PearShaped

Imagine a world where every truck, bus, and car runs on clean electricity - and the grid is no longer the bottleneck, but the enabler of that future.That’s exactly the challenge Mike Lazelle, co-founder of Kwetta, is working to solve. From his first day at university in New Zealand, where he met his lifelong collaborator Rob, to helping design parts of the national power grid, Mike’s journey has always circled back to one question: how do we get fossil fuels out of transport, and power everything with clean energy?In this episode, Mike shares:The origin story of Kwetta - how an “impossible” idea turned into a global deep-tech startupWhy grid capacity is the hidden barrier to mass EV adoptionThe pivotal role of advisors, accelerators, and early customers like Z EnergyWhat it takes to build a culture of high performance and resilience inside a fast-moving climate-tech companyWhy Europe - and the Netherlands in particular - became the natural home for scaling their technologyHis personal evolution from engineer to leader, and why he sees Kwetta as a “teenager” learning to grow up fastThis conversation is a window into the kind of hard problems PearShaped exists to spotlight. It’s about founders and funders who aren’t chasing easy wins, but building the infrastructure that makes a sustainable future possible.If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to reinvent something as big as the electricity grid and why now is the critical moment to get it right - this episode is for you.