Walking the Walk

Last week, Erica led us in a conversation about our values, and I wanted to share some thoughts about situations when our values are truly tested. Recently, we’ve faced situations that tested us in each of these ways, and we had to examine what it means to be a company that walks the walk:

First, when there’s a potential disconnect between the interest of the company and an individual. These are moments when we have to make decisions as a company that affect people in relatively less powerful positions. Without choice, values don’t matter - sticking to our values requires having the option not to.

Second, when our values come into tension with each other in a specific situation. How do we navigate when the right path isn’t clear because multiple values we hold dear seem to conflict?

Third, when our values conflict with comfort - the things we do habitually or the conventional ways of doing business. When the easy path is to do what everyone else does or what we’ve always done, but our values suggest a different approach.

Though our values are communally adopted, walking the walk is personal. Whether our values are held tightly is put to the test when feelings like fear or greed kick in our reptile brains, or when our sense of self is challenged (“Am I the kind of person who….”). So my thought for the moment in what helps when a conflict arises is to remember that we are each a powerful person. The cowering reptile can STFU.

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: $177,333

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 6

Last Week’s Highs and Lows

• I onboarded the Willdan and KC3 folks for projects feature and they can start using it! And we’re very close to the pushing out the contractor side of it as well. (JB)
• Naina and I visited a NYCHA complex Monday morning. It was both comforting and disheartening to see building conditions the same way I remember them–with live steam pouring out and fogging up my glasses. (JB)
• After being pretty hands-off for a few months, NYSERDA is coming up with more direction for the Building Data Platform, focusing on themes of data quality and transparency over features. We’re expecting a new Product Requirements Document imminently. (FH)
• Interesting market feedback from manufacturers led by Daniel on how they are trying to go to market which relates to RFP bidding feature set (MZ)
• Very insightful conversation with Aurora Energy Advisors on how they can best use Momentum this fall to triage their 1000 - 1500 building portfolio for the best decarb project opportunities (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

Carryover with updates:

• Hiring Process - 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.
• Budget through the end of the year and thinking about next year for hiring and operating expenses. Also, making sure the budget and how we are spending 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.

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?
• Continuing 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 flywheel so that our customers experience every project making the next one easier and we deepen our moat?

Update:

• Process orchestration Listened to a podcast over the weekend that discussed process orchestration with AI. What tasks should be done by AI, what tasks should be done by AI + humans and what tasks should be done by humans? I don’t have as much of a handle on this for our development work… but this framework has gotten me thinking about how Momentum fits into the wider industry. Where and how can we disrupt things? And where and how can we be disrupted?

On Deck for This Week

• Eligible employees - make your healthcare elections in Justworks by Thursday Sep 25! If you do not make an election, your coverage will end on Friday Oct 31. (EP)

• Working on some policy refreshes this week - some for the handbook and some for employees. The employee policy refreshes will be discussed in Friday’s brownbag on security and will require everyone’s signature in Justworks. (EP)

• SOC-2 season is upon us. Expect meetings and deep dives ahead of site visits from our auditors. (FH)

• First Service Energy Momentum decarb plan review (FSE is the owners rep of largest property manager in NYC / North America)

• Con Ed Electric Grid RFP Forecasting interview (MZ)

• Climate Week Nerdfest (MZ)

• Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

Upcoming Release

• Contractor portion of projects/RFPs, including email notifications
• Adding an external key to buildings–starting with Viewpoint ID to support the ConEd program projects

Please Leave Feedback

Please note your reaction to this update in the Slack channel. It helps us to know what is resonating, what is unclear, etc. Thanks!

• What are your highlights / low-lights?
• Did we miss a highlight? Something else you want to react to?