Where WEB3 Meets Venture

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I worked in London in banking, and I moved back to Australia about a decade ago, and I did a PhD. In electricity markets, and I, um, had a few different board positions and also ran for office and was the deputy Lord Mayor at the city of Perth for a little brief stint, but I think a lot of those things that I was doing were quite small, but then as power ledger became bigger. effort and focus, I stopped doing a lot of the other things that I was doing at the same time. So pretty much for the last four years, that's been my sole focus. And in, in all of that, and actually seven weeks before I met John Bullitt, my business partner, I had my first child, Amelie, and then since then I've had two more kids, so I'm a mom of three. Who are now four, six, and eight years old. And I live in Switzerland in Zug and we moved here a year ago. We moved Powerledger's head office and our family here a year ago from Australia. We were based in Australia for seven years, Powerledger that is. And we moved here to be closer to our clients and , the markets in which we operate and be part of the blockchain ecosystem in Zug as well, rather than having to travel to conferences.

So, yeah, that's just a little bit about me and my background.

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And. Obviously in doing that, other people are the beneficiary of that in reading what you've written. And yeah, it's somewhat analogous, I guess, to that as well.

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That's the impact it's having. And they're already large consumers of energy, given they run data centers for, cloud and search and things like that. So, yeah, it's quite fascinating to see. The level of acceptance and lack of awareness around actually, what are the environmental consequences of this? And by what I mean by that is, , if the, if they demand more energy and there isn't ready supply, that's going to push up the price of electricity for everyone. , and when we've already got, you know, lots of sort of macro pressure on the cost of energy from, conflict and, , sanctions and, , certain supply chain chains being interrupted and the consequence of that has been, you know, electricity prices have gone up when you add in, like, you heap on, you know, more issues on top of that. That's not really being talked about, I would say right now.

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But that's the interesting part as well is. From an energy point of view, is it, is, are these new jobs just creating more of a, uh, impact on prices than potentially some of the efficiencies that you're saving in other areas?

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They're things like renewable energy certificates and carbon credits, a renewable energy certificate. Okay. It is 1 megawatt hour of renewable power certified as having been produced because when like a solar farm or wind farm generates a megawatt hour of power, it sells the energy in what's called an offtake agreement, or it might sell it directly into the wholesale market, and it can sell that energy with a certificate attached or separately, if they sell it with the certificate attached, you can call that renewable power. But if you sell it without the certificate of patch, it's just plain old energy. , the certificate can be sold separately to the energy, which allows somebody else who's bought energy from somewhere else. In that particular country to buy a certificate and therefore validly and legally claim that that energy is renewable, whereas a carbon credit is 1 ton of carbon emission abatement. And that's, , a little bit different in that carbon credits can be bought and, , consumed by companies. In any country, whereas renewable energy certificates are normally geographically located because you're saying, well, I'm buying a renewable energy in America. So you can't buy a certificate from Australia and claim that the energy consumed in America is renewable.

Whereas with carbon, it's seen more globally and you can buy a credit from Africa if you're in America and, , and make claims about carbon abatement. And then in terms of our solution, um, just to explain those two topics first, so that Listeners could understand what it what's an environmental commodity. So these certificates are traded. They're bought by companies that want to make claims, but they're also traded in the secondary market at different prices to manage and hedge. , people's exposure to markets and also for speculative purposes. And we have a marketplace in the US called Tracex, which is an integrated marketplace to buy and sell and settle renewable energy certificates.

When I say settle, I mean, transfer the certificate from the seller to the buyer and the buyer pays the seller as well. , so that is currently focused on renewable energy certificates, but we've also built an instance of that, which can be used for carbon credits. And that and then the other thing that the company does is peer to peer trading of electricity. And we have a project in Austria with a large energy supplier there called Energy Steiermark. And they are a very innovative retailer that really wants to put the customer first. And so we've developed with them a product for energy communities, which means that households, businesses, farmers can sign up to Energy Steiermark.

