#10: Sam D'Amico - How to Boil Water in 40 Seconds (and Revolutionize the Grid)

I want to introduce you as the San Francisco's hottest DJ because of the common misconception that you are a... We do not make DJ equipment yet. No, okay. Well, thank you so much for joining us. It's very, very happy to have you. I can't promise that this is going to be Jason Carbon level banger of a video, but you know... It's Cool. Why don't you introduce yourself and tell us what you're building? Yeah. So I'm, uh,

I'm San Domingo founder and CEO of Impulse. We make, uh, high performance home appliances with the idea of this basically simultaneously transforming the grid as we deploy and sell these appliances. We're starting with the highest performing stove ever to our knowledge. And with the idea of basically just like durably proving that gas stoves are over in a, like any performance and product sense

Totally. So you're building electric appliances, you're building super high performance electric appliances that basically have the ability to just

pack tons of power, either heat something up really fast or control it really sensitively. I think like the coolest thing that I, that when I was going through the materials and like learning about this, I think there are cool benchmarks of how it relates to, you know, the, the peak output power, like even the normal output power of like a gas stove or a normal induction stove.

Yeah. So like normally your gas stove is like 15,000 or 18,000 BTUs for like the burner on high and maybe like your outdoor, if you've used one of those outdoor propane burners, the fry a turkey or something like that, we're actually much closer. Those are like 72,000 plus BTUs. We're actually in that zone and we're in that zone in a way where it's still usable and controllable by a normal human for normal size pots and

pans, which is sort of unusual. And so what this means is instead of like waiting six minutes or seven minutes for a liter of water to boil, it's like 40 seconds. And to scale this for people from like a culinary perspective, a box mac and cheese would be like six cups of water or about a liter and a half of water. That takes a minute on our

system. It takes like 10 on a gas stove. So it's like there is like straight up a like performance and time sort of experience aspect to this that's kind of crazy where We can almost like fully kick away the like a watch pot never boils or whatever urban legend. It gets relegated Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't matter anymore. Technology has accelerated. That's right. Hell yeah. So yeah, tell us, I mean, tell us how it's possible. Because you're not having any sort of like, you

don't need me to upgrade my panel. You don't need me to do anything fancy Yeah, so the way we do this is we put a lithium iron phosphate battery pack inside the appliance and then that battery pack is super high power output and able to actually really push a lot of energy or a lot of power into

the like induction drive system. So this is also in fact an induction stove and we're able to do that well in excess of what your normal wiring in your house would be able to be. So like normally a induction stove, you have to install it on a 240 volt, maybe 40 or 60 amp circuit. In our case, we can run on a 120 volt outlet because of the same effect. Basically the battery buffers and stores energy

over time. And then when you need to use like the ultra high power levels to boil something or things like that, it will release it in tiny bursts to get things up to temperature basically. And so from the consumer perspective, you get a high performance stove that works identically to any other high performance stove, but The install requirements are dramatically less. It's a lot easier to fit within maybe like if you're in San Francisco, you may only have 100 amp or 125 amp

panel for your apartment. You're able to fit home appliances with this architecture in a system like that. Whereas before you couldn't do that and you'd be stuck with gas appliances because like Can you talk about what volts and amps and watts are and things and how that relates to what somebody actually has normally in their house? Yeah, and I think the way to do this is like, you use water as the

analogy is kind of the best way to best way to describe this stuff. So like, when you think of you hear something as volts, amps or watts, so watts are like powers. This is like horsepower in your car. This This is like... The total output of the system. It's Yeah, it's what the system can do. Now, volts are kind of like how high on the hill you are. And then amps are kind of like how wide the stream is, if that makes any sense. If you're using this in a pure

water flow analogy. And so volts times amps is kind of, you get power effectively. And so in our case, it's like what you're limited by in a typical home is when you talk about 120 volt appliances, 240 volt appliances, You're limited by two things. So one is like the thickness of the wire in your house dictates how many amps your house can draw. And so typically, like if you're in San Francisco, you might even see people getting this done or waiting for it

to get done. You'll need to get your utility to physically upgrade the connection on the pole to your house to be able to support more amps into your house. Now, additionally, like a lot of major home appliances are 240 volt, not 120 volt. And so you basically get double the power on the same wires. Now that 240 volts is actually like two 120 volt connections that are actually kind of like stacked together in what's called split phase. So if you actually go look at the wire and coming into

a typical home. in towns and cities where it's overhead wired, you'll actually see three wires entering the house. And you'll see it's like hot, neutral, and hot. The two hots, if you get a multimeter and measure across them, you'll see 240 volts. And then from

the neutral to any of the one hots, you'll see 120. And so that goes into your house, typically connects to what's called your electrical panel. which you've probably had to flip a breaker on once or twice, and then you see two sides of the breaker. The left side is one of the so-called phases, and then the right side is one of the other so-called phases. So across the two sides, you'll see 240, but then from the left to the center and the center to the right, you'll see

120. And so you end up in a situation where, based on how stuff was wired in your house before, you could only have a 120 volt ebol on a 120 volt breaker going to your kitchen. So if you have a gas stove today, that's likely what you have because that's all you need to run the igniters. If you want to put an induction stove today, you will have to, one, increase the voltage to get to 240, so you'll have to install a new breaker in

your panel. but two you have to increase the amperage you have to put thicker wires from the kitchen to your panel and that means that you have to get an electrician to come in and it's it's in san francisco this is more expensive but like u.s nationwide this is maybe 500 bucks to a thousand bucks um um sort of price sort of price range to do that the next problem though is you may only have a panel that's got

