David Friedberg: hey everybody hey everybody it's a big sunday show for you today it is we do not take the weekends off no no way no days off yep except saturday we're doing you know we're doing what

Jason Calacanis: we do we're doing uh vc sunday school we got this week in climate startups we're doing it all yeah

SPEAKER_04: and uh this is your six month anniversary here congratulations on making it to six months at this week in startups and as an investor at the syndicate.com climate we're gonna go over

SPEAKER_06: everything you learned in the last six months and everything we talked about and then look at your next six months going forward what you hope to achieve as a year one vc and the audience gets to learn with you if you've ever thought about becoming a vc molly's first year is your roadmap

Jason Calacanis: absolutely and then we have another awesome edition of this week in climate startups i sat down with zora chung and stephen chung from rejewel a startup that has developed technology to evaluate battery

SPEAKER_08: health and help create a used car market for evs it's going to be a great show stick with us this

SPEAKER_09: week in startups is brought to you by bubbles guess what you don't have to be in back-to-back calls all day or get continually pulled into quick syncs by using bubbles async collaboration tool you can remove a minimum of two meetings a week from your schedule get your point across with unlimited screen and video recordings for free at use bubbles dot com slash twist brave brave is an internet privacy company on a mission to protect your personal info online download brave today at brave dot com slash twist to browse faster search privately and so much more all in a single click and i trust capital did you know that you can invest in crypto through your retirement account and still get the same tax advantages as a traditional ira visit i trust dot capital slash twist

SPEAKER_12: to start investing today okay it's time for vc sunday school we are going to recap molly's first six

SPEAKER_06: months as an investor all the things that molly learned and any anything stand out for you molly

Jason Calacanis: that have been like the highlights of these discussions i mean it and you know i've it i've said this on the show before but i've just basically opened up my brain and a fire hose of information is coming in and it's such a i think for me what has been so noticeable is the way that like some of the skills are really similar right it's interrogation it's pushing for understanding it's being like wait okay can you back up and say that in a way that my mom would understand as if i were going to write a story about it but you know so that i can actually understand it as an investor but thinking about things in a pure math way is not only more sort of like specific of a skill than i ever would have

SPEAKER_19: expected but also kind of awesome it's like well super freeing and interesting to be like well

SPEAKER_04: actually math says this well you know it's interesting too because i think you and i both

SPEAKER_06: came from journalism and we have to we understand storytelling we have to deconstruct those stories and then say hey does this story check out will this actually work when it hits the real world customers competitors etc and so i think that's the part that journalists have to add to their skill set i certainly had to add it and a lot of times it's even this morning we were you know seven eight in the morning going back and forth on our slack debating a specific company saying hey what's the capex on this and what will the margins look like what does the competitive set look like and it's been just wonderful to watch you learn uh and it's like watching somebody learn a complex skill like skiing golfing uh or poker and so watching you learn and i think the audience has gotten to benefit this benefit from this i think it's really inspiring for people that it's a it's a hard skill to learn but if you just do it consistently every day for six months all of a sudden you're good at it and i'm just watching the conversations and the questions you ask and then your responses to the questions i ask or other people on the team ask like i think you're 85 of the way there i literally think you got to 85 proficiency in six months now i think you came in

SPEAKER_24: with 40 proficiency because of your background at best yes no i i mean understanding storytelling and

SPEAKER_06: being able to ask questions that started you on second base but i think you're on third base now and i think like this last the next six months is going to be you really dialing in hey i built this mental framework i did the math i made my own little model here on the back of the envelope here's where i think this is going to face challenges but here's why i think it could work right and that's the should i call this hand or should i raise or should i fold that decision making at the final instance that's the piece that you're going to now in the second half i think of this year and it's just amazing to me just you know getting to mentor you in this small way has been it's wonderful for me

Jason Calacanis: because it clarifies my thinking well i'm glad because it's wonderful for me because it's such a like a hands-on education and it's so specific and what i think i really like about this and you know i knew that there were mechanics of calculating valuation and understanding tam and and of course like there are textbooks about it and i read the books and i understand that there are mechanics what i think i didn't understand is that you can build such a specific mental model and put so many things and i love a filter and you can put through it so many things and then i will say the other learning and the thing i didn't expect is how much i would love founders

SPEAKER_20: yeah as a class of human because say more say more what do you love about founders because that

SPEAKER_06: is what i tell people the non-financial reason i do this is because i get to hang out with the the most awesome group of people in the world founders what is it that you've learned to love and

