speaker-0 (00:05.646)
Welcome to the Hard Tech Podcast.

And everybody, welcome back to the Hard Tech podcast. I'm your host Deandre Herikis, my usual suspect, Grant Chapman. Everybody, we have a super fun guest us today. Burt from Electra is joining us from New York. Is that right?

How's it Thanks for joining everybody.

speaker-0 (00:23.286)
Yeah, that's right, Brooklyn, New York. Thanks. Yeah, really excited to be on.

Welcome to the show, Burt.

speaker-2 (00:29.186)
Yeah, love to hear a little bit of your background before you got to Electra to kind of set the tone for everyone listening because I've heard your background and it's awesome and love to see the pivots you've made to get here. So just want to give a quick background on what you did before and then what you're doing at Electra.

For sure. Yeah, I've been working in tech for 15 years now. That's wild. Basically, I came out of college, was interested in working on climate change, worked at a company called Saphira that made tools for architects to design more energy efficient buildings. It used to be the case that if you're an architect, you needed to send your work to a mechanical design engineer, have them evaluate your massing to see how energy efficient it was, how much solar gain it had.

weeks, we got you results in a couple minutes. So it was like trying to move the needle at the beginning of the carbon emissions process. Then I ended up going to Google where I worked on something called Fuchsia, which was an experimental operating system. We had many goals with that project, but my goal was to make it so that even the most affordable computers were as secure as like a modern iPhone.

And so that was extremely fun. Worked there for five years. Decided to go on sabbatical because I was really craving that concrete impact of my climate focus work earlier in my career. And then was on sabbatical for a while saying no to things, waiting until I heard that a friend of mine was trying to raise money to buy coal power plants and turn them off, which was the coolest and most concrete thing I'd ever heard. So I was like, yeah, right. It's like when you think

about it like coal power plants aren't that capital efficient they're not like great investments like the main thing is they have like consistent returns and right now they're getting outcompeted by gas solar everything so

speaker-0 (02:21.262)
At the time it was 2022 and it was very clear that we could raise the money to do this. And so we started looking into it. It's become a more popular idea now. think Mark Cuban is trying to do it now among other people. And we got into it because the reason, the place I fit in was if you're going to replace a coal power plant with something, it should be something that takes advantage of the huge interconnect to the grid a coal power plant has. And so if you want to accelerate the deployment of solar,

other renewables or even just bring more balance to the grid, you need a lot of batteries and performance focused, reliable, secure, safe software is really like my bread and butter, at least, you know, especially after that time on Fuchsia. So I was like, yeah, like this is great. Like I would love to build software for distributed battery arrays. And we started there.

It turns out when you're buying coal power plants, like geopolitical events actually quite affect the purchase price. So wild things happen that year. The war in Ukraine, the lots of stuff. Energy policy has changed a lot since 2022. And so in between that and now we realized doing a coal power plant thing would deliver a lot of climate impact, like a lot of batteries would get deployed to the grid.

When it comes to decarbonization, change now is worth a lot more than change later because of the way that global warming is a feedback loop, like greenhouse gases are a feedback loop.

that you'll have to compound interest is a hell of a drug

speaker-0 (03:58.944)
Yes, exactly. So we were like, is there any way we can take this battery technology and bring it to market near term? So then we're like, well, you know, the problems are interconnect capacity, transmission capacity. These are big long term things. When you go to like an energy conference where people who are really into grid scale stuff are talking to each other. So we went to one very early as we're trying to suss out the coal power plant conversion market and

There's a moment I remember where someone in the middle of a talk was like, oh, by the way, so and so just finished their power line. How long have you been working on the power line? And she's like, 17 years. It really stuck out to me like, oh, we need to make sure we're not stuck on those kinds of timescales if we could be bringing this technology to market in a better way. And then once you're trying to figure out how do we end run around

That's insane.

speaker-0 (04:52.588)
bottlenecks in transmission capacity, you start to think, well, why don't we put the batteries where the demand is?

And then you start to think, okay, well, should it be commercial or residential? And then you start going through all those permutations. Commercial, they're figuring it out actually. People are figuring out how to get battery capacity on a grid. But residential, it's hard for people. There's electrical codes, they don't know where to put their batteries, there's fire codes. You need to figure out exactly how this fits into your life and there's not usually a one size fits all answer until now. So we did a lot of user studies, talking to people, and it turns out,

talk about this more later probably, but the kitchen is the final frontier of power efficiency in a home. Because it's got this really spiky load. It's got your stove, if it's electric. And it's only used a very small percentage of the time. So as soon as you see that, it's like one of those, I forget what they're called, you know the magic picture where you squint at it?

