CIO Confessions EP.5 – Thijs Baars on Cloud Migration, Vendor Lock-in, and the Future of AI in E-Mobility

[00:00:00] Gert Jan van Halem: Good morning, good afternoon and good evening. Welcome to a new edition of the CIO Confessions podcast, where I, Gert Jan van Halen, your host, have conversations with CIOs and CTOs. We talk about experiences, learnings and views on the market and the changing role of CIOs and CTOs. 

[00:00:16] Jingle: This is the CIO Confessions, a podcast by Devoteam.

[00:00:25] Gert Jan van Halem: Today I’m very happy to have Thijs Baars as my guest. Thijs has been leading development teams at FastNet and Bold. com. and is now the CTO of Last Mile Solutions, an e-mobility company with more than 200, 000 charging stations, over a million charging cards, and users in 22 countries. Last Mile Solutions has grown into the largest independent provider of e-mobility platforms in Europe.

[00:00:49] Thijs is accountable for all products and engineering within Last Mile Solutions. Welcome Thijs. 

[00:00:54] Thijs Baars: Thank you. 

[00:00:55] Gert Jan van Halem: Great to have you in the podcast. I was wondering, after your experience with FastNet [00:01:00] you are back in e-mobility now with a break with Ball. com. So e-mobility is really your thing or is it by coincidence?

[00:01:06] Thijs Baars: No, I don’t think it’s coincidence. It’s just an incredibly interesting market. So after I left Ball. com and McKinsey, I was looking for a new market to join. And I was looking for something that was fast growing but also socially very relevant. And e-mobility yeah, remains that industry for me.

[00:01:21] And especially if you look at 10 years ago when I started my career at FastNet and where the market is now, there’s a big difference. So volumes have really changed, the pickup has really changed, but there’s still a rollercoaster ride. Growth 100, 200, 300 percent are not unheard of. So it remains very interesting to be in.

[00:01:40] So that’s why I’m back. 

[00:01:41] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah, so thanks for being here because I think that makes it very interesting for the listeners as well, because it’s a market with such growth. And change that also the technical perspective from your view, I think it’s very interesting. And for me, when I started thinking about it, it started with indeed the relevance of this business as you described, because [00:02:00] it’s I’m not sure when we actually started driving electric, but I think that was the big drive to really make this grow and make this adopt.

[00:02:07] Generally. And could you describe a little bit more how LMS or Last Mile Solutions? I’m not sure. Do we call it LMS or do we call it both? But how Last Mile Solutions started in that and grew and where you are now? 

[00:02:18] Thijs Baars: Yeah. And I think that’s really interesting. But Last Mile Solutions is that it started at the very early beginning of EV driving electric vehicle driving passenger cars in the Netherlands.

[00:02:28] So over 15 years ago, there was a small workshop from an energy provider, an eco That was looking, how can we kick start this market for electric vehicle driving and the infrastructure behind that? And the founders of Last Mile Solutions were there to show that prototype of a hardware board that connect to a car and could communicate with it and say, okay, deliver energy now or stop delivering it.

[00:02:49] And that was from all kinds of different pivots in the history of Last Mile Solutions, the moment where they said, okay, this is it. EV boom, this energy transition is really happening. We want to be there. [00:03:00] So from the very, very early days of the EV industry, Dastman Solutions has been a key player in the market.

[00:03:07] And if you then now look where we are now the biggest European platform that really has that provenance and that multiple years of experience in which the market has completely transformed and we are still here. 

[00:03:19] Gert Jan van Halem: So it all started with that board, the connection and the communication. So that also explains all the charging stations that Last Mile Solutions has, but you do also the cards.

[00:03:27] So there seems to be a mix of the hardware, the software, the transactions, 

[00:03:32] Thijs Baars: everything in between. 

[00:03:33] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah, 

[00:03:33] Thijs Baars: so at the moment we stopped doing all hardware developments. So we’re a pure software player. And if you look at the EV industry, there’s basically two sides of the market. There is the charging point operator that provides energy via charging points towards cars.

[00:03:46] And there’s the mobility service provider that delivers. Mobility services, which in practice basically means a charge card. So a means to pay for your electricity. And we are positioned to [00:04:00] play both markets. So we have customers on both sides in our platform. And I think what really sets us apart is that we deal with all the financial transactions behind it.

