Investing in Electrification: A visual guide

Sketches on how we're investing in clean energy, especially electrification.

Welcome to Post 1 on our emerging investment thesis, Batteries Included. Subscribe here so you don’t miss future posts. More posts:

• Post 2 on how building electric motorcycles informs our investing

• Post 3 on B2U Storage Solutions (1 of 2)

• Post 4 on Channing Street Copper Company’s induction stoves

• Post 5 on on B2U Storage Solutions (2 of 2)

Two days ago, I read Paul Graham’s latest, How to Do Great Work. My notes/highlights are here. This part stung:

I’ve been reading too much, producing too little.

Luckily, I had a shot at changing that up the very next day. My Next Electric Investor-In-Residence, Pete Christensen, and I’d scheduled our first “let’s talk to another investor about what we’re investing in” call.

But we didn’t have a deck. So we made some art instead.

For a canvas, we chose Saul Griffith’s 1 Billion Machines.

Saul Griffith’s brilliant sketch of the 1 Billion machines that run on fossil fuels, and where they live on the Sankey diagram of energy generation and usage for the US.

We heat-mapped areas of Saul’s map that are most interesting to us. Then we placed investments I’ve made so far on the map. Here’s what we came up with…

The July 2023 My Next Electric investing map. Now with cheeky title: Batteries Included….?

Over the next few posts, I’ll explain each of these investments and how it informs how we’ll invest in more electrification. For now, here’s how the sketchy sausage gets made.

If you want to talk about any of this - from why I sketch-to-think-to-write, to what Pete and I are doing about investing - join us on discord!