By Caroline Stanton
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2021 issue of Nantucket Today magazine.
It is a clear-skied Thursday afternoon in the Mission District of San Francisco. Ben Parker is sitting at a table in a Mexican restaurant called Chuy’s Fiestas talking about the path between finding an idea, shaping that idea, and turning that idea into a start-up. It is the sort of conversation that feels as if it continually takes place here, close to the center of the high-tech world.
After studying engineering at Dartmouth, a job at the electric car company Tesla brought him to San Francisco. Today he is talking about how an idea germinated, changed, and how a pandemic road trip through the RV parks of the American West focused that idea and allowed him time to explore how best to take the next steps in his life.
“I was like, ‘Oh, it’s obvious. Go out into the chaos and see where the opportunity is,’ because when the whole world changes, there’s a ton of new opportunity,” he said.
Parker has found a lead investor for his idea, a firm called Obvious Investments. That investment allowed him to officially put together his company, called Lightship, in a nod to Nantucket. He is not the first young tech entrepreneur to ask himself the following question: “Did someone just give us a bunch of money to live out our dreams?”
The idea began with food trucks, which are a common sight here in the East Bay. While at Tesla, he wanted to find a way to electrify food trucks. In 2019 he spent nine to 10 months on this pet project with a co-worker.
Throughout the project, he consulted Select Board member and Something Natural owner Matt Fee. Parker worked at Something Natural throughout high school and some of college, and expresses an admiration for Fee as a businessman and steward of the island’s energy use. He recalled a time when he was sitting on the production floor at Tesla working on the Model 3 battery when he read about Nantucket’s purchase of a Tesla power-pack installation – which Fee was instrumental in making happen – to help address the surge in summer energy demand.
“I definitely consider him, like, kind of a mentor and influential figure in my life growing up,” Parker said.
Parker was willing to build an electric food truck to sell Fee’s sandwiches around the island, but he ultimately found that electrifying food trucks would not make the profit or impact he was aiming for. He began shifting away from the food-truck idea after “realizing that the food-truck market is neither big nor is there a lot of extra money in food-truck businesses. They’re primarily mom-and-pop businesses.”
During his nine-week road trip he kept a running update on the social-media platform Medium. He explained the goal of the trip in one of his first postings.
Why am I on this journey? I could not sit still in San Francisco for more than two months and knew there must be a way to maintain physical distance and germ-safety protocols while seeing new sights. I am 26 years old, just left my job as a battery design engineer at Tesla after about 5 years (including internships) and am due for soul searching.
The open road called me, and an RV made the most sense in the midst of a pandemic while also allowing me to explore my business idea: battery electric home power systems for RVs, a way to eliminate the smelly, noisy gas generators that RV operators must use today for power while camping off grid. I will use my RVing experience these next two months to generate and refine on a product concept for superior off-grid RV power.
Parker had been negotiating the confines of a shared home workspace, feeling disconnected from co-workers in the new world of the virtual office, and burned out at work.
“The pandemic whipped up and things were super-stressful with me and my roommate,” he said. “It was just like, if I have any control over being in the city and in this living situation, I should exercise it now.”
So he set out on a 5,389-mile trip through the West.
As he hoped it would, the trip provided inspiration, allowed him to road-test his technical idea and do some soul-searching. Now he is back in San Francisco with two rounds of fundraising under his belt and the task of building a diverse team of engineers to bring the idea to fruition.
Parker comes by his urge to start a business honestly. Both his parents were small-business people. Matthew, his father, built and ran the Seven Sea Street Inn, a bed and breakfast on-island. Mary, his mother, bought and ran an island quarterly magazine called Nantucket Magazine. She later sold it for a profit.
“I wanted to try entrepreneurship – I had known that really in some form for a long time – because I just really liked growing up in a small-business environment,” Parker said.
It is not so much the success of these businesses, rather the risks his parents were willing to take for an idea they thought worthwhile, that stuck with him. In describing his father’s business, he said, “I really respected that my dad had the chutzpah to go out and try this thing where he was, like, taking loans on loans to make the business work for the first five years because he didn’t have any basic customers, like guests, at that point.”
