August 2026

The idea of an all-electric racing championship used to sound like science fiction, and in its debut season, Formula E’s cars needed a mid-race swap just to make it to the checkered flag.

“12 years ago, if someone said we’re going to create an all-electric racing championship, people might have thought you were absolutely crazy,” says Jeff Dodds, CEO of Formula E.

At the time, just 300,000 electric vehicles were sold worldwide and, according to Dodds, “they weren’t very good.” 

“In our first season, we needed to have two cars to finish a race, because the battery wouldn’t last long enough,” he recalls.

Today, the technology has improved dramatically. Around 22 million EVs are expected to be sold this year, with BloombergNEF forecasting that figure could reach 35-40 million annually by 2030.

The transition is already accelerating in markets worldwide. And Formula E has spent the past 12 years positioning itself in the driver’s seat.

Altering the Formula 

Before joining Formula E, Dodds spent years in the automotive industry, working for Volvo and later Honda, where he became deeply immersed in motorsport.

“We had our own Formula One team, MotoGP, British Superbikes, touring cars—they had everything,” he recalls.

That background explains why Dodds doesn’t view Formula One as a threat. If anything, he sees it as the benchmark for elite motorsport

“Believe it or not, whilst I was an F1 fan, I also followed Formula E before I came to work here,” Dodds says. “I have a good appreciation for the journey that Formula One’s been on,” he adds. “We’re similar, and then we’re very different.”

F1 and Formula E both use open-wheel, single-seater Formula racing cars. But there are some major distinctions. The main one is obvious from the name: Formula E is an all-electric racing league, while Formula One uses traditional internal combustion to power its cars. 

This doesn’t just reduce Formula E’s carbon footprint — it changes the racing product itself. With limited energy at their disposal,  the world’s best drivers must decide when to conserve and when to push, adding another layer of strategy to wheel-to-wheel racing. Dodds likens it to “a game of chess on the racetrack.”

He believes this appeals to racing fans differently than F1. “F1, for me, is nostalgic,” Dodds explains. “I know the drivers. I know their journeys. I love the locations they race at. Perhaps the bit I like least about it is the actual racing.”

He compares many F1 races to a “procession,” where fans often have a good idea of who will win before the engines start.

Formula E, by contrast, places a premium on parity.

“If you say to me, ‘Who do you think is going to win the London race?’ I legitimately would say it could be anybody.” Dodds says. “Everyone has a chance of winning that race. That’s pretty rare in motorsport.”

Races are designed to last under an hour, with plenty of overtakes and the kind of “thrills and spills” that can hold the attention of viewers accustomed to faster-paced entertainment.

Those differences are reflected in Formula E’s audience. Its fan base skews younger, is split nearly 50-50 between men and women, and has a particular interest in technology, sustainability and innovation. That audience has also attracted the attention of media giants. On August 11, Formula E, Disney+ and ESPN announced a landmark multi-year agreement that will make Disney+ the global streaming home of the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship across 144 territories. In the U.S., races will stream on Disney+ alongside ESPN+ beginning with the 2026/27 season.

“I don’t mean to be disparaging because I watch it and enjoy it,” Dodds says, “but I don’t find F1 anywhere near as exciting as I find us.”

Speed without sacrifice

What sets Formula E apart from many companies now embracing sustainability is that its mission wasn’t created in response to a trend. Sustainability has been at the championship’s core from the beginning.

“If you’re a big business that decides you want to become more sustainable, that’s a very worthy thing,” Dodds says. “But you’re trying to reverse-engineer a more sustainable approach into your processes and the way you work. We’ve only ever had it as a core tenet of our business.”

Formula E was built around three goals: create an elite global racing championship, help accelerate the transition from combustion engines to electric vehicles and become the world’s most sustainable sport.

More than a decade later, Dodds believes the organization has a strong case for achieving that last goal. Formula E is the only sport in the world certified as a B Corp. This designation recognizes companies meeting high standards for social and environmental performance while committing to continuous improvement. 

Sustainability is embedded throughout the race weekend. Events are powered by hydrogenated vegetable oil, single-use plastics are eliminated on-site, and the cars are charged using renewable energy. Formula E says its Gen4 car will also be 100% recyclable or reusable.

“My personal view is when people hear ‘sustainable,’ they often hear compromise,” Dodds says. “They think the product’s going to be more expensive, or not as good, because you’re trying to do it sustainably. And I think we are a brilliant argument against that, because we produce the fastest-selling race cars in the world and the most exciting racing, while being the most sustainable sport.”

World’s most exciting test lab 

The racing is entertaining, but it isn’t what makes Formula E important. Much of the championship’s impact happens off the track, where it works alongside some of the world’s largest automakers to test EV technology that can eventually find its way into consumer vehicles.

Formula E has six manufacturers competing in its championship: Porsche, Jaguar, Nissan, Stellantis, Yamaha and Mahindra.

“One of the reasons they’re in is they treat the racetrack like a laboratory for testing technology that can make its way into their road cars,” Dodds explains. 

