February 29, 2024 • 34 mins
Sam D'Amico is the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, a company that makes induction stoves, with a clever twist. Sam’s problem is this: How do you build an electric cooktop that works just as well as gas, and can be installed without having to rewire the house? The solution that Sam found could eventually help transform not only kitchens, but the way homes draw power from the electrical grid.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. There's two ways in. There's two ways in, and
I'll let you choose. One way in is pizza and tokyo.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
The other way you got, what's the second one? What's
the second one?
Speaker 1 (00:30):
The second one is the more uh thinky, the more
intellectual way in, which is like electrification is great, but
like the wire going into my house isn't big enough
basically to get all the electricity into my house that
I need.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Let's start with pizza.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the
show where I talk to people who are trying to
make technological progress. My guest today is Sam Demico. He's
the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, which is a
company that makes induction stoves. Sam's problem is this, how
do you build a really good DRIC cook top that
(01:10):
people can install without having to rewire their house, and that,
by the way, could eventually help transform the way electric
power works in America. It's an ambitious project, ambitious stove,
and it goes back to this moment when Sam ordered
a pizza. He was working for Facebook at the time,
helping to build their Oculus VR headset, and he was
(01:33):
at a conference in Tokyo. What neighborhood in Tokyo did
you have the pizza?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I think it was. I think it was near Akasaka station.
It's like, savoid pizza.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Okay, so tell me about the pizza.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I order my pizza and I get it back in
like forty five seconds or like a minute or something insane.
I probably say a different number of different people. But
it was fast enough and absolutely fantastic. Then Krispy a
lot of garlic, super super good, like master of the
craft type situation. So I get this, and I'm like,
I want to do this at home, and I don't
(02:10):
want to have to have a giant brick oven in
my backyard. And so I was like, it would be
really sweet if you could do this with electrical electricity.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
And how are they doing it? What's going on?
Speaker 2 (02:23):
So this is a classic like how normal brick oven
pizzas make, and I was like, I want to replicate
that like an old school brick oven. The amount of
infrared power that thing dumps onto the pizza because the
fire reflects off of a curved bowl above the of
the pizza. It okay, I'm like, could I just do
this with halogen light bulbs? And a lot of power.
(02:45):
Could a pizza oven that makes a pizza of that
quality be an electronic device? And I was like, I
let's figure this out. And I realized that the power
density of like the amount of infrared and the heating
you need to get that onto the pizza, you were
going to need more than a normal one twenty volt plug.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
So you're saying that if you you figured out how
much power you would need to make a pizza of
them that could get that hot from electricity. Yeah, and
you realize that you couldn't build a device that you
could just plug into the wall because it would need
too much power. That's the fundamental constraint.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Of bingo bingo exactly. I was like, okay, well, how
often are you using this thing? And also how often
is it even if you're like cranking out pizzas, like
you're gonna be like prepping the next pizza, Like, there's
time in between for say a battery to recharge, uh huh,
in between the various pizza making sessions.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Right.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
So I went and just looked at this and I
was like, Okay. I sized the battery pack and I'm like, okay,
this is getting large. It's not like it's not it's
not like laptop battery size. It's more like it's getting
into like those little stationary like batteries you use for
camping or something like that. It was getting into that.
It was getting into that a lot.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
So you realize you're gonna need a lot of battery power.
But what I just want to pause before we get
into like how big were the battery, because the idea
of the battery is I feel like at a certain level,
it's why I want to talk to you, right Otherwise, yeah,
the stoves, like the battery is a great, big, powerful
idea with lots of ramifications. Right, And so the first
(04:20):
the first, the first thing, the first reason you think
of the battery is you realize, oh, you can use
the regular outlet, just the same outlet that whatever I
charge my phone on. You can use for like a
super powerful, super hot stove if you add a battery,
because the battery can just draw power all day when
(04:42):
the stove is just sitting there, and then when you
go to turn on the stove, it can discharge a
ton of energy all at once, more than you could
get out of the outlet. Right, Like that is that's
upside insight because we don't think of home appliances that way, right.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
And it's always and your appliance is always plugged in.
Why would you put a battery in something that is
always plugged in? Yeah, which is kind of the like
weird yeah right that you have to make yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Right, because right right? Why not just get it enough
power whenever you want on it?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Bingo? And then I was like, Okay, this is a
good idea. Let's pressure test what would actually cause a
VC to want to invest in this. And I then
kind of started fanning out beyond just me being like
I want my pizza really fast and in high quality.
And by the way, this pizza in my head is
(05:30):
like glistening in its pizza way. I'm like this, this
is this is like I want this pizza. But you
have to think about, hey, is this a platform? Is
there a wedge into a broader market? What's the big
story here? And so and so what I realized was like,
let's look at other appliances what the story is. And
I I then thought through kind of the implications and
(05:51):
I was like, Okay, for the bigger appliances, say the
ones that normally plug in with like a two forty
evolt plug like the bigger one, or like a dryer,
like a stovetop and of it like a wall of it,
or a range product or a hot water heater, and
how big is the battery going to be in those cases?
And I kind of did the math and sizing, and
(06:13):
I was like, oh, it's going to be like north
of two kilo what hours at least? So I'll give
you the scaling factor on this is like is like
you you could very quickly take like four, three or
four major appliances because you think of all the big
boxes you've got in your house. Times a couple of
KILLO on hours batteries, you get about the same amount
of storage as a Tesla power wall.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
A Tesla powerwall being the like you can live off
the grid you put your panels on your roof, and
a Tesla powerwall. So you're basically saying you can sort
of distribute a like live off the grid amount of
batteries if you could put a battery on the stove
and the fridge and the hot water heater.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yes, yes, exactly. Then I looked at what was happening
in the stationary storage battery industry and it was like
it was all focusing on these centralized battery systems like
a battery wall battery wall type product. They weren't addressing
all the wiring in your house. And also, like appliances,
basically they haven't seen a lot of innovation in like
fifty years or so. It's like induction stoves are fifty
(07:13):
years old for reference, so's it's like, this is an
opportunity to generationally advance the appliance industry and then also
wedge like let's call it ten plus kill a lot
of hours of batteries into every home in America. That
is really interesting, right, Like that is a bigger story
than your pizza is awesome.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
So there's a few balls in the air right now,
how do you land on starting with an induction stove?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
So we thought of doing maybe tabletop devices first because
they'd be easier.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
But I don't know what that means.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Tabletop device would be like you could imagine the pizza
oven being an ambitious one, but you could think of
like there's other product ideas we've been peddling around. It's
like kettle just like that. Yeah, ok, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
you could do something. There's a lot of things that
have high peak power demands that are interesting.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
We were like, we got an air fryer and it
keeps blowing out the circuit breaker. We can't run the
air fryer and the microwave at the same time. Give
me a battery.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I know, I will know. No announcements on this podcast
for product announcements.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Okay, but those feel sort of small ball compared to
a stovetop right, Like an air fryer is like kind
of a luxury weirdo item, whereas everybody has a stove.
I mean, is that part of why you land on
a stove.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
There's there's two reasons. One is there has not been
there's actually a lot of meat on the bone where
you could say, like if I make your hot water
heater like three times more powerful, you can't make the
water three times hotter.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Most people wouldn't notice the difference if their water heater.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
So this is this is the key insight is gas
stoves are and like the knobs and all that stuff,
the ui ux of the stove is the fuel source.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
And so just to be clear, when you say you
mean the user interface user experience, like when you turn
on a gas stove, you can see the gas flame.
