Supercharging Lithium-Ion Batteries with Gene Berdichevsky of Sila Nanotechnologies

0:00Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to How I Built This Early Early and Ad Free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcast. Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. And no matter what you like, Audible's romance collection has something to make you swoon. Here's your invitation to have it all. Find a book boyfriend in the city and another on the hockey field. Or if nothing on this earth touches your heart, you can always find love in another realm. Hear modern rom-coms from authors like Lily Chu and Allie Hazelwood. The latest romantic series from Sarah J. Maas and Rebecca Yaros.

0:36and Regency favorites like Bridgerton and Outlander. And that's only the beginning. Audible has an incredible selection with over one million audiobooks, podcasts, and Audible originals all in one easy app. And you can enjoy Audible anytime while doing other things, household chores, exercising, on the road, commuting, you name it. Audible makes it easy to drop into your fantasies during your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. There's more to imagine when you listen, Your first great love story is free when you sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial. Visit audible.com slash built.

1:14I love traveling with my family. We did an awesome trip this summer. And one of the things that made the trip so special were the Airbnb experiences we did. Immersive tours, cooking classes, a chance to get coffee with a world-class barista. I had so much fun on those experiences that I decided to host my own Airbnb original experience in San Francisco, designed to help you think about how to unlock your next big move in your career or even in your life. To learn more about my Airbnb original experience, head to Airbnb.com slash guy. Remember dongles? Each piece of tech had its own plug and none of it worked together.

1:58That's where a lot of businesses are with AI. Discover AI that can work seamlessly across your data and applications at ibm.com. The AI built for business, IBM. Hey, it's Guy here. And before we start the show, I want to tell you about a super exciting thing. We are launching on How I Built This. So if you own your own business or trying to get one off the ground, we might put you on the show. Yes, on the show. And when you come on, you won't just be joining me, but you'll be speaking with some of our favorite former guests who also happen to be some of the greatest entrepreneurs on earth. And together, we'll answer your most pressing questions about launching and growing your business.

2:43Imagine getting real-time branding advice from Sunbum's Tom Rinks or marketing tips from Vaughn Weaver of Uncle Nearest Whiskey. If you'd like to be considered, send us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with. And make sure to tell us how to reach you. Each week, we'll pick a few callers to join us on this show. You can send us a voice memo at hibt at id.wondery.com, or you can call 1-800-433-1298 and leave a message there. That's 1-800-433-1298. And that's it. Hope to hear from you soon. And we are so excited to have you come on the show.

3:29And now, on to the show. Hello, and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So a lot of the technology we use today is powered by batteries, specifically lithium-ion batteries. And when they were introduced in the 1990s, they were truly revolutionary. And they've enabled everything from smartphones that can last a full day without being charged, to super thin laptops and tablets, to electric cars that can go over 300 miles on a single charge. But as with every technology, lithium-ion batteries have limits. And because batteries have gotten so good over the past 30 years, we're basically at the point where traditional lithium-ion batteries are about as good as they're going to get.

4:15So that's where today's guest comes in. Gene Berdyshevsky and his team at SELA Nanotechnologies have pioneered a new material. It's a composite silicon anode that they say could increase the capacity of lithium-ion batteries by as much as 40%. And their hope is that these batteries can give electric cars significantly more range and make them even cheaper for consumers. Gene Berdyshevsky was born in Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. And he spent much of his childhood in Russia before moving with his parents to Richmond, Virginia, when he was nine years old. So back in the Soviet Union, my folks were engineers working on nuclear submarines.

4:59So we actually spent a part of my life living north of the Arctic Circle in a little town called Murmansk, which is the northwestmost 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, you know, electrical engineer turned software engineer and, you know, really wanted me to be one too. So that was definitely the one thing I wasn't going to do. I know you ended up at Stanford and you studied mechanical engineering. And while you were there, you were part of a solar car project. Tell me about that project.

5:36Yeah, 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 it was, you know, 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. Yeah, that's more than 2 ,000 miles from between Chicago and LA. And by the way, how fast did that car go? We got it up to about 86 down a hill, and you could go about 55 on flat ground.

