Impulse Labs, Trojan Horse for Battery-Powered Homes | Backed by Lux Capital

0:15Welcome to Sorcery, I'm your host, Molly O'Shea. Today we have Sam D 'Amico, founder of Impulse labs. Impulse labs is accelerating home electrification, starting with next-gen appliances. They've created one of the highest quality battery integrated induction stoves with unbelievable power, efficiency, and precision. They last raised a$20 million series A by Josh Wolf of Lux Capital in 2022. And more interestingly, they're also secretly known for their mission to be the Trojan horse for decentralized battery powered homes. Really interesting. Special thank you to Min Kim of Lighthouse for the intro and Anna-Sofia Lesiv from Contrary Research for help with researching questions.

0:57This is a really fun conversation and we even talk about pancakes. I hope you enjoy. Hey, Sam, thanks for coming on. Thanks for hosting. Well, I've heard a lot about you and thanks again to Min Kim for the intro. From my research and from people I've talked to, it sounds like you're building the Trojan horse for battery powered homes. I'd love to start there and get into what are you building and what is your big vision with Impulse Labs? Yeah. So kind of starting from the beginning because, and, you know, and not rebutting any accusations of people calling me stove guy on Twitter, we've built the world's best stove.

1:35And it's three times more powerful per like heating element and more precise than any other stove. And we enable that by embedding a lithium iron phosphate battery into the stove itself. So it's powered by a battery internally. That's all cool. And I'm really, really, really excited about what we're going to be able to give customers with this awesome product. But once we sell these to a bunch of people, we've then basically backdoored ourselves as like the key storage power broker on the electric grid because we'll have batteries in everyone's house. And so that kind of turns this sort of like appliance company idea of like, hey, maybe you can build Tesla for appliances into a much more expansive energy company story.

2:21To go even further back, how did this start? So when were you founded and how did you get the idea? I was thinking in this space probably like 2018 2019 time frame um the initial thing was actually i think the initial thing that caused me to order some stuff online for prototyping was i wanted to build a overpowered pizza oven that could cook like neapolitan style pizza and like the correct time like 90 seconds or whatever and so was like realized that there was not that was not something you could do from just a normal plug. Like for reference, like the standard U S electrical plug gives you about 1500 Watts of power, which is like, yes, it'll run a toaster or blender at like, okay power, but it's not something that's going to make that make a pizza in 90 seconds or something like that.

3:16You need substantially more power. And then I kind of went down the path of looking at batteries and being like, Hey, so how much energy and how much power can you get out of kind of the latest and greatest batteries that you could buy today, realized it was more than adequate and kind of annoyed the crap out of a lot of my friends talking about this and other ideas and things like you could do. So I kind of started from like the product first. I was like, okay, if you embed a battery in an appliance, you could make it more powerful for the first time. And this was also just as a reference point for like where the market was, there were a number of, um i think at that point mostly fledgling but like some of them were more mature um smart oven companies um on the market and a number of them had pretty cool tech but the idea was really driven by could you put a smartphone ship in an appliance and then suddenly you could do some smart stuff like cook perfect chicken like the costco rotisserie chicken would come out or something like it would be stuff like that basically and it was like at the that was the key thing but no one had an advantage that was like, oh, our product is just twice as powerful as everyone else's.

4:27And I realized that that was something that was just missing in the space. And in some sense, a key fact that meant that like, if you're a new entrant, if you're a new entrant to the space, you wouldn't necessarily be able to compete with the incumbents or someone who like knows what they're doing around the kitchen. You wouldn't be able to compete with the incumbents because like you weren't actually better on like key performance characteristics of the product. And so that became kind of like, that was the big, the big draw for me initially. And then the second piece, and this, this is where kind of the Trojan horse battery deployment story comes in was I started looking at the size of the batteries for various kitchen appliances.

5:08And I realized very quickly that the battery was going to be a couple kilowatt hours at least. And so once you're kind of in that two plus kilowatt hour zone, you're starting to be a decent chunk of a Tesla Powerwall. And so realize that this was actually a much bigger story where if we go and convince people to upgrade to the most awesome appliances available, we then deploy a non-trivial amount of battery storage in everyone's home. And that's when I basically started drafting a pitch deck for a, it was not named Impulse at the time in 2019 around this concept, basically. Wow. So this was in the initial idea.

