Podcasts about ygrene

Greg Saunders, CFO of Ygrene Energy Fund, joins us to discuss PACE financing and what asset-backed securities (ABS) investors like about the asset class, how Ygrene differentiates itself from competitors, how he foresees the PACE market changing in the coming months and years, given the increased focus on clean energy from the White House, what is really going to create scale in the PACE asset class, and how environmental, social and governance (ESG) plays into securitization.

With a burning desire to “get out into the world” and a growing passion for entrepreneurship, Stacey became an “accidental entrepreneur” at the age of 25, with a startup born out of her Harvard Business School assignment. After her first company raised millions of dollars, was acquired, and she went on to build several tech ventures, she felt that she was burning the candle at both ends. Stacey took a trip to India, where she immersed in the realm of wisdom traditions, collective wholeness, and the inner landscape. Ever since then, Stacey has integrated the notion of conscious leadership and authenticity into the world of business to co-found the Center of Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley, run for U.S. Congress, and build her latest venture Ygrene Energy Fund. -------------------------- >>TIME FRAME> ABOUT STACEY and MARIA > MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE> CONNECTED WITH 2TF > MUSIC

With a burning desire to “get out into the world” and a growing passion for entrepreneurship, Stacey became an “accidental entrepreneur” at the age of 25, with a startup born out of her Harvard Business School assignment. After her first company raised millions of dollars, was acquired, and she went on to build several tech ventures, she felt that she was burning the candle at both ends. Stacey took a trip to India, where she immersed in the realm of wisdom traditions, collective wholeness, and the inner landscape. Ever since then, Stacey has integrated the notion of conscious leadership and authenticity into the world of business to co-found the Center of Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley, run for U.S. Congress, and build her latest venture Ygrene Energy Fund. -------------------------- >>TIME FRAME> ABOUT STACEY and MARIA > MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE> CONNECTED WITH 2TF > MUSIC

The Treasury Team is fortunate to have Michael McCormick from Ygrene Energy Fund, Director of Capital Markets.   In this episode we discuss: The highlights of Michael’s career His advice that he’s learned over his career that he wishes he’d known at the beginning His approach to networking and relationships Capital markets and his advice to people interested in it The change in the treasury role in his perspective What Ygrene does The challenges of being in a PACE company

