Sheldon Kimber | Hydrogen Project Development Demystified

Sheldon Kimber, CEO and Founder of Intersect Power, demystifies hydrogen project development.

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This article is part of the series: Hydrogen Innovators Podcast

Transcript

[00:00:07.19] Karen Baert: Dear listeners, welcome to this week's episode of the Hydrogen Innovators. It's a podcast series produced by the Stanford Hydrogen Initiative, spotlighting bold innovators in hydrogen all the way from academia to industry. You can find our podcast series, Hydrogen Innovators on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. I'm Karen Baert, recent Stanford MBA graduate, entrepreneur, and innovation strategist at the Initiative. And I'm thrilled to be your host for this week's podcast.

[00:00:35.25] Today, we have the privilege to welcome a very special guest, Sheldon Kimber. He's the founder and CEO at Intersect Power. Sheldon, welcome to the podcast. We are very excited to learn from you today.

[00:00:48.78] Sheldon Kimber: Thanks for having me, Karen.

[00:00:50.22] Karen Baert: So before we get started, a little bit of background on Sheldon. Sheldon received a bachelor in economics from Kenyon College in Ohio and an MBA at Berkeley. So he's been around in the neighborhood here. He started his career in finance and strategy consulting. And after that, he became the COO at Recurrent Energy, a major utility, solar, and storage energy player. After that, he founded the company he is managing today.

[00:01:18.66] All right, Sheldon, at the Hydrogen Innovators podcast, we've heard a lot from scientists and startups that are working on technology development within the hydrogen space. And I'm actually particularly excited for this conversation, today, because we're touching upon something very different, a different piece of the puzzle but a very important piece of the puzzle.

[00:01:40.21] Developing a technology is one. But then enabling projects in the field is something else. Can you give our listeners a brief overview on energy product development 101, what is it and why does it matter?

[00:01:54.24] Sheldon Kimber: Thanks for that introduction. And let me just start by saying, "go Bears." Your Stanford-oriented listeners maybe will appreciate that comment.

[00:02:04.78] In terms of project development, I mean, what you've got, here, on the show today is the knuckle-dragging, dirt-kicking project deployment folks. And we often are the least popular people at Bay Area cocktail parties. We're not saving the world through enterprise software. And we're not creating nuclear fusion in the lab. But we are putting all of that in the field.

[00:02:38.21] And the thing I like to tell technology companies, VCs, others is that, unlike software where you can just push a new version of the product if you have a bug or something like that, deployment of energy technology is much, much harder. And in fact, all energy technology, to some degree, eventually has to go through guys like me.

[00:03:03.30] It is almost all incredibly capital intensive. It is almost all incredibly supply chain intensive, requires manufacturing, requires a great deal of capital to stand up that manufacturing. And so it's everything from land acquisition to permitting to engineering the actual integration of many of these technologies now.

[00:03:27.90] So there's actually a good bit of the technology side that sits in companies like mine, at this point, because you can have a battery or an electrolyzer or something of that nature, but it still needs to be integrated into wind farm and a solar plant. Many of these technologies are being applied in combination.

[00:03:46.68] The whole way through to construction and financing, project financing, almost every bit of these technologies are tax based financings now, which are not simple. Even debt financings are not simple. But when you add in a layer of tax base financing. So all of that value chain of deployment, from land acquisition through operations, is what we do at Intersect Power.

[00:04:12.64] I routinely tell VCs-- I actually spend quite a bit of time talking to a lot of VCs who I've met over the years. And they'll call me with a technology they're looking at and just want to get a view from the deployment end of things. And one of the things-- outside of just the specifics of whatever opinion I'll offer, one of the things I generally tell VCs is, if you run into a technology company that tells you that they're going to go end-to-end, that they're going to take a technology out of the lab and become an IPP. I've got a technology that generates power, cleanly, in a certain way, and I'm just now getting out of the lab. And I'm starting to scale production of the technology. And I'm going to be an IPP.

