#132: The Business of Disrupting and Democratizing Energy

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Bill is a career tech CEO with multiple exits, including an IPO. He worked at Greylock as a venture capitalist and, after selling his marketing tech company Silverpop to IBM, he shifted roles to help lead IBM’s global strategy for their CEO and SVPs.

He spent the last few years creating media ventures in climatetech. He started with a TED talk which grew into the #1 ranked podcast on renewable energy. His new book, Freeing Energy, is a practical guide for disrupting and democratizing energy.

In this episode, we’re discussing…

[3:07] His background and what made him do the jump to all these

[7:19] What is climate tech?

[12:57] How much more money will be needed for clean energy?

[19:11] What happens if the grid goes down for a day, or week?

[21:12] How to get started as a climate tech entrepreneur

[27:13] How can energy be one of the most powerful tools for social equity?

[30:31] How can people find his book?

[32:51] How much storage is there, Is it going to get better, if the grid goes down or a storm knocks it out?

Resources from Bill

+ Read the transcript

Mike Stohler
What if you could be doing something smarter with your money that creates income. Now, if you're wanting to get ahead financially, and enjoy greater freedom of choice, if you want a comfortable retirement, and you know you'll have more choices, if you can do more with your money. Now, if you've wondered who else is creating ways to make their money work for them, and you want actionable ideas, with honest pros and cons, and no fluff. Welcome to the Richard geek podcast. Where you here helping people find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom. I'm Mike Stohler, and in this podcast, you'll hear from others who are already doing these things and learn how you can too.

Hello, everyone, this is Mike Stohler, your host of the richer geek podcast. As many of you know, I have owned or managed over 1500 doors from single family homes, multifamily, and hotels. I've received so many questions about how I transitioned from multifamily to hotels. I've been featured on some of the our nation's largest podcasts. I've spoken at national conferences about hotel investing. How do you do it? What are the differences between multifamily and hotel investing? What about franchises? What did I learn during COVID? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I am excited to announce that we'll be having a hotel investor workshop on May 5 and sixth of 2023. If you're interested in hotel investing, please come join us. You can sign up on our website, the richer geek.com. Go to the bottom of the page and click on training. I'm hoping to see you all there. All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the richer geek. We have a another tech geek coming at us today. And guy's name is Bill necie. And he's been in tech for a long time and just decided, hey, you know, let's do something different, let's better better himself. He's been, he was a career tech CEO with multiple exits, which we all want, including an IPO. He worked at Greylock as a venture capitalist. And after selling his marketing tech company silverpop to IBM. Very nice. He shifted roles to help lead IBM's global strategy for their CEOs and SVPs. He spent the last few years creating media ventures in climate tech, which is what we're going to get into. He started with TED Talk, everyone knows that which grew into a number one ranked podcast on renewable energy, his new book freeing energy as a practical guide for disrupting and democratizing energy. So Bill, how you doing?

Bill Nussey
I'm doing great. Really excited to talk to you today. Thanks for having me.

Mike Stohler
Absolutely. You know, so we love having another tech people here because, you know, a lot of our listeners are in the tech field. And, and they're just wondering is, you know, so give us a little I just want a little bit of the background. Talk about where you were, where you been? And what made you do the jump, you know, with with all that stuff?