125 amps total capacity. And if you then run into that problem, you're now looking at like a $3,000, $5,000 ordeal where basically it's like you have to rip out the entire core of your home electrical system. And it can be worse because your house could be 100 years old. Your panel and all the wiring seems to be out of date. And it could actually force you to do much more expensive, much more invasive electrical work. to kind of like true up

to the latest standards. So that's sounds terrible, but then this gets worse, which is you, the wiring from the street to your house could be undersized. And so, and this gets really nasty because it could literally mean that the conduit, like the pipe that the cables go through could be too narrow to run thicker wires. So you're now into

like, you need to get a general contractor to come in. Like you're not, you need an electrician, you need a general contractor, you need to make sure that you like don't like you're putting holes in the side of your house you'd make sure you don't you seal those right and you could do all that and you could probably spend like thousands of dollars and then you have to wait for pacific gas and electric or whatever your utility is to come around to actually run the wires from your

updated conduit to the street that is like a ten thousand dollar exercise and it's not just a money thing it's like a uh i think the current lead times in the bay area are 18 months for literally running new wires from your house to the existing transformer and then you just mentioned transformers if you were one of the last people on your street to request one of these and by the way all your neighbors are doing this even if they don't care about their stove because

they're getting an ev or something like that you have to potentially pay to upgrade that transformer and so you're then in the situation where like basically the the deck is stacked against you all the way like all the way up the stack it's kind of highly i would i think the right way to

So you're not getting an induction stove. If that's the Yeah, so my next door neighbor did a whole home remodeling situation and basically was like, was considering it, didn't end up doing it because it was just too dramatic in terms of what the situation would be. there's a fix, which is what if you could supply your, if you look at how all these appliances, and it's not just stoves, it's like stoves, ovens, hot water, heaters, laundry machines, they're

only in use for tiny fraction of the day. They're not like continuously on ultra high all the time, if that makes any sense. And even for cooking, if you're cooking, like you're running like a Uber Eats kitchen at your house, you're not leaving all the burners on high with an electric stove like you might do with a gas stove in a commercial kitchen or something like that. And so you're in a spot where there's

this huge intermittency with all these things. So if you could solve the peak power supply problem without having to do any of the upgrades by virtue of putting the peak power supply in the thing that's going to cause the new peak load you have completely solved the problem this then basically is kind of what impulse does it's like you essentially embed a peaker power plant in a next all the next generation home appliances which then means all the wires going to them can be skinny because

they're because none of our products have like a traditional peak load they're all like essentially programmable lower capacity loads or lower, lower requirement, lower, lower, lower, Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, and really secretly, what that means is that you're upgrading the entire electrical system of the house without needing that massive effort by PG and E and by you act like you upgraded, like

ripping your walls out and stuff. You're just literally like the literal installation is Yeah, so there's two ways to install our products and I'll kind of, I can go and kind of go into some of the details of that now. And I think some of this we'll cover later. Sure. But basically it's, we're, our plan is you install this thing just like you'd install any other appliance. Like there's no, there's no special requirements. Um, but

we can change the power cable between a couple of different configurations. So it's like whatever Today's episode is brought to you by NordVPN. Now there are lots of reasons why you'd want to preserve your privacy and secure your online browsing. There's the normal reasons like not wanting to get hacked, which is pretty essential for deep tech companies like the ones featured on this show. But

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there's no risk. There's a 30-day money back guarantee. So check out that link, which is in the description of this episode, or go to nordvpn.com slash first principles. Let's get back to the show. So do you mind telling us

about like, how is power transmitted? How is power used by normal appliances and Yeah, so we can go back hundreds of years or a hundred, hundred plus years. But basically the situation is direct current is the voltage is essentially steady. So it's like how a battery works. Basically, it's like you have an alkaline battery, that thing has 1.5 volts across the terminals. It's not changing at any given time. So you can Yeah,

It's a steady flow out of the battery. It doesn't matter. There's no waves or It's just getting the power. You have the voltages. There's no high frequency components in the voltage. Now for AC, what you do is the voltage is modulating typically in a sine wave. And so when you see 120 volts, that's actually the root mean square voltage.

of uh of the uh um of the actual voltage so like you actually can get the peak is actually higher than 120 it's like but basically it's like that number is a root mean square voltage it's not actually like the the voltage actually swings between negative like 100 plus volts and positive 100 plus volts basically what this does and this is kind of goes back to the edison versus tesla war of the currents and all this other stuff the advantage of ac is you

can use transformers to convert AC voltages to other voltages while preserving the power transfer. And so the example would be like, you have a power station, let's call it, on the Hudson River or something

like that, and you want to get the energy to New York City. That station, you'll upconvert the energy, and I'm using this kind of in the Edison analogy, so New York-centric, you'll upconvert the energy to much higher voltage in the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions of volts, and then you send it over the high voltage lines that look like They look like really gigantic structures you'll

see like kind of when you're driving through the countryside and stuff like that. And then when it gets to the city, you start stepping it down to the lower voltage and then it ends up on the poles distributed to the transformers. And then that gets stepped down eventually to the 120 and 240 volt service that I talked about earlier. And the advantage of this is, and this goes back to, and we're like, why do you need to do this? Like, why do you need to do

this at all? And so the real reason is higher voltages, you can send over longer distances with less loss. And this is because of, there's a, the loss term for basically the power loss over a, so every wire is a, what's called a resistor, it can technically impede the flow of current. Now, you ideally want to design your wires to not be good resistors you want them to not really resist the flow of current but If you have hundreds of miles of

wire, it will have some resistance. And so what you'll do is you'll basically, when you think of this, the square of the current times the resistance of the wire is actually the power loss you can have. So there's a real advantage to lowering the current. that you send across transmission lines. And the best way to do that without having to lower

the power you're transferring is to increase the voltage. Because the power transferred is V times I, but the losses are I squared times R. So if you can basically increase the voltage, you can basically have more capacity in terms of power over the same size wires. And so this was a big deal because if you can use alternating current to easily transform low voltage to high voltage and back, it makes it a lot easier to distribute electricity nationally or globally as well. And so then I

mentioned this thing called the transformer. I should explain how that works. The way a transformer works is it's basically you have a Let's call it a ferromagnetic core. So you can think of this as a big chunk of iron or something like that. And then you essentially have two coils. The coils convert the current into a magnetic field. That magnetic field, because you're running an AC, is moving. So basically that is now alternating. that

conducts through the iron core, ferromagnetic core, to the other side where you have a different size coil, and the relative ratio and number of turns of the coil defines

