Achieving net zero requires organizations across industries to make big structural and operational changes. Arguably no sector has more impact on whether the world reaches this goal than the energy industry, where the green-power transition remains a top priority for utility providers.

High Alpha Innovation Managing Director Ryan Larcom moderated an Alloy 2024 panel session with Southern Company Director of New Ventures Robin Lanier, Energy Impact Partners (EIP) Managing Partner Anthony Oni, and Chuck (a High Alpha Innovation portfolio company) CEO Todd Thomas to discuss how their companies approach investment and innovation in their corners of the energy industry and trends they’re seeing in the space.

Key Takeaways

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• Robin relayed how utility providers need an equal focus on today's problems and tomorrow's opportunities. The energy landscape is complex, and customers’ needs change rapidly. By working with and investing in startups that aim to solve problems facing energy value chain members, these organizations can future-proof their businesses.

• Anthony explained how innovating around the edges of the energy sector is critical — and why startups offer an optimal avenue for strategic innovation by incumbents. The key for startups looking to tap into energy utilities' resources to grow their companies and scale their solutions is to partner with energy providers and ecosystems that encourage innovation, not stifle it.

• Todd detailed how startups have the flexibility and speed of development that corporations, including those in the energy industry, just don't have. Working outside the constrictive nature of large enterprises, but with their investment and guidance, can allow for accelerated innovation and the creation of new, novel solutions the energy sector desperately needs.

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Watch the entire Alloy 2024 session below to get more insights from these energy-industry experts and learn how startup creation and investment can accelerate the sector's ongoing sustainability transformation.

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Sign up for our Wavelength newsletter to access additional Alloy 2024 content, including recaps of our other sessions and keynotes.

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Transcript

Ryan Larcom: If you think you've talked about some difficult sectors to innovate healthcare, government, just wait. We're about to talk about energy today. And it's another toughie, but we've got some really awesome panelists up here who are managing to innovate and bring some really new and unique opportunities to the space.

We're just going to work our way down.

Todd Thomas, CEO and Co-founder of Chuck, a High Alpha Innovation portfolio company launched with CMS Energy and NorthStar Clean Energy out of Western Michigan. We've got Robin Lanier, Managing Director of New Ventures at Southern Company here in Atlanta. And then all the way down, Anthony Oni, a partner from EIP, one of the largest energy investors in the space. So startup, BigCo VC.

We're looking for some hot takes today. Excited to have y'all here today.

I'm Ryan Larcom. I'm a director here at High Alpha Innovation. I support our partnerships with BigCos that help to create exciting startups that can innovate in the space. I got a chance to participate in the one with CMS and launched Chuck. So excited to be here with y'all. I'm going to just kind of take the kind of facilitators’ role right here just to set the stage, and then I'll let you all do the actual talking.

Some crazy stats, though, just for the audience as y'all are coming up to speed on energy.

The EIA, that’s the Energy Information Administration, projects a 50% increase in world energy use by 2050, which has led to growth. Renewables generating capacity could increase between 50-100% in that time. In the next two years, though, projects in energy consumption from data centers, and cyber security are set to double and it.

The U.S. electrical grid is already reaching capacity, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute, let alone being capable of delivering 2-3 times the amount of power needed for those industries.

So big stats. The energy industry transition is clearly underway.

Anthony, why don't you kick us off? How are these competing demands for both increased power consumption? And increase stated desire for sustainability actually playing out in the sector. 

Anthony Oni: Thank you, Ryan. And thank you to High Alpha Innovation for allowing us to be part of this panel today. Ryan, you hit on a lot of points that really make me excited to have the role I have now and be part of this energy transition space.

You're certainly right. You know, the amount of energy demand is growing. You know, if you look at the past, over the last few years, the growth rate for the energy industry was somewhere around 4%. Now, we're looking at forecasts above 10% a year, which is tremendous.

Obviously, this is being fueled by the electrification of everything in the home, but also in the transportation sector too, more and more gadgets, more and more devices coming online.

We're seeing here in Georgia, a lot of remanufacturing and reshoring has been happening across the U.S., and certainly we've seen first here, without a doubt.

When you think about the generative AI data centers, huge impact to the grid and then also climate. When you think about just the more extreme winters and summers, we have more people using energy to cool and heat the homes.

So this is providing and creating a lot of strain on the grid. And also will provide a lot of strain on the environment if we're not thoughtful about how we solve this.