5:48This didn't evolve with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the decision to do a stove is the first thing came a bit later. But the idea was basically the initial playbook and thinking around this was very clearly build the most awesome appliances and you Trojan horse batteries into everyone's home. And this isn't your first rodeo in hardware. You worked at Oculus before and you mentioned you've also been to China and understood their manufacturing. So based on your previous experience, could you just share how that gave you more insights into this? I've been in consumer electronics since I think 2012.

6:25I started as an intern on the Google Glass team between my undergrad and master's program. And then ended up staying there after graduation for a bit before joining Oculus, like as they were getting acquired by Facebook. And I actually think the combination of seeing Google X attempting to make a mini Apple internally around this product Glass and then seeing Facebook essentially attempt to do the same with the Oculus acquisition was this very interesting zero to one situation where you could actually see how you'd have to scale down a hardware operation from best in industry standards to something that could still ship best in industry products, but wasn't necessarily like a very established company and the undisputed leader of the consumer electronic space.

7:14And so it was actually in some sense, really illuminating to see kind of the full stack as it got booted up versus joining an already established organization in that sense. And this comes into like, my skillset was in undergrad, grad school was like, I did a lot of like software, even though I was an electrical engineering major, ended up kind of getting miss scoped when I joined Google as a camera hardware person, which was, which sounds totally random and disconnected from stoves, but by virtue of having to do the, the, the camera module on Google glass. So like basically it's the same kind of cameras in your smartphone or whatever.

7:53By virtue of having to do that, it was actually a mini self-contained consumer electronics program in and of itself, because there's all these complicated details about that. And that is, in some sense helped me understand how to run these programs with third-party manufacturers out in Asia, and then apply those lessons to increasingly more complex things as my career went on. So interesting. And in terms of Impulse Labs, how much have you raised to date and who gave you the initial check? Yeah, so we've announced two funding rounds. The most recent one we've announced was in 2022, and that was led by Lux Capital and Josh Wolf.

8:32We just had Grace on, So we love Lux. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, she's awesome. She's so good. Okay, so we talked a little bit about your background. We talked about the general ideation and vision. Now that you mentioned your stove guy, I can't get that out of my head. I'd love to understand the landscape to which you're building on. What percentage of home energy usage is tied to appliances and why stoves first? Yeah, so this is going to sound like I'm not tackling the big problem. and so when you think about home energy use the the first thing you really need to think about is heating ventilation and cooling so um and that's about 50 percent of american home energy use goes into that um so you you think like oh yeah you should just figure out how to time shift power for hvac or something like that but it is no one really like you don't like if you have to have a gas boiler in your house or a heat pump they can be centralized but the ui ux is still the thermostat And that's why Ness went for that versus necessarily like ripping up the entire home energy system.

9:36The desire to go for stoves is, and I would say this is kind of crazy, is the average U.S. house uses something like 20 or 30 kilowatt hour, all electric house is about 20 to 30 kilowatt hours of energy a day. Um, my understanding of, if you go look at the energy star standards for induction stoves and induction stove on average uses like in the 300 to 500 watt hours per day or something very limited like that. So it's like 1 % basically of, of, of home energy use goes to, goes to something like a stove. Um, appliances are about 15%. If you like exclude HVAC and I think hot water and then hot water by itself is also about 15%.

10:17But you could argue that a water heater is an appliance, right? Between all the energy usage within the home, like how is that distributed across appliances and if that's changed at all over time? Yeah, I mean, it has because of it has because of AC and and heat pumps. So the big story is like and lighting as well. So lighting used to be a much more substantial fraction of your home electrical use. And in some sense, it was like in many cases, it was the only use case for it. if you had like a wood stove or something like that. But yeah, the lighting, I mean, LEDs have essentially changed the game, right?

10:52Like it's like a factor of 10 in terms of energy usage reduction for LEDs versus incandescent light bulbs. I think like a 60-watt equivalent bulb uses like 7 watts or something like that. It's something on that level of craziness. But yeah, that's definitely changed. And then obviously no one had like, I don't know, six or 700 watt computers that we're running all day or game consoles or things you know like like those start those start substantially adding up um um versus even like 15 years ago or something like that it is funny because i feel like there's like a meme that goes around of like you'd think that like your parents telling you to turn off the lights is really why like it'll decrease your energy bill but it's actually because you're cranking the ac and so because of the led lights it's really dramatically brought down that cost.

11:43And then it's like, okay, so if that cost is brought down by LED lights, and that's been a pretty good innovation over time, yeah, how do we decrease the rest of the energy usage across all the other elements within the home? So it's interesting how you're going after this battery powered solution. Diving into that further, so what is the exact technical breakdown of the product? And how do you access the battery energy? Yes, I'll start with like, so I mentioned like stoves are like a very small fraction of home energy use, but they're the one where you actually care about the fuel source because the it's like the UI UX of a stove is a flame, right?

