The Sign You're Doing the Right Thing | A Why Design: Founders’ Mission and Purpose Journey

The wrong that started it all.

Most of the products on this show exist because someone looked at the world and decided that the way things were just was not acceptable.

Four guests on the specific wrong their product is trying to right.

I really started to see with my own eyes the inequities that exist in fertility in particular and how we've landed with a system that enables people with money to have babies, healthy babies, and people without money to just struggle alone and take chances.

And that really like plucked at that well hang on a second that's not fair uh sort of desire and uh and then yeah creating a company where i was able to build a team and and start creating that sort of culture yeah and it was uh the early days were really really fun really hard but really fun

So yeah, Windfall Energy is a company.

We're building a home energy product, a battery, that's aimed for people who live in flats and smaller homes and people renting, which is about half the homes in the UK.

So there's 28 million homes in the UK, and about half are either flats, renters, small homes.

People for whom solar panels, they don't have a roof, they don't have space for a big Tesla power wall or something.

Just the kind of, probably too early to say traditional home energy products, but the incumbent stuff just doesn't work.

And Those people are kind of being left behind.

If you hear about kind of octopus homes where the people have no bills, but in order to get there, you need to have a big enough house to have solar and kind of some sort of energy infrastructure built in.

You need to be able to afford it.

I mean, that's typically solar and batteries in a bigger house could cost 10 grand plus.

And so if you're in a flat living in the city, that's just not going to happen.

And the result of that is just bills going up and a lot of people are kind of stuck.

So we thought, well, can we make a product for those people? So effectively for half the country that's been left behind.

And typically home batteries, so people think of a Tesla Powerwall, they're primarily designed to take excess solar power when you're not using it.

So that means you need solar panels.

And again, only about 5% of homes in the UK have solar panels.

So effectively, that means all home batteries are kind of aimed at those 5% of people, which again, is kind of crazy that that's almost like the mainstream market.

It's just that tiny little niche.

So we thought, how can we open this up a bit more and make a battery for

everyone? I've worked in lots of businesses where they've implemented automation and the business has grown.

When I joined Ocado, it was 2,000 employees.