Entrepreneurs for Impact (EFI) Podcast: Transcripts
#86:
90% Reduction in Lab-to-Production Timeline for Iron-based Battery Cathodes — Vivas Kumar, CEO of Mitra Chem
Chris Wedding:
Vivas Kumar, Founder and CEO of Mitra Chem, welcome to the podcast, buddy.
Vivas Kumar:
Yeah, Chris, thank you for having me.
Chris Wedding:
We've clearly chatted in the past, but sometimes I'm doing a little extra prep on backgrounds and bios and such and as I was reading yours, I thought I would actually pull out a few bullets for the listeners. Part of the reason is I think you write a damn good bio. Now, clearly, you have a good bio, but lots of folks have good bios. So, for the listeners, let me pull them on the screen here and partly it's the combination. The first, when you describe your company, it's just very laser focused, which is often not true.
Iron-based cathodes for Western mass market EV industry. It’s not any EVs, it's not any cathodes, so that's pretty crystal clear, which I think is nice for folks listening as they craft their own one-liner. The other you go into, this is through LinkedIn, where you say, “Senior manager at Tesla,” so check, “within leading commercial negotiations on contracts worth billions of dollars along the battery supply chain.” So, big risk, big stakes here, so that's nice, but then you get like personal, which is a fun combo.
The Toastmasters International World Championship semi-finalist on, not your 10th try, but your first try. You don't leave it there, there's some numbers, top 100 out of 35,000 global competitors. Luckily, I can't see you blushing. Then you go on to say you speak fluent Spanish, Portuguese, Tamil, and basic Mandarin. Of course, we're speaking in English. Pretty cool.
And the last hobbies part, Indian food, electronic music, and NBA basketball. I think when folks read that, they're like, “Well, I think it'd be nice to have a beer with Vivas or maybe invest in his company.” Who knows? Anyway, nice combo of both cred plus like, “I'm a human being with many interests.” Yeah.
Vivas Kumar:
Yeah, I do have a life. I'm very happy to say that.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, for sure. All right, so the place we start is, what's your elevator pitch on this new company?
Vivas Kumar:
Mitra Chem is solving three problems, shifting us towards more iron-based cathodes that are safer, cheaper, and more sustainable. Building US-based manufacturing at scale for battery cathodes, and finally reducing the design-build test cycle by 10X to bring a new cathode product to market.
Chris Wedding:
Sweet. Again, your speaking practice shows up as you speak and deliver the elevator pitch that was, I'm sure, carefully crafted.
04:15
Vivas Kumar:
Well, what they don't tell you about being a CEO is, it's actually a pretty repetitive job. I get asked the question of, “What does Mitra Chem do?” probably 10 times a day and so I just sit there and say, “Well, these are the three problems,” and I just say it over and over again. You can't tell, but I'm actually asleep right now, going through the same pitch.
Chris Wedding:
Totally, yeah. Well, that's true. I mean, your key job is sales for sure, but it's not just like you say it with confidence and so forth, but it's the specificity in the two or three bullets you just ran through, I think that's part of it, too. I hear a lot of elevator pitches and they sound just a little too generic and I think, “Well, gosh, I know like five companies, what you just described,” but that's not what I hear with the specificity of the bullets there. All right, cool. Yeah.
Vivas Kumar:
But the reason to get specific is because, I mean, if we start with the most global message that we can give on this it's, we are failing to solve climate change and we need a multitude of solutions to go on and solve climate change. We as Mitra Chem cannot do all of the solutions. There are many companies that need to be born to solve climate change and this is our contribution is by bringing more safer, cheaper, more sustainable materials manufactured in the US to the American grid, to the American roads, to the American industry, battery industry.
Chris Wedding:
We're going to go way into the details later on the company. Let's back up a little bit and ask you a question about beliefs. CEOs are leaders of culture and setting the vision and so forth. The question is along the lines of, what is something that you strongly believe in? It can be company related, it can be broader than company, which you bring in to company. Tell us about a conviction, if you will, Vivas.
Vivas Kumar:
One of the most important parts of our culture that I harp on every single minute of every single day is the importance of feedback. The most effective way in which feedback is modeled in any group, whether it be a professional group or even in your life outside of work is you describe an action, you describe the impact that action had on you, and you describe a behavior change. This is the formula for how to effectively, non-emotionally convey feedback.
Anybody can give anybody feedback. I'm constantly soliciting feedback from my team members. I don't really care about titles as much as I care about the quality of the feedback that's coming to me. So, a junior engineer with a month of work experience is as qualified to give me feedback as my co-founders.
