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Welcome to Join Ideas, Mateo. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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Thanks so much for joining us.
0:03
So, Mateo, you've had a long career dedicated to the energy grid, but unlike many other entrepreneurs building in this space, you actually have a master's in theological studies from Yale Divinity School.
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Um so, how do you think this has informed in your work?
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I say this as someone who studied religion and philosophy at Princeton, so I'm biased toward you, but it'd be great to hear how uh this has informed your experience.
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Yeah, as as uh perhaps the ranking theologian in the energy storage space >> [laughter] >> Well, so I I did go to the Divinity School at Yale, um which does a wonderful job preparing most of its students for ordination uh into the priesthood.
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It turns out, I would I'm happy to say I learned very early on in that process I would have been a terrible priest. Why do you say that?
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>> [laughter] >> Well, cuz I I like solving problems pretty immediately as soon after I hear them.
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Uh you know, being a pastor is sort of, you know, the the pastoral approach that's required to minister to people uh is is not really constitutionally what I'm cut out for.
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And I was happy to learn that cuz it's a it's a you know, a real vocational commitment.
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Uh in the end running a, you know, so far a thousand person company or so Uh there are a lot of similarities, however, ironically with uh tending to a flock of people and making them, you know, feel cared for and motivated and, you know, all things.
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So, how's it informed it?
1:23
In the end it's a human problem fundamentally that we're that we're, you know, that you that you solve first to solve a technical problem.
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Uh there's there's no extracting in the human about it. Uh that that's for sure.
1:34
Um so, it's deeply informed, it you know, my approach to to business, uh to building a business, uh to operating a business, to to remember that, you know, we're all we're all human and we're all imperfect in our own unique way, and uh it's it's not the imperfections that matter.
1:48
It's the it's the the rest of the stuff that really does matter.
1:50
And, you know, to to maybe push the analogy a tiny bit, which is one reason why I find batteries sort of inherently curio- uh they create a lot of curiosity for me.
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Um you know, they are imperfect.
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Each each energy storage form is imperfect in some way, right?
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Uh there's like some trade-off you have to make.
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Um and it's it's not that it's not that a battery is perfect for all things.
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It's that a battery can be perfect for the thing you're using it for at the moment.
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So, uh so there you know, I like to sort of think about, you know, the challenges that drive curiosity uh for humans, likewise for for technical solutions.
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>> And is that just a we'll we'll move on to the technology shortly, but is that a big part of your motivation?
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What your kind of worldview that you picked up at at the theological seminary or before? Yeah, absolutely.
2:35
Um you know, the other thing that sort of studying theology teaches you and, you know, sort of in the pastoral setting is people can improve. They they really do.
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Um and they can people can change.
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Not always, but they can.
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Um and that's one thing I love about technology.
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It's one thing I love about batteries.
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There's no fixed frontier.
2:51
Um you know, it's it's the world of material science now, and you know, especially in this age of AI, uh you know, we're seeing improvements uh in ways that we never really anticipated before.
3:02
And um and it is not known what we can do yet with material science and really drive the state of the art forward.
3:08
You know, one of the things I'm most proud of at Form is it the team, not me, but the team um learned something new about iron that humans did not know before.
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And which is sort of astounding given that, you you know, there was a whole age of humanity that was, you know, investigating with iron.
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And uh and we continue to drive that forward.
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There's there's we have yet to really understand how far we can push this technology.
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And and so, uh you know, there's there's always room for improvement.
3:34
And that's a good segue into the actual product.
3:36
So, for those who aren't familiar with the energy space, can you give us a 60-second explanation of what Form Energy is, what it does, and and why it's important?
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Yeah, Form is commercializing a new type of energy storage.
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In our case, it's iron-air batteries.
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So, so we are rusting and unrusting iron for for the battery.
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That that's the electrochemical reaction.
3:56
And what why does the world need a new battery? Lithium-ion's fantastic.
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Um iron-air is an order of magnitude cheaper if you do it right than lithium-ion.
