#25 - Sam D'Amico, Founder & CEO of Impulse

0:00The appliance industry is stuck in this spot where they really need to charge people for repair and servicing and all this other stuff. they're not going to go out of their way to like help fix your stove and keep it operating if you flip the script where it's like oh it's actually in the interest of us and the brands to make sure that every appliance is just rock solid and works forever that's a very different value proposition for the consumer because they know like if my stove goes down like they'll give me a new one sam it's great to talk with you today um let's start off with uh who is like the chef in your home as a kid so my both my parents actually cooked a lot um and it's kind of a funny thing is i i remember like we're like making waffles my dad as a kid um doing barbecue um i was not allowed to deep fry turkey but we did you guys have that conversation we did deep fry turkey i mean it was more like just don't get near the turkey fryer and it's sort of like that but deep fried turkey is amazing um yeah like ended up cooking a bunch of stuff like while was it while i was at home my parents and stuff like that so it was always like accessible um my uncle actually owned a restaurant uh until very recently so there was like some of that dna in the family one of my cousins uh trained professional chef you know there's kind of like that sort of stuff has been around and like you know we weren't and and and of course like my mom's always been like judgmental of other people's cooking and you know being like oh this potluck was terrible like you know sort of thing like that um second piece was always like to kind of go travel and try different types of food um and that really started heating up honestly as part of being in hardware companies because what do you have to do when you design consumer products yeah you got to go meet people for dinner in china a lot of the time and among other and other places so like china japan south korea um taiwan um hong kong singapore like you name it um ended up having to go i spent probably like i think it's been a quarter of the year one year literally only like just in china in 2015 in 2015 or 2016 and like it was at the level where facebook at the time got me a residence permit so that we were china for china no way so that we wouldn't get in trouble on it from a compliance standpoint because technically once you cross 90 days 90 days you're like the not a citizen but you're like no you're you're past the point of like they need to know about you for tax accounting purposes basically um and they were trying to play by the book if you're just if you're just like a startup person like they don't really matter but like facebook obviously was trying to get into china at that time like 2015 or something like that and so it's funny it's like basically We just spent tons of time out of home, like not at home, but really loved like street food, trying new stuff, trying to tell people like, hey, does this have peanuts in it or not?

2:52Because I have a peanut allergy. Did you have a like carry those like I have a pen and stuff like that? I tell people I do. Are you living on the edge? I know. I carry a bunch of Benadryl with me in my backpack. So usually and I do have an epic backpack, but may be expired. Who knows? Those things are expensive. but that would be a crazy bear case he died of a peanut allergy so the good thing is my allergy is pretty minor so it's like i can deal with it with like two benadryls um um but uh one thing was for certain though is like i really liked like taking some of the food i had in you know basically like side of the road in shanghai or whatever at like 2 a.m after me and some friends were at a bar or whatever eat some like lamb skewers and like this grilled bread thing they have it's really good and all this other stuff and i was like can i cook that at home and so i really got into like hey i'll get like the right barbecue grill i'll get the right equipment what was your what was the grill that you i got one of these like skewer grills that's like a little trough thing that you can like barbecue on and uh if you come to my house ever i i have i still have that it's great um you make lamb skewers and stuff like that it's super super super good um so i got i just kind of got into the craft of like hey i really like this thing let me go and figure out how to replicate it at home um not really a professional chef thing um not anything like super serious but um the right before the pandemic this kind of actually i started getting obsessed about other things i was like could i make a pizza really fast and i was like let's get one of those like little pizza ovens so this was like right when those companies were i think getting started um and i was well and i was thinking could you make a tabletop plug in electric version of this it makes it in like a minute that would make it like a minute and i realized this was a fundamentally power limited task it was something that like you could not like you could not pull from a 120 volt plug the power needed to flash cook a pizza basically um because like the radiation from a brick oven and like also conduction from the stone is like that's more power than what you'd normally get and is it more than like just goes to a house kind of thing yeah it's you have to store you'd have to store and deploy the energy basically which it's not more than what goes to the house but it's more than goes to a 120 volt just normal plug which would be like 1500 watts or something like that um and for for comparison i actually when that happened i went and looked at other kind of like smart oven products that are about 1500 watts like they run off a plug and i was like do they advertise that they can cook a pizza and i found out it's like 10 minutes and i was like rookie numbers that's rookie numbers but it's also it's fundamentally not the same taste profile because you're not cooking it in the same way and this sent me down this rabbit hole and i was like but what if you added a battery to the pizza oven because then you could trickle charge the battery from whatever's available like you know 120 volt plug or solar panel or whatever you want and then when you need to cook a pizza you just press the button and it dumps the battery power into into the oven and i was like i was like this seems like a good idea and i actually went and started buying some of the parts to go and build this and i think it was like 2018 or 2019 like i just totally was too busy with work and other stuff to like yeah you were like working at facebook i was working at facebook at the time yeah yeah and so um we were designing a next gen controller that shipped with the quest pro headset so it was like a computer vision on the controller it's kind of a cool product but uh i so i went and actually bought like an lfp pack and all this other stuff and was like i probably could have done bang on a prototype in a couple weekends but i didn't end up doing that um but then i realized that this was a bigger idea and it was could you if you could put a if you could make better appliances because you put battery in them so the whole idea is like the energy from the wall is a power supply from the wall is limited to bet even if you're on 240 like you may have to rewire your house to install an electric vehicle charger yeah like you may need to get a new service connection on your street basically they may have to even upgrade the transformer on the pole to be able to basically the like residential houses are designed for a very small amount of energy they were designed for a past era and we've like decided to make the built world really hard to change for various reasons like you know to preserve our parents housing prices or whatever and so you're not interviewing me about the book abundance so we can talk about that maybe you know you know another podcast but basically um but basically the point is we've frozen the built world in amber it's really complicated to change stuff and at the same time there is this transition happening and you can call it like you know climate driven energy transition or whatever but it's really like there is a transition to a new technology stack and that new technology stack is kind of like what i would loosely call like the electrification stack and it's not a honestly the argument like it's less and less about like is this a climate change thing are we saving the planet so no it's like this is just better and more powerful and more awesome better tech and this came from this came from the ev industry um basically getting all this stuff to kind of escape velocity where now you've got batteries you've got advanced power electronics you can actually deploy that energy like at high power and high power density and then you've also got like motors as well so like you know everyone's talking about robots and robot actuators these is but like that where that come from where that where a lot of that come from it's like the ev industry and and then lastly it's uh um like obviously computing as well so it's it's basically like all the tech inside your phone plus all the tech inside your electric car well that's the same stuff that's in a drone that's the same stuff that's in um that's the same stuff that's in pretty much all of these like new class of devices and it's coincidentally all in the same stuff that when people start freaking out about like oh china's beating us in xyz they're beating us at that yeah because that is the technology stack of the future it's not a like oh we're gonna make the tanks woke by making them series hybrids no the tanks are gonna be better and they'll be quiet and they will have lower thermal signatures and 60 and whatever and they'll have better acceleration and and uh you'll have all this energy available to like for electronic warfare air and air defense and all this other fun stuff so like and lasers or whatever whatever you want and so and and that's kind of an extreme example but basically that transition is happening and meanwhile the built world is frozen in amber and so there's this this actually opens a really big opportunity which is like kind of going back to that pizza oven what if you could make just fundamentally better devices that people will buy anyways because they give them a capability that they would not otherwise have they put them in their house and then coincidentally they've installed a battery yep now you don't need to upgrade all of that infrastructure upstream of that battery because the battery can choose when to draw energy when utilization of that whole delivery network is at its lowest you're basically not you're you're choosing a different path instead of like trying to fight regulators and do all this other stuff you're just like why don't we just make us we have this you know portable thing that every single house can have and it's not it's not necessarily portable right so it's like it's not necessarily a portable thing but it's a it's a like appliances are installed every like in every neighborhood in the united states every day like every every every week out of the month every every week out of the year so it's like and so kind of like bringing it back to like the the big picture it's like so there's this this pizza oven concept i'm like obsessed about um i take a step back and i'm like is this a more generic idea like can you do this for kind of any device with a power cord and what are the most exciting ones and then i realized what about other home appliances they're permanently installed so like again the battery would then be permanently installed in the house which means you can do more than just like power the device with the battery power the house you can power the house you can power the grid you can do you can do you can power the building for multifamily you're able to do things because it's installed that you wouldn't otherwise be able to do and then the last piece was like okay so what do we do first right and and it's kind of this funky thing where it's like i believe we're making kind of like this play at the tech stack of the future but we're making a stove right it's kind of this funny like it's like okay that's a weird thing to do very few people are doing that there was a couple there was a couple smart oven companies a couple years ago i mean some some of the product experience in those are fantastic by the way but it's like this has been a space where there are carcasses like juicero um the appliance space is not for the um it's not for the uh there's just some horror stories it's not an enterprise sass like play where there's like it's a straightforward thing for some vc analyst to be like yeah this thing rocks you meet these metrics we'll lead your series a like it's not that it's it's it's not that and so there's a little it's a little psychotic to go into the space especially given like oh there's like and also by the way it's also kind of consumer hardware right consumer hardware is psychotic as well i have friends who have crazy revenue numbers and even then fundraising is not some like you're anointed you're anointed walk in the park anything like that like this is this is not you know this is this is this is a little bit of a therapy dragon situation, even though more people should be doing this, because I think if more people do this, the investors will realize this is actually a good space to be in.

