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- [00:01]
A
We were competing against a bunch of infrastructure work and we were competing against another appliance.
- [00:08]
B
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers. Where they talk, all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump into today's episode. Today our guest is Walden Kennedy, co founder and CMO of Copper. Walden, welcome to the show.
- [00:46]
A
Thanks Brent. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to chatting. Of course.
- [00:49]
B
Super excited for this. And then looking at your background, you just have a very fascinating background. So normally I just jump right into the technology, what you're building. But let's talk a little bit about your background and what you were doing before you got here.
- [00:59]
A
Sure, yeah. So I got my start in political mobilization and social campaigning. I care deeply around the kind of core fundamental values of fairness, justice, equality and sustainability and thought that if I'm going to be spending most of my daytime hours doing something, I should be pursuing those values. And so got into politics and nonprofit organizing and campaigning because I thought the thing that I could do that would be most impactful would be to persuade other people to take action on those same values. So I did that for a number of years, worked for political parties in the US and the uk. I worked for nonprofit organizations. I campaigned on international development with a number of organizations and then just kind of taking that and trying to say, oh, what if I empower other people to run these Campaigns? Helped bring Change.org, which is an online petition platform, and brought that to Europe, which is where I was living at the time, and created a campaign trading academy with some friends, a nonprofit organization to help kids from kind of disadvantaged backgrounds or kind of politically marginalized backgrounds to help them have more political agency. So did a lot of that work for a long period of time. And then, you know, roughly a decade plus ago, maybe 12 years ago at this point, kind of found that one of the most, the biggest budgets you could bring to bear in terms of changing people's opinions and mobilizing people was marketing. Like, that's where all the money was to change the way that people saw the world and the way that they lived their lives. And so I thought, you know what, actually I should get into a thing where I'm actually doing marketing, which is, you know, functionally a very similar skill set to political campaigning and social mobilization. And so just took that skill set and said, okay, now we have to find products that make the world a better place and make people's lives better. And so I did that. I started a company in Africa making performance running shoes in East Africa called Enda, and then grew that business, sold it a number of years ago. Around the same time I met some folks here in Berkeley who are kind of been doing some research around how to deploy more batteries to the edge of the grid and how to accelerate electrification. And that is what became a copper. So the timing happened to work out just right and I got to join a group of folks and co found copper here where we make battery equipped appliances.
- [02:55]
B
I haven't read the book in like 10 years, so I'll probably butcher a lot of the details, but there's a book called Alpha Dogs. Not sure if you've ever heard of this, but it's a group of political consultants who, you know, basically invented political consulting. A fascinating book. And they just talk a lot about how, you know, they had the realization that marketing a Coke is kind of similar to marketing a candidate. You know, it all comes down to kind of fundamentals at the end of the day. And it was a fascinating read and just it was interesting to even like think about that being a discipline that had to be formed and had to be invented.
- [03:23]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I have not read that and I definitely want to. Alpha dogged in political mobilization and in the nonprofit world, all the people who are kind of orbit the world of, you know, government and non governmental organizations. Marketing kind of a dirty word, right? It's not smiled upon as an activity. And so I, I didn't really realize that I had like built and developed marketing skills until, until a fair bit later because I kind of thought that's not a nice thing, that's not a good activity to partake in. But yeah, it truly is. It is the art of persuasion on a mass scale. And that is, you know, it's marketing a candidate, it's marketing a set of ideas and it's marketing a set of behaviors and actions. You know, you are getting people to make a purchase decision or you're getting people to pull a different lever and vote, or you're getting people to show up for an event. These are the same things you're just trying to persuade.
- [04:09]
B
One of the things that I believe about marketing and I've just really seen work, is if you can go and market movement that your product is aligned around, that's like the best type of marketing possible. And I know that ties in very well toward to be talking about here with category creation and how to create a category, but I feel like that's also probably very beneficial for you. Right? Like, you were in the business effectively of marketing movements and now you're marketing new movement, but there's a product that's tied to that movement. Yeah.
- [04:35]
A
And look, we're not so clever, you and I here. This is like a widely known thing in marketing, right. Like, it's the old Seth Godin line. People like us do things like this, right. That that's like the staple of the good marketing campaign is helping people see their own identity as part of a collective group of people all doing the same actions. And like, yeah, it is at the heart of a lot of persuasion.