Jason Calacanis: appreciate i the the sheer hopefulness and work ethic and and kind of like you know i've been saying for i don't know a decade or two that every child is hope i have this sort of like offhanded phrase like people are like i don't know if i want to you know bring a kid into this or whatever

SPEAKER_04: oh yeah i had that conversation yesterday with a couple oh you bring a kid into the world it's so

SPEAKER_33: up and i'm like you know what every child is hope you never know which of them is going and

Jason Calacanis: but so i've been saying this in this really offhanded way like every child is hoping you never know which one of them is going to be the one to find a solution or make the change every freaking founder is hope yes and then getting to interact with them is completely inspiring because you see how much they are willing to put on the line for an idea or a concept for their team it might just be like so tiny they've got their friends and family literally invested in their success like they want to succeed more than anything that is so inspiring and incredible to watch and then also to find myself in a position to occasionally be of any use like to be helpful

SPEAKER_04: to them is an actual honor yeah it's it's absolutely fantastic i think you summarized it great you know if you think about our previous careers as journalists and we do that in the first half of the day here random acts of journalism and commentary you know you're you have to come at

SPEAKER_06: everything with a certain level of cynicism and questioning right that's kind of built into the job okay i'm probably getting snowed i'm trying to find the truth here and so i love that about the job the detective work of being a journalist but let's face it a lot of it has maybe gotten a little too cynical and you know you know the the the nature of journalism in terms of having to get clicks and it's it's been a little perverted i think everybody would agree especially people who are in journalism would agree and then you are you and i as lifers would you understand this implicitly yeah who got the best jobs who moved up the ranks it was the people who got the most clicks who got the most views including the two of us right so yeah we understand there's a limitation there but then all of a sudden you're on the other side of the table and you're like okay i could criticize these founders and certainly you know there are some who are just outright criminals

SPEAKER_45: frauds charlatans insane people of course or who don't want to do the work right you do see the

SPEAKER_47: ones who don't want to lazy and entitled that comes across too and so it's super interesting to like

SPEAKER_48: be getting be able to start to pick those out oh yes yeah the lazy and title group is under reported on

SPEAKER_43: you know and so then you start thinking about it it's like we get to spend our day if you look at the best of founders you know the top third or whatever it is top half top 25 i'm not i don't know what percentage it is as human beings but they really want to build something in the world and just the act of building as opposed to critiquing which is what critics do right yeah i always think about that anton ego speech from ratatouille it's one of the most important moments you know or speeches in my entire life that i ever heard and uh you know i'll pull it up here and i'll read it to you so if somebody could just pull it up one of the producers i'll read it this is one of the most important things i think people who are in a position of power to critique people people who have the audience people who have the pen need to remember that the life of a critic you know they get

SPEAKER_04: to lord over people they get to have this position of authority okay criticism is valid we all like to read some criticism here and there it's helpful to the world it's entertaining all that

SPEAKER_06: but the world needs more people to try to solve problems and what a critic can do in their best instance i think is to make a little space for these imperfect young you know even just the ideas being young the products being young it's so important and so that's i think part of our jobs and i'll just read it to you in many ways the work of a critic is easy we risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment we thrive on negative criticism which is fun to write and to read but the bitter truth is we critics must face the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things the average piece of junk it's probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so but there are times when a critic truly risks something and that is in the discovery and the defense of the new the world is often unkind to

SPEAKER_58: new talent new creations the new needs friends last night i experienced something new an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source to say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement they have rocked me to my core in the past i have made no secret of my disdain for chef gustos famous motto anyone can cook but i realize only now do i truly understand what he meant not everyone can be a great artist but a great artist can come from anywhere it is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at gustos who is in this critic's opinion nothing less than the finest chef in france i will be returning to gustos soon hungry for more this speech so important for people to realize don't get are you

SPEAKER_49: getting i'm literally tearing up like this i'm a child i'm just like anyway it's designed to do that

SPEAKER_58: to everybody so if you got choked up during that it's because that's what the world needs you need to have hope you need to have people building stuff and so let's just i understand it's easy to dunk on people it's easy to criticize people people make mistakes they fall down but let's just create a little

SPEAKER_63: space for people to succeed just a little just that's what venture capital is king is yes like

SPEAKER_33: the discovery in defense of the new is something i'm going to tape on my monitor because that it really

Jason Calacanis: is that and the idea of being in a position to be a positive provocateur to say i see these problems but instead of just writing them down and hitting publish yep i can work with you on how to solve them and then you will build a better business that will have an impact in the world you will create jobs in this economy my dad is like so excited that i might be like creating jobs in this economy

SPEAKER_70: i mean yeah that's good stuff i mean talk about a boomer how cute is he he's like you're making jobs