I recall our founder Hans Kobler talked about the beginning of EIP back in 2015. There were just only a handful of companies that were focused on net-zero targets, and today, we have thousands in their global.

And so this growing, insatiable demand for energy is fueling renewable energy across the board. And so when you think about, you know, the impact to the sector and what's taking place, you're seeing a multiple multiplier effect, right? So it's not just enough to have renewable energy in play.

What this does now is create a level of complexity, a level of challenge across the board, which is fueling a lot of innovation and a lot of problems that I think startups need to solve for, right? Whether it be, you know, micro grids or energy storage, as you start to put more renewables, you have to have storage.

And now we have to think about how that works on the grid. Or when you think about EV transportation and batteries, now you can put batteries back on the grid.

So when you start thinking about, you know, ways that this is impacting current industrials and decarbonization of your supply chain, or really just how to manage the more complicated, the more digital grid, complexity challenges arise, which ultimately creates opportunity.

And so I think right now we're seeing a lot of problems to solve, a lot of opportunities, and a lot of cascading things that need to be solved beyond this appetite, so it keeps us really busy.

We're excited to be in this space. We're excited to do this with partners and the approach that we take at energy impact partners. It's one where it's a very collaborative approach.

We often say we can't FedEx the electron. And so we have to figure out how to work with the incumbents, the energy incumbents in the market, but also work with a whole host of other industries and startups and try to figure out how to manage that growth.

Ryan Larcom: Yeah, that's great. Thanks, Anthony.

And, you know, when you talk about an uncertain future, you want to take a portfolio approach so that you have as many experiments as possible. The lowest cost per experiment allows you to navigate your way forward, through that future.

I'm actually going to do this in a different order.

Robin, why don't we just keep going? You've put together a really cool portfolio approach as you think about navigating towards Southern's net-zero targets. Would you just talk a little bit about why you've taken that approach and what that looks like for y'all? 

Robin Lanier: Yeah, absolutely. So, for those of you that are not as familiar with Southern Company, we are an energy company and we also provide complimentary service like broadband cable, et cetera.

But our primary focus is around energy. So we've got operations in six states. We serve about 9 million customers. Hometown here is Georgia Power. And so, with that, from a portfolio approach, we set a goal of being net-zero by 2050.

Today, as it stands, as we serve our 9 million customers across our service territory, we are, on our electric side, about a third of our generation fleet is carbon free energy.

So whether it's a traditional approach, because we do generation, we move the energy across distribution, and transmission lines, and then we also serve our customers again on the electric side, whether it's more of the traditional approach from making sure that we're integrating new nuclear, which we were the first utility to do that in a number of decades or also integrating new renewables to our portfolios, solar, biomass, others.

But also, I'm gonna say the non-traditional approaches. So, we partner with startups. One recent one that we recently announced that we're excited about that is an EIP portfolio company is Singularity. They're focused on emission reporting — more granularity with emission reporting — which is a new and different thing for a utility.

We typically would report it out annually, just one specific emission number. But now we're getting down to hourly, in terms of granularity.

And so we're, we're excited to partner with startups really across that entire ecosystem, across energy, whether it's making energy for our customers, moving energy, so that we serve our customers in a more modern and personalized way. 

Ryan Larcom: Awesome. You talked about different ways to get to net-zero — renewables, clearly a key piece of that, solar and wind too. And you mentioned it in passing, but I didn't realize the third of this trilogy is not like geothermal or some other ones you would think it's biomass.

So Todd, why don't you talk a little bit about the opportunity in biomass that I think most of us probably would overlook, and what Chuck's doing to help to begin to close that opportunity. 

Todd Thomas: Sure. Yeah. Thanks. Great to be here.

Yeah, lots of thought leaders in the energy space particularly renewable energy space are really looking at the trilogy wind, solar, and biomass. Wind and solar are fantastic, but they have their own challenges.

Probably the biggest being they're not completely reliable. They're dependent on weather factors. And so lots of companies look into biomass really as to provide the base-load energy generation for their areas, because biomass is much more controllable. You can store, you can wrap it up and down as necessary.

We launched in Michigan last October. So we're operating and supplying biomass to CMS Energy in Michigan. And, in July, in the state of Michigan, we had very little wind for whatever reason. So they had very little wind. They also didn't have a lot of sunny days. They didn't get a lot of solar production. So they really ramped up, used a lot more biomass.

