Venture Everywhere Podcast: Kameale C. Terry with Scott Hartley
Scott Hartley, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, catches up with Kameale C. Terry, co-founder and CEO of Chargerhelp!, on Episode 36: Plugging In.
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In episode 36 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Harley, Co-founder and GP of Everywhere VC, catches up with Kameale C. Terry, Co-founder and CEO of ChargerHelp!, a company that specializes in on-demand repair and maintenance for EV charging stations, ensuring operational efficiency and promoting electric transportation growth by providing a convenient solution for operators and owners. Kameale shares insights on the pivotal role that dependable charging stations play and ChargerHelp’s innovative solutions through advanced tech and thorough workforce training. Kameale also talked about the company's approach to data analytics, and her personal drive and commitment to promoting sustainable transportation through the adoption of electric vehicles.
In this episode, you will hear:
Challenges and opportunities in the electric vehicle charging infrastructure space.
Evolution of electric vehicle infrastructure and parallels with historical technology adoption.
Role of ChargerHelp in addressing challenges through technology, training, and data analysis.
ChargerHelp's workforce development and training initiatives, including partnerships.
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:21 Scott: All right. Welcome to the Everywhere Ventures podcast. I'm here today with our special guest here in Los Angeles, Kameale Terry, the founder and CEO of ChargerHelp! Welcome to the podcast.
00:00:32 Kameale: Hello. Hello. I'm so excited to be here.
00:00:35 Scott: So I'm Scott Hartley, one of the co-founders of Everywhere Ventures. And we're so excited to be here today with you. Can you tell us a little bit about what does ChargerHelp do and the backdrop for this really emerging whole space of reliability as a service, helping electronic vehicle charging, reliability and operations and management. It's such an underbelly of a trend that I feel like we talk about every day of the week with the announcements in Tesla and the announcements of just, you drive around the streets and you see the cars and vehicles everywhere, but there's this underbelly infrastructure problem that the world faces, and I think you guys are doing an incredible job defining that and working in it, so maybe you could tell us a little bit about that vision and what you guys focus on.
00:01:17 Kameale: No, absolutely. Well, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I like to explain how we got here and why it's important to me and, high view level and then we'll narrow it down, but three big steps. So interestingly enough, during COVID, during the pandemic, I live in South Central Los Angeles and not too far from me is the Hollywood sign. But it was not until the pandemic that I actually saw the Hollywood sign because we didn't have smog.
00:01:43 Kameale: And the moment that I realized just the ways in which our cars, the ways that we get around literally pollute the air and actually, is like a health problem in communities like mine and just communities abroad. That to me was always this sticking point to like why it was important to figure out more sustainable ways to move people around.
00:02:05 Kameale: The second piece to this, my co-founder's parents, she's from Compton and they live in an area where it's multiple different, very large freeways, interstates. And both of her parents passed away from lung-related diseases. My mom passed away from lung cancer. All of three of my brothers have asthma. And so that was like that other extent where it's like, okay. One, I can physically see what happens when we don't drive these type of vehicles. And then two, I have a very real experience of what happens with how we breathe and the air we're breathing in.
00:02:37 Kameale: So I always thought that there was something very interesting about mobility and transportation. And I had the opportunity to work in climate prior to starting ChargerHelp!. And I got really excited about electric vehicles, EV charging stations. But I had a real experience where I was seeing that the infrastructure sometimes didn't work or didn't work as intended.
00:02:56 Kameale: And as software providers and startups, it was very hard for us to understand why the stations didn't work. So putting all three of those things together really gave me the foundation and the why for ChargerHelp!, was that I do believe that the way that we move people around today is detrimental to our health. And I do see that electric vehicles could be a way forward, not the silver bullet.
00:03:18 Kameale: But then I also say that there is like this big barrier around the stations working and having public trust. And so at ChargerHelp!, very simply put, we fix charging stations. They break. They have software issues. It's a part of the future and we're doing it in two really cool ways through big data and then also through workforce training, but happy to delve more into that. But just wanted to set that foundation of how I got to just even the idea of ChargerHelp and continue to grow with it.
