Brock Briggs  0:00 

Hello and welcome to the Scuttlebutt podcast, the show for current and former service members looking to make better decisions, think deeper and earn more money. My name is Brock Briggs and each week I do that by bringing you a conversation with a badass veteran at the top of their craft. Today, I'm speaking with Jeremy McCool. Jeremy is a former Army infantry officer and currently the founder and CEO of HEVO, a wireless electric vehicle charging company. We talked through Jeremy's inspiration for HEVO, a story recounting restoring power to a village in Iraq while deployed.

He explains the barriers to wireless charging and how they're combating both the innovation and distribution challenges. Their recent partnership with Stellantis and advice for young entrepreneurs raising money. Jeremy is the type of person that when you listen to them talk about the future, it's exciting. He also tells a story of how he was explaining his idea for wireless charging when HEVO started back in 2011 to Exxon executives, just three years after Tesla released its first roadster. Considering how far they’ve come, it's difficult to not to be optimistic about that future. Don't forget, you can always check out this episode, transcripts, the YouTube channel and the newsletter where I dive deeper on each episode every week, all that scuttlebuttpodcast.co. Please enjoy this conversation with Jeremy McCool.

Brock Briggs 

Normally, where these conversations start is with people's time and service. But you were just kind of telling me that some of your entrepreneurship experience started, actually, before you joined. I think that that would probably be the most appropriate place for us to get going with your story, Jeremy.

Jeremy McCool  1:52 

Yeah, I've been an entrepreneur my entire life since I can remember. I've been trying to figure out ways to bring product to market. Starting with being a newspaper boy, I was delivering product to customers that wanted it and then I figured out something. Those were customers that may want to have their lawns mowed, as well. And so I started to market to those people. What if, you know, what if I came back over the weekend and mowed your lawn. Next thing I know, that turned into a real business. By the time I was nine years old, I had hundreds of people that wanted me to mow their lawns every single day and or every single week, I should say and it turned into me hiring people, starting up a real business, had to go become a small business, actually pay taxes, do all these things.

And I took that money and I rolled it into other entrepreneurial opportunities such as comic books, baseball cards, video games and I found a market because where I was living at the time, in the Marshall Islands there wasn't any availability and access to those kinds of things. And so I took one and turned it into another and turned it into another. And by the time I was 10 or 11 years old, I had three streams of revenue. I was making enough money to be able to basically pay for everything for myself. And learned how to manage people, learned how to hire people, learned how to manage books, learned how to create product-market fit, learned how marketing works, and you know, all these other things that has played very well in my life. In 2001, 911 happened so I was 21 years old. And you know very much watching this thing unfold in front of us. And that very moment became the day when I made a decision.

I wanted to become an army guy. You know, back then I didn't know what that meant. So I tried to join, just like so many other people did on September 12. And there just was too many people that were trying to join at one time and they didn't have any room for me. So they told me to go take a look at ROTC and National Guard in terms of the recruiters and I said, okay, we go see what's going on there. And I went to RTC, started as fast as I could and quickly realized I was missing a lot of the tangible skills that a lot of the other prior service members had. And it was important to me to try to learn how to be a soldier before I became a leader and to be a follower before I became a leader I should even say. So I went to the National Guard, went through infantry basic training that launched my service time, six years in the military, three and a half years active duty. I was an infantry officer.

And then I went to Baghdad and everything changed in 2007-2008. And it changed the direction of my life perpetually. In terms of what I was going to do next. I already had an eye idea that I wouldn't be doing it for life. But this made it very clear to me what I was going to have to do if I had the chance to make it back. So that's where I got moving and went from Baghdad to Brooklyn in 2008, right in time for the great recession to start, but also a good time to start my graduate studies at Columbia University. And that's where HEVO, the company that we're going to talk about, took off from there.

Brock Briggs  5:28 

You were saying, as you were preparing to join the army, that you didn't know what being an army guy meant. With the benefit of hindsight, what do you think that that actually means to you now?

Jeremy McCool  5:39 

Well, it means a lot of things. I think, first and foremost, the qualities and the traits and the values of what the Army represents is very true with loyalty, the duty, the respect all those things but the most important one was the selfless service. That one to me always stood out as the one that if you followed through that, then you could respectfully be all the other things. Because if you put everybody and everything in front of you, in terms of those things being the most important part and especially the people that you were serving along and leading, then you would serve with honor, you would serve with integrity, you would serve with personal courage.

And so if I had to get down to the brass knuckles of what it is, it's selfless service. I think that's exactly what it means to be in the military. You're doing something that is, in most people's opinion, crazy, especially when it's in time of war. That really doesn't line up with most people's risk appetites. And it's clear that the kind of job that I did in the infantry and being an infantry leader, first being on the enlisted side and then later on the officer side, it's clear that I had an appetite for more risk. But I also had an appetite for being in the midst of where some of the greatest soldiers live. And I felt that I had this rare opportunity in my youth to lead some incredible people and do something that was well beyond my comprehension, their means. And to be able to do it with some success only meant that I was doing it with the right people that believed in me.

So that plays out very well, though, by the way, in professional life and business life. Turns out, it's literally the same thing as creating a company. Entrepreneurship is like, in many ways going to war. You gotta convince people to do things that they normally wouldn't be willing to do. There's a lot of risk and jumping on board with a startup. And I've been doing this now for almost 12 years. So I can speak to all the hardships that most people would ever experience, whether it's fundraising, you know, whether it's having a product that doesn't meet the market requirements, whether it is pricing. Running through all those different challenges, it's a very similar situation to what it's like to lead soldiers and convincing them to do things that normally they want it and that gets down to leadership and leadership is influence. And that is the single thing that you have to be able to do on both sides of it whether you're in business or you're in the military.

Brock Briggs  8:39 

Would you say that your ability to lead is the thing that changed the most about you during your time in? Maybe starting out and you mentioned not having the necessary or requisite skills to kind of lead. Is that what you grew to develop because of your time in?

Jeremy McCool  8:58 

I've always been a leader since day one. Since I was born, always been a leader. But what it helped me to do was improve upon it, to refine it, to understand my flaws and the self recognizing to those flaws and understanding what I need to do to ensure that wherever my gaps are, my flaws are, a. to conceal those to others so that it doesn't become part of the story, a being that, b. then to make sure that I help other people elevate to what they can potentially become. And when you're a leader, you gotta harmonize around a couple of things. One is your never the perfect leader. Everybody wishes that they could be but there's no such thing, and to be okay with that but not to cause disruption to the morale of your team or your troops, to not be a person that inflicts pain or suffering onto others.

And I would just step this part up, which is to be the encouragement, to be the coach, to be the influencer that makes them want to always rise to the occasion. And then to actually be able to walk away from that. And they always continue to do that going forward. That's the part that it takes time to build. So what the military trained me to do and you know, a lot of that is self training, honestly, because you have to be reflective. What it trained me to do was to learn how to manage, you know, the things that I needed to be a better leader and to also help me to grow the things that I was already good at but more importantly, how to influence and grow other people's potential.

Brock Briggs  11:07 

What were some of those areas that you think that you needed the most improvement on leadership wise? I find it interesting that certainly in an early stage startup you need leadership, maybe not right at the beginning if you're setting out as kind of like a solopreneur or you're just doing it on your own. But eventually, if you want to reach any amount of scale, you have to convince people of something. And I think that you touched on that a little bit. What do you think was your biggest opportunity to improve on and like, maybe how has that bled over into your time at HEVO?

Jeremy McCool  11:42 

Calmness, calmness in all situations, calmness and all types of challenges. It's easy to paint the picture of starting a company and going through some hard challenges after you've gone to war because you can always relate back to that, right? And go, well, it's not Baghdad.

Brock Briggs

Right, right. It can’t be that bad, right?

