Accelerating Net Zero: A Conversation with Payaca’s CTO, Matt Bessey

Join Matt Franklin, CEO of Payaca, as he sits down with the company’s new Chief Technology Officer, Matt Bessey, to discuss how software innovation is driving the adoption of low-carbon technologies. In this insightful episode, they delve into the challenges and opportunities in scaling installations of heat pumps, solar panels, and EV chargers to meet ambitious Net Zero targets.

Matt Bessey shares his journey from Silicon Valley to Payaca, highlighting the differences between large tech teams and the agility of a smaller, mission-driven company. They explore how Payaca is streamlining complex processes, such as integrating with the Energy Networks Association (ENA) API to automate compliance for low-carbon tech installations.

The conversation also touches on personal actions to reduce carbon footprints, the importance of public awareness in combating climate change, and the role of software in facilitating the green energy transition. Whether you’re interested in renewable energy, software development, or sustainable business practices, this episode offers valuable insights into the intersection of technology and environmental stewardship.

International Energy Agency (IEA) Net Zero by 2050 Report

https://www.iea.org/reports/net-zero-by-2050

VitoEnergy

https://www.vitoenergy.co.uk/

Energy Networks Association (ENA)

https://www.energynetworks.org/

Book: “Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air” by David MacKay

https://www.withouthotair.com/

Hannah Ritchie’s Substack Newsletter

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/

Hannah Ritchie’s Book “Not the End of the World”

https://www.nottheendoftheworld.co.uk/

Carbon13 Venture Builder Programme

https://carbonthirteen.com/

Green Tech South West Meetup Group

https://www.meetup.com/greentech-south-west/

International Energy Agency (IEA)

https://www.iea.org/

Our World in Data – Climate Change

https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions

Book: “Food and Climate Change – Without the Hot Air” by Sarah Bridle

https://www.withouthotair.com/

Matt Bessey on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbessey/

Matt Bessey’s website

https://bessey.dev/

Matt Franklin on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-payaca/

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Full Transcript:

Matt Franklin: Matt Bessey, thanks for joining me for a chat. You’ve recently joined the Payaca team as our Chief Technology Officer, or our CTO. It’ll be really exciting to talk about your aspirations for the role and your ambitions for the impact we can make.

Matt Bessey: Thanks, Matt. Happy to be here.

Matt Franklin: It’ll be really interesting to talk about your backstory, how you came to be here, and really what your ambitions are while you’re at Payaca.

Matt Bessey: Yeah, but first of all, can I just say, good to be here? Thanks for having me. In my origin in the industry, I did a computer science degree. I was one of the many teenagers that was like, “I’m going to be a games developer.” And my brother said, “Don’t do that. I mean, maybe do that, but do a computer science degree to keep your options open.” So thank you, Richard, you’re out there.

Matt Franklin: Sound advice.

Matt Bessey: Yeah, I got into web development and have been in it ever since. So much software is web these days; it’s kind of taken over the world. I moved from the assisted living industry in the US to cybersecurity here in Bristol until quite recently.

The thing that drew me to Payaca really was that in about 2020, when climate became big—I think around then, Greta Thunberg was suddenly front-page news all the time for many reasons, unfortunately—her message resonated with me. It got me into doing a bit more research about how I could have an impact, not just perhaps indirectly as an effective altruist or something like that, trying to give your wages to high-impact charities. It was the first time I thought maybe even as a software engineer, I can have an impact.

The thing I did was read through the International Energy Agency’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 report. I think they keep that up to date today. I highly encourage any of the listeners to read through the report. It doesn’t sound particularly interesting to say, “Read through a 100-page report,” but it’s actually not super dense. There’s a lot of graphs, and it’s a technologically realistic but optimistic roadmap to achieving net zero by 2050.

I’m sure people will question whether it’s doable, and I myself am not so sure that we’ll hit 2050, but it certainly posits a way to do it with technology that either exists today at scale or exists at the experimental stage. It’s not a report saying, “By 2049, we’ll invent fusion and then we’ll just roll it out and it’ll be fine.” It’s very hands-on or based in reality, I should say.

