Clay Christensen: Hi. This is Clay Christensen. I want to welcome you to a podcast series we call The Disruptive Voice. In this podcast, we explore the theories that are featured in our course here at HBS, Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. In each episode, we'll talk to alumni of our course and others who are trying to put these theories to use in their lives and in their organizations. It's great fun to hear from them and I hope that you find these conversations inspiring and useful. If you have an idea about a topic or a speaker that you'd like to hear more about or if you'd like to comment on our work, please reach out to us here at the school.

Katie Zandbergen: Hello and welcome to The Disruptive Voice. My name is Katie Zandbergen and I'm the community manager at Clayton Christensen's Forum for Growth & Innovation here at the Harvard Business School. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Jessica O. Matthews to the podcast. Here at HBS, we know Jessica as a member of the class of 2014 and as a former BSSC student sitting in the class of Derek van Bever, the Director of the Forum for Growth & Innovation.

Katie Zandbergen: A dual citizen of the United States and Nigeria, Jessica's career took off at the age of 19 when she invented the Soccket ball, which is an energy-generating soccer ball that provides off-grid power for the developing world. At the age of 22, Jessica founded a company called Uncharted Play and expanded her line of power-generating products to such things as jump ropes and skateboards. In 2016, she was able to raise $7 million for her startup, which was the largest ever series A raised by a black female founder. She also renamed the company, calling it Uncharted Power.

Katie Zandbergen: Today, Jessica is out of town as CEO and Uncharted Power has become a global full-service power technology company that builds, owns and operates renewable power infrastructure. Some of her accolades include Fortune's Most Promising Women Entrepreneurs, making Forbes' 30 Under 30 list, and a designation as Harvard University Scientist of the Year. Jessica is calling into the HBS Podcast Studio from New York today and we're thrilled to have her on the line. Jessica, welcome to the podcast.

Jessica O. Matthews: Hey, I'm happy to virtually be here.

Katie Zandbergen: I wanted to start off by asking you a bit about your personal story. Specifically, in an earlier interview that I listened to, you were asked how did you get into energy, and you responded by saying, "I needed it and my family needed it." Elaborating on that, could you tell our listeners a bit about your background and the story behind the Soccket ball? As I think it's a really great example of jobs to be done where you witnessed firsthand the progress that your family and friends were trying to make in a very specific circumstance.

Jessica O. Matthews: Sure, yes. Yeah, as you said earlier, I'm a dual citizen of Nigeria and the United States. For me, that meant yes, being born in Upstate New York in Poughkeepsie, but from the moment I was born, being told that, "You are Nigerian just as much as you are American," making sure of that was very much part of my life. My parents would essentially not really invest. Sometimes, we'd go on vacations, but most of the time, we'd be in Nigeria. My father ended up spending most of his time and currently live in Nigeria. The majority of my family lives in Nigeria, so we would be in Nigeria every single summer for a few months on end and essentially be living there as we were growing up.

Jessica O. Matthews: In that way, I had a really interesting upbringing because I had exposure not only to what we probably take for granted here in the United States, but direct exposure to what a world where there is no reliable infrastructure across the board, not just in power, but in water and systems that you would normally expect to be solid and stable. How people overcome that, how people live despite that, and that this was something that I had to grow accustomed to whenever I would be in Nigeria.

Jessica O. Matthews: For me, it started off, obviously, as a general annoyance, it's like, "Oh, okay. Of course, we're going to lose power." It's one of those things where when the sun would go down, that could be the end of your day. You would expect to lose power three to four times a day. It doesn't matter if you are in the village or if you're in a bustling city like Lagos or Abuja, if you don't have a direct connection to a generator, you're going to lose power. These generators are running off of diesel, they're running off of things that are horrible for the environment, and in the village, sometimes people are using things as simple as kerosene lamps. Either way, these things are also admitting fumes that are horrible for the individuals in that space.

Jessica O. Matthews: It was something that was just directly in front of me and that I knew was a massive problem. It was a problem that I knew almost immediately was infrastructural because you actually are paying more per kilowatt-hour in the Global South, in particular in places like Nigeria, than you pay any United States, but you have no system to pay that money into, right? It's an issue that masquerades as socioeconomic, but was always infrastructural.

Jessica O. Matthews: I think for me, at that age, the first problem, you'd want to talk about the jobs to be done. The first problem wasn't: Okay, how do we solve this infrastructural issue? The first problem was: How do we get people to be in the appropriate mindset to realize that they could solve this problem, right?

