Once people decide to buy an electric car, they quickly wade into a foreign realm of complicated incentives on cars, their financing and home chargers, said EV Life co-CEO Kevin Favro.
Most EVs are more expensive than their gas counterparts, and the incentives and subsidies for them tend to pay out over time.
Favro and co-founder Peter Glenn developed EV Life to make the transition to electric vehicles clearer, easier, faster and less expensive.
EV Life finds applicable subsidies from hundreds available nationwide, and offers what's known as a climate loan that reduces the upfront cost of the vehicle.
The kernel for what is now EV Life LLC was borne of a Startup Weekend hackathon in 2019 at the Granite City coworking office in Folsom. Favro and Glenn attended — and won — the event. They came up with software to help alleviate range anxiety that consumers have in making the switch from a petroleum car to electric. It tracked driving habits in a fuel car to see how drivers would fare with an electric vehicle.
“We wanted to positively influence people’s decisions and behaviors,” Favro said.
It turned out to be an interesting effort but not commercially viable, Favro said. But the founders did notice that all the different incentive programs for electric vehicles were extremely confusing.
“We realized that if we can’t figure this out, how will our parents do this?” Favro said.
“I was at that first event, and I have watched them evolve,” said Thomas Hall, executive director of nonprofit CleanStart, which supports clean energy efforts in the region. “They really went out to the public and asked them what they needed to know in buying an EV.”
To build awareness, and potentially win some cash, Favro has competed in the Sacramento Kings Capitalize contest twice, making it to the final four and the final eight. In March, EV Life took the $10,000 cash top prize in the inaugural Pitch Elk Grove startup company competition. In April, he took EV Life to the Techstars Startup Weekend in San Diego.
Such competitions are a great venue for startups, Favro said. “They give you an excuse to pause and really tell your story. They have helped us to solidify our pitch and clarify what we are bringing to market.”
Favro was born in the Bay Area, and was raised in the Sacramento area, graduating from Jesuit High School. He sings and plays guitar, so he went to college at Loyola Marymount University to study recording arts, and at the time he was in a band that played gigs in Los Angeles.
By the time he graduated with his degree in recording arts, he realized he didn’t really have the passion for the industry he thought he would. He had internships and opportunities, but he came to realize that being a recording engineer meant long hours in windowless rooms and basements.
“It’s not a lifestyle I wanted,” he said. After college, he joined a volunteer program and taught fourth grade in Nepal in an effort to take a break and figure out what he wanted to do.
While teaching in Nepal, he learned about hypertext markup language, or HTML, looking over the shoulder of a fellow teacher in Nepal who was making webpages.
“The instructions for webpages are just text. It blew me away,” he said. “My career in software began in a small village in Nepal with 200 rupees, a few pirated copies of Macromedia Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks, and a desire to build a website to share my letters, pictures, film and music.”
After being self-taught in writing software, he took some courses, and then got a series of jobs as a front-end and back-end coder. He built his first app as a side gig while working for a Bay Area technology company. He still maintains some clients with his own consulting company, which helps pay the bills while he’s been developing EV Life as a startup. EV Life plans to raise a seed round for growth money later this year.
His college band, Fat Toby, taught him business basics he still uses today, he said. “You wear so many hats.”
Favro said that although bands perform and compose, they also must book gigs, collaborate, design promotions and graphics, sell T-shirts and raise money to record.
“You really have to figure out how to promote and network and put yourself out there,” he said. “I see the similarities every day.”
The Essentials
Co-CEO and head of product for EV Life
Age: 43
Education: Bachelor's degree in recording arts from Loyola Marymount University
Career: Co-founder, EV Life, 2019-present; owner, Abacus Digital, 2016-present; VP of engineering, UpMetrics, 2017-2019; mobile app engineering, Afar Media, 2012-2016; senior software engineer, Servio, 2011-2012; senior web engineer for Serious Magic in Folsom and then Adobe Inc., which acquired it, 2006-2011.
Personal/Family: Married to Michelle; son Owen, 11; Everett, 9; and Felix, 7. Lives in Folsom.
Passion (outside work and family): All things winter and snow, including skiing and snowmobiling.
First non-professional job: Cleaning racing pigeon coops in seventh grade. Paper route.