4:04
And with that dramatically lower cost, you can go dramatically longer durations and and achieve durations cost-effectively that that heretofore on the grid have really solely been the domain of fossil fuels, frankly.
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Um and so, in our our case, we have uh we've we've commercialized we already deployed our first version to a customer um a 100-hour rated at full power duration battery.
4:26
Um and again, why 100 hours? Why does that matter?
4:31
That's the duration of weather events that drives essentially the entire sizing of the electric grid, the cost, the reliability, everything really.
4:39
Um and and so, what we have uh been able to demonstrate with this iron-air battery is that in fact, there is something else on Earth, iron, in fact, that has an entitlement from cost perspective to compete with fossil fuels and to do so for the electric grid and solve some of these really naughty reliability challenges.
4:56
Um and it's again, it's to compete.
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We're we're never the grid will not do a full, you know, replacement of anything, but it is to have a differentiated storage asset that really can bring a lot of additional value to the grid.
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So, that's what Form is doing.
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We've been at it for 9 years.
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We're about a thousand people now.
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Um we we started started those first commercial deliveries last year in relatively low volumes, and we're going to ramp up very very quickly from here.
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We have a huge tailwind on the on the market side.
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Last week we just announced a big deal with Google uh and Xcel Energy, sort of main utility in the Midwest of the United States um for 300 MW, 30 GWh, the largest battery announced in the world um to date.
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And and we're going to turn the factory out fully on here in the next few months and and really run from there. Amazing.
5:39
And so, you know, the the properties of iron, one of the oldest, you know, materials on on the planet is is pretty key to what you're doing at Form.
5:46
How did you back in to this idea that we should use iron for the battery rather than lithium?
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Um and that would be the material that would create the 100-hour storage.
5:54
Was that based on your experience at Tesla or was it uh yeah, yeah, how did how did you come to that conclusion?
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Yeah, so I was at Tesla for about 7 years, and I I started what became the Tesla Energy effort there.
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So, so taking the lithium-ion batteries out of the grid and adapting them appropriately for the or out of the car and putting them on the grid.
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And and I left after about seven and seven years and change.
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The the company sort of went through a dramatic growth period, 300 people when I joined to about 30,000 when I left.
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You know, it's sort of a learning factory.
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It's just like so so many lessons to be to be picked up, you know, over that arc.
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And as I built the the the first part of the energy effort, I I, you know, was talking to utility execs around the country and internationally, and and they were all sort of saying, "Yeah, lithium-ion is fantastic.
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We're going to end up deploying it as a in in large volumes as its cost comes down, but you know, do you have any battery that can really solve this this longer duration problem?
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Because if not, I got I basically have to build two grids.
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I have to keep my thermal grid, and I got to keep my renewable grid.
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And it's highly unoptimized, right?
6:55
And so, that was really the question I thought about after I left Tesla.
6:58
I didn't I didn't leave Tesla with the intention to start a company.
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Um I left Tesla just cuz I was it was time to leave for me personally.
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I had a fantastic run, but I'm married, I have three kids, and like, you don't want to stay married and be in my kids' lives and that kind of thing.
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Uh you may have heard in Tesla Tesla can be, you know, intense intense intense guy. Yeah.
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Um and uh and so, really it started as a thought experiment than anything else.
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I had never started a company before, never been I've been early stage, you know, companies, but never like badge one, you know, founder shares, that kind of thing.
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And and so, that was never my intention.
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It was really just to sort of scratch an intellectual itch, like, you know, what is the thought experiment?
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What kind of battery could do that?
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All right, how close could you get?
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And and as I started to sort of pull the thread on it, I did encounter iron-air.
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It's it's it's in the public domain.
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It was studied in some details by a Swedish national lab in the in the '70s and by by the US Department of Energy in the late '60s and '70s.
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So, there was some published literature on it, and it never went anywhere cuz it doesn't work for consumer electronics or or transportation or anything else.
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But but what I saw at the moment, you know, going back to 2017 was that that, you know, those characteristics finally had a really big role to play on the grid.
8:08
You you could sort of make those right trade-offs, right, that I was talking about earlier.
