First Time Founders with Ed Elson – This Founder Raised $900M to Power the Grid
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Scott, you recently wrote a post on your blog, No Mercy, No Malice, about the energy industry and your predictions for what is going to happen in terms of our energy consumption and global energy demand. Could you summarize what your thoughts are there? We always find a way to put...

energy to work. And I think that essentially when you look at the problems around carbon and global warming, and then you couple that with so many nations developing who want, who are producing hundreds of millions of people coming into the middle class. And what happens when you come into the middle class, you start getting a car, your energy consumption goes up, you start eating more beef, all of these things that require a ton more energy.

The demand here is insatiable. And so people who come up with whether it's nuclear or some sort of different renewable or near self-propulsion machines in the ocean, whatever it is, that is going to create a lot of billionaires and maybe our first trillionaire. Welcome to First Time Founders. Here's a stat I learned recently. A chat GPT request consumes 10 times more energy than a Google search.

We're in the early innings, but AI is already using up more power than small nations, and that consumption is expected to triple by the end of the decade, which leaves us with an existential question for our planet. How are we going to keep the lights on?

My next guest is a pioneer in energy, specifically energy storage. After designing batteries for Elon Musk as Tesla's director of energy, he decided to start his own company to help us store energy cheaper and for longer. Over six years, he raised $900 million in funding, built a 1 million square foot battery factory in West Virginia, and will soon deploy the biggest battery ever created.

There are few individuals alive today who have had a bigger impact on the energy industry and its future. This is my conversation with Mateo Jaramillo, CEO and founder of FormEnergy.

Good to see you, Matteo. Good to see you, Ed. Nice to be here. Let's get right into it, because I know that you don't have all the time in the world. So, you know, we've been discussing energy a lot on this podcast recently, more than usual, and it's been coming up a lot, mostly because of AI. Just a couple stats that really grabbed our attention. One is that energy demand for AI is currently doubling every 100 days.

And two, partly as a result, the total amount of energy consumed by data centers is expected to triple in the next six years. And for context, that would be enough energy to power 40 million homes in America. Now, I know there's a lot more to the energy conversation than AI, but I would say that the key takeaway that we're learning is that basically in the next few years, we're

far more than we produce today. And we're going to need new, innovative solutions to generate, store, and distribute that energy, which is exactly what you are doing with your company, Form Energy. I'd like to start with some very basic stuff before we get into you and Form. Your mission is to

quote, transform the grid. I hear that term a lot, the grid, the electric grid, the power grid. What actually is the grid? The grid is perhaps the most complex machine that humans have ever made, and also the largest. In many ways, think of it as a single integrated entity, bi-continent more or less,

where we are simultaneously producing and consuming a commodity at the same time. And in the case of the electric grid, that is, of course, electricity. And today, that's happening on every continent in slightly different ways. But largely what we do is we generate electricity in one location and we move it to where it's needed, where the demand is, where what we call the load sits.

And so we have this reconciliation that's happening on a sub-second basis, in fact, you know, micro-second basis, for production and consumption of a good. So that's what we're talking about when we say the grid. It's basically the electric system, the production or generation, as we say, the transmission, the distribution, and then the consumption. But you are an innovator in...

And I don't think you mentioned that word when you described the grid there. I don't think a lot of people understand or appreciate what a significant industry that is, let alone realize that it actually exists. Give us a rundown on energy storage. What is it?

What are the different types? How does it play into this complex system which you described, which is the grid? Yeah, and part of the reason I didn't mention it is because one of the reasons why the electric grid is so impressive as a feat of engineering is because it doesn't use a lot of storage, in fact. It's sort of counterintuitive, at least not from the generation to the consumption side of things.

You think about any other very large industry. It could be retail, refrigerated goods. It could be data. We have data warehouses. It could be, you name it. There is a version of inventory that sits somewhere between production and consumption because it's a natural thing to do. That's how we sort of move things around and become efficient at that. Whereas on the electric grid, we're doing all of that in real time, generation and consumption. Yeah.

There's upstream versions of storage. We have liquid fuels or we have coal or we have these kinds of things. But in between the generation and consumption, we don't have a lot of storage. So this is a growing area because there is a growing need for storage because now we have different kinds of generation. We do not have those fuels in many cases to just store and have sit around until we need them. Yes, we still, of

do some of that, but increasingly in very large volumes, the lowest cost version of electricity is the renewables. And these are by definition, weather driven, right? Renewables and therefore intermittent, right? They go away and they come back. And so we need to think about the storage that we need to reconcile these generation resources at the scale that is really impacting the entire electric system.

