In our final episode of 2023, we sit down with Dan Shugar, founder and CEO of Nextracker, Inc. (NASDAQ: NXT), a leading provider of intelligent, integrated solar tracker and software solutions used in utility-scale and distributed generation solar projects globally. With over 30 years of experience in the field, Dan has been a driving force in advancing climate tech solutions in the U.S. and around the world. In the conversation with Gil, Dan reflects on Nextracker's incredible success over the past ten years, including its successful IPO earlier this year; they talked at length about the company's steadfast customer-focused mindset and how that has driven so many industry-first solar tracker innovations in their mission to transition the world to affordable, renewable power. Dan also talked about Nextracker's remarkable initiatives with U.S. manufacturing expansions over the past three years and the importance of public policy engagement for our industry. He also touched on a few non-U.S. markets that are key to his optimism for the future of solar power. We even found time at the end to have fun talking about great guitar music and his new musical products venture, AmpMojo.
In our final episode of 2023, we sit down with Dan Shugar, founder and CEO of Nextracker, Inc. (NASDAQ: NXT), a leading provider of intelligent, integrated solar tracker and software solutions used in utility-scale and distributed generation solar projects globally. With over 30 years of experience in the field, Dan has been a driving force in advancing climate tech solutions in the U.S. and around the world.
In the conversation with Gil, Dan reflects on Nextracker's incredible success over the past ten years, including its successful IPO earlier this year; they talked at length about the company's steadfast customer-focused mindset and how that has driven so many industry-first solar tracker innovations in their mission to transition the world to affordable, renewable power. Dan also talked about Nextracker's remarkable initiatives with U.S. manufacturing expansions over the past three years and the importance of public policy engagement for our industry. He also touched on a few non-U.S. markets that are key to his optimism for the future of solar power. We even found time at the end to have fun talking about great guitar music and his new musical products venture, AmpMojo.
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Nextracker, Inc.
Episode recorded December 8, 2023.
Email your feedback to Chad, Gil, and Hilary at climatepositive@hasi.com or tweet them to @ClimatePosiPod.
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Dan: It's incumbent on all of us to really engage and lean in, evangelize our story, which is a great story. Everyone wins under our story. Costs are reduced for energy consumers. Jobs are created. Energy independence is advanced
Gil: In our final episode of 2023, we sit down with Dan Shugar, founder and CEO of Nextracker Inc, a leading provider of intelligent, integrated solar tracker and software solutions used in utility-scale and distributed generation solar projects globally. With over 30 years of experience in the field, Dan has been a driving force in advancing climate tech solutions in the U.S. and around the world
In our conversation, Dan reflects on Nextracker's incredible success over the past ten years, including its successful IPO earlier this year, we talked at length about the company's steadfast customer-focused mindset and how that has driven so many industry-first solar tracker innovations in their mission to transition the world to affordable, renewable power. Dan also talked about Nextracker's remarkable initiatives with U.S. manufacturing expansions over the past three years and the importance of public policy engagement for our industry. He also touched on a few non-U.S. markets that are also key to his optimism for the future of solar power. We even found time at the end to have a bit of fun talking about great guitar music, and his new musical products venture, AmpMojo.
I hope you enjoy this episode with one of the clean energy industry's most brilliant and passionate CEOs. So, with that, here is my conversation with Dan.
Gil: Dan, welcome to Climate Positive.
Dan: Thanks so much for inviting us to participate.
Gil: Our pleasure. To kick things off, I understand you just celebrated Nextracker's 10-year anniversary. You had a big event last night, and you also won a big award, the Trailblazer of the Year at the Platts Global Energy Awards. I guess I'd ask you, how are you thinking about both milestones?
Dan: We were very honored to be recognized by Platts, Gil. Look, the 10-year celebration with the company is sort of a milestone of what the team's been able to accomplish in furthering our mission to make solar the number one source of power in the world. What's happened is, since we started the company, if you went back 10 years ago, coal was still over 40% of national energy generation. Today, it's under 15%.
Gil: Amazing.