You things you can see, but you can only un- you can't un-see the second one you found. Yeah, well for all the listeners at home, I just want to unpack how grid energy works, right? Like, you and I take it for granted, we understand how much a peak hurts the grid versus continuous use, right? So for everyone listening...

Exactly.

speaker-2 (06:08.654)
I actually dropped out of college the first time to do grid energy storage. is my thing. that industry is old enough that there are, as said, mature players doing it for commercial. If you're doing this for a factory, there are systems now where you, what a factory does, they might pay for, let's say 10 gallons of gasoline worth of energy throughout a day. But the dollar per gallon is set at what their peak drain rate is. So if you're in a car, if you floor it once a day and you're all the way to the floor, that sets the...

a higher price point than if you're always only 10 % throttle the whole day. And so it's both cheaper to buy electricity and it's easier to produce and maintain the grid if it's consistent. So in commercial applications, you'll store energy in a battery or other systems, but mostly batteries today. And when your factory turns on in the morning and heats everything up or cools everything down, whatever your factory does, and gets ready to run, you actually drain the batteries. And that way you're not pulling more from the grid. And then throughout the day when you aren't using

peak electricity or at night when the factory's off, you'll recharge those batteries ready for the next day at a low rate. And that way the grid, in our case, coal power plants possibly, are spinning that steam turbine at the same rate 24 hours a day and that's where they're efficient. Changing speed or turning little plants on and off is really inefficient for all the users out there. So, Bert today would do a pretty good job of summing up why the grid hates peaks.

Exactly. Literally perfect.

Yeah, so you're tackling this, what I'm going call it, the micro micro problem. Not on a microgrid on a commercial factory line, not a microgrid in your home like a Tesla Powerwall or an EcoFlow wall. You're tackling it on the appliance that is what I'm going call the worst offender. Even your air conditioning is peaky, but it runs a lot of the day in hot days. Your stove literally runs for 20 minutes, right? Like it's a much smaller time scale. So what have you guys solved and how do you do it?

speaker-0 (07:58.688)
I mean, the main thing is how do you get enough energy into a small space? How do you make it safe? And how do know that it's delivering the most cost efficient energy you can? Because people have to ultimately like one of the neat things about this application is

It makes your cooking experience better. If you're switching from gas, you're upgrading your cooking experience and by the way, you get a battery for free. You get good stability for free. You get cooking through power outages for free. And I think the hard parts are all like, how do you make sure all the parts of the system know about each other? And then how do you make sure like all the parts of the system are the best they can be? It's really like a really fun systems design problem if you're in that world. I mean, I'm sure many of your listeners are.

No, 100%. And so, know, digging into what you guys have is you're bringing energy storage localized to a thing that's very peaky just to shave that peak out, right? You're still connected to the grid. You're still charging the battery from the grid. And you guys can still power a burner from the grid, right? From our last talk, you guys basically have... That's right. know, can you explain what a traditional electric stove does that yours doesn't? Like what does it require and like why would you use this versus a traditional stove?

Totally. So a traditional electric stove, very simple. You power all of the burners and oven elements from the grid. And the important thing there is just like the factory in your example, your electrical panel, all your wiring, your home's interconnected utility is also rated for that one time a day when you floor it. instead of having this like 12 kilowatt, very unpredictable load, 12 kilowatts

is the biggest load in the house. It's as big as a level 2 EV charger. It's a big load. the... As much as... Give me a second.

speaker-0 (09:58.83)
It goes from a 12 kilowatt load down to a two kilowatt load. So it's cutting your, um, you know, 12 kilowatts, 800 Watts. That's an 85 % reduction in the capacity required from every part of your electrical system. So the wires, that part of the electrical panel and that frees up space. If you're on the electrification journey for your home, if you're wanting to put in an electric heat pump or hot water heater, or a level two EV charger, just switching from a conventional electric stove.

to Electra will give you a cooking upgrade because induction rocks. This is an induction stove. And on top of that, it makes space for you to make those second and third tier electrification moves you want to make anyway because you're already on this journey. You already want to like figure that.

Well, I think it's cool you can put the stove anywhere, right? Unlike if I'm doing a kitchen remodel and I wanted to put an electric stove in where I had a gas, I have to go get an electrician to run 12 kilowatt high voltage, you 220 volt rated connections all the way to wherever I'm putting the cooktop. I can now put an Electra in a basement kitchen that I'm adding in for an ensuite, right? You know, an in-law suite. I can just plug it into the same 110 I plugged the microwave into.