So what we're seeing is lots of energy companies are really looking to biomass for that base load, and then augmenting that with wind and solar. Lots of energy companies already have. Facilities that are capable of using biomass.

But, for the most part, they don't have enough biomass there. I've said a lot of folks are desperately looking for more biomass because they have to meet that base load. So if they don't have enough biomass, they augment it with coal or petroleum. And so when you're looking to reach net-zero that becomes a big challenge.

Traditionally, when people talk about biomass, they think about forestry and landscaping and agriculture to a certain extent. What Woodchuck is doing is something pretty different.

We are definitely looking to supply biomass and meet that demand for renewable energy. But, at the same time, we're also looking at the construction and the manufacturing industry.

So, construction and manufacturing have their own issue in that they have way too much waste. They're literally sending millions of tons of wood to landfills every year. So it's a massive problem. They're looking for ways to reduce that waste.

Woodchuck comes in and provides really kind of a pretty simple solution to both of these problems We divert wood waste out of the waste streams from construction companies and manufacturing companies. We process that turn it into biomass and deliver it to our energy partners.

What people don't realize is how much wood waste is out there, if you're you know in forestry everybody of course forestry and landscape, and of course you think about that wood, but when you think about construction, there's a ton of wood that's used in construction itself, it generates a lot of wood waste, but everything that comes and goes from a construction site, everything that comes and goes from a manufacturing site, even if what you're manufacturing has nothing to do with wood, everything comes and goes on wooden pallets.

Pallets are, for the most part, single-use items. They get used one time, and then they end up in landfills. So again, there's literally millions and millions of tons of wood waste that's going to landfills that we can divert, turn into energy and provide energy companies with the biomass they need to really meet this growing demand for energy.

Ryan Larcom: Super cool. And I joked about it on the way in, it is not easy to innovate in the energy industry, despite the obvious, you know, early momentum you've already got.

I learned that there's a magic word that energy providers like to use, which is called ‘grid-scale’, which previously I was like as an innovator, I'm like, ‘Why are there new barriers to letting me just play and make things new that clearly there's an opportunity clearly we need to move quickly?’ And yet, for very, very smart reasons, you can't just play around on the grid.

So maybe Robin, you want to just double-click into the kind of trough, if you will, between initial awesome opportunity and actually functioning at grid scale. 

Robin Lanier: Yeah, absolutely. So when I think about this question, I'm going to divert a little bit from panel prep, but we were not allowed to go into what our answers would be so that we can have a little bit spicier discussion. So I'm gonna surprise everybody.

When I talk to venture organizations and startups, we get this question around safety. Yes, as a utility, we put safety as our number-one priority. Energy can be dangerous. But then the question comes, ‘Well, how? Or why?’ And, as an engineer who at one point wanted to be a teacher, I tried to break it down in, in a little bit simpler terms.

If y'all remember more rural cities. They had these large water towers, and those water towers would typically store water, to be consumed by the communities. They serve two purposes. One, they had enough water for, for drinking and utilization. And two, it created pressure, to be able to put water into the, the last home on the pipe.

So think about the energy system at the electric system in particular as similar to that water tower. We have large, traditionally we would have very large, generation plants, and then that would push power all the way to the end user.

Now, flip back to that water tower example and think about your next door neighbor. They have started installing rain collection barrels and they're using it. They're using those rain collection barrels, for their own use, which is great, right? We believe in sustainability. They should be able to do it.

But now think about if they want to use those same rain collection barrels and push that rainwater back into the pipes that you are now consuming. You may have some questions. Is that water safe? Is it drinkable? There's just a lot of questions that did not exist previously.

So that water is very similar to power quality. And so when we think about different renewables behind the meter coming back on to the grid, we think about power quality.

We want to make sure that when we do install things at grid-scale, that they are operating in a way that preserves the reliability of the system and keeps lives safe and make sure that it's the reliable energy that you expect. Not only does it turn your light bulb on, but then does it make sure that that light bulb later does not randomly blow prematurely.

And so that's why it's so critically important to think about things, at grid-scale and think about making sure that yes, they, when, when they are on, they work initially. And then, over time, because we typically make these asset investments over decades. Not just over a year or two.

So we're in it for the long run. Any, any equipment, anything that we install, we want to think about it from a programmatic approach. So for us, it's not just one individual widget. That is important. And that's a key step, but we are in it for the long run, because we want to be that trusted energy partner for our customers and our communities for years to come.

