is these organizations are exposed to a lot of headwinds from a human capital standpoint. In some organizations, you have as much as 20% of the labor force nearing retirement. You may have as much as a quarter of your labor force turning over in terms of just leaving.

And so, it's very hard to retain institutional knowledge year over year over year, where, you know, we experienced this at Citi and in financial services, where you fast-forward four or five years and more than half the faces are new. And that's just, you know, par for the course for these types of organizations.

So, what AI enables us to do in terms of our platform is we have all this proprietary data that gets spun out in just day-to-day ordinary operations. If we can capture that, fetch it, and now train a system on how to interpret it, now we have this legacy system that's able to bridge the changes in personnel and team and provide you with continuity of business. And the ability to customize things within the platform starts to be this repository for institutional knowledge.

So, I think it actually does serve a lot of value across different-sized organizations. It's just slightly different in terms of the way that we frame it.

[14:17]Brian Jackson: Yeah, this is so interesting to me. We've talked about one of the segments being IPPs, which are Independent Power Producers, for our listeners who may not know. I'm also curious about, like, your interactions with the hyperscalers. You know, what have you learned from them? What's been surprising to you?

[14:33]Jacob Mansfield: Yeah, we've worked with a number of players, I guess, that you'd consider hyperscalers or the tech giants. And I think that their needs are changing with respect to energy storage. I think if you had looked back maybe two, three years ago, the way in which they would approach storage is as this sort of sustainability alternative, as an augmentation to the renewable energy portfolio.

And so, a lot of the work that we did initially on Tierra was setting up storage as, sort of, this clean energy asset in your portfolio. It can do a bunch of different things, but the big thing is charging up renewables, shifting it, discharging and displacing peak or fossil fuel plants, and avoiding emissions.

And while I think that is probably somewhere in the stack order of priorities, it's been bumped down by just speed to power. And so, folks have probably heard generally the concept of speed to power. But to give you a simple example, it's basically like if a data center company approached a utility and said, "Hey, I want to build a really massive data center in your territory." And the utility says, "Great, you can interconnect in 2032."

And they scratch their head and say, "Well, that doesn't really work for us because we, kind of, need this data center quickly because of the AI wars, and we've got to bring this capacity online and get economies of scale."

And so, what's happening is this new advent of bring your own capacity, or BYOC, which colloquially refers to this concept of bringing off-site resources like power plants that you've procured to a utility or an independent system operator and using that as a way to, kind of, circumvent the line because you're, kind of, adding to the problem, but now you're adding part of the solution in terms of balancing or offsetting your demand with supply.

That's a perfect use case in which storage can come in. It's quickly deployable. It's relatively low footprint. We already have the supply chain. It's pretty robust compared to the turbine, you know, backlogs that we're seeing for gas plants.

And so, storage is a really effective use case there, where there's going to be a lot more power plants put on the grid that now need to be managed in some form or fashion, and where our software can be very helpful to hyperscalers.

[16:37]Brian Jackson: What was the moment that Tierra felt like finally, like, "Oh, this is a company?”

[16:42]Jacob Mansfield: Probably when we started generating revenue. I mean, I think Emma and I used to joke early on about this concept of existential dread, which I'm sure founders can relate to. You know, when you work in a big organization, you may get some little nervousness around, like, bonus day or when you hear, you know, there's going to be some reorg. But generally speaking, like, I wasn't concerned going in, day in and day out, that Citibank would be in existence. It was one of the largest companies in the world.

And so, I think the difference is when you start a company, you do have, like, those butterflies in your stomach or that, kind of, like, "Okay, like, I want to make sure that what I'm building is going to amount to something and be meaningful."

And I think that when we finally solved the cold-start problem, we had gotten a really large corporate that we started working with. It started to feel like, "Okay, now we're validating our existence as a business and all the work that we put into it thus far."

But I don't know. Emma, what are your thoughts on that?

[17:35]Emma Konet: Yeah. I mean, I would say maybe a little earlier for me. I think Jacob was finishing up his MBA, and I actually quit my job at Key Capture Energy, which is an energy storage IPP, before your MBA finished up.