SPEAKER_72: i literally had a young person say this to me like oh my god like you know what do you do for charity

SPEAKER_06: i'm like every company i invest in creates dozens to thousands of jobs yeah the greatest form of charity is a great job you know like if everybody had a really great job not everybody has a great job right i think we all realize that the bottom third of jobs kind of suck and they're you're grinding it out i'm talking about great jobs careers passions like if if we can create more of those in the world that also is a mitzvah that that's that's super important so anyway yeah i really so that's a long way

Jason Calacanis: of saying i absolutely love it i can see where i can see where the math would start to get hard and you have to probably keep your sense of discovery in defense of the new which is why i want to put it on the monitor but yeah um i love it and i think i'm finding cool companies and i'm proud that i have like actually some companies in our portfolio already which i didn't expect to

SPEAKER_81: be happening at six months so thanks for that like it's all happening it's all happening you found them

SPEAKER_04: and if you want to join us on this adventure if you want to support the new this wasn't intended to be

SPEAKER_06: an ad uh but if you're a rich person uh yeah or anybody of affluence if you're an accredited investor which means you're the top six percent of the country you could give to charity i encourage you to do so but also maybe think i could invest 5k or 10k instead of my you know 15 000 in first class tickets or business class tickets to italy this summer or in addition to it and maybe i'll place a bet on a startup on something new and you can go to the syndicate.com climate and the companies we uh share there are going to be super super speculative and risk-taking by definition i mean it's the one of the most risk-taking categories climate and sustainability so come in with eyes wide open this is going to be hard work and uh the chance is the majority chances you lose your money uh but if you keep investing and you get to a diversity you know of uh you know diversification in your portfolio hey there's a chance you could have outsized returns as well that's why i wrote a book angel that's why we do angel.university uh and have given two hundred thousand dollars to charity

SPEAKER_43: uh just by rich people coming to angel.university and learning how to get richer so i love that's like my my like uh robin hood squared um yeah uh not the the stock trading app no shout out to vlad but my robin squared of like i'm not robbing from the rich i'm getting the rich richer and then getting them to donate to charity and to do good things in the world so virtuous cycle it's a good

SPEAKER_63: virtual cycle anyway the promise of remote work was more flexibility more time back and more freedom but in reality many of us are more bogged down than ever why because of the non-stop messages emails and video calls so let me tell you about bubbles bubbles is an asynchronous collaboration pool that enables teamwork on your time it's a 3d environment of screen audio and video recordings it combines the best parts of zoom meetings and google docs it's great for giving designers feedback

Chamath Palihapitiya: product walkthroughs code reviews and so much more bubbles is free and includes unlimited recordings one-click sharing and it works in browser there are no downloads necessary i was going through the new job board we launched at inside so i told my product manager alex walk through the product for me and then i went through and i gave him video messages back and i put notes on different moments in his video and i did this all i kid you not in under a minute and there were no meetings necessary and also no more mistakes send me your product tour and if you add jason me with your bubble i will guarantee you i will watch it use bubbles.com twist go ahead and just send me the bubble to at jason on twitter u s e b u b b l e s dot com slash twist i want you to use bubbles it's an awesome product great

SPEAKER_86: job on that and then next up is your climate interview correct yeah yeah next up uh this

Jason Calacanis: week in climate startups again more and more hopeful incredible every founder has hope in this case actually it's a brother and sister zora chung and stephen chung have uh created this company called rejewel and it's developed technology this is so interesting because we're now getting to the place in ev sales where not only are they all over the road some of them are starting to come out of service and be resold as used cars and right now there's not really any way at scale to test the health of a high capacity battery like you can test your iphone battery and see how much like lifetime is left in it you can't great idea sort of safely do that for ev batteries or like grid scale batteries and so they have developed this technology to do this for evs particularly with the purpose of identifying and then encouraging a second life for them figuring out either can it be resold to somebody and they still have you know battery life left or does it need to be recycled just it's such an important

SPEAKER_06: it's just an important moment in time right like we now have enough of these on the road that thinking about their end of life and reusability and retirement or reuse or resale refurbishing whatever

Jason Calacanis: it happens to be that you need the tools there like consumer confidence if you want to buy an inexpensive ev because it's cheaper than a new one you need that confidence to know that the battery is not dead that it's not going to hold a charge and so you could be you know this gives dealers the ability to say yeah this car is seven years old but it's fine still got you know this is a hardware

SPEAKER_04: and algorithm if i understand correctly because i did a little research on this company when i heard you were interviewing them i'm going to listen along with the audience right now to get educated which is what i do on sundays by the way i just in the morning i pop open this thing and i go do my workout or whatever and i listen to molly's interview just so i learn more because i'm a