Jessica O. Matthews: I'll give you an example. I remember when I was 17 years old. We were in Nigeria for my aunt's wedding. As expected, we lost power. We brought in a diesel generator just to keep the festivities going. This is totally normal and standard. Unfortunately, this time, though, just to keep the power in just one room going, this diesel generator was admitting fumes and we had the windows closed. Some people were doing fine. I'm a bit more sensitive to fumes and things like that, so I started to feel really sick and I started to complain. My cousins, who were in their twenties at the time, these are young men, a few of them actually have engineering degrees. They just turned to me and said, "Don't worry, you'll get used to it."

Jessica O. Matthews: That really hit me because again, I mean, yeah, from a young age, I've always liked to tinker, I've always liked to invent. I try to fashion myself as the love child of Bill Nye the Science Guy and Beyonce in everything that I do, but it was way more Bill Nye back then; built up the Beyonce later on in life.

Jessica O. Matthews: In my mind, why wouldn't there be an innovation? Why wouldn't there be some sort of public-private partnerships, something that could be better? What was crazy that they essentially told me, "No. The best way to solve this problem is to pretend like there is no problem and ignore all the horrible things that are essentially happening for us sitting in this room, breathing in fumes." Living with a kerosene lamp is like smoking two packs of cigarettes today. Can only imagine what's happening here.

Jessica O. Matthews: Then I think what hurt me even more was looking at my cousins again, who, as men in Nigeria, they should see the whole world as their oysters. They should see all of this opportunity. They should feel like they have so much agency and yet, they've essentially gotten used to done, right? They've gotten used to doing nothing and saying that's the solution.

Jessica O. Matthews: For me, the first job to be done was: How do we bring people into this space to say, "You know what? Maybe I can have a direct impact. Maybe this scary, big word..." Because even me, I was like, "Obviously, this is an infrastructural issue, but infrastructure's scary. Infrastructure, I don't even know where the door to the room is, to say the least, of getting in the room and having a seat at the table." Clearly, it wasn't only me who thought that most people think that these issues that are affecting the entire world are just too heady, too complicated, too intangible to actually address.

Jessica O. Matthews: What I wanted to do was create something that would bridge the gap between what's working and what's not working in a community and bridge the gap for those people who feel comfortable in one way about thinking about things and show them that they can bring their intellect, they can bring their passion, they can bring their fortitude into a space as heady as energy, right?

Jessica O. Matthews: The invention of the SOCCKET, the idea was take the most popular sport in the world, soccer, something that my cousins, most of them being relatively average to below average at sports, when they're playing soccer, they will tell you that they can do anything. They will tell you that they can make the goal that maybe Pele made or that they can do something that Beckham did. Nine out of 10 times, they don't, but that one out of every 10 times that they're able to do it, it's really exciting, it's really hopeful.

Katie Zandbergen: Yeah, a sense of empowerment.

Jessica O. Matthews: I wanted to just take that same passion... Yes, exactly, a sense of empowerment. I mean, the idea was: How do you take that same passion, that same empowerment, how do you take the same perspective about a game and bring it to life and bring it specifically to the world of energy?

Jessica O. Matthews: It's almost like a recruitment tool, the job that needs to be done with that. We need to recruit more people because the problems of this world are just getting entirely too complex for any one person or company to solve them. The best chance we have in hell is if as many people as possible feel like they can play a role in addressing this and they at least try.

Jessica O. Matthews: The SOCCKET, in being an energy-generating soccer ball that could harness the energy of play and store that power inside of the ball so that it can be used as an off-grid power source and that it can be a one-for-one replacement with a kerosene lamp, the idea was take something that they love, take something that gives them passion and excitement and have that be their first step into this idea of them having impact, of someone having impact in something as heady as energy, right, in a playful way, in a way that felt more tangible, in a way that felt simple. I like to call it a "domino innovation," right? It was an innovation that was designed to beget more innovations. That's what started me down this path.

Jessica O. Matthews: I think what I didn't expect was in creating this ball, in creating this product, I thought it would be something that would demonstrate a different way of thinking about power to the entire world and that the more appropriate person would be inspired and then run with it, right? I was like, "Okay. I'll use this ball as a platform to say, 'Look, there's a whole new way of thinking about power, thinking about it from a renewable perspective, thinking about it from a micro, decentralized perspective, through play. Yay, run with it.'" It did that for some people in a lot of different ways, but it did that for me the most and ended up being my first step into this space. Here I am, 13-14 years later and I'm still in it.