the voltage that is output on the other side. And this is definitely something that requires a little bit of an illustration, but essentially you can convert electricity into a magnetic field and then you can convert it back into electricity at a different voltage Yeah, this is like the most miraculous thing for people who have never seen it before or never done these experiments. Like the original experiment was done by

this guy Hans Christian Oersted. I don't actually know how to pronounce his name, but he was the first guy to realize that if you put an electrical field next to like, you know, it would basically become a magnet. Like

it would move a little compass needle. Um, and then, um, Faraday was the guy who, like, actually started proving this, like, proving how this design worked, where you could have these looping coils around a metal something or other, uh, and that, you know, if you plug in a battery to one side, then on the other side, you actually still see voltage. It's like it's converting to the magnetic field and then back to electricity again. Um, it's extremely

cool. And, uh, that's the principle. Like, that's literally what's happening in that transformer outside your, your building or whatever, like, on your block. It's like it's coming in at a very high voltage. There's fewer loops on the side that's closer to your house or whatever. And so it's stepping down the voltage as it comes to you. Very cool. Exactly. Yeah. So now we've talked about, you know, the amount of power that's normally coming to your house is like 120 volts. The amount

of amps is not that high. So you don't have that many volts to distribute across everything. but you're still delivering this extremely high, this high voltage experience, so this high amperage experience, even without that, because of the existence of this battery. So do you want to talk a little bit more about the battery, like why you chose the particular chemistry you did, how

Basically, when we set out to do this, there's kind of some interesting, this is actually one where there is a performance requirement, and then there's a policy and regulatory requirement, and there's a couple other things. So first thing, you put a battery in someone's house. you want to check the IRS tax code. And so, which is kind of funny, because if you get, if you're a three kilowatt hour battery, you are eligible for the investment tax credit as

like a home battery system. And so being very conscientious of that, you want to make it at least three kilowatt hours. So that's

one. And it's actually funny is we could have probably made the battery smaller in the product because like, again, you only need it intermittently for boosting, you don't Like, in some sense this is a weird product because it's like, the fact that it can run itself when the power's out is a bonus, it's not actually like, we're not designing around that, but like, you get three uses when the power's out, so like, you can use your stove in

pretty much like all but the worst outages. without actually noticing that the power's out. The second thing was basically, can you get enough, you have to size the battery enough. Batteries can't discharge in zero time. There's a maximum discharge rate, usually related versus the capacity that they're able to do. This is what's called the C-rate. So it's like you can discharge a battery, like a 3C battery, you can discharge in 20 minutes. or like the peak discharge rate

is within 20 minutes. And so what this means is, it means you can discharge the battery 3x its rated amp hour

capacity. So you can say a three amp hour battery, you could discharge it at nine amps. Now that's the other limitation. So then it's kind of like, okay, what's the max power we want to use the stove at? And then you size the battery for the max power that the stove would draw. That's the second design parameter. And the third design parameter is like, Hey, there's a fire safety concerns on lithium ion batteries. Hey, you need to get this thing vetted

for indoor installation. And you need to basically check all the boxes for like, people are like, you're putting a battery in a stove, like, that is a fire safety thing, like, just, like, way to have it. And so, now, induction doesn't actually get the stove hot, like, it gets the pans hot, so, like, you solve that problem. But the second piece about this is you want to make sure that you kind of dot your I's and cross your T's on the fire safety thing robustly. And so, that,

and then the fourth one is cost. And so, coincidentally three points, three and four pointed the same direction, which is using lithium iron phosphate, not lithium, like traditional lithium, manganese, cobalt, or like these other, these other higher energy density technologies. Um, and so once you have that requirement, you're now like, okay, let's figure out how to fit a battery of the, of, with all those requirements into

a product that's like a cooktop or something like that. Um, we got lucky that this was barely possible and pulled it because it's got better safety characteristics, it's easier to build a battery pack with lithium iron phosphate. And so if you go buy the base Tesla Model 3 today, to my understanding, that battery pack is built, I think that battery pack is built by CATL in China. Interesting. Basically, LFP is starting to take over in the automotive space, driven mostly by the Chinese battery

pack manufacturers and the automakers. the NMC like packs or what you see in the higher end vehicles like Tesla, I believe Hyundai also

uses them as NMC, et cetera. There is actually, it's something where initially LFP was only a stationary storage thing, but it's starting to kind of crawl into the rest of the use cases as well because its energy density And yeah, so that was how I thought of the trade was that, oh, it's bigger and it's heavier I should explain the safer part it's yeah yeah basically it it does not have enough internal oxygen to like sustain a chemical reaction without external oxygen so like if

there is a if you have a thermal event as they say it in these parlance, in some sense it's like, it won't self-sustain

into a un-extinguishable fire. That's what runaway means, like thermal runaway just means there's not enough oxygen within the thing to- No, thermal runaway means, thermal runaway is when a battery pack is essentially self-oxidizing its own fuel, and essentially it's like you can't put it out without, the only way you can really put out the fire is if you, you essentially have to rapidly cool it to take it out of- reacting with itself, basically.

That's like the commonly described failure mode for lithium-ion batteries. The point is, for lithium-ion phosphate, it's dramatically more difficult to...

