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

0:11 欢迎收听 Smart Charge by RiDERgy 播客。我是 Claudio Geyken,RiDERgy 的创始人兼首席执行官。这是你学习电动汽车和车队能源管理与智能充电创新的节目。

0:37 好的,感谢你今天能来,Thomas。你好吗?感谢邀请我,很好。柏林今天真是个大晴天,我得说这在最近可是挺罕见的。是啊,从现在开始我爱柏林了。没错,没错。那么,对于不认识你的听众，我们认识已经有一段时间了，也许你可以随意回溯到你想回顾的时间,或者按你感觉的方式来回答这个问题。

1:12 你是谁,是什么造就了现在的你?哇,这对开场来说是个相当大的问题。那么,我叫 Thomas。我在电气化、电动汽车充电和新出行领域工作了大约17年。2008年以一种典型的方式开始,作为一名德国南部的工程师,为一家德国汽车制造商，梅赛德斯工作,专注于电动汽车和氢能源汽车,这在当时是相当不寻常的,因为那时候

1:49 一切都围绕着内燃机。所以在2008年,你是少数几个做这件事的异类。但很有趣。我学到了很多关于如何用电动动力系统或氢动力系统替代内燃机动力系统的知识。然后我继续学习更多关于能源的知识,以及能源从哪里来的问题,在 EnBW 担任了几年产品经理,那段时间非常有趣,当时德国也许只有几

2:19 千辆电动汽车,2010年到2012年,摸索充电基础设施，商业化,可以说是打引号的商业化,对吧?第一批充电卡,第一批后台系统。是的,那时候我发现价值链中最重要的部分既不是能源也不是车辆,而是软件，充电基础设施背后的大脑、智能,是能源和出行未来背后的智能,

2:52 对吧?是的,这促使我最终在2013年支持在柏林创建了一个名为 Hubject 的漫游枢纽。

3:10 不,是独立的。所以我中间有一段插曲,主要作为顾问为保时捷工作,领域是车队电气化。我对那份工作并不太满意,而且说实话,那时候我对创始人、风险投资以及所有资金从哪里来完全没有概念。但是,我对企业界有点幻灭,尽管如此,我还是觉得,嗯,我跟踪了

3:42 Hubject 在 EnBW 的整个创立阶段,我认为这很有趣。我想从零开始体验初创公司的成长可能会很酷,尽管它是一家企业初创公司,对吧?有趣的是,我在2013年被聘为研发主管。大多数人认识我是作为首席执行官,是把公司做大的人之一,但实际上我是作为

4:10 Hubject 的研发主管开始的，与 EnBW 无关,只是一份独立的应聘。是的,很快之后我就被要求成为公司的首席执行官。是的。对于那些不了解的人来说,Hubject 是一个相当奇特的存在。现在你会称它为漫游枢纽,或电动车漫游枢纽,或充电基础设施枢纽。这家公司背后的想法实际上是连接充电基础设施网络,主要是在德国。这意味着如果你想在

4:40 2013年给你的电动汽车充电,你需要大约70或80张充电卡才能在德国给你的车充电。第一批股东认为这是个问题，相当广泛的一组股东,既有汽车制造商,包括宝马和当时的梅赛德斯-戴姆勒,两家电力公司 RWE 和 EnBW,以及两家科技公司西门子和博世，他们意识到,嗯,我们需要解决这个问题,但我们只能一起解决,我们需要

5:07 创造一种利益平衡。所以,想法是在德国完成这项工作,但我们一开始在德国完全失败了。德国还没准备好,或者对我们连接充电基础设施网络、统一充电体验、让电动汽车可以用一张充电卡充电的解决方案不感兴趣。所以这变成了一件国际性的事情。我们首先在邻国更成功,之后才

5:37 在德国取得成功，其实荷兰也不是第一个。荷兰在德国之后才加入,因为荷兰在漫游方面已经相当先进了,他们也不太赞成我们在做的事情,因为他们当时已经有了自己的漫游方案。所以奥地利实际上是第一个。瑞士来得很早,然后是芬兰、北欧国家，那是我的第一个目标市场，还有丹麦。后来才是德国。但这是教科书式的发展,

6:09 被嘲笑了两三年,然后在某个时刻体验到了网络效应。从那时起,销售周期变得相当快,与开始相比也更加直接。但是,这是一段有趣的旅程,我真的很享受做了六年多。最后在六年后创建了自己的公司，我们已经创建了这个在欧洲表现良好的公司,

6:42 第二个地理区域是日本。最后还有美国和中国的公司。六年后,我问自己:好的,我现在是这家做得相当不错的公司的首席执行官。在我们进入的大多数市场中,我们或多或少是垄断者,因为我们的竞争对手相当弱。所以我问自己,

7:10 好吧,我应该延续这段旅程吗?我从股东那里得到了一份相当不错的续约5年的邀约,我觉得这真的很令人受宠若惊。我们与股东之间有着相当紧密的联系,这是一种非常相互尊重的关系,但我最终决定做一些自己的事情。我来自一个创业家庭,我想创业DNA，这个问题:你想在余生都做一个职业经理人首席执行官吗,还是

7:37 你的人生,还是你想自己做点什么?，这个想法更强烈。所以最终促成了Cosmic Hat Group的创立,这也是我今天来到这里的原因。好的,现在我有很多问题。让我看看从哪里开始。那么也许让我们从开头说起。你从汽车主机厂起步,然后转入能源领域,接着基本上就去到了

8:04 两者的交叉点。那么离开主机厂的动机是什么?有些人一旦进入主机厂,就会一直待在那里。我想那时候这并不常见，完全不常见,对吧?是的,这是个很好的问题。所以我必须提一下,在我在梅赛德斯担任电动汽车和氢能源汽车项目经理的第一份工作之前,在我读书期间我在

8:33 弗劳恩霍夫研究所工作了4年。这是弗莱堡最大的太阳能研究所。我在那里工作几乎贯穿了整个学业,所以我一直与可再生能源有联系。同时我也做实习,已经在为汽车制造商工作。所以这个交叉点对我来说一直很有趣。与可再生能源和能源生产的联系总是比车辆更强。我从来都不是真正的汽车迷,

9:07 我今天都不拥有一辆车。所以这一直存在,但最终来说这是可能的，我当时加入梅赛德斯也是因为获得了一个MBA奖学金,基本上是由梅赛德斯资助的,所以这也只是一个在那里开始的机会。对我来说,这段旅程就是从了解电动汽车如何运作、有哪些部件开始的。我负责故障管理,特别是

9:42 氢能源B级车的故障管理,而且有，我可以告诉你，那时候那辆车有很多故障和问题。所以真正理解整车是相当有趣的。然后,你问到转型，具体来说,有个有趣的故事:当我告诉我当时的老板我想加入原力的另一边,也就是能源领域时,他有点嘲笑我,告诉我说,嗯,你现在在为

10:05 可能是世界上最性感的汽车制造商工作,而你现在想加入一家半公有的、超级不性感的公用事业公司。这就是当时能源供应商的形象，我想在某种程度上现在仍然是这样,对吧?所以这完全不受欢迎。对于当时的施瓦本汽车制造商来说,在那里工作一辈子是很常见的。比如,我的大哥，

10:36 他大我12岁，他已经在梅赛德斯工作超过25年了,我认为这是件相当酷的事情。所以那时候这就是常态。是的,但我对这个决定非常满意,因为它给了我真正体验更多的自由。当时的梅赛德斯已经是一个庞大的企业巨兽,而EnBW,让我惊讶的是,并没有那么庞大。所以我们在谈论大企业，这是你

11:05 提到的一点，然后是你家族中的创业DNA。也许你可以详细说明一下为什么你认为自己不是典型的企业人,以及家族DNA是如何塑造你的。是的,当然,当然。嗯,我不会说我对企业世界有问题或者我不适应。我想我今天可以说的是

11:33 我在与企业世界合作时感到相当舒适,但在创业和规模化企业世界中也是如此。我的家族最初是用木头制作各种不同的东西。我来自一个木匠家庭,第四代。我哥哥大概在15到20年前接手了。我有3个哥哥,第二大的哥哥接手了,这在他大概15岁的时候

12:04 就已经很清楚了。所以4个兄弟之间对于谁来做这件事并没有真正的争论。我的曾曾祖父很久以前就开始了整个事业,从那时起它就只是一个小村庄的木工坊，但这确实在某种程度上塑造了我,是的,如果你在一个家庭中长大,那里对于

12:37 工厂和家里发生的事情之间没有真正的分隔,所以它在某种程度上差不多是一回事。我想这真的会塑造你。而且我认为从长远来看,对我来说成为企业家或自己做点什么总是很清楚的,但这在一个你知道的、世界仍然还不错的地区长大也不是真正的常态。这是德国最富裕的地方之一,是没有失业的地方之一。

13:07 那里有很多中小企业,像勃林格殷格翰或莱帕这样的大公司,所以。在那里创办自己的企业不是真正的常态,我想,至少绝对不是作为一个软件企业家。所以是的,我不会从零开始就创业。所以我更多地走的是无聊的经典道路,我想,在做自己的事情之前为大型

13:33 汽车制造商和公用事业公司工作。

13:40 你的关键收获是什么，你记在心里的东西,你认为是亮点的?也许还有故事?嗯,我可能可以写一本书了。我的意思是,首先,我对那个阶段感到无比感激,尽管那是大量的血汗和泪水。连续6年每周工作7天每天24小时,建立起一家现在仍然在

14:11 三个不同大洲活跃、发展良好、最终盈利的公司,这在电动汽车充电软件领域仍然很罕见。所以,在31岁时被任命为CEO是非常特别的事情,而我从这个阶段得到的经验教训仍然对我帮助很大。从哪里开始呢?我的意思是,我想我

14:41 在一开始提到的，勇气,在某种程度上,也是天真,尽管是一个企业的孩子，在相当早的阶段就在其他地理位置、其他地区传播信息,并真正相信那种网络效应。我认为这是我们承担的一个风险,我们相信它,但也如我所说,带着一定程度的天真。所以我给你举个例子。当时,当我在

15:19 在北欧的销售额相当可观,我开了一次董事会,股东们问我,谁是新客户,销售方面有什么最新进展。我当时说,嗯,我挺高兴的,我在芬兰跟一家小公司签下了第一单,一家只有两个人的公司。他们就问,你在芬兰干什么?你知道吗,你应该在德国做好你的本职工作。那家当时只有两个人的公司现在叫做

15:46 Virta,现在是欧洲最大的参与者之一。我认为他们受益于网络效应,我们也一样受益。所以在最开始的时候这其实并不是那么必要,因为那是一场关于覆盖范围和你平台上有多少个充电桩的数字游戏,当然还有质量以及技术、法律和商业框架,这些基本上是连接充电基础设施所必需的。所以每个国家的每一个充电桩

16:17 都有助于在某个时刻为网络效应创造足够的杠杆作用,这是一个巨大的经验教训。因为当然你可以读到相关内容，学术界有很多关于网络效应和产生网络效应的不同模型的研究。但如果你亲身经历,那是完全不同的事情。我还想说,如果你看看过去几年发生的事情,那就是充电基础设施领域曾经传奇公司的大规模消亡。

16:50 他们中的大多数都将自己定位为垂直整合型参与者。比如EV Box,最近还有Landis+Gyr，名单很长。还有New Motion，其中一些被收购了,主要是被石油公司或汽车制造商收购。但他们中的大多数都将自己定位为垂直整合型参与者。那么这意味着什么呢?他们相信提供端到端的解决方案,包括硬件、软件和服务。而Hubject对我们来说则恰恰相反。

17:27 我们一直很清楚,我们只想将自己定位为一个市场平台和B2B层。这有时候很艰难,因为只需轻轻一按开关就可以变成一个EMSP，电动出行服务提供商，销售充电卡,把B2B业务变成B2C或B2B2C业务,提供充电卡和充电应用程序,然后当然就拥有了最终消费者。但我认为对我们来说一直很清楚的是,这

