Episode 8: Thomas Daiber - EV Transition, OEM Innovations, Charging Solutions, and Strategic Consulting

Welcome to the Smart Charge by RiDERgy podcast. This is Claudio Geyken, founder and CEO of RiDERgy. This is your show to learn about all things, energy management and smart charging innovation for electric vehicles and fleets.

Alright, thanks for making it today, Thomas. How are you today for having me. Thanks, great, yeah. Really, really sunny day here in Berlin, uh, so that's, uh, quite rare these days I would say so far. Yeah, I, I love Berlin, um, starting from now exactly, exactly. So, um, yeah, for the, we know each other since a longer time, but for the listeners who don't know you, maybe, yeah, feel free to reach back in time uh as you want or take the question as you feel to

Um, yeah, who, who are you and what makes you who you are? Oh wow, that's, that's quite a big question for the start. So yeah, my name is Thomas. Uh, I've been working in, uh, I'd say electrification, EV charging, and new mobility now for about 17 years. Started quite in a, in a classic way as a southern German engineer in 2008, working for a German car manufacturer, Mercedes. Um, focusing on both electric car and hydrogen cars, which was quite unusual back at the time where, you

know, everything was around ICE. So, uh, 2008, you were one of the few exotic people to do that. But it was fun. I learned a lot, uh, you know, on how to exchange the um IC powertrain with an electric powertrain or hydrogen power train. Yeah, and uh move forward to, to then learn more about energy and the question on where energy comes from uh as a product manager at EBW for a few years, which was quite fun back at the time where you had maybe a

few 1000 electric cars in Germany, 2010 to 2012, uh, you know, fooling around with charging infrastructure, uh, if you want to call so commercialization, quote unquote, right? Uh, first charging cards, uh, 1st, 1st back ends, and yeah, back then I figured out that the most important part of the value chain is neither energy nor is it, uh, the vehicle, but software from my point of view, the brain, the intelligency behind charging infrastructure behind if you want, so the future of, of energy and the future of

mobility, right? And, uh, yeah, that, that brought me to, uh, finally. Supporting creating a, a, a roaming hub called, called Hubject in Berlin in 2013. Um, yes?

No, it was separate. So I had a little intermeo working for Porsche, mostly as a consultant in the field of, um, of fleet electrification. So I wasn't really happy with my job and, uh, so I was a corporate child, to be fair, back then I had no clue about founders and venture capital and you know, where the whole money comes from. But uh yeah, I was a little bit disillusioned, so to speak, with the corporate world and still I thought, well, uh, you know, I followed

the whole. Founding, uh, phase at EBW of Hubject. So and I thought it was an interesting one. I thought, uh, it could be cool to experience ramping up a startup from scratch, even though it was a corporate startup, right? And so funny thing was I was hired in 2013 as a head of R&D. So most people know me as a CEO and as the, you know, one of the guys that that ramping, uh, ramped it up as a CEO, but I actually started as a head

of R&D at Hubject. Nothing to do with EMBW, just, you know. Uh, independent application and uh, yeah, quite soon after was was asked to become CEO of the company. Yeah. Yeah, probably for the ones that don't know, Hubject is quite a, quite a strange animal. Uh, so, yeah, nowadays you would call it a roaming hub or e-roaming hub or uh charging infrastructure hub. So the idea behind the company was actually to connect charging infrastructure networks, mainly in Germany. Uh, that means if you wanted to. Charge

your electric car back then in 2013, you would have needed around 70, 80 cards, charging cards to only charge your car in Germany. So that was seen as a problem of the, the, the first shareholders. Quite a wide group of both car manufacturers uh with BMW and Mercedes Daimler back then, uh, two electricity companies with RWE and EMBW and two tech companies with Siemens and Bosch that figured out, well, we need to solve this, but we can only solve it together and we need to kind

of create a balance of interests, right? So, um, yeah, the idea was to do the job in Germany. We were, but we failed completely to do it in Germany at the beginning. Germany was not ready or not interested in our solution to connect charging infrastructure infrastructure networks to unify charging experience, making it possible to charge an electric car with one charging card. Uh, and so yeah, uh, this became an international thing then, um, you know, we were quite more successful in our neighbor countries first before

We experienced the, the, well, not the Netherlands actually. The Netherlands came after, after Germany because the Netherlands, they were quite advanced already in roaming and they were also not really much in favor of what we were doing uh uh uh because they already had their own roaming schemes back then. So Austria was actually number one. Switzerland came quite early, uh, Finland, the Nordics, uh, this was my, this was my first kind of target market, Denmark. Yeah, and, and later Germany, but it was textbook, textbook development

I would say, you know, being laughed at for 2 to 3 years and then at some point experiencing the network effect and from that point onwards, uh, you know, sales cycles became quite, quite fast and uh much more straightforward compared to the beginning. But yeah, it was, it was an interesting journey journey and uh yeah, really, really enjoyed doing it for, for over 66 years. To finally create my own company after 6 years, you know, we created this. Uh, this player that was doing good in

Europe and, uh, spread the word in, in, uh, you know, 2, 2nd geographical area was, was Japan. Um, and finally credit order companies in, in the US and China and then after 6 years, I ask myself like, OK, I'm now CEO of this company that has quite done a good job, uh, you know, in some, most of the markets we had, uh, we're more, more or less a monopolist because, because our competitive, uh, our competitors were quite Week. And so I asked myself, I was like

OK, should I, should I extend this journey? I had a quite, quite nice offer on the table from the shareholders for 55 more years and I thought this was really, you know, uh, flattering and uh, yeah, we had a quite strong bond and it was really respectful relationship to the shareholders, but Finally decided to do something by myself and I come from an entrepreneurial family and I think the the entrepreneurial DNA, you know, the question, do you want to be a hired CEO for the rest

of your life or do you want to do something by yourself? So this was stronger. So finally create led to the creation of Cosmic Hat Group, uh, which, which brought me here today. Yeah. Alright, yeah, now I have plenty of questions. Uh, let me see where, where to start. So maybe let's start with the beginning. Um, so you, you, you started with the, with the OEM, uh, a vehicle OEM and moving into the energy space, um, and then, and then basically going to the, to the

Intersection of both uh so what, what was the, the motivation of, of leaving the OEM for example, there are people that mostly if they stay if they are within OEMs, they stay there. It's not, I think it's not at that time maybe it was not that common to not at all, right? Yeah, it's a great question. So I have to. I have to mention that before my first position as a project manager at Mercedes for electric cars and hydrogen cars, during my studies, I worked for

Fraunhofer Institute for 4 years. Um, this is the biggest solar solar power institute, uh, uh, in, in Freiburg. I worked there for, yeah, more or less during all of my studies, so I always had a connection to renewable energies. And in parallel I made internships at, uh, you know, already working for car manufacturers. So this intersection was always interesting to me, probably. The link to renewable energy and energy production was always stronger than vehicles. I was never really a vehicle guy at all, uh, you know

