Great to chat with Sebastian Manchester, Co-Founder and CTO at Jaza Energy. Jaza Energy is empowering the 1.3 billion people living without electricity, one solar energy hub at a time! We discussed the electrification of rural areas, the experience of working in Tanzania, the use of portable batteries instead of kerosene, the importance of building a good relationship with the community and more!
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James
The unedited podcast transcript is below
James McWalter
Hello today. We’re speaking with Sebastian Manchester cofounder and CTO at Jaza Energy. Welcome to podcast! Could you tell us a little bit about Jaza energy.
Sebastian Manchester
Thank you for having me.
Sebastian Manchester
Sure so Jaza was founded in 2015 we started in Canada after spending a few years working on rural energy projects around Tanzania. And the idea was to scale up some of the early projects we had built in Tanzania and build a company around it. So originally, it was ah a project that was part of a charity called community forest international. I was a grad student who was kind of looking for interesting projects to work on and my friend and co-founder Jeff who’s now the Ceo of Jazza was running a charity called community forest international in Tanzania and together. We kind of started thinking about. Really simple ways to provide access to electricity in some of the communities. He was already working in running his organization and the the basic idea that we came up with which is still kind of the fundamental. Business model that we operate on today is charging portable battery packs that customers can take home and use to power their electronics so we built one energy system that serves an entire community and customers can charge battery packs. That energy system and then walk home with the batteries. That’s what we built for the first time in 13 and that’s basically what we build today. The technology has come a long way how we run the business at scale has changed a lot but that’s the basic idea portable battery packs. Charged from solar energy at retail shops that customers can use to power their homes.
James McWalter
That’s so fascinating and I guess you know I think believe you and your cofounder are both from Canada. Um, and so I guess you know what? what led led to Jeff you know, focusing on Tanzania and its charity work there initially.
Sebastian Manchester
Um, so after Jeff and I grew up together. We’re both from a small town in Canada called Sackville New Brunswick and after high school Jeff took ah a nontraditional route and just started traveling the world. I went to engineering school and then we kind of met up later on in the summers and we would work together planting trees. It’s a typical job for Canadian students to make enough money to live through the school year. Um.
James McWalter
I Actually a good friend of mine used to do that and it was it was He was an academic and it was his most lucrative job. He I think he’s ever had.
Sebastian Manchester
Yeah, it can be very lucrative very painful but lucrative but fun anyway. So so as tree planners we’d meet up in the summer and then Jeff would continue traveling I’d go back to school.
James McWalter
And right.
Sebastian Manchester
Jeff ended up on a small island off the coast of Tanzania called pemba and while he was there some of his local friends were very interested in. You know this career he has as a canadian tree planter that affords him the ability to travel the world and spend time in their communities. And so they started pondering how can they do tree planning in in pemba which is which was like facing a lot of issues around deforestation and and obviously like there was ah there was a lot of good reasons to plant more trees. So Jeff with. Some local friends started an organization called community forests international and you know initially I think in the first year they planted a few hundred thousand trees just by collecting seeds building little nurseries around in different communities. Um, you know working a lot of working with a lot of. Local communities to understand what trees grow where how they grow really really leveraging the local expertise and then using his resources kind of in connections back in Canada to raise money to fund the organization and over the course of you know about a decade he scaled that organization. To plant. You know I think over 4000000 trees. They’re now operating across several countries in East Africa it’s very cool organization and that’s how we ended up in Tanzania was basically like the first projects we built that I described we. Built a small energy system on a small island off the coast of pemba so an island off the coast of an island. Um, that’s where we tested the model and initially it was just a 1 ne-off project. But after I finished grad school and. Had spent a few years kind of working in the energy industry Jeff and I kept thinking about these systems we built and like what could we do to make them better. We we found that there was definitely some potential there because people were still using the product years later. It was very cheap to install and very easy to maintain so we thought we should. We should see what else we can do with this and it made sense to to launch in Tanzania because we already had a network there. We Jeff had already scaled an organization there and it’s just like. Also. Incredibly beautiful place to work and live so like it’s good excuse to go spend time onto tropical island in the indian ocean.