17:57 永远不会是我们的道路,直到今天Hubject仍然是纯粹的B2B业务,一个纯粹的市场生态系统。我认为这是一个明智的决定,因为有了这个战略,我们可以保持精简,我们可以专注于我们真正强大的核心领域,而不会在所有竞争战斗中迷失方向，无论是在后端层面、充电后端层面,还是EMSP层面。所以我认为

18:27 这毕竟是正确的战略,尽管多年来其他一些参与者在短期内要成功得多。但从长期来看并非如此,因为我认为将精力集中在所有这些战斗上对很多参与者来说都相当艰难。所以有一件事我非常感兴趣,特别是也许对听众来说，这些漫游平台,正如你所说,它们是让充电桩运营商

18:56 和所谓的充电卡、MSP,或者你用来激活充电会话的应用程序，以更精简的方式连接起来的关键。那么,当你创办Hubject时,你是如何从电信行业获得灵感的呢?你还记得当时的设置是怎样的吗?所以从历史的角度,或者从类比的角度来看,你能从电信或其他有类似设置的行业学到什么,特别是在现在也有很多批评的情况下

19:28 针对当前的设置,认为从长远来看它可能成本太高?也许你对我们如何能做得更好,或者什么样的设置会比我们目前拥有的更好,也有一些想法。是的,完全正确,这是一个很好的问题。首先,公平地说,尽管我认为企业人士称自己为联合创始人或创始人是相当流行的,但Hubject从来不是一家由

19:57 创业者创立的公司。它是由德国工业界的六家重量级企业创立的。而且它源于，现在很多人已经不知道了，但它实际上源于一个名为Green Emotion的资助研究项目。当时,IBM是该项目的主要推动者,后来成为了某种意义上的竞争对手,但不太成功。德国汽车制造商也参与了这个项目,他们已经开发了一个漫游平台的想法,或多或少

20:28 受到电信行业的启发,但他们不被允许将其商业化。所以这就是他们决定的时刻,好吧,我们能否在研究项目资助之外将其提升到商业层面?这导致了Hubject当时的共同创建。事实上,与电信有很多类比之处，特别是网络、电网的分离。我认为我们现在有三个电信网格,或者说三个电信网络,如果

21:01 我没记错的话,在德国。但我们有数百家移动电话服务提供商，你知道,你可以在超市买到,德国有AliTalk或Lidl。这些都是不拥有任何网络的虚拟提供商。所以这个想法是想出类似的东西,当然也是由汽车制造商的战略利益驱动的，拥有电动汽车驾驶员,或者为客户提供一个好的答案:嘿,我在哪里

21:31 可以给我的电动汽车充电,以及如何充电，我需要一个应用程序吗?我只需要插上插头,一切都会自动发生吗?当时没有这个答案,而且,如果你对第一批电动汽车进行神秘顾客调查,那是很糟糕的。你得不到一个恰当的答案。有时甚至经销商的人会对你撒谎,告诉你如何给电动汽车充电。所以最终他们创建了

21:56 Hubject,当时的定位，现在仍然主要是这样,这与电信行业不同,我待会儿会解释原因，主要是作为一个连接性参与者。Hubject的核心工作基本上就是确保你能找到下一个充电站:聚合充电站的兴趣点数据、静态和动态数据，首先,找到充电站或引导你到正确的位置,提供数据,然后获得访问权限,

22:35 而获得访问权限总是意味着提供互操作性,也就是说如果你使用宝马的充电卡,你可以在意昂的充电站充电,比如说。所以这是一个核心用例，让不同的充电实体之间能够实现:即终端消费者一侧所谓的eMobility服务提供商,提供充电卡和充电应用,以及基础设施一侧所谓的CPO(充电点运营商)。最后确保所有需要的数据能够

23:05 打开充电站并授权消费者、电动汽车驾驶员,然后与所有各方交换这些交易信息，这过去是、现在仍然是漫游平台和Hubject的核心工作。当然,与此同时你可以深入探讨金融服务、清算、计费、结算、对账、债务催收，所有这些。所以我认为Hubject创建一个拥有BaFin许可证的实体,现在称为

23:39 Hubject Financial Services,这是一个非常酷且明智的举措。我认为这一直是个计划,而且我认为深入金融交易世界的时机也不算完美。但回到电信行业的比较:电信行业的清算所主要只负责金融交易,而Hubject只负责连接服务,现在他们正在将业务范围扩展到金融服务。但我们从电信运营商那里学到了很多,而且

24:06 在最初如果你和沃达丰或德国电信交谈,这也挺有趣的,他们当时也是参与者,因为在早期很多电信提供商都尝试作为eMobility服务提供商碰碰运气。他们说,请做得比我们最初做得更好,因为清算所作为连接层来实现这个想法对电信运营商来说并没有成功,据我

24:37 了解,这导致了大量双边连接和不同服务质量的混乱局面,还有,你知道的,

24:46 电信行业?是的,据我了解,电信行业有几家清算所。其中一家我们也有合作。是一家来自以色列的公司。不好意思,我得承认我忘记名字了。但类似于电动汽车漫游的只有少数几家;只有少数几家参与者在做这项工作,处理数百万笔交易并进行清算

25:15 清算这些交易,但主要只是作为金融层面。是的,我想金融行业也是如此,可能在不同行业有类似之处。但不在那里深入探讨太多细节了，然后,是的,这可能是一个非常行业特定的问题,但在这个背景下仍然相关:有这样一家新创公司叫IAI,我认为它正试图革新这种通信层、连接层的工作方式。你对此有什么看法,特别是它与

25:46 Hubject的比较以及这样一家新创公司的相关性?当然,是的,我认为这会非常有趣,我认为每一个为漫游世界带来新鲜空气的新参与者都对电动汽车充电生态系统有好处,我对IAI也会这么说。我认为他们在融资方面也做得很好。我的意思是,我们看到很多电动汽车

26:17 充电领域的参与者都在挣扎,所以筹集大约1000万我认为是一项成就。所以祝贺他们。这家公司有趣的地方在于,它基本上在某种程度上利用了市场叙事,即那些已建立的领先漫游参与者，只有三家:如前所述的Hubject;Gireve,可以说是法国版本;以及来自比荷卢地区的eCleaning.net。在德国,对吧?Gireve主要是法国和西欧,

26:51 是的,但主要是法国。关于领先漫游平台的共同叙事，在一定程度上我认为这也是正确的，是它们相当昂贵,而且它们想要创造某种技术锁定。这基本上来自于每年按车辆收取固定费用,与交易数量无关。而IAI正是在这一点上定位,说我们想要让连接民主化,我们想要通过免费提供这项服务来发展网络

27:34 然后稍后在，可以说，更酷的东西上自愿向客户收费,比如金融清算、智能充电,以及所有可以叠加的酷服务。我认为这是个很好的想法,而且我认为,如果你看看很多网络，我的意思是,我想我们都知道Facebook的例子，是如何增长的,就是这项服务免费提供了多年,在某个时候他们找到了如何用它赚钱的方法,而且

28:02 我认为这或多或少是相同的策略。所以我认为这很令人兴奋,我认为这很酷,而且我认为这也会帮助主要的漫游平台稍微加快步伐，它们现在也是大公司了,对吧?，更加集中精力并更加敏捷一些。同时,当然,我认为在三到四年内我们会对这将如何运作

28:29 了解更多,也包括EApi和其他几家定位相当相同的参与者。因为我想在你真正将其商业化并启动开关的时候,你也会成为一个中间件,对吧?所以这是漫游之争，漫游论点一直是在集中式漫游枢纽之间,一种集中式方法，你知道,一个赢者通吃的模式,采用集中式枢纽来聚合,而且它们聚合得越多,聚合的质量越好,

29:03 它们获得的谈判筹码就越大,对吧?现在,我们看到了OCPI的兴起，抱歉有很多缩写,但这就是电动汽车充电领域的现状,我们会为播客提供一个术语表。但随着OCPI的兴起，对听众来说,这是一个能够在点对点层面实现漫游的协议,基本上去掉了中间商;在这种情况下,中间商就是Hubject，随着OCPI的兴起,一直以来

29:33 都有一个问题:你还需要漫游平台吗?你需要中间商吗,还是想通过双边方式来做,去掉中间商?我有点偏见,因为我在Hubject工作了相当长一段时间,但我认为拥有一个中间商有很多好处,特别是它负责质量保证并提供一套一致的服务。但我们可以深入

29:59 探讨这个问题，这相当技术性。但当然点对点参与者也有生存空间。所以这一直是个大问题:你是站在点对点这边还是站在中心枢纽这边?我认为对我来说这不是非此即彼的选择。我认为两种方式都有一些好处,但我确实认为,特别是对于像Stadtwerke或德国公用事业公司这样的小型参与者

30:24 或者在法国的较小公用事业参与者，你需要为他们提供一个聚合平台。在双边层面上连接是没有意义的。但我的观点是,一旦你想要扳动开关,基本上作为一个中心化枢纽来赚钱，无论是在金融交易上,还是在smart charging上，你就成为了中间件,而一旦你成为中间件,可能就不再具有积极的含义了,而且你还

31:00 控制着,你也自然而然地创造了某种锁定,对吧?我认为这对于像IApi这样的参与者来说也将是一个有趣的点。首先,要聚合足够的关键质量,但我认为从我所看到的,他们做得很好,而且创始人也相当聪明、有智慧。他们在这方面做得很好,但关键质量很重要,然后当然还要执行漫游服务,然后确保

31:28 目前占主导地位的漫游中心的命运不会成为他们的命运，成为每个人都想去掉的中间件。无论如何,谢谢你的分享。那么转到Cosmicat:你说你几年前就开始做这个了,我了解到你已经运营了相当多种类的服务和项目。也许你可以分享一下Cosmicat背后的本质，为什么要做,你想要实现什么

32:00 什么,你已经实现了什么,并分享一些你特别自豪或认为值得强调的故事或项目。是的,当然。Cosmicat基本上是一个小型朋友团体,主要是在Hubject或Hubject周围认识的,现在仍然是朋友,仍然在一起工作，这已经是12年前的事了。Cosmicat背后的理念是为新出行和新能源服务创建一个战略精品咨询公司。这意味着,通过Hubject

32:44 将数百个参与者连接到枢纽,将数千个充电站连接到枢纽,我们在电力生产、公用事业、汽车制造商、软件参与者、CPO、EMSP等领域看到了很多。当然,我们设法创建的网络，因为Hubject的销售周期相当艰辛,特别是在开始阶段，相当诱人,基本上可以稍微扩展我们的足迹,不仅仅谈论

33:22 充电,而是为你所说的出行和能源的未来创建一个战略咨询公司。这个想法是做的不仅仅是电动汽车充电,不仅仅是电气化,还关注车队的数字化,关注车辆作为移动计算机以及你可以用它做的所有很酷的事情,将出行视为一种服务而不仅仅是硬件销售驱动的业务，这仍然是我们的游乐场。所以Cosmicat集团的核心

33:58 基础业务是提供战略支持,特别是为那些想要在出行和能源交叉领域从零开始做一些新事情的组织。这导致了一个相当有趣的客户和合作伙伴群体，当然从最明显的开始,汽车制造商,这是我们的起点。但也有能源参与者。我想现在的主要目标群体实际上是家族企业的规模化公司

34:38 或者创始人主导的正在扩大足迹的组织，在地理上扩张或扩展他们的服务组合。所以这就是我们作为基础业务每天所做的事情。我自己也一直在深入研究资金来源。我提到过:在Hubject,我们有6个创始股东,都是战略股东,都是大公司。然后第7个是2016年的大众汽车,第

35:14 8个是2018/2019年的Enel。所以我想通过Cosmicat学习，我的想法也是更多地了解风险投资和私募股权。这已经成为我们现在正在做的事情的第二个支柱:关于并购、融资、尽职调查，既为投资者,即风险投资公司和私募股权公司,也支持创始人找到合适的匹配,找到合适的投资者。但只

35:48 专注于我们擅长的领域，出行和能源。我们确实认为这是咨询和并购业务的未来。我不相信通用服务提供商,特别是当我们谈论早期阶段公司时。所以这就是我们正在做的事情。很好,非常清楚。也许为了让它更具体,你能为这两个支柱各举一个故事或一个