Now, there has been electric storage on the grid from the beginning because people did realize some of this is a challenge. And primarily it was water. So you sort of had water up on a hill more or less, and you would run it through a turbine going down the hill to generate electricity. And then during periods of low cost, you would pump it back up the hill. And so that's been sort of a known way to use energy storage for a very long time.

And of course, we rely on nature's natural mechanism for that, which is snow in the mountains, which very helpfully melts during the other half of the year and sends water downstream that we sort of capture, which we then put to productive use.

And so the question now is how do we bring more types of energy storage onto the grid cost effectively and at scale such that we can incorporate even more of these low-cost, renewable, but intermittent sources of electricity? So it sounds like then coal, oil,

those are both energy producers and examples of energy storage. That would be right? Exactly. In some ways, yes. I mentioned the use of energy storage paired with renewables, but in fact, they can also be very effectively paired with those conventional resources as well.

So I mentioned sort of intermittent weather, right? Some going down, some coming back. But we also live in an increasingly volatile weather environment where we have these storms, you know, extreme heat or extreme cold. And that is also stressing the way that we have generated electricity for a very long time. So look at the winter storm Uri, which was this storm that happened a few years back in Texas and cost $60 billion worth of damage. You know, this sort of unprecedented freeze in the middle of February in Texas, right?

And one of the major reasons why the blackout lasted as long as it didn't was so impactful was because the natural gas resources were frozen in place more or less. In other words, you couldn't access the stored energy. And so that's another way that we're looking to say, well, what is a non-correlated way to store this energy in such a way that we have just a really reliable, robust system?

system overall, because increasingly, and I'm sure we'll talk about this on the AI front, increasingly electricity is a requirement to operate the modern society. There's a woman who runs a utility called Portland Gas and Electric, Maria Pope, and she's a leader in the industry. And she's fond of saying that electricity may only be 2% of GDP in the United States, but it's the first 2%.

And, you know, everything else sort of relies on that 2%. And so having different kinds of energy storage show up in ways that it hasn't been required to previously becomes a really interesting and compelling and fun, frankly, aspect of sort of where we are in the electricity industry. So it's almost like, I mean, just to put it very simply...

A wind turbine is generating the energy from the wind, but it's not necessarily storing it. And as we increasingly rely on renewables, we're going to need more ways to store that energy in a way that... And I love that point you made that the freezing weather conditions, we couldn't even access those more traditional forms of energy storage. Which brings us to batteries. I think some people, maybe not everyone, has heard of the lithium-ion battery.

I feel like there's been this increased interest in lithium. That's what I understand to be the, what do we want to call it? Blue chip battery that we have been using for energy storage for however long. You have a different

battery called the Iron Air battery. What's the difference between this traditional battery we've been using for the past however many decades, I actually don't know, versus your battery, the Iron Air battery? Yeah, so lithium-ion has been around for some time. It was sort of first discovered in

in the late 70s, early 80s. There's different variants of that battery. So lithium-ion covers a class of different kinds of those batteries. And it was commercialized in the 80s for camcorders. So pre-cell phone, of course, you had to have a dedicated device, which was a shoulder-mounted camera, this huge bulky thing, but was an enormous success commercially because for the first time you were untethered. You didn't have to keep this thing plugged in and you could walk around your kid's

baseball game or a wedding or whatever it was and take video footage. That's why lithium ion was commercialized. And lithium ion is a wonderful chemistry principally because of density. So you can cram a lot of energy in a very small amount of volume and it doesn't weigh very much. And so it enabled all these subsequent consumer electronics applications.

