Brooklyn startup shares road map for winning an NYC contract

Curbside EV charging startup It’s Electric’s efforts to win a New York City contract began in earnest late last year. But in reality, the work started years before.

It finally paid off last week, when the New York Power Authority (NYPA) announced it had selected It’s Electric to build the city’s permanent curbside EV charging network across all five boroughs.

“The contract for New York has moved us from a position where it’s no longer journalists or investors asking, ‘Well, will cities be doing curbside charging?’” Tiya Gordon, It’s Electric’s co-founder and COO, told us. “The question is now going to be, ‘Which cities are next going to be doing curbside charging?’”

In August, the NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) announced plans to expand its PlugNYC curbside EV charging initiative from 88 chargers to nearly 700. The program supports the city’s Green Rides Initiative, which requires rideshare vehicles licensed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission to be electric or accessible by 2030.

It’s Electric got its start in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, born out of a walk Gordon and fellow co-founder Nathan King took in Brooklyn that had them considering where, exactly, all the EVs were supposed to charge. It occurred to them that vehicles would have to charge up on the street—and that buildings could power them. The startup’s business model involves working with property owners to use existing electrical hookups in buildings.

Winning a contract with the most populous city in the country is a game-changer for the Brooklyn-based company. King and Gordon spoke with us about what it took to make it happen.

Think ahead

It’s Electric’s origins are rooted in the idea that NYC, with its density and limited off-street parking, would one day need curbside EV charging.

“What we did five years ago was try to anticipate everything that could possibly be in this RFP when it finally did drop,” King said. “We knew that this was an infrastructure problem that needed to be solved, and what we tried to do is make every decision about how we structure the business, the software, the hardware, our operations, the people that we hire, anticipating cities’ need for this specific RFP.”

In the meantime, they completed a pilot with the New York City Economic Development Corporation, and secured contracts with numerous other major cities, including LA, San Francisco, and Boston. One lesson they took away from working with different cities is that when government leaders are looking for a solution to a problem, they’re likely to ask their counterparts for advice.

“You should always have versatility in your product,” Gordon said, “because that’s what enabled us to win a lot of cities that loved our product, but were not fully comfortable with the private power connection.”

Know when to build or buy

NYC DOT contracted with NYPA on the procurement process. Because the RFP was open only to a list of preapproved vendors the state agency had worked with before, It’s Electric’s leaders began what Gordon described as “really, really extensive outreach” and ended up teaming up with Maverick Corporation for engineering and construction services on the project.

This reflected an early decision King and Gordon made, to not build an in-house engineering team. They did, however, bring on policy experts and a project team; those hires were instrumental in the RFP process, they told us.

“That strategic decision that we made early on, to stay focused on the relationship-building,” King said, “on understanding the policy implications, all of those things, was really helpful for this RFP once it did drop.”

Tell a story

It’s Electric’s team didn’t find the paperwork it had to submit to NYPA to be particularly cumbersome, but King and Gordon said it was crucial to tailor the application to what New York City was looking for, not just copy and paste from previous RFPs they worked on. And they had to be prepared to answer different types of questions from NYPA and NYC DOT.

“It just means that we can’t create a Claude bot to make responses for us,” King said. “We have to get our urban designer and our urban planner involved in looking at maps. We have to actually go and visit the city, and we have to make sure we understand which kinds of neighborhoods the city is looking at.”

Actually submitting the proposal was maybe 20% of the work, King estimated.

“If you do not have the relationship-building, if you do not have an understanding of who your city is, if you don’t have the right product and solution that is specifically addressing the things that are in that RFP,” he said, “it’s gonna be tough for you to win it.”

They emphasized the importance of creating a narrative arc within a proposal—It’s Electric, for example, highlighted that it would be manufacturing its chargers in NYC, even though that wasn’t required. (Boyce Technologies will manufacture the new chargers at a plant in Queens.)

“Every RFP we do has a story. We stake that out at the very beginning,” King said. “It’s hard to convey that through forms and standard questions. But in New York City, the arc was about this homegrown [startup], and the advantages that you get working with a local company.”