Bill Nussey
Well, you know, I got started early in the tech world, I was 15 when I was running my first tech company in high school. And, and it's a great story because I, I couldn't throw a ball from 10 feet and hit a wall. So I had to find something to do. And there was this super geeky, nerdy, loser thing to do called computers. And I fell in love with them and have been typing on computers. So I was started several companies. Then there was that fateful day when the programmers gathered me in the room, I was the CEO, and they call it a meeting and they sat around in a circle. They said, Bill, we don't want you to program anymore. And I was crushed. And they said, you're really not that good. And so we wish, we wish you would just go and spend all your time being the CEO of the company that we joined. And so I like to say I got demoted and management and I've been stuck in that job ever since and had did some other startups and had some nice exits, went to business school and spent a couple years at Greylock, which was fantastic learn that deep secrets of venture capital, which there are a lot of secrets. And then I started a got involved with another company and took it public grew to 3000 people rent you know, press the button and NASDAQ as the CEO, which is super cool. And then I built a software company up that was marketing tech, digital marketing. Were the first digital marketing company is one of the biggest sold at IBM that became the IBM marketing cloud and this is where it starts to get interesting. So do I want to work at a giant company like IBM? And I was pretty excited about it. Just because I'm on fire when I'm learning things That's what I've discovered about myself when I'm learning new things and meeting people who have different perspectives, I'm pretty happy. And I thought, well, I'm going to learn a lot working in a big company, and the people the top of IBM, sharper, motivated. You know, I think collectively, the output of what IBM does is a lot less than it could and should be. But the individuals there are really great. And I had the strategy job and looking at all the things that IBM could do with a billions and billions 10s of billions of dollars of resources and, and along the way, accidentally, I discovered the this whole clean energy thing. And while IBM didn't end up going hard after that space, in fact, they spun out a lot of their assets and ended up making a ton of money company got acquired shortly thereafter, the Clean Energy appealed all my all the stuff I loved about tech, right? It first it looks like it's like I gotta build things. It takes forever solar panels are regulated, it's political. But as I dug into it, and that's really what the causes me to write a book is there's there's angles on how to get into this energy industry that are there not, not everyone knows them. But the real, they're huge. And the book called free energy, which I finally came out with last late last year is dedicated. And you know that that first page, there were someone, they thanked her family and everything for help. In my book, it's like to the 10,000 people, the tech entrepreneurs who are not currently in clean energy that are going to join in, they're going to save the planet. And the books not at all about climate tech is not about climate change. That's important. But that's not what it's about. It's about how people that have been tech entrepreneurs, how they can invest in join, or create companies in climate tech, that not only is one of the most lucrative careers, lucrative areas of investment going for, and plenty of numbers, I can tell you that blow your mind that it's you wake up every day, sort of even if the day doesn't go, Well, maybe you don't close a deal or you know, someone quits that you don't want to quit, but every day, you know, the future is getting better because of your work. And that's the first time in my career, I've had that chance to wake up every day, and know that the world is a better place. Because people you know, 1000s of others are working towards this goal. And it's just it was a It's a wonderful feeling.

Mike Stohler
Now, you know, let's talk a little bit about you know, the climate tech in particular, everyone's heard of, you know, everyone knows musk. And yeah, Mr. Mr. Elon? And, you know, he has he has these fancy computers on wheels. And, you know, he kind of revolutionized that part. And you could say that there's a lot of tech in that. No one really knows about the other tech side of climate. Everyone thinks, Okay, there's windmills, there's solar panels. What specifically is there? What is climate? Tech? I mean, is that just digging the ones and zeros in all this?

