This Founder is Fixing Climate Tech's Paperwork Problem
A Q&A with Jeff Coleman, CEO & Co-Founder of Eli Technologies
This episode originally aired on June 2, 2026. Watch the full episode on YouTube here.
In 2025, renewables hit a historic milestone: they surpassed coal as the world’s largest source of electricity for the first time ever.
So you’d think it should be getting easier to choose clean energy for your own home. It isn’t - at least, not at the rate the climate crisis demands.
The culprit: paperwork.
Say your water heater breaks. You gotta call a plumber. In theory, there’s a rebate program that would help you swap it for a heat pump, a clean alternative solution. But the paperwork to get that rebate is so long and complicated that the plumber doesn’t want to deal with it, the rebate check takes two whole months to arrive, so the plumber just installs another gas heater, because that’s the path of least resistance.
Jeff Coleman started Eli to make it frictionless to get through all that paperwork for all kinds of clean energy programs that can help make these options more affordable and widespread. Eli pays contractors faster than rebate programs and replaces the endless paperwork with software that speeds up the process.
My conversation with Jeff is about the “boring” middle layer that’s causing all this friction in electrification, and our conversation is anything but.
Welcome to Future in Bloom.
Steph Speirs
Thank you so much, Jeff, for joining us for this podcast in a park. You have worked in energy for a while in various capacities, from public policy to nonprofits, to now running your own startup.
And we talk about what it takes to build climate technologies a lot, but really, adoption is what can make or break companies. So, can you tell us a little bit about your journey to Eli, and how you started, and what you do now?
Jeff Coleman
Yeah, sure. So I started with a career in startups that had nothing to do with energy, really, that were sort of an outgrowth of my time working in politics on the Obama campaign and a few other things. I started out looking at technology, like, how do we move people in the real world to do the thing we want them to do? How do we build technology that can aid in that? And I first did that in the context of campaigns and advocacy and things like that. I moved over into the energy world to lead programs at a nonprofit called Grid Alternatives that put solar on multifamily and single-family affordable housing. So, working with low and moderate-income communities to put free solar on their roof.
And what led to me founding Eli was that in my time working in those types of programs, I learned over the first year and a half or so that the cost of finding a qualified site to build the solar and give it away for free was actually more than it cost to acquire a paying customer for a company like Sunrun. And so essentially between the sort of administrative friction on the government and utility side, to just the costs associated with going out, getting people to fill out all kinds of paperwork, and figure out who’s qualified, and verify their income, and verify the equipment, all of that added up to eating half of the money that we were spending trying to decarbonize the built environment on just paper friction.
Steph Speirs
So okay, explain to us, just take us back, summarize in a couple sentences what Eli does.
Jeff Coleman
Eli is building a sort of automation layer to get rid of a bunch of manual paperwork on top of modern payment infrastructure to move money faster. And so the simple explanation is that in these markets, often you have work being done, machines being installed, and then a whole bunch of paperwork and manual processes that end up feeding into some institution paying money out to different parties in the transaction, right. And the two points of friction that we address are the paperwork not being spread out across different departments and different organizations, and actually kind of unifying all of that into a single workflow and automating it.
And then the second is using our own capital to just pay out the installers, pay out the workforce that’s actually doing the work, installing the machines within 48 hours of doing the work, and being able to let them move on to their next project, handling all the settlement layer kind of on the back end ourselves, right? And so we pay contractors in Massachusetts within two business days for the heat pump they just installed. We collect from the Mass Save program six, seven, eight weeks later. And we’re able to do that because our platform is able to understand the project, understand the risk, and understand whether it qualifies instantly. And so we can issue the payment confidently and collect on the back end.
I would say technology has a decent track record of being able to come into an industry and figure out how to remove a lot of friction. And a big part of my journey in the last few years has been just being along for the ride at first in the AI revolution and seeing how this technology has the potential to do a lot more than just remove a little bit of friction, but potentially kind of move us from heavy manual processes to get this work done to something much cheaper and faster, which is what we want in the energy transition. So, yeah, it’s been an evolution.
Steph Speirs
And so originally, the pain point that you talked about was ordinary households accessing these incentives for things like energy efficiency upgrades or heat pumps, and then you transitioned to really serving the installer network. Can you talk about that?