00:03:43 Scott: The backdrop of so many companies that we choose to work with and invest in, looking at some of the internal data at Everywhere Ventures over the last five, six years, we've logged and looked at over 10,600 different companies, believe it or not. And one of the drivers of who we decide to work with are really these passion areas around empathetic founders solving what we call world positive problems, right?
00:04:08 Scott: Something that was deeply intimate to the health of your family and Evette's family, your co-founder, and not to mention the experiences that we have in Los Angeles being stuck on the 10 or the 405, I know it quite well, this has to change and there are these big infrastructure challenges. The backdrop, I guess, of EV charging, maybe you could talk a little bit about emergent technologies.
00:04:31 Scott: I know oftentimes when you go back to even reading about Henry Ford and the Model T in the early 1900s, people dismissed the automobile because they said, well, the tires are too thin and it always gets stuck in the horse manure on the streets and the streets aren't built for it. And you realize that the reason people were dismissing the technology was because the infrastructure wasn't right yet.
00:04:53 Scott: The roads were still made of dirt. They were still covered in horse manure. The tires were thin. The cars didn't have a lot of power. So people dismissed the automobile early days because they said, well, you know, the infrastructure is not there. And I think similarly that happened with the internet when it was running over telephone wires and it wasn't super fast until we created broadband and dedicated lines for, internet. We didn't have to say, Hey, get off the telephone, I want to use the internet.
00:05:16 Scott: And so all of these backdrops around EV charging being a core driver of the adoption of this new technology. Maybe you could talk a bit about the evolution because you've been in the space for the better part of a decade, right? Thinking about how has this infrastructure changed and how has it also changed the adoption of new vehicles as this has gotten better as the infrastructure?
00:05:37 Kameale: Yeah, oh my goodness, Scott, I'm so happy you laid that out. And now I'm like, I have to incorporate what you just said in my pitches, because you're so right. You're so right in regards to oftentimes, I would say folks that the larger mass adopters, they may point things out that could be seen as roadblocks or we shouldn't go that way. But for us, the way that we think about it is then you are getting the best piece of information on how to actually do the thing, right?
00:06:04 Kameale: The consumer is telling you why this thing isn't working. And that's good because you actually figure out what needs to be fixed. And so over the last 10 years, one thing that we saw was that a lot of people didn't like the cars. I don't know if you remember electric vehicles 10 years ago, they were turquoise and ugly. I say it all the time. But now you see these beautifully crafted, designed automobiles where I'm just, oh, my goodness, this is amazing.
00:06:30 Kameale: So one, I've seen that change happen in a real way. My little brother was the first one to get an electric vehicle in my family. Does he necessarily care about the environment? Maybe. He's not like a tree hug or anything, but he was, this Tesla is really cool, so I'm buying this cool car. Yeah, it's electric, whatever, but I want a cool car. So I think we learned a lot from the consumer. I think we were doing a tremendous job in regards to getting a great vehicle, but I think the gap still remains in that infrastructure piece.
00:06:58 Kameale: And I think mainly because in the beginning, a lot of folks who are purchasing electric vehicles could have home chargers, and home chargers are very reliable, right? But now that we're getting more into mass adopters and we're having to think more about the public infrastructure, we are now at that critical point that you chatted about earlier, where we do need to take a better look at what can we learn, what is the consumer saying, and what should we be paying attention to?
00:07:23 Scott: It's so interesting. I remember years back, I had the fortune of having lunch in London with Joey, who's one of the founders of Allbirds, and he was saying a very similar thing to what you just said about your brother, that they set out to... He was a petroleum engineer, and they set out to merge plastics with wool and make these very environmentally favorable sneakers. And they found that when they interviewed people at Point of Sale, they said, yeah, but they're just cute. That's why I like them.
00:07:46 Scott: They're cute and they're cheap and they're comfortable. And oh yeah, number five, number six, number seven on the list was, oh yeah, they're environmentally friendly. So I think the motivation sometimes for what drives these infrastructure changes or these changes. The consumer behavior may be loosely in line with the goals. But oftentimes it's a secondary thing. So it's so interesting you talked about the sex appeal of Tesla's as a car and how beautifully designed they are, an Apple product, driving so much of this mass adoption.