It's dramatically more difficult, and in some cases impossible, to have the same failure Yeah, and it also makes it a lot easier from a testing and validation perspective to pass the tests required for How much of that, does that end up being a pretty big driver of trying to This is, yeah, so there's all sorts of different requirements you have to meet here, so it's weird because you think of this from a, is this legal perspective and it's

actually... This is done by third-party standards organizations like UL and CSA that set up the kind of, they set the standards and tests and stuff like that. You're not legally required to do this per se to like make a product that people can buy, but all the building codes and various intellectual codes and stuff like that all list these requirements in there. So it's almost like indirectly, it's kind of a quasi-legal regime that you have

to go past and be super diligent about. And that's something that we've been, from day zero, making sure that we design our systems with that in mind. Because you're doing something ambitious and tricky, you have to make sure that it's also going to be legal. And when I say building codes, it's down to towns and cities having their own individual building codes It's not just the no battery fires. functional safety for like the stove to make sure that like it turns off and like things

While we're talking about batteries, I wanted to ask you about sodium ion batteries. I think that you're pretty excited about them from what I understand, and I would be curious to Yeah, so sodium ion has like also dramatically better safety characteristics. The energy density situation is, I think, at the moment worse than lithium iron phosphate, but it's not that much worse. Um, and then there's also some, and then there's also cost as

well. So like you don't, there's no lithium. And so, um, there's, uh, there's some very interesting things going on there. Um, my expectation is there will be, I think there already are cells sampling in some volumes. I'm not sure if there's any product shipping with them yet. but they likely will be in 2025. And so, there's going to be, I think, a bunch of motion in that direction very soon, and that's going to be pretty exciting.

The other thing that's interesting is there's some regulations that only specify lithium batteries. If you use sodium, you might sidestep them. That might change, though. So, I'm like, I'm not, you know, that's a 2Q by half kind of thing, so I'm not banking on that. Um, but yeah, generally the safety characteristics are dramatically better. Um, plus, um, yeah,

plus, plus cost is also going to be dramatically better. So it's going to be, Yeah, I mean, I think that people are talking about batteries a lot as kind of a solve to additional climate change things. Basically, like it allows us to use renewables in a way that we can't otherwise. Like, do you want to talk about that and specifically how your size of battery helps with it? Because it's not like I mean, a three kilowatt batteries is

big enough. for this purpose, but it's not huge and it's not covering your whole daily usage of electricity. So yeah, why don't you talk about that, about how much electricity people are using, why it might help to have batteries in the house, how big your battery is, that Yeah, I'm probably going to sue my foot in this, but it depends on where you live in the country. Imagine a typical single family homeowner in the US, they're consuming like 20 to 30 kilowatt hours a day in total energy. So

that's like, that's like all the, that's if you have an electrified house. Like if you, if you, if you got AC and ironically this is like not San Francisco, this is like, this is like Florida. It's like where you're fully electrified. You've got an electric stove, you've got an electric like AC, you don't have a heat pump because it doesn't get cold. Like, but you, you get the idea,

you get the idea, you get the idea. And so what, Imagine you're using 20, 30 kilowatt hours. Now, we're not going to stop with one appliance. So you could imagine we sell you three or four different ones. We're then in the point where we're addressing like half of your total demand, which Then you think of that and you're like, okay, that's pretty notable. The other piece of this that's interesting is there's this whole nature

of how people live their lives, right? So people aren't consuming electricity uniformly from their house at 100% rate all day. they're consuming electricity, they're basically not consuming any electricity in the middle of the day, and they're consuming when they're at work, and they're consuming, like, the peak demand is from 4 to 9 p.m. or something like that,

typically. And so if you can largely address those peaks with the storage, you can dramatically reshape kind of, like, how the grid needs to be optimized for distribution and stuff like that, because, like, you might have completely clobbered the entire nature of having a quote-unquote peak at that point if you've got, let's call it 10 kilowatt hours Because ideally you would want it to be perfectly uniform, just from like, if you were a solar farm and you

were designing how people actually use your electricity, you would want it to be roughly, throughout the day you would though, because you don't want it to be, you don't want to, okay, tell me, No, you want it to match your, so this actually goes back to a bigger issue which is, People don't understand how the electricity grid works. Every electron that is produced needs to get consumed shortly thereafter as soon as it gets sent to, as soon as it goes through the wire. So like basically speed

of light sort of situation. Now, because of that, it's like a real time matching situation has to happen. Because of that, and then you realize solar farms are not like, they peak in the middle of the day, so like at solar noon. Or maybe sometimes before or after, depending on if they tilt the panels or whatever. But basically, you'll end up in a situation where solar farms are variably producing electricity. The cool thing with having batteries is the batteries can be variable consumers.

And so what you really want is you want the batteries bill to match whatever production is happening at a given time. Not like

I will constantly draw. 10 amps all day like it's it's not that it's it's actually it's actually you want to basically perfectly match production with consumption and what's cool about this is like by having enough batteries you turn homes from like homes essentially don't have to like homes essentially become flexible loads so so what a home can then do is a home can basically be like okay i will draw electricity when market pricing tells me it's

the cheapest now we don't have those price signals exposed in all markets but in like markets like texas You can actually go it like there's plumbing to be able to pull stuff off like that but that's the that's the that's the endgame where effectively if you have enough batteries you can actually break that like real time assumption of the network. And

it gets real it also it just greatly solves like. all of these various things around transmission where it's like okay we need to size the wires for everyone coming home and turning their lights on and their AC on or their their heater on at 6 p.m and plugging their Tesla in at 8 p.m like it's like that that sort of stuff is like nightmare planning there's actually um An example from the UK that has historically happened, which is called the TV pickup effect, which is

because the, I think there was like a relatively small number of channels that had live sports. When major games, major football or soccer games were on, people would go make tea on their 230 volt 15 amp kettles that are crazy fast that they like to make fun of us for not having in America everyone will turn on their like three kilowatt kettles at the same time and This would mean that they would actually have to live import electricity from France through the undersea power lines I'm The

other solve is basically you either overbuild the infrastructure for transmission or you have batteries. And batteries mean you can avoid having to do Exactly. Yeah. Just to underscore what you're saying, I think people don't fully understand that the electricity right now that's powering my heater and powering my computer and powering whatever, these lights, all of that is effectively generated at the moment it's consumed. Yes. It is literally generated

at this moment. So maybe it's coming from a solar plant, maybe it's coming from the solar on top of my house, maybe it's coming from a power plant, wherever PG&E is delivering it, but it's being created exactly right now. Yes.

