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.
Full transcript
Federico Ramallo (00:00.78) Welcome back to the PreVetted Podcast, where we spotlight extraordinary people and remarkable talent reshaping our world. Our guest today is Joseph Nagle from Pando Electric. So this is a very interesting, different episode today because we’re going to do it live. So it’s going to be very refreshing for you guys and a new experience for me.
Thank you, Joseph Ford. In real life.
Thanks for having me. Absolutely. And I think it’s great to be your first live show. Yes.
Yes, yes. Perfect. Awesome. And we’re at a beautiful location today. Yes.
Yeah, we’re in the SSF offices. This is done through the Chamber of Commerce for the City of San Francisco. And so to help promote a lot of the startups here, they provide us this great office space to just come and use and it’s completely free.
Federico Ramallo (00:56.908) that’s amazing. Yeah, that’s very interesting. I’ll ask you more about that because I might use it in the future.
Absolutely, they’re right there there, we can go talk to them too.
And we were lucky today to have it available. So that’s nice as well. Awesome. before we start talking about Pando Electric, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Yes, absolutely.
Joseph Nagle (01:21.548) Yeah, so I moved out here back in 2013. I had been living in Barcelona, Spain as a freelance writer, trying to do that. It never really got off the ground. It was very difficult. And I really just had this draw. I love tech and I just wanted to be around it more. And, you know, I met a bunch of people at Mobile World Congress who convinced me to move to the Bay Area. So I packed up all my stuff and I came here with nothing but a backpack full of clothes and
hopes and dreams. And you know lo and behold I ended up getting an internship at Nokia and I just slowly worked my way up through the company and you know the rest is kind of history. And just slowly over time got more interested in emerging technologies like electric vehicles and just moving you know through and in the Bay Area is great for stuff like that.
You just meet so many different people who are working on really cool projects. so it’s always been interesting to just keep seeing what else I can do.
Yeah, I I love coming to the Bay Area because it’s a bubble of innovation, right? And then everyone else in the world is kind of like following what is happening here. It’s kind of living two or three years ahead of time.
A little, yeah. Definitely.
Federico Ramallo (02:41.806) I was talking a little bit about before we started recording about, we both share an experience with working at Microsoft. When I was working at Microsoft on the pre-sales team, was kind of doing that, learning about new products before they were launched. And then I was teaching people about that. So people were like, oh, you’re so smart, know all this stuff. Well, I’m reading it and then I can tell you about it. And I tested, see how
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (03:11.76) So it was kind of like living in the future-ish, you know.
That’s the best part about working at one of those big companies because you end up getting access to all these little new things that are coming along that you just barely heard a little bit about, but then you get to learn it from the ground floor. And then you do kind of end up becoming a de facto expert because there’s just not a lot of people out there who know about it yet. Right.
Yeah, I even did a course about the launching.net. I think it called something different before. They had two or three names throughout. I don’t know if you saw that. They have this acronym search.
Go by Christmas.
Joseph Nagle (03:57.559) Yeah, I got it. So I hated those acronyms.
So you could search for an acronym and then you have two or three responses for the same words. It was very crazy. So my first language that I learned was ASP before joining Microsoft. That’s what I used to build my first start. Then I joined Microsoft, I learned about ASP.NET.
I didn’t quite like it. was like there’s something missing here. And then I went to learn Ruben Reis and I love it. Anyway, that’s kind of how I got into that. So yeah, San Francisco is kind of like that. It’s like living a little bit in the future. But also here we learn about
all the things that could be, some become, some do not, which is kind of part of this term. But what you guys are doing on Panda Electric, from what I understand, is a much more grounded innovation.
Yeah, totally.
Joseph Nagle (05:11.19) Yeah, it really is. think in general, and it’s crazy because I’ve been in the EV charging business for over a decade now. Right. And the fact that nobody was really thinking about socket based charging until more recently is it kind of does blow my mind. Right. And so I am starting to be more mindful of that in my later career of looking at like, are these, how do we simplify technology? And I think that’s what PandaLock really did well was take this slightly complicated
system of traditional charging systems and then simplify it down to what people actually need which is simple access to energy. You don’t need like this big charging station that has all these bells and whistles. You just need an outlet on the wall that has a meter in it that can kind of track how much energy is going through it and then you the ability to person. It’s pretty simple and straightforward and that’s where we’ve kind of run into like a little bit of a problem and a great opportunity.
Because the problem is that a lot of what people have already been sold or learned is now kind of like aging rapidly. And so when I come in with this, like it’s a smart outlet, there’s not, you it’s a smart outlet, but it’s an outlet. There’s nothing like that would confuse you about it. But it’s very confusing when people expect to see an EV charger and you pull out an outlet and they’ll just like, what is this? Right. Well, it’s an outlet. There’s nothing fancy about this, but that’s
kind of where like, I really think Pando like has the right solution for this, like to solve the problems that we’re seeing in the multifamily space.
Yeah, I think that the hype, building hype, it’s very appealing because you attract a lot of eyes, right? We were talking about, I think last week we talked about the, you know, this robotic arm that connects with the car. It sounds cool, right? But in practice, you know.
Joseph Nagle (07:10.382) You’re right, yeah. It’s impractical. It’s very expensive. It solves a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s a solution looking for a problem.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (07:22.617) Plus eventually the battery chemistry is going to evolve so the robotic arm is going to, the needs are going to be different. Correct, yes. So I don’t know if it’s going to be one way or another but it’s going to change. I think that one of the things that I find very interesting about what you guys are doing is that it’s a
you know, have you heard about these boring businesses, right? Like, you know. And I say it, know, in a positive way, right? Because it sounds like a boring problem, but that means that you have a lot of potential, plus you have a solution that can last for a long time. And that…
No.
Joseph Nagle (08:12.64) Absolutely.
for me is hype is great. Having a flying car sounds interesting, right? I remember, what is the name? The Winston? The Jets? That’s the future that people imagine in the 50s. So we’re nowhere near there, right?
slightly dangerous.
Joseph Nagle (08:30.638) Yeah.
Joseph Nagle (08:39.148) No.
But it sounds great on the cartoons, right? But then when you have to put it in real life, Then I think that’s where the boring solution-ish, right, are the ones that are going to be, you know, are going to have more impact on the long term.
Totally. I think it really boils down to like usability for a lot of those products. Like when you have something that’s boring, I come from marketing so I’d say simplistic.
But yeah, like you want to simplify things down so that it’s like it’s not scary to use it’s easy to use I think Mac is like Apple Mac’s in general like that’s kind of their whole thing It’s still complicated right but comparative to like a PC and all the different things you can do with a PC like You know Macs have simplified things down to make it a lot more easy to use more approachable And I think the same thing happens with Pando electric when you’re just taking something that’s more complicated
and you’re just pulling out the stuff that you don’t need. And one of the biggest things that you don’t need is this cable that’s attached. And now there’s all these issues with this cable that’s been attached to it because people are stealing it or they just break all the time.
Joseph Nagle (09:53.568) And then it goes back to the person who bought the station in the first place, has to constantly maintain the system. And then they don’t make any money and they’re just, it becomes like a big revenue drain on them because they’re constantly having to maintain the system, constantly having to fix it. And it just is something where you realize like, what if I just removed the cable from the device and had the EV driver just bring a cord that plugs in to the outlet and then they have their own cable. And then the property owner
not on the hook for the breakage or the theft and they still have an EV charging station. So there’s always going to be the person who can come in and charge from that spot.
Right.
Joseph Nagle (10:34.446) And if, you know, God forbid something bad happens to your cable, right? That doesn’t affect me or the rest of the people. can still use that station. You’re going to have to end up, you going out and buying another one, which is, is a downside to you as the EV driver, but as the station owner, I don’t have to fix the station. And as like the other EV drivers on site, I still get to use the station too. So like to be able to do all that by just simply removing the cord is, it’s a big change. And I think it will actually get more property owners.
interested in installing EV charging because it’s now something where they’re not having to constantly pay more and more money into the system.
Right. Right. I mean, if you think about it, it’s like laptops. You have this cable, right? But you have a connector on both sides. the laptop is mobile. And you have the wall plug. Yeah. Very If the cable breaks, then you can change it.
What you’ve just called out is something that I’ve been trying to get people to understand for a very long time, which is that electric vehicles have a lot more in common with like a laptop or phone than they do a traditional vehicle. Yes, it is.
It’s a laptop on wheel. Yes. Yeah, I agree. And I was listening to a short on social networks. I kind of refer to those type of things like that because they are less reliable information than when you find the right source. So call it rumors if you like. But in Spain, they were talking about
Federico Ramallo (12:11.278) limiting the EVs to the buildings because of the fire hazards. And one of the most important fire hazards issues was the charging station. So they were like, well, we don’t want the car to start fire and then affect the whole building. Where combustion engines, can…
They’re less likely to get on fire, but also they can be shut off by the fire department much easier. So I think that your solution can also help on that.
Yeah, definitely. So there’s a couple of things that go on in with that. So number one, EVs are actually a lot less likely to combust. mean, internal combustion engine, it’s in the name. Right. And it’s driving around the giant tank of gas, which is effectively a bomb. But we like and this same argument, which is crazy, if you go back and you look into like the early 1900s when cars were just starting to come around.
This is easy.
they were EV first and the inverse was happening where they were like, we don’t want gasoline cars parking in or near buildings, we don’t want gas stations near schools or anything because they were so terrified of this stuff catching on fire and causing chaos. So it’s the same basic argument. The reason that it is something that’s really important is because of the battery pack.