And if they've got rooftop solar, they can sell their surplus solar. To their neighbors or, , neighboring farmers, or if they don't have those things, they can purchase renewable energy from, , people in their, in their local area. And we also have deployed that in other places. For example, in Thailand, in Bangkok, there's a project there, , called T77 and 077, which is peer to peer trading. Of electricity as well. So in broad brush, we do tracking of electricity, trading of energy, peer to peer and trading of environmental commodities.

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taking this there and, and not just trying to, you know, Funnel it out of Australia.

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So we ended up getting into 14 countries. And when you first set up a cup, like a tech startup, the first question potential clients ask is, you know, can you build anything? So you're always having to, in that initial phase, having to demonstrate your ability to, , build your core product. And then once you've built it a few times. Clients start asking different questions such as, I got, you can build it in New Zealand or Japan, but I'm in India. Can you build it in? Can you, can you deploy this in India? Uh, and so then you start demonstrating capability in particular geographical regions. And those light, what I call lighthouse projects are really great because neighboring areas can refer to those and get confidence of your ability to work domestically. But, um, yeah, so that's kind of how it evolved rather kind of organically, I would say, but when I moved to Switzerland, I started to look at actually, even prior to that, the countries that we're in, like, how much swayed that advocate have within their organization to do something bigger than the initial project, or what was the regulation looking like in terms of what we thought might happen in terms of evolving it? To make it easier to do work there versus what's actually happened. What's the size of the market, the addressable market and, um, the accessible market as well. And like, what's the go to market strategy? And as we started to do this work, we saw that there were a few places that that kind of ticked more of those boxes, let's say, and so then we decided to hone in on those and focus on those. And as I know, as projects completed in places that didn't fit those kind of criteria, we decided not to continue operating there. And this was, um, what I would call like, you know, a new phase for the company, which is, you know, really. We're not proving that we can build anything. We're not proving where we can build something in a particular geographical location.

Now we're looking at commercialization in particular places where we see the biggest opportunities for scale. And I think with that, that's helped us focus as well, because to come back to your initial question, um, you know, managing things in lots of different countries is complex. You have to get your head around a lot of different areas.

There's a lot of time zones. Yeah, there's a lot of complexity with, um, getting meter readings from different, um, you know, formats and ways. And I think that, um, yeah, isn't it's okay for a period of time, but ultimately it has to lead to something that's more, uh, enduring and scalable.

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What you're doing possible, right?

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We made a token called Powr, P O W R, which is an Ethereum. , ERC 20 token standard. We issued that to the market , with a white paper explaining how it was being used. And, um, that was very successful. We did the first one in Australia. We raised 34 million and we have managed those resources really effectively such that we, you know, we've been able to fund the business and buy back shares.

, and also since we moved to Switzerland. As well, , , we've decided , we will start direct investing in other companies. We are very excited about this and that's another kind of reason for the podcast was because I wanted to understand more about how investors think. We've, PowerLedger's invested in other, in like a fund previously, then invest in other companies.

So we've, we've, we've been thinking about this for a while, but really to learn more from other investors and share deals. I think this was, um, Um, and I'm wondering if there's like another kind of motivation for having the conversations with investors as well.

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You've also then got now looking at it from the other side and starting to invest in, in, uh, in other businesses. And does that. You know, lead you down a path of looking for like minded businesses. Do they look at, do they look to be complimentary? What do you, what do you look for in, in, um, in how you're going to invest?

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And the kind of strategy is one of those is going to get big, at least. And I mean, we may do some of this kind of work, but that's certainly not our strategy. But I think we want to invest in things that we understand that we really like the founders, that we trust them. That, yeah, we, we have a view on the addressable market for that.

