Sandhya Hedge 00:01
Our guest today is the CEO and Co-Founder of Aurora Solar, and my dear friend, Chris Hopper. Aurora is a solar design platform started in 2013 by GSB classmates, Chris and Debbie, that has now powered the design and delivery of over 10 million solar projects. Aurora was last valued at $4 billion, and has over 7000 customers of varying sizes. So, I'm so excited to learn more about your climate tech journey. And thank you so much for joining us, Chris.
Chris Hopper 00:34
Of course, thank you for having me, Sandhya.
Sandhya Hedge 00:38
I remember way back, I think in 2012, even before you guys started Aurora Solar, you were both individually interested in doing something in solar, you had already been a part of starting BBOXX, the home solar company in Africa that happened to be an investor in, and Delhi was already fooling around with financial instruments for climate, you were both individually interested and curious. So, how did you actually come together and arrive on your insight around building design software for the industry?
Chris Hopper 01:19
Good question. I mean, it's hard to say when exactly it started because one thing leads to another. So, starting at the very beginning - I studied electrical engineering for undergrad, and during that time I was really interested in how I might apply my skills and do something to better the world in some way, shape, or form. It felt kind of useless to just build AM radios in a lab where I'm like, “I'm an engineer, I should do something.” So that was my motivation for entering the off-grid solar space. So, I spent two years with some friends trying to figure out how do we sustainably electrify off-grid communities in developing countries? Where there are more than a billion people worldwide without access to electricity — which is a mind-blowing fact. And so, did that for a couple of years and then started to help start BBOXX back in 2010. But then my life took me a different route. I came to California, to Stanford for Business School where we met, and also I met Sam, my Co-Founder. And yeah, the two of us just, first and foremost, became friends. We just met socially, hung out, and started talking about life after business school. What we might do individually, and through conversation I shared with him the work I've done in Rwanda, the off-grid space, installing very small-scale solar installations. And Sam, having grown up in Kenya, said, “Hey, you don't have to go off-grid for energy to finish, even in the city, even in Nairobi, where I grew up.” That's a big, big problem. People have power cuts, they spend a lot on their bills, they are on diesel generators. But hey, we have a lot of sun, right? Like, wouldn't solar make sense? They're like, “Yeah, that makes sense on a high level.” And so, we basically hatched the idea of starting a solar installation business, at a time focused on emerging markets. That was the original business idea. And so, we put together a pilot project to show ourselves we can do this and show our investors, show clients that we can do this. Let's piece together a pilot. We found a school in Nairobi, in Kenya, that wanted to go solar. We raised alone, we obviously designed a system, we hired local engineers, and then flew down there to install the system during a summer internship, between our two years of business school. So, that was the original idea, or business, that we wanted to start. And then what started happening is other people started reaching out to us. I said, “It’s because the system worked out, it was the quintessential solar success story, no more power cuts because we put batteries in place, they saved on their bill every month because they produced some of their own energy. And no more diesel generators, so it was a great success and other people heard about it.” They're like, “Hey, the solar makes sense for me. I also want to save on my bill, I also have power cuts. Should my building go solar? How much would it cost? How much would I save?” And we're like, “Well, we don't know. It depends.” This is the central question of solar that I have to answer over and over again, you have to determine whether a building is fit for solar and what to do, how to design it, and how to finance it over and over again. So, we quickly realized if we wanted to scale this as a business, we needed software to help us do that and to make data-driven decisions in the process. That's how we came across the idea of what is now Aurora.
Sandhya Hedge 05:07
What was the first customer you had in mind for the software? It sounded like initially the customer was yourself. You had gone through this process of trying to design one project and then you thought about, “Okay, who are the other people out there that meet the same criteria, have the same problem?” How did you think about who was going to be your first desperate customer looking for what you are going to offer them already?