Joseph Nagle (13:44.718) and you can’t put out a battery pack with just water. Or you can, but you essentially have to submerge it and keep it submerged for a significant amount of time. So it’s unlikely that’s going to happen in a building. You have to have like a special foam. So from our perspective, we do want to build in like a lot of protections around that. So our system has actually been designed from the ground up. know, our CEO and founder, Aaron Lee, is a really talented engineer. He comes from Apple. He built the Apple Watch, designed it.
And so a lot of what he built into that, what he calls Apple quality and what he wanted things he wanted to build in with a lot of safety features. there’s a bunch of sensors inside the device that’s monitoring the current, temperature.
voltage, anything like that. If anything falls outside of a normal range, it’ll immediately shut off and send us a signal to let us know, hey, something happened on this device. You either need to reset it, which is 99 % of what we have to do, or hey, this issue keeps popping up. You need to send somebody out there to actually take a look at it.
And then the really nice thing about the nature of our device is that instead of having to send an electrician to open it up and do all this stuff, we just send them a new device and then just say, just in the box, just you take it off the wall, you put that in the box, send that back and then put the new one on and then you don’t have to worry about it. We’ll figure it out on our end. So it’s not like we’re going to sit and tinker with this thing that’s been throwing up a lot of lots of red flags. You just send it back to us and we’ll get another one out to you.
Interesting. Well, I was reading about that, you know, the Apple refurbished, they have much more quality checks than the regular products, right? Because for some reason they failed and then they’re coming back. So they have to double check, fix, triple check. yeah. And I think that the ethos around, you know,
Joseph Nagle (15:26.119) yeah.
Joseph Nagle (15:36.174) Check.
Federico Ramallo (15:45.122) delivering quality products and safe products. I think that’s very important because that’s what actually has impact on people’s life.
Absolutely. Yeah, and I think that’s kind of the same like ideology that we keep at Pando Electric, which is we want to make sure that, you know, even though it’s just an outlet on a wall.
we do want people to have the understanding that there’s a lot of quality built into that blue box. So anytime they see that blue box, they know, hey, this is a premium outlet. Something that they know they can trust and use, and it’s always going to work. And that’s kind of like, we have to build that in at the very beginning of the company. Because you don’t want to have the opposite of that, where you build junkie product, and then you have to convince people that, no, I no longer make junkie product.
Right. One of the reasons I buy Apple products is because of the quality. You can go to buy Chinese products, and the Chinese products have, you see the exact same product and they have different qualities, which makes it appealing as a manufacturer because they can provide that flexibility, but as a consumer, you don’t know which one you’re buying.
So, you know, and the other different, you know, following these ethos, right, if you go to the App Store, right, on Apple, it’s much harder to get in. Yes. And the screening they do for the applications on the App Store is much more thorough, where on Android it’s like…
Joseph Nagle (17:24.361) Anybody?
So you can find 10 calculator apps, but they all suck in different ways, right? So at this point, I mean, they’re almost perfect, but they suck here, they suck there. So whereas on the App Store, you have like one, maybe two options, right? But they’re really good options.
The best.
So from what you’re describing, it’s kind of like that, right? Absolutely. working to build one box that is going to be the highest quality possible. It’s going to have all the checkpoints and security inside, and it’s going to be as safe as possible.
Absolutely.
Joseph Nagle (18:05.23) Yeah. And I think that’s the other side of it. It’s like the one last thing that I’ll point out is that we also designed it to last forever. Like it’s, it’s designed to be 15,000 cycles, meaning one cycle is a plug in and unplug. So we test those things all day and night to get up to 15,000 cycles because we want to make sure that they’ll last. If you do that once a day, that’s about a 40 year lifespan for that product. And so we want to make sure that when people buy these, they’re not, you know, 10 years later, we got to get rid of them because
broken. It’s like no, no, This is the only one you’re going to have. You’re going to have it for the next 40 years and then whenever there’s a new technology that you want to integrate in you can do that then and you’ve had 40 years of usable life which is you know well beyond what any of our competitors are doing.
Right. You’re talking about the connector?
The connector and then the whole box as well. But the connector is the biggest piece because that’s the thing that’s being used most often.
Right, it’s the part that is going to mechanically get wear out.
Joseph Nagle (19:05.102) Correct, yeah. So you want to make sure that that is the most robust piece because it’s really the only failure point that exists on the entire device.
I had a friend that used to do windshield wear tests. And they had to do like a million to million cycles. Every cycle was like on different conditions. So I always find fascinating when, know, so I’m talking about this was in the late 2000s.
Okay.
Joseph Nagle (19:26.828) You
Federico Ramallo (19:38.33) he would have a Skype webcam connected to it, you know, because he would let it run and then he would go home and then, you know, we hanging out on the weekend and he was like, you know, look, look, you know, he would pull up his computer and he’s like, look, I’m doing this. And you can see the wipers going on a windshield, you know, just hanging out. So anyway, I find those type of, you know, stress tests fascinating.
You
Joseph Nagle (20:06.368) It’s really just brute forcing something like that, yeah.
Plus it’s a kind of inner child of, I want to see when it breaks.
Federico Ramallo (20:19.53) It’s broke. Woo-hoo! It’s worse auxilium. That’s not the sense. anyway, it’s interesting that you’re testing that, because that’s one of the things that are going to get them more aware. And then once you have that connector working, you have that standardization. You can upgrade eventually the box if the technology changes. Which, I don’t know.
We don’t know what is going to happen with EVs.
That’s actually one of the bigger things that we designed for is the unknown. So that’s why we made a NEMA connector. So in the United States, the NEMA standard has been around for over 100 years. Every single socket that you see in the US is based on the NEMA standard. So we know that no matter what, Elon will come up in a ketamine phase. We’ll think of next. If you want to change everything again, for us, it doesn’t matter. Because we know that.
that every single car on some level will be able to plug into an EMA outlet because that’s always gonna be access to energy and so it just makes perfect sense in our minds to say, we’ll just keep on this structure. It’s old but we know it’s reliable. We know it’s always going to be there. So no matter what happens in the future, they’ll always be able to use this.
Yeah, it’s future proof because it’s proven reliable. When it gets there, what’s the point of…
Joseph Nagle (21:48.878) Yeah, there’s no, yeah. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Yes.
So one of the reasons it’s appealing for the managers of buildings is that it’s kind of set and forget. They are running so many things. They don’t want to add one more thing for them to check. So I understand the appealing for them. For the end user, the appealing is that now you can have more socket available.
That is correct.
Federico Ramallo (22:20.398) You can have your EV and actually being able to charge it, right? Because you have the range anxiety. then when you get to a place where, I think charge point is where you can see where the connectors are. You get there and it’s it’s busy, or broken, or another car parked in, or the cable is broken, which is basically the case, right? And that makes the…
if we’re
Well, yeah, and it ruins the whole experience. like, I mean, I talk to people about this all the time, you know, because EVs have become like this political statement on some level, which is a shame, because we should be able to evaluate these things as just on their merit. And you know, if you look at an EV based on just merit, it’s a better vehicle. It’s faster, it handles better, it’s better braking, they last longer, you can do more with them, like you can’t power your house with a gas car.
So there’s like a lot of these things that, you know, people are kind of ignoring or just don’t know about with when it comes to electric vehicles. But the thing that they focus in on, which is true, is that there are these times and places where you might drive your vehicle somewhere and you just won’t have any way to charge it back up. And then, you know, that’s the fear. Like I drive to, you know, I was just in Santa Cruz last weekend. It’s about an hour drive from here. Like, well, if I drove there an hour and then I was planning on charging down there and I can’t find a station.
down there then all of a sudden I’m like oh no yeah like what do do
Federico Ramallo (23:52.47) And what is supposed to be transportation that you don’t really have to, you shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about it. It should be reliable, it should take you from point A to point B, and then spend as little time as possible, it becomes now I have to spend two hours sitting in a car charge station or whatever.
Yeah, theoretically you can charge it in what, 20 minutes? I don’t remember the numbers, usually the high speed is not available or it’s not working or whatever,
Well, those are really expensive too. So like the idea behind Pando Electric is just a affordability, right? Really drive down the cost to like make it as low cost as possible to incentivize the property owner to install them. So now you can put a bunch of these. just outlets, truly. So you just put a bunch of these smart outlets everywhere. And now if I go down to Santa Cruz and I stay at my friend’s apartment, well, you we can put in this very, you know, low cost EV charging outlet. I bring my cable. I can.
plug in, I pay for my usage back to the building because there’s a payment system there that’s built into the charging station. And then I just go about my life. And like the whole idea behind Pando Electric is truly to just be, I wouldn’t even say set and forget. Like I just want you to forget. I want you to not even think about charging ever again. You just walk up, you plug in, tap your phone against the charger to unlock it and then you go back today. And one of the things that I found really funny is like,
into an argument with somebody about electric vehicles, and they’re like, well, how long does it take you to charge your vehicle? It must be hours and hours. And I’m like, actually it takes about five seconds. Because I pull into my house, I park, I plug it in, and then I walk away. And it just charges when I’m doing other stuff. So it’s like the same thing with your phone or your laptop, where it’s like you don’t truly think about it too much. You’re just, phones especially.
Joseph Nagle (25:48.366) It doesn’t matter what state of charge the phone is at the end of the day. Likelihood is you’re going to charge it up because you want to have a full battery for the next day. And it’s the same kind of basic principle that EVs should be operating under.
Yeah, for short commutes and 90 charge, that works great. But in order to have that, you need to have a lot of availability of charge. That way, you know you can park, plug, it takes five seconds, and you forget the next day you unplug, you go to your life, and that’s it. If it takes…
Totally.
