SPEAKER_02: Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to How I Built This early and ad-free right now.Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.Today's business travelers are finding that fitting in a little leisure time keeps them recharged and excited on work trips. I know this because whenever I travel for work, I always try and meet up with a friend to catch up, have a great dinner, or hit a museum wherever I am.So if you're traveling for work, go with the card that puts the travel in business travel, the Delta SkyMiles Platinum Business American Express card.If you travel, you know. TurboTax makes all your moves count.Filing with 100% accuracy and getting your max refund guaranteed.So whether you started a podcast, side hustled your way to concert tickets, or sold Hollywood memorabilia, switch to TurboTax and make your moves count.See guarantee details at TurboTax.com slash guarantees.
Experts only available with TurboTax Live. Our friends at Coriant provide wealth management services centered around you.And you know what?Coriant's goal is to exceed your expectations and simplify your life.Coriant can help high achievers just like you preserve your wealth and provide for the people, causes, and communities you care about. Corriant has extensive knowledge across the full spectrum of planning, investing, lending, and money management.They're one of the largest integrated fee-only U.S.registered investment advisors, and they have deeply experienced teams in 23 strategic locations.Teams that put the collective power of their expertise into building you the custom wealth, investment, and family office solutions that can help you reach your holistic financial goals, no matter how complex they may be. Real wealth requires real solutions.
For more information, speak with an advisor today at Corriant.com.That's Corriant.com.Hey, it's Guy here.And before we start the show, I want to tell you about a super exciting thing.We are launching on How I Built This.So if you own your own business or trying to get one off the ground, we might put you on the show.Yes, on the show.And when you come on... You won't just be joining me, but you'll be speaking with some of our favorite former guests who also happen to be some of the greatest entrepreneurs on Earth.And together, we'll answer your most pressing questions about launching and growing your business.
Imagine getting real-time branding advice from Sunbum's Tom Rinks or marketing tips from Vaughn Weaver of Uncle Nearest Whiskey. If you'd like to be considered, send us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with.And make sure to tell us how to reach you.Each week, we'll pick a few callers to join us on this show.You can send us a voice memo at hibt at id.wondery.com, or you can call 1-800-433-4333. And leave a message there.That's 1-800-433-1298.And that's it.Hope to hear from you soon.And we are so excited to have you come on the show.
And now, on to the show. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab.I'm Guy Raz.So a lot of the technology we use today is powered by batteries, specifically lithium ion batteries.And when they were introduced in the 1990s, they were truly revolutionary. And they've enabled everything from smartphones that can last a full day without being charged to super thin laptops and tablets to electric cars that can go over 300 miles on a single charge.But as with every technology, lithium-ion batteries have limits.And because batteries have gotten so good over the past 30 years, we're basically at the point where traditional lithium-ion batteries are about as good as they're going to get.So that's where today's guest comes in. Gene Berdachevsky and his team at Sela Nanotechnologies have pioneered a new material.
It's a composite silicon anode that they say could increase the capacity of lithium ion batteries by as much as 40%.And their hope is that these batteries can give electric cars significantly more range and make them even cheaper for consumers. Gene Berdachevsky was born in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union.And he spent much of his childhood in Russia before moving with his parents to Richmond, Virginia, when he was nine years old.
SPEAKER_00: So back in the Soviet Union, my folks were engineers working on nuclear submarines.So we actually spent a part of my life living north of the Arctic Circle in a little town called Murmansk, which is the northernmost port that doesn't freeze.So I went from that to a much nicer climate in Virginia, and my folks both ended up being software engineer.So kind of classic, you know, electrical engineer turned software engineer and, you know, really wanted me to be one too.So that was definitely the one thing I wasn't going to do.
SPEAKER_02: I know you ended up at Stanford and you studied mechanical engineering and while you were there, you were part of a solar car project.Tell me, tell me about that project.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it was a competition that was put on by the Department of Energy, I think since the late 80s.And students built a car from scratch.So it was, you know, maybe a half dozen of us.And we raced it from Chicago to LA on Route 66.And the car used only about two horsepower worth of solar cells and had a little tiny lithium ion battery.And so I learned a lot, you know, in my undergrad about lithium ion batteries,
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's more than 2,000 miles from between Chicago and LA.And by the way, how fast did that car go?