Chris Hopper 05:38
So, as you said, the very first customer, if you will, was us. We built this for ourselves. Quite literally. So, initially, we didn't intend to start a solid software business. We just built a small web app for internal purposes. And that kept growing. And at some point, I didn't even know, probably a couple of months after — late 2012, maybe early 2013 — we took a step back and we're like, “Hold on, this keeps growing. Why are we reinventing the wheel? Clearly, people are installing solar, not just in emerging markets, but in the US. Also, there must be something that we could just buy off the shelf, that people use.” So, we looked around and we were quite surprised that there wasn't a great solution. That was the second aha moment, we're like, “Wow, this is strange. This is not how we expected the industry to look,” not how we thought it would look. There were some early SaaS startups that were just starting, but nothing even remotely close to what we thought there should be. And so, it was a gradual evolution. It wasn't like waking up, let's build software. It was starting an installation business, building software for ourselves, doing that for a while, and I go, “Let's look around and like, oh, wait a second, there's nothing.” And then we actually got introduced to an early adviser to the GSB Network who had spent a couple of years in solar prior at larger solar companies, and so started chatting with him about our idea. And he's like, “Oh, yes, I've been saying this internally for such a long time, we need to build something.” So, he joined us early on and guided our development. We had, almost, a customer in-house, in a way. So, this advisor saw it from the perspective of scaling this type of organization. Then we also, obviously, reached out to, quote-unquote, real customers or prospective customers. It was literally as simple as going through the phonebook, or googling local solar installers, and picking up the phone and saying, “Hey, we're working on something that could be of interest to you. Can we swing by and show you and get your feedback?” We did that in the early days. This is before we had anything just to sell or were just building our own thing.
Sandhya Hedge 08:14
What did the shape of the industry look like at that time? How much of the solar installation market felt like, of the big public companies versus the long tail of mom-and-pop family businesses and solar installers, what was the shape of the market, at the time? I'm curious whether you reached out just to the small local installers or did you interview across the spectrum of big companies and small companies to understand how you are solving this problem right now?
Chris Hopper 08:54
The industry, at the time, was actually very concentrated, at least in part that was. But 40% was Solar City at the time. Now it is acquired by Tesla, it's Tesla solar. And then there were a couple of larger ones, and then there's a long tail. So, it's fairly concentrated. That was always a question we would get in the early days like, “Hey, is this a market where it's just going to be two or three, five customers?” We never believed that, just the way we understood the dynamics of solar, we didn't think that it's a very local business. It's not something that lends itself to — there are some benefits to scale for sure — but not something that we thought would be very, ultimately, just to enter a limited workplace. In terms of the outreach, I can't say we were particularly structured about it. It's not like we had the map of the market. Let's make sure we sample from all this. It was very, we took whatever opportunities we got through the network. So, people are interested. And honestly, those nuances didn't matter as much at the time anyway. There's definitely a way to position and structure a product for enterprises versus SMBs, and that obviously has implications on many fronts. But when it comes to the core design part, that was really the core of where we create value and add value, it's kind of the same. Whether it's a big company or a small company, they do the same thing for each project, which is to create a roof model, they want to figure out how many panels fit, they want to calculate irradiance, how much sun you get, how much energy it’s going to produce, how much savings it’s going to generate — all these calculations. And those are fundamentally the same. And then there's a second question: How do I now wrap that in a go-to-market motion, to the general process and permissions that target different segments, but that's for our kind of product? The first step was to nail the core workflow. There was just talking to folks on the ground, folks who live in AutoCAD all day, and SketchUp, Excel. They had this tool soup that they pieced together. We just spoke to a lot of these folks. That was also a bit of an insight because we realized this issue in solar, you want to create a, ideally a 3d representation of the home and the question is, how do you do that? You can do that with AutoCAD, but that's quite complicated. And some people can do it, but many are not skilled enough and certainly at the velocity you want to create these becomes prohibitive. So, then SketchUp is one step down, it's a little bit simpler. So, we took that one step further, cassette SketchUp is still a fairly general modeling software. We just said, “Okay, we just built great roof modeling software, on top of which you can put solar.” And so that was a big, big part of a value-add. How do we take the thing they're trying to do, but really streamline it and make it hyper efficient for their use case? And then what an interesting thing that happened is as you start talking to people, you can build a mental map of the world. If you, as these data points trickle in, you see this type of person worries about this. Or the company in this geography cares about this and not about that. The sales reps cares about this engineer kit, but the owner cares about that. So, you start building the map of the world as you have more of these conversations. So, that was also very, very useful. Then it's important to, obviously, not just talk to one person, but multiple.