Jeremy McCool

But at the same time, that's not what everybody else is experiencing. So everybody else, especially when it's hard and when everybody's not getting paid properly. And all these other things in those early years or if they're even getting paid at all. It's the calmness, it's staying very positive around and optimistic around the key focus points that you have to retreat. We teach this every single week. And every week, I write. I start up every week by writing an email that goes out around seven o'clock in the morning on Monday mornings. So every morning, every person walks into HEVO’s office with something that I have been thinking about over the process of the last, you know, week or several weeks or month or something.

And it had been something I've been reading, something I've been watching, something I've been talking about with my peers. And at the end of the day, that always drives to the first principle, which is discipline. So we know that the more focused you are, the greater strength that you have around the vision, the more tuned up that you are around your values, the easier it is for people to get behind that. But there's other things in principle that get lost and it's your habits. And so we really work hard to form habits that are long lasting, that creates systems that allow for people to easily step into and be able to replicate all these things that already pre existing everybody's already on board with. And so to you know, get back to that point. There are these well defined things that we do.

And the number one thing that we always preach, coach on, teach in terms of all the management team, but it starts with me is about maintaining discipline. And you would go well did that start in the military? And the answer's no. It started with my parents. And my parents are the ones that taught me and my brothers discipline. And we were lucky enough to have really great parents that taught us how to control our focus, to create long life habits that would set us up for success and to continue to refine our discipline as time went, so it's always been there. And it allowed me to, you know, I would say elevate it when I was in the military and then even refined it more as I become a business leader.

Brock Briggs  14:43 

Were your parents entrepreneurs? I find it interesting or an interesting case study to look at really successful entrepreneurs and I've always wondered if you can truly teach entrepreneurship. You obviously went on to teach entrepreneurship at NYU. And obviously, you've got this background that kind of supports, hey, I've been in the trenches. I've been doing and living this. And I've always found that an interesting discussion point. So I guess maybe we'll start with where your parents entrepreneurs?

Jeremy McCool  15:13 

We don't have entrepreneurs in my family, I'm the only one. And that goes way back not just myself, but others. When we do have, that's interesting. That's pseudo entrepreneurial in its own way. Because we do have preachers and priests in our family, people that were evangelical traveling preachers and folks like that. And I think that was always different from my parents to have to deal with. Every child comes out with some uniqueness that they need, right? And I don't have any children, but HEVO is my child. Anytime anybody asked me if I've ever been married, I had to reply, yeah married to the game. And if they asked me, do you have any children? I said, yeah H, E, V and O.

So this is where I put my lifeblood into. But to kind of back into my parents, though, although not entrepreneurs, my father was an electric technician with some R&D groups that were working for the military, hence why we were moving around all the time. I started off my life along with my brothers in the White Sands base and in a small area called Alma Gordo. And I was literally born in the area where the first atomic bomb was tested. And then from there, we moved to the Marshall Islands, not too far from the beginning at all, where the first hydrogen bomb was tested, if you start to get, you know, the sense of what's going on here. Then we moved to the area next to Huntsville, where von Braun and some others were working on missile tech and we're responsible for a lot of those things. So my father was involved with some really cool technology, hard technology.

We never got to really discuss it because it's always obviously confidential. But we do know that he worked on missile tech. We know he worked on lasers, we know he worked on flight simulators and all kinds of cool things like that. Unfortunately, he passed in 1999. We were very young. I was 19, my brothers, even younger, 16 and 14 and he passed from cancer. And it was just again, to the luck of having really great parents that we had already really strong discipline in our lives. And although don't take it for granted, you know, we lost a very important member of our family. We were set up to be able to become independent men and had to do that very early. And so all of us joined the military.

As a matter of fact, all my brothers, we all joined around the same time. One went into the Coast Guard, one went into the Air Force, I went into the army. And it was, you know, that early age of my parents let me be an entrepreneur trying to encourage me to do it. Not knowing exactly how all these things work, but being there to help support my father was taking phone calls from people and in playing secretary to all the people that want to have their lawns mowed, you know, or that wanted to come over and do some sells and purchases on baseball cards and things like that. So we had some fun as a family. It was really a great time to grow up in that era.

Brock Briggs  18:33 

One of my favorite podcasts is hosted by this guy, David Senra. The podcast is Founders Podcast, I'm not sure if you're familiar. If you aren't, it's a must listen. But something he always says is, the story of the father is embedded in the son. And it's really interesting to see what drives and inspires people and how, you know, sometimes it works like a pendulum. We're going back and forth and extreme to one or the other. But oftentimes, it's an interest in this is like laying the groundwork for the next generation, I guess.

Jeremy McCool  19:09 

Yeah, I would tell you, you know, we had an interesting childhood. We moved in locations that people can't even find on a map basically. Often, even when I tell people I'm originally from New Mexico, they think I'm from a country, not from a state and the Marshall Islands, good luck finding it. It's in Micronesia, if anybody's trying to find it. So you know, these places I grew up in a sandbox, high desert, then equatorial climate on a tropical island. Then my backyard was a cornfield, quite literally. And so having those kinds of different types of elements to be around different people. And growing up in these kinds of locations. I think it sets us up for life. And our father was such a great coach and a great teacher. He was quite literally our coach in sports and things, but he's such a great teacher of all things of life, not just, you know, tinkering and building things. And we did a lot of that. And we got to get our hands very dirty. But we've got a lot of independence in life.

And, you know, when we weren't doing what we should, we got disciplined properly, but often, we were doing the right thing. And it was just part of, you know, his plan. And thankfully, it worked out the way that he had planned because he put so much effort into it. And our mother has always been the greatest cheerleader for all of us. She's somebody who I think most people would consider being the mother that they want, you know, the person that bakes cookies and cupcakes and things and always thinking of others, that kind of person. And, you know, she, we've taken care of her as life has, you know, been a bit of a struggle for her in her later years. But that's easy because we were able to do it because we were successful because of all the things that they helped us to achieve. And they didn't come from money. We didn't come from money. They just have high school diplomas, basically. There was a big leap forward and they paid it in being great parents, thankfully. And I hope, you know, others have been able to have that or what, yeah, entrepreneurs, that wasn't anybody in our family.

Brock Briggs  21:33 

It's certainly not for everybody, that's for sure.

Jeremy McCool  21:35 

I hope not. I don't recommend it for most people.

Brock Briggs  21:40 

You've said in another interview that one of the more inspirational moments that you've had that inspired you to start HEVO was helping to restore power to some civilians on while you're on combat deployment to Iraq. Can you kind of maybe recount that story briefly and talk about how that's kind of filtered down into what you do now?

Jeremy McCool  22:04 

So HEVO as a mission is built on two things. And that is on security and conservation. And it started with the story in Baghdad. And I will tell you that the tenets of HEVO its people planet and power, but what really was the genesis, the colonel that launched it started with security and conservation. And so when I got to Baghdad and our troops started to, we started doing missions into these neighborhoods. And what we found out real quick was that people didn't have power. They're getting a couple of hours or less of power per day. We had to go back and we couldn't figure out why we'd go to the engineers. Engineers couldn't give us a straight answer. So we got pretty inquisitive and started to just map out the entire grid system of Baghdad, quite literally moving from substation to substation, power line to power line, we traced it all back and then went back to the main generators that we had destroyed and there just wasn't enough juice.

And we mean, the military, because that's the way that we did things back then. So then became the situation with well, what's the biggest causation for extra judicial killings? What's the biggest surging factor behind insurgencies? And we got to the point where it's obvious to us at least, it's around security. And it's not just security as in securing life, but it's about securing economy. It's about quality of life, it's about hospitals and basic services being available and they didn't have any of it. So I became a really good, I wouldn't say great, I became a really good servant in the civil services side of things. And a couple of things that we did upfront to improve people's quality of life was, unless you've been there, you can't imagine how much trash there was around Baghdad. At that point, everything was a heaping pile of trash. And that's where all these IEDs were. And everything else that was coming out of that was diseased. You know, animals were getting into it, kids were getting into it.

