Building America's Electric OS: A Deep Dive into Base Power's violent execution
Chapter 2 of the Book of Base. In April 2025, Packy McCormick published his second deep dive on Base Power — "Deep Diving into Base's violent execution to build America's Electric OS" — a follow-up to his May 2024 launch essay, and his first as an investor.
Why he invested. McCormick had passed on a $60M round led by Valor Equity Partners at a $300M post-money valuation at launch, then reversed course after seeing Base execute: over 1,000 batteries installed on Texans' homes, a partnership with homebuilder Lennar, and a team stacked with ex-Tesla, SpaceX and Anduril operators. Director Antonio Gracias preempted the Series B after the December board meeting; a planned $100M round swelled to $200M as Lightspeed, Addition and a16z joined Valor, Thrive Capital and Trust Ventures, with Lee Fixel taking a board seat.
Executing violently. Within seven months of launch, Base had grown from a handful of people working out of "The House" to a team of 78 plus 20 field crew, and installed over 300 systems in March 2025 alone — more than 15 per working day, with over 1,000 batteries live across Texas.
Electricity's Operating System. McCormick's thesis: software-enabled batteries are the abstraction layer between generation and consumption — the single best layer from which to create and capture value in the Electric Era. Base's innovation is integration: it does pack assembly rather than commoditised cells, becomes its own retail electric provider, builds power-trading software, and installs and services the hardware itself. It moved pricing from roughly $3,000 up-front to $595 up-front plus a $19 monthly fee, driving a 30% month-on-month jump in signed customers. On the grid side it optimises real-time and day-ahead trading — ex-Tesla Autobidder engineer Chase Dowling leads battery aggregation and ERCOT trading — and it was nearing ERCOT's ADER qualification to bid into ancillary service markets.
Why it matters: The essay argues that the more hard operational problems Base tackles, the bigger the opportunity becomes — positioning the vertical integrator, executing ahead of schedule, as the best bet to become America's Power Company, and the OS layer from which to expand up or down the energy stack.
Read more: Not Boring — Base Power Company: Chapter 2
