Startup ending the EV charger chaos with Kameale C. Terry

In this episode of Delivered, you can learn how one founder turned the issue of unreliable EV charging infrastructure into a thriving business.

We sat down with Kameale C. Terry, co-founder and CEO of ChargerHelp!, a tech-driven EV charging station repair and maintenance company. Kameale’s innovative approach blends real-world data, predictive analytics, and machine learning to tackle the biggest roadblock to mass EV adoption.

Key learnings:

• Understand how EV charging technology works
• Find out why over 25% of public EV chargers in the U.S. are broken
• Learn how ChargerHelp! is redefining the industry with Reliability as a Service
• Explore Kameale’s journey to becoming a leader in cleantech
• Discover how mission-driven leadership fuels startup success

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Transcript

Kameale C. Terry, welcome to Delivered. 

Thanks so much for having me and good morning. 

Good morning. Yeah, thank you for joining us at an early hour where you are in the world. Also, by far one of my favorite names of guests we've had so far. Super cool name as well. So welcome to the show and yeah, what time is it in your part of the world today? 

We just got to the top of nine o'clock, 9:00 AM 

That's commitment. I love that. Well, look, I try to really summarize what you're doing with your role, your company, and I feel like what you do is so much broader than what I can condense into such a short amount of time. I think talk a little bit about you first to set the scene for the audience at home about becoming a CEO and founder of ChargerHelp and what that kind of entails. I think let's, let's just start with you. 

Okay. Well, I'm originally from South Central Los Angeles, which is a special part of LA and my parents are immigrants. And yeah, my background, honestly, my mom worked for the school district and my dad was actually an entrepreneur specifically in building out server rooms across Los Angeles for a lot of the black doctors here in L.A. And so I've been around computers my whole life. Had the opportunity to delve into several sectors over the course of my career history, but really landed in the climate tech space through a company called EV Connect where I was the 10th employee and got really, really, really fascinated and interested in really the future of mobility and how data and computers play a role in that. 

Yeah, I think it's such a varied area to go into one of those, I guess topics that's on the ascendancy more and more each day. And I think that kind of EV car segment of the world, it used to be kind of this one day, I'll get one, it's probably a bit of a pipe dream where now it's pretty normal. And I also think that normality of maybe having an EV car comes of a cost of can you charge it? I know lots of people that I speak to are kind of a little bit hesitant at times about can you charge and maintain an EV car easily? I think it's more normalized now, but you're right, that coal connection point behind the car and mobility itself is the data, is the hardware, is the software working as one? So yeah, I think what you do is super cool. 

I'm actually quite jealous of the role that you are in. It's a very good one with a nice ethical wrapper around it. But I mean, I guess where we are today in terms of that current state of EV and EV charging in North America for example, where do you see that in the minute? Because I read this stat about 25% are broken at the minute. So if you have one of these EV cars, there's 25% chance where you got to charge that in the public road somewhere that you're not going to be able to do that. Where do you see that coming from your point of view? 

Sure, and look, I was set the stage here, so right for a while I would criticize industry and say that electric vehicles were turquoise and weird and not your average person was choosing to buy an electric vehicle. But I have to say probably in the last five years or so, I've been impressed about what the car OEMs specifically here in the US done around producing an experience that anyone would want to participate in, whether you cared about the environment or not. So one, I think that's really cool. There's beautiful cars out there, an amazing experience. And one thing that folks always chat about is that it's neat to drive an electric vehicle because of the technology that you're able to introduce into that vehicle. But to your point, EV charging infrastructure, man, there's so much to get into and sometimes I get too nerdy and too into the wormhole here, so I'm going to try to stay above waters. You're welcome there.  

So I mean with charging infrastructure, yes, you're right. But we see about 25% of the US can have issues and we see upwards of 90% of those issues being more software and communication issues. And I guess the last thing I'll say that probably will help to ground the conversation is that these issues are hard to detect and understand. And I think a lot of it goes back to this being the early industry. I think that it goes to, it's our first time ever deploying software into the built environment in a meaningful way. And so I don't think I've been taken aback by this. I think they're going to exist. I think that we're at a critical point now where it's like, okay, we understand that there are problems. What do we do next? 

Yeah, and I think you're right, and I said this maybe before in some other shows, but I feel like we are the luxury of being one of the most exciting times in history for humanity in terms of technology opportunity. And I suppose as humans, we're just trying to fundamentally work with what we have and try and normalize it as fast as we can and make it, I guess easy to access. And you're right, just being able to access certain things like an EV charger, there's so much behind the scenes that actually make it work or not work, right? It's not just simplistically like the plug doesn't fail or the hardware doesn't work, there's software, there's data, there's so much more, I guess tackling that. And I suppose from that problem arises a solution. And I suppose charger help is that solution, which I'm very happy to see in the world. So how is that really tackling the problem then? And I tried to really blend your innovative approach in the intro because I know that crosses all manner of, I guess nerdy sort of buzzwords, but really important ones about analytics and artificial intelligence and things like that and machine learning. So how does Charger help really tackle this problem with this new innovative approach that I've heard about? 