The ones that we sort of take for granted today, laptops and phones that fit in our pockets. And they are literally right next to our existence. We're so reliant on them. And so it's no surprise that we're also using a lot of lithium ion batteries for the electric grid because it's a proven technology. It's now being made at massive scale, especially thanks to the automotive industry, which is driving that.

scale and cost down. And largely what they're doing is helping to meet the peak of the electric grid. So think about the patterns of electricity consumption that happen throughout the day,

They follow the patterns of human existence, right? So very quiet at night, and then they ramp up during the day, and there's a peak that you see, which happens in the middle of the day when sort of activity is at its greatest. And then it comes down over the course of a night and sort of goes to bed, if you will. And historically, we've used coal or natural gas or hydro to sort of match those cycles. We turn it

turn things on and off or ramp them up or down, and batteries being wonderful at coming on when we need them and going off when we don't need them, that's the very first application for a lithium ion on the grid as well, is to meet those peaks, those relatively short-duration peaks that we have as an electric system. Because again, we need to reconcile all of this in real time, right? It's use it or lose it electricity. And so having these

batteries show up instantaneously and provide that power exactly when we need it for a few hours and then go away. That's a very helpful function for electric storage. One key feature of lithium ion or any battery really is that duration goes hand in hand with cost. In other words, you can't really separate how long you discharge it from how much it costs to do that, right? Because it all comes down to that. And lithium ion is great from a

energy density standpoint and from a cycle standpoint, you can charge and recharge it many thousands of times now. It is not so great comparatively speaking from a cost standpoint. And so for the purposes of the electric grid anyway, phones and laptops and cars are quite different. But from the electric grid standpoint, it's cost effective to only discharge it for a few hours at a time. In other words, generally between two and four hours duration. Anything longer than that, it's really just not cost competitive.

And so think about the landscape of the electric grid. We have to solve all of the challenges, right, of intermittency, not just a few hours at a time. We've got to solve for seasonal imbalances. We have to solve for, you know, extreme weather that sits around for a week or for, you know, four days or whatever it might be. And so to solve those problems, we need to start to look to other types of energy storage that really can be cost effective over those much longer durations than just a couple hours at a time.

which brings us pretty nicely to the ion air battery, which from my understanding, it lost several days in comparison. One of the reasons why we liked this technology was it had been demonstrated. You can rust and unrust iron reliably many times.

but it had never been commercialized because it didn't have a killer app. It was first investigated in the 1970s in the United States under actually a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to Westinghouse, which was one of the main electric entities at the time, as well as a Swedish national lab right around that same time as well. But when they sort of

dug into it, iron air batteries are not very suitable for vehicles or for consumer electronics or for anything else, frankly. It sort of sat on the shelf, relatively speaking, for about 50 years. And when we were starting Form about seven years ago, we went looking for things that did exist but which had never been commercialized. And we saw iron air and we said, this looks like now there is a killer app. And

And that killer app is on the grid for much longer duration than any of the other technologies can go after. And it's, again, because of the cost, right? If we need a certain duration to be much longer to bridge those multiple days of intermittency that we face, or the weather volatility, broadly speaking, then we have to come in at a much lower cost to get that much longer duration, right? That's sort of the inevitable trade that you make.

And so that's what we sort of picked up off the shelf and dusted off and said, now let's apply 50 years of human knowledge in electrochemistry, right, battery development, corrosion science, knowledge of iron, right, all these things, and go commercialize that battery. Not just prove that the science works, but build a device at scale of a manufacturing facility and keep the cost entitlement where it is and drive performance further than even what they thought they could get.

50 years ago. And so that's what we've been doing. That's been the work of the company is to really drive this commercialization of iron air as a chemistry into the world for the first time. What has the demand for these batteries looked like

in the past couple of years, it appears, I mean, especially based on the amount of funding that you've secured, that there is already a serious need for these. Is that what you're experiencing on the sales end? Yeah, absolutely. And of course, the picture changes quickly, relatively speaking. So when we started the company,

We said, well, we're going to build a 100-hour battery that's, you know, one-tenth the cost of living money. And people said, a lot of people said, ah, well, that's not going to be relevant for 20 or 30 years. You know, good luck, right? It's going to take forever for a market to show up for that kind of thing. And what very clearly fell out of that really detailed analysis that we ended up doing with utilities, by the way, was if you can have a 100-hour battery, you're

at the cost point, because those two things go together, then you drive a whole new asset class on the electric system, and there's a huge amount of value right now. You don't have to wait 20 or 30 years. You can address pockets of that intermittency or reliability challenges or whatever else that might be right now, because it's just another cost-effective asset. It doesn't even really matter. And so that came out very, very clearly.