12:27It's actually much better than enterprise. So it's your job a little bit to pitch. My job is to prove that. This is like an awesome quest and we're going to go on it together if you want to be on. And by the way, other people I think should be starting hardware companies because I think if there's more of us, I think this is going to be something where at least more VC funds will have templates to show that this is like a reasonable investment yeah versus a psychotic side quest basically um yeah so then so that so that so that kind of gets to like why a stove right and so we wanted to be i basically was like what is the one thing in your house where the fuel source is the user experience and that's the stove and that's the stove yeah what's a gas stove in a case of a gas stove even I want to I want to also talk about that because like I know if you know I come from like a chef I actually went to like chef school and uh if you asked most chefs like what they want they would basically respond with in effect a faster horse right a better like more precise gas stove and then you come in and you're saying well this piece of technology that used to be bad which was like electric where it would go on and off constantly and it wasn't super precise like you can make it amazingly precise um how did that work yeah so it's actually interesting of like i was always kind of a gadget nerd you know sort of like i would follow the like i would follow the happenings of uh you know who what people were shipping kind of the smart appliance space and other things and like would obviously buy stuff if it kind of nerds night me um do you have any examples of things you bought the first i i didn't want to buy it until i had some venture money for this idea but i was like i need to get the breville control freak and so the breville control freak is a it was designed by this company i think chef i think it's um polyscience so polyscience um is they do they're like the original like sous vide people basically and i think they started with like i mean it's literally for for like temperature processing for science experiments basically and biology and stuff like that but they basically started a cooking division and then they were shipping i think a sous vide circulator because they were doing immersion circulators for like biology research and stuff like that and then they made a hot plate so like a single burner induction stove basically put on your counter um that had a temperature probe on it so it would actually sense the bottom of the pan through this contact sensor and it worked pretty well so it's like you could actually put a pan on there instead of and And instead of saying zero through 10 and you have no idea what 10 means, you can say 350 degrees and it will hold it.

15:02And it works okay. It's like it's a pretty good product. And I was like I wanted this thing because it was like in some sense that was what induction all induction stoves should have. Like why are you running this like what's called like open loop control where you're just setting up power level and not understanding what the pan is doing. And that's how cooking works, right? Like you have to look and you have to like lift the pan up and do all this other stuff. And like, that's where, you know, you went to school for, right? So, so, so you end up in this, this thing where the temperature control is like, if I was to pick, if I was to stack rank the automations you would want for a kitchen gadget, it's like a, it's like, if I took your ovens thermostat away, would you want to use that oven anymore?

15:48Yeah. And it's also funny because people like brought, you know, these like laser pointers to check the temperature, right? That's how we verify that. Yeah, that's how we, it's not a laser. The laser is actually the like, the laser is actually just showing you where it's aimed at, but it's an infrared sensor for the audience. And so the... You probably definitely know more about this than I do. We had to tear down and study every single way that people have done this before we narrowed it on to approach it. How many people have done this or tried? So, I mean, there's been a bunch of companies that have done temperature controlled cooking.

16:22Breville or PolyScience, which then sold sold their cooking division to breville did the best i think up to this point and it was just a well-tuned kind of standard control loop where it's like measure the sensor update the update the induction power level to try to keep the pan at a specific temperature and not and they didn't do anything super sophisticated some other brands do something where they have an infrared sensor going through the glass the problem is the glass blocks like wavelengths of infrared light below a certain temperature so it's like it only works at 300 degrees plus so you can't you can't sous vide on it or anything like that um and also there's some you get signals from the glass and other stuff so it's not perfect and then then there's uh there's other category devices you buy special pans and they have bluetooth and they have a thermocouple like threaded into the very bottom of the pan and those actually can work pretty well um the issue is i'm not in the pan business I'm in the stove business right so um uh company Heston um we've got some folks from from there actually with us but somebody Heston interestingly like they were selling they sell pans so they went down that approach and that's a good idea if you're selling pans right so um the idea that we had though was we want to make sure you install this thing in your house and like you don't have to replace your pans or do anything special and we also don't have to fight like oh you can't use this fancy pan brand you could just be able to bring your own thing um but then the second thing we found out was like none of these approaches worked at high power at all why so this kind of comes into a speed situation so it's like if your induction system heats the pan faster the sensor has to respond proportionally faster or you could end up in a situation where it will like it won't it will be hot before it knows it's hot oh so you're just burning and you'll burn stuff or you'll overheat the oil and start smoking or in a more extreme case you'll actually like warp the pan like there's a number of issues there so so we were like we needed some different approach because at the other piece of this and again i'm telling the story in such a long form way so my apologies for me and i love it i'm meandering a bit we put a battery in the stove the battery gives us like 15 kilowatts of additional power beyond what the plug gives you so i was like let's make this thing output 10 000 watts if you if you want to steer 10 000 watts to a single helmet burner go for it and that's three times more than like a typical induction stove when it's in its power boost mode or whatever like and that's enough if you haven't heard me say this to boil a liter of cold water from the tap in under 40 seconds um or 10 cups in like i don't know it's like a minute and a half or something like that so it's very quick like you won't have to wait for pasta or anything like that you potentially can put the pasta in cold water isn't your goal basically to like you know you put the pan on the stove and then by the time you know you turn it on and by the time you come back with whatever ingredient yeah pasta whatever it's ready there's no there's no lag you're no there's no lag and then yeah the problem is if you have that you need a sensor that is fast enough to track that rise in temperature so we had to invent a new sensor type and we actually the first thing we did we were like okay let's uh let's take the sensor design from the breville control freak which is a um it's like a thermo thermistor we have measuring temperature electronically it's basically a resistor you run current through and it changes if it's a different temperature and you have that touch the bottom of the pan um with a little metal cap and some industrial design work and stuff like that so you had that and then we're like well that's too slow because you don't control that like that contact yep and then we were like okay let's also do the optical thing so let's throw the optical thing on as well and then we found a bunch of issues with the optical approach where and so we're like okay we could do some like combine this thing but it's not measuring what we want we want to measure is not the bottom of the pan we want to measure inside the pan we want to measure what you're actually cooking exactly and like the surface temperature of the pan the surface temperature of the pan yeah and that's a different thing to measure it's a very hard thing to measure and and how long is this process of just like realizing oh crap there's just you know whatever you know path we go down it's just not quite the right one and you got to go down so we actually we we narrowed that tech that the the research kind of figuring out the architecture there took almost a year from kind of fresh start of the company it's like 2021 to 2022.

20:55Yeah, 2021 to 2022. And we actually, we hired an external consulting firm and kind of like just boiled the ocean on all the approaches. And they were like, they ran a bunch of experiments with different things. And it's pretty cool, you know, pretty cool set of prototypes we ended up building about that. And it was really, it was interesting. But, and then you had to develop algorithms around that, it was MATLAB stuff. It gets really messy. This was before Claude. Before you could Vibecode anything. And so, and so, um so basically uh we got that figured out like i was like i remember getting a demo of our temperature control system in like august 2022 and i and i think they cooked me like an egg they made me like a mcmuffin or something i forget the exact thing they made me it was actually quite good the whole the prototype was not a real prototype it was like this like hacked up thing that they built you're like it works it works and the i understood the physical principles i'm like this is actually going to work like this will this will actually work now then it took us another year to get prototypes yielded from our manufacturing partner with the like ceramic components the custom ceramic components and like all of the optimization we had to figure out we had to make sure that like the spring that pushes it into the pan wasn't magnetic so it didn't like itself turn melt or anything like that like there was crazy stuff we had to engineer in that system down to like the component level to actually get that out and so we pushed that through our supply chain and eventually yielded out a first version of that sensor that was like production grade and there was a bunch of intermediate lab prototypes we did internally did you melt any like stoves at one point we we've actually we've melted sensors before but we've not actually caught a stove on fire nice and the the sensor melting is like you know you uh um a lot of it's basically well the easiest material to make the sensor out of is plastic because it's you need to like mold it you can make it out of ceramics and stuff like that but that gets really tough it'll take time it takes time and there's process development we didn't know the vendors and all that stuff but there are plastics that are rated to very high temperatures like well above what you'd ever need a sear a stake at and so we're like let's just use those and then you have to figure out okay what's the intersection of the plastics you can use their actual melting points their rated melting points because that the rated one is what you're allowed to like set the the stoves max temperature to and like this turns into a an entire design challenge of like what plastic resins can i get that are already certified so i don't have to recertify a new one for like fire risk or anything like that yeah just add extra time and add extra time so it ended up being a very complicated challenge that a number of really talented folks on our team like address kind of like cross-functionally um to actually make this thing both work and be manufacturable and be high enough temperature rated that like even if like some arbitrary like temperature overshoot situation it doesn't melt itself and that took i i think i was like going through the the number of discrete like for the whole stove program it's like we basically built like i just actually walked through the number of prototypes we had yeah yeah so so and also walk through with with the timeline like what date what date yeah yeah around which yeah yeah so so so for for grounding this like i come from the consumer electronics industry um i was at facebook facebook google google more recently yeah and so i had that but typically you have like a standardized product development process now the appliance industry works a little differently than this it's much more of a we'll build some prototypes then we'll ship it um is it because they're just like not that complex or something it's because actually it's it's interesting it's not like they're not very complex they're actually very complex in the well you have a hundred different skews you have to make but they all have off the shelf electronics from like one or two vendors that like are essentially the suppliers you put them together in a slightly different way and ship it it's like building um it's like you wouldn't need to do five iterations of a desktop pc build where you're buying where all you were really doing custom was the case yeah so it's like like imagine imagine you're building a desktop computer you have a you have a sheet metal shop that lets you build whatever case you want but you're buying your motherboards from gigabyte and you're buying your gpus from nvidia or something yeah yeah yeah so you basically and and so you're you're you're you're doing this as like a a kit build but the the brand facing parts are all things that you like that's all the the enclosure basically um and then this is the the thing in the appliance space that's really tricky is you have to install this in one house their house could catch on fire you don't want to be at fault so you need to get this thing certified and that's where why you see like the ul little circle or csa or other there's a couple other labs as well you'll see a a listing on that thing where it's listed to a specific test standard typically a ul standard or csa standard if it's north america and that process is a big can of worms but what this means is these appliance companies they're really good at distribution they'll have showrooms like literally across the street from here with like a bunch of different models different models they'll be in thousands of showrooms across north america they'll have all that reach they can handle just like a lot like the car industry it's like the car industry yeah it's it's very much like the car industry it's like ford buys continental and bosch parts so in like more ways than one you're kind of trying to be tesla a little bit yes actually that's that's a good way to put it because it's and but it's tesla in i would call it the 2010 cents not test like tesla now is a even different beast right yeah but like the 2010 tesla was like tesla was the electrification stack provider for the automotive industry that's what got their ipo done that was like the key thing was daimler and toyota had deals with them to power their next generation electric vehicles tesla was going to build the battery the inverter the motors like the whole powertrain for these guys and they had all the ip to do it they had the ability to manufacture it they had already built the roadster they didn't end up doing that because they they they ipo'd and made enough money and then raised enough money to be able to uh and they got really and they got really lucky in the recession bought new me like they got super lucky to be able to actually do this direct-to-consumer car play and manage to grind it out after many painful years.