Dan: Solar is the number one source of power being installed in the United States and overseas. At Nextracker, we have a very strong platform of projects and customers, both in the States and overseas. What's truly amazing is the US Energy Information Administration, which historically has been very conservative on solar and massively under-forecast the growth of solar. Guess what? EIA, their base plan, has solar being the number one source of energy generation, not capacity, higher bar energy generation, in the United States in 10 years. Solar will be number one. They have, for the next five years, solar at a 26% annually compounded growth rate.
Do I believe that? Yes. Nextracker's had over the prior five years, a 30% CAGR. It sounds in the realm of doable. It's very exciting. We're at the 10-year celebration. We've delivered well over 80 gigawatts of power globally to dozens of countries around the world. We couldn't be more excited about that milestone.
Gil: I want to talk about your customers, too, because I understand you had the privilege of having a bunch of them in town to celebrate the anniversary last night and perhaps today. Why do they choose to do business with you as we sit here in December 2023 versus the competition?
Dan: I really appreciate that. First, we have the Solar Dream Team at Nextracker. Six of my six co-founders from when I founded the company 10 years ago are still with us today. We have well over 20 years average experience of the people on our leadership team. We've been in the shoes of the customers. We'd like to say that when you're in a conversation with a customer, there's one mouth and two ears. We really try to listen to the customer. Then, in fact, just this morning, we had an event at my home. We had one of the leading developers, one of the most sophisticated developers in the industry here.
We were speaking about the next series of projects we're doing that incorporate features that the customer asked us to develop. What we don't do is go off in an ivory tower and conceive something in a vacuum and then unveil our masterpiece in front of the customer. What we do is we try to work with them as we're conceiving new features or responding to specific issues they have or opportunities to create value and develop partnerships. Then we execute on those. I'll share with you our secret sauce in one word. It's called ICE-T. What does that mean? ICE-T stands for, for us, innovation and innovation that delivers value for customers.
Customers is the second point. Execution to then fulfill that in team. It sounds like a catch word, but it's not. If you go around and talk to companies and get in there and ask employees, "What's a company strategy?" They don't know. At Nextracker, they do because it's basically one word. Then we cascade specific initiatives down that roll into these very core principles. We stay focused on that, eye on the prize. That's why customers reward us with their trust and their business.
Gil: It's so clear that the customer focus mindset, it can be a bit cliche, but it's so clear that it's central to your DNA as a person and as a company. It resonated a lot with me. I think about our. Unfortunately, we don't have a great acronym like ICE-T, but we have very simple three values. One of them is, it's not particularly corporate, it's just solve client problems. It's so elegant, it's just like be obsessed with your customers and solve their problems. You're probably not that surprised that not every financial investor is always thinking about, "How can I solve client problems?" I applaud you for that. Let's step back, I think, to the company, alluded to some of the success and the great year it's been.
In February, you achieved what I think is the largest IPO on Nasdaq and NYSE for clean energy stocks this year. Your shares have performed very well. I don't have the exact number in front of me since the IPO, certainly benefiting from strong earnings and leadership. What do you attribute to that successful first year as a publicly traded company, particularly in light of what are real headwinds for the solar industry and a lot of pressure on solar and other renewable energy stocks this year?
Dan: Yes, I appreciate that question, Gil. At the time we did the IPO in February, it was the largest IPO that had been done since October. The market had been really significantly closed. We exercised a lot of restraint in terms of the expectations we created. We want to make sure that we built our plan to be able to perform despite unknowns that might happen. Our teams executed on those, our plan, and we have performed. Basically, in the quarter since we went public, we've exceeded our revenue and our earnings targets, and we've been able to increase our plan for the year. You call that meeting and beating targets.
I really think that comes down to discipline. When we were out speaking to customers prior to the IPO in what are called test of order meetings, we heard a very clear message from the investment community that they really liked our story. They really liked the company history and the financial performance. They were really imploring us to be the adult in the room that achieves our plan and meets and beats that. Because a number of other companies had underperformed. Part of our mission is to make clean energy the number one source of power in the world. In order to do that, we need to grow. In order to grow, our industry needs more capital.