I read through that, and my big takeaway was software has a huge role to play in that industry, in decarbonizing. I thought, “Well, I’m a software guy; I can get into it.” So I just made a list of all the areas in the report that come up as big areas of growth—decarbonizing heat pumps, virtual power plants, distributed grid systems, solar and wind installations. We’re going to have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of solar panels and wind farms. They’re going to need IT systems to manage them and just started doing research on how I could get into that space.

Matt Franklin: It’s super interesting. Going back to when I first messaged you, I think the history of Payaca—we started very much in an industry-agnostic way. It was construction, and we thought we could help solve those organizational challenges and process challenges. But seeing that on your profile, you write a lot of stuff about how you’re a net zero enthusiast. I think it was becoming clear to me at that time that there was a particular segment of the customers that we were serving that felt like we could make even more impact and allow us to focus and really get behind a cause and have a very clear mission.

As I learned more about it, I could see that in this industry, there is far more impact Payaca could have. A lot of these businesses are pretty new, so actually the legacy tech or legacy systems jump that we were experiencing before, where businesses were working on pen and paper and jumping to a sophisticated tech product, it’s too much of a jump. But actually, for these newer businesses investing in renewable solutions, we could help them more. But also, the process is so complex. There’s a lot of compliance to handle that we can help solve. There are so many different skill sets potentially as part of even one project, even a domestic project, that require different skill sets at different stages of that project. So then you’ve got all these different people to manage to optimize availability. It just all came together as an opportunity for Payaca.

With you being really focused on that area, I think for us it’s super exciting that you’ve come into the business now, and we’re able to make that investment and really focus on this area.

Matt Bessey: Absolutely.

Matt Franklin: Going back to your early experience—you sort of touched on it that you’re in the US—but it would be interesting to hear a bit more about that because I think you were in Silicon Valley at a very interesting time. What did you learn from that experience?

Matt Bessey: Yeah, great question. For background for the listeners, in my final year of university—or not even; I was on a four-year master’s degree. In my third year, I found an internship program that was explicitly for getting computer science student graduates or undergrads out to startups in Silicon Valley, a spectrum of them, organized by a guy named Mike who works for Leap. Big shout-out to Mike for getting me out into the Valley.

I signed up. It was the first year it had ever run. I think it’s run yearly ever since, plus or minus COVID, and got out there with a bunch of guys and girls I didn’t know from all around the UK at different universities doing computer science. We all just kind of jumped into working at startups in the Valley in 2014.

You could sneeze in a coffee shop and have a VC offer you a million in seed funding kind of phase—just loads of money sloshing around and loads of great and bad startup ideas sloshing around, but just a real buzz in the whole city. It was amazing.

When we talk about things like Silicon Roundabout in the UK or all around the world, people would be like, “Oh, well, Berlin is the Silicon Valley of Germany,” or “Silicon Roundabout is the Silicon Valley of London.” But when you’re living there, you appreciate that a valley is a big structure. It is not a street; it is not a borough of a city. It’s 20-plus miles of highway where you can—you know, you’re on an eight-lane highway looking left and right, going, “Okay, there’s the Google campus bigger than Bristol University; there’s the Microsoft campus; there’s the Apple donut thing.” Every billboard is selling you Twilio APIs or QuickBooks APIs or advertising developer conferences instead of Coca-Cola ads. There is so much tech in one place that you are the norm; you are the default consumer in that area, and it completely changes how the place works.

So yeah, that was incredible to be in, and to be surrounded by other people in the same position meant that for a good year, I was just living with other startup tech people. We were just—probably looking back, I didn’t have the healthiest work-life balance, and it’s not something that I’d want to do now that I’m 33. But at the time, it was perfect. I learned so much from every element of the tech stack and the product side of businesses, reading “The Lean Startup” and getting into understanding what an MVP is and product-market fit and all these things, and doing hackathons on the weekend and making toy projects with your roommates. Yeah, really, I owe my career to it.

In fact, I dropped out of the degree I was on because they paid me. They paid me, and I was learning a lot more here in the last year than I had done in three. So I thought it was going to be Bristol; let me get an undergrad out instead of just not getting any degree, which was really nice of them.

Matt Franklin: So when you—potential investors listening—dropping out of your uni degree to go and code software is, I think, quite a good signal. So what was the point that you decided to leave the US and come back? What triggered that?