And so the first thing we did is we brought out bulldozers and became garbage guys overnight. We were hauling trash off to these man heaps, but then we started to expose, people still couldn't work. And we got to work on helping to bring energy back. And so the way that we did it was we teamed up with a bunch of local entrepreneurs in Baghdad and around Iraq who are Iraqis that wanted to help rebuild Iraq and of course, figure out new business models. So we helped them to bring In these generators, these diesel generators that they could bring into these neighborhoods because we couldn't give them central power. And overnight, you know, we'd see hundreds of lines basically being connected from people's homes and people would just do it automatically on their own. And overnight, people went from having two hours of power or less to having an amazing amount of power in the form of 8, 12, 18 hours. Some of them weren't even had power 24/7.

And immediately, when that happened, quality of life went up. People started being able to build businesses again. And all kinds of more nefarious things went down significantly. And so killings and insurgencies, all these things, because now people had a life that they wanted to build and live for. And there was this one problem. We started getting reports of high respiratory illnesses and epidemiological issues. And working very closely with the hospitals, it came back down to it was coming from these generators. We went back to his neighborhood and started to look again and sure enough, anywhere we've had a generator put in, there was black set, covering places that were, you know, not the same black before. So we took those generators and moved them out into the neighborhood or outside of the neighborhoods, walling them up, put some security around it just to make sure nobody was there to play with it. And it helped to bring that down. But there was this other thing that started to happen.

That was really interesting, Brock, which was that all of a sudden, al Qaeda caught on to what was going on. And they started to sack the supply lines. And the diesel was being stolen by al Qaeda, driven into the neighborhoods where these kerosene or these diesel generators were located at and then being resold on the black market pricing to them and all sudden, everybody's chits for their energy skyrocketed 10, 20, 30x. And so people started to report that to us and we had to go find these operatives and eliminate that problem. And so we finally was able to securitize the energies supply chain for them. It was all on from that point, we didn't have to do much to secure our neighborhoods anymore. They self secured, credit policing forces, they immediately went into building businesses. Schools were operationally almost at 100% across the board, hospitals were seeing drops in all kinds of just things that you can, you know, imagine having problems with in first of all countries. And it was a really good turning point at that moment for a lot of people's lives, thankfully.

Brock Briggs  28:05 

It's a shame because the news really paints over our time in the Middle East over the last 20 years as a war effort. And it is, but there is a certain element of like humanitarian relief that has gone on behind the scenes that's just kind of completely unnoticed. And there are hundreds of 1000s of stories exactly like that, that don't really make the front page and probably served a highlight, maybe more good than the actual combat that was done over there. Hearing that story made me think of Malcolm Gladwell, his book, The Tipping Point where he outlines the Broken Window Theory.

And if you're unfamiliar, it basically outlines back in the 80s, New York City had this terrible crime problem. And there was this graffiti everywhere and shootings and whatever. And what they did was they started cleaning up the graffiti rather than targeting the shootings and the crime, which just elevated the entire neighborhood. And it gave people a better feeling about how things were in an area and actually lowered the crime more drastically than the actual targeting the crime itself. And that just seemed really reminiscent of the story that you just told.

Jeremy McCool  29:27 

That's right. Causation is often hard to find. This one was easy. Just nobody was paying attention to it. That's the problem. And they weren't giving it enough credit. I'll tell you there was neighborhoods that were so unsafe, that we only rolled in when we had enough people to go into then. And we went into other companies or platoons rolling with us because they were so unsafe. We didn't want them to get thrown into something. By the end of our tour, a lot of that had subsided and we were able to go to most neighborhoods pretty welcomed. You know, it's interesting too that at the same time, the dichotomy of this situation was that we were very much humanitarian developers in a lot of ways. Don't get me wrong, we did kick in a lot of doors and go find people that were responsible for just horrendous, terrible things that people should never have to experience, mass killings and all kinds of things.

And we found those guys but we did it in a way because we knew our neighborhoods and we were in such lockstep with the leaders of those neighborhoods in those tribes, that it didn't disrupt or harm the communities. But as soon as some other elements, you know, other platoons or companies or some of the Black Op guys, which specifically show up in those neighborhoods, it would become more of a raucous situation and it'd become very kinetic all sudden. And it would often turn the neighborhood's against us. So we were constantly battling against a few in the neighborhoods who just wanted to loot, kill and destroy. And we worked with neighborhoods to get rid of those people. If you're willing to hear a story, I'll give you one. This one is pretty remarkable, actually. So my platoon sergeant and I are my second command, we had gotten this mission to go try to find a couple of high value targets.

And we went into this part of a neighborhood where it was very unsafe and actually went to meet with the leader of that area at the time, a liaison to this leader of Jaish Amati, which was an insurgency group within Iraq. And so we meet with him at a coffee shop and we have this major from the Iraqi army with us. And we're sitting in this coffee shop, it's on a corner. And within minutes, there's hundreds of people surrounding us, we're completely surrounded. And it was to the point where it was mob, it felt like we were about to be completely overrun. I pushed out our elements for security to move them out to keep the little bit of calmness to the crowd so that they're in case some other things happened to me and my second command and my interpreter, not everybody needed to be in the middle of that. So we pushed them out a bit. And they were chanting, you know, things in Arabic about their anger to America, etc.

And within about 20 minutes of talking with the crowd, I was able to get them to calm down and to get them to understand what we're going to do next. And this was our vision of how we're going to open up the community back for getting energy, getting the economy back, getting all these things that they hadn't had in several years. And by the time I was walking out, you know, 20-30 minutes later, they were chanting USA and they'll just walk through the crowd untouched. We pretty much that was going to be one of our last days on earth. That's still really stuck with me. But at the end of the day, there was a lot of people doing a lot of hard work on the ground, trying to do things for the betterment of those people. And, you know, we did our best and we'd left it in the best effort in the best hands that we could as we transitioned back to the US. Those stories will live with you forever, right?

And what it teaches you though, is that there's a great deal more to this story than what most people think. There's a lot of hatred and challenges that were in that dynamic before we showed up. We did our best to lower the intensity and to improve people's lives and their quality of life, which automatically lowered the intensity. But then things that were out of our control. You know, those are the situations that you have to live with, that stay with you. So yeah, there's a lot of interesting kinds of moments like that. I know everybody has a lot of stories, but I think ours are kind of unique than ones of our platoon in our company because of where we were. We were positioned. Brock, I remember this, we went from Baghdad International Airport where we were first stationed up to being pushed into the neighborhood or in between neighborhoods.

And, you know, we got stuck in his two storey house, amongst buildings that were all taller than us. And I remember walking into this house that we had purchased and acquired and then making that a joint security station. And looking at all the observation points everywhere around us 360 degrees. And thinking, you know, this is just a matter of time. We're gonna have to stay here, basically 24/7, hold this up, but everybody can always see our maneuvers. And at any point in time, they can just lock load and have some fun. And they did that. And to the point where we had to calm that down. And so we were always at threat, you know, it was always a high threat level just because of where we were and we just happened to be fortuitous fortuitously, if you want to put it that way.

And I'm using that facetiously. We haven't really put right, the dividing line of a massive al Qaeda element and a massive insurgent, JCL, naughty element, and they were fighting with each other on that riff line and we were right in the middle of it. They we got stuck right in the middle of it. And, and we were, where we were, not only were we positioned in this really, you know, unfortunate location and sardined in with 60 people in a two story home and we've got pictures to prove it. People being sardined in there. But it was the smallest joint security station, I think at the time in Iraq, from what we were told. And so we were out on our own, really out on our own, we it was us and us only. And if we ever got into something, there was no elements out there to help us. So we had to go about this a different way. We had to think more strategic. Because if we angered all these elements at one time, it was no doubt that they could overrun the JSS and RP, a couple times they tried but unsuccessful.

Brock Briggs  37:34 

If you were to change something about your time in service and maybe while deployed, looking back with, again, the benefit of hindsight, what do you think it would be?

