Latest / Giant Ideas / Form Energy CEO Mateo Jaramillo: Building the Largest Battery System in the World

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Form Energy CEO Mateo Jaramillo: Building the Largest Battery System in the World · Giant Ideas

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_00: Why not go after the most ambitious, hardest to solve problem?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: All the great people want to work on meaningful problems, right?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: No phenomenal person, like technical person, market person, whatever it is, wants to work on a marginal problem.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Giant Ideas, Matteo.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to be here.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for having me.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining us.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_01: 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.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: So, how do you think this is informed in your work?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: 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.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, as as uh perhaps the ranking theologian in the energy storage space.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh well, so 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.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: It turns out I would am happy to say I learned very early on in that process, I would have been a terrible priest.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you say that?
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: Well, because I I like solving problems pretty immediately as soon after I hear them.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, being a pastor, sort of, you know, the pastoral approach that's required to minister to people uh is is not really constitutionally what I'm cut out for.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I was happy to learn that because it's a it's a you know real vocational commitment.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in the end, running a you know, so far, a thousand-person company or so.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there are a lot of similarities, however, ironically, with uh tending to a flock of people and making them feel cared for and motivated and you know the whole thing.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: So how's it informed that 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.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's there's no extracting the human about it, uh that that's for sure.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's deeply informed 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.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And uh it's it's not the imperfections that matter, it's the it's the the rest of the stuff that really does matter.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, to to maybe push the analogy a tiny bit, what's one reason why I find batteries sort of endlessly curious uh they create a lot of curiosity for me.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, they are imperfect.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: Each each energy storage form is imperfect in some way, right?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there's like some trade-off you have to make.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's it's not that it's not that a battery is perfect for all things.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's that a battery can be perfect for the thing you're using it for at the moment.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: So uh so other you know, I like to sort of think about you know the challenges that drive curiosity uh for humans likewise for for technical solutions.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: And is that just uh we'll move we'll move on to the technology shortly, but is that a big part of your motivation?
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: What your kind of worldview that you picked up at the theological seminary or before?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: They they really do.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um they can people can change.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Not not always, but they can.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that's one thing I love about technology.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's one thing I love about batteries.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: There's no fixed frontier.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's it's the world of material science now.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And um and it is not known what we can do yet with material science and really drive the state of the art forward.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: You know, one of the things I'm most proud of at Forum is that the the team, not me, but the team, um learned something new about iron that humans did not know before, and which is sort of astounding given that you know there was a whole age of humanity that was, you know, investigating with iron.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and we continued to drive that forward.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's there's we have yet to really understand how far we can push this technology.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: And and so uh, you know, there's always room for improvement.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a good segue into the actual product.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: So for those who aren't as familiar with the energy space, can you give us a 60-second explanation of what form energy is, what it does, and why it's important?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, form is commercializing a new type of energy storage.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: In our case, it's iron air batteries.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: So so we are rusting and unrusting iron for for the battery.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: That that's the electrochemical reaction.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And what why does the world need a new battery?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Lithium ion's fantastic.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um iron air is an order of magnitude cheaper uh if you do it right than lithium ion.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: And with that dramatically lower cost, you can go dramatically longer durations and achieve durations cost effectively that that heretofore on the grid have really solely been the domain of fossil fuels, frankly.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um and again, why 100 hours?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Why does that matter?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: That's the duration of weather events that drives essentially the entire sizing of the electric grid, the cost, the reliability, everything really.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it 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.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it's again, it's to compete.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: It's we we're never gonna the grid will not do a full you know replacement of anything, but it is to have a a differentiated storage asset that really can bring a lot of additional value to the grid.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what Forum is doing.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: We've been at it for nine years.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we're about a thousand people now.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um we we started those first commercial deliveries last year in relatively low volumes, and we're gonna ramp up very, very quickly from here.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: We have a huge tailwind on the on the market side.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: We just announced a big deal with Google uh and Excel Energy, sort of main utility in the Midwest of the United States, uh, for 300 megawatts, 30 gigawatt hours, uh, the largest battery announced in the world um to date.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and we're gonna turn the factory out fully on here in the next few months and and really run from there.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_01: Amazing.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, the the properties of iron, one of the oldest you know materials on the planet is is pretty key to what you're doing at Form.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: How did you back in to this idea that we should use iron for the battery rather than lithium?