That's what you can It's the place in your house
where you actually see, like, oh, I am burning fossil
fuel in order to cook spaghetti.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Gas stoves are the one situation where if you want
to make a fossil fuel free home or like electrify
the home completely, you would be That is the one
mental block and like actual like performance block where people
are like, well, I like my gas stove and I
can't get rid of it.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Nobody's going to be like I love my gas dryer
or I love my gas water.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Who cares? Yeah, yeah, No, that's it. That's a cost thing.
That's like a that's like a maybe maybe my gas
company's expensive, maybe is cheap. You'll pe people.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Don't have an attachment to a gas water heater the
way they have an attachment to a gas stove. Yes, exactly,
I buy that, But that seems like a reason you
wouldn't want to do and stove as your first one.
That seems to make it harder, not easier.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
So that's one piece. But then the second piece was
the battery. Lets us beat the pants off of anything else.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
In the market in terms of performance.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Performance In terms of performance, it.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Goes back to the amazing pizza oven.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Yes, it goes back to the amazing piece of a
thing where it's like and so thinking through this was
where is there like a wedge where like you have
to beat fossil fuels by a resolutely huge amount to
displace it. So that's why it has happened. Fully, we
can do it. And it's also an installed appliance. So
the and this is the piece that I'm going to
(10:28):
get it next. So the battery can be wired in
a way where it can support the grid by charging
and discharging into the house, not just like the appliance
having a boost from the battery basically.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
So there's sort of two different ideas. There two reasons
you wanted to do the stove right. So one the
first one you said, is because it can you can
use the battery to make a better electric stove than
exists now and to make a stove that is better
than any gas stove that exists now. Yes, and that
improvement is meaningful to the typical homeown or the typical
(11:03):
human being in a way that a better water heater
who cares.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah, and like better water hitter may save you money,
like say you go to a heat pump water hitter.
It's like, oh, my energy bill is two to three
and a half times less, yeah, versus a resistant one. Cool,
but in our case, it's like your water literally boils
ten times faster than your gastove.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I want to talk about that. Let's we'll get back
to the wiring thing and the battery and that your
battery can then like go back into the grid. Like
I like all that. It's very interesting. It's a big
idea there. I want to talk about it, but I
want to wait a minute to talk about that. And
I want to just talk about induction stoves, yeah, for
a minute in a few ways. Right, So one, I
(11:49):
mean just simply just like kind of basic A basic
thing is like there's different kinds of electric stoves. Right,
there's the kind like I had as a child in
the nineteen eighties with the coil that gets orange, right,
And then there's the kind that you know people had
as a child in the whatever two thousands, where it's
(12:09):
a flat piece of glass and the little circle gets
red right.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Ye.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
And to be clear, neither of those is an induction stove.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
They are both terrible as well.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
They are terrible, right, So I grew up with that
and now I have gas, and I'm like, I like
gas because you know the other one. You turn it
on and it takes forever to get hot, and then
you turn it off and it's still hot, which, like
you like pan really bad. Yeah, if you've got a
bunch of things on the stove, there's nowhere to put
it and gas, Like, you turn it on and you
can see it, and you turn it off and like
(12:39):
any pan will work on it. You don't need special pans.
You can turn the knob turn, does it you see
the flame? Like at a certain non rational level, I'm
wary of induction stoves. First of all, tell me why
I'm wary of induction stoves.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Yeah, so I think it's. I think it's because the
entire history of electric stoves has been disappointing. The first
generation of with the coils that is like a it's
like a heating ailment that conducts into the pan basically,
and the knob controls that. It takes like minutes for
that to change its temperature. So the next gen is
they're like, let's just basically put a light bulb underneath.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
So that's the flat piece of glass with the red
circle under it. That is also like confusing and kind
of slow and bad.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yes, it's it's terrible, it's bad. And then and then
induction is this technology that directly heats the pan with
magnetic fields. And so this is one where it's like
there's nothing glowing red, there's nothing actually getting hot.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Besides stove itself is not getting hot on an induction stone.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
And we always get asked this question from people being
like putting a battery in a stove, isn't the stove
really hot? And I'm like, the stove is not hot,
the pan is hot. You form a large electric current
in the base of the pan. The pan is made
of steel, not like copper, so it's kind of poor
in terms of electrical conductivity, so it doesn't it impedes
(14:05):
the flow of electricity.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
And that generates heat to let the electricity flow through it.
And that resistance is what creates heat in the pan.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
In the pan, yes, huh.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
What kind of pans work and what kind of pants
don't work on an induction.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
So you can make all of them work. Most pans work.
There are two pans that generally have issues unless they
have a laminated iron layer in them, and those are
like the copper pans and the aluminum pans, and a
lot of aluminum pans. Very commonly, they laminate a like
a steel disc on the bottom to make induction stoves
(14:44):
work these days.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Skill to come on the show, Sam walks me through
what I would need to do to install a regular,
non battery powered induction stove in my house, and that
explanation points to a really big problem that has to
be solved if we're going to electrify homes around the country. Also,
how Sam thinks he can help solve that problem. There
(15:18):
is a kind of second order problem with switching stove,
which is like, even if I decide, okay, I want
an induction stove, regular induction stove, not talking about what
you're building. I want a stove, I'll get rid of
my gas stove. I'll buy an induction stove. For whatever reason,
my house may not be wired for it. Right, Like,
(15:39):
I'm already willing to pay for the stove, but I
can't just buy the stove and get somebody to bring
it in and plug it in often, right, my house
is one hundred years old. I have a gas stove
and a gas off and what would I have to
do if I wanted to get an induction stove.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
So where the where in the country. Where in the
country is your.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
House of Brooklyn, New York?
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Excellent, Okay, this is I can I can give you
an even more micro tailored example. So here's the situation.
You're like, I'm doing a kitchen remodel, I'm doing whatever.
I'm like, I'm gonna I want to get a new stove.
I heard this induction thing is awesome, Let's go do it.
And then there's like the Then it's basically like you
talk to your general contractor and you're like, oh, you
(16:22):
need to run a new two hundred and forty volt
circuit to your kitchen from your panel. If you if
you were lucky and you don't live in Brooklyn, this
is typically like five hundred bucks. Like it's not a
huge deal. So then the next piece is they're then
going to go to your panel and they're gonna open
it up and they're gonna look at the numbers for
what your panel is rated for and your electrical panel
(16:43):
for folks, that that's the that's the metal box that
has all the circum rates. Like yeah, so you open
that up. There's a label on the inside and it
says maximum let's say sixty amps, because I'm picking on
if you have a Brooklyn apartment or something like that,
that would be what it is. It'll say sixty amps.
You then look at the spec sheet for the induction stove,
(17:05):
it says sixty amps. You would need to use your
entire Brooklyn h electrical supply. A new panel is like
three grand or something like that, Okay, or four grand.