Matt Bessey: Yeah, good question. I’d be lying if I didn’t say love was a part of it. I met a girl when I was to and fro the US, managing work visa stuff. I met a lady who lived in the UK. She was my landlady at the time, funnily enough. She is my age. So a good part of it was we both spent a bit of time in the US, but she didn’t have work status to stay longer, and I didn’t want to say goodbye.

But that wasn’t entirely it. San Francisco is a city torn in half by tech, by its prosperity. America is already a country with huge inequality problems. I’m not saying I left because I found it unpleasant so much as I found existing in a society that allows that to be the norm uncomfortable—knowing I can afford healthcare and I’m the one that doesn’t have to pay for it; that comes as a company perk. Whereas these people obviously are deserving of more support from the social state than they’re getting here. I didn’t want to be a part of that anymore, really.

Matt Franklin: So I guess that was one of the key catalysts for leaving the US. Now you’re back in the UK—how do you feel about the tech scene in the UK? Do you think it’s something that is exciting, getting more exciting?

Matt Bessey: Yeah, exactly that. I mean, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t anticipating when I moved back—I worked remotely for a good year or two thinking, “Well, I want to live in Bristol, but I’m not going to find equivalent places to work here.” And far from it—there is no denying it’s a lot smaller. I think mostly it’s just that there’s a lot less money sloshing around from VCs rather than there being as many software engineers.

But yeah, there’s certainly a good startup scene here. London, no question. But Bristol, we’ve got lots of Runway Easts and there’s a few other co-working spaces that are filled to the brim with early-stage tech companies as well as some more established players in the city. So yeah, I think we’ve got it. I wish we had more of it, and I don’t think there’s really any reason for us not to, other than there isn’t enough funding going into that.

Matt Franklin: I think one of the things that really helps is—you kind of need some big exits because then that creates more potential startup founders who’ve got some money, and it continues a cycle. Probably just not enough of those, although obviously London is far ahead of Bristol in terms of—it’s much bigger. There’s perhaps more tech and investment going on there.

But even in the few years that I’ve been working on Payaca, I’ve seen more and more funding come into Bristol and other cities outside of London. So I think once you get going, you’re off to the races.

Matt Bessey: Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Franklin: So the first business that you joined when you came back to the UK—was that Immersive Labs?

Matt Bessey: Yeah, that’s right. Cybersecurity training would be the succinct way of putting it.

Matt Franklin: Not very exciting. Well, very important.

Matt Bessey: Yeah, it is quite an exciting product, but I think as soon as you say security, people switch off a bit.

Matt Franklin: But they do like to know, I guess, if they are either Payaca users or potential Payaca users—they do like to know that security is important to the business where they’re trusting their data. I think your background in that certainly helps.

So you left Immersive Labs before getting sort of contracted, didn’t you? So what kind of things were you looking at then? Was it very much renewable energy, net zero focused?

Matt Bessey: Yeah, exactly that. A bit of it was a time for a career break. I’d been in the industry for, I guess, 10 years straight without a major amount of time off. But I knew that I wanted to move into the green tech space, and ideally, I was seriously considering founding. I thought, while I’ve been playing the role of a cross-functional principal engineer for a few years, maybe I can—that’s a skill set that lends you very well to being a technical co-founder. You don’t get the luxury of picking which hat you’re going to wear in an early-stage thing, and so I thought that would work out nicely.

So yeah, I was looking into a few options. One of them was the Carbon13 incubator. First of all, I should say, I was going to a lot of meetup groups for green tech; there’s some really good ones in Bristol, like Green Tech Southwest, a very supportive network of people there. I basically turned up and said, “Hi everyone, I quit my job to work in green tech. Anyone got any suggestions?”

I wasn’t actually as lacking of a plan as I maybe seemed at the time, but it was an amusing moment. And yeah, a lot of people there recommended to me Carbon13, which is a Cambridge-based startup incubator with, I think, quite an unusual setup. You’re not expected to go in as a team with an idea. It’s certainly encouraged to have an idea, but there’s not much expectation that what you go in with will be what you do. You’re going in to build your team. You’re meeting people from across sales, marketing, product—they vet for engineering—the best environment for you to find the right team to work in, specifically in green tech or in accelerating getting to net zero emissions.