Sure. So I think a good way to understand how we tackle a problem is that when I came into this industry almost about 10 years ago, I used to work for this company and I was something called EV driver support. And so essentially when EV drivers went on site and they had an experience that maybe wasn't in alignment with what they were hoping to have, they were the person that I was the person that answered their calls. But sometimes we would have these instances, and this wasn't just for the company that I was at, we were hearing this often where either the station would say that it was available, but in actuality it wasn't. Or the driver would describe a behavior of the station that in the information and dataset that I was privy to, I couldn't verify or validate the experience that they were having in the field. 

And so a good way to contextualize this is that Tesla is a vertically integrated system from the vehicle to the payment systems to the connector, to the software, to the hardware that is all one company. And so when these softwares fail to act as intended, when there is a problem, it's a lot easier for a company to prioritize. But I'm pretty sure, I think you could quote me on this, I don't believe there's any other entity that's fully vertically integrated like Tesla in the world. And so what ends up happening is that when there are these issues that occur, if it's a different company, if there's different priorities, so it's hard to identify whose fault it is, where's the problem and all that jazz, where does Charger help come into play? For the first two years of the company, I really had a field service organization. 

We hired field service technicians. We worked with the Society of Automotive Engineers in order to create a standardization of what those technicians should learn and understand. And then we created a field service app. And so every time a software provider couldn't really understand what they were facing in the field, they would deploy my technicians. And so over time we started to troubleshoot some very complex problems. And even today, sometimes charger help is usually the first boots on the ground of troubleshooting a problem that no one has ever seen before. But what we do differently is that we are bringing in that dataset alongside dataset from the charging station itself, the software itself, and then recently with an investment from a car OEM, some of that data as well. And we get a holistic viewpoint and understanding to easily then identify really whose fault is it, what should be the problem and what are the best next steps? And so we do that through a lot of data and analytics and all that jazz. But I'll pause there. I know that was a bit of a mouthful. 

Yeah, no, it's cool. And I can totally relate. I have an EV, and you're right, the first integration of Tesla is beautiful, as in it's seamless. You'd have to think about it, you just plug it in, it works, right, it's done. But I know what it's like on the flip side when you're just trying to plug into, I guess you could say a native or a different charger, and it's like I have to sign up, I have to put payment details in. Is it going to work? Is it not going to work? Is it available? Is it working? And I've had a couple of situations where I've almost run out of charge because I've been to a charger and it wasn't working or it just didn't connect. And I think there's a level of responsibility, I guess this industry is in, its Ines, right? It's getting more people are embracing the EV cars, which is great. 

It's great for the world, but I think you're right, yeah, there's so much more going on behind the scenes. And I think that's what excites me is there is a solution here. Charger help to I guess prepare and support the ever-growing need for this, I guess infrastructure. And as you're saying, the infrastructure needs to grow rapidly, but in that growth comes risk. And I suppose the risk is where the opportunity lies for your company where you can go, well, we need to make sure these different types of providers have a sustainable architecture to create that kind of sustainable world long term. So I think there's a nice beauty in the synergy of the two things coming together. And I suppose if I can really just lean on the kind of impact I guess around what charger helps bring into the industry so far, could you maybe speak to the impact it's bringing just to the world from what you're seeing in the field? 

Sure. So I think it first starts off with our business model. I believe we have one of the only business models that are directly tied to whether the station is fully operating or not. And we just announced a performance guarantee two days ago where we will actually take on penalties if we're not able enable the station to properly work. And so with that, it then forces, it's a forcing mechanism on us as well that we can't solve everything by ourselves. My goal of Charger Hill was never to be, oh, we're going to fix all of reliability. No, there's two things that we want to do. One is that as we get data and understanding from the field, we want to be able to bring that back to industry and tell industry, Hey, we're consistently seeing an issue with being able to actually swap software over the air. 

That is a problem. And here's how we've identified the problem and here's how we think that we should implement certain business standards. So as an industry, we can be better or we would say, Hey, we've realized that a lot of the field service technicians do not understand open ChargePoint protocol. This actually impedes on meantime to repair and troubleshooting an issue. We should work with the Society of Automotive Engineers in order to come up with a way in which we are going to validate that a technician not only is safe, but actually understands software protocol. So much of our impact is like, yes, we have venture backed, so I have to make money and all these things. Yes, we'll be of service to the industry from providing a business solution, but I think at least for me, it's more than that. It is to come to industry and say, here's some valuable insights on how we can all be successful together. 

