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0:14 at energytechnexascom. Welcome back to the show. Today, we're here with Dr. Matthew Dawson of Elementium Materials. They're building a next generation battery electrolyte company. Matthew, tell

0:26 us about what the fundamental parts of a battery are and why the electrolyte is important. Yeah, great question. So, I mean, a battery actually is pretty simple. It's comprised of basically

0:36 three parts, an anode, a cathode, and then in between there is an electrolyte. The electrolyte separates it. Maybe I won't go into too much detail, but it blocks electrons but it allows ions to

0:49 go through. So, you know, it's really interesting. And part of the reason that, you know, I actually end up building Elementium is, you know, more than 90 of all the money in all the research

1:01 was going into electrodes, because electrodes are the most expensive part of a battery, and they also, people understand them better, they're very functional, and so people had just been

1:10 neglecting electrolyte. But what we found, kind of the epiphany that formed the foundation of elementium was the biggest leaps and performance that people can actually realize today are coming from

1:21 the electrolyte. So all the classical degradation mechanisms for batteries, they're all due to the electrolyte failing. I could walk through those in detail, but in essence, it's kind of been

1:34 lost on industry. And because the electrolyte is a lower cost element, people have kind of just ignored it, right? And that's really the trick behind what we've discovered and why our batteries

1:47 are literally, or the customers we're working with, are literally industry leading. Yeah, and so just to, I guess, look at like the stack of cost. If I remember in a battery, it's like, Oh,

1:57 the electrolyte is not the most expensive from a cost basis. Then you have the cathode, which is usually like carbon or something, right? It's just low value stuff. Yeah. It's the other way

2:06 around. Oh, okay. You know, it's like graphite. Oh, I don't know. Okay. Which is the one with all the lithium in it. So, so the lithium, the ions go back and forth. Okay. Start in the

2:15 cathode, the cathode, there's all sorts of materials, but it could be LFP. It could be NMSE for lithium ion, for instance, you know, it could be LCO in your cell phones, but those, the

2:26 cathode is typically over 50 of the cost of a battery. There you go. I got it totally wrong. Yeah. It could be 60 or 70, the anode could be, you know, 20, right? So these are very, very

2:36 expensive components. The electrolyte typically five to 10, depending on the battery. Got it. And how did you come to want to focus on innovating in the electrolyte area? Yeah, it's a, it's a

2:49 great question. Um, you know, I think it came to this epiphany to realize, you know, The reason that well actually I'll even step back you know for the last half a century, people have just been

2:59 using carbonates. As

3:02 50 years ago, they discovered carbonates work for lithium-ion just by happenstance in certain setup. And then they said, okay, well, it works. And as they moved to progress more advanced

3:12 technologies, more challenging operating conditions, new materials, they realized that carbonates don't work anymore. So what they've been doing for the last half a century is they've been putting

3:23 additives in empirically exploring the lab, they do thousands and thousands and thousands of experiments. And they say, OK, this little additive makes the performance a little bit better. And so

3:34 that's why your electrolytes today have 20 components in them, just some astronomically asinine kind of composition. And it's fundamentally because carbonates really are not suited for the types of

3:49 applications people are using today. And so really, we step back and we He said, What if you just. did something novel like design an electrolyte to be an electrolyte, you know? Hello. And so,

4:02 you know, that's what we did. We fundamentally designed an entirely new family of molecules, bond by bond, that were fit for purpose. So rather than trying to repurpose something that doesn't

4:12 work, you know, why don't you just design something that does? And it was a novel concept, but the results have just been transformational. When did you start working on this? So, you know,

4:23 really, it's been less than a year We were very nascent early stage company, but the progress that we've made has just been at an incredible clip. You know, today we'll get in this more. I'm sure

4:34 we're working with over 35 companies. Wow. Already, customers. And, you know, half of these are Fortune 500 companies. Virtually every single major battery company in the world's working with

4:44 us. So, you know, we'll get into that, I guess, later. But yeah, it's been a fast journey and we're making just unbelievable progress. the business, are you a material designer? Yeah, you

4:59 know, I see us having staying power as a chemical company in essence. We manufacture these brand new molecules. We help people, actually, this is what we didn't appreciate earlier on. A lot of

5:10 people don't know how to use electrolyte. It's like amazingly large companies that have a long legacy in building fantastic batteries. There's gaps of knowledge on how to really deploy electrolyte

5:23 effectively. In fact, it's almost like, you know, there's elements that deviate from science into almost art when you're starting up a battery. I had no idea about this. I think it's like

5:32 charging discharge and all that magic. There's this really like intricate magic process for soaking and heating and charging and discharging under certain, it's called the formation procedure. You

5:42 get that off just a little bit, your battery doesn't work at all. And nobody really understands fundamentally a lot of the core steps that people deploy They don't really understand why they're.

5:53 them that way. So it's a real interesting area. I know very little about batteries, but the more I learned about it, I wonder, how do we even get a battery in the first place? We don't know how

6:01 any of it works in terms of this like voodoo, but it does seem like, I guess, the early ones were really just, it was developed by accident. And it's just like, we have to put these things

6:12 together and it worked. Yeah, in a sense, right? And I'm not a history buff, but of course, you know, there's there's a hundred plus year legacy of technology development here. You know,

6:23 actually even, you know, Houston, you know, essence kind of comes into it. XM Mobile was foundational in the development of lithium ion batteries. Oh, really tell me. I don't know enough to be

6:32 the expert guru. You can Google that. But it, you know, I believe it's in like the 70s, right? They're really attributed with being, you know, major innovators at the frontier of getting that

6:42 deployed. I mean, ultimately, you know, UT Austin was also really arguably with, you know, good enough, professor good enough where lithium ion batteries came into being. commercially so to

6:53 speak. He really unlocked their commercial potential. Texas has a long history in the foundation of batteries. Got it. Good. So you mentioned ExxonMobil has a history and lithium ion battery

7:09 development. We know you previously worked at Exxon would love to understand your career path and what brought you to Elementium. Absolutely. Unfortunately, I didn't get to touch lithium ion at

7:20 all. They weren't doing it in the decades I was there. But you know, actually, it's really interesting. I didn't really appreciate this at first, but I was reflecting on it recently. I built my

7:30 first company over 20 years ago. And that was when I was a grad school at MIT. And actually, you know, ultimately that technology was deployed by MIT's endowment in a roundabout way. I was trying

7:41 to sell it to them. They ended up hiring me. So it kind of worked. What was the business or the technology? It was an asset management tool. And I like to think, I mean, we'll see if MIT agrees

7:52 with this, but I like to think that, you know, there were some major adjustments in the portfolio, where MIT did some really smart things in the 2007-2008 timeframe before the market disruption,

8:05 and, you know, I like to think I had a part in that, I'll put it that way, saving them billions of dollars. I'll never have to give to MIT ever again, maybe, if they give me credit for that.

8:16 It's just going to give you a building, you know, that's what that is No, in all seriousness, of course, like, you know, small cog in a massive system there, but yeah. Yeah. And so you

8:26 started with this kind of entrepreneurial mindset, but then it went to work in big industry for years. I did, yeah. So I went to the, you know, I started there and then had some interesting

8:36 opportunities to work at these industrial titans, like ExxonMobil. And I really enjoyed my time. I learned a lot about building companies in these major organizations, which you wouldn't Yeah.