Jeremy McCool  37:48 

Yeah, I thought about this actually quite a bit over the last 15 years. And the answer is that other than just not having been in Iraq in the first place, you know, I'll put that as one high level objective for the US in terms of its security and conservation of its own might and will. But if looking back on it, the one thing that I do wish that I would have done was I think it would have been great to have stayed in and been a company commander not to have gone in deeper into the, you know, the dark arts, not into the Black Ops, but actually to have just stayed in long enough to be a company commander and had trained the next leaders and coached them, and been with them to help them be prepared to train the next one. So that side, I have a little bit of a, I know a gap inside about that one.

Brock Briggs  38:56 

I don't know that there's many people who look back on their time in service and don't think, you know, what if a couple more years, what if one more tour. It's such an easy thing to think about, especially when times get a little bit tough on the outside or even just kind of reminiscing about the old days about, you know, if I knew this, then what would be different. There is a discussion to be had there about pursuing what your highest calling is. And who knows, you know, maybe HEVO doesn't exist at any time in the future without you. So maybe that was your highest calling and here you are today.

Jeremy McCool  39:37 

That's a good, you know, appreciate that. Thank you very much. But that's how I've also looked at it too. And I don't regret not going on another deployment. I can promise you that. I'm very happy to have not. I had enough in that first one. It was quite rowdy. So I got enough out of that one and did my best for everybody I could and left everybody that had served with in the best position that I possibly could. And it turned out very well, for almost all of them. I mean, they really went and did some amazing things in their professional lives, either they stayed on the journey in the military, or they didn't, but I was not. I don't have anything left on the battlefield, by no stretch of the imagination. And that's why HEVO started. I didn't want to see other young people go into battle for these kinds of things again, to go into war for these things. It was ridiculous that we ever did it in the first place, in my view.

Now, I'm not going to sit here and, you know, try to talk for everybody. But my personal opinion, it was a ridiculous situation that we ever found ourselves there. And it could have been easily, it didn't have to happen. And we are a highly innovative society. The US is the innovator, the chief Innovator of the world. We can innovate like nobody else. That 100% is a true statement about the United States. People always look at what is the number one, what is the United States the best at, I don't know why we don't ever talk about innovation. Everybody always looks at things like you know, the military, or you know, GDP and things like that. Our greatest asset as a country is innovation. We innovate way beyond anybody else or any other country's capacity to do so. And the reason why we're able to do that is because we've created systems over the last several, several generations, not decades, not years, generations to ensure that we can innovate.

And we have all this innovation laying around that had not been being used, that could have safeguarded the country's interest, not just the militaries, but the geopolitical interest in so many ways. And that's what empowered me to come back and get on with HEVO. And I didn't know I was gonna be HEVO, by the way. I just knew I was going to do something and sustainability to curtail this issue of other people being deployed for this. I just didn't see it, it was nonsensical to me. And so I went to Columbia with one purpose: to start a company. That was it. I didn't want to work for anybody in the form of work. But I wanted to build something. I wanted to create something. I wanted to make something so unique and so powerful that it would be able to stand the test of time, to give alternatives to people and to safeguard our interest, security, conservation, things that are important for the livelihood and in the next generations to build to take on and carry forward as well.

So I look at my time actually in Baghdad served very well because the eye opening experiences I had and the chief challenges I got to see firsthand and be able to witness what happens whenever people are sucking in contaminants from petrol and fossil fuels at a rate that they shouldn't end and taking that out and thinking about it from a macro point of view. And this is where the passion starts to get in, right? Because you can't go through that in life and just and be a robot. We're all emotional creatures. And we might want to try objectivity as much as we want. But we can't. Everything has some subjectivity. Everything has some bias to it. This wasn't to me the situation that made it very easy for me to go and spend the last 12 years of my life working on something that still may never come to come together. But for me, a life where well were spent trying and continuing to be this selfless servant to my country and to the citizens of this world.

Brock Briggs  44:04 

Absolutely. Well, and I think to the long term incentives are in our favor. And I think that you, describing this generational, you know, opportunity that is just kind of compounding over time. I think a lot of that is spurred by capitalism. We have the ability over the long term to realize almost unseemingly, unrealistic outcomes if you're ambitious enough. And there's a lot of holes and stuff with capitalism that people are very eager to point out and it's by no means a perfect system. But I looking at the innovation, as you say, that has come out of our country. It's hard to argue that it isn't very good at the very least.

Jeremy McCool  44:52 

The last 150 years, chiefly, those innovations have been written by the United States. I mean, everything From locomotives and energy, petro refinement like those things, spur it up. The economy got people out of really terrible living quality issues that we were dealing with in the United States, you could pull yourself by boot hills out of it and get jobs that allowed you to perform and for the next generation to have the next opportunity and the next opportunity. The entire IT and computer age is owned by the United States to its effect. We owe a debt of gratitude to Tim Berners Lee and everybody that worked on creating an open Internet, right? I mean, think about everything that we're able to do right now you and I are talking over an interface, this is really remarkable.

And we're able to do it very efficiently with just little amounts of resources to do that. Everything that we're using right now is likely chiefly built around the things that we as a country got to be a part of, or responsible for leading. And I really believe that it's so important for people to understand how much the country has been leading from the very start at the front. And in the beginning of the arts of this century leading from the front on on things related to sustainability. You know, there would not be a solar industry, or a wind industry or an electric vehicle industry, if we didn't have entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, in New York, in Texas and other places across the country that were willing to step up and take a lot of risk on. You know, we came in in 2011. And you know, people may not even know what HEVO is yet, in this conversation. It's a wireless charging company, we charge cars wirelessly.

That company was started in 2011. We predicted a problem with electric cars before there is more than 20,000 electric cars on roadways around the world. At least my research did, I should say. So there's this commonality though also that there's a bunch of problems that need to be resolved. And so infrastructure and charging and all these things, giving people a universal way to be able to charge and having a bunch of different cores like you have for phones and tablets and things like that. Making it where it's safe and easy to use, making it equitable so that people that have disabilities don't have to figure out how to unravel, unravel a cord that weighs 50 pounds. You know, there's just a lot of things that really drove the mission here. And it became very clear to me that this was going to be my pathway forward.

But I want to say one more thing about my time in the military, which is, that probably the most understated thing that has happened successfully. of the people that served in the military and went into combat is that we got a foundation of leaders in this country that are on coming up right now. It's not just me out here, right? I know a lot of cleantech veterans out in the space now. When I first started, there wasn't any, maybe a couple. We would see each other and it was kind of like spotting a unicorn out and in the wild. But now there's so many of these leaders stepping up across the board in all kinds of different categories and industries.

But clean tech has been one that we've seen a lot of leaders from the military, young leaders, you know, 10-15 years ago, who have made a decision to transition to something that they could get behind in the security and the conservation of our resources. And that is going to be the real tail of the tape of what our generation of leaders and more in combat went through. We'll take those experiences. We'll take all the nuggets of knowledge and leadership that in training that we got and we will apply it to making the world a safer place to live in the form of better access to energy options and better access to conservational access options as well.

Brock Briggs  49:32 

You might have just summed up the purpose of this show like far better than I ever have. That is such a good point. And the veteran population is extremely dynamic. And I love when they go into entrepreneurship and go on to build and start businesses and that it's so exciting to me. As I was saying before we started recording, talking about interesting people that are contributing to the world in a really meaningful way. But the fact that they were in the service is kind of, it's usually a footnote, it's not something that's like, hey, maybe this is like a common driver of what makes or like, builds a successful person. You know, there are so many notable people that like, it's just not talked about, Sam Walton, Fred Smith. There's just all of these really, really intriguing people who have served and I'm here to talk to him. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm here talking to you today. It's exciting, it's a great time, as always, to be a vet, I think.

Jeremy McCool  50:40 

You know, probably better than anytime. We're able to get access to resources, like we've never had before. Obviously, everybody would like to see better resources. But that's also not take it for granted the amount of work that it took for all the other previous generations to allow us to have this ability to have all the access to these resources. And if we're ambitious enough, as people are as a person, to your point you can get after and that's why I moved to New York. This is the city of ambitious people. To me in New York is the greatest distillation process of all human ingenuity that's ever existed. If you can bottle this up and you can spread it around the world, there's a chance that we will be able to do some great things around the world. And that's why I came to New York. It was not an easy place to move to.