I don't own a vehicle nowadays or today, uh, so this was always there, but, uh, yeah, in the end of the day it was possible uh um I joined Mercedes back then also together with a scholarship, an MBA scholarship that was uh basically financed by Mercedes, so it was also just a possibility. To, yeah, to start there. And, and for me. The journeys just started uh with elec understanding how an electric car works, what are the components was responsible, was responsible for error management, in particular

for the hydrogen B class, and there were, I can tell you there were a lot of errors and problems back then with this car. So that was quite fun to, to really understand the vehicle as a whole and then, yeah, you asked about the transition, so uh to be very concrete, fun story when I told my boss back then, you know, that I wanted to. Join the other side of the force, meaning energy, kind of laughed at me and told me that, well, you're now working

for the probably sexiest car manufacturer around the world and you now want to join a, you know, a half publicly owned uh uh utility uh that is super unsexy and that was back then the connotation of energy providers. I, I think to a certain extent that still is, right? Um, so that was completely unpopular and I mean for Swabian car manufacturers. Um Back at the time, you usually, it, it was very common to work there your whole life. So also, for instance, my, my oldest brother

he's 12 years older. Uh, he's been working for Mercedes, uh, and I think that's quite a cool thing, right? But he's been working there for over 25 years, right? So this was the thing back then. Uh, yeah, but I'm very happy with the decision because uh it gave me the freedom to really, yeah, experience much more. So Mercedes back then was a Was a huge corporate animal already, uh, and NBW to my surprise, wasn't so. So, so we are talking about corporates, the one point you

made and then then the the startup DNA um that is in your family, maybe you can elaborate on why you think you're not the type of corporate person and, and how come yeah the family DNA, uh, maybe you can elaborate as well on, on how that shaped you. Yeah, sure, of course. Yeah, well, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that, um, you know, I have an issue with the corporate world or I didn't fit in. So I think what I can put on the table today is

that I feel pretty comfortable working with a with a corporate world but also with a with a startup or scaleup world or in the startup startup and scale up world. Um, originally my family comes from. Making all different kinds of stuff with wood. So I come from a carpenter family. Yeah, 4th generation. So now my brother took over probably 1520 years ago. So I have 3 older brothers, so the second oldest took, took over, which was clear uh already when he was, I don't know, 15

or something. So there's no, no real, no real argument about the 4 brothers and who's going to do it. So, yeah, and my grand grand. Grand grand grandfather started the whole thing, uh, a very long time ago and uh since then it's just been a, a small, a small, you know, village carpentry, but definitely something that, that shaped me in a way that. Um, Yeah, if you grow up in a, in a family where there's no real separation of what's going on in the, in the

fabric uh in in the house, so it's kind of more or less one thing, uh, this really shapes you, I guess, and Uh, I think on the long term it was always clear for me to become an entrepreneur or do something by myself, but this was also not really a thing growing up in, um, a persuasion, you know, where the world is still OK. This is one of the places, one of the richest places in Germany, one of the places where you, where there's no unemployment

There's a lot of, a lot of Middel stand industry, uh, big, big companies like Binger Ingelheim or Lieper, so. It's not a real thing to start your own business there, I guess, at least not uh definitely not as a as a software, as a software guy, a software entrepreneur. So, yeah, that was not in my, it was not given that that I would, uh, you know, start that right from scratch. So I I I more went down the boring classic way, I guess working for big

car manufacturers and utility companies before doing something by myself.

Uh, phase, what are your key, um, yeah, the things that you keep in mind, learnings that you, that you consider was the highlights you would like to also uh stories maybe as well, yeah. Well, I probably could write a, write a book about it and, and I mean, first of all, I'm incredibly thankful for that face even though it was a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Working 24/7 for for 6 years and you know ramping up a company that's now, yeah, still active on on

on 3 different continents and and and it's doing good and and you know, uh also finally making money, uh, which is, which is still rare in in EV charging softwares, you know. So, uh yeah, for me being appointed CEO at at an age of 31 was was something really special and the learning I can take from this phase are still, you know, something that's that has helped me a lot and. Where to start with subject? I mean, I guess, uh, the, the, the thing that I

mentioned at the very beginning, the, the courage and to a certain extent also the naivety, even though being a corporate child to. Spread the world, spread the word in other in other geographies in other regions quite an early stage and really believe on that network effect. I think that was something that was a risk we took, um, we believed in, uh, but also as said with a certain extent of of naivety. So I'll give you an example. Back then, when I was working in uh in

sales quite a lot in the Nordic, so I had a board meeting and uh you know, shareholders asked me about like, you know, who are the new clients, what is the, the latest development in uh in in in sales. And I was like, yeah, I'm quite happy I closed my first deal in Finland with a player, a small player, two people company. Like, what are you doing in Finland? You know, you should do your job in Germany. That back then two people player companies now called

Virta and now one of the biggest players in in Europe and I think they benefit, they benefited from the network effect and we did, we did. And so it wasn't really too necessary at the very beginning because it was a number crunchy game about coverage and how many charge points you had on the platform and that of course also. Um, the quality and the technical legal and business framework, uh, you, you basically came up to connect the charging infrastructure. So every charge point in every country

helped to at some point create enough leverage for a network effect and that was a huge learning because of course you can read about it, uh, you know, it's a lot of stuff in the academic world about network effects and different, different models to generate network effects. But, but if you experience it, it's a, it's a different thing. And I would also say, I mean, if you look at What has been happening over the last year is the big dying of former legends in charging infrastructure

Most of them, they have been, uh, their position as vertical players. Well, EV Box, for instance, um, you know, Landis and Gur lately, the list is long. The new motion, I mean some of them have been acquired mostly by oil companies or car manufacturers has to be, um, but most of them has position as vertical players. So what does that mean? They believed in. Um, and believed in providing end to end solutions including hardware, software and service. And The Hubject was quite the opposite for us

It was always clear that we only want to position ourselves as a marketplace and B2B layer. Which was sometimes tough because it could have been easy to just dip the switch and become an EMSP, an immobility service provider and you know, sell charging cards, uh, turn the B2B business into a B2C business or a B2B2C business, provide charging cards and charging apps and then of course, having, having the owning the, the end consumer, right? But I think we, for us it was always clear that this

will never be the path and until that day have to is a pure B2B play, a pure marketplace. Uh, ecosystem, um, and I think that was a wise decision because therefore, with that strategy we could be, we could remain lean, we could just focus on our core where we were really strong at and not, you know, not getting lost and also all the competitive fights both on a, on a back end level like charging back end level on an EMSP level, um, so I think that

was after all the right strategy even though. You know, uh, over the years, um, some of the other players were much more successful, but, uh, not on the long term because I think, you know, to concentrate your efforts on all of these battles, I think that was quite tough for a lot of players. So one thing I I'm, I'm very interested in, especially just maybe for the listeners, so these roaming platforms, they are, as you said. The the key essential to get the charge point operators

and the so-called charge cards MSPs or the, the apps that you use to activate the charging sessions to connect those in a leaner way. Now how did you take inspiration from the telco industry when you started um Hubject? Uh, do you remember also how the, the setup was and um. So from a historical standpoint maybe or or from an analogous standpoint what can you learn from the telco or other industries maybe that that have similar setups especially nowadays where there is lots of criticism as well