8:46 Necessarily expect. technology development, commercialization. In fact, some of my best commercialization experience actually came out of Ecuador when I spun the technology out of that into a

8:60 startup company. You really get exposure of how to drive technologies to market, which is instrumental in doing a

9:09 startup, but it's not necessarily intuitive, and it's not necessarily something you learn in school, and it's not something you're accustomed

9:19 to, right? So it's, especially for engineers and technologists, it's much more relationship-based than people might be used to, right? So it's building those relationships, understanding people,

9:27 you know, it's that influencing without authority to get people to adopt something that's totally transformative, very disruptive to their lives, and to potentially their companies, but could have

9:37 a big impact. So how do you sell, like, you know, actually entrepreneurship, I'd say, especially as a founder, is a lot more sales technology or things like that, that you might think it is

9:48 when you go into it. Yeah, no, let's stick into that, tell us something that kind of transitions for you in terms of your understanding of commercialization when you made that jump. Yeah, so I

9:59 think that that was really the thing that I start to appreciate. You know, when you're in big organizations, you have to sell as well, right? Even as a technologist doing RD, you have to get

10:11 your management, you have to get the business units buying into what you do, and that's maybe where the journey started, right? You know, I developed many technologies, dozens and dozens. I

10:21 probably have over 100 patents, I'm sure many, way over 100 patents by now, but even at these industrial titans, you know, I had to sell my ideas, right? And so that's where that process

10:34 started naturally actually. I'm actually a very much a reclusive person, I'm kind of very reticent. I'm not one who likes Steven Tox, kind of just a meme on a podcast, right? But over time you

10:45 develop those skills. So I'd encourage any entrepreneur, anybody who is entrepreneurial, to really focus on developing those people skills, those communication skills, because they're

10:55 instrumental. You can't build a business if you can't make money. You can't make money if you can't sell. And so anyway, what I found is, I really enjoy being at the nexus of technical innovation

11:08 that's transformative to society. And this almost sales or marketing type element to try and get people to realize that there's new opportunities on the horizon and not be afraid to kind of take

11:22 those leaps and go with me in this process. And it is, it's almost, it's a partnership. Every customer relationship, it's a partnership. They're betting on you as a person. They're not betting

11:32 on your technology or your company. They're betting on the people that they're working with. So you have to build those relationships you have to deliver on. commitments. I'm digressing, but I

11:41 got something I do want to share here. Go for it. Yeah. You know, there was a guy, he was actually with the Ramco Ventures, and I just think the world of him. Really smart guy. One time he

11:50 told me, Business moves at the speed of trust. And I was like, Oh, that's interesting. And he sat there. This was at the NREL IGF forum in Colorado, and he wrote down this equation, Trust

12:01 equals. And I love equations. I've got PhD in LIT. I've got PhD in LIT And he goes, Trust equals, and he wrote the wordcar, right? Competence times authenticity times reliability. Now, I've

12:15 since modified that equation. So now I have car C over C times

12:21 care for others over care for yourself. And so he really, that was a pivotal point really in my life when I started thinking about this is how I want to build companies. These are the people I want

12:32 to attract. I want to attract people that know what they're doing. They're really competent. They're really talented. And I've always had that tilled. But I want to

12:45 attract people and I want to build a company that's authentic, it's genuine, it's transparent, it's truthful, it's open, right? And then, you know, I want to, this is the, coming back full

12:48 circle here, you know, I want to have a company that's viewed as reliable. We deliver on our commitments, right? And so when your customers are out there, they need that element. They need to

12:58 trust and know that you can deliver on what you're doing, 'cause they're putting their reputations on the

13:04 line to buy your products, to test your new technology Yeah, no, I found when we were deploying product into the oil field like in the Bakken, it mattered as much like you were there selling, but

13:16 you were also there afterwards for when the product was installed and deployed and when it inevitably failed. You would be on the phone and you would be out there in the negative 40 degree weather,

13:25 making sure it worked. And that mattered as much as

13:30 the vision of the technology. And I think that's something that is especially the in sharp energy industry that you need to have this kind of trust because the. the world is both dangerous because

13:41 of all the HSE issues, but also needs to be reliable, it needs to work. Yeah, and the cost of failure is high. The cost of failure is so high, and so when that trust is there, people will buy a

13:51 lot of product from you when you've proven yourself out, but the barriers are high, and it's not not necessarily a technology barrier, it's that trust barrier. Yeah, that's right. I find it

14:00 interesting that you're an engineer scientist, but you're very commercially oriented, and you've built companies, but you've also worked in a corporate environment and know how difficult it is to

14:15 get built consensus and buy-in from the right stakeholders. What advice do you have to technologists wanting to get their technology actually deployed? Yeah, that's a great question. I would say

14:29 you

14:32 kind of hit the nail on the head, right? I mean, you can have the best technology in the world But if people don't, appreciate it. then, you know, it'll never go anywhere, right? So, I mean,

14:42 it gets back to, you know, when I used to sell into, you know, I'm just thinking like how I did some of the sales in the past, there were some fundamental principles that I always try and set up.

14:50 I mean, first of all, you know, you wanna have a product that has huge value, okay? You have to start there, 'cause people have to get excited about it. There, again, there's so many

14:58 opportunities. Every single technology you think you have, there's a thousand others just like it, okay? You may not know it, but there are. And so, you know, in a sense, you have some

15:08 differentiating capability, of course, some differentiating aspect, but you have to get people to realize and appreciate that. So that's number one. Number two, what I found is people don't like

15:18 risk, of course, right? So you have to find a way to stage your deployments to minimize that risk. So even if it's like, I'm not deploying the full technology at the start, but let's do this

15:33 test, let's do this trial, that's very low risk to them. Because again, there are reputations on the line in their company, you want to make sure you don't harm that reputation. So you want to

15:39 build in these baby steps, however you can. And sometimes it's not even your technology, it's some other analog that you can build that momentum around. So there's high value, low risk, low cost

15:39 is another dimension, okay? Now this is a thing, and especially if you're coming out of university, please listen to this Now I think else, from what I say, this entire thing, this is it,

15:39 right? Businesses focus on cost, okay? This is like a novel concept with many, and I helped so many startups. I'm on all sorts of different boards, you know, I'm an advisor to a lot of

15:40 companies and have been over the last decade, and I've helped a lot of university spinouts. And so I see this a lot that people don't appreciate coming from academia or national labs, the

15:40 imperative around cost.

16:34 Okay. Because they believe if it's so great, someone will pay for it. Someone will pay for it, or they just don't even think about it. Okay. Actually, I mean, I won't go into too many war

16:43 stories here, but I've seen it too often where you can have a great technology, but they never thought about cost, and there's really no point in ever even talking about it ever again. And they

16:53 spent years or decades and millions of dollars working on this, and it was pointless from day one, and they should have realized it from day one, because fundamentally, it's one thing to drive

17:04 down the cost curve, although I don't recommend doing that. I recommend just starting it, but I'm starting in a competitive spot. It's one thing to have a vision to drive down the cost curve.