Katie Zandbergen: We like to say in the Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise course that you can put on the lenses, the theories of the course, and then you're seeing non-consumption everywhere. In this instance, it really sounds like an example of spotting nonconsumption and being on the lookout for struggling moments, in this case, not having reliable access to power. You're a lived example of jobs theory in action.

Katie Zandbergen: On your social media accounts, you describe yourself as "Founder and CEO of Uncharted Power, believer in all things authentic, disruptive, and empowering." Now, Clay would say that disruption isn't just something that's new and exciting and really cool, but rather, that a company's disruptive impact must be molded into strategy and that it's all about coming in at the low-end of the market, which is where you're targeting overserved customers, or new market disruption, which is where you're targeting nonconsumption.

Katie Zandbergen: In other words, disruptive technologies are typically simpler, more convenient, and less expensive products that appeal to newer, less demanding customers. I'm wondering, when you described yourself as being a believer in all things disruptive, are you thinking of it in terms of Clayton Christensen's understanding of disruption?

Jessica O. Matthews: Yes. I think that and plus, right? I think there's something to be said about designing for the extreme, designing for the people who are ignored. Oftentimes, what you designed may not seem like a fit for everyone, but for that small group where you're addressing their needs and you're pushing in that way, it gives you a way in.

Jessica O. Matthews: I'll give you an example from the infrastructure perspective. If I said that's the first job to be done was just convincing more people, including myself and people who are interested in innovation, which believe it or not, is not common in the power industry at all, it is why our grid was last changed in 1926, so you wouldn't believe that they can get in there.

Jessica O. Matthews: Once you're in the space, what's the innovation that's going to be disruptive? How do we push this? There are some simple things, right? Most transmission is built on AC in the United States because people believe it's the best way to design centralized infrastructure that has to run a long way. However, if you're really using renewable sources, there's different reasons why would actually make sense to do DC, but it doesn't really fit in with the way people like to build our overall infrastructure, but on the fringes, microgrid developers on smaller land size and all of that, they might be willing to consider a DC-to-DC microgrid.

Jessica O. Matthews: We know that the way to keep costs down in our overall infrastructure solution that enables us to build this infrastructure in a way that's scalable, that's easily maintained and all of that means that it just has to be DC-to-DC. We went ahead and said, "Yeah. That's what we've designed the system to do." That's what makes sense. It may mean that 85% of the market doesn't get how they can work with us, but the 15% that does get how they can work with us, that's how we get in, that's how we start to address their needs, a very specific use case and interconnecting decentralized energy resources. Then we can scale from there.

Katie Zandbergen: Okay.

Jessica O. Matthews: I do believe in that. To me, when I say, again, "Designing for the extremes," it's a lot of the way people think about power is people are force-fitting things. People are force-fitting into the way everyone's been doing, some of the way the majority of the market's doing something and then you get a lot of inefficiencies as well. For us, we would not have even been able to develop the solutions that we have right now that we're seeing global applications for if we weren't designing for a market that had no infrastructure, right?

Katie Zandbergen: Yeah.

Jessica O. Matthews: The way we currently build centralized power infrastructure in the United States just isn't working, isn't scalable in Sub-Saharan Africa. It doesn't work from a technology perspective, it doesn't work from a policy perspective, it doesn't work from a financing perspective.

Jessica O. Matthews: In designing a solution that could work in Sub-Saharan Africa, we ended up designing for an extreme, which actually ended up giving an insight to the fringes in the global market as well, and starting to get at the actual pain points of the more majority markets, too. It's a break-in, too, yes, and it's a very specific use case, but the things that we do well, the status quo system very much does not.

Katie Zandbergen: Yeah. Initially, you started off providing energy-generating products like the SOCCKET ball and the PULSE jump rope for Uncharted Play. Now, you've shifted gears and you're really interested in developing system-wide solutions at Uncharted Power. I've heard you talk about the triangle of the energy technology ecosystem, which is made up of energy generation, transmission, and storage. You touched on this a little bit, this idea that with our aging infrastructure and trying to force things into a system that isn't really well-equipped to handle it, could you elaborate a bit on that through this lens of this triangle?