[00:04:57.97] I want to tell you the story of the last two companies I've built, in the IPP space that didn't-- that started well after the technology leg of this, and really help you understand, as a VC, then, that you're essentially investing in a company that wants to build two or three companies in one. And that's what you're betting on.

[00:05:16.88] So I think, as you look at technology companies, really look at them through the lens of how they're going to get to market, probably through partnerships, and what their model is, whether it's licensing technology or whether it's equipment manufacturing or which piece of the supply chain they want to play in. So that's how I am different, probably, from a lot of your other guests.

[00:05:41.71] Karen Baert: That's super-interesting and a great overview to kick us off. And indeed, it's very important for technology development players to partner with players, like your company, to actually get us to the buildout of a full project, effectively.

[00:05:55.85] Now, let's talk about Intersect Power. So you started the company back in 2016. What does Intersect Power do, specifically and also related to hydrogen? And what was your vision and goal when you started it?

[00:06:09.92] Sheldon Kimber: I mean, Intersect is one of the largest developers, owners, and operators of renewable and clean energy assets in North America. So what does that mean? It means that we have built and are operating-- well, we've been part of developing and building about 4 gigawatts of generation and 1 and 1/2 gigawatt hours of batteries. We currently still own about 2.2 gigawatts of that generation. And we own the full battery fleet at 1 and 1/2 gigawatt hours.

[00:06:42.96] We are in a position, right now, where we are set to-- we're about a $200 million EBITDA business. We're set to roughly triple that with our next portfolio by about the end of '26 or early '27. And we've done about $5 or $6 billion of project financing and raised about $1.3 billion of equity at this point-- so really, really strong capitalization and very good at financing assets.

[00:07:14.45] Strategically, I mean, the company was founded on two key questions. The first one is, at the time we were looking at it, when we founded the company in 2016, it was even more pronounced than it is today. But still today, it's fairly pronounced. And that is this notion that long term contracts destroy value. So the entire business of renewables had become sort of a game of real estate development.

[00:07:43.59] So Recurrent's whole business model, for instance, my last company, really was not about operating assets. It was about developing assets, taking control of the land, interconnecting, permitting all of that. And then what we would do is, basically, we had a contract with the utility, right? And the utility had a credit rating. That credit rating was very high.

[00:08:04.12] So we would get very cheap debt and lever up the projects. And then we would sell the levered returns to a very cheap cost of funds buyer, like a pension fund or an institutional investor. And those folks would put it in their infra pocket, right now.

[00:08:21.01] That was good business. As a developer, you collect a big development fee when you sold it. And it was, as I call it, kind of a cash and carry business. We were, effectively, bond packagers and salespeople. That business started to get much, much harder as supply chain got a little tougher and the contracts, these long term contracts, were less rich.

[00:08:42.76] And so what we were seeing is the notion that the renewable industry really needed to enter the traditional energy world. Gas-fired assets aren't built that way. LNG plants aren't built that way. So what we wanted to do was build a company that took a little bit more market exposure. So we didn't sign these really cheap, really kind of throat-slitting, long term contracts. We took a little bit more market exposure in terms of the price of power that we sold into the deregulated market on an uncontracted basis. And we had much higher revenues.

[00:09:18.89] Now, what it means is that you have to out how you finance that. Because, obviously, it's much easier to finance a fully contracted asset. So that's really been the magic of what we've cracked in the last couple of years. Our whole current fleet of 2.2 gigawatts and 1 and 1/2 gigawatt hours of batteries is financed off of a much different revenue profile in terms of its contractedness. And we've done that with some pretty innovative debt and tax equity financing. So that's the first thing.

[00:09:45.38] And then the second thing was really something I've talked about a lot, which is this notion of the realization I had in between Recurrent and writing the business plan for Intersect, which was you've got all this power, at the right time and the right place. It's almost so cheap and so abundant that you can't put it on the grid. And so what do you do with it?

