Entrepreneur Broc TenHouten Solves EV Charging Challenges

Broc TenHouten, Co-founder and CEO of Intrinsic Power, Inc., is a leading authority on the challenges of distributed energy and a technical leader and manager of electric vehicle technology commercialization. Hear how his startup identified and solved major pain points impacting consumer use of EVs, while addressing capacity challenges facing our country’s electrical grid.  Broc offers great insight about the future of electric vehicles and his approach to launching a tech startup.

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• 0:00 Broc TenHouten

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Jeanne Gray: While electric vehicle use continues to grow, challenges remain. Our guest today on Experienced Voices is Broc TenHouten, co-founder of Intrinsic Power, a tech startup that has introduced breakthrough electric vehicle charging technology. Brock shares how his team solved major pain points in consumer use of electric vehicles and the growing challenges EVs present to our country's electrical grid.

Broc, it's great to have you as a guest on Experian's Voices. Having learned a bit about your Intrinsic Smarter EV Charging Stations, what was going on that made you decide to pursue this venture? 

Broc TenHouten: You know, we've been developing new kinds of electric vehicles and energy storage systems over the past 20 years and, we've really seen great advances in electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles going from the place where, you know, 20 years ago, electric vehicles were comical.

They weren't things people would want unless it was specifically to help the environment. And today the top vehicles in almost every class of vehicle is, is either an electric vehicle or hybrid. And but over the same period, we've seen hardly any change in the chargers that we use to charge at home and work or the electrical infrastructure that they're connected to.

And there's a huge disconnect there. The grid can't support the coming wave of electric vehicles. And we knew that new technology was required in order to enable that. 

Jeanne Gray: When you say we knew, who are the parties that are involved in the startup? And how did you go about creating your concept and then vetting it?

Broc TenHouten: Yeah, so the, the company was started by my brother Dave and I as well as Narender and we've all been working in energy and EV startups for the past 15 years, and, and then we have about a dozen other people that have been working on the project with us and they're people that are just some of the most talented people we've worked with over the years, and most of them at multiple companies now.

They all understand that we have this bigger problem coming where now there are great EV options and people are electrifying. And what we need to do is we need to have the infrastructure for people to charge wherever they park. That's, you know, the team and how we came together and realized this problem as far as how we've vetted the product and what people needed.

We had a pretty strong feeling about what was needed from working in electric vehicles and energy storage. But we did go out and test it and talk with customers and potential customers and figure out exactly what their pain points were. And we looked at what the current systems were and we saw that the biggest problem was that in order to install charging stations, Most buildings, whether it's homes or apartments or office buildings, they don't have enough power to put enough electric vehicle charging stations in to allow everyone to charge.

And to upgrade those circuit breaker panels and service to the building is extremely expensive. It's about 6, 000 per charging station if it's just circuit breaker panels, and it's even more if a service upgrade is required. And so we saw that as one of the biggest pain points, how do you charge more vehicles?

On the existing building infrastructure. 

Jeanne Gray: Let's just take the apartment building concept. I come home with my EV and there are charging stations that exist at these apartment buildings, but they don't have enough capacity, or are you going to apartment buildings that have no charging stations and bringing yours in?

And, and why does that change the narrative? 

Broc TenHouten: It's a little bit of both. One there are not all that many apartment buildings even have charging stations in Los Angeles at 16%. In the Bay area, it's 20% of buildings have charging stations, but the even bigger problem is that the typical apartment building has enough available capacity in their circuit breaker panel to add four charging stations. These are places that have a tremendous number of vehicles parked at them. We see more and more electric vehicles, there just isn't enough stations. The first four people that get home from work and plug in, they get to charge and everyone else is just out of luck.

What we've done is we created our intrinsic power charge bot and it allows us to plug in three times as many charging stations to a given electrical service. And by doing that, we're able to provide 12 charging stations where they would have only been able to provide four.

And if they need even more than that, they only need to upgrade their service by about a third as much in order to supply the number of chargers they need. So it's a it's a state change in how these groups can charge and offer charging to their tenants. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, let's delve a little bit into the tech features that seem to make this smarter EV charging station almost a comprehensive solution. You talked about the grid being under pressure as far as capacity. Share a little bit about the features that make your models really user-friendly and convenient. 