Jessica O. Matthews: Sure, yeah. This is an oversimplified framework, but I wouldn't be an HBS student if I didn't have an oversimplified framework to organize things. The way I like to think about the energy industry, right, is that it's a series of triangles that are interrelated and I say this in that you can't say you want to change one point of the triangle without expecting there to be shifts of the other two, whether they're directly intentional or indirect.

Jessica O. Matthews: Primarily, when you're thinking about the kind of the energy industry and anything happening in it, the three points of the triangle to start are technology, policy, and financing, right? Or what are the technologies that are going into what you're making to provide this power? What are the policies that by the government that dictates the way this technology is installed and who owns it and the services? Because this is a public good, right? There needs to be rules and regulations and safety and all of that. Then who's paying for all of it? What is the business model? How is it getting financed?

Jessica O. Matthews: All of these things come into play when we think about any shift in this industry. There are a lot of other things, but that's the top three that I think you have to watch, all at our own beat. You can have an amazing technology, but if the policies won't even allow it to go to market or it won't allow it to go to market for a hundred years or no one's going to finance the development or no one's going to buy it in the way it's currently set up, that's the issue, right?

Katie Zandbergen: Mhmm.

Jessica O. Matthews: People will often, again, say, "Well, why don't you just put solar panels all over here?" or, "Do this and that." It doesn't make sense from a policy perspective or from a financing perspective.

Jessica O. Matthews: From our organization, we first started out focused on the technology side. Within technology, energy technology, again, there's, probably from a hardware perspective, three core parts. There's energy generation, which can be likened to the car, right? Your having a great car is like having the energy generation, whether it's solar or hydro or wind or kinetic energy. There are lots of different ways to generate energy and oftentimes, when people are thinking about energy, unfortunately, they're thinking about generation and they're missing out on the full pie.

Jessica O. Matthews: The other way, the other two parts are storage and transmission. Storage is like the garage that you keep your car in, right?

Katie Zandbergen: Yep.

Jessica O. Matthews: Obviously, if you have a temperature-controlled garage and all of this stuff, it's nice and great, your car will hopefully last a very long time. It's a nice little way to maintain your little car, your little generation piece. That's wonderful.

Jessica O. Matthews: Then there's transmission. You can liken energy transmission and distribution to the roads, whether it's the highways or the back roads that you drive your car on. What we have found is that... Oh, I'm sorry, I should say that similar to roads, transmission distribution, that is what gets into the network effects, right? That's what enables us to have this full-functioning system because if you think about this, again, you drive, you have your car, but the main point of your car is to drive it on the road, to get it to where it needs to go, to have this impact, to have this reach, and yes, of course, have good places to store your car that are safe and secure and resilient and all of that. That's a full-functioning network system. It's the same thing for power on the technology side.

Jessica O. Matthews: What we found, first, like everyone else, we jumped in and knew there was an issue, whether it was on the consumer side with soccer balls and jump ropes or even on the infrastructural side, we had developed essentially energy-generating speed bumps and things like that. We realized, "Okay, great, this is wonderful, but okay, where are we going to store this?" All right, there's a few places to store it.

Jessica O. Matthews: But the big thing is when we did a full evaluation of the market and whether it was our technologies or whether it was solar or hydro or wind, we realized that a lot of people were focusing on generation, a lot of people were focusing on storage, and that simply no one was focused on infrastructure-level transmission and distribution.

Jessica O. Matthews: We found that across the United States, most transmission and distribution infrastructure is anywhere from 68 to like 150 years old. We found that in Sub-Saharan Africa and other places around the world or in the Global South, that the big thing is that there are barely any transmission lines per capita.

Jessica O. Matthews: You sit there and you say, "Okay." Well, we're all over here developing some new sustainable, amazing cars, few of us are over here creating really exciting garages for these cars, but how long will this car actually last? How far will this car go if the road it has to drive on hasn't been updated in 150 years or if it doesn't exist at all? How can we possibly have a sustainable network, a sustainable system, if the roads that we're going to push the thing out if there is no real internet of power, like a high-speed highway of power?

Jessica O. Matthews: Think back to, it's almost like how we survived before we had roads. Think, all the difficulties we think about in terms of growth, in terms of sustainability, in terms of systems and networks in the way that we kind of interconnect. That's what we need.