And so that's why it's a problem for renewables. Like you said, a solar plant will obviously only produce power when the sun is out. It's not producing power at night. And it's producing more power when the sun is directly overhead and shining straight down as opposed to shining through a bunch of the atmosphere or something. And so we want to be able to use that. We want those renewable sources of energy, but we

can only get them at certain times of day. They're variable. They're not always happening. And so from the perspective of like that piece of energy, you do want to find a home. You do want to find something that you can productively do. And if you can't go directly get like, you know, consume to charge a Tesla or to power a light or something, it's much better that you end up inside of

a battery because then somebody can use you later. And that's kind of what Yeah, and you can actually see on California ISOs, Independent System Operator for the grid, you can see when they have curtailment of solar. And so basically, if there's no place to put those electrons, you actually have to shut the panels off in some cases. And so, and so that's the, what's interesting is like adding batteries in some cases, it's like you're, you can harvest these like otherwise

discarded electrons effectively. You can, you could actually get, you could actually store energy that is free, basically. Now, in California, we don't have pricing signals set up to make that exactly happen, but in Texas, they sure do. And you can see cases where, oh, it's a really windy day and the wind farms are overproducing, but it's 4 a.m. and no one is running anything. You get negative price signals to convince people to charge batteries and stuff

like that. And so, and so that's a, like, this stuff is starting to kind of, people are trying to be aware of this, and it's starting to kind of, it's starting to become more front of mind. But I still think it's like, it's, it's non obvious to people, until you kind of poke into the space that like what you said, it's like, every electricity has It's funny, I think people probably don't know that Texas has their own grid. There

are three grids in the United States, East, West, and Texas. I think that's hilarious. And ERCOT, I mean, so I don't even know what ERCOT stands for, Energy Something Committee of Texas, I don't know. But they are pretty innovative, I think, generally speaking, right? They're considered the ones, they have more of this real-time stuff, they have the Ironically, it's electric reliability. a progressive state when it comes to modern energy markets, as you just said. It's

very, very interesting. This also has meant that there's been an absolute boom in solar and battery deployments. Um, and some, and in some sense, like eclipsing California in terms of build out rate, I think, um, this is also driven by the fact that California has like all of these micro checks and balances down to your local city council. on getting anything approved ever, whether it's low-income housing to solar farms to whatever, the

NIMBYs will want to have their shake of it. And so Texas has a bit different state politics on some of these things, and so the combo of The combo of the market-driven electricity thing plus, let's call it less local control in terms of what you can, if you own the land, you're generally allowed to build on it, ends up meaning that the renewable deployment in Texas is actually quite strong, But why is it, I think this is true, why is it true that California has

so much higher gas stove rates? Why don't Yeah, so that's a great one. And so this is actually because of where the gas... I will gaslight you on this. Where gas distribution to homes started was for gas lighting. So if you go to like the OG cities in the United States, Interesting. So it's just that we had gas infrastructure. It's not that we like did and we just never upgraded basically. Like we already had the

solution. We had a stove that worked. We had light streetlights that I don't know if the San Diego gas lamp district still has gas lamps, but you get the, you know, you get the, that's what it says. Yeah. Um, but,

but yeah, the, uh, someone will fact check us, but yeah, the, um, That's a factor where it's like, it's basically there's legacy infrastructure after they replace whale oil or whatever cursed thing they were using before. And then the second part is where all the kind of heavy industry was, was on the coast. So it's like, of course you'd have the gas, like you'd have the oil and gas refineries and stuff like that, like around there. So the distribution would be easy to do

because you'd have a big tank of it anyways. And so that's kind of, it's kind of like if you were a major urban area in 1900, decent odds you have gas, if that makes any sense. But then if you're ex-urban sprawl in Texas, 0% chance you have gas. And then there's some other fun ones around building codes and other things. So like Florida, my understanding is like some of these Miami high-rises can't have gas because of like hurricane risk.

And if you have a gas leak, it can cause a fire. So there's also that All right, well, we've actually we've gotten this far, we still haven't talked about how induction actually works. I think let's do that. I mean, we hinted at it with the whole electricity and magnetism thing. But so like, what's actually happening inside the stove that heats Yeah, so let's we can walk through a couple different types of stoves. So kind of like clear

this up, and then we'll get to induction stove. So gas stove is really simple. It's a flame under your pot. The flame heats the air, which heats your pot. And yeah, What's interesting about that and what's not expected is it's only about 40% efficient because it's more efficient at heating the air in your kitchen than it is at heating the pot, which is a little counterintuitive. So this is also where it's like, it makes it really challenging to compare performance

between various stove types because the BTUs of the burner, then you have to map through some various efficiency scaling things to compare to say an electric or induction stove. So then, let's talk about electric stove. There's kind of a couple different types of electric stoves. Induction is inclusive in that, but we'll separate that one out. The first type is like the ones with the coils that look like a spiral that are on your counter. The red glowy spirals underneath the glass, yeah. Or

the one that's above the glass. And in some cases, that's just like it conducts, you basically get a thing that gets hot and the pan touches it and it gets hot. Now, the improved version of that is what you just described, which is, that's called a radiant electric stove, and the way that works is basically you have a light bulb underneath the glass that glows mostly in infrared, and it heats the pot up. It also conductively heats through the glass as well, so

you kind of get two modes of heating there. The big problem with that is it takes literally seconds for that glow to modulate, so if you are about to burn something, you can't just turn it down, because it'll still be heating your pan up, Even after you turn it down, so you end up having to like lift the pan off the stove and stuff like that. It almost changes how you cook. And meanwhile, like gas is like you directly adjust the dial, it directly adjusts the flame in

real time. So that's like one of the things that people really like about gas stoves. Induction gives you that back mostly. And so the way induction works is the stove doesn't get hot anymore. There is a coil in the stove, but it's actually a 25,000 hertz alternating current signal. And the reason you have to go really high is for reasons I'll just describe later. So basically you're putting 25,000 times a second, you're basically sending a, like a sine wave into

the, at very high current into this coil. That coil then forms a magnetic field that's switching at that frequency. The pan is a piece of metal, and you can think of this as actually a transformer, and it's like the world's crappiest transformer. The pan is, in some sense, you've got a bunch of what's called windings on the coil underneath the glass. The pan is one winding. It's just a circle. And so, but