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Um and in pursuit of very very low cost, it didn't matter, right?
8:14
And and the primary trade-off is is efficiency.
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It is a lower efficient system.
8:20
But um but as the cost of the fuel, so to speak, the renewable fuel comes down so dramatically, that the efficiency matters a lot less, right?
8:27
Additionally, for a capacity asset, you're not trying to sort of run as much energy as possible through the system.
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You're you're maybe 15% capacity factors, 20% capacity factors.
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In that case, CAPEX is what is what dominates the value proposition for your asset.
8:41
You know, there's a lot of sort of realization right now about the underutilization of the grid, right?
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It's like 60% utilized, you know, for 95% of the hours of the year.
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And and so, you want a very low capacity factor, very low cost system to solve that problem.
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>> your core insight, and did you raise the first round based off that theoretical premise and and nothing else and your credibility and background? Yeah, okay. Wow. That that was it.
9:06
It was uh you know, the the world is about to need a new kind of battery, and this is the kind that we think can solve it.
9:13
>> Okay, well, fast forward.
9:13
You've just closed your Series F, 400 million, signed a billion-dollar deal with Google.
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Um you're one of the standout companies in the climate space, which obviously has gone through a bit of a boom and bust um over the past couple years.
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And you I think you stand out for having scaled a very capital-intensive business.
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Um you know, through to through to the stage you are now.
9:31
What what are some lessons you can take from that?
9:32
Where why have you seemingly are succeeding where the likes of Northvolt have struggled or or failed?
9:40
Yeah, well, every every journey is, you know, probably unique in its own way, but I think one thing that we have really tried to do um is to make sure that, you know, the commercial side and the technical side don't sort of outpace each other.
9:52
Can you can you maybe can can you maybe you into a little little more details?
9:55
What do you mean by that?
9:56
You know, on a hard tech path, you sort of you're assuming that if you're going to create some some brand new hard deep technology, then almost by definition you're creating a new market as well at the same time.
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And um And so you have to make sure that you're accounting for that time that it takes for both those things to mature over the relevant time scale for building a business.
10:19
But you can't be too far out of sync.
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In other words, you can't you can't have pre-sold the ability to actually make things and you can't develop the technology if the market's not there, right?
10:26
And so it's sort of this very delicate balance.
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What I think is important to do is to pick actively which one you want to be in the lead though.
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And because you can't it can't just sort of be a haphazard, you know, occurrence, right?
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And and so given my background, which was building the markets, I I knew that the market was there.
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I knew I knew that we had the techno-economic entitlement to compete.
10:49
And and the trick was setting it just far just in front of the technical side that the technical side could could catch up, right?
10:56
Um and so you know, from a fundraising perspective, that was sort of the dynamic there for the first we're on our series well, you said our series F.
11:04
We're actually raising our series G right now.
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Um and and so that was sort of where we were through the first five rounds of the company.
11:09
And then and then over the last year or two, it's it's really sort of flip flipped a little bit and now it's become, okay, the market is there, you know, the Google deal is sort of you know, the canonical example like of the of the value that we have been saying for many years, you know, would be brought.
11:28
And now investors want to say, okay, show me the show me the technical progress.
11:31
Show me that you can't actually make this thing and scale it up.
11:33
And and so that you know, we had to make sure that there was not that big gap, right?
11:37
And you look at you look at um a lot of it there there are so many uh it pains me to say, but but failed battery companies in the world.
11:44
There's like a trap door.
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We sort of fit characterize these like seven trap doors that you got to get across.
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And and by the way, you have to get across all of them.
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You can't go like, you know, run through six and then fall through the seventh and say, well, we made you know, six out of seven.
11:56
Um you know, and that last one is is the hardest, right? The manufacturing of it.
11:59
And um so we've put a lot of work and effort.
12:02
And this is where a lot of challenges were for the company last year or year and a half making the electrodes, you know, we from powders.
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The iron and you know, iron powders come in and you know, these carbon powders come in and we produce the iron anode and the discharge cathode.