So this is like more expensive than a lot of
induction stoves. Like you buy some great products from SAMs
like are LG those are those are the panel upgrade
(17:25):
and the rewiring is going to be more expensive than
the entire stuff stove.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Yeah, and I've heard you talk about one more step
right which which goes beyond the panel, and it's about
like how much power is coming into the house from
the street. What is that piece of it.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Let's say you want to get a two hundred amp panel,
you may only have one hundred and twenty five amp service,
which means you're going to have to call up con
ed and maybe wait eighteen months. That's what the lead
times are for PGN in San Francisco for them to
go and upgrade your service from the street.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
And do they charge me for that as well?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yes, and that can be over ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
I will say, even having to call con ed, even
before you got to the tenth thousand dollars in waiting
a year, I'm basically out right if I got a
call cond to get a new stove, like my stove
is fine.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Whatever you're you're on the side of big gas and
you love it. So that's the situation and scope of
this problem.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
And so that I mean, so whatever the level is, right,
So you've sort of stepped through like.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
There's a somewhat level.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Oh I was okay, I was already sold. What's the
fourth level?
Speaker 2 (18:32):
If you were the like last person on your street
to want to do this. And by the way, all
of your neighbors are getting EV chargers installed and also
doing the service upgrades. Even if they don't care what
their stove uses, they're gonna need to get to charge
your Tesla. It's the same as a Tesla charger and
a induction stove are both like forty to sixty apps,
so it's the same. So that's the order of Magnazue
need to think. You may have to if you're the
(18:55):
last person, you may have to pay to upgrade the transformer.
And because we stop building stuff in America anymore, there
is an insane lead time on transformers.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Now, yeah, I mean at this point it's like whatever,
you gotta get out a rocket ship and go to
the moon. Right, So there is an idea here that
is really interesting to me, right, and to you as
well obviously, Like there's this basic idea of like, yes,
we're all going to electrifire homes over some timescale, hopefully
faster rather than slower, right, and great, and people are
(19:26):
figuring out, you know whatever, nice efficient ways to eat
water and dry clothes and cook food with electricity. Great,
but there's this very basic sort of last mile problem, right,
last ten feet problem of getting enough electricity just to
the stove from whatever the panel from the street that is.
(19:50):
That is a real problem.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
I think the last ten feet problem is kind of
a way to think of like versus last mile, but
last ten feet it is like a really great way
to think about it.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
And it's kind of fractal.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Right.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
It's like first it's like from the from the panel
to the stove is one of them, and then like
from the panel to the street is another one, and
and uh.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
From the outlet to the induction coil, because you could
make it more powerful.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Yeah, the last one. Yeah, And so the battery. Sticking
a battery on the electrical appliance becomes essentially a hack,
uh that that allows you to sidestep the problem because
you don't actually need the electricity all the time. Yes,
(20:38):
you don't actually need a bigger wire. You just need
to be able to store the amount of electricity that's
coming into the house now.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, exactly, And we've done we cook a lot in
the office with our prototypes and units we've gotten back
from manufacturer as well, and like what we found is
a normal one twenty volt outlet on a stove is
more than enough to keep the battery charged while you're cooking,
Which is counterintuitive because it turns out that like when
(21:09):
you're using any of these high power draw appliances, even
when they're quote unquote working, like the peak and the
average are so widely disparate that there is a huge
opportunity here. And like the big thing is, like all
of these new things we're doing to our homes for electrification,
induction stoves, heat pump water heaters, dryers, et cetera. All
(21:32):
of them are like high peak load. So if you
basically put what's called like a peaker power plant inside
the device when you deploy it, you've addressed that problem
as you scale.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
So you're saying, like the standard way of solving this
problem of like whatever bigger panel, bigger wire coming to
your house, maybe of whatever a new transformer on your
block that is all designed to handle these just rare
moments when you have like all the burners going full
blast for a minute and it's like, no, we don't
(22:06):
actually have to rebuild the world around that. We can
just store up power because we're never almost never doing that.
And if you just stick a battery on it and
store up the power, that solves it.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yep, that makes that's exactly it.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
There's another thing you can do, right, which is use
that power that's in the battery, not just for the stove,
but send it where, send it to my house, send
it back to the grid, Like is what is the
other move? Once you have a battery on the stove.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
You're not cooking the complete battery capacity, Like we're able
to give you like three or four meals worth of
battery storage. Huh, you're able to use the excess energy
to offset, say you're heating maybe during peak hours. So
like typically in New York and in San Francisco, in
La many places, there's widely different electricity rates depending on
(22:56):
if it's like noon and there's like excess solar on
the grid or at six pm and everyone just got
home and is turning on their induction star.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
And this is a huge problem in energy right. In fact,
the utilities build gas fired power plants that exist only
for the moments when everybody suddenly turns everything on and
there's a huge amount of peak demand. Right there are
these peaker power plants that are inefficient and expensive, and
(23:27):
if we could figure out how to smooth demand from
the utility, like that would be great. Right. It's cheaper
for consumers, but it's also way more efficient. And you're saying,
these batteries on whatever, a bunch of stoves can actually
like power your house at the moment when you really
don't want to be pulling power from the grid.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
We also we have inter access. We're connect to the
internet and like that. These are kind of the things
like nests does for kind of the like, uh, are
you home, how to manage kind of like the heating
in your house for like home energy optimization and saving
you money. We essentially can use some of the similar
signals to then say, hey, you're done cooking for the day,
(24:07):
we can drain a chunk of the rest of the battery.
Now we're going to get people options. So this is
not like done behind your back or whatever. Sure, but
the but the idea is like you then can drain
the rest of the battery to say that with that
energy being used for your HVAC or.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
For so I can use the energy in the battery
on my stove to power the rest of my house.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah, you're gaming PC whatever you want?
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Yes, huh and that works? Now? Is that the dream?
Or like, when you start selling stoves later this year,
will that work?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Are are we're hardware able to do this? There's regulatory
compliance steps to go through on that, and we're the
goal here is to have this enabled on all of
our hardware.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
So let's let's talk about the hardware. I love the dream.
I feel like we gave the dream it's due. Let's
talk about the reality. I know you started accepting pre orders, yep.
When when are like people going to be able to
get their stoves for real, like, not as a special trial,
(25:10):
not as like ceci Q four. Okay, how confident are
you in that verition? Very great? What do you have
to figure out between now and then?
Speaker 2 (25:27):
I will speak generically because I want to I some
of this stuff is more confidential terms of where we
are in the process and how this stuff works. But
the general way you approach hardware is first you kind
of were like, does this idea work like? And so
we went and like built prototype stoves that had a
battery in them, have tested out the whole system. You
(25:48):
basically want to use that to figure out how to
scope out what you actually want to design now that
you know kind of the details of it. Start with that.
You then need to land the manufacturing partners that actually
scale up, and you need to actually go start doing
a sequence of builds with those manufacturing partners with kind
of like three or four month cadence where you're increasing
the fidelity of the product and increasing the fidelity of
(26:10):
the manufacturing process. I mean, there's then Elon quote that
I think is reasonable here, which is like the factory
is the product, but effectively it's like you need to
build the machine that builds the machine, and not just
figuring out the spec sheet of the thing that you
post on the website, but like you have to make
sure that you have confidence not just in the like, hey,
this thing is going to be the best to have ever,
(26:31):
but like we will also be able to deliver this
to you at at scale, reliably, et cetera. And so
we are at the point where we've figured out all
of the details that are kind of like let's call
it the major changes to the product. So it's like
the units we're building are representative of the final thing.
