The Framing Effects of our Days

The framing effect is a cognitive bias where people react differently to the same information depending on how it’s presented or “framed.” The classic example: people respond more positively to “90% survival rate” than “10% mortality rate” - even though these describe identical outcomes. The framing (positive vs. negative) influences decision-making and perception.

I’ve been thinking that framing effect is all over our work:

First, there’s Local Law 97 itself, which is structured around a fine - the benefit of action is that you don’t have to pay this fine, you don’t have to give up something that’s already yours. The cost of inaction is that you’ll end up having to pay this fine, your money that’s going to be taxed. A lot of the work we’re doing is in this format of motivating action on behalf of owners by imposing a fine. And it’s not just loss aversion - it’s the fact that this is your money, not that the government is going to give you a bonus. It’s going to take money away from you.

Then there is how framing effect plays into how we think about the work we’re doing. As François keeps reminding us, we often pass over the wins because we have so many challenges ahead of us. But there are things we’re doing well:

• Our financial operations are excellent - every accountant and financial adviser we’ve contracted for annual review has said we’re so tight that several have suggested we knock off doing these reviews for the time being because it’s costing us money and they don’t think there’s much value-add!
• Our SOC 2 auditor has said we’re pounding through the process at a tremendous rate where many organizations would struggle, and we’ve got processes in place to get important compliance hurdles out of the way with minimal disruption to normal day-to-day.
• And in the Laravel developer interviews, I’m realizing the degree to which we are more disciplined than the average bear. People aren’t used to thinking about architecture as deeply as we have been, nor do they have a focus on testing discipline. Even though we’ve been focused on shipping features, we’ve managed to build a pretty sophisticated code base!

In light of the near-term hiring, I’d like to propose addressing framing effect directly by changing our hiring interview evaluation process to combat confirmation bias. In addition to the format of doing bottom line assessment and then one paragraph justification, I’d like the justification to include two additional prompts:

1. Why might this person succeed at Cadence?
2. What challenges might this person need to overcome at Cadence? That way we balance out the perspective - we think about what are this person’s dings, but we’re not overly focused on them, and we give our thought processes space to say, how can we imagine this person succeeding in our environment?

Metrics

Traction

• Unique Buildings: 10,857 (Sep, +1,638 MoM)
• Annual Run Rate: $1.5M

Financials

• Monthly net burn (accrual basis): $68,532 (+7.7% MoM)
• Year-to-last-month net burn (cash basis): $59,232 (+8% MoM)
• 2025 Transaction fees to date: $38,658
• Outstanding invoices as of today: $273,133

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): 3, 1 of which is getting closed with Rel 105 this week

Last Week’s Highs and Lows

• Lets not jinx it, but the SOC 2 auditor visit has been going really well: it sometimes felt like the auditor struggled to use the time assigned to each session, and they told me we’re way ahead of schedule. Kudos to the team for their hard work in preparing for this, and in particular to Reuben. Bonus note: the SOC 2 certification keeps on paying off during discussions with potential customers! (FH)
• The team is hitting a groove with Rel 105, and I think a world where we have less stressful sprints is coming. (JB)
• Urban Green gala and alignment with key local policy folks there. Having drinks with all of our friends past my bedtime was hardly working, I know…. But there is also only so much screaming into a void that one small org can do… and I am hopeful of how key partnerships and relationships from this crowd will help us be part of something much bigger (not a scalable approach for other markets, but a worthwhile hack for NYC) - (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?

François’ List

(repeats with tweaks)

• NYSERDA BDP: while the project we were contracted for is going well, we’re still managing our customer’s expectations to steer clear of ad hoc consulting on unvetted datasets internal to NYSERDA, while the scope of the contract is to deliver tooling on subscription. A pattern I’m concerned about: a lot of things we do are really hard (e.g. picking the best possible data from datasources that disagree with each other), in ways that aren’t immediately obvious to outsiders or newcomers to a project.
• Growing the team: three month to NYCA first deliverables mean we need to be efficient at onboarding and leveraging new talent. With a few folks about to onboard soon (fingers crossed), we’ll need to dust off our onboarding playbook, and learn from lessons learned: tight pairing, accurate casting on the right tickets/projects, regular evaluations, quick decisions.
• 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.

Bomee’s List

• Getting Marc a product he can sell We need Marc to be confident that we can make things he can sell, and I think a big contributor to that is taming our sprint / release practices. I think we’re making progress there. What do the rest of y’all think?
• Team dynamics Maybe it’s because we’ve been doing a lot of 360s recently, but I feel like there is a lot of communication going on – another positive trend! Let’s no one disappear into any caves!
• Planning for growth on the team We’re welcoming 4!! new folks shortly – data engineer, devops, and two Laravel devs. Whoot!
• NYCA, ConEd Recompete and HPD Don’t want to count the chicks before they’re hatched, but they are SOOOO close to hatching
• Uptake of AI tools - I love AI. I’d like to see more of how folks are using them.
• Cash. We have deployed about half our cash in hand and have 16 months of runway.
• Over-all architecture We have started to refactor per DDD - I think when we start to really see the benefits in terms of ease of testing etc, that will be when we really know it’s worth it (but I am all in).

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 Willdan got a 1-year extension–I hope we can better integrate with them over this next year to keep ConEd happy.
• 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.

Erika’s List

Can’t stop thinking about:

• Budget and cash management - we’re doing okay and have implemented a process to track spend more closely (13-week cash flow) 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, still need to make sure the budget and how we are spending is clear for all to understand and make decisions from.
• Hiring Process - ensuring new hires have everything they need to hit the ground running from an admin perspective as well as expectations of their work onboarding. Also want to make sure that new hires and the team are aligned on what makes for a successful transition and how we account for a successful transition.

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?

New:

• Mamdani!!! Wants to do something biggish and boldish with building decarb… NYC bulk buying window heat pumps has been floated. With a new wave of people in city government… how do we stay relevant and also exert our influence to set up any city scale program for success?

On Deck for This Week

• Onboarding new folks! Great to have help, and very much looking forward to replicating the backend team’s successes with onboarding

• Building clear understanding of what is the happy path (vs happy highway). We have 5 releases left in the year!

• I’m presenting results from CFHF at the NESEA BENYC conference this week! It’s great to have results to share, and it’s usually a good conference. (JB)

• Quarterly reporting and budget updates

• Meeting with CPC Climate Capital to update them on our national analysis and (hopefully) introduce Momentum as a useful tool for evaluating projects in different geographies (MZ)

• Post Climate Week Nerdfest Meetings with NYSERDA (Michael Reed) and the NYC Office of Management and Budget to continue to stay ahead of policy developments (MZ)

• Better defining requirements and closing out Jeremy’s “Hat Sorter” project (MZ)

• Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

Upcoming Release

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