The Long Good-Bye

I’m writing this post on my last day in the role of CEO at Fabriq, the company I founded as EnergyDeck just over eight years ago.

On Monday I will move on to a new role with a new company, and Fabriq will firmly be in the hands of the next generation. In this article, I will try to lay out what made me take this decision, what I have learned during those past eight years, and what’s next.

Because, you know, life goes on!

// 0 // - The Back-Story That Never Gets Old

I started Fabriq as EnergyDeck in October 2011, after a five-year stint at Google.

That's always how the story starts...

During my time at the big G, I had spent a lot of effort trying to improve the environmental performance of our building portfolio (offices and to an extent data centres), reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, invest in renewables and support progressive environmental policy. 

The one thing that stuck with me from this experience was just how hard it was to get access to useful data about our buildings, even only for basic performance benchmarking. The fact that I was working for one of the leading tech organisations in the world didn’t seem to make my life much easier. 

If it was that hard for me to get the job done at Google, then it would have to be nearly impossible for everyone else.

Yet clearly, the world needed a solution to address this problem. Climate change was already rampant. Buildings on a whole account(ed) for 40% of global emissions.

Against this backdrop, I had just witnessed first-hand in late 2009 the abysmal failure at global policy level to do anything serious about climate change, in the form of a COP15 in Copenhagen that ended without a meaningful and binding result - despite my best efforts (not that successive COPs fared much better, with only Paris being a shiny - but ultimately inconsequential - blip on the map of global climate policy in recent years).

We threw everything at COP15, and the kitchen sink. It all started with an idea -- I honestly thought we could make a difference, but it was a total failure on all levels (the first of many). The visualisations of climate change, however, looked super scary. Because it is! In fact, when you really study it, it's so scary that I'm still wondering why everyone isn't running for the exits! Oh wait, there aren't any. Right.

// 1 // - An Idea Is Born

An idea formed in my head for a web-enabled platform that would make short work of collecting consumption and other operational data from buildings, automate much of the tedious analysis, and provide useful insights to users.

The core concept and USP of EnergyDeck was to leverage the collective intelligence of all participants (and assets) to develop industry-leading performance benchmarks, as well as provide insights into potential savings opportunities to users. The analytical accuracy and user benefits would increase the more people would be on the platform -- the much-fabled network effects.

Add to that subscription pricing for the core platform and a marketplace on top for suppliers offering energy efficiency services and products (which would automatically be matched with buildings in need). And hey presto - we had our highly scalable business model ready to save the world!

The original platform concept from an early pitch deck in 2011. It was called Green Central then and built on serverless technology (Google App Engine) half a decade before 'serverless' even became a term. Always ahead of the curve -- maybe too far so.

This part of the story is quite well-known. I must have told it a thousand times. 

What came next was less glamorous …

// 2 // - Magic In Every Beginning

Was it hard to leave Google? You bet! It’s a fantastic company, and fantastically powerful at what it does - which is a lot of things. That was as true in 2011 as it is in 2020 - if anything, it’s an order of magnitude more powerful today than it was back when I left. And that's before we even consider the $1Trn market cap.

Not only was Google a generally good place to work for me and my peers, but my role in Green Business Operations and Clean Energy Advocacy meant I was living the dream for the longest time. Work was what I was looking forward to for several years.

Still, eventually there came a time when it felt like I had achieved everything I could in that context within Google (here in EMEA anyways). In addition, I felt an incredible urge to go out there and implement the ideas I had for changing building performance management to the better.

Which incidentally wasn’t something that Google was up for at that point in time (and arguably isn’t to this date). Maybe because they knew better ... and getting data at scale from buildings was considered too hard a problem to solve, even for the most advanced tech company in the world?

I wasn't fazed though.

There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, they say.

Question: on the chart above, where would you place the average commercial building today? Answer: all the way back in 1990! That is, the typical building has a level of connectivity and data availability that's pre-"Web 1.0". We have connected toothbrushes and all sorts of smart gadgets today, but the vast majority of commercial assets is essentially still run via spreadsheets. I knew this to be true when I set out in 2011... but never expected it to be only marginally less true in 2019 (The Edge in Amsterdam and a number of other smart buildings that have popped up in recent years notwithstanding).