Jeff Coleman
One early thing that we learned was that there’s not much of an audience out there for home electrification. Not very many people are waking up in the morning thinking, geez, I really want to electrify my home. I did. You may have. And many of our friends may have.
Steph Speirs
We’re special.
Jeff Coleman
And there are nonprofits out there doing great advocacy work around this. I hope that one day, many people wake up and think I really want a heat pump, hot water heater. But what actually happens is people’s water heaters break, and they call a plumber or an electrician or an HVAC installer to come out and replace their hot water heater.
So we first of all just learned right at the beginning, the contractors are the kind of node in this network where education happens, marketing happens, the sale happens, and the money flows through. Many of these programs, whether they’re incentives or even financing, if you want to get a loan for a heat pump, it’s most likely going to come from a credit union that’s working with your contractor. So that was that piece. And then the end consumer, I think we view them as one of our most important stakeholders, they’re just not our customer. So we very much think about how are they seeing this information, how are they figuring out what they can afford, and making sure that we’re giving the contractor tools to be able to do that effectively.
Steph Speirs
Yeah, and I think that’s an important differentiation because energy efficiency and electrification have been a decades-long industry. The friction that no one has ever really solved is trying to make things standardized and easy for installers because it’s such a decentralized, localized network.
Jeff Coleman
Yes.
Steph Speirs
At the same time, helping installers is such a local play because they’re just spread out all across the country. And in some ways, scaling that kind of business model is really difficult because you’re dealing with a lot of local small businesses. So, can you talk about how you think about growth?
Jeff Coleman
Yeah, sure. So we look at growth in two ways. One is we look for who the trusted partners of these contractors are. In many cases, that’s a distributor or manufacturer. So we work directly with some of the big distributors in the U.S., Mitsubishi Electric, who manufacture heat pumps, is a partner of ours; a lot of installers get education through them, training through them.
So that’s one way they do it. And then the other is through the programs themselves. All of these programs have varying degrees of success, but they all try to reach out to contractors and get them enrolled as approved contractors in their program. We solve a really important pain point for the programs. Because frankly, if you go out and find a random HVAC contractor, for example, and say, what do you think of energy efficiency programs? The answer is probably not going to be positive.
Even though ostensibly, these programs should be helping them sell what they sell. They’re mostly going to have to talk about complaints about paperwork and how long it takes to get paid. And so we realized that, oh, these programs actually just want us to be part of their program because it makes them look better to their contractors. It solves a pain point for them. So those are really our two growth channels, which are actually working directly with programs themselves and then working with suppliers.
Steph Speirs
And you said installers are your customers. Can you talk about how you get paid?
Jeff Coleman
Yeah, sure. And I should say, actually, programs are also our customers. So we have two products. We have a product that is essentially a financial product for contractors. So if you’re participating in a program of any kind, it could be energy efficiency, rebates, any utility or state-funded program, or a federally funded program. You can use Eli to make the sort of paperwork side of that easier and get paid up front. And we take around 4% of the rebate value–not the project cost–to do that. We don’t charge any kind of software fee. All the benefits they get across the paperwork part, the software part, and the financial product are all wrapped up into just a transaction fee. But then we also work directly with programs, with utilities, and governments that are running these programs. So they’ll essentially pay our fee and our costs. And for the contractors in their program, it’s free.
Steph Speirs
Got it. And energy efficiency has historically been known as a low-margin business. How have you thought about building your business in the context of that industry?
Jeff Coleman
Yeah, well. I don’t know how spicy we want to get here, but low margin for whom is the question, right? And so traditional energy efficiency programs, there is a multi-billion dollar industry in the US of these services firms, consulting firms that have a long track record of owning these contracts with utilities to run the programs. And it’s a little, I hesitate to use the term because it’s a little loaded these days, but it’s sort of an abundance problem where you have the government, and utilities don’t actually have the capacity to deliver any of this work. So they’re not just outsourcing software or the installation, they’re outsourcing the thinking about, they’re outsourcing designing the program, they’re outsourcing hiring everybody to run the program. All of that is being done by service firms.
And so I think when you say it’s low margin, I look at it as most of these programs you’re seeing 30 to 40% of the dollars going to these implementation firms. And many of them are doing some really great work around things like policy and program design. But a lot of that money is getting eaten up by just paperwork and kind of old IT infrastructure and things like that. So that’s a big part of what we’re trying to disrupt. We don’t need to be spending 40 cents on the dollar to stand up these programs. And there’s, as you said, very little standardization. You don’t need to pay a consultant to reinvent the wheel every time you want to launch a new program or a new funding stream. So that’s part of it.
