How Euclid Power Streamlines Clean Energy Development at Scale

May 5

Jacob Sandry is the CEO and co-founder of Euclid Power, a platform for renewable energy project development, financing, and operations—with AI-enabled services layered on top. MCJ is proud to be an investor in Euclid, having joined the company’s seed round in mid-2022.

Jacob has worked in renewable power his entire career, starting at Generate Capital right out of college, where he worked under Jigar Shah. He then spent several years on the investment team at Goldman Sachs' Renewable Power Group before having the a-ha moment that led to Euclid—and left to start it with a couple of his fellow Goldman teammates.

Jacob and Cody discuss how he’s seen the renewables industry evolve over the past decade, his theory of change, the insights that led to founding Euclid, and the company’s current product and traction. We also touch on his thoughts on AI, power demand curves, and more. As we see it, Jacob is riding two massive waves with Euclid: the inexorable growth of solar and storage, and the curve-bending potential of AI and workflow automation.

Episode recorded on April 25, 2025 (Published on May 5, 2025)

In this episode, we cover:

[1:59] Jacob’s early career and background
[3:34] Working with Jigar Shah at Generate Capital
[8:26] Time on the Goldman Sachs Renewable Power team
[9:24] The origin story of Euclid Power
[15:23] Challenges in building renewable energy projects
[19:15] From internal Goldman tools to the Euclid platform
[20:29] Client spotlight: UBS
[21:57] Transitioning from project development to a software company
[26:07] The role of AI in Euclid’s platform
[31:49] Business growth and market traction
[33:35] Building Euclid as a multiplayer platform
[37:10] Balancing software automation with hands-on services
[40:41] Current limitations of AI and automation
[42:50] Jacob’s outlook on the future of renewable energy
[46:05] Powering data centers and emerging demand
[47:30] Where Euclid is looking for help
[48:18] The meaning behind the name “Euclid”

Cody Simms (00:00):
Today on Inevitable our guest is Jacob Sandry, the CEO and co-founder of Euclid Power. Euclid is a platform for renewable energy project development, financing, and operations with AI-enabled services on top. MCJ is proud to be an investor in Euclid, joining the company's seed round in mid-2022.
(00:24):
Jacob has worked in renewable power for his entire career, joining Generate Capital right out of college and working under Jigar Shah. He spent multiple years on the investment team at Goldman Sachs' Renewable Power Group before having the a-ha that led to Euclid, and leaving to start it with a couple of his fellow Goldman teammates.
(00:46):
Jacob and I talk about how he's seen the renewables industry evolve over the last decade, his theory of change, the observations he had that led to Euclid, and a bit about the current product and traction. We also touch on his thoughts on AI, power demand curves, and so much more. As I see it, Jacob is riding two larges waves with Euclid. The inexorable growth of solar and storage, and the curve-bending technology of AI and workflow automation. From MCJ, I'm Cody Simms and this is Inevitable.
(01:26):
Climate change is inevitable. It's already here. But so are the solutions shaping our future. Join us every week to learn from experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry.
(01:46):
Jacob, welcome to the show.
Jacob Sandry (01:48):
Thanks, Cody. I'm excited to be here. I've been putting it off for a while.
Cody Simms (01:52):
I know! We finally got you on here. It's great. Now you can tell us all your secrets.
Jacob Sandry (01:58):
Exactly.
Cody Simms (01:59):
Let's start. You have built a career in this whole space of renewable power truly at an incredible time in this industry. Looking back to, it looks like your very first fellowship while you were in college was at Mosaic. You have been in it basically for your entire working career.
Jacob Sandry (02:22):
Yeah, that's right. Growing up, I was a really math-y kid. I was also a super competitive athlete in high school.
Cody Simms (02:30):
What sport?
Jacob Sandry (02:31):
I was a runner. I ran track.
Cody Simms (02:33):
Oh! I didn't know that.
Jacob Sandry (02:34):
Yeah. I was a state champ in the mile in high school. I ran in college.
(02:39):
But in high school, I got really into social issues. I thought I was going to go into politics, or work for an NGO, or something. I think that happens to a lot of people who end up in renewables. There's multiple people at Euclid who their last job before they got into renewables was working for PIRG or Environment America. In college, I got an internship at this company called Mosaic. Not the web browser, the now solar loan financing company. I think it was this really beautiful mix of this issue that I cared so much about, but also using math, and science, and numbers, and goals. It spoke to my sense of competitiveness. I was like, "This is what I want to do. I just love this."
(03:19):
The founders of that company were amazing. I ended up taking a semester off. I lived in Billy Parish's house for six months so I could afford to be an intern at Mosaic. And became close with Dan Rosen, those are the founders of Mosaic, and they're early advisors for us.
Cody Simms (03:34):
Amazing. You were at Generate Capital pretty soon after college. Explain the experience of working with Jigar and being part of that whole thing?
Jacob Sandry (03:43):
I think at the time, renewable energy still felt like alternative energy. There was a lot of thought around if we're going to accelerate the deployment of renewables, we need to get more capital to flow into the space and figure out how to do that. That was actually Mosaic's original business model was there's not enough people investing in renewables, you can crowdfund your solar project. That was the original business model.
(04:04):
For me, I was like, "Great. I want to figure out the answer to this question. Why do some rooftops have solar projects and then some rooftops are empty?" Who knows why? You're in college, you don't know how anything works. The people who knew that were the finance people. They understood how these deals came together, and who paid who, and how it all worked.
