Hello, everyone, and welcome to this episode of the podcast, I'm your host, Tyler Curran. Thanks so much for joining us here today today on the show, we're going to be talking about the origin story of Volta, so we're going to dive into the reasons why it was founded in the first place. Its mission and so, so much more. We're going to dive into the background as well of Dennis Caruso, who is the founder and CEO of Volta energy, and he joins me now on the podcast. Dennis, Thanks so much for joining us. How are you doing today? Doing great, Tyler. Thank you for opening this up for me. Absolutely I'm thrilled to have you on the show, Dennis, and I'm really excited to get to dive in a little bit more into the background of Volta and get kind of the origin story of everything that you do there. But first, let's start off with you, Dennis, and start off with your background. Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into this industry in the first place. Yeah so I'm a real tech geek from birth. Loved cars ever since I was probably six years old, maybe even earlier. Who knows? You know, growing up because of the love for cars, it was real important that I also study engineering based on, you know, parental pressure, family pressure. Let's call it. So the story goes that I wanted to be a mechanical engineer because of the car thing. And then at some point when I think I was 13 or 14 years old, I opened up a fuel injection box. This was an old Cadillac that my father used to have. So it was the first throttle body fuel injected system in the industry, and the car at the time was old, right? But so he allowed me to play with it. So I opened up that computer in the ICU, as it's called today, and I saw a whole bunch of chips and I'm like, this is fascinating. You got electronics controlling an engine. I want to learn more. So that's kind of I went down the path of Electrical Engineering that was sometime in high school. And, you know, luckily I was studious enough and had the grades to be able to go study electrical engineering. So that's how it kind of started. That's all. That's awesome stuff. I never would have had the math capabilities to be able to follow through on that. But but I'm glad that you were able to and and that all seemed to work out very well for you. So tell us then about how you ended up founding Volta. Tell us about the defining moment that kind of led up to this, and why you founded the company in the first place. Yeah so Volta was oddly enough founded in 2009. And originally we had started because Tesla had just released the Roadster at the time and having a background in electrical engineering, I thought to myself, well, that's interesting. What if everything became electric? All vehicles became electric? We would put a massive pressure on the grid. So in 2009, we founded volt as specifically to address that problem through power management, let's call it, or demand management. So if you have too many vehicles charging within the same location, you can do a bit of load balancing so that you don't overload the transformer upstream in a neighborhood. That was the idea. It was a little ahead of its time. So now we're in 2022 so that was 13 years ago. So now that's possibly starting to become a problem. So that's why Volta was founded now in 2009, because it was so early. We never got a lot of traction from the investment world or we built some products and applied for some patents, but we made a decision that we really had to survive as a company. And so that was way too early, and we went down a consulting path for industrial automation and fixing problems for motors and so forth. And through the consulting, we came across this concept of electrical signature analysis, and that's where Volta insight was kind of born. So that's the very short summary of how we ended up. We started with Volta and ended up with Volta insight, to be precise. That's really interesting. And I like that idea of were so far ahead of your time. You kind of had to find some other, you know, ways to bide that time until then, later on. Maybe, you know, the time is a little bit more right now than it was back in 2009 because we've progressed up to that point. I think that's a really interesting aspect of this story. Yeah so I mean, you've got to pay some bills, right? Having a long term vision is great. If you're too much ahead of your time, you're not going to get any customers. So we had to go get some customers. And address some problems and solve some real problems today so that we could get paid and pay some bills, so we did that, we started out with that and then as we were consulting, we also started another project with Adam power, which has made the world's first solid state circuit breaker. So volt is involved in that from a founding standpoint. And now Adam power has actually built electric vehicle charging systems that do exactly that sort of a demand management on site. So full circle. There you go. That's pretty. That's pretty incredible. I like that. I like that. So it's also about the name Volta in the first place. Where did that name come from. And is there any kind of significance behind the name? So Alexandra Volta, I like to say, was the first electrical engineer. So Tesla Tesla Motors had come out, so I thought Volta would be an interesting sort of parallel company. Alessandra Volta was the first. He was actually a chemical engineer, but he was the first electrical engineer in the sense that he put the first battery pack together. So bolt, that was back in 2009, and it hasn't changed. I like that. I like that now. You kind of broke down a little bit more earlier about the origins of Volta insight, but but how does Volta inside Volta energy and Adam power all integrate in together? What's