Zach Dell Thinks He Can Solve America’s Energy Crisis

To get inside why Zach Dell believes he will shake up the half-trillion-dollar U.S. power industry and then go global, it helps to take account of who’s inspiring the moves.

That would be his father, Michael Dell, who sold computer parts out of his college dorm at 19, took Dell Computer public four years later and by age 26 had entirely disrupted the personal computer business and become one of the richest people in the world.

At 29, the younger Dell is still working out the kinks at Base Power, the Austin, Texas, battery startup he co-founded two years ago. That, he concedes, puts him just slightly behind the pace his father set four decades ago. “I got off to a late start,” Dell jokes. Still, investors have been throwing money at him, most recently a $1 billion round in October, which valued Base at $4 billion, almost five times its valuation six months earlier. Base plans to spend some of the money on building two battery-making factories in Austin.