Base Power Company: Chapter 3

Welcome to the 2,538 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! Join 275,867 smart, curious folks by subscribing here: Hi friends 👋 ,There are only two companies on which I’ve written multiple Deep Dives.The first is Ramp, which I first wrote about when it was valued at $300 million, then again when it was valued at $1 (and $1.6) billion, and then multiple times since. Today, it is valued at $44 billion.The second is Base Power Company, which I first wrote about when it was valued at $300 million (Chapter 1), then again when it was valued at $1 billion (Chapter 2). Today, the company is announcing that it has raised $1 billion at a $12 billion pre-money valuation, bringing its valuation to $13 billion.In the intro to the last Ramp piece, Ramp at $1 Billion, I wrote that “One of my goals for this newsletter (and Not Boring Capital) is to find a handful of generational companies as early as possible, write their story in chapters over time, and then publish the whole thing as a book when they IPO.”That is certainly my aim with Base Power Company, which I’ve both invested in and plan to keep writing about through and beyond IPO.This is the third chapter in the Book of Base. There will be many more to come. If you want to help write the Base Story, and I think you should, because I think it’s going to be one of the most important of our generation, my advice is to get yourself on the next flight down to Austin and join them.Let’s get to it.One Friday night earlier this summer, Base Power Company CEO Zach Dell and Ribbit Capital founder Micky Malka agreed to terms on a $1 billion Series D at a $13 billion post-money valuation. By Saturday, the round, co-led by Ribbit, Valor Equity Partners, Addition, and JPMorganChase’s Strategic Investment Group, was fully subscribed. By Sunday, it was multiples oversubscribed.$13 billion is, to be sure, a hefty price tag for a toddler, no matter how precocious. Base is less than three years old, and it is now the second most valuable energy startup in the world, behind Helion, and the most valuable that is selling a product today.It is a bet, I think, that Base can become the largest energy company in the world.That seems crazy, I know, but it’s been my working thesis for a while - that Base has the opportunity to do to energy what SpaceX did to space, what Anduril is doing to defense - namely, win a large, old, incumbent-dominated market.It’s also the company’s ambition.Last November, before Base had decided to expand to Chicago, before it had produced its first Base Core, Zach came to New York to do a fireside at Thrive Capital’s office.After the conversation, we were chatting with a small group and someone asked whether there was still upside in going to work at Base, to which Zach replied, “Base can become a $400 billion company.”It was offhand and automatic, but what struck me was that Base had just closed a $1 billion round the month before that valued the company at $4 billion. As the valuation grew, the ambition did too, at exactly a 100:1 ratio. I suspect no matter how highly valued Base becomes, the goal will always be 100x higher.When we caught up last week, I asked Zach about that conversation at Thrive, and whether now that investors had valued the company at $13 billion, in his mind, Base was now a $1.3 trillion company in the limit.He didn’t remember saying $400 billion at Thrive, and said that he doesn’t necessarily think about it that way… before laying out exactly how it could happen:I think about it more in terms of the scope, the size, the total opportunity, and how big a part of the energy market we can be.A trillion dollar company is pretty big today. I don’t think it’ll be that big in 10 years.So I mean if you believe that energy is going to remain one of the world’s largest industries, or even get bigger as a percentage of total GDP, and you look at all the largest energy companies in the market, you stack rank them by market cap and you stare at it and you say, ‘Which one of these can be trillion dollar market caps? And you think okay there might be one or two in here.’And then you look at that list and you’re like, ‘Do we think Base is going to crack this list? And where on it do we think they will be?’ I think we will crack that list and I think we can be near the top over time. I think we will be at the top.So. Biggest industry in the world. We want to win it. You tell me how big that would be.Energy is an enormous industry, and arguably the world’s most important. It sits at the base of everything. The world’s largest energy company today, Saudi Aramco, is worth $1.7 trillion. Exxon Mobil is second at $650 billion, a cool trillion dollars less. What is remarkable about the energy industry, though, is that there are 18 energy companies worth more than $100 billion, and 55 worth more than $50 billion. At its current $13 billion valuation, Base would rank 182nd among publicly traded energy companies, between China’s COSCO Shipping Energy and Norway’s