00:08:14 Scott: But then we have these challenges with public infrastructure or fragmentation across standards. I feel like, maybe you could talk about that. In the early days of adopting technology, are you finding in the infrastructure just different modalities or different types of infrastructure you have to service and how you maybe segway into workforce development and how you train people in the three week training program when you bring them in to join ChargerHelp. How do you get them up to speed on how to service these various different pieces of the puzzle out there?
00:08:44 Kameale: Yeah, I think probably just starting from your first question in regards to what are the problems? I chat with folks a lot of times, they're like, but don't you just got to go screw in something? Why is this so complicated? Why do you need to have a company that's focused on this? This shouldn't be so complicated. And I'm always, oh man, if you only knew, huh? The good way is how people really understand what we do and why it's important. I always talk about Tesla. Tesla is a vertically integrated system.
00:09:12 Kameale: So the software for the car, the software for the connector, for how they receive payments, to the charging physical unit, to the software in the charging station, all the same company. There is no other entity like that, at least in the United States, and I will argue the world. And so when you have a vertically integrated system, specifically with software that is controlling physical assets that are deployed out in the field, that feedback loop is in sync, right? And Tesla has their own field service folks.
00:09:41 Kameale: So when something is odd or wrong, they're immediately getting data and information so that opportunity to innovate, to problem solve is, you can multiply that, it's a machine. And we saw that when Tesla had this big problem with, when it was cold in Chicago, when they had all of these strandidizations, literally my, I have a Tesla, literally my next update, not only consumer education, there was an update to the battery. It was literally two days later, that's a closed loop. You can fix those things. There is no other entity like that.
00:10:11 Kameale: So the rest of the industry is fragmented. And so we rely upon interoperability, handshakes, different languages, understanding one another in a seamless interaction. And the part that usually breaks here is that there are not today, until we started the company, there were not folks specifically trained on how to troubleshoot these types of devices in the field. And the other part to this, the reliability problem for charging stations, it is not a labor problem. And that's something that we always have to manage with folks with expectations.
00:10:44 Kameale: Cause they're like, oh, you train all these people. You got all these folks like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Just, if you just send someone on site does not solve the problem. This is what we were talking about earlier. It's a unique opportunity to combine people and technology. You do need both, right? But we are in the business of creating good long-standing jobs, but not mass jobs. That is not charging.
00:11:05 Kameale: How we solve issues today and how we train today is teaching people systems, it’s teaching people about how to understand the charging station software, the hardware software, teaching people how to ask the right questions. And then we utilize that data in our mobile application to build out machine learning models, to allow that expert in the field to be that more efficient.
00:11:26 Kameale: And so that's how it's all connected. But the biggest part to all of this is creating that feedback loop in a fragmented space and allowing us to innovate technology at an exponential rate, right, to keep up with what the consumer expectation is, which is a seamless experience.
00:11:42 Scott: Were there any models or analogs of other businesses that you looked at, maybe Geek Squad, right, where you have, maybe the Apple ecosystem is like the Tesla ecosystem. It's relatively vertically integrated, where if you have a problem with your iPhone, you can go, book a genius appointment, go to the Apple store. But if you have a number of different devices in a more fragmented ecosystem, maybe you need a third party service provider that can come and help you with that technology.
00:12:07 Scott: Were there any other analog businesses that you said, oh gosh, this is an interesting parallel path. Maybe this can give me some data points around the roadmap that we might take or how our go-to-market might be. Or as you went on this journey, five, six years ago to start ChargerHelp, were there any beacons or models that you looked at, external to what you were going to build?
00:12:29 Kameale: Yeah, it's so interesting. In the beginning, I think a lot of folks wanted to compare us to a Geek Squad. But to me, what the Geek Squad, is still this ideal that if something breaks, a human can actually fix it. And what we see is that over time, the things that do not work in a station, which the problems we're solving are software issues, is that over time, you do not need a human to fix it. You just need that initial data set to know how to do what you need to do to solve the problem.
