Allen John

My ideal day has no plan, nobody waiting on me, and nowhere to be. Most of what I do is so I can do nothing in peace.

I'm always looking to be somewhere I've never been, and my next vacation is usually planned months in advance. I'd rather sink into a place than tick it off: see how people live, eat what they eat and drink what they brew. Having a local beer on a night out, finding a proper bowl of ramen and the state of the cars on the street teach me more about culture than any guide or map.

As one of the best men at my best friend's wedding, I found myself stranded with his EV, trying to charge it. In the end I ditched it for a good old diesel for the weekend. That was my first real taste of range anxiety and the pain of owning an EV, and it took me down a rabbit hole of how EV charging actually works, why it fails so often, and why you can't just plug in wherever you stop.

EVPanda is a company built on this research. We believe charging networks should just work at scale. Charging an EV usually means the car, the charger and the app you pay with all talking to each other, often across different companies, in a split second. When one of those messages breaks, the charge fails and the driver is stuck. EVPanda is an OCPI hub: it sits between charging networks and catches issues in every call, so the next time you stop at a charger, it just works.

On the weekends, I'm building a homestay in the hills of Munnar with my family. We look to welcome guests from 1st January 2027. Munnar is a small town known for tea and cardamom. It's the only hill station worth visiting in Kerala. We have tea estates covering the slopes, and mist that blankets them by the afternoon. If you're lucky, you'll see a varayadu, the Nilgiri tahr. It's a mountain goat found only in the Western Ghats, and next door in Eravikulam National Park it lives in bigger numbers than anywhere else.

I try to stay active by playing football, pickleball and hitting the gym.