“If you look at the latest Porsche Cayenne Turbo, it’s the most powerful production Porsche ever released — and it’s all-electric,” Dodds says. “It’s an incredible piece of machinery, and a lot of the technology in that car has been developed through, or come out of, Porsche’s Formula E program.”

He also mentions Formula E’s work with Jaguar’s I-Pace, where Jaguar discovered a way to install over-the-air software updates to their cars from an iPhone. “This is where we are in terms of the cutting-edge nature of the technology,” Dodds says. “You know, things are being developed and discovered on our racetrack that will find their ways into your cars incredibly quickly.”

Zero to 100

Dodds admits it’s difficult to imagine just how far Formula E could go. After all, the championship’s first 12 years have already produced growth that once seemed unimaginable.

“12 years ago, we had zero fans, zero TV audience, and a car. You needed two cars to do a race. The car finished at 130 miles an hour,” Dodds shares. “Ten years on, you’ve got 420 million fans, over half a billion TV audience, and you’ve got a car that accelerates to 100 kilometers in 1.6 seconds and races well over 200 miles an hour. It’s inconceivable how far we’ve come.”

Because of this, Dodds is reluctant to put hard limits on Formula E’s long-term growth. In an industry moving as quickly as electric vehicles, he believes setting objectives too far into the future can be more constraining than helpful.

“I definitely have an ambition, but I wouldn’t want to constrain that by tethering us to a set of targets that are too low,” he says. They’ve already gone from zero to 100 incredibly quickly. It’s impossible to tell how fast they’ll grow now.

The idea of an all-electric racing championship used to sound like science fiction, and in its debut season, Formula E’s cars needed a mid-race swap just to make it to the checkered flag.

“12 years ago, if someone said we’re going to create an all-electric racing championship, people might have thought you were absolutely crazy,” says Jeff Dodds, CEO of Formula E.

At the time, just 300,000 electric vehicles were sold worldwide and, according to Dodds, “they weren’t very good.” 

The most important shift in global capital right now is not about which sector is hot or which market is recovering. It is about how the system itself is being reorganized. While much of the investment world remains fixated on AI and software, the next wave of opportunity lies where technology intersects with physical infrastructure — from energy and logistics to manufacturing and defense. Those industries are being reshaped by innovation, and the Gulf South is emerging as one of the places where that future is being built.

The Gulf South sits at the intersection of American productive capacity and global demand in a way that very few regions in this country can claim, and that positioning is not yet reflected in how institutional capital is allocated here. The gap between what this region represents structurally and how it is currently valued is, in my assessment, one of the most significant mispricings in American economic geography.

An investment thesis in motion

Earlier this year, I attended the 3rd Coast Venture Summit in New Orleans, one of the Southeast’s premier gatherings for founders, investors and startup leaders. What I saw was a thesis in motion: founders building at the intersection of energy, logistics, climate and technology; capital from outside the region engaging seriously, some for the first time; and a community that had been building quietly and was beginning to move with real intention.

That moment reinforced what I had already been working toward as an investor building within the region. The opportunity is to build investment architecture specifically designed to capture this dynamic, connecting the depth of Gulf South industry to the global corridors of demand across Europe, the Middle East and beyond.

If New York is America’s financial brain and Silicon Valley is its technology center, then the Gulf South is its physical infrastructure and its gateway to the rest of the world. And right now, that gateway is dramatically undervalued relative to what it is already producing and what it is positioned to become.

Regional assets, global implications

The Gulf South — Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida — is the load-bearing infrastructure of the American economy. Texas produces over 40% of the nation’s crude oil. Louisiana anchors American LNG exports to Europe and Asia. The Gulf Coast holds roughly half of U.S. refining capacity and is also home to one of the largest concentrations of aerospace production and advanced industrial capacity in the world. The ports of Houston, South Louisiana and Corpus Christi move an enormous share of what this country produces and imports. That alone would make it strategically significant, but the more interesting fact is where those ports point.

The region connects directly, by water, pipeline and long-established trade route, to Latin America, West Africa, Europe and increasingly the Middle East and Asia. These are the corridors where the majority of global GDP growth will originate over the next twenty to thirty years. Emerging markets are not a future consideration for serious investors. They are the primary consideration. The founders building here reflect that same orientation, constructing businesses with operational discipline and capital efficiency that the build-fast-break-things era rarely produced.

The opportunity for investment

What compounds this opportunity is the cost structure. This level of global connectivity exists at a materially lower cost basis than the traditional hubs where capital tends to concentrate. For investors and operators, that changes the calculus entirely. Capital can move into real industries at scale without the saturation or the premium that coastal markets demand.

Some of that mispricing has a foundation. Governance challenges and climate risk in certain metros — New Orleans being the most visible — create perception drag that bleeds into broader regional assessments. These are legitimate factors. They are also exactly what creates the entry point. Complexity and perceived risk, when layered over genuine structural strength, produce the conditions where patient capital can build lasting positions before consensus arrives.