[00:10:06.00] And that really became the beginnings of what we call the nexus of deep decarbonization, this insight, this strategy, this sort of philosophy that guides us, which is that loads will come to generation. And the first one we really spent a lot of time on is hydrogen.

[00:10:22.19] Karen Baert: I want to unpack both of these, a little bit, because I think they're great, very important points. If we start with the first one, so you mentioned financing. From my limited understanding about the project development space, what I keep hearing is there's this huge chicken and the egg problem. When there's not enough offtake, the financiers don't want to commit. And then offtakers don't commit until there's actually projects and financing for it. How do you avoid that and how specifically does Intersect Power play here? And how do you achieve the lowest cost of capital to fund these relatively high risk projects?

[00:10:59.95] Sheldon Kimber: Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a couple of things there. I mean, renewable financing is pretty well worn. I would point out that, in the world that I described of long term contracts and the cash and carry, bond packaging world, you could have what the industry affectionately calls the two guys in a truck or the two guys and a dog development model, where you're just very entrepreneurial, real estate development-type players, just sort of flipping assets into these low cost of funds. And you would go out there, and you would throw your hat in the ring in the casino of long term contracts and try to get one. And then you would make it worth something. And a lot of people made a lot of money doing that. And the banks would finance good projects. They wouldn't finance bad projects. But there wasn't so much a flight to quality.

[00:11:53.72] I think a couple of things have happened. The banks have-- Winter Storm Uri, I think, proved that not every contract, not every long term contract is a good contract, and that the details matter in terms of-- and I won't go into it in detail, but a lot of people got really turned inside out, even on contracted, quote unquote, "safe assets." And so the commercial points there, in terms of the contracts, are not always done correctly.

[00:12:24.58] And then I think, the supply chain hits of the last three or four years have been just enormous. And so even in conventional renewables, there are a lot of challenges with financing today. I think it's not so much the structures or the execution of the financing once you're there. I actually see a flight to quality where the banks don't really wish to increasingly play with smaller players.

[00:12:51.77] There's a consolidation beginning in the industry. The scaled-up players are able to access capital, debt, and tax equity markets. And what's funny is I think capital formation and successful financing will occur around those projects and those development and operating platforms that have access to what is in the most short supply, which, in most cases, is equipment.

[00:13:16.47] And so if you've got equipment or in the case of, say, Intersect Power, you're not signing long term contracts-- because right now, in this environment, if I signed a long term contract three years ago, and now I want to build the project, which routinely happened in renewables before, inflation has just eaten my contract. And the cost of money has gone up. The cost of equipment has gone up. And now I have a project that's underwater.

[00:13:42.27] And so I think banks and others are looking at companies, like Intersect Power, that have slightly more inflation resistant business models, either from their access to equipment, through our long term contracts for solar and others, or from our willingness to take more market risk where the prices float up with inflation as opposed to being locked.

[00:14:03.73] So that's I think the key in financing, right now. It's not so much the technology and the structures, but who's got the reliability for delivering for the banks. That's who's getting the money.

[00:14:16.33] Karen Baert: Yeah, it's very interesting. And obviously, for green hydrogen, specifically, if you look at the amount of megawatts of electrolyzers that are out there today, it's still very limited. But looking at the next years, there is a huge increase in capacity and manufacturing capacity, right? Do you think that will have a big impact on the project financing world?

[00:14:37.20] Sheldon Kimber: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And I think what's really interesting in the hydrogen realm is that you would think it was-- a lot of people would think it was a technology game. But really, whether it's alkaline or PEM, the reality is the banks can get there. They can wrap their heads around the technology, pretty easily. While it hasn't been proven or it hasn't been run at the scales we're talking about, there's not a scalability problem from a technical perspective.

[00:15:02.86] The scalability is almost a lot more in the balance of plant, in some respects, than it is in the actual stacks. So I think there's, in some cases, a little bit of a degradation and durability question. But it's not like solar PV, where, when it first came out, it was sort of like, does it work at this level? Or a thin film module, when solar first got financed, that's a much bigger leap, technologically.