it's also shorted. It's a short circuit. And so what'll end up happening is you get losses in the pan, and you make the pan out of, material usually has to have some steel in it. And so it's kind of high resistance. It will lose energy in that section of the circuit. And that energy loss turns into heat, which heats the pan. So the pan itself heats itself by virtue of being in a short circuit with the inductor induction coil that's beneath the glass. Now there's a couple ways this heat also

happens. So basically you also get heat through, my understanding is through magnetostriction. So basically you're also flipping the magnetic domains inside the steel. from like North-South, like basically you're flipping them between states at a high rate, and that also causes heating as well. But yeah, that's, and so for this reason you need, you typically need a ferromagnetic, or so it has iron, pan

to make induction work well. There's a couple, there's one product I think that works with aluminum and copper, but I found out that they cheated because they just make the underneath of the glass hot But yeah, so that's the one constraint that you end up having to have. Now, the good news is most pan makers are realizing that induction is becoming popular and they're making sure that all their pans Yeah, so the pan is basically a short like you can think of this as like you

have like a spiral wound coil. So it's a bunch of windings in a transformer you then the pan is just a single winding. So instead you're putting a huge amount of current through that pan at very high frequency and At high frequencies, you get what's called the skin effect, where only the top layer of the, or in this case, the bottom layer of the pan, will actually carry the current. So you have a very skinny wire.

You can think of this as a very skinny wire that you're putting a lot of current through, which Yeah, there's a couple different things that you have to do here. So like, there's a, this kind of goes into the weeds on power electronics design and various other things like that. the frequency that typically

you want to do is the lowest frequency that you can hear. That makes So you know that like annoying mosquito noise that like people used to like prank people with like 10 years ago that we probably both

of us can't hear anymore. Um, so that, that annoying mosquito noise is like just below what you, what induction typically drives So you would ideally, assume that everyone on earth was deaf, like would you choose to- You could run it at lower Now there's kind of a sweet spot in terms of like thickness of the pan, the material, like various other things. And then the other thing is you end up needing smaller capacitors

the higher the frequency you are. So there's kind of this like, Because what you're doing is, the way induction drive circuits work, you're trading energy between a capacitor and an inductor in kind of a resonant circuit. So you're moving stuff between an electric field and a magnetic field back and forth. Now, the faster you do that, the smaller those components need

to be. That makes sense. Because you're transferring less energy per And that's sort of the same thing that's happening with like, wow, I'm like really getting over my skis here, but like gallium nitride and That's why your power brick is getting smaller, because the magnetic components and the Can you explain that just like for people who have never heard of gallium Yeah, so the reason your power brick on your phone has gotten smaller but

like higher power over the last 10 years or so is because of advances in new types of semiconductor technology, primarily in this case will be gallium nitride in like the electric vehicle case, it's been silicon carbide, but we'll go to talk about gallium nitride. The primary advantage is you can switch at much higher frequencies without huge losses. And so what this means is you can essentially have a really, really, really efficient power brick that

is really small. Now, the change you make to make that small as you run the So to convert a DC voltage to another DC voltage, which is how a power brick works, it converts AC to DC and then DC to DC, you actually have to do what's called like a switch mode power supply, and you essentially have to make an AC waveform again inside that. That's a little oversimplification, but that's essentially what happens. And then if you run that at a higher frequency, you can make the inductor

and the capacitor smaller. And so that's the primary advantage. That's been the driving force for why this has been possible, is basically new transistor architecture is driven by the new semiconductor technology is enabling smaller magnetic components in power bricks. Are you guys using that for your stove? No, we don't. Yeah, so actually, we're very conscientious on how to make sure we cost optimize the system. Because they're

awesome, but they're really expensive. It's expensive. It's also like you don't necessarily need them. So like at this frequency we're talking about here, you do not need gallium nitride for When the stove is heating up or cooling down, is that just flowing more

Yeah. So if you want to cool it down, you turn it off. So it works just the same as turning off a gas flame. And then, yeah, to input more power, yeah, you increase the AC current in the coil. And then that proportionally means more power in Yeah, because one of the things that I know that you guys have as a big selling point, basically, is like very sensitive temperature control. Is that because you can change the current really precisely? Or is it because you also have like

Yeah, so there's a couple things going on here. So one is, yes, a bunch of more usually cheaper induction stoves. And I think even some of the nicer ones, when you go to lower power levels, they start clicking on and off. And so simmer, and this actually works kind of like your gas stove in simmer mode, where the burner will click on, click off, click on, click off, versus you

could actually throttle it down really low. And so we had to make sure that we could throttle down low enough to make micro adjustments and stuff like that. That was one thing. But then the second piece was, Yeah, the temperature sensor, if you go and increase the power of an induction stove to like 10,000 watts, which is what we're doing, you can quickly outstrip like, now for boiling water, it's usually fine, but you don't know

if like the person put water in the pan, like if that makes any sense. Like you can't guarantee certain things like that. And so you very quickly could go into a spot where like the pan is not at a safe, temperature very quickly. And like for typical cooking, you don't really need to go very high, like 500 degrees is kind of like, first stove, it's like, it's enough. Because you're going to be, that's at the point where you're smoking all your oils, making a huge mess, like this sort

of thing. But you need to basically be able to tell like, hey, is the temperature within nominal range in real time and ideally really fast, because like you could be in a situation where like, you put a pot of water on the stove, the last droplet of water boils off, it's running at max power,

and then it doesn't, like, you don't get in trouble. And so we had to basically go in and invent a new type of temperature sensor for the system that had, like, just way better performance characters than anything else in the market to make that work. The implications are actually pretty sweet, though, on the low end. So we were, you can do things like, you can do things like sous vide a steak without That's so cool. I remember, I think you tweeted about that or something, and it just

broke someone's brain. They're like, what are you talking about? What do you mean that you can sous Then some other people roasted me for not searing the steak properly. We fixed that problem. But one thing that's fun is actually, we can sear a steak without

Yeah, you just set the temperature to be above the point where the steak goes like, you get some charring on the steak, but below the point where the oil smokes, and you're like... That's brilliant. And

And you're doing all these cool experiments. You're doing, like, you know, you told me about this fried egg thing that you did, and you're, like, becoming, you know, the next top No, I mean, I think I get roasted, pun intended, by all sorts of folks, and, like, we're very excited to, like, get real chefs in the mix and kind of see what they can do with this thing, because I think there's gonna be some really exciting stuff that people wouldn't be able to do. Not even me.

