NY Climate Week

Well, another NY Climate Week is behind us! Climate Week has gotten rather much lately, with too many events to indulge – this year, I was very choosy about which to attend, which meant I spent most of my time with people in our immediate orbit. Out of those handful of events, the one that put me in the best mood about our work was an event at Building Energy Exchange where the USGBC and ASHRAE “Strategic Decarbonization Plan” was presented by our friends Laurie Kerr, Laura Spencer Humphrey, and Adam Hinge. The take-away was “everyone should be doing 5-year plans!” I could not agree more! Let’s help make that the standard practice!

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: $33,879
• Outstanding invoices as of today: $158,733

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 7, but 1 will be closed with next week’s release

Last Week’s Highs and Lows

• The projects feature is all-but there! We’re going to start training contractors on it next week! (JB)
• Naina analyzed ~20 projects of CFHF cost data; it’s great to start seeing the trends. (JB)
• We selected a contractor to help us with data engineering for NYSERDA’s Building Data Platform. (FH)
• Great feedback from our customer First Service Energy (the energy services subsidiary of the largest property manager in NYC and in the US) on a systematic process for them to use to develope decarb plans with Momentum this fall. + initial discussions of their need for Momentum in Boston, DC and Colorado (markets that all have exisitng Building Performance Standards like Local Law 97) (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?

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?
• Process orchestration 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?

Erika’s List

Carry-over with updates:

• Budget through the end of the year and looking ahead to next year for hiring and operating expenses. We’re trying to track our expenses closely from a cash management perspective and as we grow, it’s important to keep an eye not only on what is being spent, but emerging trends and events that impact our bottom line. Also, while updating the metrics, 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. This dovetails with overall cash management as well. Also would add the time to close agreements because we cannot get paid or put those amounts due on our books until an agreement is signed. How can we get these closed faster and for the government-related agreements, get through the process more efficiently (it really just means keeping me in the loop and my staying on top of folks but I need to know).
• 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.

On Deck for This Week

• Training contractors on the new projects flow! I’m excited for them to use this. (JB)
• Marc, Bomee, François, and I will be discussing a GTM strategy with NYCA as given. I think this is critical to informing product development. (JB)
• Continuation of SOC-2 preparation-related activities, leading to the auditor “virtual visit” the week of October 6th (FH)
• Meeting on Monday wih the Association for Energy Affordability to show them the bidding features and get them excited about working more closely with us (MZ)
• Re-engagement with CPC Climate Capital on data analysis we are doing for them so they can pick 3-4 markets across the country to roll out their green loan product (MZ)
• Kicking of Q3 close of our books and look-ahead to Q4 and where we will find ourselves at year-end (EP)

• 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
• Some fixes for team_scoped_buildings feature (almost there) and miscellaneous BuildSci improvements

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?