Steph Speirs
And it’s not just about making the paperwork streamlined or helping installers offer their energy efficiency upgrades or electrification more seamlessly. It sounds like there’s a really important payments layer. And so can you talk about why you expanded into the financial transaction side as well?
Jeff Coleman
Yeah. So we started with understanding that there was a kind of cash flow problem for contractors. So most of these programs require contractors to give their end customer an upfront discount and collect the money from the program later. We are still in a world where 90% of the contractors installing this equipment are small businesses, and they just can’t put that kind of money. And I think there was an era, you know, ten-fifteen years ago, the average installer might have one out of ten projects that they’re doing have this incentive layer. And now in many places it’s much more like ten out of ten or eight out of ten. So now they’re just in this position of like a small business cannot float 2, 3, 4, $5 million a month to their end customers while they wait to get paid.
So that was the entry point to solve the contractor cash flow problem. What we realized pretty quickly was that the cash flow problem wasn’t created by just sort of incompetence or bureaucracy; it was actually structural in many cases. So you might have a program that’s ultimately funded by ratepayers that needs to get approved on a quarterly basis from the utilities commission. And then you have an implementer who is the services firm, who’s running the program. They’re required to invoice the utility on a certain cadence with all this data for all the projects they’ve completed. So essentially, they’re being asked to front money to the contractors while they wait to get paid by the utility. And kind of throughout this ecosystem, you have a bunch of people not wanting to hold that bag.
And it’s not coincidental that most of these implementation firms are private equity-owned, and private equity doesn’t like having debt on the balance sheet. So we learned that we were providing a lot of value, not just to contractors, but to the programs, to the whole transaction by being the party that was willing to bring risk capital to the table to make the projects happen fast and without friction.
Steph Speirs
So when you raised your seed round in 2024, the world looked very different, right? When you started your company, I’m sure you expected there to be a ton of IRA tax credits that would help homeowners and businesses do upgrades, do electrification. And then the world shifted under your feet. And with a lot of those credits gone, I want to first talk about the homeowner, the business. Is it still a good financial decision for homeowners and businesses to do these kinds of upgrades?
Jeff Coleman
Oh yeah. I mean, in many, many cases. It was never the case that it was a no-brainer for everybody, right? And I don’t actually think that the federal situation really has changed that much outside of solar, where I think it has had a much bigger impact on the tax credit piece, right? And certainly, there have been other regulatory changes in solar that have impacted that. A lot of these upgrades make sense for a lot of people. They did before the IRA, and they do now. I think what has changed also in the last five years is that the cost of the hardware has gone down in a lot of these industries.
So the cost of a heat pump, hot water heater is much lower now. So that whole rights law thing of the downward slope of costs on the hardware has been proving out. But meanwhile, we have the upward curve of the costs of bureaucracy, where things are getting more complicated and more expensive on the soft cost side, while the cost of hardware is going down. So I think that for us, the political shift meant a big shift in our go-to-market strategy and how we expected to reach people, but not actually a huge shift in the underlying dynamics of the markets that we are involved in.
Steph Speirs
So take us back to that moment as an entrepreneur where you learn that these tax credits are going away, you focus on batteries and heat pumps, and you still believe that people will buy those in this new political and economic environment. But how do you, as a business, make the decision on how to pivot?
Jeff Coleman
Yeah, yeah. So for us, the pivot was more of a strategy pivot than a product pivot. So we were already focused on heat pumps, we were already focused on batteries, we were already focused on markets that have really robust, either utility or state-funded programs. And I think a really important underlying fact is that for utilities, especially now, demand side programs, whether it’s energy efficiency or demand response, these are some of the cheapest ways to generate new capacity, right? The way we think of it is that buildings are this really valuable demand side resource for utilities. And there are market-driven reasons for them to want to fund these programs, even though they’re required to by their regulatory commission date. And so the big change for us was that we knew that we were going to try and disrupt a really entrenched industry.
And the industry I’m referring to is the implementing energy programs business, not the heat pump business or whatever. And our path to doing that under an administration that was doubling down on the IRA versus making it disappear would have been to use that as our distribution channel to kind of ride the wave of new programs rolling out, because we thought new programs would be easier to disrupt than programs that already exist. It turns out, though, that it had mixed results because so much money was rolling out into these new programs, and it was flowing from the federal government to states that were being given a big bucket of money and very few resources to guide them on what to do with it.