Federico Ramallo (26:27.264) One hour, two hours of 12, it doesn’t matter, right? Because you’re sleeping, right? You’re not using the car, right? Plus vehicles are 95 % of the time they’re waiting for you. Please take me for a I think that for that case, the EVs are great.
sitting in a spot. Yes, absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (26:51.522) the scenario of what you have to do like long haul or you have to do if you travel from the East Coast to the West Coast or whatever, Long trips like that, then it makes less sense because you’re traveling and then you expect to have a charger and it’s not available, not going to wait for it, right? And that’s where the charging time becomes important, right?
It’s really important in those scenarios. again, we’re in the Bay Area, so I’ll use another Bay Area example. Up to Tahoe, was about a four-hour drive.
it’s highly unlikely that there’s a vehicle that exists today that can make that drive round trip. Like you have to stop and charge. And so they keep having to add more and more public charging along that route because it’s a very popular place to go and do like a weekend ski trip. And the problem that they run into is that because the charge times are so long, you can come in and park in that spot, charge up in 40 minutes and be gone. But let’s say you come in and then I come in and then somebody else come in and we’re all stacked up. So I have to wait for you for 40 minutes and then
they have to wait for me for 40 minutes and then the next guy and then just the line just keeps going and going and going. And so we do need to figure out a better way or faster way to charge in those scenarios because of just that fact. Like the cars are gonna start to stack up and the only other option you have is adding more vehicle chargers. And it’s to some point, some degree or another, like we can’t just, power isn’t an infinite resource. You have to generate it and you can’t just keep adding and adding and
Thanks.
Joseph Nagle (28:25.73) expect to solve the problem.
That’s where the viability of chargers will give you that flexibility.
Right, so instead of me having to use a public charger, let’s say that the place that I’m staying in Tahoe has a NEMA 1450 socket or the hotel I have has a Pando charger in it. So now I know, when I go up there, just charge it the hotel. I don’t have to worry at all.
But those are the things that’s kind of you have to figure these little bits and bobs out. And there still is this public network that is doing the fast charging. But really, I think the biggest point that we need to get to is where most of the places that we’re parking our cars, so that would be hotels, homes, and office buildings.
you’ve got to a significant number of charging stations in all of those locations to actually get over this range anxiety issue that a lot of people seem to justifiably be nervous about.
Federico Ramallo (29:24.59) Right. And what you were describing about having a standard connector, doesn’t matter which electric car you have. Correct. Right. Because now the Chinese have their own connector, Tesla has their own connector. So it’s only matter of having your cable. Yes. And then you can go and connect to the Panda box. That’s correct. And you’re golden, right? Right. Yeah.
That is.
Federico Ramallo (29:53.536) And so one is the connector and then the other one, which I was going to ask you, is charging speed, right? Yes. I’m assuming that the Panda Box can negotiate with all the brands of cards.
That is true. And so I think one of the things that lot of people don’t understand about EV charging is that every single EV charger that you can think of in your head is not a charger. The charger’s in the car. So the car’s the thing that’s actually like turning it from DC to AC or by versa. It’s the one dictating how much energy is going into the battery.
Right. So what we are is just an access point, truly. We’re just a door to get to some chargers, or to some energy, right?
So the Panda Box does conversion from AC to DC.
No, we don’t do any of that. We’re an AC charger and then the car, the onboard charger in the vehicle will do the conversion in there because it’s very expensive. The heavy piece probably want to in the car anyway because you want that system to work perfectly. You don’t want an outside system to tell your car how much it can take because that might cause a lot of problems that would cause fires. Yes. Yes. But you know, like it can charge any vehicle on the road. It’s a higher power charger. So it’s a nine point six kilowatt output, which is about 50 percent higher than like a standard level
Joseph Nagle (31:10.864) two. So there’s three levels of charging. have your level ones, which is basically like every outlet in the room that we’re in. typical 110. Yeah, that’s a level one. Level two is a Pando charger. There’s a big range in the level twos. It goes from like 3.3 kilowatts all the way up to 22, which is, if you know anything about energy, like that’s a big difference. One is like a nasty shock and the other one will kill you. And then, so we’re kind of like right there in the middle.
10.
Joseph Nagle (31:39.822) That’ll give you about 300 miles of range, you know, over an eight hour time period. So you can go from about 0 to 100 % in your car overnight and that’s really what anybody actually needs. And the more data we get actually suggests that most people don’t even need that much. We see most people charging from 20 % to 80 % and the reason a lot of people do that is that is the happy spot for the battery system.
So if you keep their battery between 20 and 80%, the likelihood that that battery is ever gonna degrade or go bad is extremely low. And that’s something that a lot of people, like one of the things that was talked about with EVs was like, oh, well, the batteries are really expensive to swap out if they break. That’s true. But if you maintain your battery, it’s just like your engine. Like if you make sure you keep getting the oil change, it’s unlikely that you’re gonna have to replace the engine. Right?
Thank
Federico Ramallo (32:35.35) Yes.
with EVs, it’s just proper maintenance.
So taxes, the engine lasts way longer, like five, 10 times longer than normal folks.
The reason for that is because they have a different use cycle. So they turn the car on in the morning and then they keep running it throughout the day. So the car never goes cold. So every time that it’s cold and you start it, that’s when you have most of the engine wear. So if you go…
Right.
Federico Ramallo (33:14.392) from your home to your office, right? And then you start the engine cold, and then you drive, and then you stop it, and then the car gets cold again, and then at 5 p.m. you start the engine again, and you go back home, the tear on wear for the engine is much higher than a cap because they keep it hot throughout the day, right? So, you
Absolutely.
The pattern will be different with batteries, but yeah, if you keep it between 20 and 80%, it’s going to last much longer.
I mean, it’ll last, it should theoretically will last forever. It’ll last an incredibly long time. Like there’s so many stories that from, you can go back and look at the original Tesla Model S’s that have come out that have hundreds of thousands of miles on them already. And the degradation is like four or 5 % on a car that has a hundred thousand miles on it.
And it’s because they’ve been properly maintaining the battery. Like if you keep it just in that range typically, it really won’t ever have any issues. Once you go outside of those ranges, it’s fine to do it occasionally. But if you constantly are like going all the way to 100, all the way to zero, and back and forth, it’s a similar type of problem of hot cold. So if you let it go too hot or too cold, you’re going to have some problems. Yes.
Federico Ramallo (34:33.966) So the use case for the Panda Box is destination charge.
Destination, home, and then an office space as well. Which is kind of a destination, but not quite.
Oh, and now we’re speaking. Right.
Federico Ramallo (34:53.204) Yeah, I mean what I’m saying is that when you get to the place and you’re to stay there, that’s I’m defining destination is, it doesn’t matter the charging time, right? Or it’s less important.
It’s yeah, it’s it’s minimally important.
Yeah, because if you go from here to Tahoe, right, and you stay there overnight, and you have the peace of mind that there’s going to be a reliable charger, there’s going to be a PandaBox, then it doesn’t matter how long it takes, Absolutely. Because you’re going to arrive, you’re going to…
know, stay for the night. The next morning the car is going to be 100 % charged or 80 if you prefer, Depending on, your…
Yeah, so we focus specifically on multifamily charging, so apartments and condos, but really in the reality of it, it’s anywhere a car has parked more than four hours. That’s a perfect spot for a Panda Box.
Federico Ramallo (35:55.086) Great, interesting. So do you guys have an app for people to see other panda boxes and find them? Or is it mostly for when you go to your home?
Right now it’s mostly for your home. And so we don’t really need, I don’t want to incentivize people to stay within the a Panda network, right? You can use any, you can use ChargePoint, you can use Blink, you can use my former company EverCharge. Those are all fine. There’s nothing wrong with it. So it’s more just providing charging where you’re at currently. So it’s, that’s kind of the goal, right? So if you’re living in an apartment, I want you to have charging. If you’re going to a hotel, I want you to have charging. If you’re going to work, I want you to have charging. So you can always plug
in and charge up when you need to.
Right. I was reading a little bit about the security labels. Can you tell us a little bit about what security labels does the Pando Box have and why are they important?
Right. So we have UL and CSA that’s really from like mostly weatherproofing. Like NEMA 4 is waterproofing. you don’t want water to be able to get into the outlet because that would be incredibly dangerous. You want to make sure that you also have OCPP, which is an open charge point protocol. That’s really for peace of mind, mostly because what we’re starting to see is like a lot of these companies that were started up are now failing.
Joseph Nagle (37:29.616) And when they fail, you don’t want the system and the thing you already paid for to also now be useless, right? And so OCPP helps solve that problem in a way. It’s an open source protocol, so nobody’s making any money off of it. But it allows any provider to come in and put their software into that device.
So Juicebox went out of business, they were not OCPP compliant, so there was no way to bring new software onto those chargers, and so they were just bricked.
I see.
Right, so you don’t have anything that you can, it can’t connect to anything so it won’t let you charge. So you put in this OCPP which allows for a cloud service system to come in and I can go into your cloud, I can put in my software and then those chargers then just transfer over to my network and then you, the person who bought them, isn’t like, well now I have to replace everything that I just bought.
Right, so it’s future-proof and you’re not locking in the users to your…
Joseph Nagle (38:28.654) Absolutely. Right. like again, so if anything bad happens, you can actually overcome that.