And I truly believe in this idea of rising tides lifts all boats, and at the end of the day, I can only be as great as my partners. So if my partners have the worst infrastructure, that is not good for my business model. And so I have to continue to feed free information back into the industry to allow for them to continue to evolve in order for the business to be successful. But to be quite honest, I wholeheartedly believe in us being able to move better and that as of course you get innovation into petroleum, but that there is a better way to move with electric vehicles. It's not the silver bullet, it's not going to solve all our problems, but it absolutely is somewhat of a better way. Right. 

Yeah, that makes complete sense. And I love how you are phrasing that in terms of it is a connected system, isn't it? It's not just about you and your company, it's about the partners. It's about many things all working as one to make this work seamlessly. I guess for the just general populists who use this technology going forward. And I was actually quite interested about in my notes here, I was going to ask you a bit about the kind of at legislation in the US about EV charging. I think in the spirit of everything working together as one, is there something there around legislation in the US that maybe needs to tie into this to help a better architecture and better infrastructure for EV charging in general? Is this something that you guys have maybe been part of or assisted with in any way? 

Absolutely. One of the things that our industry struggled with early on was that we didn't really have an agreed upon way to measure reliability or to measure how the product was being used once it was deployed. And so we actually worked with this guy named Corey Bullis out of flow, and he's actually the one that first came to us was like, Hey, we want to create a formula. And for a long time I had been really trying to advocate for us to at least at bare minimum make an agreement that all of our formulas weren't the right ones. And so Corey comes and he is like with flow and they're like, look, we have this rendition of a formula. Can we start bringing an industry in order to collaborate to all agree that this is a formula that we could put forward? And so that formula actually got picked up by the US Federal Administration through the NEVY legislation, but most of we were able to put forth legislation in California called the EV Charging Reliability Act. And that specific legislation was more so to really nudge the energy commission to one to measure, you can't really fix what you have to measure to measure uptime and reliability and then to be able to put forth some type of teeth behind folks not hitting a certain metric. Yeah, absolutely. We were part of those conversations, brought the folks together, but definitely want to honor that the industry really took it seriously and really put some time behind getting the legislation stood up. 

Yeah, I think that's a really good and powerful way to look at what it takes to, I guess run a company as much as be a face of a company is it is about building great products. It is about building something that's useful to the world, but having almost like you have a kind of responsibility or the power to maybe make real change in a positive way beyond just the bottom line, which I know companies need to make because backed by venture or they have P and ls to maintain. But I think if you can be part of the change around that legislation, and I think also I'm quite interested as well, you mentioned before about what a technician needs to do now to maintain this stuff. It's not just a hardware technician now, it's also software. I mean, maybe there's something within that as well around the wages, the quality of technicians being paid fairly for the work they do, because it must be pretty skilled and pretty hard going at times as well. Yeah. Have you been involved in anything around that as well as the legislation? 

Yeah, sure. And I mean, just to double tap on the point you were making earlier, it's fascinating. As a CEO, you kind of have to find these sweet spots where you can do good, you can make profit and you can do something that lasts. And not every instance, and I don't think not every business is able to find a sweet spot, but we've been very privileged and blessed to find these sweet spots where we can continue to drive the business, we can bring in partners, and then we can also have significant impact. So with the technicians as well, one of the things that we consistently faced was that a lot of folks didn't understand systems. So you had electricians that were going out to solve software issues but didn't really understand the system of a charging station from a software perspective. And most of the time, look, the electricity was fine, we were facing interoperability issues. 

And so I can't even take any credit for this. My co-founder who worked for the Department of Labor and really understood what it took to actually establish a job code in the United States really took ownership of bringing industry together as well to be able to say, what do we agree on that this person should know? And then it was what we wanted to insert was then what should they be paid? And I'll say two things really quickly, why this was important to us. One in the US we wanted to make sure that whether you had a college degree or not, this position was a minimum of a high school diploma. And at the base pay minimum pay was $31 an hour. And that's a good starting rate for folks in the US with the high school diploma. Other thing that we wanted to do is that there was a good coupling of technology and people, so what I was chatting about earlier, it's very important to showcase that charging reliability is not a labor problem. 