Then you are running through a suite of tests, some
(26:52):
of which are like in the lab being like, hey
does this thing scratch if I like use the wrong
cleaning agent or something. It's like it's like you're doing
a matrix of tests.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
You're trying to break it.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
You're trying to break it. You're trying to break it.
You're also doing software development because it's like you have
to develop this is a product that's like a connected device.
It's got a lot of software and firmware. There's a
lot of like compliance aspects of that too, So there's
code stuff. There's what's called like ul.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Like underwriters laboratory, that little thing that's on the tag
on every lamp you ever owned, right.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Like, this includes stuff like FCC, Like you have to
make sure that you pass FCC.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
If you have a ready communications commission because it because
it's like Wi Fi enabled or something.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
It's not just as Wi Fi. If it has an
induction coil, you have to make sure that it's like
you know, like it's not gonna jam your WiFi by accident.
It's all of these sort of there's there's a huge
host of details here that you have to get right.
And it's not just checking all the boxes. It's also
making sure the product is safe, right like like it's
like safe safe and so doing all of that is
(27:56):
a process into itself.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
And so so you have a lot to do. Fine, Uh,
how much is it going to cost?
Speaker 2 (28:04):
We are currently selling units on our website for fifty
five This is normal for high end induction stoves. So
if you look at if you look at some of
the top brands in the industry, this is what they
sell for similar scope.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
You could get a nice one for half of that.
Certainly you can get a nice one for It's just
a stove, to be clear, it's not an.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Oven, yes exactly. Now that's the headline price. Now, a
big change that the Inflation Reduction Act did has to
do with batteries. There's a thirty percent tax credit for
battery products.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
And so do you get thirty percent off the whole
stove as a result.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
We're working through the specific details, but as it stands now,
I believe so. And then additionally, the IRA takes off
eight hundred and forty dollars via rebate if you have
a gas stove and you want to switch to this.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
So that that's going to help you a lot.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
That's the first piece. And then the second piece is
because you're putting a battery in your home. Once we
kind of have the deployment with battery storage and all
this other stuff working, you can save money on your
energy bill at the like and depending on where you
live and what your rate disparities are and what other
(29:14):
program there's other programs for virtual power plants and all
this other stuff. There's potentially a like thousands of dollars
in like savings you can have on energy costs over
the lifetime of the product.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
And will that will that kind of dynamic use of
the battery be ready I know it'll be technically ready
to go from the point of view of the stove
and the battery when you ship, we'll will.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Have we will have a subset of that all ready
to go at ship date.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
And will the sort of like utility regulatory whatever side
be be ready then? Or is that going to take
like forever because it's utility.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
It's not gonna take. It's not gonna take forever. There
is a path to making a let's call it the
eighty twenty version of this work. Yeah, very fast.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
There's a version where you can do a lot of it.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah soon. Yeah, okay, And I think that's actually that's
something that we're keeping a little close to the chest
until we're further along. Can tell on to talk about that.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah, so you're gonna ship stoves to people on or
before December thirty first, twenty twenty four. What are you
going to do next?
Speaker 2 (30:20):
We're evaluating other form factors of like appliances. I mean,
I'll say, I'll give you a freebie as we're definitely
gonna be doing an oven and I want to have
a pizza mode for that. But like you get the
idea there.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Right, because I mean, so what you're selling now is
just a cook top, right, so the oven would actually
be the obvious next one, so that you could sell
the range, right, the stovetop and oven, Like, what's the
constraint there?
Speaker 2 (30:43):
You literally need to have a much bigger logistical footprint
as a business.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
What is a happy story to you of how the
world looks in five years?
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah, so I think I think the happy story is
like if you can go get a substantial fraction of
appliance installs, but like if a company can get like
a million homes with this with and we're able to
connect the batteries in a way where they're able to
do kind of the equivalent of vehicle to home type thing.
You're in a spot where you have enough storage to
(31:14):
be kind of a big player on the grid.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
That's the real the real game for you is not
the stove. It's not bringing the power in. It's sending
the power back out. That's that's your reeling gig.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
It's both, it's both, it's both and so it's like
it's like you make the stove that is the best
stove that is also the easiest to install stove. Yeah,
and then you basically are just deploying more batteries than
anyone else on the grid.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Through that hook, there's a universe where you're not just
a stove company. You impost labs are selling electricity into
the grid, and the electricity is coming from the stoves
of your customers who are in somehow participating in this.
Maybe they're getting some of the revenue, say.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Exactly, or they got a discount on the product, or
there's some incentive structure. We are yes, that's I think
that's one hundred percent correct.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
We'll be back in a minute with the light ground. Okay,
let's do the lightning round. What kind of stove views
at home?
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Okay, this is going to change in like soon, But
it's a Viking four burner, say it's it's a Viking
four burners stove.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Gas gas gas gas stove. It's a great stove. That's
a fancy stove.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
It takes it takes six and a half minutes to
boil a liter of water on the same pan. It
takes forty seconds for our stove to do what.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
What's like a go to weeknight dinner to cook for you.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
I've had less time to do that more recently, but
I do like doing stir fry stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Is it right that you worked on on Google Glass? Yes,
so Google Glass was a long time and I was
ten years ago. Maybe. Uh it's basically augmented reality glasses.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Yeah, it didn't work, right, the Google Glass doesn't exist today.
I don't mean it didn't work technically, I mean and
it didn't catch on. Uh So I'm curious, what is
something you learned from from the failure of Google Less.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
I definitely look back fondly to days when Google was
like will like to do like extremely ambitious, like stick
their neck out things, and I hope that with all
this AI stuff happening, they're gonna do that again. And
it seems like it might it might be happening, which
is kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Oh interesting, like like weird, kind of ahead of their
time experiment.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Keep Google weird is like my like protest protest statement.
We Also, because I was on the Camera Harbor team,
we actually had the opportunity to speck out this one
camera module. This is a trivia thing, this one camera
module that went into this thing called Project Tango, which
is this very future looking remember you know, like ar
kit on your phone where you can do like the
measure app on your iPhone and stuff that was like
(33:54):
the first version. The first version of like ar on
phones was done at Google. We specked out a special
camera for that. That same camera ended up on the
Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
That's fun. So you're saying you worked on a hell
you worked on a camera that wound up on a
helicopter on Mars. Yes, oh fun?
Speaker 2 (34:13):
Okay as an intern.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Great, anything else you want to talk about.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
We covered a huge amount of stuff.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
This is we did good work. We did go work here.
Delight to talk to you. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Sam Dimico is the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs.
Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was
edited by Lydia Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Buguer.
You can email us at Problem at Pushkin dot FM.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Problem
Pushkin. There's two ways in. There's two ways in, and
I'll let you choose. One way in is pizza and tokyo.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
The other way you got, what's the second one? What's
the second one?