So it couldn’t have been a better fit for me, really. I was like, “I don’t have any network. I want to get into it, but I don’t know the right people, and I want to work in net zero.” And then a bunch of people come along and say, “Oh, here’s an incubator designed just for that.” So yeah, that was one consideration for me.

I applied to it; I did get accepted. But I just didn’t think that the odds of moving to Cambridge for a bit, going through the wringer with a bunch of people, fighting for the best talent, fighting for funding, fighting to get my team to relocate back to Bristol because I love the city—I was like, there’s no chance that that is worth the risk. So I very happily took on Payaca.

Matt Franklin: Yeah. And I think it was about that time, like I say, where I was really starting to realize the impact that we could make at Payaca. So then I was able to really talk about, ultimately, the biggest ways of decarbonizing is to get all of these low-carbon tech installs done across domestic and commercial. And the fact that you’ve got these really aggressive government targets, but we’re way short of that.

And if you look at the reasons why we’re short of that, it’s because it’s so hard to scale installations across the millions of properties across the UK. So then it felt like, well, actually, we can make a huge difference there because we’re making efficiencies across the entire end-to-end process. So we can help anything from a business that’s got, I don’t know, 15, 20 people up to potentially the large energy suppliers rolling this out at scale. So yeah, I think for me, it got me really excited about it as well, bringing you in. It’s kind of all come together at the right time.

Matt Bessey: Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Franklin: We’ve had some really interesting conversations about what the average consumer might be able to do to reduce their emissions. What are some of your top tips for what people could do? What are you doing? What would you recommend others do?

Matt Bessey: Yeah, so I went pretty deep on this. In Bristol, probably about half of the population are already kind of climate-conscious, thinking about these things or changing their behaviors to what they assume or believe will reduce their impact on the world. I found a couple of sources that really changed how I applied behavioral change.

There’s a book called “Food Without the Hot Air,” and also Hannah Ritchie, who works for Our World in Data, writes a Substack and also has a book out that I haven’t read yet. But her blog and Substack by Hannah Ritchie is incredible. She’s a data scientist by trade and, similar to me, was getting tired of climate doom and gloom and wanted to see how data could find positive stories or prove existing positive stories that people had the wrong rhetoric about.

A lot of my behavioral changes have come from them, and I’d say the biggest surprise for me was this idea that eating local is certainly beneficial or likely to be beneficial for the environment is not really backed up in data. People will feel very guilty about—it’s so vague to go into the supermarket and be judgmental about, “Oh look, this tomato has come from the Netherlands; that’s bad,” or “This avocado has come from South America,” or something like that.

It’s very intuitive, right? “Oh, well, it’s traveled really far. I know that ships run on bunker fuels, so that sounds bad, so it must be really bad for me to eat food that’s transported here that way.” But actually, it’s largely not true. If you account for the amount of stuff that you can fit on a container ship and the amount of petrol that you might be using, for example, driving to your local farmers’ market instead of walking to your nearest shop in an urban environment, then you don’t have to drive far for it to be actually worse for you to be driving to your local farmers’ market to do your weekly shop than to eat food from far away, which I was really surprised by.

The exception, I should say, is anything fragile that has to be air-freighted, and that completely changes the maths. If you’re eating berries or things with a really short shelf life where they can’t just put it on a container, that’s generally—avoid berries out of season is good advice. But everything else—vegetables and hardier fruits—it doesn’t matter where they come from. It matters that you don’t waste it; eat it all. That would be my advice on fruit.

Matt Franklin: Yeah, the message is really, “Don’t give yourself food poisoning.” But don’t necessarily respect shelf life dates because those are completely arbitrary. Use your eyes; work out if you think something’s gone off, not just because the packet’s told you it’s gone off.

Matt Bessey: Yeah.

Matt Franklin: What about meat? What’s your view on meat?

Matt Bessey: Don’t eat beef is really the highest impact by far. Don’t eat beef or dairy products—stuff from cows—or reduce your intake at least of those things. If I was to replace all of the protein in my whole diet with cheese or with chicken, the cheese diet would actually have a higher impact, even though that’s a vegetarian diet, because cheese is concentrated milk, and milk is high impact. Whereas yogurt is not concentrated; it’s just transformed by bacteria.