Bill Nussey No, no, not at all. It's this is what's so cool. And quick, some quick numbers, I'll give you two sets of numbers that will blow your mind. If you look at all the large infrastructure investments we've ever made in as humans, right, most people correctly guess a little one of the largest is the US Highway System, over 25, we spent over 25 years in current dollars, we spent about $500 billion huge. Well, you talk about, there's actually a larger investment that we've made over the last 25 years, you look at the last 25 years, basically from the beginning of 2000, just before 2000, we've we've invested across the world $1 trillion in venture capital investments. So just a nice round number almost exactly $1 trillion, has gone into all venture investments from, you know, the NCSA browser and Mosaic back in the early days to you know, the most of the most current companies that your trillion dollars. That's a big number 25 years, if you look at the most conservative estimate of what we're going to invest in clean energy in the next 25 years, the most conservative smallest, smallest number $17 trillion. So this is at least an order of magnitude larger than all InVenture investments ever made. And and now that the governments of the world are starting to realize with the war in the Ukraine and other things that you know, maybe this clean energy stuff is stuff we should really think about McKinsey is estimating that we're going to be investing $9 trillion a year. So almost 10 times per year, the investment of all venture investments in the history of venture. So the amount of money moving here is just absolutely unprecedented. And you know, a lot of this is going to go to build those solar farms and the wind turbines. And so it doesn't have that kind of sexy, geeky returns. But a the venture capital side out of it, which is what I'm focused on. And what the books about is, is enormous all by itself. So go back 10 years ago, and all clean tech venture capital, which is stuff that by definitions, you know, sexy, high growth, high growth, gonna make somebody some money, put some help your listeners put some wealth increase their wealth 10 years ago $5 billion was invested in venture capital, venture capital put towards clean tech, climate tech, last year $165 billion dollars. So 10 years, you've had a 30x 33x? I don't think there's in no one, no one's looking at these numbers and realize the amount of venture money flowing into the clean tech space is just extraordinary. And so to your question, how does somebody get involved with it? And in my book, free energy I talked about, I was trying to answer that question, because everybody asks, like, how do I go build solar on my roof? What do I do? And so I created this, called the five orders, it's a simple framework that says, Listen, if you're gonna, you're gonna read an article about a new battery, that's a first order, because you're making something you gotta have a factory, some regulated, it's complicated, expensive, other countries are sometimes better at it, then you get a second order, where you take existing stuff, components, first order components, and you put them into a product like a, my favorite example is a Tesla car. Right? Back when musk and team are creating the Tesla, which has changed the world. And they were thinking about designing it, there was not a single part that they used, and that Tesla that every other automobile company didn't have, in other words, Ford, BMW, Mercedes, they could have bought any of the parts that Tesla had any of them. And they just and they didn't, and they didn't assemble them to make the Tesla. So I love to tell people that when which if you want to be successful in clean tech, you think you got to go invent a new battery, or something sciency or install a solar panel, all you do is take the stuff off the shelf and put it together smarter than the next folks. And you think well, gosh, the big companies are already doing that. Well, the entire car industry ignored all this stuff, and musk and team did, took the parts off the shelf and put it together better than anyone had ever done. cars, car drivers say it's the best car ever made in human history. So that's what I call a second order. And third order. Fourth order gets more and more interesting. More more bits and less atoms, you start to have control systems and marketplaces and all the cool stuff that we take for granted in other tech industries. And those are just coming along very quickly. And those are even faster growth, more wealth creation. These are companies that people can join, these are companies that people can invest in. As you get further up to pass this the second order and the third and fourth and fifth orders, then you get to these really cool high growth opportunities that don't have a lot of expensive assets don't get heavily regulated, but yet they're going to be grown as a result of this $9 trillion a year being spent on clean energy.

Mike Stohler
How much more do you think will be needed, you know, to be spent. Because when I look at when you spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the wind farms, but it only does X only powers X amount of houses or X amount of this. And, you know, I'm looking at just the amount of trillions of dollars that we would have to spend even to counteract the large industrial countries that don't care. time we do see a point to where it'll be worth it, you know, to where we can overcome. What some of these other countries that are just polluting the Earth. Do you see at some point it'll flip it'll be worth it down the road?