17:12 It's another thing to not understand that you can never achieve a market competitive price, because they didn't understand the fundamental barriers on the cost. So risk, value prop, and cost, and

17:25 so you want to find a way that your customers can deploy this at as low of costs as humanly possible to start with. Um, that's another, uh, you know, especially for piloting, for getting that

17:35 adoptions while I'm talking about, not necessarily the, the ultimate sale. Um, so those are, those are, those are kind of some principles that I would advise. So I want to pull this back to the

17:44 technology a little bit because cost isn't always, uh, dollars per, I don't know, kilogram. I think in, in, in a battery situation, I would hope, uh, the electrolyte is improving performance

17:55 and, and, and it's a question of, uh, what's the cost per meg, uh, was it kilowatt hour, right? Or what we're using for batteries Yeah. Right. And, and how do you, um, uh, how do you

18:06 reconcile, like, the, the kilowatt hour you're delivering for your customer versus, I guess, like, I don't know, grams of electrolyte. Right. How does electrolyte, how does electrolyte.

18:14 That is a disease. Really? Yeah. Sold by kilogram. This is a really interesting question. Okay. A brilliant question. And I don't know that I've got the perfect answer yet, but here's, yeah.

18:22 So everybody wants to buy the next product at the same price or lower than they bought their old product down, right? and if it gives uplift in performance. that's you're always gonna face that in

18:32 the industry. It's not unique to batteries. So we do have that. We have fortunately, since I did focus on cost to begin with, our electrolyte is properly engineered so that it can be made and

18:44 enable us to have very attractive margins, selling at the price point that they buy product today. So we don't have to do

18:51 this huge cost journey thing. We're gonna do it 'cause we wanna get even bigger margins ultimately, but we're positioned early on within the next six months, actually, we can talk about a scale of

19:00 journey, but we're positioned right now to sell competitively at the price point they buy. However, you break a really good point because we're adding all this value product. And what you see in

19:10 battery industries, a lot of times with other materials like new silicon anodes, is they say, okay, well, our anode is five times as expensive as graphite, but you get this 50 uplift and energy

19:23 density, so you wanna pay more for it And the battery as a whole maybe goes up slightly. but your anode cost goes up quite a lot. And people will buy that, right? So people do look at the value

19:36 proposition, they look at the price per kilowatt hour, and they look at, of course, the price per kilogram, and you have to kind of navigate this complex dynamic. So for us right now, all of my

19:48 customers, I guess we're still open to selling at the price they buy today, but we do have to spend more time to think about the value that we're generating for customers, and how do we benefit

19:58 from the additional value that we're providing.

20:02 Good. Yeah, I'm curious, like, what are your early customers telling you, and what have you learned from some of those early customer relationships? We're having a great time. I mean, this has

20:12 been probably the most fun company that I've built, because we're getting so much traction, and we have such a great product. I'm so proud of my team, and proud of what we're doing for society.

20:24 Like, the future is changing. In fact, the future has changed. It's just most people haven't realized it yet, but we have written industrial history. Absolutely, we have, you know, firm,

20:34 there's this new material called LMFP, which is a manganese rich version of LFP. It's something that's LFP is the dominant material for lithium-ion batteries today. But, you know, it's kind of

20:46 low voltage, it's kind of bulky, but it's low cost. So it makes it into a lot of batteries. LMFP provides potential to be much smaller, much higher energy density, much more compact, light

20:57 weight, and ultimately lower costs than LFP. But the problem is, it just doesn't work with carbonates, right? It comes back to this fundamental problem. And so you have this very short cycle

21:07 life. And so nobody can use, you know, right now really commercially LMFP is not commercialized because the cycle life is too short. Well, it turns out our material, our electrolyte has unlocked

21:17 these incredibly long cycle lives, these fantastic rate capabilities in this new electrode material. I actually think the question I ponder often is in five years, will they ever make an LFP

21:30 battery ever again, even though it's a hundred billion dollar market today? That's the question I back in my mind because we've had such a transformative impact on this new emerging material. And

21:41 it's not just that one material we see tripling cycle life in silicon. We have one customer that's doing 500 watt-hour per kilogram lithium metal batteries and they've been doing this for over a

21:52 decade and I can't maybe talk too much about what they've achieved so far because there's announcements and things out there. But what I can say is that we're positioned to double or triple the cycle

22:03 life that they formerly got and really have the worlds not only basically the longest cycle life in the world for these level of energy density batteries. So let's talk a little bit about what drives

22:17 the end-users because batteries are in a lot of things And I know in like vehicles, it's a lot about weight. dent and weight density, but also cycle life. And if I remember the target for cycle

22:29 life is like a thousand cycles. Is that correct for automotive or mine? That's a bare, bare, bare minimum. That's the minimum, right? They want more than that to give you the operating life.

22:37 I'm at, I think my little laptop here, which I love, I'm thinking about like 1200 cycles and it is struggling. Like I got on one Zoom call for 90 minutes and it's dead. Yeah, lots of batteries

22:46 in my goodness. They're much higher energy density. They're a complete different chemistry than you'll find in cars Yeah, they're gonna be, you know, LCO batteries, you know, these days they're

22:55 moving towards Silicon. And so they're very high laptops, consumer electronics. They want to ink out like 1 of, you know, improvement in your cell phone, you know? Like they want to get that

23:06 battery just a little smaller because these companies need the camera space to get a little bigger. And the person that always gets, you know, sacrificed what we hear from these companies is it's

23:15 the battery guys that have to do better. And the camera guys just get to, make the cameras as big as they want. So

23:24 the electrolyte can improve life cycle, it improves all their factors. Yeah, yeah, so I'll walk you through that. Actually, our electrolyte is

23:32 very unique. Like I talked about at the very beginning, this brand new set of molecules unlocks incredible performance in energy density, in power capabilities, in cycle life, in safety.

23:43 Flammability is a big thing for grid skill storage and things and a cost, right? So we bring costs down for the whole cell because you can now operate at higher voltages, which means you get more

23:56 energy density out of the same material, which means you need less of that material, the expensive anodes and cathodes. So your battery costs come down. Your devices become much smaller and much

24:05 lighter weight when you go to higher voltages. And one of the things that we're doing, we have really exciting rate capabilities. So one of the hot things right now is BYD,

24:16 five minute charge so you can charge up your EV as fast as you can fill a tank of gas. Is that a solid state battery too? No, no, no, no, that's really awesome. That's crazy. Yeah, so they

24:25 announced that. And then like a couple of weeks later, CATL comes out and like, oh, we're doing this too, right? And whether it's legit, okay? But

24:34 what's really interesting is what's happening in the US. You know, arguably we're really still at like 15 to 20 minutes is kind of like the best the companies here are touting

24:46 So our technology unlocks, you know, five-minute charge, right? So I think we're certainly at the leading edge globally for what can be done on chargers. But that's an exciting area to be able to

24:57 charge and discharge so fast that you're now competitive with gasoline vehicles. And then of course, energy density is super important. We're working with, you know, a lot of auto companies. But

25:09 one's looking at heavy duty vehicles as well. And they want to go to, you know, battery electric, You know, 16 wheelers or whatever, right? But, and that's the biggest barrier for like a bus

25:20 system or an industrial battery system is 'cause they duty cycle so much. Like a car that we own, the duty cycle, how much you use it versus how much it sits, right? It might be like 5. But when