But cheese—the harder the cheese, the more the multiplier on the carbon impact versus the same for milk. Whereas chickens are just incredibly efficient at turning chicken food into chicken, like terrifyingly so for a biological organism. So yeah, chicken is not so bad. Obviously, this does not account for the moral impact of eating animals. This is very much focused on climate. But if climate is your focus, then it’s good to learn a bit more about what the actual carbon impacts of different animals are.

It does vary a lot, and there are some non-animals that are surprisingly high, like dark chocolate and coffee beans are both very high impact. It’s a bit of a cheat because you usually measure per 100 grams, and I don’t know about you, but I could maybe eat a 400-gram steak; I probably wouldn’t eat 400 grams of dark chocolate in one sitting. Same for coffee beans—a little goes a long way.

But yeah, “Food Without the Hot Air” is a good read. Top tips.

Matt Franklin: So let’s talk about one of the key things that we have been working on the last few weeks. For people that don’t know, one of the businesses we’re partnered with is Vito Energy. So they do their own in-house installs across heat pumps—heat pumps predominantly—but also solar, batteries. They’ve done everything; they’ve done hydrogen boiler installs as well. But really, really focused on heat pumps.

But also, they operate MCS, so Microgeneration Certification Scheme, that allows a network of installers to operate within the MCS framework, which kind of checks the customer and ensures that installation is done to a high quality.

One of the things that became clear to us that we could add value on when we’re looking at that journey is that when a new low-carbon tech connection is made to the grid, you have to apply to the relevant DNO to get approval. Then we discovered that there was a new API created by the ENA, Energy Networks Association.

So yeah, that’s something that we’ve been working on the last few weeks now, very, very close to release. Do you want to talk about how that’s been to work on and kind of how much value you see that delivering to the process?

Matt Bessey: Yes. I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that that is the kind of thing that we could just directly integrate with—I guess it’s not government, but certainly with the national grid ultimately. We’re integrating with the individual network operators, the Distribution Network Operators, the DNOs. Yeah, it’s not been entirely smooth sailing. We’re now at the QA stage at the moment, so maybe this is slightly fresher in the mind than when you see this live. Yeah, it’s going to be beautiful in a few days.

First of all, it’s quite impressive what the ENA has released. They have essentially an API where we can state what low-carbon technologies an installer, a customer of ours, is interested in installing in their customer’s house, and then tailor a compliance form that they must fill out to the DNO for what that person is intending to install. That’s quite a lot to handle.

The form is not short. It requires specific serial numbers of hardware that is being installed and hardware that is already on-site at the customer’s house, which kind of surprised me. But I guess they’re thinking of the DNO is, “Well, we need to know that the sum of all low-carbon tech in the house is going to draw few enough amps that it’s not going to cause issues.” So it makes sense that we have to support that, but it was quite a lot to build.

If we were to just build out a UI that supports all of that ourselves, what we’re instead able to do, thanks to the design of the ENA’s system, is be given a schema, if you like, for what we need to show to the user and what the user needs to populate and how to validate that that information is plausibly accurate at least before we send it back to them and then programmatically generate all of that. So that’s the approach we’ve been taking as much as we can, and yeah, it’s working pretty nicely.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though. There are some teething issues, which perhaps are to be expected of a brand new API, and we have fed back to them. Hopefully, we’ll start to see some improvements there. But this seems to be well received, so I think we can be hopeful.

One of the challenges for us is going to be if they start to improve things—likely, there’s going to be very few changes—we’re going to have to keep up with it. We’re invested in this; we want it to be better for everyone. Obviously, we want it to be better for Payaca users, but we’re not out there to be like, “This is just for us.”

Matt Franklin: Yeah, absolutely. We were forthcoming with our feedback even though, I guess if we were feeling Machiavellian, we could have kept that to ourselves and our competitors have to deal with the same bugs. But we’re good.