Vår Energi.Data from CompaniesMarketCap as of 7/30/26This is a top-down view of the situation, basically just confirming that it is indeed very possible to build a very large energy company. What’s notable about the list, though, is just how old the companies on it are. These companies were largely built around the winning assets of the previous energy system: oil fields, refineries, pipelines, tankers, centralized generation, poles, and wires.The energy transition that’s been underway has already created new bottlenecks – the grid struggles matching variable supply with unpredictable demand, for example – and therefore new valuable positions.Then the most ravenous consumer of electrons in history entered the market in the form of data centers. If a new energy winner is going to be born, now would seem to be the time.The question is: how? In an industry dominated by well-established and literally well-resourced companies, how might a new entrant break into the top group, or even take the top spot?This is the question I tackled in Power in the Age of Intelligence in February. My hypothesis was that a company needs to identify the constraint holding its industry back and focus everything on breaking it in order to win the High Ground with a scarce, defensible asset. Then, use that position and its capabilities to integrate outward.This is what Standard Oil did, and Ford Motor Company, Carnegie Steel, and Swift Meats. The case study I used to show this idea in motion was, of course, Base Power Company.Base picked the right energy bottleneck - the grid - and the right technology to unblock it - batteries. They picked the right place to put the batteries, right next to homes, in the right starting state, Texas. They vertically integrated, assembled the right team to own each chunk it bit off, and got to work.“In 2023,” Zach told me, “we had this very opinionated view that batteries were this unique unlock to scaling energy consumption. And we thought that in a commodity business where cost is everything, to win, you had to vertically integrate and you had to leverage technology, because you needed to combine those things to get a structural advantage.”With Base Core, Base has won the High Ground: the ability to make the cheapest residential battery and deploy a growing network of them in the most valuable place on the grid, next to homes, starting in Texas, the state where batteries currently make the most sense.Owning the High Ground doesn’t mean Base has won, of course. Not even close. The High Ground is simply a strategically advantageous position from which to attack (“Job’s nowhere near finished,” Zach confirmed).What it means, though, is that it will be a lot harder for any new entrant, or even any incumbent, to try to attack the bottleneck in the way that Base has, or to try to beat Base at its own game. Their customers will be harder to acquire, their electrons more expensive, and their ability to impact the grid less sophisticated.As important as the position itself is what Base has learned capturing it.“Our first three years were basically learning a bunch of hard lessons about how to scale, build a brand, build a team, raise capital, manufacture and design products, optimize the supply chain, and the output of all of that is Base Core,” Zach said.Base’s young life has been a process of figuring out how to do a really hard thing, earning the right to make it a company capability, using it and other capabilities to do the next really hard thing, and turning that into a capability, too.Collectively, Zach calls all the things Base has learned to do its “Capability Cannon”: the deployments and engineering and electrical services and manufacturing and brand and balance sheet and policy chops that Base has earned along the way.The Capability Cannon is the most important thing Base builds, more important than any single product, as long as the opportunity ahead remains larger than its past accomplishments, which it should for a long time. Base can point its Cannon at the next opportunities it attacks.It is already pointing it at new geographies and new customer types.When we last saw Base, in Chapter 2, they operated in one state. Now they’re in two, having launched Illinois in June. Back then, fifteen months ago, its regulated utility business existed as one pilot. Last month, more than 50% of its installs were on regulated utility customers’ homes for the first time.It learns lessons from these expansions, too, and it will apply them to the next state and the next utility, and the ones after that, until there’s a Base Core on homes in every state, every neighborhood, and maybe even in foreign countries, too.It can also point the Cannon at new products, and at the AI infrastructure buildout.The way Zach sees it, there are four things you can do with power: you can make it, move it, store it, and sell it. Make, Move, Store, Sell.