Tiya Gordon

Co-Founder, it's electric

Tiya Gordon is dedicated to spending the next chapter of her career tackling what she sees as the next major global challenge: the climate crisis. After 20 years of experience in design, leadership, and operations across a range of disciplines for some of the country’s top firms and institutions, Gordon believes that following the COVID-19 pandemic, the next crisis New Yorkers will face is the climate crisis.

Gordon is the co-founder of the company “it’s electric,” a company that’s utilizing design to fight the war on the health of our planet by expanding urban electric vehicle infrastructure. Prior to launching her newly designed product, Gordon oversaw the development of over 200 layers of public-facing technology for the 9/11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center in New York City. When Gordon, a Brooklyn, New York resident, faced a personal need for an electric vehicle during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, she struggled to find electric vehicle charging infrastructure in Brooklyn.

“If you come to a city like New York, just to give you numbers, London has thousands of urban chargers, while New York City has significantly fewer curbside options. We can get into all those technical details as to why only 50, but it really ties into infrastructure limitations between how a city like London was built versus a city like New York.” Having spent time both in London, England, and New York City, Gordon was appalled at the wealth of electric vehicle infrastructure that London has as opposed to New York City.

Gordon explained the complications that arise when trying to implement new layers of infrastructure into old cities like New York. Typically, in cities, charging companies work with the utility to request a specialized utility interconnection permit as these companies work requires digging seven feet down, and transforming high voltage power. This can take years of time to permit and is incredibly costly. It’s elecric’s solution to implement more electric vehicle charging ports into cities completely avoids this out-dated process — by instead using spare electrical capacity from nearby buildings already metered at the right level of power.

Gordon refers to it’s electric”as “shallow tech.” It is the easiest possible solution to a very complicated problem. Even more uncomplicated: “it’s electric” utilizes detachable cables that are found in London but nowhere else in the United States to reduce the risk of theft and vandalism. After piloting their product in 2023, “it’s electric” raised seed funding with Uber co-leading the round and is expanding into multiple U.S. cities, including San Francisco and Detroit.

They manufacture their product entirely in the United States, and their chargers are designed to come at no upfront cost to cities. This is possible due to the company building a low-cost solution that doesn’t require selling hardware to local governments. By partnering with city property owners to unlock access to untapped electric supply, they allow property owners to earn passive income while solving the problem at hand: a lack of available electric vehicle chargers. By removing what they refer to as “the big, the bad, the ugly” “it’s electric” has crafted a sleek look that is recognizable but also aligns with the lifestyle of New Yorkers. At a time when federal climate support is lacking, this low-cost solution changes the game.

As someone who is deeply motivated by disaster management and preventing further climate crises, Gordon is fascinated by the idea of working “left of the boom.” After reading the book The Devil Never Sleeps by Juliette Kayyem, which detailed Kayyem’s work at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration, she couldn’t get the idea out of her head. She knew something had to change in regards to not only the climate crisis, but in regards to the lack of electric vehicle charging ports in major U.S. cities.

“We’re now living in a country that is violent toward sustainability. Literally violent. My company is on something called the Department of Energy hit list,” said Gordon. “The US Department of Energy has a, quote-unquote, hit list because they’ve found we had received federal grants that were cost-matched. We were putting in equal parts of funding, or partial parts of funding, depending on the ground, to help put infrastructure in underserved neighborhoods. And so that was a DTI strike against us.”

After returning from San Francisco Climate Week, a major climate gathering in the U.S, under the new administration; Gordon was more motivated than ever to keep making headway. Since “it’s electric” is 80% female-led by design, the team is working against not only a climate strike, but a diversity, equity, and inclusion strike. “You just made the hill steeper. You just made that rock heavier. But, we’re not deterred,” said Gordon.

“It’s electric” is looking to not only tackle the climate war, but to change the face of transportation, and energy, and also startups. Gordon explained that as she learned more about venture capital, the more she discovered the massive gender inequity that was present: less than 2% of venture capital goes to all-female founding teams.

“What you learn is that 99.999% of venture capital are male investors. And there’s something in venture capital called pattern matching, which is their polite way of saying they only invest in people that look like them, and talk like them. I worked really hard not only to even succeed in raising, because raising capital is a challenge unto itself,” said Gordon. She works diligently to ensure that as many female venture capitalists were on her side as possible.

To Gordon, sustainability means to do the work that needs to get done to live the life that you need to live, without there being negative impacts on the earth that you leave behind. She references an expression that her team uses all the time, which is coined by the company’s Director of Public Affairs, Shannon Delaney. “We call it “sheer force of will.” And I mean, if you think that if you’ve ever met a willful person, it’s likely a woman.”