SPEAKER_06: neophyte in this category this is an algorithm and a hardware solution and it can tell from what i understand in just minutes how good the battery condition is yeah exactly and it's like a little

SPEAKER_19: cart you sell it to a dealership they roll it around dirt dirt plug it into the cars boop boop

Jason Calacanis: it's just absolutely fantastic gives them a dashboard it's so simple these are the solutions that i think are so incredible like every every layer helps right with the climate crisis like these are the these are the nuts and bolts the shovels and the pickaxes of this entire economy well i mean you

SPEAKER_04: don't get picked up and you're you're not seeing your uber eats driver or your doordash driver or your lyft or uber ride picking you up in a used tesla yet yet or a usdv yet but that will happen because

SPEAKER_43: as tesla has ramped up production now they're able to actually start to meet the demand i think they still have a ways to go obviously but as they start to meet demand people will then uh stop by rich people affluent people will start stop buying teslas as their used teslas as their private cars i know a lot of people who are rich who are waiting for a tesla and they're just like i got a used model literally my friend who's worth lots of money bought a used model s just to hold them over until his plaid was ready or whatever and um this would let those cars then if they're available get tested and

SPEAKER_63: then hey you might have your door dish driver or your lyft driver pick you up in a model s right it'd be fantastic and they could buy it with confidence right yep exactly fantastic great

SPEAKER_100: great job finding this company love love this company yep all right zora and steven brother

SPEAKER_47: and sister oh here we go siblings let's support the new brother and sister steven and zora chung are co-founders of rejuul welcome to this week in climate startups thanks for having us molly um okay first of all what is it like being brother and sister working on a startup do you hate each other yet are you cool

SPEAKER_107: do you have your days um well i think the most important thing is that we have different specialties so i think across the board with any type of partnership you know you don't want to have two engineers or two cooks in the kitchen um so my background has been in business and so when steven called me um it wasn't because he thought i was a brilliant engineer uh because i barely took any science courses in college um but she's not yeah i'm an honorary engineer but uh basically he needed someone to like counter his vision you know with a pragmatic practical uh business vision and like i've also previously worked at walmart and clorox where i manage a lot of their business units and even help them start new businesses so i had a point of view that he knew that he was lacking um and so i

SPEAKER_110: think that's been really eye-opening for both of us because we've actually learned a lot from each other

Jason Calacanis: and then steven tell us about what rejuul does and the technology because that's your wheelhouse you

SPEAKER_114: invented this sucker what what did you build yeah uh so we've developed a um a faster way to measure how

SPEAKER_115: healthy a battery is um so when you're thinking about of you know millions of electric vehicles on the road um it's there's going to be a big need to understand how healthy those batteries are and how valuable those batteries are um so if you're thinking about you know your tesla model 3 after so many years um big question everyone has um how much has this battery degraded how much longer can i use it um and then if you expand that to fleets um you know fleets of electric vehicles think buses or delivery trucks um it's really an roi calculation for them um and then something that i care deeply about is um you know what's going to happen with all these batteries after um they they're no longer useful in a vehicle and so we have a diagnostic technology that can um help understand the the health and the value of those batteries for for secondary battery applications as well so it's really a an easier way to understand battery health that's accurate and cost-effective so what is the

SPEAKER_117: way that battery health is understood now because it's my understanding that when it comes to to high

Jason Calacanis: capacity or ev batteries this is actually really hard to do which surprised me because i thought i could just take my like phone to best buy and they'd be like oh you have this many you know months left on your

SPEAKER_115: battery right right and it's it's it's much easier for phones uh they're they're smaller batteries um and they they also cost a lot less um and so even if there's a wrong calculation on a phone battery um it's not that expensive to fix but when you're talking about a car battery uh it's much bigger uh higher voltage heavier dangerous um then it it can be very expensive if um if if a reading is wrong um how it's typically done today is you just uh literally charge the battery and then you discharge the battery and so um that takes actually several hours um and then if you're talking about a really high capacity ev battery um that also requires some big heavy equipment and what one of these things can cost tens of thousands of dollars just to um just to have that equipment and install it um and so that's not scalable for millions of ev batteries so what we've developed is a way that you can kind of just plug into a battery run a quick test and in you know a few minutes you can you can tell the same uh information as that several hours long test user privacy is one of the biggest topics in

SPEAKER_48: tech right now we talk about it on the show all the time and if you care about your privacy you need