Jessica O. Matthews: That was when we said, "Wow. Okay. We probably should take our expertise in embedded systems." That's understanding how to put technology, we simply power-related this technology inside of things, whether it was a soccer ball or a jump rope or even a speed bump or a road, and translate that to transmission and distribution solutions because anything we want to create on the generation side is going to need this. But more importantly, anything else that anyone else is creating, they're going to need this as well, so let's go ahead and build the road.

Jessica O. Matthews: That's what got us into a specific focus. It relates to transmission distribution infrastructure, hardware, and software that makes it easier to build it and monitor and maintain it in ways that are suitable for the way that we want to live having a more renewable energy, having it be something that can be built anywhere in a more modular fashion, a more decentralized fashion, and in a more cost-effective fashion as well.

Katie Zandbergen: Along these lines, can you tell our listeners more about your recent project, which I believe has been very stealth over the last year, but now you're able to talk about it more, which is this idea of Uncharted system and your MORE panels, MORE standing for Motion-Based Off-Grid Renewable Energy?

Jessica O. Matthews: Sure, yeah. The MORE name came from when we were doing more on the generation side. As you said, MORE from the generation side started as, essentially, Motion-Based Off-Grid Renewable Energy. That is still under development and in different areas on the generation side, both for consumer products as well as for the infrastructure products.

Jessica O. Matthews: The Uncharted system that we're now pushing out into the market specifically relates to our transmission and distribution platform, the technology platform. Essentially, there are a couple of things that it does that we realized were necessary when we think about building this infrastructure.

Jessica O. Matthews: Separate from the Uncharted system, there are essentially two ways to think about building transmission and distribution infrastructure. There's the above-ground cabling that everyone, I'm sure, is very commonly used to and has seen. This is the most cost-effective way right now, on average, anywhere from about 400 to $500,000 per mile in the United States to build it. It's easily upgradable. You can just go there and fix it and maintain it, et cetera. The problem is that it's not durable, it's not secure, it's not resilient.

Jessica O. Matthews: What you have, then, is situations where if there's a little bit of wind, like what's going on in California right now, PG&E has amassed over $30 billion in liabilities. There have been dozens of people who have died because of fires all related to the fact that when there's wind, the cables not fall down, and they essentially start a fire. You have the issues that happened with Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas, what happened in Puerto Rico. In any situation from a resiliency perspective, it just doesn't work. Even in New York, a couple of months ago when we lost power, people don't realize that was actually an issue with the transmission distribution infrastructure. There's a resiliency issue.

Jessica O. Matthews: In addition, there's also a maintenance and monitoring issue because essentially, these cables are not smart systems. The way that the utility companies will find out if there's an issue with their actual transmission distribution infrastructure is they'll wait for you to call it, you calling in and saying, "There's a fire," or calling in and saying, "There's no power."

Jessica O. Matthews: About two weeks ago, just in Upstate New York, 30,000 people didn't have power because of a quick storm. What the utilities will do is they just send a bunch of guys out to drive around about a mile a radius after people have called in until they figure out where it is and then they start to address it. You have this issue of it being very much not secure, not resilient, not durable, and just something that you can't even maintain, you don't know what's going on with your system. Obviously, that's not the system that you want to scale if you're going to start to have more distributed energy resources.

Jessica O. Matthews: The future of energy generation is very much renewable, we all hope, but also distributed. Instead of having one centralized generation plant that's like a hundred megawatts, you're going to have a bunch of homes generating solar on their rooftops that can be interconnected. You're going to have the smaller sites everywhere, which means more cabling is needed, which means more roads essentially are needed and if you're building a road this way, we're in for a big problem.

Jessica O. Matthews: The other way to do this is below-ground trenching, right? Usually, it takes about eight to 10 feet trenching below ground. This is more resilient, it is way more durable, way more secure, and also just better from an aesthetic perspective.

Jessica O. Matthews: The problem is, one, it's way more expensive, anywhere from four to 14 times as expensive per mile. The second issue is that if you do ever need to get in there and make an upgrade or maintain it or fix the problem, it's very difficult to get it, to access as well. Still, there isn't really a strong solution for actually monitoring this system, right? That now becomes an issue again, if you want to have a more modular system for interconnecting different sites as they come on and are working. Obviously, you want to know where everything is and obviously, you want it to be cost-effective as well.