6:21So we were in normal freeway traffic, and it was terrifying. We were amongst 18-wheelers, and one of our best friends is driving, and we built this car. and like his butt's on the line, you know? Wow, that was in like 2004. We are now in 2024, 20 years later. And probably back then, if I would have asked you, you'd have been like, yeah, in 20 years, these are gonna be on the streets. People are gonna be driving solar powered cars. I would not have said that. And sorry to generally disappoint. I don't think we're gonna be driving, you know, purely solar powered 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.

7:05And 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, you know, 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 miles range on a single charge. Um, you know, 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. All right. So as you just mentioned, you find out about this company, this is 2004, called Tesla.

7:42And unbeknownst to many people, it wasn't actually founded by Elon Musk. I mean, he joined relatively early as a major investor and turned it into what it is today. But there were two other founders, I believe. And probably when you joined in 2004, It was maybe right around the time that Elon Musk joined. 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 Eberhardt. J.B. Straubel, who'd go on to spend 15 years at CTO, was already there. Mark Tarpening 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.

8:23I was sort of in the back room making, you know, gluing batteries together, making it work. Yeah. Tell me about what you were doing. Because 2004, and you would be at Tesla for four years, right around the time when they released the Roadster. What were you doing? I mean, you were presumably working on developing a battery that could power a car. How much, when you got there in 2004, how much of the technology was already kind of ready to go? 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.

9:07And 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 stuffed that into the back of a car frame of the Lotus Elise. So it was a really clean slate, and I got a chance to go from clean slate to production. So, all right. You left Tesla in 2008 before it really kind of became the company it is today, but it was still really exciting. I mean, I remember when that Roadster came out in 2008. It was still kind of a novelty car. But I guess you left to continue your studies.

9:45You went back to Stanford. But did you leave with the intention of like, okay, there's something to this battery thing, and I want to pursue this? 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.

10:19So 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 of 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. All right. So let's dive into the problem for a moment. I mean, let's go back to 2011 because you founded the company in 2011. And what was the problem you were trying to solve at the time?

11:01Was it the same problem you're still trying to solve today or was it a different problem at that time? Same problem. And this is one of the beauties of picking the right problem is 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, the cheaper the battery pack can be.

11:40And 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. Okay, let's break down battery technology for a moment, because essentially, a lithium ion battery, it stores energy, right? And you'll do a better explanation, because you know the science, but essentially, from what I understand, the lithium stores the energy, and then over time, that lithium transfers to the, for lack of a better description, the other side of the battery when it spends the energy.

12:29Is that more or less right? Yeah, 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's charged, is today graphite.

13:09In almost every single battery in the world, it's just graphite, the same as your pencil lead. And most of that graphite, I think, is extracted in China, right? The majority of it? 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. And what's the problem with graphite? Is there, I mean, my understanding is that, and you mentioned this, that over the last 10 years, lithium ion batteries have gotten better, not as, maybe not as quickly as we hope, but they've gotten better.

13:42They're more efficient. They store more energy. The range of certain cars has been extended, but is there a limitation to what graphite can do and store? 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. You cannot push more energy into the graphite, into the existing kind of architecture of a normal battery. 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.

14:23And 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 cycle life, 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 us sort of five years to solve. And it's taken us closer to 10. We're going to take a short break, but when we come back, how Gene and his team tackled the battery life cycle problem, and why they stuck with it for so many years.

15:07Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

15:18If you've been listening to the show these last couple of episodes, you've probably heard me mention the Airbnb original experience that I'm hosting. And I'm so excited to have a chance to connect with listeners in a completely new way. It's called the Reinvention Lab, and it's designed to help you think about how to unlock your next big move in your career or even in your life. I'll help you discover your own story in ways I do on this show with my guests. and attendees will get a chance to take a deeper dive with me on so many lessons I've learned from this show. Lessons that have transformed how I work and think about the future.

15:56All proceeds from the event will go to support the Ronald McDonald houses that helps families stay near their children who are being treated at nearby hospitals. It's going to be really fun and I can't wait to meet you. So come join me in San Francisco and take your idea to the next level. To grab your spot, visit airbnb.com slash guy. It's going to be great. Ever had one of those afternoons where your brain just quits on you? You're sluggish, hangry, maybe even a little foggy. What if it's your glucose? See, glucose is an energy currency for your mind and body. When it's stable, you're on point.