Food trucks were removed from the equation when people he knew in the electric-vehicle (EV) world, people he shared this work with, saw potential in another industry.
“When I talked to more entrepreneurially-minded folks about the food-truck business, they would always bring up RV-ing. RVs seemed to share a lot of the same needs as food trucks and were way more popular,” he said.
Recreational vehicles are a $25 billion industry. One in 10 Americans own one and over half a million RVs are sold a year. These statistics were surprising to Parker.
“It’s not something I would have guessed having lived in a college town, on Nantucket and in San Francisco – the three most unlikely places to find an RV in the country,” he said.
He soon realized that he had a lot to learn, if he was going to make his name in this industry. “It was an amazing opportunity to do long-form user research,” Parker said about the trip.
In a time of great political divide, Parker found a space for connection in the world of RVing.
“Everyone is just there to have a good time. It's like the least-contentious setting you can imagine. There’s a ton of opportunity to build bridges between people, and by that I mean to build a common understanding of each other.”
RVs, Parker soon found, provide a chance for people to step out of their silos.
“It’s also one of the few forums you can find in America where there is that amount of mixing because people are traveling from all over,” he said. “Right now we’re geographically polarized as well. You have the coasts and the whole middle section of America and people from those various environments don’t come together physically that much anymore.”
Throughout his road trip, Parker was also able to collect data to help guide his business endeavor. Using an app on his phone, he kept track of the different types of RVs he saw. By a landslide, the most popular was the trailer. It was a stroke of fortune since he has found that electrifying a motorhome would not be as nearly as feasible. “Trailers are the vast majority of the market and they are way easier to electrify,” he said.
Back in San Francisco, Parker began an advisorship with Dorian West, one of the first dozen people hired by Tesla in 2005. West was the engineering leader for the Tesla semi-truck program for the first couple of years and now has his own company called Electric Hydrogen.
Parker said West loves camping and has gone RVing, so was naturally taken with his idea of electric RVs. West became Lightship’s first investor and helped Parker find a co-founder: Toby Kraus. Kraus was in the finance department for most of his time at Tesla from 2009-2014. He then took on the role of director of finance and strategy and later became vice president of an electric volt company for commercial vehicles called Proterra.
“The world is electrifying,” Parker said as he pulled up the slideshow for the first Lightship prototype on his phone. A key feature to Parker’s electric trailer is how it compacts when on the road and tucks in behind the vehicle to reduce drag.
“When you’re going down the road, you want something like an airplane fuselage, basically as low-profile and sleek as it can be, because the air should flow smoothly over it instead of hitting it like a wall, which is what happens on most RVs today,” he said.
When at a campsite, the roof of the trailer pops up to create an eight-foot ceiling inside. The roof has solar panels that can generate energy for onboard appliances and even charge the tow vehicle, if it is electrically powered.
“This is EV architecture,” Parker said. “The whole interior, the design and styling, needs to be updated, needs to be more modern. There really aren’t that many modern-design RVs out there.”
Parker is now focused on bringing together a team of engineers from diverse backgrounds to take this idea from the drawing board to the showroom. Diversity in hiring is especially important for Parker, who believes that a company is limited in who it can market to if its employees only reflect a single subgroup of the population.
“You and I both know the reputation of RVing as an industry and a pastime is stodgy, old and white,” he said. “There is so much more opportunity to expand it as a pastime to a truer cross-section of America than the industry is capable of doing right now.”
“I think the way that we reach a diverse group of people is by first getting representation in the business, for making a diverse, equitable and inclusive business. That’s an internal revolution that can lead to a serious competitive advantage when it comes to marketing and the growth of the company.”
Stepping out into the sunny San Francisco afternoon, Parker admitted he had seriously considered leaving the world of electrification and EVs just before his road trip. Why the change of heart? Why double down and start his own electric vehicle company?
“I realized that I only have one life,” he said. “I think climate change is a defining challenge for all of us in this generation and I like working on electric vehicles. It is a way that I can really contribute to the world.”
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