SPEAKER_00: We got it up to about 86 down a hill and you could go about 55 on flat ground.So we were in normal freeway traffic and it was, I mean, it was terrifying.We were amongst 18 wheelers and, you know, one of our best friends is driving and we built this car and like his butt's on the line, you know?
SPEAKER_02: Wow.That was in like 2004.We are now in 2024, 20 years later.And probably back then, if I would have asked you, you'd have been like, yeah, in 20 years, these are going to be on the streets.People are going to be driving solar powered cars.
SPEAKER_00: I would not have said that.Um, and, um, and, uh, you know, sorry to generally disappoint where I don't think we're going to be driving, you know, purely solar powered cars for a long time.Um, what I did know from that work was that we were all going to be driving electric cars because they were so much more efficient than gasoline, any kind of combustion car.And we could see the batteries getting better year over year, even in the sort of the four years I worked on the project, batteries got dramatically better.And as part of that, you know, I ended up for an entrepreneurship class writing a business case about using lithium ion batteries to build electric sports cars that could go 300 mile range on a single charge.You know, if that sounds familiar, that's because, you know, six months later, I heard about some entrepreneurs doing that.I had a little company called Tesla, and I decided to drop out and join them.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. All right.So as you just mentioned, you find out about this company.This is 2004 called Tesla.And unbeknownst to many people, it wasn't actually founded by Elon Musk.I mean, he joined relatively early as a major investor and turned it into what it is today.But there were two other founders, I believe.And probably when you joined in 2004, it was maybe right around the time that Elon Musk joined.Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Elon was almost the sole funder of the company at the time.But that's right.The CEO at the time I joined was Martin Eberhardt.JB Straubel, who'd go on to spend 15 years at CTO, was already there.Mark Tarpenning was another one of the co-founders.I worked day-to-day with them.Elon was very involved with them at the board level, so I didn't interact with him very much.I was in the back room gluing batteries together, making it work.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.Tell me about what you were doing, because 2004 and you would be a Tesla for four years right around the time when they released the Roadster.What were you doing?I mean, you were you were presumably working on developing a battery that could power a car.How much when you got there in 2004, how much of the technology was already kind of ready to go?
SPEAKER_00: Almost nothing.So the office was two white rooms in Menlo Park.We spent a lot of time working out of JB's garage where he had a bunch of tools.And the sort of initial prototype of the battery was laptop cells that were literally super glued together.Wow. And so that was what we started with.And over the course of four years, we engineered a system that was able to interconnect, cool, and safely manage almost 7,000 individual cells and stuff that into the back of a car frame of the Lotus Elise.So it was really a clean slate, and I got a chance to go from clean slate to production.
SPEAKER_02: So, all right, you left Tesla in 2008 before it really kind of became the company it is today.But it was still really exciting.I mean, I remember when that Roadster came out in 2008.It was still kind of a novelty car.But I guess you left to continue your studies.You went back to Stanford.But did you leave with the intention of like, OK, there's something to this battery thing and I want to pursue this?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.So I was a mechanical engineer and the thing that vexed me was that battery performance was not improving at the rate that we had seen even sort of in my solar car days, just four years before that.And I knew nothing about the chemistry.I knew nothing of what went on inside the battery.And I looked at it and said, look, if these performance curves are projected forward, they're going to stall out and we're not going to have EVs, you know, replace every gas car. So I left with the mission to study material science, physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, all of the disciplines needed to find a breakthrough in batteries.And I did that for a couple of years while also looking for a technology to build a company around.So it was very purpose-driven.And, you know, I think I'm a sucker for the hardest problems.And we had sort of figured out how to make battery packs for EVs.
And, you know, now the hard problem was making the chemistry better.Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: All right.So let's dive into the problem for a moment.I mean, let's go back to 2011 because you founded a company in 2011.And what was the problem you were trying to solve at the time?Was it the same problem you're still trying to solve today or was it a different problem at that time?
