Odd Lots - This Stove Company Wants to Change How the World Uses Energy

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

One of the minor culture wars in America has to do with electric stoves. To some, they're more energy efficient and better for air quality. To others, electric stove requirements represent government overreach, and a loss of freedom to use a gas range. Impulse Labs wants to change the whole conversation. The company produces an induction stove — very different than most electric stoves — that it claims can not only produce superior food, but can also be a catalyst for electrification, thanks to its built-in battery storage. On this episode, we visited the Impulse offices in San Francisco to try out the stove ourselves and talk to CEO Sam D'Amico about the company's vision. We also discuss how a stove maker based in the US thinks about the grid, tariffs, buying batteries, and other challenges that come with selling a physical consumer product.Read More: How Did Gas Stoves Ignite a Culture War? Become a Bloomberg.com subscriber using our special intro offer at bloomberg.com/podcastoffer. You’ll get episodes of this podcast ad-free and exclusive access to our daily Odd Lots newsletter. Already a subscriber? Connect your account on the Bloomberg channel page in Apple Podcasts to listen ad-free.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thanks for listening to OddLots. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the podcast OddLots on Amazon Music. Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts Radio News. Hello and welcome to another episode of the OddLodz podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthall. And I'm Tracy Alley. Tracy, we just had like one of the most amazing sticks for a lot. It was really good. I just ate the cap and it was delicious. It was so good. And you and I are both in D. steak. I like steak people. And you're like also have particularly exacting standards to your steak.

I don't think it's exacting. I just like my steak cooked a particular way. I like it black and blue, which is weirdly controversial at some steak restaurants. I think because they have like health and safety rules about serving raw meat, raw and burnt meat. Yeah. But that's the way I like it. I like it. I'm more of a medium rare guy, but I do. Mid, very mid, Joe. Very mid, very mid take. Yeah. But yes, we just had an amazing steak. And, you know, listeners might be wondering why. Why we're eating steak? Well, why we're talking about steak and why we would be introducing an episode based on the fact that we just had steak?

So, full disclosure, Joe came to me before we started this episode and said, I really want to interview the stove company out in San Francisco. And I was kind of like a stove company. Like, are we doing consumer goods reviews now? But after seeing the stove and hearing more of the overall pitch, I kind of get. I hadn't realized the scale of ambition here, but it is really interesting. It's not just a stove. So on Twitter, I would say over the last six to nine months, every once in a while I'll see a video of someone who made a pilgrimage to San Francisco. And they're like, oh my God, I just had this crazy steak.

And so in my mind, when I knew that we were coming out here, I was like, we should learn about this crazy steak. But actually, it's not the steak, though that was good. it's the stove that made the steak. And if a bunch of people feel the need to tweet about a particular stove that they saw when they came here, it's like, we should also make that same. Yeah. And as we just learned, it's not just the stove either. There's also a battery component, which gets into some really interesting energy ideas. There's a whole energy vision.

So why don't we just kick it off? We are going to be talking about steak. We're going to be talking about stoves. Eggs again. We're going to be talking about electrification. We are going to be talking, yeah, about batteries. American culture wars over gas versus electric. We're going to be talking about manufacturing.

There is a lot of meat here. So to speak for Audlod's listeners. You've been waiting to unveil that one. So we have, yeah, the perfect guest. We're going to be speaking with Sam D'Amico. He is the CEO of Impulse Labs, the maker of the legendary stove. We can confirm. They were really good.

And the whole point is it. Yeah, it's perfect state. It's so nice. So they are legendary. Sam, thank you so much for coming on Adlaught and cooking us a steak. Thanks for coming to the office, so I didn't have to go anywhere. I'm trying to think we're to begin. Actually, obvious question, which is, you know, there are a lot of software companies around here. There are a lot of AI companies. What moved you to launch a stove company? That's a fun one. So it's actually funny as I've been in consumer hardware basically for the past 10 plus years.

Oh, cool. Working on a number of different ARVR headset programs. So, you know, infamous ones like Google Glass or famous ones, depending on your interpretation of that, was. at Oculus kind of as they got acquired, joined the team, got to kind of shepherd the first true consumer product of theirs to market by basically being one of the people at the factory, like helping bring the factory up from the ground up. Also worked in a couple other programs, including like headsets, VR controller, stuff like that. So I've been in kind of hardware, but not culinary. I've been into cooking for a long time. Personally, it was this sort of like some family background, but also I like to cook the food from the places I visit. So, like, I got really into cooking, like, Chinese food, got like one of those outdoor skewer grills.

