Founder Stories: Josef Hjelmaker of Electric Outdoors

Among the phalanx of executive meetings held every day at Thor Industries - the world's largest RV manufacturer with brands including Airstream, Jayco, and Keystone - Josef Hjelmaker and his team were running into the same barrier over and over.

Landowners needed a way to open new destinations for RV enthusiasts without multi-million-dollar grid extensions and the permitting obstacles which come with them. Meanwhile, visitors needed to charge EVs and find water in places that often had neither.

"We pretty quickly realized that that's actually nothing the industry itself will solve," Hjelmaker told us when we sat down to talk for this Founder Story. "It has to be solved outside the industry. And me having that background and such a passion for the outdoors, I said, 'Well, I guess that challenge is mine then.'"

Hjelmaker is from Jönköping, Sweden, a town in the middle of the country on the edge of one of its largest lakes. He grew up mostly on the west coast of Sweden in Gothenburg and graduated as an Electrical Engineer in the same town. His career began in his home country in the automotive industry, which led to roles in Germany and eventually to Michigan where he worked for Whirlpool before joining Thor in October 2020.

He left Thor in late 2022, incorporated Electric Outdoors in April 2023, with his life in the state playing a crucial role. “Michigan was early in supporting what we're doing because they … really want to be seen as an innovator in the intersection of mobility and outdoor hospitality. And Michigan has so much good to share, from an outdoor hospitality point of view.” Three years on, the company has raised a $3 million seed round, picked up a $250,000 prize from Michigan's PitchMI competition, and is deploying its canopy platform for customers across the nation.

Electric Outdoors builds a modular canopy that goes up in hours and runs off-grid. It harvests its own energy, stores it, charges electric vehicles, generates water from humidity, and handles waste through incineration. Roughly 1,800 data points - on weather, harvest, storage, demand, consumer behavior - feed a central operating system that Hjelmaker describes as the company's real differentiator.

"Someone called it ‘software enabled’ or ‘software powered hardware’," he said. "That's exactly what we do." 

Solar-plus-battery installations already exist, and Hjelmaker is quick to acknowledge them, but he argues they tend to be large, destructive, and expensive. "They take down hundreds of thousands of acres of trees to put up [manufacturing] plants," he said. "We do it very differently." What Electric Outdoors is selling, beyond the canopy itself, is a distributed-energy platform that can serve outdoor hospitality, marinas for electric boats, FEMA disaster relief, and temporary housing. These may be very different verticals, but with Electric Outdoor they can share the same underlying system.

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Formative Mistakes: 1,000 drilled holes, not 10,000 hours

Hjelmaker’s first real paying job was at 15, spending summers at a steel shop run by a friend of his grandfather's.

"Basically everything in Sweden [revolves] around IKEA," he said. "We were building legs for IKEA furniture. I was in front of a machine from 6:30 in the morning to 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon drilling holes."

He remembers one particular batch, where he got the drill position wrong. A thousand legs had to be scrapped. That’s a large amount of work we suggest and this is the reason he’s unable to forget the number.

"That's painful when you're 15 and you [make] a mistake like that, but you take it and you move on," he said, adding that "I did three summers there. It financed my motorcycle and lots of other fun things." A painful mistake etched across his brain, but the adrenaline junkie-outdoorsman in him also remembers the positive outcomes from all that work.

Before the steel shop, at 11 or 12, he spent summers on a Swedish farm turning over mud-and-grass squares for sale; eight hours a day, lifting and flipping two-by-two-foot slabs. The lesson from both, he says, is straight work ethic. "Nothing comes for free. You have to put your energy, your effort, your all into whatever it is that you're doing." 

Early in his career in the auto industry, during the late 1990s, he worked as a software engineer, coding Java and websites. He moved through systems work, project management, account management, and into P&L by the mid-2000s.

The move to Germany tested his ability to adapt early. In 2010, while at Delphi Electronics and Safety, he received a phone call on a Friday night asking him if he’d move to Germany. He was given the weekend to decide.

With young kids who were young enough to adapt they surmised, he and his wife decided to go for it.

They lived in Düsseldorf at first, then two years in Munich, where he worked on radars, cameras and lidars. He and his teams built early autonomous-driving prototypes with Audi, Nvidia, and Mobileye,  "before it was even a thing," he notes with pride. 

