#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
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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.