12:17
And we made 100,000 of those electrodes over the last year and a half or so.
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That's 60 miles worth of material going through the factory just to give you know, sort of give you a sort of a mental image there.
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And and now we can say we've produced at rate at scale with yields, you know, the the performant electrodes.
12:31
And and so we know we can scale from here.
12:35
Um but but I think what we've done well is balanced that market development with the technical development.
12:39
You can't sort of be too far out of phase with those two things.
12:42
And it it's been challenging to be clear.
12:46
And we are behind where we wanted to be by about a year.
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Um you know, when we started the company, I think if you it's easy to pull back and be like, ah, 10 years, what's what's a year?
12:54
But like that year costs a lot of money and it's it's very very challenging.
13:00
But there's there was still there was still engineering risk even even as late as this year you'd say there was still like meaningful engineering risk. Yeah, for sure.
13:05
Until you put it all together at and this is why it's challenging.
13:07
You can you can only de-risk that last phase at scale. Yeah.
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There's nothing you can do at subscale that that lets you say definitively I've retired that full scale risk. >> Yeah.
13:19
What was it Bill Gates said?
13:19
He said I've lost lost more money on on battery startups than I thought was I thought was possible. Something like that. >> [laughter] >> Yeah.
13:26
Yeah, and and that's why Elon says prototypes are easy and and scale is hard, right?
13:30
Like there aren't any shortcuts there.
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There's no and we've done you can do a lot of de-risking to be clear, but you can't prove it.
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And you can only prove it once you've landed the production equipment, run at your intended rates with your yields and your you know, everything else.
13:44
Like you just that that's where it becomes really really hard and that's where it does cost a lot of money.
13:50
And and frankly like you're either right in the right period of time or you're wrong in the in the wrong period of time and then it doesn't work.
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And that that would sort of be the north pole.
13:58
>> And do you think you were building this in the right period of time?
13:59
Has regulation helped you?
14:00
Was the IRA critical to to your success? Yeah, absolutely.
14:05
And and we anticipated the mega trend.
14:07
We didn't know that AI would be present in the way that it it is in the demand perspective over the last, you know, two years.
14:14
But we knew the mega trends were in place, right?
14:16
Electrification broadly speaking of industry and transportation and you know, decarbonization in in certain regions.
14:21
And uh so so that part we got right.
14:24
Uh you know, the IRA certainly was helpful in that it started to point to the fact that domestic in the US manufacturing was was important again.
14:30
And um and storage, you know, sort of enjoys this bipartisan support um sort of regardless of of what your political affiliation might be, we all can agree that you know, energy storage makes a lot of sense for the grid and we should we should try and you know, make as much of it um here as as we possibly can.
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And so so that's what we're doing.
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And the IRA sort of kicked off the support for for manufacturing energy storage again in the United States.
14:56
And it was fully reaffirmed to be clear in the BBBA, right?
15:00
The the reconciliation bill that came out last year under the obviously new administration and Congress.
15:06
So so we've been able to sort of enjoy that support and um I think it it will continue.
15:10
So maybe taking a step back, I wrote a piece um two summers ago called the symbiotic relationship between AI, big tech and energy.
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And I sort of predicted that with this huge boom in AI coming, there would be this interesting relationship that would develop between big tech investing huge amounts into data centers to drive AI, which would ultimately, you know, drive innovation but also huge in energy but also huge demand for energy.
15:32
And that would ultimately be the kind of limiting input of AI.
15:35
And that's that's very much played out.
15:37
We actually had Doug Bannister, also a a former Elon employee building radiant, you know, claiming to similar tailwinds with his micro nuclear reactor.
15:45
Um and yeah, so it's quite it's kind of fascinating.
15:49
I'm kind of curious what you what you see from your vantage point and whether you think ultimately this will be a net benefit for the climate or a net detractor cuz obviously it is driving huge innovation in energy, which is fantastic.
15:59
But the demand that AI is driving for energy is also kind of unseen, I would say, previously unseen.
16:05
So yeah, very curious to see cuz you have quite unique a unique vantage point.