Bill Nussey Well, here's the funny thing. And I try to get this across in this book. And in my podcast. If your motivation if the if your frame of reference is how do we do these things that will clean up the earth? And how are we going to find hundreds of billions trillions of dollars to go save the planet or compete with China or all of the above? You're asking the wrong question. It's a great question, by the way, but it's the wrong question. You have to answer how much money would people invest in something where they knew they would get a fantastic return? More predictably than almost anything else? They could do? And the answer is an unlimited amount of money. And so take real estate, for example. I mean, the numbers vary, but you know, across the world, we invest five, six $7 trillion a year in real estate. Why do we need more buildings, maybe the population isn't growing nearly that fast. We're doing it because they're great investments a new building that has the old building doesn't get used anymore. That guy goes bankrupt. It builds a new building it's shiny pretty people rent visit that building that store. So that sense of contract renewal happens because not because the government said let's build more new buildings, not because everyone said the planet is going to burn down if we don't build more buildings are saying I want to build a new building because cuz I can make money doing it and my investors are gonna make money doing it. That's what we're talking about for clean energy. So how much money does it take is the wrong question, how much? How much money? How many? How big are the investments? We're almost everybody can make money. And it's the other side is this. This is not a supply constrained industry. This is this. I saw, it's not a demand constrained industry, it's a supply constrained industry. And the question is, how can we build enough solar panels, and manufacturing of wind turbines, and find land and all those things fast enough. That was the other thing that I got stuck on. Because I knew the economics of solar and wind are just simply better. They're not apples to apples with a coal plant or natural gas plant, but they, generally speaking, they're a better deal. And getting better every year, because they're going down in price at a crazy fast rate. But the problem is, connecting them into the grid and finding all the land. And so this is where your people get stuck. And this is where the politicians get involved in depending what side of the aisle they're on. They're like, Oh, my God, we're all gonna die. If we don't do this. And the other people, the other side says something like, you know, well, this isn't a problem. And by the way, we don't like the government doing all this stuff. And so they get into this ridiculous battle. But you know, there's something that every politician agrees on whether the whatever aisle they're on whatever their stripe is, whatever. Firstly, everybody everywhere agrees on, which is that, you know, I'd like to put solar on my roof, because my electric bills are going to go down. And if there's these increasing outages I'm reading about around the world, and floods and hurricanes, you know, my house is gonna stay powered, my kids can, you know, have the refrigerator is going to keep our food intact. And if I have medical equipment, I have a remote job, I gotta use a computer, it's going to keep running. And by the way, I'm going to save money doing that. And there is no political divide on that everybody wants, every politician wants their constituents to save money, to have individual choice, to have resiliency have stronger communities. And that's the crazy thing. That that's really what my this book free energy is about. So I call it freeing energy. Because the energy system has been trapped by giant corporations and governments it's been, it's all about economies of scale. It's built a billion dollar nuclear plant, it's built to a billion dollar petroleum refining plant. And this is good. I mean, we have a great society, because of all these great inventions and all these great investments, but but it no nowhere in there does that put more money in, you know, people's pockets, right? It's electricity bills are going up everywhere. Resiliency is getting worse, you know, grids going down more often. So there's this new thing called what I call in the book, local energy. Everyone knows what it is. So the giant wind farms we see off the highway, or it's just put it on your roof, put on your building, put it under school, put it on your church, on your mall, on your campus, and it's going to save you money, it's going to crease your resiliency, it's going to create local jobs. I mean, you know, you think about like, if you put a put solar and batteries in, let's say in your community, in your high school, you put on your high school roof, right? Almost every single time that people on that roof are in the same community as a high school. So that money doesn't go to some a bunch of corporations that are flying people in and off in some field 30 miles outside your town, you're never going to meet, they're going to leave and go back and pay taxes somewhere else. The people putting that rooftop solar on your high school, on your police station, on your house, they're in your community, and their taxes are going to pay for your school and your police department in the fire department. And so I probably going in more than anybody cares. And getting into the social side. And I'm a capitalist. But the reason this is so the reason I make this point to you, is this why politicians are so slowly realizing that this isn't this political battle, they're having a big solar, big wind, big nuclear, big fossil fuels. This is everybody loves this, every voter loves this. And that's why and and honestly, Mike, no one's talking about this. That's why I decided to take my pretty good tech career. You know, I built companies exited companies could have lots of opportunities. And I said, to write a book. I don't want to write a book. But this stuff is huge. It's a great opportunity. No one gets it. And so I said, you know, I'm gonna take the time to write a book and get the story out there. And that's why I was excited and flattered to be part of your show. Because I just want to get this message. I got no horse in this race, other than let's make a better future for everybody.

Mike Stohler
Yeah. And do you advocate more towards it seems like more of the local. Yes. Instead of, you know, the big Uranian the big nucular? You know, that can solve a lot of the the issues, but it doesn't solve. And you know, what's great is depending on what side of the aisle, you can also say, Hey, you can get tucked into it. Because if something happens grid, I can actually go off the grid. Yes. You know, if something because you know, a lot of people are saying, look, it's not going to be another attack by an airplane snake and we think you know, all these different things. It would make more sense. Well, you know, someone could attack our grid. What happens if the grid goes down for a day? A week?

Bill Nussey
The consequences are pretty bad. You know, I think, what is it? 300 people died in tech. Just last year, just because the winter was so bad and the grid went down. But you know, the funny thing about these, like nuclear, a lot of people are fans of nuclear, I think I listen, I don't have a horse in the race with nuclear either way. But let me just give you a simple metaphor. So hey, let's build lots of nuclear because we can power lots of people at once. So let's reduce that to a simple metaphor. Let's say we want to make a living for housing for 10 people, 10 families, right? So we could build one, if the numbers were the same, I could build a giant home with a room for 10 families to live in it. And it would cost me $1,000. And that's nuclear. And so it's going to cost me basically $100 for each one of those families. Does that make sense? This local energy stuff was like, well, I could also make a home for each of those family for $20 each. So people are just enamored with this idea of building these giant nuclear giant natural gas plants, giant grids. And, and they say, well look at all the people I can do. But if you do this simple math, and this, there's this math is available anywhere you Google it, you're going to find no one disputing what I'm telling you that if you build a giant nuclear plant, it's going to cost each person using electricity, five times more money than if we build a solar plant.