- [04:55]
B
You had the exit for the footwear company and then I'm sure that you had a long list of ideas, right. If you're like most founders, you have a notepad somewhere. If you. All the different things that you could go into with Copper, why'd you decide to go into this space specifically?
- [05:07]
A
Yeah, I knew I wanted to do more focused work on one of three issues in three directions. One of them was selling a happier future as a solution to climate change. I thought the discourse around climate change had gotten to a very dark place and the people who were looking to make progress on climate, there was so much communication that was about the negative and it was making it very difficult to make progress. And so I knew I wanted to work on this. I had a couple other things around either disinformation and helping young men see themselves as part of a pluralistic society. I wanted to work on one of these issues. And, you know, it just happened that I was visiting some friends in Seattle and our kids are the same age. And I was like, you know, we were having a great hangout and I was like, oh, let me make some dinner. And I go into their kitchen, love cooking and turn on their stove. And my friend who's who works in public health is former medical doctor. Transition to public health runs in and like opens the back door. This is a Seattle in January. And so it's like cold driving rain and miserable wind. And I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, oh, sorry, we have a gas stove. You have to do this when you have a gas stove. Because like, especially with our kids, you know, it's like the air pollution is really bad. And I had never heard of this, right? Like, I was just gobsmacked because I'd lived my entire life with gas stove, it was never a thing. And I was like, oh, wow. And so like I used induction cooking before living in Europe. It was like a pretty common technology. And so I was like, oh, I know there's a good alternative out there that is very good. And so I, I was like primed and ready to be working on this when some friends in the environmental advocacy space connected me up with Sam, our CEO here who is doing syndrome environmental advocacy and doing. He's an inventor basically as well, right? He's a MIT PhD and had kind of created the basic concept of you could run a device off of battery and that running a device off a battery allows you to do two things very well. It allows you to plug into any wall outlet and then have a high powered cooking experience because the battery acts like a reservoir that can fill very slowly and then dispense power very quickly. So you can end up basically just getting a boost of power from the battery compared to what you're drawing out of the wall. And then it also decouples your energy from like time of use, right? So you don't have like high tariff rate because dinner is at like the worst time of day to use electricity. So you shift that electricity use. You also then have an electric stove that works with the power goes out. There's a bunch of performance improvement things in there. But then it also deploys more batteries to the grid very cheaply. So like per kilowatt hour of deployed energy. Our range, Copper's Charlie range, which is battery induction range, is cost equivalent to deploying a Tesla powerwall, but it comes with a free luxury stove. And the reason why it's so cheap is it's because all the battery packaging and deployment is done in a factory and there's no like custom installation on the house. It just slides into the spot and plugs in. Whereas like normally deploying like home energy storage is a very large custom installation that requires electricians and permitting its law work. And so, you know, I met Sam and he had kind of come to this, like, I'm going to be working on this kind of product category. And I was like, sweet, I would love to do some market discovery and help make a business out of this. And that's how like, you know, I was just wrapping up my time at end at that was how it was like, okay, I've got the motivation from the experience of, okay, this is an important thing to work on. And also this is like, this is actually the great solution to make it happen. And so, yeah, we like, there are a couple of us kind of coalescing around that and we formed the company a couple of months later.
- [08:14]
B
This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines I.O. podcast. Now back to today's episode and when it comes to the category, how do you describe the category that you're in?