There is also a deeper shift in what innovation actually means that makes this moment particularly important.

Where the innovation curve is heading

The dominant narrative of the last twenty years was software eating the world, and it did so productively. The frontier is now moving. Energy transition, supply chain resilience, advanced manufacturing and climate adaptation are the defining challenges of the next era. The innovation curve is bending toward physical systems and industrial complexity — toward the kind of problems that require more than a laptop and a good API. Those problems are native to the Gulf South. The companies being built to solve them will define a new geography of innovation, one that does not look like the last cycle.

The defense and space layer adds another dimension entirely. NASA infrastructure in Houston, New Orleans and Mississippi; propulsion testing corridors; defense shipbuilding operations across the Gulf — these represent strategic infrastructure in the fullest sense. They make the Gulf South simultaneously economically essential and geopolitically irreplaceable, a combination that attracts long-duration capital and signals something important about where national and institutional priorities are actually pointed.

In a multi-node world, rare combinations of productive capacity and global connectivity are exactly what serious capital should be identifying before the market does. The Gulf South is the connective corridor between what America produces and what the world needs. The opportunity now is not simply to invest in technology, but to invest where technology is transforming energy, logistics, advanced manufacturing and other critical infrastructure sectors the global economy can’t function without.

The most important shift in global capital right now is not about which sector is hot or which market is recovering. It is about how the system itself is being reorganized. While much of the investment world remains fixated on AI and software, the next wave of opportunity lies where technology intersects with physical infrastructure — from energy and logistics to manufacturing and defense. Those industries are being reshaped by innovation, and the Gulf South is emerging as one of the places where that future is being built.

The Gulf South sits at the intersection of American productive capacity and global demand in a way that very few regions in this country can claim, and that positioning is not yet reflected in how institutional capital is allocated here. The gap between what this region represents structurally and how it is currently valued is, in my assessment, one of the most significant mispricings in American economic geography.

An investment thesis in motion

Earlier this year, I attended the 3rd Coast Venture Summit in New Orleans, one of the Southeast’s premier gatherings for founders, investors and startup leaders. What I saw was a thesis in motion: founders building at the intersection of energy, logistics, climate and technology; capital from outside the region engaging seriously, some for the first time; and a community that had been building quietly and was beginning to move with real intention.

The more businesses I built, the more I realized that industries change, but the problems that determine success often repeat. Here are five patterns every entrepreneur should learn to recognize.

From the outside, my career may look like I kept changing lanes. I have built and operated businesses in hospitality, real estate, construction, home inspections, healthcare and digital marketing. People sometimes ask how I move between industries that seem so different. The truth is, I don’t begin with the industry. I begin with the problem.

A hotel guest, a homebuyer, an urgent care patient and a small-business owner are not the same customer. But each wants clarity, consistency and confidence. Each wants to know what happens next, whether the company can be trusted and whether the experience will be worth the money.
The greatest advantage of working across industries has not been diversification alone. It has been pattern recognition.

One NBER study of Danish firms found serial entrepreneurs were 39% more productive than novice entrepreneurs. But experience only becomes an advantage when you understand which lessons transfer and which do not.

Look for the emotion beneath the transaction

Customers rarely buy only the product or service listed on the invoice. A hotel guest is not just paying for a room. After a long day of traveling, that guest may be buying rest and reassurance. A patient visiting urgent care wants answers, relief and confidence that someone is paying attention. A homebuyer ordering an inspection wants more than a report. The buyer wants to feel informed before making one of the largest financial decisions of their life.

This is similar to the jobs-to-be-done approach developed by the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen: Focus on what the customer is really trying to accomplish. In every business, I ask three questions: What is the customer worried about? What would make the experience easier? What must happen for the customer to trust us?

Those questions often teach me more than a traditional competitor analysis.

Transfer principles, not procedures

Hospitality taught me that people remember how a business makes them feel. I carried that lesson into healthcare, but that did not mean turning an urgent care center into a hotel. It meant translating the principle.

In a hotel, a warm welcome, clear directions and quick resolution can reduce stress. In urgent care, those same principles may become a respectful check-in, accurate expectations about wait times and clear communication about the next step.

Franchising taught me another transferable lesson: Systems create consistency, but only when people understand and use them. That principle has helped us grow inspection operations across multiple markets. The procedures are different, but the need for training, accountability and consistent execution is the same.

When you see a successful practice in another industry, don’t copy it word for word. Identify the principle underneath it, then adapt it to your customer, team and operating environment.

Treat repeated friction as market research

Some of my best business opportunities didn’t begin in a brainstorming session. They began with a problem I kept seeing.

While operating local businesses, I watched strong companies lose attention to competitors that were easier to find and better at explaining their value online. That repeated problem eventually helped lead us into digital marketing. A service you struggle to source, a question customers ask every week or a workaround your team has quietly accepted may point to a larger opportunity.

The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends combining market research with competitive analysis to understand demand and identify an advantage. You can start closer to home.

