People Power

September 12, 2025

Yes AI is going to be a super boost to our work, but there is of course no substitute for great people.
I feel very fortunate to be a part of an organization with such a talented and committed group of folks.
And as we look to scale… I am beyond thrilled that Jon Braman has accepted an offer to start at Cadence as our “Customer and Industry Relations Lead”.
More on Jon’s 18 years of experience below. Excited about how Jon can help us deepen and broaden our market engagement. As a bonus, we also think he can help us work more closely with BrightPower. * And I looking forward to seeing the queue on Friday brown bags grow with more new folks to further accelerate our development efforts.

www.brightpower.com/leadership/?bio=Jon%20Braman

(this is MZ’s first stab at title language for these weeklies… Bomee needed a break… and I will pitch in more going forward)

Metrics

Traction

Unique Buildings: 9,219 (+1,502 MoM)
Annual Run Rate: $1.6M

Financials

Monthly net burn (accrual basis): $56,996, +32.9% MoM
Year-to-last-month net burn (cash basis): $60,959, -10.35% MoM
2025 Transaction fees to date: $32,511
Outstanding invoices as of today: $274,484

Development

Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 3

Last Week’s Highs and Lows

Naina, Robin, and I escaped the room with no hints and ~6 minutes to spare! (JB)
Bomee and I brainstormed the program admin/user registration workflow that we need for NYCA. She turned that discussion into several tickets, which I’m now reviewing. (JB)
The Friday Brownbag was a fun and informative way to shed light on the players and processes involved in the historical CPC program support. Kudos to Jeremy for organizing and leading this. (FH)
I put Momentum through its paces to develop decarb scopes for a test group of 50 buildings in the Douglass Elliman portfolio – the 3rd largest property manager in NYC. Based on this developed a standardized, rule based process for an owners rep partner (Aurora Energy Advisors) to approach developing decarb plans for the other 80% of the portfolio (MZ)

Any missing highlights? Please share in Slack comments.

Crow’s Nest

Looking out for icebergs: What are the risks on the horizon that we’re watching for and navigating around?

Jason’s List

Carryovers:

Improving clarity around our roadmap and prioritization process–I really want/need to put more time into this.
How will the ConEd MFEEP/AMEEP program pilot go? I’m eager to get actual folks using this new workflow!
We need to move faster, and I hope we can grow the team and integrate more people quickly and smoothly!
We’ve increased our feature set quite a bit lately, and it’s going to continue growing for some time. How can we scale our our testing to keep pace?
AI Document Scraping–will this make it easier for users to find value?
~~Local~~ politics There’s still a lot that could happen between now and the general election in November. At this point, it’s not just local; the boundaries are blurring, and none of it’s good.
NYC Accelerator We have a lot of build for this–and we need to pave the happiest of paths first before exploring the foliage along the sides.
ConEd Recompete Still waiting for news
Portfolio/program reporting I think aggregating results across buildings is one of the key selling points of our software as compared to a traditional energy audit report. Metabase looks pretty promising, and I know we need bulk calculations as well. Many of our clients will want some version of this, so we need to find the commonalities to avoid building custom features.

François’ List

(repeats with tweaks)

Lego sets, not Playmobils: we’re chasing multiple deadlines for a variety of customers. Sometimes we’ll have to build a custom one-off (Playmobil) for the sake of expediency, but let’s go after Lego sets when we can, trying to anticipate on user needs that are around the corner. We are learning from CPC -> Generic Project ; BKB -> BDP to build datasets, APIs, and UI components that can scale with us.
Defining the contours of back-end as a product: the NYSERDA Building Data Platform (BDP) initiative, the recent L+M analysis work, E3 research for ConEd, HPD, individual users loading large (~2000) lists of buildings, and other opportunities ahead of us have common themes of enabling analysis on large groups of buildings, with data integration and processing at their core. Should we turn this into a product we sell, or are we OK making it a service we offer tactically?
Making our Code Base more welcoming: staffing is hard, making new folks successful quickly is not easy either. One of the major wins I’m hoping to get from outside senior help (Laravel architect, Senior data engineer, etc) is to help define structures that make it easier for new folks with different profiles to be productive faster and safer.
Growing the team: the NYCA news further raises the priority of onboarding the right talent to help us deliver quickly from data processing to front-end. We’re making progress identifying places where we need the most help, we have a candidate pipeline for data processing and a Laravel architect helping us - but are we ready to welcome new folks and help them be productive?

Erika’s List

Hiring Process has been on the list - how we will bring people in and ensure they have everything they need and that new hires and the team are aligned on what makes for a successful transition and how we account for a successful transition. I also want to add onboarding back in and making sure that is clear and streamlined. Going through a couple of onboardings the past two weeks has shown there are additional ways to better communicate the process and what could be the early flags that could take the process off course (e.g. non-responsiveness) and what that could mean for the onboarding.

Marc’s List (carry-over)

Execution We are the dog that caught the car with NYCA and other stuff brewing. Stakes of everything we do will be increasingly high. So many eyes will be on us. How do we best expand the team?
Continuting to stay ahead of the curve that is turning into a hockey stick How much of scope builder will be able to be recreated by an AI native start up in the mid term? What are we doing to build the flyseheel so that our customers experience every project making the next one easier and we deepen our moat?

From last week:

Budget through the end of the year and thinking about next year for hiring and operating expenses. Also, making sure it is clear for all to understand and make decisions from.
Getting paid on time or at least on a schedule that is more closely aligned with our needs. Our customers have been pretty consistent the past year but lately I have had to do a lot of follow-up for amounts big and small and it’s impacting the money we have in the bank.

On Deck for This Week

Soft launch of the projects pilot with Willdan and KC3 users is schedule for this Wednesday! I’m very excited to finally get folks using this feature. (JB)
I’m taking Naina to see a NYCHA complex Monday morning, thanks to our friend Tom Sahagian. I’m glad she’ll get to see some buildings and system IRL before she flies back to the UK. (JB)
Finalizing a monthly reporting format for our budget and financial position (EP)
Momentum decarb scopes development for First Service Energy (owners rep subsdidiary of the largest property manager in nyc) – will follow the above Douglas Elliman playbook (MZ)
Prepping for a Climate Week event we are leading next week with NYSERDA (MZ)
Prepping for a Con Ed grid infrastructure interview RFP next week (MZ)
Talking to a bunch of manufacturers with Daniel to document their customer acquistion process so we can better understand how bidding features ultimately tie into their model (MZ)

Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

Upcoming Release

Sharing projects with owners
Email notifications related to projects
Adding an external key to buildings–starting with Viewpoint ID to support the ConEd program projects

Please Leave Feedback

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Did we miss a highlight? Something else you want to react to?