You can't send a technician out on day. That does not mean that you'll solve the issue. You have to get data and insights from the field, and the goal is to eventually solve it from over the air. But here's the thing, it is not to replace the job of the technician. It is to protect the job of the technician. Because what ends up happening is if you can solve more things over the air that are more rudimentary, and in that way you continue to allow for this technician to becomes a specialized workforce because then they are only concerned with harder problems. And that was really important to us is that as we solved more rudimentary things over the air and gotten data insight, we continue to allow for this technician to become more specialized. So they could never become a job that you would pay $12 an hour or $15 an hour. We are always utilizing technology in order to plump up that technician to ensure that they're working on the hardest problems. 

I love that. And it's very much, I guess what you just articulated is the antithesis of things like data, machine learning, AI, there's this big narrative that it's there to take people's jobs and automate 'em away. But actually you're right. It's actually about augmenting the human be more specialist and to leverage the technology and to utilize the data and to deploy stuff faster, better. And essentially they are still their in job and they're still, as the technology is getting more complex, they're getting more tooled up with stuff. And I think that's really where I see a lot of shifts, whether we're talking about EV charging or autonomous companies or anything to do with AI to with ev, it's the same method about empowering the humans to deliver that better service and like you're saying, make it more specialist and not generic. So yeah, it's great to hear that's the kind of the vibe I guess you could say from a technician's point of view. 

I guess. 

Only thing I would add to that is I think you have to be very intentional about it because I definitely do think that people, there's a lot of people that aren't thinking about people when they're thinking about technology. So I do want to point out, because it's not easy. It's not like, oh, we created the software now that we're going to protect technicians jobs. So we are constantly having to figure out how to protect technicians jobs. So I do want to overlay that not everyone is doing that. Some people are trying to replace people too. There is a level of critical thought that has to go into this to ensure that it works properly. So I just want to call that out. Yeah, 

Yeah, it's a really good point. And I think from doing innovation from my side, from, I don't even know about 20 years now, a long time, it definitely needs to have the human component, the people component fully considered otherwise, that I think is the kind of single point of failure Most of the time for any software innovation based product service, you have to have that in. But definitely pro-human definitely about augmentation versus replacement, at least from my point of view. So that's good to hear. I mean, in terms of charge helps accelerating the adoption of EVs from improving a driver experience. Why, from your point of view, is the mass adoption of EVs important to you personally? Do you have a connection to it beyond the business and beyond shareholders and venture P and Ls, you have to satisfy, where does it sit for you from a personal point of view? 

Sure. So I mean, think the thing that was so interesting to me when I came into this space was realizing just how much air quality impacted my life. And I didn't really understand or realize that being in South Central, I'm amongst freeways. And so most of the folks in my family have asthma. My mom passed away from cancer. My co-founder who's from Compton, who's really surrounded by freeways, both of her parents passed away from lung related diseases. And so I always tell folks, look, no, there's a lot that needs to be improved when it comes to the EV batteries and electric vehicles, but is there an opportunity to innovate in order to be better? And so we deserve to engage in that and try to be better. That's why. So I always think about EVs and just trying to be more innovative as not just a nice to have, but personally it's a health issue. It's crazy. We breathe air that harms us all the time. That's wild to me. So I'm trying to do my part part to circumvent that a bit. 

Yeah, I love actually when you boil it down to first principles, it's like we produce lots of air or toxic air from ice vehicles and that harms us. So you want to fix it. And that's totally, you know what I mean? It just a get more simple than that. And you're right. And I also from an early doctor of an Evie and myself, and you get the skeptic saying, well, yeah, they might be doing this, but then they're doing bad somewhere else by how they produce the batteries and stuff. But in my mind, it's what you just said, really, it is better to start than make it perfect. And I think yes, it is perfect now, but it is a start to change longer term that that's going to get more improved, more better, more accessible over time. So yeah, very commendable, commendable day. Thank deal. And I guess just want to touch on the challenges because there must be some that have come to pass from your side and what's that really been like? What have you learned from that as a personal experience? But I guess it's also been the same for in the computing industry, telecom industry by industries preventing innovation from flourishing. So 

Yeah, what stories have you got from it always sent you on a rainbows, there's always a dark cavern to cross to get to where you are. 

And what's challenge being for you? 

You know what? I think because I have a bit of a different perspective, look, I come from a community that the challenges that we face in life are not things that are not huge. So funny, when you start thinking about some of the things that I've seen or some of the things that folks in my community have experienced, and nothing ever seems super horrible to us, it is kind like, well, that's just how we grew up. You don't know anything different. And so I think that's been very helpful as a founder and innovation because I think I approach life where it's like, no, it's going to be hard. Things are not bad things. And if something is hard doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. Almost there's an expectation that things should not come super easily. And so I guess for me, I just have to consistently remind myself of, I would say three things. 