Ryan Larcom: Yeah. Investing over decades, a totally different horizon than I think even startups, which are a pretty long hold, tend to think about.

Anthony, I want to jump around just a little bit. More than $100 trillion dollars in the pipeline that have been committed to the energy transformation, of which EIP's major player with respect to capital deployment also have a really long horizon that you're thinking about.

But there's the short-term needs of startups and innovation, and then the long-term effects on the communities that you're ultimately impacting as well. Talk about what you are balancing as you're thinking about the long-term opportunity investing. 

Anthony Oni: Absolutely. You know, I think, you know, for startups, you know, they're critical in this space because you know, what Robin just described is energy companies as a whole are de-risking the infrastructure. And it's really important that these assets have long shelf lives.

Startups do have a role to play in this space in the sense that, we, the energy industry as a, as a whole, and one of the reasons why, you know, Southern Company is an investor in EIP is that looking for startups to iterate and innovate around those edges to make sure that these utilities, these energy companies, other, other strategic incumbents are nimble in, in thinking through how to navigate that space.

And so, part of the role that we play, I think of it as smart capital capital that it's not just financial, in nature, but also comes with smart money, smart collaboration, with our utility and other energy, energy partners.

So I think for, for startups really taking time to understand, you know, the, the environment that they're in, this grid-scale environment that really operates with the highest critical infrastructure, in the world, but being able to innovate in a way that does progressively get you to whatever those milestones are, but being, but thinking critically around the, the, the really high operating environment that utilities are is really important.

You know, one of the things that we focus on a lot is ensuring that we are. We are working very collaboratively with startups. We are a very thesis driven fund, so there are certainly sectors that we have insights on. And really, in some ways, act as that translator for startups and speak that utility, that utility talk and translation layer.

To make sure that as companies are innovating in the space, they're kind of thinking of the environment where these innovations are going to take place. And I think, you know, being able to leverage partners that have those types of resources, you know, my money will be dumb money in healthcare, right? But my money is capital-smart in energy.

Startups, thinking a lot around, you know, beyond the capital, but really how that translates into the things that they're building and the networks and the ecosystem is so important.

And so that's part of what, you know, I always pitch to startups is just making sure you're very thoughtful about the environment in which you're playing in, and really the ecosystem partners that you're, you're riding alongside you, as you're looking to grow.

Ryan Larcom: Yeah, that’s great. Partnerships is the name of the game here.

Let's actually double-click Todd, Robin, kind of back to back from the startups perspective, right? What do you offer the ecosystem from a speed and agility perspective? And how are you helping folks like CMS, IKEA, General Motors to kind of meet goals that they otherwise would not be able to expedite?

Todd Thomas: Yeah, that's a great question. And obviously this crowd is probably biased towards startups, which is great. But yeah, startups bring a flexibility and a speed of development that large corporations just don't have.

So part of my background, I used to run the Stanley Black and Decker Accelerator and, theoretically, it was an insulated box. And within that box, we could operate as a startup and make our own decisions and develop rapidly. But the reality was, the installation wasn't very good. And, at the end of the day, if we develop something that was too similar to a product that one of the business units was developing, or if we needed additional funding, we had to go back to the mothership, and it didn't really work.

We were under the same restrictions of any large company. So it restricted what we could do.

The cool thing about High Alpha Innovation and the way you guys set it up, the startups like Woodchuck are truly standalone startups, and we can operate at startup speed so we can develop innovations and bring these solutions to our enterprise clients much faster.

For us, CMS Energy has been a fantastic partner. So obviously, they were our first investor and our first client, but we have great access to them. We work with them all the time on our, on our long term plans, and a lot of that comes around how we do things at grid-scale.

So in the biomass portion of the energy production world, for the most part, historically, it's very localized. You're, you're trying to source biomass very close to where you're producing that energy, cost is very much a factor. Part of what Woodchuck is trying to do is really build out a biomass supply chain initially, because our client's based in Michigan, so we'll build out a biomass supply chain to supply the entire state of Michigan.

CMS Energy has three biomass facilities spread out across the state of Michigan right now. None of the three of them operate at full capacity because they need more biomass, so we are setting up a network to supply all those parts of the secret sauce of what Woodchuck brings to the table is we're bringing an AI, to really help us improve the processing of that biomass.

Specifically, we're using image-recognition AI to help us process that biomass to, number one, reduce the processing costs, but number two, to produce a higher quality biomass on the outside.