And then at one point, I kind of got fixated on pizza. And I was like, I want to cook a pizza really fast. It is surprisingly difficult to build a proper pizza oven. And I have looked into this and I am very intimidated. So I think this was 2019 timeframe. I got fixated on the pizza problem. And I was like, it would be amazing if you could make a tabletop pizza oven that was as good as these, like, fancy brick ovens that could rip, get a pizza out in like 45 seconds. I was like, what is the actual power requirement to do this? And I realized that I was like in the 10,000 plus watts zone. So for reference, that's like six times more than the plug in your kitchen. And I was like, okay, but how often am I actually putting a pizza into the oven and blasting it with heat? And I'm like probably not most of the time, probably like a small fraction of the time. And that's when I realized that if you put a battery in a device like that, you could actually get that high power for a very short period of time. And I'm like probably not most of the time. And I'm like,

and then without having to, you know, basically like dedicated... So the constraint is no longer the wall plug. The constraint is no longer the wall plug because you can then cram a lot of energy into a short period of time versus spreading it out over a long period of time. And that was the first sort of light bulb. Like, okay, you could now make appliances that didn't previously exist. And there was a lot of talk about smart appliances, you know, Juicerro being a great example, stuff like this where there was like a subscription model or there was a subscription model or there

like a smart aspect of this. And I was like, but there wasn't a way to actually increase performance. And this was the first thing I could think of that would actually let you do that. And this is a reason why this whole industry is stagnated. It's kind of like cars where until EV showed up, there was not really competitive pressure to like really innovate on a number of different things in vehicles. Like every vehicle has the same vendor for infotainment system, for instance, and things like that. So I was like, this is a big deal. Now, the second part, was what if you did this in an installed appliance and how big would the battery be? And I realized that once you put it in like a stove, oven, hot water heater, laundry machine,

that battery is like a third of a power wall or a quarter of a power wall. So equivalent of like a full-size home battery system. And so now you could actually change the grid at a fundamental level. You could basically deploy enough batteries through this Trojan horse of the appliances to actually reshape the grid in a resilient, distributed way with essentially the idea of a power plant pushed all the way into people's homes, basically. I want to get more into the sort of mini energy distribution system that you're envisioning. But before we do, can I ask the basic question, which is, why do so many people in America seem to dislike electric stoves?

Because electric stoves are terrible. and have in some sense defamed themselves through bad technology. And I have to have to be clarifying. The electric stove that has defamed itself through bad technology is the electric stove that most people have, which is either of two types, the ones with the coils that are elevated above the surface and give inconsistent heating to the pan and also take a very long time to heat up and all those other stuff. Or those radiant electric cook tops where it's basically like an infrared light bulb below the counter. Oh, yeah.

That also, because it's very high temperature, like you end up, if anything spills, it scorches it completely and it's really hard to deal with. Induction has actually been a lot better, but then there's a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt where people are like, are my pans compatible, you know, all these other things. And many people have not had an induction stove experience in the United States. So their probable experience they've had on an electric stove is a terrible one. and that means that when you compare that with gas, you're like, okay, with gas, I adjust the knob. It directly controls the flame to the pan. I get that direct feedback. I can actually feel like I'm in control.

You don't get that necessarily with electric in the same way. Okay. So induction stoves already exist. There is a market for them. You have innovated on them by including a battery so that they can get to. high intensity for a short period of time or you can get high intensity without the constraint of the plug in your house or apartment. Is there anything on it? We just got this extremely impressive demo. That's 10 kilowatts of power going into this burner. Oh yeah. You can see the bubbles.

Yeah, it's already simmering. We never thought this would be so exciting. We have four people staring at a pot or boiling water. This is the first time where if you've washed the pot If you watch the water boil, it actually does boil. We're debunking that. And then it'll boil much more angerly when you've seen it's wrong. So what was that like 30 seconds from before the water? It's like under 40 to get a liter boil. Yeah.

So like a cup is under 10 seconds. Boil water in 40 seconds. Steak came out perfectly. What else tech wise had to happen for you to make this really good? The story was basically kind of resuming from, hey, what installed appliances we want to do. The stove culture war kind of came to mind first because we're like, we actually have to prove that electric is better. You can't just guilt trip people into saying electric is better.

To electrify homes, we basically need to have better products, period. And so the goal here was to target the one that was the spiciest because that's the one where we could probably show off the best and have like, you know, the most buzz around it, which was the stove. The first thing we were doing was like, okay, once you integrate. a battery into the product. And so for reference, this is a medium-sized battery. It's three kilowatt hours, which is roughly 30 times as big as your laptops battery,

for a reference on that. And about 1.20th the size of a Tesla Model 3 battery. Okay. To give you kind of an intermediate scale of what that is. So we put the battery in there. That gives us an extra 15,000 watts on top of the maybe 1,500 watts that like a normal plug would get you. So you get a ton of power available in the device.

So we were like, let's just make that available in the burner. And so we developed a technology to put 10,000 watts versus like 3,000 watts into an induction burner, meaning that a liter of cold water boils in under 40 seconds versus two and a half to three minutes, like a normal induction stove, or seven minutes for a typical gas stove. So we've been able to do these side by side comparisons where literally the watch pot is boiling in our video and you cut off before there's even bubbles in the gas stove video. Oh, that's cool. So with the battery, if I have, for instance, solar panels at my house and now I have this appliance that comes with a battery, I can collect some of the energy that the panels are generating during the day, store it for cooking at night. Yes.

And so the product basically is we're able to run off of whatever energy your home is producing. So if you've got solar panels in your house, they can preferentially charge the battery at those times. we've actually like ensured this whole thing as software defines. So we're able to accommodate kind of what people would want to do in these sort of situations, basically. But you could imagine that the system works identically to a existing home battery system. It just happens to be like installed inside a stove, basically. So does that mean you're not just competing with GE or some maker of household appliances?