So it actually pushed them into the arms of the incumbents in our space anyway, because they were being pressured to get this money out the door quickly. And the only people they could turn to were the people who’ve been doing this for 30 years. And lo and behold, you have states that, I won’t name names, but states that have a lot of people focused on this problem and are very forward thinking, that just launched their IRA-funded rebate programs four months ago, spent three years building the program and deploying it, and then the money ran out in six weeks.
So I think we dodged a bullet in a way because even if the IRA was still in place and there was more money coming, I think actually that focusing on the durable market-driven dynamics that utilities are dealing with is actually a better way to build a business and also a better way to solve these problems. Like, change the way utilities think about this, change the way, you know, they think about demand side resources and how you get, how do you deploy that. How do you say, well, we want to get a thousand batteries in this area because we’re putting in a data center, okay, we have software to move the electrons and control the machines. We have an OEM who wants to sell the batteries at a discount. But then, how do you actually get a thousand households signed up?
And how do you make it? How do you get installers to come in and do the work? How do you pay them? And the answer right now, the status quo is you hire a consultant, and you take two and a half years to do it. And we want that to be three months, not two and a half years. And we want it to cost 10% of the budget, not 30%.
Steph Speirs
So then how do you solve that particular problem?.
Jeff Coleman
Yeah. So essentially, our platform, utilities, and governments can hire us in place of hiring a traditional program implementer, or they can hire us alongside a program implementer that they give a smaller scope to. And so have consultants do consultative work, use our platform for the kind of nuts and bolts of determining project eligibility, collecting documentation, approving projects, and paying contractors.
Steph Speirs
And you said yourself you’re trying to disrupt this industry that has been around for 30 years. It’s highly entrenched; they do multi-million dollar contracts. How do you intend to do that?
Jeff Coleman
So what we’ve been doing is, as I said, there are many of these consulting firms that actually are happy to let go of some of the pieces of that work because they recognize those are actually kind of cost centers for them, where they are spending a lot of money on manual rope processing work that they know could be automated. And so we work with a number of them as partners, where we respond to an RFP or pitch a utility. Here’s this experienced partner who can help you think through the dynamics of the program. And then here is a platform that can do all of this kind of core processing and payments work for a fraction of the cost that they used to pay for it. And it’s been a really compelling pitch.
We’ve had some really great wins in the last year and in the last couple of months on that front. The second is that we are pursuing opportunities where we are the program implementer. And to be frank, right now, those are smaller programs. Those are, we have a couple of counties that are running programs on our platform. These are at the scale of, you know, $10 million a year of funding going out the door, not hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And those are important too because it’s helping us learn where the edges of what a platform can do, what an AI platform can do in this industry. If we imagine ourselves to be able to run these really huge programs without any partners, what will our organization look like? Who do we need to hire? Yeah.
Steph Speirs
And what are you learning about that?
Jeff Coleman
So I think what we’re learning is that, as I said, governments and utilities don’t just outsource the labor, they’re outsourcing a lot of the thinking. And I don’t mean that as a derogatory thing. It’s just the reality. It’s like they know some really high-level outcome they want to achieve, and they know how much money they can approve for that. And it really stops there in many cases. And so I do think that expertise around program design is really important. And when I say program design, I mean we want to achieve this grid impact. You know, we want to achieve these benefits for the grid. We have this much money. We also want to have these community benefits. And then how do you design a program that delivers that effectively?
Steph Speirs
And you talked about your customers being installers in these program utility programs and distributors who often make the hardware. What percentage would you say of your customer makeup is between those groups?
Jeff Coleman
The program side of things is a much smaller number than the contractor side. We have hundreds of contractors on our platform of varying sizes. We have contractors who are really themselves sort of aggregators of contractors that are quite large. We have many contractors on our platform who only do a couple of projects per week. So there’s a long tail of small businesses there as a percentage of our business in terms of revenue and stuff like that, it’s about close to half and half, half coming from essentially financial services to contractors, and half coming from revenue programs.
Steph Speirs
And what have been some of your biggest lessons in building this business that you didn’t expect at the beginning? What have been some?