[00:15:31.61] I think, instead, what's really interesting is that the banks are really looking at the business models of folks. So there's a lot of, quote unquote, hydrogen developers. And when someone says they're a hydrogen developer, you have to look at a handful of things.

[00:15:46.54] How many renewable plants have they ever developed in their entire lives? So if someone comes at you and says, here, I've got an electrolyzer. There's a lot of grid-tied electrolyzers on the Gulf, for instance, that are setting up next to hydrogen offtake. They've got customers. But they need an insane amount of power.

[00:16:05.77] Well, maybe, for those people who actually work and live in the renewable-- in the electric industry in Texas, I can tell you that reliably getting clean power, with a high capacity factor, from West Texas to the Gulf, if you're betting your whole business on that, and you don't either-- you're already taking a lot of risk. If I were to do that, if I were to go build electrolyzers on the Gulf Coast and we're running 1.2 gigawatts of quasi-merchant power in Texas, in West and North, and we're building more every day, I would be taking out a fair amount of risk.

[00:16:43.71] I think my team could probably manage it. But if you don't have any generation in Texas, and you're trying to find high capacity, factor clean electricity delivered over the grid to the Gulf, and you've never traded, you don't have a trading and origination team, you don't have any assets, I just don't even understand how you claim to be a business. It's like saying, I'm an oil refinery, but I have no access to-- I'm built on a pipe that's the size of a straw. And I don't have any upstream contracts. That's pretty much where we're at.

[00:17:13.96] So I think the banks are increasingly, on hydrogen, beginning to unpack the business model complexities and say, does this project really make sense, in the marketplace, in terms of its input costs and its export costs? Now, you could say the same thing about some of our big projects out in the panhandle. The bank's biggest concern is how are you going to get that hydrogen to market? Where is it going to be used? Are you going to turn it into SAF or ammonia?

[00:17:40.59] So each business model has its-- I'm not just throwing rocks at grid side. I mean we're playing in both. Well, just to be clear, we'll do both models. But yeah, those, I think, are the challenges.

[00:17:52.21] Karen Baert: Very interesting. And I think that's actually a perfect transition to the next point I wanted to touch upon, which is grid. My understanding is that green hydrogen specifically is kind of both a blessing as well as a curse for the grid. The curse is that, well, as you just mentioned, it requires a lot of gigawatts of additional capacity if you want to produce green hydrogen connected to the grid.

[00:18:13.61] The blessing could be that, in a way, producing green hydrogen could balance out the grid through some kind of demand response. You can produce when there's excess energy and shut off when there's not. What do you see as implications to the grid when we continue to build out green hydrogen capacity? And how is Intersect Power anticipating those changes?

[00:18:37.90] Sheldon Kimber: Yeah, I mean, I think the curse and the blessing? So I think it's primarily a curse. In order for it to be a blessing, in order for an interruptible load to be a blessing, it has to be a load that's already on the grid. Because the only way an interruptible load is a blessing otherwise is if you somehow are building a whole bunch of new infrastructure and transmission on the grid, and then you add an interruptible load.

[00:19:06.59] Now, yes, you've got a more flexible-- you can size that new transmission, that new infrastructure to accommodate a more flexible load. That makes a lot of sense. But that's all predicated on the fact that we're actually building something on the grid. And we haven't done that in decades. And the reality is we never will. We'll do some of it. But no one's coming to save the United States power grid. That's not happening.

[00:19:33.11] Instead, you will see load moving to generation. It might not come directly to the busbar of projects like mine, but it will move to the right side of the constraints in Texas, for instance, and be more localized to the West Texas grid. So it might still be delivered over some short span of the grid. But it will not necessarily be delivered to Houston from West. Those big upgrades I don't think are coming. And they certainly aren't coming fast enough.

