Today Redflow announced the appointment of John Lindsay as a non-executive director of Redflow Limited. John has deep skills and experience around technology and technology related business matters. He is, to use a favourite phase (for us both), ‘smart and gets things done’.

Its worth appreciating that John has specific expertise and experience in precisely the realms that Redflow needs. I sent John over to Brisbane when I originally invested in Redflow, to help me assess the technical merit of the technology. He, like me, has been a shareholder in Redflow ever since.

In addition to being a great businessman, John is also a technology geek at heart (as am I). He has been an active member of the electric vehicle and renewable energy community for many years. His daily driver is electric (as is mine) – of course. He knows which end of a soldering iron is the hot end.

His idea of a fun weekend hobby is (literally – and recently) to have set up a D.I.Y. solar and battery offgrid system in his own garage to charge up his electric car from renewable energy because… he can (and because he knows how to).

His appointment frees me up to transition my own head space in the Redflow context totally into the technology around making our battery work in the real world. Doing that stuff is what I really love about being involved with Redflow. I love helping to make this amazing technology sing and dance smoothly for real people, solving real problems.

It was just the same at  Internode – the company I spent more than two decades running. The ideal situation is to do things in business because you’re passionate about it. In the words of Simon Sinek: People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

I care about Redflow because I believe that Redflow’s technology can genuinely help to accelerate the world’s transition to renewable energy as a replacement to burning things to make electricity. Its really that simple.

The technical lever I designed, to help Redflow to move this particular part of the world, is the Redflow Battery Management System (BMS). I am very proud of the great work done by the technical team at Redflow who have taken many good ideas and turned them into great code – and who continue to do that on an ongoing basis.

So… while there can be a natural tendency, when looking at this sort of transition, to wonder whether my leaving the board (given how influential I’ve been at board level in the last few years) is because something ‘bad’ is happening, or because I don’t like it any more, or because I don’t feel confident about things at Redflow, the reality is precisely the opposite.

My being happy to step back from board level involvement over the next few months is the best possible compliment that I can give to the current board, lead by Brett Johnson (and now including John) and to the current executive (now ably lead by Tim Harris).  

I’ve put my money where my mouth is, to a very large extent, with Redflow. I am its largest single investor – and I have also put my money down as a customer, too, in my home and in my office.

At this point, I’m happy to note that we are seeing great new batteries turning up from our new factory. We are on the verge of refreshing our training processes to show our integrators – and their customers – how far the BMS and our integration technology has come at this point (and just how easy it all is, now, to make the pieces work). We are looking forward to the integration industry installing more of our batteries into real world situations around the world again – at last.

We do this with confidence and we do this with eagerness.

I am proud to be a shareholder in Redflow and I look forward to the next chapter of this story.