on on um the current set up in in in the sense that it might be too costly for for the long the long run and maybe you also have ideas on how we could make it better or what would be a better set up than we currently have. Yeah, totally, it's a great question. And to start with and to be fair, uh, even though I think it's quite popular that corporate people call themselves co-founders or founders, uh, Habtek was, was never a company that was founded

by entrepreneurs. It was founded by 6 heavyweights from the German industry, right? And it derived, and um, nowadays a lot of people don't know that anymore, but it actually derived from a funded research project, um, called Green Emotion, and back then actually. IBM was the main driver of the project which later became something like a competitor but but not too successful but um the German car manufacturers were also participating in this project and they developed the idea already of a roaming platform that was more or

less inspired by the telco industry, but they were not allowed to commercialize it and so this was the point where they decided, well, can we bring this to a commercial level outside of the funding of the of the research project, right? And that was that led to the the co-creation of Hubject back then. There are in fact a lot of analogies to telco, um, in particular, the separation of The networks, the grids, uh, I think we nowadays have 3 taco grids, or 3 taco networks if

I remember correctly in Germany. Yeah, but we have hundreds of mobile mobile phone service providers like, you know, you can get it in a supermarket and you get AliTalk or Lidl in Germany, right? These are all virtual providers that don't own any, any network. And so the idea was to come up with something similar, of course, also driven with the strategic interests of the car manufacturers. To own the EV driver or to provide a good answer on uh for the for the customers on, hey, where

can I charge my electric car uh and how like do I need to charge a car? Do I need an app? Do I just need to plug in and everything happens automatically. So that. That answer back then wasn't there and also, you know, if you did mystery shopping on the first electric cars, it was horrible. You didn't get a proper answer. Sometimes even people at the at the dealers lie to you about how to to to to charge an electric car. And so finally they created

a hubjack and hubja was positioned as um and is still positioned mainly and that's different to the to the telco industry. I'll tell you why in a second. It's mainly positioned as a connectivity player. So. What Hubject basically does in the core is just um making sure that you can find the next charging station, so aggregating point of interest data, static and dynamic data for charging stations, 1, finding the stations or leading you to the right point, uh, providing the data, uh, then getting access, um

and getting access always means. Providing interoperability in the sense that if you use an EBW charging card that you can charge at an Eon charging station for instance. So this is, this is a core use case, uh, making it happen between different charging entities, so-called immobility service providers on the end consumer side, providing charging cards and charging apps and so-called CPOs, charge point operators on the, on the infrastructure side. And, and finally making sure that all the, the data that is needed to, to open the

charging station and authorize the, the consumer, the, the uh the EV driver and then exchanging these transactions information with uh with all, all um parties that, that is, that was and still is the core job of a roaming platform and Hubject. Of course, meanwhile you can dig deeper talking about, you know, financial services, clearing, billing settlement, reconciliation, debt collection, all of this so I think it was a very cool and wise step of Hubject to create um an entity with a baffin license uh now called

Hubject Financial Services. I think that was, yeah, that was always a plan and I think the timing was also not perfect to to do so, dig a little deeper into the financial transaction world, uh, but. Uh, to go back to telco, to the telco comparison, clearing houses in telco mainly only take care of the financial transaction, whereas Subject only took care of the connectivity service, and now they're, you know, extending their footprint to financial services. But we learned a lot from the telcos and also it

was quite fun at the beginning if you talk to Vodafone. Or telecom, which were also players back then because um in the early days, um, a lot of telco providers, you know, tried their luck as immobility service providers. Yeah, yeah, they were like, well, don't do, uh, please do a better job than we did at the at the beginning because the idea of the clearing house. Also to make it happen as a connectivity layer didn't didn't work out for the telcos as far as I, as

far as I understand, which lead to a lot of chaos of bilateral connections and uh different service qualities and you know the

the telco industry? Yeah, there are, there are a few, uh, as far as I learned, there are a few uh clearing houses uh in the in the telco industries in the telco industries with one. We also work together. It's a company from um from, from uh Israel. Um, unfortunately I forgot the names. I have to admit, but there are only two of similar to EV Romi, there are only a few players that that are that are doing the job. So handling multi-millions of transactions and clearing

clearing these transactions, but only mainly as a financial layer. Yeah, I guess also the financial industry and there might be analogies in different industries but without getting too much into detail there and then um yeah this is maybe a very specific now industry uh uh question but. Uh, still, it's relevant in this context is like there's this new startup, uh, called IAI that I think it's trying to revolutionize the way, uh, this communication layers, connectivity layer works. What's your view on, especially how it compares to

object and, and the relevance of such a new startup? Sure, yeah, yeah, I think it'd be super interesting and I think um. Uh, every new player who kind of. You know, brings a breeze of fresh air into the roaming world is good for the EV charging ecosystem, and I would say exactly that also for IAI. Um, I think they also did a great job in fundraising to start with. I mean, uh, we've seen quite a lot of, uh, you know, players as sat in, in EV

charging struggling and so raising, I think about 10 million is quite, it's quite an achievement. So, so, so, uh, congrats on that. Um, what's interesting about this company is that. Uh, it basically plays a little bit, I guess, with the narrative, the market narrative that the established and leading roaming players, and there are only 3 of them in Germany, uh, Hubject, as mentioned, Giraffe, this is the French version if you want, and ecleing.net from Benelux, in Germany, right? Giraffe would be mainly France and Western Europe

yeah, but mainly France. Um, so the, the common narrative and to a certain extent I think it's also correct about the leading roaming platforms is that they are quite Uh, expensive and they wanted to create a certain tech lock in, um. That's basically coming from charging a flat fee per vehicle per year independent from the amount of transactions. And so, and he positions exactly at that point by saying we want to democratize connectivity and we want to basically grow a network by providing this for free

and then later. Charge charge clients voluntarily on the if you want cooler stuff like, you know, the financial clearing and smart charging and uh all the cool services you can put on top. I think it's a great idea and I think also like if you look at how a lot of networks, uh, I mean, I guess we all know about the Facebook example grew was that the service was for free for years and at some point they figured out how to make money with it and