One is that so much of what's innovation is people having an understanding. And so always trying to find to people and trying to understand if they're pushing back or if they don't get something, why, what is their perspective? And so that's very helpful to me. And I think the other part is that there is so much power in people. I believe that people are inherently good and that there's power in tapping into your community and trying to figure out how to solve something. And I think the last piece, this is really what my dad instilled in me. There's nothing that I cannot do. And if I wanted to go to the moon tomorrow, and I know it would take a long time and maybe I couldn't go tomorrow, but I could figure it out. So with those principles, there's nothing Dad would say, oh, this is so hard, or this has been a tough thing. It's like, no, it's all supposed to be a little hard. If it was easy, then I would be worried. 

Yeah, that's so true because I think the reality is the best things in life are on the other side of difficulty and hardships. So it's like if there isn't that friction to get past something, like you say, it probably isn't either big enough or right enough for you to work on that problem. And I love a founder story that is steeped in conviction what you're saying there. It's like it's not about building the company to build it, sell it, make money, which is the most standard basic answer of all times. It's actually to help a real problem that's affected real people around in your life and you're just there to try and do good things with this vehicle. And that's what I think a business is. It's a vehicle to do good things, and yes, it makes money and yes, it other stuff, but is ultimately, or it should be anyway. 

This is probably my optimistic view on business, but if it can do good with that beyond making great products and services and some money, what a great thing to be in. It's a great way to work. And I suppose just on that, I'd be really curious just to talk a bit about, I guess the long-term vision. I think I have a sense of, but maybe we can just maybe talk a little bit how you see the short-term long-term vision there. And I know we danced around it a little bit just in your previous points, but just to maybe cement that for the audience at home. 

Yeah, I mean, my super long-term vision is really around solving this problem of what happens when you bring software into the built environment, what happens when you have multiple protocols that have to interact with one another and you can't fix everything yet over the air because we've never brought software into the built environment, and what is the workforce of the future when things are all connected through software and there's a physical aspect to it. So yeah, I mean the most immediate goal of Charger help is that we want to be able to offer essentially an insurance product on all of these charging assets, the full system. And I want to be able to utilize data in order to offer a guarantee on the performance of those assets. And if they don't perform, I want to be able to offer that we would have some type of penalties against it. 

I think that's the type of product that when you think about electrifying the California Highway Patrol cards, or you think about electrifying FedEx vehicles or the vehicles that deliver stuff from a lot of these large companies, it is not going to be good enough to have a parts warranty. It's not going to be good enough that you sold some type of service level agreement. People are going to want to say like, Hey, because if my medium or heavy duty truck cannot deliver this shipment because you software provider can't figure out what's wrong with your software, there's a problem here. And so Charger Hope just wants to be able to deliver a level of trust and certainty to the industry so that way people can continue to run their businesses in a better way through electrification, but they're not having to necessarily take any type of the pain that comes with having software in a built environment. 

I love that answer in terms of connecting it back to just everyday important ecosystems, like you say, to change I guess the day-to-day driver like me to an EV one thing, but to maybe move that into higher, more, I guess larger vehicles like lorries and even emergency vehicles like ambulances and things like that. Absolutely. 

You don't want, say you can't afford the EV problem, the charger doesn't work, I can't move. And I've never thought about that scale, but you're right, that would be the most systemic change of all time to make a dent in this kind of pollution problem from mobility vehicles. And so yeah, it just clicked to me why this is so important now beyond just in my mind, I was like, oh, it's to help people like me who are a car that's Navy, and it just stops it from not being able to charge it. But when you look at that level, the infrastructure level of larger vehicles, it's so super important and I think that's a really exciting thing beyond the other sustainable parts of this. 

So I'm going to move on because I could go on this a lot longer, but I know we have limited time. Can we talk a little bit about you and your leadership style? And I know this is kind bit of a jump from the world to more to you, but what kind of culture do you build at charge of help to foster that innovation? And again, we talked about before, the people are a big part of the innovation. It's not just the technology. You need that culture as well in there working as one. So yeah, let's talk about leadership style. What's your vibe with leadership style? 

Yeah, I think I would say the thing I would point out about my leadership style is I'm really, really aware of all the things that I don't know how to do well, and I try to find people that can fill in that gap. 

I love that. 

For me, I am a visionary. I have purpose. I know what I want to build, and I know that I want to build it in kindness, but I also drive very hard. And so I have to have a balance because everyone is not all purpose built like me or look, some people work for the company. It's just a job. And so I have to be careful of my expectations. And so my co-founder, Yvette Ellis, she is so good at being able to just make sure that as I drive and go, that the people at the company are well taken care of. And the same thing, Walter Thorn leads our SVP of product and strategy, and he also sits in this tandem of understanding the vision and then also the reality of today. And so yeah, I think my leadership style is just being hyper aware of what I'm not good at and trying to make sure that that doesn't harm people. 