I've never lived in a city like this, not even close to this size, right? Baghdad was the biggest city I've lived in before. Just give it some level of knowledge of what my background was like. So moving to New York was a bit overwhelming. And it was the first time I'd had walked into something where I was actually a bit nervous, I had never been in a situation in an institutional situation, where I'd walked in, overwhelmed, not underwhelmed, or at least not, you know, with the level of confidence that normally would have and Columbia did that. I remember walking into the campus and going, this is a place where great people go. And this is where right where great people come from. And it was clear, where I'd always been at the top, top, top, top, top of the list of anything I've ever done in my life, that I was probably going to be lucky if I was in the top 50%.

And thankfully I was, but I was definitely not in the very, very top 10% or less like I've normally been in my life and everything. So this really was, for me, that was a great turning point too for the ambition point and taking myself well beyond what I thought I was capable of being able to do. And it gave me the confidence to start HEVO. I became homeless on the same day I graduated from Columbia. And I have also been recorded for a documentary that they can all at the same time. The highs and the lows happened all at once. I was an Ivy League grad, a military vet. I was being filmed for a documentary for clean tech entrepreneurship for veterans, quite literally that day. I had just started HEVO. Everything could have been better. And then without any notice, I didn't have a place to live. And I didn't have a place to live for the next three months. And I had to beg borrow and steal to get a place to live, which was on a sailboat in the Hudson harbor with one of my friends.

Brock Briggs

Wow!

Jeremy McCool

And he was starting a yacht chartering company called New York yacht chartering or Narwhal as it's known as. And he had just started it. And we played rugby together in grad school at the Columbia Business School. And he was the captain of the team. He was a very strong seller grown up on boats his whole life. I didn't know a lick about selling. But he called me one day while he was working in, you know, Wall Street, telling me how much he hated it. And I asked him what he wanted to do. And he said, I want to start a yacht chartering company. I said, okay, if you do that, I'll help you. But I get to live on the boat. And so we lived like two pirates on a boat for the first year because it was me and him helping to build his business. I'd work in the evenings and at night.

I was really good at building engines and doing things like that. So we had a lot of problems with this boat. That first year we quite literally almost sunk it multiple times we had to get hauled in. He's now become the number one yacht chartering company in New York. He's incredibly successful. If you want to know what that is, it's Narwhal Yacht Chartering. So look it up. Eric Puleio is the captain. He taught me how to sell. And he taught me a lot of good things in life. And I deeply appreciative of people like this that have helped me along my way. But if it wasn't for that I would have had to keep on living in an office space at an incubator where they didn't know I was living at for several months.

Brock Briggs  55:16 

This interview is them finding that out for the first time.

Jeremy McCool  55:21 

Well, there was always a speculation that somebody was sleeping in the incubator and I had this little roll out net that had carried with me for many years. And so I'd had to wait for everybody to disappear and multiple companies in this incubator as an NYU incubator. So we had snuck our way into the incubator. They just kind of, I think said, alright, this is interesting. These people are here, just get them to test space. And then this whole thing happened whenever I graduated and then I just started sleeping there. I had to take my showers at the local gym. I would get up. By 5am, I was out.

And I was usually only getting to sleep one or two because there's always somebody still hanging out in the incubator. And, you know, it was really a nourishing time, because quite literally is the only way I got my nourishment. I didn't have enough money. HEVO was only being bootstrapped off of my VA compensation, which wasn't that much. It's barely like 400 something bucks. So I didn't have any money to survive in the city. And yeah, very thankful for all those lunch and learns at those incubators. Always had a couple of extra sandwiches in my pocket, always had a couple of extra cookies in my pocket. That's what kept me alive for the first year and some change, thankfully.

Brock Briggs  56:45 

That is literally a wild story. And I'm sure all those hours in the incubator gave you plenty of time to work.

Jeremy McCool 

Yeah, that's right.

Brock Briggs

If that is your sole objective, it's like we get signed to get nose to the grindstone and got nowhere else to go. So

Jeremy McCool  57:01 

Yeah, most people call it obsession. I was compulsive about it. So it was an extra compulsive obsession for me. I just, I immediately latched on to the whole thing. It was so fun. And it has been every single day, everybody that I've had the chance to work with here has just brought some element of uniqueness and surprise and capability and things that we just every day, there's something new that's constantly happening. There's never a dull moment. And now we actually have a full product. Imagine this study of just what concept, right? No investors. I don't have an engineering degree. They didn't have a team. I just started with an idea with a vision. That's all it was. I started with a vision going right back to the military. Start with a vision. So I created a vision. I wanted to create a planet and create something that would radically reduce our reliance on foreign and fossil fuels. That was it and this was what I thought we could do with HEVO. You know, when I used to tell people about wireless Evie charging, imagine the story. First thing I would tell them about electric cars and they would think I was crazy. So they'd

Brock Briggs

You already like 90% of people right there.

Jeremy McCool

Easy, easy. Nobody was converting, nobody was converting. This is 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 even. Nobody was converting to electric cars. They were, if anything, it was something to laugh about. And I got laughed at a lot. One of my favorite things I ever got to experience from HEVO in the very, very early days. I had just started to get to the point where I knew I was going to do this. And I had a conversation with a couple of executives at Exxon. And they had come to our university to come talk and when there was a small group setting and I was the president of the SEPA Energy Association. So we got to invite these people and have this really intimate discussion. And I asked them, I said, hey, what's your renewable and electric vehicle plan? And they looked at each other and they started like elbowing each other and they laughed hysterically.

Brock Briggs

This guy right here.

Jeremy McCool

Yes. Right. They couldn't believe that somebody would dare to ask them this question. And I realized, oh, wow, that's hubris. And Hubris, Hubris, that's a weak point. And that allowed me to start thinking about well, this is probably what they're thinking everywhere right now. Every utility, every energy company, every company involved with anything related to automotive, they're all thinking the same way. That's when you get the chance to be a disrupter.

And I really, really fascinated being a disrupter just by the look and the stroke of it, I happen to have parents that used to be country hippies. So it's always been in our blood to be quite independent. Even though my father was in the Air Force was one time, you know, that didn't matter. The Air Force was much different back in the 70s. Some would argue better. But it was to be independent, to be a disrupter, you know, to cut some shenanigans. And so that was great. I heard it directly from the math. And I said, wow, this is gonna get a lot of fun to be a disrupter.

Brock Briggs  1:00:48 

Yeah, I just had to look up when the first Tesla Roadster came out in 2008. And so that is really quite the it's very early certainly. I would love for you to kind of like paint a picture about that's kind of like gives us some backdrop about where this started. Where are you guys at today?

Jeremy McCool  1:01:11 

Sure. And where HEVO is today, is still very much feels like a starting point because this entire industry still feels like it's at a starting point. So we're currently doing projects on four continents. We have done projects with some of the biggest automakers in the world. We just announced a partnership with Stellantis, which is formerly known as Chrysler Fiat. And they've added in all these other groups, Peugeot and a few other ones from Europe, like Mazda Rottie. And so now they're the fourth largest automaker in the world. And so we are a partner to Stellantis. And we have a partnership with another company that does box trucks, vans and delivery kinds of vehicles that they trans over from regular petrol vehicles to electric vehicles. That company is Lightning E motors.

And so these are two of the primary automaker companies that we're working with that we can speak about publicly. Some more to be announced hopefully in the next year or in the next even few months. We have a partnership with a company called Via that's out of Detroit. They are the selected partner buys Stellantis for installing charging stations at the 20 or like 2500 or plus dealerships that still Lantis has across the United States. I think that actually covers in North America to a degree as well. So we hit now have a partnership with them. And we have a couple of partnerships globally in the UK, in Australia, in Korea and so things are getting set up. HEVO is the first company in the world to ever certify wireless Evie charging and a form of for automotive standards, which is known as Society of Automotive Engineering.

