No construction projects happen unless the owner decides to do it.
Directly or indirectly, the owner is everyone's customer — it's their spend that drives the market.
Our job is to make the owner's decision as easy and as fast as possible.
Components of getting to 'yes' are:
Doing the construction meets a business goal
Capital is available at a cost that "pencils out" against construction costs and business goals
Construction will have good operational outcome (i.e. will finish on schedule, will make occupants happier or whatever)
Each component has a risk calculus.
If the business goal is to avoid LL97 fines, the risk is that the wrong set of measures will result in non-compliance.
Once the project pencils out on paper, there's still the risk that the estimates are wrong and the costs are higher than the amount of capital they can access, or that the contractor doesn't perform the work well — delays (money), poor quality (call-backs/money), etc.
When you buy a cup of coffee, you usually get it pretty immediately.
If the barista forgets you for an hour, they'll probably comp your coffee or throw in a pastry or something, because in a coffee transaction, the risk of delivery belongs to the coffee shop.
If, on the other hand, you get your coffee on time but you just don't like the taste of it — from the $1.50 coffee cart you're not getting your money back; if you paid $8, they'll probably make you a new one, because the price of the "satisfaction" is built into the $8 cup. The price difference is a risk allocation — what you pay buys you out of holding a risk.
Construction transactions are the same, scaled up: they price a good or a service plus risk. The risk is large, bundled, and spread across many hands, so every price along the chain carries a premium for the risk that party is holding — and those premiums stack.
Winning any single player comes down to taking risk off its plate. Mitigating the owner's risk means reaching through the owner to the parties it pays — the contractor and the lender. The premium baked into what the owner pays — the markup over the real cost of the work — is their risk, priced in. Shrink their risk and that premium shrinks with it: the owner's deal de-risks and cheapens at the same time.
Two kinds of risk sit inside that premium, and we can mitigate both. Some of it is perceived — a party prices against a danger that looms large only because it can't see clearly. Show it the truth and the fear shrinks to its real size — the exposure was never fully there to begin with. Getting it that truth, though, is hard work: it takes the data and the track record to prove the danger is smaller than it looks. The rest is real — the genuine chance the work runs late, the savings miss, the loan goes bad. Better information won't argue that away; you shrink it by pooling it across the whole market, where one party's live exposure is another's known quantity, and by carrying some of it yourself. Two different problems, then, and neither of them free.
Opacity wrecks competition on top of all this: bidding runs blind, so it never clears at an efficient price — the contractor and the lender bid defensively, chase work they won't win, and the owner never gets the price real competition should deliver.
Take a contractor. It bids high because it already has two other bids out for the same schedule slot and doesn't know which will land, and because it isn't sure the scope it's pricing is the scope that will actually be required. If it wins, it still has to make money under the worst case, so it pads. Most of that padding guards against perceived risk — a collision it can't see well enough to rule out. Let it count on the job dropping into a slack period without colliding with its other work — and give it that experience over and over as more of its book runs through Momentum — and the padding has nothing left to protect against. The premium disappears, and the savings split three ways: a better price for the owner, steadier utilization for the contractor, and a spread for us. It compounds, too: the more work that runs through Momentum, the more dependable the flow, the lower the premiums, the more reason to bring the next job through Momentum.
All construction projects require a bunch of transaction partners. Each of them makes its decisions against business risk it can't see. Demand is real and patterned, but it arrives unsynchronized and invisible — no one can see where the market is forming, so everyone hedges against its own unknowns, and the hedges stack on top of each other.
The owner decides whether to buy, and the decision is all risk: will the savings be real, will the work go sideways, will the financing pencil out, will the contractor deliver, is now the right time.
The contractor wins work one job at a time and can't see the pipeline ahead. It wants 100% capacity, but no single bid is sure to land, so it hedges by bidding to ~150%. Every contractor does this at once, and the inflated signals cascade.
Lender funds the work and is part infrastructure, part competitive bidder. Blind the same way, it misprices and over-hedges its capital, one deal at a time.
Non-transaction stakeholders are no less blind:
The utility provisions capacity ahead of the requests, but each project arrives as an isolated yes/no ("can I put this equipment here?"). It never sees the wave coming — long-lead bets made blind.
The regulator clears projects to proceed and takes each as a one-off. Even with fifty similar projects coming in six months, it can't see the pattern, so it re-litigates every one from scratch instead of streamlining for the wave.