James McWalter
Yeah, not not bad at all and I guess you know at that point you know you’re talking to Jeff you have done this you know this small kind of pilot project in essence but maybe hadn’t realizeed. It might be a pilot project to something larger. Um. You what was your kind of mindset at that point you’re like oh I want to start something and like this is a good opportunity or you’re like oh um, there is this existing kind of framework that gets me very excited and I’d love to continue working on that and.
Sebastian Manchester
Well, it was it was kind of a combination of both like on 1 hand. The problem was very interesting to me being 600000000 people living in Sub-saharan africa without access to electricity. This is sort of what got me interested. In in you know what eventually became jazz initially it was just as a grad student I was studying energy storage thinking about how to integrate you know, big commercial wind farms. Um, onto the grid using energy storage as a buffer and then at the same time I was you know. Doing some independent research and reading about how you know some of the some of the technologies available that were being proposed to electrify rural communities a lot of like micro-grids a lot of kind of solar diesel hybrid grids and it was pretty clear that. Ah, cost of energy storage was coming down the cost of solar panels was coming down the availability of kind of like that the the cost of personal electronics was coming down people were people were starting to. You know, use smartphones in a lot of rural communities but still have nowhere to charge them and so it just seemed like a very obvious big problem that could be solved with existing technology that just wasn’t really being solved I wanted to figure out why and so that’s when we started. Working on it just to to try and explore the problem and understand what what was preventing 600000000 people from having reliable access to electricity.
James McWalter
And I guess you know as you kind of dug into it like what were those reasons right? like you know it seems like jazz. It seems so obvious like in hindsight but you know why? why? Why were they’re not like 500 competitors already sitting there kind of doing something similar.
Sebastian Manchester
Well there there were a lot there still are quite a few I mean a lot of people have tried to build a reliable affordable you know, energy access technology for for sub-saharan Africa it’s been done. Um, I think I mean one one big reason why it was you know I think the time was right for us was because we’re kind of just coming in as the cost of of batteries is coming way down and the cost of solar had already been dropping quite a bit.
James McWalter
So.
Sebastian Manchester
Um, and you know it’s a difficult. It’s a difficult market to operate in. Um, you know our customers earn less than $2 a day. So it’s ah it’s a hard customer to sell to understanding the customer how they spend how they prioritize their spending and what they’re going to actually use energy for is is not an easy thing to figure out something we’re still learning. Think a lot of companies. Never really solved that problem and it’s very expensive to to learn those type of lessons. Especially if if you know you’re you’re building infrastructure. Like a micro-grid. Um, and the the reality is like our customers don’t have a lot of money to spend on energy the demand for energy is also quite low. So it’s a market that may be um. I think a lot of people will just ignore because they assume people don’t have money people don’t need electricity like why would we try and sell sell there and that’s just something we think is false. Um, yeah, it’s but but still like to this day like ah I’m not. I’m not sure why this problem hasn’t been solved because like we’re working on it and it seems like we’re getting there and I do think that you know Jazza will solve energy access and I hope that other companies can help because there’s a lot of work to do.
James McWalter
I.
James McWalter
No absolutely and I guess when you’re you know, implementing, you know a new project. Um, your product in a particular community who’s the I guess buyer for that like who are you trying to contact first.
Sebastian Manchester
So We sell directly to customers um customers Our customers are people who live in the community. So We Electrify. So Basically the way it works is when we select a site to build a hub. We recruit local women to kind of. Run and manage the hub that we call them jazz stars and then you know through the process of kind of onboarding them training them and equipping them with all of the technology know-how and and infrastructure to then like start serving customers. They’ve already ah got a. Relationship with a lot of the people that ultimately start using the service and so the the hubs themselves are like pretty interesting looking. It’s ah it’s like ah a small shop but it’s a kind of prefab building that you know we worked With. An architect friend to to help design and it looks really Cool. So people are interested in what what it Is. We get a lot of organic sales just from people coming up to the hub and seeing what you know what are we doing and once people start using the service. There’s a lot of word of mouth because it’s like. Very easy product to use. It doesn’t require any special setup like we don’t need to send a technician or anything to set your home Up. You can just walk home with the battery and a lighting kit that you get from us and on day one within you know a few seconds have electric light in your home.