[00:04:09] So if you look at so that’s also where a big volume comes from, is from ensuring that the CPO gets paid for the electricity. And the mobility service provider gets their money from Boomer, their customers are and ventures that money to the CPO. 

[00:04:23] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah. So So you’re the middleware. Yeah. Yeah. And with that growth, of course, the platform grows immensely as well, also in a number of transactions.

[00:04:32] I’m not sure if you’re allowed to share stuff or, 

[00:04:34] Thijs Baars: yeah. So I, yeah. And and I think it’s a, yeah. So that’s also very interesting in this market is that the growth has been exponential since the beginning of it. Yeah. But I think for the. Say that the early days until 10 years in, the numbers were very small.

[00:04:50] Eso we always talked about triple digit growth, but double digits in numbers on you can see that. So and we’re now in this moment where it’s the volumes are getting very large [00:05:00] and the percentages are getting slower. But if you look at different markets where we also operate in, so to say in the eastern part of Europe, Romania, that this is still happening.

[00:05:08] Romania has about 45, 000 electric vehicles, is still doubling to 200 percent growth year over year in total numbers of vehicles, but on a total fleet of 9 million. 

[00:05:19] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah. 

[00:05:20] Thijs Baars: And for us, from a tech perspective it is. You need to switch your strategy. So for a long time, we did everything ourselves, self hosted, because even though that was very fast growth, a single server could manage it all.

[00:05:34] And even with doubling the amount of traffic we had, it was still peanuts on what a modern server can do. And now that we see that the percentage wise, the growth is slowing down. The volumes are still tremendously growing. And now we’re looking at a phase where it becomes much harder and harder to do it yourself.

[00:05:53] And we really need to be on point on operations to make sure that we can actually handle all that traffic. 

[00:05:58] Gert Jan van Halem: And what does that mean more in detail on the [00:06:00] technical perspective? Because I can imagine, not sure if it’s right, but I can imagine that you just start with one application, and it works, and it grows, and you can handle the growth as you said.

[00:06:09] Maybe you need to think about new architectures as well. So what does it entail for this to have this growth? And then from a product perspective, how does your product change? 

[00:06:19] Thijs Baars: And that’s the interesting situation where we are in now, is that we need to do a double strategy. So we have developed countries with large customers, real enterprise customers that want reliability, they want availability and they’re looking to really set down a very professional, solid service to their customers because a lot of businesses are starting to require it.

[00:06:40] It’s no longer the hobby, the tree hugger, whatever you want to call them that’s driving around. We have proper fleets, proper insurance like large customers that rely on their service and there’s on us. And at the other idea of these upcoming markets that are really looking for fast innovation because they want to outcompete all the other [00:07:00] small startups that are trying to do this.

[00:07:02] So for us to become on the technical part very difficult because a we want to maintain a high level of quality, high levels of availability. We had a big program to really up those numbers. And at the same time, we’re dealing with customers that want fast fast moving parts, rapid development.

[00:07:19] And of course, rapid development becomes a lot more difficult to combine with stability. And and as I just mentioned, so we’ve always been in our own in our own data center. So we always had our own racks on hardware. And now we noticed that This disparity between these two markets is becoming too large.

[00:07:38] So we need to look at different strategies. And that’s why we’re now slowly starting to move towards the cloud. 

[00:07:43] Gert Jan van Halem: Okay. And so that’s because cloud is whenever I’m at any customer cloud is already there. You just make a transition now has to do with that volume because you could just manage it on your own server.

[00:07:57] Thijs Baars: Yeah. So I think so for the [00:08:00] last couple of years it’s been Very simple for us. We have a very small team to maintain our service because the volumes weren’t just that, weren’t that large. And a lot of tooling that you have in the cloud is open source. So we apply that as well in our own setup and our own infrastructure.

[00:08:15] So we have a very small bare bones team. We were able to maintain all these servers, the databases without many difficulties. And now that we see that these volumes are becoming larger, it is, it’s becoming more difficult to maintain the infrastructure. With an increasing demand of new feature development, which you need some kind of tooling or ecosystem to apply that.

[00:08:39] So we did an analysis, right? And I think that’s one of the things that I’ve really learned over the last two years that I’ve been here is that every week is a different week. Like the world has changed. So any preconceptions you had a week ago or a month ago might no longer be valid. And we knew on this cloud decision to stay off the cloud for the last two years, [00:09:00] we knew that was a contentious point.