Broc TenHouten: Sure. So the thing that's allowing us to do this, there are two underlying technologies that we have.

One is active power management and what we're doing is we're monitoring how much power is being used by the building. And we know how much power the chargers are using. And what we do is if there's excess available capacity in the building, we shift that available power to a bank of chargers. And then within the bank of chargers, we don't specify a fixed amount of power for each charger how much capacity each one is reserved.

We are flexible about where we send the power. So we're not reserving power for a charger that Is in front of an empty space or has a gas car parked in front of it, or even an electric vehicle that's fully charged, we're only sending power to where it's needed. And that's the first technology. The second is our dynamic optimization.

And what we're doing there is we have the ability to determine what kind of vehicle is plugged in. And approximately what their state of charge is, how full their battery is. And based on that, coupled with the customer information and their historical use from the app, we know what their range requirements are.

And that allows us to, in an advanced way, prioritize which vehicles need to be charged first. So I know that if you know, a customer pulls up and they're already 90 percent charged and they typically don't leave until the next morning we can prioritize charging some of the other vehicles at a higher rate and make sure that they have the charge they need. 

Just to put a concrete example at this, we talked to a large tech company in the Bay area, and they put in a tremendous number of chargers at their location. And what they found was that even when they put in as many as they could by upgrading their circuit breaker panels, they couldn't put in more because they needed a service upgrade.

And there's a waiting list for that because local substations and transformers need to be upgraded by the utility in order to enable even more, but putting in as many as they could, there were still employees that had electric vehicles that weren't able to charge. And then they looked at the percent utilization over the day.

And they saw that the power was only 5 percent use. And so what was happening was people were driving 10 or 15 miles to work and then they were fully charged in a half hour or so. And then the car would just sit in front of the EV charging station all day long. And so their solution was they hired a valet service and we talked with this valet service and, and they would literally shuffle the cars all day and get the keys from the EV owners.

They would shuffle the EVs and what we're doing instead is we can install three times the number of charging stations and allow people to park in front of them. And then instead of shuffling the cars. Our systems are smart enough to do the same thing that the valet was doing, knowing how full the cars were typically when people leave if they go out to lunch and shuffle the power instead of shuffling vehicles.

Jeanne Gray: Well, that's amazing to go for such inconvenience, managing all those cars showing up at work and people jockeying around for power. Your client base, where are your, prime targets for these installations? 

We talked about apartment buildings. We talked about work locations is one more important or more ready than the others or are there just a lot of different locations that are ripe for your services.

Broc TenHouten: There's a lot of places that are great for it. And we've been focused on adding some apartment buildings. We already have agreements with some smaller OEMs and EV dealers. but really any sort of building, and we started with apartment buildings because there's a really high ratio of the number of parking spaces to the available power in the building.

It's similar in commercial buildings you know, office buildings, these kinds of places. But we just decided to start with apartment buildings. We got a tremendous response rate from them. 

It seemed like a good place to start. The system's also relevant for people's homes. The amount of value we add, if, if a home only has one charger is we do add some value, but it's relatively small where we start to shine for homeowners is if they want to have two charging stations.

The average American home has a 200 amp circuit breaker panel and each breaker for a home wall charger is 60 amps. So if you wanted to install two chargers, that's 120 amps. That's more than half your electrical panel. And most of us, the last time we've had to go reset a circuit breaker can remember that our panel is more than half full at home.

Almost nobody has room for 120 amps in their existing panel. And so with our system, you can share a crop, you know, a couple of chargers, three chargers, however many you need at your home, and they can intelligently shift the power around and charge multiple vehicles. And do it in a fast and efficient way and take into account power bills and time of use schedules to reduce your, costs of charging as well.

But the bigger thing that people care about is people don't want to stop watching Netflix with their significant other and walk downstairs and switch which vehicles are being charged. People would rather have a charger for every EV they've got every EV and hybrid. 

Jeanne Gray: It just seems to be a variety of solutions that make charging your car a lot easier and more convenient.

Let's step back a little bit. As far as you know, some of the entrepreneurs who listen are sizing up how they would go forward with their own ventures, especially tech ventures.