SPEAKER_123: to check out brave brave shields you from ads trackers and other creepy stuff that follows you across the web now they have three core products at brave the core browser the search engine and its browser native crypto wallet i had the founder of brave on the program in fact brave's browser now has over 60 million users think about that and thousands of daily downloads and it's built on chromium which is the open source chrome project so all your favorite chrome extensions they work in brave and it's three times faster than chrome why because brave doesn't bog you down with all those ads you can import your bookmarks passwords and settings from chrome or any browser with just one click and it doesn't track you what you search for or what you click on and here's why you can really trust brave brave was co-founded by brendan ike who was the creator of javascript a co-founder of mozilla firefox and a technical lead on netscape how about that huh he knows what he's doing he's been on the pod so brave search is a truly private and independent search engine go download brave today at brave.com twist to browse faster search privately and so much more all in a single click brave.com twist go download it today and try it give me some feedback before i move on to the

Jason Calacanis: business part a little bit with zora tell me a little more about the technology you're using this electrochemical impedance spectroscopy spectroscopy spectroscopy yep um explain that to me like i'm 10 and what what is value you know have you invented something here like is it is it do you own this ip

SPEAKER_129: and how does it work but like i'm 10 because no one's gonna okay maybe 12 i will go up to 12. yeah

SPEAKER_130: and first i want to say it so it's electrochemical impedance spectroscopy spectroscopy yeah we can also

SPEAKER_120: say eis and don't worry after you know five plus years i still get it wrong sometimes um so eis is a um it's an electrochemical measurement technique so we didn't invent that technique um it's used by electrochemists all around the world for decades now um and it's a you know fairly well-known technique to characterize and understand um batteries so where our ip is um is in figuring out how to do that for higher voltage and basically larger batteries um to do eis uh today you can buy a machine that can do that on a like a cell phone battery a cell um typically three to five volts and what we've done

SPEAKER_115: is develop some technology that can perform this on higher voltage batteries so 50 volts we're doing right now we're looking at 400 volt ev batteries um so that that's the first kind of unique part of our technology um the other thing is we've figured out a way to do the testing collect the data and develop battery state of health or soh models it's basically a machine learning algorithm based on that that measurement and we've developed a way to systematically and repeatedly be able to develop these battery models from that eis measurement gotcha so you it's a hardware and a

Jason Calacanis: software solution you plug this in see what the battery health is like and then deliver essentially this health report does is it also predictive does it also sort of say i mean i assume the health report must be somewhat predictive the battery will last this many more years that kind of thing

SPEAKER_120: yeah yeah exactly um what we do is so that one measurement provides kind of a snapshot in time

SPEAKER_115: but if you have multiple snapshots you can kind of create a pretty good idea of where a battery is going to go in the future and then if you combine that with other information you know all batteries have some sort of battery management system or bms so there's a lot of data collection already so combining our prediction with some other sources of information then you can get a pretty good idea of

SPEAKER_135: how much how many more years does a battery going to last in a particular application and it sounds

SPEAKER_47: like there are kind of two options there's how many more years will the battery last or this battery is

Jason Calacanis: ready for some other use what are those other uses zora's nodding do you want to jump in here

SPEAKER_107: oh yeah um it's very interesting uh we get that question a lot um and i think it um a simple answer would be um any application that is less stressful than the original one so if you think about how stressful it is for an ev battery it probably goes through extreme temperatures um you're subject to shock and vibration and if you think about trying to accelerate on the freeway that is an intense amount of energy that it's using as a huge load on the battery but if you think about a stationary application that's the most common one that people think of it might be sitting in the building hopefully it's in a more temperature controlled environment and everything about a building load maybe the most intense thing you do is pump up the ac or the heat but that is more consistent than you know accelerating from zero to 60 on the freeway for instance right there's other applications that people have looked into as well such as even putting it into you know lighter electric vehicles such as forklifts or golf carts where maybe the top speed is you know under 25 miles an hour and these are maybe also in very controlled environments like a forklift is not going to be off-roading um and so they're going to be better taken care of so there's a lot of opportunities here um and i think what's really powerful about the technology is that there's not one use case so being able to understand the specific health and the remaining useful life is incredibly valuable in identifying that ideal use case because even in my opinion the battery only has one year of life left that could be the best application for a diy project where you just need to prove out something why would you buy a new battery for that it's a waste of resources on everybody's part right

SPEAKER_117: and do these pathways for reuse exists now or is this the kind of technology that could enable

Jason Calacanis: these pathways for reuse and then keep these batteries that might have a year of life left in

SPEAKER_146: them out of god help us a landfill there are pathways but they're they're not like you know