[00:09:01] We knew we need to have a sharp eye on that. And over the last half year, we looked at, the forecast for the coming year or growth perspective, the new the new type of customers we were going to hoping to get. What that would rely depend on us. And based on that, we said, okay, let’s do re evaluate this cloud decision.

[00:09:19] And I think key for us is that we noticed that for a long time with a very small team, the Capex investments or the investment in your hardware was key. Now that we’re seeing that with org growth, we also need additional people. The capex is no longer leading. OPEX is starting to lead. So the people cost is starting to lead.

[00:09:39] And then you need to do an analysis, right? How can we most optimize, how can we optimize the cost of these people? How can we make sure that these people spend the time on the best things? And it’s not just an infrastructure team. It’s also the teams on top of that, the product teams that were growing.

[00:09:53] What do they spend their time on? And one way or another, if and even if you use all the tooling that the cloud has [00:10:00] from open source packages, you’re always building your own ecosystem. So these people are coming in and everybody needs to understand how do we work? What is our way of deployments?

[00:10:09] And even though we might be using Argo CD, GitHub, all the well known tooling, it’s always going to be the different flavor because we build it ourselves. So everybody needs to step into your own ecosystem and you need to. Develop this ecosystem. So you need to develop your documentation, your onboarding program.

[00:10:25] You need to maintain that. So that’s a lot of time spent on something that you could argue is not justifiable or not directly or core business. And then if you move to the clouds, you gotta get this out of the box, right? People have. Experience with AWS, Azure, GCP, whatever public flavor you have. They don’t need to learn all the tooling there because they are aware of it.

[00:10:48] You don’t need to up maintain the documentation because the documentation already exists. So when your people costs are becoming very important, that’s the cost you outsource to a cloud provider. [00:11:00] 

[00:11:00] Gert Jan van Halem: And I can imagine because that’s what I like about, or what I find very interesting about this is that It’s, yes, there’s a technical side to it because of the volumes, but it’s maybe more an operational side on how do I spend the time of my people in the best way possible?

[00:11:15] Thijs Baars: Yes. Yeah. And I think the tech follows 

[00:11:19] Gert Jan van Halem: exactly. 

[00:11:20] Thijs Baars: And it’s, ’cause in the end, you can build your own Kubernetes cluster you can build all the tooling in there but the cloud offers that out of the box or with a click away. And that’s just, I think the ease of it. 

[00:11:30] Gert Jan van Halem: And then I can imagine in a business like you are in, it’s also there’s to what extent do you do that?

[00:11:36] Because what I see in other companies as well is that we’re on at the moment in time that people start to wonder, shouldn’t I do a couple of things on premise after all? So should I go to a hybrid position and not just give everything to 

[00:11:49] Thijs Baars: Yeah, and that’s and I think that’s also safe. People often like what is the difficulty of migrating?

[00:11:54] It’s not so much the technical parts. It’s if you’re in your own data center, there’s a couple of things that are [00:12:00] given data locality. is never an issue if you’re in your own data center, because there’s literally one or two places where it can be. And now in a cloud, with, a line of text, all of a sudden your data might be in a region which is non compliant.

[00:12:12] The way you have your cost in place, so your expenditure, you’re like, I need to approve the bill on a new server. And this all of a sudden in the cloud is, something weird happens and the bill might rack up. So you have this different cost features, you have this different this different perspective on how a cloud operates versus your own data center.

[00:12:32] And then if you then look at your question so how do we, how do you how do you decide what do you want to move to a cloud and what not? These kind of perspectives become incredibly important. Doing certain things still on premise or in your own data centers. There is cost involved with egress, ingress, that, you’re unaware of, or at least your team has no experience with.

[00:12:54] And I think those are really difficult decisions to make. You have a vendor lock in, and you want that vendor lock in, [00:13:00] because it gives you a lot of benefits. And it’s, people are easy to start up and innovate, but at the same time, if you ever want to move out. For whatever reason, that vendor lock in is also, might be very dangerous.

[00:13:10] Gert Jan van Halem: And then how do you approach a problem like that? Because to some extent you could say, let’s just try and let’s see where it ends. But some things you also have to think up front. Otherwise you walk into a direction that makes more problems than solutions. 

[00:13:23] Thijs Baars: Yeah, that’s a really good question because it’s definitely the place where we are now.

[00:13:27] So what we did is so we got a couple of baselines. So we accept vendor lock in, but we’re making an assessment. Where does the vendor lock in become very critical? So if our accounts get shut out for whatever reason, what are the key things we need to get up and running? So one of the things, I think a very practical example, is queuing.

