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Potentially interesting idea, but the founding team doesn't inspire a lot of confidence: https://www.legends.solar/v2-the-team https://www.legends.solar/v2-the-

Potentially interesting idea, but the founding team doesn't inspire a lot of confidence: https://www.legends.solar/v2-the-team https://www.legends.solar/v2-the-team One "product designer", one former art gallery manager, and one embedded engineer with a couple years of experience. Advisors include another "product designer", someone who describes themselves as a "storyteller film maker", and someone in the solar financing space. At least there's one person in here with semi-related solar financing experience. Of course, it's entirely possible for a scrappy team like this to execute on a startup if they can get all of the right pieces aligned. I do get skeptical when the founding team and advisors have more "designers" than doers, though. Seeing the founder have "summer design associate" as a title within the past few years doesn't really inspire confidence in a capital-intensive solar company. Would love to see them succeed! However, I would need to see some proof that they can execute before I'd even consider touching this. This is the kind of business where you lose any claim to your solar panels the second they go out of business, and many lenders are happy to prey on those scenarios. The numbers on their example page also raise a huge red flag that they don't seem to understand the economics at all: https://www.legends.solar/get-early-access https://www.legends.solar/get-early-access $250 as an estimated investment for a panel they show as 350W is way below the installed cost that anyone is pulling off right now. I'm guessing they picked random numbers to collect interest to fundraise with, not from actual models. Honestly, I'd much rather see a corporation set up as a publicly-traded company that builds solar installations and pays out a dividend to investors. That keeps investors aligned with the company and maintains their claim over the installations. The way this is set up feels like it's designed to strip rights from individual retail investors by funneling their investment through the platform while someone else owns the company.

deleted 4y ago
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yepnopemaybe 4y ago
Resident 'Summer Design Associate' here - (might be time to take that one off my LinkedIn). We've been placing 100K+ solar facilities with accredited investors for a few months now as we've gotten our private beta version off the ground. We've also been working with more experienced finance partners to structure future investments available on Legends Solar. My wonderful cofounder hails from the art world, and has been helping to place our accredited product. She will be key in helping Legends create a resonant brand with cultural currency as we grow and evolve. Before we raise seed or launch our retail product, we will bring some project finance experience in-house. Recruiting has been easy because people outside of climate love our brand and mission, and people inside of solar finance are often finance professionals who rarely have an outlet to share what they do for the world and the industry publicly. (You should see us as solar finance conferences, we're the bell of the ball - not kidding, we found many of our finance partners there). I wanna push back on the idea that designers are no 'doers'... 'Doing' is an ethic, not a discipline, and there are plenty of examples of designers rising to be successful entrepreneurs (AirBnB, et al.).
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Rooting for you to succeed, but to be candid your response kind of proved my point. Many of us on this site have a lot of experience with early stage startups and get nervous when we hear founder roles described like this: > She will be key in helping Legends create a resonant brand with cultural currency as we grow and evolve. Brand is no doubt important, but execution is what makes a startup work. > I wanna push back on the idea that designers are no 'doers'... 'Doing' is an ethic, not a discipline, Hard disagree. Plenty of startups have risen to fame on impressive branding only to fail because they treated execution as an afterthought. Execution is at the core of every startup, and it's certainly not just a mindset. Someone has to execute. > there are plenty of examples of designers rising to be successful entrepreneurs (AirBnB, et al.). True! But in the startup world I've also seen many, many founding teams who thought they'd design the product and then figure out how to execute it later using future hires. It's basically a meme: Usually "we have it all figured out, we just need a few engineers..." It doesn't work out. Getting someone on the team who knows how to execute should be the top priority.
  - yepnopemaybe 4y ago
    We are more than just a website/hype machine... we've sold a few $100K worth of panels to accredited investors while we get our app and platform off the ground. We are only 5 months old, but plan on bringing on project finance experience ASAP. For the time being, we lean on some of our pre-seed investors for help on that front. I am running things fairly conservatively, the marketing site is the tip of the iceberg. We need to prove retail demand to get off the ground but the other pieces are also coming together (project finance, deal flow, transactions, engineering, etc). Per 'doers' - my point is that 'doing' is not taught in engineering school or consulting or Goldman Sachs any more than it is in product design. In that sense it is an ethic, not a credential or professional discipline. I think we are more or less simpatico here.
    - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
      > we've sold a few $100K worth of panels to accredited investors (Accredited investor with solar experience here) - On a commercial scale that's 1 or 2 installs. Good for getting your feet wet with solar but what you're proposing is a different game entirely. > Per 'doers' - my point is that 'doing' is not taught in engineering school or consulting or Goldman Sachs any more than it is in product design. In that sense it is an ethic, not a credential or professional discipline. I think we are more or less simpatico here. "Doing" is definitely taught in engineering school in the context of doing engineering things. I don't think anybody here doubts that you can "do" designs. The point is that the type of "doing" this startup needs has little to no overlap with the founders' experience. It's not enough to make hand-wavy claims that "doing is an ethic". Someone still has to do all of the business things and execution.
factfindingisfn 4y ago
EXACTLY, I was thinking the exact same thing. Like a team of folks who do not have any experience in Energy are trying to build a distributed energy company that also includes shared real estate. This looks like someone's summer project that got published accidently
rogerthat_au 4y ago
Your latter suggestion (public corporation) exists. Check out Renew Power - they're a large developer from India. The challenge historically has been there are very few such listed developers. Most of this asset class so far has only been available to very large funds - Goldman, Walburg, etc who operate privately. That's why we entered the space too (see: www.renewables.org - only for accredited investors for now)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