And also for Underwriters Laboratories, which is responsible for anything that's powering off of the grid. And Evie charging equipment has to be UL certified. So we became the first company in the world to achieve those back in 2020. We gave us the notoriety and the capability to validate that this technology could then be put into some kind of commercial application and our focus is fleets. So we focus on logistics. We focus on transit and we focus on what we call accessibility or disabled driver fleets as well. And so that's where our early market adopters are. That's what we've been focused on. Today, we've done a few dozen different projects around the globe. And we're preparing for what is the biggest single project yet to be implemented for wireless Evie charging, which is here in the city of New York.

As part of a consortium, we won a project to provide wireless Evie charging for a transit company called Dollar Ride, which is also located in New York. And they service people that are in the outer boroughs areas where they have no access to transit, which are known as transit deserts. So these hundreds of 1000s of people each day in New York have to rely on what is called a dollar van. They jump on the van, they pay this driver a buck. It's unregulated. It's just this existing ecosystem. Just like you know all things in New York kind of exists in many ways. This unique existing ecosystem that's there. It's perpetual, it works and people keep on going on with it. But these happen to be in neighborhoods of disadvantaged communities. But not only that, in neighborhoods where we have seen the highest emissions and that going back to that point about epidemiological and respiratory issues. That's where some of those cases of eyes.

So what this project is going to represent is the first of its kind public charging network for wireless charging. And it's starting in New York, we're going to put out 100 chargers in these neighborhoods. Overnight, these vans, these electric dollar ride vans are gonna pick up these passengers throughout the day or night they're gonna charge. And then during the daytime, what's really cool about this is that it's also the only product that offers both plugin and wireless from the same source, one package. So during the daytime, these are either private locations at retail locations or the semi public locations. You can come up and plug in charge and get juice off of it if you have a plug in charging vehicle. So we're rolling out these 100 plus units over the next couple of years starting at the end of this year with the first 20 to 30 going out.

And quite a bit more coming up, we're starting to see something along the lines of 2025-2026 where we'll start producing for automakers that will have wireless charging automatically on their vehicles. So you will be able to get vehicles automatically from the automakers, somewhere around 2025-2026 with wireless charging already built in. And then you can just get out a charger from HEVO. It's a wireless pad, kind of like a souped up version of wireless power for your mobile phone. Except way more efficient to the point where it's basically the same as plug in charging. And we can do it at any power level that plug in charging can do as well. So there's no limitations on this. And we've been able to do that over the course of the last 10 years as we've been developing this technology through.

Brock Briggs  1:06:48 

I'm going to include a link to a video I watched in preparation for this that outlines you being interviewed and you showed the Nissan LEAF with the wireless charger and going over the thing. It's super cool tech. And I have to imagine that like once you see it, it's one of those things that's like, oh, it's obvious, like why wouldn't you do that? And so and usually the best things are it's like that thing that's in plain sight, but not really. How many public chargers do you guys have right now? And then how many of these like retrofit units like are out in the world I guess?

Jeremy McCool  1:07:25 

Yes, zero. Every project that we have is in a private location, fleet yard or something like that at the moment. And I would just say that there are zero wireless public charging stations today. Everything has been, I'm talking about from any of our competitors, or anybody. And there are some competitors, but not many and so that to state, this is going to be the first year that there are actual public charging stations and HEVO is the first to do it. So, you know, coming back to that point where I said, innovation comes from this country. That's where this really, really kicked off at nothing against the other developments that had happened in other places in the United States is where we saw wireless charging become a product to be able to be purchased. And it was HEVO that led the way in meeting all the requirements.

And being at the tip of innovation like this at the front front end of the spear, it just feels like it's the same thing I've been doing since 2001. Yeah, this isn't different for me. But what I want is that everybody loves it, right? This is my child. This is our child. And in fact, it's interesting that you brought up the Roadster because it did come out in 2008. And it was the first car that I had seen that made me feel that there could be a chance for electric cars. An interesting story about that is that I, with a couple of other friends at Columbia had hosted a symposium and energy symposium, where we invited the only Tesla Roadster owner in all of New York City at that time to bring the Roadster and park it in the middle of Columbia's campus as part of this energy symposium as one of the key things to showcase as an exhibit.

And it was a showstopper. I just remember it rolling into the middle of the campus on this cobblestone kind of road that or walk path and it was this almost like a chameleon green and it rolled up and we also had also got Chevy to give us a volt. So we had the Chevy Volt and we had the Tesla Roadster sitting next to each other in front of of these two really important kind of parts of the campus in front of law library where there's this alma mater statue that everybody has seen on any movie about New York City in financial crimes, it always shows that the statue of Columbia just kind of works out that way.

So anyways, these vehicles were sitting there and I got into it and said, oh my god, this is real this can happen. And our COO today, our chief operating officer, who didn't come into HEVO as a COO to until 2021, he was at the symposium. So he saw the Roadster too. And it just so happened to be later on, he became the COO many years later, of HEVO. We happened to be there together. We didn't even know each other then. So it happened to become a team later on in life around this one event that I got to be a part of that got to help the CO hosts and since then HEVO launched.

Brock Briggs  1:11:01 

Certainly that definitely more so in those early days, like awareness is such a big deal. And kind of what I perceive as the challenge that you guys are tackling now is kind of twofold. You have like a tech problem. Like you need to this, hey, we don't have this thing that should exist, but needs to. And then you also have like kind of a distribution problem. It's like, okay, we have this tech, but it needs to actually be able to be used and like, you think about the infrastructure that's gone into like, building out gas stations across the country. Like that's kind of what we need. What do you think is? Where are you guys at in like tackling both of those problems? And I guess, what do you think is your biggest challenge right now today?

Jeremy McCool  1:11:47 

There's a few. So first, is that we currently operate out of facility about 4500 square feet or so in Brooklyn, New York. And people ask, well, why Brooklyn? Well, when I started HEVO, this is where all the talent was. And it was also where the money was. And so we've continued to prove that point. And, yeah, we love Brooklyn. And we love New York. So it's been great. But as we start to think about scale, we've looked at New York options and continue to look at New York options. We're looking at other options and other states as well, Michigan, Tennessee, Texas, and onward to see where we'll be putting in production.

And so we're getting to the point where production will become the next story of HEVO and just the next story of the industry, much like Tesla had to go through the first process to create a real repeatable and scalable production line. And there's going to be what they call manufacturing hell. We're gonna have to go through the manufacturing hell. We're gonna be the first one to do it, we're gonna have to go through it, we're gonna have to just as we've done so many other things to be the first in this industry to do. We're gonna have to go through that process first to create a scalable solution. And so the production side of it, we're leaning very hard on automotive executives, people that have since you know, finished their time 20, 30, 40 years in automotive, or the big Detroit three or somewhere else. And they know how to scale. They know how to build facilities.

So we're currently in the phase of finding that key person or people to come and help us out to build this thing next second to that answer is that getting it onto automakers vehicles, automakers always have a couple of upfront things. First is not built here, not create here. That is a mentality, it's an ethos. So you got to get them over the hump of, well, this isn't from you. But you wouldn't want it any other way because now as a supplier to them, they get to dictate the terms. And to do that means that we have to meet those qualifications. So this goes back to production. And so all these things start to line up about what's in the next phase for this.

Getting it on the vehicles is the easy part. Convincing the automakers is the more challenging part because you can't just go to one decision maker. These automotive companies are built around a very well defined qualification quality control system in decision making for things that go on to their vehicles. When you finally get to a vehicle production line owner, somebody that actually owns that vehicle platform, that car that make that model, it's gone through the hands of very, very important people along the way who has said okay, this is good to go so that they can finally make a decision to put it on. And then from there, you know, the final thing that automakers are going to always be looking at is weight and cost, you have to have a system.