I assume you started with the whiteboard and brainstorming and, picking the brains of people that you knew had answers for your concept. How quickly did you go to a prototype? Did you allocate a certain amount of money just to get one done and use that as a vehicle, no pun intended to take you to the next level? 

Broc TenHouten: A lot of startups focus on creating this proof of concept and making something that shows off the tech so that they can attract more investment.

We've been successful at prior startups and because of that, we had some of our own money from those prior endeavors. We went forward with designing and developing exactly what we understood that the market wanted. You know, we, are industry experts. We've been in this area. We're users of EVs and these charging stations.

We also went out to customers to really make sure we were making what they wanted as we were developing and setting our specs, but we didn't do this interim step of making a product that's only useful for them raising more money. We went straight to making a production quality system that has real technology in it and filing patents around that.

That was our first step. And I would recommend that, so far as it is possible for founders to go straight to real hardware as opposed to making this interim step and, then having to re-spin and redo everything, it's definitely a better way to go. 

Jeanne Gray: Definitely. It sounds like your depth of industry experience jumpstarted the venture. I guess that also works to your advantage as far as sourcing the manufacturing. Is this something being done, domestically, and you're doing it in limited runs to get through the pilot? 

Broc TenHouten: No, we, we went straight to our production partner. We went to someone we've been working with on other things for eight years, they don't make any charging stations, but they make high quality devices for both and systems for automotive and medical.

And they are manufacturing partner on this and we have no need to own our own manufacturing facility. There's a lot of money available for that, for people to build new manufacturing facilities in the U S bu that seemed like something that wasn't really necessary.

Our core competency is in designing better systems and products. And it just made sense to work with a contract manufacturer. They can only produce it for us. And it's our system and then we deliver it and manage it and, take care of all the software that's associated with it.

Jeanne Gray: It sounds like your prior experience changes the narrative when it comes to approaching investors. I guess the couple of basic questions are your targeted investors? In the industry? and, what do you define  as a really good investor for your company?

Broc TenHouten: When we went out and did the pre-seed raise after we'd put in our own money and, started to spool things up.

We were really lucky to have Plug and Play lead the round. They were an early investor in Google an a great group and really supportive. And then we also did the Tech Stars accelerator program and, that was a lot of fun and we learned quite a bit in there it was great program as well and great to have them on our cap table. 
We also had some notable angels come in including a couple of strategics. One of our customers is an online used EV dealer and one of their principals invested in that round as well and an apartment building owner that owns buildings around USC also came into the round.

It was great having those people that were customer voices in the cap table with us to help guide us and understand exactly what's important to them and that was really what we focused on for that. And now we're going to be going out for a larger seed round.

We're capital light and it's great to have people that understand the space and can think about the space. And add value and, really understand where we're coming from without us having to set the table in the context for them whenever possible.

Jeanne Gray: Can you share a little bit about the use of projections, especially since you have all the prior experience? A first-time entrepreneur often struggles with what's the purpose of projections since so much of it is sort of loosey goosey in the first two to three years. How did you think about it when you were first an entrepreneur and how do you do it in your current venture that maybe applies that experience?

Broc TenHouten: I think that there's a lot of people that are great at modeling and, obviously there's people that are better at modeling than I am. But the main thing to keep in mind when you're building your first financial models is that you're not trying to create a projection of what you wish would happen, but you're trying to figure out what the right approach for the business is.

So focus on what are your options in how you're going to build the company and what's the financial result of those different options of how you build the company then focus on the places where that makes sense. You should be using your financial model, not just as a tool for explaining to investors that this is going to be successful, but rather to help yourself figure out how to best build the business.

And if you are trying to use the model as something to think critically about the  profitability of the product and how attractive it is to customers and how many people in different areas you'll need in order to execute the business. Then the model will start to come together as, as you flush out all those details.

Jeanne Gray: How important is the CFO in a tech startup as far as, bringing someone on the team right away, or just tapping into someone in the local talent pool who's got some experience as a CFO with tech startups? 

Broc TenHouten: Yeah, I think that being able to articulate a business plan mathematically and figure out the model is important.

If you don't have someone in the company that can do that, you need to add someone that can. And there needs to be a financially literate person in a business to make sure you're building a solid plan and that it makes sense. That in the long run, you have a business that's going to sustain itself.

