In the race to combat climate change, electric vehicles and renewable energy have become the poster children of progress. But what if the real game-changer isn't the cars we drive or the solar panels on our roofs, but the batteries that power them?

In this episode of In the Arena, host Evan Baehr sits down with Gleb Yushin, co-founder of Sila Nanotechnologies, a company that's raised a billion dollars to revolutionize battery technology. Yushin's journey from Soviet-era labs to Silicon Valley boardrooms isn't just a classic immigrant success story - it's a wake-up call about where true innovation comes from and why it matters.

Yushin challenges our assumptions about clean energy, arguing that without radical improvements in energy storage, our dreams of a sustainable future are just that - dreams. He explains why the battery in your phone could be the key to solving industrial-scale energy problems, and how a breakthrough in materials science could reshape everything from transportation to robotics.

But this isn't just a tech talk. Baehr and Yushin dig into thorny questions about innovation, education, and the role of free markets in solving global problems. Why did Yushin have to leave academia to make his biggest impact? How does the profit motive drive solutions to climate change? And in our rush to electrify everything, are we overlooking potential downsides?

As major automakers like Mercedes-Benz begin adopting Sila's technology, Yushin offers a provocative vision of the future: one where better batteries don't just power our cars, but fundamentally alter where and how we live and work. Could the American Midwest become the new Silicon Valley, powered by cheap, abundant clean energy?

Whether you're a tech enthusiast, a climate activist, or just someone who wonders why your phone always dies at the wrong moment, this episode offers a fresh perspective on one of the most pressing issues of our time. Join us for a conversation that will change how you think about the devices in your pocket and the energy that powers our world.

Transcript:‍

Gleb Yushin
0:00:00
We have a very short life on this planet and we want to make the best out of this life. I want to focus on something that can have a significant impact and the batteries, to

Gleb Yushin
0:00:11
me, will do that.

Evan Baehr
0:00:18
The only way to solve our biggest problems is to have the audacity to try. Welcome to In the Arena, I'm your host, Evan Baer. In the Arena with Evan Baer is sponsored by Arena Hall. We are experiencing a revolution in the automotive world as more and more electric cars hit the road. Nearly 10% of American auto sales are now electric vehicles.

Evan Baehr
0:00:41
And in 2023, for the first time, over 1 million electric vehicles were purchased in the United States. Notably, General Motors has made an audacious declaration that by 2035, their production focus will pivot exclusively to electric vehicles. EVs might be the future, but they also pose unique technical challenges, propelling companies to produce batteries that are smaller, lighter, and longer-lasting than anything previously

Evan Baehr
0:01:08
thought possible. My guest today, Gleb Yushin, is on the forefront of this scientific revolution. He co-founded the company, Sela Nanotechnologies, a company that creates components for lithium batteries. Their products have helped electric vehicles go farther and charge quicker than ever before.

Evan Baehr
0:01:25
I spoke to him today about the future of energy storage and how it might transform America.

Evan Baehr
0:01:30
Welcome to the podcast, Gleb.

Evan Baehr
0:01:31
It is really awesome to be with someone that has built this unbelievably amazing

Evan Baehr
0:01:36
company at the cutting edge of batteries, which we, as we've talked about in some other conversations are so critical. Yes to issues like climate change. Yes to thinking about the future of electric vehicles and so many more things that power our lives and really excited to dive into the story of how you built this company. I want to start with this.

Evan Baehr
0:01:55
So where are you from and give us a little bit about your path coming to build companies in the US.

Gleb Yushin
0:02:06
Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. I grew up in the Soviet Union and it was fortunate to get to some of the best schools, but qualitatively there was significant emphasis on quality education in the Soviet Union, especially in the exact sciences. So education was free, accessible to all. The country offered the same textbook, the same curriculum to everyone from somebody living in the capital to somebody in the remote villages. There was still study physics, there was still study chemistry.