We have a content that goes on to a vehicle that is very unique. You don't usually see this kind of content in one package going on one vehicle and it's actually as a cost component. It's a higher cost component for the vehicle. We're talking generally in the range of about 300 to $400 max. What we would conceive as a very high cost of content. But the reality is that it is to the automaker and it is to their customers and how they market it. So we got to be very dictated around how we price things out and how we get it in terms of the weight. The weight, we know we had to have it under 20 pounds in order for the vehicle side to be kitted up so that the automakers feel that it meets its requirements. You know still with on a vehicle that weighs 4000 pounds. These vehicles are tanks. Have you ever seen video or pictures of the Hummer Supertruck?

Brock Briggs  1:16:13 

No, I haven't. Pretty large?

Jeremy McCool  1:16:16 

Take a look. It is a 10,000 pound vehicle. And so adding something that weighs 20 pounds to it doesn't seem remarkable, right? But they care about those things. They got to make sure it meets all the safety standards, rattle, environmental standards and all these things. And it's really important to the end of the day for the customers. So we're going through that process right now with a handful of different automakers. And we're working to get customers which they've been asking for it for a decade now. We're working to get them ready to up wireless Evie ready vehicles that come off the line with wireless charging. They don't want to do retrofits and we don't want to do it either, honestly, unless the automaker has approved.

If the automaker approves the retrofit, we'd love for you to be able to go to their local dealer and get your existing Eevee retrofitted up with a HEVO wireless pad and battery adapter on your vehicle. But that's really the only way symbiotically that could really exist for an aftermarket solution. We're really channeling on the focus of it being factored built in so that customers can get it automatically with it and then just make the choice for wireless upfront. And then having already existing networks there to do that installation. I will tell you one more thing, though. And it's kind of a last, but very important part of the ingredients, which is that there are existing Evie charging companies out there plug in charging companies. And with companies like HEVO and some of our competitors out there, having gotten partnerships and having been given the opportunity to put wireless charging on those cars, these companies have to adapt or die.

That's the answer. It's like as if you had a rotary phone in your at&t and you never adapted to the wireless phone. Could you imagine if they didn't ever get into cellular service? There would be no AT&T today. So they have to get on with this story. And we're looking to make our first announcement of a major Evie charging company that's known, well known actually, to add to our list of partners within the next month or so. And that by itself will help to staple together everything. Now people will know they can get charging from a known Evie, charging supplier and network with wireless charging enabled systems that have been qualified through automotive. And there's a lot of legwork that's had to go into this. And thankfully, we've had a team that's been in motion to bring it together for us.

Brock Briggs  1:19:09 

It sounds like you're tackling both the chicken and egg type of problem that this presents. It's hey, we need to get the chargers onto the vehicles. But there also needs to be a network of places where people can go to use these.

Jeremy McCool 

That's right.

Brock Briggs 

Partnering probably makes the most sense in terms of time to market because those things take time, you know.

Jeremy McCool  1:19:32 

Yeah, that's right. We're a company of partnerships. And there's certainly companies out there that are great partners that we're ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work with that we already are working with and many more that we can't wait to work with. But this is gonna be a very interesting year. In many ways this is the year of wireless. It's more of like the year of wireless becoming a known thing just in the last month when Tesla did its investor day. The person who is now responsible for Tesla's global infrastructure further charging is the former CEO of one of our wireless power competitors. And she took over that role over the last I think year. I was surprised that I didn't know she had gotten in, you know, nothing but the best of luck for her to that program.

But she teased wireless charging in her final slide at Tesla's investor day. And it caused a very frothy kind of conversation across Twitter and across LinkedIn and all kinds of things for us and for other people. And you know, there's certainly the luddites out there, they're like, hey, what do we need wireless charging a plug in is no problem, you know, totally get those people where they're coming from, like, I'm not trying to dismiss it. But understand what you're saying at the same time, if you're dismissive about wireless charging. That'd be the same as being dismissive about transitioning from dial up to Wi Fi, get the point. We are an innovative country, we're an innovative society, we're an innovative people, we're going to move on. Wireless charging, the thing that it does simply is that it makes charging simple for everybody for mass adoption.

Anybody that's an Evie adopter today needs to be on the same team of you're the early adopter. So get behind the ideas that are going to help for mass adoption, how does wireless charging have helped for mass adoption? It's simple. Quite literally, it's simple. We plug in charging, you gotta come with all these different connector types. You got to know what kind of connector that you need to go to. There's only certain types of stations that do that. There's all this looseness that does not attract the mass adopted. And we're all in this thing together. And that kind of way, we all want to champion the same thing. We want electric cars because of all the things that it brings to us in terms of safety, security, and all these conservational things. And they drive better. Have you ever driven an electric car before, Brock?

Brock Briggs  1:22:08 

No, I haven't, still yet to.

Jeremy McCool  1:22:10 

You come to New York. Let me show you what's up. Because I'll take you in the Tesla, the P85D. And I don't have the plan. But you don't need it to feel like you're in a rocket ship. I put one of my mentors who's a general. He used to be the, actually he was the general of the reserve forces of New York State. I put him in the front seat with me. He goes, I told him, I was like, this baby's quick. And he goes, well, I've been in jets before. You're not gonna impress me. And I hit that accelerator.

And if his phone went flying back and his son in the backseat caught the phone because his son was in the back too, his son caught the phone. And I hit the brakes a little bit, you know? And I said, so what do you think? And he goes, I just realized I had G suits on when I was in the gym. So you know, this is it, the performance is really fun. Do you need to go accelerating zero to 60 in 2.9 seconds, you know, for your normal day of driving? No, but I can and it's really fun. And it can do all kinds of other things, too. I love fast things, I'm guessing you do too, Brock.

Brock Briggs  1:23:21 

You know, I've had to like tone, my love for speed down a little bit. And that's kind of been come in conjunction with getting a little bit older and paying speeding tickets and things like that. And I have purposefully like stopped myself. I'm like, I'm gonna drive an old car. I have like a 97 F 250 diesel truck. I cannot drive fast. And that is like, it's been a good kind of exercise and like not letting me so I'm sure it'll rock my socks extra. I will definitely be giving you a shout next time I'm up in New York.

Jeremy McCool  1:23:54 

Well, I hope you get a lightning Ford lightning as your next truck. What a beauty, first and foremost. And I would tell you, it lives up to the hype. It's a fun vehicle to drive. I've got my eyes set on a few other ones too. And so I'm hoping that, you know, we can get Stellantis and Chrysler and those guys that work with us on some other vehicles that we may or may not be able to say. And if those come out, I can promise you this that you're gonna get in that with me and you're not going to want to have anything else other than one of those kinds of vehicles.

Brock Briggs  1:24:34 

Looking forward to it. That's super cool. And it sounds like you guys have a bunch of really cool things kind of coming down the pipeline. I know you guys closed a crowdfunding round this last year. And I would love to talk about like what that means for you guys as a company and like what the next five years looks like for HEVO?

Jeremy McCool  1:24:54 

So let me talk about the fundraising journey of HEVO because I can tell you and this is where coming back to having been, thankfully, having given the chance for four years to teach entrepreneurship at NYU. The most important thing that you can do credibly, for a lot of people is to help them figure out how do they raise money, in real really is hard actually, it turns out. And it's even harder today, it turns out than ever. I, we didn't raise any capital for three years, zero. So HEVO ran on my VA compensation 100% for three years. That was hard. And we tried and tried and tried to raise capital. And you know, it was. I don't know. I have one friend, in my peer group, or anybody I've ever met. That's an entrepreneur that had to go through years of dry cake without any powder.

Thankfully, we got our first investor in 2015. I started HEVO in November 2011. Our first investment income into January 2015. And so we got our first seed check. And in between, then what did we do to survive? We went out and we won business competitions, business planning competitions, anything that we could get where there was some money and capital and access. So we also figured out how to win grants. We had just won our first grant in 2014. There's a couple other things that we got ahead of that too. Actually, this isn't a story I have ever really told in public. So I might as well just tell it now while I've got the chance to do this because it does relate to veterans. So in the early teens, I don't think this program exists anymore. And I might be the reason why. So I understand the hate I might get from this.