Speaker 1 (00:30):
The second one is the more uh thinky, the more
intellectual way in, which is like electrification is great, but
like the wire going into my house isn't big enough
basically to get all the electricity into my house that
I need.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Let's start with pizza.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the
show where I talk to people who are trying to
make technological progress. My guest today is Sam Demico. He's
the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs, which is a
company that makes induction stoves. Sam's problem is this, how
do you build a really good DRIC cook top that
(01:10):
people can install without having to rewire their house, and that,
by the way, could eventually help transform the way electric
power works in America. It's an ambitious project, ambitious stove,
and it goes back to this moment when Sam ordered
a pizza. He was working for Facebook at the time,
helping to build their Oculus VR headset, and he was
(01:33):
at a conference in Tokyo. What neighborhood in Tokyo did
you have the pizza?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I think it was. I think it was near Akasaka station.
It's like, savoid pizza.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Okay, so tell me about the pizza.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I order my pizza and I get it back in
like forty five seconds or like a minute or something insane.
I probably say a different number of different people. But
it was fast enough and absolutely fantastic. Then Krispy a
lot of garlic, super super good, like master of the
craft type situation. So I get this, and I'm like,
I want to do this at home, and I don't
(02:10):
want to have to have a giant brick oven in
my backyard. And so I was like, it would be
really sweet if you could do this with electrical electricity.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
And how are they doing it? What's going on?
Speaker 2 (02:23):
So this is a classic like how normal brick oven
pizzas make, and I was like, I want to replicate
that like an old school brick oven. The amount of
infrared power that thing dumps onto the pizza because the
fire reflects off of a curved bowl above the of
the pizza. It okay, I'm like, could I just do
this with halogen light bulbs? And a lot of power.
(02:45):
Could a pizza oven that makes a pizza of that
quality be an electronic device? And I was like, I
let's figure this out. And I realized that the power
density of like the amount of infrared and the heating
you need to get that onto the pizza, you were
going to need more than a normal one twenty volt plug.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
So you're saying that if you you figured out how
much power you would need to make a pizza of
them that could get that hot from electricity. Yeah, and
you realize that you couldn't build a device that you
could just plug into the wall because it would need
too much power. That's the fundamental constraint.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Of bingo bingo exactly. I was like, okay, well, how
often are you using this thing? And also how often
is it even if you're like cranking out pizzas, like
you're gonna be like prepping the next pizza, Like, there's
time in between for say a battery to recharge, uh huh,
in between the various pizza making sessions.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Right.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
So I went and just looked at this and I
was like, Okay. I sized the battery pack and I'm like, okay,
this is getting large. It's not like it's not it's
not like laptop battery size. It's more like it's getting
into like those little stationary like batteries you use for
camping or something like that. It was getting into that.
It was getting into that a lot.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
So you realize you're gonna need a lot of battery power.
But what I just want to pause before we get
into like how big were the battery, because the idea
of the battery is I feel like at a certain level,
it's why I want to talk to you, right Otherwise, yeah,
the stoves, like the battery is a great, big, powerful
idea with lots of ramifications. Right, And so the first
(04:20):
the first, the first thing, the first reason you think
of the battery is you realize, oh, you can use
the regular outlet, just the same outlet that whatever I
charge my phone on. You can use for like a
super powerful, super hot stove if you add a battery,
because the battery can just draw power all day when
(04:42):
the stove is just sitting there, and then when you
go to turn on the stove, it can discharge a
ton of energy all at once, more than you could
get out of the outlet. Right, Like that is that's
upside insight because we don't think of home appliances that way, right.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
And it's always and your appliance is always plugged in.
Why would you put a battery in something that is
always plugged in? Yeah, which is kind of the like
weird yeah right that you have to make yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Right, because right right? Why not just get it enough
power whenever you want on it?
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Bingo? And then I was like, Okay, this is a
good idea. Let's pressure test what would actually cause a
VC to want to invest in this. And I then
kind of started fanning out beyond just me being like
I want my pizza really fast and in high quality.
And by the way, this pizza in my head is
(05:30):
like glistening in its pizza way. I'm like this, this
is this is like I want this pizza. But you
have to think about, hey, is this a platform? Is
there a wedge into a broader market? What's the big
story here? And so and so what I realized was like,
let's look at other appliances what the story is. And
I I then thought through kind of the implications and
(05:51):
I was like, Okay, for the bigger appliances, say the
ones that normally plug in with like a two forty
evolt plug like the bigger one, or like a dryer,
like a stovetop and of it like a wall of it,
or a range product or a hot water heater, and
how big is the battery going to be in those cases?
And I kind of did the math and sizing, and
(06:13):
I was like, oh, it's going to be like north
of two kilo what hours at least? So I'll give
you the scaling factor on this is like is like
you you could very quickly take like four, three or
four major appliances because you think of all the big
boxes you've got in your house. Times a couple of
KILLO on hours batteries, you get about the same amount
of storage as a Tesla power wall.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
A Tesla powerwall being the like you can live off
the grid you put your panels on your roof, and
a Tesla powerwall. So you're basically saying you can sort
of distribute a like live off the grid amount of
batteries if you could put a battery on the stove
and the fridge and the hot water heater.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yes, yes, exactly. Then I looked at what was happening
in the stationary storage battery industry and it was like
it was all focusing on these centralized battery systems like
a battery wall battery wall type product. They weren't addressing
all the wiring in your house. And also, like appliances,
basically they haven't seen a lot of innovation in like
fifty years or so. It's like induction stoves are fifty
(07:13):
years old for reference, so's it's like, this is an
opportunity to generationally advance the appliance industry and then also
wedge like let's call it ten plus kill a lot
of hours of batteries into every home in America. That
is really interesting, right, Like that is a bigger story
than your pizza is awesome.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
So there's a few balls in the air right now,
how do you land on starting with an induction stove?
Speaker 2 (07:42):
So we thought of doing maybe tabletop devices first because
they'd be easier.
Speaker 1 (07:47):
But I don't know what that means.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Tabletop device would be like you could imagine the pizza
oven being an ambitious one, but you could think of
like there's other product ideas we've been peddling around. It's
like kettle just like that. Yeah, ok, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
you could do something. There's a lot of things that
have high peak power demands that are interesting.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
We were like, we got an air fryer and it
keeps blowing out the circuit breaker. We can't run the
air fryer and the microwave at the same time. Give
me a battery.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I know, I will know. No announcements on this podcast
for product announcements.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Okay, but those feel sort of small ball compared to
a stovetop right, Like an air fryer is like kind
of a luxury weirdo item, whereas everybody has a stove.
I mean, is that part of why you land on
a stove.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
There's there's two reasons. One is there has not been
there's actually a lot of meat on the bone where
you could say, like if I make your hot water
heater like three times more powerful, you can't make the
water three times hotter.
Speaker 1 (08:43):
Most people wouldn't notice the difference if their water heater.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
So this is this is the key insight is gas
stoves are and like the knobs and all that stuff,
the ui ux of the stove is the fuel source.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
And so just to be clear, when you say you
mean the user interface user experience, like when you turn
on a gas stove, you can see the gas flame.
That's what you can It's the place in your house
where you actually see, like, oh, I am burning fossil
fuel in order to cook spaghetti.
Speaker 2 (09:12):
Gas stoves are the one situation where if you want
to make a fossil fuel free home or like electrify
the home completely, you would be That is the one
mental block and like actual like performance block where people
are like, well, I like my gas stove and I
can't get rid of it.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Nobody's going to be like I love my gas dryer
or I love my gas water.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
Who cares? Yeah, yeah, No, that's it. That's a cost thing.