Sandhya Hedge 13:08
What would you say was the big aha moment for your customer? Was it, “Oh, my God, I'm going to save so much time I can get to the output I wanted way faster? Or was it, “Oh, I can create something I will be proud of. And I couldn't even do it with SketchUp.” What was the big aha moment for your early adopters?
Chris Hopper 13:34
There was a couple, but one central one that really drove us, in the early days in particular, and where I think we had a big part to play in shifting the industry and towards a better place was, when we started in solar it was still very common to do site visits very early in the funnel. So, if a homeowner was interested in going solar, there would be an installer or a sales rep would get in a truck, drive out for an hour, the person wouldn’t be home, they drive back to the office and rescheduled right back out. And they'd climb on the roof, they’d take shade readings on the roof, I've literally met people who fell off the roof doing that so it's not a safe thing, either. Then they’d drive back to the office, they plug into the computer, and then they get some shade valleys, so they sort of ballpark into their production estimates. So, it was not an accurate process and a very expensive one because if you do that early in the funnel, you work five times, six times, eight times, and you get paid once. What we did is we said, “Hey, you don't have to drive out to the site, we believe that we can give you the same level of accuracy from your office, we can represent the system that creates a 3d model based on different data sources, aerial imagery, LIDAR data and weather data and so forth. Calculate the irradiance in a much more granular way.” You can actually quote that from your office, saving the site visit, which is almost 1000 bucks per install. So, it's a significant savings for installers. That was a big, big one where we literally had customers come up to us say, “Hey, because of you guys, we don't have to roll trucks anymore. We did the math, we've tested it, and we changed the way we do our business.” So, that was a big, big unlock for them, first and foremost, and then therefore for us.
Sandhya Hedge 15:29
That would be huge, in terms of how much risk it takes away from your ability to reach out to more prospects and off make more proposals, that sounds incredibly valuable. Once you had figured out what was the core product this customer wanted, what was your early go-to-market strategy? And one of the things we investors obsess a lot about, maybe too much in the early days, is if your customers have a certain ACV. They will pay you, I don't know, $1,000 a month or something like that, then you have to have more inbound and a more low touch sales model. You can take six weeks to sell these customers, because the LTV CAC on that up in the end. What was your early path to scoring your first 100 small customers? What worked well? How quickly did you get there?
Chris Hopper 16:35
You know, I don't know if we took a textbook approach to that. We just spoke with people and people liked what we did. And they referred us to other people. And we do a lot of trade shows. We actually do some local trade shows that we did with this man, a booth, and talk to folks for three days and collect the business cards, and I hit them up after. That was a lot of our initial, even before that we did roadshows. So, we did, I remember one time we did a three week roadshow. We flew to Texas, Las Vegas for a trade show, then Southern California, then New England area. And we just hit up different installers, and demoed, and sold them that way. So, it was almost a traveling salesman kind of thing. Me and my Co-Founder doing that, and one of our early advisors. So, that's how we sold them in the early days. Then it became, we did a lot of online demos, got quite a bit of web traffic and converted keywords, and then converted — it’s not particularly sophisticated, it was just sign up here, book a demo, it was all through a demo because we cherished the customer conversation. So, it's not self-onboarding, it was not a very efficient process from a cost perspective because they're human, they're talking, doing 5, 10 demos a day, that sort of thing. And we're charging 160 or 260 bucks a month, so maybe two grand a year. And many small companies, so many customers only bought one license. So, it was not an optimized model by any stretch. And we then, obviously, got more refined as we grew and matured but it didn't matter as much because the product was resonating. And we kept focusing on that. So yeah, that was, in the early days that's what matters more than optimizing. I'd say that go-to-market motion. That's something you can do after. If you first optimize a go-to-market motion but don't have a product, it doesn't doesn't work that way around.