Now, one of the reasons why this is so important and I harp on it so much is because I believe most workplaces fail at providing a space for their people to give effective feedback. There are hierarchical concerns, egotistical concerns, override the need to give effective feedback and when we think about building a company from a first principle standpoint, I'm an engineer, we use first principles to solve any engineering problem. And building a company is pretty similar in terms of putting together effective teams, creating the environment to communicate and make decisions effectively across an organization.
07:40
Many of the places where I have previously been involved with in my life had feedback flowing in only one direction, had feedback being discussed in venues where they were not being delivered to the person who needed to hear it the most. I totally do not believe that that is the way to build a long-term sustainable and effective company.
Chris Wedding:
I’m just taking notes as you’re talking. There’s a saying or something that says, feedback is just data. It doesn't have to be personal. I'm clearly guilty of making feedback personal, especially in the past, maybe a little bit today, but usually it's data. The other is to think about, some listeners have read like Ray Dalio's book, Principles, where they talk about this candor and it's similar to what you describe here. But most organizations and maybe most organizations in the US—
Vivas Kumar:
I think Ray takes it to the extreme a little bit. I mean, he goes into so much detail about exactly how feedback is delivered within Bridgewater and I think that if you were to take somebody outside of Bridgewater and put them to Bridgewater, they're going to feel culture shock immediately.
Chris Wedding:
Oh, yeah, I agree.
Vivas Kumar:
But in the long-term, the results are self-evident. So, in the industry that he's chosen, Ray is one of the most successful people out there.
Chris Wedding:
Sure, yeah.
Vivas Kumar:
This first principle’s approach of bringing feedback to the forefront of the organization, it's translatable beyond hedge funds.
Chris Wedding:
Oh, sure, yeah, but I think where I was going was, it is a big culture shock to be that candid. Maybe I haven't worked too much outside of the US, but I feel like in the US, especially perhaps, we're less prone to give honest feedback in both directions. Perhaps in another culture is where, whether it's the objectivity or it's the ability to tolerate some, I'm not saying confrontation, but uncomfortable discussions.
I know that among the CEO peer group we have at Entrepreneurs for Impact, members sometimes will say, “Gosh, I got the feedback from my team, but it's too nice. Like I'm not that good.” How do we encourage, how do we give permission to the team to give both constructive and positive?
Vivas Kumar:
There's always an opportunity for constructive feedback and here's the analogy that I draw. Usain Bolt, the fastest human being in recorded human history, even Usain Bolt has a coach. Even he needs feedback to be delivered on his performance to him. So, if Usain Bolt can have a coach, if Usain Bolt can take constructive feedback, then any one of us can too, in our quest to be the best at what we are doing.
10:45
Chris Wedding:
I agree with that and I was just listening to a podcast this morning. It was Impact Theory and they were drawing the analogy of those who come from being involved in sports, it's obvious. Your coach says, “No, if you want to do the following, move your leg here, hold your arm there,” but somehow that feels different when it's our performance or our brain or our communication. But it doesn't have to be, I guess, is the point here.
Vivas Kumar:
And that's the other issue, it's feedback has to be delivered in a way in which it is focused on action impact and not focused on the person itself. I mean, let's say I'm delivering feedback to you, Chris, about the impact that your shirt is having on me, and I were to say to you, “Hey, Chris, you suck,” what does that actually do? The next level is, “Hey Chris, you wore a blue shirt and you suck because of it,”
I mean, that's just too personal, but if I say to you, “Hey Chris, you wore a blue shirt and the impact it's having on me is, blue is hurting my eyes because of the lighting. Let me change my location. If you change your location, we can have a more effective conversation,” we're getting towards identifying a specific action, the impact and the mitigation right there. It’s not all about how you suck for making the decision that you made. You made a decision based on the data that you had and I'm simply introducing more data so that you can make a better decision in a way that benefits both of us.
Chris Wedding:
Plus, the shirt is so soft I just had to wear it.
Vivas Kumar:
Well, I too am wearing a blue shirt right now. I'm being a little facetious.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I got it.
Vivas Kumar:
You get the point that I'm making over here?
Chris Wedding:
Of course, man.
Vivas Kumar:
This manifests every single day. I mean, every interaction, the message that's being delivered, the medium through which it's being delivered, the tone of the message, the pacing of the words you use, all of these subliminal parts of communication have more of an impact than the actual words that you are using. For most groups, they're just so focused on getting the work done that they allow the depth of the stress of some of these interactions to compound over time, which ultimately leads to dissatisfaction that breaks up groups or has people leaving their jobs.