[00:13:45] You can use the built in queuing. It takes you probably a week to build up your own queuing cluster again, and that’s acceptable. But if you look at your your identity management, that is so ingrained in our application system, the way you do your authentication authorization. [00:14:00] Yeah. So analyzing do we actually want to do this?

[00:14:03] Or do we say if we ever need to migrate this out, that’s going to be such a hurdle that migrate out in six months is unlikely. 

[00:14:12] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah. So to some extent you think up front. Okay. 

[00:14:15] Thijs Baars: Yeah. Yeah. So we’re trying to mix it. Yeah. So certain things we say, okay, yeah, we need to have to eat the speed. We want to really reap the benefits of the cloud.

[00:14:21] So this is what we accept. The risks or the decisions and the sort of part where we say, Okay, we need to be a little bit slower here because we do want to be in control across the same thing. We don’t want to put hard brushes on it. But in the month in the first year, we’re gonna monitor these costs very closely and then decide on a path forward.

[00:14:37] But there’s definitely some preemptive planning and assessments. Why do we accept this? And where do we say? No, we really need to be entirely in control. 

[00:14:44] Gert Jan van Halem: And so far, that’s quite infrastructural, right? So it’s cloud infrastructural, but There’s of course a lot of software and products running on top of that.

[00:14:53] Do you see the same move there or is that more your own ip? 

[00:14:57] Thijs Baars: That’s a really good question. So I think yeah, so I, I [00:15:00] think this is a little bit the classical core, non-core do we believe that this is competitive edge for us or not? We’re coming from a a history where we did everything ourselves because we could.

[00:15:10] It gives a little bit of comfort, protection and a lot of our customers are risk averse. So if we can explain to them, we built it ourselves, it gives them comfort as well. In this growth, and especially with the new customers that are coming in that are looking for really high speed innovation, you got to outsource certain things.

[00:15:32] But it’s always in a very that’s very tightly controlled. There’s a very, yeah, we have a very close control of where do we decide this is no longer our core or we don’t believe we can compete in this. But I do think that’s all infrastructure site. And the ability that cloud gives you is especially on the product side on the software development is to really speed up your innovation.

[00:15:55] Using, all kinds of tooling that is widely [00:16:00] available within the cloud using SAS vendors. It’s just going to make our life a lot easier, and it does allow us to spend more time on the right things. 

[00:16:10] Jingle: IT Confessions Box Every IT career has its challenges. In the Confessions Box, our guests share their lessons learned and resilience gained.

[00:16:22] Gert Jan van Halem: And what I see of course, nowadays, all the cloud providers also pushing AI. They all want to have that. You need to use their AI solution, right? And we need to use AI because your life will get better. Does your life get better?

[00:16:36] Thijs Baars: I think my life does get better a little bit with AI, but it’s a bit of a mixed bag. I had a discussion with a partner of ours and they were telling us that A. I. Is a bit of a weird beast. Things that we consider very simple, counting the amount of arts and strawberry as a great example.

[00:16:51] We all believe it’s like it’s a basic skill, right? You first learned that. And then you learn how to write poems. And they are. It goes the other way around the first life to write full, [00:17:00] beautiful poems. And that teaches itself how to draw the arts. So it’s so cool. Cool. At this moment, it is still difficult.

[00:17:08] It’s a little bit hazy where we can see the benefit because of this adjustment of things. I do think, and that’s so the ecosystem that the cloud provides is also an ecosystem or the road path, the road map towards AI. And one of the, in the analysis we did do we need to stay in DCs or do we need to move towards cloud?

[00:17:26] AI was, of course, a big factor because it is coming. It is here to stay. It’s definitely gonna change all our lives in ways that we still haven’t understood yet. And how are you set up for that roadmap? 

[00:17:37] Gert Jan van Halem: And then developing the basis yourself is too much of an investment, especially for you guys. It’s not your core, of course.

[00:17:43] Thijs Baars: Exactly. Yeah. And then you have to competitive or is this core business or not? And our core business is to provide an infrastructure platform to EV industry and not to build our own AI models. So you need a way to tap into that. And you can do that on premise, but it’s just a lot 

[00:17:58] Gert Jan van Halem: harder. 

[00:17:58] Thijs Baars: Yeah. 

