YouSaid · the spoken record

Gene Berdichevsky

lines on the record: 41
first: 2024-03-07
most recent: 2024-03-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I hope so. Make the world a little better place than we found it. And I think the decades that it'll have taken will feel worth it.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't make proclamations like next year we'll have done all of these things. We have much more realistic timelines now that we've managed to hold. And right now we're planning to be complete with the current phase of the factory, what we call phase one, at the end of this year, and we'll spend the first half of next year bringing that online very carefully to make very high quality product. And we'll begin to ship that product in the second half of 2025 to our customers. And we expect that consumers will be able to get the first cars with our technology in 2026.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Factories coming online, we want them to use silicon technology. While the new car factories, right, we want all the new car platforms to be electric, but that doesn't mean you sort of switch overnight.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're cheaper. They're also just, they're designed for that application. It's not a big enough application for a new entrant to go after. So it does take time. But technologies do sunset. Nickel cadmium isn't used anywhere anymore. Lead acid is still used quite broadly. And that's a 100-year-old piece of technology. So I think there'll be a place for graphite, but I would say in 20 years silicon should be able to replace it in every nook and cranny. But in 10, I suspect it's still, you know, it's going to be a one-way pendulum. Just like in 10 years, there'll still be gas cars out there for these industrial sectors to turn over. It takes a lot longer than people realize because you have built the assets and shutting them down, you only do in very rare occasions. So more importantly, all the new assets being built, all the new batteries.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think people will still use it in some places. I think you'll have the production assets, it'll be cheaper to run them than. Still in use in a lot of places They're still in use in a lot of hybrid cars, for example”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have the advantage. And to your point, they require dramatically less mining. They require really much less labor. These technologies are much more efficient. They require clean energy, which we have in Washington state, where we're building our factory from the Columbia River. And they require innovation, which America is glad. It is our best asset. And so what's critical is that not only do we lean in to display some of the shortages as a country, but we do it with new technologies, which is our competitive edge. And we end up in the lead for 21st century energy. You know, it'll take 10 years, but just like we got there with oil and gas through technologies like fracking, we should get there in batteries through technologies like silicon anodes and others.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does change the equation. It democratizes where you can produce anode materials, and there's a lot from a national security standpoint and from a regional security standpoint, there's a lot of good reasons that we want production of anoid materials in the US. Europe wants production of anode materials in Europe, and by the way, and cathode materials and separators and electrolyze, all the key components, and the batteries themselves. So this is the energy sector of the 21st century. And just like, you know, it really, really mattered where energy was produced in the 20th century and we fought wars over it, we should really get ahead of the curve and ensure our own energy security by having domestic supply of anoids. And if we're going to do that rather than trying to compete on an unlevel playing field and try to catch up to what a dominant position that has been established in China on graphite, we should do it with new technologies where”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we acquired a site, land in a building, that's it. And we are building, you know, if you remember, all of our equipment is custom developed to make this new class of materials at the R&D scale. Well, it turns out it also needs to be custom developed to make this material at automotive scale. And so we're building a massive plant, ultimately will be several billion dollars of investment. The first phase is a couple hundred million of investment that will produce, again, ultimately several million electric cars worth of product. Today we're starting with supplying the G-Wagon and the Panasonic contract and a couple other customers that we've signed up.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great question, and this actually goes back to the original founding idea. One thing we realized is that the battery makers were going to get really, really large and they were already extraordinarily experienced. So they were 20 years of history at Panasonic making batteries. And so we believe that it was foolish to reinvent how the batteries produced or try to compete with them directly. And so instead, we make just this material, justice anode powder, and we ship that in bags to gigafactories around the world, and they integrate it just like they would graphite. Every battery coming out of their factory is better.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can pretty confidently just cruise on whatever road trip you're going on. And as long as you have a good network, you pull over, you go use the restroom at the rest stop, and you're right back on the road. I mean, it's already true that you don't have time for lunch if you're using a supercharger. This would be sort of almost as fast as a gas station.