The Camus Energy Story: From Google SRE to Grid Innovation – Why Technical Founders Should Think Bigger
Technical expertise can be a double-edged sword for founders. While deep knowledge enables you to build sophisticated solutions, it can also narrow your vision to purely technical challenges. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Camus Energy co-founder Astrid Atkinson revealed how she avoided this trap by asking bigger questions about impact and transformation.
The Power of Early Technical Experience
Joining Google in 2004 when it had “just under 2000 people, including the contractors,” Astrid found herself at the forefront of cloud computing. “I was really fortunate to be part of the team that was building their early internal cloud computing platform,” she explains. “This is about two years before I actually looked up the first public incidence of using the term the cloud.”
As a founding member of Google’s site reliability engineering team, she helped pioneer approaches to massive-scale distributed systems. But the most valuable lesson wasn’t technical – it was about impact. “The biggest revelation of that journey with Google was understanding how profoundly impactful the work of a single person can be in that kind of context… basically everything in the world, the entire world as we see and encounter it, is the work of a large number of individuals just working hard at one particular thing.”
From Technical Excellence to Mission
Despite continued success at Google, something was missing. “While I continued to feel pretty good about the work that we were doing,” Astrid recalls, “it wasn’t clear that my presence mattered at all anymore. And I wanted to feel like I was working every day at something that mattered to the outcome.”
Instead of immediately jumping into building, she asked two crucial questions: “Where in the climate and energy space is there a particularly high value for someone or team with expertise in the space of distributed systems and large scale software infrastructure?” And for the skills “that I and the folks I know best are great at… is there an opportunity to put something together where we could take that show on the road?”
Finding the Technical Gap
This analytical approach revealed a surprising opportunity in utility software. While incumbents dominated current needs, they weren’t equipped for future challenges. “Almost all utility software is on prem today. So there’s really not a lot of maturity around like cloud scale technologies or really big data approaches or cloud scale machine learning or AI type approaches,” Astrid explains.
This technological gap meant even industry giants were “starting from nearly as much of a blank slate as we are” when it came to building solutions for what she calls “the two-way, heavily customer involved decarbonized grid of the future.”
Building for Transformation
Rather than creating incremental improvements to existing systems, Astrid focused on enabling fundamental transformation. “The decarbonized grid of the future is one in which we can leverage the resource, the platform, represented by the existing physical connectivity of the current grid… That future grid, it has a ton more participants, millions to billions, instead of kind of thousands of active participants today.”
This vision has resonated with forward-thinking utilities. Their early customers are “so creative and so dedicated to demonstrating models of dramatic change in some of the areas we need it most around decarbonizing our energy supply.”
Lessons for Technical Founders
- Look for systemic opportunities: “There often are times when the existing solutions don’t serve the needs of the market… And eventually those changing needs really shape the solutions that succeed.”
- Focus on transformation over competition: “Success for us isn’t whether we beat out another fledgling software company, it’s whether we can grow the market enough for all of us to be successful together.”
- Align technical expertise with mission: “It was really looking to take what I am best at and what I’m great at and what the folks that I most respect are really good at and put it to work in the service of a problem that I really care about a lot.”
The key lesson? Technical expertise isn’t just for building better products – it’s for identifying and enabling fundamental market transformations. As Astrid puts it, “I don’t think it’s crazy to try to redefine your problem space in a way that lets you tackle something really big and new, but I think that it makes the most sense in contexts where there really is a very big change in the environment that you’re working within.”