SPEAKER_00: Same problem.And this is one of the beauties of picking the right problem is you get to focus and you don't have to pivot.So the problem we wanted to solve was that, what I saw was that the performance of lithium ion batteries, particularly in energy density, the improvements were slowing down and reaching a plateau.And the reason that was so important isn't because you necessarily need longer range for EVs, but in the long run, you need cheaper batteries. And it turns out the more energy each battery cell can store, the cheaper the battery pack can be.And the way to think about the reason for that is if every battery cell you have stores twice as much energy, then you need half as many cells.And if you need half as many cells, you need less manufacturing equipment, less packaging, less labor, all of those things.So the best way to make EVs affordable long run is to make the highest performing batteries.And that was the thesis that we started with.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, let's break down battery technology for a moment, because essentially, a lithium ion battery, it stores energy, right?And you'll do a better explanation because you know the science, but essentially, from what I understand, the lithium stores the energy, and then over time, that lithium transfers to the, for lack of a better description, the other side of the battery when it spends the energy.Is that more or less right?Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a pretty good start.So as you say, there are two sides to the battery, two really important components, the anode, which hosts the lithium when the battery is charged, and the cathode, which hosts the lithium when the battery is discharged.And so when you're charging up the battery at night, you're forcing all the lithium to move into the anode.And then as you're using it, as you connect it to the motor, the lithium ions kind of run back to the cathode, and the electron goes and does a bunch of work in your car.And so the anode side, the material that stores lithium when the battery's charged, is today graphite.In almost every single battery in the world, it's just graphite, the same as your pencil lead.
SPEAKER_02: And most of that graphite, I think, is extracted in China, right?The majority of it?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, something like 95% is mined or processed or refined in China.So some of it gets extracted, let's say, in Australia, but then it gets shipped to China to process.So that's right.
SPEAKER_02: And what's the problem with graphite?I mean, my understanding is that, and you mentioned this, that over the last 10 years, lithium-ion batteries have gotten better, maybe not as quickly as we hope, but they've gotten better.They're more efficient.They store more energy.The range of... Certain cars has been extended.But is there a limitation to what graphite can do and store?
SPEAKER_00: There is.And it's a thermodynamic limitation.So it is the laws of the universe.It is what God gave us.And there is no getting around it.And we are at that limit in every lithium ion battery today.
SPEAKER_02: You cannot push more energy into the graphite, into the existing kind of architecture of a normal battery.Right.
SPEAKER_00: Exactly right.And so with that, we, you know, I went out and I looked at the, frankly, the periodic table of elements, which is small.And there's only a couple things better than what's been used conventionally in lithium ion batteries.And one of those technologies is a silicon anode technology to replace the graphite anode that's in a lithium ion battery today. And so that was the target we picked.But the problem with the silicon anode technology is it had notoriously bad cycle life, meaning you weren't going to get, you know, 300,000 miles on your car.Basically, your battery pack would die after, let's say, 10,000 miles.And it turns out it's a really hard scientific problem.And we thought it would take us sort of five years to solve.And it's taken us closer to 10 years.
SPEAKER_02: We're gonna take a short break, but when we come back, how Gene and his team tackled the battery life cycle problem and why they stuck with it for so many years.Stay with us, you're listening to How I Built This Lab. As a business-to-business marketer, your needs are unique.B2B buying cycles are long and your customers face incredibly complex decisions.Isn't it time you had a marketing platform built specifically for you?LinkedIn Ads empowers marketers with solutions for you and your customers. LinkedIn ads allow you to build the right relationships, drive results and reach your customers in a respectful environment.You'll be able to drive results with targeting and measurement tools built specifically for B2B.In technology, LinkedIn generated two to five times higher return on ad spend than other social media platforms. terms and conditions apply.
Hey, small business leaders.At How I Built This, we hear all about how founders have built their companies from the ground up.Today's sponsor, JustWorks, is all about supporting that small business growth.Whether you're looking for help with payroll, benefits, HR tools, or compliance, JustWorks has you covered. Do you ever get tired of doing it all or feel like you're too busy cutting checks, filing forms and browsing benefits to even think about the rest of your to-do list?Running a business takes a ton of work, but you don't have to do it alone.Let me tell you how JustWorks can help your business. JustWorks can help handle some of the administrative work you don't love.With their easy to use platform, you can manage onboarding, payroll and PTO all in one place.JustWorks cloud based platform enables managers and employees alike to quickly and securely access benefits, payroll and other HR functionality from anywhere, anytime.