“There are massive opportunities across the whole stack,” he explained to me. “You think about the stack and power, it’s really four things: you have to make it (generation), you have to move it (transmission and distribution), you have to store it (batteries) and you have to sell it (retail and wholesale markets).”A couple of the other people on the team mentioned it too, as in, “Has Zach talked to you about his Make, Move, Store, Sell framework yet?” It seems to be an animating framework.And he shared it with Ribbit, too, which used MMSS as an organizing concept in the Power Letter it published last week.Ribbit took it a step further, actually, applying MMSS to both electrons and intelligence, and grouping “Dam Breakers” by which of those functions they did to which commodity.This is “capture the High Ground and integrate outward” in a picture, and the question is: which squares give you the best starting point from which to expand, and how far? This is why we get out of bed in the morning here at not boring HQ!Maybe they move left and start to Make or Move electrons.That would clearly fit the mission of fixing the grid, and of delivering affordable and reliable power to customers. Zach has hinted at owning generation since the beginning, and both Jared Greene, Base’s Head of Software, and Justin Lopas, its co-founder and COO, have talked about how you can start to integrate backwards into the grid once you own the Base Layer with batteries and software.Maybe, just maybe, they even move down into intelligence to capture some of those blue squares.“There’s a tendency for a company of our scale now to be like, ‘Oh, well we’ve got 500 people now so we can go and do more things,’” Justin told me, when I asked what they might do next, “But I still think - Zach and I talk about this all the time - that focus is extremely key.”Justin Lopas (l) and Zach Dell (r) in FocusFocus on what, though?If what Base sells is batteries next to Texan homes, then any deviation from that - selling batteries outside of Texas when there are so many Texans left, or selling something besides batteries or electrons altogether - might count as a lack of focus.But that’s not what Base sells, what it is building, or where its ambition ends.Base exists to fix the grid and sell affordable, reliable power to those who consume it, and it is building a set of capabilities that it can deploy at the best opportunities to do that.Three years ago, it had a very opinionated view that batteries were the best way to do that, and they nailed it. They nailed the strategy, and they’ve nailed the execution. No one brings batteries online faster, and no one makes batteries that deliver cheaper electrons.“Now,” Zach told me, “it’s time to scale the fuck out of that.”Along the way, they’ve learned a ton about how the industry works, and they’ve earned the knowledge that there are way more opportunities beyond making batteries to store and sell electrons.“And so we’re going to do all of that,” Zach said… “And then we’re going to take that massive Capability Cannon and we’re going to point it at AI.”And we’ll get there, I promise, but all of Base’s best laid plans, up to and including becoming the world’s largest energy company, rely on its ability to build its capabilities, to build the Core and then build outward from there.Which is one of the reasons that Base started manufacturing its own batteries.The plan, when I spoke to Base’s Head of Hardware Dino Sasaridis for Chapter 2, was to not manufacture batteries for a little while. Crawl, then walk, then run.The Gen 1 battery, the one Base has been installing on customers’ homes, was a basically off-the-shelf battery system.Gen 2, he told me, was being designed to Base’s requirements and manufactured by partners (one battery partner, and two inverter partners). That was the focus at the time of writing.Then, once they’d worked out the kinks, they’d make the battery they really wanted to make, Gen 3, the vertically integrated, Made in Texas, absolute best battery in the world.Gen 3 is why Dino joined Base, after thirteen years at Tesla, where he led mechanical engineering on Powerwall 3.“I decided that whatever I did there I can do it again,” he told me, “and I can do it better here, and then Base Power Company can have the absolute best residential battery in the world. And I think we’re going to easily achieve that, honestly.”“That best residential battery is Base’s Gen 3, which it’s planning for now. Gen 2 is up next, later this year,” is what I wrote then, in April 2025…“Actually, the first time I recommended we cancel Gen 2 was right after I joined [in May 2024],” Dino admitted when we caught up a couple of weeks ago. “And I was like, these suppliers do not care about our success as much as we do. We should not do this.”He actually looked into canceling the contracts then, but for a number of reasons, including the fact that the $15 million in cancellation penalties would eat a big chunk of the money Base had raised, they couldn’t get out. So he turned his focus to making Gen 2 as good as it could be.The idea of just canceling it kept nagging at Dino, though, “Because at the end of the day it was still just buying a product from someone else, money transacted at day zero. And the reason that ends up being a problem – I’m sure I’m the 50th person to tell you this today – is that if you don’t own the stack of the technology, you’re absolutely not empowered to fix it when it breaks.”