Much of the problem is that these are risks that are easier to quantify and price at the market level but hard to price for each individual circumstance. You know that the quarter will come up heads half the time if you flip it many times, but if you only flip once, knowing it doesn't help you.
Everything in this market hinges on one thing: the owner buying the product. The contractor needs it to have work. The utility needs it to justify its investment. Finance needs it to deploy capital. Even the regulator wants it — their entire program exists to get owners to act. Every player is downstream of the owner's decision to buy.
So we plant our flag on the owner. We want Momentum to be the easiest, most performative way to buy the product — the way Amazon is the easiest way to buy almost anything. (The App Store is a more extreme version: on an iPhone it isn't the easiest way to get an app, it's the only way — a kind of ownership worth aspiring toward, even if we don't start there.) When buying the product means "run it through Momentum," we own the owner.
Owning the owner is not about making the workflow easier.
The owner hesitates because the decision is risky. Will the savings be real? Will the work go sideways? Will the financing pencil out? Will the contractor deliver? Is now even the right time? Those unknowns stop the purchase; the friction of the paperwork barely registers.
So the deliverable is a de-risked decision. Our workflow does part of that de-risking — the portfolio view, the compliance picture, the cost-and-savings estimates, the contractor matching, the financing — but it's only our current means to that end, not the end itself. To win we don't need a more perfect workflow; we need the decision de-risked. If mistletoe de-risked it, mistletoe is the business we'd be in. Don't over-index on perfecting the workflow.
If we forget that and just keep making the workflow smoother, we're building a better horseshoe — faster, cleaner, nicer to use, and still the same thing the owner is wary of. We need to be inventing the car: changing what the decision is, so the owner isn't bravely betting on an uncertain project but making an obvious choice against a known quantity.
There are three distinct ways to sit between the people in a market: a marketplace owns the match, a platform owns the foundation, an aggregator owns the customer. (Full breakdown here — it's worth the read, because the difference matters for where we're headed.)
We're all three at once, but each plays a different role, and they reinforce each other.
1. We own the building owner. (Aggregator — the strategy, and the hub.) The real prize is becoming the building owner's default home for their building. Their whole portfolio lives in Momentum: it shows them what they owe under compliance law, tells them what work to do and what it'll cost and save, and helps them find someone to do it. Once an owner runs their building through Momentum, we're their starting point for whatever comes next. The owner relationship is the asset — everything else hangs off it.
One wrinkle makes us more interesting than Amazon. Amazon owns the purchaser for its own account: one relationship, one beneficiary. The energy programs that run on Momentum — utilities, cities, and agencies setting up their programs inside our system and paying to operate on our foundation — aren't competing with us for the owner. They're asking us to own the owner for them: they want the owner engaged, compliant, and moving projects, but don't want to build that relationship themselves. (This is also where a flavor of platform shows up — they're operating on our rails — but the substance is aggregator.) So we own the owner once, and that relationship pays off in two directions: it's our strategic asset and a service we deliver to the programs. Even our hosted customers reinforce our ownership rather than fighting us for it. Owning the owner is the revenue today.
2. We provide the data backbone. (Platform — the strategic one.) This data backbone is what matters most for where we're headed. We provide it for program analysis: NYSERDA runs on it today, PSC is next on the same model, and Con Ed is a potential customer — a utility that could come on but isn't there yet. The true platform is the condition-setters themselves — regulators and utilities building their analysis and decisions on top of our data. And it points straight at the players' core problem: these condition-setters are blind to where demand is forming, so they can't provision for it. Our data is what gives them the visibility to do that.
3. We take a cut of the deals. (Marketplace — the meter.) Because we own the owner's attention, we can sit in the middle of the transactions they need: hiring a contractor, and — coming next — financing the work. The plan is to take a fee on both. The contractor side isn't fully wired yet (today it stops at "you're hired," before any money moves), and financing is the cleaner place to earn a fee, so it's likely first.
How they fit together. Owning the owner is the hub, and it funds us today — partly because the programs pay us to do that owning on their behalf. The data backbone is the real platform and the strategic moat. And once we own the owner, we can meter the transactions they need. Own the customer first; meter the transactions second.
The bet the whole strategy rests on: Momentum should become the market maker. That term gets used loosely, so it's worth being precise about what a market maker actually does and the spread it earns — but the short version is that it stands in the middle of a market and quotes both sides continuously, so anyone can transact now instead of waiting for a perfect counterparty.