16:08
Yeah, I I think it's there's maybe three ways that are that are, you know, importantly intersecting for us.
16:16
One is just on the pure demand side.
16:16
So you know, like you know, this this period of demand is is really sort of unprecedented for I mean, sure we were growing at, you know, at the same rates maybe 50 years ago when the basis was much much much smaller.
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And now we have a fully built out grid that's growing at those rates again, which is kind of incredible.
16:31
So just the demand signals for electricity broadly speaking, speed to power.
16:34
How do we interconnect these loads?
16:38
Um the other is specifically, you know, take the case of this Google project, right?
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They they specifically wanted to do the you know, that that we would be included here.
16:46
And so the the hyperscalers driving the innovation aspect of that load growth.
16:50
Not just sort of, you know, load growth all by itself.
16:52
But you know, what are the what are the tools and the technologies that are maybe, you know, at that nascent stage that can really help drive this thing going forward.
17:01
And specifically identify those.
17:02
And just I just quickly on that project for our listeners, that what they've done is they've ordered a 100-hour battery for you from you, right?
17:09
To to power one of their data centers.
17:11
Yeah, or to provide storage for one of their data centers.
17:14
Yeah, and to our customer is actually Excel Energy, the utility in that case.
17:18
And they're that utility is providing a portfolio of resources to to Google.
17:19
But we are the reliability asset.
17:22
We're the capacity asset, right?
17:26
And so in that case, you know, showing that actually this duration, this 100 hours actually does let you compete with with gas in that case.
17:33
Um so so that so that's the second one, you know, specifically driving the innovation access.
17:36
And then the third is and I touch on this briefly, we are huge optimists that the that the model capabilities for driving material science innovation is really just getting going.
17:48
And as with most things, there's a there's going to if if we aren't there already, it's it's coming imminently for data haves and data have nots.
17:56
And and Form has the world's most robust data set on on iron-air batteries.
18:02
And we've been spending the last nine years accumulating that data set.
18:04
And we have tens of millions of operating hours test data, full systems, you know, deployed >> [laughter] >> and it's being able to tap into um sort of that that mindset again is is important for us going forward.
19:56
So, I think if we if we're able to you know, lower the bar a a little bit for sort of how we go build big things, I think that's possible certainly.
20:03
Um as long as you kind of don't get in our own way on that one.
20:07
And how do you think about geothermal nuclear?
20:08
Some people think that this this is the future and potentially you know, renewables and storage will be leapfrogged by some of these new technologies that create energy at more scale, more cheaply.
20:17
How do you see the landscape and them all fitting in together with what you do?
20:23
Well, I mean, the market is so massive that that it's never going to be a zero-sum game.
20:28
There's not going to be a single technology that dominates um because of cost, because of local dynamics, because of local resource availability.
20:37
It's almost impossible to to conceive that there's going to be a single tech that dominates here.
20:41
And in the end, you know, given the way that we operate that we know how to operate a low-cost, highly reliable grid overall, you want asset diversity. Right?
20:51
You you want geothermal, you want wind, you want solar, you want hydro, you want, you know, nuclear of whatever kind is cost-effective, right?
21:00
So, so I I think we're we're going to see that continue to be the case.
21:03
Um you know, we are very good at at balancing a complex grid today and there's no reason to sort of back away from that and have have, you know, a single shot approach which um you know, suffers from other potential failure modes that are that we don't want, right? Incredible.
21:20
Okay, we're going to shift gears now and talk about your time at Tesla.
21:23
Um you've worked with, you know, on paper the most successful entrepreneur of all time in terms of value creation.
21:29
What are some key lessons from working with Elon Musk?
21:34
Uh there there are so many.
21:34
Uh you know, one of them is and one that I directly took into founding Forum is um why not go after the most ambitious, hardest to solve problem?
21:49
You know, I like to work hard anyway.
21:51
I might as well work on something that is like that really has a huge payoff.
21:54
And and the other the upshot to that is um all the great people want to work on meaningful problems, right?