You're also competing with battery companies, like maybe a Tesla. Yeah, I don't want to say I'm a competitor. I don't think you want to bet against Elon, you know, in some cases. especially given the events the last two weeks. But my sense is, yeah, like this is, there's actually a really compelling story, which is appliances are installed every day in the United States in every neighborhood. Home battery systems are a lot more invasive to install. So installing a home battery is you basically can get a microscope to your electrical panel,

figure out, hey, what are the important lows to prioritize, size the system. There's basically a like individualized arts and crafts an electrician project required to get a home battery in your house. and Tesla's done a very awesome job at mostly making that painless, but it's still very high lift. It's like $6,000 to do the install, not just the cost of the batteries, but then appliances are installed every day in the United States.

So the story is like a Best Buy truck pulls up and unloads a dishwasher and it gets put into someone's place and that's like marginal cost of $50 or whatever. And if you can piggyback on that installation and then you also get a battery on the grid, you're now the cheapest energy storage by far in the United States. People talk about electrification.

What does it mean to have a battery in our home? Obviously, the battery helps you in the situation of high performance cooking. But big picture, what is good about having a battery in your home? So this is actually the reason why not everyone has a battery in their home yet. Okay. And so the story is the current reason for have a battery in your house is for backup. It's for, hey, if the power goes out like a battery, did in Seattle yesterday or something like that, your house still works. And you can like,

you know, your stuff in your fridge doesn't go bad. Like, you end up being able to continue to live your life in a modern, connected way, despite the fact that the grids down. That is the feature that sells battery storage to people today. The kind of a marginal thing. I would describe it as it's a prepper pitch versus a versus it's by that instead of a generator. It's by that instead of a generator. Exactly. Exactly. And so. But mostly on a day-to-day basis, that doesn't make my life anymore. And then on a day-to-day basis, that is invisible unless you've gotten, like, maybe you live in Texas and you got just totally shellacked by storms over a previous year. Now you're like, I'm totally buying a battery for next storm season.

The problem with that is that's not enough to get batteries in every home in the United States. Yeah. And so what we realized was if you could make better user experiences for the devices and those were enabled by the batteries, then suddenly the batteries are installed in their house. And then the actual benefit for having the batteries in people's houses beyond that, beyond the user experience is, well, this is also part of a new decentralized grid that is getting kind of built in real time today. And if you can push battery storage all the way into homes or like as close as like the street and basically the street and into people's houses, you actually cut down on the transmission upgrades required to the rest of the grid. So a big problem is as everyone is electrifying because electric vehicles are better than gas cars, for instance, as electric dryers are better, for instance, like the heat pump tires are better. As people switch and as induction stoves are better, people's energy consumption, especially the peak energy consumption of their house is going to go up. And what that means is your utility is going to have to upgrade all the wires up and down from the power plants all the way into people's neighborhoods.

the transformers have to get upgraded because like if everyone on the street starts charging their vehicle, that's a problem. We're going to have to make all these sort of massive upgrades. But then we're kind of obeying this previous reality, which was we were planning for like everything being on at once, like every light switch being turned on at the same time, versus the real reality, which is everything is intermittent. And if you can put battery storage, you know, to charge up kind of over time using whatever. capacity of the wires is available, then the battery can be available to provide that peak demand when it's needed right at the point of demand, which saves you from essentially having

to upgrade much of the grid. So to summarize, because that was kind of a long point, batteries are actually a key part of the future of wires in a sense, like because it's kind of like, I have a skinny pipe because the app like I actually want to take a shower I have a skinny pipe I have a reservoir upstate I have a skinny pipe to my house and then I've got a water tank I can go shower off the local water tank even though that pipe is only giving me a trickle of water over the whole day because I'm not showering more than twice a day or something like that in my building so that's a way to potentially think about it but instead of upgrading the pipe you can essentially upgrade the storage and you can do that without having to

modify the built world, which is, you know, if you go... Which is very difficult. Which, as we know, is illegal. Well, okay. Speaking of the real world, I mean, the idea is very clear and very cool. But talk to us about the actual manufacturing process of doing this. Because you're trying to do like a bunch of different things at the same time. So incorporate that battery storage, make sure that you can turn up the power very quickly,

also manage the actual heat on the appliance itself with sensors. it seems complicated. Yeah, and so I'm not sure if I've walked through the whole architecture of the system just to kind of describe it for the listener. Basically, this is a induction cooktop, standard size, induction cooktop can fit in your counter. So if you're remodeling your kitchen, feel free to buy one. We're selling them right now, just a shill.

But inside the normal form factor of the device, there is a battery that's basically the size of, I know, it's like two shoe boxes or something like that. It's kind of a way to think about it. So the battery kind of inserts in a slot in the device. device, but otherwise it's not any bigger than a normal stove effectively. We then also had to develop to leverage that high power of the battery, we had to develop a new type of temperature sensor technology, which also resulted in the perfect steak that you all had earlier.