And there's zero value in being the greenest company in bankruptcy. 

Jeanne Gray: I agree with that so as far as milestones, which is part of, you know, creating the financials and getting a handle on how well an entrepreneur can deliver on their projections or on their vision. what are some of the milestones that, you put for yourself with your brother, Dave?

Broc TenHouten: Our, milestones with the last funding we had were to get through hard tooling and have a hard tool unit and then also to get the supply chain and manufacturing all setup and then finally deliver the first pilot units to customers.

Customers were actually going to be using the systems in the field. And we achieved all three of those milestones. Those were the big ones. Our next set of milestones going forward that we plan to accomplish with the next round of funding are to complete UL which will happen this year and then to start ramping up volume in Q1.

And then deliver 3 million in revenue in 2025 which is a modest amount of money, but it creates a good footing for the company to build from and proof of the value of the product to the customers. A place to ramp from. 

Jeanne Gray: Now, clearly your experiences is shining through and that a lot of the headaches that a first-time entrepreneur you're bypassing, you're leaping over.

So kind of take a view of, especially on the supply side with a tech startup, and maybe you have to go back to your prior ventures. How do you choose or set up a supplier relationship? If you're not in that particular space, you know, there are a lot of visionary entrepreneurs who are marketers or sales, but they don't have a techie or they go find a techie, but they still have to find the manufacturer.

What kind of process is that for a first time entrepreneur? 

Broc TenHouten: Yeah, I would say that setting up that relationship and starting that manufacturing relationship with a contract manufacturer or the plan to build your own plant if you're in a space where that's required that needs to be done early and it needs to be done at the stage that you're developing the hardware or you're going to wind up making big mistakes in the development of the systems.

Things need to be designed with manufacturing in mind and cost in mind, and that often doesn't happen if you don't start those relationships early. And you need to have team members who understand manufacturing, understand design for manufacturing, and then you need to work closely with the manufacturer and the supply chain to make sure that you're watching your costs and understanding what the cost and robustness of the system going to be. 

The companies that carry manufacturing or design for manufacturing debt forward into their company, they often wind up having a very large gap between having functioning units in the lab and having units that they're able to deliver to customers.  That can create a time in which a company can run out of money, so it's worthwhile making sure that manufacturing is sorted. 

Jeanne Gray: And to expect or build into the model the delays and representing too tight a schedule to investors puts you in a corner at the get go.

Would you say that's the other hurdles? 

Broc TenHouten: Oh, absolutely. Having too tight a schedule can create disappointment in the startup in the investors in the startup but the bigger one is this, functional area debt where people are ignoring a piece of their business that has a very long lead time.

It can often be very difficult to burn down those long lead times. Testing is one manufacturing is another, supply chain and delivery, and customer support. These are things that you need to start developing early and you don't have to hire a whole person to do every one of those things.

But you need to start the partnerships and the relationships and figure out the whole plan from the start. So that you don't get all the other functional areas done and then all of a sudden you have one thing that becomes the long pole in the tent and stops you from being able to deliver. 

Jeanne Gray: Is the sales cycle part of that as well? Because you're in the pilot phase, but now you're going to go and land customers, but you're talking to a client base that might be slow in gaining all the necessary approvals. 

How did you think that through as far as you were saying $3 million in 2025. Did you come up with an estimate of how long it takes to close some of these clients? 

Broc TenHouten: Absolutely. And, some customer types are much faster, but the apartment buildings are typically on a slower process. They've got a longer term view of profitability and value creation. So they're not in a rush to get things in a day and they make sound decisions that they think through. We just need to be sensitive to that. The customer sales cycle, you can start talking to them early, but it's difficult to sell things well in advance of being able to deliver them just because of customer expectations.

That can be a difficult one to reduce the lead time of and for us we waited until we had a product that we could show and that we were confident in before we went out and started talking with the apartment buildings.

But by talking to apartment building owners in advance when we were developing the product and making sure that we were doing something that was interesting for that category of customer that reduced the risk because the real risk is not just the time it takes to complete the sales, but the potential that what you've made is not aligned with what the customers want. 

Jeanne Gray: So how do you build in for that particular disconnect? 