22:00
No phenomenal person, like technical person, market whatever it is, wants to work on a marginal problem really.
22:07
And and the talent density at Tesla was just incredible.
22:12
Um and it was, you know, particularly instructive to me that the deals so that that we did with Daimler and Toyota, uh that was my day job at Tesla for the first 5 years.
22:22
In background, literally my nights and weekends job was the starting what became the energy effort, but but I primarily I was responsible for the powertrain business for the first few years there.
22:32
And and so Tesla did these deals with Daimler and Toyota and they were power, you know, Tesla was developing the electric powertrain that would go into either a let's say a Daimler B-Class or the RAV4 for Toyota.
22:42
And it was like shining a light in a cave and like these people inside of these massive companies like found their way to work on this project.
22:49
They they were compelled to work on this innovative, you know, bleeding frontier project.
22:53
And dare I say they were the best people in those companies, right?
22:57
They they like they just they had to find a way to come work on this amazing stuff and and you know, so that the lesson for me was like shine the right light and you attract the right people, you know, for the for the right kind of really hard problem.
23:10
Like it's a little counterintuitive, but the harder the problem, the better the people you can attract in fact.
23:14
>> The hardest problems attract the best people. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
23:16
You know, you have to phrase it right, of course, and you got to like, you know, make sure that you can distill it down to to a nice clean narrative for for why any of this matters, but you know, the the mission is what drives people and the and the the hard mission drives the best people, I think.
23:32
And and so, you know, from the beginning of Forum saying we're going to solve a problem people think is not possible to solve, i. e.
23:40
come up with a battery cheap enough that the duration is so long that you can compete with, you know, fossil fuels in the market and solve this intermittency issue intermittency issue.
23:49
Um that's highly motivating to phenomenal people.
23:51
And you know, so that's that's a very deeply imbued lesson that I I saw at Tesla, you know, day in day out.
23:58
It was the quality of the people that let the company whistle past the graveyard half a dozen times that we did, right?
24:02
That you know, the stories that that don't get told there, but um you know, you need that kind of commitment and and quality out of out of folks to to go through these really hard pathways.
24:12
Anything you would not emulate? Oh man. Cert- certainly.
24:19
Um I think I we've taken a slightly different approach to deadlines.
24:23
I mean, Elon loves to sort of put just insane deadlines out there uh for the team and and I think you know, under under his management style, it works, but there's also a there's also sort of an an acceptance like that that he's doing that intentionally and people know that he knows that they know that that's not you know, there's always like a convergence to reality.
24:45
>> cries wolf at some point, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
24:48
And and you know, Tesla's been able to pull off, you know, phenomenal things and almost always later than what Elon originally said.
24:57
And and you know, what part of it is just like I'm not never aspired to be never thought that it was Elon, so I should not manage the way that he does, right?
25:07
And and so, you know, I try and pick a slightly different tact on the on the deadlines, which is to say, pick aggressive, but but the but achievable, you know, that the team believes is like grounded in reality timelines, right?
25:21
We don't pick timelines at Forum that are easy to hit to be clear.
25:24
And we have missed deadlines because we've been too optimistic and you know, too aggressive up front.
25:29
But um but nevertheless, there shouldn't be sort of like a you know, knowing acceptance that the that the or quite, you know, unsaid acceptance that the team knows that my deadlines are unrealistic, that they're going to pretend to hit and I pretend to believe that they're going to pretend to hit. You know, like that.
25:44
You sort of reduce the wear out factor around that a bit.
25:48
Um you know, Tesla, you know, has does have a very high turnover rate.
25:53
Um and you know, maybe we can reduce that a little bit by sort of reducing the turn a little bit there.
25:58
So, that that's one you know, stylistic difference, but on the other hand, there is no style like Elon's, so. >> [laughter] >> Fair. Very fair. Yeah.
26:05
And you've hired you guys have a thousand people now at the company.
26:08
Have you developed your own rubric for trying to identify you know, A+ talent or people who are a good fit for the culture?
26:15
Yeah, uh you know, there's nothing like demonstrated success.