25:31 you get to these industrial vehicles, like they're running all day for eight hours, it's efforts from 30 to 80 duty cycle. So you need to charge them quickly, right? Yeah, so you wanna be able

25:40 to charge quickly, but you want them to be lightweight and small. And so we're working with folks, that's where this like LMFP innovation is getting really exciting, because suddenly now you can

25:49 dramatically shrink the size of these batteries and unlock mining duty heavy unlock, trucks vehicles,

25:55 all sorts of new applications. Yeah, so energy density is one thing, power is another, cost is another, and then of course safety is important in other applications like grid scale storage. So I

26:08 wanna go back to kind of why now, right? And you said what's different here is you designed kind of molecules, class of molecules from the ground up, and I'm wondering, is it because we have

26:20 better computational technology? Is it because we understand the physics better? What allowed you to have this insight that maybe others haven't had? Yeah, that's a great question. I think in one

26:29 sense, there was, there's just been a limited amount of funding put into electrolyte, right? So it really was almost this epiphany to say, wait a second, everybody's ignored, you know, even I

26:41 at first, when I saw how much this is a, it's intuitive, right? And you see how much the cost deck is for electrolyte. You say, why would I work on that? Yeah. It's five to 10 what's going on

26:52 here. What people don't realize is that is the root problem for why batteries fail. That's the root problem for why your batteries are so big and charged so slowly. So it's, you know, all the

27:03 things that people are trying to achieve can be solved with electrolyte, but you naturally look at the price point and you're just like, oh, that seems like it's not the problem you should be

27:12 working on. Right.

27:15 if you just search 90 plus percent of all publications that have been done in the last two decades have been on anodes and cathodes, not an electrolyte. So fundamentally, there was a shortage in

27:26 funding and a shortage in the realization that basically unlocking performance requires a compatible electrolyte with all these emerging materials. I'd say the other change is, there are all these

27:38 emerging really great materials, anodes and cathodes coming out over the last, say, 30 years. And so these materials have matured. Say 30 years ago, the limitation wasn't the electrolyte, right?

27:52 Now it is. And so that's the maybe why now. It is funny how things stop and start in technology and

28:01 you can kind of find that hidden gem when you look at the system and say, okay, where is this weakness that has been underinvested in? Even though it looks like it's not. I wouldn't even call it a

28:11 hidden gem. it was hiding in plain sight. Right, right, right. And like you said, people focus on the things that are more valuable and this area was neglected. Yeah, that's right. And so how

28:24 do you guys protect yourselves? Do you, are you patenting the molecule? Can you patent molecules? You sure can. And actually we just invented a brand new one like a week ago, it's super exciting.

28:33 But anyway, we've been very aggressive on IP We filed over 15 patents in the last nine months. So we've been very aggressive on patenting everything from the synthesis process to molecules

28:48 themselves to compositions of matter and applications and beyond. But that's actually only one dimension, right? You have to protect yourself far more than just patents. So we have a heavy focus

28:60 on trade secrets and know-how internally. Like what are the secrets to actually synthesize these molecules and get the purities that we can reach, understand what impurities. and what additives

29:12 have a huge impact on the performance. These are key fundamental things that we keep very, very close to the best. So trade secrets and know-how and protecting that within the organization's

29:24 instrumental. A third pillar is we've been very aggressive in marketing. I mean, we're the only ones working on this. It's a brand new like family of molecules. And so we're out there working

29:33 with virtually every major customer. And we're getting the right contracts in place. We're building the right relationships and ultimately, you know, I just find it hard to believe you're working

29:42 with these big organizations for however long. And then they try and go buy your molecule from someone else. I don't think that's going to work very well. And then the fourth pillar that we're

29:53 doing is, we're a real company. This is where a lot of startups fall short. We're actually manufacturing and delivering this product at a price point that. You know, I don't want to be too bold.

30:04 I don't want to dare the Chinese to compete with us.

30:08 But let me at least say - With or without tariffs,

30:12 first of all. Right. But let me at least say that we are delivering at a world class, you know, competitive price that, you know, and competitive quality. And so, you know, we manufacture our

30:25 products and that's gonna be a differentiator that's, you know, we're first to market with this brand new thing, you know, in domestic manufacturing outside of China. These are very rare things

30:35 that people want and we're delivering on it. So I think that's an important lesson for anyone who is really venturing into a new material space or a new, you know, technology that's hard tech. You

30:49 have got to have a pathway to be one of the most competitive manufacturers in the world or your lunch is gonna get eaten. So that's what we focused on and you can do it internally, you can do it

31:00 with the right partnerships. And we happen to be forming some amazing partnerships with global chemical Fortune 500 companies who are willing to toll manufacture with us and we'll have some of those

31:11 announcements come out. But basically these partners are enabling us to go to market very quickly. And we've come to arrangements that work really well for all parties. Are you ready to lead the

31:24 decarbonization charge? Energy Technexes is your platform for growth, offering unique resources and expertise for energy in carbon tech founders. Join us at energytechnexescom and start building

31:36 your Thunderlisset. So I don't even know how does electrolyte deliver? Does it come in barrels? Is it a powder that you ship and it works? It's a liquid. Okay. So yeah, it can come in barrels,

31:47 basically. Okay, interesting. And so you have barrel, like are you producing? Or are you producing? Are you producing, so you're saying production? I assume you're producing at that volume.

31:55 So we're kicking off large scale production in Q4

32:59 for a kilogram and then, you know, they're not supposed to agree. But one to one, one kilogram, one kilowatt hours, the easiest thing to remember. Okay, so I have like these little battery

33:07 packs in my home, so it's probably a kilogram of electrolyte in there to power my home. Okay, interesting. Okay. And then do you ever have to worry about the, like we were talking earlier about

33:17 the carbonate electrolytes whenever your battery dies and the gunk starts coming out. That's what - I think that you completely, but yeah, what's the end of life? Yeah, I was gonna say, I had an

33:30 old laptop I rescued 'cause the battery was starting to swell in it, and that's when you know it's like gonna explode soon. Right, and that's actually due to carbonate. Yes, we don't have that

33:40 problem. Okay, I wanna talk about swelling if we get a chance. Yeah, it's gonna go on, go on. Yeah, so it was like, it was one of those things where I saw that, and I was like, Ooh, this is

33:46 what catches on fire. We gotta throw this away before it beats out. And my wife was like, Who, no one deals with this. Why don't you just buy a new laptop? 'cause it's a50 battery and I'm not

33:56 gonna buy a new laptop. But that's a whole different story. And did you throw it in the garbage? No, you're not supposed to do that. Okay, yeah, I was gonna make sure. But it was a whole, I

34:03 had to spend an hour finding someone who would accept a swelling battery. Best buy wouldn't take it. We ended up having to go to Home Depot. So I don't know how normal people dispose of their

34:14 living. No, we don't want to talk about it. No, we don't want to talk about it. They follow the rules. But it's - No, normally, get us zoomed. All people do normal things and not everyone

34:21 knows. Yeah, I know, I mean, just as a side note from a safety agency perspective, you are supposed to dispose your batteries, all batteries, by taking them to the Lowe's or Home Depot and they

34:30 have battery collections, yeah. But this swelling issue is a real issue for a lot of our major customers. And we just had some great results come in from a Fortune 100 auto company the other day.