And we started working with these utilities. So our customers are those utilities, right? If you're a customer of a utility, it's probably the name of the utility that you send a bill to every month. This is Xcel Energy in Colorado and Minnesota or Georgia Power in the state of Georgia or Pacific Gas and Electric, PG&E in California, Dominion in Virginia, these kinds of entities.

that are under the way the United States operates these things, they're essentially regulated monopolies. So they have a natural monopoly, right? They run the wires. You're not going to have two companies running wires to your house, right, to compete. So if you have blackouts, it's their problem, right? They're the operator. They're responsible for it fundamentally.

and they have to keep costs under control, right? It's gotta be safe. And increasingly it has to be decarbonized. And so this is sort of the challenge of the last 10 years of the utility industry is to figure out how to solve all of that and now add on top of it load growth, which is another new challenge, relatively new challenge that the industry is facing, which it hasn't had to face for the last 20 or 30 years, right? Load growth, right? The amount of new demand for electricity has been flat for the last 20 or 30 years.

Before that, it did grow very quickly. We electrified the whole country in the United States basically from zero,

not basically from zero in the 1920s, all the way sort of the 1970s, there was very quick load growth and it sort of evened off. So we have built a lot of electricity sort of system capacity historically, but we haven't had to do that for the last 23 years. So load growth on top is a challenge that maybe the electric industry is not used to meeting. It's something that they did be in the past, but it's a brand new challenge. And you mix it in with these other ones of

of reliability and cost and decarbonization. And now it's just an even more complex set of challenges that the utility needs to solve. And into that mix, we're introducing a new asset, a new resource, a new tool, if you will, for them to solve all these problems simultaneously. Yeah, I mean, this idea of energy consumption going up and then being flat, and it's just about to tick up again, which I just find fascinating. It seems like it's just because of AI, right?

I did a little bit of research on this in the past couple weeks and just sort of looked at per capita energy consumption over the past 200 years, basically. And it more or less is an exponential curve. I mean, this is per capita. It's not that we have more people on Earth. People are consuming more energy.

Is that just going to continue into eternity? Are humans just on a per capita basis going to consume more and more and more? It's a great question. And part of the question is, is that consumption being enabled by low costs, right? You know, these things go hand in hand, right? So if you build the highways wider, do more people just show up, right? Because they want to use the resource more.

But all of modern human civilization is based on low-cost, abundant energy. That's sort of a fundamental of the civilization that we live in today. And where that energy comes from, the mix of it, has shifted over the last 200 years. So initially, of course, that energy was wood. We literally burned through forests of Europe that are just now essentially growing back in many ways. And so we started doing

do fuel switching. So we went from wood to coal and then from coal to more hydropower and then ultimately to other sources of hydrocarbons. And we've been reliant on the hydrocarbons for the last hundred years.

maybe mixing in some nuclear in there fairly recently. And then now we're pulling in more renewables. So you do see a fuel switching and the numbers going up because costs continue to go down, right? That is a feature of the energy in the industry more broadly, is that despite all of that growth, despite all of that demand, costs, in fact, continue to go down on a real basis. We'll be right back.

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Hey, Sue Bird here. I'm Megan Rapinoe. Women's sports are reaching new heights these days, and there's so much to talk about. So Megan and I are launching a podcast where we're going to deep dive into all things sports, and then some. We're calling it A Touch More.

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Whether it's breaking down the biggest games or discussing the latest headlines, we'll be bringing a touch more insight into the world of sports and beyond. Follow A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday. We're back with First Time Founders. I'd love to...

get an understanding for how you arrived here, and that is at Iron Air Battery Manufacturing, one of the leading renewable energy storage people in the world. Just a little bit of your background. You grew up in Salinas, California. You went on to Harvard for undergrad. You studied economics. Then you

You made what I would consider a very rare move in the world of tech, which is you went to divinity school. You went to Yale and you were studying to become a theologian. And from my understanding, you wanted to be a priest. Tell us about your childhood and especially about that decision to go to divinity school and perhaps how that may have translated into your career in renewables. Yeah, so the town of Salinas, where I grew up in California, it's an agricultural community. So we grow lettuce, essentially. That's the primary good there. And that...

community was totally transformed when they figured out how to ship lettuce from the West Coast to the East Coast. In other words, refrigerated car, or you want to think about it, storage, right? Energy storage. And my parents were public servants, my dad a lawyer for farmworkers, my mom a teacher at public schools for children of farmworkers, essentially.

