Heather Hochrein

Most cleantech founders chase the shiny part of the electric future - the cars, the batteries, the autopilot. Heather Hochrein went looking for the extension cord.

Today she runs EVmatch from San Francisco, a company that does something deceptively simple: it lets someone with a charger in their driveway rent it out, by the hour, to a stranger who drives electric and has nowhere to plug in. She calls it Airbnb for EV chargers, and the comparison holds. There is an app, a host, a guest, a payment, a review. The twist is what sits underneath - a bet that the clean energy transition stalls unless the people without garages get to come along.

That is the part Hochrein keeps circling back to. The early electric-vehicle market was built for homeowners who could bolt a charger to the wall and forget about it. Renters, apartment dwellers, anyone parking on a public street - they were quietly priced out of the future. "The charging access problem was the one that we saw was really going to hold the industry back," she has said, "particularly for making EVs available and feasible for renters." EVmatch is the answer to a question the rest of the industry was happy to skip.

The thesis that refused to stay a thesis

EVmatch did not begin in a garage or a pitch competition. It began as a group master's thesis at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, where Hochrein and her classmates were handed a research question and an eco-entrepreneurship track. They studied what was actually stopping people from buying electric cars and found three culprits: the cars cost too much, the batteries did not go far enough, and there was nowhere convenient to charge. Battery range was already improving fast. Price was a manufacturing problem someone else would solve. Charging access, especially for renters, was the gap left wide open.

"EVmatch started as our master's thesis project," she recalls. "Shannon and I were both completing our master's at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School." In 2016 she and co-founder Shannon Walker won the school's Eco-Entrepreneurship Venture Fellowship, which gave them the runway to turn a paper into a company. The peer-to-peer service launched in spring 2017. Eighteen months of research stood between the idea and the incorporation papers. "I didn't expect to start a company," she has admitted. "But after working on this idea for a year and a half, we knew we were on to something."

The accidental business owner

Hochrein is unusually candid about the fact that none of this was the plan. She studied Molecular Environmental Biology at UC Berkeley, then environmental science at UCSB, on a track that pointed straight at nonprofit and government work. Before graduate school she spent years inside the energy world - utility and energy-management experience at Pacific Gas and Electric, and roughly five years at Rising Sun Energy Center, a Bay Area nonprofit, where she ran utility-funded energy efficiency and workforce development programs. It was steady, mission-aligned, and entirely un-entrepreneurial.

"I think I'm surprised that I am a business owner," she says. "That is not something that I expected." A former supervisor, she has noted, saw it coming before she did and predicted she would run a company one day. The Rising Sun years left a fingerprint on how she thinks about climate work: she argues the environmental movement has spent decades leaving economic development out of the conversation. "It's important that the environmental sector consider jobs and job creation," she says, "because frankly, economic development has been left out of the environmental conversation for decades." EVmatch, in that light, is not only a charging network. It is a way for ordinary people to earn money off the energy transition instead of just paying for it.

Convincing the room

Building a hardware-adjacent cleantech company as a first-time, female founder in a brand-new market meant a particular kind of friction. "In retrospect, starting EVmatch was a risky move because the electric vehicle market was so new when I started," she has said. The harder edge is the one she names directly: "It feels like we have to be even more convincing that this is a viable business opportunity." She has talked about walking into rooms where someone has already decided what she is - and the quiet satisfaction of proving them wrong. "Maybe they made a judgment about me, and they had some sort of stereotype, and I'm breaking that stereotype. I love that."

The uncertainty was constant in the early years - she has described the gnawing not-knowing of a young startup: "not knowing where our funding is coming from, not knowing where we're going to live, not knowing where our next big opportunity is." EVmatch has since raised seed funding and shifted much of its weight toward managed charging software for multifamily and commercial properties - the apartment complexes and shared lots where the original problem lives. The mission held; the business model grew teeth.

What she is actually building toward

Ask Hochrein where this all goes and she does not hedge. "In the future, I believe cars will be shared, autonomous, and electric." EVmatch is a stake in the ground for all three - a network that assumes ownership of a charger, and eventually a car, is something to be pooled rather than hoarded. The company even planned to flag "solar hosts" on its platform, so a driver could choose to fill up on sunshine. "With our sharing network," she says, "we can really change the demographics and enable EV ownership to a broader group of individuals." The pitch is not greener cars for the people who already have them. It is the on-ramp for everyone else.

For that work she was named a 2018 Echoing Green Climate Fellow, joining a cohort of social entrepreneurs the organization backs for taking on climate problems with business models. It is a fitting badge for someone whose whole company is an argument that doing good and turning a profit are not opposites - that the most equitable thing you can build might also be the most boring-sounding one. A driveway. An hour. A plug. Multiplied across a country that forgot to ask who gets left at the curb.