So if it ever feels like your business is running you, visit justworks.com slash podcast to see how JustWorks can help you run your business.That's justworks.com slash podcast.This episode is sponsored by Miro.If you haven't heard of it, Miro is an incredible online workspace.Our team relies on Miro for a lot of our own brainstorms and processes.And I think it's super useful to try out if you want to build something great with your team. One of my favorite features is the Miroverse.It's this collection of over 2000 pre-made templates made by ordinary Miro users for all sorts of use cases, like collecting feedback, running meetings, icebreakers.It saves you the hassle of building from scratch.We actually partnered with the folks over at Miro
to create a how to build a podcast Miroverse template to help you kickstart your journey on making your own podcast.Check it out and let me know what you think.You can find our template at Miro.com slash H-I-B-T.That's M-I-R-O dot com slash H-I-B-T.That's M-I-R-O dot com slash H-I-B-T to check out our Miroverse template for yourself. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab.I'm Guy Raz.My guest is Gene Bertashevsky, co-founder of Sela Nanotechnologies.So this is interesting because back in 2011, when you founded this company, right, you were trying to solve a problem that really did not yet exist in the sense because electric vehicle adoption at that point was still very tiny, right?And so you would need people to essentially buy electric cars with a graphite anode
in the battery before people started to realize that you actually needed to solve really this problem need to be solved.And that's where we are today.I mean, is that fair to say like you, you're working on a solution before the market was ready for that solution?
SPEAKER_00: Skate to where the puck's going to be, right?Right.I mean, you have to do that.And you have to understand what the incumbent technology is going to do.I think we saw this in the solar industry, for example.There was this explosion of new solar cell chemistries in the late 2000s.And the problem was they didn't account for how good – conventional solar cell chemistry would get.And that got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.And we ended up with a bunch of bankrupt solar cell companies.
Now, what we understood, what I understood is graphite had nowhere to get better, full stop.And so that was part of the... calculus in starting this company is saying like, look, I know this has a limitation.Five years from now, people are going to want better batteries.And so we have to solve this chemistry problem.All right.
SPEAKER_02: So you, all the way back in 2011, you had a hunch that there was a better solution, right, to graphite, and that is silicon.And when I think of silicon, I mean, we're thinking about the same material that is in a computer chip.
SPEAKER_00: Yep.And a solar cell too.So it's a pretty magical material.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.So tell me about this material and how you kind of came upon this as a better option than graphite.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.So as I mentioned before, the periodic table of elements is quite small.And it's well understood that silicon could be a lot better at storing lithium ions.And to give you a sense of how much better, the thermodynamic limit of graphite, which is made entirely out of carbon atoms, is you need six carbon atoms to store a single atom of lithium. Whereas with silicon, you can take a single atom of silicon and store four lithium atoms.So that means instead of six to one, you're one to four.So silicon is 24 times atomically better at hosting lithium. So that's not secret.That's been known for a long, long time.The problem is silicon is so good at storing lithium that when you charge the battery, because four new atoms come in and react with every single silicon atom you have, it expands really dramatically.
And that expansion causes huge mechanical issues in the battery.And those mechanical issues lead to chemical issues, lead to degradation mechanisms, and your battery dies in like 10 or 100 cycles traditionally. All right.
SPEAKER_02: So you knew theoretically that this was a better material, but you also knew that as of that moment in 2011, nobody had figured out how to make it work.It was too volatile.And so you decide, I'm going to tackle this.I'm going to figure out how we can make silicon work.And that project you thought you could do within about five years at that point.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we thought.And there's an important other thread to that story, which is one of my co-founders, Professor Gleb Yushin, who from about 2007, 2008, he had a background in physics, came into batteries and said, oh, interesting.Here's this problem, again, well-understood problem.I think I have some ideas of how to make entirely new class of materials, how to structure silicon into a composite form that will solve this problem. And, you know, he published a few papers as a professor at Georgia Tech.I read some of those papers.I thought they were quite insightful.And, you know, and we met up through another professor friend, mutual friend of ours.And it turned out he was really itching to start a company.And so it was, you know, I understood the problem better.
From the vehicle side, I understood the problem.From the battery side, he really understood the solutions that you could bring to this from a material science perspective.And so I think neither of us sort of understood quite how hard the other half of it was.And so I think together with another co-founder of ours, also an ex-Tesla colleague, the three of us kind of said, yeah, we think we can figure this out in five years. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: So you and Gleb basically joined forces.And I know you, essentially, you had to raise some money to begin the process.And you raised about $5 million back in, I think, back in 2011.Tell me what the pitch was to investors.You said, we are going to build a better battery that does X, Y, and Z. What were you saying to investors?
