Coordinated with Fredrik

Episode Summary: In this episode, we explore the dual reality of Europe’s energy transition. In 2025, the EU reached a massive milestone: wind and solar officially generated more electricity than fossil fuels. However, this rapid growth has exposed a critical bottleneck: the power grid. With over 120 GW of planned renewable projects at risk of being stranded and massive connection queues slowing d...

The story everyone tells about energy is about generation. Solar panels, wind turbines, the clean energy race. And that story is true. Wind and solar just overtook fossil fuels in Europe for the first time — 30 percent versus 29 percent. That’s a real milestone. But the story I want to tell is about what comes after the generation war is won. Because that war is over. The hardware is cheap. The ph...

In 1962, a researcher at the RAND Corporation named Paul Baran looked at AT&T’s telephone network and saw something that the people running it could not see. The system worked. It carried every voice call in America. But it was structurally wasteful. Circuit-switched networks reserved entire connections for conversations that used less than 10 percent of available bandwidth. Baran’s idea was to br...

I recorded a podcast episode this week that I’ve been turning over in my head for months. It’s about where Sourceful is right now, what we’ve built, and why I think the next few months matter more than anything we’ve done so far. If you have the time, go listen. But if you want the written version, here it is. The clean problem and the dirty one Most energy tech companies pick a clean problem. The...

Before we begin, I want to be upfront about something. The voice in this episode is mine, but it’s AI-generated. I cloned my voice using ElevenLabs, and the entire episode was produced that way. I think it’s important to be transparent about that. The words are mine. The ideas are mine. The delivery is artificial. That feels like a fitting place to start, because a big part of what I want to talk...

Picture a spectacularly beautiful, cloudless spring day in California. Millions of solar panels across the state are operating at peak efficiency, churning out massive amounts of clean, zero-marginal-cost electricity. But behind the scenes, grid operators are frantically hitting the kill switch. They are actively disconnecting solar farms and shoving millions of dollars worth of pure energy straig...

It’s fall 1999. A venture capitalist named John Doerr walks into a cramped office in Mountain View — thirty employees gathered around a ping-pong table that doubles as a boardroom. The company is called Google, and it’s the eighteenth search engine to arrive on the web. Doerr carries an $11.8 million check in one hand and a management system in the other. The check made Google possible. The manage...

In February 2026, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan published a short essay arguing that “don’t boil the ocean” — the most common piece of startup advice — is now obsolete. His reasoning rests on a chain of ideas stretching back 160 years, through a Victorian economist, a radical architect, and two professors betting on the price of tin. I followed that chain. It changed how I think about everything. The...

This episode is different. Instead of talking about the grid, energy markets, or coordination protocols, I’m talking about this podcast — how it’s made, why I rebuilt the entire production pipeline from scratch, and what it taught me about the relationship between tools and output. The NotebookLM Era Here’s what used to happen: I’d spend a week reading papers, articles, talking to people. Then I’d...

In this special episode of Coordinated with Fredrik , we went deep — not at the strategy layer, not at the founder layer, but at the socket level. This was a strict engineering teardown of a single question: Can NATS become the autonomic nervous system of Sourceful Energy? What follows is the architectural synthesis. The Real Problem We’re Solving At Sourceful, we are not just operating a backend....

You know the feeling. You’re low on range. The map says there’s a charger around the corner. You pull up — relief. And then… black screen. Or “out of order.” Or worse: it looks fine, but nothing happens. That moment — that tiny spike of anxiety — is the real enemy of EV adoption. In this episode of Coordinated with Fredrik , we go deep into the engineering side of that problem. Not surface-level E...

It wasn’t for a broad audience. It wasn’t for policymakers or the energy-curious. It was built for one specific person: David — a firmware engineer driving north on the E4 toward Linköping. Long highway. Solo drive. Brain half in traffic, half in state machines. So we decided to go deep into something that actually matters if you’re building charging infrastructure: OCPP — Open Charge Point Protoc...

The textbook version of how the internet came to be is clean. A few smart people in California connected some computers, email happened, and then we got cat videos. That version is wrong. Or rather, it is so sanitized that it misses what actually makes the story worth telling. I spent this episode going deep on the real source material. DARPA archives, technical memos from the Internet Society, or...