Some of the highlights of the show include The diplomacy that's required between software engineers and management, and why influence is needed to move projects forward to completion. Driving factors behind Ygrene's Kubernetes migration, which included an infrastructure bottleneck, a need to streamline deployment, and a desire to leverage their internal team of cloud experts. Management's request to ship code faster, and why it was important to the organization.  How the company's engineers responded to the request to ship code faster, and overcame disconnects with management. How the team obtained executive buy-in for a Kubernetes migration. Key cultural changes that were required to make the migration to Kubernetes successful. How unexpected challenges forced the team to learn the “depths of Kubernetes,” and how it helped with root cause analysis. Why the transition to Kubernetes was a success, enabling the team to ship code faster, deliver more value, secure more customers, and drive more revenue.  Links: HerdX: https://www.herdx.com/ Ygrene: https://ygrene.com/ Austin Twitter: https://twitter.com/_austbot Austin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/austbot/ Arnold's book on publisher site: https://www.packtpub.com/cloud-networking/the-kubernetes-workshop  Arnold's book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Kubernetes-Workshop-Interactive-Approach-Learning/dp/1838820752/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. My name is Emily Omier, and I am here with Austin Adams and Zack Arnold, and we are here to talk about why companies go cloud-native.Austin: So, I'm currently the CTO of a small Agrotech startup called HerdX. And that means I spend my days designing software, designing architecture for how distributed systems talk, and also leading teams of engineers to build proof-of-concepts and then production systems as they take over the projects that I've designed. Emily: And then, what did you do at Ygrene? Austin: I did the exact same thing, except for without the CTO title. And I also had other higher-level engineers working with me at Ygrene. So, we made a lot of technical decisions together. We all migrated to Kubernetes together, and Zack was a chief proponent of that, especially with the culture change. So, I focused on the designing software that teams of implementation engineers could take over and actually build out for the long run. And I think Zack really focused on—oh, I'll let Zack say what he focused on. [laughs].Emily: Go for it, Zach.Zach: Hello. I'm Zack. I also no longer work for Ygrene, although I have a lot of admiration and respect for the people who do. It was a fantastic company. So, Austin called me up a while back and asked me to think about participating in a DevOps engineering role at Ygrene. And he sort of said at the outset, we don't really know what it looks like, and we're pretty sure that we just created a position out of a culture, but would you be willing to embody it? And up until this point, I'd had cloud experience, and I had had software engineering experience, but I didn't really spend a ton of time focused on the actual movement of software from developer's laptops to production with as few hiccups, and as many tests, and as much safety as possible in between. So, I always told people the role felt like it was three parts. It was part IT automation expert, part software engineer, and then part diplomat. And the diplomacy was mostly in between people who are more operations focused. So, support engineers, project managers, and people who were on-call day in and day out, and being a go-between higher levels of management and software engineers themselves because there's this awkward, coordinated motion that has to really happen at a fine-grained level in order to get DevOps to really work at a company. What I mean by that is, essentially, Dev and Ops seem to on the surface have opposing goals, the operation staff, it's job is to maintain stability, and the development side's job is to introduce change, which invariably introduces instability. So, that dichotomy means that being able to simultaneously satisfy both desires is really a goal of DevOps, but it's difficult to achieve at an organizational level without dealing with some pretty critical cultural components. So, what do I spend my day on? The answer to that question is, yes. It really depends on the day. Sometimes it's cloud engineers. Sometimes it's QA folks, sometimes it's management. Sometimes I'm heads-down writing software for integrations in between tools. And every now and again, I get to contribute to open-source. So, a lot of different actual daily tasks take place in my position.Emily: Tell me a little bit more about this diplomacy between software engineers and management.Zach: [laughs]. Well, I'm not sure who's going to be listening in this amazing audience of ours, but I assume, because people are human, that they have capital O-pinions about how things should work, especially as it pertains to either software development lifecycle, the ITIL process of introducing change into a datacenter, into a cloud environment, compliance, security. There's lots of, I'll call them thought frameworks that have a very narrow focus on how we should be doing something with respect to software. So, diplomacy is the—well, I guess in true statecraft, it's being able to work in between countries. But in this particular case, diplomacy is using relational equity or influence, to be able to have every group achieve a common and shared purpose. At the end of the day, in most companies the goal is actually to be able to produce a product that people would want to pay for, and we can do so as quickly and as efficiently as possible. To do that, though, it again requires a lot of people with differing goals to work together towards that shared purpose. So, the diplomacy looks like, aside from just having way too many meetings, it actually looks like being able to communicate other thought frameworks to different stakeholders and being able to synthesize all of the different narrow-focused frameworks into a common shared, overarching process. So, I'll give you a concrete example because it feels like I just spewed a bunch of buzzwords. A concrete example would be, let's say in the common feature that's being delivered for ABC Company, for this feature it requires X number of hours of software development; X number of hours of testing; X number of hours of preparing, either capacity planning, or fleet size recommendations, or some form of operational pre-work; and then the actual deployment, and running, and monitoring. So, in the company that I currently work for, we just described roughly 20 different teams that would have to work together in order to achieve the delivery of this feature as rapidly as possible. So, the process of DevOps and the diplomacy of DevOps, for me looks like—aside from trying to automate as much as humanly possible and to provide what I call interface guarantees, which are basically shared agreements of functionality between two teams. So, the way that the developers will speak to the QA engineers is through Git. They develop new software, and they push it into shared code repositories, the way that the QA engineers will speak to people who are going to be handling the deployments—or at management in this particular case—is going to be through a well-formatted XML test file. So, providing automation around those particular interfaces and then ensuring that everyone's shared goals are met at the particular period of time where they're going to be invoked over the course of the delivery of that feature, is the “subtle art,”—air quotes, you can't see but—to me of DevOps diplomacy. That kind of help?Emily: Yeah, absolutely. Let's take, actually, just a little bit of a step back. Can you talk about what some of the business goals were behind moving to Kubernetes for Ygrene? Who was the champion of this move? Was it business stakeholders saying, “Hey, we really need this to change,” or engineering going to business stakeholders? Who needed a change. I believe that the desire for Kubernetes came from a bottleneck of infrastructure. Not so much around performance, such as the applications weren't performing due to scale. We had projected scale that we were coming to where it would cause a problem potentially, but it was also in the ease of deployment. It had a very operations mindset as Zack was saying, our infrastructure was almost entirely managed—of the core applications set—by outsourcing. And so, we depended on them to innovate, we depended on them to spin up new environments and services. But we also have this internal competing team that always had this cloud background. And so, what we were trying to do was lessen the time between idea to deployment by utilizing platforms that were more scalable, more flexible, and all the things that Docker gives with the Dev/Prod Parity, the ease of packaging your environment together so that small team can ship an entire application. And so, I think our main goal with that was to take that team that already had a lot of cloud experience, and give them more power to drive the innovation and not be bottlenecked just by what the outsourcing team could do. Which, by the way, just for the record, the outsourcing team was an amazing team, but they didn't have the Kubernetes or cloud experience, either. So, in terms of a hero or champion of it, it just started as an idea between me and the new CTO, or CIO that came in, talking about how can we ship code faster? So, one of the things that happened in my career was the desire for a rapid response team which, that sounds like a buzzword or something, but it was this idea that Ygrene was shipping software fairly slow, and we wanted to get faster. So, really the CIO, and one of the development managers, they were the really big champions of, “Hey, let's deliver value to the business faster.” And they had the experience to ask their engineers how to make that happen, and then trust Zack and I through this process of delivering Kubernetes, and Istio, and container security, and all these different things that eventually got implemented.Emily: Why do you think shipping code faster matters?Austin: I think, for this company, why it mattered was the PACE financing industry is relatively new. And while financing has some old established patterns, I feel like there's still always room for innovation. If you hear the early days of the Bridgewater Financial Hedge Fund, they were a source of innovation and they used technology to deliver new types of assets and things like that. And so, our team at Ygrene was excellent because they wanted to try new things. They wanted to try new patterns of PACE financing, or ways of getting in front of the customer, or connections with different analytics so they could understand their customer better. So, it was important to be able to try things, experiment to see what was going to be successful. To get things out into the real world to know, okay, this is actually going to work, or no, this isn't going to work. And then, also, one of the things within financing is—especially newer financing—is there's a lot of speed bumps along the way. Compliance laws can come into effect, as well as working with cities and governments that have specialized rules and specialized things that they need—because everyone's an expert when it comes to legislation, apparently—they decide that they need X, and they give us a time when we have to get it done. And so, we actually have another customer out there, which is the legislative bodies. So, they have to get the software—their features that are needed within the financing system out by certain dates, or we're no longer eligible to operate in those counties. So, one of it was a core business risk, so we needed to be able to deliver faster. The other