Sandhya Hedge 18:53
And what was some of the early customer feedback that helped you get more conviction around your product strategy? Any surprises, anything that made you change what you were building, how you were positioning it? Because I noticed at some point, you also went from just design software to this help you design, build, deploy, all of it. Did that come from early customer feedback?
Chris Hopper 19:28
It depends on which phase of the business. In the early days, the conversations usually were something like, we'd go, we'd demo, and they'd be like, “Oh, guys, we love what you're doing, it’s awesome. But I really can't use it day to day for XYZ reasons.” Well shoot, but fair enough because the things made sense. So, sometimes I needed to use this equipment or I needed this kind of functionality. For example, initially, we didn't have a layout engine, so we were placing panels. So, we were thinking, “Well, if that makes sense, we guess we have to build that.” So now we went back, and we would go and we build that. And then we'd come back. And then we're the same people a couple months after. And they're like, “Oh, that's fantastic. Love that you built that. But also, we need a, b, and c,” like God, dang it. So, that was sort of the loop where we go back and build that. And at some point, people start buying. It's actually amazing how open people are when someone comes to them and is earnest in caring about what they do and solving their problems. That was how we built the first product, but I would say it was equal measure vision and customer feedback. We also came with an opinion, it wasn't just like, “We have no opinion, give us feedback.” It was like, “Here's a vision we have, we think solar should be designed, not just today, but like in 5,10 years, we think there's all the benefits.” And then we put it to the test. Then we got feedback around it. And that's how we honed that. Later, it got more refined. So, then some of the more organizational factors came in. For example, I remember being at a trade show, this was one of my aha moments, where I demoed the whole software, and I could tell the guy was liking it and at the end, it's like, “Chris, I love this fantastic level you guys have built. But can you please take away this feature, or that feature? Or that feature?” I was like, what? The last couple of years, literally, I coded it myself, I'm like, “Why? Why should I take it away?” He's like, “Listen, I have 20 sales reps, or something like that, and I don't want them to do these things in software.” For example, you can model trees and build it in software, which casts shade. So, you can represent the impact of shade on your system. He's like, “I don't want them to be able to change tree heights, virtually cut back the tree, because if they cut back the tree it shows more energy production which makes it more likely that they get commission on their sale. But then I have to clean up on the back end of it because we're going to have problems with the customer.” Like, wow, okay, that makes sense. It was sort of the insight that is not just about the product itself, but how does it fit to the organization and the incentives in the organization, the needs of the organization? That was maybe two years ago. So, this was a big aha moment because it showed to me a whole new dimension of value, that was actually very strong. And that we then spend a lot of time thinking about how we make this and especially for large organizations, that's what matters, how do I? How does it look from the perspective of that buyer? And how does this product fit into their workflows and the needs of their organization?
Sandhya Hedge 22:58
How do you almost productize trust and governance as a part of this thing, so that it's really easy for the sales team to work but it's also really easy for the deployment team to trust that the customer will have a good experience? And it's really fascinating. I guess the fact that you were talking to not just the sales reps, who would use the software, but also the designers, the owner of the business, that 360 perspective. I think this is the unique thing, if you're building what we describe as vertical software. When you're building software, specifically for one industry, you need to understand every stakeholders point of view to get the collaboration and workflow right, as opposed to if you had focused on the sales rep alone you would have built something that maybe the owners don't fully trust. So really, really helpful insight. Maybe switching gears a little bit to fundraising. Even though you started the company in 2013 and you've had so much success in the past couple of years, in the early days it was more of a windy road. Given the environment we are in right now, I would expect that that's going to be the experience for most founders that are starting companies this year or started last year. So, what was it like between 2013, and when you raised your Series A Round, and 2019 — that six year window? What was it that helped you get the company to a fundable place? What were your Series A investors looking for, in terms of evidence that you had found Product-Market Fit?