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that would be the material that would create the 100-hour storage.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: Was that based on your experience at Tesla or how did you come to that conclusion?
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so I was at Tesla for about seven years and I I started what became the Tesla energy effort there.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: So taking the lithium-ion batteries out of the grid and adopting them appropriately for the or out of the car and putting them in the grid.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: And and I left after about seven and seven years and change.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: The the company sort of went through a dramatic growth period, 300 people when I joined, about 30,000 when I left, you know, sort of a learning factory, just like so so many lessons to be to be picked up over that arc.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: And as I built the the the first part of the energy effort, I I you know was talking to utility execs uh around the country and internationally, and and they were all sort of saying, yeah, lithiumine is fantastic, we're gonna end up deploying it as it in in large volumes as the cost comes down.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, it do you have any battery that can really solve this just longer duration problem?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because if not, I got I basically have to build two grids.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: I have to keep my thermal grid and I've got to keep my renewable grid, and it's highly unoptimized, right?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so that was really the question I thought about after I left Tessa.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't I didn't leave Tessa with the intention to start a company.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um I left Tessa just because that was it was time to leave for me personally.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: 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 kid's size and that kind of thing.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you may have heard Tessa can be Intense Intense Guy.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh and so really it started as a thought experiment than anything else.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: I'd 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.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: And and so that was never my intention.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: It was really just to sort of scratch an intellectual itch, like, you know, what is the thought experiment?
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: What kind of battery could do that, right?
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: How close could you get?
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and as I started to sort of pull the thread on it, I did encounter iron air.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's in the public domain.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was studied in some details by a Swedish national lab in the in the 70s and by by the U.S.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Department of Energy in the late 60s and 70s.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: So there was some published literature on it, and it never went anywhere because it doesn't work for consumer electronics or or transportation or anything else.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: But but what 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.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: You you could sort of make those right trade-offs, right, that I was talking about earlier, um, and in pursuit of very, very low cost, it didn't matter, right?
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: And and the primary trade-off is is efficiency.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is a lower efficient system, 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?
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: Additionally, for a capacity asset, you're not trying to sort of run as much energy as possible through the system.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: You're you're you're maybe 15% capacity factors, 20% capacity factors.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: In that case, CapEx is what is what dominates the value proposition for your asset.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's a lot of sort of realization right now about the underutilization of the grid, right?
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's like 60% utilized, you know, for 95% of the hours of the year.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: And and so you want a very low capacity factor, very low cost system to solve that problem.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: That was your core insight.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: And did you raise the first round based off that theoretical premise and nothing else?
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And your your credibility and background?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: That that was it.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, well, fast forward, you've just closed your Series F, 400 million, signed a billion-dollar deal with Google.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: 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, and you I think you stand out for having scaled a very capital-intensive business um you know, through to the stage you are now.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: What are some lessons you can take from that?
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Where why have you seemingly are succeeding where the likes of North Vault have struggled or failed?
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, every every journey is uh you know probably unique in its own way.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I think one thing that we have r 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.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: Can you can you maybe can maybe go into a little more details?
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: How what do you mean by that?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: You know, on a hard tech path, you sort of you're assuming that if you're gonna create some some brand new hard deep technology, then almost by definition you're creating a new market as well at the same time.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: 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 timescale for building a business.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: But you they can't be too far out of sync.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, you can't you can't have pre-sold the ability to actually make things and you can't develop a technology if the market's not there, right?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's sort of this very delicate balance.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: What I think is important to do is to pick actively which one you want to be in the lead, though.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And because you can't it can't just sort of be a haphazard occurrence, right?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: And and so given my background, which was building the markets, I I knew that the market was there.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: I knew I knew that we had the technoeconomic entitlement to compete.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: 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?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so you know, from a fundraising perspective, that was sort of the dynamic there.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: For the first, we're on our series, well, but you said our series F.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: We're actually raising our series G right now.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so that was sort of where we were through the first five rounds of the company.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then and then over the last you know, year or two, it's it's really sort of flipped, flipped a little bit.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: And now it's become okay, the market is there.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And now investors want to say, okay, show me the pr show me the technical progress.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: Show me that you can actually make this thing and scale it up.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: And and so that you know, we had to make sure that there was not that big gap, right?