The egg thing was fun, because it's just, like, I can fry an egg in front of you, and it's, like, it comes out perfect every time. And I don't make eggs for breakfast because, Yeah, totally. But would you ever build in like routines? Like, you know, press a button, like the popcorn button on your microwave, but instead of the fry an Yeah, so there's actually some interesting like restrictions on what you can do in terms of unsupervised control for stoves. For ovens, you can do some stuff

like that. But for stoves, what we found is, so the answer is yes, we can do things like this. It's just there may be additional, This one is counterintuitive, but you're not allowed to have an auto-off feature. Because then, the point is, they don't want people to expect that But then what if it just is safe if you Ironically, it is safe if you walk away from it, but it's not going to turn off. We're not allowed to turn off, but you can turn to like, yeah. You're not allowed to

fully turn off, but yeah. But yeah, what's cool with this is I can fry an egg in front of you, and then the pan could still be at 330 degrees or something, just like chilling. And it'll be hot, but it's not gonna be like, you're not gonna accidentally burn Well, what I'm really hearing from you is that I need to figure out how to jailbreak my stove as soon as I get one of these things that I can set up my illicit methods for I love it. Okay, well, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about

manufacturing. How do you actually make a consumer device and get it out to hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of homes? I know that you've obviously thought a lot about this. How far are you guys? You're shipping at the end of this year, I think, Yeah, we're shipping in Q4, and that's it. what I would call reasonable volumes. And that's like if you're a, you're not a friend of the company, this is like general availability. I think we're working through the production process to

get through all that stuff. I don't have detailed play-by-play I can really share, but I can also describe generally what not exactly on our schedule, but like what the process looks like and like, you know, what you asked in general, like, I'm curious generally about how, like, how do you go find the right manufacturer? How do you persuade them to take your business? Cause I presume that you have to, um, like Yeah. So let's start from the very first part of this, which is okay.

Build versus buy effectively. And so like, I'll, I'll, I'll kind of knock your probable subscriber base because this is, this actually a good point. It's like SpaceX made a lot of, wave by being like, we're vertically integrating everything, we're gonna do it, we're gonna

insource as much as possible. A big story with this is, well, the legacy aerospace supply chain wasn't able to kind of keep up with what SpaceX was doing, so they had to kind of like, and also we're just gonna overcharge them massively. There's the pros from the Elon book on the so-called idiot index and things like that. So it's like, okay, if you want to build something fast, cheap, and reliable, it's like, Well, consumer electronics is a very different beast than aerospace in some sense. And

so a big portion of this is if you can leverage the consumer electronics supply chain, you can actually potentially even lap the legacy appliance vendors because it's just like they've had to be dramatically more advanced and mature than pretty much any other industry at being able to do stuff like this. And so we were kind of dead set on like, let's work with someone in the consumer electronics space.

Now, the next point is like, who's going to work with you here? And it's like, I think there's three different things that startups do when

they go find a manufacturer. One is, it's kind of like, I will optimize on some sort of local option or things like that then you'll have to you'll eventually maybe outgrow or like yeah but you'll you'll essentially be in this local maxima that will scale you a big story in the united states is that the manufacturers there's a couple big major manufacturers that are quite good they don't really work with startups okay and so um and then additionally the engineers that would be like you'd

want to like augment your team. You get people who are good at like manufacturing engineering, but you won't get, they won't be able to provide like design engineers who could design a smartphone or something like that to your cost. Now, in Asia, you get like a vertically integrated team that's almost like a product team that can go and just do stuff for you. Now, getting them over the hump where you're able to do that is not trivial. Like this is not a,

and I think I've seen two ways this can work. One is, One is basically like you're a known quantity and like, you know, I'm like someone famous made some calls. And then the second one is kind of like, um, like in the second one, there's maybe there's three, actually, there's kind of like the known quantity one. There's the, like, you can convince them that, that you, you're

probably a known quantity. And then the third one is like, you can actually go to like, more mom and pop scale places that maybe, that have good equipment and access and things like that, but maybe aren't like, name brands and stuff like that. Now it actually is more of the like, you move to Shenzhen and figure it out yourself kind of thing, which I've heard people do successfully. I would say we're probably in that middle one, not in

the first one or the second one. Um, but yeah, so that's, you basically define someone who has the capability of doing this and wants to work with you. And ideally like has engineering team that can augment your team because you're a tiny startup and like you're building something complicated. Um,

so there's that. And then the second piece is like the way of working and like how to get things across. And it's kind of like the big story is if you do stuff with your manufacturer, including prototyping, then all of your manufacturing will then translate to production immediately. Or all of your prototyping translates for production immediately. And so then, and then it's kind of like, part of this is like when you're a new company, you have

to kind of get on the horse and that's kind of a fun exercise. But once you're established, then it means that subsequent products, it's like, oh cool, we can just take these building blocks we already built and like things can just be really fast. There's that, there's a lot of like, I had to do a lot of kind of like, dog and pony show and like a

lot of FaceTime and building trust and stuff like that. I think that was a big, big aspect of Um, does it look similar to how you build, like how you raise money from investors where you're like, here's my pitch on here,

It's, you do have to kind of do some stuff like that. It's not, it's not exactly the same, but it's, it's like, there is a little bit of a similar skill set, but it's definitely mixed with like, And then it was, I think the bigger thing was learning how to scale down from like, I was at Facebook Meta, or Meta before, I guess, most of the Oculus team back when it was branded that way. And so, on the Oculus team, like, it was kind of a zero to one thing for

manufacturing boot up, and I got to see a good chunk of it. You can rerun some of that playbook, but obviously you're not like a trillion And so you're, you go out there, you pitch folks, you find somebody to bring on. How do you actually, like, you said you're prototyping with them. So are you sending them designs and then they're manufacturing something and they're shipping it to you to check it out? Or, like, how is