00:12:54 Kameale: So the model that was actually very interesting to me, surprisingly enough, is car OEMs. So you have car OEMs, right? They deploy this vehicle. And then when people have issues, they're taking them to garages. And the backend system that's in the garage is that that car OEM can actually understand in a very aggregated, mass way, all of the issues that they're experiencing with cars all across the world in real time. There's a system for that on how those garages input data.
00:13:22 Kameale: And then that allows the car OEM to then actually make and fix these physical assets. And so to me, that's where we see where ChargerHelp, we're very much so looking to be the Intel and the Smarts, not separate, but a part of the system and saying that, Hey, we've been able to amass this large data set, we have a lot of learnings. You can now incorporate this in how you look at moving your business forward. And to me, that is more important because it's not a band-aid to the system. It allows you to actually have that exponential growth and understanding of what's actually happening in the field.
00:13:52 Kameale: And the last thing I'll say to that is we always tell folks that the true lab, all these people, they test all these things in these labs, huh? They, there's labs all over the place. And we say the true lab is the field. There are so many times where my technicians are experiencing and solving things that the first time that anyone's ever experienced it, because your lab is in an office somewhere, my technicians are bringing you data from the field to allow for you to make better decisions.
00:14:16 Scott: It's an incredible parallel. I did not think about OEMs and this aggregation of really fragmented data from garages across the world, but that's what really informs maybe a recall on a given part. So you start seeing, hey, this thing catches on fire all the time. Maybe that's not good for–
00:14:33 Kameale: I was like, oh man. The pedal thing, we could talk about the Elon Musk with the pedal. You're starting to see that everybody is going to acceleration because this pedal wasn't properly created on the Cybertruck, but yes.
00:14:46 Scott: Yeah, absolutely. That I guess segues into the Trojan horse that you guys have created in some ways of acquiring all this amazing data across the infrastructure and the network that you've built. And so maybe you could talk about, I think at this point you said 19 million data points you guys have collected across 20,000 different locations. And it's incredible in aggregate over the last five, six years to be able to amass this, which I imagine can lead to some predictive models around different things that maybe preemptively could be swapped out or changed to get ahead of some of these breakdowns?
00:15:20 Kameale: No, absolutely. And getting the data from the field was so important to me because when I was at my prior company, you would work with some field service technicians, they're trying to troubleshoot an issue and no one would ever truly write down what they did. And so the next time you have that same issue, you've got another person out there and they're literally going down the pathway that the last person's already proven, that it doesn't work. So your efficiency was just not there because no one was collecting, analyzing, looking at this data.
00:15:47 Kameale: What can we learn? What can we do differently in the field? And so that was the first thing that we did. We built out a field service mobile application that puts that field service technician at the forefront of the mind. I am all about design. I think that we can change the world and how people move and interact through design. And so we took a lot of time to ensure that the mobile application was designed in such a way that when you are sitting in 102 degrees heat in front of a charging station, and I need you to give me some good data, how should that be represented to you? Right.
00:16:16 Kameale: And we still have ways to go, but I'm always tapped in with my technicians. Just being, is the mobile app trash? Do you like it? Tell me, like, let me know. Because it was so important for us, because they held this very unique, juicy data set that no one had. And so I'm super excited to have 19 million unique data. And that's over, yes, 20,000 field service interactions. And we grow and grow literally every single day. And it is pushing us to a place where we can start doing predictions and getting smarter about how we deploy technicians.
00:16:48 Kameale: And the last thing I'll say, Scott, is it was very important to me to ensure, once again, we weren't just creating $15 an hour jobs. I'm not in the business of that. My technicians start off at $30 an hour and I didn't want to overcrowd the market and I wanted to utilize this technology in order to allow them to be experts. And so over time, as we get more and more savvy with the data and being able to do predictions, we can solve basic things. And so that way it drives the value of that labor.