34:41 They showed us the swelling that they're facing and then they showed zero percent swelling with our electrolyte and I was like, that's awesome. I mean, that's what we expect. 'Cause we don't have

34:50 carbonates, we don't have that same failure mechanism but you brought up this matter of end of life. And there's a few things that are exciting about our electrolyte. The classical carbonates, I'm

35:01 gonna get into technology. It's gonna be deep, very, very fall asleep. But there's a few classical failure mechanisms for carbonates. And one is they oxidize and then they deprotonate, meaning

35:12 hydrogen gas comes off. And this is where it gets exciting so you can still pay attention, but that hydrogen gas can form HF, right? So there's really nasty acid inside your battery and that can

35:20 then form LIF and other things and consume up your lithium, right? So that's kind of what you're seeing when you see that puffing happen. And anyway, we avoid all those degradation mechanisms. So

35:34 our electrolyte and our batteries can last much, much, much longer than conventional batteries can. And even be recycled. You know, our batteries are electrolytes so good, you can just pull it

35:45 out of end of life and put it into a new battery. So what I've understood from batteries is some of their end of life is because you get

35:54 formation inside the anode, but most of the time they fail because of this gassing problem that is because the electrolyte physically breaks down. Yeah. But and so because of the composition of

36:04 your chemical, you don't have that same kind of breakdown. Correct. Yeah. And that's that whole carbonate issue. But I assume you also that the new electrolyte also does doesn't have the same

36:16 kind of degradation and performance that you see, that could also be another end of life pathway. Oh, absolutely. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's that one mechanism, but there's

36:24 transition metal dissolution in your cathode. That's a very classical common. And what is, tell me what that is in layman's term. Basically, all these high performance batteries have things like

36:33 manganese, we talked about LMFP earlier, or they have nickel, nickel rich, right? These are transition metals and carbonates just want to eat them up. Right. And so pull them out. And they

36:41 just pull them out. Right. And so we avoid that dissolution with our, it's just a much lower solubility to those like order magnitude less. And so that's a key failure conventional electrolytes

36:53 and batteries are based on it. It's all because of the way the electrolyte interacts with the metals that are kind of embedded in this chemical matrix. And there's a whole bunch of these. There's

36:60 stress corrosion cracking and there's aluminum current collector corrosion. All these failure mechanisms are mitigated with our electrolyte. And that's why it's magic. Yeah, and the other thing

37:11 that's really cool, this isn't a trade secret, but I would say that it's not really known in industry yet. This is pretty remarkable discovery that we've made Conventional electrolytes, they just

37:22 form this thing in the anode called an SEI. It's like a barrier layer, okay? And it breaks with carbonates. It breaks down and reforms all the time. It's just constantly evolving. With ours, we

37:33 form a much thinner SEI, and it's much more stable and it's inorganic. So it's highly conductive. And what we've found is one of the primary capacity loss mechanisms is this SEI is just growing in

37:46 your batteries, all day long, just being bigger and bigger The big resistance. The big resistance. and just grows and grows every cycle. And our electrolyte, it grows much, much, much slower.

37:56 And so we end up having much lower resistance. So our cell, just as very low resistance to begin with, but then it doesn't lose capacity over time because that resistance isn't growing as much.

38:07 And of course, you get faster charge rates. I'll give you another traits. This is like, okay, this is the technologists are gonna eat this up, okay?

38:15 In electrolyte world, there's a thing called ionic conductivity And it just basically means like how easily does the electrolyte transport ions, right? I mean, as it sounds. And everybody thinks

38:27 that that's the most important thing when it comes to rate capability. You need high ionic conductivity. It's gotta be able to move those ions really fast and easily. Turns out that, you know, we

38:35 don't agree with that thesis anymore. There's two other mechanisms that every always ignores. One of them's called this transference number, which means like how much lithium are you actually

38:44 carrying and transferring, and

38:46 are our transference numbers the typical carbonate transfer in summer. So that makes our rate capability 2X, so it's weak nominally. And then the other big thing is the resistance in the cell. And

38:58 so these SEIs are far more important than people have appreciated to date. So by getting a very, very low resistance, we can actually have, you know, world leading rate capability like we talked

39:08 about with a very low ionic conductivity material, which is like blows the mind of people. They're like, what's your ionic conductivity? We're like, you know, five And then they're like, oh,

39:18 that doesn't make any sense. How do you get, you know, a five-minute charge? It just doesn't compete. And it's just other mechanisms that enable it. So how do you think about your end market?

39:27 So like you're working with auto manufacturers right now. Do you see a world where you will go to consumer electronics? Well, and

39:36 actually I want to ask the question a little differently because of how batteries get sold. So there's the whole value chain of like the OEM that like makes the product like a car or a cell phone And

39:45 then there's the actual battery. like a cell manufacturer, right? So who do you end up having to work with? Great question. 'Cause ultimately you're going at the cell level. That's right.

39:53 That's who you're selling to, I should say. That's right, that's right. And that's a brilliant question. And it's probably, you know, interesting to your, anybody who wants to know how to get

39:60 into batteries. So we work with both. You have to work with both. You have to work with the big automotive OEMs, the big cell phone manufacturers, you know, I was over to my cell phone companies

40:10 and get them excited about your product. And then they actually go and they go to the big cell manufacturers and they say they're your champions and advocates. You also on the other side, we work

40:19 with all the big cell manufacturers and small cell manufacturers directly as well. Because, you know, we go to these guys and we say, Look, we can triple your cycle life with a 500 watt hour per

40:29 kilogram battery. And they're like, Let's do it. They're super excited about it themselves. But to your other question, you know, automotive takes a long time to get technology adopted, just

40:41 from safety and just how long it takes to do these options a couple of years So we're actually starting. in the consumer electronics market, the drones market, the drone market, robotics, things

40:51 like this. So the adoption cycle is much faster. It's, you know, six months instead of two or three years. 'Cause they're really soon to model every year, whereas the auto industry will sit on

41:01 one car platform for, you know, eight to 10 years. And the safety and things with grid scale storage and with automotive is different than it is with, you know, a cell phone or something like

41:12 that, right? So there's different challenges to the adoption Anyway, the consumer electronics is a much faster adoption. The most exciting area for me is actually military and drones, you know,

41:25 'cause the margins are really high, number one, but also like, you know, they're the most high performing batteries really for any application and they're willing to pay. And it's just a great

41:35 place to start.

41:38 I'm curious, like, are you currently working

41:42 We can't discuss

41:46 it. If we were, we'll learn to firm or deny. We can either confirm or deny that. But I will say that, you know, you can see the importance to the military of things like drones. It is going to

42:01 be the future of the military. And so of course, many government organizations are gonna be very interested in batteries. And we're here to support all those Yeah, so let's, I think we've

42:13 peppered some of the discussion on just kind of advice. But when you've been kind of growing the business, have there been any significant challenges that you've had to overcome in the first nine

42:24 months? Yeah, I mean, we only have an hour.

42:30 Oh, also also you've been with the company nine months. I started. He started. Oh, so nine months is the life of the company. Oh wow. Right, right, right. We go quickly and we're doing great.