Jessica O. Matthews: What we would hear from different developers and different utilities that yes, we know that there's so many costs inherent with having these above-ground transmission solutions that are old that need to be replaced, but below-ground just isn't cost-effective. We can't upgrade it, we can't pay for it, so here we go, where we're stuck.

Jessica O. Matthews: Let's create a solution that addresses these main issues, right? We need something that is both resilient and secure while also being cost-effective. We need something that can be fully monitored at a high resolution so that we can actually visualize the full system and know when problems are happening and be able to send someone there even if no one calls and all of that. We need to make sure that this is something that is very financeable, so whatever additional revenue streams that can come from installing this infrastructure that we can turn on so that we can reduce the payback period and make it something that makes sense not only in the short term but in the long term if it needs to be. The Uncharted system essentially does that.

Jessica O. Matthews: The first part of the system is a structurally-sound conduit made a fiber-reinforced polymer. They're using it now for lots of bridges. The reason why the L in New York City didn't have to be turned off is because they're using FRP for this. It's a material that is about 80 to 90% lighter than concrete, but has the same structural integrity. We designed a really exciting conduit system that essentially looks like a paver, it looks like a panel. It looks like panels for sidewalk, panels for road, totally normal, but it can withstand almost 60,000 pounds of pressure and weight.

Jessica O. Matthews: Basically, you can install it as a top layer panel in the ground, like you would just install paver, normally it's ADA-compliant and all of that. Now, you can put things inside of that, power cables, fiber optic cables, all these different things, you can put things inside of those panels now without having to trench eight to 10 feet below, but with the same structural integrity, all of that, and you're able to do that with tools that allow you to, if you have to upgrade it, if you have to get into the panel for any reason because they're not trenched below, using these customized tools, you can get in and easily do that.

Jessica O. Matthews: We're able to design this system so that it's actually the same cost as above ground, so this conduit system gives you the best of both worlds, essentially. It gives you the resilience and durability and security of what you get with the cables being trenched below, but it also gives you the cost and upgradability that you get with the cables being above ground. That was the first part, making sure we address that. Okay, great. Now, you can't say that.

Jessica O. Matthews: Now, with the monitoring system, because you can't just have this sprawling energy network interconnecting all of these distributed energy resources and not actually know where anything is, we designed essentially a smart cable that allows us to transmit energy and data in real-time. It has sensors and microprocessors interconnected as well.

Jessica O. Matthews: Essentially, what we're able to do is have a full visualization of the system up to one square meter of resolution. In every square meter, we know the health of the system, we're collecting lots of sensor data about the system. We can now figure out exactly where a problem is within seconds, deploy units if necessary to address the issue, but more importantly, as we're collecting data, we'll soon be able to predict issues before they even happen and fix them before they even happen. This not only give us this whole monitoring to provide a better service and to actually enable a more sprawling service, it overall actually lowers the operations and maintenance costs of having the service.

Jessica O. Matthews: Still, again, we knew that it's helped to have multi-functional infrastructure. It helps. People never really wanted to pay for power infrastructure, so we wanted to come into this thinking about the built environment and not only breaking the access gap in terms of power, but also the future of things that would be enabled when you have a reliable, secure place to power things inside of the ground.

Jessica O. Matthews: The third part of the system is the co-location space. Essentially, whether it's leasing space for people who want to run fiber optics, IOT companies, the different types of sensors that are necessary for driverless cars, et cetera, it's actually a space that telcos and other types of companies or the municipality itself can actually lease to place tech inside of the ground where they're cooling and heating budget as necessary. There's also essentially access to power and connectivity.

Jessica O. Matthews: Those three parts of the system allow us to transform the ground that you're walking on and the roads that you're driving on into the future of transmission distribution infrastructure. Very technical, but for the 10 people who listen who are interested in that stuff, call me, we can geek out about it. We can have a drink and keep talking.

Katie Zandbergen: Does this system of microgrids allow for power from other sources, like solar, hydro, and wind, to plug into it as well? Or is it primarily for the power that's generated from kinetic sources?

Jessica O. Matthews: It's everything. Everything. It's 100% power source agnostic. Any type of power can be interconnected into this system.

Katie Zandbergen: Wow. In a relatively short period of time, you've evolved from generating power through play to actually embedding power generation into infrastructure and tackling these greater and more complex systemic challenges, which is really impressive.