Yeah, exactly. This is one of the problems with talking about this product. There's so many good angles. It's like, how do get them all in? know? Yeah. But basically the no renovation thing means that if you have a gas oven, want to switch, it's a huge liberating factor. No drywall dust, no waiting for a contractor. There's a, you know, American, why America wide electrician shortage, you know, no waiting for an electrician. it's a big change in your quality of life while you're

going through that transition process and people are really responding to that. People are like, wow, I can just decide like, hey, I want this in my life, get someone to cap the gas line and the next day we'll ship you a stove. You know, it's pretty awesome.

speaker-1 (11:50.414)
I think that from the practical perspective, if I'm thinking about getting a stove, I think of Electro because you're exactly right. I worked for a company called Geyser Steam for a number of months and had a similar innovation around the steam room. So historically, whenever you would install a steam room, you would need to call a plumber and get permits and have electrical because it's a big TX220 or 210 outlet to run that unit, similar to...

Let's go.

It was to a stove. And the whole innovation was that you could just plug this into a regular 110 outlet. And that just blew people's minds. said, I can put this very nice premium steam room anywhere, in my house or outside.

or in a rental.

Or in a rental. And what's super cool about what you've built is that you've enabled that same aspect, same ease of access to put a stove generally anywhere in your home without the need to go hire a contractor and go through the process of changing things out. I mean, think that in terms of innovation, that's a huge step forward.

speaker-2 (12:46.882)
Yeah.

Exactly. If you have an ADU, this is the best way to put a full-size range in it. You can cook like you're at home, even though you're in the ADU. You can cook like you're at home and that rocks. there's no... The things people don't always think about right away with gas, you have ventilation requirements that you don't have with this. This doesn't emit any toxic fumes. You can actually just... You can decide how much delicious cooking aroma you want to stay in the room. That's your ventilation requirement.

Yeah, exactly. Well, and I the neat thing going back to the pure physics that made this happen, you only need 12 kilowatts in your stove when all the burners are all the way on. Right. Like that's that's the limiting factor. And so what you guys have done is basically enabled people to have all their burners on because you have a battery that can power that for, you know, one or two standard deviations of I couldn't tell you the last time I had all the burners on my gas stove. You know, right. I'm I don't know if I've ever done it, but you have to wire it as if it's going to be on all the time. So how did you guys

take this problem statement, I want to reduce the peak power of a stove and benefit, I now get to put it anywhere. What tech did you guys have to develop to bring that to reality?

For sure. the main thing is always knowing before you turn a knob, like as you're turning the knob, before you actually draw the power, we always know you're about to draw the power. So it's like, as you turn the knob, the stove is sensing that you're turning the knob and before it requests like a burner to turn on, like in 10 milliseconds or something, it's talking to the battery, saying,

speaker-0 (14:26.576)
Okay, Like we're in a normal state. Yeah, let's go and you turn the power on.

available.

But we can do cool things with that. So we can do things like, well, the battery is full. The battery is going to be full for most people, like 99.9 % of the lifetime of the stove. It's like really power outages that are the case where you might have the battery run down a bit. But most of the time, you'll use between 10 and 20 % of the capacity of a battery in a normal day. So most of the time, there's tons of power available. We can do things like turn on extra heating elements for fast oven preheat because it always knows what's available. And then if for some reason you're starting the oven preheat and you decide

you want to boil four burners worth of tea at the same time, you know, you can, it'll know that and transparently turn off the extra burners for the fast preheat. So you don't have to think about that, but very rarely, basically only in power outages will we ever throttle one of the cooktop elements. And this is interesting because even very high end stoves from other brands, stoves, induction stoves, might pay like eight to 12 grand for, they'll throttle you without telling you.

If you turn too many printers on.

speaker-0 (15:32.686)
And so it's really nice to not be in that situation. The battery is like much, much more powerful than a typical wall.

And how much energy are you storing in the battery in your system?

This battery is five kilowatt hours. Yes.

Big amount of energy. Like that's real. like, how I'm trying to go figure out math my head, you know, to to maintain a tea boil, right? You know, what's the you know, if you had two of your burners on is that how many kilowatts of power is that you're draining to keep like two two burners or so on cooking dinner and cooking two pots?