[00:20:02.49] So when we look at that, I think, in a grid that is static and is not changing or growing, it becomes a curse more than a blessing. But it doesn't have to be a curse. It can be-- if you can put it largely behind the meter or in places where, again, there's plenty of transmission capacity to get from generation to the electrolyzer, then it does become a flexible asset that is primarily powered by incremental green generation that's going on the grid or going behind the meter. But then it can supply services to the grid.

[00:20:48.89] I'll give you an example. One of our very, very large behind the meter projects, say, in West Texas, might have a gigawatt of renewables, half and half wind and solar. And it might be a 500 megawatt electrolyzer. All of that might be behind the meter. Well, in a summer like the one we just had, there were constraints, at certain times of day, getting power to Dallas and Houston and other places from West.

[00:21:14.27] But in many times of the day, the load centers in Texas could take as much power as you could feed them from the West. And in fact, the loads in the West were significant enough that we needed every bit of that power. So in that case, now you've got an incremental generator and an incremental load, but the load is flexible. And now you really are providing a kind of a blessing for the grid in those moments when it really needs it.

[00:21:41.74] And as the grid becomes more renewable, there will be more volatility on the grid just by definition. And so these additions of flexible loads will be more valuable. But again, they have to be paired with new, either generation or transmission, infrastructure. Otherwise, they're just soaking up what's already there, and that's not making anything more flexible.

[00:22:06.28] Karen Baert: And I think that's a great reminder of the fact-- I mean, in this podcast, we've talked a lot about the fact that you want to co-locate your hydrogen production with the user because it's such a pain to transport. But I think this is a great reminder of the importance to think strategically about the location of your electrolyzers based on where the clean power is actually available.

[00:22:24.77] Sheldon Kimber: And just to be clear on that, Karen, one other quick thing is that I'm not a zealot. I think I've been somewhat cast as a zealot because of the policy positions we've taken. The policy positions we've taken are for the long run. We can't be sitting, here, in 2042 making, quote unquote, green hydrogen, assuming that the grid is going to be decarbonized. I've spent my entire career on the grid. I think I have a pretty informed opinion about the fact that in 2035, in 2040, the grid will not be 100% green.

[00:22:55.51] So that assumption cannot be made. And that's all we're really saying. Again, in the near term, we're the first to say that there will be grid-tied electrolyzers. There will be grid-tied electrolyzers that are used, and we'll do some of them. We do see the need to grow the industry and not be purists about behind the meter.

[00:23:14.97] Karen Baert: Yeah. Great. Sheldon, I'd love to transition a bit towards more broader leadership questions. But before that, we'd love to summarize, for our listeners, when you think about what makes a good or even great hydrogen developer, if you would have to summarize it in a few bullet points, what would you say?

[00:23:35.01] Sheldon Kimber: I'd say make two lists. I've said this before and I'll say it again, make a list of every clean power company that has developed multiple 500 megawatt-plus renewable generation assets in North America. This example is for North America, let's say. So make that list. That's not a lot of people. Even many of the bigger players in renewables don't do that scale of asset.

[00:24:06.46] Now make another list of the players who, within that one, are not tangled up in supply chain and long term contract issues, where their contracts are out of the money and their pipelines are upside down, from the last three years of chaos in the industry. Because there's a very large number of those players that are tangled up in those issues.

[00:24:33.55] The overlap of those two lists is where the really great hydrogen developers, I think, are going to be found. Because you need to have folks that have that depth of experience but were not so far into renewables, as a company, to have so many legacy issues that their senior-most management have had the time to put together a clear vision for how they're going to play hydrogen.

[00:25:00.30] And I often sit on panels with folks, with senior folks, from other companies, and I think that's really one of the advantages a company like Intersect and many others have. I mean. I'm not saying we're the only one. There are others on that list.