27:28But how were they valued in such a way where after only shipping 1 ,000 cars, how could they possibly IPO? And it was this. And so I've studied that very closely and acutely aware of that reality. So... Did you just see Elon Musk's pain and were like, that's what I want? i i think there's ways to avoid that um so the big thing is i don't want to run a car factory under any circuit under any circumstances um so someone else is like manufacturing it and then you're just like well so no i think i think car factory is a different story because just the capex of a car factory is just so brutal it's like you essentially have to be your own gp of your own venture fund to be able to get the capital required to like make some of this stuff happen and like effectively he kind of is in a sense um but uh but yeah so so so going back to i'm trying to remember the the the the initial the initial part of this this tangent journey basically the timeline for the different iterations so basically like and then i went into the the the appliance industry being like cool buy the off-the-shelf part buy the off-the-shelf electronics integrated in your box get it certified because all those parts are already certified so it's easier to certify um but that means that you have the same parts as your rival your cross-town you're selling you're selling a slightly different product but like very slightly but what's the case but your advantage is brand industrial design and distribution and and service as well so like you can actually like be like okay the rely and reliability and all that stuff but that's where people actually hold up these brands versus consumer electronics versus a technology play so on the flip side we ran this program like a consumer electronics program and so to describe that it's kind of like you build prototypes where you're like let's figure out if the science of the idea works and like an example of that for the audience would be like palmer lucky um being like hey i got some magnifying glasses like magnifying glasses i like that i think if i look through this on a phone screen like i get a good i like this is actually like i'm pretty sure i'm not i may be mis mis misquoting kind of the some of the origin stories for oculus but like essentially it was like figure out what could be done with the off-the-shelf parts and like almost like duct tape and like figure out something that you can just make yeah yeah and then and but basically figure out like what is the like get the science project part of it out of the way yeah and so the science project part of But for us was like, it was, can you put 10 ,000 watts into a pan and actually, can you triple the performance of an induction stove?

30:09Was that actually like ever a question of, does this even like work at all? We were trying to put it in a smaller pan than normal, like a consumer pan. Because, yeah, you could totally do like induction walk burners that are like huge, can do like 8 ,000 watts or whatever. It's fine. But I was like, could you, was there some fundamental problem with like, hey, I put a small pot on a stove like ours and like throw 10 ,000 watts into it. um do you get the problem that nuclear reactors get when they go into when they go into meltdown when they go and when they go into meltdown where if a water-cooled reactor where it turns all of the water around the fuel rod into steam and then it's jacketed in steam not water so the temperature now starts to go from the boiling point of water to no limit and then then you know you you you have a bad time um so it's like do you have issues like that do you have where we're like the bottom of the pan then we get red hot because there's like it's like pan steam water or is it going to circulate enough and you'll be fine that it's not a big deal and there's risks like that there's risks like hey like can you build a battery pack with the requisite power outputs to get the stats to be exciting for someone um and then there's like those were kind of the earliest questions we would need and then like hey can we build our own temperature controlled stove period like are we capable of doing this because a bunch of consumer electronics people and some folks in the automotive industry and stuff like that but like we hadn't done appliances before so it was kind of like can you do all those things and so that was the first thing it's like build a prototype that just did that so we we did that took us a couple couple months um and ended up being this kind of crazy high performance thing we got some cool freebies out of it too where we also prototyped the knobs being magnetic which yeah how did that how did that come to be like why did you so i wanted to it was interesting was i wanted to do knobs on a cooktop as part of the like part of the whole concept but we were working through our industrial design process and obviously you don't want to have the shaft going into the device because if you clean behind like it's hard to clean just so it's like can you make them magnetic and removable and then also inspired by like nest and how you can navigate menus like that it's like and also i didn't want a touchscreen because the problem with touchscreens it'll get greasy it gets greasy your stove's already dirty like it like and so we came up we came upon a really really really compelling like all magnetic design for the knob where there's no electronics in the knob it's just a magnetic angle sensor under the glass and we actually deployed that in our very first prototype um so we had the magnetic knobs we had the 10 000 watts per burner we had a i think it was like a three-ish kilowatt hour battery oh yeah i think it was about a three kilowatt hour battery that could do i think about 15 kilowatts output maybe more actually um and it had temperature control so like functionally it's fairly similar to what you actually have today yeah so from a stats pay but it was integrated into a server rack it's kind of like this height so it was basically like this big it had four burners you could do it it was about this tall and it was basically like a server rack version of this thing um and that was the first prototype and then we were like we're trying it and we're like okay and it had a screen in the middle so it had like some of the same ui ideas we had this all worked and uh that was maybe like april may so the company got founded in like july 2021 um closed the seed round in september mid-september um started hiring folks october november december january time frame and then this came out like we basically started having like this starting to get integrated march april um so it was really fast it was it was pretty fast as these things go and so once we had that we're like okay let's go i think we now know kind of like roughly the bounds we're gonna be able to do here to get all the parts like did you have to fly to china and like go talk you couldn't go to china you couldn't go because it was like covid right it was covid yes you couldn't go to china so like this is the big this is actually one of my if i was like giving my past self-advice it would have been like stop doing as much prototyping in your lab with non-production stuff like do not do it get on a plane and do the two-week quarantine and that would that would have like saved you a huge it would save much time because we would have found like random vendors that or like start dming people on aliexpress or whatever like just just just just just just realize that um prototyping is you have to leave the lab and prototype with production parts because it'll save you so much time because you won't have to like you don't have to do all this zero to one stuff that other people have already solved for you and so that's that that's like the first huge huge i mean and i already knew this but it was just like i had to relearn it because of the covid reset and all that stuff um so we ended up raising a bit a series a at that point um in like the summer but that's when we actually were like okay now we have to get serious get a contract manufacturer figure out the supply chain all the other stuff and and then actually build a works like looks like built like version of the product which is a much different much different task yeah so so that that was kind of that was of like the next that was a thread that started kicking off the other thing we realized was we were starting to use this prototype and we're like the temperature control sucks and we had kicked off a process with um uh some some in parallel basically to develop that new type of sensor and we were starting and we basically started getting on the path of building prototypes with a more mature version like a so you're almost like a year in before you even started on the sensor is that right the sensor we started in like we started like or like q1 or q2 um 20 i can make a q1 it was probably q1 2022 we started on it but we really it started yielding results like we had kind of done the the trade studies and all that stuff started yielding results on the chosen architecture like august oh wow so the 20 lag was yeah painful i imagine and then and then so then we basically proceeded to hey let's build some prototypes that have that sensor in them that and we ended up building those domestically and i said i would like again i'm like i'm not sure if there was a great answer to how to do it either way but it was like that was painful as well um we built a bunch of single burner cooktops that had this and you plug them into a battery under the table and we tuned it till it worked okay um and that was pretty fun also that was actually the the demo that we'd be able to show people of like what the result would be like yeah once we actually had the product ready so then we got to 2023 or actually end of 2022 we ended up down selecting on our vendors we figured out who we could use as a contract manufacturer and we kind of had a choice of like could you go the appliance route and then you'd run into this problem of they don't know electronics yeah or you go the electronics manufacturer route and they may not know appliances and we kind of found someone that different business unit of theirs did do appliances but we didn't get access to that one um but they were an electronics one and the other issue is you're a startup you're not like an established yeah and like and like and i'm a nobody right like so like and and like the the we're a bunch of ex-meta people or we've got some ex-meta people who'd worked with these guys before like so it wasn't like super alien but it was it was something where you had to build the trust and and it had and and and it takes time and so i ended up so so we kicked that off in the fall the good part is like we actually knew like we could actually start transferring a lot of the architectural decisions we had made kind of building those like internal prototypes to them so it was like okay make sure that like you avoid magnetic components in the temperature sensor so they don't get heated by the induct like we we basically knew how to set a lot of the requirements now because we had done all these prototypes so we didn't thrash them with like hey try this then try that maybe do that like you know like you can't really do that with the language barrier and stuff like that and then we also figured out how to source a battery pack that would past certification as well and we ended up basically doing kind of like one like a half bit of like let's do a draft architecture of the product fully and i think i ended up doing a big chunk of that initially it was like this is what the major circuit boards need to be in the product this is how we wire stuff to that um by the time we started hiring people better than me at this like they were like yeah we need to refact completely redo this and like and so and this is actually a big point is you build a complicated product you end up having to figure out what the integration like kind of boundaries have to be so you're like okay it needs to have these features it needs to do this stuff it's almost like you have like the part list but you don't know how to like modularize it into individual testable chunks and you also don't know like hey if you have multiple modules like what's the wiring harness look like and if you can and it's actually fun to go look at that it's like if i show you an old prototype versus a new one and you look at the wiring harness complexity it's gone completely it's gone down a lot is it like the uh the like rocket engines for spacex yes it's super complex less complex iteration people are like it doesn't even work right and then they show it working yeah yeah yeah you're like you're missing you're missing all of the all all the sensors or whatever it's like no it's all there and so yes you literally have to do that kind of like raptor one through three one through three thing um and the the danger too is like you're building a lot of these right so like you got to build like so our first so our first proto build i think we built like 10 units or something like that um and how much one of those units cost to like it's probably in the thousands of dollars it's crazy because it's again like again you're using like engineering time even in china it's expensive it's like yeah it's not free and like these are hand built by engineers and like you know it's like that so it's you build like 10 of them and you're like okay this is a good idea nothing's optimized and then you gotta write the software against it so like you need the unit to write the software for it so then your software team gets all busy and so we do that and then it took several months for us to get that thing once we built it to get it brought up and like working well and we showed it off at ces in 2024 and stuff like that but it literally took like a long time to get stuff to the zero to one phase like two two and a half years yeah and then and then you do and that was the first prototype built at the actual factory with their supply chain that like actually worked it actually worked yeah um it had some bugs and that was what we call a p1 proto one and p0 would be like non-form factor or like you could call like maybe even like the lab prototypes we'd have were like p0 or something like that um and then different companies have different terms for this but then you basically have like engineering verification belts like evt sort of thing like that where you're like this is closer to pencils down you fixed all the major issues your prototype not um um and so we then go into that build which is like so that was like august 2023 you go into evt in like april 20 or so actually oh i forgot about this you build the unit in august 2023 the first thing we did then after that was let's get a unit back to the u.s we're going to invite the compliance agencies we're working with our compliance firms like to your to our office and we will do a tear down together and they're going to go look at the whole thing and they're going to comment like you can't do that you can't do that you can't do that you can't do that it's like we were very knowledgeable to be like let's hire a compliance expert who's done this stuff before and let's like as soon as we had a prototype you brought those people you brought those people and you do what's called a construction review and you basically do a tear down in front of them and they're like like just redlining it like it's a redlining doctor and then yeah and then you you have those red lines you have the red lines from what you found out that didn't work you have the stuff you find out from incremental testing you do all sorts of testing you like we put it in a cabinet and make sure it doesn't get like super hot like you do every tons of stuff and then that folds into the next design cycle where you basically do a redesign of the whole thing yeah and we change the shape of the battery pack we like i mean it looks the same on top but like change the temperature sensor design pretty completely like completely new molded parts um you have to update and then you also go from like from like all new software yeah the software architecture was totally different totally i mean it was main computer how many times have you rewritten like the entire our software um it's it's been not super bad basically we got we caught the big problem with the architecture before we built the first prototype what was the big problem um i basically put it all in one microcontroller and then that meant that like all the sensors went to each individual burner so you'd have like really long sense lines going from each one and how we have it now is like each individual heating element controls itself and the wires go from the temperature sensor go just to a little board right next to it and it's like and so way more efficient like i literally have one over there you can see it but basically it's all self-contained and like if you want to make a six burner stove it's like just add a six add two more and you're you're you're electrically able to do that and so that was the so but you basically end up learning a bunch of things like that where you're like okay i actually cut the abstraction split planes in the in the the architecture wrong and i'm learning this because i went to the factory and we tried to build it and it doesn't fit together in this right way or like this means this process is much more expensive and difficult or well if i have a failure here then that means i have to junk this and i can't like so you end up discovering all sorts of things like that that you only find out by actually going through the process of of iterating but when i say iterating it's like you're prototyping not just the product but the factory and like that elon quote it's like the factory is the product yeah is so true because it's like what are you actually building here you're not building a stove you're building a process to produce battery integrated appliances um not just potentially stoves and and that's a you know that's a that's a big like and you're also doing stuff that's like hasn't exactly been done before so it's not like there's a best practices of like hey there's no like how to on it yeah like if i'm experimenting yeah like your production line is a unique production line it's a special snow it's a special snowflake the first one it's the first one and so so um so kind of going from that proto one proto one thing to like ebt and you know a lot of people i think i was talking to some other hardware founder and they're like your ebt was probably more like a p2 right i'm like yeah everyone lies about that apparently but uh basically you end up getting most of the stuff right and i think i was pretty proud of what we landed at the ebt bill where i was like it looks pretty much good it looks pretty much identical to the units that are shipping to customers yeah um electrically architect wise like almost the software is almost completely compatible um we landed every key feature in it um which was actually really like so proto one we did not have any of the inverter hardware and we did not even have a supply chain to source can you explain what inverter hardware so yeah so okay so this is a this is a very meandering conversation but the inverter i'm enjoying it The inverter hardware.