So keeping a boil is easy. Keeping a boil is easy. Bringing a stove to a boil, let's say like you might use 3,600 watts to bring that stove to a boil. But because it's induction, you lose so little of it to outside losses basically that all of that power is going directly into the water through the.

speaker-2 (16:23.446)
inefficient.

speaker-2 (16:28.088)
pan. that's interesting. So you're only more efficient than like gas that the flame is making the you go by your your induction. So you're literally only giving the pan, not the stove top. Exactly.

Exactly. So that's another amazing thing. if you're, let's say you're like a busy parent or something. And one of, one of the things you do all the time is like, okay, you're cooking, there's lots of stuff going on. Okay. It's time to put dinner on the table. Your stuff is done because it only heats the pan and it doesn't heat the cooktop. You can take a rag right away and wipe it down. You know, your, your, your kids aren't going to get burned. Like there's

Wipe it down.

speaker-0 (17:08.502)
Like efficiency has so many beautiful second and third order effects, know? So the fact that the cooktop is 90 % efficient means that your water boils faster and you're less likely to get hurt and you know, so on and so forth.

That's awesome. And so, know, even if I'm a power user, you know, using all my burners, I can do this for half an hour an hour because the battery can charge while you're using it, right? You're probably always able to draw 1500 watts from the wall to supplement what you're draining from the battery. So it's not a binary. I mean, they're charging or discharging. You're doing a little bit of both, right?

Exactly. Yeah. So we mix all that power in the DC realm. So we're really flexible with how we, so you can be, you can set, um, in our, we have like an app you can set in the app, like, Oh, I only want to draw 10 amps or I want to draw a full 15 amps.

You can also say like, hey, I'm really like, wanna be topping on my battery all the time. So I wanna like prefer using wall power when it's available. Or you can say, like I'm on a time of use plan. Actually, I don't have a flat rate electricity. So I'd prefer to charge at night. Or I'd prefer to charge when electricity is cheap, which is, you we can talk about that. like the overall, the upshot is that the battery can always be charging as you're using it.

Or you can be just preferring wall power, making sure that you are basically if I cook pasta for myself, I use almost no power from the battery in a normal meal.

speaker-2 (18:35.458)
Right, you're cooking one burner, which you can do from the wall.

Exactly. Even two burners. Let's say you're getting your water boiling and then throwing your pasta in maintaining the boil is easy. Right. So even then I can have I can be sauteing my

your sauce like yeah your shrimp and your onions for your sauce.

And that's going with, you know, let's say a kilowatt. Let's say I want some nice sear on those. the keeping the water out of boil, maybe uses 900 Watts or something. And then you're still right under that 1800 Watts. 1800 Watts. you're, that lets you just use the full 15 amps in the water.

And what's cool is what you just said I can know myself as a user and you've made a nice app to do this that hey I know I'm never cooking a big meal for all of my family all the time I you know I mean my wife we just cook a pasta in this you know in a main at the stove Let's use the battery will never kill a battery in a day and let's charge at night when it's cheap But then I can go in the app on Thanksgiving if my whole family's coming over when we cooking all day Keep this battery as full as you can and I can run all day

speaker-0 (19:33.774)
Exactly. And by default, we keep it as full as you can. So you never have to think about it unless you're the kind of person that wants to be.

Like an energy nerd so

Yeah, exactly. One of the questions I've got is the cook quality. So the quality at which it cooks food. Have you done any kind of side by side comparisons? think that people might think, there's less power. It's less hot or something like that. But just to kind of rule out some of those concerns that may or may not be there.

Totally. So I think, again, like I think a lot about people transitioning from gas. with induction, it's so powerful that you can basically make it like arbitrarily powerful. So the question is not like how powerful should it be? So the question is not like how powerful can we make it? The question is how powerful should it be? So we aimed for basically the nicest gas stove you can buy plus a little bit.

You know?

speaker-0 (20:25.614)
So a normal gas stove that people are used to cooking on is maybe between 7,000 and 12,000 BTUs per hour. I'm not going to go into the math right now, but our small burners are comparable to those. And then our big burners, we aimed for like a 15 to 20K, like prosumer borderline restaurant grade.

Yeah, like the restaurant-grade gas burner amount of heat that you could put into your pan.