(04:20):
I think of two views of the world about renewables. One is what I call the Bill Gates view of the world, which is we need breakthrough new technologies if we're going to decarbonize our grid. We need fusion, and new battery chemistries, et cetera. Then I think there's the Jigar Shah view of the world, which is we have and have had all of the technologies that we need. The silicon solar panels that we're deploying are the same ones we've been deploying for decades. The batteries that we're deploying on grid-scale are the same ones that EVs and in your cellphone. By the way, they cost 10% of what they did 10 years ago. But we need to deploy it faster, so how do you do that?
(04:54):
At the time, it was really about how do we get more financing. I was like, "This Jigar guy seems super interesting, I need to get a job." I just luckily got a job at Generate out of college. I think they didn't make the mistake of hiring someone out of college again for five years after that. Yeah, I got to be employee number eight at Generate. Jigar was my manager for a bunch of that time. And just got to see what worked, what didn't, and get a crash course in how do you invest in projects.
Cody Simms (05:18):
Being employee number eight at Generate certainly had to have come with quite a bit of learning. What an amazing opportunity, to work with Jigar so early in your career. How in the world did you land that gig?
Jacob Sandry (05:30):
Its was through a professor at school knew him. I think one of the things about Jigar is he obviously has this huge persona. One of the amazing things about him is he'll meet with anyone. There were times when I would be in New York when I was at Generate and he would invite me to breakfast. He would be meeting with an installer of energy efficient appliances in Queens and just want to understand how he could support. When he goes to conferences, he would just be like, "Hey, I'm going to camp out at this bar at this time, anyone who wants to come hang out and chat." I think he was just down to meet me.
Cody Simms (06:06):
He reminds me of, from my time at Techstars, I got to know Brad Feld really well. Brad Feld at Foundry Group is this famous VC who everyone feels like they know Brad and they're best friends with Brad. They're like, "Oh, I know Brad." In reality, they exchanged emails with Brad three times in 2012. But he makes everyone feel like they know him and he knows them. People who have a way of doing that is such an amazing personal touch.
(06:31):
I totally agree, Jigar has that in spades. It's cool that you were able to crack into that so early in your career.
Jacob Sandry (06:38):
I feel super fortunate. The folks at Generate are just really smart. It was a really interesting for me intellectual exercise in which technologies work and why.
(06:49):
What's interesting for me coming out of that is then I was just like, "I actually just want to do larger-scale solar and storage." Because I felt like a lot of the story of how we were going to decarbonize was actually going to be written by large scale deployments of solar storage and wind. And that a lot of these others technologies, while I'm hopeful that they're going to get traction and take off, I think for me, I was where I can have the most impact is all of the problems that we're seeing in these technologies that were starting to become the down the fairway renewables investments. But actually, still had tons of challenges getting deployed, lots of errors, and all of the things we saw when we started Euclid. But I was like, "I want to focus there."
Cody Simms (07:28):
They were getting kind of boring. You know how to do them, and yet there are actually still a lot to iron out. Your mission was, "How do I go actually take this thing that clearly has runway, it doesn't need to have a bunch of technology risk figured out or whatnot, and really help it get to scale?"
Jacob Sandry (07:46):
I think when we were at Generate, it felt like solar and wind, the problems were solved, and those were just being deployed. The focus was what are the next generation of technologies? That the technology is proven, but the business model and the financing for it isn't. Solar thermal was something we were looking at. Batteries was actually one of the things we really got right, because at the time, we were doing those early behind the meter stem deals. Now, batteries are some large percentage of the new power on the grid is batteries. Back then, it was nothing. But there weren't that many things like batteries that became that. It was really just batteries. We've seen developments other places, but we're still not deploying enough solar.
(08:26):
For me, the reason I moved from Generate to Goldman was Goldman raised a couple billion dollars and they were like, "We're just going to do solar." I think a lot of people were like, "That's boring." For me I'm like, "No, we need to be doing way more solar deployment than we are today." It still felt like that asset class was under-funded. I was like, "Cool, if Goldman can make a good business out of this, then other people should follow." That's why I went to help launch the Goldman Sachs Renewable Power, which is where I was working before we started Euclid.
Cody Simms (08:55):
I saw just a few stats that you listed on your LinkedIn. You were there from the period of zero to $3 billion in asset growth at Goldman, and you worked across over 250 utility scale and commercial industrial projects. Rolling out solar and solar and storage, I assume.
Jacob Sandry (09:12):
Exactly. It was a mixture of operating assets that we acquired, and then we did some of the first really big utility scale solar and storage projects in California. Then soon after, much bigger projects got done.
(09:24):
This is where we came up with the idea for Euclid. I like to tell a story where the idea for Euclid was actually incubated in a Trump-owned building in San Francisco. The way we get there is I join Goldman in 2018. That's around the same time that Ryan and Brian, who are my co-founders at Euclid, also joined. They led technical diligence and construction management for the fund, and I was on the investment team.
(09:50):
One of our first investments was acquisition all of SunPower's, at the time, operating CNI solar projects. 220 rooftop solar projects, mostly schools in California. That was a $600 million portfolio. Goldman was really supportive of us, even though we were 26, running after this. I built the model and led the bid, and we got the term sheet. We thought we were going to have four months to close. And they told us that we had six weeks, because they were like, "Oh, we have public reporting, we're a public company. We want to move this."
(10:23):
Something that I like to say is investing in renewable energy projects as an asset is not like investing in a startup. At a startup, you're fine if seven out of your 10 investments go to zero, and hopefully one of them 100Xs. There's no solar project that can 100X. These are six to eight percent un-levered. Once you've built it, there's nothing you can really do to make it better. Most of it is downside protection. If you miss something when you're doing diligence, you can't go back to the person you sold it from and be like, "Oh, I missed this." They're like, "Sorry, we sold it to you."
