Hamed Babai and the problem of going it alone

On a leadership retreat in Bozeman, Montana, Hamed Babai and his companions discovered that their hike had acquired an inconvenient preliminary assignment. The trailhead could not be reached by car. They would have to walk to the place where the walking was supposed to begin. Snow and ice complicated the arrangement. Each person was spending effort finding a way forward, and the group was paying for the same discovery several times.

Babai proposed a different method. One person would choose the steps; everyone else would follow those footprints carefully. They would exchange the lead when it became tiring. The group completed the hike. In his telling, the useful discovery was shared responsibility: someone could concentrate on opening the route while the others concentrated on following it. Leadership became a job that moved between people, rather than a permanent possession.

It is a fitting scene for the founder and CEO of Power Kiosk. His business brings energy buyers, brokers, and suppliers into a common marketplace. His earlier research examined how individual choices affect traffic. Even his essays return to the mechanics of cooperation. Read together, these parts of his career suggest a persistent interest in the space between people: the information they exchange, the work they repeat, and the decisions they can improve.

Before the marketplace, a road full of foxes

Babai, who also goes by Hami, earned a doctorate in engineering at Northwestern University. His academic work gives the business story an unusual beginning. Long before asking how an energy broker should choose a supplier, he was asking how a driver should choose a road. Both questions involve a decision made inside a system where other people are making decisions too.

A paper he coauthored with Hani S. Mahmassani, published in the EURO Journal on Transportation and Logistics in 2016, divided simulated drivers into two groups. The “sheep” used the available information to form their expectations. The “foxes” went a step further and anticipated what other drivers would do. The animal names are memorable; the underlying problem is familiar to anyone who has taken a shortcut and found the rest of the city there.

The foxes’ advantage depended on how many foxes were on the road. In the model, anticipating other people’s choices helped when relatively few drivers were doing it. As their share increased, that advantage shrank and eventually disappeared beyond a threshold. Learning also made the system more stable and reduced the payoff from opportunistic behavior. A clever individual move could change its value once enough people learned the same trick.

These were numerical experiments in an idealized traffic system. They offer a way to understand his intellectual background, rather than a formula for buying electricity. The connection is interpretive: Babai’s research and his business both concern participants whose results depend on one another. Providing information matters. So does understanding how people respond to it. A system can become easier to use while the choices inside it remain complicated.

In 2012, he also appeared among the researchers on a conference presentation about online pricing and sourcing for truckload transportation. That work considered matching shipments with carriers and the likelihood that each side would accept an offer. The subjects changed across his career, but the recurring practical question was already present: how do you get two sides of a market to agree?

A doctorate, then a very busy telephone

After his Ph.D., Babai entered energy brokerage. What bothered him was the repeated effort required to obtain offers: brokers kept calling suppliers, with little coordination between them. He dated the imagination behind Power Kiosk to 2012. The company was incorporated in 2013, the same year the startup where he had been working failed. An inefficient industry and an interrupted career became the setting for building a business of his own.

“Everything ran slow and inefficient,” he said. The complaint is plain enough to sound like something said after a long day, and specific enough to suggest a product. A broker could spend the day locating information that another broker also needed. Suppliers had to engage with those requests. Buyers needed a choice they could understand. A shared marketplace offered a way to bring those tasks closer together.

Babai completed a first fundraising round in September 2017 and brought in Steve Joung as a partner. By 2020, Power Kiosk described a business that had grown from one employee to 25 full-time staff, with offices in Chicago and Atlanta. The picture is of several years spent building a working organization around a problem he knew from the inside.

“Everything ran slow and inefficient.”

Hamed Babai / on energy brokerage

Put the choice where people can see it

Power Kiosk’s early startup description used the word “clearinghouse.” It was a useful choice. The proposed business would give brokers, suppliers, and utilities a shared place to conduct transactions, supported by technology and data. The description tied the company to Babai’s engineering education and his firsthand experience of retail energy. He was working on the machinery of a transaction, including the parts that a customer might never see.