And so, I was full-time, but I don't think I was paying myself. Like, we didn't have any money. We had some money that we had, you had won, like, a pitch competition. We had a little bit of money in the bank, but, like, we needed it really to, like, pay for data and get the company off the ground.

And so, I would say we did a pre-seed fundraise in Q4 of 2023, and when I started getting a paycheck, I think I was like, "Oh, okay, we have a real company." Enough people believed in this business idea to fund it, and I could start paying myself to actually build this thing. You know, that was a pretty big eye-opening thing for me. I mean, really, with being a founder and starting a business, like, you know, awesome to be able to be innovative and make a change in the world, and that's really cool.

But it's also cool to just take capital and turn it into jobs and turn it into productivity and create value for people. And I think that's been, looking back on the past three years, like, we've accomplished a lot, but that's also just, kind of, like, important to me, what we've done for job creation and just creating this thing that didn't exist before that actually improves someone's life.

[18:52]Brian Jackson: That's great. So, I guess, you know, pre-starting, I'm sure you had assumptions of what being a founder and an executive of a company that you create is, but looking back now, are you like, "Yeah, wow, those assumptions are completely wrong. I had this totally misframed."?

[19:07]Emma Konet: So, I went and did my MBA at Rice, and I did the, like, professional program. So, I was doing nights and weekends and summers and all that stuff, like, straight through two years. I think going into that program, I'm not sure I ever would've quit my job and foregone health insurance and, like, taken the big risk because I was scared. I mean, I was genuinely like, "Oh, like, that feels really risky. I'm not sure my risk tolerance is there."

But through the process of my MBA, I think because Rice is so focused on entrepreneurship, like, that's, kind of, in the veins of the MBA program throughout. I basically got convinced that it wasn't as big of a risk as I thought, and I think throughout that program, it just made me realize, "You know what? Just do it." Like, it was kind of the just-do-it, just-take-the-leap mentality that pushed me over the edge, and I'm very, very glad that I went full-time on this.

I think it's really hard to successfully build a company when you're also having a full-time job somewhere else, like, and you're just trying to do it on the side. I think you really do have to commit, and committing is, I think, what started to get the company off the ground. You know, I have every reason to believe that Tierra Climate's going to be a success, and I hope it will be.

I think if it's not, I want to build something new. I want to keep going on this journey of entrepreneurship and try to make a mark on the world and, you know, be my own boss. And I think that brings a lot of joy and happiness. Like, I wake up every day, and I love my job, and I can't say that about any other job that I've had.

And I think if you're thinking about building something, you will find more happiness by building it than staying in your job that you're stuck in that has stability.

[20:42]Jacob Mansfield: Yeah, I think on that exact point, what I was going to bring up was I had a professor in business school that said that magic happens when you commit. There's some sort of lucky space of serendipity that you invite when you talk to people, and you clearly come from the space, and you understand their pain points, and yet you've, kind of, left all of that world to try to solve the problem. I think that's pretty compelling for folks.

I think it's committing at inception, but it's like a continual process of commitment throughout the entire journey. Kind of, to provide maybe a more bleak analogy, I think maybe it's timely given SpaceX's IPO, but Elon Musk, I think, once said, "Entrepreneurship is like, you know, staring off into the abyss and, like, chewing broken glass."

And honestly, sometimes it feels that way, where it is a grind, and you are grinding away, and there's highs and lows. But yeah, I would say that it is a continual process of commitment and also, like, being adaptable to things that are changing. I think we've had to adapt from time to time to changes in the macro environment, to the political environment, and that's not a bad thing.

And so, I think one of the benefits of being an entrepreneur is you get so much access to so many people and things, but also you get to chart your own journey. Like, I don't have to go through some sort of bureaucratic process to make some change. It's like all of the decision-makers are in one room, and we can very quickly make a determination as to what we need to do, which is really exciting and I think very freeing.

The last thing I would say is, you know, when I think about the folks that we add to our team, I once heard this analogy that folks fit into three buckets. They're either commandos, soldiers, or police.

