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David Senra: Zach Dell on Base Power, Energy Abundance & Building a Company for Life

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Zach Dell is the co-founder of Base Power, an energy company on a mission to make electricity more affordable and reliable. His starting insight was that home batteries had the wrong business model. Companies sold expensive backup systems that sat idle most of the time. Base installs batteries at homes, retains ownership and operates them as a fleet: charging when electricity is cheap, discharging when it is expensive and providing backup when the grid goes down. The homeowner gets lower electricity bills and backup power. Base gets an asset it can put to work every day. Dell explains why batteries can make the existing grid more efficient, why installing them where people consume electricity helps overcome infrastructure bottlenecks and how Base serves both homeowners and utilities. His strategy is to build a compounding cost advantage through vertical integration and technology. That now includes Base Core, a battery designed and manufactured by the company, and a longer-term ambition to help meet the growing power demands of AI. Dell grew up watching his father, Michael Dell, build a company and knew from childhood that he wanted to become an entrepreneur. After several early

[00:03] David Sacks: So out of every single guest on the show so far, yours is the business that I understand the least. So let's use this conversation as an opportunity to fix that. Explain what you're working on and like what your mission and how you're doing it. [00:14] Zach Fadem: Yeah, so the grid is something in the power system and electricity broadly is a topic that a lot of people don't understand and it's pretty common. I think that's because there's a ton of nuance to it. It's a very old system, it's highly regulated, and so it's not something that is in kind of natural, common…

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