Because sometimes the things that you're not good at it could be very harmful to others. And so trying to be aware of that. And then I just try to really listen, man. I mean, I'm constantly just trying to get information in to know when I'm screwing up or not doing great, but also being aware of the things I'm really good at. So it's like in college, my degree was in organizational leadership is I took a lot of leadership classes. And the thing about leading, I feel like you're constantly, at least you're constantly trying to figure out like, okay, am I still a good leader? Am I still a good leader? It's like a daily check-in and you mess up, you mess up all the time. I probably mess up once a day. I'm just like, damn it, I shouldn't have done that, I guess. And then getting people that can protect your pointy parts because at the end of the day I'm trying to build something very fast and something that's never been done before and it is extremely hard. And there's 41 people that work at Charger help that of course, yeah, they're excited about what we're building, but at the end of the day, they all have families. 

And so it's an intricate balance. So I don't know how much of that is an answer, but those are my thoughts on it. 

Yeah, no, I think you've nailed it nicely. And I think you're right, it's about acknowledging what you are as much as you are not right. And I think embracing that and filling the gaps to counterbalance the things you are not right, and that then protects your team, your business, it is a very hard thing to do as well because I think it's probably a slight level of you have to check in with yourself and check your ego and be like, okay, I'm not great at this thing, so I need to solve that. Now, ripple effects through this is purely from an experience that I've been through historically. I know it's a difficult, it's just like a spiritual thing, isn't it? It's quite a spiritual question, wasn't it? In hindsight. So I guess I could say a lot of people that watch this show, they're obviously tech related people. They maybe are in a large company or enterprise or even starting their own companies or have started their own companies. Obviously from your background, what advice would you give to a textile founder? And it can be spiritual and 

Yeah, you know what? It's so funny. This morning I do this little ritual thing. This is the first time I recorded it, but I was going to put it on Instagram and I put it and I took it down so every morning because the biggest advice I would give to a founder is that it is so important to protect your mental space because I think in building and creating, sometimes you might be three or four light years ahead of what reality is today, and some of that you do have to bring back to reality. You got to build something today, but then some of that you have to protect from people from squashing it. And so I always tell folks, building and creating it to me is the greatest part about being a human and living is to have purpose and then to create something from nothing that is so incredible to me. 

But in order to do that, grounding yourself. So every morning, and I'm not like some people, they're like, oh, I meditate for 30 minutes. I could never, I wish I could. I guess I should never say never, but it would be difficult. So I do five minutes of meditation and sometimes I just do one breath, but every morning I just try to start off with five minute meditation. I've been doing really good at writing out three things that I'm grateful for. And you would just be so surprised on some of your worst days you can still find three things that you're grateful for. And then I've been reading the Stoics, so I've been reading the stoics and I've also been reading the bio pick back up the Bible. I went to a Christian college and I've picked back up the Bible. So I've been doing the stoics and then the Bible, and then I try to read some type of book. But 

Oh man, 

I just tell people, try to ground yourself. Yeah, 

I love that. So I'm assuming you, maybe you've read the Ryan Holiday type stuff right around his stoics stuff, ego's the Enemy, all that stuff. I'd highly recommend that book to anyone listening. Ego's the enemy, amazing book, especially if you are building companies, keeps you in check. Yes, I love that. I love that. I suppose to kind of wind down my questions, we have quite a few from the audience listening, just in terms of the best thing you've delivered, had to look at that in there somewhere. What's the best thing you feel you've delivered? And that could be from a career, your company or even your personal life. Is there a thing that stands out as like, yeah. I'm pretty proud of delivering that.

Man, I'm so proud of ChargerHelp. I think that this is the best thing I could have ever really invested in. And when I think back to all of the experiences that I have, it's like it's a culmination. I don't have any children. My dad always ask me about grandchildren. I was like, look, you got a whole toddler charge. Your old five years old, this is my prize possession. So I think that Charger Help has done an incredible thing for the industry of bringing forth and highlighting a problem that didn't exist. I think that we've really showcased what collaboration can bring. And then most of the people, I would say about 90% of the people at Charger help never worked at a EV charging company before. And so for them to now be exposed to this space, and people pick off my people all the time, which I think is fine, you pay them more, you could take 'em. That's fine. And I guess the last thing I'll say is what I'm most excited about is what are the startups that are going to come from Charger help? I think that's what would make my heart feel so warm, is to see who at the company has saw another gap and that they'll go out and solve it. And I'm really excited for that to see that. But today I would say that this is the thing that I'm the most proud of that I've ever built in my whole life. 