And so I saw also sort of the energy nexus, right? The way that having access to low-cost energy and that being a fundamental building block of civilization, how that intersects advantaged and disadvantaged communities in some very important ways. And so that has always been sort of a feature of my thinking in general. And I went to Harvard and I studied energy economics largely. And then I actually worked in the tech industry for a few years after that. This was the very first tech boom in Boston in the late 90s, early 2000s. And

uh, was, was largely disaffected with what I saw in that industry. It seemed, it seemed like it couldn't be real. And indeed that was the case. And so I had a hunger to work on what I felt to be more meaningful topics, vocationally, you know, professionally, I, I like to work, I like to work hard. I want that to mean something. And so, uh, I also take my, my faith seriously. And I, I wanted to pursue sort of the intellectual aspects of that and was open to becoming a

an ordained priest, but found out very early on, thanks to the curriculum at Yale, that I'm wholly unfit to be a priest. That should not be my job. And so once I realized that that was just not gonna be my vocation,

And I took those same skills and tried to apply them to figure out what did I want to do. And energy, you know, sort of having been a lifelong fascination for me, I really sort of wanted to pursue that. Now that's a very broad topic. And so I started to just do a lot of research and, you know, a lot of

a lot of connections. It's one of the wonderful parts of Harvard. I, they used to have a book that you could literally open and call people, alumni that were willing, that were in the field of energy, that you, they were willing to take a call from. The manual LinkedIn. Yeah, exactly. I had to physically go to an office to take down numbers. And, uh,

And started to sort of piece together a thesis, if you will, about what the energy landscape was going to look like. And even then, you could see costs coming down on wind and solar. They were very high compared to where they are today, but the trend was definitely pointing in the right direction and steep, right? Steep down. And so I sort of made a sector bet. I basically just...

bet vocationally that it would be an interesting field and it felt very relevant and needed to have compelling types of energy storage to take those renewable resources that were coming down in cost so quickly. Basically, I just said to myself, I bet at some point batteries will become relevant on the grid. And that's what I did. So I went to a company straight out of Divinity School and we

picked up my master's in theology and went to go work for a battery company. And then that was in New York. And then a few years after that, ended up at Tesla in 2009, where I started what became the Tesla Energy effort, taking the lithium-ion batteries out of the car and really for the first time putting them on the electric grid. You worked closely with J.B. Straubel, who was the co-founder of Tesla. I believe you were working with Elon Musk, too.

What were some of the learnings from being on that rocket ship? I mean, it sounds like, I love you say you made the sector bet. We often talk in this podcast about riding the right wave, picking the wave and then just riding through it. You did that with that sector and you also did that with a company. You went from a smaller startup to one of the largest and most influential companies in the world, right?

What was that experience like? Well, at the time, in 2009, it was definitely not one of the most influential. In fact, there was a Tesla death watch, right? There was this website that was trying to predict exactly when Tesla would fail because so many people were sure it was going to fail. So absolutely, it was a different moment for the company and for the electric vehicle movement in general.

Um, but it was, I could not think of a better place to go. It was also the Tesla was like a shining light for folks who really want to work on the hardest, most impactful problems. Tesla just was like, it was like moths to a flame for that place. Um, and so, you know, Elon rightly deserves a lot of credit for the vision that he said and the ambition of his goals, which, um, which, which were just, you know, completely inspiring, um,

And the quality of the people that ended up showing up is unparalleled, just spectacular. And so I got to work with JB and I got to work with Elon and a bunch of other colleagues, Drew, Beckley, and I could list many, many names there.

And, you know, some of the key learnings were go after hard problems. You'll get the best people to work on them. It's a little counterintuitive. Like great people don't want to work on mediocre challenges. They want to work on hard problems. They want to work on, in fact, the hardest problems. And if you pick the right ones and you set ambitious goals, you know, in some ways you end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy on that in terms of the type of talent you can bring into the company. Now, getting...

high-quality folks into the company, that's step one. You've got to continue to motivate them and drive them in the right way and everything else. But absolutely, I saw that play out to the company's benefit time and time again in those early days at Tesla as we went from my time there from about 300,000 to 30,000 people. It was quite the sweep. So that was certainly a key learning. Go after the big stuff that matters. Why not? But it wasn't enough to keep you. And then eventually you started your own company. Why...