Exactly. then the other thing to note is, when I first started, when we first started designing this product, we did a lot of math, you know, like heat transfer, BTUs, watt hours, whatever. And one interesting thing about the way these stats are measured is they're usually measured boil in water because it's a simple thing to measure. But the experience of cooking with induction, when you're actually cooking food on the pan surface is actually like the efficiency comparisons that you get versus gas stoves actually

understate the difference in experience because the pan is getting hot and boiling water is kind like a perfect load for like, you know, if you've got kind like a lossy, like, you know, hot air leaking around the sides of the pan. Yep. Boiling water is kind of a perfect case to understate those efficiency losses. But when you've got food in a hot pan, like searing a steak, amazing on induction. Like I'm from Texas. I love steak. searing a steak is one of my favorite things to do on this cooktop.

One is you can get the pan hot so fast. think that's the other thing most people miss on electric stove like electric like conduction stove, which what most people have versus induction, which is you what you guys do what you're literally resonating, you know a magnetic field that vibrates the atoms in the pan and expand hot. And it's not a microwave for all those listening at home that don't like microwave their food. This is just affecting the base of the metal in the pan to make it hot. Yeah, and you're putting that heat directly underneath your food instead of underneath the pan that then has to go through a pan through your food.

speaker-2 (22:21.008)
Thank

Exactly. you know, we don't think about this that much, but like the folks who listen to this podcast know air is an amazing insulator. When we want to, when we want to insulate things, like the best insulators we have are aerogel, you know? So when you're cooking with gas, there's this big insulating layer, you know, around your food. And when you're cooking with induction, the heat is in the pan. The heat is coming from inside the pan, you know, calls coming inside the house. It's like, there's no intermediary other than pan food. And I mean that like,

like I said, the efficiency numbers understate how much nicer it is to cook with induction. That's why I say range is like 15 to 20k BTUs per hour for a comfortable gas stove because if you're boiling water, know, gas stoves, maybe you're more like a comparable to a 15k BTU per hour gas stove. But if I'm searing a steak, I gotta sear it. Exactly. Yeah, it's like quite basically the best like searing, braising experience that I have. Even stir fries. Like if you're interested in

It's the same as one.

speaker-0 (23:20.982)
Yeah, doing like really hot stir fries and getting that beautiful.

Glaze, crisp, yeah. No, that's great. And so, you know, to make this all happen, you need, you know, you're sucking energy from the grid through a tinier straw, but you're storing it in the bucket, the battery underneath. And then just like any induction stove, because induction stoves don't just vibrate at 220 volts underneath your pan, right? It's not just the wall going through a coil. There's power electronics there. So your system has a DC bridge that is your battery pack. You're pulling energy from that into an inverter.

Yeah, exactly.

speaker-2 (23:53.996)
to control your burners and then that is sending energy to the pan. So you guys had to basically learn how to do, know, 110 volt AC into DC, store DC and manage it effectively and then pump that out as very controlled AC current for induction. How was that learning curve for you guys to go into the, you know, from what's grid energy, you're mostly just buying inverters, right? And the real math is that you your batteries and things like that. You're now having to go through and do the whole shebang in a product.

Well, we're excited to do the whole shebang. My team is amazing. So one of my teammates works, one of his side projects is he works at NYU on the Open MRI project. And those coils are harder to design than these coils. We're excited to get there, where we're designing our own induction coils. think the biggest parts of the learning curve for us were really not like, we do it? That was never a question. But the question was, can we make it simple?

so that we can make it accessible to everyone. Like that's the biggest difference you'll notice between us and our competitors is like everyone's at one price point and then we're at a different price point. And it's like, how is that possible? Well, it's engineering, you like you make it as simple as possible, but no simpler. And you try and make sure that like we spent all of our time and energy working on basically

reducing components, making the system simpler, making that DC mixing like as, with as few active electronics as possible.

Right, as organic as it can be. Like, it wants to work together.

speaker-0 (25:31.532)
Yeah, and then from there, it's like one of the things I'm proudest of is like how much of our power delivery and safety stuff we do in hardware. It takes a little more time to get it right because you're not iterating, you know, in code. You're iterating in circuit designs and breadboards and then you're sending off PCBs to get made and like analyzing the thermal performance.

that's cool.

speaker-2 (25:53.568)
And then you're cutting traces and running wires to hot fix your PCB because you never get it right the first time.

