Scaling tem: Rewiring energy transactions for a fairer future
with Joe McDonald, Co-Founder & CEO of tem.
Posted
In an interview hosted earlier this year by Adam Chirkowski, Partner, AlbionVC, Joe McDonald, the co-founder and CEO of tem, discuss the inception and rapid growth of tem, an energy platform aimed at transforming energy transactions by allowing businesses to work directly with renewable energy generators.
Joe shares his background in the energy sector, particularly his time at Lime Jump, and his motivations for starting tem in 2021. The company has grown to over 1,600 customers and facilitated nearly a hundred million in transactions. Joe emphasizes the importance of focusing on product development over early traction, the complexities of balancing supply and demand, and the necessity of a strong company culture. He also reflects on the challenges and successes of adopting VC funding, particularly through their partnerships with AlbionVC and other investors. Joe outlines tem’s mission to disrupt the global energy market and make energy transactions fairer and more transparent, and highlights their long-term vision of significantly reducing global transaction fees in the energy sector
Tem was founded in 2021 to create an end-to-end transaction infrastructure connecting businesses directly with renewable generators. Joe, drawing on his experience at Limejump and Shell, saw the real-world damage outdated systems caused—especially for small businesses hit by the energy crisis. This was the spark for Tem.
Rather than chase short-term revenue, the team prioritised platform depth and defensibility. From the start, Tem focused on building strong internal infrastructure—AI-driven pricing, scalable onboarding, and product-led growth. Despite early customer demand, they paused scaling twice to fix foundational challenges. Now, Tem has grown from 300 to over 1,600 customers, with a focus on “profit-market fit.”
“We’re now going from product-market fit to profit-market fit. The metrics are moving in the right direction—renewals, retention, gross profit. The foundation’s in place.”
Joe McDonald, Co-Founder & CEO of Tem
Tem isn’t a marketplace—it creates continuous liquidity by solving the data and infrastructure gaps that inflate energy prices by 25–30%. Joe likens the tech challenge to combining Uber’s logistics with Amazon’s fulfilment.
The company culture is just as intentional. From renaming OKRs to “Quests” to rejecting traditional hierarchy (Tem has coaches, not managers), Joe sees culture as core infrastructure. TemFest, a biannual team offsite, and constant investment in alignment help preserve connection across their remote-first team.
Joe credits Tem’s progress to a uniquely complementary founding team. Their dynamic is competitive but caring, underpinned by honesty and emotional alignment, not just titles or KPIs. It’s a founding relationship built to last.
Personally, Joe sees his path to entrepreneurship as unexpected but inevitable—shaped by high-performance sport, law school, and what he calls “stability capital” from a supportive upbringing. He’s driven by both purpose and privilege: “If I don’t take advantage of this opportunity, that’s just such a shame.”
Looking ahead, Tem aims to power every energy transaction on the planet. Joe believes energy is the new lever of global change—the cost of an electron will shape economies, industries, and even humanity’s future. Success for Tem isn’t just saving billions in fees, but building a fairer, more transparent energy system at global scale.
The reason we have LLMs is the cost of compute has gone down. Everything comes back now to an electron and the cost of that electron will define world orders. It will define market opportunities. It will define humanity’s chances of success. Um, and I feel like I’m right in the heart of that.
Joe McDonald, Co-Founder & CEO of Tem
And if Joe could go back to 2021? He’d tell himself to act faster, trust customers sooner—and remember: “It’ll be okay. You can build something big, and still have a life.”
Other news