Why did you decide to do that? Well, as much as I saw that Lithium Mine very clearly back in 2009 when I joined Tesla was going to be the next thing to come into the grid in a meaningful way and have a big impact.

It also became clear over my time there that lithium-ion was not the end-all, be-all for energy storage on the grid. And, you know, that just, that was increasingly clear as I talked to utility executives while I was building up the Tesla energy business there. You know, they would describe these other challenges that lithium-ion was just not going to be able to meet.

Additionally, seven and a half years roughly is enough time for me to spend at Tesla. You may have heard, it's an intense place to work. And so I love to work hard. I love to work on what I feel matters. And I'm also married and I got three kids. And I want to stay married and be in my kid's life in the right way. And so for me, that was enough. And it was enough for me that it was enough. I didn't have to keep staying there.

And I also wanted to leave on good terms. You know, everybody has a time at which, you know, it's time for them to leave Tesla. And I saw a moment and I just said, you know, now's a good time, right? I did exactly what I wanted to do. I started the Tesla Energy effort and got it stood up. And I'm super proud of the business that it is today and the role that I played early on. It's a great business.

And there were more things I still wanted to do specifically for energy storage, precisely because I made a sector bet, not a company bet. And so I saw more runway there and more opportunity and frankly, more fun to go back to an earlier stage and start something. And I didn't know that at the time when I left Tesla, but that's very quickly where my brain went to because I

I've been in the industry 20 years now. It turns out I'm not very good at thinking about much else other than energy storage for the electric grid. So it was sort of a natural inevitability, I suppose. And I also should say that I had never founded anything when I became a co-founder of Form. And before I had started a company just on my own that ended up merging to become Form.

But at the same time, I was 40 years old. I also knew exactly what needed to be done. And so, you know, I had zero doubt. You know, I need some encouragement from close friends and more importantly, my wife to take that step. You know, you do have to sort of take that very first step and say, I'm going to be a founder on something, do the incorporation, right? And push it forward, make the mental commitment to go do that.

But I also had, once I did take that step with that support, I also knew exactly what needed to be done. And I still feel that way. I see very clearly the path in front of the company. And that's because, you know, I've been doing this for a long time and I've seen good, I've seen bad, I've seen, you know, different ways to do things. And I think I've got a pretty good sense now for what works, not just for the industry, how to go build a business, energy storage specifically, but also for how to build an organization.

You mentioned that you were a co-founder and that the company merged. It's a very interesting story. I mean, the original company you created was a different company called Verse Energy, and then you ended up combining it with what I would call a competitor. I mean, it was this research team out of MIT, headed by this guy, Yip-Mick Chang, who's now your chief science officer. I believe his whole team is pretty much on your founding team.

Why did you decide to combine with someone else, specifically someone who was working on the same problems and thus competing with you? Yeah, this was maybe a benefit of the age that I was when I started it. At some point, you realize that sublimating the ego is in your own benefit. And before Tesla, I'd been at a failed battery company. We basically didn't do anything after working hard for years.

almost five years at that entity. And I wanted to make sure we gave ourselves every possible chance to succeed. And that included having multiple technical shots on goal and having people around the table from the very beginning that had been through this before. And so not just yet, but my other co-founders, Marco, Ted, and Billy,

We've all been in batteries before. This was nobody's first time around the block. And so having the collected decades of knowledge and wisdom and hard-earned scars was just too compelling to pass up. And we had more than one technical shot on goal. I had identified Iron Air on my own, but we didn't know at the time that that was going to succeed.

succeed at all, right? And so, you know, in the world, you know, starting at this stage, you know, that we did of novel R&D and, you know, early stage commercialization, inevitably, there are several cards that you turn over that's either

It's aces or it's zeros. And we're lucky enough that on Iron Air, we turned over enough of those early on to say, yeah, this is the one that's going to be, but you just never know. As a friend of mine says, sometimes the universe works the way that you want it to, but you don't know that going in, right? And so bringing five co-founders, which is an unusually large number of co-founders,

made complete sense to us at the time because we all got along very well, it turns out. And we're all still in the company. We're all still pulling hard on the company. It's now a huge advantage. We're 750 people and we have five founders throughout all parts of the company that represent the founder mentality that are completely committed to the success of this company. And so I can't imagine doing it any other way, being a sole founder in this kind of enterprise. It's just

It's really, really hard. None of it has been easy. We've benefited from a ton of really hard work and super smart people and some luck along the way. None of it easy or given, frankly. And so any company is sort of imprinted by its founders. And I can't imagine a better set of four co-founders to be with on this journey from the very beginning.