[00:25:13.46] But when you combine those two lists, it's about having, from top to bottom in the company, a deep understanding of the economics, the technical elements, and a clear vision for how you're going to play hydrogen, and then also having had the experience, from across the entire value chain of development, to raise the money, build it, put it in the ground, operate it. And so, yeah, I think there aren't actually-- ironically, there aren't actually that many people who are truly qualified to deliver these things.

[00:25:43.78] Karen Baert: I think that's a great summary. And I look forward to continuing to monitor the landscape as this very important piece of the supply chain and value chain continues to materialize. Great.

[00:25:54.65] Sheldon, we'd love to dive into a little bit more personal or leadership, questions. I'd say, first of all, I keep hearing from your team that you're a great leader. And in effect, when you see that you got a lot of the Recurrent Energy band back together at Intersect, I think that speaks for itself. Could you tell us a bit more about the team you have, why you like to work together, and what learnings from Recurrent you're applying to Intersect Power today?

[00:26:24.05] Sheldon Kimber: Yeah. I mean, just to really talk about the people that I've spent my career working with on renewables. I mean, the team of folks that I worked with at Recurrent, and then many of them came over to Intersect, and then we built a team beyond that with people who have deep experience at some of the largest players in the industry.

[00:26:49.33] Even not gathering up the megawatts and gigawatts that those other players have looked at, but even just looking at what the first employees that came over from Recurrent have been a part of, between Recurrent and Intersect, that core team has been responsible for, I think, more than 5% of all the installed solar in the United States. So when you look at that, that's a pretty good thing. There aren't a lot of people who can look back on their careers and just so directly tie back to such an impact.

[00:27:21.07] So I think the team we've built has a lot of things to be proud of, both the initial team that came over from Recurrent but also the team that we're building around that. Because even just the 2.2 gigawatts and the battery portfolio we're running now has been put in the ground just so much faster than anybody else has really ever done it in this industry from a flat start. So a lot to be proud of there.

[00:27:50.32] Intersect Power, itself, the reason we are so successful is that this company was built, from the ground up, very intentionally. I had a whole bunch of health issues and other things when I left Recurrent. I pretty much crawled out of there just having, for lack of a better term, kind of brute forced my way through a very hard growth path, both for the company and personal growth.

[00:28:16.22] Because when I started at Recurrent, or when we were starting the company, I think I was 28 years old. And as I've told other entrepreneurs who've asked me, it's really how fast can you grow not how fast the company can grow. So it really broke me. And I took a little bit of time off with my family, moved my family to Hawaii.

[00:28:35.90] And then I got back together with my executive coach before I made any decisions about what I would do next. And we actually sat down for an entire day, kind of a workshop, one on one, and we defined what a company would look like that would be worth my coming back to work. Because, obviously, we'd done well at Recurrent, and I didn't want to come back to this unless there was a way to do it in a way that excited me, that I thought was worth doing.

[00:29:05.25] And so we were very intentional about the mission, the vision, and the values of the company. We're a very values based company. We're really focused on our mission around beating back climate change. And we're very focused on building an intentional community, as well. So I think the leadership, that maybe others talk about, comes from that intentionality more than anything else.

[00:29:30.71] Karen Baert: That is truly remarkable. Sheldon, thank you for sharing that. Even beyond Recurrent and Intersect Power, you have a very impressive leadership story and personal journey. Your father was a pastor, and your family are immigrants. Would you be open to sharing a bit more of how these things have shaped your journey and your vision, hopes, and dreams for the future?

[00:29:53.58] Sheldon Kimber: Yeah, sure, sure thing. So my family came to this country, in the mid '80s, when I was about seven years old from South Africa. So I'm a sixth generation South African. I do not have the cool accent because it was beaten out of me on the playgrounds of rural Ohio where it was not it was not a cool thing to have.

[00:30:21.82] But yeah, my father in particular was asked, less than politely by the government, the apartheid government of South Africa, to leave and never come back. And so we took the hint and, for lack of a better term, fled to the United States. My dad was a Methodist minister. And so combining the sort of political elements of my household with the sort of faith based elements of my household, there was always, always an understanding that your career and your trajectory was more about the meaning and the impact that you had on the world than it was about financial success or anything of that nature.