SPEAKER_00: So we told investors we're going to make a battery that improves energy density, meaning how much energy the cell can store, which will either enable us to increase range for EVs or lower costs.It'll also enable us to reduce charge times, which this chemistry has a side benefit of. And we could apply that same chemistry into consumer electronics because graphite's in every lithium ion battery.It's in your cell phone, it's in the laptop, it's in your car.And so we can apply this chemistry across different markets and we could start in consumer where we could get to production much faster and then we could scale into cars where the opportunity is just mind-bogglingly large.So really from day one, we laid out the plan that we executed.And 10 years in, we got into our first consumer electronics device.And it'll be sort of around five years more from then to get into a first car that folks can buy.
SPEAKER_02: All right, let's back up because, as you mentioned, it would take 10 years before your battery essentially was in a consumer product, which is the Whoop smart band.It's a fitness tracker, essentially.But before we get there, for that 10-year period, 2011, 2021… I read that you went through something like 80,000 iterations in trying to develop this, right?Because you were essentially, this was not off the shelf technology.You guys had to figure out the science behind this.So walk me through a little bit of what you did during that 10 year period.Because that is, man, that must be a gift of a lot of patience, right?Waiting for that moment where it's going to work.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.So the best way I can summarize it is I think innovation, this is a slight twist on what you've heard before, is 1% inspiration and 99% iteration.So it's all about how fast you iterate on your ideas. It matters how smart you are to start.It matters how good of a professor you've got on the team.But what matters more than anything is the machine to drive that invention and turn those ideas over and discard the bad ones as quickly as possible. And so in this case, because we were inventing an entirely new materials class, we also had to invent the processing techniques for synthesizing those materials.And so the first thing we did wasn't to get in the lab and start cooking materials.The first thing we did was build a bunch of reactors to do the synthesis work. And instead of doing it in a typical grad school fashion where it kind of held together with duct tape and bailing wire, we built really nice automated machines that would be just bulletproof and execute every recipe that we gave them to synthesize these materials with extreme precision.
We outfitted them with hundreds of sensors and we built a dozen of these machines pretty quickly. And then we honestly just turn the crank, right?Ideas in results out, discard the bad ideas, recycle the good ones, put them together and iterate, iterate, iterate.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. I mean, we've had RJ Scaringe on the show from Rivian.And, you know, they knew that this was going to take a long time.And it took them about 10 years before they had a vehicle to sell, which is a long time when you've got investors and you've got, you know, people working on this.You said that it took a few years before you could start to see the light at the end of the tunnel, which would still take another six or seven years.How did you just persevere?I mean, were you sure this was going to work?
SPEAKER_00: Uh, no, certainly not in the early days.And so, you know, we talked about this explicitly in the early days when it's a science project, you have to decide what you're going to measure yourself by.If you're Measuring yourself only by the result, then you will never take on something where you might fail.So, you know, you have to measure the inputs and the inputs are, did we work as hard as we possibly could?Did we, you know... Come up with the best ideas we could.And then do we do it with integrity and respect?Because if you lose your integrity, the whole thing falls apart.And so I think we were all committed to the mission.
And we all believed we could get there.We certainly believed we could crack the code.The thermodynamics... said it was not impossible, which is all you have to know.Once you know it's not impossible, it's really just a question of how long and how hard is it gonna get.
SPEAKER_02: I'm curious, because a lot of times, founders of startups will ask me, when is it time to give up?And you could have.There was a world where you could have thrown yourself into this, and the science just would not have worked out.And it might have been 10 years. of your life that you would have devoted to this thing that didn't work out.Was there ever a moment in that 10-year period where you thought, maybe I should just take my talent and try something different?
SPEAKER_00: Nope.Never.Nope.And I think it's – look, I think this problem is so important that it's worth doing.But if you told me on day one that you'd be sitting there 13 years in, you've got a consumer product out, you're still years away from a car. I don't know if I would have signed up for it, but that doesn't matter when you're in it and you can see how you're going to get there.I think this is true of a lot of entrepreneurs.I've heard many of the greatest entrepreneurs say, look, if I knew how hard this was going to be, I'm not sure I would have signed up.But the other part is I'm convinced that if not us, who? The world is not, in technical terms, a state function, meaning in a state function, if something should exist, it becomes that.
