Before the rulebook existed. What I learned in e-mobility’s earliest years

By Eric van Voorden, CEO Last Mile Solutions

I have a copy of an annual report from 2009 sitting somewhere in my office. It belongs to Eneco, one of the Netherlands’ largest energy companies back then and still nowadays. Flip through it and you will find a photograph of something that was, at that moment, considered a milestone: a single EV charging station.

One charger, in an annual report! The board was proud of it. So was I, because we developed it, together with an industrial design company named Mango.

I look at that photo now and I feel two things at once. First, there’s pride: we were there, at the very beginning, when nobody quite knew what “there” would turn out to mean. The second is a kind of amusement. Because from where we stand today, one charger in a corporate annual report reads almost endearing. Of course, it wasn’t the case back then. It was actually the frontier.

That station represents the start of something that would take 15 years to become obvious to everyone else. Something many of us spent those years building, certifying, funding, defending, and just willing into existence.

I was one of those people, and looking back now, with almost 20 years of Last Mile Solutions behind us, I find myself thinking more about what those earliest years actually taught us.

The lessons from building something before the rulebook exists hit differently:
They tend to really stick.
 

Year zero: building something that didn’t exist yet

Let me take you back to the beginning. Not of EV charging as a concept, since that conversation had been going on since the early twenties. But the beginning of actually building it: early hardware in hand, standards that barely existed, and absolutely no guarantee that any of it would work.

When we set out to develop our first charging station, there was no product to reverse-engineer. The standards at the time were preliminary at best. While there were frameworks on paper, nothing was road-tested nor agreed upon at scale.

So my co-founder Johan and I started from nothing: we designed the hardware, the electronics, and the software from the ground up. In that situation, “from scratch” is not a figure of speech.

That is what you do when the road is not yet built: you lay the next stone and keep walking.

To put a charging station on the market, you need to satisfy the relevant regulatory bodies – what is known as Dekra. We went to them with our charging station. They looked at it carefully then told us, with complete honesty, that they had never certified an EV charging station before.

We did what we had to: we built the certification process together, in real time. That is not something you find in any business school curriculum. To certify a charging station, you need a test car to charge. But in 2009, there was essentially no electric vehicle available to us for that purpose.

We thought about it for a while and decided to build an EV simulator. Just a box with a plug, wired to mimic exactly how a car communicates with a charging station during a session. That box became our “test vehicle”. It sounds almost comically simple in hindsight, but at the time, it was the obvious solution to an obvious problem.

“There was no electric car. So we built a box with a plug that acted like one. You do what you need to do.”

It all paid off; the station got certified. It was, as far as we know, the first of its kind. And if you look at it in that annual report photograph, you will notice something that might seem normal today: it had a display screen.
 

Ahead of the curve, without knowing it

A display screen, in 2009, on a charging station that nobody had built before.

Today, display screens on EV charging infrastructure are standard and increasingly, a regulatory requirement too. Industry bodies debate screen size, brightness, and user interface guidelines. There are entire working groups dedicated to what information should be shown and how. In short, it has become a topic.

We had one already in 2009. It wasn’t because we anticipated any of this or read the regulatory direction and got ahead of it. We simply put a display on that first station because it seemed logical. You are charging a car; the driver probably wants to know what is happening.

It’s a pattern I have seen repeating itself throughout this industry. The things that eventually become requirements – the things that working groups are formed around and white papers are written about – were almost always already being done by someone who just thought it was the sensible approach. They were not visionaries per se. They were just engineers solving a problem in front of them.

“Innovation at the frontier rarely feels like innovation while you are doing it.”

There was something else on that station that was ahead of its time: basic remote management. We could reset it by sending a message, a simple command that cycled the system back on.

By today’s standards, that is quite unremarkable. Every charging station on the market can be managed remotely through a platform. But in 2009, it was truly novel. The idea that you did not have to drive to a broken station and manually intervene was not yet a given. Again, it seemed obvious to us. We just built what made sense.