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you look at you look at um a lot of it.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: There are so many, uh it pains me to say, but but failed battery companies in the world.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: And there's like a trapdoor, we sort of characterize these like seven trap doors that you've got to get across.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And by the way, you have to get across all of them.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: You can't go like, you know, run through six and then fall through the seven and say, wow, we made you know a six out of seven.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, and that last one is is the hardest, right?
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: The manufacturing of it.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so we've put a lot of work and effort, and this is where a lot of challenges were for the company in the last year or year and a half, making the electrodes from powders, 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 discharged cathode.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: And we made a hundred thousand of those electrodes over the last year and a half or so.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's 60 miles worth of material going through the factory just to give you a sort of a mental image there.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: And and now we can say we've produced at rate, at scale, with yields, you know, the the performant electrodes, and so we know we can scale from here.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um but but I think what we've done well is balanced that market development with the technical development.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can't sort of be too far out of phase with those two things.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it it's been challenging to be clear, uh, and we are behind where we wanted to be by about a year.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, when we started the company.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think if you it's easy to pull back and be like, ah, 10 years, what's what's a year?
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: But like that year costs a lot of money, and it's it's very, very challenging.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: But there's there was still there was still engineering risk, even as late as this year you'd say there was still like meaningful engineering risk.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for sure.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Until you put it all together at and this is why it's challenging.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: You can you can only de-risk that last phase at scale.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing you can do at subscale that that lets you say, definitively, I've retired that full-scale risk.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: What was it Bill Gates said?
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: He said, I've lost lost more money on on battery startups than I thought was I thought was possible, or something like that.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why Elon says prototypes are easy and and scale is hard, right?
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like you there aren't any shortcuts there.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: There's no and we've done you you can do a lot of de-risking to be clear, but you can't prove it.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Like you just that that's where it becomes really, really hard, and that's where it does cost a lot of money.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: And that that was sort of the northwest.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: And do you think you were building this in the right period of time?
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Has regulation helped you?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Was the RRA critical to your success?
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: And and we anticipated the megatrend.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: But we knew the megatrends were in place, right?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Electrification, broadly speaking, of industry and transportation and you know, decarbonization in in certain regions.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And uh so that part we got right.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, the IRA certainly was helpful in that it started to point to the fact that domestic in the U.S.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: manufacturing was was important again.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: And um and storage, you know, sort of enjoys this bipartisan support um sort of regardless of of what your political affiliation might be.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so so that's what we're doing.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the IRA has sort of kicked off the support for for manufacturing energy storage again in the United States, and it was fully reaffirmed, to be clear, in the O BBBA, right?
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: The the reconciliation bill that came out last year under the obviously new administration and Congress.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: So so we've been able to sort of enjoy that support, and um I think it it will continue.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe taking a step back, I I wrote a piece um two summers ago called the symbiotic relationship between AI, big tech, and energy.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: 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.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: And that would ultimately be the kind of limiting input of AI.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's very much played out.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um we actually had Doug Banauer, um, also a uh a former um Elon employee uh building Radiant, you know, playing into similar tailwinds with his micro nuclear reactor.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, so it's quite it's kind of fascinating.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm kind of curious what your what you see from your vantage point and whether you think ultimately this would be a net benefit for the climate or a net detractor, because obviously that is driving huge innovation in energy, which is fantastic, but the demand that um AI is driving for energy is also kind of unseen, I would say, previously unseen.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, very curious to see because you have a quite unique unique vantage point.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I think it's there there's maybe three ways that are that are you know importantly intersecting for us.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: One is just on the pure demand side.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and now we have a fully built-out grid that's growing at those rates again, which is kind of incredible.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: So just the demand signals for electricity, broadly speaking, speed to power, right?
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: How do we interconnect these loads?