SPEAKER_115: official pathways there's a lot of people doing diy projects you know hobbyists essentially um and there's a few companies who are starting to do this on a on a larger scale but it is you know we see our technology really as like you're saying as an enabler um something to be able to do this on a on a massive scale um because we are expecting millions of these electric vehicle batteries to reach end of life um you know in just a few years and um doing a 10-hour test on each of them just doesn't really pencil out um so having a more systematic way to do this um and you know certified way to do this um

SPEAKER_49: that that's where really what we're targeting right you take your your racehorse and you put it out to

SPEAKER_123: pasture right if you're listening to this podcast you probably already have some exposure to crypto well did you know that you can now invest in crypto through your retirement account that's right with itrust capital you can buy and sell digital assets from a crypto ira this means you'll get some of the same tax advantages as a traditional ira itrust capital has over two dozen of the most popular cryptocurrencies to invest in and unlike the stock market you can buy and sell 24 hours a day if you want the itrust capital platform is easy to use and it only takes a few minutes to create your account setting up an ira is free and itrust fees are low you get a free account and a one percent fee per crypto transaction so visit itrust.capital.twist to start investing today that's itrust.capital.twist disclosure taxes and conditions may apply fees apply cryptocurrencies are a speculative investment with risk of loss itrust capital inc does not provide legal investment or tax advice consult with a qualified legal investment or tax professional um i'm not saying i relate to the

SPEAKER_19: acceleration burden that one puts on an electric car i'm only saying they accelerate really quickly um

Jason Calacanis: zora what is the what's the business model here who would be the buyer of this technology

SPEAKER_106: uh yeah um right now uh we are talking to uh a top 10 automaker and um the idea is that this would

SPEAKER_107: that be deployed actually at the service departments so while they don't own the dealerships they would be looking at an enterprise subscription that they would then farm this out so the paying customer um in this scenario would be the automaker and then the end users are actually the technicians at the service departments over time we see that changing um but right now with ev penetration especially in the us being fairly low and a lot of that control needs to be at the automaker level over time i can also see this going out to like the jiffy lubes and auto zones of the world where if you think about the service offerings that they have now in a an environment where you have 50 of evs on the road um they will have to expand their offerings right what's the status of the business now you

SPEAKER_155: said you're at 50 volt batteries you're kind of in proof of concept and piloting stage is that right

SPEAKER_156: yeah yeah we're doing some uh commercial pilots right now um actually on two continents so that's

SPEAKER_115: really exciting you know aside from just proving out that the technology um we're we're scaling up for that next um the the higher voltage um battery packs if you will so um zora mentioned that we're we're doing a project with a top 10 automaker um and that's you know we're essentially doing um a bit

SPEAKER_117: of technology demonstration for that next generation product how important do you think it is to have

SPEAKER_19: technology like this to sort of i mean it just feels like a lot of people would probably choose a used dv over a used ice vehicle but they don't have that confidence because we've all had the experience with

SPEAKER_47: our phone where the battery just won't hold a charge after a while yeah yeah this um this is incredibly

SPEAKER_160: important and um one thing one of the reasons that when steven called me about it that was spoke to me

SPEAKER_107: very much is that if you look at the vehicles on the road the average age of a vehicle is about 12 years and um since covet i've read that that is expected to increase and so most people are buying their cars used and not new so if we are to really look at ev adoption mass ev adoption we need to make this available to uh you know people that aren't super wealthy and are mainly focused on buying used vehicles but that risk is um too great right now there's too much uncertainty and we actually have a funny story one of our interns bought a used bolt and when he asked them to check the car battery

SPEAKER_162: they checked the 12 starter battery um and yeah exactly got it so there's a little bit of an

SPEAKER_163: education hill that you have to also climb here yeah how hard is this to do steven i mean it feels

SPEAKER_47: like one of those things you know the first conversation i had with zora i was like wait i don't understand why this doesn't exist but it sounds like it is pretty hard to approach these big

SPEAKER_167: batteries with a real diagnostic tool is it also dangerous um we're we're making it less dangerous

SPEAKER_120: uh it's so yes yes um i with any um large high capacity high voltage battery there is an element

SPEAKER_115: of danger in there but there's things you can do to kind of build a lot of safety into either the process um the the equipment that you use you know ppe obviously so it's it's definitely dangerous to do um it's not something that every you know car technician is trained on actually very few of them actually have any um expertise in handling high voltage batteries or you know even knowing what to look for um so as you said before there's there's a huge education gap um that can be addressed um but with a technology like ours um we're trying to make it as plug and play as as possible so that um somebody doesn't even need to be exposed to any high voltage um they just plug something into a um a port and it's you know they just press a button and then this this uh this test runs so