00:17:18 Kameale: It is to say now, when I do send someone out, it's because, this very, very specific needle in the haystack problem. And because of that, I can now actually put more money into my labor instead of just paying somebody $50 an hour to go cycle a breaker. That's not interesting. That's not a good job. People want to use their brains and problem solve.
00:17:42 Scott: It's so fascinating. I was talking to a company a couple of weeks back. And they were defining what they did as basically an enterprise resource planning, ERP company with signals at the edge of a network and what their job was to listen to those signals and then deploy the most valuable resource they had, which are people to those end nodes or those break points, but only when that absolutely necessary.
00:18:00 Scott: And so they were an ERP leveraging a bunch of signals at the edge of a network to deploy human capital only when absolutely necessary, saying that this is actually our most important resource. They actually work in law enforcement and emergency response in small communities where maybe there are multiple inbound questions and you have to say, well, we only have one person who can provide a service, where should they go? What's the most pressing need?
00:18:26 Scott: And I think that in many ways, the network and the data that you guys have developed across the network enables you to send a technician, but only when necessary. So in some ways, it's an ERP platform that allows you to have really high skilled, high wage jobs, train people up in amazing ways, and then they basically are only deployed to these assets, physical assets when the predictive models, the data suggests, hey, this one is, the necessary is in need of a real person to come fix it.
00:18:54 Scott: And maybe shifting gears a little bit to this whole aspect of workforce development and how you train up these jobs, I think it's so incredible. Number one, a lot of people look at technology and they say, well, technology is taking away or eroding jobs. And I think that there are these flip sides of every coin where there's this emergent category, where there are a number of really interesting jobs being created around this EV ecosystem, reliability as a service.
00:19:24 Scott: Maybe you could talk a little bit about the training that you guys do and how you bring people into ChargerHelp. And then also some of the benefits that you provide around just, when somebody can get into a formal job like that, and then be able to focus on other aspects of their life. I know you do a lot around even just developmental aspects of helping somebody work out or do other things to live a healthy lifestyle that is peripheral to maybe what your responsibility as a company is, but it's an amazing thing to provide to these employees.
00:19:54 Kameale: Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't think of it as the flip side to it, because I do think that there will be jobs that will replace people. Right. And I think that the reason that is, is because we don't often think critically enough about entry level jobs. And even as a founder, right, as I look at growing and things in your, like caste constraint and in capitalism, there are certain people that will have to make a certain amount for other people to make a certain amount.
00:20:18 Kameale: So I think that if you do not give thought to what does that floor amount need to be? And how can you actually drive value through whatever that floor amount is in such a way that the floor amount isn't the floor, floor, floor, floor. And so we took a lot of time to really think about if we want these technicians to be expertise, it could be really easy to make this just another off-ramp of a software engineer of somebody that went to college and you just transitioned them into a job like this. That's what I think about like a Geek Squad.
00:20:49 Kameale: So we said, okay, we would like to be able to have folks that worked in oil and gas, where you have people who worked in oil and gas that they're making 90,000, six figures, but is it a job that they love? Is it a healthy job? All of these things, right? But to transition them into another job here in our industry, what could that look like? What would be that pathway? And then could you still get them to that same amount of money that they're bringing in?
00:21:14 Kameale: So from our workforce development, what we ended up doing was hyper focusing on adjacent industries that had the bare skill sets that we knew needed to be successful. And so we looked at folks that worked on oil rigs, we looked at folks that came from telecom, we looked at folks that were actually meter readers, because we wanted to ensure that for this job, the thing that is true always is that you will have to travel, you have to be comfortable in the field, you have to be comfortable in the element. And you also have to be comfortable working without direct supervision.
00:21:45 Kameale: And so I think being very intentional about who could be successful here allowed us to create a curriculum. And then also, we created the O*NET code with the Department of Labor to allow this to be a real job. And then we worked with the Society of Automotive Engineers to allow there to be a certifying body arm to validate that someone can actually do this job. That piece, I think, allowed us to make sure that the jobs that we were creating could be a good couple to technology and that people could be very successful here.