For 30 days, keep a friction log. Record recurring complaints, delays, outside services you repeatedly purchase and manual workarounds. Then ask who else has the same problem, what it costs them and whether they would pay for a better solution.

Validate the pattern before building around it

Seeing a recurring problem doesn’t automatically mean you’ve found a viable business. Because you understand the problem, you may assume others value the solution as much as you do. Before committing significant time or money, talk with potential customers. Test a limited version. Ask customers to pay rather than simply asking whether they like the idea. Set a budget, a deadline and a clear result the test must produce.

Not every frustration deserves a new company. Some are operational problems that should be fixed inside the existing business. The goal is to distinguish between an inconvenience and a market.

Build a leader, not another job

A new opportunity becomes dangerous when it depends on the founder for every decision. Before entering another business or market, I consider who will lead it, what authority that person will have and which measurements will show whether the operation is healthy.

If every customer issue, employee question and financial decision comes back to you, you have not built another business. You have created another job. The common thread across my businesses is not a particular industry. It is solving real problems through service, systems and trust.

Entrepreneurs don’t have to chase every trend. They need to notice recurring patterns, translate lessons carefully, validate demand and develop people who can lead. Once you recognize patterns, new industries become less intimidating. More importantly, you become better at knowing which opportunities deserve a yes — and which require a disciplined no.

The more businesses I built, the more I realized that industries change, but the problems that determine success often repeat. Here are five patterns every entrepreneur should learn to recognize.

From the outside, my career may look like I kept changing lanes. I have built and operated businesses in hospitality, real estate, construction, home inspections, healthcare and digital marketing. People sometimes ask how I move between industries that seem so different. The truth is, I don’t begin with the industry. I begin with the problem.

A hotel guest, a homebuyer, an urgent care patient and a small-business owner are not the same customer. But each wants clarity, consistency and confidence. Each wants to know what happens next, whether the company can be trusted and whether the experience will be worth the money.
The greatest advantage of working across industries has not been diversification alone. It has been pattern recognition.

One NBER study of Danish firms found serial entrepreneurs were 39% more productive than novice entrepreneurs. But experience only becomes an advantage when you understand which lessons transfer and which do not.

Look for the emotion beneath the transaction

Customers rarely buy only the product or service listed on the invoice. A hotel guest is not just paying for a room. After a long day of traveling, that guest may be buying rest and reassurance. A patient visiting urgent care wants answers, relief and confidence that someone is paying attention. A homebuyer ordering an inspection wants more than a report. The buyer wants to feel informed before making one of the largest financial decisions of their life.

This is similar to the jobs-to-be-done approach developed by the late Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen: Focus on what the customer is really trying to accomplish. In every business, I ask three questions: What is the customer worried about? What would make the experience easier? What must happen for the customer to trust us?

Those questions often teach me more than a traditional competitor analysis.

Transfer principles, not procedures

Hospitality taught me that people remember how a business makes them feel. I carried that lesson into healthcare, but that did not mean turning an urgent care center into a hotel. It meant translating the principle.

In a hotel, a warm welcome, clear directions and quick resolution can reduce stress. In urgent care, those same principles may become a respectful check-in, accurate expectations about wait times and clear communication about the next step.

Franchising taught me another transferable lesson: Systems create consistency, but only when people understand and use them. That principle has helped us grow inspection operations across multiple markets. The procedures are different, but the need for training, accountability and consistent execution is the same.

When you see a successful practice in another industry, don’t copy it word for word. Identify the principle underneath it, then adapt it to your customer, team and operating environment.

LinkedIn doesn’t want to lose users to a flood of AI content. 

In an effort to create a better user experience, LinkedIn chief product officer Hari Srinivasan announced in a post on the platform last month that the company would include a new feature: a “seems like AI slop” button. 

AI slop refers to poorly generated AI content. LinkedIn is allowing users to flag posts that appear to be AI-generated.

The button immediately proved popular. Srinivasan wrote on LinkedIn last week that within the first two weeks of the button’s launch, more than a million people have used it. 

“Overall members are now experiencing 40% less views on what we classify as AI slop from just a few weeks ago,” he wrote in the post. “Despite the progress, we know we have more to do to ensure LinkedIn remains a place where you can find real people & real perspectives.”

Avoiding activity from AI bots

LinkedIn is trying to avoid the “dead Internet theory,” or the idea that much of what users see online is no longer made by real people for real people. The theory imagines an Internet increasingly filled with bots, AI-generated posts, fake accounts and automated engagement. 

In other words, machines effectively post, like, comment and boost each other, making most of the content on the Internet AI-generated.

As AI agents and bots flood online spaces, the theory has gained traction. 

“There’s a lot of missing pieces of information, but a lot of the observed data suggests the same thing, which is there is more bot activity,” Rudy Yang, PitchBook’s enterprise and retail fintech analyst, recently told Fortune. “Agentic AI activity is driving a lot of the browser activity you’re seeing.”

