Under Forty: Justin Segall

The pandemic didn't stop these luminaries from the energy and utilities space from innovating in all types of technologies. Ninety individuals sprang into action, creating new tools or strategies to better serve their colleagues and communities. This year, PUF is celebrating these ninety Under Forties. 
 

PUF's Steve Mitnick: What's your typical day like?

Justin Segall: I'm not sure if there is a typical day, which is both fun and crazy. In this pandemic era, we're holding a lot of Zoom meetings back-to-back all day.

I'll give you a flavor of today. We have a Customer Advisory Board, where we have about fifteen chief customer officers, CIOs, from several of our customers that we use as a sounding board for new ideas and for direction for the company. We talk about everything from potential Uplight M&A target to growth and operations.

We're checking with the advisory board to test ideas, get feedback on what the industry needs, and then working with our team on new ideas that we're incubating. They provide feedback about business or regulatory models, and even on bigger strategic aspects in the company.

Our advisory board helped with the formation of Uplight because they were clear they didn't want to deal with multiple point solutions so they help us understand where we need to grow and other acquisitions we should be looking at.

Our customers now are thinking about more complex, bigger picture ideas, not just a home energy report or demand response program, but a customer digital business model transformation, weighing in with customer teams or getting on calls with customers, helping them think through those pieces.

We're in the process of working through our updated long-term strategy and near-term investment plans.

PUF: Do you consider yourself a serial entrepreneur?

Justin Segall: I've only started one company, so I can't label myself a serial entrepreneur. If you count Uplight as its own separate company, maybe that counts as two, but more important, I'm a catalyst. What I do is ignite things and people to believe in something bigger than they thought was possible.

Before starting Simple Energy, I was employee number one at Renewable Choice Energy, and I wore a lot of hats, which was great experience for starting a company. We were trying to create something out of nothing, whether that was in public-private partnership and infrastructure, to building out things in the rural spaces.

With Uplight, it's always, how do we create something meaningful, impactful, and tangible, out of nothing? Then what are the things we've got to do? What are the teams we've got to build, and the customers, policymakers, and business model to go make that happen?

The fun part of my job is we're building new things. We're innovating in different areas of new products, business units, and business models that we're testing. In some ways, I'm getting to test launch a handful of new businesses alongside how we can do, rebuild, and scale what we're doing here.

PUF: As the new young guy, how was it, trying to deal with the more status quo aspects of a slower moving industry?

Justin Segall: For better or for worse, one of the first things I did out of school was work on a bigger redevelopment project in Atlanta called the Belt Line. Real estate development also has a lot of folks who say, here's the way we've always done it.

It was the same with policymakers in some cases where we had to ask ourselves �" how do we get policymakers, developers, communities, and different stakeholders who all want something and have their reasons for why they want it, to go do something in a different way.

Dan Ariely was one of our early behavioral economics advisors. He gave us his advice about users and how to get people to change how they save energy. It's applicable to our customers and our partners as well, which is from a behavioral science perspective, don't get people to care about saving energy, get people to act as if they care about saving energy by doing what they care about.

We started Simple Energy and started with social gamification and the use of social media and the internet to change the customer experience. At the time, utilities were more focused on meeting call center metrics and regulatory requirements, and if we were able to connect the dots to those metrics, we would be successful. There were a lot of early mistakes when we failed to connect the dots.

The regulatory model isn't prescriptive on how to change things, it's focused on looking for the best ways to champion the best interests of the customer. If you work toward the metrics that utilities need to hit today, you can help create change for tomorrow on how they think about the best way to help the customer.

What I've learned about people in this industry, even though they may be resistant to change is, they are in this industry for the right reasons. When we talk to people about their why, it's that they want to serve the community.

PUF: Was there an, aha, moment? Maybe you said, nobody's actually doing this, so there's a gap. We need to fill it.

Justin Segall: Prior to starting Simple Energy, I was working in rural development and there was a bit of an, aha, moment. I built a model of all the renewable generation, relative to both voluntary demand and RPS requirements across the country, by learning it.

In 2010, looking at everything that was already in the queue and with a transmission build out, it would take until 2137 to build everything we needed. We couldn't solve the problem solely by continuing to help get more renewable projects built faster.

I didn't want to wait until 2137 to solve this problem and that launched us down the path of what else can we do to solve it. My co-founder at Simple Energy, Yoav Lurie, came from a more data and technology background and that was the catalyst for our conversations.

We started talking about, what was the big problem? Having gone through Techstars, one of the things they talked about a lot, which I firmly believe in is, it's team, team, market, then product, because the one thing that will change is your product. Do you have the right team to go execute? Are you in a market that's big enough to build a viable company? Your product matters enough insofar as, it's a good place to get started.

What we've done successfully is to first, focus on the team. Have the right set of people on the team. We're able to be successful in learning, understanding, and delivering for the market. We're in a market that has a ton of opportunity in terms of growth and impact, and we've evolved.

We found that having a better mousetrap wasn't necessarily better, because it didn't need to be. We've continued to evolve with the products that we deliver. With the M&A and these capital partners we have around the table, we continue to evolve to meet today's business needs.

Where so many companies in our space have failed is, they're building for tomorrow's needs, and tomorrow keeps being tomorrow. Meet today's needs. Deliver for today and build for tomorrow.

PUF: What do you see doing with this company over the next ten years?

Justin Segall: My journey on this started when I was ten and doing a hike. I saw a plume of smoke in the distance and asked my counselor, what is that?

He said, it's a coal-fired power plant. I said, I don't like it. He said, you should do something about it. I'm still living ten-year-old Justin's vision of, go do something about it. The reality for me is, it's not about how valuable is your company, or what is it that you do. It's about, achieve that outcome.

What we think about at Uplight, for our targets, it's around sustainable environments and communities, and reductions in metrics in the carbon dioxide emissions, in sustainable environments and communities.

It's helping people save on their bills, making sure the benefits of the clean energy economy extend to all. We will not have been successful if those benefits don't extend to all socioeconomic backgrounds, all races. That's the why.

In doing that, if we create a place that is enabling people to do the best work of their lives on something that's meaningful and fulfilling, we will have a sustainable company. We will be a high-growth impact company. That's why I'm doing this. We've still got a lot more to achieve.

If you asked me years ago, when we started down this path, do I think I'd still be doing the same thing eleven years later, I would have said no.

Because we need a more sustainable environment, and we need to invest in our communities, and people need fulfilling work to go do. I will keep doing that. We just got to the place that most entrepreneurs dream about.

We have a platform and a scale that impacts. There are exciting days ahead. Whatever it is I'm doing, you'll find me trying to drive on those issues wherever I am.
 

2021 Fortnightly Under Forty conversations:

• Shivani Sidhar, Sempra Energy
• Devin James, Edison Electric Institute
• Jace Carlock, Entergy
• John Siefert, Electric Power Research Institute
• Amanda Olson, Burns & McDonnell
• Ali Mohammed, New York Power Authority
• Justin Segall, Uplight
• Brandon Pixley, CPS Energy
• Stephanie Crawford, NRECA
• Kristjana Kellgren, Alberta Utilities Commission
• Flavia Lenzi, ENGIE Italia
• Patrick Wruck, British Columbia UC
• Müge Özerten, Hitachi ABB Power Grids
• Aki Marceau, Hawaiian Electric