This is one of the lessons of those early years. When you are operating on the frontier, you do not always know which decisions will turn out to matter. You make the sensible call, you move forward, and 15 years later someone tells you that what you did back then is now a compliance requirement.

“We didn’t know we were ahead. We just thought it was logical.”

From product to EV software: the decision that changed everything

After the first station, Eneco commissioned more. We produced 70 units in total, part of a contract drawn up for 700. At some point, they slowed down their e-mobility business; the market was early, the road was long, and the risk was high. But it left us with a question: what do you build next, and how?

In the early years, we operated in two worlds simultaneously. On the one hand, we were supplying controllers to third-party charging station manufacturers – companies like EcoTap and WeDriveSolar – with around 30 to 40 customers running on our technology before most people had heard of Last Mile Solutions. On the other, we were developing our own platform services. Two revenue streams run in parallel by a small team and a lot of determination.

“The durable, scalable, defensible value was in the software and the platform layer that managed everything sitting behind the charging station.”

Over time, it became clear that the real opportunity was not in the hardware. The durable, scalable, defensible value was in the software and the platform layer that managed everything sitting behind the charging station. The session data, the billing, the access management, the smart load balancing. The invisible infrastructure that makes a charging station actually useful at scale.

We took a tough decision. We would stop working on charge point controllers – what became a commodity anyway – and start focusing 100% on recurring platform services. We would go white label: the infrastructure layer that operators, employers, and energy companies could build their services on top of, without needing to build it themselves.

You can compare the model to Booking.com. They’re not the hotel, nor the airline or the taxi service. The platform sits between supply and demand, handles the complexity, and makes the experience smooth for all parties. A Dutch company, built on the same principle: you do not need to own the rooms to run the best room-booking business in the world.

“We made a deliberate choice: to be the platform, not the product. The brand on the box was never the point. Making the whole system work was.”

For our case, it meant operating without a consumer brand; that most people using our technology would never know our name. Some companies would see that as a problem. But for us, it was the right kind of focus.
 

It truly is about the right people and mindset

Back then, in a company like ours – a small team operating at the edge of what was possible – getting the right people was paramount. I’m happy that’s still the case. Many stories stayed with me, but one that I often recall is this one:

We were developing DC fast charging capability, working with a Partner on a system that nobody had managed to get fully operational. It had been sitting unresolved for a while after passing through different hands. Then it landed with Johan, my co-founder and our Head of Hardware and Electronics, the person who had been building this technology alongside me since the very beginning.

Four weeks later, it worked.

There wasn’t any big announcement or PR; just Johan refusing to leave before the problem was solved. That is the kind of engineering culture that either exists in a company, or it does not. It cannot be forced. You can only build an environment where it is possible and then get out of the way.

I think about that when people ask me what builds a company in the early years. It is not the strategy deck or the funding round. The people who stay in the room until the thing works are the key.

“The best thing you can do as a founder is hire people who are better than you in the areas that matter most and then trust them completely.”
 

The e-mobility frontier has just moved

I still have that annual report in my office. A single charging station, photographed like a trophy.

What strikes me now is not how primitive it looks, but how much had to be true for that photograph to exist at all.

The hardware designed from nothing, the certification process invented alongside the product, the simulator built out of a box and a plug, the software layer developed in parallel, the team that refused to give up on problems that had no solution yet.

Such an enormous amount of invisible work behind that one charger.

That is still how new markets get made: through the accumulation of hard, unglamorous decisions made by people who are convinced enough to keep going before the rest of the world catches up.

Twenty years in, the EV charging industry looks very different. EV charging is not a curiosity anymore. People and businesses alike expect it, and it’s increasingly a strategic asset for organisations navigating fleet electrification, energy costs, and employee benefits all at once. The standards exist in a solid EV market. The risk managers have arrived, which means the pioneers did their job.

But the frontier has just moved once again. Vehicle-to-grid. Bidirectional charging. Smart energy integration at building level. The next chapter of the EV industry is being built as we speak by people in rooms that most of the world has not heard of yet, solving problems that do not have rulebooks.

I know what that feels like. I would not trade it for anything.