[00:17:59] Gert Jan van Halem: So at the [00:18:00] moment it’s monitoring what’s happening and how could it help us more than having your own advanced idea on this is how it will change.

[00:18:06] Yeah. 

[00:18:07] Thijs Baars: And basically aligning us that once we see the opportunity, we can directly use it. We can step into it and we 

[00:18:12] Gert Jan van Halem: don’t need to do that switch then at that moment. And then being there in the clouds, you have all everything there. 

[00:18:18] Thijs Baars: Yeah. And I was thinking on this last week and you see all these small steps for people saying it’s just a big hype.

[00:18:25] The big data thing edge computing. It’s all these things that people are, it’s just a hype. It will go over. But all of these like this granular small steps that now lead into LLMs. And LLM is going to be yet another small step into this probably AGI or whatever it’s going to be.

[00:18:40] Let’s see. But so you need to be on path on these smaller steps. And if you’re a small company with small volumes and you’re focused on, running your own business, you have this tunnel vision where you don’t really realize this. And now that you’re looking, okay, we’re really going to pivot.

[00:18:54] We’re really in the hockey stick right now. You need to widen your scope and understand, okay, what else is there? And what [00:19:00] do we need to prepare us for? 

[00:19:02] Gert Jan van Halem: And you mentioned edge. And I think for with charging stations and the man in the middle sounds a bit scared, but you have to do some stuff on the edge as well, right?

[00:19:13] It’s not just all centrally run. 

[00:19:16] Thijs Baars: So it’s a really interesting setup. So in a sense, every charge point is an edge computer or an edge server. It accepts input from a car or a charge card or any other device. It does some processing and then it sends it to our central server. So you could say that we’re running one of the Europe’s largest IoT networks.

[00:19:36] But you still need to have some central handling of authentication. Is this charge card correct or not? They try to do that more also on the edge, so more in the charge card, giving the charging point more localized knowledge and trying to make decisions. But that becomes really difficult because Charging in the end is a big network of interacting parts.

[00:19:58] So even though you might be thinking [00:20:00] it’s a car, you put it to your charging point. It’s a local connection that needs to be authentication of that car or a charge card. We need to understand what is your car made off. You want to get maintenance metrics from either the car or the charge point.

[00:20:13] So there’s a lot of value. And in the end, you need to process that centrally. 

[00:20:18] Gert Jan van Halem: So you have to have a few on the whole chain that’s involved to make a decision locally. 

[00:20:23] Thijs Baars: Yes, exactly. Yeah. I think that’s very well put. 

[00:20:27] Gert Jan van Halem: It almost feels a little bit like in the old days when we had dumb clients, smart clients.

[00:20:31] Yeah. And it changes a bit over time, maybe as well. How much smart can I have locally? How dumb do I want to be locally? 

[00:20:39] Thijs Baars: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think so what they try to do is let’s try to move away from a lot of authentication authorization stuff. Put it on the edge, right? So let’s try to remove around it to the central server, especially if you’re in the city, the connection will be fine.

[00:20:53] But if you’re charging along the highway in the middle of nowhere, your connection tends to be poor. So by the time your car is recognized, [00:21:00] the server gets it, sends yes, you’re 10, 20, 30 seconds. Because of course, if you’re waiting to charge and charging already takes way too long in the perception of the average consumer.

[00:21:10] I know, I’ve been there. Yeah, so you wanna, so how can we speed this connection up? So let’s do the authentication authorization in the charging point. But then the charging point needs to have a continuous up to date database of charging cards in the world. Is this card still allowed? Is it enabled?

[00:21:24] Disabled? There’s caching mechanisms and we all know that caching is probably one of the hardest problems in IT. So that I’m trying to run this on a charging point with a underpowered CPU. And that kind of opens opens up a whole world of fraud. We are trying to, yeah, improve the user experience.

[00:21:44] Is coming back to us with people understanding that if their card is cached, but they disabled it and the cache hasn’t been updated, you’re able to charge. Or let’s say we don’t want a localized payment terminal, but we give people a QR code. People are gonna use, [00:22:00] scan the QR code for payment.

[00:22:01] And QR codes are probably the most fraught. For different parts in the payment chain. So we see people all of a sudden putting their own QR codes on that. And instead of paying for your charging station, you’re actually just wiring money to someone. 

[00:22:16] Gert Jan van Halem: And it’s actually been a nitpick of me for a long time.