Yeah, I've heard you say elsewhere that you don't consider yourself one of these kind of charismatic salesmen, visionary, what I would call, say, like an Elon Musk, Steve Jobs type. And I personally, I find that refreshing. And the way that you describe it, it sounds like from the very beginning, what you've been leaning on is your expertise. I mean, from your entire career in the industry, plus teaming up with four other experts in this,

I like it because I feel like there's just, there are a lot of leaders in tech right now who I would say lean on the vision, which can kind of delve into blind confidence, which I think we have enough of. So I'm just interested as a leader,

Who do you look up to? Who are sort of some of your leaders that are your role models? Who do you try to model your behavior off of as a manager? Well, first of all, I heartily agree with your sentiment that we over-index to sort of the megafauna CEO founder type. And I think that there's just too many other styles of effective leadership to over-index on just one. And so the one that I bring to the table is perhaps a little bit more understated, which

To be clear, what I don't compromise on is standard of excellence that we have internally. And you can drive that in a lot of different ways, to be clear. And it doesn't have to be, again, sort of this megafauna-type personality that's just hammering people from the down. We hold each other to very rigorous standards. And if there's one sort of management approach that I take first and foremost, it's a...

Very immodest hoarding of talent. I will completely admit to that. You need to go after the absolute best people for absolutely everything you possibly can and then hold them accountable. Set the right vision and hold them accountable. But I also am not a micromanager, much less, as Elon would say, nanomanager. I really do want to hire those great people and then empower them to go do their best possible work.

That understated style comes from my parents, to be perfectly honest. I saw them be leaders in their respective fields using that approach. Yeah.

And so, you know, there perhaps is also an echo, just a little bit of one, from the vocation of people who are ordained in the ministry. Like, in other words, how do you lead a group with humility, but still with vision, right? And still with a driving force. We'll be right back.

Hi, everyone. This is Kara Swisher, host of On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine and Vox Media. We've had some great guests on the pod this summer, and we are not slowing down. Last month, we had MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on, then two separate expert panels to talk about everything going on in the presidential race, and there's a lot going on, and Ron Klain, President Biden's former chief of staff. And it keeps on getting better. This week, we have the one and only former Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. And we have the one and only former Speaker of the House,

After the drama of the last two weeks and President Biden's decision to step out of the race, a lot of people think the speaker has some explaining to do. And I definitely went there with her, although she's a tough nut, as you'll find. The full episode is out now, and you can listen wherever you get your podcasts. We're back with First Time Founders. When we last spoke, there was this one line that you mentioned to me, which I love, which you said sort of guides you. It's this passage from Proverbs, quote, "'People will perish for lack of vision.'"

What does that mean to you? You know, it's a stark reminder. That was written at a time when people were living in the desert. And literally, if they didn't all agree on the vision, they would die, right? And the imperative of a clear vision is as relevant for the group of the 750 people inside of form as it was for the people, you know, the Hebrew people that first wrote that down.

And the company will go away. It will perish if we don't have the right vision. People can go take different jobs. People can go decide to do something different with their life. And if we don't give them the right vision and let them know today why they're working on the thing that they're working on and why it matters in a broader context...

The company will perish. It's as simple as that. And so it's a stark reminder of sort of the existential requirement, in fact, especially if you're starting something brand new from scratch, creating a category inside of an industry that's relatively nascent, right? Not to mention a company doing something new.

to provide that vision and to be very clear about why we're here and why this group of humans gets together on a regular basis, in fact, on a daily basis, to work on a common goal. It's also a reminder to be humble in service of that vision, right? It is not about me. It's not about the management team. It's about the vision that we're setting as a company and the impact that we hope to go have. It almost goes beyond just the company because

one thing we haven't mentioned yet is climate. And this was one of the main reasons, I assume, that you started this. I mean, much of the upside in your company is that it will address climate change. Ion-air batteries are a way to store energy without relying on fossil fuels. And the data is just getting bad and scary. I mean, one stat I pulled here is that

