Interview with a CEO
Dexter CEO
Luuk Veeken
1. In one sentence, what does Dexter offer and who do you target? Dexter offers an AI-powered software platform that forecasts energy production and consumption as well as market movements, so energy companies can optimize their renewable electricity trading and planning in the short-term.
2. How did you make your way into the world of SaaS and start your company? After working at a clean-energy VC for several years as an analyst, I learned that the energy transition would heavily disrupt the way energy companies plan and trade electricity. Where previously a select number of fossil fuel plants provided electricity on-demand, green power now flows only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. This major change requires many new automated tasks like forecasting and continuous optimization techniques. We started Dexter by learning a lot about these problems with several pilots and consultancy projects. This helped us to build a vision on what energy companies require and we used this to acquire our launching customer NieuweStroom. They affirmed our vision and that enabled us to develop a load forecasting platform and get paid for it. At the same time, we also successfully won a pilot at Greenchoice for our other product: price forecasting. The idea from the start was that these two products would come together eventually, giving us an edge over competition.
3. What makes Dexter unique? As described above, we invest heavily in building the best load forecasters (day-ahead to realtime forecasts for wind, solar and consumption) and price forecasters. This enables us to go one step further than our competitors, who are just doing one of the two, and optimize their full trading and planning of electricity. This creates much more value for our customers and at the same time provides a more holistic solution for their problems. Additionally there are synergies in focusing both on load and price forecasting as they influence each other, an example is that a very good wind forecasting model for our customer can be re-used to make a wind forecast for a given region, which is a very important input for an AI-based price forecast.
4. There is no easy path to success. What was the biggest challenge you went through and what was your biggest achievement? The biggest challenge for our company was to change our opportunistic mindset, which is highly required in the early phase of a company, towards a strategic mindset that gives the teams focus on the products that matter. Instead of chasing all opportunities we had to learn to say no to potential customers or to postpone pilots as we couldn't do all of them. We learned this the hard way and eventually adopted a new way-of-working by adopting OKRs in combination with the PR/FAQ method. We optimized this way-of-working after some iterations and now this works really well. Our biggest achievement is the performance of our new wind forecasting product which, after a focus block of just 3 months, was able to compete with the best wind forecasting companies in Europe which all have been around for more than 10 years. This achievement is very promising also for our other products which we are putting focus on right now.
5. Dexter contributes to a more sustainable way of producing energy. Do you see that there is a sense of urgency and if yes, how does this contribute to your business? We focus on customers that take the energy transition seriously and want to be a front-runner in this space. Our mission is to accelerate the energy transition and our customers know this. Some of our customers are worried about what the future will bring them as a result of this transition, our mission is to convince all our customers that challenges in the energy transition can be converted into opportunities if they use the right technologies and that they should act now.
6. What is your advice on setting up a go-to-market strategy? Setting up a go-to-market strategy really needs to be around your competitive edge. Our main learnings were that it pays off to first fully develop the product with this edge, scale it within one market region before entering new ones. In the beginning we lost a lot of focus, time and energy by trying to enter new regions with e.g. our wind forecaster before it had reached our preferred status in terms of competitive edge. This was also due to our opportunistic mindset which we really had to change.
7. Hiring talent is an important part of a CEO's job. What lessons have you learned in this respect? Especially in the early phase it is extremely important that people fit the company culture. Know how to test new employees on your company's core values. Additionally I advise, especially in the early phase, to thrust your intuition as it is often your best counselor. If you have any doubts, don't do it. Even if you can easily get rid of the new hire, it always results in a lot of lost time, energy and it can badly influence team culture.
8. As a CEO, what do you know now that you wish you had known in the beginning? I think what I learned mostly over the years is that your intuition is often the best and only counselor. Additionally, it gives you speed in making decisions which is highly required, especially in the beginning. You are doing something totally new and setting up a company is not a science.
9. What advice would you give other founders in the B2B SaaS industry? Trust your intuition ;-).