45:37So you build a stove or you build any. So the whole idea here is like we build our first product is a high performance induction cooktop with a battery. But you need to charge that battery. But then there's an opportunity, which is if you're connected in such a way that you can also feed power back into the house. Well, you could actually do hypothetically. Hypothetically, you could do grid services. You could do you could support the home. like you reduce home power consumption during um great events periods yeah yeah outages etc so you can do really exciting stuff and you can make money on that battery if you're also an entrepreneur like us um but you need to have a inverter that is stove sized yes and it's not like a and it doesn't intake solar panels and your battery voltage is something weird and like all this other stuff so like and it has to fit and so we had this little appliance in this little appliance So we had to kick off a whole program or that.

46:33And most of the inverter vendors don't want to work with like some random startup they never heard of before. And they're like, why am I making this for a stove? Like, what the hell? So we figured out how to actually solve that problem, too. But that took a very long time. A lot of development work. Yeah. And like, isn't this a whole nother can of worms, like regulatory? Yeah. So it's a compliance regulatory nightmare. Nightmare. Because so the other thing is it's connected to the grid. So like it needs to know the inverter has to be kind of smart. it has to like know like oh the frequency is starting to like drop because like literally generators upstate are starting to spin slower because there's like more demand um i need to now up my power output to help support that like there's an entire like super complicated set of algorithms you have to put on these things and then you have to validate that those are all there and and like compliant and that is a adventure that you got to do um so it's in and this is this basically there's like not only is it a hardware thing but it's a software thing and the software is where all the ip and complexity is and if you're a startup like you're not going to solo that i gotta imagine so do you have just some like i don't know love for doing maybe what you believe is right but it's just like an extremely painful and difficult path because it seems like at every kind of turn you're you're doing the hard thing it may make sense if you can actually pull it off but it's not easy yeah i would say this is like i would say i would say like there's there's probably different ways to do this business that may have been more may have gotten wins faster the problem is you still have to make the thing compliant to be able to actually ship it at scale and put into those houses so it's like we would still have to have the battery the stove all sort of certified and like go through all this process so it's like okay if i had that done now then i need to sell these why would someone buy my thing versus someone else's well it needs to be higher performance yeah and if it's higher performance i need to have this temperature sensor probably because it's not just about power it's about like delivering that power in the best possible way there's probably things we could have made easier about executing the product industrial design various things like that but like and then you're like well also what's the big picture here why is this the company like i don't want to just be a stove company i want to be like something bigger than that and it's like okay then you need to do this inverter thing too like a full plans company that's like multiple things so the vision here is is actually taking a step back is like this product is the vision in one product like landed which is you build a better product than everyone else in this category it just mogs mogs people to use something a word from your generation destroys all current competitors destroys all yeah just it just is incomparable people thus want in their house they figure out how to get it in their house somehow even if like you're renting you put in a cart sitting on a table whatever you get in your house we've now installed a battery in your house and we're now building a new distributed power grid out of all of these battery assets that are at the very edge of the grid and we can because that what that means is if every device with a power cord has an embedded battery inside it suddenly and maybe we control the software of that we control all the consumption on the grid we also control a good chunk of the storage as well so you end up being like the primary counterparty and you're very flexible to all the generation assets yeah it just makes the like entire grid way more flexible because you i think you talked about in the like ashley vans thing uh that there's something like 400 000 power rolls right now from tesla that is an out-of-date number um i apparently are doing really well right now they're growing like crazy but basically the point is i think they're the point the point is in order magnitude about that but then you think of like how many appliances or like how many appliances or how many appliance installations happen in the united states every year it's like 55 million wait really in the united states how many houses are there uh 140 something million so it's like roughly one in three years you're getting a new appliance yeah because you think of it you have like three or four appliances and they replace them every 10 years okay probably better way to put it okay um but that means that there was a best buy truck on your block probably once a week or something like that maybe not your block but like in your area once a week delivering an appliance which means we've gotten really efficient at installing them cheaply it's like installing a 240 volt appliance is like a 50 task that we've kind of worked around some of the electrician requirements various other things like we've gotten efficient at that whereas like a power wall installation unless you're in a jurisdiction that allows their meter socket adapter thing which makes the installation a lot easier to six thousand bucks for the install and so it's like two orders of magnitude yeah so it's like the cheapest way to get battery storage on the grid if you want to get home battery storage could be just if people are buying nice appliances sell them nice appliances that are the same price and they just happen to have the batteries in them and you've automatically is there is there a future where you are making your pizza oven like yes are you going to make that yeah so so this is actually and so so walking through like the development pipeline and stuff like that it's like basically we had to do a bunch of different revisions of this one product and what we were also doing at the time and kind of going from like proto to evt to dvt to pvt and ramp which is like we're shipping imminently right now um the you're also maturing all the key modules inside the product so like the power electronics that inverter i mentioned the battery pack you're getting all those the sensor the software you have to certify the software for the control system so everything from the knob turn all the way to the temperature sensor and the induction that's a certified set of software that like ul actually looked at um and we've got a ul 6730 cert which is like for functional safety as part of that but like but all that stuff is now durable ip and we have a supply chain that can produce it in high volumes with the consumer like like a consumer electronic supply chain that can produce in high volumes battery vendor is a very well-known company so now we've got all these key modules so how do we expand like what what's the appliance what's the big thing with the appliance industry is i don't want to make a hundred different devices on my website like you can like because people are like okay you make this one cooktop in one size like but mine is this i have a 48 inch range in my kitchen with like two ovens and like eight burners and all this other stuff like how could i swap in your thing it's like the answer is you're not and i don't see and we're a technology company not a expert at making a million skews and a bunch of appliance and distribute and distributing these you want to make a few products really well we want to make a few products really well but then additionally figure out how to scale that technology as broadly as possible in the market so we've started announcing big partnerships with major appliance oems and what that lets us do is say hey all of that ip that we've developed and those power electronics we developed and in some sense this is the tech stack of the future it just happens to be stove edition and at least for now but you can think of how this applies to ovens water heaters fridges fridges like you um laundry stuff like that you offer the electrification tech stack the software the control systems even like customized ui things like that and the battery and the and the inverter to these large companies maybe you help them integrate them into their existing products or help them to find new products and now you've got reach through everywhere every showroom in the united states oh so you're basically just like hot swapping whatever they have in the current showroom with like way better technology it's now like a it's already working on the we're working on the branding but it's like like powered by impulse sort of sort of sort of thing where it's kind of like intel inside yeah and so their next gen products instead of being baselined on like the equivalent of like bosh and continental be supplying ford it's like there's actually a german company that supplies most stove stoves as well so every induction stove if you see that zero through nine same same stuff or even the knobs have like nine or 18 defined positions same same company um so instead of being the equivalent of bosh and continental supplying the big three or whatever it is much more like tesla supplying daimler and toyota with yeah with like with the rav4 electric and these other things um but to our in like initial orders and stuff but the advantage here is this gets us like it puts batteries in everyone's house and it puts batteries in people's houses that have no connect like they're that are like in mid purchase stream of like thinking about getting an appliance so they go to a