12:23And so you have to innovate there. You have to produce a product that people are willingly going to want to switch to because that's the reason they actually still have a gas connection in their house. and because and once you're starting to pay the gas company then they'll uh that then you might as well switch because you're already paying the fixed costs associated with natural gas then you'll use gas for heating you'll you'll use gas for hot water etc and that's where they actually make all their money or that that's where they actually sell you all the gas right because your stove's not actually using that much gas um and so focusing on the stove first because this was like an energy story for the home that actually hasn't really seen a ton of innovation And we could actually go and do a step function that significantly improves that function over anyone else.

13:08The key thing to realize with stoves is if you switch from a gas stove to an electric stove or like what's made you want to put an EV charger in your garage? A typical home in the United States has about 200 amps of like circuit capacity available. and a induction stove and an EV charger use about the same amount, like about 60 or 40 to 60, depending on model and configuration, various things like that. So you're looking at a very substantial power usage story, even though the energy usage is quite low for something like a stove. And this means that it has kind of a relatively outsized footprint in like your home energy story, despite the fact that it's used super, super intermittently.

13:50Like if you're using a stove like an hour a day max and you're not even using it at full power within that hour like you're you're getting pasta pot to boil that would be close to full power on one burner and then maybe you're like medium low on average over a cooking session um whether you whether like when you're aware of that or not and so that realization makes putting a battery in the stove make a ton of sense because what you can do is you can basically trickle charge the battery whenever energy is cheap and clean so like middle of the day in california there's usually excess solar power that like would otherwise be like discarded effectively that you can essentially receive and know pretty clearly that you're not going to be causing a fossil fuel turbine to spin up or something like that elsewhere in the state now and then additionally you likely pay a lower rate depending on your energy plan.

14:45And so you can trickle charge all day. And then when you go and cook, maybe you want to boil water for pasta on a gas stove that'll take like seven minutes per liter. So like, let's say 10 minutes for like the six cups of water for like a box mac and cheese from Kraft or 80s or whatever. In our case, we can do that in about a minute because we can push order of magnitude four to five times more power into the pan than pretty much any other stuff because the battery is right there able to give us DC power straight to the coils. And like just much more efficient. I've lived in many different houses.

15:22My mom has a love for historic homes, but she still upgrades it with like the nicest appliances. And one of our previous homes that we lived in, there was an older Viking stove in there, an oven. And I swear, whenever that turned on, the whole house would heat up. and it wasn't just the, like the food would take forever and the whole house would be really hot. And we'd be like, so what's going on here? But, but like, are you seeing more efficiency with like the actual transfer of energy because of that? Because you're saying it takes so much less time to actually hit the coils and then boil the water.

15:58Like you're not going to heat up your whole house. Yeah. So gas stoves uniquely have this problem because gas stoves essentially heat the air around the flame and then that gets transferred into the pot but then a lot of the air goes around the pot like the pot's not it's not like sealed right and maybe you don't have like heat fins on the bottom of the pot to like best absorb absorb the heat into the pot so they do make special pots like that um so it's it's estimated around like 60 of the energy that comes out of your gas flame heats the room not the not the pot um and meanwhile induction is like 95 plus depending on a bunch of different internal electrical um details um but what you're doing is you're um you're generating a switching magnetic field with a coil the stove itself is cold but then the pot essentially receives that energy and heats up directly.

17:01So the only thing that actually is being actively heated is the pot. And the only losses are kind of like a combination of internal electrical losses or like the pot then heating up like the glass that's sitting on the stove or things like that. So if you touch it, will you get burnt? So it depends. So if you, the pot obviously will be hot, right? But if I take the pot off, the glass will be typically colder than the pot. It may be still warm because the pot heated it, but it would typically be cooler than the pot. And if you go and put like a towel between the pot or between the stove and the pot, only the side of the towel that's touching the pot will get hot and the stove will be cool.

17:44Yeah. How does that work? There's a couple of different ways to explain this. Essentially what's going on is inside the stove, there is a, you convert the DC from like, so the battery is basically, think of the battery like an electric vehicle battery or something like that. But basically it's like a, you convert the DC voltage of the battery to alternating current actually. So this switches it to about 24, 25 ,000 times a second. So basically you get a very fast sine wave. and that is the frequency is actually chosen for a very hilarious reason if you make it like lower than 24 kilohertz um you'd hear it or like your pets might hear it or your kids might hear it or something like something like that so you have to put it just outside the human hearing range but low enough that it's still efficient um and so so you generate that and this is being generated with a big basically electromagnet so there's now this giant magnetic field that's like right where the coil is.