So I guess by the time people are listening to this, that feature will be out there. But I think just to briefly summarize the impact—so previously, people would have had to probably do a paper application, find out who the right DNO is, send it off, wait for feedback. Now, within Payaca, they’ve already got the customer details; they’ve got the project; they see where it is in the pipeline, and they’re able to go make a compliance application.

We’re going to pre-populate a bunch of the data for them because we already have that within Payaca, and we’ll actually be able to improve on that over time and add more and more to it. Then they’re able to quickly fill out, save progress, because one of the other bits of feedback that we were hearing was that it’s great if you’ve got all of the information in front of you, you can do the application, but if you don’t, it can take time. So we’re saving the progress.

Also saving—if anything goes wrong with the application, the other side, you’ve got it saved. Then when you make an application, it’s just simply clicking a button in Payaca. And also, the other thing that we were looking at yesterday that looks really cool is the live status updates. So hopefully, they get approved within like a minute. You’re seeing live updates like what stage of the process it gets to.

And then the other thing I’ve not mentioned is when users are out in the field collecting photos and things that are required as part of this application, that’s automatically being stored in your Payaca, and then you just select from the images that you need. The API seems to be quite smart, as in it will assess the quality of that image and either accept or reject it. But if you needed to redo it, then you’d have all that data saved kind of ready for it next time.

So as excited as you can be about a compliance feature, I think it adds a lot of value. I think this is something that I talked about at the start with our being partnered with Vito Energy and other low-carbon tech installers, that we’re able to look at their entire end-to-end process, which with them we’ve mapped out to the nth degree. We’re able to say, “That’s the opportunity; that’s causing the most manual overhead,” which means that then they can scale these installations faster. They don’t actually need as many people to do the manual work.

So they’re scaling, so don’t worry about it. If you work for them, I don’t think they have any intention of getting any smaller, but they will be able to grow installs faster without needing to necessarily hire those people to do manual work, which would take more time, which means we can really help the government and the UK and essentially the world to meet those targets and really have a massive impact on decarbonization. So yeah, super exciting.

Matt Bessey: Yeah, absolutely. And we know—just to add to that—we know that from the work we’ve been doing on this API that new regulation is being introduced. The API is saying that they’re about to have to do—so this is a pre-connection compliance before doing the installs, but they’re about to make required for all generation applications post-connection commissioning information submission, which they’re also providing an API for. So hopefully, in time for that being required, we’ll be able to roll that into our interface as well.

Matt Franklin: Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Bessey: Yeah.

Matt Franklin: So in general, what are your ambitions for your role at Payaca? Where are the limits?

Matt Bessey: I love helping tech teams operate effectively. I get a tremendous amount of joy from being a force multiplier in engineering teams. So identifying where processes and technologies are not necessarily slowing us down, but we could be doing it better than we are, and helping facilitate that. I just find tech very interesting. I’ve been in the software world for a decade, and I find keeping up to date with the state of the art interesting, and that often means that you know about the thing that people don’t know about, and you can have an impact that way.

But that’s true—would be true of anywhere I work. I think here specifically, I’m very excited to be helping with the net zero transition, so being able to keep an eye on our analysis dashboards and see—well, keep an eye on our sales report, seeing how many customers we’re helping, but also how engaged they are. There will be a time in the future where we’ll be able to say, “Oh, I know that I’ve saved this many person-hours of time because I know that we’ve had 10,000 DNO reports go through our system and have been automatically approved,” or something like that. I think being able to put my impact on my personal beliefs into rock-hard numbers is really exciting.

Matt Franklin: Yeah, I think that’s really exciting. I think it’s something that we’ve not done yet and we really should do because we can actually measure that number of installs that have happened and then translate that into the actual impact in terms of how much that is decarbonizing. I think it’d be really exciting to pull some of that together.

One of the challenges that Payaca faces now, I think, is we started with smaller businesses, and we are moving our way up the scale. I think one of the things that’s becoming increasingly obvious as a focus that we can add a lot of value to is the area of scheduling. Have you had any thoughts about how we can approach that area?

Matt Bessey: Yeah, I think we’re in a good position now where, as we get more information from a business, as businesses get more invested in the platform, we have an awareness of all the projects that they have in their pipeline, the locations of the customers that those are associated with, and historic data from our mobile app of how long, in practice, those projects or stages of those are actually taking. You could take that stuff together and, with a bit of machine learning magic, be optimizing, as they’d call it in computer science, the traveling salesman problem: How do I most effectively route my people in the shortest route and accounting for how long they need to spend at each spot such that they spend the most amount of time in their day working on and not in dead air waiting for something.

