How to grow a greener energy grid, with Octopus Energy’s Greg Jackson
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I think a benefit of having built several companies over time is, you know, when you move house, you've got the opportunity to leave behind all your clutter and start again. And it's like that when you start a company. Greg Jackson's UK-based company, Octopus Energy, is a hyperscaling disruptor in what's usually a pretty sleepy sector. He's paying people to use less energy and has managed to figure out how to build a whale of a business, or in this case, an octopus of a business in doing so.

Greg says that one of the key reasons he's been able to do this is he and his team have built a culture where team members are genuinely willing to fail. If you're going to innovate, some stuff's going to fail. Yep. So it's actually being very grown up about that and giving people space to do it. I think it enabled us to scale horizontally and vertically much faster than a traditional organization. If an innovation is working, we feed it.

And if it's not working, we starve it. And it's just a process of natural evolution. Greg says that Octopus Energy has reached about $20 billion in revenue by upending the typical relationship with customers. From leasing electric vehicles to helping build more efficient homes to teaching people how to game out savings, Octopus is driving down energy costs. By selling the same software they use to run their own business, Greg is generating ripple effects across the industry.

It's a fascinating story of scale in an arena that isn't known for fast-moving entrepreneurs. You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going out. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing.

This is Masters of Scale.

I'm Geoff Berman, your host. Greg Jackson is focused on scaling not just his own company, but bigger solutions to our global climate crisis. It's a mission that has been central to his identity from a very young age. Greg, welcome to Masters of Scale. Hey, Geoff. Thanks for having me on. It's great to be here.

Well, I have to tell you that as I was prepping for our conversation, I read a line that said that you were big on green energy, but I misread it. And I read it as it's saying you had big green energy, which I love that description of you. I'll take that too. That's my new Twitter bio.

Yeah, I love it. I love it. So before we get into what Octopus does and how you all are scaling and changing the world, where does your interest in energy come from? It's not necessarily the obvious place an entrepreneur goes. So how do you get there?

How did you end up here? I think probably three reasons. I mean, first of all, as a consumer, I found energy companies didn't give the kind of service that you got in other sectors. And largely because they came from these kind of very old-fashioned backgrounds with old-fashioned technology and kind of saw themselves as really just providing a utility as opposed to serving customers. And so the first thing really was, as a customer, you could see you could do this very differently.

I think the second thing was I care about the environment. I joined Greenpeace when I was 15 and, having built and sold some businesses, had this opportunity to try and do something at scale that might actually make a difference, something I care about. I think the third one is, look, as a business person, energy is a $2 trillion sector globally. It's largely running on technology platforms that are three or four or more decades old.

Just the opportunity to enter what must be one of the biggest sectors in the world, if not the biggest, and be able to help drive change through digitalization and build a really big business. I mean, that's pretty exciting. Joining Greenpeace at 15 is not something every kid does. What was it about the home you grew up in or you as a child that led you to make that decision?

I was brought up by a single mum. She had three kids. We had no money. We didn't have a car. We had to walk everywhere. I remember traipsing around and, you know, you'd see these cars belching out exhaust fumes. And those of us who were walking had to breathe them in. And we didn't get the benefit of being in them. And it kind of gave me this sense of there's kind of an injustice in the world of pollution that applies everywhere. That, you know, some people create it and other people experience it. And that kind of felt...

At the same time, by the way, Greenpeace were in that phase of their life when you turn on the TV news and you see videos of people scaling oil rigs and putting huge banners up.

It looked pretty exciting. And I thought, look, you know, if you can tackle injustice in these cool ways, I kind of found that really motivating. How did you make the transition from Greenpeace to becoming an entrepreneur? I mean, I was only ever a member. Sadly, I never got the chance to go and volunteer. Gotcha. For me, the journey to entrepreneurialism was one way that mum coped with having three young kids and no money was to delegate a lot of responsibility to us. So from a very early age, I was used to doing all my own tasks and looking after money and earning money myself.