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um the the other is specifically, you know, take the case of this Google project, right?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: They they specifically wanted to do the, you know, that that we would be included here.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And so the the hyperscaler is driving the innovation aspect of that load growth, not just sort of you know load growth all by itself, but you know, what are the what are the tools and the technologies that are maybe you know at that nascent stage today that can really help drive this thing going forward and specifically identifying those.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And just uh just quickly on that project for our listeners, that what they've done is they've ordered a hundred-hour battery for you from you, right, to to power one of their data centers, yeah, or to provide storage for one of their data centers.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And to our customer is actually Excel Energy, the utility in that case, and their that utility is providing a portfolio of resources to Google.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: But we are the reliability asset.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: We're the capacity asset, right?
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um 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.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that so that's the second one, you know, specifically driving the innovation access.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: And then the third is, and I touched on this briefly, we are huge optimists that the that the model capabilities for driving material science innovation is really just getting going.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: And as with most things, you there's a there's gonna be if you if we aren't there already, it's it's coming imminently for data haves and data have nots.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: And and form has the world's most robust data set on on iron air batteries.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: And we've been spending the last nine years accumulating that data set, and we have tens of millions of operating hours, t test data, full systems, you know, deployed systems.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: And and now we're seeing an extremely virtuous cycle between that test data, the performance data, feeding it back into the models, um, and getting pretty astounding directional results.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Run these tests, you know, uh probe these variables, um, getting the physics-based models that we already built to be fully harmonized with the empirical data that we see.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's sort of shocking how little we actually know about electrochemistry.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: I'll say I'll make a like a general statement about that.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and these models are converging the models and the empirical data in a way that we just we have never really seen before.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the third way that we see this really driving the capabilities of the technology as well, right?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Using the tools themselves.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell Well, energy scarcity is often defined civilization.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think we're approaching a period where you know the cost of energy is going to trend towards zero and with storage and renewables, we're essentially going to have close to free and abundant energy.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that's possible?
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Powell I think it's possible.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we're pretty good at putting up roadblocks to achieve effective funds.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh uh, you know, we're probably I mean, we already see this happening, right?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um regions that are able to build capacity are gonna benefit from from this boom right now.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, what we should be doing is thinking about how to unlock the existing resources that are already built to make them as highly utilized as possible.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we should be building more things again.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think the, you know, certainly the the position in the States is you know, unfortunately, calcified to how do you stop building things for la especially coming from sort of the left side of things, you know, to to now again we we do have to go build and we should be building, right, for the benefit of of all of us.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, this notion of abundance being able to tap into sort of the that mindset again is is important um for us going forward.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um as long as we kind of don't get in our own way on that one.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Trevor Burrus, Jr.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: And how do you think about geothermal, nuclear?
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Some people think that this this is the future and potentially you know renewables and storage will be uh leapfrogged by some of these new technologies that create energy at more scale, more cheaply.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: How do you see the landscape and them all fitting in together with what you do?
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I I I mean the market is so massive that it's never gonna be a zero-sum game.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's not gonna be a single technology that dominates um because of cost, because of local dynamics, because of local resource availability.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: I th it's almost impossible to to conceive that there's gonna be a single tech that dominates here.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: And in the end, you know, given the way that we operate that we know how to operate a a low-cost, highly reliable grid overall, you you want asset diversity.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: You want geothermal, you want wind, you want solar, you want hydro, you want you know nuclear uh uh of whatever kind is cost effective, right?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: So so I I think we're we're gonna see that continue to be the case.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, w we are very good at at balancing a complex grid today.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_00: 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 that we don't want, right?
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: Incredible.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we're gonna shift gears now and talk about your time at Tesla.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um you've worked with you know, on paper, the most successful entrepreneur of all time uh in terms of uh value creation.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: What are some key lessons from working with Elon Musk?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Uh there is so many.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, one of it is uh uh and one that I directly took into founding form is um why not go after the most ambitious hard.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Just to solve problem.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: I like to work hard anyway.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: I might as well work on something that is like that really has a huge payoff.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: And and the other the upshot to that is um all the great people want to work on meaningful problems, right?