18:50Now, as soon as you put a pot that has iron in it, so a magnetic pot, you're now essentially absorbing the magnetic field with the cookware. And then there are losses inside the pot that then heat it up. So basically, it's like you're essentially making a transformer, if you know what that is, where you can convert one voltage to another. So the big one on your pole outside your house converts the higher voltage that's running around the street to the 240 volts or 120 volts that goes into your house. Essentially, you do that, then you short the output. And so that'll get hot. And that's how induction works effectively.

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20:15Visit Archer.com. How do you integrate these into the home? Like, I know my friends who have Tesla Powerwalls, you know, they have to get special setups and that kind of thing. Is this the same thing? No. So one thing that actually, I think this is part of the whole kind of Trojan horse play is an appliance installation. So a Tesla Powerwall installation costs about$6 ,000. And then like, so the power wall costs like 12 grand, but like installing it costs six because you essentially have to go to your main electrical panel and do all this hacking to make your house able to back up parts of the house with the power wall.

20:54Basically there's, there's all this huge mess there. Um, in our case, um, we're not doing a whole home backup solution. We're just making a single appliance to start. So there's no tear up on that side of the house that you have to do. You just have to like essentially plug or wire in the appliance, just like you would plug or wire in a normal appliance. So we can actually go through the normal appliance installation path, which happens every day in every community, all over the world, basically. Great. So no constraints there. And there's no constraints there. And then the other piece is a big story, which I mentioned earlier, typical stoves use like 60 amps or something like that.

21:33We can run on as little was like at 240 volts we can run on as little as a 120 volt outlet so you can just plug this thing in with like your normal like ac power cable um and get the same stove performance as someone who wired it in on 240 volts for instance you'll get a full-blown full performance stove no matter what your home electrical system has in your kitchen basically and where does the battery sit is it just under the stove? Is it separate? Do you have to find special room for it? How does that work? Yeah. So basically, the way it works is we're selling a cooktop. There's basically negative space inside the product that the battery inserts into, just like it slides in effectively.

22:19We ship the product with two boxes and you just get a battery in one box and the stove in the other, and you latch them together effectively, and then you do the installation. The only real change is that you need two people to lift the stove versus just one because it's a little heavier now now that we've broken down the product and the vision and what you want to build where does this sit at in terms of price point of existing appliances is the goal to get it down to a certain price given batteries are typically expensive how are you envisioning that and where do you think the entry will be yeah so this is this is actually where our thinking on market positioning just the beginning I want to kind of describe what we were planning on doing here.

23:00The goal from the beginning, and we have held to this fat hard and fast, is ship the absolutely best stove that exists. Like we want to make sure that this is... Because the problem with this entire space is basically people don't trust new brands. People like will think highly of brands that have been in their homes for decades or even a century or something like that. We need to beat that by basically just being like the singular best. It's kind of very similar to like Tesla being like, Hey, we're coming out with plaid mode or something like that. We need to make sure that we exist at this different category, different tier, where there's a different set of capabilities that you can do and making sure that that is offered to people in a non inaccessible price, but still like premium price, if that makes any sense.

23:45And so the first thing to kind of talk about is like we are about three times more powerful than pretty much any other induction stove for like heating a like standard size pot. If you want to boil water, again, we can boil a liter in under 40 seconds. My Viking gas stove that I had before is like seven minutes at doing the same thing. So it's kind of this just insane capability bump where we can be like, actually, a watch pod boils now. We've changed that term or phrase. And so that's the first piece. And then the second piece is so crazy high power. The second piece is try to make sure that we win on control and precision as well.

24:32So we want to be the most powerful and precise stove ever made. And the precision angle is something that people do not understand. understand, but like they actually do do this every day, which is if they, if they bake an oven has exact temperature settings, like you don't set your oven to medium, you set your oven to 350. And so making sure that we can actually carry that to a stove with any pan was a insane engineering challenge. Um, but the results mean that we can do things that no other stove can do. like you like you can basically fry an egg in a stainless steel pan and guarantee will never stick like every single time you can um temper chocolate on the stove by setting an exact temperature and getting the crystal structure of the chocolate perfect um and then you can do this other thing that i'd like to do when people come visit the office and and if anyone listening is hungry in san francisco please hit me up um basically i can sous vide a steak just in a pot by setting the pot to 140 degrees or something like that.