In order to attract more capital, it needs to be a good investment vehicle and deliver returns reliably. We think it's important for Nextracker and important to the industry. There's other high-performing companies, for example, Quanta Services is a public company. They have a very strong offering in EPCs, and they've been performing, and some others have. We really wanted to demonstrate both for the Nextracker investors, but also for the solar industry.
Gil: [crosstalk]
Dan: Yes. That'll help attract more capital and enable us to grow.
Gil: In this back to the point, it's not all rosy out there and although it's getting better, right? Supply chain snags and trade were tough on the overall US utility scale solar installations last year, but they've really bounced back in 2023. Just yesterday, SEIA, where you sit on the board, announced that the US has added 6.5 gigawatts of new generating capacity this year, solar, which is a 35% year-over-year increase and solar is expected to have a record 33 gigawatts by the end of the year this year. A great year for the segment. We talked a little bit earlier, besides EIA, they're finally coming around with good projections. What makes you so bullish about '24 and beyond for the broader segment at large?
Dan: If you look at the, there's a lot of headwinds people talk about. interest rates are higher, there's been inflation, there's delays-
Gil: Interconnection.
Dan: -on interconnection, there's equipment lead times. Are all those things true? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. No question about it. Look at the tailwinds that we have. Six quarters ago, everyone for the US was modeling a 10% investment tax credit. Guess what? It's 30% for everybody and 40% if you can get, or more if you can hit certain domestic content provisions, which we're seeing in some projects. Nextracker supports customers that need high domestic content because we've massively expanded our US supply chain, and we can unpack that later if you're--
Gil: Yes, I got a couple of questions on that.
Dan: We'll come back before we move on. Just to finish the answer to your question, Gil. That's thing one. It's the best policy environment ever for renewables from that standpoint. Number two, as you mentioned, if you went back a year ago, there were huge constraints on availability of solar panels for the US. What's happened is, it's still a thing, an issue, a bit of a headwind, but it's largely alleviated because there's been significant expansion of US manufacturing capacity and existing manufacturers like First Solar that have two new factories under construction in the United States, and they're expanding at one of their existing factories.
You have additional US suppliers. There've been 50 announcements of US capacity, and you have some overseas suppliers that have set up completely outside of China for an A to Z supply chain and that's also alleviated the situation. Those are significant tailwinds. The industry growth is evidenced by-- in our case, we've had very strong growing backlog. As part of our earnings calls, we announced at the end of March that we were at a 2.6 billion backlog, which was up 90% from the year prior on our last earnings call. The subsequent earnings call, we said it was at 3 billion, and then the last earnings call, we said it was well over 3 billion.
High-performing companies are seeing growth. It's incumbent on all of us to execute and also to articulate all the benefits that our industry is providing to places we operate. In the US, we're creating tens of thousands of new jobs, we're lowering costs for customers, we're advancing energy independence, and we're decoupling globally from petrostates.
Gil: Yes. Let me just come to the manufacturing piece in particular, a little more on the supply chain, and this has been a big year for Nextracker in terms of really leaning into the US manufacturing base. Correct me if I'm wrong on the number, but Nextracker has opened over a dozen new manufacturing lines from all over the US, from Pittsburgh to Las Vegas, just since the start of '22. In doing so, you're of course reducing shipping distance and addressing those supply chain uncertainties, but you're also increasing the demand for domestic steel.
Tell us just a bit more about the significance of your investments in public manufacturing, those openings. You've talked about the strategy, but anything else that just comes to mind on what an incredible year of expansions and openings are in terms of where you're doing your manufacturing?
Dan: Thanks, Gil. We've always had manufacturing capacity in the US, but what we did was, it wasn't just last year, but we actually made the decision to radically expand our capacity almost three years ago now, well before the IRA.
Gil: Timely decision, though, and the right decision.
Dan: We started this conversation talking about customers. This was a customer thing. Because we were having a very difficult time, as all companies were, getting materials through ports when the supply chain efficiency went off the rails. You had 90 ships off the port of Long Beach, the largest port in the United States. It was taking a month or two to get materials landed and out of port, blah blah. We have a very, very strong international presence we're making in dozens of countries around the world, including the US, but we just decided at that moment, before there was any policy support, we were going to do what we needed to do to be able to deliver on time, deliver on schedule.