And so, commandos are like what you'd imagine, like Army Special Forces. They parachute into the jungle. They cut down the jungle. They, kind of, build everything from scratch. They don't have a game plan.

And then the soldiers come in. They pave the roads. They frame up the walls. They, kind of, formalize processes and structures. And then police come in, and at that point, they're just directing traffic and making sure things don't break.

And I think for a lot of people who work in big organizations, they probably fit into, like, the latter two categories, maybe even most often the last category. But the benefit of being an entrepreneur is you can come in and you can build everything from scratch. It's going from zero to one.

And I think that's the really exciting part of being an entrepreneur. Now it makes me think it'd be hard to go back to being, like, a police officer-type role in a large organization where everything's already built out, and I, kind of, fit in as this very small piece of the overall puzzle.

[23:11]Brian Jackson: But to take that leap, to commit, what did you feel like was the hardest thing to leave behind? I mean, you all both, you know, large organizations, and you had successful careers you were parting ways with.

[23:22]Emma Konet: So, when I left my job, KCE had been acquired. So, you know, I was a pretty early hire there. I was the 25th hire, so it's certainly not as small of a company as Tierra, but, like, it still had startup vibes.

And by the time I left, it was over 100 people. So, it had grown quite a bit and had been acquired by a private... You know, by SK E&S. They now own KCE.

It, kind of, felt like that journey was coming to a natural end. I mean, I could've stayed on. I mean, obviously, like, a lot of people did. And, you know, I think things changed because the company changed ownership. It felt like a natural time to leave. I didn't really feel like I was leaving that much behind. It felt just, like, exciting to step into the entrepreneur position.

[24:01]Jacob Mansfield: I would similarly echo that. I think we both were well-positioned to take the jump into entrepreneurship, where we have both been in careers where we have built up some experience. We know we have marketable skills.

That makes it a lot easier to take a leap because I think you always fear, "What if I fail?" But you have other things to fall back on. And I think the other thing, too, is entrepreneurship compresses a ton of learning into a very, very finite period of time, where you're pressed to do things that you never had to do before, maybe several things that you've never done before, all at the same time.

And so, it's really challenging you to grow very, very quickly. You have to present yourself in a certain way. Even, like, you know, in my role, where I was really focused on structuring and originating deals for wind farms and solar farms and supply agreements for corporate clients in the bank, selling software is completely different.

And so, there are a lot of learnings along the way that you acquire, such that you come out of it, you know, being able to certainly do something that's marketable and valuable to society, even if the startup fails.

So, that is hopefully comfort or assurance to folks that, like, it doesn't have to be a completely scary thing to do. And I think right now the barrier to entry is so low, especially for software companies, because of the fact that the tools that are readily available and accessible, which is a really big advent of the time that we're in with AI and what that means for hopefully the proliferation of other companies to start.

[25:29]Brian Jackson: So, if you had the entrepreneurial bug and you were looking at utilizing these tools now that can, kind of, expedite an idea to actually, you know, something actionable, what would you do to, kind of, test-case it and figure it out and generate ideas? Where would you be?

[25:44]Emma Konet: Yeah, I mean, I think this is something that we talked a lot about at Rice and, like, the Lilie Lab. We talk a lot about, like, the minimum viable product that you can build that is something you can sell, and getting feedback as early as possible.

And, like, I think they always use the example of, like, the Mechanical Turk. Basically, it was this machine that, like, everyone thought could, like, play chess, but it was actually just a person, like, in a box playing the other side.

It looked like it was this fancy thing, but it ended up being hacked in a way. And that's really good for entrepreneurs and startups because you don't want to spend a lot of resources on a product until you know that it's valuable to someone, because, like, you could build this fancy mousetrap, but if no one wants it, then you've just wasted time and resources, and you won't have a successful business.

So, I think the way that that plays out in what we're working on, especially in this time of coding agents, which are just really incredible, I mean, the ability of what they can do. I mean, for me, as, like, the CTO and running this company and running the technical team, it's like having another engineer, if not more than one engineer. It's like I can send agents out to go do things, and it just increases productivity.

