B Corp certification and executing the plan: Angela Tucci of Uplight

B Corp certification gets treated as a marketing badge. Angela Tucci describes it as something considerably harder to hold onto, and as a resolution to a genuine internal argument at her company about whether it was a business or a cause.

Tucci is COO at Uplight, the technology partner for energy providers working toward decarbonization, valued at $1.5 billion at three years old. Before this she was chief strategy officer at Symantec, CRO and CMO at Rally Software, and CEO at Apto. She chairs the board of trustees at the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, and is in the Collegiate Softball Hall of Fame.

Physicist to COO

Tucci's career started as a physicist in the medical device industry, which she notes is the obvious route to her current job, with a couple of turns along the way.

After 25 years selling software that made things faster and easier, she wanted to work somewhere that had impact. Her framing is generous to people who figured this out sooner. Younger people, she says, have worked out that this is how they want to live in general, and she considers herself a slow learner for arriving at it later. What she wanted was work that mattered to her kids, her community and the world.

Uplight fit because it is mission-based and B Corp certified. A friend made the introduction, on the basis that the CEO could use some help.

What B Corp certification actually requires

Tucci's explanation is refreshingly free of marketing language. B Corp certification says you are a business doing good while still being part of the machinery of capitalism. You have to demonstrate that you are giving back.

For Uplight that means reducing the carbon footprint of consumers, businesses and utilities, and shifting consumption from coal toward renewables.

The part worth noting is that it is not permanent. The assessment is rigorous, recertification comes every three years, and Tucci was candid that theirs was approaching and that passing again is not a given.

Having held every other C-level title

Tucci has been a founder, CMO, chief strategy officer, general manager, CRO and CEO, and now COO. Asked what that does for her, she gives two answers.

The first is credibility across functions. Having sat in those seats, she has some grasp of what it takes to be a CRO or a CMO, or a CEO with the accompanying sleepless nights. The COO job draws on that functional depth while also requiring a view of the whole system.

The second is self-knowledge, and this is the more useful half. She has founded a couple of companies and has concluded she is not a visionary. She likes getting things done, checking things off lists, making forward progress. She is not going to invent the next technology, though she might invent a better way of working.

That makes her complementary to a CEO who is a visionary, and empathetic toward the functional leaders who report to her, because she has done their jobs.

Execute the plan

The division of labor with CEO Adrian Tuck is unusually clean, and it was stated explicitly before she took the job.

Tucci describes him as a tremendous rainmaker, and then adds something more pointed: one of the few CEOs she has worked for who is not a narcissist. She had made a rule about that.

His pitch to her was an admission. He is not an operator, not the person who follows up and gets things closed, and he needed someone who could execute the plan. That was the job description, in those words. Her answer was that it sounded great.

The spreadsheet that vetted the job

The most portable career tactic in this episode is how Tucci evaluated the opportunity.

When she left her previous job, before starting any interviews, she wrote down every characteristic she was looking for in the next one. Her reasoning is confirmation bias, described with a familiar domestic scene: you decide you love a person or a company, and your partner points out that you said you would never do that again.

So she wrote the criteria in advance and gave them to people who would hold her to them, including her partner. Then she scored the opportunity against them in a small, deliberately unsophisticated spreadsheet, assessing both the CEO and the company.

The other half was references. Boulder is a small community, so background on Adrian was easy to obtain, and he did the same on her. Her phrase for it is that reputation matters in a small pond.

What Uplight actually does

Tucci walks through the product in three layers, and it is worth reading because the operational difficulty is invisible from outside.

Home energy reports. The letter telling you your neighbors use less energy per square foot than you do. Someone runs the analytics behind that comparison and, for many customers, physically puts paper in an envelope. The hard part is the comparison itself, because a house built in the 1990s and one built five years ago are not comparable, so producing a fair peer set requires combining multiple datasets.

