Hayden Wood - Founder Bulb
Jimmy is joined by one of the UK’s leading entrepreneurs, Hayden Wood founded Bulb alongside his co-founder Amit just five years ago in 2015.
For those of you that haven't heard of Bulb, they provide 100% renewable electricity and 100% carbon-neutral gas to a now staggering 1.7 million members across the UK.
That has led Bulb to become the fastest-growing private company in the UK, but its growth is not just limited to these shores. It has recently just announced expansion into France, Spain and Texas.
They employ almost 900 people in a wide variety of different roles, and we ask Hayden where he sees green jobs of the future coming from. It is a phrase that is often trotted out, but we'll aim to get into more of the detail today.
Whilst it has been a great success story, not everything is or has been plain sailing and we discuss some of the challenges the company has had along the way.
Prime Ministerial Summary
If I were summing that conversation up to the Prime Minister in a short briefing memo, here are the key things that I would include:
All employees have some form of data test now.
The best ideas can come from surprising places for example their internal hack weeks, where they put lots of multidisciplinary teams together to try and improve the business - this is where their single energy tariff idea came from.
Only 5% of their employees had a background in energy before joining the company. At any given point, 5% of employees are in rotation within another part of the business, seeing how each other work and sharing ideas
The biggest challenge came when trying to recruit too many people too quickly - this is a challenge we see often for fast-growing scale-up companies
They are using the traditional in-person interview less, because of biases that this can lead to.
Lastly, I was interested to hear how whilst the energy use has been smoothed throughout the pandemic, rather than the traditional 5-7 pm dash, that has actually led to an increase in prices because it is less predictable.
I would then cross-check that with the energy adviser to see if they had any comment they wanted to add.