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's a nuance of the chemistry, but essentially when you use graphite because you need so much of it to store the lithium, it makes for a really thick electrode and it takes a long time for lithium ions to get all the way to sort of the bottom of the graphite particles, if you will, as they move from that cathode to the anode. When you use silicon, your electrode is much, much thinner. And so the lithium can move much quicker to the sort of rearmost particles in the battery, if you will. And so we think, especially for low-cost EVs, that's going to be a game changer. So imagine you've got a 200 mile $25,000 car, right? Maybe you can't afford the $45,000 $400 mile version. But if it only takes you seven minutes or eight minutes to go from 10% to 80, which is kind of the typical way that EVs measure charge speed, then”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. But the other thing is there's a lot of consumers that are still willing to pay a premium for electric vehicles, right? Most of the cars sold in America average over $45,000. But they certainly, there's a lot of consumers, especially as you start moving from the early adopters to the mass market, that don't want to think about recharge times and worrying about, you know, if I forget to plug in on a Saturday night, then I'm not going to be able to get my kids to soccer practice on a Sunday morning. That's a problem. And we need to make it. Sort of forgettable. And so there's a couple other factors that we can make better. One is we decreased the recharge time. So imagine not only do you have 400 mile range on your mid-price DV, but you can also recharge it in, say, five minutes or seven minutes or 10 minutes.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we tell our customers that we can deliver for them a 20% increase in energy density, which they can translate to 20% longer range. So if you've got an EV with 250 miles of range, we get you to 300 without having to redesign everything, without having to have a battery pack that has to replace your back seat. It just fits into the exact same space where your current battery is. And so if you've got 300 mile range already, then we can get you to 360. And so that's where the technology is today and then over the next few years, we'll get that to a 30% improvement. Eventually, we think we can get that to a 40% improvement over state-of-the-art graphite chemistries.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So we have a supply agreement with Mercedes, and they plan to bring us into their electric vehicle lineup. They say mid-decade, starting with the electric G-wagon, the EQG. And so we will be offered, I think, as an upgrade pack. They'll have a graphite-based battery without us. And then they'll have a silicon-based battery with us. And then we also made an announcement that we signed a supply agreement with Panasonic in December. And so we're also working with them to bring our batteries into their customers' electric cars.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Piece together a lot of innovations, but we enabled them to make a product that's better and that more consumers could buy. And the same will be true for EVs. We help them make a product that's better, that more consumers want.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had a certain amount of size for the battery in this device. And it's mostly battery. There's sensors and there's some microprocessor, but there's no display. There's no screen. So it's probably half of the device as a battery. We help them improve their battery performance by about 20% relative to the prior generation because the device is mostly battery. It made it a lot more compact and allowed them to stuff more sensors in. It allowed them to stuff more compute in. And really importantly, it gave them a five-day battery life. So we didn't have to recharge it from Monday to Friday, which is pretty cool. So we were a small part of that.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The world is a path function. I mean, I think about an alternate history. Imagine we go back to 1890s and someone figures out how to put together a lithium ion battery with much cruder tools than in the 1990s. And today we're all driving electric cars. What an amazing world that might have been. But the world doesn't go electric because it should. It goes electric because of, you know, I mean, people like Elon and Martin and JB. It goes electric, you know, hopefully because of people like us. And I think when you realize that you're at the forefront, it almost feels obligatory to finish it. I don't think it is, but it almost becomes that. Know pushing, trying to make a small dent in the universe.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nope. And I think it's, look, I think this problem is so important that it's worth doing. But, you know, if you told me on day one that you'd be sitting there 13 years in, you know, you've got a consumer product out, you're still years away from a car. I don't know if I would have signed up for it, but that doesn't matter, right? When you're in it and you can see how you're going to get there. And I think this is true of a lot of entrepreneurs. I've heard many of the greatest entrepreneurs say, look, if I knew how hard this was going to be, I'm not sure I would have signed up. But the other part is, you know, I'm convinced that if not us, who, the world is not in technical terms a state function, meaning in a state function, if something should exist, it becomes that. Just because the world should be electric does not make it electric.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thermodynamics said it was not impossible, which is all you have to know. Once you know it's not impossible, it's really just a question of how long and how hard is it going to get.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, certainly not in the early days. And so we talked about this explicitly in the early days when it's a science project. You have to decide what you're going to measure yourself by. If you're measuring yourself only by the result, then you will never take on something where you might fail. So, you know, you have to measure the inputs and the inputs are, did we work as hard as we possibly could? Did we come up with the best ideas we could? And then did we do it with integrity and respect? Because if you sort of, you know, if you lose your integrity, the whole thing falls apart. And so I think we were all committed to the mission. And we all believed we could get there. We certainly believed we could crack the code.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Recipe that we gave them to synthesize these materials with extreme precision. We outfitted them with hundreds of sensors and we built a dozen of these machines pretty quickly. And then we honestly just turn the crank. Ideas in, results out, discard the bad ideas, recycle the good ones, put them together, and iterate, iterate.