42:39 There's been a lot of challenges. What's interesting is this environment, you know, I've obviously been raising capital for a long time in the various companies I've built. I would say we're in

42:49 one of the more challenging capital raise environments. The most challenging I've ever seen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so that's an interesting situation. So I think that's been challenging, but

43:02 fortunately we have great backers. We also have people that are just very excited about our technology, which helps and we have all this customer traction So in an environment like that, you would

43:12 not want to start any hard tech company this second today, you won't get any money. Everybody's now requiring basically revenue in order to put even like seed checks in. It's incredible. So this

43:25 is not the time to start a company today, maybe six months from now, but it's challenging. So I think thankfully we have great backers and we've got incredible traction so that we're really well

43:38 positioned, but raising capital is always a challenge. Um, building the team, I would say is probably the second biggest challenge. And we've been so fortunate. Um, you know, we've got, I

43:47 don't know, half a dozen MIT PhDs and, you know, Harvard, Caltech, you know, all these, these great folks that have joined our team, but attracting the right talent, um, at the right stage

43:57 who will take a bet on you. I mean, if you think about this, if you're trying to, this is probably the hardest thing in a company to build a successful company is, is building the right team, um,

44:08 harder than sales, harder than technology, like 10, 10 times harder than the technology, uh, you've got to get the right people and, and if you do that, everything else falls into place. But

44:18 you've got to figure out how do you attract a world class talent who has every option in the entire world before them to come join you to take an incredibly high risk for very low pay. Yeah. Yeah.

44:33 You figured that out and you do it 10 times over. You'll build amazing And I think the best companies are talent constrained. like there's just, there's not enough time. There's plenty of money

44:43 when you figure it out, but it's really finding those good people. And I'm curious, you know, three years ago, there was a ton of money coming into this space, into batteries. And I remember

44:53 talking to a company in New England, in the cost of like a good battery engineer doubled. And they were recruiting, they could no longer recruit out of New England. They had to recruit people out

45:01 of like Chicago and the Midwest and pull them over because they could not find enough talent. And the world's different now I think a lot of the capital dried up that was coming in in 2021. So I

45:14 assume people are more available. A lot more talent available. Although the best talent's always taken, right? You're only trying to get the best talent. So I don't think that parts change,

45:22 right? They're still very highly compensated. And I'm curious, I assume your team is nationally distributed 'cause otherwise how did you convince them So no, well, yeah, great question. No,

45:33 our, you know, so I live in Houston. We have a couple other folks here, but we have a research center in Somerville, Massachusetts. Okay, there you go. Yeah, where, you know, again, a lot

45:41 of our folks are from MIT and Harvard, most of our team. So, you know, they kind of have that as their epicenter. Okay, in Somerville? In Somerville, Greentown Labs, actually. Okay, good,

45:51 Greentown Company. I didn't pick up on that. Yeah, no, there's so many companies up there coming in. And a little plug for Greentown, as I know you were there in the past And there was actually

46:02 one of the reasons we've been able to go so fast is there's a battery company that does battery testing in Greentown. So it's just this - What's the name of the company? Oh, my goodness. I know

46:12 the guy's name. Daniel's consulting name is the company. That's the company, Daniel. Yeah, Daniel's, yeah. That's his last name, if I remember correctly. Yeah, so what's really interesting,

46:21 and so there's a plug for you. Yeah. But what's really interesting is the synergy, sitting right next to us. So we were able to get testing our stuff so fast,

46:31 The other thing that's advantageous about electrolyte is you can buy dry cells and put your electrolyte in and be tested in next week. You try and make a dry cell, you got two or three year journey

46:40 ahead of you before you can get your first cell tested. So we got testing within weeks of starting the company, which is like a phenomenal advantage. And then Greentown Labs enabled us to

46:52 accelerate that even further. They also had - They have a dry box there. No, we had to buy our own glove boxes, but they gave us a space and they did give us wet lab space, which for any startup

47:02 is also a major hurdle if you need wet lab space to find it. Good, where we go with this? So yeah, so the talent, so you got the talent, you are distributed, you're here, there in Somerville,

47:17 and

47:19 how do you recruit these people to join? Is it more selling is what I'm hearing? It's more selling, yeah, it's gotta be, really, 'cause we really are looking for, you know, tens people that

47:29 could go build their own company. and become billionaires doing that. Like that's the people I want to join my team. And that's the people we've fortunately to be able to attract. How do you find

47:38 them? What's kind of a tell-tale sign that this person's awesome? Yeah, how do you get a player? How do you get dozens of A players on your team? Yeah, I don't know, I've been so fortunate. I

47:46 almost fortuitous, I mean, even at Utility Global, my prior company, I hired this guy, another plug, Nicholas Frandos running his own company now, but the guy was a genius. He was a huge

47:56 instrumental part to the success that we had, building that company And I came across him by reading papers, and I read this guy's work. And I was like, wow, this is great work. And I called him

48:06 up and I said, hey, you wanna be a consultant for us? And he took on that role. And I was like, oh, you're really good. Can I hire you? And he's like, yeah. And then like six months later,

48:13 he's my CTO, his salary's doubled. I mean, like, he was that good. And ultimately, like, you know, I think the principles we talked about, I'll tell you about how to find him, I guess, in a

48:23 second, but the principles we talked about, the culture is what attracts people You know, it's this culture of trust. that we talked about. It's the culture of autonomy being able to actually be

48:33 unleashed to your full potential because these incredible A players are out there. But how many opportunities they have to be fully unleashed? It's rare. And that's what they get when they work

48:42 with me. So a talent tracks talent, right? The more you kind of build, then you get even more talent. It's great. But yeah, you have to convince those first people that you're a partner that

48:54 they can rely on, and that's worth building a company with. And then it's like a magnet, right?

49:01 The more of those you get, the more great people want to join you. I love people also probably self-select because if you're trying to hire a PhD from MIT, Exxon probably would hire them as well.

49:13 But that person probably has a different risk profile. So the ones that want to change the world or have the autonomy, they will naturally come and find you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And

49:26 actually, you know, One of my classic retool - tools for recruiting people as I ask them to self-select. I tell them, here's what the job's going to be like. It's incredibly intense. It's a ton

49:36 of work. And I'm going to give you an unbelievable amount of autonomy. But with that comes an unbelievable responsibility. And you have to decide, do you want to work here? Because 90 of people,

49:48 it's great. But 10 of people, we're going to separate. You know, I learn right up front, like if you don't fit the company and the culture, we're not going to be able to stay together So make

49:57 sure when you make this decision, you know what you're getting into and that you can deliver at this level. And if you can't, please for your own sake, you know, don't join our company. And so

50:06 you actually kind of put that like pressure out there is like, oh my gosh, could I be with this group of people and deliver at this rate? Or are they going to cut me in like a month? And a lot of

50:15 times, actually, this is the amazing thing. Most of the people I hire, I only say you only can work here for three months and we'll assess. And these are like top notch people making hundreds and

50:25 hundreds of thousands of dollars or whatever they're doing, right? These are the top notch people in the world. And I tell them, I'm actually gonna give you a job for three months. Yeah. And if

50:33 you think you're good enough to take that, like bet on yourself, if you can bet on yourself, then you probably are the right fit for the company. Yeah, yeah. And it's so important to give people

50:43 that off-ramp to, to decide, okay, is this really what I wanna do? 'Cause sometimes people view a job as something they're tied to, they just need permission to leave. So that's very interesting

50:57 I had a question, I forgot what it was. Sorry. No worries, I was like - No, no, I mean, it seems like you're a good leader and manager, dude, is it just over time that you've built up this

51:07 skill set? You seem very progressive in terms of like - I don't know, I think - Building a culture of trust. I think I've had a lot of great mentors and I think I've actually learned a lot from my

51:09 employees. I've learned what it takes to attract this talent and keep it and I've just observed over time So I think, you know, I'd say all my successes

51:27 from really the partners that I've had. Even dating back everywhere I've ever looked, actually, the technology that I developed at Exxon and Econor and elsewhere, I always had a great partner, at

51:37 least one great partner. And somehow it was this dynamic between us that unlocks something truly special. So I want to talk a little bit about the fundraising environment. You did mention that it's

51:50 a hard environment, but you also mentioned you had some strong backers.