Gleb Yushin
0:02:31
And I think, you know, qualitatively the biggest benefit of education is not only the knowledge, but also the confidence and gifts. When I started at the university, we had so many semesters of math and physics. And so after a few years, you realize you can translate any technical question into set of equations and solve them. And it is a little bit like getting superpowers, you know, be able to

Gleb Yushin
0:02:52
solve almost anything or have a feeling that you can solve anything, no matter how complicated the problem seems in the beginning.

Evan Baehr
0:02:58
So you've got this sort of invincibility about kind of your course of study. You're doing undergrad and graduate there. So when you're in St. Petersburg, is it on your mind that you might become an entrepreneur? Was that something you were imagining?

Gleb Yushin
0:03:11
I mean, a little bit. When I was growing up, the Soviet Union was collapsing, and so there was more and more information about the Western countries, about the United States, and people realized that the quality of life, the standards of life, was so much higher in the West, and so it was quite motivational. You know, what is so special? And I think when you grow up, you realize that the Soviet system, even though it had

Gleb Yushin
0:03:33
some benefits, including education, there was no external motivation to do anything well. So if you're doing an excellent job, giving everything you have to the job, your salary and your income, your benefits are going to be exactly the same as if you were doing a very sloppy job.

Gleb Yushin
0:03:49
And so most people didn't give everything they got. The system became very inefficient and especially difficult for us to innovate. And as a result of lack of innovations, there were extreme inefficiencies in the economy. Most of the factories in the Soviet Union were initially built by Americans. Most of the technology was kind of borrowed or stolen

Gleb Yushin
0:04:07
from the West. There was very little innovations. Ever since I was a teenager, I've been fascinated by innovations because it kind of links my passion for science and with a desire to make a tangible impact.

Evan Baehr
0:04:19
It's interesting, like a common phenotype in my experience, I'm curious if this resonates with your own story. There's definitely a lot of people that go into business, maybe they buy a business or start a business and economics, personal wealth is a big motivation and I think that's really awesome. But the people that are building the kinds of companies like your company that are squarely in the fairway of trying to solve one of the biggest challenges that our country is facing, that the world is facing. Often, the founder is obsessed with the technology

Evan Baehr
0:04:56
or with the problem. They can't not build this company. And in a lot of ways, honestly, if you kind of ran the math, they might actually have a higher expected economic outcome if they joined a big company or went into finance. It was not someone saying, my passion is clean energy, and I want to build

Evan Baehr
0:05:17
batteries. And so the best way to become a billionaire is to go build this battery science company. And probably the average wealth of people that try to build battery companies is actually probably not that high. And so my just sense about you and then tell me if I'm wrong or how I'm wrong on this is that you probably just got obsessed with a mix of the problem you were trying to solve, the excitement about being at the cutting edge of the technology that you were building and the extent to which you personally become wealthy and or you generate a lot of wealth

Evan Baehr
0:05:44
in your company. It's kind of like it's a necessary part of building companies that scale. Does that description sort of resonate with how you think about it?

Gleb Yushin
0:05:52
I mean, yes, probably. And it was a gradual decision. I realized I wanted to do innovations. I wanted to learn more about innovations from kind of young age. And I was just taking it kind of one step at a time and if somebody would take me that it would take 12 years to get where we are now and we would have to raise a billion dollars. It would be very demotivational for me. In that sense the Ignorance is blessed. I wanted to have a company and you know I selected the co-founder, a partner who had the same vision in life to have something, to build something great, to build something

Gleb Yushin
0:06:24
lasting not necessarily to make themselves rich. It's not about the quality of life, it's about the impact you want to make that drives you.

Evan Baehr
0:06:31
I want to get into the story of this move to the U.S. You got here, was it what you expected? Was it an easy transition? What was it like making that move?