36:20 具体问题吗?如果你能说出公司名称就更好了。是的,当然,有很多例子。

36:33 所以现在对听众来说可能比较有趣的是,我们一直在与物流领域的参与者合作,帮助他们实现车队电动化。而且可能会让一些听众感到意外的是,卡车或长途运输车辆的电动化一直相当有趣,并且正在加速发展。所以我们为这些参与者所做的是一件不同的事情。它始于一个问题:如何为电动卡车充电。如果你驾驶一辆电动卡车

37:17 并想要使用它，驾驶它，大部分时间,你一年可以达到500兆瓦时的电力消耗。这大约相当于125户家庭的用电量。与乘用车不同的另一点是,所有这些商业案例都是相当可规划的:你知道这些卡车去哪里,你可以计算路线。但如果你想计算路线,你需要一些参数，比如卡车有多重,你知道

37:50 卡车动力系统的关键绩效指标是什么,天气条件如何,当然你还想确保可以在目的地的场站或附近某处为卡车充电。所以这对我们来说一直是一个相当有趣的领域,我们来自乘用车领域,特别是私人乘用车,那里所有这些使用场景都非常多样化,在一定程度上很难规划。因为如果你和朋友谈论电动汽车,话题一直都是关于

38:17 比如,"我不确定是否应该买,因为我一年一次想开车去意大利,800公里。"但大多数时候你用它来通勤,通常每天开不到40公里,对吧?所以卡车就不同了。一切都是可计算的，每一度电都是可计算的,每条路线都是可计算的，所以商业案例相当透明。所以我们现在所做的就是帮助这些公司

38:43 在整个生命周期内更精确地计算车辆的总体拥有成本,但特别是也帮助他们支持充电基础设施的扩建。通常情况下,与传统的乘用车项目不同,你已经有相当复杂的电力系统在运行。这意味着如果你与大型物流公司在他们的场站交谈,他们中的大多数都有庞大的设施，他们在这些厂房、这些

39:19 场站的顶部有太阳能发电。他们中的一些甚至有风力发电场。他们中的很多都有本地电池储能,因为这些已经是相当能源密集型的业务，例如,有很多冷却系统。而我们介入来支持他们,考虑什么是正确的规模,研究充电站,你在哪里放置这些充电器,你需要什么样的服务提供商。我们特别帮助他们审查服务提供商,这对于

39:55 从未这样做过的公司来说相当困难,因为从外部看,特别是软件公司,它们现在看起来都一样,对吧?过去几年他们在差异化方面做得不太好。所以我们支持他们找到合适的参与者、合适的战略合作伙伴,从规划和安装开始，挖洞、连接线路，HPC充电硬件以及AC充电。软件仍然是,我认为,其中最关键的部分,还有

40:25 能源管理、smart charging,以及希望很快能实现的V2G服务。非常有趣。所以,如果我理解正确的话,你们确实有一个广泛的范围，从大型企业的战略决策,如果我理解正确的话,这将是一个范围,然后在运营层面上,如何更好地规划场站,要考虑哪些其他因素,以及审查服务提供商等等。完全正确。我的意思是,如果你有幸能真正从战略层面开始，但很多

41:01 物流领域的参与者,我真的很喜欢这一点,都相当务实。所以对他们来说,战略这个词非常接近执行,这很酷。但如果你想谈战略,你通常会问:电动化对你的车队扮演什么角色?比如说到2030年,你的车队中电动车辆的百分比是多少,你打算如何实现?我们帮助你实现这一目标,计算这会对你的业务产生什么样的影响

41:32 ，而且不仅仅看车辆本身。你知道,一辆长途卡车的价格是燃油卡车的3到4倍。但特别是还要看电力和充电基础设施。当然,有趣的是,几年前市场上的普遍说法是,电动化对于最后一公里配送、轻型电动车、电动厢式货车来说很酷，但长途运输将是遥远未来的事,而且

42:02 每个人都在谈论长途运输的氢能源。而现在这完全改变了。我可以告诉你,如果你设法控制电价,你可以在很短的时间内就创造出正的总体拥有成本。这意味着我们有客户的目标是尽快

42:39 电动化他们的卡车车队,并对此非常积极进取。这是我3到5年前没有预见到的,我必须承认。

42:48 当然,补贴仍然发挥作用，碳信用额度，当然现在随着新政府的组建,希望是越早越好。人们和行业都希望获得新的补贴,但从长远来看,主要的驱动因素将是真正控制电价。有人说,如果你相信研究报告,关键的里程碑是低于每度电35欧分,而且

43:26 一些公司可能在2到3年内就会实现正的总体拥有成本,其他公司则在5到10年内，这真的取决于你在充电基础设施和电力交易方面做得有多好。但要做到这一点,你必须增加对充电的了解,你必须增加对充电和电力整个价值链的了解,我认为这是每个人都在

43:54 现在他们在物流行业加大了力度。是的,特别是当我们谈到物流时,我觉得有趣的一点是价值链并不直接，很难理解谁对什么负责。我也很想听听你对此的看法。特别是单车卡车主,拥有很少几辆卡车的公司，这些人可能更难真正实现转型,或者有时间来规划向电动出行的转型。我猜你们主要是在和规模稍大的中小企业,甚至是像DHL这样能够应对并规划转型的大型

44:23 公司对话,对吗?是的,所以通常当我们谈论充电、卡车充电以及电力来源时,当我们作为战略顾问介入时,情况差不多都是一样的。物流企业，我并不是在评判这一点，他们

45:03 会通过与提供电动汽车充电端到端服务的企业合作来追求快速成效。这意味着那些控制从规划、安装到硬件、软件、服务、交易、充电卡等一切的企业。当然,它的优点是,如果他们做得好,作为客户的你会很轻松,因为你可以从一个企业那里得到一切,一站式服务,开箱即用。但同时,对你来说这也是一个黑盒子。所以这样做的学习

45:34 曲线是相当值得怀疑的。你会失去对自己所做事情的很多控制权,特别是如果你是一家较大的物流公司,这将成为一个关键因素。因此,通常我们做的是在一开始就专注于知识转移:价值链中有哪些不同的角色,它们为价值创造增加了什么，比如谈论软件后端,比较硬件解决方案,例如

46:09 Alpitronic、Kempower或Energetica充电桩之间有什么区别。并确保我们能在几个月内找到一个真正能够深入研究技术、成本驱动因素、收益驱动因素的组织,然后从那里开始为每个特定客户审查合适的服务提供商,确保符合他们各自的规模。当然,如果你是一家只有两辆卡车的物流公司,把一切都分开然后与后端、硬件制造商等分别签订合同是没有意义的

46:43 端到端的解决方案当然有其优势。但对于大型企业,我们的战略主要是分离价值链的这些部分,然后与客户一起决定什么是实现我们目标的正确战略,以及谁是合适的合作伙伴。而在大多数情况下

47:09 坦白说,存在很多搁浅资产。有很多搁浅资产,因为做出了错误的决定,在技术和合同方面都缺乏控制，这是我们想要与客户一起改变的。在最好的情况下,不仅将充电基础设施视为他们必须做的事情,而是他们想要做的事情,并将成本中心转变为利润中心。这就是

47:38 我们的想法。考虑到我们已经谈了一些关于角色的内容,以及你们如何尝试提供这种颗粒度,相比黑盒方法，鉴于你在这个行业的经历,你是否看到未来几年与车队相关的不同市场参与者和解决方案提供商将如何发展的趋势?是的,当然，好问题。坏消息是:它将变得比现在更加复杂

48:12 为什么会这样?如果你和风险投资公司或投资者交谈,向他们介绍电动汽车充电的奇妙之处,以及我们刚刚开始讨论的所有角色，CPO、后端、roaming hub、EMSP,所有这些缩写，我认为我们现在看到的设置,特别是对于物流用例来说,还不够充分。这意味着如果你与来自充电行业的传统软件

48:46 提供商谈论物流用例和车队用例,对于物流企业已经存在的许多需求,你不会得到充分的答案。我给你举一个非常简单的例子:预订和预约。与欧洲的大型EMSP交谈,他们会告诉你预约并不是很有用,因为他们都来自乘用车领域。他们都在考虑燃油车占用充电站的问题,然后你会提供糟糕的

49:14 客户体验,因为电动汽车驾驶员会遇到燃油车占用充电站的情况。当然,对于24小时受保护的私有停车场,在私有场地上的卡车充电站不会有占位的燃油车,对吧?所以迫切需要有一个预订解决方案,以确保

49:49 电动卡车的驾驶员，对他们来说每一秒都很重要,每一度电都很重要，可以百分之百确定充电会在特定时间进行。这是一个关键功能,但只是众多功能之一。我们目前还在讨论整个价值链的整体效率和就绪程度。如果你查看充电会话,我们目前的平均成功率约为85%，这意味着平均有15%的充电会话失败

50:27 或出现问题。15%,这是一个疯狂的数字,对吧?而且这在几年前甚至更糟,有不少流行的例子,实际上美国的情况比欧洲还要糟糕。但这当然是整个行业的工作,从硬件制造商开始,也包括所有其他层面,让这变得更可靠,特别是在谈论像物流用例这样的商业用例时。

50:57 这是至关重要的使命。我的意思是,我们不能再继续应对那种情况了。是的,这是市场上每个人的工作,但尤其是硬件和软件厂商的工作。如果你想从更宏观的角度看看会发生什么,我个人的看法是,我们将看到目前彼此完全脱节的两个世界融合在一起。这是充电基础设施的世界,意味着充电

51:35 数据、OCPP、OCPI等等,以及车辆数据和调度物流数据流的世界,比如路线规划系统、TMS等等。目前它们是脱节的,所以对于车辆资产管理,你可能会使用像Webfleet这样的公司,或者像Geotab这样的远程信息处理解决方案。这是等式的一边;对于充电基础设施,你可能会使用像Monta、Virta或Driivz这样的后台,我认为这两个世界将会相遇,并在一定程度上

52:10 也会竞争。然后我们将看到对物流行业特别关键的新服务,但这也将帮助私人用户。如果你有车辆数据,比如电量、你在车里已经行驶的公里数、电池健康状况等等，你基本上可以用这些数据做很多很酷的事情,归根结底

52:41 将是1加1等于3,对吧?我想,这就是软件厂商要处理的下一个级别。是的,很有趣。而且行业内现在也有一场争论,关于电动出行服务提供商作为一个角色是否可能会消失,更多直接支付方式会接管。你对这个问题有看法吗?是的,我有。这里也一样。你知道,我们在电动汽车充电领域见过很多宗教式的讨论，

53:12 我提到的一个,关于点对点与漫游中心的讨论。我认为两者都不对,所以我们将同时拥有点对点解决方案和漫游中心，这不是非此即彼的问题。我认为对于智能能源和smart charging解决方案来说也是如此,但对于支付和接入也是一样。很多人把临时充电押注为EMSP厂商、充电卡提供商的替代品。对于听众来说,我认为了解一下会有帮助,

53:46 欧盟提出了一项名为AFIR指令的指令,基本上要求,特别是直流充电站基础设施厂商提供直接接入,不需要任何虚拟提供商或充电卡提供商就能接入和使用充电站充电。因此这导致了一种假设,即不再需要EMSP。如果你看统计数据,情况恰恰相反。所以在欧洲,我们有一个运作良好的EMSP和CPO生态系统,大多数用户仍在使用EMSP

54:25 解决方案,但当然会与临时直接支付解决方案共存,因为不是每个人都必然需要注册EMSP,如果你一年只使用一两次,其余时间你在家里或在雇主那里给车充电，你不需要依赖EMSP。不过,行业中很多人搞错的是,用户旅程并不是从接入和

54:58 支付开始的。接入和支付是用户体验中最微小的一部分。从技术上讲,这也不是那么复杂。我们目前正在与其他事情作斗争。我们正在努力获取正确的兴趣点数据，关于我在哪里能找到充电器的正确数据。这听起来很简单,但有时如果你开电动汽车,可能会相当混乱、相当具有挑战性。更不用说,当然,谈到商用车，你想确保你能找到