showroom they go buy one and ours is the one that's working on the showroom because it's got a battery in it so they don't have to plug it in it doesn't need a gas line like all this other stuff so they go try it and it's the best performing product in that showroom so obviously they're gonna go get it and they don't have to go realize like wring their hair out over like this new brand or like oh that's the twitter stove or what like you don't have to worry about that it's like you go to some brand you already know and like the maybe it's one you already have in your kitchen and you get the new thing and then suddenly all the benefits of impulse technology are deployed yeah and so that's how we see the scaling where it's like i think you can build kind of the roadster or you know plus plus we think we've designed this first product for real scale but you can then use that to get the platform out and then the platform ends up being this very long arm that reaches just everywhere everyone yeah and also it means that we don't have to hold like like the margins in like the low end of the appliance industry are utterly terrible but like i want to get this technology out into like so you can turn like a bad business into an awesome business you can turn a bad business awesome because you're basically like i don't have to be in the business of distributing low margin stuff i can distribute high margin power electronics and i can make all the money in the battery storage so you get like a subscription on the back end as well as you know yes and so yeah and and we're a little quiet about how that exactly works at least at least you know publicly but basically the point is like if you have a battery that's on the grid it is worth something and if you have software control over it and permission from the homeowner to to do so and i believe we've found a way that kind of squares that circle in a nice way um you can do something pretty awesome and what's also great about it is appliances kind of the appliance industry is stuck in the spot where like they really need to charge people for repair and servicing and all this other stuff and it's like it's kind of a cost center or it's like maybe they can make money on it but it's not something that like they're not going to go out of their way to like help fix your stove and keep it operating but if if you flip the script where it's like oh it's actually in the interest of the of us and the brands to make sure that every appliance is just rock solid and works forever because that means the battery is attached to the grid yeah that's a very different value proposition for the consumer because they know like oh yeah like if my if my stove goes down like they'll give me a new one

57:40yeah that's a crazy that's crazy business funnel um yeah uh okay so i know that you're like partnering or i guess i don't know if you're partnering with a bunch of like creators but you're definitely like this is such an awesome product because there's so many people that like people love to watch uh that are making amazing food you know uh so how does that work so we're building a relationship yeah so this has been something that's been very interesting where it's like we build this product that has a bunch of safety requirements and it's also just like it's kind of i think we're a bunch of perfectionists over here so it's been like i've always like i've been fighting the urge to be like don't let it out yet just yet but like we're ready and so that's the exciting part now how long have you been fighting that urge i think we could have gotten away with it six months ago and people would have been like this a this is a crazy awesome stove because like people come to the office and like try and they're like yeah makes obvious sense yeah can i get one like you know can i just grab that one over there like you know it's like it's like that sort of that sort of thing so but the the big part is like we're ready we're ramping production um there's a bunch of boxes in the front that are going to go to vips and stuff like that so like it's like it's like it's fine it's finally happening um and And I do want to shout out like the Matic robots guys, because like they they've been grinding for years on that thing.

58:55And then now people are getting in that Wired article came out. But then like every random person is like, I bought this thing. This is not a sponsored post. I'm not a VC that invested in this whatsoever. It's just really good. You should get one. It's a thousand bucks, but you should get one. And like and like. I'm just seeing that and I'm like, cool. that's the goal let's make sure that let's and i think we're gonna hit that so it's pretty which is pretty awesome yeah uh what was it like so i know that you said that you were able to like raise you know seed and a without like too much you know that was in the before times but yeah right right um what was it like so i think like locky broom was the first check was he was he was yeah he was he was one of the co-leads for the seed round yeah right and he was also the first guy to get a stove he was the first guy what was it what was it like delivering that first stove well so i didn't deliver it was a good some other guys on our team did actually um well they couldn't get into his house first which is a funny story because he wasn't home um so just outside his house with a stove yeah it's funny though i think i need to swap his out because uh his fan uh he has the preview he has the he has the build before the the production unit so his fans are louder than they should be so if you if you've actually checked out lock your stove the next the one i replace what would be better um but it was it was actually what was funny with that one was that was proof that it was ready because it was just like he would just text us most anodyne things being like this doesn't exactly work like i expect can you fix that you know things like that and it's like totally fine reasonable stuff and i'm like okay if if we let this thing out the door and it's working and it's ota updating and all that stuff is working let's just make sure that we can keep doing that and getting the stuff out and uh does that cause any problems like regulatory wise like are they it's a sample not for sale you put a sample not for sale sticker on it's fine um but uh you like there's there's there's ways to handle low volume prototype stuff but like as soon as you've got purchase consumer like a consumer purchases it um you got to be you got to have fcc part 15 part 18 we had to do some crazy stuff to actually make that pass at the super high power output for the inductions like there's some crazy stuff we had to do which uh i can't talk about until the patents are fully filed but you get the you get the the on some of that stuff but it was crazy actually it'll be filed by the time it's with yours but um basically that was hard you then also then you also to install it in people's homes you want the ul cert as well it's not like there's a police siren that goes off if your product is not compliant but um my understanding is like there's no like retailers showrooms all their stuff like they won't sell products that are not listed yeah and so getting all that stuff through it doesn't gate giving it out to vips and influencers or anything like that no one unless you're really like deep wonky in the space you don't necessarily know this sort of stuff but it's um not required for handing out prototypes to cool people um is required to ship to consumers yeah yeah do you uh like okay so you're just starting the ramp up on actually producing the stoves right and delivering yeah and delivering um is it are you experiencing like production hell just like elon would describe yeah so the production i mean the thing is we've built several hundred of these already um so you already went through production hell to some extent well it's funny because it's pre-production hell pre-production hell because so so um you find out like so this is where you find out like okay the product goes together poorly and you have to redesign it kind of thing it's like a simple thing or like there's actual problems like oh you're failing FCC part 15 because when you turn the induction on like you get like spurture emissions in this specific frequency that exceeds something like that and like that means you have to change the design right so like you have to then go and feedback or you have process issues like we've got a bunch of like silicone seals on our product for the industrial design like the robot that dispenses the glue well they just randomly decided to change the glue today like and like it's that sort of stuff that you like can't necessarily plan for or it's like it's like you have to in some sense you have to understand all the processes that go in the system and make sure that like those are conscientiously managed or like they're consciously managed yeah and so so like because if there's a uh you don't know what you don't know basically until you go and do it so you end up building a bunch of these um and so we had kind of like a wave of ebt units some of those went out to like demos internal people's houses stuff like that those got superseded with the dbt units which are pretty much mostly exactly what we want and then like the the production or pbt production units basically like apart from like the first batch not having our logo on the box like pretty and like the manual in there like are identical to the production intent design basically yeah what what's it been like uh so you i know like so you went and worked with facebook in like 2014 2015 i believe in 2016 and then i went back to google and back for was it was that like super helpful as far as you know having these like moments where you're in china for nine plus or you know not nine months in a row three months or whatever um it's two weeks at a time off and on all over and over and over again right and you're like building those relationships what was that like building those relationships uh back then and how's that translated yeah so i mean the big thing is i think there's kind of this like i think i've said this in other interviews but basically like and this is maybe for like kind of the earlier career engineers in the audience maybe or people just entering hardware it's like the misperception of like Tony Stark in a cave with a box of scraps, soloing an Iron Man suit.