I think this is more or less the same strategy, um. So I think it's exciting. I think it's cool and I think it will also help the the main roaming platforms to move a little faster and you know, to, they are also now big companies, right? So uh to, to, to sharpen their focus and be a little bit more agile. Um, at the same time, of course, I think in 3 to 4 years we will know a little bit more on how this, uh, will work

out also with EApi and a few other players that position quite, quite the same. Um, because I guess at the point where you then dip the switch on really commercializing it, you also become a middleware, right? So, uh, this is the roaming, the roaming fight, the roaming argument has always been between. Uh, centralized roaming hubs, a centralized approach, you know, one winner takes the winner takes it all model with centralized hubs that aggregate, and the more they aggregate and the better the quality of the aggregation

the more power, the more negotiation power they gain, right? Now, we have seen OCPI, uh, a lot of abbreviations. I'm sorry for that, but this is EV charging. So we'll we'll provide a glossary for, for, for the podcast. But with the rise of OCPI, so for the listeners, this is a protocol that enables roaming on a peer to peer level that basically cuts out the middleman. Middleman is subject in this case of roaming hub with the with the with the rise of OCPI. It has always

been the question on, well, do you wanna. Do you still need the roaming platform? Do you need the middleman, or do you want to do this bilaterally, cutting out the middleman? I mean, I, of course, I'm a little bit biased working, working for Abject for quite a while. I, I see, I think there's a lot of beauty having a, having a a a middleman that in particular takes care of the uh of the quality assurance and provides a consistent set of services, but we can dig

deeper on that one is quite technical. Um, but of course, uh, there is a right to play for, for peer to peer players as well, and so, um, this has always been the big question, uh, um, you know, are you on the peer to peer side or are you on the hub side, you know, I think it's for me it's not an either or. I think both, both ways have some benefits, but I do think that in particular for smaller players like Stadtwke or German utilities

or in France, uh, uh, um. Um, yeah, like the, the smaller utility players. Yeah, you need, you need an aggregator for them. It doesn't make sense to connect on a bilateral level. But my point is that as soon as you want to dip the switch. To basically make money as a centralized hub, being it on financial transactions, being it on smart charging, you become the middleware that, you know, once you become the middleware maybe that that doesn't have the the positive connotation anymore and you also

control and you also create some kind of lock in naturally, right? And I think this will be the interesting point also for players like IApi. Uh, first of all, to, um, to aggregate enough critical mass, but I think from what I've seen they've done a great job and also quite, quite smart founders, intelligent people. They have done a good job on it, but, uh, critical mass is, is important and then of course also executing on. Um, on, on the roaming services and then making sure that

the fate of the current dominating roaming hubs is not their fate, being the middleware is like that everyone wants to cut out analysis, thanks for that. So switching gears to um cosmic, uh, cat, so you said that you, you, um, you did that a few years ago and. So I understand you have been running quite a few types of services and projects. Uh, maybe you can just, yeah, share a bit of the essence behind Cosmic can, the why, what, what you, what you want to achieve

with it and what you have achieved with it and yeah, share a few stories or projects that you are particularly proud of or that you, yeah, you think are worth highlighting. Yeah, of course. Yeah, Cosmicat is basically a small group of friends that have met. Mainly at Hubject or around Hubject and still friends and still working together. So this is now 12 years ago. Um, The idea behind Cosmiccat was to create a strategy boutique for new mobility and new energy services. That means um with hubja

connecting hundreds of players to, to the hub and connecting, you know, 100s, thousands of charging stations to, to the hub, we have seen quite a lot in the realm of, of electricity generation, utilities, uh, car manufacturers, software players, CPOs, ESBs, and so on. And of course the the network that we that we managed to create because sales cycles were quite cruel at Hubject in particular at the beginning was, was quite, quite tempting to basically expand our footprint a little bit and not only talk talk about

charging but create a strategy house for what you would call the future of um of um mobility and energy. So. The idea was to do more than than only EV charging and more than only electrification, also focusing on digitization of fleets on the vehicle as a uh mobile computer and all the cool stuff you can do with it, uh, mobility rather considering mobility rather as a service that just a hardware sales driven business and this is still our playground. So the core of the bread and

butter business of Cosmic Cat Group is. Um, providing strategic support in particular for organizations that wanna start something new, something from scratch, um, in, in the intersection of, of mobility and energy, and yeah, this has led to, uh, to quite interesting, uh, group of clients and partners of course starting with the most obvious one, the car manufacturers. This is of course where we were coming from. But also energy players, but I, I guess the main target group nowadays is is actually scale-ups of either family owned

businesses or founder led organizations which are about to um expand their footprints so you know, expand geographically or expand looking at the service service portfolio. So this is, this is what we do on a. Yeah, uh, uh, on a daily basis as a, as a bread and butter butter business, I myself. have been also digging deeper into where the money comes from. I mentioned it. So with Hubchek, we had 6 founding shareholders, all strategic shareholders are all huge companies. Then number 7 was Volkswagen 2016. Number

8 was was Eel 2018, 201919. Uh, and so I wanted to learn with Cosmicca. My idea was also, uh, to learn a little bit more about venture capital, about private equity. And uh yeah, and and and this is, this has become kind of a second pillar to what we're doing right now. So all about M&A fundraising, um, due diligence, both for the investors, meaning venture capital firms, private equity firms, but also supporting founders to find the right fit, to find the right investors. Uh, but only

focusing again on, on what we're good at, on, uh, on mobility and energy. We do think that. This is the future of both advisory but also M&A business. So the I don't believe in. In um the generic service providers, in particular if we talk about early stage companies, right? So this is, this is what we're doing. Cool, yeah, very clear. Maybe uh to also make it even more tangible, can you give um some for for each of the two pillars, give like one story or one

specific problem, um, maybe even if you can name the companies, um, even better. Yeah, of course, there are a lot, a lot of examples, um.

So maybe what's interesting for the listeners right now is that we have been working with with players in logistics to electrify their fleets. And to maybe the surprise of some listeners in particular, The electrification of trucks or long haul vehicles have been quite interesting and taking up and So what we are doing for these players is a different thing. So I mean it starts with the question on How to charge an electric truck, so. If you, if you drive an electric truck. To an extent that

you, you want to use it most of the time, you wanna, you wanna drive it most of the time. Uh, you can get up to 500 megawatt hours of electricity consumption a year. That's, that's around 125 households. So, uh, what's also different to passenger cars is that all these business cases are quite plannable, so you can, you know, where these trucks go, you can calculate the routes, but if you want to calculate the routes, you need some parameters like how heavy is the truck. You know

what are the KPIs of the power train of the truck, uh, weather conditions, and of course you want to make sure that you can charge the truck at the depot of, of your destination or somewhere around. And so this has been quite an interesting field for us coming from passenger cars, in in particular private passenger cars where all of these use cases are quite. Diverse and hard to plan to a certain extent because you know if you talk to your friends about electric cars all about

it has been all about like I'm not sure if I should buy it because you know once a year I want to drive to Italy uh 800 kilometers and so uh but mostly uh you use it to commute and drive usually up to 40 kilometers a day, right? So this is different with trucks. Everything is calculatable, so every kilowatt hour is calculatable, uh, every route is calculatable, and so business cases are quite transparent. So what we are doing right now helping these is helping these companies

to be more precise on both overall TCO for the cars over the whole life cycle, but in particular, of course, also help them to support ramping up charging infrastructure. And usually different to uh to uh to the classic passenger car uh endeavors, you already have quite complex uh electricity systems up and running. That means if you talk to big logistics companies like depots, um, you, most of them have huge facilities, so they have solar power on, on top of these uh of these fabrics of this