I want to be clear about something also. Nextracker doesn't own any manufacturing facilities. We're like Apple. we work with manufacturing partners to make our products. We work with both proven partners in the States and abroad to bring capacity to the United States. We work with new providers that we hadn't worked with previously. Great US companies that we worked with. We catalyzed 15 or more factories across the United States in geographically optimized regions to build up this capacity. Now, something we did not fully appreciate that has been a huge benefit when we started this build out was how much cleaner the US steel is than the overseas steel.
The reason for this is very simple. At the highest level, the overseas steel, about 80% of it comes from what's called the basic oxygen process, which is essentially like a blast furnace that uses products from coal and so forth, which pollutes about two tons of CO2 per ton of steel produced. By contrast, the US 80% of the US steel is produced using an electric arc furnace process, which uses this raw material, predominantly scrap steel, and recycled steel. For example, in the automotive industry, if they stamp a car door or hood from a sheet of steel, about 30% of the material ends up as clean scrap. You can just remelt it and reuse it.
That kind of steel that's made predominantly in the US has an order of magnitude lower CO2 per ton of steel. The best plants are in the neighborhood of 0.2 tons of CO2 per ton of steel instead of 2 tons. We cultivated relationships with great US companies like Steel Dynamics, US Steel and Nucor to then align our fabricating capacity with their best in class plants and then have material for those plants be geographically optimized and create capacity for those that then also align with our customer demand. For example, in May of this year, we opened a new facility in Memphis, Tennessee. We had a great public opening. It started with our customer, Silicon Ranch Corporation, which is one of the top developers in the-
Gil: [crosstalk]
Dan: -southeast, fantastic, innovative company. Basically, we announced our second volume commitment agreement. In this case, it was a 3-gigawatt agreement serving many projects for them in that region. That was a customer. Then we had a fabricator, a company called Metalogalva, a European company, relocate some existing equipment they had for us in Portugal to start up a facility which is bespoke, dedicated for an extractor in Memphis in a building that had not been used for manufacturing many years right on the Mississippi River. Then it's located about a 45-minute drive from a US steel facility called the Big River Steel Plant, which is one of the cleanest plants in operation.
We're using that super clean electric arc furnace steel in this facility to serve Silicon Ranch and other customers. We have this end-to-end model. We have demand, fabrication capacity and raw material in this really nice--
Gil: Hub.
Dan: Yes. It's an ecosystem that puts demand with raw material and talent. We're able to basically de-risk and also lower costs because it's optimized, and the steel is made in one place, it's galvanized in one place, and then it's fabricated nearby, and it goes to the project sites nearby instead of making stuff in Timbuktu and shipping it over, with diesel on a ship and then putting it on a truck or whatever.
Gil: We can't go any longer in this conversation without talking about the fantastic products a bit. Let's do that now. Nextracker's intelligent, integrated solar tracker and software solutions. Tell me how they tell they optimize performance for utility scale solar plants. I want to challenge you. I think most of our listeners probably know what a solar tracker is. I always try to broaden the reach of our audience here. Folks are just coming in the industry and want to learn more. I'm going to challenge you, give me in layman's terms, what a solar tracker is and how it functions. do you have a favorite metaphor or analogy to unpack it?
Dan: Mother Nature invented trackers a long time before.
Gil: Pretty good, yes.
Dan: We have a sun.
Gil: Biomimicry.
Dan: Exactly. If you have a sunflower, it faces east in the morning, and in the afternoon, it's facing west. By following the sun, you can get 30%, 35% more energy on a surface. Biomimicry, I've never pronounced that word, but I'll work on that offline. It's a great one. I love that. Thanks for that.
Gil: It's a buzzword. I don't know if that's a hot buzzword anymore, but I remember it from a few years ago.
Dan: Look, back, literally, in the 1980s, when I was working at PG&E, we were thinking about how to really optimize photovoltaic plant performance. We tested two axis trackers, one axis trackers, tilted one axis trackers, stationary systems, bifacial even, BACnet, believe it or not. I had the great fortune of working with Howard Wenger then, and Howard today is our president. I've worked with Howard in 4 solar companies over the last 33 years.