Gleb Yushin
0:06:41
Yeah, it wasn't easy. I would say immigration in general is not easy. So maybe let me tell you a little bit more about economic situations. In the Soviet Union when I was living, the salary of a professor was $100 a month. It was very difficult to conduct research and support the family. There was no money left to buy new equipment or fix broken equipment. And without high-quality equipment, you cannot do experimental science. It's impossible. So there was kind of no choice

Gleb Yushin
0:07:10
but to immigrate. I moved, and I was told my salary would be, I think, $1,200 a month as a PhD student. And that seems such an enormous amount of money for me. It's like 10 times higher than the salary of a professor in Russia. I expected it would be fantastic. And then I learned that the buying power of dollar is very different in the US and everything is way, way much more expensive in the States. The apartment is very expensive. The food is very expensive. We had to buy the cheapest food,

Gleb Yushin
0:07:39
live in the worst possible place. So that was emotionally difficult, especially because my expectations were different. The internet wasn't developed at that time and access to internet wasn't brought in the Soviet Union. For me, it was shocking how worse

Gleb Yushin
0:07:55
the quality of life started for me in the US. You know, we went to supermarkets and bought some cheap apples, cheap bread, cheap milk and cheese, and everything didn't taste good at all. So even food-wise it was difficult. And I moved to Raleigh, so there was no, or very little public transportation.

Gleb Yushin
0:08:12
And if you don't have a car, you would have to go to the supermarket for like 45 minutes back and forth, and it wasn't fun. So overall, it was challenging, but in the meantime, the working lab was fantastic. Equipment, people, it was very special.

Evan Baehr
0:08:31
So give me the story of the founding of the company and how you got so obsessed with batteries.

Gleb Yushin
0:08:38
After graduation from NC State, I tried to get a job in industry and I switched my field from physics to material science because I thought that the biggest discoveries in physics were done before I was born. How to get my Nobel Prize or a Nobel Prize level discovery. And so I wanted to switch to something younger and also something that would be much more versatile.

Gleb Yushin
0:09:01
Material science is very versatile. If you know fundamentals of materials, you can work on a variety of different fields, I don't know, from textiles to nuclear power plants, to airplanes, to batteries, to biomedical applications and so forth. And while at NC State, I was taking classes, some business classes and classes about entrepreneurship.

Gleb Yushin
0:09:20
And I learned that many companies originated from universities, including LG company, that became very successful and had a significant impact on energy savings and therefore decreased greenhouse gas emissions. So that was inspirational.

Gleb Yushin
0:09:33
So I thought, well, maybe if I get a postdoctoral position at another university, maybe learn more about material science, learn more about entrepreneurship, maybe I can help to commercialize some other technology that will also be useful for society. So I searched for high-impact publications at the time and reached out to several professors,

Gleb Yushin
0:09:51
including Professor Yuri Gagosty from Drexel, and put an offer to join his lab in summer 2003. There I learned electric chemistry, I learned about synthesis of nanostructure, materials, applications in medicine, supercapacitors and fuel cells. And at that time, the climate change was not a political issue and everybody, Democrats, Republicans, thought that moving away from fossil fuels, reducing greenhouse gas emissions

Gleb Yushin
0:10:19
was the right thing to do. And also it seemed that the transportation industry was a bit stagnated and ready for disruptions. After three years at Drexel, I applied for tenure track positions in other schools and specifically proposed to work on batteries, even though I had no experience in this field, but faculty believed in my ideas and I was fortunate to get several offers, including one offer from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and that's a fantastic school, the biggest engineering

Gleb Yushin
0:10:46
school in the country. And there I progressed from kind of learning the craft of making battery components and assembling batteries and testing them to making multiple breakthroughs in the field and eventually found in Sila. In general, the battery industry is very conservative. And in fact, you know, when I started my research at Georgia Tech, I was told that battery technology

Gleb Yushin
0:11:06
is quite mature. There is nothing to innovate. There is no need for better materials. Materials are good enough. But you kind of, to understand fundamentals, you say, well, you know, you can always improve further.