depots. Uh, some of them have even wind power parks. Uh, a lot of them have, uh, local storage for batteries because they already are, these are already quite energy heavy businesses, a lot of cooling systems, for instance, in place, and, um, yeah, we come in to support them. Um, thinking about what is the right size, looking at charging parks, where do you put these chargers, what kind of service providers do you need? We help them in particular to vet service providers, which is pretty tough for

companies that have never done so because from the outside, in particular software companies, they all look the same nowadays, right? So, they haven't done a great job on differentiation over the last years. Uh, and so we support them from, uh, to, to find the right, the right players, the right also strategic partners, starting with planning and installation, digging a hole, connecting wiring, um, the charging hardware for HPC but also AC charging. Uh, software still I guess the most critical part of, of it all and also

uh energy management smart charging and hopefully soon vehicle to grid services. Very interesting, uh, so to understand you, you, you really have a broad, um, scope from the strategic. Um, decision making of big corporates, that's, that would be one scope if I understand correctly and then very much more operationally, um, how to better plan a depot and what's, what's other factors to consider. And the service providers to vet etc. Exactly. Yeah, usually, I mean if you have the luxury to really start strategic, but a lot

of players in the logistics field I really love that are quite hands on. So for them, um, the word strategy is quite close to execution, which is which is cool, but if you wanna, if you wanna talk strategy, you usually would ask like what's the role of electrification for your fleet like uh what's the percentage of your fleet. Uh, driving electric, let's say in 2030 and how do you want to get there and we help you to get there, calculating, uh, calculating what kind of impact

this has for your business and not, not only looking at the vehicle, uh, as you know, and, uh, a long haul truck is, is 3 to 4 times the price of an IC truck, but in particular looking at the also at electricity and charging infrastructure and. Of course now what's what's cool about it is that a few, few years ago it was, it was all about uh the the common narrative in the market was that, well, um, electrification is cool for or electric electric vehicles might

make it for, of course, for last mile delivery for um for light electric vehicles, for electric vans, but long haul will be far out in the future and uh everyone's talking about hydrogen for long haul. And now this is completely changing. I can tell you like if you, if you manage manage to control. The electricity price you can create. Uh, positive TCO already on pretty short notice. That means we have clients that are aiming electrify in electrifying their fleet, their truck fleet as soon as possible

and are super progressive about it. And this was, this is something I haven't seen coming like 3 to 5 years ago. I have to be honest.

Well, of course subsidies still play a role like carbon credits and of course now with hopefully the. Uh, the, the foundation of the new government, uh, that, that's, that's hopefully rather soon, sooner than later. Uh, people and industries hoping, uh, for, for new subsidies, but on long term. The main trigger will be. To, to really control the price of electricity. So some say like if you, if you believe in studies, some say critical landmark is about being below 35 cents per per kilowatt hour, um, and

some are, some will be DCO positive, uh, maybe in 2 to 3 years already, others will be in 5 to 5 to 10 years, really depends on how good you are in, uh, in, in, you know, getting it right with charging infrastructure and, and electricity trading. Uh, but to do so, you have to, you have to increase your knowledge in charging, you have to increase your knowledge in, in the whole value chain of charging and electricity, and I think this is where everything, uh, everyone is

now stepping up their game in, in the logistics sector. Yeah, well, especially if we're talking about logistics, one thing that I find also interesting is that the value chain is not straightforward to understand who is responsible for what. So I, I'll be also curious to hear your view on, on this. Especially this one truck, um, owners, they're like companies that own very few trucks. These people might have more difficulties to really make the switch or get the time as well to make the time to, to

um, plan the switch to electric mobility, and I'm assuming you're talking more with SMEs that that are a bit larger or even the very big, um, DHL and counionage that are able to. To cope and and plan and, and uh yeah for the transition, right? Yeah, so usually, when we talk about charging and truck charging and where the electricity comes from. When we come in as strategy advisors, it's more or less always the same story. So usually logistic players. And I'm not judging on that, they

go for the, the quick wins by. Um, partnering with end to end players for, for EV charging, that means players that control everything from planning and installation to hardware, software, services, transactions, charging cards, everything, and of course the beauty of it is that if they do a good job, um, it's easy for you as a, as a client because you get everything from one player, one stop shop, everything out of the box, but. At the same time, it's a black box for you. So the learning

curve is quite, quite questionable if you do so. You lose a lot of control over what you're doing, in particular if you're, you know, a bigger logistic companies where this will become a critical factor. And therefore, usually what we do is at the very beginning rather focusing on knowledge transfer on what are the different roles in the value chain, uh, what do they add to the value creation, you know, talking about software back ends, for instance, comparing hardware solutions, you know, what's the difference between an

Alptronic and Kampala eco Energetica charger, for instance, um. And making sure that we will find an organization in a few months that really can do the deep dive on technology, on uh, also looking at cost drivers, looking at revenue drivers, and then take it from there to really vet. The right service providers for every particular client and making sure that there is the right fit for their respective size. Of course, if you are a logistic company with two, with two trucks, it wouldn't make sense to

you know, put everything uh to separate everything and then do a separate contract with a, with a back end and a hardware manufacturer and so on. So there there is of course a beauty in an end to end offer, but for the big players, mostly our our strategy is to separate those parts of the value chain and then together with the client make a decision on what's the right strategy to achieve our goals and what are the right partners to do so. And in most cases

there are a lot of stranded assets, to be fair with you. There are a lot of stranded assets because uh wrong decisions have been made. Um, and, uh, there's a lack of control both on the tech technological side but also contractually, and, and this is something we want to change with our clients to, in best case, um. Not only see charging infrastructure as something they have to do, but something they want to do and turning a cost center into a profit center. So, this is the

idea. And uh considering we talk a bit about the roles and how you try to provide this granularity compared to um yeah this black box, is there any um as you have so much history now in the industry, um, is there any trend that you see for the upcoming years of how the different market players provide solution providers that are relevant for fleets, um, how these are going to develop? Yeah, totally great question so. Here's the bad news. It will become even more complex than it

is already. Why is that? So, so if you talk to venture capital companies or investors and uh you introduce them into, you know, the, the uh the wonders of EV charging and all of these roles that we have just started to discuss being at the CPO, the back end, the rowing hub, the EMSP, all of these abbreviations, um. I think the setup as we see it nowadays for, in particular logistic use cases is not is not sufficient yet. That means if you talk to Classic software

providers coming from charging about logistic use cases, fleet use cases, you will not get sufficient answers for a lot of these needs that uh that logistic players already have. I'll give you one very easy example, that's booking and reservation. Uh, talk to big, uh, EMSPs in, in Europe and they will tell you reservation is not is not really helpful because they all come from passenger cars. They all think about ICE cars blocking the station and then you don't have, uh, and then you provide a bad

customer experience because you're the EV driver, uh, um, you know, sees basically is confronted with an ICE blocking the charging station. Of course, for, for privately owned depots that are, that are basically secured 24/7. Um, this use cases there, uh, there, there are no blocking IC cars for, for, for, for privately owned or for, for truck, truck, truck stations on, on privately owned grounds, right? And so this is urgently needed to, to have a booking solution to make sure that, you know, uh, I have my

router with my, with my e-truck. Every second counts, every kilowatt hour counts. I need to be 100% sure that this charging session will take place at a particular time. And so this is a critical feature, but this is just one out of many. We are currently also talking about the overall efficiency and Um, readiness of the value chain, uh, we are currently at about 85% success rate. On average, if you look at charging charging sessions, that means 15, on average, 50% of the charging sessions fail

or have an issue. 15, which is a crazy number, right? And this has even been worse a few years ago, uh, quite, quite a few popular examples, and it's been even worse in the US compared to Europe actually. Um, but this is of course the job as a whole industry starting from, of course, hardware manufacturers but also all the other layers to, to make this more, uh, uh, you know, make this more reliable and in particular talking about commercial use cases like, like logistic use cases