51:55 How did you find them? How did you bring them into the company? And tell us a little bit about that relationship. Well, and I've raised capital for a number of companies. I'll actually just go

52:06 more bulk for multiple companies, but you know, network's important. And so I used to venture capital a long time ago and that created a really nice network of folks. In fact, I would say,

52:19 curiously now I'm just reflecting live with you here. A lot of the capital I brought in over the years has been through an existing network one way or another, right? think about that as you're

52:28 thinking about, I want to build a startup, make sure you've got the right network to draw the capital from. And so, you know, I think that was probably part of the key is that I knew the right

52:39 people and even if they weren't the guys who are going to invest in me, they might connect me to somebody else, right? And it's those warm introductions. Don't think you can go out and, you know,

52:49 cold email, you know, Sequoia Capital on their info at Sequoia Capital dot email address, right? And get a response. It's unlikely to happen. You really want to have those warm introductions

53:02 through a network if you can. If you can't go out and give the best pitches of your life at the Rice Alliance and NREL IGF and all these other different forums and start to build relationships. It's,

53:16 you know, someone once told me, companies aren't sold, they're bought, right? You know, people, and that's what I've experienced. I've tried really hard sometimes to convince people. We have

53:27 something great, invest in us, and I spend hours doing call after call and due diligence after due diligence. And I can't tell you, probably a hundred entities I've gone through that process with

53:38 and they have not invested in my company. And I've had the other experience where I have like one dinner with someone, literally, and they invest. That's actually what happened to elementium. I

53:49 had one dinner and they invest in the company. And that was through a relationship that I've had for a long, long time And they've known me for a long time. They wanted to do business with me or

53:59 invest in me for decades. And this is the opportunity. We have a great dinner, and then it's done. So I think take advantage of building networks every opportunity you have, don't burn bridges.

54:13 Take care of people, be giving. I don't know if this has had any role or not. I can't directly say that it has. But one thing I do practice is I try and help people. A lot of times, like I said,

54:24 buys all these different companies. free and they're like, Oh, we'll set up something to give you some ownership stake or we'll do whatever.

54:34 Nine times I attend, that doesn't ever happen and I don't care. I'm here to actually just, I've got a network. Why can't they access that network? I feel like a lot of things come full circle

54:45 some point and maybe if they don't, that's okay. It's nice to just help people and I think those sort of things are good values. I'm sure it's just because we like to benchmark it a little bit How

54:56 many investors do you feel like you would recommend people talk to before they really put around together or first financing together?

55:07 That's a great question. There's a couple answers to that question. When you first go out to pitch, you don't know what you're doing. It doesn't matter if you're like me and you've been building

55:17 companies for 20 years or not. You have no idea what your pitch should be and whatever your pitching is probably wrong. And so you need to actually talk to investors. a lot of investors to refine

55:28 your messaging, understand what it is and customers, customers and investors. But what are people looking for? What are your real value proposition? What are

55:37 the challenges with your company that you need to focus on? What are the things that are really jumping out to people that you didn't even appreciate, you had? You have to find all that. So that

55:47 is actually independent of raising capital, but you can use the sales process to customers. You can use the capital raise process to do that, but it's necessary So that can take many, many

55:59 conversations. It could take tens and tens of conversations to get there. And then that helps you refine your pitch, which you ultimately use to actually get capital from somebody else.

56:09 And it's one of the things I find with Houston entrepreneurs is that there's some who understand you have to pitch everyone, and they've kind of learned that from experience. But a lot of the really

56:18 first-time founders are sometimes hesitant to go out and talk to investors 'cause they don't feel like they're ready. And what I'm hearing from you is, No, you gotta practice on somebody.

56:29 Right, exactly. It's gonna release the sound. Exactly, no, and you know what, it's saying goes with customers. And this is, okay, if you're gonna be an entrepreneur, you have to be bold.

56:38 You have to take risk. Otherwise, you cannot do this. You cannot do this at Exxon, but in an entrepreneur, you have to. So what we did from day one, you wanna know how long it was from the time

56:48 I got funded to the time that we got our first sample into a Fortune 100 car company's hands? Guess how long? Knowing you, eight weeks. Six days. Six days. From the day the dollar, first dollar

57:02 came in. The first dollar came in. I'm talking, that's with shipping time. Yeah. That's with getting the lease. A lease called a vendor. It's like, it's like going. That's with hiring people,

57:13 getting the lease, getting the facility, getting the raw materials, synthesizing the molecules, doing the shipping, getting into their hands, getting the contracts, the NDAs, six days. Okay,

57:24 so - Oh, so all the, okay, so you didn't just have the product on the shelf, and then - No. Okay, okay, that is very impressive. That's very impressive. I'm very impressed with you. It's

57:32 incredible. You have to be bold. You have to be bold, right? And so, who else would have, I mean, how can you have the gall and craziness to commit to that company? When you don't have the

57:42 check in the bank, you don't have any employees, you have nothing. You don't have the materials, you have nothing. You have no lab. How can you commit to that employee? We're gonna get that to

57:48 you next week. Yeah. That's borderline insane, right? Yeah. But then we delivered on that commitment. I was amazed we did it, you know, it was amazing. So

57:59 what I'm saying is you can't wait. And actually that first sample was a total disaster, right? But that's okay. I just talked to those guys this week and they're getting more great stuff from us

58:10 now, right? So you're building those relationships. You have to focus on building the relationship. But you know, you can't wait. And so we went out guns blazing, so to speak, and got all

58:20 these different customers sending out samples before having. before I even know what the material's gonna be. I mean, just totally crazy, crazy activity to start to get that feedback. You've

58:30 gotta get that understanding of what do they want, what do they like, what it's not working. What's your process? If I don't ever commit to make a molecule and ship it off, we won't know how to

58:42 ship it. We won't know what regulations we gotta go through. We won't know how to package it. We won't know how to synthesize it. We won't know who I need to hire to make it. So I've gotta make

58:50 the commitment so you can figure out everything else. It's a forcing function for the rest of

58:56 the business. Exactly. Oh man, that's great. But it is, it is a good lesson of like putting a flag in the sand and forcing your team to get there. Right, right. And here's the thing I tell my

59:07 team. We set these incredible goals every year. And unlike other people, I meet with my team like weekly, monthly, quarterly. If somebody's doing great, they'll get feedback that day that

59:18 they're doing great If there's a problem, they'll get feedback that there's a problem and needs to be improved. So I don't wait for these annual cycles. And so we set these goals and the goals are,

59:29 they're really high. If you're meeting 100 of your goals, your company's not going in very far. If you're missing 100 of your goals, you're a little too ambitious. Okay, so you gotta be

59:42 somewhere in between, but I like to set goals so that we're hitting about 50. And if we hit 50 of those goals, we are changing the world. That's the goals that I like to set And people aren't used

59:54 to that, right? They're like, I want to set something I know I can do. I want to set something you know you can't do, okay? And then do it, half of it at least. Yeah.