55:34 充电站,并且能精确地导航到充电站。然后我们谈论接入、授权、认证、支付。我认为这就是电动出行服务提供商真正有帮助的地方,因为这是他们向最终消费者提供的服务的一部分。但是后来,如果你想谈论聚合车辆以创建类似虚拟电厂的东西,或使用灵活性服务,这就是你的主场了。

56:12 是的,这里也是一样的。你可以从基础设施方面着手,作为CPO或拥有电表,或者你可以从车辆方面和消费者方面着手,作为EMSP聚合电动车驾驶员。这里也一样，我的看法是,我们将看到两者并存,在接下来的10年里不会是赢家通吃的局面。

56:35 是的,smart charging或双向充电或虚拟电厂、聚合商的机会，不同的说法来谈论如何确保我们能够利用这些车辆内部的潜力,推迟充电过程或以某种方式改变充电过程,而不是从你插入的那一刻起尽可能快地充电,所以以某种方式影响它。在你看来,最大的潜力是什么?是在，但我们

57:09 你可以从不同角度来看,可以是从能源市场或能源用例的角度,或者更多是从车队或充电用例的角度。我认为,也许是有意过度简化，也是为了听众,至少在开始时，我总是把你可以做的所有本地优化充电曲线的事情与所有电网服务、DSO服务、TSO服务分开。因为通过削峰或只是对

57:58 负载曲线做些什么来优化充电曲线，例如,为你的峰值支付更少的费用,或者确保在一个地点的所有电动车在正确的时间充电,每个人在正确的时间获得正确的能量，这是首要任务。而且已经通过所谓的单向充电,也就是说我们只给电动车充电,但我们不把任何东西反馈给电网、本地电池或本地设施,你就可以

58:31 做出伟大的事情。不幸的是,我们在市场上看到的是,所有这些服务，你比我更了解这一点，所有这些用于本地优化、本地智能充电的服务已经被混在一起了。对于消费者来说,很难区分,特别是在B2B层面:当我从CPMS，

58:59 充电桩管理系统、后台系统或充电端到端服务提供商那里预订智能充电服务时,我到底得到了什么?盒子里装的是什么?这很难区分,而且当谈到终极目标时,情况会变得更加混乱，谈论电网服务、输电系统运营商和配电系统运营商服务,当然,在某个时候让V2G双向充电成为现实。所以对我来说,魔力，这听起来很简单，在于这些服务的产品化,而这正是

59:35 行业目前所欠缺的。作为一个物流企业，再次谈到物流，我能得到什么?作为一个私人家庭,作为房屋的所有者,作为公寓的所有者,我能得到什么?如果我住在多户住宅中,我只是个租户,我能得到什么?当我们谈论本地优化和智能充电时,收益是什么?它对我的电费账单有好处吗,或者我能得到什么,我又要为此支付什么?我认为,从本地优化和智能充电开始,我希望看到服务提供商提供一个具体的价值主张，在功能上和商业上，然后对于围绕双向充电的更复杂的使用场景也是如此。是的,这让我想到了最近一直在我脑海中的一个想法,

1:00:04 那就是确实非常困难，当我们解开这种复杂性时，让一个不在日常处理这种复杂性的人必然理解它。有些服务,比如,也许你听说过Octopus Energy,他们基本上有一个智能充电电价,每千瓦时有一个固定费用,而智能充电服务内部发生的事情是一个黑盒。如果你想

1:00:31 进行快速充电,那么每千瓦时的价格会高得多。那么问题是:Octopus是否比第三方做得更好?最终会不会有一个基准，就像你现在到处看到的AI基准,DeepSeek比OpenAI的最新模型更好?我在想,也许最终会出现类似的东西,如果人们声称他们拥有最好的能源管理或智能充电服务,

1:01:04 你必须在基准测试中证明它。或者需要对服务进行某种认证,因为声称很容易，然后你可能拥有一个与其他产品内部各种功能相比非常狭窄的产品,而所有这些功能都是良好表现所必需的。是的,完全正确。我处理它的方式，我最喜欢的例子总是来自支持风险

1:01:35 投资公司研究活跃于智能充电领域的初创公司，当我与创始人交谈时,我的问题很简单:你产品的单位经济效益是什么?我希望看到每项服务、每个国家的单位经济效益。你在哪个国家提供哪项服务,你赚了多少钱,或者你向客户保证能节省多少钱,以及你如何将其产品化?不幸的是,我会说95%的初创公司

1:02:06 有一个相当模糊的答案,原因很明显:能源市场很复杂。在几乎100%的家庭都配备了智能电表的北欧地区的做法,与在德国的做法完全不同,市场相当复杂且各不相同。双关语无意,但这需要得到回答。如果你真的想将其产品化到

1:02:45 一定程度,想将其出售给客户并获得吸引力,你需要将其产品化,使其易于理解,并让客户明白具体的收益是什么。具体来说，如果你相信研究,而且幸运的是,正如你提到的,已经有一些在智能充电方面取得成功的企业，对于听众来说,大多数专家谈到每辆车每年1,000到

1:03:13 3,000欧元作为潜在的收入来源。当我们谈论智能充电和V2G时,这可能导致在10年内你用车赚的钱比车本身的成本还多,这实际上相当酷。我猜我们目前更接近1,000欧元这一边,这是我们现在看到的情况,但谈到垂直化,我认为看看谁

1:03:42 会成为这场游戏的赢家将会非常有趣。你提到了Octopus。我们看到相当多的企业将智能充电的智能化，这主要是一个软件和交易游戏，与提供电价捆绑在一起。这是一种垂直化方式。如果你看看一些企业,它似乎证明是成功的,但也有一些企业只是作为纯粹的软件SaaS方式来做这件事,以免干扰他们自己客户的利益,这些客户

1:04:14 可能是公用事业公司,可能是能源公司,对吧?我认为,就像过去10年的电动汽车充电一样,我们已经看到了电动汽车充电中垂直化与水平化的斗争。我认为我们现在在智能充电领域也会看到完全相同的情况,这将非常有趣。我认为将会有赢家,再次不幸地不是简单的答案,但你会看到两端都有赢家。所以也许这与我们刚才讨论的内容有关。你提到

1:04:49 你也是一名初创企业顾问,不仅为初创企业,还为规模化企业和更大的企业提供咨询。也许,是的,对于那个话题但也更广泛地,从战略或心态的角度来看,你会说需要什么，你看到成功的公司或创始人与其他人相比做了什么,你会建议做什么?嗯,我想,从风险

1:05:17 投资的角度来看,我会说这取决于阶段。对于初创企业来说,我认为最重要的是专注于一个明确的客户群体和一个明确的价值主张。不要试图一次性解决所有问题。找到一个痛点,深入挖掘,并为那个特定的细分市场构建最好的解决方案。一旦你在那个细分市场取得成功,然后再扩展。对于规模化企业和大型企业,我认为关键是

1:05:55 从资本角度来看,一切都始于团队的质量,始于人。根据我的经验,如果你有切身利益，如果你自己是创始人,或者像我提到的,我们目前也与很多家族企业合作，我的经验是,切身利益真的有助于推动事情发展,这是相比大公司的竞争优势,因为在大公司里显然更多的是关于政治。

1:06:24 组织越大、你在游戏中的切身利益越少,敏捷性就越难，真的很难推动某件事、快速行动并真正专注于你想要达成的目标。但我认为这是常识,对吧?如果我们看电动汽车充电和智能能源,我认为再次重要的是理解你想在哪里真正擅长,以及你想打哪些仗

1:06:54 以及你想放弃哪些仗，选择正确的细分市场,选择你想要聚焦的地方,对这些事情进行超级聚焦,因为谈到电动汽车充电生态系统和车队SaaS资产管理生态系统的结合,你很容易因为每件事都做一点而迷失方向。所以,这里没有什么新鲜的:对你的价值主张真正保持锐利,然后执行,我认为这是关键。有太多很酷的想法在

1:07:28 那里,无论是在企业界还是在欧洲或美国和中国的创业生态系统中。但成功的创始人擅长建立能够真正快速执行的团队,而且显然也乐于快速失败、学习、站起来,然后一次又一次地重新来过。是的,有一件引起我注意的事情我想问你,这是相关的，我们之前有Mike Johans作为

1:07:56 嘉宾,来自Deaf Power,他曾在安联等企业工作。他原籍比利时,但在德国工作了很长时间,底线是,是的,确实创业公司能够更快地行动并产生影响,但德国作为一个国家，他似乎有点沮丧，说也许其他一些国家正在

1:08:23 更快地前进,对于智能充电话题来说,在其他国家尝试可能是有意义的。你有类似的看法吗,还是你实际上认为德国,尽管像智能电表这样的基础设施仍然远远落后于其他国家,会在其中一些话题上成为领跑者?嗯,我认为问题是,看看对所有

1:08:53 这些我们刚才简要讨论的酷服务的准备程度,德国绝对落后，在欧洲排行榜上是最后几名之一。但同时它是欧洲最大的经济体,所以它肯定会发挥作用。你已经可以在没有智能电表的情况下做很多很酷的事情,但智能电表的推广现在已经决定了,有一个明确的路线图，你比我更清楚我们什么时候会看到一定的智能电表覆盖率来做更多这方面的事情。但我认为

1:09:21 这里也没有什么新闻。大多数很酷的东西、很酷的服务、智能充电和智能能源的开拓者更多地来自北欧或比荷卢，荷兰，那里的监管水平更自由一些,我们看到智能电表的高密度覆盖,我想,创新的意愿也更强。

1:09:58 在这种情况下,我认为这是不可阻挡的,对吧?这将在整个欧洲发生,我们在电动汽车充电方面也看到了这一点。我的意思是,谈到电动汽车的渗透率和销售率,每个人都在谈论挪威,现在接近100%,这超级酷,绝对是世界第一试点地区。但如果你真的想将自己定位为,比如说,中期的

1:10:33 最终赢家,你必须专注于核心经济体,所以这是英国,这是德国,这是法国。如果你只在一小部分较小的国家成功,比如北欧国家,我想这是不够的,对吧?在谈论国家时,这是今天的最后一个章节之一，我们录制这个节目时,今天是所谓的解放日,我觉得很讽刺。所以,

1:11:02 特朗普总统显然认为欧洲在占美国的便宜,这个嘛,我们可以在后面打个问号。他声称电动汽车和可再生能源是绿色骗局,然后我们看到一些努力，例如,建设充电基础设施的支持或购买电动汽车的支持，现在正被取消。你对美国市场在即将到来的近期、中期

1:11:39 未来的发展有什么看法?嗯,我很想从谈论长期未来开始。我确实认为,从长远来看,我们将朝着什么方向前进的问题,无论是在能源还是出行世界,都是相当明显的。好消息是,这些决定将在世界上最大的经济体中做出,这就是中国，看看我们拥有最多的车辆

1:12:10 但也看到最大的增长率的地方。中国已经做出了这个决定,转向电动汽车以及可再生能源。我认为这与美国不同，中国有一个明确的战略,这对整个市场总体来说是好事。如果你看看什么推动市场,最简单的答案也是价格和便利性。从长远来看价格,全世界的可再生能源都将更便宜

1:12:50 与化石燃料相比，甚至不谈环境问题,这些问题在今天应该得到更多的考虑,对吧?但如果你真的只谈论商业方面,电力的最终来源必须是可再生的,仅仅因为价格,这将推动市场。所以我希望这只是我们历史上的一个短期插曲，在最大的经济体中基本上在这方面倒退

1:13:24 ，然后,你知道,再次做出合理的决策。但这不是一种趋势,甚至不是你可以通过右翼民粹主义政治策略改变的东西。这是无论如何都会被决定的事情。而从经济层面来看,这是好事,看看每千瓦时电力的价格,当然还有从油井到车轮的整个价值链。看看电动汽车,我们已经