And that this solution is going to respond to that. Uh, so I'd say that's a big piece of it. And then clearly, because of, you know, the area we work in around energy, there are going to be more deals around that, that we have a view on, that we have a deeper understanding on. We also have backgrounds in different areas like, you know, finance, for example. And so we are looking at things outside of that. I'd say it's quite broad, but obviously the more topics that you look at, the more time it takes to wrap your head around things to actually have a deep understanding. So my guess is that over time it will end up being more focused, but, um, yeah, it's a little bit of discovery right now around that.

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And that's what makes the journey of the podcast interesting, because I know the kind of caliber of guests that you've got lined up to be on the program and their willingness is just to share, isn't it? And you all want to help each other get better.

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And you're starting to see more consistency around that, but there's also innovation happening. So I think they're really, , useful and interesting things to, to talk about, um, how do you create like a. A kind of macro micro economic system using tokens that drives adoption, the right behaviors, good governance and things like that. So I think that for people that are in the space, these are really interesting topics to understand and hear how other people are dealing with it. ,

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Because at the moment, it seems to be one of those things you've either got a, inquisitive nature. And you find out you do a little bit of investing on the side. Um, or you just think it's all too hard and don't hear about it. But it's, you know, as you start to talk about energy and other areas where it's going to be an active part of a lot of things that we have going on, how important do you think it is that that we start to educate people a little bit better about how it actually works and what it's about?

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Like, for example, people are broadly aware of the U S debt, but they're not necessarily aware of things like, um, euro dollars, which is like another dollar printing system outside of America. It's double the size of debt as the U S economy has. Um, you know, it's American US dollars that are not regulated by the U.

S. Um, yeah, like the impact of all of that. , how. The real and also inflation as well. Like, what's the real inflation rate or how inflation rates. Like manipulated by pulling things out of the basket, the consumer price index basket. Um, so I think there's a lot of very complex topics there. You got to get your head around first to really understand why blockchain technology offers something that. Can address some of these things or, um, pour sunlight on them, I guess. And then, , in terms of, , investing in like crypto, you know, things like, you know, Bitcoin or Solana, Ethereum,, these are kind of what you would call, put more in the bucket of, um, or blue chip kind of investments. And, but even those, you know, you, You want to have an understanding of them before you invest in them because they're highly volatile.

Now, traders love volatility, but consumers don't necessarily like it at all. Um, so I think you, you, if you're going to invest in those things, you want to understand what you're investing in. Um, understand why that's an interesting thing to invest in compared to, say, alternatives. And, for us, the performance of crypto like Bitcoin is a kind of reference benchmark, almost like the risk free rate that anything you invest in has to be at least as good as that in terms of performance.

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Where did you, did you, could you ever have imagined that you are where you are now?

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I had turned into like a desk and like. I made like a sign for with my name on it and grab my dad's stapler and hole punch and turn that into a, lawyer's office. And then as I got older, I think I was still very interested in that, but it kind of evolved into, I, it wasn't really until I was 20 sort of starting out.

know, the tech stock boom of: 2000

I think those things were always important to me and. I feel like the work that I'm getting to do now is more of an expression than ever before of that.

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You've, as you mentioned in the beginning, you managed to become deputy mayor of, of Perth and you've written a book as well. So I think these are three things we haven't really talked about, but just give me a quick word on each of those.

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ally, when I won the award in: 2018

a client that we had. Around: 2018

So, yeah, that's some a bit about the book or a chapter in a book rather than a whole book,

but maybe one.

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And I think with entrepreneurial life, it's, it's very sclerotic. You can be pulled in many different directions. So I love that, um, the combination of things. And then apart from that, uh, Richard Branson's definitely. and inspiration in terms of like, he's created so many businesses and his brand is really just impressive.

And he also combines a business and fun, which I really like the combination of those things. Um, yeah, there three people off the top of my head. There's definitely more,

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So favorite song and favorite TV show.

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So I don't know if I can really, um, yeah, offer that many insights on that. But my favorite song at the moment is Black, Brown and White by Tahuna Breaks. I just love that song. Um, yeah, it's so nice to listen to even on repeat.

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