And so, what we've done is, like, no one on our team has front-end engineering experience, meaning, like, we've never built, like, web apps, and we don't really know JavaScript. I mean, we all code in Python.

But with the help of these coding agents, we are able to very quickly, like, get prototypes of the type of features that we thought people might like, and then we can go out to the market and be like, "Okay, what do you think about this?" Go to friendlies, go to people who are interested in buying the software, and then they give us good feedback. And then once we've established that the thing that doesn't work but, sort of, looks cool is valuable, then we go make it work.

And then that's where it actually does take a lot of, you know, professional engineering time, and the coding agents can't exactly do all of that back-end work. But at least we know that we're onto something. And I think that's how we've really refined the product and gotten it to a point where it's quite valuable to folks, and it's because we haven't wasted time building something that we hadn't validated yet.

[27:41]Jacob Mansfield: That's, yeah, a good point, Emma. I think that there's a lot of, like, core models, like proprietary modeling, that has to be done. I think that's probably where, like, the secret sauce is, of how do you understand power markets? How do you, you know, apply mathematics and complex optimization to these issues?

And so, I think that's the value of, like, the human architecting this entire system. And then things like building front ends are, like, certainly things that Claude Code or Codex are very good at. It's like finding a way to marry, you know, those things, like our core capabilities, with what these models' core capabilities are.

Back to that question around, like, where would you start, one of the things that I wrestle with of, like, if I were to ever start another company in the future, what would it be, is one of my priors is this idea that there is some inherent value to founder-market fit, meaning that a founder is well-suited to a domain or a market that they have experience in.

And I'm not entirely sure that that's the case. I think that there are a lot of instances in which you could go into a domain which you don't have priors in. Obviously, you'd have to be a good student of it and learn very quickly. But if you're customer-obsessed, you can, kind of, come up the learning curve.

Now, that has its limits, right? Like, I probably couldn't go out and start a nuclear fusion company with no understanding of, like, the core technology. I think it would be pretty challenging. But I do think it means that there's a pretty wide range of opportunities for folks to pursue. It could be informed by a personal pain point.

That's probably where founder-market fit really comes into play, is, like, being in a domain, being in an industry day in and day out, wrestling with the same issues, and then wanting to go out and solve them. And that's where I think that, with the tools and, like, with the motivation and ambition, like, people can go out and actually start to solve those problems.

[29:30]Brian Jackson: Yeah, that's really great. I think one thing you all have both talked about is the Rice connection and the common thread between both of you all. Jacob, you did your undergraduate there. Emma, you had your professional MBA. I wonder if you can pinpoint a way the Rice network influenced your careers or, ultimately, impacted Tierra as you've, kind of, gone through the last couple of years.

[29:52]Jacob Mansfield: Yeah, it's funny. At one point, our entire team had a Rice connection. Two of us had done our undergraduate at Rice, different years, years separated, and two of us had also done, you know, professional programs or master's programs at Rice. I adore my time at Rice. I think super fondly of it.

I think it was a really special time of learning more about myself, building connections with other people, really fostering intellectual curiosity, this kind of unconventional wisdom that then you take to other domains. And I think one thing that's really helped me on my founder journey is there's a set of Owls that have gone before me, have started companies in the energy space, have been quite successful.

And I think fostering a connection with them, where I didn't go to school with 50,000 people or, you know, minting a class of 10,000 people a year, it was a very, very small group of people, such that I can build those personal connections, and they can be a support network for me in building my own company.

So, I think that that's been hugely valuable in terms of just the ecosystem and the entrepreneurs within the alumni base of Rice.

[30:58]Emma Konet: Yeah, I would, kind of, echo that. It's, sort of, like the people and the community. I mean, obviously, the education is valuable, and I learned a lot, and the MBA has been useful with starting a company. But I would say, like, I made a lot of really good friends, especially women, you know, high-achieving women who are in senior roles at various different companies.