Another really big one here in California is CTEP, which is by the CDFA, which is, they still, I don’t know the actual, the acronym, we could search it up in a Microsoft database. But that program is the same program that regulates gas station pumps. And so it requires that the meters in the Pando box are accurate up to the fourth decimal place.
so that you know as a driver, like, this has been regulated to be accurate up to the fourth decimal place so that I know that I’m not getting scammed and when I’m getting electricity, I’m not charging you extra or saying, actually you used, you know, kilowatts when you used two, right? So it’s just basically showing people full transparency. And so that’s a very important thing here in the state of California and there’s like a lot of states that also follow that regulation. And then we also do Energy Star.
which is kind of just to make sure that when the device is off it’s not actually active.
That’s to measure parasitic losses.
Joseph Nagle (39:40.962) Yeah. And that actually serves a dual purpose. The first one you mentioned, the parasitic gloss. But the second one is just general safety. Because it’s a garage. are children or people walking around. You don’t want an active outlet that someone can just stick something into, and then that’s going to cause problems. So basically, if you see a Pando outlet and you jam in a graphite pencil or something like that, nothing’s going to happen, because there’s actually no active energy until you unlock the device.
Oh, right, right, right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s…
your child proofing the device as well.
Child proof, idiot proofing is more like it.
I thought about saying that, thought proofing would sound better.
Joseph Nagle (40:30.114) For me, most children know not to stick their finger in there, but I’ve seen some adults do some pretty stupid things with their outlets, and I’m just like, I shake my head, I’m like, thank God we built in these features.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve seen adults do different things with so many things. So all these labels are important for safety, efficiency, and safety.
Peace of mind, peace of mind, yeah, because you really want to make sure that people know, especially with the CTEP, that they know, like, when I’m buying something, I want to know I’m getting exactly what I paid for. Right. And CTEP is what allows for that.
Let me tell you a story that’s an ancillary to what we’re talking about, but nevertheless. Here in the US, you have 110, 60 hertz, right? Normal outlets. In Argentina, where we used to live, we have to 20, 50 hertz.
when we buy the computers. and then we have the, you know, here you have the connectors that are, you know, vertical. In Argentina, we have their vision, right? and the reason I mentioned the connectors is important for the story because we would have…
Federico Ramallo (42:05.646) power units on the PCs, right, with a switch on the back. You could switch it to 220 or 110, right. But then the cable, I don’t remember the name of the cable, but this big black cable you connect to. Now they use that connector for the printers and whatnot. Usually it will come with the 110 connector.
Eventually we could get the other one, but it was so hard to find that it was better to just use adapters and whatnot. So in my house we’d have 110 connectors getting 220, right? Or 110, depending on how we connected things, right? So we had, because…
depending on the year of the computer, these things would change. Sometimes we would get the power unit without the switch. The switch eventually came. So we had to have It’s not an inverter. It’s a… A transformer? A transformer, yeah. Thank you.
Big piece of, you
We will open those up because they have this E piece of metal with E shape. And then we will play with them. Anyway. my god. It was so much fun. They’re great for to throw them away. Yeah, because it’s a piece of metal. So if you throw them, it goes… Anyway, we will play with that. After those break, they all will…
Joseph Nagle (43:31.915) Yeah.
Joseph Nagle (43:39.022) really, I didn’t know that.
Federico Ramallo (43:51.534) Anyway, so usually we had to double check that because things could go wrong. So one day I connected to 220, a power unit. It was this big box on the PC that, but the input was 110. And I had, right next to that connector, had…
the transformer with the other connector, but I plug it incorrectly. So what happened with that is when you do that, the power unit didn’t have any protection for that. So they have these four big capacitors. They will blow out, and then white smoke will come out of the computer. It will make this big bang, and then white smoke.
10, 12, right? So I panic, know, and the whole room became, you know, with this white smoke. I was like, my God, I, you know, I burn, I’m burning down the house.
So anyway, when we’re talking about this, we think about security and idiot-proofing things. Even though I’m a kind of smart monkey, but I did stupid things anyway. So anyway, I panic. I blew that thing. Eventually, you had to buy a new power unit to fix it. But yeah, it was a very common mistake back there because of this.
It’s not super complicated, but it’s easily like something you just forget about.
Federico Ramallo (45:35.35) Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can be very cautious, but you make the mistake once and then, you know.
Or you just do something where you’re not thinking. I’ve seen people spraying an electronic device down with a hose and just like, my god, what you doing?
Hahaha!
And then you point it out to them and then they do the same thing. Like, my God, like I wasn’t thinking, like I just was just washing stuff and like my brain turned off.
Yes, it was like, well, it’s a bug, they don’t think about it. So it’s a good thing that you have that protection. Great.
Federico Ramallo (46:17.56) What happens if you start driving a car and the connector is there? Do you have this sign up?
No, so actually that’s done to the auto, the OEMs themselves.
God bless
It’s plugged in, it’ll be beeping at you and yelling at you and say, hey, you got unplugged. So we don’t have to worry so much about that. We could worry, I mean, if there was like a golf cart or something that was plugged in, like that could be an issue. But again, like it’s a pretty robust socket. So from our end, would just deactivate because it default, it would trip the fault sensor. It was probably tripped like either a voltage drop or overarching or something like
that would pop one of the sensors in the device. So it would shut off immediately and then send us a report. The golf cart that’s driving around, I don’t know what happens to that guy. I’m sure he broke his golf cart or something like that, but it’s not going to be the worst thing in the world. So our system will, at a minimum, just shut off automatically. if you had, imagine it is plugged in and it jerks out like that, it’ll trip a bunch of sensors.
Federico Ramallo (47:29.676) Yeah, yeah, because if you’re passing current through, then the moment you start disconnecting, have an arc.
Yes, that’s the overarching. if it gets that, it’ll immediately shut off. Or it’ll detect a voltage drop. Like, I’ll be like, my gosh, there’s a huge voltage drop. Shut off. So it just understands that these things aren’t allowed, and it just turns off.
So how do you say that you have no experience with EV cars without saying that you have no experience with EV cars? By asking this stupid question.
There are no stupid questions. think that’s the thing I really wish people would stop saying that because the only stupid questions are the ones you don’t ask. I think the smartest people I’ve ever met always ask just a million questions about all sorts of crazy things and ideas and you’re just like, these are some stupid questions. But truly, you should be asking those because you don’t actually know the answer until you’ve sort of confirmed it. So I think actually there are no stupid questions.
Right. Yeah, I’m just teasing myself. So in Mexico, the infrastructure for charging is not that very well developed yet. So I’m still staying with internal combustion engines and motorcycle. I drive motorcycle most of my week. So that’s I haven’t decided to do the EV jump yet.
Joseph Nagle (48:49.4) Absolutely.
Federico Ramallo (48:58.658) But when I’m here, I drove a few times, I rented some of the cars here. And I did drive the, did a drive test for the Cybertruck once. Very interesting.
Okay.
Well, you’re here now, you should try the Waymo’s. Yes. And they’re and they’re all electric. So it’s like it’s a very that’s where it is like that’s the future three years from now for most of the US with these self driving taxis going around that are super quiet. You will be shocked at how rapidly a self driving car becomes very uninteresting and boring or you don’t think about it anymore. Just like the novelty.
The self-driving.
Joseph Nagle (49:41.296) of no driver and the car moves by itself wears off pretty quick. You just sort of accept that this thing is gonna take you to where you wanna go and it is usually pretty good. There’ll still be mess ups but it’s not so horrible that you’re like, oh my God, this is dangerous. It’s just like more frustrating than anything else. Anytime I’m in a way mode and I get frustrated it’s because it’s not, there’s an open lane and I’m like, get in the lane, like I wanna.
I mean, love driving and I love driving for the sake of driving, so I enjoy the driving experience. And then that’s another factor for me for not going EV because EVs are efficient, reliable, and boring to drive.
The Cybertruck is fun to accelerate.
think you’re driving the wrong EVs.
Well, I was surprised by the Cybertruck because it does 0-60 in 3 seconds or something like that, right? Because it doesn’t build up, the torque is instantaneous. I’m used to motorcycles. I have a 1,000cc motorcycle, so it’s high performance.
Federico Ramallo (51:00.362) And the Cybertruck accelerates faster, or it feels faster. And the reason for that is because you have the torque immediately. Or on the motorcycle, you have to rev it up. So it’s more linear. And you feel the torque going up and up. So I was surprised by that. I would still not buy a Cybertruck. I would drive it eventually.
You might be able to get a great deal on one at some point because no one’s buying them.
Yeah, the issue is that the value, the appreciation is much higher than internal.
Oh, yes, crazy. Yeah. But that’s why I tell people today, if you really are interested, now is the best time to buy an EV because you can go onto the used market and get some steals. So you can get like a there’s a there’s a one that I think I might end up buying. It’s the Porsche. The Taycan, the original EV that they built. The reason nobody really wants them anymore is there. It’s a 200 mile battery. So it’s not super long range. Right. But, you know, this is a sports car. It drives like a sports car. It’s a Porsche. Yeah. And I’m like,
the handling is.
Joseph Nagle (52:04.08) It’s only 50k and it’s one year old like it and like and this is a you know almost $150,000 vehicle that came off the line like that. So it’s like these are There are some really good deals right now for used EVs. There’s nothing wrong with them It’s just that there’s not their demand is low because they were You know low range at the beginning and now there’s a better model out and so it’s like a lot of actual true value especially on these higher-end vehicles like the Cybertruck where it’s you know, is it very expensive to purchase but now
Now someone has bought it and then didn’t like it and sold it and now the value has just like completely plummeted. But the vehicle itself, there’s nothing wrong with it.
Right, yeah, and the vehicle works right within those expectations. Plus, for a daily driver, that’s amazing. Great handling, as long as you know that you’re going to have this limited range, limited still is more than what you need. Plus, it’s a Porsche. Yeah.
