Boulder’s is changing the way energy companies interact with their customers. The software company develops data-driven apps to help consumers reduce energy use and to give utility providers insight into how their customers are using energy.
Combining all that data with the app development process requires knowledgeable tech leadership, which Tendril has found in CTO and COO Chris Black. He brings more than 20 years’ worth of experience to the table, having spent the last four and a half at the head of Tendril.
We caught up with Black to talk disruption, living in Colorado and finding the balance between using cutting edge and established technologies:
What technologies power your business?
I think about the technologies that power Tendril in five categories: core platform & application architecture, hosting, deployment & management, monitoring & alerting and data & analytics.
In each area we try to be pragmatic about only building around our core intellectual property – everything else should be “bought.” Our platform is built in Java and Scala, and consists of a few dozen micro-services. These services intercommunicate using Finagle and Protocol Buffers (for scalability and backward compatible low-latency messages), and are fronted by a layer of REST APIs (for our solutions and for third parties).
What technologies are playing the biggest roles at Tendril this year?
This year, a big focus is on the data analytics side as we think about how we will continue to answer questions in real-time given the volume of data that we process. One of the main technologies used by our data science team is a statistical scripting language called ‘R’. R is great for quickly developing models and answering questions, but isn’t great for product-level scale.
To address this, we use Python for turning the R scripts into production level code. Finally, we turn to data analysis and exploration tools like Looker and AWS QuickSight. These give us a UI that allows us to perform ad hoc data exploration and answer questions quickly.
What upcoming tech project are you most proud of?
There are two projects that come to mind – one from an internal, operational standpoint, and the other is a new solution for our customers.
On the operational side, we’ve started using Mesos, Marathon, and some custom python scripting to perform auto-scaling of our micro-services.
Historically, the way that you scale services and service-oriented architectures is a manual process. Even though spinning up additional instances is easy, you still have to be aware of what loads and latencies are happening in all parts of the system and respond accordingly. With our new auto-scaling architecture, it allows us to automatically put policies in place that the system will respect and react to.
The result is a resilient system that can handle any load levels in a cost-effective way, without a bunch of human beings having to worry about it and hold its hand along the way.
The other project that excites me from a technology perspective is a new application we are developing that serves as a central communications hub between our customers and their customers. It will be able to manage energy in consumers’ homes in a way that keeps them comfortable, but lowers their overall energy usage.
This is mutually beneficial to both the consumers who want significantly lower electric bills, and the utilities that struggle to provide energy for all of their customers at all times. The application is built as a hybrid mobile app using the Ionic framework.
With Ionic, we can write the application using familiar web technologies, but then wrap it in a native wrapper and cross-compile it for all of the platforms that we want to support.
The hybrid approach gives us access to native capabilities of various devices while avoiding the headache of having to rewrite the application to support different devices’ operating systems.
What are the biggest technology challenges you've faced in the past? How did you overcome them?
The biggest technology challenge we face is making sure that we are staying at the cutting edge of the technology landscape, but not being so bleeding edge that we’re causing ourselves headaches in management and maintenance.
If you’re not on the edge enough, it’s harder to attract the most talented engineers because everyone wants to work with the latest and greatest and around other like-minded engineers. Alternatively, if you’re too far ahead and are an early adopter on everything, then you’re the first one experiencing bugs, making your job harder.
What lessons have you learned about working in Colorado that other local entrepreneurs can learn from?
Firstly, the Denver/Boulder corridor is an amazingly open community. Everyone learns from each other. In fact, it’s rare that locals have anything to hide from one another, or require NDAs before sharing everything about what they are doing and how they are doing it.
The openness and helpfulness is a huge value that our community creates, but there is a big caveat here. In order for others to take the time to help you, you first have to be helpful for them and do it without an expectation of reciprocation. Brad Feld talks about this as “Give Before You Get.” It’s the reason our community works — most people understand this concept and it makes everyone better.
Secondly, Colorado is a very competitive technology market. We’re all fighting for the best and brightest, so it’s important to be sensitive to the fact that people in Colorado are here for more than just the tech scene. They’re here for work/life balance. Going rock climbing at lunch is just as important as getting code written late at night and getting it out the door on time for our customers.
How would your team describe working with you?
In short: driven, hard working and some combination of serious and being a goofball. Even when things are stressful, I try to remain positive. I work to sustain a light environment.
At our foundation we are a business. We have real customers for whom we’re solving real problems. We also have shareholders that we need to keep happy. But at the same time, we try to make sure we are having fun doing it.
Like every software company, there are deadlines. There is always more to do than you feel like you can get done, but that’s also part of the fun. Everyone works together, like a family, to get things done.
What trends do you see happening in your industry over the next three years? How is Tendril anticipating those trends and working towards them?
We sell to energy providers, from traditional providers of electrons and gas to new energy providers like solar and battery storage companies. In our customer space, there has been more disruption and innovation in the past four years than in the previous 40 years. And that’s only going to continue to accelerate.
With disruption there’s always opportunity. It’s a lot of fun helping an industry that hasn’t seen much change in the last 40 years begin to adopt these new technologies, and figure out how distributed energy resources affect how they run their businesses.
What else do you want the Colorado startup community to know about Tendril?
We’re in rarefied air of still having the mentality of a startup, but solving real problems for real customers in a profitable business with leading investors. In certain aspects, it’s hard to look at us and say that we are a startup, but as to how we operate the business and the mentality we actively maintain, we are. I want us to think like a start up, I want us to be hungry, be agile.
We’re also on a crazy growth curve right now. New job opportunities are growing faster than we can fill them. There are few places you can go to get as much exposure to all the technologies I spoke about other than Tendril. If you’re interested in our philosophies, our culture, and our impressive technology stack, then I encourage you to come take a look at Tendril.
Photos via Tendril. Answers have been edited for length and clarity.
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