Jeff Coleman
I did not think I was starting a Fintech company at the beginning. So that’s definitely the biggest thing. I’m the kind of person who has always thrived in learning something new on the fly. I hope that at this point, I’ve also learned when not to be the person making decisions about things that I don’t fully understand. But this is, you know, we started out having a really deep understanding. My co-founders and I really understood this sort of workflow and administrative problem in this industry and had what turned out to be a really strong thesis around how to fix that. It was not until we were in the market that we realized what a huge piece the financial part was.
And then on top of that, we initially thought, oh yeah, well, we can advance payments to contractors. I don’t think we fully appreciated the complexity and how a financial product like that has this whole other kind of stack that has to be behind it to do it well and to do it at scale. And so we scaled very fast this last year. We’ve been growing about 25% month over month. And that has meant a lot of learning and growth on my part, primarily because my co-founders know this stuff well, around just yeah, what kind of things you need to do to make sure you’re being prudent with the money, and you know, moving money both from the regulatory side but also the product side, what kind of internal products you need to do as well.
So that’s the biggest thing, you know, I’m a Fintech CEO now within energy, where they started thinking it was energy with maybe a little Fintech sprinkled on top. You can’t sprinkle that. It’s like it’s a whole thing in and of itself.
Steph Speirs
I think that makes so much sense because when we talk about adoption being such a constraint for climate technologies to scale. Finance is such an important part of that, and making it easy for people to access the finance to do these things. Upgrades, which require upfront costs.
Jeff Coleman
Yep.
Steph Speirs
We saw that in community solar and in rooftop solar. And so you’re having to actually provide the capital to installers. It’s a huge cash flow issue for you as a startup. Right? Startups don’t generally build the product and also provide all the capital.
Jeff Coleman
Yeah. We brought on investors in our last round who had pretty deep Fintech experience, and that was intentional. And I think one of the things I’m seeing now is just we’ll have, for example, last year, late last year, we started growing so fast that were going to have to tell our customers we need to pause or we need to, we need to like, have you only submit half of your projects to us for the next month while we go find more capital because, we’re paying out way too fast. And then, my instinct is to panic because I, you know, I’m not used to being able to just go find millions of dollars out of thin air, you know.
Steph Speirs
In these economic times.
Jeff Coleman
Oh, God. Yeah. And so I would, you know, get on the phone with our close investors, and the ones who come from Fintech were like, oh yeah, this happens all the time. This happened 20 times in my company when we were growing. Good problem to have. Everyone’s like, that’s such a good problem to have. Congratulations. I’m like, okay. But also, I need to not run out of money in the next 30 days. And the investors who came from more of the climate side were like, wait, what’s happening? So I think we’ve done a good job navigating that and reconsignment, too. And it is, I think, a tricky thing. Any Fintech business that does any kind of lending or factoring work, as we do, is in the money.
The capital that you have to deploy in your product is fueling your growth, but it’s expensive; it’s debt. So you can’t have too much of it and use this dance of how fast you're growing? How much debt do you need? And then staging that. And it’s not as simple as that, it’s not 100% in your control because once you onboard a customer. I had a morning where I woke up, and one of our newest customers had just submitted almost $2 million worth of projects into our system overnight. They had been sitting on a pile of projects that they had not submitted, and just submitted them all.
And I learned that day that when you have a product like ours, $2 million just goes out of your account when that happens, and we do have controls in place. It’s not fully automatic, but in order to keep our promise to that customer and our system approved all their projects, I couldn’t just wait, press that button on our side. It’s been a learning curve. Now we have big institutional capital partners to make sure that never happens again.
Steph Speirs
Part of making this content of climate tech accessible to normal people who don’t wake up thinking about energy upgrades the way you and I do is to explain the impact of it. So if you were talking to my mom and you were telling her what her experience as a homeowner could look like if your technology and your platform could scale across the country, can you paint that picture?
Jeff Coleman
Well, the ideal thing for your mom if we are scaled across the country is that she would never know anything about us because we’re really about enabling that transaction to happen. But yeah, I mean, in that world, her experience would be that, let’s say her heater breaks, she calls her local HVAC installer, and her local HVAC installer can really easily and clearly show her how installing a heat pump is going to make her home more comfortable but also more affordable, and that the right choice will be the no brainer choice for her, and that contractor is equipped with multiple options for her in terms of financing, low interest rates or no interest at all, and that they represent the best available options in her region and given her situation.