Yes.
Joseph Nagle (53:10.19) I was like, don’t know how many times I’m going be able to afford a Porsche for so low.
So, yeah, I would love to drive those type of cars because for me it’s, you you have the utility of going from point A to point B, right? And for that, you want something boring. simple, yeah. I keep using the word boring, but yeah.
Simple.
Joseph Nagle (53:37.902) Thanks.
you
Yeah, but as a current enthusiast, that doesn’t sound very appealing, right? Because you want the sensation and all that, right? And the vroom vroom is part of it, They’ve been trying to simulate it with speakers and whatnot.
That is true.
Joseph Nagle (54:03.118) They’ve been required to do that. Yes. So there’s some interesting applications of that, like Rolls Royce, have their Spectre that…
it has like a more like ominous, I don’t know, like a Christopher Nolan type movie sound that when it drives around, it sounds cool. I’m like, oh man, I really actually dig that sound more than like a vroom vroom because it’s different, it’s new, I don’t know. So it’s like, think as, and this is what I talk to people about all the time, like when you’re looking at like the gas vehicle market, you’re looking at a fully matured, completely, it’s pretty much at the top of its efficiency type of a market. Like there’s not much more that is gonna
come out of this. Like we’ve pretty much perfected internal combustion engines at this point. Yes. So but when you flip the and you look at electric vehicles like we’re just the very beginning and so there’s a lot of growth that’s going to come out of this a lot of changes are going to come out of this that I don’t I can’t even predict what’s going to happen but I know that in 10 years the vehicles that are sold then are going to be so radically and wildly different than the ones that are on the road today that I think you
will see something that is truly futuristic coming out in the next decade.
Yeah, had high hopes for Audi. Audi did some interesting sounds for the e-tron. They put it on the Marvel movies. And they made this. What is the name of this? There is a, I look it up, but there is a.
Joseph Nagle (55:26.198) Yes.
Federico Ramallo (55:42.016) artist that did a lot of cinema movies sounds. He was part of the development of the sound for the Etron. that’s great. Yeah, I don’t remember his name, but I think he actually worked with Kubrick. So yeah, yeah, very well, you know, renowned sound engineer. yeah.
okay.
Federico Ramallo (56:06.73) Anyway, I think that’s going to be very interesting because that’s going to change. What I’m trying to say is that the needs for the current enthusiasts are about the experience. It’s about the journey. When you are looking for an utilitarian experience of, want to go from point A to point B that were a…
Simplistic. I’m learning. Simplistic experience is more what you’re looking for, right? Because you don’t want to think about the vehicle. You just want to go. It’s a mean to an end. So for a car enthusiast, the end is driving. It doesn’t matter where, right? Right.
Correct.
Joseph Nagle (56:49.614) Absolutely. Yeah, you kind of want to have like a great drive as up here in Marin County. Go across the Golden Gate Bridge and go on some really windy, fun roads to drive a car on.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. the way that I see it is I like to drive fast with no hurry. I like to drive slow. I love to just enjoy going nowhere rather than just driving. All of the experiences of just driving. I actually a few times did this. I drove from Guadalajara, Mexico to here. wow. Like 10 times.
It’s a drive.
It’s a 3600 miles. It’s a lot. But it’s so it’s it’s more time consuming, more expensive, less practical. But man, you enjoy the drive. And I still have to do, you know, because sometimes you don’t have enough time. one of the things I want to do is do the coast. yeah. You know, go from.
What is the root? Root one. Do the one instead of the five? I want to do that.
Joseph Nagle (58:03.502) Yeah, Highway 1. Oh, you should. It’s one of the most beautiful drives I’ve ever gone on.
I did drive Baja California. It’s beautiful and it’s different because it’s isolated. There’s nobody there, right? So one time we were in La Paz, which is south of Baja, and we were going to take the ferry. But I had my dog with it and the dog didn’t have enough paperwork. Something was missing on the paperwork. Some shot, you know.
Okay.
Federico Ramallo (58:41.068) which the dog had, but we didn’t have the paper for that. So I told my wife, you know what, I am going to drive north, all the way north and then south. You know, because my wife was like, I can fly, take the dog with me. Right. But when you take the dog, but for that you need a box. Right. So it was buying the box and then they put it on the cargo plane.
But if the pilot forgets to flick a switch, they kill the dog, right? So I was like, I’m not willing to take that risk.
Absolutely, yeah. It’s super stressful for the dog, too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My dog is, you know, he’s like super cool. Yeah. But but still, I don’t want to do that. Right. So I decided to just drive. And my wife, you know, she’s very supportive, but she said, you know what? love you.
taking the plane. Yeah. So she’s like, know, she took, you know, so we talk about it. She took my son with her and they both fly and then I drive solo with my dog all the way, all the way north and then south. Which is a little bit longer than coming to San Francisco. yeah. Yeah, because it’s, you know, you have the border and then if you go north, you have to go from Phoenix to.
Joseph Nagle (59:58.488) That’s a long drive.
Federico Ramallo (01:00:07.82) Diego and the north, right? But here you have to go south.
Okay.
20 % longer each. It’s a track. So anyway, that shows that I love the enthusiast of just driving. It doesn’t matter. I love to sport cars. I love to drive. I’m building a big Jeep with 40-inch tires.
to drive.
Joseph Nagle (01:00:43.276) go off-roading.
We put a big V8 into it. We’re working it. It’s the whole opposite way of EVs, right? But the issue is that when you’re in a small town, you don’t have a charger, right? So having gasoline right now, it’s the most dependable fuel, right? So that’s kind of what we went that way. But I’m hoping that they’re going to come up with an LS. So the LS is the engine that I put into the Jeep, right?
that they’re working on an EV LS crate engine. So basically, you replace the V8 for an electric engine, and then you have the electronics within the space where the V8 used to be. And it connects on the gearbox of the LS. wow. OK. So basically, you can replace a V8 with an EV. So I’m hoping that’s going to develop. Yeah.
That’s cool.
Joseph Nagle (01:01:38.552) That’s cool.
Joseph Nagle (01:01:43.246) Yeah, I hear a lot about conversions like that. I always assume they just rip everything out and just put it in the back, because they’re so radically different. They’re so different that it’s like, what are you going to keep?
Yeah, I mean with the G-Class, they keep the chassis, they reinforce it, and they put the, what is the name, EQ technology, right? Which is an old technology, it’s a $200,000 car, right? Yeah, super expensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s not, I believe it’s not worth buying, even if you are looking for this, right?
I mean, well, that’s why like it’s been frustrating being the industry like because of that like there’s a lot of the older automotive OEMs that like Mercedes who kind of just Do stuff like that where they’re it’s almost like well fine. You want me to make an EV fine here Here’s the EV I’m make you and it’s not really a great vehicle And it arguably probably isn’t worthy of the Mercedes name Right like they’re just they’re just throwing out like you take it because you want it instead of like let’s actually make a cool EV that has Mercedes
like the Mercedes brand built into it. And I think the ones that you’re seeing start to succeed versus the ones that you’re seeing start to fail are the ones that are actually taking it seriously. And like one of the brands that’s slowly starting to come back, you know, back from the dead is Cadillac.
And Cadillac made a strategic choice. We’re not really going to make too many gas vehicles anymore. We’re really going to focus on EVs. We’re going to build them from the ground up. And now we’re starting to see the Lyric, the new Escalade that just came out are very popular. They’re actually pulling Cadillac, that brand name, back into the luxury class name again.
Federico Ramallo (01:03:31.032) Interesting.
Yeah, so there’s these companies that have sort of figured it out. They see that like, actually, this is our path back to sort of, I wouldn’t say relevancy because Cadillac was still around, but it was just like, it had lost a lot of its cache. Right. And so like a lot of these OEMs that are focusing on EVs, especially on the high end, those are the ones that starting to really start to succeed. And I think what you’re starting to see now is like the slower trickle down of, we haven’t hit like mass market just yet in this industry. Like there’s still
The price needs to come down a little bit more to actually make it you know Hey, I can this is on par with a Honda Civic the boring car the simple car, right? But now we’re looking at sort of like if you’re gonna look at a BMW 3 Series versus say, you know The the BMW i-series like they’re fairly comparable in terms of price But then the i-series is just better on like a many many metrics
So like it’s better at handling, better at braking, much faster acceleration. So it’s like all the things that you would associate with that 3 Series are better on the i-Series. And it’s just because the electric car is just a better performance vehicle.
Yeah, I like the BMW i3, I think it is, with the range extender. They had enough criticism because, it’s a range extender, so you cannot do vroom, vroom, you know? But on the utilitarian point of view, it’s a great vehicle. It hasn’t picked up that much. think it was because of
Joseph Nagle (01:05:06.574) think they would have discontinued it.
I think they were ahead of their time, right? But I think it was a great platform for that. Because you have the benefit of the EV and the benefit of a combustion engine, right? So that’s great, right? But I think that this idea of the G-Class EQ, whatever it’s called, I’m bad with the name.
The Germans aren’t great with naming conventions.
The issue is if you’re willing, if you have the money to buy a G-Class, you’d rather buy the VA, know, three-in-one, you know, it has more power, has, you know, and the difference in fuel, it doesn’t matter. Right. If you want to make a statement about…
Right.
Federico Ramallo (01:06:02.51) green, you’re not going to buy a G-Class. You’re going to buy a Samy V that screams, I’m green.
some EV.
Joseph Nagle (01:06:12.192) Up until recently it was a Tesla, but…
Yeah, now all that changed.