This is mission critical. I mean we can't deal with that situation uh any longer. And yeah, this is the job of of everyone in the market, but in particular the hardware and software players on a If you want to say on a uh if you want to look at a more macro perspective on what will happen, my personal take on it is that we will see two worlds merge that are currently completely disconnected to each other and This is the world of charging infrastructure, meaning charging

data, OCPP OCPI, and so on, and the world of vehicle data and dispatching logistic logistic data flows, so ramping systems, TMS and so on. And so currently they're disconnected so you uh for, for asset management of vehicles you might use a company like Webfleet or you know, use telematic solutions like Geotap. This is one side of the equation for charging infrastructure where you might use a back end like Monta or Vita or drives, and I think those two worlds will meet and to a certain extent

also compete. And uh then we'll see new services that are critical for, in particular the logistics sector, but this will also help private users um if you have the vehicle data like SOC, um, you know, the, the kilometers that that are uh that you already have like driven in your car, uh, uh, battery health, uh, you know, you name it, so many, so many cool things you can, you can basically. Uh, do with this data and, uh, uh, it's in the end of the day it

will be 1 + 1 equals 3, right? And this is, I guess the next level of also software players that will take care of this. Yeah, interesting and, and there's like in the industry I think currently also a debate on um if these immobility service providers as a role might disappear and more direct payments uh being taking over. Do you have an opinion on on that one? Yes, I do. Same here, um, you know, we have seen quite a lot of religious discussions in EV charging

one I mentioned, the one about peer to peer versus roaming hubs. I think both are wrong, so we will have peer to peer solutions and roaming hubs. So it's not either or, and I think it's the same for for smart energy and for uh smart smart energy and smart charging solutions, but also for payment and access. So a lot of people bet on. Ad hoc charging as a substitute for EMSP players for charging card providers. For the listeners, I think it's helpful to know that the

European Union has come up with a directive called AI Directive that basically mandates, in particular, DC charge point infrastructure players to provide a direct access without any kind of virtual provider charging card provider to be able to access and charge a charging station. And so this has led to the hypothesis that EMSPs are not needed anymore. If you look at the statistics, it's quite the opposite. So for Europe, where we have a functioning ecosystem of EMSPs and CPOs, the majority of users are still using EMSP

solutions, but of course there will be a coexistence also looking at ad hoc direct payment solutions because not everyone. Necessarily needs a registration with an EMSP if you only use it once or twice a year uh and and the rest you you you charge your car at home or at your employer, I guess uh you you you're not, you don't need to rely on an EMSP. What a lot of people get wrong in the industry though is that The user journey doesn't start with access and

payment. So access and payment is the tiniest part of the user experience. Also, technically, this is not so complicated. We are currently struggling with other things. We're struggling with correct point of interest like the correct data on where can I find the charger. And this sounds very simple, but sometimes if you drive an electric car, it can be quite, uh, it can be quite messy, challenging, um, and even more, of course, again talking about commercial vehicles, uh, you want to make sure that you find the

charging station and and uh uh you, you get routed to the charging station precisely, um, and, and then we talk about access, authorization, authentication, payment. So, and I think this is where immobility service providers really help uh because this is part of what they provide to the end consumer. But also later on if you want to talk about aggregation of um of vehicles to create something like a virtual power plant or to play around with flexibility services, this is your this is your ball game.

Yeah, it's the same thing here. You can tackle it from the infrastructure side, being a CPO or owning the meter, or you can tackle it from the vehicle side, uh, and consumer side, aggregating and consumers EV drivers as an EMSP. Same here. My, my take on it is that we will see both and they will coexist and it's not, it will not be a winnerex doll thing for the next 10 years.

Yeah, um, the opportunities with smart charging or bidirectional charging or virtual power plants, aggregators. Like different ways of talking about how to mm make sure that we can leverage the potential that is inside these vehicles of deferring the charging process or changing the charging process in a way that is uh not charging as fast as possible um since the moment you plug in uh so influencing it in a way so what is in your view um where lies the biggest potential is it in. But we

can, you can take it from different angles, be it from, um, from, uh, market, energy market or energy use case or more from a, from a fleet or, or, or charging use case. Yeah, um, I think to maybe consciously oversimplify. Also for the Lius, for the start at least. I always Separate Everything you can do to locally optimize a charging curve from. All the grid services, DSO services, TSO services. Um, Because Uh, optimizing a charging curve by peak cutting or, you know, just doing something with

the load curve to, for instance, pay less for your peaks or to make sure that all your electric vehicles at one location are charged at the right time, uh, that everyone gets the right amount of energy at the right time. This is the number one priority and already with unit, so-called unidirectional charging, that means we only charge the electric vehicle but we don't feed anything back to either the grid or or just you know, local battery or to a local facility. You can do, you can

do great things. Unfortunately what we see in the market is that. All those services, and you know this better than I do, but all those services for local optimization, for local smart charging. Uh, have been already been mixed up, you know, and then for the, for the consumer, it's quite hard to differentiate and, you know, in particular on a B2B level. What do I really get when I, when I, uh, you know, when I book a smart charging service, uh, from a, from a CPM as

a charge point management system, a backend system or an end to end service provider for charging. What's inside the box? So this is quite hard to differentiate and it gets even more messier, talking about the end game, talking about. Um, playing around with grid services, TSO, DSO services, and at some point, of course, um, making, making vehicle to grid bidirectional charging a thing. So for me, the magic, and it sounds quite trivial, but for me the magic lies in productization of these services and this is

where the industry is quite, is currently lacking in, right? So what do I get as a logistics player, talking about logistics again. What do I get as a private household, uh, as as the owner of a house, as the owner of a flat? What do I get if if I live in a multi-dwelling house? I'm just a tenant. Um, when we talk about local optimization, smart charging, what's the gain? Uh, do I save, uh, do I, do I, does it, does it do any good to

my electricity bill, um, or what is, what do I get and what do I pay for it? And I think. Again, Uh, starting with, uh, local optimization smart charging, I wanna see, uh, uh, uh, uh, I wanna see a concrete value proposition of, of service providers. I wanna, I wanna see this, uh, functionally and commercially and the same then for the more complex use cases talking about bidi bidirectional charging. Yeah, this brings me to a thought, uh, that has been on my mind as well lately