the breakdown there. And how should people understand how each of these companies operate? Yeah, so Volta energy is sort of a parent company to Volta insight because we've had challenges doing, let's say, some kind of capital raises to fund the projects fully. We we spin out other companies. So Volta insight has engineers that have participated in the building of the product. They have equity in that, and so does Volta energy. And then the same thing with Adam power. Volta energy has equity in Adam power, and Adam power is its own entity, and it's gone off to raise its own capital and has other teams. So each team can participate in the success of the eventual company, right? That's the idea. So what inspires you the most as you look forward and as you continue to build upon what you've already done, what inspires you the most when you think about what Volta has grown to be so far and where you want to see things go in the future? So I think, yeah, the whole advent of electric vehicles and what Elon Musk has been able to do with Tesla. You know, he started effectively with one little roadster car, and now he's dominating the industry. I think it's some ridiculous number of all electric cars that are sold, at least in the US he's got more dominant market share, and more importantly, he's been able to influence all the car manufacturers to start taking electric vehicle seriously, which is fascinating, right? So in that now our electric vehicles, the end all be all of the transportation system, probably not, but I think it makes for a very good sort of hybrid model where you can have a certain amount of cars on the road that are electric reducing emissions. I think that's fantastic. And in that as we grow the deployment of electric vehicles, they're still going to be challenges on the grid, right? So you need to charge up all these batteries. That power has to come from somewhere, whether it's alternative energy, nuclear or even coal. Let's say managing all that power, ensuring that power gets delivered reliably. These are all problems that we need to address on the grid because the grid is aged. In some cases it's, let's say, 100 years old, and I'm not sure that it exists from an infrastructure standpoint that it can effectively and reliably charge all these vehicles that are coming online. Right so my focus on the focus of Volta at this point is to ensure where we can find niche applications to effectively. Reliably deliver power, right? Yeah, I think that's really well put. I'm curious, just for your perspective, I feel like every day I see I see new stories about electric vehicles and like you said, they're not the end all, be all. They're not. There's not a silver bullet to fixing any type of the things that our society or anything along those lines. But do you feel like maybe we're starting to turn a corner with electric vehicles in terms of their popularity? You see more and more auto manufacturers investing in long term electric vehicle manufacturing and things along those lines. Do you feel like we're starting to turn that corner? Absolutely I think the majority of vehicle manufacturers today have a plan either to be fully electric, which I'm not necessarily agreeing with, but at least a majority of their fleets should be electric or have a plan to at least have the majority of their fleets electric, right? So, you know, I think the I think what Tesla has done from an influence standpoint has been fantastic. I mean, a little company that started out 12, 13, 14 years ago, whatever the number is, has been able to have such influence in an age old industry realistically, right? So it's been great. Yeah I think that's well put. And I think that you make a really good point. And so as we start to kind of close out this conversation, Dennis in kind of bring us up to where we are right now in current day for people that maybe haven't, you know, brought it been brought in and bought into Volta and all the things that you're doing as a partner. What's your elevator pitch? How would you explain everything that there is to know about Volta and why people should partner with you? Yeah so the 30 second elevator pitch is effectively we use electrical data with our own hardware in order to ensure that electrical systems continue to operate reliably and more specifically in critical applications. So if you have a manufacturing facility, critical electrical motors and other electrical assets, we ensure that those assets continue to operate. Mm-hmm that's the short one. I like it. Hey, that was very well done, very well. So if people hear that and they want to reach out and want to learn more about Volta and all the different things you're doing, Dennis, what's the best way for them to do that is they're a good place for them to go. Yeah, absolutely. W ww, Volta inside.com and Volta I NSI. There you go. Volta inside.com. Note the spelling there and make sure you head over to the right spot to get your questions answered to learn more about Volta and everything that they're doing right now. Dennis crucis, thank you so much for joining us here on the podcast and tell us a little bit more about the origin story of Volta. All the things that went into it. And how this all breaks down and where you're moving in the future. It's been a pleasure getting a chance to learn more. Thank you, Tyler. Great absolutely. Yeah fantastic having you on the podcast and everyone. We're looking forward to future episodes of the podcast. So if you're out there and you enjoyed this one, make sure to subscribe to stay up to date with the latest episodes, and we will be back very soon with more episodes of the show. But for this one, for my guest today, Denis crucis have been your host, Tyler Kern. Thanks for joining us.