So now we’re yeah, well, what’s next?
The Cybertruck, I mean, I want to like it. I mean, I don’t like the aesthetics too much, you know, in your face. it’s not a good off-roader. It’s not a No, no, it’s an EV, you know, it’s a fashion statement.
Yeah, yes. I told somebody, I think it was a reporter who was asking me about the Cybertruck and I’m like, look, like I grew up on construction sites and I’m like, no construction worker. I mean, there might be a few of them, but more or less the average construction worker is not buying a Cybertruck. Like it’s just, they’re not, they’re going to go buy an F-150, which by the way, if they want an electric, there’s an electric F-150 that you can get that looks exactly like an F-150. Right.
Joseph Nagle (01:07:11.152) car that they were.
all of the accessories are going to fit in, only aftermarket.
And they know how to build it for, you know, a construction site. So it was a nice big, bed. Like it’s pretty rugged. There’s not a lot of plastic pieces on it. Whereas like you go to the cyber truck, like the whole bed’s like kind of plasticky. It’s not a deep bed. It’s, it’s a weird shape. So you can’t like just things that you would normally think of for a truck bed. You’re like, well, I can just throw stuff in it. Well, like because of the, the angle, it’s harder to throw stuff in the back than it is the front. there’s a bunch of things where I’m just looking at them. Like, I don’t know who.
thought this up, but it’s certainly not a truck.
Yeah, I mean, it was fun to accelerate it. Yeah. I did weee, know, from zero to, I don’t know, 50 was the top, you know, 40 was the top speed at, you know, I was in Santa Clara downtown. So, you know, I didn’t have much space to speed it up. So I did from zero to the speed limit and that’s it.
Federico Ramallo (01:08:14.626) And then I turn around and I said, nice track, here’s the key, bye. So for that, that was fun, but it was not practical. I would not buy it. But I do like the idea of Cadillac Escalade Electric because that’s, you you’re looking for the areas of comfort, so going EV makes it quieter, right? You’re looking to carry a lot of people.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (01:08:44.406) if you’re using a similar suspension, so it’s going to be comfortable. And you get the benefit of acceleration, so that’s nice.
Absolutely. Yeah. So when you’re moving around a ton of people, like you can get up these big San Francisco hills, no problem.
Right. Right. Plus you have all-wheel drive. Right.
So it’s, you I think we’re just in the, we’re in this transition phase of, you know, I think people are slowly starting to realize that like a lot of the, there’s hype on both ends, like EBs are gonna die and EBs are gonna take over. it’s like, maybe not either one of those things are gonna happen, right? Like we’re at best gonna be like a 20 % market penetration over the next, you know, five, 10 years, which is a huge number of vehicles, but it’s nowhere near like a hundred percent of the cars on the road are gonna be.
EVs, it’s nowhere near the 100 % of the new vehicle sales are going to be EVs because people still want gas cars and there’s still reasons to buy a gas car. I think you’re going to see more hybrids, like more of the plug-in hybrid stuff, but in general it’s going to be a more slow transition and I think that’s fine. There’s no reason to be freaking out about the transition speed at which we’re going. It’s pretty normal technology uptake transition.
Federico Ramallo (01:09:57.932) Right. So going back to Panda, I was going to ask you if you’re thinking for a solution for fleets.
Yes. So fleets are really interesting. It’s something that I worked on pretty closely at Ever Charge. one of the things that really saved that company was our pivot from multifamily charging into fleets.
interesting.
Because the technology that we created for the multifamily space we found out was like almost ideally situated for the fleet space and So the same is kind of it’s not nearly as the same We have to make modifications to the device one of the bigger things with a fleet is they? Typically don’t want to have the you know the driver get out and then have to plug it in themselves They just want to have them come in like walk around and plug in and that’s fine. So you want like what do you?
I
Joseph Nagle (01:10:52.536) So you have to bring your own cable in our system. let’s say it’s a taxi cab. You just want to have them come pull out on site. And you don’t want have have anybody have to pull out this thing and plug it in and close the doors back up. They’re just going to walk away. And we have the data to suggest this from other companies that I’ve worked at that were socket based.
So flip-based users are not willing to plug this.
Correct, they’ll just walk off, they’ll just leave. And so when you’re doing like an electric vehicle fleet, like what Waymo is doing is you basically hire like your security guard is gonna watch the lot at night, but he’s also probably gonna go around and plug in all these cars.
Also you’re going to have the driver user and the plugger user.
Yeah, basically. Yeah. And so you want to make it so it’s simplistic so they don’t have to open a thing up for each car. So you want to have the connected cable in that situation. You also want to make sure that you have some kind of like load management capability. So the other big reason and this is well solved at this point, but when I was at Ever Charge, one of the big reasons that fleet vehicles or even multifamily vehicles weren’t getting charging installed was because of simple capacity issues. Right. Power isn’t endless. Most buildings only have so much once you
Joseph Nagle (01:12:08.066) max that out, just, that’s it.
I see.
So you either have to call up PG &E, who’s our local utility provider, and convince them that you need it, which nowadays they’re never going to do. Or you have to figure out some other solution, which is power management, which is essentially like, and what Pando is doing is we’re moving into something we call edge intelligence, where it’s monitoring the entire building load. It’s understanding what’s in use and what’s not in use. So a really simplistic example would be like, hey, the elevators aren’t being used right now.
we don’t need to reserve that power for them because they’re not being used. I can transfer that over to the chargers and I can charge more vehicles because I know that there’s this big block of power that’s just sitting there idle. Right. And so so for a fleet vehicle situation, now I can put I can in any of these garages here downtown that are probably totally tapped out of power or have very little available. They all can become fleet parking because I can tap into the full building power. And I know that a lot of those building systems aren’t going to be
on all the time, especially at night.
Federico Ramallo (01:13:16.192) And now they have extra capacity.
plenty of capacity to keep charging. a lot, and Pando’s not the only one that does this by the way, but this is certainly something where we’re starting to see like more fleet vehicles wanting to go in that direction. And so I think that’s probably where we’ll see more of those applications from Pando’s side. Another really big one is not only for drawing power, but pushing power into the grid.
So vehicle to grid technologies have become very advanced. I would suspect that, I mean, we’re working on pilots today for this technology. We’re already seeing like the Ford F-150, which I mentioned, has V2G built in today. Like you can use it to power your home.
You do need an inverter because people don’t realize that you have to buy another device. But in general, like this stuff exists and for fleets, it’s going to be like really amazing because you could bring in if you had enough vehicles, you know, the more vehicles you have, the more power you have, the more power you have. You know, at some point you basically become like a de facto power plant. And so like if you see all these like way modes driving around, like eventually you start to if you start calculating out how much energy that actually is, you’re like, oh, that’s actually like almost a full power plant of
energy just kind of cruising around the roads at night. And so when you want to be able to flatten out the supply-demand curve for energy, which is what causes sort of rolling blackouts and brownouts when there’s either too much supply or too much demand,
Joseph Nagle (01:14:46.636) What you can do with these vehicles is you can push energy into the grid or pull energy from the grid to help pull that demand curve back to more of a straight line. And so we’re starting to see like grid, EBs being more of an extension of the grid, which is where Pando is really actually focusing right now. It’s trying to make that final linkage for this entire ecosystem to really start to like work together holistically.
Right.
Joseph Nagle (01:15:16.6) instead of what has been happening is more like friction based where it’s like EVs draw so much energy now the power has to generate a bunch more for it. It creates this thing called the duct curve because there’s too much demand and not enough supply and vice versa.
And so it causes all these problems. And we’ve lived through this problem. We’re still living through it because PG &E’s rates just keep going up and up and up. But we’re almost to the end where in a few years, it’ll go completely away because you’ll be able to flatten out that curve completely just because you’ve made EVs a part of the grid.
Right.
Federico Ramallo (01:15:52.662) Right, because now you can use, it can become bidirectional. So the current Panda product is one direction and you’re working on the bidirectional feature.
That is correct.
Joseph Nagle (01:16:06.85) That is correct. So that should… Yeah, the first build of that product should be done in late September, early October. So like when I say it’s coming, like it’s almost here. And then it’s more just implementing it in the world.
Right. Yeah, I thought when you were talking about this, was thinking more of, you know, years.
Yeah, like far-flung future, but it’s really not. It’s it’s right around the corner. We’re already starting pilot programs for that particular product this year.
Right. going back to my initial comment is, you don’t see that. A bidirectional box or a non-bidirectional box, you don’t see the feature going. But it’s happening, and the impact is huge. And as a user, hard to tell the difference. And so much work has to go through to make that happen.
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (01:17:07.65) Right.
And I think a lot of like, from the user perspective, we feel like it’s just not important for them, right? It’s just more like, it’s a thing that’s gonna happen without their knowledge and it’s not gonna be a big deal. And most people, when they hear that, like, well, I don’t want, if I come and bring my battery or my car into like late at night, when I hear V to G, my initial freak out is like, well, I don’t wanna wake up, you I don’t wanna park at 50 % and then wake up at 40 % because you used my energy.
All
And the reality is like that’ll never happen. Usually when we’re talking about V2G, it’s like what we’ll take is about like 5 % no more from each vehicle on the road. Because when you have thousands of these things, I don’t need all of your battery, I only need a little bit to help flatten out the demand curve.
Right, because what happens is that you have a demand on a particular spot, but you need to cover that peak demand. And that’s much better to be able to grab it locally and then slowly filling that bucket again, rather than just bringing that demand and going through the whole charge. The longer you go, the
Joseph Nagle (01:18:03.426) That is correct.