is, um, it's definitely very difficult as we are unpacking this complexity and, and. Having someone who is not in the in the day to day of handling this complexity necessarily understanding the complexity and there are like services like maybe you've heard of the Octopus Energy um they have like um they have um um basically a smart charging tariff where where you have a flat fee uh per kilowatt hour and it's a black box of what's happening within these smart charging. Service, um, and if you want

to boost charge then you have the, the, a much higher kilowatt hour price and then the question is does Octopus do a better job than a third party and then like will there be a benchmark like now, um, maybe AI benchmarks you see them all around Deep seek is. Better now than than OpenAI's latest model and and um I was thinking maybe something like that will will come up eventually where indeed if people claim they have the best uh energy management or smart charging service well

prove it in a in a benchmark um. Or or there there needs to be a certification sort of of this of the service because it's easy to claim and then you have maybe um um a very small type of um of product compared to the the variety of all the others inside products features all the features called the product that uh are required to to perform well. Yeah, totally. I mean the way I tackle it and uh. My favorite example always comes from like supporting venture

capital firms. Uh, looking into startups that are active in smart charging is if I talk to founders. Um, my question is quite simple. What are the unit economics? For your product and I wanna, I wanna see those unit economics per service per country. So, Which service do you provide in which country and how much money do you make or how much potential to save money do you guarantee your client and then of course, how do you productize it. Unfortunately, I would say 95% of the startups

have a quite vague answer and the reason for that is for this is quite obvious because as you know, energy markets are quite complex. Um, the way to do it in the Nordics where you have You know, almost 100% of the households are equipped with smart meters. It's just different to how you would do it in Germany, and then the marketplaces are quite complex and different, so. Uh, no pun intended, um, but This needs to be answered. If you really want to productize it to an

extent that you want to sell this to a client, you want to have traction, you need to productize it and and make this digestible and also understandable what's the concrete gain for, for the client and to be concrete, um, if you believe studies and now there are uh fortunately you mentioned, you mentioned one example, there are players out there, they already make money or have success stories out, we see success stories out there around smart charging. Uh, for the listeners, most experts talk about 1000 to

€3000 per per vehicle per year, uh, as a potential, if you want to say revenue stream, um, when we talk about smart charging and vehicle to grid, and this might lead to the fact that in 10 years you can make more money with your car than the cost of the car itself, which is pretty cool actually. I guess we are currently more on the €1000 side of things with what we see nowadays, but talking about verticalization, I think it will be super interesting on who, who

will be the winners of this game. You mentioned. Mentioned Octopus. We see quite a few players that bundle the intelligency for smart charging, which is mainly a software and trading game with um providing the electricity tariff. Um, so this is a way of verticalization. It seems to prove successful if you look at a few players, but there are also players that only do this as a pure software SARS game, SARS approach. Um, to not interfere with the interest of their, of their own clients, which, which

might be utilities, which might be energy companies, right? I think it also like with, with EV charging, um, over the last 10 years. We have seen that fight in EV charging of verticalization, horizontalization. I think we will see exactly the same now in smart charging, which will be super interesting and I I think there will be winners on, again, unfortunately, not the easy answer, but you will see winners on on both ends. So, so maybe it's linked to what we just discussed, um, yeah, you mentioned

that you're um uh also startup advisor and then not only for startups but also scale-ups and and bigger corporates. So mm maybe yeah for that topic but also broader in a in a in a strategy um or you can also take it from a from a mindset perspective of what you would say it takes what you've seen successful uh companies or founders uh do uh compared to others what you would recommend to to do yeah. Well, So I guess, I mean, again, taking the The venture

capital perspective here. Um, it all starts with the, with the quality of the team, with the people, uh, and from my experience, you have, if you have skin in the game, um, if you are a founder yourself or if you, uh, I mentioned we, we currently also work with quite a lot of family owned businesses. Um, my experience is that the skin in the game really helps to drive a thing and this is a competitive advantage compared to big corporations where obviously it's more about politics

and Uh, agility is, uh, the, the, the bigger the organization and the less skin you have in the game, the, the harder it gets to really drive something and be fast and really focus on, on what you want to achieve. Uh, but I think that's an, that's common sense, right? Um, if we look into. EV charging and smart energy as a thing, I think it's again really important to Understand on where you want to really be really good at and which battles you want to fight

and which battles you want to leave out exactly choosing the right knees, choosing, choosing on where you want to focus, hyper focus on these things because again talking about. Uh, the marriage of EV of the EV charging ecosystem and the fleet, SARS asset management ecosystem. I mean, you can get lost so easy by doing everything a little bit. So, I think nothing new here also, being really sharp on your value proposition and then execution, I think is key. Um, there are so many cool ideas out

there, um, both in the corporate world, but also looking at the startup ecosystem here in Europe or in the US and China. But successful farmers are great in building, building teams that can execute really fast and that obviously are also happy to fail fast and learn and stand up and do it again and again and again and again. Yeah, one thing that also, uh, caught my attention that I wanted to ask you, um, that is, that is related, uh, with, uh, Mike Johans we had as

a guest, uh, previously, uh, with Deaf Power and then was working at corporates with Ali, etc. um. And, and then he, he, he worked for Germ he's from Belgium originally but worked in a lot of in Germany and then he, the, the, the bottom line was, uh, yes, indeed startups are able to, to move faster and, and, uh, and have the impact but also Germany as a country he was uh he seemed to be a bit frustrated, um, and saying like maybe some other countries are

moving faster and then it's, it might make sense. Especially for the smart charging, etc. topic, uh, to, to, to try it out in other countries, do you have uh a similar view, uh, or, or actually you think Germany, even though you said, yeah, the, the, the some of the fundamental fundamental aspects like meters, uh, are still very much behind compared to other countries, we, we will be, uh, front runners in, in some of these topics. Well, I think the thing is looking at readiness for all

of these cool services that we just briefly discussed, um, Germany is definitely lagging behind as Germany is one of the last of the last places in the in the European charts. Uh, but at the same time it's the biggest economy in Europe and so it will have a role for sure. You can already do a lot of cool things without having smart meters in place, but, uh, now eventually the smart meter rollout has been decided on and there's a clear roadmap, you know, it better again

than I do on when we will see, uh, you know, a certain coverage of smart meters to do more on this, but I think. There's also no news. Most of the cool stuff, the cool services, the trailblazers in smart charging and smart energy are rather coming from the Nordics, um, or Benelux, uh, the Netherlands where, um, the level of regulation is a little bit more liberal, where we see, you know, higher density coverage of smart meters and a stronger appetite also I guess to. To innovate

in this uh in this context, but I think it's unstoppable, right? This will happen for all over Europe and we've seen it also in EV charging. I mean, everyone's talking about Norway, about when it comes to um the saturation. Of of electric cars and you know sales rates which are now close to 100%, which is super cool and definitely the number one pilot region in the world. But if you really want to position yourself as the, let's say ultimate at least winner for the midterm, uh

