Once a month, Utah Business hosts Founder Friday, a free event sponsored by Kiln, BONCO, Comma Copywriters and Kajae that showcases the wisdom of Utah-based founders. In November, Kiln hosted the conversation between Utah Business Editor-in-Chief Melanie Jones and Torus founder and CEO Nate Walkingshaw. Here are a few takeaways from their conversation.
Not all expertise requires an industry background. Fresh perspectives matter.
When Walkingshaw entered the energy sector, he knew “zero” about the industry. But this outsider perspective and willingness to learn enabled innovative solutions, like the flywheel energy storage technology that recently earned Torus recognition as one of TIME’s Best Inventions of 2024.
“A lot of people say you have to be embedded in the industry for years to solve the problems. I don’t think that’s true,” Walkingshaw says, emphasizing that the key to his success was conducting thorough interviews with industry veterans and asking the right questions.
“All your answers live in questions,” he continues.
Focus on outcomes over outputs.
Walkingshaw measures success by real-world impact. He tracks three critical metrics: likelihood to buy, length of stay and NPS (Net Promoter Score).
“A lot of companies will ship a feature and celebrate, but that really doesn’t matter,” Walkingshaw says. “What matters is how the user interacts with and adopts it.”
He advocates for getting products 80 percent ready for market fit, then refining the final 20 percent based on user feedback. “If you’re humble enough, when you ship a feature and it’s your baby and people call it ugly, you iterate that product as fast as you possibly can,” he continues. “We live for direct, candid feedback, and we anchor to negative feedback because those are the things that we missed.”
Lead with empathy.
Walkingshaw’s background as an EMT taught him to seek context and understand others’ circumstances before making judgments. “In these really tender moments in the back of the ambulance, you find out what the most meaningful part of the human condition is,” he says. “We’re just humans at the end of the day.”
Applying these lessons to his current role as CEO of Torus, Walkingshaw emphasizes that effective leadership requires understanding others’ truths and experiences. “If you seek context first and really get to know someone, it automatically creates this endearing factor,” he says.
Build for long-term impact.
Instead of chasing quick wins, Walkingshaw focuses on creating lasting solutions for future generations. This long-term mindset shapes everything from product development to company strategy.
“How could we build something that would last for a century, well beyond our lives and our kids’ kids’ lives?” Walkingshaw says. “It didn’t matter how successful this was going to be. Even if we had a 1 percent success rate, this is the last mile — one of the hardest problems society really didn’t want to solve or has had a problem trying to solve. It doesn’t matter what we get paid; it’s more about impact.”