In Munich, his wife began meeting the partners of executives from Whirlpool on social outings. That casual network eventually turned into the job offer which brought them to the U.S. in 2015. From Whirlpool, the move to Thor Industries also meant joining the C-suite at the world capital of RV’s, becoming their Chief Innovation Officer.

Across Delphi, Whirlpool, and Thor, Hjelmaker was constantly being handed small teams inside large corporations and asked to grow them. Back at Delphi in Gothenburg, he explains "we were two people… with basically no business whatsoever. And we grow that to 300 people." Years later at Whirlpool, he oversaw a portfolio that included both $1.5 billion core business lines and two-and-three-person innovation teams working on induction cooktops and digital interfaces.

It was, in retrospect, the closest thing to a startup apprenticeship anyone could get inside a big corporation, on either side of the Atlantic.

When people describe later-career founders as somehow “safer,” they often miss that some of them have already been training amongst uncertainty like this for years.

By the time Hjelmaker founded Electric Outdoors, he was not guessing about how products get built or how systems scale. Instead, he’s choosing to apply those experiences to a harder and riskier problem, and he’s honest about the risk. “I grow brave enough because of … all the scars,” he said. He’s also had the constant support of his wife and family. He started with what he calls “some kitchen remodeling money” that “could back my stupidity”. 

He also intimates about a feeling that gave him additional confidence, and that is the outside backing in Michigan at a point early enough to make the leap feel less solitary. “Michigan quickly was like, heck yeah, we want to be part of this,” he said. “I thought: ‘I’m not on my own here’”.

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The great leap of faith

Hjelmaker is careful about how he describes leaving Thor, not waiting to present himself as a restless corporate refugee. "I don't want to sound ungrateful," he says, crediting the companies and people who helped him grow as a professional and, eventually, become an entrepreneur. 

Once he made the leap, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation's Office of Future Mobility and Electrification began backing the company in June 2023. The company has raised 3m in funding so far, with investors including Michigan Rise, Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund, Ann Arbor Spark, Veolectra, iPlan, Tahqua Capital and Piedmont Hospitality LLC. PitchMI came later, with a $250,000 award as a regional winner in the outdoor category.

"We were the guinea pigs, [so I think] they wanted to test a lot of things with us," he said. "You can argue that maybe we paid it all back in dividends to the state,” he laughs. The real value of a pitch competition, as he tells us of his experience aiming to win the $1 million first prize, often isn't the check. It's the proximity to the other finalists, the investors, and the ecosystem figures you'd otherwise have to spend years trying to meet one lunch at a time.

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Capital, talent, culture

Asked what's still missing locally for a company like his, Hjelmaker gives us three words: capital, talent, culture.

"It's difficult to raise money in the Midwest and in Michigan," he admits. "If you want to get a $200,000 check for an early stage startup, be prepared to work for it for a year." 

Talent is tied to culture, which he thinks is the hardest of the three. In his view, too much of the regional labor pool is shaped by decades of big-corporate work. This is potentially ironic for someone who took the leap themselves after years of climbing the proverbial corporate ladder. "Why risk your $150,000 salary, sitting and doing coding in a cubicle in a dark skyscraper for whatever company?" he said. "But if you try to take that individual and work in a startup world where the risks are high, the pace is furious… it's just very different," he adds. "We're good at building physical things. We're not as good at building smart, intelligent platforms, handling a lot of data." 

Conveniently, that is exactly the gap Electric Outdoors is trying to fill.

He sees a parallel between the Midwest and the country he left. "Sweden has always been on the edge of surviving," he said. "Resources are there, but you need to know how to get them, grasp them, how to turn them into something valuable." That necessity, he argues, is what turns Swedes into resourceful builders, and it's the same trait the Midwest has in reserve. Provided its ecosystem can find the means to support the founders trying to build within it.

For Electric Outdoors, now entering what Hjelmaker calls its scale phase, he's openly uncertain about what that looks like in Michigan. Larger checks. Larger commitments. More in the pipeline. The state's early-stage support has been real; its scale-stage support is, for him, still an open question.

If there's a piece of advice he'd pass to anyone considering his path - from corporate veteran to first-time founder later in his career - it's the opposite of the lone-genius narrative that startup lore usually traffics in.

"Big or small, just make sure that… you don't travel alone," he said. "Try to have people one way or another. If it's financially or capabilities, talent-wise, try to have people around you. Because it gets really lonely."

Especially - we imagine - far from ‘home.’ Especially in the great outdoors.

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