Mike Stohler Yeah, that's very interesting. You know, I'm glad you're explaining these things. Because here's the thing people only know, based on what media they listen to, you know, and that's how they gain these insights. And these gain these these opinions. Let's get back to what we love is being an entrepreneur, how can you even get started as a climate tech entrepreneur?

Bill Nussey
Well, I tell you this, this is the time 2022 was the birth of when it became a great time to jump into this industry, I like to tell people, you know, I'm old enough to been around when the internet came out in the late 90s. And this feels the same to me, you know, if you could go back to your friends in the late 90s. And say, there's this thing called the internet, you know, maybe you want to find a company like social networks, maybe or this, you know, sort of routers, you could do something in that. And they're like, I don't know what that is, it's new. And this is the same time in history for clean tech. And so the good news is, if you want to go be a part of a company that puts solar on roofs, or builds big solar plants, or whatever, that there's plenty of those opportunities everywhere. But when I think about people like me, and a lot of your listeners, I'm a nerd, I want to, I want to do stuff with computers and build software. And so that's where it's really getting interesting now. And so in free energy, I in the last two chapters, I list out 50. And I'll give you some examples. 50 different industries that are going to be emerging or are emerging now, each of which is going to be multiple billions of dollars of revenue per year. So because I wanted to get the point across, it's not like just two or three things. There's dozens and dozens of things, all of which are massive markets, none of which exists today. So just like a simple example, one of my favorites, I need to right now, when we're putting solar on the roof, you know, I have a roof someone put my roof up, then I say I want solar, so I, I hire a team, they go on my roof, they put holes in my roof, then they put solar panels on my roof, right? And then and say my roof is getting old, I need to replace it every 15 years, I'm going to hire a team to go through replace all my shingles, then I'm gonna hire another team to go up and put the panels on my roof. Well, you know, Tesla's an example of a company selling solar shingles. Why put panels this make your roof? Solar? Right? Make your walls solar, make your driveway solar, make your windows solar, so you're gonna have to Windows you're gonna have to have but the roofs the easy one, it's totally cheaper, totally easier said of just putting up solar panels on top of your existing roof. Just make your roof of solar, make the shingles solar powered? And so you think that this is like, well, how easy it How hard could that be? It turns out Tesla is now in there. I think on their fourth iteration of this. It's really hard to do, right? And by the way, it's not just this mechanical science, chemistry, you know, fancy physics with solar. It's actually like, how do you design a system of wiring? This is a classic problem that software people can solve? How do I create this very intricate wiring? And how do I explain it and create diagrams for the electricians who are often not sophisticated? technical people or technology people? How do they go up and connect the wires? And how do I, how do I design this? How do I schedule it? How do I pitch it? How do I analyze it when it's done? You know, the vast majority of solar plants out there the midsize ones when they go down? Nobody knows. Because, you know, if your website goes down, you kind of know it, right? Because we have tools. But those tools don't exist in the Solar World as an example. So it's all very basic stuff and then you go all the way up to the really sexy stuff. Like peer to peer electricity trading. You know, you it's it's currently illegal in the United States, as the United States is probably behind most of the world when it comes to electricity innovation, but you go to Australia, Japan, many places in Europe And you admire next door neighbor's Mike and I put up a bunch of extra solar and you, you don't you have 20 trees in your yard, you don't want to put solar upper, but you have a big basement you're not using. So you're gonna put a couple of battery packs down there. What we do is we go on any number of new companies emerging on their platforms like think eBay, right? Or Etsy. And we go there and I say, Well, you know what, Mike, I'm gonna sell you. I'm not using all the solar, so I'm going to sell you some extra solar. And you're like, well, listen, I could trade we could do an Aetherium trade contract trade, we could do any number we could. Anyway, we could do this. There's gonna be 50 companies going to you and me as neighbors saying, how do we one plus one equals three? How do we save money, increase the resiliency without having to do the entire thing ourselves. So creating marketplaces like that. And we're talking $6 trillion a year sent an energy spent on energy $6 trillion a year spent on energy. So if you look at all the money spent on it, and trading Pez dispensers on eBay, this is a trivial amount of money, trading energy, massive individuals trading energy. I mean, think think eBay meets Exxon.

