Bootstrapping Clean Energy: Vessyll

It takes a lot of things to start a small business. You need a great idea. You need drive. You need determination. Sometimes you need a great partner, many times a great product, but you always, no matter what, need cash. When Zahra Hargens Iliff launched her company Vessyll, she had all of that except the cash. It's not like she didn't try. She took Vessyll all over looking for someone to believe in her vision, but the answer was always the same.

"Well, go sell some. Let us know how it went and if that's successful, we'll come back and maybe fund you later on." Well, when you're building a small business, you need the money now. I was shocked, but somewhere between the fifth and the 10th rejection, it was like, "Ah, yeah, this is not going to work." It was very defeating and I was taking a lot of blows.

but Zara had to make it work.

I got really frustrated and then something in my head goes, "F it. You're going it alone. We're just going to go for it."

On today's episode, how she did it. Welcome to the Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. I'm Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business. On the Unshakeables, we are sharing the daring moments of small business owners facing their crisis points and telling the stories of how they got through it. We'll hear more from Zahra, but I'd like to welcome Kathleen Griffith back to the Unshakeables. Hey, Kathleen. How are you? Welcome back.

So glad to be back in the studio with you.

And back in New York and back in your hometown.

Back in New York, my old stomping grounds. I love it here. I love the electricity of this city, the entrepreneurial culture, all the small businesses. You can have three pizza places on one block. Each says they're better than the next. It's just there's nothing better than the Big Apple.

I live here and really, I just don't eat enough pizza because I'm trying to watch it. There's one around the corner from my office and I walk by and I smell it and I'm just like, "What am I doing?"

We can make that happen, Ben, I'm.

Down for that later. But first, we have another terrific story I want to share with you today. It's about Vessyll, which is a company that makes batteries. Of all things, Batteries are huge as a category. I just came across this report from Bain &; Company that it's expected to quadruple by 2030.

I come from a construction background. It has always been my personal philosophy that if we are going to build something not to make waste of time or materials. So if there's materials there that can be reused, let's use them. But if we are going to be using new materials, let's care about where it's sourced, let's care about if it's durable, renewable, and before thinking about how at the end of the life of this building or home, how is this going to fade out or be replaced? Let's be very conscious about that and almost like pre-build for what we can see in the future.

Not only is she a builder, she's an incredibly thoughtful builder. It's not enough to make sure everything looks great, it has to be functional and beautifully. So in every aspect she talks about the mechanical or the electrical, the behind the scenes elements of a house as the thing that makes the house live and operate.

When I walk in, the mechanic rooms are so beautiful and all this stuff is tied in wonderfully. It's like that movie Pulp Fiction where they opened up the briefcase and light just shines, and the pinnacle of that to me is energy. and for Zara that means clean energy because in a complete clean energy system, you generate the energy, you store it, and then you can use it. So an example is like let's say you had rooftop solar.

You just one day woke up and said I'm going to start a company. It can't have been that simple.

No, it was not that simple. I wish there was a day where the confetti went off and the lights all illuminated and I go, "That's it." It wasn't. It was more of a incremental advancement. It just seemed to be something that I was reading about, wanted to research more, wanted to see more of it, something that you just cannot let it go. Strangely enough, for me, that was batteries and it sounds very strange.

Zara wasn't totally unfamiliar with large scale battery use before she started Vessyll. She started thinking about this in twenty twenty. Her partner was working for Tesla at the time in the energy department.

So in our free time, we literally talk about the areas of our interest and what can we build because that gives me great joy to build things. So we were looking at building infrastructure with EV Chargers, talked about it, planned for it, penciled it, but it didn't keep my interest. Looked at other things in the clean energy space and batteries, I just couldn't let it go and I couldn't stop thinking about it. It seemed like I'd already subconsciously accepted that's what I was going to do. The pandemic was an amazing time to have the open space and freedom. So it's literally just sitting in the living room floor with articles and papers and white papers, and then up on my laptop is this other research paper I'm reading and just understanding what it is and a lot of conversations. And then we get to play with and test with batteries.

And specifically lithium iron phosphate batteries. They're more stable, safer, and longer lasting than traditional lithium ion batteries, and they're already in use for mass energy deployment in other parts of the world.

This is not a brand-new technology. In other places in the world, this technology has existed for a decade, which is very good for us because as we grow and make this transition, we can look at the materials and the data that has been existing in other parts of the world and incorporate that and learn from that.

So how did you go from an idea that, "I want to do commercial batteries," to, "Okay. I've got a business plan and I've got a product design and I've got," whatever else you needed?

Yep, yep.

Started to put together the prototype. Yeah, that I bootstrapped with my own funds, just on.

Your own, like literally working at home.

You designed a battery, Yes, they're in my garage.

Thank goodness.

They came out of my garage, because that got really difficult in winter. Of course, it's freezing winters here. It gets so cold, and batteries, by the way, do not really like too hot or too cold.

Zara found space in a university lab where she could run research and development for vessel.

My favorite electrical engineer came and we put stuff together and we started testing things and we powered a lamp and then we would just bring things into test and how long can these batteries go on, how long can they run little appliances. We took those calculations and then you scale it and sent it over for safety testing, which is really important.

Of course, when I hear lab, I imagine a mad scientist with sparks flying, lots of little plumes of smoke. So I had to ask if there had ever been any explosions.

Yeah, yes, do you know in my industry though we don't use that word, we use the term thermal event.

Soon, Zara had a prototype of her battery. It was definitely a bit larger than a dura cell.

This prototype is about three hundred and fifty pounds, so that's fun. Do you know, like the old style box TVs, they're that same size.

The prototype is pretty big.

And it wasn't just the batteries that were big.

Some of my competitors are kind of like big boys, you know, they're the.

Tesla and the LG.

When I decided to formally launch, I was not scared.

You were not scared.

I was so excited about it. I wasn't scared.

A lot of companies in my space, in my industry either play in the utility-grade space, really large projects, literally at the power plant or residential, and I could see right away a need. Just from talking to solar installers, electricians, electrical engineers who would say, "Hey, I cannot source this," so there was a space there in commercial industrial that there's a need that needs to be met and I'm meeting that need.

Kathleen Zara's story is really interesting.

So I've got a notebook here that says build on the front of it. She must have used that word a hundred times. The way that I define a builder is someone who has a vision, who intentionally steps into realizing that vision on a daily basisAnd she's an actual builder. She's a legit, real deal building big stuff. Yeah, it's pretty neat.

I mean, it's clear that she was able to find the intersection of a number of passions. Right, She's passionate about sustainability, she's passionate about building stuff. She's been able to put a bunch of passions together in a unique way. Yeah.

Yeah. Can we talk a little bit about internal belief? Because she strikes me as delusionally optimistic. There's that great saying, "You're only crazy until you do it." She is attacking this massive category. She seems completely undeterred and totally optimistic about it. So, do you think that is a necessary trait for a founder to have?

I do. What was different about Zara's approach is most of the people I meet who have what you're saying, this insane belief that they can conquer, they tend to be overwhelming personalities, and Zara is not. She's lovely. I would say she's on the introverted side.

I'm cool and collected, calm.

Cool and collected, understated, and so she kind of strikes me as a bit of an entrepreneurial assassin, like she's quietly patting around just killing it and no one even noticed.

Right, I'm really on the same page with you, Like I think optimism, having this self belief, this internal belief that you are going to forcibly push something into the world that is just in your mind's eye. What that requires is just a tremendous amount of belief in oneself.

I want to talk more about this mindset later, which spoiler I do think is our secret sauce. But let's get back to the story. So you form the company. You and your co founder are working in this lab, You're coming up with designs, you're collaborating with people, and then you decide, Okay, if we really want to do this, we got to go get some cash.

We got to get some cash.

So I took my pitch deck, I took my business plan, and I hit the circuit, the VC circuit, And You've.

Got tons of money right away overnight. Sure, not a dime.

Not nope. I tried.

I figured that, Okay, I'm gonna go get VC money. I'm gonna be able to buy a bunch of materials in engineering help and just like go at it and then quickly learned that that was not going to happen for me and for a vessel. And the frustrating part for me was that I struggled getting good feedback. I wanted to know why, like what was going on?

What didn't you like?

And I was assuming that I would get that feedback and then I can make adjustments and then you know, go for the next onto the next VC and got none of that. Now, granted, a lot of this was during the pandemic. I don't think that one time. Did I pitch in person?

Did you know why at the time, And if not, do you know why now?

I do not know why. Now I do not have any hindsight on it. I was told that, hey, this looks really interesting. Come back to me when you have some sales. That was the common feedback, which wasn't you know.

Right, Yeah, they wanted proven product market fit, and you wanted money to prove product market fit.

I need the money to get that. Then I started saying, "Okay. We got to find something else. I got to do something else." So, scoured sites. How can I get a hold of money to help me buy more materials? Can I start demonstration projects? Then at the same time really worked my networking and then you've got to say, "Okay. This is not working. I have to pivot."

How many no's do you think you got?

I know it's not going to sound alit because I hear people like do it a hundred times a thirty something. That was enough for me though, because it is extremely time consuming. I've got to go back to my product. I've got to go back to my company. I can't keep doing this right.

It's not like you're making a salary in the meantime. You got to go do something exactly.

And then also you're not working on your business during that time. Yeah, you're solely trying to raise money. I was very, very surprised I couldn't raise money. I was very shocked.

With no VC funding on the horizon, Zara continued to research other ways to raise some money. She found an innovation grant that the state of Minnesota was funding, and, unlike the VC she pitched to, Minnesota saw potential in her.

Very sweet I was so excited about it.

It was great, and that grant turned out to be a nice idea but completely unhelpful.

Zara had been awarded a matching grant.

So you have to spend the money and then they'll reimburse you. It was 48,000. I was bootstrapping it and I spent a lot of money on materials already and things were really tight with cash flow. So the problem with that is that first of all, it's not like a cash grant where they just give it to you and you take the money, you go and spend it. You have to have the capital to spend it. So I have to make a decision. Let's say do I spend 10,000 on a new website and new branding or do I buy materials in engineering time? I know those figures sound so low, but when you are a startup business and you are scraping for every dollar and I only have an X amount of money.

It was really like I was taking a lot of blows.

And then I got really frustrated, and something in my head goes, F it you're going it alone, We're just gonna go for it, and we're gonna get really scrappy and we're gonna keep applying for things.

Did that leave you low on cash?

Yes?

Yeah, yeah it did at that time.

I haven't I've met too many women working in the clean energy space. Are there a lot?

No, not a lot. But I'm kind of used that because there weren't a lot in construction.

Do you think being a woman ever affected your ability to raise money to make sales? Do you think it's a factor or not. I always wonder.

I wonder that too, because no one ever tells you.

You get a kind of inkling if I would show up and look a different way. I found this in construction. It is having to explain to people that I can do this. I get asked a lot, "Are you an engineer?" I said, "No, I'm not an engineer, but I work very closely and I hire engineers." "Are you a professor?" "Nope, I'm not a professor. I work very closely with some universities." I feel like I am asked to explain myself when I feel like there's other people in the room that don't have to explain themselves. They don't have to take the five minutes to be like, "How did you get here?" So I don't know if it's that or being a woman or it could be both. I don't know. I actually don't care. That stuff doesn't scare me. It's just disappointing. It will slightly make me concerned of am I not going to have enough people that are brave and are just going to go with the status quo because it makes it feel safe, or is this market or this industry going to allow space for me? Because I can't get in unless I'm let in

Did you ever think about giving up?

No, I just got a little bit angry.

I want to pause for a moment and I think we need to talk about a few of these things. Since I'm in finance, I have to focus on this a little bit. I thought it was fascinating. The pivot she was able to do for a capital-intensive business to find ways to bootstrap it up, you really don't hear a lot of that. We talk a lot about sourcing capital on this show. It's a very personal decision for a business owner, but in some cases it's just not a choice. She did what she had to do.

Venture capital is interesting because people always think to go there first. And someone said something great, which is like venture capital is like you go on one date and you decide to get married and you can never get divorced again.

That's a good analogy.

And she talked about that right like thirty some odd pitches. Do you think she should go back to venture?

I think it depends. So one of the things I always advise entrepreneurs is what are you trying to achieve from a business perspective, but what are you also trying to achieve financially? Because some people just want to build a business that can earn them a nice living and they can do what they love. I'm for that if that's what you want. If she's trying to build something that disrupts the entire industry, she's going to have to go raise capital because she'll never scale enough.

Let's dig in on that a little bit more, because when I think about our culture, one of the things that spring to minds you were saying that we're so obsessed with these big businesses right scaling to this huge place, the unicorns. So do you think that's part of it where people have a hard time also just admitting that that's not the game they're in.

Social influences in general have been turned up to volume twelve. Right, you know, this is what you're supposed to want. Now, what do you want?

Right, let's all embrace that today. Let's get radically honest with ourselves and embrace where we're at.

There are no rules and you get to be as selfish as you want. One of the things that, particularly being in a corporate environment or a business environment, we're taught it's not about you. It's about our customers, the company. It's about your teammates. It's about society. It's about your employees. It's about your shareholders. That's all true once you're running a business. But when you're deciding what business you want to run and what business you want to build, that can be the most selfish decision ever and it's fine.

She was talking too, she decided to then walk away from raising capital formally. I was thinking about Melanie Perkins, the founder of Canva, which is a great small business, and she got a hundred nos and she was undeterred. She just kept pitching and pitching and now I think her company's 40, $50 billion is the valuation, something like that.

For our sports fans out there, it's a low batting average, high at bats game.

To get into the Hall of Fame, you need like a thirty percent batting average.

Yeah, when Babe Ruth broke the home run record, he was also the leader in strikeouts. But how do you know when you're hearing no for the right reasons for the wrong reasons, like is it time to pivot and change your pitch? Is it not me, it's you? Or it's actually me? Or how does that mean? How do we think about that?

Well?

Yeah, I think you do need to take a step back, and clearly it is you at a certain point and you need to recalibrate. I think there are two things that she could have done better, maybe three without knowing her mindset intimately. Well, the first is to negotiate live. She said she did all of her negotiations remotely pandemic, I know, and it put her in a very difficult position. But you've got to be in the room. You have got to find a way to be in the room.

Okay, awkward pause.

I was waiting. Okay, that's it.

That's it.

So what's the advantage of the pause, because you'll start backing off if you don't.

Exactly so you tend to shift your position, you'll take your number down, you'll start giving all these caveats that make you seem less strong and sure footed in your position.

Okay.

And three, yeah, so this is mindset.

So this is to just identify as someone who's filthy rich. This was like, okay, actually a major aha for me because I always saw everyone else when I was walking into these rooms as they're the rich people, and I'm here to get money, okay. And so when that shifted, when I just started to see myself as a filthy, rich woman who maybe at the time didn't have a huge bank account, but that's how I was going to

Woo woo or not. Mindset really is key to so much of what we do. Okay, So back to Zara's story, because her mindset at that moment, well, it was a little bit angry, but there was no chance she was going to give up on vessel.

It's absolutely not an option. Not one is such a great idea and I know the future of it, and I cannot let go. I just I can't let go. Whenever I got really angry, there are occasional times I'd go outside outside of the loading dock and scream into the air.

So that was helpful. But also recite this.

Speech that I would be giving in the future sometime a spite speed, I called it.

So say more about that.

So I have a spite speech. In my head, I've listed all of the people who have told me no and don't believe in me, and I would recite this thing in my head. For some reason, that made me feel better and helped with being like, "Okay. It'll be fine. Have some resilience. It'll be okay. Keep marching."

That might be the coolest entrepreneurial coping mechanism I have ever heard in my.

Life, my spite speech.

Now, that's fantastic. I love imaginary magic. That's fantastic. yeah, thanks, okay. Okay. So then at some point you broke through, right? So take me from the grant had just fallen apart. You're low on cash. You're giving a spiked speech, but then at some point something gives, right?

Yeah. I started making money from revenue. One of my first jobs fully paying energy storage projects was at the Cachil DeHe tribal lands in Colusa, California. There is quite a number of tribal lands that have invested and really taken an innovative approach to clean energy. On tribal lands, they have 52 homes, a casino, hotels, common buildings all run off of clean energy, completely free of utility power. It's amazing.

How did you make that sale?

I made that sale through networking, okay. And by the way, I did an exercise with my business consultant not so long ago where we looked at completed projects recently and little over ninety percent of them were for referral based networking.

That's fantastic. So how many of these systems have you now put in?

I have over a dozen systems in and we've got a lot of work in the pipeline. Because of the scale of our projects, our lead times are quite significant.

Yeah, it's got to be a long sale cycle.

Right, Yeah, twelve eighteen months.

And then along productions. How long is the production cycle for some of these.

Actually a production cycle is not that bad. I am concerned about manufacturing. I am concerned about supply chain since there is parts of my battery modules that are coming from overseas. The more people I talk to their understanding what it is, so it's not such an educational effort. People are understanding these systems more and more. So we're definitely in the growth phase. Now. I'm going the more traditional financing route with banks for growth.

Right, So now that you've proven the market works, you can go for debt financing instead of equity financing.

Yeah, I want to see how far this goes.

All.

I know we're in an energy transition. We can't feel it like when you're in a transition you don't understand and sometimes you can't see it that you're in the middle of it. But we're in the middle of it.

So if you could wave a magic wand what do you hope for Vessyll in the next year?

More projects, more sales, more deployment, and I just would love to continue to be in this space of working with tribal entities for helping the lands become free energy sovereign independent systems. That work is so just heartwarming. I love it so much. I hope and I will be getting involved in more of those projects. It's very exciting.

I'd like to end on a question that we ask all of our guests on the show, which is, if you had just one piece of advice that you could give to our listeners, who are largely entrepreneurs and aspiring business owners, what would that piece of advice be?

Can I give two? I'll let you cheat, don't worry.

Okay.

Okay. Thanks. Thanks. First, I would say when you're starting your business, immediately go get some type of counseling, therapy, mentorship. So much of this business building and resilience and dedication is going to have to do a lot with your mental state and your mental health. So a lot of it is keeping that sharp, keeping that clear. That would be my number one advice. My second bit of advice would be I'm four-plus years in. Every six weeks or so, I go back to my business plan and I tweak it. I found that exercise just to be fantastic, and it changes so much, and it tells you that your pivots are working or they're not working, because whatever you intended to do in the beginning is probably not what you're doing now.

It's great advice. Well, Zara, I just can't thank you enough for being on the show. This has been so fun. Yeah, I love your story. We're all inspired by it. So thank you for being here with us today.

That's so sweet. Thank you for having me. It feels so honored.

So the most interesting thing for me in the whole thing was the advice that she gave at the end, and which I would combine with her spite speech and everything else, was she understood better than many people I've seen how mental this thing is, and how much of this is about the mental clarity, the focus and the drive, and the fact that having that mental clarity and focus is you can't pull those things apart, they all go together.

It's everything. And most founders start focused on skill set, right. You learn the hardcore skills sales, financials, marketing, pitching, brand strategy, right, customer service, you name it, and then they try to build their mindset off the back of that. They're trying to kind of cobble it on top. And I think for anyone who's listening right now, if you're starting a business for the first time, to be able to focus on your mindset first as the foundation, realizing what those

Yeah. It's a completely different approach than we've heard from other guests, and I thought it was refreshing and interesting. I also want to spend a little bit of time on her second piece of advice, because we had another guest on Kathleen who said, I wrote my business plan and it is my rock. It doesn't change, and I go back to it and it's my bible. And then we got very different advice from Zara, who said, I have a business plan and I updated every six weeks

You don't hear that often. She shifted right, So initially she's coming in, she's thinking venture capital. She has plans to scale pretty sizably, and that's shifted a bit where she's really bootstrapping. So it makes sense to reevaluate.

How many women small business owners? Have you mentored? A lot?

Right, a lot? And we've got now close to I think one hundred thousand women in our community. We're all small business owners.

We talked to Zara about being a woman, particularly in a STEM field, in an engineering field, which is not the most female dents. How should people think about being outliers in their field? You know, women is one case. Could be minorities, could be people from other countries, could be whatever, But you know, let's focus on women in this case. Is there a way to turn what can be perceived as a disadvantage into an advantage?

I mean, I see being a founder as your number one power tool. Is you stepping into the limelight, is you owning your personal brand irrespective of what category you're in, Then it becomes really doubly powerful when you are in a category that is traditionally dominated by other people that are not you. So, as you mentioned STEM, less than thirty percent of women are in STEM currently, you know,

But how do we deal with the fact. I mean, when she says I had to justify myself in a way that I've never seen a man have to justify himself. That's got to be tough.

Yes, and in this might be a controversial point of view, but I don't think focusing or fixating on that is helpful at a certain point when you just wholly own the uniqueness of who and what you are as a founder and the fact that normally, as a founder you are an extension of your business too, right, it's one and the same, that's when you start to become really undeniable.

Well, and Zara seems particularly unflappable about the whole thing. That's great, so I think she'll be fine. I'm blown away by Zara's story, and I think there's some really good lessons for everyone in there. So, Kathleen, I can't thank you enough for being back on the show and helping us pick that apart.

Yeah, thanks for having me unpacking That one was really good fun. You know. I've got a special place in my heart for female founders, so this one was particularly great for me.

I'm sure we'll find some more. Thanks for being here. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Unshakeables. If you liked this episode, please rate and review it. On the next episode, we are completing your outfit. It's not enough just to have great shoes, though. If you like shoes, you should check out our episode with George Esquivel. You also need great accessories. One woman in Kansas City made some and launched a multimillion dollar enterprise all from a pair of earrings.

"It was almost like I had discovered a new dinosaur. I have to tell you about the coolest discovery I just made."

I'm Ben Walter and this is The Unshakeables from Chase for Business and Ruby Studio from iHeartMedia. We'll see you back here soon.