James McWalter
Oh.
Sebastian Manchester
A lot of the times for the first time. So so it’s typically like our typical customers are I mean it varies a lot by region but customers who you know are frustrated with spending their hard earned money on you know Kerosene for a lantern. Um, you know we we recently launched in Nigeria and a lot of our customers. There are used to so to burning a diesel generator and that’s just not like a pleasant thing to have running in your home when you’re you know, just trying to relax like.
James McWalter
And raise a family kids inhaling that and everything.
Sebastian Manchester
So ah exit and it’s not good. It’s not good. Yeah.
James McWalter
And so the the hubs themselves So how how do you choose the specific community like you know there’s a lot of communities you I’m sure you could service us. But how do you kind of create that priority list. So.
Sebastian Manchester
It’s based on number of households within a specific radius from a location that we think would be good. So I mean we kind of take geospatial data sets about population. Um, we kind of overlay that with electrification data and find communities where there’s a lot of houses within a close proximity that do not have good or reliable access to electricity. And then typically that will generate like ah a prioritized list of sites. We look for regions where there’s a cluster of sites so we could serve from a single kind of anchor community and then we will do like. Field visits. Our team will go and kind of survey some customers try and understand what the situation is there if we could look look for suitable sites that we could lease to build a hub on and then based on a bunch of site selection criteria we can then kind of approve or move on find it. Better ah alternative for the community. Um, and that’s a process that we’re still refining and you know learning from hubs that we’ve already built what makes a good site what doesn’t because we’ve now got several years worth of operating data from. About a hundred sites in Tanzania so pretty good. Pretty good data set to learn from.
James McWalter
No, it’s amazing congratulations to get 200 sites that’s that’s that’s 3 it’s really exciting I guess when I think about the energy space in most of the develop world. It’s incredibly well regulated. Um, and you know basically the business that you’re building in Tanzania is probably not.
Sebastian Manchester
Thank you.
James McWalter
Legal in certain parts of develop world. Um, and in that particular way um, are there kind of local regulations. You have to deal with and and what’s a kind of general approach and I guess how are local agencies, governments etc. You know, responding to the work you’re doing.
Sebastian Manchester
Yeah, it’s a very good question. There are regulations typically regulations start to impact energy so providers at around in Tanzania’s ten Kilowatt threshold. If you run a micro-grid over 10 kilowatts. There’s a bunch of regulations you have to follow. We are quite a bit under that a typical hub. Um, it’s about three and a half Kilowatts of solar pv so it’s pretty small system but it can still serve ah that system can serve. And anywhere between 20300 customers depending on how they use energy. So we fall under the regulations for Tanzania um, that said it it is also like a purely dc energy system. So it’s all low voltage.
James McWalter
So.
Sebastian Manchester
So anything under 50 volts is kind of considered inherently safe. So that also helps in terms of government engagement like we do spend a lot of time engaging local government as part of the site selection process when we move into a new region. Yeah there’s a lot of you know steps to go through to make to you know, engage local authorities make sure you know we are following all of the the right steps and it’s it’s it’s. Important to like ensure that you know we are focusing on not only like communities where they I mean they they can help us identify communities where they think there’s a need and doing that gives them sort of ownership over the outcomes of the project. Builds kind of some social capital to be able to say like we brought jaza to the community got power and in terms of the like utilities. There are the electrical grid is pretty widespread in Tanzania and in Nigeria. But a lot of customers still haven’t connected because they can’t afford whether it’s like the connection fee sub places that’s subsidized but it’s also expensive to wire your home and then buy the appliances to plug in. So a lot of a lot of customers just aren’t connecting are choosing not to connect to the grid and so Jasa provides an alternative that where customers can get electricity. We do start to fulfill the electrification mandates of the the national utility. But without them having to spend money on expanding their infrastructure to to reach every single home because that’s you know at current electric electricity consumption rates for a lot of rural households. It’s just not economically feasible to build out that grid. Just because the amount of money people spend on electricity is so small that the capital costs are just will never be recovered and and most of the electrical utilities in sub-saharan Africa operate at a loss so anything we can do to increase electrification in rural communities seems to help.