yepnopemaybe 4y ago

Resident 'Summer Design Associate' here - (might be time to take that one off my LinkedIn). We've been placing 100K+ solar facilities with accredited investors for a few months now as we've gotten our private beta version off the ground. We've also been working with more experienced finance partners to structure future investments available on Legends Solar. My wonderful cofounder hails from the art world, and has been helping to place our accredited product. She will be key in helping Legends create a resonant brand with cultural currency as we grow and evolve. Before we raise seed or launch our retail product, we will bring some project finance experience in-house. Recruiting has been easy because people outside of climate love our brand and mission, and people inside of solar finance are often finance professionals who rarely have an outlet to share what they do for the world and the industry publicly. (You should see us as solar finance conferences, we're the bell of the ball - not kidding, we found many of our finance partners there). I wanna push back on the idea that designers are no 'doers'... 'Doing' is an ethic, not a discipline, and there are plenty of examples of designers rising to be successful entrepreneurs (AirBnB, et al.).

PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Rooting for you to succeed, but to be candid your response kind of proved my point. Many of us on this site have a lot of experience with early stage startups and get nervous when we hear founder roles described like this: > She will be key in helping Legends create a resonant brand with cultural currency as we grow and evolve. Brand is no doubt important, but execution is what makes a startup work. > I wanna push back on the idea that designers are no 'doers'... 'Doing' is an ethic, not a discipline, Hard disagree. Plenty of startups have risen to fame on impressive branding only to fail because they treated execution as an afterthought. Execution is at the core of every startup, and it's certainly not just a mindset. Someone has to execute. > there are plenty of examples of designers rising to be successful entrepreneurs (AirBnB, et al.). True! But in the startup world I've also seen many, many founding teams who thought they'd design the product and then figure out how to execute it later using future hires. It's basically a meme: Usually "we have it all figured out, we just need a few engineers..." It doesn't work out. Getting someone on the team who knows how to execute should be the top priority.
- yepnopemaybe 4y ago
  We are more than just a website/hype machine... we've sold a few $100K worth of panels to accredited investors while we get our app and platform off the ground. We are only 5 months old, but plan on bringing on project finance experience ASAP. For the time being, we lean on some of our pre-seed investors for help on that front. I am running things fairly conservatively, the marketing site is the tip of the iceberg. We need to prove retail demand to get off the ground but the other pieces are also coming together (project finance, deal flow, transactions, engineering, etc). Per 'doers' - my point is that 'doing' is not taught in engineering school or consulting or Goldman Sachs any more than it is in product design. In that sense it is an ethic, not a credential or professional discipline. I think we are more or less simpatico here.
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    > we've sold a few $100K worth of panels to accredited investors (Accredited investor with solar experience here) - On a commercial scale that's 1 or 2 installs. Good for getting your feet wet with solar but what you're proposing is a different game entirely. > Per 'doers' - my point is that 'doing' is not taught in engineering school or consulting or Goldman Sachs any more than it is in product design. In that sense it is an ethic, not a credential or professional discipline. I think we are more or less simpatico here. "Doing" is definitely taught in engineering school in the context of doing engineering things. I don't think anybody here doubts that you can "do" designs. The point is that the type of "doing" this startup needs has little to no overlap with the founders' experience. It's not enough to make hand-wavy claims that "doing is an ethic". Someone still has to do all of the business things and execution.

factfindingisfn 4y ago

EXACTLY, I was thinking the exact same thing. Like a team of folks who do not have any experience in Energy are trying to build a distributed energy company that also includes shared real estate. This looks like someone's summer project that got published accidently

rogerthat_au 4y ago

Your latter suggestion (public corporation) exists. Check out Renew Power - they're a large developer from India. The challenge historically has been there are very few such listed developers. Most of this asset class so far has only been available to very large funds - Goldman, Walburg, etc who operate privately. That's why we entered the space too (see: www.renewables.org - only for accredited investors for now)