We'll say it a perfect egg, by the way. And this actively will sense the temperature and catch up to, like by implying more power, basically dynamically. So if you put something cold in, it automatically adjusts. grows more power in this situation. So what I can do is actually cook this egg perfectly, steaming it in its own water, basically. And then you'll notice the temperature starting to catch back up

on the UI. Whoa. And the- Sorry, how does it know, like what is the mechanism via which it knows the temperature of the egg, or that it knows something cool has been trumped in there. So this sensor here is an active temperature sensor that we designed.

It uses technology that has not previously been deployed in the culinary space at all. It's actually inspired by some technology from LiDAR, which our CTO used to work on. The approach basically is this can actually sense inside the pan what the pan's temperature is through the metal because it works through heat flow, not through temperature.

Tracy, it review? It's really nice. It's a good egg. All of this stuff had to basically be built custom from the ground up. A big problem in the appliance space is a lot of the major appliance manufacturers essentially just build boxes that they put other people's parts into. And it's very similar to

how the automotive industry pre-Tesla worked, where they're sourcing stuff from, in the automotive case, it's like Bosch and Continental and all the other folks. They're sourcing essentially like a kit of parts and then they integrate it into a vehicle. That's how the appliance industry has developed over the past 20 or so years because there's been kind of a variety of like combo of regulatory plus innovation gap sort of things that have. kind of frozen the industry a bit. We actually had to operate at a lower abstraction layer. We had to basically go and say, hey, we're building this like a consumer electronics device more generally than as a stove. And by interfacing with consumer electronics manufacturers,

folks that build things like TVs and headphones and products like that, we're able to actually vertically integrate a lot more of the technology stack from everything from the power electronics to the sensors, to be able to custom design a battery designed for our application, and tie that battery to all of the other pieces of the system we're developing. And so we ended up booting up a very complicated supply chain through some industry leading partners we're working with to be able to make this happen. And like my background in consumer electronics, I've had to work with a number of big contract manufacturers and joint development manufacturers in Asia.

That's been invaluable experience that we've kind of. of taken over from weirdly enough. It's like, how do you jump from VR headsets to stoves? It's like, in some sense, we kind of re-ran the playbook. Today's show is brought to you by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real.

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My kids would be blown away, having seen my eggs. I just have a quick random question. I want to get into some policy questions because electrification, a lot of ambiguity. Just a real quick question. On the battery component itself, one of the pushes under the most recent administration has been boosting domestic battery manufacturer.

primarily for EVs. In your either currently or when you look a few years down the line, like do you see US-sourced batteries being important or useful or part of it at this point? Yeah. So I think there's actually a number of things that are very interesting going on here that you have to kind of poke through to read. So like an example is Tesla after the IRA passed, Tesla essentially bought the tooling from one of their battery manufacturers and moved it to California. and essentially the battery cells that go into, I think, Tesla Megapack and maybe Powerwall are made in Lathrop, California at a big factory, at their quote-unquote megafactory. So a number of big shifts have happened.

I would say honestly, like I was looking at this. I think Tesla is like probably one of the biggest players right now just in terms of total volume. But LG, Goshen, a number of big folks have committed to large factories in the U.S. A lot of this is targeting automotive, specifically like GM or Rivian or things like that. there's kind of this like interesting gap of batteries for everyone else and for you know people doing weird things like us i have not seen the motion there yet because i think there needs to be slack capacity in the automotive space yeah but we've also been tracking what does onshoreing look like

what does all the other stuff look like there's a pretty clear step-by-step process that we think is going to exist and it's likely going to involve even the existing players that folks are already sourcing batteries from overseas. Speaking of policy, away from energy, do you have a spreadsheet somewhere that's like the cost of manufacturing this item currently versus the cost of manufacturing this item with 20% tariffs on imports from China? Yeah, so that's a fun one. I think there's a very funny situation from the first Trump administration, which was,

oddly enough, every Apple product had an exemption. Yeah, I remember that. Like very oddly enough, every Apple product had an exemption. And that was locked in, you know. And so maybe there's an exemption for stoves in the future. I'm joking. I don't think I matter that much. But the point, though, is they did not exempt appliances in the beginning for reference.

So my understanding is a more broad China tariff is something that we could potentially expect. Our playbook is we pick manufacturers that have multiple bases of operations. And also are amenable to U.S. onshoreing. where relevant, or Mexico, insuring were relevant. So we've been from day zero, very cognizant of this. I mean, another example of this is like when the company started, you could not go to China very easily unless you did, unless you, unless you did a two week plus quarantine and all this other stuff. So we've been very aware of like trade barriers and potential risks while also trying to make sure that we work with the best people in the business. I have two more policy questions.

One is just really straightforward. You currently, if you buy the stove, can get a tax credit, right? Yes. And we don't know what the future of the IRA is, but at least under current law, you get, what's the price? So the product is $6,000 MSRP, which is normal for a high-end induction cooktop by itself. So like if you go buy one from one of the fancy European brands, even ones that you can buy and say Best Buy or things like that, there are stuff at that price range. But then you additionally get this 30% tax credit because it is a home battery system. And it is a full home battery system. It's got an inverter. It's able to actually do all the things that a power wall can do from a grid interactivity perspective. So you get that 30% tax credit or you can you self submit for

the 30% tax credit. And then on top of that, there's income based IRA rebates that kick in. So like there's an $840 one if you're switching from a gas stove to an induction stove. You can get that. It has an income limit. And then a lot of local utilities plus like various jurisdictions. local jurisdictions have like a gas to electric incentive program. And those kind of vary by state and region. All right. The second one. And this is like probably one of the most complicated.