(10:55):
Doing the diligence on 220 operating solar projects means going through tens of thousands of documents that are permits, and are connection agreements, and revenue contracts, and operations contracts.
Cody Simms (11:08):
By the way, Jacob, a lot of projects that get some kind of funding do ultimately die on the vine, I think because of interconnection queue problem. Or, oh, gosh, we didn't realize there was going to have to be this amount of transmission built to actually connect the project to the grid. Oops, the project cost just increased by some factor where, even though we sunk some money into it, we're not going to end up doing it. This happens quite frequently in the space, does it not?
Jacob Sandry (11:34):
60% of projects are delayed, and 30% fail all together.
Cody Simms (11:39):
After money has already gone into them. Some degree of money. Not the full boat of financing, but some amount of money.
Jacob Sandry (11:45):
In some ways, when you're developing projects, this is part of the business. You know some of them aren't going to go there. What's really frustrating for people in the industry is how much of this unforced errors. It's projects that could have been built, or could been built on time, or could have been built on budget, but miscommunication, or poor data management, or not knowing the right questions to ask lead to these problems.
(12:08):
I think we hear a lot about the interconnection queues, but when you're in the field and in the industry doing these projects, you see a lot of other stuff that happens. You didn't realize you were building on a wetland, and you should have if you had done your work. Then you have to cut the project in half, or you have to cancel the project all together. Or you don't even realize that until after it's built, and then you're damaging the wetland, and then you're getting sued about it. Or you've been accepted for an incentive program, and every few months you need to update the incentive manager with information about your project, but no one tracks that you're supposed to do that so you just forget. Then you spend millions of dollars on this portfolio of projects, you forgot to update your incentive application, and it gets pulled. This stuff sounds crazy, but this is what's happening all the time in our industry and it's super frustrating.
(12:57):
We knew that we had to go solve these things, and that the underwrite was going to be based on our work. We'd spent a bunch of time in San Francisco meeting with the SunPower team on this portfolio. In their offices all day, until the room fogs up and everyone's giving away deal points because you're just exhausted. Then we would hole up at the Goldman office, which is at this building called 555 California, which is one of Trump's marquee office buildings that he owns. My now co-founder Ryan and I, we just built a bunch of spreadsheets, and tools, and processes to figure out how do we actually feel good about making an investment in 220 projects where you have to know all of the information is right.
(13:36):
I think I cried twice trying to get this portfolio done because it's $600 million, you're 26. You're like, "If I get this wrong, does Goldman own my soul for the next 1000 generations for me to pay this back?" We ended up getting the deal done. But in the process we were like, "If this is the way that everyone's doing this, how are we going to be able to deploy this many solar projects at scale if it's this hard to do 200?" We just felt extremely overwhelmed.
(14:04):
We took those tools to the next big deal that we did, which was with a publicly-traded solar developer. They looked at those tools and they were like, "This is the best thing we've ever seen." We were like, "How is that possible?" We had that experience a bunch more times and realized that the industry is full of extraordinarily smart, hard-working people that are just moving very fast to get their projects done. And often, not slowing down to invest in the tools and processes that they need to do it. Often because they just don't have the resources, or time, or expertise.
(14:37):
Ryan, who was in that story, Brian, who led construction management and felt all of this stuff when it came to managing construction of these projects, I think we found that we were the ones who really liked to build those processes. We hated to see all of these unforced errors, and challenges, and people just feeling burnt out and overwhelmed. We decided at the end of that, "Let's go solve this for the industry."
(14:59):
I think on my journey, I got to a point where it no longer felt like we were doing alternative energy. 93% of power coming onto the grid last year was renewables. We were getting outbid by Apollo, and Carlisle, and Brookfield. There's lots of money had been raised to go after these investments, but it was just really hard to get them done and it was really messy. That's why we decided to start Euclid.
Cody Simms (15:23):
What is complex about building these projects? What are all these documents, and workflows, and back-and-forths that need to happen that make these so challenging?
(15:36):
I think one thing you have said to me when I've asked you that before is, "It sounds easy, it's a solar farm, but these are power plants. They are complex." They're important, they're high voltage, they're potentially dangerous. Maybe just break down some of the complexity, for those of us who haven't built a $600 million solar farm before?
Jacob Sandry (15:57):
I think that's a really good way of framing it is these are power plants. In 2005, we installed 200 power plants in the US, the royal we. That was mostly coal, gas, nuclear. In 2022, we installed 10,000 solar projects that were all what we call CNI, or Walmart-rooftop size or bigger. That's a 50X growth in the number of power plants that we as a society are building every year, but we're still building them like it's 2005.
(16:24):
When you're doing this, it's not just one person doing this, you're managing a bunch of people. It's lawyers, and engineers, and you need to manage procurement, and tax, and financing. You're sort of running a business for each one of these projects. They literally are their own business, their own LLC. That's across interconnection, and permitting, and site control, and tax, and financing, and construction, and whatever incentive program that you're managing.
Cody Simms (16:53):
We forget most of the time, there is some off-grid, behind the meter stuff, but most of the time the building or whatever, if it's a rooftop project or whatever that's sponsoring the project isn't actually using the electrons. They're flowing onto the grid, so they're getting distributed to people's homes. They have to be reliable in terms of production, because the pricing through which the grid is buying these things is requiring them to actually be delivered.