Yeah, exactly. the thing is, we're really strong. Like that's our strength. Like we're really strong at electronic engineering, power electronics and software. And so we like all of our safety stuff is in hardware. When we go to like UL to get our stuff safety certified, they're so thrilled because they don't have to look at our software. They're like, all your safety protections are in hardware. We can just test those and your software could be like out to lunch and you would still be safe. And I think

That is really satisfying from the system design perspective. It's very, very, and it also is very good for the simplicity of the system, getting costs down, making things accessible, basically. Which is, again, our ethos with this product is make it accessible to as many people as possible. If you look at a third party that is talking about the pros and cons of doing this kind of gas stove to induction conversion,

Before us, there was like, you'd have a graph which is like, should you do this like battery augmented stove swap? And it'd be like, yes, if you can get a subsidy from the state and the federal government and like, you whoever else, but with us, it's just a better value. It's like, it's already better, no subsidy required, you know? And I think that effect is like the thing I'm proudest of in terms of like all the engineering we did to get here.

No, that's awesome. again, sounds like the... Circling back to one thing before I stop my next topic, doing all of your safety and hardware is underrated these days. Yes, it's easy to develop in software. It's easy to write code that, quote, makes it safe. But it's also really hard to make software that you 100 % know can't go out to lunch, right? Not in any corner case can it go out to lunch. And it's one of those things that, like, doing it in hardware, we do this in medical device, at Glassboard, all the time, where we're like, okay, we could measure this in software and we will, but we'll report an error back to the UX

speaker-2 (27:56.784)
and the connected device and all of the software, but we're going to protect the patient with hardware. Here, this is going to trip the circuit that I can't even override in software if my life depended on it because hardware is safer. And that's just so cool to hear that you guys took that to the kitchen.

Yeah, hell yeah. No, that's awesome. Yeah, we're proud of it. mean, medical devices sound like a really fun place to do that work as well.

It is. It's challenging because like the safety and like the rigor of the regulatory is harder than UL. But it's the added benefit that cost is a little bit less of a concern upfront. But it's funny, medical then gets really squeezed once you get to be in reimbursement and insurance. Just like you guys, once you're out of subsidy, now you've got to go find a way to make it a real value for the consumer. And instead of the consumer being the person cooking on their stove, the consumer and med devices, ironically, the payer, not the patient.

It's this really weird disconnect of like who's paying for it. with what you guys are doing, what was the biggest, I'd say, knob you turned to get that cost down? And I would ask, is it batteries? What battery tech are you using and did that help play a role in making this a less expensive product?

Definitely. mean, yeah, I think the biggest thing was deciding to once we once we did the we come from batteries. So that's the preface. Like we started with these like big grid scale batteries. Once we looked at the landscape, we realized it's very it's very seductive to like outsource the batteries because people have there's many battery designs out there. But if you bring it in house, you can package it better. You can get

speaker-0 (29:31.2)
the thermals perfect, you can hit exactly, you know, your desired targets and you can do things like you can source cells that don't catch fire whether when you puncture them or short circuit them or heat them. And it's like it gives us such peace of mind to put these in our homes, you know, to know that we got to design this whole thing from scratch with all the safety protections and hardware and the safest cells we could find. And the other thing that I really like about our battery design is it kind of reminds me of like

driving a car with like a big V8. Like it's always chilling. Like it's never being pushed that hard. It's like always, you know, basically the batteries don't get hot because they always have so much in reserve. One of the benefits of having like a big pack with lots of energy in it.

Well, and think that's what's neat is because you guys are what's your peak kilowatt draw on the stove if everything was on for like the the highest peak you could draw from this is like is it 10kW?

Yeah, if everything was on at the same time, it'd be about 10KW.

Right, which is only 2C on a 5kWh pack, which for all of you listening that aren't battery nerds, that's not that hard these days. 2C on discharge is like that battery won't even get warm to the touch, which is really neat. And you guys aren't regening that energy back. Like in an EV, you actually get most of your heat in your battery from charging too fast. Regen or plug it into a fast charger. As we don't have that problem, as your stove doesn't have that challenge to overcome, you can just pick cells that are great at discharge and are super safe. And that's got to be a cost savings, a safety savings, and a peace of mind.

speaker-0 (31:05.29)
Exactly. And then the other thing is because we have such tight control over our charging, we can charge and optimize for longevity. like when we talk to our cell vendors, basically it's really fun because they've done like all this analysis on their cells, like all this like longevity and cycle testing, all this stuff. And they're like, your use case looks a lot more like the no use use case than it does like the heavy use use case. And that makes me feel great. Cause we tell people,

you know, these batteries are good for 10 years, but in reality, they're good for closer to 20 years, and it's like, we just want to see it proven out, you know? It's like, because we're looking at like a 6,000 cycle cycle life, less than a cycle a day, like a fifth of a cycle a day in normal use.