Mike Stohler Now, sounds wonderful. But then the utilities companies are gonna say, Oh, wait, wait a minute. What's in it for me? I mean, it's hard enough. I'm an Arizona we're not even allowed to sell back the the energy that we store, right? Okay. Where California you can and other states, you can if I put solar on top of like an RV storage Park, this huge amount of roof space? Doesn't make sense, because I can't sell it back to the grid. I can't bring it back. So it's how when do you think or do you think that the states or the get it and say, hey, look, you know, does it take just Well, what's in it for me? Before everyone realizes that, because it's now it seems like a lot of the utilities are, so you put solar on, but then we're going to charge you for having that go for even trying to save them? Now. It's not even a savings anymore. Or

Bill Nussey 27:13
let me tell you a story. Let me tell you two stories, you know, there was an invention group of people out of Silicon Valley came up with a tech solution to something a couple of years ago. And it was revolutionary, but no one got it. And it didn't appreciate it. And it actually took on a regulated monopoly industry that didn't want this to happen. And so this monopoly industry, just like the electricity industry, currently, it's like, I don't want this to happen. They're saying, we're gonna get in the way, we're gonna use our political power to stop these things from happening. But what happened was that it turns out, everybody wanted Uber. And of taxi companies who are monopoly a granted state granted monopoly. Like, we don't want this, they went to the state, and they knew the state legislators, they'd been there. They all were friends for decades, right? Like, stop this, and they did it first. But what happened was people said, Wait a minute, Uber is cheaper. It's better. Later. It's cleaner. You know, I want Uber and legislators for a while said no, no, no, we're not going to do it. You know, it's bad. What happened almost every single place when enough people gave a crap, the regulators Well, we're not here for the large taxi companies. We're not here for large utilities. We're here for citizens and voters. If you if the regulator's don't get it the politician? sure as heck will. And it's like, as I like to joke there's there's a lot of division in America about how we should run the country and things like that. And we could have a great debate on it, I'm sure. But I'll tell you, there's one thing that's universal to Americans, there is there is no American you can go to and say you know what, Mr. or Mrs. American, I would like you to pay substantially more for this essential product that you use, because I want to make sure that this large unnamed company, you've never heard of the remains very profitable. You just can't do that to Americans, didn't matter, Democrats, Republicans. And so what happens is, most Americans, you happen to be aware of the fact that you could probably be saving more money with solar if your government supported it in Arizona. But, you know, your government's listening, there's not enough of you saying that. But let me tell you a second story about where that did happen. You know, there's a little state, just south of me here in Georgia, they called Florida I think, and the Florida utilities, you know, in detail, I talked to utility people all the time. They're really good people. They're trying to do what we asked them to do. It's old laws and a bunch of stuff that makes everyone confused about what we should be doing. And so the utilities convinced the Florida legislature to pass a law that would make solar just like happened to you in Arizona and make it pretty much an uneconomic. Yeah. And the legislator passes along party lines, you know, no one voted the other way. And, and so, of course, you know, the governor of Florida is famously conservative, and of course, he was going to go with his legislators. You know what he did? He vetoed it. Florida, Ron DeSantis. vetoed local energy would have shut down local energy and when asked why he did it, he said, Listen, 85% of Floridians lost of having solar on the roof. It didn't matter what party they're in. And so that was a shot her around the world for politicians, you know, this is local energy. Yeah, local energy is no longer politically divided. And Ron DeSantis says, I'm all for local energy. You know, my, my state's pretty, pretty good to work with your state has been and isn't. We'll go back. So Ron DeSantis is sort of setting among the people that pay a lot of attention to what he does. He's setting the trends. So I think in the next couple of years, it's going to be profitable to do it everywhere for us.