James McWalter
Ah.
Sebastian Manchester
To be received well because it’s helping fulfill that electrification mandate.
James McWalter
Yeah there’s this kind of fascinating history around the electrification of rural areas. Um I know Ireland Best but also a bit of the us and the Ireland you know has a lot of kind of scattered small islands. You know you’re canadian there’s a lot of scattered small islands as well. And getting electrification across those islands you know was something the national government decided to do but still took multi-decades of of effort and at a incredible expense and I guess but there was also like the the kind of economic um ability to to spend that money. Um and and see that kind of return and investment right? because when you electrify a place. It starts being more productive nearly by definition and so yeah, it makes kind of complete sense that you can basically you know hand maybe not hand in hand be partners with utility but you know you’re you’re kickstarting the economic development of these areas in a way that would potentially be beneficial to the utility down the road when as these you know? um. Clusters of of communities become more economically viable for something more like a full build out off the grid.
Sebastian Manchester
Yeah, definitely I don’t I don’t think jazz is going to be like the the current model of energy distribution from portable batteries. It’s like it’s the fastest cheapest way to get electricity in homes right now. But I don’t think it’s necessarily. Future. This is just step one so we want to be you know helping get as many households on electricity as possible now and then we want to be part of that transition into the next the next phase of electrification of rural communities. Whether that’s building out micro-grids or connecting to a larger. Larger grids. 1 other thing that we’re doing is you know collecting a lot of data on household energy consumption that could help inform where and when it would make sense to build out some more more infrastructure.
James McWalter
That That’s Interesting. So in Essence you could down the road be um, you know like a kind of larger scale product developer and basically the energy company because you already own the that relationship right? with all these all these communities. Um in a way that you know they probably love you right? You know your jazz of stars running around. Um, you know, kind of building that like strong relationship.
Sebastian Manchester
Totally yeah, we so we own the hubs we own the batteries we own the customer relationship and besides just being and a network for energy distribution. We also see our network as a distribution layer for other types of services.
James McWalter
I.
Sebastian Manchester
Because we’ve built the retail footprint we’ve we’ve trained you know customer facing employees who know the community know their customer and so there’s all kinds of interesting add-on services. We could think about layering into our network beyond just energy. So. First step though is giving people power and the next step is is the is you know where where things get really interesting, but right now we’re still still just trying to electrify houses.
James McWalter
Not absolutely and in terms of that kind of growth trajectory trajectory over the next couple of years um yeah I guess what are the you know what? what are the kind of constraints from the speed of your growth is it people capital. Ah. Suitable community something else.
Sebastian Manchester
So we’ve been pretty been pretty deliberate recently about you know growth in that we want to make sure that we’re building business that’s worth growing. So we’ve been very focused on hub. Unit economics making sure. Yeah, every every hope we build is profitable every customer we serve. You know that there’s positive yeah unit economics because we have to not only build the hub. We also have to manufacture design and manufacture the battery ship it around the world. Um, deployed into remote communities. It’s like there’s a lot of it’s a it’s a complicated and expensive capitally intensive business to run so we want to make sure before we scale up, we’re doing it really? well so so currently we’re we have but hundred locations between Tanzania. And Nigeria we just launched the the we’re actually going to be raising our series a over the next couple months and so that’s going that’s one constraint that will unlock growth because we do feel very good about this that.
James McWalter
Exciting.
Sebastian Manchester
State of the business. We’re ready to grow. Um, people is obviously a constraint you know we need to recruit um a lot of jazz stars to run our hubs and so there’s a lot of you know, a lot of. Work to do there to to build the process to kind of onboard the next Thousand Jazza stars supply chain has been a constraint especially over the past year as kind of semiconductor shortages have impacted us the kind of global shipping container shortage and shipping network congestion. Slow things down and also kind of finding a factory that we can scale up manufacturing with but a lot of those challenges we’re working through were we’re comfortable with where we’re currently operating I don’t see that as the constraint right now. Um. And site selection. There’s you know about 2000 sites in Tanzania we think would would make good good communities to build the hub in and many more in Nigeria those are our 2 operating markets. But um.