Utility marketplaces. If the report prompts you to buy a smart thermostat, Uplight runs the marketplace under the utility's brand and makes the rebate seamless, instead of leaving you to buy at retail, enter a code somewhere, and chase the utility separately.

Demand response and orchestration. This is the part utilities are most anxious about. Everyone comes home, turns on the air conditioning and plugs in an electric vehicle, and the resulting spike forces utilities to fire up generation they are being pushed to retire. Uplight orchestrates consumption instead, pre-cooling a house before you arrive and, with consent, managing when the vehicle charges. The utility controls how much and when.

Tucci is proud of the technical layer underneath. Their algorithms outperform what a thermostat does on its own, and their models can identify what is behind your meter from the load signature alone, distinguishing the fridge from the air conditioner from the water heater.

Six companies, then a pandemic

Uplight was assembled through the acquisition of six companies over seven or eight months, conceived and executed by Adrian before the business existed in its current form. Michael's observation is that this inverts the usual sequence, where roll-ups happen after a company is established.

Tucci attributes it to the same rainmaking. Adrian thinks at the scale required by someone trying to affect climate change, works constantly on macro moves, builds relationships across the industry and connects dots other people would not. Getting five other companies to transact, and a private equity firm to fund and own it, required every one of those parties and the humans inside them to agree.

The choice of private equity over venture came down to a strong Colorado firm with utility sector expertise and existing relationships, plus a view that this path could go bigger faster. One consequence was a strategic investor: AES, a Fortune 500 company already invested in Simple Energy, rolled its equity into the combined entity and invested further.

Tucci joined about six months after the merger, and the cultural fault line she found is one every mission-driven company will recognize.

The spectrum ran from almost-nonprofit to for-profit. Some people were simply glad to be working on clean energy. Others were focused on the fact that the company had to make money. Her read is that the combination turned out to be powerful, because it forced the question of how to do both, which is what led to B Corp certification. The reminder on the other side was equally real: private equity investors expect a return.

Her image for it is the elephant. Everyone was walking around it seeing something slightly different, and she says you can still detect those origins in discussions today.

Why COVID helped the integration

Tucci joined six weeks before lockdown, which meant integrating six companies without the tool the CEO is best at.

Adrian is a face-to-face operator. Before the pandemic he planned to attend all six holiday parties across Vancouver, Seattle, Boston, Everett and Pune, where the development team sits.

And yet her assessment is that the pandemic accelerated becoming one company, for a specific and clever reason. On video, she could not tell where anyone was. Everyone was in a basement. Which meant she could not attribute a comment to someone's former employer or office, and neither could anyone else. The heritage stopped being visible.

There was also a shared crisis. Everyone was working remotely, everyone was somewhat frightened, and that common experience pushed people toward what they had in common rather than what separated them.

Her summary is the one that recurs across this show. Processes, software and mechanics all matter, and people can derail any of them faster than anything else.

Selling into a regulated monopoly

Uplight serves at least 80 of the largest US utilities, sitting behind roughly 110 million consumers, about a third of the country, of which perhaps 70 million are active depending on the product.

The sales motion is a genuine outlier in software, and Tucci describes it in terms anyone who sold on-premise software will recognize. RFPs, shortlists, bid processes. There are around 3,000 utilities in the US, but Uplight sells to the top tier of regulated providers, which are monopolies in their territories and therefore obligated to run competitive processes and justify any sole-source award. Sales cycles run nine to twelve months.

Then there is politics, which is where it stops resembling normal enterprise software. Regulators change their minds. A state changes political control and its appetite for clean energy funding shifts with it. Tucci cites Ohio, where clean energy programs disappeared, and Hawaii, which changed its position during the pandemic when states decided they could not afford programmatic work. She is careful to describe this without judgment, as how the system works.

Her line about it will land for anyone with an MBA on a shelf: this is the first time in her software career that she has used all five of Porter's forces, because the regulatory dimension is finally in play.

Ninety months, and not crushing your team with it

Adrian talks about roughly 90 months to act on global warming before a point of no return, which is a motivating number and also a heavy one to hand a workforce.