was how can we grow the business?Emily: Zach, this might be a question for you. Was there anything that was lost in translation as you were explaining what engineering was going to do in order to meet this goal of shipping code faster, of being more agile, when you were talking to C level management? How did they understand, and did anything get lost in translation?Zach: One of the largest disconnects, both on a technical and from a high level speaking to management issue I had was explaining how we were no longer going to be managing application servers as though they were pets. When you come from an on-premise setup, and you've got your VMware ESXi, and you're managing virtual machines, the most important thing that you have is backups because you want to keep those machines exactly as they are, and you install new software on those machines. When Kubernetes says, I'm going to put your pods wherever they fit on the cluster, assuming it conforms with the scheduling pattern, and if a node dies, it's totally fine, I'm going to spin a new one up for you, and move pods around and ensure that the application is exactly as you had stated—as in, it's in its desired state—that kind of thinking from switching from infrastructure as pets to infrastructure as cattle, is difficult to explain to people who have spent their careers in building and maintaining datacenters. And I think a lot—well, it's not guaranteed that this is across the board, but if you want to talk about a generational divide, people that usually occupy the C level office chairs are familiar with—in their heyday of their career—a datacenter-based setup. In a cloud-based consumption model where it really doesn't matter—I can just spin up anything anywhere—when you talk about moving from reasoning about your application as the servers it comprises and instead talking about your application as the workload it comprises, it becomes a place where you have to really, really concretely explain to people exactly how it's going to work that the entire earth will not come crashing down if you lose a server, or if you lose a pod, or if a container hiccups and gets restarted by Kubernetes on that node. I think that was the real key one. And the reason why that actually became incredibly beneficial for us is because once we actually had that executive buy-off when it came to, while I still may not understand, I trust that you know what you're doing and that this infrastructure really is replaceable, it allowed us to get a little bit more aggressive with how we managed our resources. So, now using Horizontal Pod Autoscaling, using the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler, and leveraging Amazon EC2 Spot Fleets, we were only ever paying for the exact amount of infrastructure that was required to run our business. And I think that is usually the thing that translates the best to management and non-technical leadership. Because when it comes down to if I'm aware that using this tool, and using a cloud-native approach to running my application, I am only ever going to be paying for the computational resource that I need in that exact minute to run my business, then the budget discussions become a lot easier, because everyone is aware that this is your exact run-rate when it comes to technology. Does that make sense? Emily: Absolutely. How important was having that executive buy-in? My understanding is that a lot of companies, they think that they're going to get all these savings from Kubernetes, and it doesn't always materialize. So, I'm just curious, it sounds like it really did for Ygrene.Zach: There was two things that really worked well for us when this transformation was taking place. The first was, Ygrene was still growing, so if the budget grew alongside of the growth of the company, nobody noticed. So, that was one really incredible thing that happened that, I think, now having had different positions in the industry, I don't know if I appreciated that enough because if you're attempting to make a cost-neutral migration to the Cloud, or to adopt cloud-native management principles, you're going to probably move too little, too late. And when that happens, you run the risk of really doing a poor job of adopting cloud-native, and then scrapping that project, because it never materialized the benefit, as you just described, that some people didn't experience. And the other benefit that we had, I think was the fact that because there were enough incredibly senior technical people—and again, I learned everything from these people—working with us, and because we were all, for the most part, on the same page when it came to this migration, it was easy to have a unified front with our management because every engineer saw the value of this new way of running our infrastructure and running our application. In one non—and this obviously helps with our engineers—one non-monetary benefit that helped really get the buy-in was the fact that, with Kubernetes, our on-call SEV-1 pages went down, I want to say, by over 40 percent which was insane because Kubernetes was automatically intervening in the case where servers went down. JVMs run out of memory, exceptions cause strange things, but a simple restart usually fixes the vast majority of them. Well, now Kubernetes was doing this and we didn't need to wake somebody up in order to keep the machine running.Emily: From when you started this transition to when you, I should say, when you probably left the company, but what were some of the surprises, either surprises for you, or surprises for other people in the organization?Austin: The initial surprise was the yes that we got. So, initially I pitched it and started talking about it, and then the culture started changing to where we realized we really needed to change, and bringing Zack on and then getting the yes from management was the initial surprise. And—Emily: Why was that a surprise?Austin: It was just surprising because, when you work as an engineer—I mean, none of us were C suite, or Dev managers, or anything. We were just highly respected engineers working in the HQ. So, it was just a surprise that what we felt was a semi-crazy idea at the time—because Kubernetes was a little bit earlier. I mean, EKS wasn't even a thing from Amazon. We ran our Kubernetes clusters from the hip, which is using kops, which is—kops is a great tool, but obviously it wasn't managed. It was managed by us, mainly by Zach and his team, to be honest. So, that was a surprise that they would trust a billion-dollar financing engine to run on the proposal of two engineers. And then, the next ones were just how much the single-server, vertical scaling, and depending on running on the same server was into our applications. So, as we started to look at the core applications and moving them into a containerized environment, but also into an environment that can be spun up and spun down, looking at the assumptions the application was making around being on the same server; having specific IP addresses, or hostnames; and things like that, where we had to take those assumptions out and make things more flexible. So, we had to remove some stateful assumptions in the applications, that was a surprise. We also had to enforce more of the idea of idempotency, especially when introducing Istio, and [00:21:44 retryable] connections and retryable logic around circuit breaking and service-to-service communication. So, some of those were the bigger surprises, is the paradigm shift between, “Okay, we've got this service that's always going to run on the same machine, and it's always going to have local access to its files,” to, “Now we're on a pod that's got a volume mounted, and there's 50 of them.” And it's just different. So, that was a big—[laughs], that was a big surprise for us.Emily: Was there anything that you'd call a pleasant surprise? Things that went well that you anticipated to be really difficult?Zach: Oh, my gosh, yes. When you read through Kubernetes for the first time, you tend to have this—especially if somebody else told you, “Hey, we're going to do this,” this sinking feeling of, “Oh my god, I don't even know nothing,” because it's so immense in its complexity. It requires a retooling of how you think, but there have been lots of open-source community efforts to improve the cluster lifecycle management of Kubernetes, and one such project that really helped us get going—do you remember this Austin?—was kops.Austin: Yep. Yep, kops is great.Zach: I want to say Justin Santa Barbara was the original creator of that project, and it's still open source, and I think he still maintains it. But to have a production-ready, and we really mean production-ready: it was private, everything was isolated, the CNI was provisioned correctly, everything was in the right place, to have a fully production-ready Kubernetes cluster ready to go within a few hours of us being able to learn about this tool in AWS was huge because then we could start to focus on what we didn't even understand inside of the cluster. Because there were lots of—Kubernetes is—there's two sides of it, and both of them are confusing. There's the infrastructure that participates in the cluster, and there's the actual components inside of the cluster which get orchestrated to make your application possible. So, not having to initially focus on the infrastructure that made up the cluster, so we could just figure out the difference between our butt and the hole in the ground, when it came to our application inside of Kubernetes was immensely helpful to us. I mean, there are a lot of tools these days that do that now: GKE, EKS, AKS, but we got into Kubernetes right after it went GA, and this was huge to help with that.Emily: Can you tell me also a little bit about the cultural changes that had to happen? And what were these cultural changes, and then how did it go?Zach: As Austin said, the notion of—I think a lot—and I don't want to offer this as a sweeping statement—but I think the vast majority of the engineers that we had in Seattle, in San Jose, and in Petaluma where the company was headquartered, I think, even if they didn't understand what the word idempotent meant, they understood more or less how that was going to work. The larger challenge for us was actually in helping our contractors, who actually made up the vast majority of our labor force towards the end of my tenure there, how a lot of these principles worked in software. So, take a perfect example: part of the application is written in Ruby on Rails, and in Ruby on Rails, there's a concept of one-off tasks called rake tasks. When you are running a single server, and you're sending lots of emails that have attachments, those attachments have to be on the file system. And this is the phrase I always said to people, as we refactor the code together, I repeated the statement, “You have to pretend this request is going to start on one server and finish on a different one, and you don't know what either of them are, ahead of time.” And I think using just that simple nugget really helped, culturally, start to reshape this skill of people because when you can't use or depend on something like the file system, or you can't depend on that I'm still on the same server, you begin to break your task into components, and you begin to store those components in either a central database or a central file system like Amazon S3. And adopting those parts of, I would call, cloud-native engineering were critical to the cultural adoption of this tool. I think the other thing was, obviously, lots of training had to take place. And I think a lot of operational handoff had to take place. I remember for, basically, a fairly long stretch of time, I was on-call along with whoever was also on-call because I had the vast majority of the operational knowledge of Kubernetes for that particular team. So, I think there was