Dinner with Octopus

When Octopus Energy chief executive Greg Jackson invited Utility Week to join one of his company’s most sacrosanct traditions, we could hardly refuse. What followed was an unconventional and ultimately enthralling insight into the inner workings of an energy behemoth and the technology behind it. But with such a reliance on its Kraken platform, is Octopus really anything more than an operating system? Adam John went to find out.

Greg Jackson’s idea of a family dinner is unconventional to say the least, as I found out when he invited me to experience one of the most fundamental events in Octopus Energy’s weekly calendar.

Apparently I am the first journalist ever allowed to join Octopus’s weekly Friday afternoon company-wide meeting – a tradition Jackson brought across from a previous business that was inspired by the end of week dinners that were sacrosanct in his childhood home.

It’s a tumultuous affair with teams joining from across the company – and the country – to share highlights of the week, profile new developments and innovations and generally get hyped up. The teams in person (we’re in a kind of neon pink lecture hall that sits in the middle of Octopus’s head office near London’s Oxford Circus) whoop and cheer while the Zoom call, presented on a large screen, is littered with emojis and shout outs.

The assembly is led by Jackson, who doesn’t so much chair the meeting as incite it. He makes a play of being slightly scatter-brained about the loose agenda for the call. “Right, who’s doing this bit, oh it’s still me, come on let’s get through this,” he says as he plays a complimentary BBC News snippet at double speed to try to catch up some time. “The news should always be like this,” he muses as the company’s director of regulation Rachel Fletcher appears briefly on screen, sounding like Minnie Mouse opining on heat pumps. Hilarity ensues and his teams lap it up. He’s like a minor celebrity here; there’s a lot of love for family dinner.

Part of the reason the meeting is so off schedule is that Jackson keeps darting off on to new subjects, disappearing from his little Zoom window (he’s in the office but presenting from his laptop) to suddenly appear in someone else’s virtual square modelling a new Octopus backpack.

He literally cannot sit still and he is exactly the same during our unconventional interview which took place directly before the company meeting. During the hour we have together, Jackson regularly walks off to grab a colleague to share an anecdote or march me through the office to illustrate whatever point has just popped into his brain, which is operating at breakneck speed.

At one point I suggest (fairly uncontroversially, I thought) that he is part of an industry that doesn’t have public trust. “I’m not,” he harrumphs before striding off out of view. I think for a moment he’s abandoned the interview but he returns with chief operating officer Jon Paull who is asked to relay a story about an encounter on a train with a customer passionate about their Octopus app. Jackson greets the story with a look that says “see”, but before I can follow up he’s dived into another topic.

The Chinese wall

Throughout the interview Jackson chain drinks coffee (although apparently now only drinks decaffeinated) and fidgets constantly. While Paull is talking he feverishly scrolls through his phone and I notice him open Instagram and type in ‘I luv you’ – the reason later becomes clear during family dinner.

This isn’t to say that he is distracted exactly, just that Jackson’s brain is clearly working faster even than the 100mph rate of his speech. It’s no wonder, given the meteoric rise of Octopus from tiny challenger in 2015 to the UK’s second-largest supplier, following major acquisitions including Bulb’s customer base and an agreement to buy Shell’s retail energy business. Yet this rapid growth has not brought financial success, with the company posting a £161 million loss in its results for year ending 30 April 2022.

That said, Octopus’s main focus has been customer growth via building out its Kraken platform, which now serves around 30 million customers globally. In preparing for this interview and probing energy retail sources on what they would ask Jackson if they had the chance there was a common theme: exactly where does Octopus end and Kraken begin?

It’s a question that I repeatedly ask Jackson as he leads me around the office and while he certainly doesn’t dodge the question (it comes among such a blizzard of facts, anecdotes and opinions) it’s hard to keep up. Especially when every corner we turn seems to spark Jackson’s brain even further (“look, this is some artwork our customers sent us – what other energy supplier gets sent artwork?”).

Says Jackson: “Kraken and Octopus are entirely separate with a Chinese wall, there’s only four people that sit above the Chinese wall, we use the same separation approaches you use for trading… when it comes to being able to help those companies use Kraken, what happens is we’ve taken a load of people that were originally in Octopus Energy operations and they’re now employed by Kraken so they don’t work for Octopus. No-one ever works for both companies.”

At one point I interrupt the flow and pose another innocuous question, “Kraken is basically a billing service, right?”. “Noooooo” Jackson wails, before he explains what he sees as its numerous benefits:

“It contains the recording and transcription of every phone call we’ve ever made. Machine learning reads those transcripts, it knows the context of every phone call. It’s got the same for every email, every WhatsApp message, every meter reading, every statement. Not only does it have every meter reading, it has two years’ worth of forecasts for every meter which we update four times a day, and that’s at the half hourly level.

“If you’ve got an electric vehicle, and you’ve integrated with these, it’s got which model it is and its got the API integration with it. It’s got every charging session, it’s got every charging session in public – 25% of all of the UK electric vehicle owners are members of Octopus Electroverse which does public charging, all of that is in Kraken.”

This all sounds great but Kraken is licensed to millions of customers across several of Octopus’s UK rivals including Eon and Good Energy, while EDF is currently in the process of migrating its 5.5 million customer accounts on to the platform. How then does Octopus differentiate with so many of its competitors using the same technology?

In his response, Jackson uses the example of Shopify, which allows thousands of different businesses to trade online, all on the same platform.

He says: “From a platform, you’re capable of creating any number of products and services, all of which are different. And if Kraken is like an operating system for energy, or indeed now water as well, each of these things I’m describing, they’re like apps on it. So just like in your phone, iOS understands everything about communications and about media and images and then every app has access to that capability. It’s like that, but for utilities.”

As you enter Octopus’s London HQ, you are greeted by a wall of trophies, tokens of the numerous accolades the supplier has been awarded over the short period it has been operating. The colour pink is ubiquitous and the walls are decorated with inspirational quotes from figures such as American civil rights activist and poet Maya Angelou, while plush toys of “Constantine”, the company’s cephalopodic mascot, can be seen dotted around as far as the eye can see. It’s certainly a company trying to make a statement. The eccentricity of the décor does not really come as a surprise, especially given Jackson’s own infectious enthusiasm as he continues to show me around his office.

“When you asked where Kraken starts and Octopus ends, these speed gates are part of the division… we can limit which people from each bit of the company can go where,” he explains, as our whirlwind tour of the business moves through key card-controlled gates to the Kraken hub – an area that is surprisingly quiet this afternoon considering how much of Octopus’s business relies on the software.

“We’ve got 600 software developers globally. There’s about 300 based here in London, we’ve got about 50 in each of Tokyo, the US, Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy, Germany… in the last six hours, Kraken has had 58 releases,” Jackson explains in front of a screen detailing some of the technical information on the platform.

“Rapid release means instead of saving up all your changes and doing a ‘big bang’ release that finds loads of quality issues and they all clash with each other, with Kraken each release is small. Each one is subject to…” but he once again trails off as he spots James Edison, chief technology officer and chief architect of Kraken. Edison is called away from his desk and we are introduced, with the CTO adding a touch more detail about the intricacies of the platform.

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