Mike Stohler
Yeah. And that's fantastic. I'm so glad that people say like, Nope, I'm conservative, I can't do this. I can't behind it. Get behind him, because my voting base, but if you listen to the people, doesn't matter who you are, or what side you're at, on. We do want clean energy and and a reduction in costs, you know? Absolutely. You know. So, you know, we've got just a few more minutes, you know, let's talk a little bit more about your book. Where can people find your book, it's called freeing energy.

Bill Nussey
The book is available pretty much anywhere I was we went through a lot of trouble. So we get the hardcover, we got the softcover, we got the Kindle, we got the ebook from KOBO. And we also for people like me that like audiobooks, I hired a great audio narrator and it's he's got a great voice, and he, he does the audiobook. So you can get any of that. Pretty much anywhere you get books, a lot of people like to buy from small bookstores, you can get them there. They may not have it in stock, you have to ask for it. But they'll get it for you. And listen to there's somebody that wants his book and in can't afford it, you know, it's $10, if they can't afford it, just maybe they can't they want it for the library, just they reach out to you send me an email, Mike, and I'll send you some free PDF copies with their name on it. So I'm not this is not about selling my book, I just want to get the message out there. And so there's a website called freeing energy.com. People think it's free energy, which kind of is going to happen, but it's freeing energy. It's the active voice of freeing energy. And they want to if they if they found this hidden to me, poor folks, if they think Listen to me, it's interesting. I actually have a podcast that was recently ranked the number one renewable energy podcast, also called freeing energy. So pretty straightforward. Apple podcasts and Spotify and everywhere else. So what we're really trying to do, and that's why I'm so excited to talk to you, man. Because this is aimed 100% of tech entrepreneurs, hey, I want to I not only do I want to make a lot of money, and you know, maybe crypto isn't as hard as I thought it was, I want to do something that's actually going to really help the environment crypto hurts the environment. This is that's why I wrote it for so that's really the story. If any folks get a chance to read the book, I love to hear what they think and love to have them if they like it to pass it along to the friends.

Mike Stohler
Yeah, I really appreciate it bill. And I think every one of us can agree now it's like, look, get with the times get with what is happening. It doesn't hurt that, you know, I'm talking about you know, one Saturday there doesn't hurt trying to free your energy. You know, whether it's the solar panels, you know, and I know the batteries will get better. Some of the you know, depending on the house and things like that, well, how much storage is there? You know, and you know, is that going to get better? It's like, well, yeah, if the grid goes down or a storm knocks it out, I've got a day.

Bill Nussey
Yep. Yeah, if you buy a Ford one, I'm gonna I'm lined up to get a Ford 150 Lightning. Yeah, right. I mean, that thing's fantastic. Right, talking about crossing the political divide. Right? I love the four I have a Ford 150 and old kind. And I really want to get this new one because if the power goes out, just plug it into my house and power my house. There you go. I mean, the future this is

Mike Stohler
well, you know, I'm signed up to get the cybertruck if it ever.

Bill Nussey
I want that one too. I love that comes out. My wife says Oh, no, you can't park that in my driveway. And I'm like, I love that honey. We're gonna have to have a discussion about it.

Mike Stohler
Yeah, I have a Tesla x now which I absolutely love. Great car. But you have to cybertruck ever comes up you know, I'm ready. So everybody listen to Bill nnessee. His book is freeing F r e i n g not just free freeing energy. He also has a podcast named the same. Bill. Thank you so much for coming on to the Richard geek.

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ABOUT BILL NUSSEY

Bill Nussey is a career tech CEO with three successful exits, including an IPO. He has also been an investor with the venture capital firm Greylock. After IBM acquired his marketing tech company Silverpop in 2014, he was promoted to IBM’s VP of Corporate Strategy, helping the CEO and SVPs set the company’s overall strategy. As a CEO, his companies have raised more than $400 million, created thousands of jobs and billions in shareholder value.

In 2016, he left IBM to create the Freeing Energy Project. It began with his 2017 Ted talk then grew into 100+ articles and, most recently, the #1 ranked renewable energy podcast, The Freeing Energy podcast. On December 7 2021, all this came together in a book called Freeing Energy: How Innovators Are Using Local-scale Solar and Batteries To Disrupt the Global Energy Industry From the Outside In . It is the result of 320 interviews across several continents. Bill received a degree in electrical engineering from North Carolina State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Passive InvestmentsNichole StohlerFebruary 15, 2023podcast, season 1