Broc TenHouten: You need to talk to those customers in advance while you're developing the product, make sure you're making the right thing, test those specs with them, find out if they will pay for that and they're interested in it.

There's plenty of startups that made a great product and developed something that functioned well and created a product manufacturing plan, but then it turns out that they didn't have customers for that product that they made.

You really need to have someone that's focused on product early. And not, just on engineering and, and development of specs, but rather that there is a market fit for the product. And so if you do that in advance, then the sales cycle is just a delay rather than a time where you're finding out whether or not the market is going to be interested in what you've made.

Jeanne Gray: How much remains in the marketplace for getting both your clients, but also the general public to be better educated about where the technology is at hand, as opposed to where it was three, five or seven years ago? There's a certain amount of momentum that helps startups knowing their product is now seen in demand more.

So where's the general education about the EV space now? 

Broc TenHouten: Well for the overall EV space we've seen tremendous growth and and the sales of EVs, whether they're growing or stable, it's a large number of vehicles being introduced into the US every year. Every year the EVs that are being sold are replacing 20 year old vehicles that are coming off the road.

Over the next 20 years, now that we're selling large numbers of EVs, whether EV sales keep growing, like I suspect, or, you know, stay flat or even decline a little bit. Heck, even if they fell in half, which I don't think is going to happen, half a million vehicles a year would be added every year.

And there's not enough charging infrastructure, even for the vehicles today, right? That 32 percent of EV owners today don't have charging stations at home means that it's already a problem. And this problem only gets worse as electric vehicles become less expensive and the used market for EVs grows and those cars are less expensive.

If you're buying a $15,000 used electric vehicle, the idea of spending 6, 000 to put in a charging station your home is absurd, right? You can't have the charger cost a third of what your vehicle costs and as we are getting EVs in those less expensive places, apartment buildings, this becomes a real problem.

Electric vehicles can't only be something for rich people with mansions that have no problem putting the chargers in and, can afford the brand new nicest EVs. we want everyone to be able to participate in this. EVs are more cost effective to operate and it's a better solution and they're better vehicles.

And so everyone should have access to that and charging for that. And so that's, what we're really interested in. And we've created a solution that addresses that main problem for charging stations today. 

Jeanne Gray: My last question is about venture capital. I've heard that venture capitalists love to invest in a startup that's part of a wave.

And so would you describe the EV industry and charging stations as, as part of a wave? 

Broc TenHouten: It's mixed on that one. It's an enormous market, residential electric vehicle charging alone is a 16 billion market growing at over a 30 percent compound annual growth rate.

This is an enormous market, but what's interesting about it is how many competitors there are in the space making products that all look the same and don't have any real technology in them and it's very unusual that you would have an industry that's only 15 years old where the products and the technology is completely stale.

Stepping into that we weren't interested in creating another marketing company and a sales company that just sells products that are the same as everyone else's. Even though there's tailwinds and companies that do just that can make a lot of money. 

What we wanted to do was something to help that 32 percent of people that don't have chargers and support apartment buildings and having enough chargers and we've got a better solution. 

There's a couple other small companies out there that are trying something new as well. Our technology is more advanced than what, what anyone else is pursuing out there. 

Definitely the big incumbents you've seen their difficulties in the media and it's because they're not addressing the needs of the customer. They've made something that's not very high tech and then they've tried to expand into a growing market by a focus on marketing and sales. It's worked for them until we reach a point where more and more electric vehicles are coming on and this problem of available infrastructure becomes more pronounced and it's only going to become more and more of a challenge. 

Jeanne Gray: It seems inconvenience is a major pain point for the general public as to how to use EVs in their lifestyle. it sounds like you have hit so many of their pain points in your one product and service. 

I think you've got a great story. Thank you for coming on Experience Voices, Broc, and sharing it with us. I am going to be really curious to hear as you move out of the pilot phase some of your early successes and the milestones you'll pass. So thanks again for coming on experience voices.

Broc TenHouten: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on. It's been great to be a part of your show and, you know, look forward to catching up with you as we advance as well. 

Jeanne Gray: You have been listening to the podcast series, Experienced Voices. To hear more and subscribe, visit americanentrepreneurship. com forward slash podcast, where you will also find a form for listener feedback.