Gil: Yes, SunPower legend, yes, no question.
Dan: Yes, he's amazing. Howard had actually pioneered performance simulation software that modeled how solar power plants worked and was publishing all this stuff in the '80s and early '90s. We sort of analyzed all the options and down-selected to horizontal single-axis trackers as really the killer app. In 1991, with some co-authors, we published the backtracking algorithm as a concept to further improve the yield in single-axis trackers. We've been thinking about this stuff for a really, really, really long time.
Gil: How many patents are we talking about here?
Dan: At Nextracker, we have over 400 patents, either issued or pending. Those span innovation categories of mechanical, electronics and controls, and software, and with a nice spread in each one. What happened was, so in my prior company, when I was at PowerLight, which we then merged with SunPower, we hadn't invented the idea of tracking. After Mother Nature, people in the industry, there were some early trackers in the '60s and '70s. We didn't invent the idea, but we sure commercialized it. We had the first multi-megawatt single-axis trackers out there in the industry at scale. We did the world's first 10-megawatt project that was in 2004 in Germany.
We developed the California Valley Solar Ranch project, a 300-megawatt project. That was all on single-axis trackers. We're building these projects. When we started, all the legacy stuff we had built way back in the day, we used a linked row technology, which was the right choice then because what we did was-- There weren't digital control and distributed controllers and wireless mesh networks. All that tech didn't exist back then. We used old-school controllers and mechanical systems to interconnect these. They moved like a Venetian blind. All the systems were parallel. That works, it's reliable. We built a lot of stuff and some of our old plants are performing great.
Gil: That's exactly what we want to hear in this business. No, because I want to ask you about-- it's not just tracking the sun anymore. I saw the Hail Horizon solution. [unintelligible 00:23:53] Go ahead.
Dan: Yes. I'll come to it. I'll come to it. The point is, trackers and horizontal tracking really is the killer app. When we started Nextracker, having built many dozens of plants, probably hundreds of plants around the world and operated them. In my prior company, we also ran basically an O&M and operation center. When we started Nextracker, I only had one requirement. It had to be an independent row tracker to basically decouple the tracker from mechanical connections in the field because that allowed us to navigate through the system, to be able to deal with undulating terrain, to be able to do vegetation management, cleaning, and then that unleashed.
Then we had a brilliant CTO join, Alex Au, came in and he invented this balance tracker with a self power tracking system. You don't need utility power to run it. If there's something that you were mentioning, hail or extreme weather, and the utility power goes down, we can still control the tracker because we have integrated batteries and things like that. That unleashed a lot of innovation. Then we were able to take the backtracking technology we developed back in the early '90s to the next level to be able to really optimize the angle of panels as you go up and down hills and things like that. The hail thing was a customer-driven requirement. I'll tell you the story.
Gil: Yes. Something like Texas or Kansas to get a lot of hail down there, right? I don't know. Give me it.
Dan: Yes, I'll try to keep it brief for my answers, Gil. We had a customer in our office about three and a half years ago that had a system that suffered over a $70 million event-
Gil: Holy moly.
Dan: -on a different tracker, someone else's tracker out in West Texas. As he was speaking, we conceived the idea, "Hey, we can have a single button that is activated that broadcasts with high urgency to all the track--" You could imagine tens of thousands of trackers on a multi-square-mile site that receive these signals almost instantaneously and within a minute or two or go to a safe stow angle of 60 degrees. We commercialized that, we had it up and running within a couple of quarters. What we announced at the last show a couple of months ago was taking that to the next level called Hail Pro. There's a great video on the Nextracker.
Gil: Yes, I watched that. That was intense. I'll put that in the show notes when we put the episode out. That stow angle and alerts your phone. I don't know, somewhere on your system and your remote controlling it.
Dan: The reality is weather has gotten more extreme with the heating up of the atmosphere, and that's just a fact. Insurance costs have gone up and people have built a lot in hail regions, so we wanted to develop a range of technologies to mitigate the risk and help owners operate these plants cost-effectively.