Just because the world should be electric does not make it electric.The world is a path function.I mean, I think about like an alternate history.Imagine we go back to 1890s and someone figures out how to put together a lithium ion battery, you know, with like... much cruder tools than in the 1990s.And today we're all driving electric cars.What an amazing world that might have been.But the world doesn't go electric because it should.It goes electric because of people like Elon and Martin and JB.It goes electric hopefully because of people like us.
And I think when you realize that you're at the forefront It almost feels obligatory to finish it.I don't think it is, but it, you know, it almost becomes that.And, you know, pushing, trying to make a small dent in the universe.
SPEAKER_02: We're going to take another quick break, but just ahead, how CELA's technology could supercharge the electric vehicle market.Stick around.You're listening to How I Built This Lab.
SPEAKER_01: An epic matchup between your two favorite teams, and you're at the game getting the most from what it means to be here with American Express.You breeze through the card member entrance, stop by the lounge.Now it's almost tip-off, and everyone's already on their feet. This is going to be good.That's the powerful backing of American Express.See how to elevate your live sports experience at AmericanExpress.com slash with Amex.Eligible American Express card required.Benefits vary by card and by venue.Terms apply.
SPEAKER_02: We've all been there.One confusing email turns into 12 confused replies and then a meeting to get aligned.And who has time for that? Grammarly is a trusted AI writing partner that saves your company from miscommunication and all the wasted time and money that goes with it.I personally love using Grammarly to help me strike the right tone when I'm sending important emails to my teams and business partners.I was amazed at how seamlessly it works with all the different communication tools I use every day. Grammarly works everywhere you work, integrating seamlessly across 500,000 apps and websites.No cutting, no pasting, no context switching.Personalized on-brand writing help is built into your docs, messages, emails, everything.So join the 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly to work faster and hit their goals while keeping their data secure.
Learn more at Grammarly.com. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab.I'm Guy Raz.So after 10 years of research and development, Gene and Sila are finally ready to launch their silicone anode in a consumer product.And in 2021, they worked with a company called Whoop to design a fitness tracking device with an improved battery.
SPEAKER_00: You know, they had a certain amount of size, Whoop did, for the battery in this device.And it's mostly battery.There's sensors and there's a microprocessor, but there's no display, there's no screen.So it's probably half of the device is a battery.We helped them, you know, improve their battery performance by about 20% relative to the prior generation.Because the device is mostly battery, you made it a lot more compact. and allowed them to stuff more sensors in, it allowed them to stuff more compute in, and really importantly, it gave them a five-day battery life, so you didn't have to recharge it from Monday to Friday, which is pretty cool.So we were a small part of that.They had to piece together a lot of innovations, but we enabled them to make a product that's better and that more consumers could buy, and the same will be true for EVs.We helped them make a product that's better, that more consumers want.
SPEAKER_02: All right.So you've proven that this battery technology can work on a small scale in consumer products, right?It's being used today in the Whoop fitness tracker.And now you're also at the point where you're ready to start working with car companies, right?
SPEAKER_00: That's right.So we have a supply agreement with Mercedes and they plan to bring us into their electric vehicle lineup.Um, they say mid decade, uh, starting with the electric G wagon, the EQG.And so we will be offered, I think as an upgrade pack, they'll have a graphite based battery without us, and then they'll have a Silicon based battery with us.And then we also made a announcement that we signed a supply agreement with Panasonic, uh, in December. And so we're also working with them to bring our batteries into their customers' electric cars.
SPEAKER_02: All right.So let's talk about what the battery can do right now.All right.You've got a G-Wagon, an electric G-Wagon, let's say, and I don't know what the range is on it, but what does this new battery bring to the table?How does it improve the vehicle from a consumer standpoint?
SPEAKER_00: So we tell our customers that we can deliver for them a 20% increase in energy density, which they can translate to 20% longer range.So if you've got an EV with 250 miles of range, we get you to 300 without having to redesign everything, without having to have a battery pack that has to replace your back seat.It just fits into the exact same space where your current battery is. And so if you've got 300 mile range already, then we can get you to 360.And so that's where the technology is today.And then over the next few years, we'll get that to a 30% improvement.Eventually, we think we can get that to a 40% improvement over state-of-the-art graphite chemistries.
SPEAKER_02: So 40% improvement.So from a consumer standpoint, if this plays out as you imagine, you're talking about cheaper EVs, longer range EVs, if this technology is adopted by the average vehicle?
SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.But the other thing is there's a lot of consumers that are still willing to pay a premium for electric vehicles, right?Most of the cars sold in America average over $45,000.But they certainly, there's a lot of consumers, especially as you start moving from the early adopters to the mass market, that don't want to think about recharge times and, you know, worrying about, you know, if I forget to plug in on a Saturday night, then I'm not going to be able to get my kids to soccer practice on a Sunday morning.Like that's a problem.Um, and we need to make it sort of forgettable.Uh, and, and so there's a couple other factors that we can make better.One is we decrease the recharge time.So imagine not only do you have 400 mile range on your, you know,
mid-priced EV, but you can also recharge it in, say, five minutes or seven minutes or 10 minutes.
SPEAKER_02: Why does it charge faster?
SPEAKER_00: So it's a nuance of the chemistry, but essentially when you use graphite, because you need so much of it to store the lithium, it makes for a really thick electrode.And it takes a long time for lithium ions to get all the way to sort of the bottom of the graphite particles, if you will, as they move from that cathode to the anode.When you use silicon, your electrode is much, much thinner.And so the lithium can move much quicker to the sort of rear most particles in the battery, if you will. And so we think, especially for low cost EVs, that's gonna be a game changer.So imagine you've got a 200 mile, $25,000 car, right?Maybe you can't afford the $45,000 400 mile version, but if it only takes you seven minutes or eight minutes to go from 10% to 80, which is kind of the typical way that EVs measure charge speed, then you can pretty confidently just like cruise. on whatever road trip you're going on.And as long as you have a good network, you pull over, you go use the restroom at the rest stop, and you're right back on the road.I mean, you know, it's already true that you don't have time for lunch if you're using a supercharger.
This would be sort of almost as fast as a gas station.
SPEAKER_02: All right, you've come up, you've worked on the technology for the past 10 plus years.What about the actual batteries?Are you going to produce batteries and sell batteries?
SPEAKER_00: Great question.And this actually goes back to the original founding idea.One thing we realized is that the battery makers were going to get really, really large and they were already extraordinarily experienced.So they were, you know, 20 years of history at Panasonic making batteries.Yeah. it was foolish to reinvent how the batteries produced or try to compete with them directly.And so instead, we make just this material, just this anode powder, and we ship that in bags to gigafactories around the world, and they integrate it just like they would graphite, and every battery coming out of their factory is better.
SPEAKER_02: So I know that you've acquired a production facility.This is in Washington State.And that facility is going to be making the silicon.It's basically going to be making this powder.
SPEAKER_00: So we acquired a site, land and a building.That's it.And we are building, you know, if you remember, all of our equipment is custom developed to make this new class of materials at the R&D scale.Well, it turns out it also needs to be custom developed to make this material at automotive scale. And so we're building a massive plant.Ultimately, it will be several billion dollars of investment.The first phase is a couple hundred million of investment that will produce, again, ultimately several million electric cars worth of product.Today, we're starting with supplying the G-Wagon and the Panasonic contract and a couple other customers that we've signed up.
SPEAKER_02: We hear a lot about shortages of materials that will make it very difficult to increase production of lithium ion batteries and so on.Does this help solve some of that challenge?I mean, if silicon is, unlike graphite, it's plentiful, it's available everywhere, and you're talking about a U.S.-based company. It can be mined in the U.S., right?Does this change that equation or is the whole idea of a shortage kind of overblown?
SPEAKER_00: It does change the equation.It democratizes where you can produce anode materials and there's a lot from a national security standpoint and from a regional security standpoint, there's a lot of good reasons that we want production of anode materials in the U.S.Europe wants production of anode materials in the U.S. And by the way, and cathode materials and separators and electrolytes, all the key components and the batteries themselves.So this is the energy sector of the 21st century.And just like, you know, it really, really mattered where energy was produced in the 20th century and we fought wars over it. We should really get ahead of the curve and ensure our own energy security by having domestic supply of anodes.And if we're going to do that, rather than trying to compete on an unlevel playing field and try to catch up to a dominant position that has been established in China on graphite, we should do it with new technologies where we have the advantage. And to your point, they require dramatically less mining.They require really much less labor.
These technologies are much more efficient.They require clean energy, which we have in Washington State where we're building our factory from the Columbia River.And they require innovation, which America is incredible at.It is our best asset.And so what's critical is that not only – Do we lean in to display some of the shortages as a country?But we do it with new technologies, which is our competitive edge.And we end up in the lead for 21st century energy.It'll take 10 years, but just like we got there with oil and gas through technologies like fracking, we should get there in batteries through technologies like silicon anodes and others.