Tucci's account of how they handled it at the company gathering is mostly about authenticity. The leadership team was genuinely upset about the number, in the same way employees were, and did not perform optimism.

What they offered instead was a path: how each person is part of the solution and where they can make a difference. She acknowledges the honest dilution in that, since no single company will solve it, and that some employees are visibly deflated when new statistics land. Her phrase is that the emotional heart of the company is very strong.

The upside is on retention. Uplight is not competing with local technology employers, it is competing with other missions, because people want work that matters.

Ego, EQ, and being told to sit out the meeting

Asked what she learned the hard way, Tucci goes back to leaving business school convinced she was smarter than everyone, and conditioned to think that way.

A salesman across the table told her she would not be invited to the next meeting until she got her ego in check. She credits him with being kind about it, and marks it as the first time she understood what emotional intelligence was.

She contrasts that with what schools now teach about being a constructive member of a team, and adds a personal note. As an only child she says she was not well socialized for people, and her father once advised her, whatever she did, not to lead them.

Her assessment now is that she is genuinely humble because she has had enough failures to warrant it, and that showing up in the way a moment requires is a continuous project she still gets wrong.

Systems thinking as the core COO skill

Her advice for people entering the role is direct: it is systems thinking.

She is careful not to disparage depth, noting the force-multiplier engineer ten levels down who changes everything. But the COO's job is to see the system, because the work is optimizing, fixing and shaping the interplay between parts. If you cannot see it, explain it, and give examples of the what and the why, people will not follow you, and you will devolve into doing functional work and miss the point of the role.

Two things built the skill. Working at a company that sold agile software and transformation taught her change management from a non-waterfall starting point. And she worked closely with someone who could have written the book on systems thinking.

Her metaphor, which she cheerfully flags as an athlete's: see the whole field, and see where the open space is.

Advocacy, and a blind spot she is still processing

Tucci's involvement with the Anita Borg Institute started with a moment at Symantec. As chief strategy officer she joined a group of women and asked what she thought was a trivial question: what is your name and what do you do here.

The reaction told her something was wrong. She describes it as though she had asked them to strip naked and walk on hot coals. The discomfort was about speaking, being heard, being seen.

She realized she could help with how these women were perceived, and with advocacy for people who did not feel they had a voice. Symantec was partnered with the institute, which invited her onto the board.

She is honest about what changed in her own thinking. For a long time she moved through her career without foregrounding being a woman, and equally without advocating for other women. The board role gave her a way to be an ally and to work on voice and equity.

Her practical advice starts with unconscious bias training and the reason it usually fails. Everyone takes the course, agrees it is obvious, and reverts, never reaching escape velocity into actual practice. Then she connects it to hiring pressure. In a talent crunch, the default is to hire people like us, because we recognize them. Without a deliberately diverse candidate slate, the company does not become diverse, and its creativity suffers.

The passage that lands hardest is something an employee told her. A Black woman on her team said she felt safe with the leadership because the C-level included a Jewish man, a woman who is a lesbian and an Asian man. Tucci's reflection is that any of us assumes we are personally safe to talk to, and that this is not the experience most minorities are having.

On building that safety she is realistic about how hard it is, including at her own company. What has helped is bringing in an expert on identity to work through intersectionality and privilege, using concrete scenarios. Her example is being stopped at a light late at night in Colorado when a police car pulls alongside, and how differently that lands depending on who you are. Her mechanism for a homogenous team that cannot start the conversation itself is facilitation, plus finding the people already willing to go first.

The story she is still sitting with

Michael's standing question produced one of the most self-critical answers the show has had, and Tucci volunteers it deliberately.

About a year earlier, a group of employees came to her anonymously to describe a leader's behavior and how it made them feel. They were not willing to go to HR, which was still forming, and did not feel safe there.