a good bit of rescaling and mindset shift from the technical side of being able to adopt a cloud-native approach to software building. Does that make sense?Emily: Absolutely. What do you think actually were some of the biggest challenges or the biggest pain points? Zach: So, challenges of cultural shift, or challenges of specifically Kubernetes adoption?Emily: I was thinking challenges of Kubernetes adoption, but I'm also curious about the cultural shift if that's one of the biggest pain points.Zach: It really was for us. I think—because now it wouldn't—if you wanted to take out Kubernetes and replace it with Nomad there? All of the engineers would know what you're talking about. It wouldn't take but whatever the amount of time it would to migrate your Kubernetes manifests to Nomad HCL files. So, I do think the rescaling and the mindset shift, culturally speaking, was probably the thing that helped solidify it from an engineering level. But Kubernetes adoption—or at least problems in Kubernetes adoption, there was a lot of migration horror stories that we encountered. A lot of cluster instability in earlier versions of Kubernetes prevented any form of smooth upgrades. I had to leave—it was with my brother's—it was his wedding, what was it—oh, rehearsal dinner, that's what it was. I had to leave his rehearsal dinner because the production cluster for Ygrene went down, and we needed to get it back up. So, lots of funny stories like that. Or Nordstrom did a really fantastic talk on this in KubeCon in Austin in 2017. But the [00:28:57 unintelligible] split-brain problem where suddenly the consensus in between all of the Kubernetes master nodes began to fail for one reason or another. And because they were serving incorrect information to the controller managers, then the controller managers were acting on incorrect information and causing the schedulers to do really crazy things, like delete entire deployments, or move pods, or kill nodes, or lots of interesting things. I think we unnecessarily bit off a little bit too much when it came to trying to do tricky stuff when it came to infrastructure. We introduced a good bit of instability when it came to Amazon EC2 Spot that I think, all things considered, I would have revised the decision on that. Because we faced a lot of node instability, which translated into application instability, which would cause really, really interesting edge cases to show up basically only in production.Austin: One of the more notable ones—and I think this is the symptom of one of the larger challenges was during testing, one of our project managers that also helped out in the testing side—technical project managers—which we nicknamed the Edge Case Factory, because she was just, anointed, or somehow had this superpower to find the most interesting edge cases, and things that never went wrong for anyone else always went wrong for her, and it really helped us build more robust software for sure, but there's some people out there with mutant powers to catch bugs, and she was one of them. We had two clusters, we had lower environment clusters, and then we had production cluster. The production cluster hosted two namespaces: the staging namespace, which is supposed to be an exact copy of production; and then the production namespace, so that you can smoke-test legitimate production resources, and blah blah blah. So, one time, we started to get some calls that, all of a sudden, people were getting the staging environment underneath the production URL. Zach: Yeah.Austin: And we were like, “Uh… excuse me?” It comes down to—we eventually figured it out. It was something within the networking layer. But it was this thing, as we rolled along, the deeper understanding of, okay, how does this—to use a term that Zack Arnold coined—this benevolent botnet, how does this thing even work, at the most fundamental and most detailed levels? And so, as problems and issues would occur, pre-production or even in production, we had to really learn the depths of Kubernetes. And I think the reason we had to learn it at that stage was because of how new Kubernetes was, all things considered. But I think now with a lot more of the managed systems, I would say it's not necessary, but it's definitely helpful to really know how Kubernetes works down in the depths. So, that was one of the big challenges was, to put it succinctly, when an issue comes up, knowing really what's going on under the hood, really, really helped us as we discovered and learned things about Kubernetes.Zach: And what you're saying, Austin, was really illuminated by the fact that the telemetry that we had in production was not sufficient, in our minds, at least until very recently, to be able to adequately capture all the data necessary to accurately do root cause analyses on particular issues. In early days, there was far too much root cause analysis by, “It was probably this,” and then we moved on. Now having actually taken the time to instrument tracing, to instrument metrics, to instrument logs with correlation, we used, eventually, Datadog, but working our way through the various telemetry tools to achieve this, we really struggled being able to give accurate information to stakeholders about what was really going wrong in production. And I think Austin was probably the first person in the headquarters side of the company—I'm not entirely certain about some of our satellite dev offices—but to really champion a data-driven way of actually running software. Which, it seems trivial now because obviously that's how a lot of these tools work out of the box. But for us, it was really like, “Oh, I guess we really do need to think about the HTTP error rate.” [laughs].Emily: So, taking another step back here, do you think that Ygrene got everything that it expected, or that it wanted out of moving to Kubernetes?Austin: I think we're obviously playing up some of the challenges that we had because it was our day-to-day, but I do believe that trust in the dev team grew, we were able to deploy code during the day, which we could have done that in the beginning, even with vertically scaled infrastructure, we would have done it with downtime, but it really was that as we started to show that Kubernetes and these cloud-native tools like Fluentd, Prometheus, Istio, and other things like that when you set them up properly, they do take a lot of the risk out. It added trust in the development team. It gave more responsibility to the developers to manage their own code in production, which is the DevOps culture, the DevOps mindset. And I think in the end, we were able to ship code faster, we were able to deliver more value, we were able to go into new jurisdictions and markets quicker, to get more customers, and to ultimately increase the amount of revenue that Ygrene had. So, it built a bridge between the data science side of things, the development side of things, the project management side of things, and the compliance side of things. So, I definitely think they got a lot out of trusting us with this migration. I think that were we to continue, probably Zack and I even to this day, we would have been able to implement more, and more, and more. Obviously, I left the company, Zach left the company to pursue other opportunities, but I do believe we left them in a good spot to take this ecosystem that was put in place and run with it. To continue to innovate and do experiments to get more business.Zach: Emily, I'd characterize it with an anecdote. After our Chief Information Officer left the company, our Chief Operating Officer actually took over the management of the Technology Group, and aside from basically giving dev management carte blanche authority to do as they needed to, I think there was so much trust there that we didn't have at the beginning of our journey with technology and Ygrene. And it was characterized in, we had monthly calls with all of the regional account managers, which are basically our out-of-office sales staff. And generally, the project managers from our group would have to sit in those meetings and hear just about how terrible our technology was relative to the competition, either lacking in features, lacking in stability, lacking in design quality, lacking in user interface design, or way overdoing the amount of compliance we had to have. And towards the end of my tenure, those complaints dropped to zero, which I think was really a testament to the fact that we were running things stably, the amount of on-call pages went down tremendously, the amount of user-impacting production outages was dramatically reduced, and I think the overall quality of software increased with every release. And to be able to say that, as a finance company, we were able to deploy 10 times during the day if we needed to, and not because it was an emergency, but because it was genuinely a value-added feature for customers. I think that that really demonstrated that we reached a level of success adopting Kubernetes and cloud-native, that really helped our business win. And we positioned them, basically, now to make experiments that they thought would work from a business sense we implement the technology behind it, and then we find out whether or not we were right.Emily: Let's go ahead and wrap up. We're nearing the top of the hour, but just two questions for both of you. One is, where could listeners find you or connect with you? And the second one is, do you have a can't-live-without engineering tool?Austin: Yeah, so I'll go first. Listeners can find me on Twitter @_austbot, or on LinkedIn. Those are really the only tools I use. And I can't really live without Prometheus and Grafana. I really love being able to see everything that's happening in my applications. I love instrumentation. I'm very data-driven on what's happening inside. So, obviously Kubernetes is there, but it's almost become that Kubernetes is the Cloud. I don't even think about it anymore. It's these other tools that help us monitor and create active monitoring paradigms in our application so we can deploy fast, and know if we broke something. Zach: And if you want to stay in contact with me, I would recommend not using Twitter, I lost my password and I'm not entirely certain how to get it back. I don't have a blue checkmark, so I can't talk to Twitter about that. I probably am on LinkedIn… you know what, you can find me in my house. I'm currently working. The engineering tool that I really can't live without, I think my IDE. I use IntelliJ by JetBrains, and—Austin: Yeah, it's good stuff.Zach: —I think I wouldn't be able to program without it. I fear for my next coding interview because I'll be pretending that there's type ahead completion in a Google Doc, and it just won't work. So, yeah, I think that would be the tool I'd keep forever.Austin: And if any of Zach's managers are listening, he's not planning on doing any coding interviews anytime soon.Zach: [laughs]. Yes, obviously.Emily: Well, thank you so much. Zach: Emily Omier, thank you so much for your time.Austin: Right, thanks.Austin: And don't forget Zack is an author. He and his team worked very hard on that book.Emily: Zack, do you want to give a plug to your book?Zach: Oh, yeah. Some really intelligent people that, for some reason, dragged me along, worked on a book. Basically it started as an introduction to Kubernetes, and it turned into a Master's Course on Kubernetes. It's from Packt Publishing and yeah, you can find it there, amazon.com or steal it on the internet. If you're looking to get started with Kubernetes I cannot recommend the team that worked on this book enough. It was a real honor to be able to work with people I consider to be heavyweights in the industry. It was really fun.Emily: Thank you so much.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Our Local Business You Should Know Segment: David Kelly, Sr VP of Sales for Ygrene