Jacob Sandry (17:19):
Correct. This is where we talk a lot about delivering projects on time and on budget. What happens is you make a mistake somewhere along the way, you promised someone you were going to deliver them power. If you're six months delayed on that, you still have to deliver them that power in a lot of cases, so you're buying power from the market or you're paying liquidated damages.
(17:39):
Then the other thing is the way this works at scale is it's a good investment. I think that there's a lot of what people call impact investing in the world. Investing in renewables is not impact investing. Goldman didn't raise a couple billion dollars to do impact investing. They did it because they thought it was a good asset class. They looked at it like credit. This is when interest rates were much lower. "If you can buy Walmart credit at 3%, but we can do a solar project on Walmart's roof for 7%, that's a good deal. There's 400 basis points of extra return. We think that's worth the risk of this solar project." They're thinking about it that way. If your system is under-performing, that math starts to erode. They're looking for a certain return for their investors.
(18:25):
The cool thing is that the biggest pools of capital in the world are pension funds and insurance, and they like investments like this. They like investments that produce stable, longterm cashflows.
Cody Simms (18:37):
Which is basically risk arbitrage with a built in cashflow is what I'm hearing.
Jacob Sandry (18:42):
Right. The sun shines every year more or less the same. But the problem is a lot of this capital was raised by people who thought this was credit. We actually came out of the group at Goldman was a credit group, they lent to mid-sized companies. The difference is that writing a loan is very different than building a power plant. That's really the problem that we saw was there's a lot of capital that wants to invest in these projects, but getting those projects to get built while at the velocity that they want is challenging. Then for those to be good, high performing assets, that's what the industry needs if we're going to flourish.
Cody Simms (19:15):
How did this go from being something you were doing inside Goldman to being a broader platform that could service more industry customers?
Jacob Sandry (19:25):
Early days for us, we didn't know how to build software. We wanted to build a software platform for this, but at first we were bootstrapping. We just had a high conviction that this was something the industry needed because we had seen it. We built a bunch of stuff in spreadsheets and went to our old clients. We were like, "Hey, would you use this?" They were like, "Yeah. But we'd also love help moving this stuff forward." I think that became largely the vector of our business was people want better tools, they want better processes. They're tired of having all their information spread across eight different data rooms, and a bunch of Smartsheets, and Excel, and emails, and trying to coordinate. But they also want to move faster.
(20:03):
Part of the challenge is they're often limited in how much headcount they can bring onto their team. They come to us because we can do a lot of the in-the-weeds diligence work, document management, data management that unlocks them making decisions faster. That means they can get more projects done every year and that's really what they're in the business of doing. That's how we got started.
Cody Simms (20:24):
Give me an example of a customer who came to you and looked for that expertise.
Jacob Sandry (20:29):
I think a really good example of this is UBS is a big client of ours. One of our colleagues from Goldman spun up an energy storage investment fund at UBS and became a really big client of ours. The way they're thinking about it is they're really good at understanding which market should we go after that are going to be profitable to invest in for storage. How can we make good investment decisions? But not have to build this big operation around managing that.
(20:57):
Then they come to us and they say, "Hey, Euclid, can you do a bunch of this stuff for us? Can you manage our stakeholders and vendors? Can you do the project management? Can you build process and organization for us?" That's what we do. It spreads the ability to do this to more people. I think a lot of people are spinning out of development shops and starting up their own thing, and Euclid can be an accelerant for them.
(21:20):
Then we also become an accelerant for these larger investors in IPPs who develop and own a lot of projects. They want to do more. Everyone wants to get more projects done. They're often limited by their internal resources and headcount in order to do that, so we can supercharge it and help them get more projects done every year.
Cody Simms (21:38):
You mentioned you didn't know how to build software, and yet here you are now deciding, "I'm going to start a software company." Did you know this was going to be a software-driven AI company at first? Or did you think, "Hey, there's a need for almost a niche services model in this space? We can basically be a boutique firm that can provide that."
Jacob Sandry (21:57):
We knew a lot of things were broken. There's this book called Good to Great, we actually send it to new Euclid employees. They talk about what's your hedgehog concept. For us, we were like, "We want to be best in the world at the process of getting projects developed, financed, and built. If we do that, there's going to be a ton of value." That was just the problem we knew we wanted to solve for the industry.
(22:20):
I think early on we were like, "This industry needs a software platform like a Carta that organizes all this documentation and information, much provides project management workflows." We also knew that people needed a lot of help. They needed immediate help and they needed hands on deck.
Cody Simms (22:35):
Jacob, when I first met you, you were teaching yourself how to code. You saw a software vision, but it felt like trying to figure out how to get the company to that vision.
Jacob Sandry (22:45):
This was pre-LLMs. I think now it's almost better and worse to learn how to code now, because you can get off the ground faster, but you almost don't have to actually learn a lot of it. I took the Harvard CS 50 class, which you can just take. This is the great thing about coding. You can just take anything you want open source, online. Obviously, to get really good you need to work with really good engineers. But I was teaching myself to code. We were building stuff in Excel and Smartsheet and just selling that to people.
(23:08):
I think we had a meeting with one of our big clients at the time, it was in-person. A big client of ours, investing hundreds of millions a year across a lot of solar projects. They sat us down in their office. After we had done a few projects ... This was still when all of our tools were in our spreadsheets. They said, "We want every project that we do to be in Euclid. Anything that you guys can build that will make us faster, we'll pay for." I think at that point, we looked at ourselves, and I think Brian, my COO, was like, "Jacob, you're not going to learn how to code fast enough." Then we went and raised a seed round. We knew we had something here that we wanted to go after.
