The Update: Tracking $1B of Solar, Virtual Antennas, and Casino Hacking

Keeping an active internal discussion about the things that interest us at Geocene builds trust and makes it easier to have conversations about harder topics. I summarize our most interesting internal discussions for this newsletter, so you can be a part of our community too. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

• We created SunSpot, a web app that aggregates data from the $1 billion California solar energy program, SOMAH. Over the next decade, SOMAH will install 300 megawatts of solar energy (~1 million solar panels) on thousands of affordable housing projects. Our biggest technical challenge was dealing with data heterogeneity: thousands of solar projects installed by hundreds of contractors, each using a wide range of solar hardware configurations. But now, with SunSpot, SOMAH staff can ensure the success and accountability of each project in this sprawling but hugely impactful solar program. It’s like herding cats, but with solar software!

A screenshot of SunSpot’s home page populated with some synthetic data. Instead of making up fake site names, we asked ChatGPT to “imagine some realistic names for housing developments.”

• Just last week, we announced a design house partnership with Ignion, a company that makes “Virtual Antennas.” These are cool little chip antennas that operate over really wide frequency ranges—this one goes from 698 Mhz to 8 GHz! Virtual antennas are great because you don’t need to design different antennas for different RF bands. We sometimes refer to RF design as Black Magic, because it takes a special type of engineer to really get their heads around it and build a good radio system. Ignion are RF Black Magic wizards and will help us to build great radios in a fraction of the time and cost for our clients.
   
• We’re an intentionally small team. While we enjoy working with larger organizations (like the program administrators at SOMAH!), we were not surprised by research published in Nature showing that small teams are more impactful than large ones. It fits our experience, but it doesn’t mean large companies can’t succeed. Gallup reports that small companies have higher engagement, but Bezos takes advantage of this fact with his Two-Pizza Teams rule.

The study in Nature shows that as team size grows, citations grow, but disruption (or impact) falls rapidly.

• We’re not gamblers, but we spent quite a bit of time discussing casino-hacking while we were in Vegas for CES. The clever engineering intrigues us, of course, but it’s also cultural—we grew up wanting to Hack the Gibson. This recent Bloomberg story has us scratching our heads. Was he able to replicate an old school tech roulette hack with his mind?
   
• We will be leasing a new office in West Berkeley in the next couple months. It is rough out there for corporate office building owners, which some are positing could be the next big risk for banks. Hopefully our rent solves this looming financial crisis. We’ve seen some great spaces, but if you know of something, please hit reply and let me know.