Mike McCormick graduated from the University of Rochester in 2004 and is the Director of Capital Markets at Ygrene Energy Fund. In this episode, we learn more about Mike's work and how COVID-19 has disrupted his industry. He also shares lessons he learned while transitioning from Bear Stearns & Co. to Ambac during the Great Recession in 2008-2009.

In this episode, Blair and Jeff debate on the benefits and drawbacks of one of the Eighth Circuit's article on a court ruling that says properties that have been foreclosed will no longer have a mortgage on them. They give everyone an update on Project X. They also talk about the importance of making a decision based on numbers and risks in a subject-to deal involving a Ygrene loan, an unsure skinny deal, the only time this business does rent credits, and the period of time needed to own properties before they get cashed out. They cover finding the right virtual assistant for the right price. Finally, the talk turns to how to do business in markets with high value and in other markets, and the right person for this work. Mentioned Resources: ph Upwork Craigslist In this episode we covered: 00:01:05 – Eighth Circuit's article on court ruling; foreclosed properties will no longer have a mortgage on them (benefits and drawbacks) 00:14:26 – Making a decision based on numbers and risks in a subject-to deal involving a Ygrene loan 00:30:39 – An unsure skinny deal 00:44:45 – The one and only time this business does rent credits 00:47:02 – Period of time needed to own properties before they get cashed out 00:48:27 – Update on Project X 00:54:28 – Virtual assistants; the right person for the right price 00:57:37 – Finding business in markets with high value and in other markets, and the person who should do the work About Blair: Blair is the founder and creator of Dealbot, a motivated seller lead generation company. He has managed nearly $2mm in marketing spend and generated over 100,000 motivated seller leads. He also buys and sells houses himself in the Winston-Salem and Charlotte, NC markets. In the past year, he has acquired nearly $3mm in cash flowing rental properties with zero money out of his pocket. Multimedia: Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiatKNrfIlTWIAiPU_UQfsQ Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-transactional-real-estate-investor-show/id1460647919 Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/listen?view=/ps/I3au2kzrhhadq3xlegyyfebg27e Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BlairHalver/ Thank you for listening!