That's like a that's like a maybe maybe my gas
company's expensive, maybe is cheap. You'll pe people.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Don't have an attachment to a gas water heater the
way they have an attachment to a gas stove. Yes, exactly,
I buy that, But that seems like a reason you
wouldn't want to do and stove as your first one.
That seems to make it harder, not easier.
Speaker 2 (09:54):
So that's one piece. But then the second piece was
the battery. Lets us beat the pants off of anything else.
Speaker 1 (10:01):
In the market in terms of performance.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
Performance In terms of performance, it.
Speaker 1 (10:05):
Goes back to the amazing pizza oven.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Yes, it goes back to the amazing piece of a
thing where it's like and so thinking through this was
where is there like a wedge where like you have
to beat fossil fuels by a resolutely huge amount to
displace it. So that's why it has happened. Fully, we
can do it. And it's also an installed appliance. So
the and this is the piece that I'm going to
(10:28):
get it next. So the battery can be wired in
a way where it can support the grid by charging
and discharging into the house, not just like the appliance
having a boost from the battery basically.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
So there's sort of two different ideas. There two reasons
you wanted to do the stove right. So one the
first one you said, is because it can you can
use the battery to make a better electric stove than
exists now and to make a stove that is better
than any gas stove that exists now. Yes, and that
improvement is meaningful to the typical homeown or the typical
(11:03):
human being in a way that a better water heater
who cares.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah, and like better water hitter may save you money,
like say you go to a heat pump water hitter.
It's like, oh, my energy bill is two to three
and a half times less, yeah, versus a resistant one. Cool,
but in our case, it's like your water literally boils
ten times faster than your gastove.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
I want to talk about that. Let's we'll get back
to the wiring thing and the battery and that your
battery can then like go back into the grid. Like
I like all that. It's very interesting. It's a big
idea there. I want to talk about it, but I
want to wait a minute to talk about that. And
I want to just talk about induction stoves, yeah, for
a minute in a few ways. Right, So one, I
(11:49):
mean just simply just like kind of basic A basic
thing is like there's different kinds of electric stoves. Right,
there's the kind like I had as a child in
the nineteen eighties with the coil that gets orange, right,
And then there's the kind that you know people had
as a child in the whatever two thousands, where it's
(12:09):
a flat piece of glass and the little circle gets
red right.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Ye.
Speaker 1 (12:13):
And to be clear, neither of those is an induction stove.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
They are both terrible as well.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
They are terrible, right, So I grew up with that
and now I have gas, and I'm like, I like
gas because you know the other one. You turn it
on and it takes forever to get hot, and then
you turn it off and it's still hot, which, like
you like pan really bad. Yeah, if you've got a
bunch of things on the stove, there's nowhere to put
it and gas, Like, you turn it on and you
can see it, and you turn it off and like
(12:39):
any pan will work on it. You don't need special pans.
You can turn the knob turn, does it you see
the flame? Like at a certain non rational level, I'm
wary of induction stoves. First of all, tell me why
I'm wary of induction stoves.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Yeah, so I think it's. I think it's because the
entire history of electric stoves has been disappointing. The first
generation of with the coils that is like a it's
like a heating ailment that conducts into the pan basically,
and the knob controls that. It takes like minutes for
that to change its temperature. So the next gen is
they're like, let's just basically put a light bulb underneath.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
So that's the flat piece of glass with the red
circle under it. That is also like confusing and kind
of slow and bad.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
Yes, it's it's terrible, it's bad. And then and then
induction is this technology that directly heats the pan with
magnetic fields. And so this is one where it's like
there's nothing glowing red, there's nothing actually getting hot.
Speaker 1 (13:38):
Besides stove itself is not getting hot on an induction stone.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
And we always get asked this question from people being
like putting a battery in a stove, isn't the stove
really hot? And I'm like, the stove is not hot,
the pan is hot. You form a large electric current
in the base of the pan. The pan is made
of steel, not like copper, so it's kind of poor
in terms of electrical conductivity, so it doesn't it impedes
(14:05):
the flow of electricity.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
And that generates heat to let the electricity flow through it.
And that resistance is what creates heat in the pan.
Speaker 2 (14:14):
In the pan, yes, huh.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
What kind of pans work and what kind of pants
don't work on an induction.
Speaker 2 (14:21):
So you can make all of them work. Most pans work.
There are two pans that generally have issues unless they
have a laminated iron layer in them, and those are
like the copper pans and the aluminum pans, and a
lot of aluminum pans. Very commonly, they laminate a like
a steel disc on the bottom to make induction stoves
(14:44):
work these days.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Skill to come on the show, Sam walks me through
what I would need to do to install a regular,
non battery powered induction stove in my house, and that
explanation points to a really big problem that has to
be solved if we're going to electrify homes around the country. Also,
how Sam thinks he can help solve that problem. There
(15:18):
is a kind of second order problem with switching stove,
which is like, even if I decide, okay, I want
an induction stove, regular induction stove, not talking about what
you're building. I want a stove, I'll get rid of
my gas stove. I'll buy an induction stove. For whatever reason,
my house may not be wired for it. Right, Like,
(15:39):
I'm already willing to pay for the stove, but I
can't just buy the stove and get somebody to bring
it in and plug it in often, right, my house
is one hundred years old. I have a gas stove
and a gas off and what would I have to
do if I wanted to get an induction stove.
Speaker 2 (15:56):
So where the where in the country. Where in the
country is your.
Speaker 1 (15:59):
House of Brooklyn, New York?
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Excellent, Okay, this is I can I can give you
an even more micro tailored example. So here's the situation.
You're like, I'm doing a kitchen remodel, I'm doing whatever.
I'm like, I'm gonna I want to get a new stove.
I heard this induction thing is awesome, Let's go do it.
And then there's like the Then it's basically like you
talk to your general contractor and you're like, oh, you
(16:22):
need to run a new two hundred and forty volt
circuit to your kitchen from your panel. If you if
you were lucky and you don't live in Brooklyn, this
is typically like five hundred bucks. Like it's not a
huge deal. So then the next piece is they're then
going to go to your panel and they're gonna open
it up and they're gonna look at the numbers for
what your panel is rated for and your electrical panel
(16:43):
for folks, that that's the that's the metal box that
has all the circum rates. Like yeah, so you open
that up. There's a label on the inside and it
says maximum let's say sixty amps, because I'm picking on
if you have a Brooklyn apartment or something like that,
that would be what it is. It'll say sixty amps.
You then look at the spec sheet for the induction stove,
(17:05):
it says sixty amps. You would need to use your
entire Brooklyn h electrical supply. A new panel is like
three grand or something like that, Okay, or four grand.
So this is like more expensive than a lot of
induction stoves. Like you buy some great products from SAMs
like are LG those are those are the panel upgrade
(17:25):
and the rewiring is going to be more expensive than
the entire stuff stove.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Yeah, and I've heard you talk about one more step
right which which goes beyond the panel, and it's about
like how much power is coming into the house from
the street. What is that piece of it.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
Let's say you want to get a two hundred amp panel,
you may only have one hundred and twenty five amp service,
which means you're going to have to call up con
ed and maybe wait eighteen months. That's what the lead
times are for PGN in San Francisco for them to
go and upgrade your service from the street.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
And do they charge me for that as well?
