Clicking as Co-Founders, From Bad Idea to Goldmine, and Becoming Market Leaders in EV Charging, with Peter Barba and Zygi Zabieta of Lectrium

The VITALIZE Podcast: Venture Capital | Startups | Angel Investing

Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) talks with Peter Barba (@pbarba_22) and Zygimantas (Zygi) Zabieta (@zzabieta), Co-Founders of Lectrium, a full-service platform for EV home charging on a mission to make every home EV-ready. They make the home charging installation process easy through their network of EVITP certified electricians. At Lectrium, they believe that true carbon neutrality can be achieved only if the transition to EVs is frictionless, and their ambition is to standardize and reduce the cost of the installation process and remove financial barriers for EV adoption.

Peter Barba played Division 1 basketball in college and left his job in investment banking to attend Antler’s disruptive startup builder in Oslo, Norway, where he met his co-founder. He is passionate about climate technology, electric vehicles, blockchain, and building businesses.

Zygi Zabieta loves innovation, EVs, blockchain, renewables, politics, and sustainable planning. He is also a public speaker, host & co-founder of Impact Meetups Vilnius, Community Champion for Nordics and Baltics at WEF Global Shapers, and got his Master of Science degree in Environmental Management & Policy at Lund University (IIIEE).

Website: Lectrium

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/peter-barba/ and linkedin.com/in/zabieta/

Twitter: @pbarba_22 and @zzabieta

Show Notes:

• How Lectrium is making U.S. homes EV-ready
• Lectrium’s origin story
• How they ended up at the Antler accelerator
• How Peter and Zygi met at Antler, bonded, and decided to work together
• The evolution of Lectrium during the Antler program—how a bad idea became the goldmine
• What customer discovery looked like for Lectrium
• Product development and using no-code tools (Zyro and Typeform) for initial building
• Getting their first paying customers
• Lectrium’s business model and customer acquisition
• Bottom-up vs. top-down dealership acquisition strategies
• How they’re approaching growth in these early stages
• How new U.S. public EV charging mandates could affect Lectrium
• The argument for residential vs. public EV charging
• The potential for partnering with auto-manufacturers directly
• Onboarding electricians and their role in Lectrium’s success
• How they’re approaching brand recognition and marketing, and startup showers as the new baby showers
• How they’re managing a distributed team across time zones
• Their execution plan to succeed as market leaders in the next few years

More about the show:

The Vitalize Podcast, a show by Vitalize Venture Capital (a seed-stage venture capital firm and pre-seed 400+ member angel community open to everyone), dives deep into the world of startup investing and the future of work.

Hosted by Justin Gordon, the Director of Marketing at Vitalize Venture Capital, The Vitalize Podcast includes two main series.

The Angel Investing series features interviews with a variety of angel investors and VCs around the world. The goal? To help develop the next generation of amazing investors.

The Future of Work series takes a look at the founders and investors shaping the new world of work, including insights from our team here at Vitalize Venture Capital.

More about us:

Vitalize Venture Capital was formed in 2017 as a $16M seed-stage venture fund and now includes both a fund as well as an angel investing community investing in the future of work. Vitalize has offices in Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

The Vitalize Team:

Gale - https://twitter.com/galeforceVC
Caroline - https://twitter.com/carolinecasson_
Justin - https://twitter.com/justingordon212

Vitalize Angels, our angel investing community open to everyone:
https://vitalize.vc/vitalizeangels/