And so instead of being spoon-fed, I learned to make my own decisions and manage stuff. And I think a great example was, mum used to get this money from the government in the UK as a payment to parents. It's a small amount of money per month. And she said to me and my sister, "From now on, I'm going to give it direct to you, and you buy your own clothes." And so of course, instead of buying clothes, I went down the electronics shop and started buying little bits of electronics and learning how to make circuits and then learn how to program computers.

And that led to a bit where, you know, for example, at one point as a teenager, I'd write video games through the local store or in magazines. And I think even though eventually I'm going to university and getting a proper job at Procter & Gamble, I only ever saw that as being a sort of holding pattern until I went and did my own thing. Greg Jackson built a successful career working in tech, but he couldn't shake the idea that he could transform the software tools at the heart of our energy grids and help the planet in the process.

As a consumer, you could see that energy was providing poor service and actually really bad value. Energy companies were bloated and inefficient. And so we saw the opportunity to build an enterprise software platform for the energy sector that would let energy companies move into the 21st century. I sometimes describe it as like Shopify for utilities.

Because the idea was we could standardize all of the processes and create super slick single data set for the entirety of an operation. And you could literally take your existing customer base, upload them into our platforms called Kraken, upload it into Kraken, and then run your business from there. So we saw the opportunity and we went to talk to some energy companies. Some of them said, we've been doing what we've been doing for a long time. We know what we're doing and we don't need your help. Thank you very much.

Other companies said to us, this sounds great, but we're a very conservative sector and someone's got to go first. And we realized if we wanted to sell software into the energy sector, we first of all had to build an energy company to demonstrate just what a digital energy company could do.

And that's Octopus. So we ended up building both our software company, Kraken, and our energy company, Octopus, as kind of yin and yang. Now, you're doing this in the UK, which for our audience who are not experts in energy policy and how this world works, is a very different setup than how things work in the US. Can you just give us a little bit of an understanding of how things work in the UK and how things work in the US before we roll into how you've actually deployed in market? Yeah.

That's right. So in the US, most states, people have the local regulated energy utility. But in the UK and in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and some of the countries looking at this too, you have a competitive market for energy. So the same way that as a consumer, we can choose a number of different wireless networks for our cell phones, in all those countries,

You sign up to a plan with an energy company you've chosen. And so we had the opportunity to create our own energy company and then get people to sign up for it. Now that said, in most countries, the big incumbent energy companies have been the same for decades. And so we were really entering this market where it might be like trying to set up your own cell phone network from scratch. It's that kind of scale of challenge, but it's also that scale of opportunity. And so that's what we set out to do.

The scale of that challenge is not small, right? I mean, you are going in against massive entrenched competitors. How do you even begin to start to build a company that's going up against competitors that have this incredible built-in advantage from their legacy and their base of customers? Yeah, so I think it's the same in so many sectors when you're a disruptor. Those incumbents will obviously be thinking hard about their current asset base.

What we thought about was customers. And so we started designing the journey, the sign-up journey and the in-life journey from a purely digital perspective that says, how do we make this a much better experience for a customer? And we basically, instead of thinking about, for example, the energy system and working forwards to the front end of the consumer, we started with the consumer.

and then worked backwards into the energy system. Now, I've built quite a few companies now, and I think the single biggest thing you can do is sign your first customer. Because until then, everything's theoretical. But your first customer, you're able to find out, do your processes work end-to-end? Where are the pain points you hadn't recognized? Where are the opportunities? Because when you see what customers are doing, you discover all the things you could innovate. You might say it's a bit like Apple versus Microsoft. So both are great companies.