1:14:02 到那里了,对吧?临界点已经到了。电动汽车将更便宜,将更清洁,也将更有驾驶乐趣，或者说它们驾驶起来更有趣。所以我认为我们可以希望这只是一个插曲，希望是一个短暂的插曲，在电气化和可再生能源进一步发展的过程中。好的,是的,我也这么认为。埃塞俄比亚是一个非常奇特的案例,因为这里的人们,或者说听众,可能没有

1:14:36 意识到它实际上是世界上第一个禁止销售内燃机汽车的国家。还有其他例子吗，如果你不谈那些通常被讨论的热点地区，你认为在电动汽车行业中被忽视的?世界上另一个你认为值得强调的国家。嗯,好问题。我的意思是,这可能是一个常见的例子,但我认为令人印象深刻的是如果你看

1:15:08 挪威。如果激励措施得当，当然挪威的激励措施,看看奢侈税等等,他们推广电动汽车的方式是不同的,你不能一对一地复制到其他国家，但有趣的是,现在仍然有趣的是,对于每个人,对于社会的所有阶层来说,向电动汽车的过渡是多么顺利。我的意思是,我认为

1:15:45 这对于仍然担心的每个人来说都是一个很好的例子，你知道,我的母亲,我的祖母应该能够驾驶电动汽车,可能会有任何问题。我认为让人们接触这项技术,让人们接触并体验电动汽车，我的意思是,我们现在谈论电动汽车,但最终我们应该摆脱汽车,对吧?最终我们应该为出行和能源提出一个更智能的生态系统。

1:16:17 但我认为如果激励措施得当，这当然可以是资助计划,可以是税收优惠，尝试降低门槛,让人们尽快接触技术和产品。这不仅是对像我们这样从事技术领域工作的人,也是对社会中的每个人。

1:16:48 我认为这是超级关键的,我们应该在这方面有更多的勇气,因为对于德国经济来说这是显而易见的:如果我们不能成功实现这一转型,我们将面临巨大的问题。所以我也真的怀疑推迟2035年禁止内燃机汽车的策略。我认为德国汽车制造商,

1:17:19 欧洲汽车制造商从长远来看会从某种程度上被迫电气化中受益很多。而且还要提到他们在过去10年做得很糟糕，你不需要有魔法水晶球就能知道这将会到来。所以我真的支持在这方面实行强有力的监管,因为否则我们只会首先被中国汽车制造商吞噬。而

1:17:51 你知道,这个决定不能由单独一个国家做出。德国太小了,作为汽车制造商或服务提供商,仅仅专注于德国是无法成功的。你必须把世界作为一个整体来考虑,这些决定主要将在中国做出,可能第二是在美国。所以,在我们结束之前,也许你想告诉听众他们如何联系

1:18:19 你,或关注你,或者你想强调的东西。是的,当然。联系我们很容易，可能最简单的方式是在领英上搜索我们,然后给我们发消息。是的,我们对一切都感兴趣,对所有你想从零开始做的项目感兴趣。这可以是一个新的业务部门,可以是一个新公司,可以是与

1:18:53 战略盟友的合作伙伴关系,或者是你想要让其做一些新事情的客户。所以通常当你在出行和能源领域思考一张白纸,好的,我们下一步能做什么，这就是我们喜欢与行业利益相关者交谈的地方。是的,我想说重点相当广泛。所以我们的客户中有政治实体。所以我们也为

1:19:30 德国政府工作,涉及充电基础设施的问题。我们为印度经济部做过关于roaming的项目,汽车制造商,公用事业公司,但主要是服务和软件即服务领域的规模化企业。所以是的,这就是我们喜欢的,我们非常平易近人。所以随时可以联系我的团队或我。很好。谢谢你,Thomas,是的,很快再聊。非常感谢你,Claudio。

1:20:03 能来这里和你谈论出行和能源真是太好了。Thomas今天与我们分享的内容令人惊叹。我特别印象深刻的是他在2000年代就很早地参与了电动汽车和能源转型,以及他如何处于一个可能非常独特的位置来如此详细地理解这个领域，与一家大型OEM合作开发第一批电动汽车,然后转向第一批充电业务模式并与EnBW(最大的公用事业公司之一)进行测试,然后成为

1:20:46 基本上互联所有人的最大参与者之一的经理和共同创造者,然后之后专注于该领域的战略和运营咨询。所以他需要理解的范围，你可以从他与我们分享的行话中看出:CPMS、OCPI、OCPP、roaming、MSP等，然后是他对商业模式、创新、初创企业、投资的看法。好吧,我希望你们和我一样喜欢。像往常一样,别忘了分享并

1:21:26 点赞这一集,并在领英或其他地方提出评论或问题。并继续关注下一集。

0:11 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.

0:37 Alright, thanks for making it today, Thomas. How are you? Thanks for having me, great. Really, really sunny day here in Berlin, so that's quite rare these days, I would say. Yeah, I love Berlin, starting from now. Exactly, exactly. So, for the listeners who don't know you - we know each other since a longer time - maybe feel free to reach back in time as you want, or take the question as you feel to.

1:12 Who are you and what makes you who you are? Oh wow, that's quite a big question for the start. So yeah, my name is Thomas. I've been working in electrification, EV charging, and new mobility now for about 17 years. Started in a classic way as a southern German engineer in 2008, working for a German car manufacturer, Mercedes, focusing on both electric cars and hydrogen cars, which was quite unusual back at the time where

1:49 everything was around ICE. So in 2008, you were one of the few exotic people to do that. But it was fun. I learned a lot on how to replace the ICE powertrain with an electric powertrain or hydrogen powertrain. And then I moved on to learn more about energy and the question of where energy comes from, as a product manager at EnBW for a few years, which was quite fun back at the time where you had maybe a

2:19 few thousand electric cars in Germany, 2010 to 2012, fooling around with charging infrastructure - commercialisation, quote unquote, right? First charging cards, first back-ends. And yeah, back then I figured out that the most important part of the value chain is neither energy nor the vehicle, but software - the brain, the intelligence behind charging infrastructure, behind the future of energy and the future of

2:52 mobility, right? And yeah, that brought me to finally supporting the creation of a roaming hub called Hubject in Berlin in 2013.

3:10 No, it was separate. So I had a little intermezzo working for Porsche, mostly as a consultant in the field of fleet electrification. I wasn't really happy with my job and, to be fair, back then I had no clue about founders and venture capital and where all the money comes from. But yeah, I was a little bit disillusioned with the corporate world, and still I thought, well, I had followed

3:42 the whole founding phase at EnBW of Hubject, and I thought it was an interesting one. I thought it could be cool to experience ramping up a startup from scratch, even though it was a corporate startup, right? So the funny thing was I was hired in 2013 as a head of R&D. Most people know me as a CEO and as one of the guys that ramped it up as a CEO, but I actually started as a head

4:10 of R&D at Hubject - nothing to do with EnBW, just an independent application. And yeah, quite soon after I was asked to become CEO of the company. Yeah. Probably for the ones that don't know, Hubject is quite a strange animal. Nowadays you would call it a roaming hub, or e-roaming hub, or charging infrastructure hub. The idea behind the company was actually to connect charging infrastructure networks, mainly in Germany. That means if you wanted to charge

4:40 your electric car back in 2013, you would have needed around 70 or 80 charging cards just to charge your car in Germany. That was seen as a problem by the first shareholders - quite a wide group of both car manufacturers, with BMW and Mercedes-Daimler back then, two electricity companies with RWE and EnBW, and two tech companies with Siemens and Bosch - who figured out, well, we need to solve this, but we can only solve it together and we need to kind

5:07 of create a balance of interests. So yeah, the idea was to do the job in Germany, 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 networks, to unify the charging experience, making it possible to charge an electric car with one charging card. And so this became an international thing. We were quite more successful in our neighbouring countries first, before

5:37 we experienced - well, not the Netherlands actually. The Netherlands came after Germany, because the Netherlands were quite advanced already in roaming and they were also not really in favour of what we were doing, because they already had their own roaming schemes back then. So Austria was actually number one. Switzerland came quite early, then Finland, the Nordics - that was my first target market - and Denmark. And later Germany. But it was textbook development,

6:09 being laughed at for two to three years, and then at some point experiencing the network effect. From that point onwards, sales cycles became quite fast and much more straightforward compared to the beginning. But yeah, it was an interesting journey and I really enjoyed doing it for over six years. To finally create my own company after six years - we had created this player that was doing good in

6:42 Europe, and the 2nd geographical area was Japan. And finally further companies in the US and China. After 6 years, I asked myself: OK, I'm now CEO of this company that has done quite a good job. In most of the markets we had, we were more or less a monopolist because our competitors were quite weak. And so I asked myself,

7:10 OK, should I extend this journey? I had a quite nice offer on the table from the shareholders for 5 more years, and I thought this was really flattering. We had a quite strong bond and it was a really respectful relationship with the shareholders, but I finally decided to do something by myself. I come from an entrepreneurial family, and I think the entrepreneurial DNA - the question: do you want to be a hired CEO for the rest

7:37 of your life, or do you want to do something by yourself? - was stronger. So finally that led to the creation of Cosmic Hat Group, which brought me here today. Alright, now I have plenty of questions. Let me see where to start. So maybe let's start with the beginning. You started with a vehicle OEM and moved into the energy space, and then basically went to the

8:04 intersection of both. So what was the motivation for leaving the OEM? There are people who, if they are within OEMs, they stay there. I think at that time it was not that common - not at all, right? Yeah, it's a great question. So 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

8:33 Fraunhofer Institute for 4 years. This is the biggest solar power institute in Freiburg. I worked there more or less throughout all of my studies, so I always had a connection to renewable energies. In parallel I did internships, already working for car manufacturers. So that intersection was always interesting to me. The link to renewable energy and energy production was always stronger than vehicles. I was never really a vehicle guy at all,

9:07 I don't own a vehicle today. So that was always there, but in the end of the day it was possible - I joined Mercedes back then also together with an MBA scholarship that was basically financed by Mercedes, so it was also just an opportunity to start there. And for me the journey just started with understanding how an electric car works, what the components are. I was responsible for error management, in particular

9:42 for the hydrogen B-Class, and there were - I can tell you - a lot of errors and problems back then with that car. So it was quite fun to really understand the vehicle as a whole. And then, you asked about the transition - to be very concrete, fun story: when I told my boss back then that I wanted to join the other side of the force, meaning energy, he kind of laughed at me and told me that, well, you're now working

10:05 for probably the sexiest car manufacturer in the world, and you now want to join a half-publicly-owned utility that is super unsexy. And that was back then the connotation of energy providers - I think to a certain extent it still is, right? So that was completely unpopular. For Swabian car manufacturers back at the time, it was very common to work there your whole life. For instance, my oldest brother -

10:36 he's 12 years older - he's been working for Mercedes for over 25 years, and I think that's quite a cool thing. So that was the norm back then. Yeah, but I'm very happy with the decision because it gave me the freedom to really experience much more. Mercedes back then was already a huge corporate animal, and EnBW, to my surprise, wasn't so much. So we are talking about corporates - that's one point you

11:05 made - and then the startup DNA that is in your family. Maybe you can elaborate on why you think you're not the typical corporate person, and how the family DNA shaped you. Yeah, sure, of course. Well, I wouldn't say that I have an issue with the corporate world or that I didn't fit in. I think what I can say today is

11:33 that I feel pretty comfortable working with the corporate world, but also in the startup and scale-up world. Originally my family comes from making all different kinds of things with wood. I come from a carpenter family, 4th generation. My brother took over probably 15–20 years ago. I have 3 older brothers, and the second oldest took over, which was clear already when he was, I don't know, 15

12:04 or something. So there was no real argument among the 4 brothers about who was going to do it. My great-great-grandfather started the whole thing a very long time ago, and since then it's just been a small village carpentry - but definitely something that shaped me in a way that, yeah, if you grow up in a family where there's no real separation between what's going on in the

12:37 fabric in the house, so it's kind of more or less one thing. This really shapes you, I guess. And 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 a region, 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 there's no unemployment.