Chris Hopper 24:53
Maybe a quick background on that because we're somewhat of an unusual company. As you said, in 2019 we raised an A round with, we're now in Series D so we went down the venture path quite successfully the last last couple of years, but the early years were very different. So, we started the pilot project in 2012. We incorporated a software company in 2013. We raised a small seed round, like 925k, but we basically bootstrapped from 2014 through 2019. And so, that was, I would say, in equal parts because we could, in the sense that we looked and the product resonated and we just kept selling. So, we went to maybe million in ARR within the first year or so. And then we just kept growing and sell a couple deals, hire an engineer. So, a couple deals signed as you build more product, and that was the the loop and it was a grind. It took five years to get to scale at that point. So, just charged 50 people and basically, organically, we managed the whole business and the cash flow document. Every engineer was a line item, and we'd look at how much cash we could add and how much comes out. Also, it was not easy to raise money for what we were doing. And that's maybe where it connects to where we are today, or the environment we’re in today. Although in our case, it was a bit more idiosyncratic, it was possible to raise money at the time, very possible, just not for solar. Because we were right, it came right after a boom and bust in clean tech, eight through 11. So, we're still very much in recent memory, people like this clean tech thing. Folks love lost a lot of money and it was an uphill conversation. Honestly, with most investors, it was like, “Okay, what solar? How does it work? How big is the industry? What even does an installer do? Why do they need software? How critical is he? How does it differentiate?” There's so many questions you need to go into that it was just difficult and impossible really to raise money, we found some great angels who believed in us and some seed fund to pair out of Palo Alto, they've been fantastic for us, who believed in us in the early days. But on the whole, the market was not there. And it was frustrating because we're like, “Well, that's not about that. It's about where cleantech is going, the future is going to be powered by solar energy. There's massive transformation happening in energy and solar speak, big theme in that.” And so, the way to resolve that tension, for us, was to say, “Okay, we'll just do our thing. We'll just, we believe in this, and we just build a product, and it resonates with the market.” That's what kept us going. It wasn't a rocket ship, in terms of its growth, but we were like, “Well, we have a business and the business keeps growing. And the customers love it.” And they say it changed their business. We kept it lean, and kept growing. So, we just had that fundamental belief in our business. There was never a question whether this would be a business, in my mind. There was a bit of a question around timing. How long will it take for the world to wake up again to renewables? Is this going to happen in 2 years or in 10? That's somewhat out of your control but I know, no doubt, that that would be a business and that in the long run it has the potential to be a very big business, as well. Because we need to make that shift to renewables and there needs to be a software layer in it.
Sandhya Hedge 28:50
What changed in 2019? Was it just that now you, as a business having bootstrapped all these years, had enough scale and momentum? Was there also changing the regulatory environment and the climate outside? Was there a tipping point for Aurora Solar in the last three years?