AI content is gaining ground

Data supports the idea that the web is increasingly dominated by AI. Cloud platform Cloudflare said in April that for the first time, automated traffic had overtaken human traffic on the Internet. As of Wednesday, bots generated 58% of search requests, compared to 42% from people, per Cloudflare.

AI-written material is also showing up more often across the web. In a Pew Research Center analysis released last week, researchers examined 10,000 webpages gathered in July and found that 10% contained strong indicators of AI authorship, up from roughly 2% five years earlier. 

More than one-third of webpages published since ChatGPT’s late-2022 debut showed at least some evidence of AI-generated writing, the analysis added.

LinkedIn appears especially exposed to the shift. The professional networking site, used by more than 1.3 billion registered members to follow companies, industries and workplace news, had a larger share of AI-generated long-form posts than Medium, X or Substack, according to a  July analysis by AI-detection startup Pangram. 

Pangram classified more than 40% of LinkedIn’s long-form posts as entirely AI-generated.

LinkedIn doesn’t want to lose users to a flood of AI content. 

In an effort to create a better user experience, LinkedIn chief product officer Hari Srinivasan announced in a post on the platform last month that the company would include a new feature: a “seems like AI slop” button. 

AI slop refers to poorly generated AI content. LinkedIn is allowing users to flag posts that appear to be AI-generated.

Between 2020 and 2025, U.S. electricity demand grew roughly 1.7% a year, more than ten times the annual pace utilities saw over the prior decade and a half, according to federal energy forecasts. Data centers, EV charging depots and reshored manufacturing plants are pulling more current through wires than the grid was ever designed to carry.

For founders building anything that touches physical infrastructure, real estate, logistics or manufacturing, this is not an abstract policy debate. It’s a supply chain risk. A transformer failure in the wrong substation can shut down a distribution center for days. Power reliability is quietly becoming a competitive advantage.

The challenge: Aging infrastructure meets rising demand

Much of the U.S. transmission network was built between the 1950s and 1980s, engineered for a slower-growing, less electrified economy. Layer today’s load onto yesterday’s steel and copper, and stress shows up fast: sagging conductors, overheated transformers, voltage drops during peak demand.

Add geography to the equation. Utility crews service lines strung across mountain passes, wetlands and dense urban cores, often well above 100 feet, exposed to wind, ice and heat that legacy equipment was never rated for. Every outage compounds: hospitals lose backup capacity, cold storage spoils inventory, data centers throttle compute as AI workloads push demand the grid was never designed to carry. The grid isn’t just old. It’s outmatched by the loads now riding on it.

Why maintenance is more critical than ever

Reactive maintenance, fixing equipment only after it fails, was tolerable when demand stayed flat. It isn’t anymore. A single unplanned outage can cost a mid-size manufacturer six figures in lost production, and repeated failures invite regulatory scrutiny utilities can’t afford.

Preventive maintenance flips the economics: Crews replace worn hardware on a schedule, before it strands a substation. It also protects people. Line workers hold some of the most physically demanding jobs in any industry, and a single fall or arc flash can end a career. Compliance bodies increasingly treat inspection cadence as a legal requirement, not a courtesy.

The role of advanced maintenance technologies

Utility maintenance has moved well past bucket trucks and paper inspection logs.

Insulated aerial platforms, drone inspections and modular repair rigs now let crews reach damaged conductors without de-energizing entire feeder lines. That single change cuts repair windows from days to hours.

To reduce downtime and protect crews working at extreme heights, utility providers increasingly rely on specialized electric line repair equipment built specifically for high-voltage transmission and distribution work. The same logic that keeps warehouse employees off ladders for hazardous tasks is pushing utilities toward remote, automated inspection wherever the terrain allows it.

Crews report real gains from this shift:

• Fewer full line shutdowns during routine repair work
• Lower injury rates for elevated tasks
• Faster mobilization to remote or storm-damaged sites
• Longer equipment lifespan through frequent, less invasive servicing

Scaling grid expansion with smarter solutions

Renewable generation adds complexity before it adds resilience. Solar farms and wind installations often sit far from existing substations, requiring new transmission runs into terrain utilities have rarely serviced. Data center power demand alone is projected to nearly triple by 2030, forcing utilities to expand capacity while keeping existing customers online.

Smarter deployment now centers on:

• Modular substations installed without months-long shutdowns
• Rural line extensions using rapid-deployment repair equipment instead of permanent crews
• Staged upgrades that isolate single circuits rather than whole grids

Business and economic implications

Reliable power underwrites everything from manufacturing schedules to server uptime. Every hour of outage ripples through payroll, spoiled inventory and missed shipping windows — the same triage businesses run through after any physical disruption.

Faster repair cycles also help utilities retain skilled linework crews. Turnover is expensive to replace and slow to train; equipment that reduces physical strain and risk keeps experienced workers on the job longer, itself a resilience asset during storm season or rapid buildout.

The future of grid maintenance

Predictive analytics are starting to flag failing transformers before they fail, using sensor data the same way manufacturers now forecast equipment breakdowns. Remote monitoring, satellite imagery and automated drone patrols are shrinking the gap between damage and dispatch.