“So I took a hard look at the design, mechanically and electrically, and asked, ‘Is this thing going to break?’ And I was like, ‘Yep, it’s probably going to break.’ It was in a lot of ways more complicated than our Gen 1 product.”Worse, Dino suspected that Base wouldn’t actually learn anything new from Gen 2, which is why you’d ever waste time walking before you run in the first place. Focus means focusing on things that grow your capabilities, and Gen 2 just wouldn’t.Everything was pointing in the same direction: Dino had gotten himself to about 80% confident that Base would move faster if it just cut Gen 2.Then he went to Zach Dell, Base’s CEO and suggested that “Hey, crazy idea, I’ve looked into it for almost a year and I really do think we should cut Gen 2 and just do it ourselves,” to which Zach responded something like, “Woah, that’s big, I need to think about this.”He did, and when they spoke two or three days later, they’d both walked it back a little, and they kind of nervously laughed, like “That was crazy, right?”But you know how this works. You’ve felt it. Once you get that feeling in your gut, whatever the details, the only thing that will resolve it is just cutting bait? That’s where Dino was.Which is why, even though they’d put the cancellation on pause, Dino kept talking to people about what if.In a one-on-one, he mentioned to Jared, that “Yeah, I was talking to Zach about how we should probably just cancel Gen 2, but never mind, that’s crazy.”“And Jared looked at me and said, ‘Oh my God, you’re right. We need to cancel Gen 2.’ And I was like, wait, am I right?”And whether he was actually right or not, it ping-ponged from that conversation to a leadership team meeting within the week, right around April 2025, right when the Liberation Day tariffs made it that much more attractive to make as much as possible in the US anyway, at which point Base’s leaders decided, “Okay, fuck, we need to do this. Let’s rip the Band-Aid off.”On May 1, right on schedule as always, two weeks after I’d published Chapter 2 with a few hundred words on the merits of Gen 2, Zach sent out the monthly investor update.Everything had moved in the right direction in April. Monthly installs crossed 400, with a new high day of 26. Closed customers grew 30% MoM. Austin Energy had selected Base to move on to the next stage of its RFP process.And one more thing…We made the decision to cancel our Gen 2 program and accelerate Gen 3, a lower cost, Base designed and manufactured (in Texas) home energy system. We’ve re-allocated all internal engineering resources from Gen 2 to Gen 3, worked with our Gen 2 suppliers to wind down all work with them, and focus 100% of our hardware & supply chain efforts on accelerating Gen 3 development.“It might have changed the game,” Dino tells me. “It might have pivoted the success of the business, honestly.”“We had dozens of people immediately stop working on it and start focusing on Gen 3. There was a bunch of throwaway work we avoided. And the number of meetings per week talking about the day-by-day slip of one inverter supplier versus the other… all that shit just turned off.”“Then, because we had all the resources freed up, we did a big architecture week,” he continued. “The power electronics team is in San Carlos, so I invited them here. We gathered the desks in a big circle and sprinted toward a concept for Gen 3. Then we got Zach and Justin and Jared, the whole team, together and looked at it. And we were like, ‘Oh man, we can make this so much better than it was going to be.’ I think at that point we all felt like we’d dodged a bullet. And then we went and made it.”“And then we went and made it” sounds so simple, but making batteries was not something Base actually knew how to do back then. So they called Andy.After eight years at Tesla, where he left as the Director of Battery Manufacturing Engineering, Andy Ross decided to take his talents to General Motors as Director of Manufacturing Optimization. General Motors is a very large company and there is a lot to optimize.Just one week into his new role, in August 2024, Justin and Dino reached out to Andy to talk about Base. At the time, Base wasn’t manufacturing its own batteries, and wasn’t planning to for another generation.“The timing isn’t great for me,” Andy told them, “and you don’t need anybody who does what I do either. But feel free to use me as a resource.”Andy Ross, Base Head of ManufacturingAndy joined Base in March 2025.Has it been more fun than GM? I asked.