Victor Quinn

Engineering leader. Co-founder and CTO at Texture building the operating system for the energy grid. Husband and father of two, eternal problem solver.

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

I've never shipped anything that didn't stand on open source.

Every product I've built has run on software someone gave away or used datasets someone else maintained for free. None of that was inevitable. Somebody decided to build it in the open, and everyone who came after got to skip the hard part.

Energy rarely gets that luxury. The data about the U.S. grid is public, but it's scattered across hundreds of separately maintained sources, and every company that needs it rebuilds the same thing privately. We did it, too.

CommonGrid, https://t.co/7ClPkmyP5B is that work, opened up. Every U.S. utility, territory, ISO, market node, and major asset, connected in one registry that anyone can read, cite, or contribute to, under the same license as OpenStreetMap.

It started as my colleagues and me building something Texture needed. It's more useful to everyone if nobody has to build it again.

If you know a corner of the grid better than we do, go edit it. We're also looking for moderators to help curate this data. And if there's a data set that is not there that'd be useful to add, let us know.

[Texture @TextureEnergy]

Today we're releasing CommonGrid, an open-source registry of the US power grid that’s connected, community-maintained, and ready to use.

Until now, understanding the full grid meant piecing it together from hundreds of separately-maintained public sources. CommonGrid connects complex data from across the grid into one model with open APIs, community moderation, and a public changelog.

"No single company can keep an accurate model of the U.S. grid on its own," @victorquinn, Co-founder and CTO of Texture, shares. "So we borrowed the model that works for Wikipedia, anyone can propose a change, and every change carries its source and its history."

We're not the first to take this on, and we want to recognize the projects that pushed this space forward before we got here, innovators like Map Your Grid, OpenGridWorks, and gridstatus library from @grid_status, among them.

The grid is shared infrastructure. Understanding how it's put together should be shared, too.

Read the full announcement: https://t.co/8qt0dZiLLw

[Obie Fernandez @obie]

Your job may be surviving on inertia. Your resentment won’t extend the runway. What do you actually want to do with the intelligence now at your disposal? https://t.co/vikawjCmZD

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

Most people picture AI agents waiting in a chat window.

Ours don’t.

They produce a daily company podcast, preserve decisions, improve their own infrastructure, and turn my voice-note rants into tested internal tools.

But the real unlock wasn’t a smarter model. It was giving agents identity, context, procedures, guardrails, and clear human accountability.

Part 5 of 5, What Nobody Expects, is live. The payoff of everything we built:

https://t.co/OUd0yyUD8p

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

Every company is suddenly an "AI company." Same chatbot, new logo.

For us at @TextureEnergy it's not a label. It's in our product, our infrastructure, and how we operate. This post is one piece of that: a fleet of agents doing real work inside the company.

A big reason a team our size ships this fast.

https://t.co/7oFncRUVvA

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

Nearly one-third of all PRs merged into Texture’s monorepo this year were authored by autonomous agents.

The unlock wasn’t a magical prompt. It was treating agents like real members of the engineering organization: identity, access controls, independent review, observability, and a codebase with clear patterns to extend.

Part 3 of how we built Texture’s agent fleet:

https://t.co/QWqAq4BMZp

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

@jaybobzin Nope absolutely not, wrong link 🤦 Thanks for calling it out, updated!

https://t.co/STiyWJcMOq

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

We give every agent on our team a badge: a name, a role, an owner, and a clear place in the system.

It sounds small. It changes how people trust and work with agents.

We built ours on OpenClaw, but the principle is bigger than any framework: agents need identity, accountability, and context, not just a clever prompt.

Part two: Give Every Agent a Badge
https://t.co/ld2YkGpFha

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

I started with ChatGPT and Claude. Then Claude Code. Then I asked a different question: what happens when the AI doesn't need me sitting in front of it?

That led to an @openclaw agent with my own credentials, a lot of mistakes, months of feedback, and eventually a fleet that can take a Sentry alert all the way to a human-reviewed PR.

The story: https://t.co/Py0FXq9u4Q

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

Ask a stranger to grab you lunch, you might get a ham sandwich. Ask your spouse, they know: no mushrooms, extra spicy.

Same intelligence. Different context.

AI on top of fragmented grid data (GIS, CIS, MDMS, SCADA) is the stranger, not the spouse.

https://t.co/xZUZ1KApmJ

[sanjiv @SanjivSanghavi]

1/ @TextureEnergy has raised a $12.5m Series A

https://t.co/xSSYJdOcYZ

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

Technical debt isn’t the enemy.
Taking the wrong kind is.

Good technical debt creates leverage.
Bad technical debt quietly attaches itself to your foundations and compounds.

Wrote about how to tell the difference — with real examples from Texture. 👇
https://t.co/rS032UFZdX

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

At Texture, we're taking the counterintuitive path: fewer people, but better. After 5 startups, I've learned this approach accelerates success even while burning capital faster. Senior folks make better decisions when they matter most.
https://t.co/B9KHM0CSnm

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

The power grid is no longer one-way.
Homes are becoming power plants.
Every EV is a mobile battery.

Yet energy companies are stuck with legacy systems "because we've already invested so much."

Time to evolve. https://t.co/lz25liXVEx

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

Reverse-engineered APIs = unstable, insecure, & unreliable. At Texture, we partner directly with OEMs to build stable, well-supported integrations that power distributed energy at scale. 💡 Learn why this matters: https://t.co/FgmQDROHtS #EnergyTech #APIs #Innovation

[Texture @TextureEnergy]

Sites are not just central to our platform — they are the foundation of our value proposition.

https://t.co/pVL4dwOJEq

[Texture @TextureEnergy]

Texture’s Digital Grid Services Solution streamlines every step, helping you optimize grid interactions and scale efficiently https://t.co/2WymbysZBn

[Rick Zullo @Rick_Zullo]

I like my whiskey like I like my cap table…minimizing dilution

- @victorquinn of @TextureEnergy

[Grace (DeJesus) Penders ⚡ @GracePenders]

1/ ⚡️ Traditionally, energy companies focused solely on powering homes. It was simple: build enough generation to meet demand and deliver it. But today, the game has changed. The energy industry needs to track customer profitability. Is it time for a “Veeva” for energy? @Rick_Zullo @SophiaJDodd

https://t.co/v7QDlnxWcJ

[Victor Quinn @victorquinn]

"connection failure"