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the best way I can summarize it is I think innovation, this is a slight twist on what you've heard before, is 1% inspiration and 99% iteration. So it's all about how fast you iterate on your ideas. It matters how smart you are to start. It matters how good of a professor you've got on the team. But what matters more than anything is the machine to drive that invention and turn those ideas over and discard the bad ones as quickly as possible. And so in this case, because we were inventing an entirely new materials class, we also had to invent the processing techniques for synthesizing those materials. And so the first thing we did wasn't to get in the lab and start cooking materials. The first thing we did was build a bunch of reactors to do the synthesis work. And instead of doing it in a typical grad school fashion where it kind of held together with duct tape and bailing wire, we built really nice automated machines that would be just bulletproof and execute every”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we told investors we're going to make a battery that improves energy density, meaning how much energy the cell can store, which will either enable us to increase range for EVs or lower costs. It'll also enable us to reduce charge times, which this chemistry has a side benefit of. And we could apply that same chemistry into consumer electronics because graphites in every lithium-ion battery, it's in your cell phone, it's in the laptop, it's in your car. And so we can apply this chemistry across different markets, and we could start in consumer where we could get to production much faster, and then we could scale into cars where the opportunity is just mind-bogglingly large. So really from day one, we laid out the plan that we executed. And 10 years in, we got into our first consumer electronics device. And it'll be sort of around five years more from then to get into.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From the vehicle side, I understood the problem from the battery side, he really understood the solutions that you could bring to this from a material science perspective. And so I think neither of us sort of understood quite how hard the other half of it was. And so I think together with another co-founder of ours, also colleague, the three of us kind of said, yeah, we think we can figure this out in five years.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's what we thought. And there's an important other thread to that story, which is one of my co-founders, Professor Glubushin, who from about 2007, 2008, he had a background in physics, came into batteries and said, oh, interesting. You know, here's this problem, again, well understood problem. I think I have some ideas of how to make entirely new class of materials, how to structure silicon into a composite form that will solve this problem. And he published a few papers as a professor at Georgia Tech. I read some of those papers. I thought they were quite insightful. And, you know, and we met up through another professor friend, mutual friend of ours. And it turned out he was really itching to start a company. And so it was, you know, I understood the problem.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that expansion causes huge mechanical issues in the battery. And those mechanical issues lead to chemical issues, lead to degradation mechanisms, and your battery dies in like 10 or 100 cycles traditionally.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So, as I mentioned before, the periodic table of elements is quite small, and it's well understood that silicon could be a lot better at storing lithium ions. And to give you a sense of how much better, the thermodynamic limit of graphite, which is made entirely out of carbon atoms, is you need six carbon atoms to store a single atom of lithium. Whereas with silicon, you can take a single atom of silicon and store four lithium atoms. So that means instead of six to one, you're one to four. So silicon is 24 times atomically better at hosting lithium. So that's not secret. That's been known for a long, long time. The problem is silicon is so good at storing lithium that when you charge the battery, because four new atoms come in and react with every single silicon atom you have, it expands really dramatically.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What the incumbent technology is going to do. I think we saw this in the solar industry, for example. There was this explosion of new solar cell chemistries in the late 2000s. And the problem was they didn't account for how good conventional solar cell chemistry would get. And that got cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And, you know, we ended up with a bunch of bankrupt solar cell companies. Now, what we understood, what I understood is graphite had nowhere to get better, full stop. And so that was part of the calculus in starting this company is saying like, look, I know this has limitation. Five years from now, people are going to want better batteries. And so we have to solve this chemistry problem.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly right. And so with that, I went out and I looked at frankly the periodic table of elements, which is small. And there's only a couple things better than what's been used conventionally in lithium-ion batteries. And one of those technologies is a silicon anode technology to replace the graphite anode that's in a lithium-ion battery today. And so that was the target we picked. But the problem with the silicon anode technology is it had notoriously bad psycholife, meaning you weren't going to get 300,000 miles on your car. Basically, your battery pack would die after, let's say, 10,000 miles. And it turns out it's a really hard scientific problem. And we thought it would take sort of five years to solve. And it's taken us closer to 10.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is, and it's a thermodynamic limitation. So it is the laws of the universe, it is what God gave us, and there is no getting around it. And we are at that limit in every lithium ion battery today.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, something like 95% is mined or processed or refined in China. So some of it gets extracted, let's say, in Australia, but then it gets shipped to China to process. So that's right.