?Starting my own company, building my own product and generally running my own show took things to a different level.

Product-related work was what I had always enjoyed the most at Google. But I had not previously experienced the kind of deep satisfaction and excitement you get from this combination:

1. Build an actual product based on your own ideas
2. Get positive feedback from users, who tell you how beneficial it is to them
3. Find people who give you money for it (aka, having a business model)

This, in a nutshell, was the ultimate job satisfaction for me. I couldn’t have wished for anything else and was truly in professional heaven. 

That is, until the cash crunch hit.

There comes a time in the life of every entrepreneur, when the initial do-your-own-thing-magic-fairy-dust-bubble hits the seemingly-insurmountable-wall-of-cash-flow.

Which means: it’s time to get out of your ivory tower and raise!

When I first set out, I seriously thought that with the ￡50K or so I had cashed out from my GOOG shares I could build the product, market it, sell it and achieve profitability. And then scale it.

Yes, really. Talk about reality distortion fields ... 

As a matter of fact, we were quite efficient and fast with the MVP. The first version of EnergyDeck launched in March 2012, a mere three months after product development started in earnest (thanks to our stellar development team in Kiev - to this date run by the very same Tech Lead whom I started out with in 2011 as employee #2).

I wasn’t even totally embarrassed when we launched; v1 actually worked pretty well for what it was meant to do. 

EnergyDeck v1.x, late 2012. The tablet and mobile versions were "concepts", and the web platform took unsuspecting users straight to the Analytics view. Three-bar charts were all the rage in those days.

Clearly, I knew what I was doing. Or so I thought.

// 3 // - School Of Hard Knocks (Or "Startup 101")

The real problem was - as I had to learn the hard way - that building stuff is the easy part, and making it work well is not too difficult. As an engineer, you can solve almost any technical problem. As well as the impossible ones, given enough time.

But selling any product in any significant quantity is a totally different story - especially in Enterprise SaaS, which this was. 

Finally, scaling product adoption is like a different dimension altogether. And one whose existence I could hardly fathom when I started out.

To sum it up in one short sentence for everyone to repeat: Distribution Is Everything!

Yet, back in 2011, I really did think that if I build it, they will come! On launch day, my single biggest worry was not that the product might disappoint or even how to promote it, but that the (massively overpowered) server we were hosting it on was going to collapse under the burden of users signing up and wanting to try out the platform. 

Well, let's just say that the server didn’t break. In fact, I’m not sure it even registered as much as a flicker of a workload...

But it wasn’t a total "no-show" either. Thanks to an article in Business Green as part of a trade mission to San Francisco that I participated in (Clean & Cool FTW!), plus active networking on my side, we had something like 100 sign-ups after one week.

Not a bad start, all in all. 

The original Business Green article announcing the launch of EnergyDeck is still alive. Thanks forever, @James_BG! (double glazing not included in platform offering, but generally a good idea)

It even felt like this could be the beginning of something big.

And yet, and yet … 

• sign-ups doesn’t equal active users ...
• doesn’t equal paying customers ...
• doesn’t equal cash-flow ...
• doesn’t equal scale ...
• doesn’t equal financial success ...
• doesn’t equal exit (not that I cared about that last point).

I had lots to learn, and I was only three months in.

// 4 // - After The Round = Before The Round   

Fast forward a year (don’t worry - the intervals are going to get longer now, I have a word limit to adhere to). We closed our first seed round in March 2013. In other words, 18 months in.

And 6 months after we ran out of cash.

We only survived through remortgaging family property (don’t ever try this at home, do you hear me?!) and not taking “salaries” for several months. Not that we had anything close to a normal salary before, mind.