(23:47):
We were really lucky. 18 months ago, we found our CTO, Kushal, who was at Google pre-IPO and all these crazy things And just has a passion for renewable energy. When we met he was like, "I want to help you guys build this." Now we've been able to really invest in the software. I think in the last even just six months, seeing where AI can play a role here.
(24:12):
I think something that's really interesting to me about legacy industries where a lot of data is trapped in unstructured formats, and when I say unstructured, I mean a document. You can think about the power purchase agreement rate is written eight different ways in eight different PPAs. That makes it hard to build automation in software because you need to normalize that data. What software does is take structured data and transform it into other structured data. I think AI is really cool because it really accelerates the work of our team in getting all of this information into our platform in a way that you really trust. There's providence back to where that information came from.
(24:50):
When we think about on a macro scale, how do we accelerate financing moving from people who have capital and want to invest it in projects so those projects can get done, figuring out what all those workflows are, and then figuring out how do we accelerate them is really exciting for us.
Yin (25:05):
Hey, everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ, here to take a quick minute to tell you about the MCJ Collective membership. Globally, startups are rewriting industries to be cleaner, more profitable, and more secure. At MCJ, we recognize that a rapidly-changing business landscape requires a workforce that can adapt.
(25:25):
MCJ Collective is a vetted member network for tech and industry leaders who are building, working for, or advising on solutions that can address the transition of energy and industry. MCJ Collective connects members with one another, with MCJ's portfolio, and our broader network. We do this through a powerful member hub, timely introductions, curated events, and a unique tele-matchmaking system, and opportunities to learn from peers and podcast guests. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. If you want to learn more, head over to mcj.vc and click the Membership tab at the top. Thanks, and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (26:07):
I've heard you say that a lot of people talk about AI and it's about the chatbots, but really that's the interface, and what's magical about AI is actually what it can do to automate workflows and streamline process.
Jacob Sandry (26:20):
That's exactly right. What's amazing about Euclid is I think we have the best team in renewables. There's a ton of people I think that we've found that were like Ryan, Brian, and me. Out in the industry, who were the person at their development shop who were in charge of their Salesforce instance, or building all their tools in Excel, and they were frustrated that they didn't have a better way to do this. And really good at development, or financing, or engineering. We've built this great team at Euclid who really understands these workflows and what's clunky about them. I think that is our secret sauce in our ability to make this better is the passion of our team for finding all the different nuanced ways that this stuff works, and then being like, "How can we do this better," each time.
Cody Simms (27:04):
You mentioned the seed round you raised. We were lucky enough to be invited into that seed round by your lead investor Spero Ventures. At the time when we met you, we were like, "Oh, gosh, these guys seem like they know this industry as well or better than anyone we've met. Boy, they've got real revenue! They have marquee clients or customers. But I don't think there's any product here yet. Is this just a services business, or what is it?"
(27:29):
We took the leap of faith that you were going to figure out the product thing, and then the AI wave hit almost after that moment. I feel like you guys are surfing two waves right now. You're surfing the wave of renewables being this huge, what is it 80% of planned capacity on the grid over the next decade or something is renewables, you're hitting that wave. And you're hitting the wave of a technology wave that is very good for your business, both at the same time.
Jacob Sandry (27:56):
We're in this really interesting moment on the grid. I've been doing this for over a decade, and the story before was never, "Well, we have too much demand for power." If anything, power was flat or going down because of energy efficiency. Now there's a triple-threat of challenges to the grid.
(28:15):
The first one is AI, which is the obvious one that everyone's talking about.
Cody Simms (28:19):
Not AI as a wave that is a positive on the technology side of your business, but AI in terms of its impact on power consumption is what you're getting at here?
Jacob Sandry (28:28):
Yeah, utilities are panicking because we're building all these data centers in places like Virginia. Our total demand for power in the state is going to double in five years. This is coming from a place where it's been going up or down by 1% per year. It's just completely away from something we're used to. What actually is interesting is our clients are actually seeing just as much demand from manufacturing coming back to the US.
Cody Simms (28:51):
Which is good, because we'll see if the AI demand is fully realized or not. I think that's an unknown. But it feels like the manufacturing trend is real.
Jacob Sandry (28:59):
I think this is something that's really interesting and I don't think Biden gets a ton of credit for is we actually kick-started a lot of manufacturing in the US during the Biden presidency through the IRA and other programs that they put together. Our clients are signing big behind the meter deals with steel companies. I think that is something that's probably not talked about as much in the media.
(29:20):
Then the third one is just the electrification of transportation. Which, is that going to happen on the fastest timeline or not? Either way, one of the things I think about is if 25 years from now, most of our power grid is renewables and all of our transportation comes from electricity, the renewable energy industry should feel something like how the oil and gas industry feels today. Hopefully, from a size perspective and an impact on the world, but inflected positively.
Cody Simms (29:48):
Maybe not today, maybe 15 years ago, we forget that now, you look at the Fortune 10 or whatever and it's all tech companies. But 15 years ago, half of them were oil companies. It was Exxon, and Chevron, and whatnot. For a long time, energy companies ruled the blue chip stock market.
Jacob Sandry (30:06):
Exactly. I sometimes say I want Euclid to be like Schlumberger one day. If there's going to be super majors, I think of Nextera and Brookfield. There's going to be people who own all of these assets. Then there's going to need to be companies that are servicing this industry and helping this industry along. Today, you don't drill an oil and gas well without using Baker Hughes or Schlumberger for a bunch of things. I think about that's the place that Euclid plays as the industry grows.