Sebastian Manchester
Those will should keep us busy for the next year or 2 but we’re definitely looking at expanding into numerations as well. We’ve learned a lot from expanding into Nigeria this all just actually happened in the last three months so a lot of this is still fresh but we’ll take those lessons and they can. Systems. We’ve built to launch into a new market and and be looking at the next the next market market to expand to so with the right systems to to to recruit train Jazza stars a supply chain that can feed enough batteries into. Into hubs and the capital to to build it all I think right now we’re pretty well set up to grow. But again like we’re still learning and surely we we’ll find new constraints as as we. As we do grow because it’s um, yeah, we’re we’re always learning. We have spent time. There have been certain periods of time where we’ve we’ve like grown really fast like added 20 hubs in a month just to see what happened so I feel like we have worked out a lot of those kinks. But. Doing that month after month after month is going to be something new so it will be interesting but I’m confident we we can do it.
James McWalter
and and I would imagine retention is like close to a hundred percent once you once you build out a hub.
Sebastian Manchester
Um, it’s I mean hundred I wish it was 100% I mean a lot of people will try the service and and for 1 reason or another it might not be for them. We do have pretty good retention. Overall it’s about like all time retention. Yeah, after operating in a lot of these communities for. You know up to 3 years is like 60 so there’s a number of reasons why customers will churn but typically customers who start using the service stay with us and the lifetime um the lifetime value of a customers is well worth building. But hub and the battery pack to serve them.
James McWalter
Yeah, yeah I guess as Bor like referencing the hub itself right? like once it’s built it. It continues to be an like an asset that is like a positive producing asset ongoing.
Sebastian Manchester
Yeah, right? exactly? Yeah,. It’s pretty low maintenance solar panels are magic as far as I’m concerned and once that like once the hub’s installed. You know there’s a bit of. Bit of maintenance troubleshooting that needs to happen every now and then but largely the Hubs just keep working.
James McWalter
And you know try to manage. Ah, you know you I believe actually I think here New York right now you’re you’re spending your time I believe between ah Canada and Tanzania as is the rest of some of the rest of the team and then obviously you have a lot of people kind of on on the ground and in Tanzania now Nigeria um. What have you kind of learned about you know trying to manage a team across all these different time zones multiple cultures. Um, and you know things that maybe didn’t go so well. But now you kind of learned from over the last couple of years
Sebastian Manchester
So learned a lot about this I mean 1 thing I feel like we were. We were well prepared for the global pandemic because we had already been working as a pretty remote team for a few years leading up to that so it helped us kind of. Ride through the early bumps but it’s it’s a lot of work to run an international company. You know, especially where we have a hardware team basement Canada that’s designing the product very far away from the end user of that product. We have manufacturing going on in China and we have most of our operations like pretty much all of our operational team in Tanzania is Tanzanian and then it’s mostly just co-founders Jeff and I who who kind of. Bridge the gap between our like engineering finance teams in in North America our operations team in Tanzania and Nigeria and manufacturing in China um, 1 thing that we’ve learned is the importance of building. Good data systems. This is especially useful for the engineering team. It’s like the best way we can learn about our customers how they use the product because we can’t be there. You know it’s not as it’s not as easy for a hardware engineer and in Canada to talk to a. You know farmer in rural Tanzania besides the distance does the cultural gaps and the the language so we do we we built a lot of data systems both in terms of like how customers are using energy how they transact at the hub. And that’s helped us learn a lot about what the product needs to do how it’s helped us evolve the product. You know the product we started with is very different from the product we’re we’re we’re operating today. We started with the. Lead acid battery that was just um I mean it’s basically just flat acid battery hardwired to an led light bulb. Um, now it’s like it’s a custom lithium ion battery pack. That’s got a custom battery management system that does data logging.
James McWalter
And press.