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Gil: We talked about the IRA. We could talk about that a bit. Broadly, I know from following you that you are very passionate about the renewables industry, engaging in a big way on policy advocacy as we've grown and matured certainly. I think that's probably a large part of the reason you're on the board of SEIA and ACP that my boss, Susan Nikki, also serves. Tell me what's driving that passion for this part of the job. I think I know the answer here, but is the industry doing enough on this front? If not, what do we need to do more of on the policy, engagement, and advocacy front?
Dan: It's incumbent on all of us to really engage and lean in, evangelize our story, which is a great story. Everyone wins under our story. Costs are reduced for energy consumers. Jobs are created. Energy independence is advanced. Not to overemphasize this, but we've seen a lot of bad things happening around the world in wars and other things. The majority of the conflicts are either about oil or funded by oil. We have the opportunity to really win at all of the above. It's up to us to evangelize this and really support representatives and folks in office that support clean energy.
This should be bipartisan stuff. A lot of the support for renewable energy does span across the political spectrum, but it's incumbent on us to go out and talk about the benefits of our industry. We do spend time doing that. Recently, I launched a series of fun videos, they're a minute or two, the conversations with [crosstalk]
Gil: You're right, at the dinner table with the naysayers, right? Tell us about that.
Dan: Right. I sat next to this guy at a wedding and he's like, "Hey, all the solar panels come from China, and solar is not reliable. What about when the sun goes down? Why aren't we doing more nuclear?" Those kinds of things. There are great answers to each of those questions, and so I created this little video series. We need to really step up on our communication. We need to step up to ensure the folks that are going to support clean energy or not put roadblocks in our way or overly support more expensive technologies like nuclear or coal that also have issues that we see clean energy happen in our industry. It's incumbent on all of us.
Gil: You mentioned the fossil fuel industry. I think I can assume we're both students of their influence over the many decades and impeding climate action. What's your take on where we stand today, particularly as we read headlines coming out of COP28 in Dubai? Which unfortunately, is hosted by a petrostate oil minister. Any hot takes on the dominant force still in the global energy industry?
Dan: I think, look, ultimately we win because we have tech that's just significantly lower cost, that's much faster to install, and it's financeable with less risk. One thing that was very encouraging that I saw out of there was the focus on the methane reduction-
Gil: [crosstalk]
Dan: -which is a tremendous bang for your buck. Folks signing up to measure methane that's created with oil and gas development and production and then reduce it, which is very affordable. Here's some stuff people don't know. Do you know the US produces more oil than Saudi Arabia?
Gil: I did know that, but I'm weird. It's so infuriating that that fact isn't known, that we're an exporter of oil.
Dan: Look. US is at the highest level of oil and gas production that we ever have been by a significant margin. Yes, you can afford to measure methane and make sure when you drill a well-
Gil: That's right.
Dan: -that you do it properly. I think, Gil, we've spoken a lot about the US, but if it's okay, I'd like to give a sense of what's happening abroad.
Gil: Please. You're a global company. Give me the perspective beyond our borders.
Dan: Very excited about what's happening globally in renewables and solar. Canada put a 30% ITC into place a few quarters ago, and we're seeing the market take off up there. Because solar panels are bifacial now, they can make power from both sides. It's great. There's snow on the ground. Great. You're making the reflections, helping the solar down in Latin America, where Nextracker's been the number one provider for a number of years. We're seeing a number of countries down there really take solar forward.
Gil: How about India? India is booming, right?
Dan: India is rocking with solar. It's fantastic. We've been in India since I founded the company. We have a very large office in Hyderabad. We have a legacy fleet of dozens of systems that have been the top performing systems in India. Very exciting about that. We've been rewarded with many gigawatts of new projects that we're fulfilling today. We talked about everything we've done expanding our supply chain in the US. We've also expanded overseas markets. We work with our partners to expand in Brazil. We've also been expanding in India. We're able to have capacity in various regions to serve those regions, but also export, if that makes sense, including from the US.