It's also kind of policy related. But it's also one of the most difficult things for me to wrap my head around, despite having read many chat GPT outputs and talk to various guests. Something you hear from anyone who's involved in distributed energy or renewable energy in particular is that the rules of power markets, legacy rules of the grid, that govern the grid, et cetera, are not ideal for a rapid rollout of some of these technologies, whether it's on, whether it's distributed batteries or whatever else. And so I'm curious from your perspective, and I know it's different in every state and whatever, but when you look at the rules that

sort of govern how power markets work, what is either worked for you or ideally should change to sort of accelerate this process. Yeah, so people were very critical of the Texas energy markets for being kind of like a libertarian wild list. But they roll it out fast. And they roll it up fast and they're installing more solar and storage

than California net is now. And so in some sense, I think this mirrors the Yimbism movement in some sense where effectively there's going to be strategic deregulation because clean tech is going to win because it's cheaper now. And we need to realize that it's not going to be,

hey, we're going to accidentally turn your river purple if we loosen restrictions on interconnection or whatever. It's like, no, you'll actually decrease emissions massively. So I think that there's that mindset does need to change because essentially building now is good for the environment versus in the 70s. It was not clearly the case. And I also would say that we should look at Europe as a model, which is hilarious to say as a tech guy based in San Francisco.

And when I say that is, so Europe has deregulated their energy markets closer to kind of what Texas is like. In response to Ukraine. In response to Ukraine. And then additionally, they have been much more lenient on distributed energy interconnection, like at the small house scale. So there's this movement starting in Germany for balcony solar power. So essentially, if you have a south-facing window in Germany, it's relatively northern, you know, northern latitude. You just hang a solar panel facing south on your, like, on your railing.

And you plug it into a normal outlet. And that solar panel essentially reduces your home's electricity demand and helps the grid. And they made some very simple rules that a ton of manufacturers now follow. And this is basically just something you can buy. And it pays for itself pretty quickly. And it's super easy. We need solutions like that in the United States. And that sort of stuff is very, very difficult to kind of work through, I would almost

call it like a thunderdome of like regulatory and compliance details. Because the enforcement regime in the U.S., there's no single jurisdiction. This is actually one of the bigger problems is there are no single jurisdiction here. Basically, individual building codes in individual cities have specific rules on what you can and can't do with, like, electrical stuff. And they do cite, like, national codes, like the national electric code. But, like, these things are a patchwork of regulation and a patchwork of enforcement across the country versus one clean set of roles all the way across. In Europe, it's like you get this one certification and, like, you're able to just plug in. Whereas whereas in the U.S., it's not just you have to navigate a very small window of what's possible and then make sure you check all the boxes, which we're very confident we've done so.

And we view that as like one of the really awesome things we've achieved as a team. But additionally, then like playing ball with every utility, which has a different set of APIs. You know, like, there's no like, hey, I have a battery. Like just go to this one website and like it tells you when to charge and discharge and you get paid for it. Like that doesn't exist yet. And I think that's something where if I was advocating for federal action, it's like stuff of that nature where it's like making it just much easier to control stuff from a standards perspective is going to be a big deal. What's the big risk factor when I read your inevitable IPO perspectives or I don't know, whatever document you produced to be acquired by some massive company? What are going to be the risk factors that you list?

Are they on the regulatory side, on the manufacturing side? That's an interesting question because I think I think we've asked. actually addressed the like ambiguity on the regulatory and install side. I would argue that a big part of this is like the appliance industry is kind of this old and state industry. One of the big challenges is I actually see it as we're doing something a lot bigger than hey, we're making an oven or a stove or anything like that. This is something that's much more of a like we're fundamentally changing how every device connects to the grid by putting. battery storage and grade into it. So I would argue the risks are going to be around supply chain

for batteries. The fact that we've not onshoreed LFP production in an appreciable, you know, an appreciable way, like with some specific brand, specific exceptions like Tesla. And then I would also argue like you need a lot of skews. Like people have different preferences and needs and stuff like that. So I want to ask a question about financing. You've raised VC money. But because you're a company that builds physical things. I assume you need a lot of working capital to place orders and that this ties up a lot of cash, et cetera. And I don't think a lot of VCs love to invest in that sort of like pure working capital. Are there different financing streams that you need? So there's like the growth over time of Impulse Labs. Do you have other financing streams for the actual like placing the orders

of the various parts and pieces? Yeah. So I mean, I actually think that there's a missing gap. in that space that's like mostly addressed by venture debt. That's the sort of canonical solution of this problem. But basically the issue is you can't finance orders for a product that doesn't hasn't sold yet, right? Like you know, you can see this product and be like, this is really awesome and like this is going to totally sell.