[00:22:18] Because as soon as somebody sees a QR code, they start scanning it. Please don’t. But it’s actually because it was just a couple of weeks, two months ago or so in the news, right? That everybody on the charging stations, people start putting their own QR codes over the standard QR codes. And it’s fishy.

[00:22:35] Thijs Baars: Yeah. And the idea behind it. So the idea of the QR code is very good. We want people to be able to charge without having a charge card. So make it very accessible wherever you are in the world. Everybody has a phone, so everybody can scan the QR code and do their payments. But then not realizing that anyone in the world can also put their own QR code sticker on top of that.

[00:22:57] And then it becomes really difficult to say, Hey, are you actually the [00:23:00] party I should be paying to? So if you’re listening to this, remember one 

[00:23:03] Gert Jan van Halem: thing, don’t just scan any QR code. Oh, please don’t. But it’s also, to be honest, a hard problem, right? Because, okay, that’s QR code. Can I trust it? Can’t I trust it?

[00:23:13] As a user, how do I know the difference? Of course, I have to have my own wits with me and make a good decision. But still. it’s not an easy problem to solve. From your perspective, how do you make sure that you provide a good service to your customers? 

[00:23:27] Thijs Baars: Yeah. And I think it’s a an indoor industry is a new problem to solve.

[00:23:30] So the volumes have been very low. So when I started at Fastnet an average charging session would cost 10 to 12 euros. There’s a thousand cars on the road. There’s not the volume in terms of transaction and there’s the transaction volume to care for either side. So the fraudster doesn’t care because it doesn’t give enough money.

[00:23:47] Okay. The charging point operator doesn’t care because if they lose out on eight or 12 euros, that’s an accepted risk. And we, you stripe it away. Now, with volumes getting bigger, a charging session might [00:24:00] cost up to 10 times. So 80 euros is not unheard of for a charging session. And of course, there are thousands of cars.

[00:24:06] So on both sides, the volumes have really massively increased. And then it becomes very interesting for fraud. And you see this whole industry thinking. Oh, no, we have this problem as well. What do we do here? And one of my colleagues, Peter van Zuyle, has been the leading person in the industry to really focus on this fraud.

[00:24:26] See how can we combat it while maintaining a good user experience? Because we do want people to be able to pay at a charge point without having their charge cards. 

[00:24:34] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah, and any emerging ideas already on how to battle something like this? 

[00:24:38] Thijs Baars: So there’s a couple of emerging ideas. One of those is they’re going to generate dynamic QR codes, so a two factor authentication code where you see the token refresh.

[00:24:46] Let’s put in a display that refreshes the QR codes. 

[00:24:49] Gert Jan van Halem: But still, I can’t. 

[00:24:51] Thijs Baars: People can still put a sticker on top of that. There are so payment terminals are really being pushed out. So we’re seeing new form factors for payment terminals where you can just [00:25:00] pay with your debit or credit card. Those protocols are very much secure and are well proven in the industry.

[00:25:05] So I think there’s a big push towards that. But definitely more costly than adding a QR code sticker on the charging point. So there’s a bit of a balance there. 

[00:25:15] Gert Jan van Halem: And how big is the problem, actually? Because I’m just a user with a card, right? So every time I charge, I just put my card to the terminal. It says beep and it starts charging.

[00:25:22] Yeah, no worries. And never look at a QR code. But are there many people actually using it with a QR code or is the main way to do it with a card? 

[00:25:29] Thijs Baars: So I think the fraud, so I don’t think the QR code fraud is that large. It’s there, but it’s not the biggest. I think the. The bigger part of the fraud is happening where you can remote start.

[00:25:41] So you have a car, you can start charging via an app. And of course, if you can hack that app in any way, you can start a session for anyone at a charging point. And that’s where the volume, so then you can with a forerunner means charge multiple cars at multiple times at the [00:26:00] same time, and then the volumes become really large.

[00:26:03] Gert Jan van Halem: Interesting challenges. 

[00:26:04] Thijs Baars: Absolutely. 

[00:26:05] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah. But if you just a bit of a step back, if you look back to your career you have been doing this for a while, you know how to build products and how to run teams like this. What would you say is one of the most interesting challenges that you’ve seen and say, okay, this is really a lesson that I learned that might be interesting for other people as well to realize.

[00:26:25] Thijs Baars: Yeah. So I think what’s if you’re in a very fast growth scenario you need to start thinking two steps ahead. And it sounds very logical, but doing it in practice is a lot more difficult. At bold. com There was a serious growth going on where we doubled the size of the the engineering capacity.