Jessica O. Matthews: Thank you for saying "generally short amount of time." Many of my investors are kind of like, "What's up? What is going on?" I'm just like, "Listen. You got to let me dream on this one." Yeah, like I said, I knew it was an infrastructural issue from the beginning, but it was scary.

Jessica O. Matthews: The first thing, the first job to be done, and in many ways the first, or a couple of years ago it was, maybe, the job to be done was to tell people, including myself, "There is a better way. We can chase this industry," right?

Jessica O. Matthews: Then the next job to be done was really specifically looking at the problems with infrastructure and what we found was that it's not just like, "Oh, infrastructure needs to be better," the job to be done is that it was related to transmission and distribution infrastructure. That's what needed to be addressed, right? That was the unserved need. That was the ignored problem. That was the missing piece.

Jessica O. Matthews: It's been a really exciting ride pushing through on this and designing this. Ultimately, the goal still remains the same: To demonstrate an alternative solution, alternative way of thinking. It started out with a soccer ball and a jump rope and then, at the end of the day, this is the kind of space where once it's built, once people see that it's working and it's fully thought out, not only from a technology perspective but from a policy and financing perspective as well, it's something that we are really excited to partner with different municipalities and even utilities to scale across the country, for sure, but also internationally.

Katie Zandbergen: Yeah, the idea will be to start off in smaller communities and make sure it's working well and then point to those communities as examples in terms of scaling?

Jessica O. Matthews: Yes. Yeah, when it's something this heavy and heady, you can't do a blitz scale and do all of these different things at one time. We've figured out the technology side, we know exactly what we want to do on the financing side, so now it's really working with the municipality side of things.

Jessica O. Matthews: What we're doing essentially, we just launched a test and demonstration facility in Upstate New York in Poughkeepsie. We still have our headquarters in Harlem, but we now have expanded for a second location where we can do much more industrial-level testing on our systems in addition to all of the third-party laboratory external testing that's happening on our system to make sure that it's safe and ready to go, but it also gives us a place to do demonstrations and actual installations of our system indoors and outdoors so that people can see this and play with it and drive over it and walk on it and all of that. With that, that actually is something that we've just recently launched, I believe about a week and a half ago and I'm starting to showcase that.

Katie Zandbergen: Wow! Congratulations.

Jessica O. Matthews: Thank you. That's really exciting because technological validation is key. We want to create sites that makes sense for us logistically to showcase what it can do prior to the full scale. The plan, really, over the next two years is to have at least two public pilot sites in addition to a few private pilots sites related to different investors and different business partners in the telco space and the echolocation space and the data analytic space that want to see what this can do but don't want to share the results.

Jessica O. Matthews: We have a site in Connecticut that we're currently developing. We're a private land pilot where we're building a full microgrid with this solution. We're also currently in talks to do a full public land pilot in the Tri-State Area. We're going to share more about that in the new year where that we're not only going to be demonstrating a technical solution and how this should be used to build microgrids, we'll be demonstrating the example of how we want to work with municipalities and how this model can then be scaled and brought to different cities domestically and internationally. In that same way, we'll be highlighting how this will work on the financing side as well and how this will make sense, as I said earlier, in the short term and long term.

Jessica O. Matthews: Over the next two years, that's what's going to be announced, that's what's going to be shared, that's what we're going to be opening up, really, to a broad community. We're actually investing, especially in 2021, in learning and collaboration forums where we're going to bring in not just the people that you would expect in these rooms, but academics and students and different people from different industries to say, "Hey, this is the future of power and data infrastructure, honestly. What would you do with it? How are you thinking about it? What might this bring in the next 10 years?"

Jessica O. Matthews: Once all of that is really on its way, we'll be very excited to say, "Okay, well, this is the model. Let's do this in Nigeria. Let's do this in Florida. Let's do this in the Bahamas. Let's scale it, right?" It's going to be a very exciting two years, but we're honestly already underway. We're going to have a few exciting announcements regarding the exact locations and the different partners we have for these projects in the new year.

Katie Zandbergen: Well, thank you, Jessica, for such an inspiring conversation today. We'll be watching Uncharted Power as you guys progress in the coming weeks and months and years. It's just been great having you on The Disruptive Voice. Thank you.

Jessica O. Matthews: Awesome. Thank you so much. I really had a great time as well.

Clay Christensen: Thank you for listening to us at Disruptive Voice. If you like our show and want to learn more, please visit us at our website or leave us a review on iTunes. Until next time, good luck, everybody.