She documented everything, wrote what amounted to a pre-performance-plan, brought the manager and his manager together to spell out what had to change, hired the manager a coach and personally coached him every other week.

Six months later he was up for promotion. The anonymous group reported improvement, and his leader promoted him.

Then the company concluded that the leader above him was not the right person and hired a replacement, who looked underneath and found the situation was still a mess.

Her verdict on herself is unsparing. It was on her watch. It was about whether people felt psychologically safe and whether they believed anyone cared. She thought she had followed the right steps and checked the right boxes, and in hindsight had not done enough homework to verify that the situation had genuinely improved.

The part she finds hardest is the contrast with her own advocacy work. She champions diversity, and she missed this inside her own company. Her closing on it is that this is how people learn and get better.

The 5 things I took away from this conversation

1. Write your criteria before you start interviewing, and give them to someone. This is the most immediately usable idea in the episode. Confirmation bias will find you a reason to take any job you have started to want. Tucci's spreadsheet, and handing the list to people who would hold her to it, is a genuine defense against that.

2. A CEO who names what they are not is worth working for. Adrian's pitch was an admission that he does not follow up and close things out, and the job description was one sentence. That clarity is worth more than a long list of responsibilities, and the willingness to say it out loud tells you something about the person.

3. Distributed work erased the acquisition heritage. This is the most surprising claim here. Six merged companies could not see each other's offices on video, so nobody could attribute a comment to a legacy tribe. The forced neutrality did integration work that travel would not have.

4. Certification settles an internal argument. Uplight had a real split between people there for the mission and people there for the business. B Corp certification is not a badge in that context, it is a mechanism that forces both to be true at once, with an external assessor checking every three years.

5. Following the process is not the same as verifying the outcome. Tucci did everything right on paper with the problem manager and still did not confirm whether anything had actually changed for the people who raised it. That gap between checking boxes and checking reality is worth carrying into any people process you own.

FAQ

What is B Corp certification and what does it require? It certifies that a business is doing measurable good while operating commercially, and requires demonstrating how you give back. Tucci stresses that it involves a rigorous assessment, must be renewed every three years, and is not a formality. Uplight's contribution is measured in reduced carbon footprint across consumers, businesses and utilities.

What is a B Corp in practice for employees? At Uplight it resolved a cultural tension between people who joined for the mission and people focused on returns, by requiring both to be true. It also affects recruiting, since Tucci says the company competes with other missions rather than with local technology employers.

What are the COO role responsibilities when the CEO is the visionary? Executing the plan, in Uplight's case stated exactly that plainly. Tucci's own framing is that her value is functional experience across many C-level seats plus the ability to see the whole system, complementing a CEO whose strengths are relationships, industry moves and capital.

How do you evaluate whether a CEO relationship will work before joining? Tucci wrote down her criteria before interviewing, scored the company and the CEO against them in a spreadsheet, and asked people including her partner to hold her accountable to the list. She also took references through a small local business community, and the CEO did the same on her.

What makes selling to utilities different from other enterprise software? Regulation. Uplight sells mainly to large regulated monopolies that must run competitive bid processes and justify sole-source awards, with nine to twelve month sales cycles. Political change at state level can remove program funding entirely, which Tucci notes is the first time in her software career that regulatory forces have genuinely shaped the market.

Also mentioned

• Uplight, and its demand response and grid orchestration products
• B Lab, the body behind B Corp certification and its triennial reassessment
• Symantec, Rally Software and Apto, Tucci's previous executive roles
• AnitaB.org, formerly the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, where Tucci chairs the board of trustees
• AES, the Fortune 500 strategic investor that rolled equity into the combined company
• Xcel Energy, Tucci's example of a regulated utility monopoly
• Porter's five forces, which she says finally became fully applicable in a regulated market
• The 80/80 Marriage, Tucci's recommendation on radical generosity over zero-sum thinking in relationships

Listen to the full episode

Angela Tucci on Between Two COO's

Between Two COO's is hosted by Michael Koenig. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.