Joseph Nagle (01:18:16.012) That is. Yeah, all throughout the grid.
Absolutely.
So yeah, I think we’re in like a very exciting time actually, even though there’s like lot of negativity in the EV space just because of Trump and getting rid of like the incentive monies. But like in general, like everybody that I talk to in the industry is actually very excited about like the next 10 years.
Yeah, I think that the EV technology is getting better and better. think that, know, PANDO is one of the contributors to that experience, right? To make it a better experience for residential users, for fleet users. I think that’s going to be a… It’s going to have a huge impact. The cars, the technology on the cars is getting better every year. They’re working on…
chemistry on different chemistry for the batteries. that’s the so one of the issues that are happening right now is that the energy density on the batteries is low is less than gasoline or diesel.
Federico Ramallo (01:19:26.03) So they’re working on that. There are a few batteries that are getting better on that sense. There is one battery that NASA developed that it’s like a tank. I don’t remember how it works, but it’s basically like a tank. And it saves the energy there. So the lithium ion battery has like 10,000 cycles or something like that, or 8,000. This has like 500,000, right?
So it’s huge. And the weight is much lower than gasoline, right? Per kilowatt. So the energy density is there, but getting from the ISS to your car is going to take a while, right? Totally. Until they make it more efficient, right? So I think that’s coming, right? Eventually it’s coming to the cars, right?
And that’s going to make the car more usable for a broader audience.
And it’s only going to improve the user experience for everybody. Because if you can get the weight lower, then you can take out lot of like, you can put lower battery, sorry, lower power motors in there. And with lower power motors, you have a cheaper car. now you start to see the prices start to really drop. And then you do get that Honda Civic that, know, $15,000, $10,000 EV. And that’s where I think we will see that this
decade.
Federico Ramallo (01:21:01.794) Yes, yes, think that’s coming. I hope, as a car enthusiast, I hope that they’re working also on this concept of synthetic fuel. OK. So one of the issues with when you burn gasoline or whatever, or diesel, but mostly gasoline, is the CO2, right?
But what you’re doing is you’re basically extracting energy from the ground. then when you burn it, you generate CO2 into the environment. But the synthetic gasoline, what it’s doing is it’s absorbing that CO2 from the environment and it’s generating gasoline or whatever it is. My chemistry product is not.
Right.
Joseph Nagle (01:21:55.886) you
know, accurate, but you get the chance, right? So if you burn that, then it becomes carbon neutral. Right. Right. So and we already have developed all the technology for the gasoline engines, Or, you know, fuel, right? Internal combustion engines, right? So if we can come with a synthetic fuel that it’s lower cost than, you know,
petrol-based gasoline, then it would make more sense to use that, right? Keep the old infrastructure that we already have, right? I think that doesn’t mean, because of that, then we should not develop EVs. I think that these are two different things.
yeah, absolutely.
Joseph Nagle (01:22:40.75) That’s exactly what I was gonna say. What we’re gonna see is more use case based. For example, for my car that I drive around the city, I’ll probably just have that as an EV. Because it doesn’t make sense to have a gas car and have a charger at home and just plug it in and I don’t drive that far. But for maybe if I wanna go super long distances or rental cars, right? Like I fly into an airport, I don’t know where I am, this new city, I’m gonna go rent a car and drive around.
It makes more sense to have a gas car because the infrastructure to power that vehicle is everywhere. Whereas if I am in a new city and I’m trying to figure out where the charging stations are at and my hotel doesn’t have one, then I’m kind of like, I don’t know where to charge this thing.
Right.
Federico Ramallo (01:23:23.714) Yeah, yeah. What do you do with a car, right? You use it until it dies, right? Makes sense.
Yeah. Yeah. So it’s, it’s one of those situations where like we’ve, think more people don’t understand that we are probably going to end up with a, a mishmash of different things.
Or you have this classical Porsche, I mean, you have the new one for daily driving and then you have the classical with the boxer engine. Or a motorcycle, know, the motorcycle, part of the things that I like about motorcycles is the experience of the engine, the wind and all that stuff. Plus you have the acceleration of a…
Right, and the new one.
Federico Ramallo (01:24:06.89) a car of a, you know, a…
Contag, or what is the name of the Ferrari, of a high performance vehicle in a tiny little package, cheap-ish motorcycle. So for the experience, it would be great to have that synthetic fuel.
and then you can enjoy it for the experience, right? And then you can have the practicality of EVs for everyday use. That’s what I’m hoping for.
I think, I mean, we’re almost there. I think it will happen eventually. It’s just, we just need, I think, you know, it’s humans are impatient. We want things faster than they can happen and we kind of just have to iterate through them and then eventually we’ll get there. And the other side of this is if you want faster, you’re to have to, you know, invest more money into it. Yeah.
Right.
Joseph Nagle (01:25:09.314) So it’s like, we got to the moon in a decade, but the amount of money that we had to pump into NASA to achieve such a thing was massive. I think it was like 27 % of the budget at one point. It was a huge chunk of our national budget. So I mean, if you want to get these things ramped up, unfortunately, the best investor on the planet Earth is the US government.
Yes.
Joseph Nagle (01:25:34.798) They have enough money to pump into all these programs, and now China’s kind of caught up as well, so they do the same. But the more investment we can put into new technology, think the faster these things are going to come out.
Yeah, so you’re saying that there is lack of political will to make this happen.
Right. think really, generally speaking, because EVs and all the, you some of these tech like renewable energies also came under this as well. Climate change in general is a political topic, even though it shouldn’t be. That’s the problem. Or it’s the reason that a lot of these things kind of get bogged down or slowed down because
should.
Joseph Nagle (01:26:16.686) there’s a political fight when there really shouldn’t be one, right? It’s a technological fight that you can let these things kind of grow organically and feed them both money and see which one wins out over time. But instead it became a political thing and now people are fighting about, oh, it’s a lie and it’s a scam. All of a I’m like, well, it’s not. You can go use these cars and drive great. But it’s one of those things where, again, I think if we can pull politics out of some of this stuff, I think a lot of it will be a of…
it’ll be much easier to deal with.
Right. There is a book I, you know, I don’t remember the name, but it’s something like How to Spend Seventy Eight Billion Dollars. It’s something like that. That’s name of the book. The number could be wrong, you know, some some billion dollars. Basically, it’s a bunch of scientists. They they they put together different proposals on how to improve the work. And they took the budget from.
but something like…
I don’t remember what it was, but it was money that the government was spending. And they were like, well, if we spend this money on this, then all of this is going to be better. It was zero politics. It was from the technocrats. yeah, yeah, yeah. People that know their stuff, and they kind of voted what would be the best way to spend that money to improve the world. So it’s kind of what you’re talking about.
Joseph Nagle (01:27:47.84) Yeah, mean there’s balance to be had in everything, but more or less yes. I think politics just get out of the way for some, for technology’s sake, just get out of way.
Yeah, yeah, I yeah. In Argentina, there’s been a socialist movement for the last 20 something years. And they basically took Argentina to a 70,000 % inflation. Now, Mila and Karin, and it’s doing better. Well, I think they’re doing better.
think the statistics prove that as well.
Yeah, the macroeconomic is way better. It reduces inflation. But for 20-something years, people voted for this party. Politics is messy.
So before we wrap it up, have a question that I wanted to ask you before I forget. I wanted to ask you about Microsoft Develop.
Joseph Nagle (01:28:59.48) We were talking a little bit earlier, so I’m glad we’re gonna get it for your viewers and listeners. So Microsoft Develop was actually a program acquired from Nokia. So my first job when I got out here was as an intern for Nokia. I didn’t work on the Develop program when I first got there. I was in charge of merchandising on the Windows Phone Store, which meant I was actually, if you went on a Windows Phone back in 2013 and you were in the United States,
and you looked at all the apps that were on the Windows Phone Store, I was the one who was responsible for putting those apps in those places.
So that was my job when I first got there. I did a pretty good job at that and an opening on the develop team came around and that team was really like, I had this wild idea for the time, which was an application development platform that was gamified. And so we would teach people how to make an app and then make it successful just through simple challenges and games. And then we would give people, anytime you completed one of the challenges, you’d get some points.
And then you could, you know, it was kind of like a carnival or like an arcade game back in the day where you get like the tickets. So you get, you know, get all your points and then can go to our store and buy, you know, all sorts of, you know, Nokia products and then later on Microsoft products.
interesting.
Joseph Nagle (01:30:24.046) So it was like a really good way to like, if you couldn’t afford like the flagship phone, you could go get one or you could get a development kit. You’re like, oh, I really want to learn how to make apps for the Nokia Lumia 1020 or whatever. I can go buy one now with my points. That program was so successful that at its peak, 75 % of all the Windows Phone apps in existence had gone through that program.
And so was like really highly sought after when Microsoft acquired Nokia. Microsoft more or less laid off the great majority of Nokia employees and kind of just like shuttered the company, that piece of the company. Nokia still exists. They only sold off a piece of the company to Microsoft. My team and about a hundred other people from across the US were actually integrated into Microsoft and Microsoft really wanted that product.
They wanted to keep that program.
They wanted, yeah, because it was, they were seeing it as like, and at that time it was like an app race, like how many apps each platform had. And it was like, you know, Apple store had like a hundred thousand apps and the Android store had, you know, because there was more of that, like 300,000 apps. And then Windows phone was like 20,000. Like they were having, they were like, well, we gotta catch up. Like that’s a really bad selling point for us.
This is the time where Microsoft was struggling, fighting to get into the smart.