you have to focus on the core economies and so this is UK, this is Germany, uh this is uh uh France and and. Uh, if, if you only are successful in, uh, in a fraction of, of smaller countries, uh, uh, like the Nordics, this will not be enough, I guess, right? And in, uh, talking countries is one of the few last chapters, so to say today as we record this is, it is the, um, so called, uh, liberation day which I find ironic, yeah, so, um

where President Trump apparently. Uh, sees Europe being taking advantage of the US, which, uh, yeah, we can, we can see, uh, as a a question question behind it, question mark behind it, um. He has claimed EVs and renewables being a green scam and uh and then we see efforts I think um for example help support to build charging infrastructure or support buying EVs now being um yeah removed um how is your view on the on the US market development in the upcoming yeah near term midterm

future. Well, I would love to start talking about the long term, uh, long term future, uh. I do think the question on where we will. Move towards on the long term looking at both the energy but also mobility world is quite obvious because now the good news is that Um, I guess this, these decisions will be made in the, in the biggest economy of the world, and this is, uh, this is China looking at, uh, you know, where, uh, where we both have the most vehicles

but also see the biggest growth rates, growth rates, and so China has already made that decision, um, moving into electric cars and also looking at into renewable energy. Um, I think this is, this is. Different to the US. Um, A clear strategy in China, uh, and that's good for the whole market in general. If you look at what drives the market, I guess the easiest answer is also price and convenience. Looking at price on the long term, renewable energy will be cheaper all around the world

compared compared to fossil fuels, not even talking about the uh um the environmental questions which are, which should be much more considered already nowadays, right? But if you really talk about Uh, only the business, business aspects, uh, the, the ultimate source of electricity must be renewable just because of price, and this will drive the market. So I hope that this will rather be just a, a short term episode of, uh, in our history to basically pull back on this one in, uh in the biggest economy

of the world and uh and, and, and then, you know, making reasonable decisions again. But it's not, it's not a trend and it's not a, it's not a it's not a thing which you can even change with your right wing populist poli political strategy. It's something that will be decided it also. And that's good on an economical level, looking at what is the price per kilowatt hour for electricity and then of course for the well to wheel value chain looking at electric cars, we are already

there, right? The tipping point is already there. Electric cars will be cheaper, they will be cleaner, and they will be more fun to drive or they are more fun to drive. So I think we can hope that this will only be an episode. Uh, hopefully a short episode in, in the further development of electrification and renewable energies. Alright, yeah, same, same here. Um, Ethiopia is, is, uh, one very strange, um, animal in the sense of the people here or in the listeners might not have, uh

as a on top of mind of being the first country in the world that. Has actually banned the sale of um of uh internal combustion vehicles is there any other um example if you just move away from the typical hot spots that are being discussed upon that you think in the EV industry is being overlooked another country in the world, uh, that you think is worth highlighting. Hm, good question. I mean, it's probably a common example, but. What I think is striking is if you look

at Norway. If the incentives are right, and of course the Norwegian incentives looking at, you know, luxury taxes and so on, uh, the way they did it to promote electric cars, they are different and you cannot copy them one by 1 to 1 for like looking at other countries, but Uh, what was interesting and is still interesting, you know, is how smooth this transition was for everyone, for, for all, for all parts of society to move to, uh, to electric cars, and I mean. I think

this, this, this is a great example for for everyone who's still afraid of, you know, my mother, my grandmother, my grand grandmother should be should be able to drive electric and and and might might have any issues with it. I think um getting people in touch with the technology, getting people in touch with. Uh, and experiencing electric cars and, and I mean we now talk about electric cars. Ultimately we should get rid of cars, right? And ultimately we should come up with a more with a

smarter ecosystem for mobility and energy. Uh, but I think um if the incentives are right, uh, and, and, and this can of course be funding schemes, this can be tax, uh, uh, tax incentives, um. Yeah, try to lower the barrier and get people in touch with uh with the technology and the product as uh as soon as possible and, and, and this is not only for, for, you know, people like us who work in the realm of of technology but also. Everyone in in in society

I think this is, this is super critical and we should be, we should be much more, we should have much more courage on, on that one because I mean for the German economy it's obvious if we, if we will not be successful making this transition, we'll have a huge issue and so I'm also really doubting about the strategy to pull back on on 2035, uh, uh, you know, banning banning ICE cars. I think this will be. This will, the, the, the, the German car manufacturers, the

European car manufacturers will on the long term benefit a lot by to some point being forced into electrification and also mentioning they've done a pretty bad job over the last 10 years. Uh, it was not a thing where you needed to, to, to have a a a magical view into the glass bowl to know that this is coming and so I'm really in favor of also strong regulation on that one. Because otherwise we'll just be eaten up by Chinese car manufacturers in the first place and

you know this decision again is not is not cannot be made by by a separate country. Germany is way too small to talk about to to to only focus as a car manufacturer, as a service provider on Germany to be successful. You have to consider. The world as a whole and these decisions mainly will be made in in China and and and maybe second in the US, right, yeah, so, uh, uh, before we end, maybe you want to tell listeners how they can get in touch

with you or follow you or uh something you would like to highlight. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's easy to get in touch with us, just, uh, you know, uh, probably the easiest way is to, to, uh, uh, search for us on LinkedIn and just write us a message. Uh, yeah, we are interested in everything. In all projects where you want to ramp up something. From scratch. This can be a new business unit, this can be a new company, uh, this can be a partnership with

a strategic ally. This can be a client uh which you want to enable to do something new. So usually when it's about, you know, a blank page where you think about, OK, what could we do next, uh, in the realm of mobility and energy, this is, this is where we enjoy talking to. Um, to, to stakeholders in the, in the industry. And yeah, the The the focus is quite broad, I would say, right? So we have political entities um amongst our our customers. So we work

also for the German government for uh when it comes to questions regarding charging infrastructure. We have we've done projects for the Indian Ministry of Economy on on roaming, um, car manufacturers, utilities, but mostly scale-ups in the, in the field of services and software as a service. So, yeah, this is, this is what we enjoy and yeah, we're quite approachable. So always feel free to reach out to my team or me. Cool. Thank you, Thomas and yeah, talk to you soon. Thank you so much, Claudio. It

was great having uh being here and and talking to you about mobility and energy. Amazing what Thomas shared with us today. I was particularly Impressed by his very early engagement in the EV and energy transition back in the 2000s and um how he probably is a very uniquely placed to understand the space such with such detail with a large OEM working on the first EVs then transitioning to the first charger, business models and testing with ENBW, one of the largest um utilities. And then being the

manager and co-creator basically of one of the largest. Um, uh, yeah, players interconnecting everyone, and so then afterwards focusing on. Consulting in the space, strategically, operationally, so the, the, the scope of what he needs to understand and you could see it from the jargon shared with us, er CPMS OCPI OCPP roaming, MSP, etc. etc. and then his view on business models, innovation, startups, investments. Well, I hope um you enjoyed it as much as I did and. As usual, don't forget to, yeah, share the word and

um like the episode and ask comments or questions on LinkedIn or wherever. And stay tuned for the next episode.

Episode 8: Thomas Daiber - EV Transition, OEM Innovations, Charging Solutions, and Strategic Consulting

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