Why this market needs one. Look back at the players. Every one of them has a market maker's problem exactly: they can't see the other side of their trade, so they act blind and one-off.
Why we're the only one who can be it. A market maker needs one thing above all: the ability to see both sides. Because we own the owner, we hold the demand. Because we run the data backbone for the regulators and utilities, we hold the visibility. No one else in the market sits on both. So we — and only we — can stand in the middle and quote both sides with confidence: tell the contractor real demand is coming so they stop over-bidding, tell the utility where to provision, tell finance what the pipeline actually looks like.
Filling the empty seat. The fragmented, mispriced risk that no single player can pool today is the market maker's seat. Pooling each party's unknowns across the whole market, so one party's uncertainty becomes another's known quantity, and getting paid for it, is precisely what a market maker does.
What this means for value. The value we create is the waste we eliminate — the blind hedging, over-bidding, mis-provisioning, and mispricing that exists only because no one can see both sides. Some of it we hand back to the players as the reason they'd rather operate through us than around us. Some of it we keep, as the spread, for standing in the middle and making the market work.
A bigger swing than the meter or the platform. The marketplace is a tax on flow — a cut of deals that would happen anyway, thin and easy to route around once the match is made. The platform is a fee for tooling — stickier, but bounded by what the condition-setters will pay, and most of the value they build on our data accrues to them. The market maker's claim is different in kind: a share of the waste above, captured across every party and every transaction at once. It grows the pie instead of taxing a slice of it. And risk-bearing is where the durable money sits — the broker earns a commission, the party that prices and carries the risk owns the franchise — so in a market this risk-heavy, the risk seat is the richest one at the table, not a side business. The position compounds, too: seeing both sides can't be competed away the way a match or a tool can.
The market-maker play is built on the other two. We can only quote both sides because we own the owner (the demand) and run the data backbone (the visibility). On their own, each captures a fraction; assembled into the market-maker seat, the same assets unlock the spread across the whole market.
Facilitating transactions would just be metering. The hypothesis is bigger: we become the party that makes this market liquid, priced, and de-risked, because we're the only one who can see both sides of it.
Strategy Notebook
The whole thing in two lines:
Both follow from one fact: every seller's price has a risk premium built into it.
Owners Have to Say "Yes" #
We agree that:
Components of getting to 'yes' are:
Each component has a risk calculus.
If the business goal is to avoid LL97 fines, the risk is that the wrong set of measures will result in non-compliance. Once the project pencils out on paper, there's still the risk that the estimates are wrong and the costs are higher than the amount of capital they can access, or that the contractor doesn't perform the work well — delays (money), poor quality (call-backs/money), etc.
We Create Value by Pricing the Risks #
When you buy a cup of coffee, you usually get it pretty immediately. If the barista forgets you for an hour, they'll probably comp your coffee or throw in a pastry or something, because in a coffee transaction, the risk of delivery belongs to the coffee shop. If, on the other hand, you get your coffee on time but you just don't like the taste of it — from the $1.50 coffee cart you're not getting your money back; if you paid $8, they'll probably make you a new one, because the price of the "satisfaction" is built into the $8 cup. The price difference is a risk allocation — what you pay buys you out of holding a risk.
Construction transactions are the same, scaled up: they price a good or a service plus risk. The risk is large, bundled, and spread across many hands, so every price along the chain carries a premium for the risk that party is holding — and those premiums stack.
Winning any single player comes down to taking risk off its plate. Mitigating the owner's risk means reaching through the owner to the parties it pays — the contractor and the lender. The premium baked into what the owner pays — the markup over the real cost of the work — is their risk, priced in. Shrink their risk and that premium shrinks with it: the owner's deal de-risks and cheapens at the same time.
Two kinds of risk sit inside that premium, and we can mitigate both. Some of it is perceived — a party prices against a danger that looms large only because it can't see clearly. Show it the truth and the fear shrinks to its real size — the exposure was never fully there to begin with. Getting it that truth, though, is hard work: it takes the data and the track record to prove the danger is smaller than it looks. The rest is real — the genuine chance the work runs late, the savings miss, the loan goes bad. Better information won't argue that away; you shrink it by pooling it across the whole market, where one party's live exposure is another's known quantity, and by carrying some of it yourself. Two different problems, then, and neither of them free.