00:22:13 Kameale: And it wasn't just, oh, you worked in the oil rigs. Now you're gonna be a coder. I think I always hear like a lot of people, oh yeah, people who worked in mines, they could just code now. But that's not an on-ramp to this space. That's not thinking critically about what will allow this job talent to be successful here. And so the last thing I say, like how we do our training today is that, one, we make sure that we're getting folks that are coming from these specific adjacent industries. And we typically stack it.
00:22:39 Kameale: So we also say that once you go through an EVSE technician training class, you might go through it and just be like, I don't want to do this. That is also okay. So we ensure that the curriculum is stacked. So we usually have, like a project coordination class attached to it. Usually, partnering with the local community college, or we have a CAD/CAM class connected to it, usually partnered with Autodesk. And we just really allow there to be pathways to other jobs in this space.
00:23:05 Kameale: ‘Cause we see the curriculum that we have as a core to just understanding the industry and that it can really off-board you into these other jobs. But it did first start off with being very intentional to making sure that the technology didn't replace folks and that we were really thinking about how do you get these folks to be successful in a job market that is valued and that we really need.
00:23:25 Scott: I love that thinking about these adjacent sectors and adjacent jobs with parallel skill sets where people maybe want to improve some aspect of lifestyle or some aspect of what they're focusing their time on. You're right, there's panaceas in the media about, okay, let's take somebody and let's just make them a coder versus there are a million adjacencies and interesting ways that the world is changing where these jobs, like what you're doing with ChargerHelp exist and maybe move somebody off an oil rig to the ability to, or meter reader to something that's actually with massive tailwinds in a high growth ecosystem, with a real skill set developing that's going to be relevant for the next 10, 20, however many years.
00:24:09 Scott: I was thinking too, how do you prioritize between, you've got these various different sides of the business, this complexity around scaling both through partnerships, maybe, moving into different states as far as where you guys support infrastructure. And then on the workforce development side, how you acquire future labor or future members of your team with the curricular development. There's a lot of moving pieces to the business. How do you as CEO prioritize or how do you run your week to think about these different sides, whether it's high growth scaling into more infrastructure, more States, workforce development, curricular development, how do you acquire these, the new workforce talent, how do you prioritize?
00:24:49 Kameale: Yeah, I think that being a first mover forced us to create this market, but we've always been in the fix charging stations. And so when they start unpacking that, what does that mean? It needs a software solution, needs a machine learning solution, it needs big data, it needs a workforce. And so we ended up, when we started the business, we started with two business groups, right? So we had workforce development. So we were just, okay, we need to train people. We need to also establish this job as a real job. We need a third party certifying body arm. So that group was just taking care of that, but it's all underneath the North Star of, we fix charging stations.
00:25:26 Kameale: And on the other end, we needed big data, right? We needed to touch stations with a good margin. And so we did what we call ad hoc services in our industry, where essentially a lot of the manufacturers, they're just looking for people to go fix stations. Go swap out parts, do the simple things, not the software part. But it allowed us to get certified on hardware. It allowed us to test out the workforce. It allowed us to figure out where the holes were. And it allowed me to learn with really, really good margins.
00:25:50 Kameale: So we did those two things for the first three years of the company, but everything has always been marching to the North Star. We fixed charging stations. About a year and a half ago, we launched our first, we call it Reliability-as-a-Service. And so this specific product, it's a fixed labor contract. It's an insurance-like product. And so we will look at a hardware software makeup with all this data now, I could show breakage rates. So I can utilize my data set to de-risk my pricing.
00:26:18 Kameale: So I can say, okay, with this hardware software makeup, I probably will roll a truck X amount of times because we figured out that we haven't solved that many things over the air yet. So this is the pricing for three years, five years, ten years. That product now, just within the last year and a half since we've launched, has almost 4x, that fast. And while we were doing all of this, which was so important to me was that, we had to set the foundation for the industry through laws.
00:26:44 Kameale: We lobbied for the EV Charging Reliability Act out of California. That passed two years ago. It's coming to fruition this year. We also were able to lobby with the federal guidelines on the infrastructure bill. The first guideline on infrastructure bill is 97 percent uptime. That's because of ChargerHelp. And then we were also able to lobby for funding to, in order to fix existing infrastructure. The federal government released one hundred million dollars to fix existing infrastructure.