26:17
I mean, people can interview phenomenally well.
26:19
They have all the right answers, of course.
26:21
It's you know, no show us known good work product, right?
26:27
That that's sort of the thing that we're looking for and then and then talking to people who've worked with them before.
26:30
I I don't know that there's certainly there is no perfect approach, but you know, good the the the the old saying is true, right?
26:39
A's hire A's and you know, B's hire C's and C's hire D's.
26:41
And you know, you just have to keep the talent bar as high as possible.
26:44
And do you give people a long time ramp or you pretty um explicit on you know, you have a fairly short time to prove value?
26:50
I would say we've evolved on that.
26:52
You know, the company has gone through pretty distinct phases over the over the 9 years and you know, you might even say that we've been three distinct companies along there.
27:00
We were an R&D company to to be clear like for the first few years.
27:03
Super heavy on scientists and PhDs and like the mindset and the methodologies is is that works for that phase does not work for the engineering phase.
27:12
Like you actually have to design a product and it has to be able to be manufacturable.
27:17
And we were that for a couple years and and you know, we were that in the absence of also being a manufacturing company.
27:22
Turns out the manufacturing mindsets and and you know, time horizons that matter for success are very very different and um and so whereas early on I think there was a lot more latitude given to folks for timelines and execution just because that's what scientists require.
27:37
Like it really doesn't work in the manufacturing space.
27:40
And so, I would say now we are we are we do operate on a on a much more sort of clinical time based assessments for whether or not somebody's working out, you know, in a way that we just didn't the you know, two-thirds of the life of the company.
27:52
And during that early period, were you working closely with Professor Yet-Ming who who introduced us and is one of the few people to have been involved in co-founding multiple climate unicorns at this point.
28:00
So, yeah, it'd be great to hear a bit about how you two collaborated together.
28:04
Yeah, Yet Yet is sort of the, you know, founder glue between all five of of us co-founders and um Yet's just a phenomenal material scientist scientist and person. Lovely person. Yeah.
28:15
He's just a you know, just amazing guy and it's been you know, such a professional pleasure to get to work so closely with him for for 9 years.
28:24
Um and you know, talk about talent.
28:25
and you know, talk about talent. Like he he attracts absolute top level talent and our our CTO is a former he was he did his PhD with Yet at MIT in material science and Billy is his name, Billy Woodford, has just been, you know, phenomenal technical leader for the company over over the 9 years and
28:43
and you know, he's a PhD, so we've brought on, you know, subsequently folks who are you know, amazing engineers, design engineers, manufacturing engineers, that kind of thing, but um but yeah, Yet Yet and the science team and you know, that ecosystem has just been, you know, critical to the success of the company throughout. Um and and even as let's say
29:00
Um and and even as let's say we sort of transitioned into engineering and engineering to manufacturing, what never slowed down was the core science advancement.
29:10
You know, I mentioned that we had this new these new learnings on on iron.
29:15
You know, the the team is just continuing to drive the fundamental knowledge and performance of that of that just the base electrochemistry.
29:22
And we now have a like a very good sense for what we see in the lab today pre-knowing that it's going to show up in a product in 2 to 3 years.
29:30
And so, we have a tremendous amount of confidence in the product roadmap because that cycle now feels very very mature for us as a company.
29:39
And that engine that that like core scientific engine has never slowed down.
29:43
And so, we feel now that we've sort of been able to land the engineering and now the manufacturing piece of things.
29:48
We we feel really good about sort of the pathway for the product and the innovation sort of inertia that we have.
29:54
>> it seems like sitting slightly outside it, but one of the things you guys have managed to do it seems essential to success is having the scientific engine, you know, which kind of stemmed out of, you know, MIT and yet Ming, having someone like you build the market, make sure there is commercial demand for it, and then over time ensuring you can actually scale up a manufacturer.
30:12
I think for a successful hard tech startup to succeed at you I think you really need all three.
30:18
Yeah, and and uh and and having the balance between those two things as I mentioned along the way.