Examining Financing options with Aaron Howard of Ygrene

Looking at the Feedback from customers

Discussion on Ygrene and other PACE providers

Your hosts Duane Knickerbocker and Bill Small open on a really high note today as Duane shares the recognition by PG&E for their home performance success. It’s all about saving energy and Brower Mechanical is a leader in the process. The shift from home energy successes to whole house fans is one not to be missed. This is one of the best seasons to consider a whole house fan but know the value and the challenges they can present. And yes, you can have Brower give you a guarantee on your utility bill for the foreseeable future. How about that if you’re on a fixed income? It’s all in a jam packed segment. Oversizing A/C units. Why do so many builders and HVAC firms do it? You’ll learn more when you listen but the bottom line on this is that the efficiency of your home, not the A/C unit, is what’s important. 62% is one of the low points in efficiency which means you’re wasting 38% of that cooling. How could that be? Just a couple of simple reasons. But don’t rush out and buy a new A/C unit. Don’t oversize. Get things right. Your A/C unit needs to run to reach its’ most efficient operation. You’ll use less energy with a smaller system running longer than a bigger system running less. Now that’s a concept that’s not familiar. Learn more when you listen to the discussion. Did you know there are ways to help you finance the energy upgrades you’re looking for? And that you can also use these same opportunities for commercial use as well? Like multifamily dwellings. Hear what Derek from Ygrene has to say and how you’ll not even need to do a credit app to make it happen! So what the heck is PSPS? You’ll hear that acronym in home energy circles more and more but it means Public Service Power Shutoff. And that is a clear description that you’re not going to have power. Period. One hour or maybe even up to one week. Hear the guys discuss variations in proper sizing for A/C and solar installations and how they correlate to the correct size of battery system for backup… or generators, or even other options. You may want to consider these if you live in an area with high likelihood of PSPS activity. This is key information and the one place to get it all remains the same. Brower Mechanical. 916-624-0808 or on line at www.browermechanical.com

Hey, did your A/C kick on this week? If so, you may need an energy upgrade. It’s not really that hot overall all day long or at night so if your home is correctly insulated and energy efficient, the recent daytime heat should not have caused the A/C to turn on. Hear Duane Knickerbocker and Bill Small share with you the steps necessary to get there. You know cooling the home means spending money. Not needing that cooling means the opposite. Yes! Savings. Money in your pocket and that feels good for most of us. Electrification is here. That means things are changing and it’s likely your home is going to be fully electric at some point in time. It’s inevitable. Solar has changed the landscape of home energy and right behind that are batteries. Hear a great discussion of how the next step, the natural evolution of electrification, is taking place and what that means to you, your home’s energy efficiency and ultimately, your energy bill. The case studies are incredible. How to finance those next energy upgrades? Derek from Ygrene goes a little deeper today into the mechanics and resources to help you build that bridge between product and payment. It really can’t get any simpler, quicker or more convenient. I think you’ll agree. Quiet, efficient and healthy. That’s how your home should be. What is the number one step to take? If you’re a regular listener, you know. If not, listen up. It’s the single most important element to home energy upgrades. That means it’s the number one change to make to save the most money. This is not complicated. Want to know the reality of what you’ll notice? The answers are in the show. Ready to act? Give Brower Mechanical a call @ 916-624-0808, online at www.gosmallsolar.com.