Sorry, that was a very software engineering answer. But in more plain terms, avoid wasting time based on what we know is true, and even be able to throw in a bit of AI magic and suggest to our customers, “Hey, you’ve got this event that you expect to take this amount of time, but historically it takes less than that. Do you want to change the amount recorded for future?”

Matt Franklin: Yeah, that’s pretty cool. I think there’s a bunch more variables in there that we’ve not even touched on that allow us to iterate on that model as well, so just get better and better at that. I mean, you’re dealing with the customers actually being available. You’re dealing with those different skill sets that we mentioned earlier on and the complexity of a project. Materials need to be ordered and arrive on-site at the right time or be picked up somewhere. There’s just so many variables there. The good thing about that is that, as I say, we can get better and better and better at solving that problem, and it is probably one of the key things.

I mean, I do think our mobile app does a very good job of being simple and easy to use and take the user through a linear journey when they are on-site so they know what to do. They can tick tasks off as they go; they can fill out those forms in the field very quickly, work offline, and take images and videos, and all that uploads back. Then our business customers in the office can share that with the clients. I think that works very, very well, but actually getting the right people to the right sites optimally is a super exciting challenge, I think, for us.

Matt Bessey: Yeah.

Matt Franklin: So what’s it been like going from a much bigger team where you were previously—because I think the businesses and certainly the businesses you worked before were much bigger—how have you found that transition into a role where, right now, there’s six of us? What’s that been like?

Matt Bessey: Mostly it’s just been astonishing how much we can achieve. I’ve come from a team of 300, and now in a team of six, I’m amazed at how much faster that lets us iterate. I’m not throwing shade or anything; it’s just that it’s harder—the lines of communication—

Matt Franklin: Yeah, it’s just more challenging to even find time when everyone can talk, let alone get them talking.

Matt Bessey: Take this ENA project, for example. We’re developing against an API where, as well as an API, they have a front end for this service that we’re effectively implementing an alternative to. We’ve used their tooling, identified shortcomings UX-wise of their system—like not saving your progress and being quite easy to completely lose all the information you’ve written in when you realize, “Oh, there’s one field I don’t know the answer to; I just have to keep the tab open until I can find the engineer that’s on-site.”

In the span of two weeks, we’ve built an equivalent product, iterated on the UX to a point that, in my opinion, it exceeds the UX of the thing that we’re building an alternative to already. I mean, that would have been a quarter project in previous roles I’ve been in. So yeah, it’s been really amazing to see how quickly we can move as a small team.

Matt Franklin: Yeah, I think it’s one of the things that I’m very conscious of—keeping the team as small as we can as long as we can. Because just those lines of communication, when you start to grow much bigger—say you’ve got 20, 30 people—it becomes infinitely harder to actually get stuff done. Clearly, we can’t scale forever at six people, but I think it is, for me, so much fun because we can just make decisions so quickly. We can develop new things so quickly, and yeah, it’s just a really exciting place to be. I think you’ve complemented the team massively very, very quickly.

Thinking about growing the team, what are some of the qualities that some of our current team have that you think really contribute to our ability to move at the kind of speed that we are able to move at? How would you communicate that in terms of someone who was looking to join Payaca? What do they need in a role like this?

Matt Bessey: I think my first answer would have to be that attitude. I think it’s from Facebook—the idea of there’s no such thing as someone else’s problem at this kind of scale. It’s a good thing to have in life anyway, but the reason we can move so fast is not that there are fewer people; it’s that there are fewer decision-makers on any given thing. If we get stuck on something, we’re all in the same room, and we just go through it and go, “Okay, I have a front-end problem. Maybe I’m normally a full-stacker, but I’m going to get more focused on front-end today to deal with this.”

So yeah, having that attitude of, “Is there a way I can get past this wall without waiting for someone else to be free or waiting for an expert?” Maybe come back to it later with an expert who can help you out, but being up for believing in yourself and pushing yourself beyond what is maybe your comfort zone and realizing that actually there isn’t that much difference between that thing that you are comfortable with and that thing that you thought you weren’t. That’d be my number one.