00:27:08 Kameale: For me, because I've always had a North Star, these things do not feel complex or disjointed. Everything that we've done has been, we have to fix charging stations. And now we're at a place. It's so awesome. Now we're at a place where our core product is reliability-as-a-service. We do learning and development as a training, but we do not hire all of our W2 technicians anymore. We created a platform and a space now that I can send companies through SAE, Society of Automotive Engineers, to get certified, I can trust that they understand. I can now put them on the platform in order to do labor for my reliability-as-a-service.
00:27:42 Kameale: Even with our ad hoc services, we're at a place now where we, I'm actually here at our first, you know, our office is opening on July 17th, first ever EVSE agnostic training center. So we have, we're gonna have over 10 different hardware manufacturers here that we could test interoperability, test things that we see out in the field, and then have those manufacturers come here to train people in a better, easier way. So for us, by the end of this year, our core product will be reliability-as-a-service. And that's the business that we've been supporting, but we had to build this industry.
00:28:12 Kameale: We had to work with our partners to say, we know this is a problem. Let's not be afraid of the problem. Let's listen to the consumer and let's ensure that we can get this done. So that way we can drive mass EV adoption. So yeah, that's how it's been working out. So it's actually very simple for me, because I'm just, Oh no, we're all doing this thing, but now we got to do that in order to make sure we do this thing.
00:28:32 Scott: That's real talent. And I think that the Abraham Lincoln quote, he said, “I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time.” And if you can crystallize down to a very clear cut vision, that is the ultimate CEO dream, right? Because looking from the outside, it's a very complex business with a lot of moving pieces. But because within your own mind, you’ve crafted this North Star, and you can see with laser-focused precision where you're going, that it doesn't matter that it's a, oh, there's a regulatory piece and there's a lobbying piece, there's a curricular development piece, there's a customer acquisition piece.
00:29:08 Scott: But there are all these complexities to the business, but because you as a founder have such a vision toward where you're going, and I think that in all the great companies that I've seen, that is a true characteristic of a great CEO. And then the second part of that is how do you execute against that vision? And maybe that comes into, how did you meet Evette? How did you guys get together? What is your superpower versus hers? And how do you guys work well together?
00:29:31 Scott: ‘Cause obviously there's always a yin and a yang. And I feel that, with Jenny and myself and how we run Everywhere Ventures, great partnerships come down to two people with compatible skill sets and putting those two sides together.
00:29:43 Kameale: No, absolutely. No, Evette is absolutely the balance that I never knew I needed. Evette is a people person. She understands people in a very real way. And that's the thing. I've always been a visionary and I can always get people to join on to an idea. But the long standing of getting people through very hard moments and how do you build that in such a way that you have foundational things about the organization that carries folks through. I'm a zero to one founder all day. I tell you. Once we get to one at ChargerHelp, we got to find someone else.
00:30:15 Kameale: And so, but Evette has been very helpful to be like, okay, when we get to that one, the people here at ChargerHelp, will at least feel as though they had a good experience here, right? That we do really look at understanding, we call it dignity and respect at the organization. We early on, because of Evette, being two Black female founders, we've always had a very diverse team and also a lot of folks that look like us, right? And with that, you would think, oh, you do the diversity thing and everything is great. It's very hard.
00:30:43 Kameale: I tell people all the time, having a diverse organization, it is extremely hard and you have to really believe, right? That it is going to bring you greater outcomes for you to stick with it. It is very hard. And so having a very diverse team, I had to have Evette here in order to lay the strong foundations to allow for us to be successful because I will have vision all day, and I will bring people to the table all day, but will they stay when it gets very hard?
00:31:08 Kameale: And sometimes I have, vision that's hard for people to understand, but Evette helps create that level of trust within the organization where they can trust it. And that I can listen to, people's pain points and where they're at, but I drive, I am a driver.