- [08:41]
A
Battery equipped appliances. So this is actually like a really interesting thing because we are very rarely competing against other appliances, just strictly. So say you're transitioning from gas to electric as there's like 45 million households in America that are going to do this over the next decade or 15 years. Right. Like gas is poisonous and low performing cooking and induction is clean cooking and significantly higher performance. This transition is happening. Now, as you look at that, most of the work and cost involved is infrastructure work. So if you have. I'll take an example of a building we just completed some work on in Los Angeles where we saved them $800,000 on their renovation. You know, they had the walls behind the kitchen range are old enough that there might be a layer of lead paint there. So if they were to pull new cable and punch a couple holes in the drywall, they'd have to do lead remediation and the residents of the building would have to be displaced for a couple of nights while they did lead remediation and dust cleanup. And then they're pulling new circuits. Now, each of these units is a 60amp per unit in the building. And so a traditional electric stove requires 50amps of service. So you're functionally doubling the electrical requirements for each apartment in that building. And so you're talking about new panels for each unit and then a new load center for the building and then a new service line to the building and new wiring throughout the whole building. So just tons of money, tons of logistics and overhead cost, and instead we just come in and plug in the stove to the outlet that was already there. That was just being used to run the oven light, right? Like, and so we just take a ton of costs and complexity and get rid of it. And that's what we were competing against. We were competing against a bunch of infrastructure work, we were competing against another appliance. And that's what category creation means for us, is that like, people see you and they think you're an object, they think they recognize it. But actually, really, when it comes to creating a new category is you realize you're actually competing against something else. You're competing against a different decision making matrix than might typically be assumed. And there's a lot of challenges in that, but there's a lot of opportunity in that, right? There's a lot of challenges because people assume this level of familiarity, that they like see a sticker price or they see like a basic spec and they think they understand it because there's unfamiliarity. But then once it unlocks, once you get that, aha, then people are like, oh my God, this is something meaningfully different. And they can, they can shift. And the opportunity to just market and sell in a whole new category and help business partners see whole new category creation opportunities is really fun because it unlocks new markets and, you know, it's an opportunity for anyone who's looking. For example, our, you know, we have partnerships with H Vac installers, they never sold stoves. This is not a thing for them. But H Vac installers, in most states in America, you don't need to have an electrician on site to do an H Vac install, right? That you can just, they can go from, they can install the H Vac equipment right there and they don't need to have an electrician on board. But when the H Vac company is there doing a heat pump for, for example, so often homeowners will be like, well, this is great, I love this. Like, you know, these new electrical technologies are making our lives better. Do I need the other ones? And they don't have electricians, so no, they don't do induction stoves, but now they can sell ours. And so like, this new category unlocks new business opportunities for these partners. And that's what category creation and thinking is. It's finding all these opportunities where you have, because of specific regulations, because of the nature of the market that you're competing against and competing in. There's actually something fundamentally different about the product you're bringing in market than everything that may look similar before. Like, everything's different.
- [12:00]
B
How do you get people to have that you know, I'm having the aha now where 15 minutes into the podcast, when I was doing just the initial research for a few minutes in my head leading up to this call, I thought, okay, it's a really cool electric stove, and there's probably some cool technology that I don't know in my brain. And I guess that's how categories work, right? Like, I instantly just put it into that electric stove. Like, how do you get people to that aha when you don't have 15 minutes with them to explain the product, explain why it's so different?
- [12:25]
A
I'll take that as good feedback that we need to do a better job on our marketing, and that's my responsibility. So thank you. I would say one of the challenges that we have is most of the people who we've been marketing to so far are already out looking for a solution like ours. They're like, they've already run into the problem and they're like, there's gotta be a better way to do this. And so, like, they're just out looking for it. And we've lived off inbound business basically. As soon as we, like, you know, we got some good SEO going from some great media coverage, we got some great reviews in, we have some good endorsements, and it's just people who are out there looking for the solution because the alternative is so hard. But, yeah, we need to do a better, like, a much better job of explaining for people who aren't searching for our category that what this category means and what it does. So, yeah, I would say the majority of people we interact with have already had that. And then when you tell them you have the thing, they're like, yerik, thank you. But for people who aren't looking, yeah, no, that's got to do a better job with that. So I appreciate the feedback.
- [13:16]
B
And how much of the market is there to grab? Like, how many people are searching for this? Like, how much demand is there that you can go and capture versus you have to switch gears and start creating demand. And I feel like a lot of people I've talked to have created categories. There's kind of two different phases of the marketing program. A lot more than two phases, but generally speaking, kind of two buckets. And it's going after the people who are already in market, the early adopters, capturing that demand. And then it shifts to, okay, we have to go out and convince people who weren't yet in market that they need to be in market. And it's a totally different go to market playbook.
