On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kathy Hannun, co-founder of Dandelion Energy, a Google X spin out and largest geothermal home energy company. Kathleen and I talk about the trends in the clean energy space and her experiences of launching a successful startup out of Alphabet's Google X Lab. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Kathy Hannun, Co-founder of Dandelion EnergyBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Kathy Hannun. She is the co-founder of Dandelion, a Google X spin-out and the largest geothermal home energy company. Welcome. Kathy Hannun: Thanks so much for having me. Brian Ardinger: Kathy, I'm excited to have you on. As a lot of our listeners know, we try to bring on the people that can give us insight into new trends and new perspectives on innovation, but also people who can bring us insights and perspectives on the process of innovation. And I thought you could do a great job of both. So, what is Dandelion? Kathy Hannun: So, Dandelion is a home geothermal company. What that means is we take a homeowner's furnace or boiler out of their home. And we replace it with a geothermal heating and cooling system. So, this is a heat pump that goes where the furnace or boiler used to be, connected to what are called ground loops, which are plastic pipes buried under the homeowner's yard.And these ground loops are exchanging heat with the yard. So, in the winter they're drawing heat into the house, that's then processed through the heat pump to boost the temperature. And then in the summer, the whole thing works in reverse. We're actually taking heat out of the house, much like an air conditioner does and putting it into the ground.Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things about this company, you've just raised a $30 million funding round with Breakthrough Energy Ventures. And you're taking what used to be very much a niche luxury and trying to bring it into the mainstream technology. So how did Dandelion get started? How did it come to be?Kathy Hannun: You're exactly right. Dandelion is really trying to take what has traditionally been a very expensive niche product, geothermal heating and cooling and making it mainstream. So, to be clear, like we did not invent geothermal heating and cooling. This has existed for decades. It's very popular in Sweden, but what we're trying to do is just make it really common. You know, much more common in this country. And the way we got started was I was actually working as a rap evaluator at Google's X Lab. So, this is the part of Google that comes up with like the self-driving car balloon internet, or, you know, a lot of the futuristic moonshot technologies. And I was looking for a great opportunity to do something impactful in energy. Specifically, I wanted to find an opportunity to really grow clean energy and heating and cooling buildings really stood out to me because unlike a lot of other consumer energy sectors like cars or even electricity, there really isn't nearly as much activity in trying to figure out how to make buildings that use more clean energy. Right? When we looked at the different solutions that you could bring to the problem heat pumps stood out so clearly. Like here's this technology that already exists. It's proven to work. It's like geothermal heat pumps are the most efficient possible way to heat and cool your home. So of course, then the next question is, well, if they're so good, why is no one using them? Right. An