Speaker 2 (18:02):
Yes, and that can be over ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
I will say, even having to call con ed, even
before you got to the tenth thousand dollars in waiting
a year, I'm basically out right if I got a
call cond to get a new stove, like my stove
is fine.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Whatever you're you're on the side of big gas and
you love it. So that's the situation and scope of
this problem.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
And so that I mean, so whatever the level is, right,
So you've sort of stepped through like.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
There's a somewhat level.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Oh I was okay, I was already sold. What's the
fourth level?
Speaker 2 (18:32):
If you were the like last person on your street
to want to do this. And by the way, all
of your neighbors are getting EV chargers installed and also
doing the service upgrades. Even if they don't care what
their stove uses, they're gonna need to get to charge
your Tesla. It's the same as a Tesla charger and
a induction stove are both like forty to sixty apps,
so it's the same. So that's the order of Magnazue
need to think. You may have to if you're the
(18:55):
last person, you may have to pay to upgrade the transformer.
And because we stop building stuff in America anymore, there
is an insane lead time on transformers.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Now, yeah, I mean at this point it's like whatever,
you gotta get out a rocket ship and go to
the moon. Right, So there is an idea here that
is really interesting to me, right, and to you as
well obviously, Like there's this basic idea of like, yes,
we're all going to electrifire homes over some timescale, hopefully
faster rather than slower, right, and great, and people are
(19:26):
figuring out, you know whatever, nice efficient ways to eat
water and dry clothes and cook food with electricity. Great,
but there's this very basic sort of last mile problem, right,
last ten feet problem of getting enough electricity just to
the stove from whatever the panel from the street that is.
(19:50):
That is a real problem.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
I think the last ten feet problem is kind of
a way to think of like versus last mile, but
last ten feet it is like a really great way
to think about it.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
And it's kind of fractal.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Right.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
It's like first it's like from the from the panel
to the stove is one of them, and then like
from the panel to the street is another one, and
and uh.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
From the outlet to the induction coil, because you could
make it more powerful.
Speaker 1 (20:13):
Yeah, the last one. Yeah, And so the battery. Sticking
a battery on the electrical appliance becomes essentially a hack,
uh that that allows you to sidestep the problem because
you don't actually need the electricity all the time. Yes,
(20:38):
you don't actually need a bigger wire. You just need
to be able to store the amount of electricity that's
coming into the house now.
Speaker 2 (20:48):
Yeah, exactly, And we've done we cook a lot in
the office with our prototypes and units we've gotten back
from manufacturer as well, and like what we found is
a normal one twenty volt outlet on a stove is
more than enough to keep the battery charged while you're cooking,
Which is counterintuitive because it turns out that like when
(21:09):
you're using any of these high power draw appliances, even
when they're quote unquote working, like the peak and the
average are so widely disparate that there is a huge
opportunity here. And like the big thing is, like all
of these new things we're doing to our homes for electrification,
induction stoves, heat pump water heaters, dryers, et cetera. All
(21:32):
of them are like high peak load. So if you
basically put what's called like a peaker power plant inside
the device when you deploy it, you've addressed that problem
as you scale.
Speaker 1 (21:46):
So you're saying, like the standard way of solving this
problem of like whatever bigger panel, bigger wire coming to
your house, maybe of whatever a new transformer on your
block that is all designed to handle these just rare
moments when you have like all the burners going full
blast for a minute and it's like, no, we don't
(22:06):
actually have to rebuild the world around that. We can
just store up power because we're never almost never doing that.
And if you just stick a battery on it and
store up the power, that solves it.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
Yep, that makes that's exactly it.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
There's another thing you can do, right, which is use
that power that's in the battery, not just for the stove,
but send it where, send it to my house, send
it back to the grid, Like is what is the
other move? Once you have a battery on the stove.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
You're not cooking the complete battery capacity, Like we're able
to give you like three or four meals worth of
battery storage. Huh, you're able to use the excess energy
to offset, say you're heating maybe during peak hours. So
like typically in New York and in San Francisco, in
La many places, there's widely different electricity rates depending on
(22:56):
if it's like noon and there's like excess solar on
the grid or at six pm and everyone just got
home and is turning on their induction star.
Speaker 1 (23:03):
And this is a huge problem in energy right. In fact,
the utilities build gas fired power plants that exist only
for the moments when everybody suddenly turns everything on and
there's a huge amount of peak demand. Right there are
these peaker power plants that are inefficient and expensive, and
(23:27):
if we could figure out how to smooth demand from
the utility, like that would be great. Right. It's cheaper
for consumers, but it's also way more efficient. And you're saying,
these batteries on whatever, a bunch of stoves can actually
like power your house at the moment when you really
don't want to be pulling power from the grid.
Speaker 2 (23:45):
We also we have inter access. We're connect to the
internet and like that. These are kind of the things
like nests does for kind of the like, uh, are
you home, how to manage kind of like the heating
in your house for like home energy optimization and saving
you money. We essentially can use some of the similar
signals to then say, hey, you're done cooking for the day,
(24:07):
we can drain a chunk of the rest of the battery.
Now we're going to get people options. So this is
not like done behind your back or whatever. Sure, but
the but the idea is like you then can drain
the rest of the battery to say that with that
energy being used for your HVAC or.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
For so I can use the energy in the battery
on my stove to power the rest of my house.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
Yeah, you're gaming PC whatever you want?
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Yes, huh and that works? Now? Is that the dream?
Or like, when you start selling stoves later this year,
will that work?
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Are are we're hardware able to do this? There's regulatory
compliance steps to go through on that, and we're the
goal here is to have this enabled on all of
our hardware.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
So let's let's talk about the hardware. I love the dream.
I feel like we gave the dream it's due. Let's
talk about the reality. I know you started accepting pre orders, yep.
When when are like people going to be able to
get their stoves for real, like, not as a special trial,
(25:10):
not as like ceci Q four. Okay, how confident are
you in that verition? Very great? What do you have
to figure out between now and then?
Speaker 2 (25:27):
I will speak generically because I want to I some
of this stuff is more confidential terms of where we
are in the process and how this stuff works. But
the general way you approach hardware is first you kind
of were like, does this idea work like? And so
we went and like built prototype stoves that had a
battery in them, have tested out the whole system. You
(25:48):
basically want to use that to figure out how to
scope out what you actually want to design now that
you know kind of the details of it. Start with that.
You then need to land the manufacturing partners that actually
scale up, and you need to actually go start doing
a sequence of builds with those manufacturing partners with kind
of like three or four month cadence where you're increasing
the fidelity of the product and increasing the fidelity of
(26:10):
the manufacturing process. I mean, there's then Elon quote that
I think is reasonable here, which is like the factory
is the product, but effectively it's like you need to
build the machine that builds the machine, and not just
figuring out the spec sheet of the thing that you
post on the website, but like you have to make
sure that you have confidence not just in the like, hey,
this thing is going to be the best to have ever,
(26:31):
but like we will also be able to deliver this
to you at at scale, reliably, et cetera. And so
we are at the point where we've figured out all
of the details that are kind of like let's call
it the major changes to the product. So it's like
the units we're building are representative of the final thing.
