Rakhesh's honest answer: "it would take a while — it's always possible." The challenges in energy are "incredibly complicated," so if you can demonstrate you understand and empathise with them and your product actually solves the problem, "absolutely anybody can come in and solve problems in brand new ways and blow people's minds." But the insider has a real head start.
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Rakhesh's own shortcut was lived experience from the buyer's side. He fits the profile of his own customers: the work he had done in the past was structuring battery portfolios to get them through funding and into operation, and in 2024 was personally exposed to "somewhere in the region of $500 million worth of project capital that could have been allocated but was not, because the investors were not comfortable that the returns were gonna come at the rate that they wanted." He could see the software gap from inside the transaction meetings — so he built it.
For outsiders, the bar is empathy and proof. Warm intro beats cold outreach because the first thing a buyer does after your pitch is check you out with shared connections. Without a track record, you have to compensate by demonstrating you genuinely understand the complicated problems that make the customer need a solution in the first place — "if you can show to a customer that you've lived it, and that's where your solution comes from, then you have a much greater chance of success than if you're brand new."