The first round - and pretty much all subsequent ones - was conducted with angels. In this process, I realised a few things:

1. There are many amazing people out there, who bought into my vision for a better world (including the hypothesis that there was a business case for it), and entrusted me with their funds without having (m)any proof points that things would work out. You know who you are, all 30+ of you!
2. VCs back then (the "general-purpose" type at least; proptech as an industry didn't exist yet, and not many Corporate VCs either) didn’t seem keen to work at the intersection of SaaS, profitable environmental technologies, and marketplaces. I do understand that “saving the world” in itself doesn’t make for an attractive value proposition for investment. But somehow, expensive fruit juicers no-one needs, mail-order mattresses or the umpteenth micro-scooter company with negative unit economics seem to fit the bill. Put a different way - how many envirotech startups can you count among the 450+ tech unicorns in the world? Exactly. 
3. I’ve been blessed to be able to work with some of the smartest people over the years, many of whom stuck with me through thick and thin and supported the mission above and beyond what I could hope for.

Over the course of the next few years we raised several more rounds. Many angels participated on multiple occasions, which was a great seal of approval. The platform continued to grow, and so did the value proposition.

All of Fabriq explained in a single chart. It took me nearly eight years to come up with this version. Arguably, one could add a third (and a fourth) dimension to it. Maybe the next version will be a tesseract?

Then finally, after raising a total of about ￡1.5m in equity including a small amount of R&D grants, we achieved break-even.

Job done! Or was it? 

// 5 // - Breaking Even, Breaking Through

If I had to pick a year in which things really turned a corner, it would be 2018.

Six years after launch, which were at the same time the longest and shortest years of my life.

Entrepreneurs spend most of their time travelling at the speed of light; which somewhat counter-intuitively means that time passes very slowly (remember special relativity? Anyone?). When you drop out of Hyperdrive mode now and then, you wonder where the heck everyone else is, and why it takes them so bloody long to catch up with you. Then - just like that - years have gone by and you're trying to figure out why you're still feeling like you're just getting started...

In early 2018, we moved to a new office, rebranded from EnergyDeck to Fabriq - as the platform was capable of doing much more than energy management by that point - and introduced a completely revamped user interface.

Our new COO (now the new CEO!) hit his stride, we signed up a number of new customers and shed those who weren’t conducive for increasing our ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue). 

That last bit sounded much easier than it was for me, which can best be described as 'extremely painful'. As an entrepreneur, you never, ever want to say No to a customer, especially when they're paying (a not insignificant amount), and trying to solve some of the industry's largest challenges themselves.

But in the end it all comes down to a question of fit. Product-market, business-customer, platform-partner, mission-people etc. It's easy ... that is, once you have figured out what it is that you're looking for!

// 6 // - The Lambo Litmus Test

By the end of 2018 and nearly two years after our last raise, which was expected to buy us a mere 6 months of runway, we had enough money left over in the company account to buy the Lamborghini that was regularly parked outside our shiny (and inexpensive - thanks @Anthemis!) Soho office. 

Theoretically speaking, of course...

I thought about it for a minute ... 'Just get the thing and fly away, never to be seen again!’. Then it dawned on me that there wouldn’t be enough money left to buy fuel to get very far. Also, I wouldn't be able to fit the whole family in it. Darn! So I got back to work.

Still, it felt nothing short of amazing to experience that level of financial comfort for once, especially since it was generated in a self-sufficient way (@HMRC: the money was spent in no time on growing the team - obvs!!)

*That* Lambo, parked right there in Great Marlborough Street... Not sure about the Italian flag decal, but it's mighty fast! (random guy in the background pretends he doesn't want it).

P.S. For anyone who's still reading but doesn't know me personally: buying a Lamborghini (or Ferrari or anything of that kind) couldn't be further removed from my actual objectives in life. I'm just using it as a metaphor here. I do like the way it looks similar to supersonic stealth aeroplanes (have I mentioned I am an aerospace engineer yet?). But that's about it. Also, it's not electric, so totally not cool! Now if it had been the new Tesla Roadster instead ... hmmmm. Just kidding!

// 7 // - The Hardest Thing About Hard Things

In a way, the positives in 2018 were ultimately made possible by the hardships experienced during the years before. We had previously lost our way a little and ended up spending a lot of time working on projects that required incredible levels of willpower and resources, but generated no or very little recurring revenue. The team was not in a good place because of the platform vs. projects mismatch.

To add insult to injury, I had to shut down product development for the next-generation AI platform that I had envisaged would be the future of the company, but which despite two years of development never got to a stage where we could actually sell it to customers. 