Joseph Nagle (01:31:50.05) Phones, yeah, because they kind of fumbled it away a few times. And so to catch up, they decided we’ll acquire Nokia.
and they’re trying to get us to help sort of boost up the apps. The problem that we had found was that we had a system that created apps really, really well. It incentivized people to create an app. The problem was that they would only create an app up to a certain point, get stuck, and then start over. And so what they were basically creating was a bunch of junky, non-usable apps. I used to, it was like a crap, I called it a crap generating system. Like, and we came in, like there was something
apps that were really, really good that came out of this, but the great majority were just nothing, non-usable. And so my job when I came into that team was like, fix this problem. And so I essentially devised, I completely tore up the script and made the game all over again.
And if you’ve played Fortnite or anything like that where has the leveling system with the battle pass, you get certain rewards at certain stages. And actually before this even came out, that’s exactly what I devised for develop was essentially if you get to level 10, you get X number of points or you get a phone or whatever, right?
And it was just designed to get people, instead of like, get to a point and then stop and then start over, it’s to take it like, no, you should learn more at this step because, you know, at this step, you’re going to get this really, you know, this big bucket of points or, you know, a cool phone or something and start to just slowly pull people down the line further and further so that they are maturing the apps that they started building that they wanted to build to build something that’s more polished. So like the end game was to get them to a polished state.
Federico Ramallo (01:33:36.846) Right. So you design incentives so people keep investing on the application that they’ve already built.
Right, like the whole idea. and so we did that for a bit and that worked out a little bit, but then we realized that now we needed to teach these people how to make businesses. Because we realized that, well, they make an app, but now they don’t know how to make money off the app. now what we’re asking them to do is like really complicated and technical and it’s going to take them time. And there needs to be like an actual monetary reward, not a phone. They’re like, you know, at some point I’m going to do so much work. I’m like, I don’t want a phone anymore. I want to be able to buy my
phone and pay my rent. And so we had to then tear that system up and rebuild it again, which got them to focus on downloads, app rating, and one more thing, and I can’t remember what it was at this point because we never got to that point. never built it.
Do you have a rating for the app?
Yeah, yeah, so it was like you would, you could get app ratings. We taught people how to do that. That was the only pillar that was actually built. The other two, we never got built. the third one was revenue. Yeah, so that was the first one we built because I proposed the system and the Microsoft people were like, well, if this doesn’t work, you’ve torn up like the system that does work and you started all over, so you need to prove it. And so…
Federico Ramallo (01:34:42.414) already.
Joseph Nagle (01:34:55.438) What we did was we got, we started this whole challenge of just focus on app reviews and teach people how to get good reviews, how to incentivize better reviews, all these things that you kind of have to do as a business, an app business. And it raised app review scores by something like over 100%. It was crazy. By just following these little changes to your behavior and how you do something. Instead of just randomly asking somebody, the first thing was nobody was asking.
like just put in this one line of code that after X number of uses, when they open it, it pops up and says, like you see on app stores now, where it’s like, are you enjoying this app? Nobody on Windows Phone was doing that. No one was asking anybody about just give me a rating.
And then the next one was like, if you get a bad rating, instead of like it directly submitting to the store, have it push it to like, oh, can you write me feedback instead? And then don’t let it submit because you don’t want the because then you want it. A, you want feedback, but B, you also don’t want that bad score because what we also found is like once you started getting bad scores, like it just like piles on and then nobody it’s really hard to get out of a bad score cycle. So you kind of did want, you know, feedback.
on some level. So we got people to focus on it. It drove up the scores and then that’s when, like I was explaining, that’s when we were taken from our home here in the Bay Area and we were moved up to Redmond.
and HQ.
Joseph Nagle (01:36:26.81) And that’s when we learned that not only like we thought we were the only ones building this thing within Microsoft because we were the ones that were brought over like, well, they really want us. And so we’ll have like our, you know, lay of the land. do whatever we want. We show up. There’s four or five other teams that are building almost identical products.
And we were like, oh, this is great. Look how many people we’re gonna have rolled up underneath us. We’re gonna really drive this. I thought I was gonna be at Microsoft for the next 10, 15 years building this product. So I was super excited. And then maybe two or three weeks later, I’m like, why are all these teams, we never meet them. What’s going on? And they’re like, oh no. Our boss came in, no, no, I don’t think you understand. We’re in competition with them. This is not a collaborative environment. It’s a competitive environment.
Right.
Joseph Nagle (01:37:14.158) And so we have to build the best product better than them and whoever wins wins. And it just turned like from that point, like the whole, you know, the, the, the game board was flipped over basically. And it was like chaos then reigned in our, in our product. And it just got slowly ripped up over time. You know, people left and they didn’t want to work on it anymore because it was just, it’s so political. was so cutthroat. It just got to a point where you’re like, I don’t want to work here anymore. I guess this isn’t fun to build something when I’m
I can’t even trust another team in Microsoft, they help me out, like figure out this problem, hey, let’s work together to solve it. It’s more like, no, if I go to them and I tell them what a problem I’m trying to work on, they’ll A, try to sabotage me and then they’ll take my idea and put it into theirs. You don’t want to work with them. like, so you start to silo yourself back off and I’m like, that’s, and if you ever use Microsoft products, that’s why, at least at that time, that’s why a lot of those products never really.
So you can.
Joseph Nagle (01:38:12.908) worked out well. Personally, I don’t believe that that’s a really good way to build great product. It’s actually a great way to build a lot of bad products.
Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. I I used to work at Microsoft and I saw that happening. I mean, it was different because it was not a press month. was in Argentina. So was mostly, they were mostly selling boxes, right? we have a Windows server, you how many you want? Two, three, four, five, you know? But then consulting was very competitive and I could see people like getting…
Right, yeah.
Federico Ramallo (01:38:48.824) fire for different mistakes that they commit, right? So it was very competitive. Yeah, and in that environment, what happens is that your creative brain shuts off and then you go to your lizard brain, right? And then it’s like fight or flight, you know? It becomes this zombie movie. you know, it’s like, you know.
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (01:39:15.47) whoever holds more food is going to survive. And then you have somebody knocking at the door and you know, don’t let them come in because they got bitten. And somebody says, oh, poor person, let them get in. And then they get in and then everybody dies. So yeah, becomes very, when you’re working without that level of trust, it becomes wearing.
yeah, totally. Yeah. But I love develop. That was like, I tried to spin that up at so many other companies just to, I was like, I know this works. I know it works. Let me finish it, please. And it just, couldn’t ever get it back off the ground. It just, I think it was one of those products that was right for its time and now it’s gone.
Yeah, now it’s a whole different word. At that time, I was using Pan 3E. You probably know what I’m talking about. I was using it at Microsoft and then somebody says, I recommend you don’t use that here because we are a Microsoft company and we should promote Windows phone, whatever.
Uh-huh.
Joseph Nagle (01:40:29.024) Eat your own dog food.
And I was, okay, then give me a phone and I’ll use it. Right? He’s like, no, no, you have to buy your own. So, you know, they at least give you a Yeah, I I was at a level of a company that they wouldn’t. So but but they had it for more, you know, senior executives. Right. And somebody eventually gave me a used one. It’s like, know, let me go and try it.
But the speed and the functionality of the PAM3e exceeded what the Windows phone could do, right? The battery would last for weeks, days, whatever. And then the other one was four, six hours, whatever. It was a very short battery. So it was like, yeah, this is not working. I’ll say with the PAM3e. Or the Nokia phones.
Yeah. Yeah, mean, Nokia, man, some great phones and it was a shame. I that was I was the first company I worked for out here and I always miss it. I wish I could I would I would have stayed there if it continued forward that in that way.
they were robust.
Federico Ramallo (01:41:34.69) Right. Yeah. I don’t think they’re doing phones anymore.
No, they do networks. So they were focused on 5G, which is they didn’t do so well. Right. Now I’m not sure. I think they mostly live off Nortel patents for the time being. I’m not sure. I don’t know what the future holds for Nokia.
Bye.
Federico Ramallo (01:41:53.794) Yeah, I don’t know. I thought they were almost extinct, but I understand that they haven’t.
The Finnish government will continue to prop them up because they do employ quite a large number of the Finnish population. Yeah, so but I’m not entirely sure like what the future, where they’re going to go next because at one point Nokia was making like tires for cars. really? Yeah, like Nokia used to be like a massive conglomerate. Right. And so now they’ve narrowed significantly over the last 50 years.
Thank
Federico Ramallo (01:42:25.262) Right, right. Which is, know, circling back to what we’re saying about startups is one of the things that I like about startups is that within the chaos, you know, sometimes it’s a little more chaotic than corporate, but you have the opportunity to pivot more faster or build stuff faster than corporations. Oh, yeah.
I just like it because I think Microsoft was one of those companies where I finally just had enough of the pitting each other against each other. I like startups because it’s a collaborative environment. We’re all on the same team. We’re all trying to make this thing work. And so it’s not like I’m fighting with the sales team. like, no, I want the sales team. You’re really good because we all want to succeed together.
Yeah, yeah, or the startup dies in whatever runway we have.
Right, yeah. Yeah, because if I’m not helping them, then we’re all the same boat together.
Yeah, we can see the cliff together. Awesome. So Joseph, thank you very much for being here. I think it’s great to have great conversation. Looking forward to hear more about what you guys are going to do with Panda. Absolutely. Keep me updated. I will.
Joseph Nagle (01:43:24.494) Because we’re to die.
Federico Ramallo (01:43:46.786) but we’ll post information about you guys on the notes of the episode. So people can reach out.
Yeah, thank you very much.
Thank you, it’s been a pleasure. This was wonderful. Awesome.