00:31:23 Scott: Yeah, I love it.
00:31:24 Kameale: I need that person that's either one, come on, I understand that you wanna go this really fast. Literally no one's following you right now, slow down. Or she's in the back corralling folks, I know we don't know where Kameale is taking us, but trust her. So that's been perfect. And then the other piece, as we've had to build out an L&D team, and I think this is the cool thing about climate tech that I think sometimes we forget as an industry is that there's so many people in these adjacent industries that have been doing these things a long time. And just because now you put climate on it does not mean that they cannot participate.
00:31:53 Kameale: My L&D team, they were principals at schools. They wrote, curriculum. Now they're just writing, curriculum for climate. So we really overexed on having expertise from these adjacent industries once again, and figuring out how, can they now play a role at the organization within the climate sector.
00:32:10 Scott: Absolutely. Well, shifting gears, I know we're almost out of time here to our little speed round, lightning round. A couple of quick questions for you. Are you reading any great books right now? Any book that's jumping off the shelf for you?
00:32:22 Kameale: Yeah and the title sounds crazy, but just trust me, huh? The name of the book is called A Paradise Built in Hell. And you're like, yep, that sounds crazy. Okay, a super quick synopsis. It's so interesting. So basically, this sociologist looks at different time periods of catastrophe in history all over the world, and how communities came together in order to take care of one another.
00:32:49 Kameale: So it's looking at right after 9/11, how you had not folks, there were some people that couldn't make it down to the World Trade Center, but in the adjacent communities, they put together vigils or they had just listing parties or whatever, but they took care of one another. And it wasn't because the government told them to do it, they just naturally did it. And so it's an amazing book to just talk about the human spirit and the human connectedness that we all have and share.
00:33:13 Kameale: And it's, sometimes crazy things have to happen to us in order for us to stop what we're doing and connect with one another, but it's so possible. And so I love that book so much, but yeah, it has a crazy title.
00:33:23 Scott: That's amazing. If you could live anywhere outside of LA, I know you're an Angeleno, through and through, where would it be? What would be on your shortlist?
00:33:31 Kameale: I love Detroit. I am a Detroit fanatic. I'm about to buy a house in Detroit. So I love Detroit and I always tell folks if you were in mobility and not doing things in Detroit, I don't know what you're doing. So yeah, it would definitely be Detroit.
00:33:45 Scott: Great, I love it. We'll have to connect you with some of our friends and portfolio companies and partners that are out in Detroit. Favorite productivity hack. Do you have anything that you do on a daily basis or how you manage your calendar to stay sane?
00:33:59 Kameale: Well, it's actually more so just how I manage my brain to stay sane. So I have to do four things every morning. If I don't do them, I know I didn't do them. So I have a five minute meditation that I do through Ten Percent Happier. I have five minute yoga, this lady that has yoga classes online. I write down three things I was grateful for from the day prior to, and then I always try to read at least one page out of a book, even if it's just one page. And so doing those things every morning helps me to just, I don't know, it slows me down, grounds me, and it puts things in perspective. And when I don't do it, I realize, oh yeah, you need to go, start your day over.
00:34:39 Scott: Yeah, that's incredible. I'm gonna adopt some of those, I think, in my blitz of a morning, most days, jumping straight onto Zoom calls. And finally, where can listeners find you? Where's the best place to find you online?
00:34:51 Kameale: I like to think of myself as a LinkedIn influencer. I just feel like if we could get money for LinkedIn, I think I would be making some cash. So yeah, I'm always posting things on LinkedIn. So definitely please follow me there. I'm literally the only person with my name spelled the way that it's spelled. It's fascinating, but yes, LinkedIn would be the place.
00:35:10 Scott: I love it. LinkedIn's the new TikTok. Well, Kameale, thank you so much for being with you. This is a fantastic conversation. Really excited about what you're building and the fact that we can be a very small part of this change we're seeing in the world. Thank you so much for being with us on the Everywhere Ventures podcast.
00:35:29 Kameale: Thank you so much.
00:35:31 Scott: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.VC, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Kameale in Founders Everywhere.