I say like a parallel is you're like a Toyota Prius a Toyota Prius is a very small battery that Moves only 10 or 20 percent from 50 percent say a charge up and down But it does it all the time every day tons and tons of thousands and thousands of cycles But the cars last forever because the battery is never going to zero and never having to go a hundred to a hundred percent chemically charged you guys are probably in a very similar use case that you never have to go to a hundred percent chemically charged and you're never draining to zero every day like our iPhones go from a hundred to whatever your bottom is at the end of the day every single day 365

You guys are only getting really drained in power outages or I'm cooking up one hell of a dinner for the entire family for a full day

Right. And even then, like a power outage, a normal power outage, like let's say your power outage is like a few hours, you've got, I'm not gonna say, I'm not gonna make any crazy claims, but like depending on how you use this cooktop, you've got like several meals worth of power in here. on top of that, you know, going back to the benefit to you, it's like if you live in a place where you have frequent power outages, they're more common than you think, it's not like, you don't have to be in the country. You can be like 30 minutes outside of Boston, and you could have like,

speaker-0 (32:59.768)
day plus power outages relatively frequently in difficult seasons for utilities. And it's like that peace of mind of knowing you will never have to compromise to get dinner on the table is so delightful. It's like, yeah, anyway, the designing our own battery was like a big choice for us. And I think for, you know, so many reasons it's paid off in spades.

The engineering in the product sounds just outrageous. I'm excited to test it out. For folks that are listening, you guys are doing some traveling coming up. Is that right? Where they could potentially come and take a look at what you guys have built?

Yeah, that's the idea. We're starting to kick off this coming week is climate week in New York City. So we will be demoing twice once where anyone can come play with it in Stidetown at an event with Brad Lander and Third Act. That's on Sunday. We'll be there from like one to six. And then on Thursday, we're at a different event from this group called Antenna House, where we'll like doing like a cooking demo with the chef and like making tea for people and making food for people. And that's at noon on Thursday. That's just the beginning.

The main thing is I'm so excited to take this on the road because I don't need to plug it in to use it. So it's like we can have like, you know, two people in a van and kind of like happily go from park to park, like making food for people. And it just feels like qualitatively that feels like the solar punk dream that, you know, like we have the technology for, but haven't built yet, you know? So it's like, like this is one step.

I love that. I haven't heard that term, solar punk dream. I am stealing that bird. That is, I need to go immerse myself in this world. Because again, am not a prepper, but I do dream one day of having a house where I've built the energy system and I can control that my energy will work all the time just because I'm an energy nerd and have been that my whole life. So solar punk dream is going right in the lexicon. That is phenomenal.

speaker-0 (34:53.398)
Yeah.

And so in terms like, go ahead, sorry. Yeah, yeah. So in terms of just like the next generation of the product or like what is the next, what does the future look like for you guys right now? So you just, as we got on the podcast, we're talking about yes, are standing at manufacturing, about to start going to market and things like that. Like what does the horizon look like for Electra?

You first, you first.

speaker-0 (35:14.904)
For sure. So our first stoves are shipping in February. Let's go. Yeah, we're stoked. It's been a long journey. We're really excited to get out there. But the thing that we get asked the most is like so prosaic, but people are like, hey, does it come in 36 inches? Like you've got a 30 inch one. That's like most people, but some people want a 36 inch stove. And I'm like, well, yeah, we could make you a 36 inch stove. like, you know, well, just keep your eyes peeled.

It sounds like a great place to go next. Also because now that all the fundamentals of the system are solid, when you go to that bigger power delivery, we can do some of the things that we've been thinking about for the next version of the system that would be more appropriate for a bigger battery, bigger power delivery system, that kind of stuff. There's a...

There's been so much progress in the last 15 years in the smallest building blocks of our system, like silicon carbide MOSFETs, things that are really, really at the nitty gritty big improvements.

we would love to start doing more and more of our electronics in-house to kind of match some of the gains that we've gotten from this battery. like 36 inch stove might be a great test bed to start.