But like you actually have to kick off that process and that cold start is actually. Yeah. And I've heard this in a lot of things related to energy specific. It's come up. Well, there's like a missing middle commercialization. Well, this is also what Kickstarter was trying to do.

And Kickstarter sort of addresses some of this as well. the other way you address this in hardware is you take orders ahead of time. And so Tesla did that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is exactly why Tesla had some of these strategies.

It's like they address these issues by virtue of essentially having a really compelling mission-driven pitch and being like, you want to be on the team, by the way you're basically giving us a free loan. And I think it worked really well, but I don't think there's a standardized solution

here beyond raise some venture debt off the tailwinds of your most recent fund raise or something like that. So we're obviously... For the zero to one side of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're obviously in San Francisco and Joe and I have been talking to a lot of venture capitalists and talking to them about what it is that they offer founders and what their

specific pitch is. So I'm very curious when it comes to your investors, why did you just... I think it's Lux Capital is the biggest one. You've interviewed Josh a couple times. Yeah, that's right. Why did you decide to go with them versus, I assume you were courted by... a bunch of others. Yeah.

So, I mean, one big deal here is this space. I basically would say that VC for hardware is a knife fight. There was basically a very brief window. I would call it like the 2020 to 22 window where a ton of people raise a ton of money for a lot of different stuff. But basically I wanted to make sure that this was not, we worked with someone who is multi-stage and also has dealt with like things of this nature where this is not going to be a single interaction where then we're successful immediately.

we're building a very complicated platform that happens to be delivered through a stove as the first product. And that's going to require, I would argue, a combination of strategic paid patients, but also like depth of experience from prior hardware bets that had similar processes, basically. That was a big factor in making sure that we work with like multi-stage folks that kind of knew the game versus there were a ton of new funds spun up in 2021 era, making sure that this wasn't like the meme of the week was hardware. Now, I guess the meme of the week is hardware again, which is great, which is great. But making sure that we've got folks that are like mission aligned through a longer process, because this is not going to be a two-year-long company that gets acquired.

Are you going to incorporate some AI just so you can put out the press release for your next fundraising round? I mean, okay, so this is an open invitation. If you park a humanoid robot at our office, you can do the same stake demo and we'll just film it. So any humanoid robot companies want to do a little tie-in for PR purposes, just pull up with your humanoid robot. That's my one joke. But actually it's very interesting is we realized that actually the key product feature for the thing was the temperature sensing. And it turns out that it turns out that like a stove that can hold temperature accurately is just not something that exists. Like it, which is kind of a weird thing to think about where you're like, okay, I put the pan on the stove and I said it to medium.

What does medium mean? Or like you're using one of these touchscreen cooktops and you press the number eight. You're like, again, what the hell does that mean? And so that's the sort of situation where we were like. like, okay, we actually should do the smart thing and make it so you can say 350 degrees, just like your oven can. And that was an entire can of worms of both custom sensor design and manufacturing, like down into like custom ceramic parts.

We had to do some crazy magnetic engineering to make everything work too. From that all the way to algorithms that approach but maybe aren't exactly machine learning, if that makes any sense. I keep threatening to say we can put a transformer on this and make it better, but we're not going to have to do that. But we realized that there was actually some key automations that didn't exist. And it's not a robot autonomously cooking your food. It's the stove holds temperature.

And then suddenly your cooking workload goes down by an order of magnitude. Do you see a commercial, obviously residential? But like, you know, I imagine a big pain point for a lot of restaurants is that consistency, right? Every dish has to be identical over and over and over and over again. And that requires a lot of patience and stuff. Is that good? Do you anticipate that? And requires training. And training and someone watching it, so labor costs, et cetera.

Is that something you're envisioning as part of the plan? We've gotten a lot of excitement from professional chefs. We're in touch with a couple. We actually have a partnership with Brandon Jew from Mr. Jews in San Francisco, which we're super excited about. But basically, we're engaging professional, we're engaging professional chefs on across the board on this. Obviously, the first use case is like get this into people's home kitchens.

Yeah. Because a lot of these folks also do content at home. but the restaurant side obviously very interested I would say the closest analog is like Turbo Chef where like Starbucks essentially buys tons of these machines

and there are the ovens behind the counter where they put in your like quasi pre-made sandwich or whatever and they hit the red button or the green button or the blue button and depending on what sandwich it is and then it comes out perfect

because it's programmable Starbucks can control that from corporate and that can be going while the breas is making your coffee for instance and so I can see a direct application of some of this temperature presenting technology into the stove version of some experiences like that for commercial.

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And this was really tricky because this, diverges of being very software-defined. I got mocked relentlessly online for under-seared stakes. And then we fixed some of the software and now works great. This is real technology.

This is like real progress. So having watched the demonstration, part of me is very excited because this seems like a very cool product. The steak was great. The eggs were great. Part of me is also sad because I think I'm a decent cook. And one of my competitive advantages in life is my ability to cook a steak reasonably well. And now I'm not watching a robot come and take my job,

but I'm certainly watching technology perfect that particular human skill. You're a cook guy. You like making food. Tell me why I shouldn't be slightly sad about this. It's like the joke, I keep seeing these AI references where they're like, be not afraid, you know, like human. But the point is, yeah, no. I mean, I think the point is basically like, do you want for rustic reasons to have an oven that has a low, medium, and high setting for baking? And then I think the other point is people who are good bakers are good bakers in a dimension after the temperature control portion of it.