And I think that’s sort of one of the big gaps right now, is that there are actually some great programs all over the country for things like no-interest financing on a heat pump. And the problem is, people don’t know about them, and often, contractors don’t know about them. Or if they do, they view that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze and that the amount of work they’re going to have to do to file all the paperwork for that no-interest loan isn’t worth it, and they’re just going to offer the 8% loan instead. So that’s the world we want to see, is just the right thing, is the easy thing.
So, for us, it’s if you want installers to be able to do what they do best, figuring out all of this stuff should not be on their plate. And that’s what we want to do. We want to be the partner that installers trust to ensure that their customers are getting the best deal and to make all of the complexity that ends up in their laps now a thing of the past.
Steph Speirs
Let’s talk about your entrepreneurial journey. You’ve worked in different parts of energy. Why did you decide that you wanted to go and be an entrepreneur? And do you have any buyer’s remorse?
Jeff Coleman
Not at all, actually. For me, it represented a sort of finding my home, but it was a long journey there. So I started in the nonprofit sector. I kind of came into the workforce wanting to focus on climate. And frankly, back then, it was more like the environment, because I’m that old. And I actually loved my first job in many ways and learned a lot, but it was definitely not just the pace - it wasn’t dynamic enough.
Really, what was a transformative experience for me was leaving my job to join the Obama campaign in 2007. It was my first time doing something where there was a sort of meritocracy, where nobody was asking for anybody’s credentials. It was just that we got so much to do, we got to move so fast that people were just heaping responsibility. This was very early on. So it was like people were heaping responsibility on people and just seeing what happened. And so it was the first time I felt like I was being really deeply challenged and being asked to rise to the occasion. Whereas my experience in school was always that I was a little bored, and what was hard for me was grinding through work.
It wasn’t hard work; it was just hard to do. You know these math assignments are like 40 problems, but they’re all just different versions of the first three problems. Why can’t I just do the first three and turn them in? And I did try that, and I got teased in math in high school because of that. So I think part of it for me was the Obama campaign. I grew so much myself and was given a lot more responsibility a lot faster than I was in a non-profit job.
And I kind of learned that the way my brain works is I have what they call an interest-based nervous system, which is like I can access a much higher gear of my own performance when there’s a lot at stake and when I feel like I have chosen to tackle this really hard thing, versus when I’m part of a bureaucracy that is kind of handing things down. So I kind of learned during the Obama campaign that probably some form of entrepreneurship was my only hope of ever being happy in a job. And so after that, I knew I didn’t want to go into government like a lot of my friends on the campaign did, sort of the opposite of a startup. And so I started a company that was sort of adjacent to what I was doing in the campaign world.
Steph Speirs
What do you wish you had known before you started your company that you know today that you would give advice to other climate tech entrepreneurs trying to build?
Jeff Coleman
I think one thing is that when you’re early on, every single one of us has this level of imposter syndrome, which never goes away. Right. No matter. I believe that–with maybe one glaring exception in the government now–but like most normal human beings given a lot of responsibility or money or power or whatever, have something like, whoa, should I really be the person doing this? And I think early on, that ends up making you seek a lot of perspectives and talk to a lot of people and get a lot of advice. And a lot of that ends up coming from VCs that you’re pitching and things like that. And it’s all really valuable. You should do that.
But I actually think that focusing more on just having a lot of conviction yourself in what you’re trying to do and finding ways to communicate that to the people around you is probably the thing that has fueled a lot of our growth in the last year and a half. It took me a few years to settle into that. I think I was a lot more reactive and reflexive to the input I was getting from investors and things like that early on. And then I realized that when I pushed back on some of that stuff, they were like, that’s the most, you know, that’s the most convinced I’ve ever heard you about what you guys are doing. And so I think, early on, look for that.
Steph Speirs
Okay, so as the CEO of an organization, as you’re managing a team, hiring people, or promoting high performers, what advice would you give to people who either want to find a job in the industry or want to advance in their career and get promoted? What do you look for?
Jeff Coleman
I wish I had something more original to say, but I think that right now, in this moment with AI and all that stuff, what I’m hearing from others and feeling myself in my seat is that what’s valuable now, what’s most valuable now, are judgment and vision because execution has kind of become less valuable. And I think that’s exciting because I think the reality is lots of people, even people who might be the kind of people you would classify as super execution driven, focused, and able to handle super complex project management, whatever, they probably have that vision and judgment in there, and they’ve just gotten really good at the execution part. And a few years ago, that had a certain value in the marketplace.