As a Founder CEO - more so than in any other role - the buck really does stop with you. After all, it was your own idea, you got it funded, hand-picked the team, had the product built to your specs, are selling it to the market on your terms and convinced countless others to follow you along on your journey.

If things don’t work out the way they are expected to - for whatever reason - there are no excuses, no force majeure, no easy ways out.

You have exactly one person to blame. 

The single hardest decision I’ve ever had to make at Fabriq - shutting down a new product line and letting a number of people go in the process - turned out to be one of the most beneficial decisions for us in the long-term.

It brought new focus to the company, in addition to a leaner payroll (which mattered a lot at that time). We ultimately even managed to fold much of the planned functionality for the discontinued product line into the new Fabriq.

Last but not least, all of those who left found new and exciting jobs in a heartbeat. Everybody happy!

There are an estimated 1,000 individual features shown above, and this is only a selection. Yet somehow, customers always seem to want more. Which is a good thing!

// 8 // - What Lies Ahead

If 2018 was the turnaround year for the company, then 2019 was the year things really kicked off. We landed and ramped up our largest customers to date, ARR doubled year-on-year, the team continued to thrive and deliver.

To top it off, product development of the platform is ahead of what even some of our most advanced customers thought was possible, as show-cased by our new Spacemaps and Insights modules (more on these and other capabilities here).  

Looking into the future, I am certain that 2020 will be the beginning of a new era in building data management. The main indicator of success will be the time when a critical mass of customers start saying "Why not!" instead of "Why?" when it comes to deploying a platform like Fabriq across all their assets.

Consider this: no self-respecting, client-focused business with more than a handful of staff would use spreadsheets today when it comes to managing their customers - there are literally hundreds of web-based CRM solutions out there that are low-cost and incredibly powerful. Yet at the same time, buildings that are worth tens or even hundreds of millions of USD are often run by spreadsheets when it comes to resource and environmental management.

This near-total disconnect between operational investment (= marginal for a platform like ours) and asset value (= massive) has baffled me for all these years. But it won't be an issue for much longer I feel, as building owners and operators are finally seeing the opportunities in operational asset yield improvement. Including their CFOs and institutional investors.

(Here's hoping that this also means that investors/landlords/funds with $ Billions in Assets Under Management will appoint more than the average 1.5 FTE of sustainability professionals to actually manage their portfolios of hundreds of buildings ... and that the Sustainability team isn't seen as a cost centre any longer ... but that's another story!)

// 9 // - Moving On, But Not Out

All of this means that for me personally, now is the perfect time to move on. 

The company I founded is stronger than ever. All KPIs are on the up. The market is coming around. We have an outstanding and highly experienced team in place. Plus a fantastic board that has a renewed drive to continue on the mission set out all those years ago.

For me personally, I have been feeling the desire to tackle a new challenge for some time now. Eight years is a long time, even by my standards. It just wasn’t clear to me until recently what that challenge could be. What is more, until we passed our turnaround point, I didn’t really feel that I could move on without betraying all those who believed in me; and there were too many to count (see Final Words). 

Even now, moving on seems a little awkward. But it feels like exactly the right thing to do. 

In fact, it feels like the right thing not just for me personally, but also for the company.

It’s not easy for me to explain why this is the case. But I’ll give it a shot anyways: there came a point somewhere in the past 18 or so months, when I realised that my value-add to my own company was decreasing over time, and had done so for a while.

The truth was that everyone on the team that I’d built was better at what they were doing than I could have ever been. I’m not even talking about software development and data science, where I had for a long time merely pretended to know what the heck was going on.

But when I realised that others had superior skills at sales, pricing, customer operations, marketing, content creation and eventually even product management, it became clear that I’d come full circle. My final contribution to the company was to make myself fully redundant.

"But, but ... what about the overall direction, your visionary leadership?", I hear you ask?

Well, for starters, I have never been particularly fond of the moniker "visionary leader". It's easy to have visions (just ask most people on the street), and everyone seems to proclaim themselves a leader these days in some way or another. Yet few truly are.