“Oh my God, so much more fun.”Base people have their own definition of fun. In Andy’s case, “fun” meant:He joined in March,They decided to cancel Gen 2 and manufacture Base Core in-house in April,They signed a lease in the old Austin American Statesman building in June,They got the keys in September, andBy March 2026, his one year anniversary, he and the team had landed two production lines and begun putting Base batteries in the field.The company refers to this level of speed as Base Pace, and it runs on a mix of process and elbow grease.When I asked Andy to describe the culture of the factory team today, now that it’s grown from four to one-hundred-and-thirty-four, he said, “We want people that can solve tough problems but don’t really care where that problem is, people that don’t care what the nature of the problem is they just want to be a part of fixing it.” That comes from the top.As soon as Base took possession of the old building, they wanted to get to work. But it was late summer in Texas, very hot, and there was technically cooling tower infrastructure in place but it hadn’t been cycled in seven years and they weren’t going to be able to get it recommissioned in time, and they’d quoted some retrofits to be temporarily installed but they were outrageously expensive, like $1 million, and they wouldn’t be ready for seven months, and the plan, at the time, was to only stay in Base Factory 1 (BF1) for thirteen months anyway, so that wasn’t going to work.BF1 Before Base Got Its Hands On It“So I just started fielding local rental companies,” Andy recounts, the way you recount war stories from the good ol’ days, when there were just four engineers on the team and no maintenance leader and so you just figured it out yourself, “to just start landing some chillers outside the building. Good, bad, or otherwise, the door-opening mechanisms on the dock overhead doors were broken, and they’d be outrageously expensive to repair too, so I was like, ‘All right, we’re just gonna land them in front of the dock doors’ and me and one of my NPI guys were just sawzalling holes in the dock doors to get ducting into this place because it was late summer so it was like 95 degrees in the building and we wanted to get to work.”“The first night they showed up, I was here until about midnight on a Friday with the rental HVAC company just trying to get this building less hot,” he remembers, with that glint. “I never thought I’d be sawzalling dock doors to duct tape and chewing gum some air conditioning into a building, but everybody was very happy when they weren’t dying of sweat on Monday.”He applied that same elbow grease to the facility’s compressed air system. When Andy realized that he wasn’t going to be able to get the leftover 1980s-level factory compressor system working himself, he “went on Tractor Supply and bought the largest, but also 120V, compressors that I could find, and I was in the ceiling making up a makeshift pneumatic system for all of our pilot systems, so running pipe and dropping lines and everything.”Andy calls these his “hacky redneck” fixes. They’ve largely been replaced at this point, now that Andy has a team. But because he’s done many of the hard jobs himself, when he asks his team to do the same, he can tell them with a straight face: “Sorry it sucks, but it isn’t going to exist otherwise.”“When I was at Tesla,” he told me, “it was a passion of mine to personally operate every station on every line on every continent that my team deployed things to, because a good solution to an engineer might not be a good solution to the person that has to use it.”Which is probably why, as Andy grew the team from those initial four engineers to the one-hundred-and-thirty-four people that make it up today, 80% of the salaried team members are people that Andy has worked with before, which I suggested must feel pretty darn good.“The thing that’s been special about manufacturing in particular is the amount of great people that have been,” he searches for the right combination of words, “bold enough, hopefully not foolish enough, but ambitious enough to pick up my call and hear me say, ‘You want to go do something crazy?’ and they say, ‘Yeah.’”“Bold enough, foolish enough, ambitious enough… doesn’t matter. They want to go solve big problems and we had big problems.”“We had no factory, we solved that problem, we got a factory. We had no team, we were solving that along the way. And we had no concept of a manufacturing strategy yet, then it was all just philosophical, on the computer, and then we went out there and found new machines, new vendors, new equipment from all over the world to go achieve it.”When Base started sourcing the equipment for BF1, it was just Andy and one other manufacturing engineer. By the time they were ready to start placing purchase orders, a few others had started to trickle in. Andy would tell them, “Welcome, this is the thing we’re going to buy tomorrow, you’re going to be in charge of executing this project now.”Those early days in BF1 might not have been pretty, and will certainly look downright primitive compared to BF2, BF3, BF…X. That’s great. At Base, you figure something out, and then you turn it into a capability. Your best laid