[00:26:44] But if you’re a big company, even though there’s a lot of team hiring, all these processes are in place because it’s a very mature company. It’s easy to add additional capacity. Here we’re in a medium sized company 150, 170 [00:27:00] people on board. I’m trying to add 30 to 50 this year, and the processes aren’t in place for that.

[00:27:08] And so you need to figure, okay, what if I add 50? But, it’s likely we’re going to start with 50, right? So you’re going to start, I think, okay, what do we need to organize? If I had 80 or 100 people, how do I organize that? How do I prepare myself that when those people land, they land in a team that makes sense?

[00:27:21] And we’re already set up for that bigger growth. And it it’s a risky move because you never know, do we actually going to hire those 80 people? So there’s a balance. How much do you want to prepare? Add to your company. You want to keep it lean as well. So you don’t want to add too much overheads.

[00:27:36] And we want this to keep maintaining the startup vibe. So you don’t want all these paper processes. And I think so, and the big lesson is it’s not just about adding people. It’s about making sure that there’s a culture there that allows them. There’s a process there, but in the right way that the current people with 30 Still accepted as well.

[00:27:57] And I see it all as a big a big 

[00:27:58] Gert Jan van Halem: challenge. And [00:28:00] in the beginning you said, okay, but you have to think two, two steps ahead. Yeah. But you also have to solve all that stuff that’s happening today on people, the technology stuff will break. Yeah. Yeah. Still. 

[00:28:11] Thijs Baars: Yeah, you need to do this as the as all fires are burning.

[00:28:14] Exactly. So the plane is flying and you’re trying to build a plane on top of that on top of that. So that’s there’s a multiple. And that’s and that’s 

[00:28:21] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. But is that process key then to make sure that the right processes are in place so that you can manage her? Or is it?

[00:28:28] Thijs Baars: Yeah, so I think the process is key. That’s, yeah, it’s the balancing act. Yeah, 

[00:28:34] Gert Jan van Halem: exactly. 

[00:28:35] Thijs Baars: And I don’t want to have coined the term agile, but we need to be agile. So you need to continuously be aware of what is really top priority. What do we need to fix now? You want to stay out of a firefighting mode, but that’s really difficult in exponential growth.

[00:28:49] There’s always something burning. So there’s continuous question. Is this really burning or is this burning? And then, okay, can we push this away and start prepping for the next [00:29:00] hundred, 200 percent increase? Or do we really need to fix this now? 

[00:29:04] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah. So it’s always 

[00:29:06] Thijs Baars: on the edge. Oh, yeah. And I think that’s and that’s also the cloud decision, this cloud decision, you need to evaluate it.

[00:29:13] But as long as it isn’t burning because it’s a massive program, it’s going to take a lot of time of your people. It’s a lot of investment in terms of money. You’re looking continues okay, is this really top priority now? Or can we do another half year and resolve these other burning issues?

[00:29:27] Gert Jan van Halem: Yeah. Yeah, because you’re never short of burning issues. There 

[00:29:30] Thijs Baars: is never a shortage of burning issues. So that’s not a good 

[00:29:32] Gert Jan van Halem: reason not to improve. No. 

[00:29:33] Thijs Baars: And all of them, and that’s, and I think that’s the beauty of the market, is they’re all good problems to have. Yeah. They’re always issues because you’re skating too fast.

[00:29:41] There’s another customer coming in with X amount of charge points, X amount of charge cards. And either product is saying, I have no idea how we’re going to build this feature or, get the. The platform in place for this customer or this infrastructure saying I have no idea how we’re going to deal with this additional amount of load.

[00:29:58] Gert Jan van Halem: And in the end, good problems are [00:30:00] also problems, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, 

[00:30:01] Thijs Baars: yeah. 

[00:30:03] Gert Jan van Halem: Very interesting. Thank you so much, Thijs. I think we learned one thing. Don’t scan QR codes. Yeah. But we also I really like your look on how do I look at cloud? How do I put my people on the right place to make the right investments for them as well?

[00:30:19] And thanks for the learnings that you shared with us. So thank you so much for being on this podcast. You’re welcome. For all the listeners, I hope you enjoyed it and stay tuned because there will be a next one. Bye bye. 

[00:30:31] Jingle: Discover other podcasts on https://devoteam.info/podcast/. Devoteam, AI-driven tech consulting.