I think that is, like, you know, when working at a really small company, like, we don't have a lot of coworkers. When you're a company of four, and you're remote, like, I live in Houston, and Jacob's in New York, and our other two employees are in Boston, I don't get to have, like, a coworker relationship in the standard way that you would think of, like, going into an office.

So, I think having this network of professionals is super valuable to, like, kind of, keep me grounded. And, you know, the fact that I graduated only a few years ago, and so, like, most of these people still live in Houston. The other piece I would say is, like, shoutout to Kyle Judah at Lilie, because I have called him in panic several times since I graduated.

I mean, we were quite close while I was in the program, but he's a great sounding board for, like, founders who maybe started companies while at Rice or used, kind of, Rice as a launchpad to start a company, and he has been quite supportive, even, you know, long after I've left.

And so, that's been really, really great, to just, kind of, have what I would call just, like, a mentor that I know that I can call, who's been a founder, who's experienced it, who knows what it's like to chew the glass, and, like, can, kind of, talk me off the ledge when things are getting rough.

And not to say that it's, like, I mean, there's obviously highs and lows, but the lows tend to, like, really weigh on you. And he's been super helpful in not, like, over-indexing on things that go wrong and being able to pivot and make sure that, you know, we're just doing the thing we need to do to keep the business alive and keep us successful.

[32:41]Jacob Mansfield: I would also say that's where, like, the founder partnership comes into play. And Emma and I, being very different people, I think that we respond with varying amplitudes to the good news and the bad news, and that's actually really good, is to have, you know, founders that are, sort of, countervailing forces to each other, where one of us has to be obsessed with the things that can fail, and one of us has to be the optimist as to, you know, "What if this worked out?"

And you, kind of, need both of those folks to, kind of, counterweight each other. Otherwise, you can, kind of, spiral into despair or be blissfully ignorant to all the things that you need to address as a business that you're putting off because you're just looking at only the positives.

[33:19]Brian Jackson: Yeah, and you were talking about that network of the people you can call. I find in the renewable space that there are more Owls, there are more Rice undergrads and MBAs out there, than I think I had seen four or five years ago. One place I'm finding a lot of them is at the Corporate Energy Buyers Association Conference.

I believe y’all were just at it, which, coincidentally, so was I. I'd be curious, what were your biggest takeaways from those conversations this year?

[33:46]Jacob Mansfield: We've been a member of CEBA for the last three years, and I think, in part, it's because we've been really obsessed with, you know, the buy side of the market, how corporates can be a big catalyzing force for deploying these assets through their off-take agreements.

And so, I think that this year was pretty unique insofar as there was actually a pretty clear pendulum shift from just signing more wind and solar deals to, what are standards going to look like for the energy landscape? How do we get credit for these types of solutions? What types of novel technologies do we want to support in deploying and bringing online? And specifically, energy storage.

So, I mean, when I... Let's say, you know, three years ago, I think I led a roundtable on energy storage, and it was, kind of, a cute topic. We're like, "Oh, okay, yeah, maybe batteries." And this year there were, like, three or four different events on just storage alone.

And so, I think it's clearly breaking into the zeitgeist of corporates as they think about grid reliability, how they contribute to grid reliability, how they grapple with and manage market risk, where they are a load, so they're exposed to market volatility.

And wind and solar deals can only cover you so much, but the real pinch point is when the sun sets, and the sun hasn't set in yet, and folks are coming home, they're turning on their appliances, and prices start to spike in the evening ramp. And that's where a solution like batteries really helps to extend that runway and cover those periods of time.

And then, on top of that, the ability to actually claim environmental benefits when you can effectively use storage to shift renewables and displace the peaker plants, the avoided emissions coming from it.

So, that was, I think, a really big change from years past that I think is really exciting. I hope it continues, and I certainly believe that it will if we continue on the pathway that we are of tremendous growth in energy demand.

[35:33]Brian Jackson: So, looking ahead, and I mean, I'm sure as founders, you all probably have things that keep you up at night, but what is keeping you up right now? What has you concerned?