But Microsoft really, its kind of DNA began serving enterprises where you'd have quite a lot of support staff required to run it properly. Whereas Apple started off like, how do you make a single device that can scale to billions of users with no customization and support? And we started at that end. And yeah, the very first customer was a member of our team. And it was a great example of, because we got moving really quickly,

We discovered the kind of challenge we were going to face and we were able to start making sure we were building for that rather than spending a year and a half kind of theorizing and then discover it was all wrong. How did you get past that first customer and start getting to scale in the UK? So, interestingly, our very first investor, I went to him with a strategy that was going to be entirely digital, no customer service, but in return, you'll never get a better price. And he said, this is all great, but actually, you need to give the best service in the market.

I took his advice and we worked relentlessly to have a great service. So what we did was, for the first million customers, we had to street fight for our customers. We had to literally find any way we could get of getting them, knocking on doors, telesales, but relentlessly making sure that when they joined us, they got this experience. And then setting up a referral program so that they would tell friends about it. As you say, you can't try it before you buy it.

But if someone you know has tried it and tells you it's great, and then it is great, you will tell other people. That was really the recipe to street fight our way to a million. And then through our brand and momentum, keep building to the point where today we've got 7.1 million customers in the UK, nearly 2 million in other countries now, and rapidly growing on the same scale. And from a revenue perspective, how big are you now? Around $20 billion. $20 billion?

Yeah, that's not bad. It's a pretty good scaling journey. Greg, you referenced the importance of getting your first customer for Octopus, but that was inspired in part by needing to get your first customer for Kraken and understanding that the market was not there yet. So what I'm understanding is that Kraken's first customer was actually Octopus. Is that right? Right. And so once you were showing that Kraken was working for Octopus, how were you able to go back to those

stodgy energy companies who had shut the door on you at the beginning and persuade them that you had a better solution for them? Yeah, there are two parts to that. The first thing, we initially licensed Kraken to a small energy company, not a stodgy one, because we wanted to be able to test. Again, a bit like getting our first customer was an internal customer on the consumer side.

Our first software customer was a small one that we could, if things were going wrong, we'd be able to over-resource and make it go right. As it was, it went like a dream. So now we proved that Kraken could not just support Octopus, it could also support, in this case, a company called Good Energy. Great company. And Octopus at the time, and still,

was doing extraordinary innovation in the market. I'll give you a couple of examples, right? So on days when it's windy and sunny, we give customers cheaper energy because the system's cheaper. And we'll do it for the half hour, the hour or three hours. On days where it's very sunny in certain regions, we'll give people free energy because otherwise the grid is going to turn off the solar farms and we'd rather give it to our customers cheap.

If you've got an EV, you can pair it with Octopus, really with Kraken through Octopus. And we automatically schedule the charging. Each car gets a different schedule every day. But in return for that automation, it's seven times cheaper to drive an EV

than it is to drive a gasoline car. Because you're scheduling the charging at the time when the cost of the energy is lowest. Exactly. When the grid's empty, when your local network's empty, when it's sunny and when it's windy, Kraken looks at 5 billion date items per day to do that for EVs.

But that optimization enables us to make the most of a renewable system. As opposed to in the old world, renewables would add to the cost of the grid. Doing this stuff, they can reduce the cost. We even now work with house builders to build homes where we guarantee no energy bills for 10 years because they've got a combination of solar panels, heat pump, battery, and smart hot water. We optimize that and we guarantee no energy bills. I mean, even with solar, how can you do that?

The way we do it is, it's all with this insight that the grid price varies, and this plays in every country. The grid price varies every half hour, every 15 minutes, whatever, depending on the market you're in. What we can do here is, when it's sunny, the grid price is usually low. So we put most of the electricity from your solar panels into your battery. We might also use some of it to heat your hot water. Then as the grid price gets higher during the evening,

We'll empty the battery onto the grid and the amount we get paid for that pays for us to take from the grid when it's dark, typically in the early hours of morning when the electricity is very cheap. So that overall, we're earning from what we put on the grid than it costs us to take it from the grid. And then because we've got a smart heat pump in there, most homes will hold heat for maybe three or four hours, right? So then we'll heat the home during the period when electricity is cheaper.

and we'll use no heating at all during the most expensive time, or very little, you'll still be at your target temperature. But the cost to heat the home has dropped dramatically. And so we're able to optimize all of that, and a bit more actually, and then give you, we guarantee, no energy bill.