1:04:33Like you're not going to be able to solo a consumer electronic product. And the worst decision you could ever make is doing that. Or trying to, or trying to, what you want to do is you want to build a Lego kit with the best Lego bricks you can have. And ideally you have an 80 % complete Lego kit that you can like, maybe you have to build a symbol. And then me, and then maybe you've got some science project to figure out some special colors of bricks or whatever. Yeah. And, but you need to basically understand where those bricks come from how that worked like you have to understand like the supply chain supply chain how stuff's made yeah like you know all that other stuff and so i spent a ton of time in china with this sort of stuff but the oculus experience was honestly fantastic because so to give folks color on this and this is over 10 years ago at this point so oculus gets bought by facebook um at that point they had shipped dev kit one which was a um he was like an lcd it was basically an lcd screen from like a tablet with magnifying glass lenses i think basically or like or the lens design was cloned from a magnifying glass if i remember correctly they had their own supply chain to make the lenses and it was built by the manufacturer that built i think rock band or guitar heroes controllers really yes and and this was like southern china in dong guan i visited this place once and it was like it was like kind of a little seedy not exactly like does not look like uh you know these like the xiaomi ev factory where it's like super clean automated looks fancier than tesla's thing like no no this is a bunch of guys no this is this is like this is like oh cool a warehouse in the jungle like you sort of thing like that old china was it sketchy um some i don't i don't want to get you i don't want to get you a strike on youtube but basically uh um but um one of so so one of the uh one of the so in china in 2014 there was there were multiple waves of kind of like um crackdowns by the Chinese government against undesirable behaviors.

1:06:41And 2014, I remember checking my hotel in Dongguan. And this is, I'd been to China before because I'd been to China in 2013 with Google. And I got to go tour a bunch of camera module vendors. I worked on the camera for Google Glass. And so I went to Shanghai. I had not been to Dongguan before. So Dongguan is like one of the biggest factory towns in the world. Like, it's like Shenzhen. It's just near Shenzhen. and uh so i go check into my hotel it's like a international brand nothing super crazy but the the guy who brings my bags up to the room is like fifth floor is massage not sex massage sex massage outside sex massage is very famous in donovan and i'm like i'm like i'm like thanks for letting me know i'm like that's why you know man i'm just 23 man like what's going on just trying to make back for some stuff um so then shortly thereafter uh they uh the the government raided all of the massage parlors oh my god um but that but uh uh and so they cleaned that up um they cleaned up a couple other things too um but you know that's that's that's when i go on some china podcasts i can tell those stories but uh but the experience though was after that we actually started with uh so that i think it was that trip we started touring kind of manufacturers for the cv1 unit like the first the first um consumer consumer version one of the oculus rift and that was like obviously they got bought by facebook they had much more resources now they didn't have to go deal with like and they didn't have to they again the manufacturers that would work with them now were everyone like including like you know up to like foxconn or whatever um we ended up touring like five or a bunch of they've been touring a bunch of people a bunch of different places the selected place ended up being in more in the north of china um but i then had to go all the time all over those i had to go all the time because what was happening was i actually ended up so i joined and i was like an electrical engineer or like i did camera module and some other stuff like that but the headset like the team had already kind of had enough electrical engineers to like design all the electronics in the headset like there wasn't like you know some some random new guy who's like a big tech person parachuting into this startup even though you know it's becoming big tech i'm not gonna go take over the people's stuff and i was like what gaps are there in like in this company and i ended up building out their factory test system so like how to test all of like if you put a lens on a screen how do you make sure there's no dust inside and so i built like computer vision inspection systems for that and what this inadvertently signed me up for was to basically stay in china continuously getting all of that stuff working yeah figuring it out figuring out and it was like it was it's kind of like an industrial automation plus software plus computer vision plus um unintentional accidental cyber security incidents plus like you know plus a bunch of different stuff but the other piece of it was a lot of learning on how to use these manufacturers to like actually prototype stuff and use because when you do production development or you do development with a production vendor you're playing for keeps yeah you're able to basically say hey if you make that if you if you if you add that part there now well the production design has that like in this case like the factory equipment will have it um and that was kind of the beginning of this lesson and i kept revisiting this lesson over the course of multiple projects at multiple companies where it was like trips to china and it was basically like look silicon valley likes to think they're the smartest guys in the room um no there's people everywhere but like if you were close to the factory and you have the ability to and this is again why the elon universe is like very effective is they're close to the factory you're able to you're able to actually like play for keeps where like i make a prototyping decision and then instead of me buying some part from some lab equipment vendor i'm actually using the real part that would go into the real thing and then when i write the complicated software against that for like you know it'll work i know and then you'll know it'll work for the actual version yeah so um and then the other piece is like this kind of respect of like okay you're working with this manufacturing partner there's kind of a you know they're just as good as you guys are they have they're just different maybe even better maybe even better and so and so and you should be optimistic about their skills versus pessimistic on their capabilities now that's not always the case um and that's maybe my some one of my one of my thoughts of being like just assume they're going to probably be able to pull it off but what that means is you get a ton of leverage because then this actually is taken over to what's going on impulse like we're 25 people we get to use like 100 plus people across our supply chain to make this product happen and that's how it can be significantly more complicated both on like the hardware side and on the and on the like regulatory side than like any other consumer product that i've worked on before yeah like this is more i would say doesn't like i would say a vr heads has different challenges like you need an app store you need a lot more software on top of the device in terms of like kind of building out the universe of what you can do with it but from a like this has probably been one of the more complicated devices just because of how unprecedented this is from like both us doing it and for like our supply chain partners doing it yeah i'd imagine that this is like the first time that they've ever put a massive battery inside of the stove yes yeah and like and like and like and that and and or even then like first time our manufacturer has gone and like worked with like inverter vendors and like sourced induction coils and like all this other stuff so it's not like they've got a 80 similar product that we then went and mutated basically which my advice to other hardware founders is do that yeah um but once you've built all these modules that are now special i'm like very proud of like the product that we've now built which is like all the stuff on that table over there all of those modules we can sell into everyone else's appliance channels you just take advantage of everyone's distribution and you take advantage of our distribution and then you become you go from selling you you go from being a stove salesperson to we build the power electronics platform for the so ironically for the electrified era basically ironically stove guy is actually going to be like the lego kit guy and he just like yeah yeah it's like it's like you know you sell the lego kit and you and you sell the lego kit with the sas software that makes the battery make money that's that's that's that's as simple as a very simple right you just have to make sure that that lego kit is ul listed and like all this other nonsense and and uh and you've talked to all the utilities and stuff like that so yeah that's awesome um what was uh so how did you end up building like the initial i i guess like relationships relationships with the regulatory people uh for this because you started very early bringing them in so how'd you do that yeah so that's that's a really that's i actually think that's a like i don't want to spoil the alpha but it turns out that basically the trick there is you cannot under any circumstances this is the first thing i'll say is you'd be like we're done let's get this thing certified now if you're like if you're if you're if you're like again if you're 80 the same as something else and like there's nothing special about it like you can often do that and like you use the same suppliers the problem is as a startup you don't usually have your own test lab and so these big appliance companies actually often have their own lab where like ul already signed off on the lab and then the ul like inspector will go visit when they run the test and confirm that everything works but you're doing the test at your own facility and so it's like a lot easier in our case it's like no we're like going to some compliance agency's lab and doing are you like bringing your bringing the unit yeah well so the the first one is you get the engineers to go look at it and like that's relatively straightforward but basically what we had to do is we're like hey guys we know this is crazy we're gonna we want to go by your rules let's let's like run the process in a reasonable way and we'll start way ahead of time and so we have many how many feet uh like cycles did you go through with regulators you know to say like okay you know you have some initial version you bring that to them get feedback so i mean and this is actually key point is they're not and so so the only regulator that you have intersection with formally is fcc um but fcc doesn't do the approval you go to like a approved lab and then you run the fcc certification um but the um the certification bodies are what they're called nationally recognized test labs so like i think it's like osha or and the various building codes cite like which ones they allow um so like in the san francisco building code they're like if you install a stove it's got to be ul 858 or something like that sort of listed something specific um so so you go to those nationally recognized test labs those are private companies they just happen to be like oh really yeah they're private companies oh okay so it's like a privatized dmv kind of thing it's not a dm it's it's probably less like a dmv and more like a the government has essentially said you we need to define standards those standards are maintained by some yeah yeah some organization yeah okay interesting yeah uh what what has it been like uh you know i know that you said that it's been slightly different uh since like 2021 ish right but what has it been like fundraising for a hard tech company in san francisco so yeah i mean i think san francisco has also gone up and down through a bunch of you know euphoria to depression to a euphoria but you know that's that's that's the name of the beast this is yeah this is a gold rush town yeah it's a it's a gold rush town we just we've replaced gold with i don't know five five things since gold so five or ten things it's gold it's like every 20 years we have a we have a boom bus cycle or every yeah every 10 to 15 years almost at this point so are the people that are like investing money are they the types of people who are like i want an awesome stove and so it kind of just like naturally makes sense no no no okay or do they not even cook they just do so so i mean i think the big thing is consumer hardware is is like i think there's some fantastic consumer hardware companies like shout out framework shout out like you know there's a shout out nothing like you know fantastic consumer companies um and some of these guys are doing great but it's weird where there's like you have the you have like you have these fantastic companies but there's not um and they have real revenue the margins are not bad like like everything about them is good but it's like because of the kind of like boom and bust of the kickstarter hardware there's you know it's like stigma or not stigma but it's just like i think there's just not enough people tried again okay um i just think there's not enough people who and i think i think narava framework said that this so this was like he was like i wish i did yc for framework for one reason because it would have been such a win that yc would have been like we should fund more we should fund more of these yeah interesting um because it would have been such it would have been such a win and like in like and then what that would have meant is even though he would have given up the seven percent or whatever it's like the ecosystem would have been then ready at the later stage so that like the competitive round like it's like like it would actually have been better for it would have been better for you know everyone basically in those sort of situations if like the winners went through some of some like accelerators like yc now um so 2021 like basically there's the zero interest rate situation where it's like yeah you're gonna be able to get and like arbitrary debt financing to build a factory like essentially like zero percentage race did that i do think there's some interesting thing though there which is it also caused like people to just invest in things that didn't do anything like yeah okay well why would i gather to build a hard tech company when i can just do crypto like it's it because and like you can and then you can get liquidity super quickly if you're in a zero interest rate environment you're like you're not incentivized to do the factory instead of yeah you have to actually build a factory versus like i could just launch a ape and make the same amount of money or more and you make the the amount of money more and more and it's like it's like and and i'd be done with the ape thing like you know i'd be done and dusted y 'all seem like an idiot for not doing the ape yeah i'm not no all my apes gone man i don't know so i never touched the apes i never touched the apes either my friend has a crypto punk i think so but uh actually a bunch of my friends have a bunch of all this stuff but um but the point the point though is now that we're in a higher rate scarcer money sort of environment actually weirdly enough it does feel like a better time to actually do hard tech because it's the only stuff that makes sense now yeah because like you can't do a a zirp thing well the the the business models that made sense during zirp which is like cool i'll i'll like i'll like finance i'll finance i'll finance loans for burrito taxis and burritos like you know like the like pay for your chipotle with clarna kind of thing like that like like basically you have like stuff like that you had like that's actually just happening that's just starting so So I don't know if that's necessarily a great example, but yeah, higher interest rates equals burrito finance.