I think that lane has largely collapsed, meaning like there used to be a lane for people to get jobs based on, you know, you’re doing this hard thing. I can be the person, you know, the ops person who can just lock everything down and now I’d rather have a bunch of sloppy, you know, really smart, but a little sloppy people who have a lot of vision and really good judgment and instincts around the business and have them learn to use the tools that we have to lock things down and be really, you know, and execute.
Steph Speirs
Famous last words. All sloppy people apply to you.
Jeff Coleman
Yeah, no, sloppy is not the right word.
Steph Speirs
But yeah, I think humans, being human, are the differentiator in this age.
Jeff Coleman
Yeah, exactly.
Steph Speirs
It comes down to judgment. It’s like connecting the dots in a way that artificial intelligence cannot.
It’s hard to be an entrepreneur. How do you stay centered, grounded, calm despite chaos?
Jeff Coleman
A lot of credit to my kids, my family, in the sense that you kind of can’t afford. There’s no space in my life to fall apart, but that doesn’t mean that I’m just holding it together and falling apart inside. It sort of forced me early on, and I think this may have been different had I started the company and then had a family. But I had young kids when I started the company. And so part of my contract with myself, my co-founders from the very beginning was, this is how this has to work. When I am picking up a kid at 4:30 from swim practice, that’s not a movable thing. Under any circumstances. It can’t. So actually that helped a lot because I’d done this before when I had really no boundaries in my personal life.
And I don’t actually think I was doing better work by working more hours or obsessing about things more. I found actually kind of the opposite, which is being forced to be very present in something that has nothing to do with my startup for several hours every evening. When the kids go to bed, I’ll have clarity on a problem that I had during the day or whatever. I’ll run into my office and bang out an email or whatever because it’s like, oh yeah. So I think my brain at least works in such a way that having these other things that intrude and force me to restart the system is really valuable. And then also just cliche but physical, moving your body.
Steph Speirs
If you had to summarize in a sentence or two why this work is so important to an average person, what would you say?
Jeff Coleman
Energy is kind of the underlying force in our economy and our lives, and there’s no reason that it needs to be also the source of ruining our planet. So I think, you know, in the case of Eli, we’re just doing a small piece of it, and I view it as the kind of generational problem that everyone just needs to pick up a shovel and find a place to dig, and this is where we’re digging. But yeah, abundant clean energy is 100% achievable.
Steph Speirs
What’s something that you wish people knew about electrification? Specifically, their home or the business.
Jeff Coleman
Yeah, it’s a better product in every way. That’s the biggest thing. I think people, many people still view it as a sacrifice they’re making. I’ll fight all day with people about gas stoves, but that’s a whole other thing. As many people have discovered electric vehicles, like oh wow, this is actually better to drive, it’s fun, it’s better. The same goes for most of these technologies. A heat pump is a much more comfortable, much higher-performing system or heating tool for your home than the other option.
Steph Speirs
Induction is way better to cook with.
Jeff Coleman
I think so.
Steph Speirs
I agree.
Jeff Coleman
Yeah.
Steph Speirs
And what’s your spiciest hot take about climate tech?
Jeff Coleman
There’s so much just incredibly interesting science and stuff going on. When I go to climate tech events I always have founders for all these other companies that get to say that they’re blasting stuff into space and they’re doing all stuff but we’re working on this paperwork and payments problem and I think writ large, we need to focus more on these kind of less sexy structural problems that we have and less on these things that are like when we go to Mars this is going to be a quadrillion dollar business or whatever which is cool. And I get why VCs are excited about some of that stuff, but most of what stands between us and abundant clean energy is boring.
Steph Speirs
Yeah.
Jeff Coleman
So we need to be able to get excited about the boring stuff.
Steph Speirs
It can be sexy. We, I think, need to do better.
Jeff Coleman
Get better at selling it, maybe.
Steph Speirs
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Well, thank you for chatting.
Jeff Coleman
Thank you.
Steph Speirs
A little bit in the rain.
Jeff Coleman
My pleasure.
Steph Speirs
Good to get outside today and really appreciate your time breaking down how to make your installers and customers do electrification faster and easier.
Jeff Coleman
My pleasure. Thank you.