Chris Hopper 29:18
There's a quote by Hemingway when he's asked to think how he went broke, and he said first slowly and then suddenly, and the arc of the company feels the same way. Even the Series A wasn't all that straightforward because the world hadn't fully caught up yet. Actually, I also realized I didn't answer your previous question: what did investors look for in a Series A and Product-Market Fit and so forth? We were actually a bit unusual in that sense because our Series A was maybe more like B, in terms of its scale, and you know, 50 people have cash flow positive. We actually had Product-Market Fit because customers were buying and we were growing, what we didn't have was venture type growth. We were growing maybe 30ish, 40% year over year. But it turns out, it also matters how you capitalize a business and so there's a lot of power that we managed to unlock with the resources we raised in the series A. But like I said, it wasn't an easy race either because the world hadn't fully woken up and while we had a business and people were really intrigued, and particularly, it was very unusual to see a Silicon Valley company that was bootstrap like we had. So, that caught a lot of attention, but people didn't quite get over the growth rate. That wasn't what they would normally expect. But we found people who did believe in us and it came, in our case, mostly from the belief in us as founders and what we were doing, but also belief in the markets. So, we found investors who understood what we were doing much more fundamentally than the folks who said no. But the folks that said, No, it’s still very much an uphill conversation. For the folks that said, yes, our Series A lead energize was a love at first sight kind of thing. We're gonna call and we're trying to go into a deck like, “Oh, this tells you about solar,” and they're like, “Let's just fast forward, we get it we get, we've been looking at this. Let's get to the good stuff.” And we're like, “Wow, we don't have to talk about why this is gonna be big,” like, “No, we get it, we just say let's talk about the business.” And so, that's the other thing, you don't have to get 100 yes’, they don't actually do anything for you. You just have to get one from the right person. That's the tough thing, but fundraising because there's a lot of nos. I don't know how many nos we've gotten over the years, but we've found the right partners along the way. And I've been very, very grateful for that.
Sandhya Hedge 32:09
This is definitely advice I give to a lot of founders. Doing investor outreach is looking for people who are already talking about the space you are working in, as opposed to trying to do cold outreach to everyone running a VC fund. There's so many funds out there, so many different specializations, find people who already believe in your market hypothesis, and you only need a couple of those. You don't need, to your point, 100 yes’. In fact, it's much more time efficient to just go to the people who are already writing about your space, saying they want to invest in it, as opposed to trying to convince someone who's never thought about your space, trying to change their mind. It's actually a bad use of your time and their time. So yeah, 100% agree with that. Having been on both sides of the table, I'm curious, especially given your in climate tech, how much time or effort do you spend, either in the early days or now, in terms of understanding regulatory tail events? Is there something that policymakers are working on that will either help or hurt you? Did you get involved or stay on top of it in any special way?
Chris Hopper 33:35
Honestly, not really. Obviously, we followed along because these things matter to us. A, from a market perspective and B, very specific product requirements, such as a certain tax credit, or a certain utility rate changes that way. And that's something that our clients care about, and therefore, we need to represent them with the software. So, in that sense, yes. But look in the early days, we were just five guys out of a desk, with five laptops at a thing, there's no what are we going to do shift shift policy? So, as we didn't, now we're doing much more of it, because we're now a much larger organization where we're speaking for more of the industry because a lot of our installers, solar professionals, run on US soil. We're speaking up more, supporting analysis, supporting industry organizations to understand what could be certain effective policy changes. So, in that sense, we're doing more but we've never made the business contingent on any sort of policy, we always thought, ultimately, long run, the world will catch up. And we always thought that hidden upside of what we're doing because this just made sense, and it made sense to support it from the policy perspective, but frankly, it was bumpy along the road. In the industry, they call it the solar coaster. If you've been in it long enough, there's ups and downs. Now, we have a lot of tailwinds but we've also had headwinds. But it's, on a long enough time scale, we knew this would point up into the right. So, that's what we bet on, we never made it contingent on policy. Even if we could influence somebody so unpredictable, it didn't seem like a sound way to run a business. So, we just said, “Hey, let's do our own thing. And we'll take any tailwinds that come along.”
Sandhya Hedge 35:39
And then did you start thinking more about enterprise customers? Is that a big part of Aurora's future? That going up-market, bigger customers, new geographies, what does that look like?