Opacity wrecks competition on top of all this: bidding runs blind, so it never clears at an efficient price — the contractor and the lender bid defensively, chase work they won't win, and the owner never gets the price real competition should deliver.
Take a contractor. It bids high because it already has two other bids out for the same schedule slot and doesn't know which will land, and because it isn't sure the scope it's pricing is the scope that will actually be required. If it wins, it still has to make money under the worst case, so it pads. Most of that padding guards against perceived risk — a collision it can't see well enough to rule out. Let it count on the job dropping into a slack period without colliding with its other work — and give it that experience over and over as more of its book runs through Momentum — and the padding has nothing left to protect against. The premium disappears, and the savings split three ways: a better price for the owner, steadier utilization for the contractor, and a spread for us. It compounds, too: the more work that runs through Momentum, the more dependable the flow, the lower the premiums, the more reason to bring the next job through Momentum.
Everyone Is Flying Blind #
All construction projects require a bunch of transaction partners. Each of them makes its decisions against business risk it can't see. Demand is real and patterned, but it arrives unsynchronized and invisible — no one can see where the market is forming, so everyone hedges against its own unknowns, and the hedges stack on top of each other.
The owner decides whether to buy, and the decision is all risk: will the savings be real, will the work go sideways, will the financing pencil out, will the contractor deliver, is now the right time.
The contractor wins work one job at a time and can't see the pipeline ahead. It wants 100% capacity, but no single bid is sure to land, so it hedges by bidding to ~150%. Every contractor does this at once, and the inflated signals cascade.
Lender funds the work and is part infrastructure, part competitive bidder. Blind the same way, it misprices and over-hedges its capital, one deal at a time.
Non-transaction stakeholders are no less blind:
The utility provisions capacity ahead of the requests, but each project arrives as an isolated yes/no ("can I put this equipment here?"). It never sees the wave coming — long-lead bets made blind.
The regulator clears projects to proceed and takes each as a one-off. Even with fifty similar projects coming in six months, it can't see the pattern, so it re-litigates every one from scratch instead of streamlining for the wave.
Much of the problem is that these are risks that are easier to quantify and price at the market level but hard to price for each individual circumstance. You know that the quarter will come up heads half the time if you flip it many times, but if you only flip once, knowing it doesn't help you.
Own the Owner #
Everything in this market hinges on one thing: the owner buying the product. The contractor needs it to have work. The utility needs it to justify its investment. Finance needs it to deploy capital. Even the regulator wants it — their entire program exists to get owners to act. Every player is downstream of the owner's decision to buy.
So we plant our flag on the owner. We want Momentum to be the easiest, most performative way to buy the product — the way Amazon is the easiest way to buy almost anything. (The App Store is a more extreme version: on an iPhone it isn't the easiest way to get an app, it's the only way — a kind of ownership worth aspiring toward, even if we don't start there.) When buying the product means "run it through Momentum," we own the owner.
Owning the owner is not about making the workflow easier.
The owner hesitates because the decision is risky. Will the savings be real? Will the work go sideways? Will the financing pencil out? Will the contractor deliver? Is now even the right time? Those unknowns stop the purchase; the friction of the paperwork barely registers.
So the deliverable is a de-risked decision. Our workflow does part of that de-risking — the portfolio view, the compliance picture, the cost-and-savings estimates, the contractor matching, the financing — but it's only our current means to that end, not the end itself. To win we don't need a more perfect workflow; we need the decision de-risked. If mistletoe de-risked it, mistletoe is the business we'd be in. Don't over-index on perfecting the workflow.
If we forget that and just keep making the workflow smoother, we're building a better horseshoe — faster, cleaner, nicer to use, and still the same thing the owner is wary of. We need to be inventing the car: changing what the decision is, so the owner isn't bravely betting on an uncertain project but making an obvious choice against a known quantity.
So What Are We Right Now? #
There are three distinct ways to sit between the people in a market: a marketplace owns the match, a platform owns the foundation, an aggregator owns the customer. (Full breakdown here — it's worth the read, because the difference matters for where we're headed.)
We're all three at once, but each plays a different role, and they reinforce each other.
1. We own the building owner. (Aggregator — the strategy, and the hub.) The real prize is becoming the building owner's default home for their building. Their whole portfolio lives in Momentum: it shows them what they owe under compliance law, tells them what work to do and what it'll cost and save, and helps them find someone to do it. Once an owner runs their building through Momentum, we're their starting point for whatever comes next. The owner relationship is the asset — everything else hangs off it.