13:07 There's a lot of Mittelstand industry, big companies like Boehringer Ingelheim or Leipa, so. It's not a real thing to start your own business there, I guess, at least not definitely not as a software entrepreneur. So yeah, that was not given that I would start that right from scratch. So I more went down the boring classic way, I guess, working for big

13:33 car manufacturers and utility companies before doing something by myself.

13:40 What are your key learnings - the things that you keep in mind, that you consider the highlights? Stories maybe as well? Well, I probably could write a book about it. And I mean, first of all, I'm incredibly thankful for that phase, even though it was a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Working 24/7 for 6 years and ramping up a company that's now still active on

14:11 three different continents, doing good, and finally making money, which is still rare in EV charging software. So, being appointed CEO at an age of 31 was something really special, and the learnings I can take from this phase are still something that has helped me a lot. Where to start? I mean, I guess the thing that I

14:41 mentioned at the very beginning - the courage and, to a certain extent, also the naivety, even though being a corporate child - to spread the word in other geographies, in other regions, at quite an early stage, and really believe in that network effect. I think that was something that was a risk we took, we believed in, but also, as said, with a certain extent of naivety. So I'll give you an example. Back then, when I was working in

15:19 sales quite a lot in the Nordics, I had a board meeting and shareholders asked me, like, who are the new clients, what is the latest development in sales. And I was like, yeah, I'm quite happy, I closed my first deal in Finland with a small player, a two-person company. Like, what are you doing in Finland? You know, you should do your job in Germany. That back-then two-person company is now called

15:46 Virta and is now one of the biggest players in Europe. And I think they benefited from the network effect, and we did too. So it wasn't really too necessary at the very beginning because it was a numbers game about coverage and how many charge points you had on the platform, and that of course also the quality and the technical, legal and business framework you basically needed to connect the charging infrastructure. So every charge point in every country

16:17 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 - there's a lot of stuff in the academic world about network effects and different models to generate them. But if you experience it, it's a different thing. And I would also say, if you look at what has been happening over the last years, it's the big dying of former legends in charging infrastructure.

16:50 Most of them had positioned themselves as vertical players. EV Box, for instance, Landis+Gyr lately - the list is long. New Motion - some of them have been acquired, mostly by oil companies or car manufacturers. But most of them had positioned themselves as vertical players. So what does that mean? They believed in providing end-to-end solutions including hardware, software and service. And Hubject was quite the opposite for us.

17:27 It was always clear that we only wanted to position ourselves as a marketplace and B2B layer. Which was sometimes tough, because it could have been easy to just flip the switch and become an EMSP - an e-mobility service provider - sell charging cards, turn the B2B business into a B2C or B2B2C business, provide charging cards and charging apps, and then of course own the end consumer. But I think for us it was always clear that this

17:57 will never be the path, and to this day Hubject is a pure B2B play, a pure marketplace ecosystem. And I think that was a wise decision, because with that strategy we could remain lean, we could just focus on our core where we were really strong, and not get lost in all the competitive fights - both on a back-end level, on a charging back-end level, on an EMSP level. So I think that

18:27 was after all the right strategy, even though over the years some of the other players were much more successful in the short term. But not on the long term, because I think concentrating your efforts on all of those battles was quite tough for a lot of players. So one thing I'm very interested in, especially just maybe for the listeners - these roaming platforms, they are, as you said, the key essential to get the charge point operators

18:56 And the so-called charge cards, MSPs, or 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 Hubject? Do you remember how the setup was? So from a historical standpoint, or from an analogous standpoint, what can you learn from the telco or other industries that have similar setups, especially nowadays where there is lots of criticism as well

19:28 on the current setup, in the sense that it might be too costly for the long run? And maybe you also have ideas on how we could make it better, or what would be a better setup than we currently have. Yeah, totally, it's a great question. And to start with, and to be fair, even though I think it's quite popular that corporate people call themselves co-founders or founders, Hubject was never a company that was founded

19:57 by entrepreneurs. It was founded by six heavyweights from the German industry. And it derived - nowadays a lot of people don't know that anymore - but it actually derived from a funded research project called Green Emotion. Back then, IBM was the main driver of the project, which later became something like a competitor, but not too successful. The German car manufacturers were also participating in this project, and they developed the idea already of a roaming platform that was more or

20:28 less inspired by the telco industry, but they were not allowed to commercialize it. So this was the point where they decided, well, can we bring this to a commercial level outside of the funding of the research project? And that led to the co-creation of Hubject back then. There are in fact a lot of analogies to telco - in particular, the separation of the networks, the grids. I think we nowadays have three telco grids, or three telco networks, if

21:01 I remember correctly, in Germany. But we have hundreds of mobile phone service providers - you know, you can get it in a supermarket, you get AliTalk or Lidl in Germany. These are all virtual providers that don't own any network. And so the idea was to come up with something similar, of course also driven by the strategic interests of the car manufacturers - to own the EV driver, or to provide a good answer for the customers on: hey, where

21:31 can I charge my electric car, and how - do I need an app? Do I just need to plug in and everything happens automatically? That answer back then wasn't there, and also, 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 dealers would lie to you about how to charge an electric car. And so finally they created

21:56 Hubject, and Hubject was positioned - and is still positioned mainly, and that's different to the telco industry, I'll tell you why in a second - mainly as a connectivity player. What Hubject basically does at its core is just making sure that you can find the next charging station: aggregating point-of-interest data, static and dynamic data for charging stations - first, finding the stations or leading you to the right point, providing the data, then getting access,

22:35 and getting access always means providing interoperability in the sense that if you use an EBW charging card, you can charge at an E.ON charging station, for instance. So this is a core use case - making it happen between different charging entities: so-called eMobility service providers on the end-consumer side, providing charging cards and charging apps, and so-called CPOs, charge point operators, on the infrastructure side. And finally making sure that all the data that is needed to open the

23:05 charging station and authorize the consumer, the EV driver, and then exchanging this transaction information with all parties - that was and still is the core job of a roaming platform and Hubject. Of course, meanwhile you can dig deeper, talking about 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 an entity with a BaFin license, now called

23:39 Hubject Financial Services. I think that was always a plan, and I think the timing was also not perfect to dig a little deeper into the financial transaction world. But to go back to the telco comparison: clearing houses in telco mainly only take care of the financial transaction, whereas Hubject only took care of the connectivity service, and now they're extending their footprint to financial services. But we learned a lot from the telcos, and also it

24:06 was quite fun at the beginning if you talked to Vodafone or Telekom, which were also players back then, because in the early days a lot of telco providers tried their luck as eMobility service providers. And they were like, well, please do a better job than we did at the beginning, because the idea of the clearing house also making it happen as a connectivity layer didn't work out for the telcos, as far as I

24:37 understand, which led to a lot of chaos of bilateral connections and different service qualities, and, you know, the

24:46 The telco industry? Yeah, there are a few - as far as I learned, there are a few clearing houses in the telco industry. With one we also work together. It's a company from Israel. Unfortunately I forgot the name, I have to admit. But there are only two similar to EV Romi; there are only a few players that are doing the job, so handling multi-millions of transactions and clearing

25:15 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, yeah, this is maybe a very industry-specific question, but still it's relevant in this context: there's this new startup called IAI that I think is trying to revolutionize the way this communication layer, connectivity layer works. What's your view on, especially how it compares to

25:46 object and the relevance of such a new startup? Sure, yeah, yeah, I think it'd be super interesting and I think every new player who 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. I think they also did a great job in fundraising to start with. I mean, we've seen quite a lot of players in EV

26:17 charging struggling, and so raising, I think, about 10 million is quite an achievement. So congrats on that. What's interesting about this company is that it basically plays a little bit, I guess, with the market narrative that the established and leading roaming players - and there are only three of them: Hubject, as mentioned; Gireve, which is the French version if you want; and eCleaning.net from Benelux. In Germany, right? Gireve would be mainly France and Western Europe,

26:51 yeah, but mainly France. So the common narrative - and to a certain extent I think it's also correct - about the leading roaming platforms is that they are quite expensive and they wanted to create a certain tech lock-in. That's basically coming from charging a flat fee per vehicle per year independent from the amount of transactions. And IAI 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

27:34 and then later charge clients voluntarily on the - if you want - cooler stuff like the financial clearing, smart charging, and 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 - I mean, I guess we all know about the Facebook example - grew, it was that the service was free for years and at some point they figured out how to make money with it, and

28:02 I think this is more or less the same strategy. So I think it's exciting, I think it's cool, and I think it will also help the main roaming platforms to move a little faster - they are also now big companies, right? - to sharpen their focus and be a little bit more agile. At the same time, of course, I think in three to four years we will know a little bit more on how this will work

28:29 out, also with EApi and a few other players that position quite the same. Because I guess at the point where you then flip the switch on really commercializing it, you also become a middleware, right? So this is the roaming fight - the roaming argument has always been between centralized roaming hubs, a centralized approach - you know, a winner-takes-all model with centralized hubs that aggregate, and the more they aggregate and the better the quality of the aggregation,

29:03 the more negotiation power they gain, right? Now, we have seen OCPI - a lot of abbreviations, I'm sorry for that, but this is EV charging, so we'll provide a glossary for the podcast. But with the rise of OCPI - for the listeners, this is a protocol that enables roaming on a peer-to-peer level that basically cuts out the middleman; the middleman is Hubject in this case - with the rise of OCPI, it has always

29:33 been the question: 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'm a little bit biased, having worked for Hubject for quite a while, but I think there's a lot of beauty in having a middleman that in particular takes care of quality assurance and provides a consistent set of services. But we can dig

29:59 deeper on that one - it's quite technical. But of course there is a right to play for peer-to-peer players as well. So this has always been the big question: are you on the peer-to-peer side or are you on the hub side? I think for me it's not an either-or. I think both ways have some benefits, but I do think that in particular for smaller players like Stadtwerke or German utilities

30:24 or in France, the smaller utility players - 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 flip the switch to basically make money as a centralized hub - be it on financial transactions, be it on smart charging - you become the middleware that, once you become the middleware, maybe doesn't have the positive connotation anymore, and you also

31:00 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. First of all, to aggregate enough critical mass, but I think from what I've seen they've done a great job, and also quite smart founders, intelligent people. They have done a good job on it, but critical mass is important, and then of course also executing on the roaming services and then making sure that

31:28 the fate of the current dominating roaming hubs is not their fate - being the middleware that everyone wants to cut out. Anyway, thanks for that. So switching gears to Cosmicat: you said that you did that a few years ago, and I understand you have been running quite a few types of services and projects. Maybe you can just share a bit of the essence behind Cosmicat - the why, what you want to achieve

32:00 with it, what you have achieved with it, and share a few stories or projects that you are particularly proud of or that you think are worth highlighting. Yeah, of course. Cosmicat is basically a small group of friends that met mainly at Hubject or around Hubject, and still friends and still working together - this is now 12 years ago. The idea behind Cosmicat was to create a strategy boutique for new mobility and new energy services. That means, with Hubject

32:44 connecting hundreds of players to the hub and connecting thousands of charging stations to the hub, we have seen quite a lot in the realm of electricity generation, utilities, car manufacturers, software players, CPOs, EMSPs, and so on. And of course the network that we managed to create - because sales cycles were quite grueling at Hubject, in particular at the beginning - was quite tempting to basically expand our footprint a little bit and not only talk about

33:22 charging but create a strategy house for what you would call the future of mobility and energy. The idea was to do more than only EV charging and more than only electrification, also focusing on digitization of fleets, on the vehicle as a mobile computer and all the cool stuff you can do with it, considering mobility rather as a service than just a hardware-sales-driven business - and this is still our playground. So the core bread-and-

33:58 butter business of Cosmicat Group is providing strategic support, in particular for organizations that want to start something new, something from scratch, in the intersection of mobility and energy. And this has led to quite an interesting group of clients and partners - of course starting with the most obvious ones, the car manufacturers, which is where we were coming from. But also energy players. I guess the main target group nowadays is actually scale-ups of either family-owned

34:38 businesses or founder-led organizations that are about to expand their footprints - expand geographically or expand their service portfolio. So this is what we do on a daily basis as a bread-and-butter business. I myself have also been digging deeper into where the money comes from. I mentioned it: with Hubject we had 6 founding shareholders, all strategic shareholders, all huge companies. Then number 7 was Volkswagen in 2016, number

35:14 8 was Enel in 2018/2019. So I wanted to learn, with Cosmicat - my idea was also to learn a little bit more about venture capital and private equity. And this has become a kind of second pillar to what we're doing right now: all about M&A, fundraising, due diligence - both for investors, meaning venture capital firms and private equity firms, but also supporting founders to find the right fit, to find the right investors. But only

35:48 focusing again on what we're good at - on mobility and energy. We do think that this is the future of both advisory and M&A business. I don't believe in the generic service providers, in particular when we talk about early-stage companies. So this is what we're doing. Cool, very clear. Maybe to make it even more tangible, can you give - for each of the two pillars - one story or one

36:20 specific problem? Maybe even if you can name the companies, even better. Yeah, of course, there are a lot of examples.