Gleb Yushin
0:11:18
But in many cases, you have to do it yourself. Most of the heavy industries moved outside the US and there was no, for example, battery production in the United States. And so when there is no battery production, it's very hard to innovate. For me, starting the company and learning more about practical challenges and, you know, the importance to focus on certain areas was very attractive.

Gleb Yushin
0:11:40
We have a very short life on this planet and we want to make the best out of this life. I want to focus on something that can have a significant impact and the batteries to me would do that. But the materials and batteries would unlock a huge potential, would disrupt multiple industries and this was a very special time and that's why I focused on it and I was fortunate that Georgia Tech allowed me to become an entrepreneur.

Evan Baehr
0:12:04
For lay listeners who don't know a lot about batteries, give me an overview of why do batteries matter? When you think about whether it's carbon production or making renewables actually work or changing how transportation works, why should people care about batteries and if they're efficient or not.

Gleb Yushin
0:12:25
Maybe I'll start with using the Sela as an example. So we manufacture and develop next generation materials for lithium ion batteries to provide high performance to electric vehicles or electronic devices. So for car users, our technology allows electric vehicles to be lighter, more efficient, be charged faster or run much longer distances on a single charge, addressing range anxiety. So you have a better battery, you have a better car.

Gleb Yushin
0:12:50
And so for car makers, our technology allows them to differentiate their cars from competitors and also again, make their car much more desirable and address the need for accelerated transition to green transportation and renewable energy. You know, for battery makers, our technology allows them to increase the output of their factories in gigawatt hours, increase revenues and also reduce CO2 emission while producing these batteries.

Gleb Yushin
0:13:14
So addressing both kind of business needs and also environmental regulations. And then while technology addresses the need to diversify the battery material supply chain, I'm not sure if you know this, but most of the battery materials are made in China. China controls over 90% of the graphite production that used in lithium ion batteries, 94% of synthetic graphite. And so just recently China issued export control of graphite, which is the main component of batteries.

Gleb Yushin
0:13:40
In this case, producing batteries outside China. And so having this alternative materials, better materials for lithium-ion batteries outside China is a major win for the world, for U.S. And then if you have a better technology, better materials, you can have also significantly reduced environmental impact of making battery production.

Evan Baehr
0:13:58
So I want to talk about some of the basics of how batteries work and what are some of the the measurements to understand how efficient a battery is. So I think the basic idea is we have electricity coming off of a grid. Let's say for example it's you know wind or solar and we have this extra energy that's being produced that we can't consume at the moment. We charge a battery, battery stays charged and then when we need it on demand we draw down electricity from the battery. That's my very layman's understanding of it. Give

Evan Baehr
0:14:29
me some of the basics about what are the key features of a battery and then help me understand the way that you guys actually innovated in that.

Gleb Yushin
0:14:37
That's a great question. And it's a great description, by the way, too, Evan. I think there are multiple components in the battery, you know, the active components, anodes and cathodes that are separated in between, and everything is immersed in electrolyte. And the materials that you use in the battery determine all the key battery characteristics, how much energy it stores, how fast it can be charged and so forth. And so if you have a better battery technology, you need to produce fewer batteries because each one will store more energy. If you need to produce fewer

Gleb Yushin
0:15:06
batteries, it will become cheaper, more economical, the battery become lighter. If you can charge faster, it also quite beneficial because again, you can have a smaller, cheaper battery because you will have much less of range anxiety for that. There is also a move to more abundant materials. As you can imagine, if you move transportation all the way to electric, overall you would need hundreds of terawatt hours of battery capacity. It's also becoming an important consideration.