And so I think that's the other point that I'm really excited about, which is now suddenly a lot of complicated stuff that was not accessible to you is now going to be. So you don't have to worry about the cooking time and monitoring the temperature. Maybe you can spend more time on, like, I don't know, the marinade or like pre-treating the meat or something like that. Or slow cooking it. And you can, or an example is like you can free up counter space because you can cook rice on this thing without a rice cooker. Though, you know, there'll be debates over which profile people select. But the idea is that is a thing that we can do because our product is fundamentally software to find for, you know, for the first time for stoves. So I just have one last question.

I'm not. cards on the table, having seen it, I'm like, oh, I kind of want to buy one of this. And I don't know. I don't know how soon I'll be in the market for stuff. Q1. Okay. But are there any safety issues with having a battery? I mean, I know it's like sometimes the batteries. People are anxious about them. The scooter batteries, of course, which I guess are different. That's a classic New York issue. Yeah, it's a big New York. It's a really big New York issue where I live in New York. Talk about designing the safety in mind. Yeah. So I think there's actually a couple things to think about when you

think about batteries and battery safety. So as I mentioned earlier, the battery is a three kilowatt hour battery that is roughly 30 times the battery size of a 16 inch MacBook Pro. But it's a different chemistry. So first we start with a chemistry design for thermal stability and safety. So we're using lithium iron phosphate, not lithium ion. And what that means is it actually does not supply enough of its own oxygen to like sustain a fire by itself. It needs external oxygen to do so, which is a big difference between that and the traditional lithium ion chemistry, which is like you almost can't put out a fire from a like a phone battery if it goes off. In this case, it's different. Additionally, the lithium iron phosphate technology is actually

advanced to such a point because the cells are so much safer. They've actually been able to make bigger cells, which is one of the reasons why China's been doing so well with EVs. Because they basically said, okay, if a big cell is now safe, we can make a battery pack much more easily. And so they make these car battery packs out of like very long cells. They call blade batteries that are basically like the width of a table or they're like the width of the vehicle, but like kind of like the profile of a deck of car is just stretched out over the length of a table. And so that's where the technology direction has actually been pushing towards larger, safer battery cells, which we can ride the tailwind of from a safety perspective to start.

additionally there's a number of relevant industry standards that we're going to be abiding by as part of this. So like you have to basically pass essentially like a fire test effectively to make sure that this thing is good. And then the last thing, which is actually the reason for the scooter story is people are getting these scooters and they're riding them like crazy because they're doing tons of delivery jobs, all this sort of stuff. Yeah. The battery, they're actually cycling these batteries because the batteries are not very big on these scooters. So they're wearing them out pretty fast. And they're the traditional lithium ion, not the iron phosphate design. So they're swapping the batteries out on the vehicles.

They're also using chargers that are not matched to the battery. And so if you mismatch the charger and the battery and you swap these things out, you've now got a safety problem just by virtue of you're not using the warranty-approved equipment to charge the battery. And so that's one of the exacerbating situations with these, specifically these scooter fires. the difference between that and like a stationary storage battery, like what we've got is our charger and our battery are like co-designed together. And so we do vet the safety of the integrated system versus,

oh, suddenly you could be using a cord that maybe isn't even rated for the right current and the cord catches on fire and then takes the battery out, for instance. So that's kind of the difference between a lot of the reports of what these fires are versus where we're operating in a much safer domain with an integrated system that we've designed for safety with a different chemistry that is also at lower risk of fire, basically. You mentioned rice earlier, and people obviously have strong opinions about food and how it should be cooked.

What's been the most heated controversy that you've had to deal with in designing the stove top? So there's a bunch of fun stuff. So I'll start with the gas stove culture war. So basically, we announced that we were up to some stove stuff in like November. So it's so some stove stuff. 2020. Early 2023, there was a, I think it was the CPSC, one of the CPSC members said that they were evaluating banning gas stoves. And this kind of was like a trial balloon sort of thing.

I'm not sure if the Biden administration was fully clued on this. But basically like the GOP, extended GOP cinematic universe was like, okay, this is going to be some good shit. Let's let's, let's. So this happened. And I then decide to post an infographic that's like showing that all the gas stoves are where the liberals live. Oh, yeah. It's like your funny thing.

So I was in the market about a year ago for a new apartment in the East Village. Oh, you told me this. Yeah. In the East Village, which is we all know how the East Village votes. And we were looking around and our broker was showing us. And she's like, by the way, this is grandfathered so you can keep a gas stove. Like it was like, you know, because New York is past the right. like all these buyers like actually want to make sure that they could keep their gas stoves on them.

Anyway, keep going. Yeah. So this is correct. Yeah. So the, the woke mob actually is who has the gas stove. Yeah. Yeah. You know, whatever you want to whatever, whatever epit that you want to use here.

