From Tech to Energy
Jackson’s professional background has nothing to do with traditional utilities. Before founding Octopus, he spent his career in technology and digital businesses, working on software platforms and customer-focused products. One early job placed him inside a small mirror manufacturing company that was struggling to compete online. The problem was straightforward: on e-commerce platforms, every mirror looked essentially identical, because only the reflective glass surface appeared in product photos.
His proposed fix was simple. If mirrors had unusually wide decorative frames, they would appear visually distinctive in digital images, giving buyers a concrete reason to choose one product over another. The experiment worked. Sales of the framed mirrors surged, turning around a business that had been barely breaking even. The lesson Jackson drew from this episode, that the customer’s experience of a product often differs entirely from how its maker perceives it, would later shape his approach to building an energy company.
Building Octopus Energy
By 2015, Jackson had turned his attention to the energy sector. His initial strategy was not to create a new supplier but to persuade existing utilities to rebuild their technology platforms. He believed that more modern systems could reduce costs and improve the experience of customers who, in most cases, had little reason to feel well-served by their providers. Those efforts met significant resistance. Organisational inertia and risk aversion among incumbents made internal change slow. Jackson concluded that building from the outside would be faster, and he launched Octopus Energy that year with a team drawn primarily from technology rather than the energy industry.
The company’s expansion since then has been rapid. Within nine years, Octopus had overtaken entrenched historical suppliers to become the largest energy company in the United Kingdom by customer count. Central to this growth is Kraken, the company’s proprietary technology platform, which automates back-office processes, integrates smart meters and connects distributed energy assets, including electric vehicles and rooftop solar panels, into grid-level optimisation. Jackson has argued that this architecture keeps operational costs low while making the company adaptable as new devices and renewable generation sources continue to multiply.
A Critique of Incumbency
Jackson’s most distinctive public argument extends well beyond his own company. In a Fortune interview published in October 2026, he stated that incumbency is Europe’s single biggest economic challenge, and that if policymakers want growth, they must allow “creative destruction” so that new businesses can deliver productivity gains that established firms often cannot. He draws direct comparisons to sectors where outsiders reshaped competitive landscapes: Uber in transport, Airbnb in hospitality, and Amazon in retail. In each case, he observes, the disruptors emerged from outside the industry rather than from within it.
Jackson also frames the energy transition in economic rather than primarily moral terms. He pointed to 49-ton heavy trucks in China running on batteries as evidence that electrification is already a global competitive reality. For European companies and policymakers, he argues, the question is no longer whether electrification is coming but whether the continent’s regulatory and market structures will adapt quickly enough to remain competitive.
His leadership at Octopus Energy reflects this philosophy. Rather than recruiting veterans of the utility sector, he has built the organisation largely from technology professionals, keeping decision-making lean to preserve what he describes as a startup’s capacity for experimentation even as the company has grown to utility scale. As he put it in the same Fortune interview, Octopus was built “not based around the assumptions of the industry, but using technology to meet the needs of customers.”
The Mirror on the Wall
The anecdote that best captures Jackson’s approach predates Octopus by years. Faced with an underperforming mirror business where every product looked identical online, he saw a solution that the company’s own manufacturers had not: the frame, not the glass, was what customers would actually notice in a photograph. Wide decorative frames were introduced, the mirrors sold quickly, and the business recovered.
Jackson has since used this story to illustrate his argument about innovation: that it begins with adopting the customer’s perspective rather than the producer’s, and that this shift in viewpoint can unlock more value than any technical upgrade. It is the same logic, he implies, that led him to build Octopus Energy from the outside of an entrenched industry rather than from within it.