We've exported from the US. We've seen these regions growing. Australia is another great story. They're growing. Australia, the Oceania region is growing. Africa is much earlier stage, but growing. Middle East, we've got some of the early large utility scale projects in the Middle East, huge projects happening in the Middle East. Yes, there's oil in the Middle East, but they're using renewables significantly in increasing amounts. We're really seeing a up and to the right. I think the last market I'd mentioned is Europe. After, Putin weaponized energy in the Ukraine War, we've seen Europe and the Nord Stream pipeline get blown up. We've seen Europe transitioning to much more renewables. We're very encouraged by the growth renewables overseas.
Gil: I just have a few more to wrap it up You have said that having a great company is like having a band. You want to give space to everyone, will contribute and listen to what is happening. Because we're going to talk about music, can you build on that? I assume this band analogy is inherently also about fostering innovation and creativity, but give me a little more color on that.
Dan: Sure. You want, not the loudest voice to win a conversation, but the best ideas to win a conversation in a company. We're also thinking a lot about succession planning. Not like I'm going anywhere. Because I have a blue line in my arm that looks like a vein, but if you cut it, silicone comes out. I'm not going anywhere. We want the next generation of leaders to come and really contribute. You need to provide space for them to do that. It's really interesting. Miles Davis was one of the greatest trumpeters of all time. He had this just incredible band, a five-piece band, and then a seven-piece band with Coltrane and all these great guys.
Then much later in his career, he had a band with all these young people, and they were out there doing it. People were asking him like, "Wow, what's up with all these young musicians in your band?" He's like, "You can [unintelligible 00:36:09]." Then you cultivate those skills and capabilities and those become your future band leaders down the road. We've had a very great retainage of talent at the company, very low turnover. It's through really leaning into the culture of the company and creating an environment where people can achieve their dreams and aspirations.
Gil: Love it. Let's turn to the rapid fire hot seat. As we close, I'm going to ask you to just say the first thing that comes to mind
Gil: Best hike you went on recently. I know you're a hiker.
Dan: Yes. I'm literally looking out the window. My favorite hike is-- I live in Pacifica, California, literally right out the door. There's just incredible views of the coast.
Gil: I know. That was my next question. What a cool little surf town. For anyone that isn't familiar, I used to go there. I used to go crabbing off the beautiful pier there and love that Sharp Park public course. Tell me about the hike there that you find a respite in.
Dan: I just love being outdoors. There's fantastic hiking and mountain biking. I do it here in Pacifica on the coast where I live in a little bit south of the San Francisco Bay, but also up in the mountains. Love that.
Gil: One more music question. You can probably see this Gretsch guitar. You correctly noted the Bigsby pickup there hanging. I think you're a better guitar player than me. I haven't been to one of your parties yet, but I'm pretty sure you're advanced. I play three chords. My question is, you may be familiar with Rolling Stone's greatest guitar list, and they just expanded. Who's your guitar idol as a player?
Dan: I love so many great guitar, but I love that old blues rock stuff. Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Johnny Winter. Then people like Jeff Beck took it to such a new level with great funk and rhythm and expression. I love all that stuff, but I also love classical music. I love Django Reinhardt and there's a lot of depth to jazz and where you can bring guitar. Actually, the thing I've been working on the last month is a classical piece.
Gil: Nice. You were telling me before we started recording, you're so into guitars, you've got a new venture. Tell me about that.
Dan: Yes. I just started a company called AmpMojo, which is a musical products company. Our first product is actually a overdrive pedal that has an integrated vacuum tube inside the pedal, real tube that overdrives the amplifier. The story of this company is it was during the pandemic early, I was playing guitar in my backyard. Over the fence, my neighbor yelled, "Hey, man, that sounds good." I didn't realize he was a musician. We started playing, and then he showed me a prototype of a pedal that he'd been building in his garage.
One thing led to another. We started manufacturing these in my garage, and now we're doing high volume production runs with really a next generation guitar effects, which is just a fantastic fun project to be involved with.
Gil: Oh, so cool. I hope to hear you play soon. I know you play out at the big shows, and I will have a better sense. Check out that top 100 Rolling Stone guitars list. My goal is to see as many of them that are still alive before I kick the bucket. When you see a great, you know it.
Dan: Hey Gil this has been a lot of fun.
Gil: Thank you.
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I'm Gil Jenkins.
And this is Climate Positive.