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: No phenomenal person, like technical person, market whatever it is, wants to work on a marginal problem, really.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and the talent density at Tessa was just incredible.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um and it was you know particularly destructive to me that the deals so that we did with Daimler and Toyota, uh, that was my day job at Tessa for the first five years.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: In background, literally my nights and weekend job was the starting what became the energy effort, but but uh primarily I was responsible for the powertrain business for the first few years there.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: And and so Tessa did these deals with Daimler and Toyota, and they were power, you know, Tessa was developing the electric powertrain that would go into either a let's say a Daimler B class or the RAP4 for Toyota.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: They they were compelled to work on this innovative, you know, bleeding frontier project.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: And dare I say, they were the best people in those companies, right?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_00: They they like they just they had to find a way to come work on this amazing stuff.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's a little counterintuitive, but the harder the problem, the better the people you can attract, in fact.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: The hardest problems attract the best people.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you have to phrase it right, of course, and you've 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.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, the the mission is what drives people, and the and the the hard mission drives the best people, I think.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and so you know, from the beginning of Forum saying we're gonna solve a problem people think is not possible to solve, i.e., 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 intermittent issue, intermittency issue, um, that's highly motivating to phenomenal people.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, so that's that's a very deeply imbued lesson that I I saw at Tesla, you know, day in and day out.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: It was the quality of the people that let the company whistle past the graveyard half a dozen times that we did.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: That you know, the stories that don't get told there.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_00: But um, you know, you need that kind of commitment and and quality out of out of folks to go through these really hard pathways.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: Anything you would now emulate?
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Oh man.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: Uh certainly.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think uh we we've taken a slightly different approach to deadlines.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, Elon loves to sort of put just insane deadlines out there uh for the team.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: The boy who cries wolf at some point, yeah.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, Tesla's been able to pull off you know phenomenal things, and uh almost always later than what Elon originally said.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know what part of it is just like I I'm not never aspired to be, never thought that it was Elon, so I should not manage the way that he does, right?
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: And um, 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 m achievable, you know, that the team believes is like grounded in reality timelines, right?
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: We don't pick timelines at form that are easy to hit, to be clear.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: And we have missed deadlines because we've been too optimistic and you know too aggressive up front.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: 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 gonna pretend to hit, and I pre pretend to believe that they're gonna pretend to hit the you know, like that.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_00: You sort of reduce the wear-out factor around that a bit.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, t Tessa you know ha does have a very high turnover rate.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and you know, maybe we can reduce that a little bit by sort of r reducing the churn a little bit there.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I that that's one you know stylistic difference.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_00: But on the other hand, there is no style like Elon's.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you've hired you've got to set a thousand people now at the company.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Have you developed your own rubric for trying to identify you know A plus talent um or people who are a good fit for the culture?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you know, there's nothing like demonstrated success.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, people can interview phenomenally well, you know, have all the right answers, of course.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: It's you know, no show as known good work product, right?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: 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?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: A's higher A's and you know, B's higher C's and C's higher T's.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, you just have to keep the telephone as high as possible.
• 26:55
  SPEAKER_01: And do you give people a long time to ramp or are you pretty um explicit on you know you have a fairly short time to prove value?
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: I would say we've evolved on that.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, the company has gone through pretty distinct phases over the over the nine years.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, you might even say that we've been three distinct companies along there.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: We were an RD company, to be clear, like for the first few years.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: Super heavy on scientists and PhDs and like the mindset and the methodologies is is for that works for that phase does not work for the engineering phase.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like you actually have to design a product and it has to be able to be manufacturable.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_00: And we were that for a couple of years, and and you know, we were that in the absence of also being a manufacturing company.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: It turns out the manufacturing mindsets and and you know, time horizons that matter for success are very, very different.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: 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, like it really doesn't work in the manufacturing space.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so I would say now we are, we are, we do operate on a on a much more sort of clinical time-based assessment for whether or not somebody's working out, you know, in a way that we just didn't the first you know, two-thirds of the life of the company.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: 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.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it would be great to hear a bit about um how you two collaborated together.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Yet is sort of the you know founder glue between all five of us co-founders.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: And um Yet's just a phenomenal material scientist, scientist and person.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: A lovely person.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: He's just you know, just an amazing guy.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's been you know such a professional pleasure to get to work so closely with him for for nine years.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, talk about talent.