An early team listing also described Peruz Carlsen developing the platform with Babai over several years. That detail puts some texture into the founder title. This was software someone had to write and maintain, supplier relationships someone had to establish, and a workflow someone had to make usable. The company’s beginnings involved collaboration at the keyboard as well as the marketplace.

Today, the platform combines procurement, market intelligence, contract management, demand management, and sustainability reporting. The breadth explains why Babai’s subject is larger than a price comparison. An offer begins a relationship that continues through usage, billing, and renewal. A clear choice at the beginning can still be followed by a confusing experience. The software’s job extends across that whole period.

In his 2021 writing about company vision, Babai placed data analysis at the center of Power Kiosk’s identity. He described energy expertise as knowledge the team had accumulated around that foundation. His stated ambition was to make the business a clearinghouse for commercial retail-energy contracts. The order of emphasis is revealing: learn how to help people decide, then build the industry knowledge needed to make that help useful.

The refrigerator had a shorter business plan

Babai remembers seeing a sticky note on a friend’s refrigerator with a simple instruction: “Do one thing at a time, the most important thing first.” It stayed with him. In his essay on focus, he argues for removing tasks, objects, and processes that serve no useful purpose. Anything retained has a cost: someone must look after it, understand it, or make room for it.

That is an engineering idea expressed in domestic stationery. A refrigerator note has an advantage over a strategy presentation: it is difficult to mistake its length for its wisdom. Babai applies the same reasoning to priorities, measurable goals, and the steps between an intention and a result. He also applies it to conversation. Giving someone undivided attention requires deciding that the exchange deserves time.

His references range across books and television. A tug-of-war scene in Squid Game became an illustration of shared strategy in his writing on vision. In Words That Matter, he used Blackbird as a starting point for discussing listening, curiosity, and trust. The habit makes his management writing less abstract. He looks for recognizable situations in which people reveal how they cooperate.

In that latter essay, he argues that questions should come from curiosity rather than a desire to confirm an existing opinion. He closes by turning to the Persian poet Saadi Shirazi. For a founder whose work depends on analytics, he gives considerable attention to the human limits of analysis: a useful conversation still requires the willingness to hear something unexpected.

A contract has a life after the signature

In October 2024, Babai wrote about a customer-engagement feature designed around the stages of a contract. His complaint was that renewal conversations too often arrived at the end, accompanied by a price. That approach leaves too much of the customer’s experience unexamined. By the time someone asks for another signature, the relationship may already have drifted.

The feature sets out milestones and opportunities for contact throughout the customer journey. Babai describes it as a way to reduce dependence on memory and make treatment more consistent. The mundane nature of the problem is part of its appeal. Remembering to follow up is easy in a business with a handful of accounts. A growing organization needs a process that continues to work when everyone is busy.

His February 2025 essay on sales carries that thought into the conversation itself. He recommends asking open questions, understanding the prospect’s needs, and explaining benefits clearly. When someone raises an objection, he suggests exploring the reason before arguing against it. These are practices a person must perform; the software cannot do the listening on the person’s behalf.

That combination helps explain the founder’s interests. He builds systems for handling information, then writes about the attention required to use them well. A broker can have a dashboard full of useful material and still misunderstand a customer. Babai’s writing keeps returning to the exchange that makes the material useful: a question, an answer, and enough patience to understand what the answer means.

Four appearances, and the next stretch of road

Power Kiosk has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list in 2020, 2024, 2025, and 2026. Its 2026 entry places it at number 2,672 and reports 121 percent growth over three years. Those figures describe a business that has continued to develop well beyond its early startup listings. They measure company growth, while the founder’s essays show the working questions that occupy him along the way.

The snowy hike remains a useful ending because it contains no elaborate theory of success. The group had a destination and a difficult route. Everyone trying separately was wasting effort. Sharing the work made progress possible. In Babai’s account, the person at the front changed, and the obligation to the others continued. For someone who has spent years studying decisions and building a marketplace, the lesson was refreshingly literal: make a path that other people can use.