NASA confirmed that 2023 was the warmest year ever. So to what extent is the existential threat of climate also a motivating factor in addition to the possibility that your company, as with any company, could perish if sales drop off? Yeah, that's a different sort of level of thinking about perishing, that's for sure. But it's a huge motivator to be

to be clear. And it's also tied to something I said earlier, which is that cheap, abundant energy underpins human civilization, broadly speaking, today. And that fact is not going away. And so we need to figure out how we will

drive the energy industry forward in a way that solves for everybody, right, in the end. And yes, it absolutely means meeting the climate challenges that we have and the decarbonization challenges that we have and still providing reliable, low-cost, abundant energy no matter what. And that is not a switch we can flip overnight. It's not... Nobody has a wand to sort of make things better immediately. It will take...

and it will take innovation at scale, and it will take massive amounts of capital. I don't know if you saw this, but roughly between $100 to $150 trillion of capital will go into this broad change that will happen over the next 40 or 50 years. It's a little incredible, like literally incredible, right? It's hard to imagine. And so we need to be able to meet the scale of that challenge,

in a lot of different ways. And absolutely, we see that this kind of storage can be a critical tool to enabling that change to happen in a way that solves for a lot of people, meets the climate goals, meets the energy goals, meets the reliability goals, right, that we have for this stuff. And so it's a huge motivating factor

in the broader context of just the scope and scale of this industry, this energy industry, and within that, the electricity industry that we happen to work on. If there's one thing that you think regular people should know about the state of our climate today, I mean, I just mentioned last year was very warm, but I feel like these stats often don't ring true for people. I think it's hard to

feel that impending doom. And I think there's a lot of psychological research on that issue. But if there's one thing you think people should know about climate today and where we're at right now, what would it be? Well, I guess I'll say two things. One, the volatility of the weather is also increasing. So that if you look at the incidents, this is from the NOAA, the National Oceanic Administrative Entity, and

that tracks these things. If you look at the number of multi-day, highly volatile weather events that are driving essentially dollars of damage in the United States, they're going up pretty significantly. I don't have a pithy stat to sort of give to you, but I've seen the chart and it's definitely up into the right there.

That's important to keep in mind. A changing climate means a lot of things. However, we experience it as weather in the end, right? And that weather will be more volatile for us. We'll have to sort of think about that. And specifically, for a lot of people, it means water volatility, either too much or too little. And what that means to civilization is quite important.

Now, the other part of that is, you know, it's important to have a sense of agency in this because sometimes, you know, $150 billion or, you know, two degrees Celsius or any of these other things that they're sort of so abstract as to be unrelatable. And I think it's important to understand the scope of the challenge. It seems really, really big. And remember that humans, whenever we decide to do something, we pretty much do it collectively.

look at every sort of energy transition age that we've been through. I mentioned the fuel substitution. That has happened. We have done it. We have been in periods before when we said, surely we're going to run out of energy. Surely we can't keep going in this way. And you run the numbers in a linear fashion, and that's all true. And innovation steps in. And human will to succeed steps in. And we've seen that pattern over and over and over again. And so I have a ton of

faith based on the evidence that I see, that that will continue to be true and that we collectively as a civilization will step up and meet the needs. And we'll do that because people from all walks of life and in all ways that they intersect energy, broadly speaking, will want that to be true. If you had one piece of advice that you had to give to your former self when you were starting the company, what would it be? Go do it. Yeah.

I really didn't know that I was going to start a company. And it took me some months to decide whether or not I mentioned good advice from friends and support from my wife that were critical to do it. And it has been harder than expected, to be perfectly honest, and more fulfilling at the same time. And I think you just really never know going into it what the journey is going to look like. And

sometimes you just still need that encouragement. And, you know, you sort of would like to ask your future self, is this going to be worth it? And I think the answer unequivocally is yes, and in different ways than you expect, right? So go do it. It's not that much risk in the end, right? I think collectively people are probably too risk averse, especially when it comes to their vocations. You know, I have, I'm fortunate. I come from a stable family and, you know,

They always support me and love me. But even still, I think professionally, people take far too few risks. Mateo Jaramillo is the founder and CEO of Form Energy. Mateo, I would love to talk for hours more, but I know you need to go build some ion air batteries. So we'll let you go. Thanks very much. It was great to chat.

Our producer is Claire Miller. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss. And our engineer is Benjamin Spencer. Jason Stavis and Catherine Dillon are our executive producers. Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tune in tomorrow for Property Markets.