People don't leave jobs. People leave bad management or people leave bad teams. They don't leave the company and the only way to avert a bad job or a bad team is to constantly have feedback loops.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, frequent.
Vivas Kumar:
Exactly.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, I think just one last icing on this delicious feedback cake here is, it's like feedback is not about identity, it's about a situation or an action. That separation is huge.
13:27
Speaking of which, the other meta question I ask folks, it's about growth mindset. We're all learning and improving, we hope. Can you talk about maybe a mistake you've made in starting, growing Mitra or other entrepreneurial decisions in the past? What you've learned from that? How it influences your day-to-day, month-to-month management in this venture?
Vivas Kumar:
One of the biggest mistakes I think I made at Mitra Chem in the very beginning was, this is going to sound so cliche, but I didn't know what I didn't know. The problems that I was solving the most in the beginning of the business were all of the problems that I did not necessarily have the skills to do.
For example, I'm an engineer, I want to focus on products and yet I was responsible for setting up HR, setting up finance, working with legal, working on accounting, making board decks for the first time. What I found out over time was, it is okay if I'm not good at doing all of these things.
Chris Wedding:
Amen.
Vivas Kumar:
I need to find people to surround myself with who are better at doing these things than I am, and then empowering them to go on and do what they're best at doing. And so, as I go back to the beginning of Mitra Chem, I wish earlier in the business, I had been honest to myself and to my co-founders about what are the things that I am good at doing and just doing those. Taking the things that the business needs to succeed that I may not necessarily be the best place to do and hiring great talent who I trust implicitly to go and run those parts of the business for me.
Chris Wedding:
Right on. I think it's liberating. It's liberating to just be like, “I don't know slash I'm not the best, dot, dot, dot.” Okay, well, good. Now what? And you said, “Well, hire the person where that is their fill in the blank, zone of genius, et cetera.” Cool. I like that. Okay, let's go back to Mitra Chem. Why start it? What's the origin story here?
Vivas Kumar:
Well, the origin story was, like you pointed out, I was a senior manager for battery materials at Tesla and there were several issues I saw with the battery industry during that time. There's a huge supply chain underlying the growth of electric vehicles and energy storage systems that is severely under invested and has been at times tremendously non-innovative.
So much focus has been paid on auto OEMs and energy storage providers going electric and integrating solar and wind with batteries respectively. But a commensurate level of interest has not been paid to all of the specialty chemicals that are needed to manufacture these batteries at scale.
If we think about the current geopolitics of the world -- As you pointed out, I speak some Mandarin because I grew up in Singapore. I've been to China many times and I've done lots of deals with Chinese industry. But the problem with today's industry is too much of the battery supply chain originates in China. Even putting aside the geopolitics, as a former sourcing manager, I'll tell you, you never want to be dependent on one company, one geography, one logistics route—
16:53
Chris Wedding:
So true.
Vivas Kumar:
…for your materials when you're building a product. Because all it takes is one argument between politicians, one natural disaster, one more COVID lockdown in China for the supply chain to have further difficulties. And so, that's why we have to build the supply chain. We have to build more of the supply chain outside of China to give geographic diversification and supply chain security for all of those electric vehicles to be on the road and all of those batteries to be on the grid, so that we can integrate more renewables and continue our fight against climate change.
Now, Tesla was doing its part while I was there. Tesla continues to do so and I'm very proud of my former coworkers who are still there and pushing forward this mission. But the scope and scale of the problems are so huge that only one company cannot be going out and solving them, even within the battery supply chain. We need tens of new companies to succeed, to build that supply chain in order to meet all of the electrification goals that the auto OEMs and the grid developers have.
And so, that's why I went out and started the company. It's because I knew that this is a once in a generation challenge to build the platform technologies like batteries that solve climate change. And that in the absence of seeing other people going and doing it at the scale that I thought it should have been done, I really should be going and putting my efforts where my mouth was.
Chris Wedding:
Well said. Back to the beginning of that, not just as someone involved in sourcing billions of dollars for Tesla, but as an engineer, you would never design some product, some system with single point of failure, just great risk in one thing going wrong. Can you talk about how what you're doing relates to the DOE? I'm not sure it's an initiative, but I think last summer they launched some sort of blueprint that ties national security and lithium primarily. I mean, it's other minerals, metals besides lithium. Clearly, what you're doing addresses, responds to that recognition by DOE, I believe, right?