40 years ago a company called Brower Mechanical started and wow, what a 40 year run! You can not believe the changes in technology that have occurred over the past 40 years. Your hosts Duane Knickerbocker and Bill Small talk about some of the key changes they’ve seen over the course of the years and how they have impacted your home energy activity. Even as specifically as the best way to time your highest energy consumption for the most efficient usage. In this segment of the show, Derek from Ygrene really takes the lead from Duane on the literal terms for financing and how it ties together. The novelty of the relationship with the contractor like Brower makes the process incredibly seamless and fully transparent and it can be done right at the kitchen table in real time at the point you choose to make the decision. There is no need for credit history. This is about equity in the home. Ygrene is the ultimate win win all around and the driver to help you get to a positive cash flow situation with your home energy upgrades. Listen in and see how that becomes possible. Finally, closing the show is a discussion taking us into the warmer seasons and the values of whole house fans. Good and bad… they’re not for everybody and if you’re thinking about one, this is a great segment to listen to. This will get you started heading in the right direction. As always, with every show, education is everything. If you want to learn more, head this way… Call Brower Mechanical at 916-624-0808 or visit them online at www.gosmallsolar.com. There’s never been a better time.

Your hosts, Duane Knickerbocker and Bill Small really turn it on today in spite of the liquid dumping that’s imminent and the anxiety most of us have about how much rain it’s going to be. For what it’s worth, there are a few comments relative to that soaking we’re getting you’ll certainly appreciate. From there the show takes off with discussion of the 40 years of experience Brower brings to the table. Do heat and/or cold influence your home heating and cooling systems differently? Maybe. You can find out more by listening. The second segment in today’s show is significant in that you’ll hear from a customer who has gone thru a deep energy upgrade that kept the home warm in an actual power failure. They converted from gas to electricity but even before that, the first step was to be sure the attic and ductwork were properly sealed. This is the most significant part of any energy upgrade as it confirms the home is ready and optimized. This is the right way to go to get things done properly. Even your utility company will verify this fact. Check it out on their website! Our third segment will shed light on the most simple process you can follow to get your energy upgrades completed. No credit check, no hassle. A nearly immediate response that will give you all the details of what you can expect and how they could impact your utility expense to your favor. It is certainly worth the investigation to check into Ygrene options to finance your project. Just visit www.ygrene.com and you’ll find what your options are. Finally, a very detailed discussion takes place on the benefits of SMUD options and rebates to make electricity work to your advantage when you consider the cost of SMUD rates. It’s very efficient and may well be the answer to help you save more, month after month. And while different, the rebate values are now stabilizing with the utility companies. PGE is no different either. There are solutions to minimize utility expense and you’ll know where to go to get the answers you’re bound to have. Call Brower Mechanical at 916-624-0808 or visit them online at www.gosmallsolar.com. Many of your questions can be answered right there. And do your best to stay dry!

The crazy rebates continue as part of today’s discussion and the savings are something you’re going to want to hear. Your hosts, Duane Knickerbocker and Bill Small look into some of the newer technology that may save you money and cost you less as a result of the rebates provided. Like a hybrid water heater that use existing heat to warm the water, the summertime heat from the garage. The stories are really quite amazing. The discussion gets to an interesting topic of “fire” in your home. Think about it. If you have gas for your furnace, water heater or stove, there’s fire in your house, isn’t there? Be sure to catch the example of a small solar system case study that really drives home the value of reducing before producing and getting the least number of panels on the roof. This also saves you a great deal of money when you consider each solar panel cost is $1000 average per panel. Reduced consumption means less panels. Less panels means less expense. Improve the energy systems in your home and reduce the number of panels necessary on the roof and save money on your utility as you go! Listen to today’s guest, Derek of YGRENE, speaking on the value of the program and how the loan values are established. There are no credit checks and the quick and easy process takes less than one hour. You can make the decision to get your energy upgrades right then and there and know immediately how much you should be able to reduce your monthly utility bill by, as well as what the investment will need to be. Do that math against your current utility expense and know that it may be well worth it to get that equipment and those upgrades now. Especially when you consider the rebates that are currently available and the simplicity with which Brower make it happen for you. Having the ability to sell and service allows Brower to assess the best situation for the circumstance with possibly newer or better technology. You may not have to spend as much or you may be able to save more by just taking a look at the situation and putting a plan together. Very few HVAC folk will go this route. It’s the first discussion you’ll have with Brower. There are many ways to look at getting things taken care of. Be sure to take the time to explore your options. You need a company that can facilitate the discussion of “best” ways to go and help you along the way. That company, of course, Brower Mechanical. Call them today at 916-624-0808 or visit on line at www.gosmallsolar.com. You’ll be glad you did.