Right, so you're able to sell high and give away for free is effectively what you're doing. Given the challenges of climate change, heat waves, catastrophic storms, how does that affect this calculus? I mean, there must be days where the energy grid in the UK is strained beyond imagination. So how are you dealing with that? Yeah, I mean, so first of all, because we've got a battery in the home, on the day it's strained beyond all calculation, there's going to be a point when the electricity price is very, very high.

so we can still empty the battery at that time. So even if we're filling up at another time, actually that strain works both ways. And so look, through Kraken, we were able to take literally tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of data points for houses that already had this kind of technology and look at how they behaved in every scenario and then model them against these kinds of different optimization techniques

And so we've run so many simulations that even our very conservative sort of finance function

got to the point that we were comfortable underwriting this proposition. Frankly, it's working brilliantly for us, but more importantly, it's great for customers. The peace of mind of never having an energy bill, it's mind-blowing. Then, by the way, for house builders, where they're working in the private housing market, these houses are obviously very attractive and they sell fast. When we're working in the market for social or public housing, the people who need it most

can start escaping from energy bills. By the way, we got onto this because you asked about how we then sold Kraken to the Stodgy sector. The interesting thing is all these proof points. What we were able to do was, prior to us building Kraken and Octopus, some people said, "Maybe one day these things will happen." But by actually doing it, we could give those companies enough confidence

And they're not old and stodgy now. Some of the ones that worked with us have been forward thinking. But we could give those companies enough confidence that Kraken could deliver these benefits for them and their customers too. And as a result, Kraken now serves as more than 50% of the UK energy market. So we've gone from a 0%, obviously, eight years ago to more than 50% now. And it's rapidly growing with brilliant clients in a whole bunch of countries.

So one of the many interesting things about your business is Octopus is a big and scaling business on its own, powered in part by Kraken. You are now making Kraken available to Octopus competitors, right? So it's not obvious that one would say, I want to actually empower our competitors to use the same software to provide an equal quality of service or competitive quality of service. How did you reconcile that?

It's a great question. Because from the very beginning, our first insight had been we wanted to build a technology platform to disrupt this sector. It was always our kind of business plan that we would license Kraken to other companies. But because Octopus grew very quickly, I mean, Octopus was really just the demo client. It just happened to grow very big and become successful in its own right. When we spoke with our board about licensing Kraken to other companies,

They were saying, "Why would you give away your secret sauce?" By the way, when I was speaking to the companies, their CEOs would say to me, "Why would we put all of our data on our customers, on your technology?" I guess there's a signal there that says, if both sides are worried, maybe there's something quite interesting. But my perspective was, once you do something with technology, you've proved it can be done,

then sooner or later, others will copy it and do it too. And you see that in every bit of technology innovation. And so if other companies are going to end up on Kraken-like software, I'd rather they're on Kraken than funding someone else to build different. Now, it's really hard to build enterprise software, big-scale enterprise software that works like this. But sooner or later, someone would do it. And I'd much rather we were that someone. Frankly, in terms of them competing with Octopus, first of all,

Kraken's like an operating system, right? And you can put apps on it. So in the same way as when we all buy a phone, it comes with the standard apps and we'll keep some of those and we'll change others and download more. So Kraken's clients can do that. So their businesses can be very, very different than Octopus. But secondly, even if they're competing against Octopus, if they do better than Octopus, I'm over the moon because that means Kraken's done its job and Octopus just needs to get better at it.

More with Greg Jackson about the opportunities and the roadblocks he sees ahead in just a minute. Hi, listener. I'm Sarah Tarter, Senior Director of Marketing and Audience Development at WaitWhat, the company behind Masters of Scale. My job requires me to be in tune with the pulse of the Masters of Scale audience. Whether I'm sending out a company-wide new initiative deck, fielding inquiries from prospective collaborators, or replying to a top-tier guest about speaking at a live event, I'm

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Welcome back to Masters of Scale. You can find this episode and more on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel.