Evan Baehr
0:15:35
I really want to make sure I understand how big of a deal better batteries could be. Like kind of my layman's assessment is like okay so I've got a Tesla I can do you know three or four hundred miles I don't really need to be able to go any farther it seems to charge pretty well I have lots of Apple devices my phone runs a full day my whoop band runs five days my Apple Watch Ultra now lasts two or three days like I don't know maybe we've kind of solved the battery issue. Help me

Evan Baehr
0:16:04
understand how a 10x better battery would actually introduce changes or improvements in my life.

Gleb Yushin
0:16:10
Well, the next better battery doesn't exist, unfortunately. The best you can do by volume is maybe three times, two to three times, that's the best you can do. But in the meantime, I would say, all of us have better cameras, better processors, better Wi-Fi. And so all these typically expensive propositions require more energy. And also people want their device to be elegant and small. And so the real estate cost inside the electronic device, like in the phone, is really high.

Gleb Yushin
0:16:41
And so if you can provide a better battery, that provides significant value to the producers of electronic devices because they can get to the technology ahead of time. For example, if I give a battery that provides us a 20% improved energy storage, they can skip the generations. They can give customer experience that otherwise the customer will have to wait several more years to get.

Gleb Yushin
0:17:02
It is a small component and it's a relatively inexpensive component of electronic devices. The battery costs maybe 1% of the bill of materials for a phone, but it takes like 70% of the volume of the phone. So if you can provide better batteries, the customers will have much better experience with their phones. In a way from the phones towards the cars, and you drive electric vehicles, you drive Tesla, so experience is much more

Gleb Yushin
0:17:26
enjoyable compared to driving combustion engine cars. You don't have all these vibrations and noise and it's very smooth and fast. But if you have better batteries, the same technology can be attained in a less expensive version of the car. The battery can be smaller, for example, if you have to charge it all on your trip, you wouldn't have to wait in 40 minutes, you can charge it within 10 minutes or five minutes. A similar experience that you have in combustion engine cars. People would have much less anxiety to switch from regular cars to electric vehicles.

Gleb Yushin
0:17:56
So the transition will be much faster, there will be less pollution, the economy will strengthen. And so I think multiple multiple benefits.

Evan Baehr
0:18:03
I just want to dream for a minute like if we did get to a 10x or a 50x battery on the core performance metrics like do you think about or do people approach you about really futuristic civilization altering things I'm just trying to even imagine what those would be like are there medical devices are there brain implants is it battery-powered personal airplane devices? Think about the future with you. In 10 years from now, what could massive breakthroughs in batteries look like for us?

Gleb Yushin
0:18:33
Yeah, for those, you don't need 10x improvements. Even like two, three times improvements would go along the way. For example, you can enable vehicle to grid integration. So if you have solar panels in a car, you don't need the massive batteries in your garage. You can have self-driving electric taxis, autonomous vehicles, you could have electric semi-trucks, completely replacing transportation, you definitely can have electric flights and electric aviation,

Gleb Yushin
0:18:57
you can have electric ships, but it will be a massive disruption of all these technologies.

Evan Baehr
0:19:03
Tell me about non-transportation applications for batteries. How do batteries matter to industrial or consumer use of electricity?

Gleb Yushin
0:19:13
I think you'll have more and more robots because of multiple reasons. One is that AI is developing so fast we can have humanoid robots helping with kind of everyday lives and those typically require battery power. The demand for robots is going to grow quite a lot. Similar to transportation, these robots would need to be unplugged for a period of time and especially if they do physical labor. In many cases if you walk around the apartments helping us, the quality of the battery or

Gleb Yushin
0:19:45
performance of the battery would be very critical. In other applications would be smart clothing that can regulate your temperature of your body, providing both cooling and heating when needed. Again it will be very efficient. Instead of kind of using the air conditioning to heat up the whole house, you can think about heating just individuals and that would require much less energy. Again, improvements

Gleb Yushin
0:20:04
in battery technologies would be required for these applications.