Jason Calacanis: hopefully we can get to that point how intensive is the hardware component like in terms of manufacturing and building it is it expensive i know that vcs have a tendency to be nervous about hardware

SPEAKER_115: um it is hardware and because we are dealing with um you know batteries and and you know high voltage components um there there are some um expensive components inside these um but it's it's you know somewhere between the cost of making a laptop and making uh making some you know heavy industrial equipment um it's not the most expensive thing and what one of the really interesting things about our technology is we found a way to do this with essentially off-the-shelf components so there's not a whole lot of customization that needs to be done um we're we're building the hardware but it's essentially just you know electronics and it's controlled by software so it's one of the more

SPEAKER_120: i guess um easy things to manufacture when it comes to clean technology uh it's it's electronics um and the way we're approaching it is uh as much of it um as much of it that can be controlled by software the

SPEAKER_117: better and then what does it actually look like it sounds like it's sort of a like a cart right like

SPEAKER_19: you just sort of pull it around a lot full of cars maybe and or do they drive into a service center

SPEAKER_117: like what's the what are the actual mechanics of doing the diagnostic yeah yeah so there's a few

SPEAKER_120: different um uh i guess looks of the of the product uh the one that we've um that we're testing with

SPEAKER_115: some commercial partners right now those are for 50 volt modules uh 50 volt battery modules and that's kind of the size of a desktop computer um you know kind of a box with some cables that come out of it

SPEAKER_120: um the the the product that we're able to plug into the charging port of a vehicle that is you know closer to the like a cart that you would roll around a parking lot um with you know box with some wheels

SPEAKER_115: um with a cable coming out and then that cable is um essentially looks like a charging cable so you can plug it into the um charge port of a vehicle and um do the diagnostic that way i have two questions

SPEAKER_47: simultaneously or i'm going to come back to you with a business question but steven how did you how did you come to this problem how did you decide like this was the thing to tackle

SPEAKER_146: yeah um so in some sometime towards the end of um grad school i was trying to find um different ways

SPEAKER_120: to not work on my thesis uh so i came across some some articles yeah yeah that's where all the ideas come out so um i came across this article about um hey what's going to happen with all these electric vehicle batteries at their end of life and um this was in 2016 so the the model 3 hadn't come out yet um this was a very you know futuristic thing um and i i just couldn't stop thinking about that problem um and then after um after grad school was just um trying to do different different things um had had a bunch of crazy ideas uh zora calls it my mad scientist days um and um during uh during that time while i was tinkering i came across this uh this electrochemical impedance spectroscopy eis um and then i looked more into it and realized hey this this can be a way to at least address the first problem of how healthy are these batteries and how valuable are they and uh i dug more into how to actually perform this eis measurement um and i realized it was essentially in an extension of um my expertise in power electronics um my i got my masters in um specifically power electronics which is you were answering the question how do you move current or or get voltage from one voltage to another in an efficient way and and eis is basically um you know a an interesting um power electronics problem um so after you know tinkering a little bit more uh calling zora a bunch of times and and bothering her nights and weekends you know we we came on this idea of well what if we were able to

SPEAKER_115: to use this hardware um to take a measurement and then understand the health of batteries and use that for use that to understand the health and the value and then zora when you go about calculating

SPEAKER_117: tamp and you talk to automakers like what is the incentive for them to buy this i i think there

SPEAKER_19: there's a tendency to think well car makers just want to sell new cars so why do they care about their

SPEAKER_107: used stock yeah yeah i think a big part of it will be policy and regulation so um it's not quite in the us yet but in europe and china um there is regulations where there's extended producer responsibility so they are responsible for these batteries at end of life and we've estimated that if the proper infrastructure isn't in place you know they're seeing lower residual value for their used cars um which is going to hurt their dealerships um there's not really a lot of work that they can do on electric vehicle right now because the whole battery is being ignored so that's revenue that their dealerships are missing out on um and then more importantly is if they don't have the proper infrastructure um to repurpose you're looking at at least a thousand dollars per vehicle to ship and recycle and i say at least because there's some if you have a smaller battery it's lighter and if it has a lot of um precious metals then you get some value back but we're trending towards lithium iron phosphate where it actually costs double to recycle it because you're not getting any of the precious metals back it's better from a mining perspective right because you're not going to the drc but when you talk about end of life that's an additional cost that they may not have factored in and so who's covering that cost um right now what we're seeing is a lot of oems that have warehouses full of these batteries that they're trying to figure out what to do with because they don't have like the million dollars or so that they might need to recycle these and they know that they're so valuable so the incentive is you know making some money i would say and then meeting regulations and of course being able to repair remanufacturing repurpose would also help meet their esg goals too right