1:00:04 Man, hours flown by. Yeah, I'm curious though, like, I mean, the world is changing a lot every day, every hour this year. How is everything going on in the world politically and with

1:00:20 all seas? Yeah, well, affecting technology and research, affecting your company. Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, it's a very dynamic environment. I think part of that goes into what we

1:00:31 talked about, the challenges of fundraising right now. There's multiple things that have contributed to that. I think stepping away from the fundraising, you know, obviously what's on a lot of

1:00:42 people's minds these days is tariffs. Now, if Donald Trump, please, if you hear this or anybody in the administration, I mean, please, I would love for them to get this message But

1:00:53 right now, the US is not a leader in batteries. China is the undisputed technology and manufacturing and cost leader, undisputed. And if we wanna bring that capability to the United States, we

1:01:09 have to start somewhere. And right now, all of the materials flow through China, all the salts, all the manufacturing, all the raw materials, all the manufacturing equipment. present a risk

1:01:22 profile that I think is underappreciated by cutting off all that access. It doesn't enable you to actually manufacture in the US. We had plans and we wanted to manufacture in the United States.

1:01:36 Those plans are in serious jeopardy right now because if we can't access the raw materials to manufacture, if we can't access the equipment to manufacture, then we can't build a manufacturing

1:01:47 facility here. To be totally transparent, love the US, we want to manufacture in the US, we want to manufacture in NATO countries.

1:01:57 Ultimately, we have to make products that are economically competitive and if we have to set up shop in Malaysia and only sell to Asia, that would be a terrible loss to society, to the United

1:02:10 States. It would just be a sad situation to see this amazing technology developed here that can't get off the ground because of some of these restrictions. and it has to go to China where they're

1:02:22 willing to put the money in or it has to go to Japan or Korea where they enable you to actually set up the facilities. And so my hope is that ultimately things calm down a little bit and we get back

1:02:34 to a place where we can still leverage the capabilities that exist globally to build and instill that manufacturing prowess back in the United States. Good, no, thank you. That's great insight as

1:02:48 the materials themselves also need to be able to flow in. 'Cause we don't necessarily mind that a lot of that here. So

1:02:56 looking forward,

1:02:58 we're gonna be in the next five to 10 years. Is there gonna be electrolyte in every battery?

1:03:04 I'm thinking a lot about our business model. I have to tell you, there's a lot going on in my head right now, but in five years, I think you will see something completely different than what

1:03:16 people expect The cost of batteries is coming down so fast. and the performance is going up so fast. People don't appreciate, I actually think that ICEs will not be competitive with battery

1:03:28 electric vehicles economically very soon. I think number two, the performance is already kind of not competitive and it's gonna get even worse, right? You know, I have this really high power

1:03:40 engine in my car, my little sports car, but you know, a Tesla's just gonna destroy me off the line, right? So not that I would ever speed

1:03:51 I'll tell anyone this, what I'm waiting for is I want an electric convertible. Like, I like my little convertible. I use it here in Houston all the time. There's none on the market right now,

1:03:59 and that's - I'm telling you that - So I think - So are you like the convertible? Do you put that in? Because I need the sun in my hair, obviously. Oh, okay, okay. And I was like, why would

1:04:06 you ever do that? Yeah, like, I was like convertible. Oh my gosh, it could rain on you. Yeah, it will go up and down, that's great. But what's stopping Evie's total, you know, take over of

1:04:16 adoption today is cost and convenience. Well, guess what, convenience is. has been solved in China, and it's gonna be solved here in the US very, very soon with technologies like Lamentiums. So

1:04:27 you're gonna be able to charge as fast as you can fill up. You're gonna be able to have all the miles you'd ever want. And so all that's gonna be solved, the cost picture's gonna be solved, and

1:04:36 you're gonna see a pretty big disruption in the auto market in the next five to 10 years. And the existential risk is really,

1:04:45 is the US auto industry gonna keep up, right? And if you're not able to compete with China on the vehicles themselves, they'll be beat on the cost curve, right? And that's the thing I think that

1:04:57 they should be really worried about. And if I can make one more prediction, I mean, there's a lot of predictions I've got, but I think robotics is something to keep an eye on, right? Everybody's

1:05:06 talking about AI, okay, AI's great, but you missed the bus. If you didn't invest in AI software by now, it's a little late. But then there's two things that are coming, right?

1:05:17 which you're starting to miss the bus on, 'cause that's been kind of known at least for a year. The demand there, I mean double, triple the Texas grid, the next five to 10 years, it's insane how

1:05:25 much opportunity there is in PowerGen. The other one that I think is still being missed on people is robotics. And I think, if I were gonna predict 10 years from now, will everybody have a robot

1:05:35 in their home? You know, I think that that's not now right off far so.

1:05:38 I think it's hard

1:05:42 to envision, you know, but it would have - Consumer robotics, not any factory. I have two robots at home. I

1:05:51 think robotics are gonna be very prevalent. I think they're just gonna take over in the next decade. And so we'll see if that happens, but I think there was a huge resistance to things like Airbnb

1:06:03 and, you know, Uber, right? And if for good reason, but then, you know, now everybody uses those all the time, right? I think there's a lot of resistance right now to thinking, oh, there's

1:06:14 going to be a robot in my house that - makes my meals. Let's see if there's that resistance in five or 10 years. Yeah, one is convenient. So this is a great Matthew. Where can people find you on

1:06:23 the internet? I guess elementiumio is the best place to find our website. Of course, we're on LinkedIn. You can search elementium. We're hiring all the time. We're growing right now. We have

1:06:35 unbelievable opportunities as we scale up and deliver for our customers. We didn't get to talk about what we're doing for scaling another day. But we are doing that. So we're hiring aggressively

1:06:43 right now And yeah, we

1:06:46 welcome a talent that wants to join. And like we said, we've rewritten industrial history. Come join us and be a part of that. Awesome. Besides the talent part, like if there's anything our

1:06:57 audience could do for you, is there anything

1:07:01 how our audience could help you out? Well, I think we're always gonna be interested in forming more partnerships, right? And deepening and strengthening those partnerships. And I think

1:07:11 specifically around investment and around customers.

1:07:16 You know, there's probably a lot of folks, some of my former investors in utility, you know, we're working with things. I think that there's a lot of folks that could join us in that journey that

1:07:25 haven't yet today, and we'd welcome you with open arms. I mean, we're working with 35 companies. I wanna be working with 100 companies. And really, when you see what batteries can actually do,

1:07:36 it'll transform your thinking of how you can deploy them. And I think people are stuck in an archaic view of what a battery can do. But when you start to realize what we've unlocked, it's gonna

1:07:46 transform the applications. Awesome, glad to hear it. Thank you for your time, Matthew. My pleasure, thank you. Thank you, John.