Vivas Kumar:
It’s a lithium-ion battery because it uses lithium and I think that the DOE's national blueprint went a very long way in showing that there's significant understanding at the federal level in a way that there has not yet been before around the importance and criticality of building a supply chain around lithium-ion batteries.
What that report also showed was beyond lithium, we need to have cathodes and anodes, nickel and cobalt, iron and phosphate, manganese, battery cell manufacturing, battery pack manufacturing. All of the various steps of the supply chain also need new companies to be born and new companies to be built.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, amen.
Vivas Kumar:
So, what we're doing very much dovetails into what the DOE has been saying in the US.
Chris Wedding:
True. For sure.
20:01
Vivas Kumar:
And beyond the DOE, many governments in the world right now are seeing the tremendous value creation and job creation opportunity that the battery supply chain gives them as the world moves towards mass electrification. As an entrepreneur, you're always thinking about many different types of risk and the market risk that we have is so low because people want electric cars. People want cleaner and cheaper sources of electricity.
The hockey stick growth in electrification makes it such that those of us who are in this industry, we need to focus on solving execution risk. We need to focus on solving supply risk and the biggest risk that I'm trying to solve for, Chris, is actually talent risk. The pool of people in the world who have had deep experiences in batteries is quite limited as compared to how many people we need solving these problems.
So, a push for diversity in our industry goes around bringing people, engineers, scientists, technologists, business people who have never been involved in the battery industry into our industry so that the electrification agenda isn't stopped by a lack of talent. When you throw great talent at a problem, the problem will be solved and identifying talent, to me, is a bigger concern than identifying another lithium source.
Chris Wedding:
I like how you phrased that. Let me ask one level deeper, I guess. When you talk about the talent, to what degree do you feel like it's more experienced folks switching careers, switching industries? Or is it more the 20 somethings coming out of undergrad or grad that you think the battery industry needs to grab, to nourish, to evolve into future leaders in this space?
Vivas Kumar:
You need a combination of both. My parents have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years. They're the ones who pushed me into green energy as an industry choice and I think about the fact that they've built multi-billion-dollar projects in their career. There's a translatable skill set from that industry to a specialty chemicals industry like one.
Chris Wedding:
It sure is.
Vivas Kumar:
What are we trying to do? We're trying to build a large-scale manufacturing plant that prioritizes safety and that can have output commensurate to a customer's need while integrating a difficult logistics value chain and chemistry at scale. This is a problem that has been solved in other industries. This is a type of thinking that has been used to industrialize other industries that we now need to bring into ours.
And so, with open arms, I welcome anybody to come and work with us and work within the industry to solve these problems. All you need is a recognition of the dire situation we're in from climate change and an excitement around electrification. And if you've got those elements, plus a strong problem-solving mind, you can learn the ropes of the battery industry and you can do well.
So, I spend a lot of my time right now on recruiting talent to bring in that diversity of thought and those experiences from other industries into the battery industry, knowing that we can empower them to go out and solve these other problems like where do we get more lithium?
23:25
Chris Wedding:
Perfect. Yeah, I think many listeners, if they knew you were going to raise the top risk in your business, they probably would not have guessed talent to be that risk. They probably would have thought of some sort of tech or scientific risk. Can you talk about the origin of the tech? How do you describe tech risk timing to get to market where this becomes a, not so much project finance, but mainstream commercial rate financed products?
Vivas Kumar:
Lithium-ion batteries have been commercialized now for 30 years. Starting first with the Sony Walkman in 1991, all the way through laptops, various types of EVs, energy storage systems, power tools, off-grid devices. So, the technology readiness level of lithium-ion batteries is extremely high.
Chris Wedding:
For sure.
Vivas Kumar:
I mean, it's the highest it can go. The technology readiness level of the types of cathodes that we are manufacturing as our first product is very high. I mean, what we are getting from our lab today is comparable to the cathodes that you would see in a made in China Model 3. So, the technology readiness risk level of our first product is quite low. We're using that as the basis to go on and do other types of products that have a little bit more technology risk embedded in them.
What I find more fascinating to talk about actually is, I mentioned goal number three for us was to reduce the time to market for a battery materials product, to bring a design build test cycle of 18 months down to one month or less. The core work underlying this thinking was done by my two co-founders, Chiru Gopal and Professor Will Chueh from Stanford University. They spent the last 10 years designing a set of machine learning algorithms to significantly speed up the lifetime forecasting, design of experiments, synthesis optimization, multiple different aspects related to the design-build test cycle. Aggregating the data sets to do so, aggregating the scientific hypotheses to do so, and perfecting these algorithms.