So, Greg, as we sit here, we've had yet another summer where the energy grid in Texas has been strained and unable to keep up with demand at times. I'm in California, where we face a persistent risk of fires that can take down the energy grid. We've got cyber threats to an aging infrastructure of our energy grid here. When you look at the U.S. market, where do you see the opportunity for recovery?

rapid and essential improvement? Yeah, so look, I mean, first of all, I'm glad you raised that backdrop. The extreme weather events we're seeing now are not just weather patterns. Humanity's use of the atmosphere is an open sewer.

has led to an exponential increase in extreme weather. Our systems are not designed to handle this. If we're seeing some extreme weather now, it only gets more and more extreme. And as we melt more ice. So first of all, this is real. Each year we're putting record amounts of carbon in the atmosphere. So even though we're increasingly doing, you know, building renewables and things like that, the reality is we're not doing anywhere near enough. And I think, look, when humanity looks back in history,

on this period, maybe the 2050s or something. I can imagine the essay question. The essay question is, given that by the 2020s, renewable power was already cheaper than fossil fuels, why did people not transition faster to a solution that was going to be better for the economy, better for the climate, better for local air pollution, and better for national security? If you stand back and look at it, what we're doing now is not rational.

We've never, as a species, been able to create cheaper power than we can today from solar and wind at the times it's windy and sunny. And if you start from that perspective, you say, well, how can we use as much power as possible at the times it's windy and sunny? Because, of course, if it's not windy and not sunny, then renewables are far less effective.

But the first thing should be, we need to start shifting our economy to maximise the energy we use at those times. Now that doesn't mean that every consumer has to check the current weather before they do anything. It means that utilities, companies like ours, technology like Kraken, under the hood, shift as much power to those times as possible. I mentioned earlier the charging electric vehicles. In just the last year and a half, just in the UK, just Octopus,

We've created an electric vehicle fleet that is 1.3 gigawatts of smart charging. That's 1.3 gigawatts, we can shift around. Now, no one knows what a gigawatt is, but it's roughly a nuclear reactor. You know, moving to renewables is not like moving from a brown caterpillar to a green caterpillar. It's like going from a brown caterpillar to a butterfly. We're fundamentally changing the way it works.

It seems to me that in the US, our energy companies are largely run by, I'll use your word, stodgy, older executives. They make insane amounts of money.

It's not clear that they understand the opportunity that would come with digitization. You've been able to achieve that so effectively in the UK. How could you see that actually happening in the US? Yeah, look, I think many of the people I've met that were in the US utility divide are really forward-thinking, and they've got a very dedicated mindset to their customer and their customer base. But their customer is the regulator. And the whole time they're thinking, what will the regulator think of this, and how can we take this to the regulator?

And some of the revenue models, you know, if you're paid on a cost plus basis, you don't have the same incentive to be efficient that you might do in different models. And so actually, I think often the companies are very forward thinking. By the way, the regulators are often forward thinking too.

But the challenge is no one's got either the incentive nor the route to market to very rapidly iterate and test ideas. And it's very, very hard on old technology. All of our rivals in Europe and the UK were in the same place. You'd have an idea for a new product, you'd spend a year specifying on PowerPoint, and

then a year rolling through a program management system, and then a year testing in the market. Whereas with Kraken, we have an idea for a new product on Monday. We've got it live with some customers by Friday.

and by the following week we'll be able to see what's working and then iterate it going forward. That's literally 50 or 100 times faster and it's very low risk. I think one of the challenges in those regulated sectors is if the regulator wants to put a new rate idea out there, they've then got to negotiate with the utility. The utility has got to somehow try and do it through ancient systems.

So the first thing you do is get modern systems. And the second thing you need to do is have an agreement between utilities and regulators that you can experiment, that you can test ideas. And a reward system means utilities and/or regulators benefit from that. But otherwise, I think everyone's paralyzed because they don't have the ability to do low-risk, high-frequency testing.