16:35When it crashes, so can you. That's why Lingo is so interesting. Lingo is a glucose wearable designed to help you connect the dots between your glucose and what you eat, how you move, and how you feel. It shows your glucose data in real time. Instead of guessing, you see the impact of your choices. Maybe that healthy snack is actually sending your glucose on a roller coaster. Or that afternoon walk is the perfect stabilizer. It's about unlocking your consistent best all day long by truly understanding your body's unique responses. Get to know your glucose and learn about how to build healthy habits that work for you with Lingo, designed for you by Abbott.

17:15Through November 30th, use code GUY10 on HelloLingo.com to get 10 % off a Lingo plan purchase, one use per customer. This offer cannot be combined with other offers, U.S., Puerto Rico, and U.K. only. The Lingo glucose system is for users 18 years and older, not on insulin. It is not intended for diagnosis of diseases, including diabetes. Individual responses may vary. Shopping for eggs should be simple. A happy hen makes a happy egg. And that's why eggs from Happy Egg are so delicious. Happy Egg partners with family farms across the Midwest to raise happy hens outdoors. The proof is inside the shell.

17:57A tasty orange yolk. It's the difference you can see and taste. I just made an incredible omelet with eggs from Happy Egg. It was delicious and so fresh. Once you crack open a happy egg, you can see and taste the difference right away. It's obvious. Visit www.happyegg.com slash built to find happy egg near you.

18:33Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. My guest is Gene Berdyshevsky, co-founder of Sela Nanotechnologies. So this is interesting because back in 2011 when you founded this company, right, you were trying to solve a problem that really did not yet exist in the sense because electric vehicle adoption at that point was still very tiny. And so you would need people to essentially buy electric cars with a graphite anode in the battery before people started to realize that you actually needed to solve – really this problem needed to be solved. And that's where we are today. I mean is that fair to say?

19:10Like you were working on a solution before the market was ready for that solution? Skate to where the puck is going to be, right? Right. I mean that's – you have to do that. And you have to understand 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 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.

19:53full stop. And so that was part of the calculus in starting this company is saying like, look, I know this has a limitation. Five years from now, people are going to want better batteries. And so we have to solve this chemistry problem. All right. So you, all the way back in 2011, you had a hunch that there was a better solution, right, to graphite, and that is silicon. And when I think of silicon, I mean, we're thinking about the same material that is in a computer chip. Yep. And a solar cell too. So it's a pretty magical material. Yeah. So tell me about this material and how you kind of came upon this as a better option than graphite.

20:37Yeah. 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. it. That's been known for a long, long time.

21:20The 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. 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. All right. So you knew theoretically that this was a better material, but you also knew that as of that moment in 2011, nobody had figured out how to make it work. It was too volatile. And so you decide, I'm going to tackle this.

21:59I'm going to figure out how we can make silicon work. And that project you thought you could do within about five years at that point. That's what we thought. And there's an important other thread to that story, which is one of my co-founders, Professor Glebushin, 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 you know he published a few papers as a professor at Georgia Tech.

22:43I 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 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, you know, 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 an ex-Tesla colleague, you know, the three of us kind of said, yeah, we think we can figure this out in five years.

23:24Yeah. So you and Gleb basically joined forces. And I know you, essentially, you had to raise some money to begin the process. And you raised about$5 million back in, I think, back in 2011. Tell me what the pitch was to investors. You said, we are going to build a better battery that does X, Y, and Z. What were you saying to investors? 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.

24:08And we could apply that same chemistry into consumer electronics because graphite's 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 a first car that folks can buy.

24:47All right. Let's back up because, as you mentioned, it would take 10 years before your battery essentially was in a consumer product, which is the Whoop smart band that It's a fitness tracker, essentially. But before we get there, for that 10-year period, 2011, 2021, I read that you went through something like 80 ,000 iterations in trying to develop this, right? Because you were essentially – this was not off-the-shelf technology. You guys had to figure out the science behind this. So walk me through a little bit of what you did during that 10-year period. Because that is – man, that must be – you have to have a lot of patience, right?

25:32Waiting for that moment where it's going to work. Yeah. 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.

26:19And 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 baling wire, we built really nice automated machines that would be just bulletproof and execute every 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 turned the crank, right? Ideas in, results out, discard the bad ideas, recycle the good ones, put them together and iterate, iterate, iterate.