1:20:19Well, actually, people are going defaulting on their burrito financings, which like the CDOs and burritos are going to zero. But the point, though, is I think now so that the I think there's actually a specific story with us that I should actually tell you about, which is. So basically, like C &A was kind of under the premise of like, how do you distribute lots of appliances? and it's it was kind of like or not kind of it was actually this thinking of well you build like the tesla of stoves and then question mark you figure out how to get a bunch of multi-family developers to buy a bunch of these because who's the biggest buyer of who bought new developers new developers like who are the bulk buyers of these things or like cities that are forcibly decarbonizing their buildings like new york or something like that so like i think like that's probably the market um and what was interesting was okay we're working on the product we're figuring out how to actually make this thing but then at the same time we're trying to figure out how to sell it and very clearly you can sell this thing on twitter by like showing cool videos but that's not going to get people in the place and time where they may be literally in market for a stove like they have to be like yeah you you talked about this like this is not an impulse purchase it's not an impulse purchase thoughtful about you have to be thoughtful about and also like more like a car no is it actually not it's less like a car than you think what i mean it's more like you can actually impulse purchase a car i've seen that you can impulse purchase a car because you can always get a second car right you can always trade in your car whereas like whereas like a lot of this stuff has more architectural implications it's like also we make one form factor we don't make 10 yet like there's those sort of problems as well even though like cooktops like they sell millions of those a year like no problem so like big enough market not a big deal but what subsection of the people that have heard about you like in a d2c context online then you go kind of like narrow down the funnel to like have the exact slot your thing would be in or in middle remodel like you kind of like go down that funnel it's like it's like you can do it it's just not something that you would necessarily want to bet your business on yeah at like at like and you could like i'm i'm very convinced you can send tens of thousands of units this way no problem but you're like getting to hundreds of thousands will require you to have many skews and then you have the same product dynamics as a um as a appliance company where you're probably not going to actually be you need to raise from different types of like capital providers yeah it's a different business basically um because now you're kind of in the distribution pack you're you're you're building do you do you even think that this was like the right first like what did you make you know not even necessarily on purpose like the right product first because if you had done something where you could just like plug it into the wall and it's just that single burner on this you know countertop or whatever it's just like extremely good at being a little burner like that might have been way easier oh yeah that would have been way easier so i've actually got a good friend of mine um who is a amazing consumer founder like amazing consumer founder shout out to you know who you are um he he pulled me aside he was like do you want to just pivot and do that i'll like like literally what i was just describing he's yeah he's he's quite successful he's like trying to pivot and do that and like and and i was like i actually went and went through the the whole thing so here's this is where d2c gets really tricky imagine you ship this thing that's perfect and and there's not and you there's no engineering difficulties of like fitting a smaller battery in with the right power levels and so like that you can ship like an apple level product you know that just looks beautiful imagine i ship that and then imagine someone else let's imagine uh someone with like let's imagine some pan brand that's got like five million followers hex clad yeah let's use hex clad it's a great example hex clad says we're gonna have a hex clad hot plate with temperature control and it looks kind of similar it doesn't have the battery but do the consumer understand any of those like do they are they drilling down into those features or is the marketing for hex clad just so much like basically and even if i have a product that's better i'm now 1v1ing them on meta display yes yeah it becomes really tricky in that space and i actually i talked to some folks that had done this before and it's it's again you end up in a situation where you end up having to get specialized in the distribution is it like a local maxima or kind of thing or that was a look that's a local max was like i'm pretty sure we could sell an amazing product there i want to actually make that product i do not view it as that is not the product that makes the company worth billions of dollars worth billions of dollars yeah it would basically mean that oh cool this is a cool e-commerce brand that has not iterated on this tech and has that it has like a zombie version of what we put in this product and we like and like it's it's not the same thing um and then we had to get we would have to get really good at e-commerce distribution in like this in a very competitive advertising market and the cost structure has to work which is again really challenging it's like can you actually deliver that in a like sub thousand dollar price does this make it easier to sell a roaster like you're selling the you know high ticket item and you get it down over time that kind of thing well so so so so what's interesting with this is this this was actually like so my my very solid consumer founder friend said like you know this would be this would be the concept and what he was citing was literally the distribution problem where he was like he talked to his friends being like hey are you in the market for new stove when are you gonna swipe your stove out like all that stuff and it's like this is a relatively illiquid market yeah even though it is a big market with lots of sales but it's a it's something that like silicon valley does not understand how to sell into and i think people even if they have like a shitty stove don't think about buying a new stove like they just it's just a stove yeah it's it but the point is the point is basically the point is basically this is so so and i actually think that weirdly enough we have a product that's like special enough that we can exist in our own space where it's like i want the impulse thing so i'll make it work yeah and we've got customers that have told us like hey we're cutting a slot right now send us the stove the next week you know whatever so so so like totally can work you have to be extraordinary and that was like okay that made sure that we had to bet on the product being extraordinary but then the second piece was okay the multi-family angle there's a couple companies that were doing like smart door locks and stuff like that selling into multi-family um and in the zero interest rate environment all these multi-family operators like were flush with cash they wanted to invest in improvements because they could finance them at like no cost no cost and then they could basically increase their rent because they've got a cool stove or whatever um so we went actually and called some people up and figure like what's the price point that you would be willing to swap a your the stove out yeah and it was like sub 3 000 maybe like 2 000 or something even if it was like full range with a battery like and it's like you just like couldn't make it work kind of thing well it was also just like that's not a very profitable it's not a profitable market meanwhile like a huge chunk of the appliance market is high-end remodels like so like probably most of like i'm not sure if it's most of it but it's like a lot of the value is but how do you access that and um one way is you build a premium brand and make make it work but the other one is well you have to find these existing brands that are already distributing and get your tech inside them and that required us to build the highest performance stove that exactly we had to like we had to build this specific product because that was the technical marketing to actually do the next to actually make this work yeah and what was funny was i then talked to that friend who was like you should go build the single burner thing and i was like we did have that conversation it was like it was like september um or it was like so it was like recently it was august or september last year yeah and it's like i had just i had just yeah and so and and i was trying to figure out like hey how do i actually go and secure enough financing to actually fund shipping the products and stuff like that and he was like don't do this very good idea you should pivot um i had and he told me a previous story of like he had to burn the ships moment kind of where it's like no way like we're not going back we're gonna delete this repo and like literally focus on this new product and it's going to work and i then went off and i was like okay there's a big gap in product is technically fantastic i think everyone thinks we're going to stick the landing on this thing and then there's then there's like what's the distribution angle how does this turn into a unicorn how like why are the comps like appliance companies that are worth like 1x revenue and stuff like that how do you actually how do you actually escape that well what's funny is i think that tesla is actually a really good example they're a really good example as all the automakers like if you just add up all their market caps like they don't even touch tesla it's a completely different business it's a completely different business and i think i think in it but it's really annoying to be saying like oh yeah we're making the tesla stores but it's like i've been like i had to study like not tesla the tesla secret master plan is a is a misdirection the tesla secret master plan was build a fast car with a really good power electronics and battery platform and then license that really good power electronics battery platform to people to car firms with lots of money that can get you lots of distribution and then while that's happening slowly build your direct to consumer profile until you can sell directly and now but what were they underwritten for for their ipo it was the platform just the car yeah it was the platform play yeah i think they were they were like just turning on the model s line like when they went public right it was i i think it was barely it was like it was like it was like it was like like to finance it kind of yeah but the but basically the understanding that was like a key key thing so i actually went back i was like let me take like five steps back and i was kind of like what companies exist in the world that do not exist in america that should and i kept coming back to byd among others and and for those that don't know what is so byd is the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the world yeah um they build i'm they build everything from they own four million five million cars here right now it's something crazy they they also build gas cars they build they build and hybrids hybrids they build imax and then they have just like a shit ton of other skews that you've never even heard of they they have they have they built they made half the covid masks in the world because they made those on the battery cell lines because like laying films on top of each other and like cutting them i think i think that uh charlie munger said that basically like the the guy i forgot i don't know his name uh like started byd is just like an absolute mad genius just like insanely good and so the other thing about them is and i've said this on in other spots is they have the best lego set in the world because the way they operate is they uh like they do they have a bunch of different ways they make money they also sell monorails among other things you can buy a monorail from them what like if you want a transit system or your city you can go to byd and they'll make it for you so it's kind of like if you smash like siemens like literally or or like uh schneider or something like that with with uh uh tesla yeah with foxconn yeah they also make like some huge chunk of yeah they make they make everything and aren't they just like opening i don't know i think the biggest factory in the world by like a massive amount yeah an entire city size factory yeah it looks like some of these like old soviet munitions factories in terms of like the like the size of the size of footprint and stuff like that maybe bigger and so and so this is an incredible company but the biggest thing is like they build stuff with their own ip so like if you go to them and say hey like like neuro is a good example like neuro is the self-driving delivery vehicle um they basically said like hey build us a car and they'll do it they'll do it and and like you know with very high level fidelity they have some of the best engineers in the world they'll assign them to that it's like if i could rent tesla to build me a stove it's that level of fidelity it's pretty crazy and then if you go look inside that thing it's like byd powertrain all sort of stuff and they're getting margin from all of that stuff inside yeah so in a sense they're both you know like you could think of them as like they're the like future electrification stack company they also have first-party products but they also will build third-party products on top of their stack basically and the u.s just doesn't have anything like that like the closest thing would be like if if like a future administration wanted to like bother elon and be like hey um we're going to defense production act tesla and now tesla has to build stuff for other people or something like that like that would be like the closest and then tesla would have to and by the way and then to do that we'll fund them to go buy up a bunch of midwest factories that they'll manage or whatever and that's the equivalent that would be the closest thing i could think of to this but it's it's a stretch yeah i would i would also kind of imagine it's a little bit like tesla if like spacex and you know starlink and boring co and all these other things were just smashed into tesla you know it's just like one big overarching company but then but then like but then then but then stove guy could go and order a stove right oh yeah and then they also do like custom stuff just for you and they would just custom for just for me and it would use and and my stove would use the battery modules from the power wall line plus like the power electronics pcbs we made on the Starlink SMT line.