Oh, you go, you go, you go. You send the team, yeah. So it's, yeah, so it's, I think that there's a, you basically have to be super willing to fly out. That's the key thing. But yeah, it's actually at the level, there's a couple different ways to slice the thing. It's like you could own the

whole design team yourself, be like, here's the final designs, just go build these. That works. But the thing is, oftentimes they'll want to source components. You're not going to go, say, buy this resistor or this capacitor or this inductor or this IC from this specific, You don't really want to hand hold them on that. It's like they will go and take care of that for you. That's like that's like a traction layer one. That's kind of what that's closer to what like meta would

do for some other programs. There's there's also kind of like a layer above where it's like you're using the manufacturer team to do stuff like PCB layout. So maybe some of the detailed CAD design, like after you kind of like give them the industrial design surfaces, like stuff like that. And then there's much more of like a, oh, this team is basically just like additional

engineers underneath your team structure. And so if you can get to that point, it's like you get a lot of leverage and like, it's really, really effective, but that's something that, that's something that's, it

Wow, interesting. I mean, I just know nothing about this world. So like I had so many questions, but I think I, my main one is like, I assume that in the early days they're going to charge you more, like they're going to, because they're providing more services to No, it costs more when you get closer to production because you're buying the tooling for production base. You're buying the tool, you're basically buying the factory line equipment is like what's going on, what's going on later on.

earlier on it's like yeah you may have like 15 engineers like doing initial design work or something like that but like that's not again you have a there's a labor arbitrage you you can like yeah compared to you get to a lot of leverage it gives you a lot of leverage now part

of the there's there's a lot of interesting effects here, which is like, when do you start the vendor engagement? And I would say like good examples are like, Oh, we're figuring out the new type of temperature sensor. We're figuring out like how best to do the induction drive architecture, topology, like, or we're figuring out like the actual product architecture. It's probably not worth engaging until you've got some of the key stuff figured out.

But like, once you're kind of like, okay, I have a 90% plus confidence that this being the right direction, let's just shoot in a straight line now. you'll be really good. The other thing you'll find out is like component sourcing, like they will solve things through their supply chain. Whereas you will solve things in like, I will, you'll order stuff from McMaster and

like, that doesn't, you know, it's like, it doesn't. And so it's like, it's like, okay, then you have to translate your McMaster order into something that you can actually go build with the factory. And so that translation, and basically if you can get most of the later stage stuff that's kind of after the architecture's been figured out through the manufacturer, you can skip that translation step, which is a huge deal. I'm curious to hear about sort of high level, what

are the things that make you excited about this company? I mean, are there big trends toward electrification? I mean, maybe the IRA is maybe something that's in this category, like tax credits for people for this kind of thing. I'm curious to hear it. What Yeah, so I mean, I mean, I think I think basically, I'll distill this down really

succinctly. It's like, we're basically building the highest performance appliances, and like the architecture for essentially power delivery, both to the grid and within the appliance, basically making that all next level. And That in a sense is the backdoor. Basically, you have this high desirability, massive step up in performance, and you use that to bulk deploy batteries on the grid at scale. And so the big picture here is, I think Tesla said they only sold 600,000 Powerwalls worldwide.

And so if you think of that versus, I think that kind of implies a number that's like, And

it's like the most famous home battery product. I think it's in the order of like one-tenth the U.S. battery capacity per year at Powerwall. It's a tiny fraction. A huge chunk of this is probably grid-scale stuff. And so when you think of it that way, you're like, no one's really cracked the home battery thing because home batteries have been in a sense like this like prepper backup thing or sold at solar. Like it's not been this like, there's

not like another reason to buy a battery. And so what we realized is like there's 140 plus million homes in America. You can probably get them three or four appliances with this tech. That is a 1.4 terawatt hour market for home batteries just by virtue of saying your appliances will become more awesome. It's a good sales pitch. I feel like that's like, I think that's kind of like it's counterintuitive, but it's kind of just huge. And then if you control that many batteries, you kind of

are like the, like you're the market maker on the grid. Like this is not a small, yeah, this is not a small situation. And so, I mean, that's like a third of total capacity or something for the entire, yeah. And can you flow energy the other way? Like can you, are there places where that's true and Yeah, there's local regulatory aspects of this as well. We're designing the

system so it looks to your house like it's a home battery system. Some of this depends on, there's a bunch of local regulatory fun with all this stuff, but we've been working with the relevant standards bodies to make sure this actually is Tell me, tell me. Gas is decel anyway. So the situation with this is, I think it's very, you see this culture war push on like, the government better not take away my gas stoves, et cetera. It's like, I actually think the right

way to approach this is like a very measured, like almost like technocratic way where it's like, My goal is to reliably kick the ass of every other stove available, and I'm not gonna go, like, force anyone at gunpoint to go buy my thing. I mean, like, I like gas stoves. They're fine. Like, there's not a problem here. That said, like, I think there is gonna be a bit of, like, an indoor air quality concern situation that definitely seems

to be sticking. And then I also think that, new technology is like what we're doing especially on the control side um we'll make it very obvious that the next generation of tech is here and like that's gonna that's gonna be the thing that convinces people to switch to electric or induction not um not like hey i will punitively say that when you renovate your kitchen, you're not allowed to do this, you're not allowed to put a gas stove back in. Totally. And so I think that's the way that

I see it. And then also the government, I'm generally pro the incentives they've been putting in place. I think doing this with incentives versus doing it with bans is probably I think that about wraps it up. Sam, thank you so much for doing this. Is there anywhere you want to send people? Do you want to tell them to apply to your site or buy a Yeah, so we're taking pre-orders now at impulselabs.com. You

can also check us out on YouTube. There's a bunch of content from some of the friends of the pod and otherwise as well that you can check out.