So essentially I post this infographic. It goes mega viral like millions of views or something like that. And then it also people start coming at me being like with impulse behind the Rocky Mountain Institute study that showed that incidents of asthma are 42%. more higher in homes with gas stoves. I'm like, I had nothing to do with that, man. But it was definitely a like fun culture war conversation where I'm like, and then there was people also getting mad being like, oh,

yeah, I'm never switching to an electric stove except that one. And pointing at us. And so there was kind of that, there was some of that feedback as well. That was the first thing. So that was like early 2023. Then we started getting hardware back from our manufacturer

and we're like writing, putting the software together. And I'm getting to the point where I'm like, I should try to do this. this dry suvide thing. And so I had this crank idea where I'm like, okay, normally with suvade, you put a steak in a bag, you put the bag in water, and you let water circulate at a set temperature with like a little circulator device gadget you put in there.

I was like, okay, we developed this new type of stove that can hold specific temperature on the top surface of the pan using technology we developed, which was a giant unlock. I'm going to cook a steak with it. And I'm going to do it suvide style where I'm going to set it to like 135 degrees or something like that or 140 degrees and let it conduct through the entire bottom of the pan into the steak. So the whole steak gets cooked like medium rare and then you go and sear it at the end. So I managed to cook the steak medium rare just fine, like that conductive suede thing that I mentioned with no water bath, no plastic, no microplastics and other stuff works great.

I then go and sear the steak. Basically, this is a very software-defined product and we've been trying to make sure that we also don't hit smoke points in the house. So if you set the stove to 400 degrees, you can actually fry with all of those. on this thing and it won't like smoke up your kitchen. But there's this very fun like fine line between like not doing that and then also like under searing or under cooking the food. So I went and posted a demo video of me doing this whole thing end to add, which is on Twitter

linked to it or whatever. And my steak looked pathetically seared. And I just got like so much. So there's nothing. The two things that set people off on Twitter are being happy and experiencing joy in life. And anything that would invite someone to criticize. Deviations in steak cooking. And anything opportunity for someone to tell you that you cook the steak wrong.

Those are the two things that are guaranteed to make people angry. And the, yeah, so I basically just got like steak Twitter just went. Yeah. So a bunch of people were like, this is cool as all get out. This is awesome. But then another faction of people were just like, dude, what the hell is that steak? Yeah. And then so that then kicked off a period of learning and self-discovery where one, we've been

We're entering our software and it's gotten more aggressive at putting the sear on without smoking up the kitchen. So that's been a big improvement and, like, very excited to shift that to people very soon. But then the second piece was I went on YouTube and I actually followed Chris Young, who makes the combustion ink thermometer. And he has, like, this instruction on how to cook a steak perfectly. So I basically just went to Steak University, followed his stuff. And then the videos just started improved, the picture started just improving time and time again. You rehabilitated yourself at Steak, I hopefully did. Hopefully did.

Yeah. It's a really good steak. Sam Domeko, thank you so much. This was so much fun. It really lived up to the hype. Thanks for coming by. I do love how this story of the stove touches on so many of our themes. Genuinely, I was skeptical when you were like, let's go interview the stove company. But like, let's talk about, so there's like power markets, there's international trade.

Batteries. There's batteries and the attempt by the U.S. Manufacturing them. There's a few other ones. Plus there's steak, Joe. Plus there's steak. There's food. Like it's, oh, funding.

Venture funding and working capital and the missing middle. Hardware versus software. For ramping up energy. There is something about this stove that it's like, it's a Trojan horse for talking about topics. And by design, it's a Trojan horse for this vision of like what a different sort of structure of power markets. It's true. I just realized today's been a big day for me in terms of technological awakenings. because to get to the stove company, we took a Waymo, and it was the first time I've ever...

And it lived up to the hype, right? Yeah, it was great. So I'm very into driverless cars right now. I'm very into cool electric stoves with battery storage. This is why it's good for us to come out to the West Coast. It's true. San Francisco specifically. I like L.A. I don't leave with like a sense of like, I've seen the future of the same way.

It's very nice and the weather is good. But you do sort of come to San Francisco. We held a live event here. And you meet a lot of interesting people doing like really interesting stuff here. It's kind of cool. Yeah, we met a quantum computer guy last night too. We met a quantum computer guy. We met chips people.

I feel a little bit more optimistic about the technologist future. But I guess, well, we'll see. We'll see how these things turn out. Are you actually anxious? Like, I hadn't thought about that element of, there were a certain skill of pan skills or tilting the pan. I mean, the essence of cooking is like responding to the process. that's happening in front of you.

And so it's funny because I know if I was cooking on that stove, my impulse, my instinct would be to like move the pan around and like flip the steak over more times than it actually needs to be flipped. Yeah. So like when I, you know, I've never like cooked a perfect egg in my life. And then I cooked a perfect egg on that stove because there was literally nothing to it. And I didn't have to worry about it burning or getting stuck because of how consistent that temperature was. Yeah. Yeah, so we're now on equal footing, even though I've been working so hard to develop my skill set at cooking on mediocre stove talks.

Oh, well. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. All right. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Allaway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Wisenthall.

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