36:33 So maybe what's interesting for the listeners right now is that we have been working with players in logistics to electrify their fleets. And maybe to the surprise of some listeners, the electrification of trucks or long-haul vehicles has been quite interesting and is picking up. So what we are doing for these players is a different thing. It starts with the question of how to charge an electric truck. If you drive an electric truck

37:17 and want to use it - drive it - most of the time, you can get up to 500 MWh of electricity consumption a year. That's around 125 households. What's also different to passenger cars is that all these business cases are quite plannable: 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

37:50 What are the KPIs of the powertrain of the truck, weather conditions, and of course you want to make sure that you can charge the truck at the depot of your destination or somewhere around. And so this has been quite an interesting field for us, coming from passenger cars, in particular private passenger cars, where all of these use cases are quite diverse and hard to plan to a certain extent. Because if you talk to your friends about electric cars, it has been all about

38:17 like, "I'm not sure if I should buy it, because once a year I want to drive to Italy, 800 kilometers." But mostly you use it to commute and drive usually up to 40 kilometers a day, right? So this is different with trucks. Everything is calculable - every kilowatt hour is calculable, every route is calculable - and so business cases are quite transparent. So what we are doing right now is helping these companies

38:43 to be more precise on overall TCO for the vehicles over the whole life cycle, but in particular also helping them to support ramping up charging infrastructure. And usually, different to the classic passenger car endeavors, you already have quite complex electricity systems up and running. That means if you talk to big logistics companies at their depots, most of them have huge facilities - they have solar power on top of these fabrics, these

39:19 depots. Some of them have even wind power parks. A lot of them have local battery storage, because these are already quite energy-heavy businesses - a lot of cooling systems, for instance, in place. And we come in to support them, 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

39:55 companies that have never done so, because from the outside, in particular software companies, they all look the same nowadays, right? They haven't done a great job on differentiation over the last years. And so we support them to find the right players, the right strategic partners, starting with planning and installation - digging a hole, connecting wiring - the charging hardware for HPC but also AC charging. Software is still, I guess, the most critical part of it all, and also

40:25 energy management, smart charging, and hopefully soon vehicle-to-grid services. Very interesting. So, to understand you correctly, you really have a broad scope - from the strategic decision-making of big corporates, that would be one scope if I understand correctly, and then very much more operationally, how to better plan a depot, what other factors to consider, and the service providers to vet, etc. Exactly. I mean, if you have the luxury to really start strategic - but a lot

41:01 of players in the logistics field, and I really love that, are quite hands-on. So for them the word strategy is quite close to execution, which is cool. But if you want to talk strategy, you would usually ask: what's the role of electrification for your fleet? What's the percentage of your fleet driving electric, let's say in 2030, and how do you want to get there? And we help you to get there, calculating what kind of impact

41:32 this has for your business - and not only looking at the vehicle. As you know, a long-haul truck is 3 to 4 times the price of an ICE truck. But in particular also looking at electricity and charging infrastructure. And of course, what's cool about it is that a few years ago the common narrative in the market was that electrification is cool for last-mile delivery, for light electric vehicles, for electric vans - but long haul will be far out in the future, and

42:02 everyone's talking about hydrogen for long haul. And now this is completely changing. I can tell you, if you manage to control the electricity price, you can create a positive TCO already on pretty short notice. That means we have clients that are aiming at electrifying their truck fleet as soon as possible

42:39 and are super progressive about it. And this is something I hadn't seen coming like 3 to 5 years ago, I have to be honest.

42:48 Well, of course subsidies still play a role - carbon credits - and of course now with hopefully the foundation of the new government, that's hopefully sooner rather than later. People and industries are hoping for new subsidies, but in the long term the main trigger will be to really control the price of electricity. Some say, if you believe in studies, the critical landmark is about being below 35 cents per kilowatt hour, and

43:26 some will be TCO positive maybe in 2 to 3 years already, others in 5 to 10 years - it really depends on how good you are at getting it right with charging infrastructure and electricity trading. But to do so, you have to increase your knowledge in charging, you have to increase your knowledge in the whole value chain of charging and electricity, and I think this is where everyone is

43:54 Now stepping up their game in the logistics sector. Yeah, well, especially if we're talking about logistics, one thing that I find interesting is that the value chain is not straightforward - it's hard to understand who is responsible for what. I'll also be curious to hear your view on this. Especially the single-truck owners, companies that own very few trucks - these people might have more difficulties to really make the switch, or get the time to plan the switch to electric mobility. I'm assuming you're talking more with SMEs that are a bit larger, or even the very big

44:23 companies like DHL that are able to cope and plan for the transition, right? Yeah, so usually when we talk about charging, truck charging, and where the electricity comes from, when we come in as strategy advisors it's more or less always the same story. Logistics players - and I'm not judging on that - they

45:03 go for the quick wins by partnering with end-to-end players for EV charging. That means players that control everything from planning and installation to hardware, software, services, transactions, charging cards - everything. Of course the beauty of it is that if they do a good job, it's easy for you 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

45:34 curve is quite questionable if you do so. You lose a lot of control over what you're doing, in particular if you're a bigger logistics company where this will become a critical factor. Therefore, usually what we do is at the very beginning focus on knowledge transfer: what are the different roles in the value chain, what do they add to the value creation - talking about software back-ends, for instance, comparing hardware solutions, what's the difference between an

46:09 Alpitronic and a Kempower or Energetica charger, for instance. And making sure that we will find an organisation in a few months that really can do a deep dive on technology, on cost drivers, on revenue drivers, and then take it from there to really vet the right service providers for every particular client and make sure there is the right fit for their respective size. Of course, if you are a logistics company with two trucks, it wouldn't make sense to

46:43 separate everything and then do a separate contract with a back-end and a hardware manufacturer and so on. There is of course a beauty in an end-to-end offer. But for the big players, our strategy is mostly 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 who are the right partners to do so. And in most cases

47:09 there are a lot of stranded assets, to be fair with you. There are a lot of stranded assets because wrong decisions have been made, there's a lack of control both on the technological side and contractually - and this is something we want to change with our clients. In the best case, not only seeing charging infrastructure as something they have to do, but something they want to do, and turning a cost centre into a profit centre. So this is the

47:38 idea. Considering we've talked a bit about the roles and how you try to provide this granularity compared to the black-box approach - given your history in the industry, is there any trend you see for the upcoming years in how the different market players and solution providers relevant for fleets are going to develop? Yeah, totally - great question. Here's the bad news: it will become even more complex than it

48:12 is already. Why is that? If you talk to venture capital companies or investors and introduce them to the wonders of EV charging and all the roles we've just started to discuss - the CPO, the back-end, the roaming hub, the EMSP, all these abbreviations - I think the setup as we see it nowadays, in particular for logistics use cases, is not sufficient yet. That means if you talk to classic software

48:46 providers coming from charging about logistics use cases and fleet use cases, you will not get sufficient answers for a lot of the needs that logistics players already have. I'll give you one very easy example: booking and reservation. Talk to big EMSPs in Europe and they will tell you reservation is not really helpful, because they all come from passenger cars. They all think about ICE cars blocking the station, and then you provide a bad

49:14 customer experience because the EV driver is confronted with an ICE car blocking the charging station. Of course, for privately owned depots that are secured 24/7, there are no blocking ICE cars at truck charging stations on privately owned grounds, right? So it is urgently needed to have a booking solution to make sure that

49:49 a driver with their e-truck - where every second counts and every kWh counts - can be 100% sure that the charging session will take place at a particular time. This is a critical feature, but it's just one out of many. We are currently also talking about the overall efficiency and readiness of the value chain. We are currently at about 85% success rate on average if you look at charging sessions - that means, on average, 15% of charging sessions fail.

50:27 or have an issue. 15, which is a crazy number, right? And this has even been worse a few years ago, quite a few popular examples, and it's been even worse in the US compared to Europe actually. But this is of course the job of the whole industry, starting from hardware manufacturers but also all the other layers, to make this more reliable, and in particular talking about commercial use cases like logistics use cases.

50:57 This is mission critical. I mean, we can't deal with that situation any longer. And yeah, this is the job of everyone in the market, but in particular the hardware and software players. 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 from each other. This is the world of charging infrastructure, meaning charging

51:35 data, OCPP, OCPI, and so on, and the world of vehicle data and dispatching logistics data flows, so routing systems, TMS and so on. Currently they're disconnected, so for asset management of vehicles you might use a company like Webfleet, or you know, telematics solutions like Geotab. This is one side of the equation; for charging infrastructure you might use a backend like Monta or Virta or Driivz, and I think those two worlds will meet and to a certain extent

52:10 also compete. And then we'll see new services that are critical in particular for the logistics sector, but this will also help private users. If you have the vehicle data like SoC, the kilometres that you've already driven in your car, battery health, you name it - so many cool things you can basically do with this data, and at the end of the day it

52:41 will be 1 + 1 equals 3, right? And this is, I guess, the next level for software players that will take care of this. Yeah, interesting. And there's also a debate in the industry right now on whether eMobility service providers as a role might disappear and more direct payments taking over. Do you have an opinion on that one? Yes, I do. Same here. You know, we have seen quite a lot of religious discussions in EV charging -

53:12 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 - it's not either/or. And I think it's the same for smart energy and smart charging solutions, but also for payment and access. 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

53:46 European Union has come up with a directive called the AFIR Directive that basically mandates, in particular, DC charge point infrastructure players to provide direct access without any kind of virtual provider or charging card provider being required 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

54:25 solutions, but of course there will be a coexistence with 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, and the rest of the time you charge your car at home or at your employer - 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

54:58 payment. 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 data - the correct data on where can I find the charger. This sounds very simple, but sometimes if you drive an electric car it can be quite messy, quite challenging. And even more so, of course, talking about commercial vehicles - you want to make sure that you find the

55:34 charging station and you get routed to the charging station precisely. And then we talk about access, authorisation, authentication, payment. And I think this is where eMobility service providers really help, because this is part of what they provide to the end consumer. But also later on, if you want to talk about aggregation of vehicles to create something like a virtual power plant or to work with flexibility services, this is your ball game.

56:12 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 and consumer side, aggregating EV drivers as an EMSP. Same here - my take on it is that we will see both and they will coexist, and it will not be a winner-takes-all thing for the next 10 years.

