Unlocking the Road to Energy Abundance with Base Power CEO and Co-Founder Zach Dell

Today, Andrew Pryor's, I'm joined by Zach Dell, the founder and CEO of Base Power. Base just announced a $1,000,000,000 fundraise from folks like Addition, Thryv, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Valor, and myself. Zach previously was at Blackstone working in different private equity and Thryv doing investments in various AI and software companies. Very excited to talk to him today about not only his company, but also more broadly about the energy industry and how energy is an input into literally everything that we do and consume. That's AI data centers. That's the pencil you're using to write. That's your computer. That's mining, that's basically everything in the world. Energy is a major input. So very excited to talk with Zach today. Zach, thank you so much for joining me today at Nano Priors. Thanks for having me. Energy is an input into everything in the world that's produced. Right? It drives data centers, it drives electric cars, but it also drives all of manufacturing, drives the Internet. It drives basically every aspect of our lives, and it's a key cost input into everything. So if you have very cheap energy, everything else becomes dramatically cheaper, and that opens up entirely new spheres. You've been working on base energy excuse me, base power for a couple years now. Can you tell me more about how you landed on what you're doing and what base actually does? Yeah. Our mission is to lower the cost of electricity for all, and we think that is the most powerful thing we can do to promote human prosperity. So to create a world of energy abundance where power is less expensive and more reliable. So I got here by way of of finance world. So I started my career at Blackstone. I was on the private equity team there. I spent a couple of years at Thrive Capital investing in technology companies and then left Thrive ultimately to start the company with my cofounder, Justin. And I think at those firms, I was able to see a lot of the industry, the value chain of of energy of different kinds of technologies like solar and storage and see this kind of paradigm shift unfolding, where if you look at the last five decades of energy, it's really been defined by coal and then natural gas. And it it seems pretty clear now that based on where the cost curves are going, the next five decades of energy are gonna be defined by solar and storage. And there's really no energy technology platform company built around that thesis. And so that is really the the the kind of vision, the idea, around which we started the company, a couple years ago. K. And you just closed literally a billion dollars in new financing, which I think brings your total over time to 1,300,000,000.0. What is that money gonna go to? What products do you provide? What services? Like, what what are you currently doing? Yeah. …