New technology is not just disrupting existing industries, it’s creating entirely new ones. Today we speak with Erik Fairbairn, the man behind POD Point, the UK’s leading provider of electric car charging points…
Erik Fairbairn, CEO (Image: POD Point)
Fairbairn founded POD Point in 2009, two years before electric vehicles were even on the market. Since then it has shipped more than 20,000 chargepoints to over 15 counties – charging 10 million miles of electric vehicle driving in the process. In 2014, and then again in 2015, POD Point turned to crowdfunding, where it raised a total of £3.7 million and the company has recently been featured in the Tech Track 100.
Freshly created sectors such as this present CEOs, like Fairbairn, with handfuls of risk, opportunity and challenges. So what advice would he give to start-ups trying to make their mark in such unexplored territory?
What challenges have you faced in getting POD Point up and running?
We launched POD Point in 2009. Unfortunately there weren’t any electric cars available then; in fact the first widely available electric car, the Nissan Leaf, didn’t arrive until 2011. It was then another three years until electric vehicles started to take off.
As you can imagine, selling electric vehicle charge points into a market which had no electric cars was quite a challenge!
Of course today the electric vehicle (EV) seems like a forgone conclusion, but back in 2009 it was quite a wild statement to suggest 85 per cent of us would all be driving EVs within 20 years. This meant that persuading people to join the POD Point team was immensely difficult. We were asking staff to take quite a risk on what was a rather outlandish prediction about the imminent arrival of the electric car!
Read more: Virgin