How a pandemic walk and a Talking Heads song sparked the idea for It’s Electric

Like many a good idea, the inspiration for It’s Electric, a curbside EV charging startup, sprouted during a stroll.

It was the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City, and walking had become an important part of many people’s daily routine.

“That’s what you did,” Tiya Gordon, co-founder and COO of It’s Electric, told Morning Brew. “You took pandemic walks: masked, social distance, waving walks.”

Nathan King, It’s Electric’s co-founder and CEO, pointed out solar panels going up on rooftops across the city. This got Gordon thinking: If the sun could power buildings, why couldn’t that same energy source power vehicles on surrounding streets?

“That was the seed. That was the golden little shiny crackle that we both started riffing off of,” she said. “And that turned into It’s Electric.”

Why so ugly?

Gordon’s professional background is in design, and one of her main gripes with the EV chargers she saw in her day-to-day life was that they were, well, not exactly aesthetically pleasing.

“There’s really no reason they need to look this bad,” she recalled thinking.

Born and raised in New York City, Gordon graduated from The New School’s Parsons School of Design. Her career has largely focused on developing designs and tech for public spaces. Before starting It’s Electric, the biggest project she worked on was helping develop the public-facing tech for the 9/11 Memorial & Museum.

“That may seem like it’s a million miles in the opposite direction of electric vehicle charging, but it really is about putting hardware in [a] city context, putting hardware in outdoor spaces, and building it so that it can be used by tens of thousands, if not millions, of people without breaking,” Gordon said.

Problem solving

Today, It’s Electric’s curbside EV chargers are available in seven US cities, including San Francisco, LA, Boston, and Detroit. Most recently, the Brooklyn-based startup announced an agreement with the city of Philadelphia to build a network of up to 1,000 chargers. Even so, Gordon says it’s still early days. The plan is to go bigger—even though she envisioned It’s Electric at a time when she was looking for less, not more.

“I wanted to personally go smaller. I wanted to crawl into a closet in the country somewhere and maybe pickle for a few years until [the pandemic] blew over,” Gordon said. “But I didn’t have that option. I didn’t have any access to capital, personally or professionally. I had to still make ends meet to pay my bills. But like a lot of good things in the world, they’re born during a very bad time, where you’re forced to reckon with the world that you’re living in.”

The company is focused on solving for the fact that about a third of US households live in multi-family housing, without easy access to home charging. It’s Electric’s model is to partner with property owners to install a public Level 2 EV charger that goes behind the meter to draw power from the building’s spare electricity; property owners receive a cut of the charging revenue.

More than 60% of households in Philadelphia don’t have access to off-street parking, according to a news release announcing the aforementioned partnership, which marks It’s Electric’s first major municipal concession agreement.

“Philly is exactly the kind of city where curbside charging isn’t a nice-to-have: It’s the only way most residents will ever be able to own an electric vehicle,” King said in a statement.

While working on the project that would become It’s Electric, Gordon leaned into her experience working in various parts of design agencies, from operations to HR to finance. She and King created a prototype out of cardboard and rubber. They used a friend’s EV to test it out; it worked.

They made a pitch deck and continued to brainstorm ways to bring their idea to life, even as they navigated the immense stresses of the pandemic.

“When I replay the story in my head, it seems unfathomable that you can go from a concept to a fully fledged business in such a short period of time,” Gordon said. “But a lot of the work that I did in architecture and public design was literally just that: A client would come in and they would have an idea and they’d want to make it real. And so that was my life experience, was taking this crazy idea and making it real.”

Around that time in 2022, Hyundai hosted a competition aimed at accelerating EV adoption in the US. Gordon and King entered their idea and won their first tranche of funding, which helped them get a pilot program off the ground in New York City.

They reached out to people they didn’t know but who they thought could help them, like entrepreneur Mia Birk and a former city official who worked on NYC’s transportation electrification plan. Both agreed to help.

“We’re like, OK, we’re not insane—or everyone is insane,” Gordon said. “We’re doing this.”

Don’t call it a startup

Gordon and King asked the New York City Economic Development Corporation to help with the pilot, and were given access to an abandoned building in Sunset Park to test out the tech.

Gordon wanted to ensure that the demonstration got some attention. So she contacted someone familiar with making noise: Talking Heads’ David Byrne, a cycling enthusiast and advocate. She secured Byrne’s permission to use Talking Heads song lyrics in a mural on the abandoned building.

The song “(Nothing But) Flowers” had been an internal soundtrack for Gordon, specifically the lyrics: “From the age of the dinosaurs/Cars have run on gasoline/Where? Where have they gone?/Now, it’s nothing but flowers.”

“That song was basically playing on repeat in my head as we were working on this project,” Gordon said. “And that’s how we treated it…It wasn’t a startup. It was a project.”

This helped Gordon not get overwhelmed by the scope of what they were trying to accomplish.

The pilot was successful enough that It’s Electric opened a pre-seed funding round. To date, the startup has raised just over $10 million, including investments by Uber and Failup Ventures in a seed round, and has a post-money valuation of $18.2 million, according to PitchBook.

“The challenge that we face is that there’s always another challenge. Just when we finish solving one challenge, there’s another,” Gordon said. “But then you can look in the rearview behind you and you can see the fact that we’ve got 500 drivers across six cities in less than 10 months.” And soon, even more.