But in early teens, there was a program at the vocational rehab and employment part of the VA, so the VA has within it. So if anybody's not following this, take a look at this. Within the VA if you're compensated, there's this extra program called vocational rehab and employment VR&E. And within that there's a boundless amount of different kinds of resources. Some of those things related to helping you to get additional funding to go to school or trade school or whatever it might be. If you're a disabled veteran and you need assistance and support at your home or housing, you know, maybe you need to have something like counters lowered or something like that very specific to you. They can do that kind of stuff.

And at that point of time, again, I don't think it's an existence and when I'm pretty sure I got the reason for it is because there was a thing that they were actually helping veterans to fund, the startup of their companies. The VA of all things. You know, I had a luck of the straw that the person who happened to be my advisor was a fan of what I was trying to do. He stuck his neck out on line, he got his director stick their necks on the line for me. They helped me to get a $50,000 no string attached fund from the VA to help start HEVO and then they stopped the program forever. So I think that probably some people in DC said well, you're putting money into a company that does wireless Evie charging or like

Brock Briggs  1:28:44 

VA, VC it’s all the same, right? So just one letter off

Jeremy McCool  1:28:45 

Go look under rocks, there's money there is what I'm trying to tell people, you know, where you might have an opportunity may not exist for others. And that is 100% what it is like to fundraise. We're not the right ingredient for most investors. We are a hardware company. We have an amazing software. We have an award-winning hardware. We were awarded this past year, a pace pilot award, which is only given to companies that are selected by a body of automotive people that are kind of like representative really the Oscars of automotive and we got one of those awards this year. We are the wireless charging awardee. There were no other awardees period in this group because we were that one.

And so to come back to it, we have amazing software, we have amazing hardware but because of it being electric vehicle, being clean tech, being hardware with principle technology that people don't understand, with, you know, hard complex systems that you get to work through through automotive adoption, through getting it engineered properly, to meeting all these satisfactory certification requirements. I'm just omnipresent on the point that anybody that joined us and became an investor in us thought of the world much differently than they were, in their fact, in many ways, a disrupter. And so we got our first investment from the state of New York after this VA funding that we got.

The state of New York invested in HEVO with the first bigger check, that was a quarter million that we got from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, NYSERDA and they've come back and reinvested in us multiple times. And so today, we brought in about a million and a half or more from NYSERDA. They've been the best investor of that we've had out of everybody because they believed in us when there was no reason to. They just understood that there was something there. Then after that, we got our first angel investor and it was actually technically an institutional and they came in for their first check in the start of 2015.

Fast forward up, we did our seed in 2016. We close that out right around a million or so if you take into account all the additional checks along the way, so 750 to a million, then we got into the face of convertible notes. And we started taking out a bunch of convertible notes. I want to reason why I'm bringing this very specific thing up is this is an entrepreneurial story from other entrepreneurs out there to think about and for them to learn from hopefully. So started taking on a bunch of convertible notes, a lot of angel investors, people that were writing checks anywhere from the range of 25,000 to 250,000 to 500,000, average check size $80,000. And we had built up a base of them of over 100 of them over a course of about four years. And they've funded our developments and funded our projects that we're doing around the world.

And we continue to win. Again, business plans along the way from places like horizon 2020 out of the EU and things of that nature. But then, whenever COVID set in and the pandemic was obvious, it was around that time that all these convertible notes. And if you don't know what a convertible note is, it's pretty straightforward. There are terms set within a convertible note that it can act as either an option to convert to equity or an option to convert to debt, with a level of either a percentage of better value than other investors will get on a conversion to equity. Or if it's a conversion to debt, then they're going to get an interest rate on that. And almost all these notes were lining up to convert at the same time that the pandemic was roaring and everybody was, you know, rightfully so freaking out.

And so we had people that were going, hey, you know, we may want to convert that to debt. I had to have a phone call with every one of our investors one on one, to convince them that that was not the right strategy for the company and not the right strategy for them. And there was all these reasons why. And we thankfully converted every single one of those people over to equity. And we were able to do that with minus one note. We were able to do that very successfully. And it led us up to do our series A in February of 2021, where we raised an additional 2.1 million and some change and then have since then done crowdfunding because this current phase of investments I'd say appetite has been strange.

The institutions, they have all but like locked themselves up to only reinvesting into their portfolio companies just to be very direct about that. We have a handful of great institutional ventures and Volvo Earth. But to the other point of that is that there was a lot of appetite for people that just wanted to invest in HEVO that weren't known as accredited investors. People that do meet all these SEC requirements for everything like making, you know, over a certain amount of money per year basis and having a certain amount of value and assets and all these other things. So thankfully, the SEC in 2021 started to loosen up on the requirements of non accredited investors, people that didn't have all this in their background within the limitation of what the amount that they could invest on a per year basis.

And we kicked off what was one of the top crowdfunding campaigns of the year for multiple platforms, we went on to a platform called republic.com. And we started with a $500,000 investment to launch that program. And we ended up closing in the round three and a half million from crowdfunding plus the 500,000 from that and is a safe note. And just to talk to that one point, what a safe note is, you don't have the same conversion principles of a convertible note. And again, I'm talking to my entrepreneurial friends out there and people that want to consider crowdfunding. The safe note is the better option for the company. And what I mean to say is that the option to convert and when the conversion happens for equity is typically driven by the terms of when the company wants that to happen.

So that could happen at the next equity round. Or that can happen when you exit. And so it leaves you with a much stronger capability to know that you're not going to have something lurking over your head with somebody wanting to convert to debt, when you may not be able to pay that back. And so I'm telling you, entrepreneur to entrepreneur out there, that the safe note is the right way to go. It keeps you from getting into trouble with conversion to debt, leaves the option now for when the conversion happens to equity between you and that investor or you just make it directly for everybody the same way, which is the way you should do it.

and that happens either on the next equity financing round, where there is a term that's set specifically for what you're going to have as your valuation or not. I know I'm getting deep into the into the woods here, Brock but I just wanted to really deeply explain to people here, there's a lot of money out there. There's a lot of ways that you can uncover it, go for grants, you can go through all kinds of different means to do that until you get to your investment. And then we finally get into investment, make sure you're doing the terms in a way that doesn't potentially take away your company from you as a founder and as the management team.

Brock Briggs  1:37:22 

No, that's great advice. I love getting into the weeds and some specific tangible input about a very crucial topic. You gotta have money to survive you personally, as a founder, as a company you need money to grow. Like that's the long and the short of it. So that's a very important topic. And I appreciate you kind of sharing some of your experience and input on that. Jeremy, this has been a very, very fun conversation. I've learned a lot about Evies and charging. I'm excited about what you guys are doing and I'm eager to take you up on that ride when I make it up to New York City.

Jeremy McCool  1:38:01 

Bring your G suit.

Brock Briggs  1:38:04 

I’m ready for it. Where can people go to find out more about you? And what can the listeners or myself do to be useful to you?

Jeremy McCool  1:38:14 

hevo.com and we're on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, find us on social media, follow us because we're very active. We keep people updated on the technology, we keep them updated on what's happening in the industry. We make all of our public announcements through that. So please follow us on one of those social media sites, if you want to keep up with HEVO. If you want to consider potentially an investment in HEVO, you can do that, investment@hevo.com pretty easy to do.

Or say I'm sorry, investor@hevo.com. The other thing is that we are always interested in finding top talent. So if you happen to know somebody who has deep automotive experience that's been producing or they've got, you know, something in their background that you think that could be a good fit, reach out about that. Always happy to find the best talented people in the world to come and join us on this mission. And then finally, when you can get a wireless charged ready vehicle buy from HEVO because you're buying from America.

Brock Briggs  1:39:21 

Fantastic. Jeremy, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today.

Jeremy McCool  1:39:25 

It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Brock!