Heather Hochrein
Cofounder and CEO of electric vehicle charging company EVmatch
Master’s in Environmental Science and Management from the Bren School at UC Santa Barbara
“In retrospect, starting EVmatch was a risky move because the electric vehicle market was so new when I started the company. But I felt the industry needed more leadership, especially focused on charging equity and access, and I didn't see that happening anywhere else. Starting a company was the best way I saw to change that.”
Electric vehicles were still a rare sight on California’s roads when Heather Hochrein enrolled in the Bren School of the Environmental Science & Management at UC Santa Barbara in 2015. But with a few years’ professional experience in energy and a deep interest in environmental problem solving, Hochrein knew she wanted to focus on the EV industry in the next phase of her career.
The Bren School offered her the option to structure her studies around an eco-entrepreneurship model, which provided both the structure and flexibility to do market research and design solutions. With three classmates, Hochrein set out to “identify the major pain points and barriers to EV adoption at the time,” she says. They uncovered three main things holding the industry back: expensive vehicles, limited battery range, and limited charging access. Battery technology was rapidly improving, which would solve both the cost and battery range problems. “The charging access problem was the one that we saw was really going to hold the industry back, particularly for making EVs available and feasible for renters,” Hochrein says.
Once they’d identified a gap in the market, Hochrein and her Bren School classmates designed a business plan to address it, pitching a peer-to-peer EV charging network. Property owners who installed their own EV chargers could rent them out to drivers who might not have access to a public charger nearby.
“I didn't expect to start a company” Hochrein says. “But after working on this idea for a year and a half, we knew we were on to something, and we had too much momentum to let it go.” In 2017, she cofounded EVmatch with one of her classmates, backed by grants from UC Santa Barbara and early investments from fellow Bren School alumni.
Since then, EVmatch’s business has evolved with the industry. Today Hochrein helms a company of ten people, focused on providing software to manage shared chargers at multifamily housing developments, so renters can more easily access EV charging close to home.
“It’s important that the environmental sector consider jobs and job creation because frankly, economic development has been left out of the environmental conversation for decades,” Hochrein says. “And what better way to fix that than to actually create your own company, where you also get to lead the culture and decide how you want to manage it?”