And so, Will Chueh wrote a publicly available paper that was the seminal paper that kicked off the whole field of machine learning-enabled new battery materials discovery and optimization. That’s when we knew that this technology was ready for the prime time, that it could be used for us to pursue commercial hypotheses and to create battery materials products that could go into vehicles on the road and into batteries that are powering the grid.
Chris Wedding:
Would you say that the iron-based cathode is the only battery innovation that Mitra Chem is after or it's the first? I heard you describe something about you are the first versus other a little more innovative tech solutions in the battery space coming. Say more about that.
Vivas Kumar:
Going after cathodes and going after iron-based cathodes is our first product category. This being a hardware business, it's still going to take us a few years to execute all the way on the various product development cycles to bring tens of thousands of tons of this material out to the market.
26:32
The reason why we're going after cathodes is because it's the most expensive part of the battery cell. It can be one of the higher margin steps and it is also the part of the battery that has a significant impact on the metrics that matter the most when measuring battery performance, cost, energy density, cycle life and safety.
Now, once we get through to a certain point, optimizing the cathode for customer driven needs, then we can turn our attention to other battery materials. Battery cells are a system comprised of multiple types of materials like cathodes, electrolytes, separators, anodes. Even the physical design of the battery cell matters a lot in terms of the overall performance of the system. An optimization across every single one of these parts or materials is what will ultimately result in the exponential improvement of the battery system.
Chris Wedding:
You've mentioned both use cases for electric vehicles and for stationary use cases powering the grid. How do you think about what's first, what's next, how they relate and/or compete with each other for you-all’s products?
Vivas Kumar:
We're finding that we're getting interest from both segments of the market, electric vehicles and energy storage. What's first for us is going to be to deliver a product that can power battery cells with iron-based cathodes at or better than today's performance. Start with that as our base. Then move on to creating an iron-based cathode powder that can have a higher energy density than today's iron-based cathode powders.
Now, why does that matter? What we are competing against the most right now is battery packs with cells that are nickel rich. If we can improve the energy density of iron-based cathodes at the pack level, we can beat the performance of nickel rich batteries. We can do that also while having a safer battery cell design.
Nickel rich batteries in general, due to the crystal structure, the physics, have a higher probability of a catastrophic fire event than an iron rich battery. We can also more likely build an iron-based battery or an iron rich battery with a supply chain with fewer breakpoints than a nickel-rich battery.
So, that's the reason why we chose to go after iron rich. That's the reason why we chose to focus so much on improving energy density and the customers that we're in conversation with have recognized the value and the effort and are coming to us and saying, “Let’s work together.”
It’s not like sales in this industry happened overnight. There's a technical sales process that happens that lasts a couple of years. There's a qualification, a verification, a validation process. The technical teams from our customers are pretty tightly integrated with our technical team as we go through the product development and design cycle. We're lucky to already have some great customers who are on that journey with us.
Chris Wedding:
In comparing nickel rich versus iron rich batteries, you mentioned safety, clearly a big deal. How about from a cost perspective, maybe you said this just to confirm, iron rich cathodes versus nickel rich iron is cheaper, I guess?
30:03
Vivas Kumar:
Yeah, the input materials are cheaper and as a result, the iron rich cathodes have generally been cheaper.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Okay. I think these are unrelated, but let's just maybe draw the connection. Form Energy, clearly different use cases, long duration, their battery maybe is iron based, very different chemistries, I'm sure. Should the listener draw any conclusions around, “Oh, well, gosh, iron is maybe not the new lithium, but iron is much more important broadly in energy storage than we had thought three years ago,”?
Vivas Kumar:
That is exactly the conclusion. Iron is a material of choice to enable electrification is very important. Now, when we think about a company like Form Energy, this goes back to my point earlier of many companies will be needed to solve the challenges that we have towards climate change. And even within the segments of the market that use lithium-ion batteries, or just batteries as an energy storage platform technology, there are many segments that each have their own unique needs.
And so, Form is going after a very different problem than us. Their CEO and I were both at Tesla at the same time and I mean, this shows the value of networks, so many people who work with the Model 3 program together. The diaspora is just tremendous in terms of how many of us became founders and CEOs of our own companies, trying to solve issues within the battery supply chain or trying to solve just climate change problems in general.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. Is this the Tesla mafia, Vivas?