[00:31:03.97] And so my sister's a nonprofit litigator who basically has spent her career working to defend the Americans with Disabilities Act. So that's a hard act to follow. So when I got into electric power, I knew that, eventually, I wanted to wind up in renewables. And even in gas-fired at Calpine, at that time, in the late '90s, early 2000s, gas was clean. We were repowering America with clean natural gas. We were bumping coal plants offline. And that was cleaning up the power grid.

[00:31:41.18] So I know people-- it seems a little cute at this point, but that really was a big push and part of why I went to Calpine. This really all fuels some of the other things I've said a lot from the Intersect bully pulpit, here. And that is, some of the work we do on domestic content, the strong belief that the Intersect team has in "made in America," the fact that we're the largest customer for solar, these are all things that really stem from the values of not only the company but my personal values, as someone who's come to this country, as an immigrant, believes that this country can still do great things, and wants to be a part of that.

[00:32:31.90] Karen Baert: That's very powerful. And it's not lost on me that this is so consistent with the intentionality you mentioned in the previous question. So, Sheldon, we're getting to the end of the podcast. I'd like to end with a question that we ask every guest. I have this strong belief that we all stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us. And to use Isaac Newton's words, it's standing on their shoulders, what makes us see further.

[00:32:55.59] In that context, who inspires you most and why?

[00:32:59.79] Sheldon Kimber: I'm going to give you a reference here, but I don't want it to be taken the wrong way as sort of a trite reference. Because these people don't necessarily inspire me. They intrigue me. I have a curiosity about one element of their leadership in particular.

[00:33:17.49] Years ago, I read this Steve Jobs biography. And right now, I'm reading the Elon Musk biography by Isaacson. And I'm intrigued. I'm not necessarily inspired by either of them. But I'm intrigued by the dilemma, if you will. You can be a great leader. You can build great companies. There are many people who have. There are many people who have built great companies. I hope to be one of them. And I think we're on a path to build a great company.

[00:33:44.15] But the people that we put on a pedestal as sort of building transcendent companies, like the Elon Musks and the Steve Jobs, are so often associated with very bad behavior, let's call it, things that would be out of line with the values and intentionality and the community-building that have been so important to Intersect's success.

[00:34:11.48] And I look at that as-- and I'm trying to unpack that. I'm trying to understand whether or not the transcendence of those organizations has to do with and is somehow defined by and reliant upon the bad behavior that is tied to those folks or whether it's possible to build something that is transcendent without that. And that is something that interests me. It intrigues me. So less than inspiring, it intrigues me.

[00:34:45.95] What inspires me? Maybe the reason that I'm intrigued is that I grew up-- as I mentioned, after I got out of South Africa, I spent most of my youth, in the Midwest, in small town Ohio.

[00:35:00.65] And the people that did inspire me and still do to lead in the way that I do are folks like my dad and his ministry and the parents of my friends growing up. They ran an accounting firm, a medium sized accounting firm in small town Ohio. And the kinds of things that you would hear from those folks, folks that were on the local agricultural bank board, were that success was about being a good man. I always heard-- I always heard that phrase, be a good man. And I'm not sure what being a good man was when I was a kid. But I'm working on it. And I'm getting a better idea of it as I go along.

[00:35:45.93] The thing I'll leave you with is what inspires me is trying to figure out whether I can be a good man and still be a transcendent leader and how do you make that step. That's really what inspires me to get better as a leader.

[00:35:59.01] Karen Baert: What a great way to end this podcast. I like to believe that we can build absolutely exceptional things while being good. Sheldon, thank you so much for taking the time and inspiring and informing us today. Thank you so much.

[00:36:11.58] Sheldon Kimber: Thank you, Karen. Pleasure to be here.

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