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The Times | The principles that built an energy giant – and could supercharge your scale up
All business owners need to draw inspiration from somewhere and my current favourite is Octopus Energy. I had the privilege of working with its founder and Chief Executive Greg Jackson over the past few years and greatly admire what he has achieved and how he has done it. In under a decade, Octopus Energy went from startup to market leader, with revenues of almost £14 billion and billions of its own renewable assets under management.
A key driver of this incredible business success story is the clear, consistent performance philosophy. Three elements, beyond the well-known factors of customer centricity and its track record on climate action, feel particularly relevant this year:
- Long-term over short-term: with Kraken, Octopus invested heavily in a technology platform to run a modern utility. For many years, it wasn’t a revenue line item, but an ‘internal tool’ that helped them to be better, faster and cheaper before they started licensing it to others. It’s now been spun out and is worth around $9 billion. In short, they were willing to invest for a decade before monetising, because they understood the long game.
- Collaboration over isolation: there are numerous examples of how Octopus has grown through partnering with others. For example, with the Canada Pension Plan in 2021 to co-invest in renewable assets, with both parties sharing upside and risk; licensing of Kraken to competitors; or launching in Japan through a joint venture with Tokyo Gas (Japan is a notoriously tough market to enter – Octopus now has a flourishing business there, with 600,000 customers).
- Action over perfection: In a highly regulated industry, Octopus didn’t wait to be perfect in the UK before going international. They expanded and learnt as they went, iterating dynamically and moving fast into new markets, launching new products (green tariffs, EV charging, demand flexibility), and refining based on market feedback.
These elements are powerful principles for other scale-ups to follow. Take the first point, long-term over short-term. Young businesses that are growing quickly often have an outsized focus on the short-term, not least due to the mounting pressures they face.
But managing for the short-term often doesn’t eliminate the killer risks: you might de-risk quarterly earnings or your immediate cash needs, but you can damage customer trust, risk regulatory rejection, or leave systemic weaknesses unaddressed.
The master move is understanding your risk profile deeply and focusing on de-risking the existential stuff.
Octopus understood this: they didn’t focus on optimising to hit their quarterly metrics, but balanced short-term metrics with de-risking the critical threats and capturing longer-term opportunities.
At Xlinks, we start with a long-term goal: developing a global grid for clean electricity. Then we make every day count. Our portfolio is centred around large, complex projects that increase global energy security through renewables generation and transmission.
Take one of our projects by way of example: Sila Atlantik, which is a wind and solar generation site in Morocco, connecting directly to Germany through a dedicated under-the-seabed cable. It will unlock billions in economic growth for Morocco, while increasing Germany’s energy security.
By its nature, this is a multi-year project in delivery, operating for many decades to the benefit of both Africa and Europe. While we continually aim to make short-term progress, it’s always in service of the long-term goal of delivering the project.
When looking at how we can collaborate, the world is systemic and interconnected. You can’t solve the big problems alone. Octopus’ partnerships across investment, manufacturing and technical innovation enabled them to outperform their peers, while making a positive impact for customers and society.
For our Sila Atlantik project, partnership is essential. That’s why our team recently met with both governments in Rabat, Morocco. Getting the key intergovernmental agreements secured is the key next step in the evolution of the project – we have already demonstrated the technical, economic and financing feasibility of the project. Beyond that, the project must partner strategically across multiple facets, including through an industrial consortium, to invest in and help deliver the project. The project also collaborates with around 40 authority bodies along its route. Successful structural collaboration distributes risk and accelerates outcomes. It enables delivery of complex work.
When considering ‘action over perfection’ there is a paradox: long-term thinking doesn’t mean slow execution. Octopus understood this – they were patient about what they built, relentless about how fast they moved. Delivering something like Sila Atlantik demands action every day — these are complex projects with long timelines, and delays compound. So while you need investment patience, you must maintain momentum, always focusing on the next milestone.
Many businesses wait until they have a perfect product before launching. Octopus understood the cost: lost time and lost learnings. The fastest way to improve an 80 per cent product is through market feedback — something Silicon Valley has proven for years. Octopus proved it works for energy infrastructure too. They launched Kraken as a functional but imperfect platform—and crucially, they were transparent about it. They moved fast into new markets. They launched new products and refined what they did, based on feedback.
For project development, this means sharing work early with partners and being radically transparent with stakeholders. You fail fast, iterate, move forward. And when your focus is improving energy security and addressing the climate crisis, you don’t have the luxury of delay. The stakes are too high, the impacts of waiting too consequential.
So be bold, be brave sometimes, and don’t wait too long. Get your product or service to market. Let your customers help you make it better.
The questions I will keep asking: are we optimising for long-term value while moving with urgency? Are we building the kind of structural partnerships that enable us to outperform? Are we moving fast enough to win?
Octopus proved all three are not just possible, but necessary. Will your business do the same?