Then you are running through a suite of tests, some
(26:52):
of which are like in the lab being like, hey
does this thing scratch if I like use the wrong
cleaning agent or something. It's like it's like you're doing
a matrix of tests.
Speaker 1 (27:01):
You're trying to break it.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
You're trying to break it. You're trying to break it.
You're also doing software development because it's like you have
to develop this is a product that's like a connected device.
It's got a lot of software and firmware. There's a
lot of like compliance aspects of that too, So there's
code stuff. There's what's called like ul.
Speaker 1 (27:20):
Like underwriters laboratory, that little thing that's on the tag
on every lamp you ever owned, right.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
Like, this includes stuff like FCC, Like you have to
make sure that you pass FCC.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
If you have a ready communications commission because it because
it's like Wi Fi enabled or something.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
It's not just as Wi Fi. If it has an
induction coil, you have to make sure that it's like
you know, like it's not gonna jam your WiFi by accident.
It's all of these sort of there's there's a huge
host of details here that you have to get right.
And it's not just checking all the boxes. It's also
making sure the product is safe, right like like it's
like safe safe and so doing all of that is
(27:56):
a process into itself.
Speaker 1 (27:58):
And so so you have a lot to do. Fine, Uh,
how much is it going to cost?
Speaker 2 (28:04):
We are currently selling units on our website for fifty
five This is normal for high end induction stoves. So
if you look at if you look at some of
the top brands in the industry, this is what they
sell for similar scope.
Speaker 1 (28:16):
You could get a nice one for half of that.
Certainly you can get a nice one for It's just
a stove, to be clear, it's not an.
Speaker 2 (28:21):
Oven, yes exactly. Now that's the headline price. Now, a
big change that the Inflation Reduction Act did has to
do with batteries. There's a thirty percent tax credit for
battery products.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
And so do you get thirty percent off the whole
stove as a result.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
We're working through the specific details, but as it stands now,
I believe so. And then additionally, the IRA takes off
eight hundred and forty dollars via rebate if you have
a gas stove and you want to switch to this.
Speaker 1 (28:51):
So that that's going to help you a lot.
Speaker 2 (28:54):
That's the first piece. And then the second piece is
because you're putting a battery in your home. Once we
kind of have the deployment with battery storage and all
this other stuff working, you can save money on your
energy bill at the like and depending on where you
live and what your rate disparities are and what other
(29:14):
program there's other programs for virtual power plants and all
this other stuff. There's potentially a like thousands of dollars
in like savings you can have on energy costs over
the lifetime of the product.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
And will that will that kind of dynamic use of
the battery be ready I know it'll be technically ready
to go from the point of view of the stove
and the battery when you ship, we'll will.
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Have we will have a subset of that all ready
to go at ship date.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
And will the sort of like utility regulatory whatever side
be be ready then? Or is that going to take
like forever because it's utility.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
It's not gonna take. It's not gonna take forever. There
is a path to making a let's call it the
eighty twenty version of this work. Yeah, very fast.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
There's a version where you can do a lot of it.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Yeah soon. Yeah, okay, And I think that's actually that's
something that we're keeping a little close to the chest
until we're further along. Can tell on to talk about that.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
Yeah, so you're gonna ship stoves to people on or
before December thirty first, twenty twenty four. What are you
going to do next?
Speaker 2 (30:20):
We're evaluating other form factors of like appliances. I mean,
I'll say, I'll give you a freebie as we're definitely
gonna be doing an oven and I want to have
a pizza mode for that. But like you get the
idea there.
Speaker 1 (30:31):
Right, because I mean, so what you're selling now is
just a cook top, right, so the oven would actually
be the obvious next one, so that you could sell
the range, right, the stovetop and oven, Like, what's the
constraint there?
Speaker 2 (30:43):
You literally need to have a much bigger logistical footprint
as a business.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
What is a happy story to you of how the
world looks in five years?
Speaker 2 (30:51):
Yeah, so I think I think the happy story is
like if you can go get a substantial fraction of
appliance installs, but like if a company can get like
a million homes with this with and we're able to
connect the batteries in a way where they're able to
do kind of the equivalent of vehicle to home type thing.
You're in a spot where you have enough storage to
(31:14):
be kind of a big player on the grid.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
That's the real the real game for you is not
the stove. It's not bringing the power in. It's sending
the power back out. That's that's your reeling gig.
Speaker 2 (31:24):
It's both, it's both, it's both and so it's like
it's like you make the stove that is the best
stove that is also the easiest to install stove. Yeah,
and then you basically are just deploying more batteries than
anyone else on the grid.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Through that hook, there's a universe where you're not just
a stove company. You impost labs are selling electricity into
the grid, and the electricity is coming from the stoves
of your customers who are in somehow participating in this.
Maybe they're getting some of the revenue, say.
Speaker 2 (31:51):
Exactly, or they got a discount on the product, or
there's some incentive structure. We are yes, that's I think
that's one hundred percent correct.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
We'll be back in a minute with the light ground. Okay,
let's do the lightning round. What kind of stove views
at home?
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Okay, this is going to change in like soon, But
it's a Viking four burner, say it's it's a Viking
four burners stove.
Speaker 1 (32:29):
Gas gas gas gas stove. It's a great stove. That's
a fancy stove.
Speaker 2 (32:35):
It takes it takes six and a half minutes to
boil a liter of water on the same pan. It
takes forty seconds for our stove to do what.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
What's like a go to weeknight dinner to cook for you.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
I've had less time to do that more recently, but
I do like doing stir fry stuff.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Is it right that you worked on on Google Glass? Yes,
so Google Glass was a long time and I was
ten years ago. Maybe. Uh it's basically augmented reality glasses.
Speaker 2 (33:01):
Right.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
Yeah, it didn't work, right, the Google Glass doesn't exist today.
I don't mean it didn't work technically, I mean and
it didn't catch on. Uh So I'm curious, what is
something you learned from from the failure of Google Less.
Speaker 2 (33:17):
I definitely look back fondly to days when Google was
like will like to do like extremely ambitious, like stick
their neck out things, and I hope that with all
this AI stuff happening, they're gonna do that again. And
it seems like it might it might be happening, which
is kind of cool.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
Oh interesting, like like weird, kind of ahead of their
time experiment.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
Keep Google weird is like my like protest protest statement.
We Also, because I was on the Camera Harbor team,
we actually had the opportunity to speck out this one
camera module. This is a trivia thing, this one camera
module that went into this thing called Project Tango, which
is this very future looking remember you know, like ar
kit on your phone where you can do like the
measure app on your iPhone and stuff that was like
(33:54):
the first version. The first version of like ar on
phones was done at Google. We specked out a special
camera for that. That same camera ended up on the
Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
That's fun. So you're saying you worked on a hell
you worked on a camera that wound up on a
helicopter on Mars. Yes, oh fun?
Speaker 2 (34:13):
Okay as an intern.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
Great, anything else you want to talk about.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
We covered a huge amount of stuff.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
This is we did good work. We did go work here.
Delight to talk to you. Thank you for your time.
Speaker 2 (34:26):
Thanks so much.
Speaker 1 (34:34):
Sam Dimico is the founder and CEO of Impulse Labs.
Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was
edited by Lydia Jean Kott and engineered by Sarah Buguer.
You can email us at Problem at Pushkin dot FM.
I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with
another episode of What's Your Problem
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