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a pretty good start. So there are, as you say, there are two sides to the battery, two really important components. The anode, which hosts the lithium when the battery is charged, and the cathode, which hosts the lithium when the battery is discharged. And so when you're charging up the battery at night, you're forcing all the lithium to move into the anode. And then as you're using it, as you connect it to the motor, the lithium ions kind of run back to the cathode and the electron goes and does a bunch of work in your car. And so the anode side, the material that stores lithium when the battery is charged, is today graphite in almost every single battery in the world. It's just graphite, same as your pencil it.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cheaper the battery pack can be. And the way to think about the reason for that is if every battery cell you have stores twice as much energy, then you need half as many cells. And if you need half as many cells, you need less manufacturing equipment, less packaging, less labor, all of those things. So the best way to make EVs affordable long run is to make the highest performing batteries. And that was the thesis that we started with.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same problem, and this is one of the beauties of picking the right problem you get to focus and you don't have to pivot. So the problem we wanted to solve was that what I saw was that the performance of lithium-ion batteries, particularly in energy density, the improvements were slowing down and reaching a plateau. And the reason that was so important isn't because you necessarily need longer range for EVs, but in the long run, you need cheaper batteries. And it turns out the more energy each battery cell can store,”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I was a mechanical engineer. And the thing that vexed me was that battery performance was not improving at the rate that we had seen even sort of in my solar car days just four years before that. And I knew nothing about the chemistry. I knew nothing of what went on inside the battery. And I looked at it and said, look, if these performance curves are projected forward, they're going to stall out and we're not going to have EVs replace every gas car. So I left with the mission to study material science, physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, all of the disciplines needed to find a breakthrough in batteries. And I did that for a couple years while also looking for a technology to build a company around. So it was very purpose driven. And I think I'm a sucker for the hardest problems. And we had sort of figured out how to make battery packs for EVs. And now the hard problem was making the chemistry better.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost nothing. So the office was two white rooms in Menlo Park. We spent a lot of time working out of JB's garage where he had a bunch of tools. And the sort of initial prototype of the battery was laptop cells that were literally super glued together. And so that was what we started with. And over the course of four years, we engineered a system that was able to interconnect cool and safely manage almost 7,000 individual cells and stuff that into the back of a car frame of the Lotus Elise. So it was really clean slate and I got a chance to go from clean slate to production.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Elon was almost the sole funder of the company at the time. But that's right. The CEO at the time I joined was Martin Eberhart, JB Straubel, who'd go on to spend 15 years at CTO was already there. Mark Tarponing was another one of the co-founders. And so I worked day-to-day with them. And Elon was very involved with them at the board level. So I didn't interact with him very much. I was sort of in the back room making, you know, gluing batteries together making it work.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would not have said that. And sorry to generally disappoint where I don't think we're going to be driving purely solar power cars for a long time. What I did know from that work was that we were all going to be driving electric cars because they were so much more efficient than gasoline, any kind of combustion car. And we could see the batteries getting better year over year, even in the sort of the four years I worked on the project. Batteries got dramatically better. And as part of that, I ended up for an entrepreneurship class writing a business case about using lithium-ion batteries to build electric sports cars that could go 300 mile range on a single charge. If that sounds familiar, that's because, you know, six months later, I heard about some entrepreneurs doing that at a little company called Tesla, and I decided to drop out and join them.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got it up to about 86 down a hill, and you could go about 55 on flat ground. So we were in normal freeway traffic and it was, I mean, it was terrifying. We were amongst 18 wheelers and one of our best friends is driving and we built this car. And like his butts on the line, you know?”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was a competition that was put on by the Department of Energy, I think since the late 80s. And students built a car from scratch. So maybe a half dozen of us. And we raced it from Chicago to LA on Route 66. And the car used only about two horsepower worth of solar cells and had a little tiny lithium-ion battery. And so I learned a lot in my undergrad about lithium-ion batteries, electric motors, efficiency, all of those type of things.”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So back in the Soviet Union, my folks were engineers working on nuclear submarines. So we actually spent a part of my life living north of the Arctic Circle in a little town called Murmansk, which is the northestmost port that doesn't freeze. So I went from that to a much nicer climate in Virginia. And my folks both ended up being software engineers, so kind of classic electrical engineer turned software engineer and really wanted me to be one too. So that was definitely the one thing I wasn't going to do”
2024-03-07 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT