What we talked about
Joseph Nagle from Pando Electric, shares how the company is revolutionizing EV charging for apartment buildings and condos with their simple yet ingenious socket-based approach. As an industry veteran with over a decade in the EV changing space, Joseph explains how Pando’s solution addresses common issues like cable theft, maintenance costs, and power management while providing reliable charging access for residents. Learn about the company’s “Apple quality” safety features, their roadmap for bidirectional charging capability, and how their technology can help flatten electricity demand curves. Joseph also discusses his experiences at Microsoft and Nokia, offering fascinating insights into product development and corporate innovation strategies.
Show notes
After more than a decade in the EV charging industry, Joseph Nagle finds it mind-blowing that nobody thought seriously about socket-based charging until recently, and that simple insight is the entire foundation of Pando Electric’s approach. The product is, in his words, just an outlet on a wall with a meter in it, and that simplicity turns out to solve problems that elaborate charging stations have been creating for years.
What we covered
- The core insight behind Pando Electric: attached cables on traditional EV chargers get stolen, break constantly, and put the maintenance cost back on the property owner who then makes no revenue. By removing the cable and having EV drivers bring their own, Pando eliminates the single biggest failure point, and if one driver’s cable breaks, everyone else can still charge.
- Pando’s device uses the NEMA connector standard, which has been in continuous use in the US for over 100 years. The logic is straightforward: regardless of what Tesla or any other manufacturer does to proprietary charging standards, every car will always be able to access a NEMA outlet, making the investment effectively future-proof.
- The device is built for a 40-year lifespan, rated to 15,000 plug-in/plug-out cycles. The connector, the highest-wear component, is stress-tested around the clock to confirm it can sustain that number, because the goal is for a property owner to install one and never replace it.
- Pando holds California’s CTEP certification, the same regulatory program that governs gas pump accuracy, which requires metering accurate to the fourth decimal place. This gives EV drivers verified proof they are paying for exactly the energy they used, with no rounding in the property owner’s favor.
- The device is inactive until unlocked via phone tap, which makes it child- and tamper-safe, no energy flows through an exposed socket until authenticated, so sticking something into it does nothing.
- Joseph’s team is completing a bidirectional (vehicle-to-grid) version of the device, with the first build expected in late September or early October. The use case is load balancing: fleets of parked EVs can discharge small amounts, roughly 5% per vehicle, to flatten demand spikes, which is what causes rolling brownouts, without meaningfully depleting any individual battery.
- At Nokia and later at Microsoft, Joseph ran the Develop program, a gamified app development platform that at its peak accounted for 75% of all Windows Phone apps in existence. When Microsoft acquired Nokia and centralized the team in Redmond, he discovered four or five competing internal teams building nearly identical products in a competitive rather than collaborative structure, which he credits as the reason he prefers startups today.
About Joseph
Joseph Nagle is a business development leader at Pando Electric, a San Francisco-based startup building socket-based EV charging infrastructure for multifamily housing and fleet operators. He has spent over a decade in the EV charging industry, including previous roles at EverCharge and Nokia/Microsoft.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josnagle
- Website: https://www.pandoelectric.com
Episode 24 of the PreVetted Podcast.