SPEAKER_19: and i could imagine that even the the simple there is all of that and just the sort of simple part where like you want to sell an ev that's a lease return and you want to give people confidence

SPEAKER_146: exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and i think another i'm sorry another really interesting part of this is

SPEAKER_115: um a lot of automakers they're be they're becoming battery makers as well um and having access to future supply of battery materials is becoming increasingly important and so there's um you know all kinds of investments in not just the cell manufacturing but also recycling now so that a lot of these companies can reclaim the materials well how do you how do you recycle a battery if um you sold it to somebody and they technically own the vehicle um they they're thinking about ways to be able to reclaim these batteries and um just finding you know new technologies and you know different uh in a way redefining what their business models look like to be able to adapt to a new electrified future right i mean that's what i think is so

SPEAKER_47: fundamentally fascinating about technologies like this is that it opens up economic pathways that don't currently exist within whether it's you know offering an incentive program for somebody to turn in a vehicle that they bought or uh creating the pathway to golf carts so that that's a revenue stream for car makers like it just all gets so interesting when you think about what you could do if you just

SPEAKER_19: have this one i mean you're like the bolt not the car the actual unintentional ev pun um well stephen and zora this is so interesting please keep us posted i love hearing

SPEAKER_107: about it yeah definitely thank you for having us and giving us the opportunity to share some of um

SPEAKER_06: our experience and insights thanks for coming on okay everybody thanks for listening we're going to be back tomorrow with a full slate of news it's going to be monday so buckle up i can't tell you how many

SPEAKER_43: crypto startups are going to go belly up or lawsuits that'll be filed but you can be sure we'll have two or three of those stories this week and everything else that happened over this weekend and going into

Jason Calacanis: summer it's a big new summer i've been stockpiling stories since friday for the monday docket it could

SPEAKER_06: be a two-hour show just like get ready unbelievable yeah okay and uh hey just a special thanks to all the amazing sponsors i want to give extra sponsor love and i want you to do it too if you're a super fan of the show and you made it to this point in the show it is your gear it is your duty it is your honor it is your privilege to go on twitter and just say thank you to whichever one of these sponsors you love the most and then just mention us so i want you to say thank you at notion for supporting at twi startups right that's a perfect example if notion or squarespace are your jam i love both of those i use both those products hey maybe masterclass i love that product i got the yearly subscription maybe you're using broker for insurance like me and a lot of my startups maybe you're getting healthy with thorn right get healthy with thorn or maybe you got a nice tight suit from indochino you go ahead and thank thorn indochino in broker and masterclass on your twitter and then that sends love to them and to us and we keep this whole operation growing maybe we go to seven days a week

SPEAKER_43: right how great would that be and thanks to microsoft they really support founders so great masterworks i'm buying my second painting on masterworks can't wait i got a basquiat i'm trying to pick my next one i may go for a warhol i don't know um lemon.io they do a great job of landing developers for a lot of our startups policy genius you need to have insurance to life insurance for your family and they're going to help you get the best price vanta for your sock to compliance intercom so that you can understand your customers and not churn customers what a great product bubbles huh we've been getting a lot of pitches on bubbles recently brave great browser uh does a lot of interesting things in terms of saving you from a lot of tracking maybe if you want to get rid of some of the ads that are annoying you and have some cryptocurrency hooks that are kind of neat and of course i trust if you want to put crypto in your ira which i am going to do by the way i have some crypto holdings but i want to put a little bit of my ira and get that tax benefit like mr peter

SPEAKER_217: teal did famously with his facebook stock so thanks again to all those sponsors who knows maybe it works out you never know you never know maybe it works out hit it out of the park all right everybody sorry i should have given you a trigger warning on that one anytime i mentioned peter teal i don't know did i trigger the lips okay sorry sorry sorry i love peter teal he's such an interesting weird dude i had him on the show i interviewed him would you interview peter teal

SPEAKER_07: would that be true triggering for you i mean i would i gotta like you gotta you gotta you gotta face your fears you gotta face your demons that would be like you going to dagobah and yoda's

SPEAKER_43: like listen your weapons you will not need them and then you go into the cave and you have to face

SPEAKER_225: off and that would be me that would 100 be me i'm gonna have peter teal i would do it i would do it for the clicks oh okay wow very good i like it i would do it for the learning i think it's important

SPEAKER_75: to understand people and where they're absolutely all right all right we'll see you all tomorrow

SPEAKER_226: see you thanks thanks partners