And of course, if you've got to do something across your entire customer base all at once over a long period of time, and it's going to cost you a lot of money, you're very, very, very averse to trying it. Yeah. What are you most pessimistic about? And what are you most optimistic about with regard to our energy future, Greg? Well, I'm incredibly optimistic that the cost of renewables keeps falling. I mean, the numbers are insane, right? Batteries are falling at 13% per year. They're 93% cheaper than they were a decade ago.

Solar has beaten that. Solar fell by 50% over the last 18 months. And wind is coming down rapidly as well. So all of the components for running an energy system in a cleaner world are getting cheaper. And by the way, through smart tech, we can do things like we can get an extra 40% peak load through a transmission line just through smart tech.

Through digitalization, we can make all this much cheaper to consumers. And on the consumption side, EVs are getting cheaper every year, partly because batteries are, but all the technology around EVs are getting cheaper. Heat pumps are getting cheaper, domestic batteries, domestic solar. So clean energy is getting cheaper every year. Meanwhile, fossil fuels are not.

And in some, the US largely escaped it. But in a lot of the world, there's one point when the price of natural gas in Europe was 15 times the normal. That was what the energy crisis was here. And we can escape all of that. So I'm optimistic that the solutions to the problem are cheaper than the problem.

I'm pessimistic that there are so many vested interests. If we think about the tobacco lobby managed to delay action on tobacco 40 years through initially denying there was a problem, then offering solutions that don't really work like low tar and filters, and it just dragged its feet for so long. And we've seen the fossil fuel industry doing the same. And we're not going to demonize them. The interesting thing is with the tobacco industry, once it had done all that dragging,

You end up in a world where the tobacco industry said, "Look, tobacco is bad for people, but some people like doing it." As a result, they've had 35 years, I think, of superior returns on the public markets. In the same way, the sooner fossil fuels just say, "Look, fossil fuels are bad for the planet, bad for the environment, but today we all use them. We shouldn't demonize them because I use fossil fuels. I'm sure you do. I'm not going to demonize it."

But they also say, look, we should be an industry in runoff, but we can have decades of superior earnings in runoff. We've been through this before with tobacco. I just hope we go through it faster on climate because the faster we do it, those companies will be better when they're not putting a foot in both camps and society will be better too.

And what do you think we can do to accelerate that change? What's the biggest thing that we can do to move the needle there? Yeah, I had this incredible experience. I visited China a month ago. Cities like Shenzhen, Beijing, Shanghai. Five years ago, people wore masks in the street, not because of COVID, but because of the air pollution. That's all gone.

Every single two-wheel vehicle was electric. All the taxis, most of the buses, a very high percentage of cars. 54% of the cars sold in China this year so far are electric. And I think we need to look at what is happening in an economy that had the leadership see that these are better solutions.

and make policies accordingly. Whereas I think a lot of Western economies are held back by the industries that lobby to keep things the way they are. And it's not just the fossil fuel industry. It could be things like the auto lobby. It's incredible, isn't it, that Ford CEO went to China last year and was, I think, palpably shaken when he saw how far ahead they are. And so I think it takes brave leadership

to see we are going to get left behind if we don't do this. So, you know, let's look at the really big picture and find a way. We'll find a way to take the workers and even the investors in those industries into a better future whilst transforming those industries or even letting some of them run into runoff mode and they'll be better off in it. Thank you so much for being on Masters of Scale, Greg. Appreciate you. Honestly, Jeff, it's been a great conversation and thank you for giving me the chance to talk. Thank you.

Greg Jackson's passion for the planet is a powerful driving force behind the rapid scale at Octopus Energy. From innovative relationships with customers to modernizing the power grid with machine learning, he is building new ways of doing business. You can tell that Greg's own infectious energy is a key catalyst driving his company to continuously innovate. And there is so much more to come. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.

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