Argumentation without arguments

Disagreements are healthy. Whether about process or code or culture, they help us be better collectively. Arguments, on the other hand, are less about solutions than about feeling respected. We do a lot around here so that everyone can have confidence that we as a company and as people respect each other as human beings. So when we’re discussing something, hopefully, our baseline understanding that we are respected can free us from having arguments while engaging in argumentation.

Here are some tell-tale signs that we might be moving from argumentation to just having an argument:

• The discussion veers off from finding a “safe to try” solution
• You feel the annoyance kicking in and your claws are coming out. You know this feeling.
• People involved have stopped asking questions that seek to understand “but, why?” and instead are building counterarguments “but, no”
• The “opposing” point of view isn’t helping you see the question in front of you with more nuance

Here are tips (filtered through the Asbergers) for getting back on track:

• Notice if your body is going into fight or flight and take a breather. It’s ok to pause the discussion and come back to it. No one is dying on any tables around here.
• Remind yourself and others that the goal is to get to a “safe to try” path
• Remember that the best condition for getting to understanding is if each person is trying harder to HEAR the other person’s point of view than to explain their own

I’d love to hear what your tips are for staying in the argumentation lane!

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: $262,618 (-2.56% WoW)

Development

• Bug Count (P-0 and P-1): Just one!

Last Week’s Highs and Lows

• I don’t know if this a high or a low, but we had another back-and-forth with the lawyers about NYCA contract. It sort of felt like we might be almost done with the reviews now… (BJ) I’m concerned about the tangle of legalese requirements that it seems like NYCA is trying to impose on us. We’re good on SOC 2, but they have a laundry list of certifications that seem overkill. (FH)
• High confidence in us from our customers! Not only that the Related Co’s C-Suite loved the work Marc did, but also that Ke completely gets where we’re coming from.
• I had a great time at the NEEP conference, meeting some new folks and learning about what other programs and states are doing to try and help electrification happen more quickly. One highlight was learning about how MA is rolling out a heat pump-specific electric rate for single family homes. (JB)
• LLMs won’t replace the need for solid data for a range of ML-powered tasks. Robin’s deep dives into external (public and private) data sets that seek to aggregate building information from multiple sources are not only helpful to understand the data landscape, but they also make me feel that we have something special in our own Building Knowledge Base (BKB). (FH)
• I did some live Momentum demos at a conference for NYC co-op board members and was able to respond to questions about specific buildings in real time by leveraging Momentum – I know a lot of work has gone into product to get to this point! (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

There have been too many things on my watch list, so I’m trimming it down a bit:

• Improving clarity around our roadmap and prioritization process–I really want/need to put more time into this.
• We may have won some minds, and we’re winning some wallets, but will we win their fingers? Which users will actually use our software instead of just looking for the outputs and expecting consultant-style service?
• What is our moat in a world and industry where data wants to be free, especially when some of our largest customers are city and state agencies?
• Politics Local is looking better, but national is really scary.

Erika’s List

Carryover plus one more:

• 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. Right now, the main trend that has emerged this second half of the year is that our accounts receivables (what we invoice) are being paid eventually, which means not on time. It is important that we collect payments in a timely manner and that our customers are conditioned to pay us on time for a few reasons: (1) our predictability in cash flow and (2) in the event of an audit or if we were raising a later round such as a series A, the length of outstanding payments would reflect negatively on us and our ability to collect. The time to fix this is now.
• Onboarding - also okay but there are still a couple of kinks to work out to make sure all hires (contractors and permanent employees)are aware of what is expected of them during the onboarding and their time with the company. Extending 15 minute onboarding calls to all should help along with the checklist for everyone and not just FTE and PTE. I will also need to be clear on what the expectations and timelines are for new hires sooner.

François’ List

• Getting ready for more traffic/scrutiny: we clarified last week that we don’t expect NYCA to trigger sudden surges of traffic in December, so load testing is dropping off a bit in our list of priorities. We still need to prepare for more scrutiny and a lot more traffic than we’ve been used to. Time to sharpen our load testing skills, and check that Fly.io can deliver on its auto-scaling promises, before we find out from real users.
• 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.

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?
• 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?

Bomee’s List

• Product development process for NYCA, ConEd Recompete and HPD Don’t want to count the chicks before they’re hatched, but they are SOOOO close to hatching
• 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!
• 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.

On Deck for This Week

• Chuck and I are headed to the Live Wire conference in Buffalo NY this week!
• I’ll be joining part 2 of the AI doc parser kickoff. I’m excited for this feature to help make our software easier for users to engage with. (JB)
• I’m attending Decarbonization Game Night at BE-Ex on Tuesday. (JB)
• I’ll be at ConEd’s annual contractor meeting on Thursday, so I’ll get to see a lot of those users in person. (JB)
• 2026 Operating Budget - we’re ready to look ahead to next year and will have a draft this week (EP)
• Attending a real estate conference and meeting with Presdient of FS Energy, one of our critical owners rep customers on Monday about where we take things in 2026 with them (MZ)

• Here’s what’s on the Company Radar

Upcoming Release

107 is

• SSO (public)
• Program admin infrastructure
• Parameterizable PTHP + Window Heat Pump measures

108 is

• Team and Program permissions

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?