There is a number that keeps rattling around in my head since recording this episode: $8.8 trillion. That is the demand-side value of open source software according to a recent Harvard Business School study. Not the market cap of the companies selling software. The value of the code itself. The actual lines sitting in public repositories, running the global economy, maintained by volunteers, hobby...

There’s a strange paradox at the heart of Europe’s energy transition. On paper, 2025 looks like a victory lap. Renewables generated nearly half of the EU’s electricity. Wind and solar alone overtook fossil fuels. A decade ago, that would have sounded like science fiction. We have become incredibly good at harvesting energy from the sky and the wind. And yet, at the same time, we are wasting stagge...

On February 18th, 1745, in Como, Italy, a child was born who would quietly alter the trajectory of civilization. Two centuries later, the unit of electric potential — the volt — would carry his name. But the real story doesn’t begin with a nobleman in northern Italy. It begins with a dead frog. In the late 1700s, Luigi Galvani observed something uncanny: a dissected frog’s leg twitching violently...

Coordinated with Fredrik There is a fundamental tension at the heart of every ambitious company. On one side: the blue-sky vision. On the other: the gritty, operational reality of making it real. Engineers understand this tension intuitively. Physics doesn’t negotiate. Gravity doesn’t care about your roadmap. Thermodynamics ignores your quarterly goals. If your calculations are off, the bridge col...

There is a phrase that has quietly governed modern management culture for decades: “Don’t boil the ocean.” It’s the sentence that appears whenever ambition starts to feel uncomfortable. When scope expands. When a system-level question threatens a quarterly roadmap. It’s framed as wisdom. Prudence. Maturity. But what if that advice—so deeply internalized that we barely question it anymore—has quiet...

Coordinated with Fredrik — Episode Recap On January 30, 2026, SpaceX filed what looked like the most boring piece of regulatory paperwork imaginable. An FCC application. A string of numbers. The kind of thing you scroll past. Except this one was for permission to launch one million orbiting data centers. And in the preamble, they called it “a first step towards becoming a Kardashev Type II civiliz...

In October 1990, a Stanford biologist sat at his desk and wrote a check for $576.07. He put it in an envelope. He addressed it to an economist at the University of Maryland. He did not include a note. No congratulations, no concession speech, not even a “good game.” Just the check, sealed and mailed. That silence is deafening when you know the backstory. Because that check was never about the mone...

There is a moment in every startup’s life where growth stops feeling like progress. You hired smart people. You raised money. You shipped something that works. And yet—everything feels slower, noisier, more fragile than when you were three people in a room. This episode is a deep dive into the most dangerous phase in a startup’s life : the transition from a scrappy founding team to a 10–15 person...

Most engineering failures don’t come from bad algorithms or insufficient data. They come from something much more basic: We didn’t define the system properly. That’s what this episode of Coordinated with Fredrik is about — system boundaries, thermodynamics, and how we should think about a home once it stops being a passive consumer and starts behaving like an active energy system Where does a syst...

Episode Summary We tend to think about infrastructure in physical terms: wires, pylons, transformers, steel and copper. But modern systems—especially energy systems—are held together by something less visible and just as critical: the messaging layer . In this episode, we trace the hidden history of how machines learned to talk to machines. From Wall Street trading floors to oil pipelines in the d...

Most conversations about supplements are useless. They start too early, aim too low, and ask the wrong question. This is not a beginner’s guide. This is not “eat your vegetables” or “drink more water.” This is a discussion for someone who has already done the hard part. You wake up early. You train consistently. Alcohol is gone. Food is clean. Sleep is a priority. In other words: the foundation is...

I’ve been thinking about this paradox since my PhD days. Back then I was trying to make ships more fuel efficient, believing it would reduce emissions. Then I discovered William Stanley Jevons and his 1865 book “The Coal Question.” It nearly broke me. Jevons noticed something counterintuitive about James Watt’s steam engine. Watt made steam engines roughly four times more efficient than the old Ne...