Yeah, I love that. I love that because such a part of you as well, isn't it? I suppose you put your whole self into this. So I think it's a reciprocal thing. If you're proud of what you've done and you're proud of it, I mean, it's a great thing to have delivered. I feel quite proud about it, and I've always really discovered it really from I was talking, but what it represents, so, okay, so I'm move across me to some questions from our audience and we'll go from there if that's okay with you? 

Yeah. 

Alright. Okay. Let's move to questions. And I'm going to pick the first one here that's come up. And this one is we mentioned being nerdy and technical. So this might be one of those questions. I don't really fully understand this, but you might do. So this is from Love Row. So what are the percentages of OCPP 2.0 that you're seeing in the field? Are you seeing any advances in reliability in relation to 1.6? It's nothing to me, but it sounds pretty 

Technical. Yeah, man. Okay, look, because I was telling someone the other day, I was like, I don't think there's any deployed OCP 2.0 in Deploy. I haven't come across it. And if someone told me no, there is, I said, okay, 1.6. And look, I'm am a huge fan of Open Protocol, huge fan of Open Charge Alliance. I think that 1.6 had a lot of holes. What we're continue to hear is that 2.0 is kind of going to be the saving grace of everything. I know that everybody's been releasing that they're 2.0 certified, but I personally have not encountered a station that is on 2.0 yet. So if they're out there, please let me know. I would love to experience a deployed in the ground today, 2.0 station, but as of today, everything that we're working on is 1.6 J. And I think we have recently come across a 1.5, which is crazy. But look, I'm actually going to be in Europe in two weeks and I'll be at the Open Charge Alliance. And just really trying to dig into just making sure that some of the things that we're seeing in one point ask people to implement 2.0 that they'll take care of it. But there's more reliability problems around business standards, I would say than, I mean, implementation is a problem too. But yeah, I guess I'll leave that there. I have a lot of thoughts on this, but yes, 

I can imagine, I can say there's almost a challenge there. Maybe for Love Row, maybe you can find a 2.0 to share onto the world when you're in Europe as a challenge. Back to Love Row from the question. Thanks, lover for that question. Okay. So the next question is actually less technical, and what's been your most difficult challenge when running a venture backed startup, which I know of how this can be. Sylvia, please share your insights on, 

I was just telling my co-founder, why do we take this money? Yeah, I mean, look, yeah, I don't even know where to start. It's all very difficult. It's all very hard. I think that you end up with a lot of investors that have never run companies themselves. Everybody has opinions about what you shouldn't do. And look, sometimes they're good opinions. Some of the times it's noisy, it becomes very noisy. I feel like that's the biggest hangup with running a venture backed company is that it's very noisy. And the thing is, for a long time I would think like, oh, well, these people must know better than me. They see all these companies, and then you start talking to investors that have opposing viewpoints. So then you're like, there's not a way. Okay. I would just say that running a venture backed startup is just so noisy and everybody has an opinion about how you should run your company, but none of them most of the time have ever run a company. There is that, but the good part about it, because I'm balancing with the good part, you do find those investors that you trust that do more listening than talking, that do more, trying help you to seek clarity as a founder than trying to tell you what to do. And those investors you cherish and you hold close to you. And I do have a few of those, but I have a lot of people that like to tell me how to do my job out, 

Almost need more, almost a bit like Yoda or something like that. Something that's more like a mythical sage to guide 

You. You just turned down the value on them. You are just like, oh, 

Yeah, I can't hear you, but thank you though. Okay. Okay. Yeah, interesting. I mean, it's not the first time I've heard that, but yeah, it's good to say it's consistent anywhere in the world, at any industry, right? It's the vibe. Okay, so I've got one more here actually. Let's look. Okay. What is ChargerHelp's strategy to combat OEMs providing long-term warranties on new charging stations? 

Yeah, it's the issue that we see a lot of time with the hardware. Well, one, our strategy has been a lot of the OEMs are reselling, starting to resell our, so that's one way to do it. The other thing is that we find that most of the, and you're talking about charging hardware OEMs, most of them are selling parts only warranty, which doesn't account for if you have a comms issue, a software issue, interoperability issue. Most folks don't want to touch it because they don't have the data set to be able to prove that they'll be successful. And so if you're not getting any type of reliability stuff that's a full wraparound, you're going to get stuck with them saying, this isn't covered underneath our warranty, which is what we see today. Right? Well, you can't really prove that it's a hardware issue or you can't really prove that it's our software. And so we haven't really seen, I mean, there's one company rely on this in Canada. I know they offer a reliability of service and I think there's a WhatsApp, WhatsApp, something to that effect. But look, at the end of the day, competition only makes us better. And that's why I tell my engineers and my team is like, I love a good competition. Let's go like, okay, let's do it. It's only going to make us better. 