Cody Simms (30:32):
Do you think you're always in new project readiness, or do you think you move into longterm asset management as well?
Jacob Sandry (30:39):
I definitely think we'll move into asset management. I think we're figuring out today what that looks like and where the need is. I think there's a lot that is to be desired in that industry, a lot of people are doing it in-house. And similar to what we're seeing in the develop and financing moment, where it's self-built tools that are sort of working today, but you're getting overwhelmed. As the base of installed capacity grows, there's just going to be more and more of a need.
(31:04):
I think the other thing that's interesting is we're starting to now see people want to do re-powering because they installed with equipment that's 15 years old. A lot of that equipment still works. That's the great thing about renewables is if you manage it right, it can last 30 years. But there's moments where it's like, "Let's add storage or let's re-power." There's also a lot of these projects get traded that are operating. It's owned by private equity or whatever, it gets traded every five to 10 years. There's a lot of support the industry needs on that front.
(31:31):
But I think we saw a lot of the problems with operating assets when we were at Goldman and we think there's a ton of value there that can be provided. Once you have interconnection and once you have rooftop space, if those panels are not producing, we're losing out on a bunch of clean electricity that could be on the grid.
Cody Simms (31:46):
What can you share about growth you're seeing in your own business?
Jacob Sandry (31:49):
I think we're at an inflection point for the business. We've grown a lot with our existing customers and we have just really great partnerships with them. It's a way for us to trial new things to offer to the market, whether it's software tools or additional services. I think in the last few months, we've doubled our customer base from a logo perspective. We've seen the ways that every project is 80% the same and then 20% different.
Cody Simms (32:13):
These aren't small logos either. These are big logos in the space.
Jacob Sandry (32:16):
Big IPPs and investors. We're increasingly trying to build solutions for smaller developers as well. Last year, we had 350 new projects that went through Euclid, so that was a 3X growth over the year before. Our team's now 90 people and we were profitable last year. We're keeping pace with the demand from the industry.
Cody Simms (32:36):
You have a 90-person team just based on a seed round of financing so far?
Jacob Sandry (32:40):
That's right.
Cody Simms (32:41):
It sounds like you've been fairly capital-efficient then with the revenue that you've brought in.
Jacob Sandry (32:45):
Yeah, super capital-efficient. I think that's in our DNA. Ryan, Brian, and I, we didn't raise money for the first year-and-a-half, we just bootstrapped. I think we've always believed that you're delivering value if you're getting paid to do the work. I've been in climate tech, we used to call it clean tech long enough, and there's a lot of flash-in-the-pan companies. We always wanted to build one that was making a real impact, and we think that's demonstrated through having people pay us for the work that we do and building real business.
Cody Simms (33:11):
One of the things I've heard you describe is how Euclid is a multiplayer product. Meaning there are multiple companies interacting with each other inside Euclid, and often times companies who aren't even customers of Euclid have to get pulled into the Euclid software in order to participate in a project or a financing. Can you describe a little bit about that network effect model that you've built out?
Jacob Sandry (33:35):
When you're developing or financing a project, there's a ton of different players that are involved. To give an example, when we were at Goldman and we were acquiring project, we would have Goldman lawyers that needed to look at it, we had external counsel that looked at it. We'd often have interconnection consultants or interconnection lawyers, permitting lawyers. You have an independent engineer who's going to write you a report. You have an appraiser who's going to write you a report. You have potentially other design and engineering firms doing work. The developer also has probably their version of all of those folks.
(34:07):
I think the way this works today is really fragmented. It becomes really annoying. Where a lot of these unforced errors happen is the way we have to do it today is you have to set up a different data room for each of these different groups. You're redoing the transaction 10 different times. Different people need different documents and different pieces of information. At Euclid we were like, "We have to centralize this in one place."
(34:30):
Euclid becomes a really efficient way to do that, where our sharing and collaboration model is really precise. You can share with all of your different counterparties. They don't have to see each other if you don't want to, you don't have to share everything with them if you don't want to. A lot of times, what our services do is they help you move this project forward, and then the software becomes the place that you're actually engaging with and interacting with your stakeholders. That builds a system of record. Everyone is working off shared information and you trust that information as it's tied back to documents.
(34:58):
The bad version of this is what would happen in my past life as an investor is you're going to an investment committee the next day, and it's 2:00 AM, and you're finalizing your model because you want to go through all of your assumptions to make sure it's right. You see a new document and you're like, "Why did the estimated production of the system go down 10%? When did that document come in?" Then you're panic calling. I would panic call Ryan, it's 2:00 AM. "Ryan, what happened?" "Oh, yeah, we got that three weeks ago and the communication never happened." We try to get rid of those unforced errors and get everyone working in the same place. It works pretty well.
Cody Simms (35:33):
The simple comparison I have to that is DocuSign. You have to have multiple parties all involved and logging into this thing, regardless of whether they have an account there or not initially in order to get the deal done. But this is more than just signing one set of documents, this is actually coordinating on the actual model of the project itself.
Jacob Sandry (35:53):
That's right. Again, I think everything comes back to documents. Nothing gets done unless it's written in a contract. A solar project is really just this bundle of documents that govern things that people need to do, when they need to do them, and how much they're getting paid to do it.
(36:08):
What we really focus on is can we tie these other workflows back to the documents? So that the information in your financial model, or in your Q&A log, or in your investor presentation isn't somehow wrong because it got telephoned away, and that happens a lot. We're really focused on being the place where you store your documents, you trust your documents, and you can extract information out of them really efficiently. Then organize people around the other workflows, asking diligence questions, flagging risks, tracking next steps. What's the budget for the project? What's the schedule for the project? That's the vision for Euclid is that you have this better tool that centralizes all of this in one place and you trust the information.