Right, just for those listening, like, Invert, let me clarify, Silicon Carbide is awesome. I've been following that stuff for a long time, when it was a pipe dream, and there's like two FETs available, and to now it's like a pretty standard thing that's in all the EVs, and you can get parts from anybody. These FETs are what would help power the induction side, so transferring the energy from the battery into the stovetop, as well as probably on your rectifying side, bringing the energy from the wall and metering that into your battery.

speaker-0 (37:03.95)
Exactly. It's one of these things that I think played out. You can look at other companies that have been figuring out the best way to take advantage of this technology. like my understanding is, mean, like the further I get away from our product and induction stoves, the more this is like, you know, like take this with a grain of salt. My understanding is, yeah, conjecture. My understanding is like EV companies have realized that if they vertically integrate, they can use more

sort of like cutting edge components like these MOSFETs are just one example and get overall system efficiencies that they couldn't get from using last generation's components even though these components are more expensive or like more premium or whatever and

we're really excited to see as we get to iterate on the system, how much more powerful can we make it? How much more? And again, the goal is accessibility. So it's like, when you come to the electric stove from a gas stove, you know how to use it already. There's no learning curve, there's knobs. And we want that transparency to be the case for every version we build.

We want it to be really, really straightforward and really accessible. So you already know how to use it. And I think that, yeah, taking those goals and taking the bleeding edge of power electronics and using one in service of the other, that's the fun of it for us. That's the dream.

That's awesome. And Power Electronics at Glassport is one of our favorite places to go play in double-E design. Again, yeah, connected products are great, and you can do a lot with tech that's already out there. But in Power Electronics, I think you're right that between silicon carbide and there's one other tech I'm missing right now that is the higher voltage version of silicon carbide that's for the crazy high EV stuff that's coming out now. But implementing those just allows so much design freedom. And like for everyone listening, it's not that you couldn't transfer energy before, it's just that it took...

speaker-2 (39:00.622)
an aluminum heat sink and a big box and a bunch of MOSFETs and it was huge and expensive and inefficient. And all of sudden you can now move energy in a smaller package with less heat sink, which is just less cost. I think to, double-clicking what you're saying, like doing that vertical integration with new tech may seem expensive. A one individual part, the MOSFET may be more expensive than the older version. But instead of it being the one size fits all tool that everyone's been selling that is a general purpose, you can get the suit that's cut for you.

Right? And it fits perfect on you. And that way you can get more impact in the suit per dollar. And that's, you know, like the analogy I have for people that aren't electronics people. Like it's taking general purpose and switching to a dedicated use, which is great.

Exactly. And that feeling when something slots into your design and then makes the whole design around it look inevitable, that is like one of the biggest rewards of this work is like, wow, like this is how, there's no other way.

you know, you all came to inspect our batteries, for example, they looked at it and they were like, oh, it's simple. That was one of the most gratifying moments for me. It was just like, oh yeah, like we really did that. Like, great. We made it seem inevitable. And I think that is, there's like, you know, a million, we've seen this play out in tech like over and over again. Like there's lots and lots of innovations where there's like this period of like,

We're all trying different things. It's obvious where the decisions were made or whatever. And then we like converge to something that feels inevitable, but was not obvious looking forward. And I think that part of this design work is just really, really fun.

speaker-1 (40:39.298)
Burt, one of the last questions I always like to ask on the pod is, if you had advice for founders, business leaders that are wanting to build in a similar vein to how you've done it, you've done it in a really unique way, really pushing the needle, what would that advice be?

speaker-0 (40:56.676)
There's so much you can say.

This is all only possible because of my team. We don't have time to go into it, but my team is amazing. And I think that one of the things that we did that really helped us do our best work is...

make this a great place to work. Like make it feel good to come to work, make work feel like time well spent and always make sure that you're leaving just a little bit of slack in every single iteration or sprint or whatever so that people, when they have those moments of inspiration can like take advantage of them. You know, because variance works both ways when you're doing any kind of hard stuff. You get like positive variance where someone has like a moment of insight and like can pursue it and then you make something simpler or faster or better.

And there's also negative variance where something is like a big rabbit hole or really thorny and I think making making it feel great to come to work and making it possible to have a little bit of slack in every week meant that we could get all the positive variance as well and which is why I think you know we're a small team we've been working on this for induction stoves for two years batteries for three years and we've built a lot

And I think the proof is in the pudding there. It's like, make work a great place to be and give people enough slack so they can capitalize on that positive upside. And I think you can go much further than you think you can, you know, with a small team.

speaker-1 (42:31.054)
I usually have a little like wrap up sentence after someone says that that was all the wrap up that was needed. Everybody. This is the hard tech podcast. I'm your host Deandre Hericus and my cohost Grant Chapman. It's been an absolute pleasure. Absolutely. Go check out Electra online and then yeah. See you guys next week.

Great wrap up. Thanks for joining Bert.