Fair, love that attitude. That's great. Okay, look, we'll do one more question. Okay. And then, yeah, just bring it right back to what I kind of said at the start. In the intro, we talked a lot about you blend real-time data, predictive analytics, AI, et cetera. So we have a question here actually that's come in. How does technology like AI, predictive analytics help improve charger reliability and customer satisfaction in terms of maintenance? 

Yeah, look, one thing I'll say is that you have so many companies that are coming out now that are like, oh, we do AI machine learning for maintenance, and it bothers me so much because a lot of them, one, have never done O&M, period. And then two, most of them are pulling data off of, they're just pulling straight OCPP data and we produce a report called DV charging reliability report, where we proved that that data set is times wrong. And so they're making predictions and models off of bad data sets. And it is frustrating because you set the customer up for failure, you don't really understand what you're doing. What we believe is that bringing infill service data, bringing in O&M bringing in all the troubleshooting things, you could build out a very large LLM for us. Last April, we hit 19 million unique data points from all field service data, and that was just last April we just opened up. 

We have a field service app that we now have field service partners like AL and spco that are going to start working on it. So we'll get even more data from the field and more learnings from the field. And then, so what I focus on, instead of having all this fancy terminology of AI and ML and all of that, we focused on the raw dataset first and understanding that data set first. Now I'm starting to build machine learning models on top of that, and I'm not even calling it AI yet. I don't think we have enough dataset and enough learnings for even saying that, right? No, I have a big data set. I'm doing some analysis, I'm doing some L on it. But the thing that you'll realize, and this is why I'm okay with competing, is that people will talk all this fancy talk, but then no one looks underneath the curtain and be like, well, what data set are you doing this fancy stuff off of? Because if you have bad data, bad data and bad data out. And so that's what we've been focused on and against how you call it, recommendations of my investors. They're like, you should just say you do ai. I'm like, no, I'm smart enough to know that I'm not doing AI. I'm doing very fancy, complex analysis, but we're not there. But when I get there, oh, you better know that it's going to be something incredible 

Now off the right foundations and the right data sets. And I think you're right. It's something that people don't necessarily look at, not as sexy as this kind of AI revolution sexy at all. Not at all very hard, but without the right data, you're going to be producing a very, I guess, long-term unsexy AI product that will basically produce crap basically. Okay. So okay. I say one more question. This is the one more question and then we'll start to wrap because we've got so many coming through, but this is from Pranesh. And in the absence of actual real-time data of public charges that are down, is there a rule of thumb that would provide a ballpark of charges that are down, say, in California? 

Wait one more. 

In the absence of actual realtime data of public charges being down, is there a rule of thumb that will provide a ballpark of charges that are down? I kind of understand. 

Yeah, I guess the thing is that we have, interestingly enough, California, they're requiring that you start pushing out real time data. So the issue is not that we don't have access to real-time data. We have a system we could pull in real-time data. Now, I think what we're looking at is how do you validate that data set? And so how we've done it is it's most, it's the coolest thing, and I think it's Foundry as RY or something like that. They showcase a lot of the patterns that they see as well, and they're looking at a broader system. But you can build models off of how a product has reacted when it wasn't working. And then when you bring in, you actually have access to realtime data. You bring in the real time data, and then you find those patterns and you say, oh, okay, this probably is down. This probably isn't working. So I think it's all about, it's really about field service data and information and other data sets than just realtime data because we don't have a lack of realtime data. If I understood that question. Right. If not, you can link in me and then I will further explain if needed. Yeah, 

Look at that in some respects. That's almost the perfect segue way to my kind of fun wrap up question, I guess, really, which is around where can the good people watching this and maybe watch this later, where can they find stuff about yourself, the good work at ChargerHelp? What's your best location? 

Yeah, the best places. Yeah. I'd say on the LinkedIn. On LinkedIn. LinkedIn, maybe on the LinkedIn, I try to post things that I learn. I get very passionate. I have a marketing. People always think, oh, your marketing team does your personal LinkedIn. I was like, no, it's just something will really impassion me. And I'm like, let me go talk about it on LinkedIn. So that's probably the best place if you follow me personally on the LinkedIn, if you want well-crafted, great marketing follow ChargerHelp. If you want my random sporadic thoughts, you can follow me. 

Love that. Super honest. But look, thank you for this. Yeah, sharing this with us today and answering the questions and just really, yeah, there's certainly some light bulb moments that came to mind just talking to you about the importance of the work you're doing. And yeah, I thank you for doing it. I think it is an important company to see around the world, and I'm glad you're coming to Europe to spread the good word. And all I'll say is thank you for the time and safe travels on your European tour in the next few weeks. 

Thank you.