Watt It Takes: The Startup Reshaping Mobility Planning With Data
Energy Gang
Wood Mackenzie
4.6 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2019
⏱️ 67 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week on Watt It Takes: How an energy researcher obsessed with electric vehicles stumbled upon a vast trove of transportation data and built a company that is reshaping infrastructure planning for mobility.
Powerhouse CEO Emily Kirsch sits down with Laura Schewel, the founder and CEO of Streetlight Data.
Laura spent her career studying storage, electric vehicles, and transportation systems at the Rocky Mountain Institute, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and then as a research fellow at UC Berkeley.
While at UC Berkeley, she got interested in finding a way to give electric vehicle owners more information about how they were driving their cars. She ended up uncovering a data gold mine in the process.
Laura built a company that now processes over 100 billion data points and provides transportation and urban planners with a granular view of how roads, bike lanes and sidewalks are being used.
In this episode, Laura Schewel talks about how she ultimately pursued the idea, and what she encountered in the wild world of entrepreneurship.
This conversation was recorded live at Powerhouse’s headquarters in Oakland, California. Buy tickets for upcoming events.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the leading solar inverter supplier in the world by volume. |
| 0:06.0 | That is Sungrow. Sungrove is now a leading supplier across the Americas too, |
| 0:10.0 | with the world's most powerful 250 kilowatt, 1,500 volt string inverter, Sungrow is providing disruptive technology for utility scale projects, projects that are both solar and storage oriented. |
| 0:23.3 | A bit later you're going to hear from the Navy vet |
| 0:25.7 | who's keeping watch over those inverters to make them run in tip-top shape. |
| 0:29.9 | Find out more at Sun Grow Power.com. |
| 0:33.0 | This week on what it takes, how an energy researcher obsessed with electric vehicle access |
| 0:45.0 | stumbled upon a vast trove of data and build a company that is reshaping transportation planning. |
| 0:51.0 | One guy, this associate at Battery Ventures, credit to them. |
| 0:53.9 | Afterwards, he wrote, instead of just your normal, like, |
| 0:56.3 | thanks, no thanks, email, or just never emailing you again, |
| 0:58.7 | which is totally the norm. |
| 1:00.3 | He was like, look, I like you guys. |
| 1:02.2 | But the problem is you're running two businesses. |
| 1:04.4 | One business, you're trying to convince all these people to download this app because they're |
| 1:06.8 | supposed to care about vehicle electrification, which I don't think people do, except for |
| 1:09.7 | weirdos like you. |
| 1:10.7 | He didn't say it, but that's what he meant. |
| 1:12.0 | And then two, you have this idea that you'll use |
| 1:14.0 | all this data to like learn amazing things about transportation and he said a good |
| 1:18.7 | startup can't be two businesses you can just be one business so you guys need to choose |
| 1:23.0 | and we're like, huh, I don't like getting rejected, but that was really, that was very smart. |
... |
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