SPEAKER_02: And do you expect that graphite is, you know, will be a thing of the past and lithium batteries in 10 years?Like, is it just going to be like a sort of an obsolete part of the technology or do you think people still use it?
SPEAKER_00: I think people will still use it in some places.I think you'll have the production assets.It'll be cheaper to run them than it is certainly to build new production assets.And I would point you to nickel metal hydride batteries.They're still in use in a lot of places.They're still in use in a lot of hybrid cars, for example.Because they're cheap, but they're cheaper, right? they're cheaper.They're also just, they're robust.They're designed for that application.
It's not a big enough application for a new entrant to go after.So it does take time, but you know, the technologies do sunset, you know, nickel cadmium isn't used anywhere anymore.You know, lead acid is still used quite broadly.And that's, you know, that's a hundred year old piece of technology.So I think there'll be a place for graphite, but I would say in 20 years, silicon should be able to replace it in every nook and cranny.But in 10, I suspect it's still, you know, it's going to be a one-way pendulum.Just like in 10 years, there'll still be gas cars out there.For these industrial sectors to turn over, it takes a lot longer than people realize because you have built the assets. And shutting them down, you only do in very rare occasions.
So more importantly, all the new assets being built, all the new battery factories coming online, we want them to use silicon technology.All the new car factories, we want all the new car platforms to be electric.But that doesn't mean you sort of switch overnight.
SPEAKER_02: Clearly, you've gotten the attention of investors because you've raised hundreds of millions of dollars.And I think your company is valued at $2 billion, $3 billion.I can't remember.What was the latest public valuation?
SPEAKER_00: The last financing, yeah, was over $3 billion.And we've raised close to a billion now.
SPEAKER_02: Which is kind of mind-blowing, right, when you think about it? That number, but it takes a lot of money.I mean, and you've gotten grants from the US government because of this, the Infrastructure Investment Jobs Act.I mean, they're funds that are designed to incentivize companies to build out things in the United States, especially around green technologies.So That's been helpful.When do you expect to be producing your material at scale and really powering, let's say, a significant percentage of EV batteries around the world?
SPEAKER_00: So I've learned that big things take time.
SPEAKER_02: You sure have, yes.
SPEAKER_00: So I don't make proclamations like, next year we'll have done all of these things.We have much more realistic timelines now that we've managed to hold.And right now we're planning to be complete with the current phase of the factory, what we call phase one, at the end of this year. And we'll spend the first half of next year bringing that online very carefully to make very high quality product.And we'll begin to ship that product in the second half of 2025 to our customers.And we expect that consumers will be able to get their first cars with our technology in 2026.
SPEAKER_02: It's been a long road and still some road ahead, but pretty awesome.I mean, when and if this is sort of the standard, it sounds like it's going to have a huge impact on our lives.Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: I hope so.You know, make the world a little better place than as we found it.And I think the decades that it'll have taken will feel worth it.Gene Bertachevsky, thank you so much.Guy, thanks.Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_02: That's Gene Bertachevsky, co-founder and CEO of Sela Nanotechnologies. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week.Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show.This episode was researched and produced by Chris Messini with music composed by Ramtin Arablui.It was edited by John Isabella.Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch.Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, J.C.Howard, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Malia Agudelo, Neva Grant, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Lab. If you like how I built this, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music.Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com survey. Hey everyone, it's Guy Raz here, and I have a new show that I think you're going to love.From Wondery and hosted by Laura Beale, the critically acclaimed podcast Dr. Death is back with a new season called Dr. Bad Magic.It's a story of miraculous cures, magic, and murder.When a charismatic doctor announces revolutionary treatments for cancer and HIV, It seems like the world has been given a miracle cure.Medical experts rush to praise Dr. Surhat Gumruku as a genius.But when a team of private researchers looks into Surhat's background, they begin to suspect the brilliant doctor is hiding a shocking secret. And when a man is found dead in the snow with his wrists shackled and bullet casings speckling the snowbank, Serhat would no longer be known for world-changing treatments.
He'd be known as a fraud and a key suspect in a grisly murder.Follow Dr. Death, Bad Magic on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.You can binge all episodes of Dr. Death, Bad Magic ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.