Evan Baehr
0:20:07
I'd love to talk a little about industrial use. I had a really interesting conversation with a company that built a large-scale graphite-based battery that I'll try to explain it in my layman's way, at least that I understood it, and curious if you agree with sort of this assessment. So a lot of the debate about use of renewables for industrial, a real challenge in those kinds of users relying on renewables is that it is often not available or that it is intermittent. And so particularly for wind and solar, if you're trying to run a company and there's no wind and there's no solar, it's a huge problem for the company. Given that current storage solutions, battery solutions are pretty expensive, it means that when operators of intense industrial reliers on energy look at the calculation, many end up picking some grid-based system that relies mostly on fossil fuel because they cannot afford to have any downtime. So if they were to say, okay, we really want to focus and be reliant on renewables, yes, the price per production of kilowatt hour is really inexpensive for renewables to produce the original unit of energy. The problem is you have to build this whole mechanism to store the energy up so that when it is not producing real time, you have a place to go consume it. And because that storage system is currently so expensive, it means that your effective cost of energy for renewables for industrial is way more than just being on the grid. And because we don't have a good massive storage system to store renewable energy, particularly for industrial, it means that a lot of energy is basically underutilized. It's hard to move that energy around, put it on the grid, or move it on transmission lines. So his point was this, when we figure out massive-scale battery storage, we will have a industrial renaissance in the middle of America because you'll have nearly unlimited, obviously clean, and like approaching free energy available that is renewable and sits in storage and alongside that proximate grid so you don't have to move it on lines. Particularly the Midwest in the United States is a region of incredible, fruitful production of renewable energy, so places to get a lot of sun and a lot of wind. He envisions this massive renaissance of tons of new, massive-scale manufacturing facilities being built in this area that's so fertile for renewables.

Evan Baehr
0:22:36
What do you make of that argument?

Gleb Yushin
0:22:42
I tend to agree, and I think innovations at the moment, the size of the transportation market is much larger, and the demand of transportation is less than for a grid storage. Like for example, if you have a battery in your iPhone, it should last for a few years. If you have a battery for your Tesla, it should last at least 10 years, right? But if you have a battery for the grid, ideally it should be like less expensive, significantly less expensive than your Tesla battery. And also it should last for decades. But technology is coming. I think technology being currently developed for the transportation market is going to be further developed for grid storage. And I suspect that the cost of battery storage is going to be reduced quite dramatically for the grid by almost a note of magnitude. And so when it happens and when you have all this address reliability concerns and everything else, certainly many areas in the United States would become very attractive for industry. And in general, I think, you know, industry is moving back from overseas to the US. And to me, especially in heavy industries, the move of factories overseas did a lot of harm for innovations because in order to innovate, you have to have so many departments working together. You have to have a consistent feedback from factories to R&D departments. Everything has to be aligned. Everybody has to have similar incentives. When new factories are somewhere far away, it's very hard to achieve. And so many companies now, even though sometimes they keep innovating, they keep inventing something new. The inventions sit on a table and don't go anywhere because people lost the ability to translate invention into into products. But I would say now when industry is moving back I think the time is going to be very exciting for for us and batteries are going to help a lot.

Evan Baehr
0:24:16
I know you guys have announced a partnership with Mercedes and you're talking about building this innovation ecosystem. Tell me a bit about how you work with your partners to sort of know what they need and to sort of pursue that innovation as a partnership.

Gleb Yushin
0:24:35
Our partners are typically kind of disruptors and innovators in the space. Those who want the best and latest technologies, who have customers that demand the best possible experience driving their vehicles. Mercedes-Benz is a good example. As one was publicly announced, I can speak freely about it. And in the first vehicle to be powered by our technology is going to be legendary G-Wagon, absolutely remarkable vehicle on top of the line. But what is expected is that once you penetrate it like luxury segment, then the drivers of premium cars will want this technology and one technology becomes more broadly available and when the costs go down, then the technology becomes available to users of premium market vehicles. And then eventually it goes to mass market vehicles. So you have the stages as the technology expands, as we build larger and larger factories and technology becomes more affordable, that everybody would benefit from it. And so this kind of trusting partnership is very important. But as maybe I should mention, we don't make batteries ourselves. We consider electric vehicle producers as our customers, but we have another partner, which are battery companies. And so the battery companies that we integrate our technologies are also close partners. And typically those who work with brands such as Mercedes-Benz, there's also innovators and typically the largest investment class. So you have kind of this three way partnership. We see EV makers or in the technology because they see the highest demand and the highest benefit from it. But you have to work very closely and build trust in the relationship with battery companies to implement the technology at scale.

