Member Spotlight: Curo
I sat down with Kieran White and Andrew Porter of Curo, the company introducing the world to the Virtual Charging Depot. We are thrilled to have Kieran and Andrew as two of our first founders at 9Zero, and to share more about their work and climate impact in the interview below.
Will Hespe: Tell me a bit about Curo, and what kinds of companies you work with.
Kieran White: Curo is an EV charging startup. We work with owners of commercial EV charging and parking to share their infrastructure with others in a safe and reliable way. That can be anyone from tech companies with campuses, existing fleets with depots, or school districts. We contract that infrastructure and make it available for a fleet, typically commercial fleets that don't want to pay for or install their own charging. Our biggest customer is one of the big telecoms, and the smallest is a two-EV rental fleet, so we’ve run quite the gamut. We’re trying to coin the phrase “virtual depot,” which provides all of the utility for a depot that a fleet would need at a fraction of the cost and time.
Will Hespe: So what are the next steps for Curo?
Andrew Porter: One of our immediate next steps is to launch our platform so we can help our customers discover depots themselves, and let them get access to our inventory. We also want to onboard depots more easily so people can have a greater selection.
Kieran White: We're in this phase where we need supply, supply, supply. So we’re building as many virtual depots into the network as possible for existing fleet customers to take advantage of.
WH: Do you have any advice for new founders trying to get something started?
AP: Consult legal from the start. That's my strongest piece of advice. It always will be. Behind that, move fast, break stuff. It’s what we do. Tends to work.
KW: I'd say you can’t cut corners. Eventually it comes back to bite you. Also, understand if you are a conviction based founder, where you build in advance of demand, or a demand based founder that builds retroactively as you get demand. I think that's something we wrestled with—the contrast of consumer versus B2B. We've been defining, “what kind of founder are you?”
WH: What are you most excited about when it comes to the future of climate innovation?
AP: I am very excited to not have to share the road with people. That’s not necessarily climate.
WH: People always say they’re nervous when they’re walking in front of a Waymo. I'm more concerned when I'm walking in front of a person!
KW: I scoot on the way to work, and when I’m going in front of a Waymo, I feel much safer. They’re not gonna honk at me.
WH: How has working out of 9Zero benefitted Curo?
KW: We've found it really fun, because every day it feels like someone we're friends with pops into the space. “I haven't seen you in three months!” It's a space for the climate community to aggregate. We've seen three or four different friends over the past couple of weeks that we just wouldn't have seen or remembered to text.
AP: I think that’s the strongest thing—you can say a lot about having a nice space to work in and the benefits of that, but I think it sells the space short.