Chris Hopper 35:59
It was around the Series A, and not necessarily that it coincided with it, it was more continental, it wasn't that Series A led to it, per se, but around the same time we were, before we saw the first enterprise customer, we wanted conversation about other ones that will get forgotten by the pull to from the enterprise in terms of feature requests, like “Hey, can you oh, we need SSL.” We’re like, “SSL, really? Sure.” You know, an API, here’s a feature that requests to the API, we need permissioning, the other version as on permission was not a problem until we talked across enterprise customers. And it's one of the biggest features, in terms of value drove, contract value, it was one of the easiest to ever build. I think it took one sprint and there was a difference between a regular team member, we call an unlimited team member, and the only difference is a limited team member, at the time limited team members could only see their own projects, they couldn't see the rest of the organizations, which, if you have 50 sales reps in one account, you definitely don't want them to touch each other's projects. And so, that makes a lot of sense. But in the early days it didn't matter because all SMB and it's like, it's like 2, 5, 10 people in the organization, there's a lot of trust and not a problem. But again, if you think about it from a larger audience perspective, so we layered in more and more of those, and went more up-market, so that's definitely a big part of our business now, and there's a lot of value to be created there. That's in addition to the core design functionality that we provide.
Sandhya Hedge 37:44
I remember, we had this, while we were amplitude going through the same journey of going up-market, we had this kind of dedicated pod around SSO and permissioning. That was, to your point, probably the most valuable work to do from a revenue perspective, but also the least interesting work to do from an engineering perspective. And it's funny how in B2B software, there’s almost always overlap in those two attributes. So, wrapping up, what would be your advice for seed stage founders starting out in 2022, in this environment where it’s hard for almost any first time founder to raise money all over again? What would be your advice, having experienced a fairly unique version of the startup journey where it bootstrapped a lot, felt slow at first, and then took off, once you capitalize the business?
Chris Hopper 38:53
You know, I try to drive lessons from our journey. I think one of the key ones is work on something you care about. This whole journey is so unpredictable. It's a lot of work and effort and it can be long. Certainly, if it's successful, and there'll be ups and downs, plenty of them along the way. And the environment is not always going to be in your favor. The last two years, it was a very different, easy, many dimensions, but in this environment. I think it's much easier if you work on something you care about. That's what carried us, we're like, “This is something worth doing, is something that should exist. We want to build a big business process and we want to raise money one day,” but it wasn't about raising money. It wasn't about a valuation headline, it wasn't about being in TechCrunch. He was like, “No, this is a gonna push to wealth in the right direction.” And that's what fundamentally kept us going. Also, you got to enjoy the process,, with all these ups and downs, and that's fun for some people, it's not for others. And so, knowing that upfront is also important. For me, it's always been just fun building a company. That's what carries you through all those bumps along the road. The final thing is, if I think back to us, I remember sometimes you can get bummed, I was like, “Why can't we raise money and some of our classmates when I was in grades, large rounds, like Jesus, how much and how, and asking for a couple 100k. And we couldn't get that. So, it might feel like, that's not a good time to start a company. But in retrospect, it was a perfect time for us to start this company because by the time the world had woken up again, it was too late. We'd spent five, six years, building this company. And most people are now waking up, oh, there's something happening in the climate and like, well, great, welcome. And there's more to do. But to start a solar design software company, like you had really started years before and so. So yeah, it's funny how that works. Sometimes it might feel like it's not the right time, but you'd be surprised. iin 5,10 years, we'll look back and we'll see many great companies built during that time. I think great companies can be built in any environment and, in particular, in this one. It improves signal to noise, but it's something you've got to believe in, in the end. And that's fun along the way.
Sandhya Hedge 41:37
Yeah, I think being in the trenches, without any hype allows you to really focus on your customer. How many installer conversations do you think you had those first five years? 1000?
Chris Hopper 41:51
I don't even know. I mean, even at trade shows alone it'd be probably 100 conversations. That's all that matters,the customer, making them happy and delivering value to them and then good things will come from there.
Sandhya Hedge 42:15
Well, one inspiring story and you guys are just getting started. I'm definitely rooting for you. Thank you so much for being on the show, it’s lovely learning more about Aurora Solar.
Chris Hopper 42:27
Of course. Thanks for having me.
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