#141: Entrepreneurship, Energy, and Leaving Things Better Than You Found Them
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Gabe Phillips. Gabe and I dug into his journey from electricity trading to founding Catalyst Power Holdings and how he's helping commercial and industrial customers decarbonize through retail, energy supply and onsite generation.
We also hit on one of our favorite topics: hiring, including why Gabe sees the highest success rates when new team members come through personal networks and the role people and culture play in scaling an energy business.
In this segment, I ask Gabe to reflect on his history of good and poor hires to identify the key lessons he’s learned along the way.
We discuss the noticeable trend where candidates sourced from personal or colleague networks consistently yield higher success rates compared to those recruited from the outside. Gabe notes that while the exact empirical reason remains elusive—perhaps stemming from differences in accountability—the data clearly shows that the individuals who have made the most positive impact on their businesses were hired through some form of personal connection.
In this segment, we discuss the mission behind Catalyst Power, an energy supplier dedicated to serving independent business owners in the commercial and industrial sectors.
We explore how they provide energy through both the traditional market and assets they build, own, and operate directly at customer sites.
Gabe explains his goal to democratize access to distributed generation solutions and complex contract structures—options typically reserved for large-scale industry participants. Ultimately, we touch on their underlying "secret" objective: to actively decarbonize these businesses while upgrading their energy access.
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