- [13:46]
A
Yeah, it's a good question. I will say very conveniently, there's a wave, two waves frankly, that we are kind of simultaneously getting to surf a little bit. So one of them is that there is an increasing amount of research and evidence of just how bad gas stoves are for you and your health and for your family in particular. You know, a child living in a home with a gas stove is 42% more likely to develop childhood asthma. Like that is bad. And like that incidence is something that I think people are becoming more and more aware of. There's increasing amount of health studies about this. And so, you know, I'm in SYDNEY In California, 13% of all the childhood asthma cases in California are directly triple gas dose in the home, right? Like, wow, it's very bad. The research is also coming on for older folks as well. The research is, don't worry, it's on its way. But it turns out breathing in a bunch of fossil fuel exhaust, because that's what it is, it's exhaust from combustion of fossil fuel is bad. And like, you can turn on your vent hood, it mildly improves it. A lot of people don't live in homes with vent hoods that vent outside are powerful enough, they forget to turn them on. And even then, even if it's like operating at peak performance, you still are breathing some of it, right? It's kind of. You would never bring like a grill into your house and light it, right? You're just like, that's dumb. But actually that's what your stove is, especially the gas oven. A gas oven is a gas grill, like just in your house. So like, that's becoming, that wave is happening. And so like, to a certain extent we don't have to go out and like push things because like, people are becoming like, okay, let's get rid of the poison. And in the meantime, more and more people are becoming aware of how good induction cooking is. More and more professional chefs are switching to it. They're being evangelical about it. You know, you see Matty Matheson, you see Alison Roman, you see Samin Nosrat, you see them out there. The team at Milk Street, Christopher Kimball, all these folks are out there just being like, we've tried this. It's better, right? Like, you know, J. Kenji Lopez alt says for the majority of American meals, this is the best way to deliver heat. For any sort of cooking experience. It's. It is better. And so like these two things happening and that we kind of address them both means that we have this wave, that we get to Surf a little bit. And so we're in this kind of fortunate position being able to take advantage of that and not have to go out and do as much demand creation as you might otherwise would. Especially as you know, as we scale manufacturing everything and you know, we have some scaled contracts and everything that help that as well. So like, you know, we have a deal with the State of New York. The New York State has the New York City Housing Authority, actually state entity. It has a whole program around kind of improving health and comfort of residents. They've done and energy performance in their buildings. And so they've done a couple of challenges recently and one of them was that they were going to start making the switch to induction cooking. So they selected us as a vendor, provide 10,000 of our ranges, battery conduction ranges to help electrify their homes. And so like scaled contracts like that kind of really I would say help on taking up the demand side of things where we then actually what is our consumer facing marketing have to do where you know, we have the luxury of being able to just kind of be responsive to a certain extent in the marketplace. So we don't have to be going out and buying a bunch of ads, doing a bunch of really hard outreach. We just have to be present in the marketplace and help people understand the solution that we provide. Because people are looking for a solution. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Company, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co
- [17:12]
B
I see some parallels there to a totally different market, but there's a company called Levels that I have in the podcast and they do continuous glucose monitors and I was asking him about that creating demand and he said kind of very similar that there's this wave right now, focus on metabolic disease, metabolic health. And I don't want to sit there simply writing that that you kind of there's downplaying, I'm sure their effort to market but overall there's a trend, there's a shift that's happening and they're part of that story and they're fitting into that story. And I feel like whenever you can kind of catch those waves, that's very lucky. How did you catch that wave? Like how did you get that right?