Sebastian Manchester
You know control some business logic so we can we can meter energy on both you know number of you know Watt Hours units of energy discharged. But also we can meter it based on time we can see how much power people are using at different times of day. How much. Um. Much energy people use on on each different on each each swap and so we’ve learned a lot about what the product needs to do and that’s helped us build feedback loops between engineering and our customers and then on the software side too like. We we we rely on a lot of customer feedback that we can collect through the hub so finding building software tools to translate what jazz of stars are hearing and seeing in the communities. Turning that into actionable data that the rest of the team can use. So yeah, a big thing is building feedback loops. It’s also been really important to just give people ownership over their responsibilities because. A lot. Yeah, a lot of times people are working kind of extremely hard in isolation and they just need need to be able to make decisions and and you know follow their intuition on things and ideally were there to support and help them learn and develop. But. Ultimately, we want. We want people to be kind of accountable for their own work and in a remote setting that’s been super important and has worked well for us.
James McWalter
Yeah I think that I would also work remote and I was at a remote company when and Covid hit and you know a lot of the things that you can kind of take for granted when you’re all co-occated. Um, you generally in remote culture have to kind of define and structure very early on and so aspects of culture you know people. Kind of just like take the take the lead from the founders or the early employees on culture If. It’s all person. Um, but like you know, being very specific about like how we communicate asyctly how we kind of own our tasks and our roles like that. That’s just necessary. Otherwise the company itself just wouldn’t be able to kind of progress in a remote fashion and so um, yeah I think of. You know the big power of something like the word culture using startups is just allowing real alignment over how to solve problems and then allowing people to kind of actually solve them themselves Once there’s alignment over that piece of culture.
Sebastian Manchester
Totally totally? Yeah, yeah, it’s the cult. The the cultures is really important in how we build what we build and you know you know our organization. We’ve really put jazz tried to put Jazzs stars at the center of it and like keeping that in mind anything we’re working on should be like directly benefiting jazz. A star is kind of the core the core of the company if a jazzas star is doing well. Customers are doing well if jazz stars getting rich then the company’s doing well so that’s helped a lot and like you know, jazz stars are definitely the most important people in our company and personally inspire me and I know. That’s true across the entire company. It’s pretty It’s it’s amazing to see. Yeah the the confidence and the power that jazz a stars can develop themselves. And you know become leaders in the community with a lot for a lot of time. It’s the it’s their first job. It’s the it’s the first opportunity they’ve had to kind of really show the community what they can do and they always. Blow us away and they both community way.
James McWalter
And what about I guess kind of other types of kind of local development that kind of can occur. Are you seeing any kind of interesting. You know, commercial use cases you know now that you have some sort of electrification. Um, you know people people are are great at like figuring out cool new things. Um. You know with heavy constraints and so have you seen any kind of interesting projects businesses and so on kind of rise up alongside your hubs.
Sebastian Manchester
Um.
Sebastian Manchester
Definitely like some some of the cool use case I’ve seen for a product. It’s ah, a lot of barbers use the jazz pack nothing worse than losing power in the middle of a haircut.
James McWalter
So. Right.
Sebastian Manchester
So the the jazz a pack has become ah a staple in a lot of rural barbers because it can easily power you know set set of Dc clippers all day every day and then at the same time it can do like a boombox. So. You can you can get your hair cut and style the another one is um, people running basically like home theaters. They’ll use the jazz pack to power Tv and Dvd are you know. A Tv that you can plug a Usb stick in and just like charge people admission to watch movies or football game or whatever. That’s pretty popular use case and those customers will typically like be swapping a few times a day because they’re just running running nonstop and doing doing pretty well for themselves. Um, and then a lot of customers will just use who are using it for business. We’ll just use it for light. So for example, if they’re running a market stand while the markets operate at night and having light this having light is helpful I think we we understand that.
Sebastian Manchester
Um, it can also charge phones so people use it to do kind of chart phone charging in their business. But yeah, it’s a lot a lot of our customers are also like shop owners. So. It’s not just a product for the home and I think that’s is this is. Kind of the next challenge from a product perspective is for us to figure out how to kind of build on that Nigeria especially is interesting because a lot of businesses will be using generators to power fridges Tvs there’s there’s a lot more Ac loads in rural communities. Niger then there than there is in Tanzania so our current product focus is kind of building on the evolution of our jazza packs our batteries to build something that can serve customer that that wants to run their business but can’t afford. Both the like financial and you know environmental cost of running a generator nonstop.