Evan Baehr
0:26:07
Teach me a little bit about how Tesla itself approached this. I've read a little bit about them building some of their own manufacturing capabilities. Could Tesla be a customer of yours or are you sort of competing directly against them?

Gleb Yushin
0:26:21
I cannot comment on any customers except what was publicly announced and the only publicly announced Mercedes-Benz, nearly all car companies that are serious about EVs in qualitative assessment without any reference to a particular company.

Evan Baehr
0:26:35
And how do you think about that? I mean, Tesla is a super interesting extreme end of the spectrum of full integration. I think they have a massive battery manufacturing facility in Nevada, obviously fully building out the brand all the way to delivering vehicles, it sounds like you've stayed pretty focused on really just developing this nano composite silicon anode. You focus on really developing that very particular kind of narrow thing. How do you think about Ford integrating into like would you be making batteries or would you be

Evan Baehr
0:27:07
you know building a brand so that Intel inside wanted to have some brand value to the chips and motherboards they were building. Would I ever see your brand on a product that I'm trying to build or buy?

Gleb Yushin
0:27:19
From my understanding, Tesla didn't necessarily want to make batteries. They had to make batteries because the battery makers didn't want to expand the production as fast as Tesla wanted. So they didn't do it because of the desire, they did it because of the need to expand car production. And so for us, we focus on materials innovations. There is no need for us to build batteries. We would never engage in these activities because maybe even from the business perspective, if you think about it, the battery market is going to be huge. It's going to be on the order

Gleb Yushin
0:27:49
of $3 million or more per year. But in 85% of this market is essentially materials. Assembling batteries are becoming less and less expensive. And so most of the costs will remain in material technologies. And so we focus on innovating in the material space, then we capture most of the markets. Battery companies existed for 30 years now, right? And the production of batteries have been perfected in many cases. The profit margins are quite slim.

Gleb Yushin
0:28:18
Most of the battery companies don't make any profits or make very small profits. When the profit margins are slim, it's really hard to innovate. While for new materials, the profit margins are much healthier and you can introduce new technologies. Qualitatively, when technology changes in any different field, typically, there are new market leaders. And so we hope to become and maintain our leadership in new material technologies for better applications.

Evan Baehr
0:28:42
You, in running this company and starting this venture-backed company, you've raised a billion dollars and recruited an amazing set of engineers and product people and a whole range of employees to be part of this crazy mission to change the world. And those are features that academia could never pull off. So it's just fun to think about the the symbiosis of how they partner together and as a resident of the earth I'm super excited that you are not running a lab, that you're not a tenure

Evan Baehr
0:29:11
track faculty member, that you're doing this crazy thing known as building a startup. You'll never forget that memory of the 45 minute each way walk to bad apples. I hope you're already eating amazing apples and that there are many amazing fruits, vegetables, meats, a whole life in front of you that in addition to knowing that you're making such a tremendous impact on industry and innovation and the planet that you're empowering so many other people to be part of that mission is has got to be really satisfying.

Evan Baehr
0:29:39
So saluting you and all the hard work you've done, super impressed by what you've built and so thankful for you spending the time with us today. Oh, thank you. This episode of the In the Arena podcast is sponsored by Arena Hall. Thanks for listening and join us next time for more conversations about how to solve humanity's biggest problems.