Capital is following. Utilities and private investors are funding infrastructure at a pace not seen in decades, betting that reliability, not just capacity, will define which grids can support the next wave of electrified industry.

Reliability depends on innovation

Grid expansion without maintenance investment is a bet against physics. Every new data center, EV fleet and factory adds load to infrastructure that still ages on a fixed schedule.

Business leaders building near that grid should treat maintenance capacity, not just generation capacity, as a site-selection criterion. Ask utilities how fast they can restore power, not just how much they can supply. The company that plans around repair speed, not average uptime, will be the one still running when the next storm or surge hits.

Between 2020 and 2025, U.S. electricity demand grew roughly 1.7% a year, more than ten times the annual pace utilities saw over the prior decade and a half, according to federal energy forecasts. Data centers, EV charging depots and reshored manufacturing plants are pulling more current through wires than the grid was ever designed to carry.

For founders building anything that touches physical infrastructure, real estate, logistics or manufacturing, this is not an abstract policy debate. It’s a supply chain risk. A transformer failure in the wrong substation can shut down a distribution center for days. Power reliability is quietly becoming a competitive advantage.

The challenge: Aging infrastructure meets rising demand

Much of the U.S. transmission network was built between the 1950s and 1980s, engineered for a slower-growing, less electrified economy. Layer today’s load onto yesterday’s steel and copper, and stress shows up fast: sagging conductors, overheated transformers, voltage drops during peak demand.

On the evening of Friday, March 14, 2025, the White House issued an executive order that listed the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI) among federal entities to be eliminated to the maximum extent allowed by law. My phone lit up, and my inbox was flooded within the hour. I have the privilege of serving as the CEO of B:Side Capital, a Small Business Administration (SBA) lender and certified community development financial institution, and the order had just put a large part of my organization directly in its crosshairs. I knew that come Monday morning, I would need to present a clear plan for my team and board members.

I knew that mission-based lenders wouldn’t escape the scrutiny of the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but I didn’t think that the CDFI fund would be targeted in such a dramatic manner. I didn’t have a plan in place for this move. Nobody did. What I had in its place was a code, and it turned a chaotic weekend into a sequence of decisions that had been explored long before the crisis hit.

I also teach leadership at Arizona State University, and from both the classroom and the boardroom, the same pattern is impossible to ignore: When real pressure arrives, the values we espouse are too vague to help. Concepts like “Integrity” or “People First” cannot tell you whether to cut staff, go public with your concerns or just quietly wait for the courts. Those words can sit alongside almost any decision without consequence, which is exactly why leaders who rely on them drift from their core beliefs.

What you need instead is a code: a short set of written commitments specific enough to be violated. I spent years studying leaders who navigated far worse than a bad news cycle, from the Roman Senate to the Depression-era Army, for my latest book on crisis-era leadership. The leaders who held in the face of crisis did not share a temperament or a strategy. They shared a moral architecture or code that held up under pressure. Their codes looked different, reflecting their unique backgrounds and perspectives, but they had one important thing in common: They were developed before the crisis hit. You can do the same by following these three simple steps.

Write a line specific enough to violate

State one thing you will not do regardless of what it costs you, and state it as a behavior, not a value. Platitudes like “I will not compromise my integrity” are useless; you can rationalize just about anything and convince yourself that your integrity remains unviolated. “I will not tell my team the business is fine when I know it is not” is different. It represents a real line in the sand. You either crossed it or you did not.

That weekend in March, my line was already written: I would not soften the truth with my team just to calm fears and placate them. Instead, I filmed a quick video telling the team, plainly, that we were facing an existential threat to part of our business, and that we would meet it methodically with our culture intact. It was uncomfortable, and part of me felt like I should have done more to soothe their nerves. However, I knew deep down that this approach represented the fastest path to finding an actual solution, and that is precisely what my team deserved.

Test your own line against the hardest situation you faced in the last two years. If it does not produce a clear answer, it is not specific enough yet.

Build the restraint before the offer arrives

Former President George Washington’s most consequential and lasting act was refusing power that no law required him to refuse. He could have been king, but he decided to take a different path years before the temptation showed up. That is the part that matters: The moment of maximum temptation is the worst possible time to be working out your principles for the first time. By then, the offer arrives dressed in arguments that almost always lead to justification.

Be wary of the temptation to do what feels good, for that instinct almost always betrays you. In the weeks after the order, there was a very real temptation to engage in public fight framing the battle as one of good against evil. This was nonsense, of course, but plenty of voices in our industry lashed out at the administration anyway. At times the pull to join them was real.

My team’s culture of restraint had been established and cultivated long before: We would not attack, and we would not let the response turn emotional. Instead, we worked our channels in Washington, engaging as constructively as we could to make the program’s value plain to the people who would decide its fate. You can do the same. Simply write down your non-negotiables before the pressure mounts, then tell it to someone who will hold you to it. A restraint kept private is only a preference.