So when you compare the kind of traditional biomass, where you're getting sawdust and clippings from forestry, you're getting landscaping you've got really manual. I would say low-tech to no-tech processing.

Biomass can be expensive and, again, very localized, and it doesn't work great. But when you start to, utilize AI processing to really reduce that cost and to improve the quality of the output. So you get cleaner biomass and by sourcing construction and manufacturing waste, which is a higher energy intensity feedstock to begin with, we end up with a ton of wood that produces drastically more BTUs than a ton of forestry affordable landscaping.

So now, all of a sudden, the economics change and you can really set up a network and you can pull levers and balance your supply across an entire geography.

We're working with CMS to find out where they need energy in, in what stages, because, I mean, there are cyclical annual things that impact how much construction or how much forestry. So the ability to have a larger network where you can really balance that supply of biomass across a larger geography provides tremendous benefit to the energy producer.

Ryan Larcom: Yeah, it's a real impact from tech and AI in a way that I think the industry would desire, but probably not access themselves at a speed and scale that kind of desire to move at those partnerships. Doesn’t happen by accident, though. Someone on CMS had to be ready and waiting.

Robin, you've really laid a pipeline so that startups can walk straight into a massive company and be successful with the type of uptake that you've experienced, Todd, at CMS.

Robin, that does not happen accidentally. Talk a little bit about the intention behind what you've built. 

Robin Lanier: Yeah, absolutely. So our team within Southern Company, we are laser-focused on identifying the opportunities within the business — not only those of today, but also that we anticipate that will be for tomorrow as well — and then putting those opportunities, problem statements, et cetera, out into the market and say, ‘Hey, this is where we need help. This is where we need some innovation. This is where we need some partnerships.’

And it's a little bit of a vulnerability moment because we're kind of admitting that we can't do it all by ourselves. But the energy landscape is complex, and customers needs’ are changing and we have to do it with partnerships.

And so, what Todd just walked through is what we ask for every time that we meet with a startup, which is why. Why does your product, why does your idea, et cetera, exist? Why did you do it?, what is it and how are you differentiated? Right. And then how do you actually do whatever you do? And so that's really what we are looking for.

For founders, for startups, et cetera, you have to stay grounded and whatever your why is. I cannot underscore that enough. I know when you're early-stage, you want to be all things to all people and you want to say yes to everybody. But the more that you stay rooted into your why, the better that that growth and partnership will be.

I'll give you one quick example. This was a 2019 time period. So before ChatGPT was really a thing, we met a company at an EIP working group, and they said, ‘Hey, I am really interested in the energy space. I believe that I can bring data and meaningful insights.’ Well, you know, can we work together?

And so that was the rooting of their why. They didn't really know exactly how at the time. And we said, ‘You know what? We'll take a swing. We'll try this.’ And we applied it first to our gas industry, where they were experiencing some problems with dig-ins. And so their data insights help us reduce dig-ins by about 50%.

Then we said, ‘This was such a great success story. We want to continue to grow together.’ We applied it to safety. We saw, you know, a reduction in safety incidents, because we were able to predict when those most vulnerable jobs or times may be for our employees.

If they were to say that today, we were saying, yeah, you know, you, data insights, everybody else, right? But, in that time, in that moment, that was a specific opportunity that we had that we needed, and we were willing to take a risk to get a high reward. 

Ryan Larcom: Yeah, that's awesome. And you mentioned the fact that you did this in partnership with the IEP.

We talk a lot about advantaged startups at High Alpha Innovation. Great founders, market-validated need, first customer, great investors, all really make that startup hum.

You talked about a couple of those ingredients. What's the venture kind of opportunity here, right? To be smart-capital and make those pairings work. How do you all work together to make that happen? 

‍Anthony Oni: Yeah, you know, I just want to double-click on what Robin said. I think for EIP that started back in 2015 to help large incumbents navigate this space, some of the key learnings that we've had through this time period in investment is that, that level of collaboration to really understand the environment is so important.

So that example is one where we, this was a very early-stage investment and, now, it's a unicorn of a company. But having to navigate you know, those environments was so, so important. Part of what we do to help facilitate that is, you know, high level collaboration with something called, we also do something called working groups where we bring in the startups, in a room.