plan needs to face harsh reality, so you can learn, improve, and try again.Plus, whatever the Manufacturing team had to do, it worked. Fast.In Austin, Texas, right down the street from Base HQ, “We landed two battery module manufacturing lines and one inverter manufacturing line (the ratio is because there are four battery modules per inverter).”Base Factory 1 in July 2026By January, a little over one business quarter after taking possession of the space, Base’s pilot battery module line was up and running and the team started pre-production builds.All told, over the course of the last fifteen months, Base got out of Gen 2 contracts with only $1 million in penalties, built out a manufacturing team, opened a factory in the old Austin American-Statesman press building, figured out how to add a generator hookup to the battery, stood up a supply chain, built the first Gen 3 batteries, tested them in as much as three feet of water, rewrote software and firmware to match their new capabilities, built more Gen 3 batteries, began installing them on employees’ homes, then friends’ homes, and then all sorts of Texans’ homes, and renamed the battery system Base Core.BASE-COREAll that done, Base now offers what Dino is “quite confident is by far the cheapest residential battery on the market.”By February, it had its first Base Core system ready to install.Manufacturing is a scale story. You certainly don’t set up a whole factory to make one battery. But you don’t scale up a whole business without stopping to appreciate one battery every once in a while, either, especially when it’s an important one.That first Base Core, which people from almost every Base team gathered to install on a teammate’s house in February, was an important one.Dana Paz, the Anduril alum who is Base’s Head of Deployments, responsible for the multi-state logistics and installation network that Base is growing, told me that it was the highlight of this chapter in the Base story.“That first Gen 3 install – sorry, Base Core, don’t tell Cole [Jones, Base’s Head of Growth] I said Gen 3 – truly was super epic,” she said. “There were so many people in a tiny packed side alley and the vibes were so high.The Base Team at the First Gen 3 Install, before it was called Base CoreFor those, like Dana, who had been there from the beginning, it was an opportunity to reflect, briefly, on how far they’d come. “The first Gen 1 install was me and Cole with the Craigslist electrician. It took over two days to hack the thing together and it was just pure chaos,” Dana remembered. “And then this one was chaos but in a much better way”:We now have an entire support system, so you have the engineers on-site, the hardware, the firmware, the electricians were there, the deployments people were there. We were finishing stuff in the factory, off the line, functional tests, like throw it in the back of a person’s car, drive it over to the same house to do the install. We had a blackstone out, we were cooking tacos. It was just way better vibes on Gen 3 than Gen 1, which was cool.“It set the stage well for us to then go out and do something hard,” Dana said. “We had a bunch of pilots that we had to go rework a bunch of times, because we would try something new out and it wouldn’t work, so people would be going back to the same house like six times. So you’re like, ‘Is it really working?’ I don’t know, you have your doubts. But being able to anchor on that super epic first install… yeah, that was the highlight for me over the past year.”Something is working.This month, only fifteen months after it decided to make the thing in the first place, Base will install more Base Core systems than Gen 1 systems.There’s been a lot of learning in between that first Base Core install and the thousandth, naturally and on purpose. Base likes to make a thing, get it out in the field, hook it up, and learn from it as quickly as possible, so that it can tweak its design, maybe supply chain, and manufacturing lines as quickly as possible, so that it can keep compounding as quickly as possible.For the Hardware and Deployments teams, that meant getting the first one out and hooked up to a house, to see where it broke and tweak the design accordingly.For Andy and the Manufacturing team, that early iteration loop meant that they needed to keep the pilot facility, BF1, as manual and flexible as possible.“What bites you in manufacturing is you design a thing that you think is going to be the thing you launch on and then you launch with a mildly different, sometimes radically different, product architecture and you’re scrambling from a manufacturing engineering and equipment standpoint to try to recover the machine to match the thing you need to go build,” he explained. “And the thing that Tesla taught me was to try to limit the amount of one way doors, or the inflexibility, as long as you can from a manufacturing line standpoint.”This is why automation comes last in Elon Musk’s five-step algorithm. Automation is inflexible.