Test your values every quarter

Leaders rarely fail in one dramatic moment. They fail one defensible decision at a time, each small compromise drawing them slightly further from the person they want to be. Seneca, the Stoic philosopher who ended up justifying the crimes of Nero’s court, is history’s sharpest warning that intelligence is no protection against drift.

The test that catches it is simple. Identify the person whose moral judgment you trust above your own, the one who would never let you get away with the comfortable version of the story or the easy way out. Then explain your hardest current decision to them, out loud or on paper, and look for the weak point: the place where the logic skips a step, or depends on them not asking the obvious question. That weak point is where character collapses and the drift lives.

Run this test quarterly, on a strict schedule, regardless of how the last 90 days felt. The test exists for the decisions that feel fine, because those are the ones eroding you.

There are two more components in the full framework, a growing edge and a transmission plan, and they matter. But the three above are the ones that carry you through a Friday night shock.

You cannot predict which black swan event will hit your business next. All you can do is trust that it will come. Prepare yourself this week by deciding who you will be when it does. Block out an evening, write your code in a language specific enough to test and hand a copy to someone who will hold you to it. The crisis will demand a code from you either way. The only question is whether you built it before the pressure arrived.

On the evening of Friday, March 14, 2025, the White House issued an executive order that listed the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund (CDFI) among federal entities to be eliminated to the maximum extent allowed by law. My phone lit up, and my inbox was flooded within the hour. I have the privilege of serving as the CEO of B:Side Capital, a Small Business Administration (SBA) lender and certified community development financial institution, and the order had just put a large part of my organization directly in its crosshairs. I knew that come Monday morning, I would need to present a clear plan for my team and board members.

I knew that mission-based lenders wouldn’t escape the scrutiny of the newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), but I didn’t think that the CDFI fund would be targeted in such a dramatic manner. I didn’t have a plan in place for this move. Nobody did. What I had in its place was a code, and it turned a chaotic weekend into a sequence of decisions that had been explored long before the crisis hit.

I also teach leadership at Arizona State University, and from both the classroom and the boardroom, the same pattern is impossible to ignore: When real pressure arrives, the values we espouse are too vague to help. Concepts like “Integrity” or “People First” cannot tell you whether to cut staff, go public with your concerns or just quietly wait for the courts. Those words can sit alongside almost any decision without consequence, which is exactly why leaders who rely on them drift from their core beliefs.

It’s easy to talk about values when every decision is straightforward and the numbers are strong. Purpose sounds good on a website and looks good in a pitch deck. But after building more than 22 companies through DRC Ventures, I have learned that values reveal themselves only under pressure, in the moments when the principled choice and the convenient one point in opposite directions.

That is where mission-driven leadership actually lives. Not in the statement you frame on the wall, but in the trade-offs you’re willing to make when nobody would fault you for taking the easier path. Here is how I try to lead when values and convenience collide.

Turn mission into daily decisions

A mission statement that only inspires is failing at its job. Values matter when they shape operations, strategy and the small decisions your team makes when you’re not in the room.

When I built the mission, vision and values for my companies, the hardest part was not making them aspirational. It was making them actionable. Anyone can write something lofty. The discipline lies in balancing ambition with practicality so that the words actually hold up against a budget, a deadline or a difficult call. I did not write them alone either. The process was collaborative and reflective, shaped by colleagues, family and stakeholders whose feedback kept the result grounded in a shared purpose rather than my own preferences.

Those statements now guide everything from the projects I take on to how I lead my team and show up in the communities we serve. That’s the difference between values you announce and values you apply.

Prioritize long-term trust over short-term convenience

Some of the most important decisions I’ve made have come at a real cost. For my products, choosing ingredients and materials that are ethically sourced and environmentally responsible is rarely the cheapest option. It slows things down, and it narrows margins. But every time I’ve chosen the harder, more principled path, it has strengthened the trust people place in what we’ve built.

That trust is not a soft benefit. It shows up on the balance sheet. Accenture reported that 62% of consumers say their purchasing decisions are driven by a company’s ethical values and authenticity. People can tell the difference between a brand that means what it says and one that is merely performing. To me, ethical leadership means weighing the long-term good over the immediate profit and recognizing that every decision touches employees, communities and future generations.

Use values as a filter for growth

Not every opportunity deserves your attention, even if it’s likely to be profitable. One of the most useful things values can do is help you say no. I measure every opportunity against our mission, and if it does not support our core focus on health, sustainability and transparency, we do not pursue it, no matter how attractive it looks in the moment.

This is where purpose earns its keep. Research from NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business found that products marketed as sustainable grew more than twice as fast as their conventional counterparts over a recent five-year stretch, even while carrying a price premium. When you commit to values that cost something, the market often rewards the consistency rather than punishing the price. That clarity is what keeps a company from chasing every passing trend.