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: Like he he attracts absolute top-level talent.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: And our our CTO is um a former, he was, he did his PhD with YET at MIT in material science.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_00: And Billy is the name, Billy Woodford um has just been you know phenomenal technical um leader for the company over over the nine years.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, he's a PhD.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh so we've brought on you know subsequently folks who are you know amazing engineers, design engineers, manufacturing engineers, that kind of thing.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but yeah, yet Yet and the uh science team and you know, that ecosystem has just been you know critical to the success of the company throughout.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_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.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I mentioned that we had this new these new learnings on on iron.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that the team is just continuing to drive the fundamental knowledge and performance of that, of that just the base electrochemistry.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: And we now have a pro like a very good sense for what we see in the lab today, pre knowing that it's gonna show up in a product in two to three years.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have a tremendous amount of confidence in the product roadmap because that cycle now feels feels very, very mature for us as a company.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that engine, that in that like core scientific engine has never slowed down.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so we feel now that we've sort of been able to land the engineering and now the manufacturing piece of things, uh, we we feel really good about sort of the pathway for the product and the innovation sort of um inertia that we have.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: It seems it seems like sitting slightly outside it, but uh one of the things you guys have managed to do which seems essential to success is having the scientific engine, you know, which is kind of stemmed out of you know MIT and Yet Ming.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Having someone like you build the market, uh, make sure that there is commercial demand for it, and then over time ensuring you can actually scale up and manufacture it.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think for a successful hard tech startup to succeed at you, I think you really need all three.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and uh and and having the balance between those two things, as I mentioned along the way.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: 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, um in his case in in nuclear fusion of of all things.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: But he but he built these very complex co-optimized co-optimization models that let us understand that sort of solution space for what battery to go produce in the first place, right?
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: 100 hours is like that's not just a finger in the air exercise.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_00: There, there's a lot of very deep quantitative work behind it.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that engagement with Excel, it's five, six years, like deep engagement.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_00: And and we only could do that because of these what we call capacity expansion modeling tools that that Marco built.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's a nice round number, 100 too.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um what do you what do you believe about the future of energy that very few people agree with you on?
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, uh well, I I'm happy to say I think people are starting to agree with me that it's becoming consensus.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: Becoming consensus.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's a lot of dismissal, you know, a lot of incremental thinking in the market.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, we'll go two hours, now four hours of lithium-I now six, ooh, eight, what about eight hours?
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, this sort of like the you may remember the eight-minute abs uh thing.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's like it's what about seven-minute abs?
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, six-minute abs, right?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, we sort of blew up that notion of incremental thinking.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that that I think that's what this Google project does.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_00: And and what I mean by that is, you know, we generally think about storage as as a as a secondary device.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_00: You you discharge and you charge, right?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: So rechargeable battery.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: But but we increasingly are taking primary approaches.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, you only discharge.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: So you so think about it as two separate processes.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: You use electricity to charge something, and then you discharge that thing to create electricity somewhere.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: But they don't have to exist in the same device in the same place, right?
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_00: 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.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_00: Now you open up these possibilities that we really don't think about.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we have a grant from the US Department of Energy for iron processing that takes half of that.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: So you take you take essentially uh iron ore, right, the oxidized, the discharge state of iron, and you add electricity and you create uh metallic iron.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um and that's that's one way to do it, and that's for steelmaking.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: So how do you decarbonize steelmaking and do it in a cost-efficient way and um you know scalable way?
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_00: And the other half of that is you take metallic iron and you discharge it.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: So now you have a metal fuel, right, that you can that you can sort of move around as you need to.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you can recharge in one place and discharge in another.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: And think of that as like a standby generator, right?
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, very, very low cost, extremely reliable, uh, and um and extremely scalable.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: And in that case, you could have 2,000 hours of fuel on hand if you wanted to, right?
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_00: It really just depended on sort of the metal that's there.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_00: 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 it.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_00: People don't know.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe it's not maybe it's so unknown that people don't disagree with with me about it.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: But uh, but I am convinced that that that sort of is the next frontier for for the way that we think about storage on the grid.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for joining us on Giant Ideas again, Mateo, and sharing these wonderful snippets of your life.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, very excited about Form Energy and its future.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's been so great chatting with you.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: Amazing to be here.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_00: Thank thanks for the chat.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: Super fun.