James McWalter
So makes a to of sense and I guess you know thinking about ah people who are trying to you know, maybe be inspired by our conversation and like oh that’s that’s a pretty cool Startup. You know it’s It’s the kind of company that um, not enough people are building and we should have more of these you know if if somebody’s kind of you know. At the stage of their career where they’re interested in starting a company is there anything that you you know you’d like to advise them ways that they could kind of maximize their success starting a company some to yours.
Sebastian Manchester
Um. Um, my suggestion or advice I mean our company is a little bit unique because we operate in a part of the world that not a lot of people who I assume are listening to this podcast will have experience with like. You just kind of have to go there and like you have to be there to really understand how to um, you know, understand the customer that you’re trying to serve I think that’s the most important thing is like what what is the problem you’re solving um, who are you solving it for. And so for us like we spent Jeff and I both spent several years living and working in Rural Tanzania before we started to feel like we had a a good understanding and it’s still something that I’m that I struggle with so um, understanding the problem and then if you’re. Moving to a new country to solve someone else’s problem like make sure you have very good local partnerships to help bridge the gap. Um, but that’s the main thing like make sure that you’re solving an actual problem and ideally a big one that a lot of people have. But not necessarily if there’s like a small problem. You care a lot about that’s also probably worth solving if you care about it chances are someone else cares about it. Um, and also just like don’t. Don’t be afraid to just start like I didn’t have any experience in hardware I didn’t have any experience in software I didn’t have any experience in building a supply chain everything I do today is like skills I’ve had to learn on the job and so don’t let don’t let that be a barrier to just starting. The most important thing is to just start once you know there’s a problem just start working on how to solve it don’t like go to don’t go to grad school to learn how to solve a problem to start a company just like try and so try and start the company and try and solve it.
James McWalter
Yeah, yeah.
Sebastian Manchester
Maybe you need to go to grad school but chances are if it’s a big enough problem. You can hire someone who already has those skills or you can learn the bare minimum until then.
James McWalter
Yeah, especially because you know a lot of people who start something. It’s often their second or third thing that actually like you know they’ve learned the skills needed and so just get get the first one get this first one done I mean in in your case, the first one’s been very successful of course. Um, it’s not true for all of us. Not not true for me. Um, you know.
Sebastian Manchester
Yeah.
James McWalter
But I think it is very very you know valuable to to put yourself out there and you know I was talking to somebody else recently about the especially if you have the ability to take risks right? Not everybody does of course and so um, you know it’s obviously a great privilege to have the ability to take you know risky career moves and and so on and and for those people who don’t. Have that ability to take risks like I think there’s nearlyrdy. Ah maybe not quite as strong as a responsibility but something similar that if you have the opportunity to take the risk to solve the big problem and you are interested in that problem well go for it. You know, get on a flight you know take take the chance. Yes.
Sebastian Manchester
Yeah, or go like go find someone else who cares about that problem and help them do it because chances are someone else is trying to solve it too starting a startup is is not for everyone and like um. Think more people should should try it but don’t feel like you need to start a company to work on these types of problems. You can also find cool companies like Jasson and you know we’re we’re looking for people who are hungry to solve problems who might not know know where to start. Can just join us join us on ambition.
James McWalter
Absolutely well Sebastian Manchester has been great, really enjoyed the conversation. Is there anything I should have asked you about but did not.
Sebastian Manchester
Um, well I’ll just echo myself what I just said like jazz is growing. We need help. It’s a big Problem. We’re looking for people to to help us solve energy access and if you love big challenges you love Learning. You have an open mind come join Us. We will help you help you learn who you really are by working on very hard problems with people who are similarly passionate about solving big problems and. I Do think we have a very very impressive team I Love working with with ever in a jazz. Ah some some of the smartest people I know are working on this problem with me at Jazzos So if it sounds interesting. Please reach out.
James McWalter
Absolutely and we’ll add your career of page link to the show notes Sebastian Manchester. Thanks so much.
Sebastian Manchester
Cool. Thank you.