“That’s one reason that we kept it pretty manual to start out at this factory, was to enable a higher amount of flexibility in both process and in design as long as we could,” Andy said.Another reason was that Base’s systems weren’t set up to handle much more than manual.The Manufacturing Execution System (MES) - the software that tracks, monitors, documents, and controls the manufacturing process - that Base had been using was “originally built to do retail clothing inventory tracking. It was something you would use in a job shop where you’re making 50 of a thing and then you’re making a new thing, not where you’re making 1,000 of a thing per day.” It was a low-volume tool where Base needed a high-volume one.At first, the team tried to redneck hack it by building an architecture in which the original software system might work. Maybe at the first level it didn’t look good, but at the second… “No, when we dug into it, it still wasn’t very good.”They presented their findings to Justin, and told him they felt confident they should go build their own MES, a significant undertaking that would require going slow for a while to go fast later.“One of the things I appreciate about Justin is that he values and appreciates the experience the members of my team bring,” Andy said. “And when we presented the idea of making our own MES to him, he looked at the team and said, ‘Yep, make it so.’”So they did. They released the first version of the system in January, right as the line got up and running. By April, it was the system of record at every station. By June, the manufacturing software team was integrating live controls for the factory’s 21 robots. (Being smart about when to automate doesn’t mean no automation, as Justin describes to Molly O’Shea during their BF1 walkthrough.)Then they built Whimsy, which stands for “Where the heck is my stuff y’all,” to track inventory from the moment it arrives at BF1 until it leaves for one of Base’s six-plus warehouses around the country, and they built a bespoke Quality Management System, to handle supplier quality, production approvals, and non-conforming parts.In each case, from the first install to the flexible manufacturing line to the internal tools, what Base is becoming excellent at is the process of going from “We’ll figure it out” to encoding the solution in process or software as quickly as possible.I first discussed writing this piece with Gabriel Federman at Base a couple weeks ago. Three days after that, on a Monday, he’d packed my calendar with meetings with about ten team members. And that same day, I got an email from two Base interns, Prithika Devarajan and Richa Pandya, subject line: “At Base Today?” Email From July 27, 2026Turns out, they’d each seen my meetings with their respective bosses on their calendars and decided to take the initiative and reach out. Also turns out that taking initiative is a big part of the culture at Base, and when we spoke the next day, Richa and Prithika each had stories.Richa, a University of Toronto electrical engineering student working on Dino’s Hardware team during her eight-month co-op, has mostly been focused on the inverter, on field returns, and on new designs for the battery management system.But as soon as she got to Base, she started looking through the Google Drive, where she found [REDACTED UPCOMING BASE PRODUCT] and thought, “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” She told Dino she wanted to work on [REDACTED UPCOMING BASE PRODUCT] and he said, “Great, write me a proposal,” and he meant like a proposal of what she’d work on, but Richa came back with a 10-page report on what the commercial version of [REDACTED UPCOMING BASE PRODUCT] could possibly look like, and Dino said, “This is really cool, you should keep pressing,” and so now Richa is working on that, too.Prithika, a University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill student (there really is talent everywhere I guess), is working on Gabe’s marketing team, on some SEO stuff, and on the vision and design for a commercial energy product that’s launching soon, and even spent two weeks boots-on-the-ground in El Paso, on which more in a second.But she was also fascinated by the company’s utility partnerships, and noticed that Base didn’t have a map of all the batteries in Texas and whether they were charging or discharging, like Powerwall does, and so she made a quick MVP and brought it to Lauren Thomas on the Utility Partnerships team. Lauren looked at it and said, “Actually, this is fricking sick. I don’t really care that you’re an intern, I want you to go figure this out and make it better and come back to me as soon as possible with it.” Which she did.This kind of openness and cross-pollination is part of the culture, too. There are fifty-five (55!) interns at Base this summer, and they all work on different teams and hang out all the time, which means they all have visibility into all the different areas of the business.Zach Dell@ZachBDellThank you to all of our interns at @basepowerco this summer.