We're very fortunate to be a, a pretty large platform that has about half of the utility incumbents and other strategic investors as part of our fund. And so we are in the same room with startups. We're in the rooms with those problem sets, and our team has a lot of domain experience in that space.

So we're collaboratively working to find those solutions. And I think that's an edge, as a whole.

And the other part that I think is critically important, too, is that, you know, I spent almost 20 years in the utility industry as well. And some of the smartest people that you'll ever find to solve these problems or at least have some background are utilities.

And so, oftentimes, if I'm working on a deal, you know, I'm actually calling Robin, calling somebody on her team. We'reworking to utilize those smart experts within these corporate settings to help us understand those problems, better diligence, but also think through about, you know, how to iterate on those product roadmaps, as a whole.

So that really tight level of connectivity and engagement I think has been really successful and helping. And then I think the other piece that is a key learning is stage of capital.

EIP is now a $4 billion platform But we are nuanced in how we think about capital whether it be capital that's more risky for high risk things So we have a fund that's focused on really deep decarbonization goals, but they are meant to take high risk. And so they work on a lot of first of a kind projects and investments, whereas we have other funds that are focused on growth capital.

So matching capital with the stage of company I think is also a key learning to make sure that you're there where you need to, to, to help prove out a thesis, but also there to have capital to be an accelerant. For some of those investments, as a whole.

So that's been pretty helpful.

Ryan Larcom: That's great. I've got questions for the next like 57 minutes, and apparently I'm not allowed to ask them all, so we're just going to do spicy takes down the way.

One thing, 30 seconds or less, that you're really excited about in this industry — either about building or investing or things, things that are front of mind for us, we're excited because we think the next trillion-dollar company is going to be built in the energy sector through venture buildings.

So right on down the way, what are you most excited about, in 30 seconds? 

Todd Thomas: I'd say the thing that we completely underestimated when we launched CHUCK was the demand from the construction and manufacturing side for sustainability., Big national construct, construction companies are under tremendous pressure from their clients, Amazon, Target, Walmart, to provide sustainability.

And right now they have almost no options., and they have no ability to get tracking and validation of that. So when we walk into a construction company and let them know, we're going to track this wood from the second we pick it up off your site through processing and deliberate and turn it into green energy.

And we'll tell you exactly what to do. Tons of material diverted, a ton of CO2 avoided, tons of BTU of clean energy produced. They get really excited about it. And we have these big enterprise companies want to know, ‘How quickly can you start? We know you're in Michigan. Can you be in Wisconsin? Can you be in Alabama? Can you be in California?’

So it's, it's really exciting. I think there's just massive demand there, and I think we're going to see a huge growth in this area over the next decade.

Ryan Larcom: Agreed. Hopefully in Atlanta too. Robin, you're up. 

Robin Lanier: Yeah, so, Anthony talked about it earlier, but we are at a time of tremendous load growth from a series of different opportunities that we're seeing.

And so during that time, it's interesting because we see a little bit of friction between continuing to decarbonize and driving affordability. And I believe that we are in a unique moment that we can use this load growth to help build a better system. And I believe that the partnerships that we will use and leverage to do it will help us drive affordability and personalization for customers.

So I'll offer one hot take, but then I'm going to slide in just for a quick second one because, some of the internet of things that offer a device level and things like that, it's going to create more flexibility, more opportunity, more connectivity, all in which should work in concert with the energy system to help drive affordability and personalization for customers.

We're in a moment. 

Anthony Oni: Yeah, we are. Thanks for being part of that, Anthony. Yeah, and I think mine is probably a thread that intertwines everything that's just been said. You know, we've, I've had a chance to spend and, and learn and see from, you know, all the incumbents in the space that are driving this load growth from Sam Altman to Jensen and Elon, the clean electron and the electron itself is a gate.

And when you think about the amount of demand that we're seeing, what it means also is that we're going to have to 2x, 3x the grid. That means that we're going to have to build a lot of infrastructure as a whole.

And so my hot take is that the workforce and people and how we build and rebuild America and build infrastructure is going to be so important and we need to do that in a very accelerated way.

We're taking a lot of time spending in the workforce sector, automation sector and things that can help rebuild the infrastructure and build it in a really smart way in a way that benefits the communities that typically haven't had a chance to be exposed to infrastructure that lays itself to economic growth.

But I think that's going to be a really big focus on the next few years.

‍Ryan Larcom: Really excited about the work y'all do and thanks for innovating and keep on doing it. Let's give our panelists a hand.