30:24
And and I should note, you know, part of the reason why we were able to do that is because of it was all grounded in in deep analytics by my other co-founder, Mark Marco Ferrara, who also has a PhD in MIT as it happens.
30:34
Um in his case in in nuclear fusion of of all things.
30:39
[laughter] But he but he built these very complex optimization models that let us understand that sort of solution space for what battery to go produce in the first place, right?
30:47
100 hours is like that's not just a finger in the air exercise.
30:51
There there's a lot of very deep quantitative, you know, work behind it.
30:54
Um and that let us go engage the utilities and the buyers years before we had technology that we could point to and sort of start that clock on on getting those, you know, those markets running.
31:06
You know, that engagement with Xcel is 5, 6 years.
31:09
Like deep engagements and um you know, they wouldn't do that if they didn't believe that that the that the math fundamentally supported the value of what we were talking about.
31:17
And and we only could do that because of these what we call capacity expansion modeling tools that that Marco built.
31:25
It's a nice round number, 100, too. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
31:29
Um what do you what do you believe about the future of energy that very few people agree with you on?
31:35
Oh, uh well, I'm happy to say I think people are starting to agree with me. It's becoming consensus. Becoming consensus.
31:43
I think there's a lot of dismissal.
31:44
You know, a lot of incremental thinking in the market.
31:45
Now, we'll go 2 hours, now 4 hours lithium ion, now 6 ooh, 8 What about 8 hours?
31:51
You know, this sort of like the you may remember the 8-minute abs thing, you know, it's like so what about 7-minute abs?
31:57
No, no, 6-minute abs, right?
31:59
Um and you know, we sort of blew up that notion of incremental thinking.
32:02
And that that I think that's what this Google project does.
32:06
But I also think that we are back to my point about the frontier of electrochemistry, we we really are just scratching the the capabilities of energy storage broadly speaking.
32:17
And and what I mean by that is, you know, we generally think about storage as as a as a secondary device.
32:22
You you discharge and you charge, right?
32:24
Sort of rechargeable battery.
32:25
But but we increasingly are taking primary approaches.
32:30
In other words, you only discharge.
32:32
So you So think about it as two separate processes.
32:35
You use electricity to charge something and then you discharge that thing to create electricity somewhere.
32:41
But they don't have to exist in the same device, in the same place, right?
32:44
And and so once you once you sort of take those apart a little bit and say, well, I have primary charge and I have primary discharge, but I can complete sort of a system level view of that.
32:53
Now you open up these possibilities that we really don't think about.
32:57
And uh um we have a grant from the US Department of Energy for iron processing that takes half of that.
33:05
So you take you take essentially iron ore, right?
33:07
The oxidized, the discharged state of iron, and you add electricity and you create uh metallic iron.
33:16
Um and that's that's one way to do it, and that's for steelmaking.
33:19
So how do you decarbonize steelmaking and do it in a cost-efficient way and um you know, scalable way.
33:24
And the other half of that is you take metallic iron and you discharge it.
33:29
So now you have a metal fuel, right?
33:30
That you can that you can sort of move around as you need to.
33:32
Uh you can recharge in one place and and discharge in another.
33:36
And think of that as like a standby generator, right?
33:37
Um very, very low cost, extremely reliable, uh and um and extremely scalable.
33:42
And in that case you could have 2,000 hours of fuel on hand if you wanted to, right?
33:48
It really just depended on sort of the metal that's there.
33:51
So I I think, you know, that kind of thinking about what energy storage is and how it fits into the market, uh we haven't really talked about. People don't know it.
34:00
So So maybe it's not maybe it's so unknown that people don't disagree with with me about it.
34:03
But uh but I am convinced that that that sort of is the next frontier for the for the way that we think about storage on the grid.
34:10
Thank you so much for joining us on Giant Ideas again, Mateo, and sharing these wonderful snippets of your life.
34:15
Um very excited about Form Energy and its future, and it's been so great chatting with you.
34:20
Yeah, it's amazing to be here.
34:20
Thank thanks for the chat. Super fun.