25:36It will get the steak up to like mid-130s all the way through without a bag, no plastics, no agitator, nothing like that, no water. You just put it in the pot with the lid on and it cooks. And then I spend maybe three minutes searing both sides and it comes out totally perfect. The idea is basically just to show that there's just this family of capabilities that just doesn't exist. And that every stove should be one that has precision temperature and this much power. And that we're now the vanguard of this new category of appliances, basically across the spectrum of devices beyond just a stove.

26:15So that's kind of the positioning, right? So it's like basically make sure that we offer capabilities that do not exist to anyone else. The second thing is, and it's just going to keep sounding like Tesla, there is a massive government incentive package available for people replacing their gas stoves with electric stoves. It's very similar to how there are rebasing tax credits available for electric vehicles. But because this thing has a battery and because that battery is three kilowatt hours, we get a 30 % tax credit on the product. So we can offer the product at a premium price point, which is comp very fairly to like the higher end of Bosch's lineup, Thermador or Gaggenau, those sort of brands.

26:59But then there's a 30 % markdown based on thanks to federal tax incentives. That means that we're actually much closer to say where like Samsung and LG and some of these other kind of more high volume brands sit for their higher end products. And the thinking is basically we can kind of operate there because there's that's where like a majority of the margin is in the space. And it's a good place to start because it's both like accessible, but also premium. them. And then additionally to that, there are income-based, like up to 150 % area median income, you get like an$840 rebate on top of it.

27:37And so all of these stack. So in some sense, it's like the federal government is massively subsidizing the product while letting us position it as like an unabashedly premium thing. Right. What about pancakes? The first one comes out perfect every single time. Does it? Yes. What is the science behind pancakes always sucking on the first pancake? It's because that's a good question. There's actually basically a I think a family of things revolving around. I am not good at cooking is actually that you are not good at controlling the temperature of the pan. And so and I'm not accusing you of being bad at cooking.

28:23I'm just saying that general saying that generally. um the uh the reason the first thing takes bad is maybe they're one reason is like maybe you don't have the oil spread around the pan properly and that's that's that's one legitimate thing but the second and most probable case of failure is you're using like a cast iron pan or a cast iron griddle it is not yet up to temperature because you have to wait for the heat to kind of like spread out especially with the cast iron ones it takes a very long time to do that um and if it's not the right temperature you end up in this situation where it will most likely undercook and stay stuck because like it won't dry out the bottom of the pancake basically enough for it to naturally de-stick and then there's a other situation where if you're like not maybe you're using like a maybe if you're using a stainless steel pan you might have the opposite problem where it gets so hot that it burns and then it sticks and so there's this interesting situation where like the entire existence of nonstick pans is driven by the fact that people like basically stoves have like incomprehensible zero through 10 settings versus an exact temperature you know i think it was really revolutionary when they put a popcorn button on a microwave i think you're gonna need to put a pancake button on the stove we don't really because it's just like we just set it to fry or something you said it's like low fry or something in it like but we're working on that's actually a really good question it's like hey so it's a very good question because this is something that like we are we're shipping the product end of this year i am definitely a tech guy um and so i put a screen on it and it was kind of like i was kind of like pedantic about we need the screen to be like at least this big for various reasons making sure that when we're trying to adjust user behavior to something that's kind of never been done well before.

30:14Making sure we can iterate on the UI UX and like didn't have to lock that when we didn't actually have a working unit was a big deal. So like we've actually iterated a bunch on making sure that we offer both the power and the precision control in a way that's not like looking like you're configuring an alien spaceship. And that requires us to be able to iterate on the real hardware. So like making sure that we have a screen there and it also like communicates with like metaphor words Like, hey, this is like a good temperature for pancakes, for instance. And also we'll eventually we'll have specific modes just like other kind of smart devices do because we've got the capability of expanding the UI and stuff like that.

30:55But that said, like I want to be very clear on the user experiences. You walk up to this thing and you turn the knob and the stove gets hot. And that is not something we wanted to change or cause like put roadblocks in the way before someone can use the product. I like that. That's really cool. And I like the screen. We like screens. Screens are great. To take a step back, what's your vision for Impulse Labs in 20 years if everything goes right? How does this all connect and how will our homes operate? Yes. I mean, I think I told this to some people, but I think there's an opportunity. So I think it's very hard to start a car company, for instance.