It also helps you tell a passing trend from a real shift. Years ago, I saw the move toward clean and transparent wellness solutions before it became mainstream. What convinced me to commit was not the hype, but the consistency behind it. It was not a moment; it was a movement. I look for that same pattern now: consistency across regions, demographics and time. Longevity is usually tied to a real need, and the trends most worth pursuing tend to reflect a genuine gap or frustration that people are living with every day.

Build partnerships that reflect your purpose

The same filter applies to the people and organizations you choose to work with. The strongest collaborations I’ve been part of have been rooted in shared values, not just shared upside. When a partnership reflects what both sides actually stand for, it creates value that lasts well beyond a single campaign.

I run potential partnerships through a simple framework: passion, audience alignment, local impact and authentic fit. If a collaboration checks those boxes, it tends to serve both the business and the community it touches. And I always start by asking what I can give rather than what I can get. True partnerships uplift both groups, and the long-term relationships they create do far more than any one-time transaction ever could.

Values are built one decision at a time

Values become most visible in the moments when they cost you something: the cheaper supplier you turn down, the lucrative deal that does not fit, the trend you let pass. Those are the decisions customers remember and the ones that compound into a reputation.

Entrepreneurs who stay aligned with their mission, especially when it’s inconvenient to do so, build stronger brands and deeper trust than those who treat values as a marketing tool. Consistency is what turns purpose into credibility. Sustainable, purpose-driven growth is not the product of a single grand gesture. It is built the same way trust is: one honest decision at a time.

It’s easy to talk about values when every decision is straightforward and the numbers are strong. Purpose sounds good on a website and looks good in a pitch deck. But after building more than 22 companies through DRC Ventures, I have learned that values reveal themselves only under pressure, in the moments when the principled choice and the convenient one point in opposite directions.

That is where mission-driven leadership actually lives. Not in the statement you frame on the wall, but in the trade-offs you’re willing to make when nobody would fault you for taking the easier path. Here is how I try to lead when values and convenience collide.

Turn mission into daily decisions

A mission statement that only inspires is failing at its job. Values matter when they shape operations, strategy and the small decisions your team makes when you’re not in the room.

Ten years ago, Kelan and Brittany Kline faced a problem. The then-newlyweds were working jobs that left them with little time together and juggling about $40,000 in student loan debt. 

Their situation was hardly unusual: Americans ages 25 to 34 carry an average student loan balance of about $33,271, according to Federal Reserve data cited by CNBC.

The Klines met in high school in Rochester, New York, and began dating in ninth grade. Since those early days, they found jobs that yielded reliable paychecks: Kelan worked as a jail deputy and Brittany as an elementary school teacher. However, neither of them felt that they had much control over their money or their schedules. 

“We were working opposite shifts,” Kelan recently told Business Insider. “We never got to see each other.”

One evening, the couple decided to confront the pressure head-on over dinner. “We sat down and said, ‘This is not working,’” Kelan told Business Insider. “We kind of just had this brainstorm of, ‘What’s working? What’s not working? Where are our finances at?’”

That conversation became a turning point. The Klines started a personal finance blog, The Savvy Couple, in 2016. It later grew into a seven-figure online business and eventually gave both of them the option to leave their jobs.

The couple told Business Insider that their household net worth, including the estimated value of their businesses, investments and primary home, topped $1 million in 2020. 

How they did it

For the Klines, financial independence did not start with investing more or cutting every expense. It started with defining what they wanted their lives to look like and creating a plan to make it happen.

If we could wave a magic wand, what would our ideal lifestyle look like? Kelan asked at the time. When they tried to articulate their “ideal lifestyle,” they found that they both wanted more time together and flexibility. 

“I was after time freedom,” Kelan said. “I was so sick and tired of someone else telling me when to come to work, forced overtime and denying my vacation.”

Brittany added that “getting on the same page is what made us successful.”

The couple brainstormed how to get more time freedom. They settled on a website. “With an online business, it’s unlimited scalability because you’re reaching the entire world,” Kelan said.

The couple ultimately chose to start a personal finance blog, drawing on their existing interests and experience. Brittany had long been focused on budgeting and saving, while Kelan had tried side hustles, including buying and reselling products on eBay.

The business did not take off immediately. It took nearly a year for the blog to generate any revenue at all, and even then, earnings for the first year totaled just $50.

Since then, their revenue hit $1.3 million in 2023 and $1.1 million in 2024, per Business Insider. 

Kelan’s advice for future entrepreneurs is that they should start their businesses before they feel ready. “The action-takers are money-makers,” he said.

Ten years ago, Kelan and Brittany Kline faced a problem. The then-newlyweds were working jobs that left them with little time together and juggling about $40,000 in student loan debt. 

Their situation was hardly unusual: Americans ages 25 to 34 carry an average student loan balance of about $33,271, according to Federal Reserve data cited by CNBC.

The Klines met in high school in Rochester, New York, and began dating in ninth grade. Since those early days, they found jobs that yielded reliable paychecks: Kelan worked as a jail deputy and Brittany as an elementary school teacher. However, neither of them felt that they had much control over their money or their schedules.