1:34:15Like it's that it's if you think about it that way, it's like that's the sort of level of like Elon's letting you use this hardware in your own product and kind of thing. Well, it's you get to you essentially get access to the machine that makes the machine basically. And so this company is absolutely amazing. But what I've realized was there's nothing like this in the United States. And there's also this huge opportunity for.

1:34:42like basically if you look at kind of the electrification stack today there's like companies that are vertically integrated brands and then there are companies that um um and they they actually have control over the stuff like tesla makes their own motor controllers and motors and just the entire thing yeah yeah um but there really aren't the us doesn't have like any sort of core capabilities around like hey if i want to buy an induction drive board for my american stove brand it just doesn't exist it just doesn't exist because no one has gone through the certification process like one german company will do it and then like there's an italian and a spanish company but they don't they're not ul certified so so are you trying to think of your company similar like impulse similar to byd not not exactly but i do think that there is literally this play where there are brands with existing distribution but none of the electrification yeah or none of the that do not offer the kind of the technology stack of the future like you're basically just coming into an existing a bunch of different existing distribution systems and saying i have an amazing product and you guys can i have an amazing power electronics platform right and i can intersect it right at the like if you think of like the appliance market it's like consumers and then you've got thousands of showrooms and then you've got hundreds of skews per tens of brands like it just gets to this crazy thing but then you're like but they all use the same induction drive supplier so you look under the hood and it's just all the same product but then it's like so it's like okay i will compete there yeah and uh and if i compete there i then pull a battery and inverter into the product which then means i can make money on energy services afterwards that's awesome and so that's the like and so what i realized though is what am i actually doing i'm actually doing kind of this like i'm kind of offering my services in the way byd does where it's like i've got all this underlying ip and manufacturing capability it's not necessarily vertically integrated to me yet but effectively i'm offering that and i'll help you make an integrated product with the futures tech stack yep and then every device with and then we'll keep doing that until every device with a power cord is powered by impulse.

1:36:55Awesome. Let's end with what's the hardest thing you've overcome? So what's the hardest thing I've overcome? This is a fun one. So I think there's this product is in getting this thing out. It was actually figuring out how to not pivot the business. Just to get this thing that you actually wanted in the world. No, it's not just. No, it's actually actually i actually think what i what i was talking about with the the with kind of like how the business needs to be like indexing everything with the power cord basically but how do you do that without randomizing the business how do you do it while it all makes sense as one story and it was i think that was incredibly difficult um and it got us to the point of like i was pretty confident that this product is like going to be fantastic like you It just adds the bones of something that's going to be special.

1:37:51But then how do you go from one thing to solving the distribution angle and getting people to believe. Believe in that story. Believe in that whole, believe in an integrated story. Yeah. Not that, oh, you could go build like a power electronics supplier for the appliance industry as a separate. How can you make people believe in an integrated story? I think that was a incredibly hard challenge to put together. um and it was it was something where like i would describe it as

1:38:23there's what i would call a good idea which is if you build high performance appliances they have batteries inside because that makes them high performance once you install enough of these you control the grid because you deployed enough battery storage that's a great idea yeah because you will actually transform the grid if you do it the question is how are you going to get that much distribution and they're like and i think a lot of people investors supporters of mine you know etc would would large question be like okay if i needed someone to tell me exactly how something like like how to execute on some technical challenge like i don't have a doubt that like you could probably pull this off we figured that out but like what's the what's what's where when does the sale convert yeah and it was actually it's actually figuring out how to get from i am hardware rich and this product is really and product rich in a sense to actually getting to the other side which i'm frankly been more uncomfortable with which is like you need to be better at selling than you are at building in this market because and i think that's something that like it just has to be true because it's just not natural for you well no it's not it's actually it's actually something that like i don't think is i almost think like like you think like elon's a good example of this is like he's better at selling than he is he's good at building but like my point is he's better at selling because he needs to be able to raise the capital before he builds the thing yeah yeah that's why he's able to raise you know six billion dollars for xai Because they know what the outcome will be on the other side.

1:40:01So because the sale has been made. And so I think that's the like, and what I had to realize was like, okay, build the, make sure there is a coherent big vision where it's like, okay, there will be distribution in the, this company is a$100 billion company if you run this playbook. And I'm like, that took a second to really land. And I was like, I think we can do it with basically if you if you can put if you can basically power most of these large devices that are going people's homes like you'll be. That's a big company. That's a giant company. That's one of the biggest companies in the world.

1:40:38Well, you know, 150 or 140 million homes times like three or four appliances equals, you know, massive market times. A thousand dollars per appliance. You end up in a very, very good spot. And by the way, our products are global. Like it's a battery, the chart, like it can charge off any voltage. Yeah. So, so it's not just the, it's not just about the U S as a TAM either, but basically you, um, but then it's like, okay, how do you actually confirm that there's a pulse on the demand side? Yeah. That's not just like a D to C play. and in some sense it was like laying out the technical competence the product excellence like all that other stuff had to be there but then it was like making sure that we basically built up all of that and then we're like okay now the proof points now the proof point can happen and so that's where we're like we're really excited to be rolling out like announcements in that space because it's going to pretty much back up being like yeah you went from your revenue like reaction goes like this and it's this is the case with hardware all the time it's like it's really hard to build the thing and then when you turn it on if it works then the like ramp just looks crazy and you have and you have really really awesome modes because it's like okay if it took 18 months for us to get certified for functional safety of our firmware and electrical system and literally no other appliance vendors do that yeah it's like that's we're not like there's not gonna be some other company coming in and trying to do that like it's it's just not it's it's like you know what the barrier to entry is yeah and you've been working on this for over four years now and you can price that barrier to entry at you know it's it it's significant so it's like okay and now we've and then the other piece was we just the number of iterations we built in the product like we now have modules that we can stand behind for or scale for other products and so it's kind of this integrated thing of like you had to do all that work to then be able to reap the reward reap the reward but then meandering through that storytelling exercise to be like okay here's the actual vision of where the scale lands and it's much closer to nvidia or where nvidia is again like powering every ai thing that exists or byd like powering every electric thing that exists um than it is to just an appliance appliance company where so you're basically like you're you're an energy company masquerading as an appliance company yeah kind of thing yeah and i i think i think it's i think but then there you're also an energy company because again once the battery is deployed is now on great energy asset so yeah this story is a hard one to tell and i think actually getting that across succinctly is something that i wouldn't describe myself as the best messenger of um because again i think it's a big challenge but it's incredibly simple to describe once you're like once you get there once you get there because you're like look we build we built this awesome product it's backed up by this platform which we impulse core we're working on the names and And then that then lands in everyone's existing distribution.

1:43:57They happen to distribute a bunch of batteries. Those, those have long lifetime value. And it's like, that's the, and that was still five too many steps, but you get the, you get the, you get the picture.