Oh boy have your hosts Duane Knickerbocker and Bill Small got a show for you today. The title almost sounds a little like a scolding. But the reality is that many people go out and try to solarize their home before getting the home energy efficient, thus minimizing the amount of solar you actually need. By doing so, you’re certain to add too much solar and not get the best result either! That’s the one guarantee you can be sure of in that case and at $1000 per panel, that’s likely not the best way to go. You can see so much by simply visiting www.gosmallsolar.com that it may even prompt you into the Brower Showroom to see firsthand what the guys are always talking about when it’s time to make the move to energy efficiency. See what a real attic situation looks before and after energy upgrades. Learn why there’s a good reason to get your job permitted when you’re changing out your HVAC. Do you know what your “true” energy monthly expense really is? Most folk just assume it’s the electricity consumption but it also needs to include the gas to determine an average monthly bill. When you do that math, you may find you’re actually a great candidate for upgrades that not only produce results but that actually yield you something in return. That same average spend for the utility commodity could just as well be converted to a spend for new equipment that helps lower your bills, increase your home’s value and gives you a better living environment as well! That’s a win/win for sure! And the net expense could be the same or less! If you’re going to spend the money anyway, you may as well get something to show for it, don’t you agree? It’s up to you. Spend the money with nothing to show for it, or let Brower Mechanical help you learn how to get something for that investment that’s tangible, lowers your long term utility bill to something predictable and gets the job you want done as well. You’ll hear Duane discuss a great case study on a 3000 square foot home that went thru this exact process. The outcome is incredible. Today there’s also a guest on the show from Ygrene home energy financing. That’s all they do and it’s built with no credit check, no long process to get an answer and no back and forth. As part of the PACE program, the decision to finance your program can be made as you’re going thru the report from you home energy contractor. No FICO or credit checks necessary. What’s special is that Brower Mechanical, now nearly 40 years in business, was one of the first contractors to embrace the Ygrene opportunity to help finance your energy upgrades. You’ll want to hear what they can offer if you’re in the process of beginning a home energy upgrade. Finally, Duane and Bill leave you with a vivid and helpful discussion on the inefficiencies of pool pumps and the values of the newer variable speed pumps. From energy to noise to cleaning capability, if you have a pool, you need to hear this segment. With the holidays just around the corner, you could be planning to save into next year so that purchasing your gifts could be literally “free” if you’ve saved on energy expenses. That’s a gift unto itself! To find out how to make all this happen, give Brower Mechanical a call. 916-624-0808 or visit on-line at www.gosmallsolar.com. It’s worth the time to look.

Energy is at the forefront of discussion today with utility shutdowns, huge rebates and even money back from PG&E. So, you think home energy starts with a thermostat? You’re on the right track and Nest is one of the most respected devices for home energy management. You’ll find out why Brower is a NestPro valued dealer for their training and expertise with the product. If you can hear your hosts Duane Knickerbocker and Bill Small, they’ve got you covered and that’s the service area you can expect them to reach. More likely than not, they can get to your home and get your needs handled. And beware, techs are challenged when the demand is greatest. So, when the season is about to change, check everything in advance. If you wait, you may wish you didn’t. If there are not enough techs to service the demand, you’ll be waiting until they can get to you and you may find yourself bundled in blankets to stay warm! Need a roof? Well, listen up since the way the energy upgrades happen today they could actually help you pay for the repairs you need. Solar, energy savings and roofing all impact the equation when it comes to home efficiency and if you do nothing else, at least explore the options. You may be pleasantly surprised at how much you can actually get done and the end result by doing so. The rebates are huge right now and you can take advantage of them while they last if you act soon. You may even protect yourself from those unwanted “guests” in your attic know as rodents. Yuck! Getting to the next steps as best you can, should always start with a clipboard audit. Don’t wait for the rain to begin, do something now while the sun is still shining. Today, Brower is proud to welcome David Kelly from Ygrene to the studio today to discuss the values and opportunities when financing your home energy upgrade. You’ll find out how simple they can make it. The speed for the application process is immediate when you’re ready to make your decision on energy fixes in your home. No waiting, no slow processing. You’ll know right then and there what you can get done and how best to make it happen. And it’s all done with attractive interest and terms. The simplicity of it all is what’s the most important part of it all and the outcome in a more efficient, healthy and comfortable home is something you’ll enjoy for a long time to come. So...somebody has to help you gather this all up and keep it all in one spot. You surely don’t want to do it yourself. Rebates and financing and best steps to take advantage of what your utility company is offering can get really confusing and even complicated. Let Brower handle the details. Call them today at 916-624-0808 or visit on line at www. gosmallsolar.com

Friends of the Show Episode 40 with @Ygrene! “Chance favors the prepared mind” – Louis Pasteur and also a bad guy in the Steven Segal classic Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (Bad Guy – Travis Dane played by Eric Bogosian) Billy is one of the funniest and also nicest folks who do jokes on Twitter, … Continue reading "FOTS 40 @Ygrene has Energy"

President Obama’s announcement of the Clean Energy Savings For All Initiative is intended to help more homeowners afford solar by opting into solar energy at no up-front cost. In light of this recent news we’re speaking to Ygrene CMO Louis Lalonde and general manager of Solar & Storage Mark Colby. Ygrene has funded nearly $473 million in climate-resilient infrastructure projects across the nation. Louis and Mark will discuss what the White House announcement will mean for the solar industry, especially in relation to PACE financing, as well as what their company is doing to help streamline PACE financing.

Lisa Cohn of EnergyEfficiencyMarkets.com interviews Stacey Lawson, CEO of Ygrene, which provides software that helps administer green projects, about the impact of Obama's climate plan on energy efficiency. She gives the good and bad news about the plan.

Lisa Cohn of RealEnergyWriters.com interviews Dan Schaefer, president of Ygrene, which has launched a clean energy finance and job creation model. Ygrene's PACE enables building owners to fund renewable energy and efficiency improvements at no upfront cost though an annual assessment on building owners' tax bills. The savings pay back the cost of the program.

Lisa Cohn of RealEnergyWriters.com interviews Dan Schaefer, president of Ygrene, which has launched a clean energy finance and job creation model. Ygrene's PACE enables building owners to fund renewable energy and efficiency improvements at no upfront cost though an annual assessment on building owners' tax bills. The savings pay back the cost of the program.