One wrinkle makes us more interesting than Amazon. Amazon owns the purchaser for its own account: one relationship, one beneficiary. The energy programs that run on Momentum — utilities, cities, and agencies setting up their programs inside our system and paying to operate on our foundation — aren't competing with us for the owner. They're asking us to own the owner for them: they want the owner engaged, compliant, and moving projects, but don't want to build that relationship themselves. (This is also where a flavor of platform shows up — they're operating on our rails — but the substance is aggregator.) So we own the owner once, and that relationship pays off in two directions: it's our strategic asset and a service we deliver to the programs. Even our hosted customers reinforce our ownership rather than fighting us for it. Owning the owner is the revenue today.
2. We provide the data backbone. (Platform — the strategic one.) This data backbone is what matters most for where we're headed. We provide it for program analysis: NYSERDA runs on it today, PSC is next on the same model, and Con Ed is a potential customer — a utility that could come on but isn't there yet. The true platform is the condition-setters themselves — regulators and utilities building their analysis and decisions on top of our data. And it points straight at the players' core problem: these condition-setters are blind to where demand is forming, so they can't provision for it. Our data is what gives them the visibility to do that.
3. We take a cut of the deals. (Marketplace — the meter.) Because we own the owner's attention, we can sit in the middle of the transactions they need: hiring a contractor, and — coming next — financing the work. The plan is to take a fee on both. The contractor side isn't fully wired yet (today it stops at "you're hired," before any money moves), and financing is the cleaner place to earn a fee, so it's likely first.
How they fit together. Owning the owner is the hub, and it funds us today — partly because the programs pay us to do that owning on their behalf. The data backbone is the real platform and the strategic moat. And once we own the owner, we can meter the transactions they need. Own the customer first; meter the transactions second.
The Hypothesis — We Become the Market Maker #
The bet the whole strategy rests on: Momentum should become the market maker. That term gets used loosely, so it's worth being precise about what a market maker actually does and the spread it earns — but the short version is that it stands in the middle of a market and quotes both sides continuously, so anyone can transact now instead of waiting for a perfect counterparty.
Why this market needs one. Look back at the players. Every one of them has a market maker's problem exactly: they can't see the other side of their trade, so they act blind and one-off.
Why we're the only one who can be it. A market maker needs one thing above all: the ability to see both sides. Because we own the owner, we hold the demand. Because we run the data backbone for the regulators and utilities, we hold the visibility. No one else in the market sits on both. So we — and only we — can stand in the middle and quote both sides with confidence: tell the contractor real demand is coming so they stop over-bidding, tell the utility where to provision, tell finance what the pipeline actually looks like.
Filling the empty seat. The fragmented, mispriced risk that no single player can pool today is the market maker's seat. Pooling each party's unknowns across the whole market, so one party's uncertainty becomes another's known quantity, and getting paid for it, is precisely what a market maker does.
What this means for value. The value we create is the waste we eliminate — the blind hedging, over-bidding, mis-provisioning, and mispricing that exists only because no one can see both sides. Some of it we hand back to the players as the reason they'd rather operate through us than around us. Some of it we keep, as the spread, for standing in the middle and making the market work.
A bigger swing than the meter or the platform. The marketplace is a tax on flow — a cut of deals that would happen anyway, thin and easy to route around once the match is made. The platform is a fee for tooling — stickier, but bounded by what the condition-setters will pay, and most of the value they build on our data accrues to them. The market maker's claim is different in kind: a share of the waste above, captured across every party and every transaction at once. It grows the pie instead of taxing a slice of it. And risk-bearing is where the durable money sits — the broker earns a commission, the party that prices and carries the risk owns the franchise — so in a market this risk-heavy, the risk seat is the richest one at the table, not a side business. The position compounds, too: seeing both sides can't be competed away the way a match or a tool can.
The market-maker play is built on the other two. We can only quote both sides because we own the owner (the demand) and run the data backbone (the visibility). On their own, each captures a fraction; assembled into the market-maker seat, the same assets unlock the spread across the whole market.
Facilitating transactions would just be metering. The hypothesis is bigger: we become the party that makes this market liquid, priced, and de-risked, because we're the only one who can see both sides of it.