[35:43]Jacob Mansfield: I mean, both of us have really small children. I have a 13-month-old, and Emma has, like, a three-month-old. So, I was going to say, probably quite literally, depending on evening to evening, probably our children.

But the other way to turn that is, like, yeah, I mean, I want to build something that has consequence and meaning. It's not worth that opportunity cost. I'd like to think that it's something that I'll look back fondly on and somehow find the right balance between professional and personal life, and raising a family, and also building a fledgling company that's, like, you know, in itself a toddler and growing it to be something that's a mature company that's self-sustaining and produces a lot of economic value.

[36:22]Emma Konet: Yeah, for me, I think it's, you know, I'm the CTO, Jacob's the CEO, so our jobs are very different. You know, Jacob is talking to customers, and he's talking to investors, and he's, like, painting this kind of broad vision of what the company is and what the company can be. And my job is much more technical.

I'm kept up at night by math problems sometimes, right? And, like, I wake up in the middle of the night, and I'm like, "Oh, okay, this is how we should do it. I came to this conclusion that, after thinking about it nonstop for three days, like, I finally unlocked this thing."

And so, yeah, I think I experience maybe more of, like, an acute sense of action, and I have to, like, build something that works, you know? It has to physically, like, go out there and do the thing that we wanted it to do.

And, so far, we've done it. I mean, we've hit all our KPIs, our, you know, the pilot that we had with this hyperscaler went, like, very, very well. We were blowing our KPIs out of the water, like 3X what we thought we were going to hit.

And so, that, you know, that's validation that things are going well. But every time you turn a corner, it's, "Can we pull this off?" And from a technical perspective, that's a tough question. I think from the early days of the company, you know, the company has pivoted several times, and we've, kind of, you know, we're obviously still in storage. We've changed a little bit what we originally were setting out to do. But I was like, "I don't even know if this can be done."

There were certain questions where I was like, "Can anyone do this?" Like, we were trying to predict the emissions rate in the future in Texas. That's like, maybe we can't do it. It turns out we could, and we did it very well, and it worked out. But I think it's those kinds of existential questions when you're trying to do something for the first time that no one's ever done, like an execution thing for me.

[37:58]Brian Jackson: So, doing the pilot, having it go well, I mean, that's a huge milestone. Were there lessons learned from it? And I guess if you could just, kind of, high-level walk through what the pilot was. I think it was a 100-megawatt battery in Texas.

[38:11]Emma Konet: Yeah. So, 200-megawatt-hour system in West Texas, 100 megawatts, 200 megawatt-hour. And it was with a hyperscaler and an IPP, and we were trying to demonstrate what it could look like, you know, if a hyperscaler does a toll, operating that battery to that hyperscaler's KPIs.

And really, it's dependent on, like, what the company wants to do. Like we said, batteries are a Swiss Army knife. You can, you know, optimize the battery for revenue maximization, you can optimize it for carbon minimization, you can do something in between. And I think for this pilot, we were doing something in between. It was a company that cared about making a sustainability claim in addition to, you know, hedging their exposure to energy markets.

I think the biggest learning that I took away was that we had an extremely small team, and we were operating an asset 24 hours a day. I mean, power doesn't sleep, right? Like, you've got to make... This thing's got to run overnight. And, like, we had four technical people working on it at the time.

And I think that the takeaway for me is that it's really incredible that we could basically do this really, really difficult thing with a very small team, and that was the indicator that I think that we could scale this business massively.

[39:17]Brian Jackson: Well, Jacob, Emma, thank you both so much for your time today and for joining me on Owl Have You Know.

[39:22]Jacob Mansfield: Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

[39:23]Emma Konet: Thank you.

[39:25]Brian Jackson: Thanks for listening. This has been Owl Have You Know, a production of Rice Business. You can find more information about our guests, hosts, and announcements on our website, business.rice.edu. Please subscribe and leave a rating wherever you find your favorite podcast. We'd love to hear what you think. The hosts of Owl Have You Know are myself, Brian Jackson, and Maya Pomroy.