As for Fabriq, I feel that the original vision - to achieve significant positive impact in environmental terms by connecting and optimising the world's buildings - is now so ingrained among the team, our supporters and of course our customers, that no "adult supervision" (I used to be the oldest employee most of the time - special relativity wasn't much of a help on that front) is needed to implement it.

In addition, I have full trust in the Fabriq family to do the right thing when the time comes to update the scope of our offering or business model -- and even the vision.

Nothing is ever set in stone. Change is the only constant, in case you haven't noticed.

And the pace of change will never be this slow again ...

At times, to gain perspective, it helps to look at yourself in the mirror. Or for that matter, the visor of the space mug that your team has given you as a leaving present on your last day (presumably so that I can stop walking around telling everyone that I am an AEROSPACE ENGINEER, and that whatever challenge they're grappling with really isn't rocket science? You just wait until I figure out how to detect gravitational waves in my new coffee mug!)

I’m not straying far and will stay in the broader energy / clean tech / data analytics space, continuing to save the world; one user at a time. I will also remain a non-executive board director at Fabriq and continue to be based in London.

For one thing, however, I shall be looking forward to standing on the shoulders of giants again. Only that this time, it is going to be one heck of an energy giant.

What attracted me the most to my new opportunity is the potential for scale. I'm talking about the kind of scale that can change the world. Achieving that sort of scale has eluded me twice now. I will work hard to not let it happen a third time.

Change the world for the better we can. I will see to it that we will!

Clearly, the one thing that hasn't changed throughout all those years is my reality distortion field. Arguably it's bigger than ever, and I'm going to continue trying to bend the fabric of space and time wherever I go.

All I can hope for is that eventually, reality will catch up with me! And not the other way round ... :)

Stay hungry, stay foolish. And never, ever give up!

// 10 // - Final words

In the vast majority of cases, success is not the product of a single person, but a group of people. In the world of entrepreneurs and startups, that is always the case.

Fabriq is no exception. In fact, it is built on the very foundations of collaboration and collective intelligence.

Look at what we've achieved with Fabriq - together! Nice. Now let's 10x that! No pressure, next-gen team :)

So thank-you's are in order, to many more people than I could possibly name or tag here. 

But you all know who you are:

• The incredible team leading Fabriq today in London and Kiev, and everyone who’s come before and gone above and beyond what I could have expected from them
• Our amazing customers, who continue to entrust us with solving some of their biggest challenges, and have shown patience when at time things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to (but who always recognised that we were working incredibly hard to make it happen)
• Our outstanding investors, who already believed in us when Fabriq was not much more than a bunch of guys and a basic web app that was able to draw exactly one type of bar chart with only kWh data (the platform offers a “few" more charting options now; but charts are so last decade - mark my words!)
• The many many many friends, supporters, advisors and all the (seemingly*) random connections whom I’ve had the pleasure to cross paths with over the years. There are literally hundreds of people in this group, and I’ve learned something from all of them. * Synchronicity works, you know! You should try it sometime.
• All my fellow entrepreneurs, business owners, world saviours, dreamers and fighters out there - be they friends, partners or competitors small and large - I mean everyone. We're all in this together, and if it wasn't for us, nothing would ever change. Yet even together, we're just scratching the surface of what is possible. So keep bending space-time wherever you go, and don't let anyone tell you what is impossible! Not that you need me to tell you that, mind.
• And most importantly - my one-of-a-kind family that has supported me and stood by my side over eight years; despite all the hardships, broken and re-broken promises, and at times (many more times than I’d have liked!) uncertain prospects for our own future.

You all have a stake in what we have built with Fabriq, as well as the impact we have achieved. And importantly, what’s yet to come! The past decade was merely a warm-up.

As Ben would say - ad astra per aspera.

Be good, wherever you are!

Not mine. Still pretty! Thanks Elon, you're a star.

P.S. Gosh, that was one long good-bye. What ever happened to the word count on LinkedIn articles? Either way, if you're still reading this, thanks for your interest. And patience!

P.P.S. Thanks Colin & Team Fabriq - how very flattering! I'll be back for F&C before long, that much is certain. And Dark Mode, hmmm.... that could be the one-year leaving anniversary present, maybe?! ;)

Whatever comes next -- you got this!!!