Cody Simms (36:50):
You guys still do some hand-to-hand services with some of these projects, actually helping to organize and coordinate the materials, as far as I understand it. How much of all of this can be purely automated through a software experience, and how much of it requires large teams and large hand-holding?
Jacob Sandry (37:10):
The service is a huge part of our business. A lot of the reason people come to us is because of what our team can do using Euclid's infrastructure to move their projects forward.
(37:21):
VCs think about, well, software versus services, AI, but our customers are often like, "I want to get my projects done." We show up to them and we say, "We can help you do that and we're going to accelerate this for you." If you're kicking off a diligence process, you could do that in Euclid yourself, but often you're stretched across four other deals that you're working on. Our team can get you up and running, instead of in three weeks, in two days.
Cody Simms (37:46):
I'm guessing your customers also want to know they can always pick up the phone and get a hold of someone if they have a question, or can email somebody and get a response. And that they know who that person is and they can build a relationship with them, that person on your team. And that, either that person on your team or your customer, can also log into the application interface, and navigate it and manage it. So you're all using the application as a central source of truth, but you have someone on the Euclid staff who is knowledgeable on the project itself.
Jacob Sandry (38:17):
Absolutely.
Cody Simms (38:18):
I feel that in VC, even just when I'm thinking about my own fund and all of the stuff I'm dealing with on the back end. It's nice to know there's somebody at my fund administrator who actually knows what's going on with our capital call, or this, that, and the other, and can work with us on that. I can imagine when you're talking these very large, complex projects with multiple stakeholders, they always want someone who can pick up the phone.
Jacob Sandry (38:41):
That's what they love about us. Our team is really passionate about these projects getting done right. We like to say we care about our clients projects like they're our own. Our success is in them getting them done.
(38:54):
Sometimes people ask this question of, "Well, can you just automate all of this away?" I think there's a few challenges with that. First is the cost of errors are really high. Even really good AI still makes mistakes, it hallucinates. The level of complexity and reasoning that our team is doing is far beyond what you think of the reasoning models doing, which are chatting with themselves. But the knowledge and expertise across these projects and how multidimensional things interact, that's what our team is really good at.
(39:24):
We like to think about how can we standardize and streamline a lot of this work, and then set it up for our team who really knows what they're doing, to make sure no mistakes are made. Our clients are paying us for that. They don't want us to just throw AI at it and have it all automated away. Then no one ever looks at it and then there's a mistake made. We think about how can we balance of both of those things? Where we can leverage AI to make us way faster, but still make sure a human is signing off and making sure that things aren't going wrong?
(39:49):
I think the second thing is just this knowledge that we're getting. A lot of even good developers might do five projects a year. We've done 700 projects at Euclid, so we've seen a lot of what can go right and a lot of what can go wrong. That base of knowledge, plus all of our background and experience, means that when we come into situations when our clients need help, a lot of times we're a really good thought partner for them on how to move things forward. Clients love having that. They really love the people on our team that show up and help them push their projects forward and get things done. Then I think they also love that it's way faster, and that they have these great tools that they get to use, this world that Euclid builds for them. I think really the value that we provide is the mixture of both.
Cody Simms (40:31):
Automation sounds great, but in reality, any of us who are using anything where you can't get a human to answer a hard question is frustrating as crap.
Jacob Sandry (40:41):
When everyone left Cursor a week ago because the AI hallucinated, did you see this?
Cody Simms (40:46):
No.
Jacob Sandry (40:47):
Cursor had this login bug a week ago, where if you switched devices, it would forcibly log you out. Then people messaged the customer success chat and the customer success chat hallucinated that this was a new policy. That actually, you were going to get logged out, but it never actually was a policy. Then everyone turned from Cursor.
(41:06):
In that case, okay, it's not good for Cursor, but nothing bad happened in the world. But errors like that on solar projects can be something starts on fire, or someone loses millions of dollars, someone loses their job. People can get hurt. For us, we're trying to be really thoughtful about where is automation and AI really real and really built into our workflows, and helping really repeatable tasks become much faster. Where is it hype? Where do you actually really want a person who's really smart and has done this a bunch of times to sign off on something or give an expert opinion?
Cody Simms (41:35):
Have you found any areas where it's still very much hype?
Jacob Sandry (41:38):
I think you've heard my view on how ChatGPT, in some ways, convinced us all that generative AI should be delivered through a chatbot form factor. I think that a lot of folks who work in industry like renewable energy, and their job is working in budgets and in schedules, what they want is those tools to be filled out right and for them to be able to use those tools to do the things that they need to do. Having to leave and go to a chatbot form factor is often not that helpful. You can send it your interconnection agreement and say, "Hey, summarize this." But then, all that information is still in the chatbot.
(42:16):
I think what OpenAI's engine can do is amazing. But it's really how do you apply that, and how do you build that into workflows? I think that's where a lot of times there's this difference between something that might demo really well and look really pretty, and it does really cool things that you're like, "That's better than a human could do it," or something. But when it comes to these really complex multistep workflows, I think what we really focus on is where can we deploy it in those workflows that make it faster? And give people the opportunity to spend more time being thoughtful and strategic, and less time, and less time churning out the same work.
Cody Simms (42:50):
The last question I want to ask you is you got into this industry realizing that ultimately, there was a huge amount of room to run on solar, and now solar and storage. It was kind of the big boring. You didn't need to innovate a ton on the actual technology. You just needed to streamline how it gets to market and bring more capital into this space.