56:35 Yeah, the opportunities with smart charging or bidirectional charging or virtual power plants, aggregators - different ways of talking about how to make sure that we can leverage the potential inside these vehicles of deferring the charging process or changing the charging process in a way that is not charging as fast as possible from the moment you plug in, so influencing it in a certain way. What is in your view the biggest potential? Is it in - but we

57:09 You can take it from different angles, be it from the energy market or energy use case, or more from a fleet or charging use case. I think, to maybe consciously oversimplify - also for the listeners, at least for the start - I always separate everything you can do to locally optimize a charging curve from all the grid services, DSO services, TSO services. Because optimizing a charging curve by peak cutting, or just doing something with

57:58 the load curve - for instance, to pay less for your peaks, or to make sure that all your electric vehicles at one location are charged at the right time, that everyone gets the right amount of energy at the right time - this is the number one priority. And already with so-called unidirectional charging, that means we only charge the electric vehicle but we don't feed anything back to either the grid, a local battery, or a local facility, you can

58:31 do great things. Unfortunately, what we see in the market is that all those services - and you know this better than I do - all those services for local optimization, for local smart charging, have already been mixed up. For the consumer it's quite hard to differentiate, and in particular on a B2B level: what do I really get when I book a smart charging service from a CPMS -

58:59 a charge point management system, a backend system, or an end-to-end service provider for charging? What's inside the box? This is quite hard to differentiate, and it gets even messier when talking about the end game - talking about playing around with grid services, TSO and DSO services, and at some point, of course, making vehicle-to-grid bidirectional charging a thing. So for me, the magic - and it sounds quite trivial - lies in the productization of these services, and this is

59:35 where the industry is currently lacking. What do I get as a logistics player - talking about logistics again? What do I get as a private household, as the owner of a house, as the owner of a flat? What do I get if I live in a multi-dwelling house and I'm just a tenant? When we talk about local optimization and smart charging, what's the gain? Does it do any good to

1:00:04 my electricity bill, or what do I get and what do I pay for it? I think, starting with local optimization and smart charging, I want to see a concrete value proposition from service providers - functionally and commercially - and the same then for the more complex use cases around bidirectional charging. Yeah, this brings me to a thought that has been on my mind as well lately,

1:00:31 which is that it's definitely very difficult - as we are unpacking this complexity - to have someone who is not in the day-to-day of handling this complexity necessarily understand it. There are services like, maybe you've heard of Octopus Energy, they have basically a smart charging tariff where you have a flat fee per kilowatt hour and it's a black box of what's happening within that smart charging service. And if you want

1:01:04 to boost charge, then you have a much higher kilowatt-hour price. Then the question is: does Octopus do a better job than a third party? Will there eventually be a benchmark - like the AI benchmarks you see all around now, where DeepSeek is better than OpenAI's latest model? I was thinking maybe something like that will come up eventually, where if people claim they have the best energy management or smart charging service,

1:01:35 you'd have to prove it in a benchmark. Or there needs to be some kind of certification of the service, because it's easy to claim - and then you may have a very narrow product compared to the variety of features inside other products, all the features required to perform well. Yeah, totally. The way I tackle it - my favorite example always comes from supporting venture

1:02:06 capital firms looking into startups that are active in smart charging - is when I talk to founders, my question is quite simple: what are the unit economics for your product? I want to see those unit economics per service, per country. Which service do you provide in which country, how much money do you make, or how much potential to save money do you guarantee your client, and how do you productize it? Unfortunately, I would say 95% of the startups

1:02:45 have a quite vague answer, and the reason for that is quite obvious: energy markets are complex. The way to do it in the Nordics, where almost 100% of households are equipped with smart meters, is just different to how you would do it in Germany, and the marketplaces are quite complex and different. No pun intended, but this needs to be answered. If you really want to productize it to an

1:03:13 extent that you want to sell this to a client and have traction, you need to productize it, make it digestible, and make it understandable what the concrete gain is for the client. To be concrete - if you believe studies, and fortunately, as you mentioned, there are players out there who already have success stories around smart charging - for the listeners, most experts talk about 1,000 to

1:03:42 €3,000 per vehicle per year as a potential revenue stream. When we talk about smart charging and vehicle-to-grid, 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 €1,000 side of things with what we see nowadays, but talking about verticalization, I think it will be super interesting to see who

1:04:14 will be the winners of this game. You mentioned Octopus. We see quite a few players that bundle the intelligence for smart charging, which is mainly a software and trading game, with providing the electricity tariff. 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 SaaS approach, to not interfere with the interests of their own clients, which

1:04:49 might be utilities, which might be energy companies, right? I think also, like with EV charging over the last 10 years, we have seen that fight in EV charging of verticalization versus horizontalization. I think we will see exactly the same now in smart charging, which will be super interesting. And I think there will be winners on, again unfortunately not the easy answer, but you will see winners on both ends. So maybe it's linked to what we just discussed. You mentioned

1:05:17 that you're also a startup advisor, and not only for startups but also scale-ups and bigger corporates. Maybe, yeah, for that topic but also broader, from a strategy or mindset perspective, what would you say it takes - what you've seen successful companies or founders do compared to others, what you would recommend to do? Well, I guess, taking the venture

1:05:55 capital perspective here, it all starts with the quality of the team, with the people. And from my experience, if you have skin in the game - if you are a founder yourself, or, as I mentioned, we currently also work with quite a lot of family-owned businesses - my experience is that the skin in the game really helps to drive things, and this is a competitive advantage compared to big corporations where obviously it's more about politics.

1:06:24 Agility is harder the bigger the organization and the less skin you have in the game - it gets really hard to drive something, be fast, and really focus on what you want to achieve. But I think that's common sense, right? If we look into EV charging and smart energy, I think it's again really important to understand where you want to be really good at and which battles you want to fight

1:06:54 and which battles you want to leave out - choosing the right niche, choosing where you want to focus, hyper-focusing on these things, because talking about the marriage of the EV charging ecosystem and the fleet SaaS asset management ecosystem, you can get lost so easily by doing everything a little bit. So, nothing new here: being really sharp on your value proposition and then execution, I think, is key. There are so many cool ideas out

1:07:28 there, both in the corporate world but also looking at the startup ecosystem here in Europe or in the US and China. But successful founders are great at building teams that can execute really fast, and that obviously are also happy to fail fast, learn, stand up, and do it again and again. Yeah, one thing that caught my attention that I wanted to ask you, which is related - we had Mike Johans as

1:07:56 a guest previously, with Deaf Power, and he had been working at corporates with Allianz, etc. He's from Belgium originally but worked a lot in Germany, and the bottom line was, yes, indeed startups are able to move faster and have the impact, but also Germany as a country - he seemed to be a bit frustrated - saying maybe some other countries are

1:08:23 moving faster, and it might make sense, especially for the smart charging topic, to try it out in other countries. Do you have a similar view, or do you actually think Germany, even though the fundamentals like smart meters are still very much behind compared to other countries, will be front runners in some of these topics? Well, I think the thing is, looking at readiness for all

1:08:53 of these cool services that we just briefly discussed, Germany is definitely lagging behind - it's one of the last places in the European charts. But at the same time it's the biggest economy in Europe, so it will have a role for sure. You can already do a lot of cool things without having smart meters in place, but the smart meter rollout has now been decided on and there's a clear roadmap - you know it better than I do on when we will see a certain coverage of smart meters to do more on this. But I think

1:09:21 there's also no news there. Most of the cool stuff, the cool services, the trailblazers in smart charging and smart energy are rather coming from the Nordics or Benelux - the Netherlands - where the level of regulation is a little bit more liberal, where we see higher-density coverage of smart meters, and a stronger appetite also, I guess, to innovate.

1:09:58 In this context, I think it's unstoppable, right? This will happen all over Europe, and we've seen it also in EV charging. I mean, everyone's talking about Norway when it comes to the saturation of electric cars and 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 winner for the midterm,

1:10:33 you have to focus on the core economies, and so this is the UK, this is Germany, this is France. If you only are successful in a fraction of smaller countries, like the Nordics, this will not be enough, I guess, right? And in talking about countries, this is one of the last chapters for today - as we record this, it is the so-called Liberation Day, which I find ironic. So,

1:11:02 where President Trump apparently sees Europe as taking advantage of the US, which, yeah, we can see a question mark behind that. He has claimed EVs and renewables are a green scam, and then we see efforts - for example, support to build charging infrastructure or support for buying EVs - now being removed. How is your view on the US market development in the upcoming near-term, midterm

1:11:39 future? Well, I would love to start by talking about the long-term future. I do think the question of where we will move towards in the long term, looking at both the energy and the mobility world, is quite obvious. The good news is that these decisions will be made in the biggest economy of the world, and this is China - looking at where we have both the most vehicles

1:12:10 but also see the biggest growth rates. China has already made that decision, moving into electric cars and also into renewable energy. I think this is different to the US - there is a clear strategy in China, and that's good for the whole market in general. If you look at what drives the market, the easiest answer is also price and convenience. Looking at price in the long term, renewable energy will be cheaper all around the world

1:12:50 compared to fossil fuels - not even talking about the environmental questions, which should be much more considered already nowadays, right? But if you really talk about only the business aspects, 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 short-term episode in our history - to basically pull back on this in the biggest economy

1:13:24 of the world - and then, you know, making reasonable decisions again. But it's not a trend, and it's not something you can even change with a right-wing populist political strategy. It's something that will be decided regardless. 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

1:14:02 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 - hopefully a short episode - in the further development of electrification and renewable energies. Alright, yeah, same here. Ethiopia is one very strange animal in the sense that people here, or listeners, might not have

1:14:36 top of mind that it is actually the first country in the world that has banned the sale of internal combustion vehicles. Is there any other example - if you just move away from the typical hot spots being discussed - that you think in the EV industry is being overlooked? Another country in the world 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

1:15:08 at Norway. If the incentives are right - and of course the Norwegian incentives, looking at luxury taxes and so on, the way they did it to promote electric cars, they are different and you cannot copy them one-to-one for other countries - but what was interesting, and is still interesting, is how smooth this transition was for everyone, for all parts of society, to move to electric cars. And I mean, I think

1:15:45 this is a great example for everyone who is still afraid - you know, my mother, my grandmother should be able to drive electric and might have any issues with it. I think getting people in touch with the technology, getting people in touch with and experiencing electric cars - and I mean, we now talk about electric cars, but ultimately we should get rid of cars, right? Ultimately we should come up with a smarter ecosystem for mobility and energy.

1:16:17 But I think if the incentives are right - and this can of course be funding schemes, this can be tax incentives - try to lower the barrier and get people in touch with the technology and the product as soon as possible. And this is not only for people like us who work in the realm of technology, but also everyone in society.

1:16:48 I think this is super critical and we should have much more courage on that one, because for the German economy it's obvious: if we will not be successful making this transition, we'll have a huge issue. And so I'm also really doubting the strategy to pull back on the 2035 banning of ICE cars. I think the German car manufacturers, the

1:17:19 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 - it was not a thing where you needed to have a magical view into the crystal ball to know that this is coming. And so I'm really in favor of strong regulation on that one, because otherwise we'll just be eaten up by Chinese car manufacturers in the first place. And

1:17:51 you know, this decision again cannot be made by a separate country. Germany is way too small to only focus, as a car manufacturer or as a service provider, on Germany to be successful. You have to consider the world as a whole, and these decisions will mainly be made in China and maybe second in the US. So, before we end, maybe you want to tell listeners how they can get in touch

1:18:19 with you, or follow you, or something you would like to highlight. Yeah, for sure. It's easy to get in touch with us - probably the easiest way is to search for us on LinkedIn and just write us a message. 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, this can be a partnership with

1:18:53 a strategic ally, or a client which you want to enable to do something new. So usually when it's about a blank page where you think about, OK, what could we do next in the realm of mobility and energy - this is where we enjoy talking to stakeholders in the industry. And yeah, the focus is quite broad, I would say. So we have political entities amongst our customers. So we work

1:19:30 also for the German government when it comes to questions regarding charging infrastructure. We've done projects for the Indian Ministry of Economy on roaming, car manufacturers, utilities, but mostly scale-ups in the field of services and software as a service. So yeah, this is what we enjoy, and 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

1:20:03 was great being here 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 how he is probably very uniquely placed to understand the space in such detail - having worked with a large OEM on the first EVs, then transitioning to the first charger business models and testing with EnBW, one of the largest utilities, and then being the

1:20:46 manager and co-creator basically of one of the largest players interconnecting everyone, and then afterwards focusing on consulting in the space, strategically and operationally. So the scope of what he needs to understand - and you could see it from the jargon he shared with us: CPMS, OCPI, OCPP, roaming, MSP, etc. - and then his view on business models, innovation, startups, investments. Well, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And as usual, don't forget to share the word and

1:21:26 like the episode, and ask comments or questions on LinkedIn or wherever. And stay tuned for the next episode.