- [17:45]
A
I'm not sure we've caught that wave entirely yet. It's a big wave and I think, you know we are catching some of it. I think the, you know, the timing and some of it we need to help create, right? So like, some of it is good fortune that, like, there are people out there who are working on these issues that are not us. And that's a thing, right? And then some of it is moving fast to get product to market. When there was a very great study published a few years back by the team at RMI and some other places and really looked at the implications for childish health and you know, that got to a national level of like, should the gas stoves be banned? And like, we at the time were kind of like, we just started the company, we were looking at like how we were going to get to market and we had like a fairly long timeline to do it. And we just said we need to cut that timeline in half, we need to get to market now. And so going fast on that was a thing so that we made a meaningful difference. I would say the other bit of like, how to do that is inserting yourself in the compensation in the right places, the marketing. So, you know, we help the health researchers, right? We have an easy transition point and it's like they're looking for studies to do of people who switch from gas to electric. We can help them do that because we happen to be at the market intervention where people are doing that. And so, like, we can help those health studies happen. We can help accelerate them. And that's very good. You know, we don't have to be out there saying, this is scary. We can just focus on the good things because we're help enabling the health research to happen. And we can also talk and create moments where we have partnerships and endorsements of people who help reinforce that message with key demographics and people who are most interested in the health concern. So parents with young children is a very good example. So one of our, the folks who have our students, one of our cooks, as we refer to them. So one of our cooks is the actress Jenny Slate. You know, she has young kid and was like scared about the health implications of burning gas for her and for her kid and is like, want to switch induction. Heard how hard it was going to be. You know, reached out and was like, hey, I'd like to get your stove and can I make a video for you guys too? Like, I want other people to know about this. Great. You know, so it's really great because, you know, we're finding those endorsers who speak to those Personas of people who are most interested in this transition. Same with like, yeah, the team. So Milk street, they have our stove in their studio. One of their chefs was curious about switching to induction, bought our stove for her own home and was like, this is amazing. And so, you know, similarly, like, there are people out there who are proactively engaging in food content and just being in those places where those people who, you know, watch the PBS show on Milk Street's PBS cooking show, those folks will be interested in food and are very often interested in health. Great. Now we have like a touch point with them. It is choosing your marketing efforts to match the Personas and the audiences that you know are interested that are, that are part of those waves. Right. You can't just like sit back and expect to surf. You have to tailor your work to match the people who are part of the movement when it comes to the
- [20:27]
B
go to market side. You mentioned that building there, so it sounds like that's B2B. You mentioned the state of New York. So that's B2G. What's the consumer side look like and how do you think about that mix of those three different go to market channels?
- [20:39]
A
Got it. I wish there was only those three. Yeah, we have a lot of B2B. We do some B2C as well. Just because we want it. Like, we believe that we should make electrification easy and obvious. And so we do sell direct to consumer. And we've stood up a whole process around that. We make it very easy. We are the easiest, cheapest and fastest way for anyone to switch from gas to electric anywhere in America. So we have stood that up. We do a bunch of marketing and reaching out to people who have demonstrated some sort of interest again in one of those categories of the transition. And then also people are interested in using clean energy. Like if you have a home solar install, you might have received a postcard from us. Right? So we reach out to people who are demonstrated some interest in moving in the direction of, of getting rid of gas in their homes or improving cooking performance. Since we do reach out to those folks for our D2C work as well. And then we do have B2B2C as well. So I've referenced the H Vac installers, H Vac installer installers are very often talking to customers and that work largely looks like just equipping those, you know, solar installers or comfort consultants in the H Vac space, equipping them with our DTC materials. Right. So that they can then sell the customer on what does the experience going to be like? And the customer can say, oh, yeah, that's going to be great. Can you just deliver that for me next week when you're doing the other work? And they say, yep, yeah, I can do that. And so that's, you know, there's obviously some work getting the, that B2B partner on, but the B2B seed work ends up being, you know, you get to recycle a lot of those D2C materials. They still, they pay benefit in that channel as well.
- [22:00]
B
And final question, we're almost up on time. What's the big picture of vision here? Maybe paint a picture for us of three years, five years, ten years out.
- [22:07]
A
Yeah. So really the fun trick is that we're actually an energy company. So we sell battery equipped appliances as a means of distributing a bunch of energy storage and making battery home and building energy management a lot easier. Dramatically, dramatically less complex. So starting with the kitchen range, because it is one of the worst electrical loads in the building and one of the most complex to retrofit. But looking at battery equipped solutions for other situations where electrification is difficult and you're transitioning from fossil fuels to electrical use, then you can make significant cost savings and significant in performance improvements by deploying batteries. So look at H Vac and water heating. Those are obviously clothes drying as well is a very good one. So we'll be going after each of those solutions.
- [22:46]
B
Amazing. I love it. Well, we'll have to bring you back on. I feel like there's so much more that we could talk about here. So before we do wrap, if anyone listening in just wants to follow along with you, where should we send them? Where should they go?
- [22:55]
A
Hit me up on LinkedIn. Weldon Kennedy. That's probably the best place to find me. I try to do it twice a week. You know, it's one of those things we're all supposed to be doing a lot more of. So, you know, I'll keep it up. Yeah.
- [23:05]
B
Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
- [23:06]
A
Thanks, bud. Have a good one.
- [23:10]
B
Well, that's all for today. Today's episode of Builders, brought to you by the Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IO where you'll find a library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers and other GTM leaders, where we unpack the tactical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO podcast as a service. Mention that you listen, mention you love the show, and then we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you in the next episode.