(43:14):
We're now I think at this point of inevitability where the capital also knows that. You mentioned all these big mainstream sources of capital that have moved into the space now, with billions and billions of dollars. What do you think the next decade looks like?
Jacob Sandry (43:27):
I think in a lot of ways, the next decade looks like how Texas and California looked at periods over the past decade. Where there's going to be places that developers really figure out how to open up a market. That is typically some mixture of the dynamics of the power market or the ISO, state incentives, and programs. I still the story is just going to be a lot of solar and storage.
Cody Simms (43:56):
The state incentive side is this story that just doesn't get told. I did an episode prior to the election last year and Caroline Spears was one of our guests. She focuses on state and local policy related to climate and clean energy. She talked about Arizona as an example where you almost can't build solar in Arizona at scale for various political reasons I don't quite understand, but it blew my mind to hear that. I don't know if you have a take on that, as an example?
Jacob Sandry (44:24):
I don't have a specific take on Arizona, but I think the history of the last 15 years of renewable energy growth has largely been there's an array of reasons why different markets work and don't. It's a mixture of what's the avoided cost of power and is solar cheaper? How much insulation do you get, so how much sun is there? Then are there specific incentive programs incentivizing this?
(44:47):
The Northeast has been really great because New York, and New Jersey, and Massachusetts had really thoughtful state incentives to spur growth. California was great because early on, they had really good incentives. Then it's just there's a lot of sun and power is expensive. Then Texas, which you wouldn't imagine being a flagship state, has been the biggest state for solar and storage. That's just because they have a pretty free market, and it's easy to build, and there's not as many permitting requirements, and they need a lot of power because of the way the market is set up.
(45:19):
What we are going to see going forward is I continue to think we're going to see solar and storage being the biggest part of the story. They were 84% of new power last year. I think they're going to be about the same this year. The need for new power I think will force new markets to open because a lot of the places we're building manufacturing is in the Southeast. Even if those states might not have friendly policies for renewables, they need power. The fastest and cheapest way to get power these days is solar to storage. I think we're going to see new markets opening just because of out of necessity, we need more power. I don't think we as a society know what it feels like for power demand to go up 5% nationally every year and it's going to feel very different.
Cody Simms (46:05):
Jacob, if the fastest way to get new power online today is solar and storage, why do we hear all these stories of all these data centers that are getting built that are having to revert to natural gas?
Jacob Sandry (46:17):
You see a lot of data centers that want to get up-and-running really quickly and they don't themselves have a bunch of land. What can you do is you can put gas gensets that have a smaller footprint and they're firm. They're operating with you around the clock. They're having trouble getting power from the utility because the utility can't service them or the prices are too high, and they want to get a headstart.
(46:38):
From a systems' perspective though, we're going to end up as a society needing a lot more power. As a society, we're going to be fulfilling that by continuing to build a bunch of solar and storage. The backlog on new nat gas gensets is five years. We're going to see what it takes to respond to this power demand, but I think it's going to force us to hopefully move a lot faster in the deployment of renewable energy technologies.
Cody Simms (47:00):
Well, hopefully then Euclid's ability to streamline workflows and reduce errors get things to market more quickly, it becomes a larger and larger part of that. I guess with that, I really appreciate you taking the time to come on here, not just to talk about Euclid, but talk about what you've observed in more than a decade now of working in this space, right at the epicenter of the boom in renewables.
(47:24):
Is there anything you want to leave us with, any remarks, any asks, anywhere you need help that you want to share?
Jacob Sandry (47:30):
First of all, Cody, thanks so much for having me on. I really wanted to wait until you made the title of the podcast Inevitable, I love the new title. Love the place that you've been playing in this broader climate tech ecosystem for years.
(47:42):
I know part of that is helping people connect with companies that are doing great things. If you're listening to this and you have a passion for accelerating renewable energy deployment, we're hiring across roles. Product, engineering, services. Reach out if you want to build something truly impactful. We'd also love to meet folks that are renewable energy project developers or investors that are facing challenges with efficiency, or workflows, or data complexity. We'd love to see if we can help.
Cody Simms (48:10):
I have one other question for you, even thing I said I already had my last question. Euclid, got to unpack the name here for us.
Jacob Sandry (48:18):
Euclid, often called the Father of Geometry. We think of geometry, you're bringing structure and clarity to the complexity of math. When we were thinking about names, we wanted something that was inspirational like that. We really liked that. To us, we saw renewable energy development as similarly complex, and in need of clarity, and order, and efficiency. Geometry is the first principles that you bring to anything that you're building in the world. We felt like the industry was forced to take a lot of shortcuts, or not quite do things right because they didn't have the tools, or expertise, or support needed. We were focused on doing things right and on the first principles of doing it.
(48:55):
One story I love to tell is Euclid, he lived in the time of Alexander. Alexander's successor was King Ptolemy. He went to Euclid and was like, "Hey, this math stuff is really complex. Is there a shortcut to learning geometry?" Euclid replied, "There's no royal road to geometry," meaning there's no shortcut to learning it. You have to do the work and do it right. I think that really spoke to us about the values we wanted to create in the company.
Cody Simms (49:20):
Jacob, thanks so much for your time. This has been fun.
Jacob Sandry (49:23):
Cool. Thanks, Cody.
Cody Simms (49:25):
Inevitable is an MCJ Podcast. At MCJ, we back founders driving the transition of energy and industry, and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about MCJ, visit us at mcj.vc. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter at newsletter.mcj.vc. Thanks, and see you next episode.