Matt Franklin: Yeah, absolutely. I think that sort of plays to one of our key values—taking action. What I say to anyone, I am more than happy to make a decision if you bring me a decision to make. But also, I want people to feel empowered to make decisions. Ultimately, all we want to do is make progress as quickly as possible. If a decision is reversible, well, just make the decision and crack on.

I guess just for context, the other two values that we’ve had consistently for years now and we’ve not felt the need to change even with our mission being more refined is transparency. I think that helps—that’s all about communication. If we are more transparent, if we’re able to document processes, whether that be really informally or formally, just making it easy for others to continue the work that we’re doing is very important.

And the other one I’ve always been big on is simplicity. We should always challenge ourselves to say, “Can we make this simpler?” Whether it’s a customer, like a user experience, or whether it’s the code that’s being written, whether it’s the business logic we’re applying—there’s nearly always a simpler solution. I think everyone in our team right now has that. But I do think there is a trend among software engineers to get very caught up in wanting to build really elegant solutions and smart code and all of that stuff, that sometimes remembering that being really focused on solving the customer’s problem then helps you go, “Okay, well, how do I most simply get there?” I think everyone that we’ve hired so far has been very focused on that, and I think it’s helped us.

Matt Bessey: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Coming in, I got pretty familiar with the tech stack—I think I just asked to have a quick look at the code, and you gave me a company laptop before I signed my employment agreement, so thank you for that. And yeah, in that time, I got a good familiarity with the code base and was—yeah, it’s very clear that a focus on simplicity is on behalf of the team already. And as you say, that’s not the trend in the wider industry. I think people are going, “Oh, how can I use that cool tool that Facebook made?” when that’s a company with 50,000 developers who have completely different problems to you, and you should be thinking, “How can I use no tool? How can I not write any code for this and have less to worry about?”

Matt Franklin: It’s super exciting.

Matt Bessey: Yeah.

Matt Franklin: So I think for us, in terms of what we’re looking for and the businesses that we want to bring in, we’re really looking at businesses installing heat pumps, solar, batteries, and EV charge points. I think those are the businesses we can help immensely with what we’re creating, and I’m sure there will be new low-carbon technologies that develop. The benefit of the way we’ve designed Payaca is we can easily flex to that.

Since you’ve been in the team, I think one of the other things that’s been interesting is we’ve been able to—I don’t want to say expose you to—but introduced you to and have you very involved with our customers. How have you found that so far?

Matt Bessey: Yeah, very useful. I mean, we’ve been working on the ENA integration with Vito Energy, who will be our immediate user, our first customers of it, who already have to deal with those manual flows we were talking about earlier. To be able to go from a design to something that we’ve implemented that we can show them between weekly calls and get immediate feedback, even just from our screen sharing, that, “Oh, your assumption there is wrong,” or, you know, of course, we’re not installers by trade. While we want to make their lives as easy as possible and have as much empathy as I have, I do need that closed loop that previously would have gone via a business analyst and all these other roles that now I can just not have.

Matt Franklin: Yeah, job titles as well.

Matt Bessey: Yeah, yeah, throw in an engineering manager. Yeah, so there’s been plenty of steps removed, and it’s been really useful for me. And Patrick’s a nice guy in the team at Vito, so it’s been very useful and gratifying as well to see—working in cybersecurity training, you’re pretty far removed from the bank that has an employee who needs to upskill on the latest compliance. I’d never hear any feedback really directly. To be able to look someone in the eyes and go, “I’ve done something good for you,” it’s really gratifying.

Matt Franklin: Yeah, no, it’s awesome. I mean, it’s one of the—I’ve got to say, that’s the only reason why I do what I do. Just in the journey of the last five, six years, just being able to say to a customer, “Hey, this is something that we do,” and them to say, “Wow, that solves my problem,” it never gets old. It’s always exciting.

Well, thanks very much for your time. That’s very interesting to talk through so many different topics.

Matt Bessey: Yeah, thank you. And I can’t wait to see what we do next.

Note: This transcript has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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