Vivas Kumar:
Well, if you draw the line 10 years out, I'm really hoping that we will be at the forefront of having deployed solutions towards mitigating climate change in a way that 10X is the impact of the company where we all met.
Chris Wedding:
I love it. One of the questions, comparing the EV market versus the stationary, I'm not the expert, but my understanding is that the EV market far larger and it's almost like what happens in the EV market determines maybe tech, but certainly pricing available to make stationary storage use cases for the power grid more feasible. Does that feel true for you all or less true?
Vivas Kumar:
So, that feels very true and the reason is because the consumer has been able to relate to electric vehicles more, and the investments in electric vehicle have generally been higher. As a result, they have had more priority in the battery supply chain. Much of the battery supply chain buildup has been associated with the electric vehicle buildup, but the grid is just as important. Deploying clean energy assets on the grid is very important as well, and the grid consumption of batteries is also rising at a double-digit percentage compounded annual growth every year in every major developed market at this point.
32:55
So, the energy storage solutions, the batteries deployed for energy storage solutions have been maybe de-prioritized, it's kind of a strong word, but I'll say it, over the last several years in favor of electric vehicles and the battery supply chain buildup, but the tide is shifting.
Grid deployers are looking very closely at how they can also make their contribution towards building the supply chain, and that's why we are now working with both types of companies. Luckily, it's not a massive difference in product category. Batteries as a platform technology, their job is to store energy and charge and discharge electricity effectively. The applications that you build on top of it for electric vehicles or energy storage, it can be different and tailored.
Chris Wedding:
Let's switch to one maybe final question on Mitra Chem, and then we'll go to questions about you, your path or your habits and such. To get to the place you're going requires a lot of outside capital. You guys have been successful in attracting that capital, smart investors. Maybe is there a lesson or two you would draw from why your capital raising has worked and maybe how you decided on the best investment partners to realize this dream?
Vivas Kumar:
Well, I'm very blessed to have wonderful investors backing us. We had a $20 million funding round about 13 months ago, led by Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital. One of the reasons why he was so interested in this business is because he had had a lot of experience in semiconductors and biotechnology. And saw that many of the platformization approaches from there were relatable to the battery industry’s growth.
He was looking to play his role within climate change as well. He had been a long-time public advocate of electric vehicles. And so, there was a lot to relate on and the rest of our investor group that came together bring a cross section of experience and networks within the energy industry, energy policy, automotive OEMs, and just general business building.
We should never overlook the importance of having people behind you who have also gone through the journey of building a business. And luckily, several of our investors have built and exited many successful energy businesses themselves. When it comes to capital raising, I think we happen to be the right team with the right experiences and batteries at the right time when the battery supply chain is in dire need of new companies, new capacity and new innovation.
And so, identifying that problem and articulating why we were so poised to solve that problem, so I think what got our group of investors excited and behind us. I got to say one last thing about this, which is finding investors who are not in it just to make a quick buck and who are not in it just to find a quick multiple from one round to another, it's so important for a hard tech business like ours. The people who are backing us, I mean, these are people with long range vision. They know that to build a successful company of the type that we are trying to build, to solve the problems of the scale that we are trying to solve, success is measured in decades, not in months and not in years.
Chris Wedding:
I think that listeners should take a lot from what you just described. Clearly, timing is important. We know team is important. Also, not looking for any capital, lots of capital out there. A little more strict on how they underwrite this second, but I think you said it well that finding folks with sector expertise, but also those who have built and sold businesses before, pretty relevant. And how patient are they? How well does their vision match up with your timeline? Before just saying yes, that can be a major mistake in growing your company with misalignment.
37:04
Vivas Kumar:
Absolutely. I mean, when an investor signs up on the journey with you, they are with you for a while. They feel like they too have the choice of where they can deploy their capital. And so, it's a two-way street of mutual respect and mutual understanding of the importance of the problem that you're trying to solve. It is okay to have disagreements on the approach to solving that problem. As a matter of fact, you want some investors who will actually push your approach and push your thinking.
I got to say, once again, we're very fortunate to have the people backing us that we do today and, in the future, to build this company, we will look for new backers as well and we'll go through the same process at that point. We'll look for values alignment. We'll look for a recognition of the importance of solving climate change and we'll look for people to bring skills that we don't necessarily have within the company today ourselves.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, it makes sense. No team can have all the expertise and perspectives they need. All right, let's do a lightning round style a little bit. We go from business to person. We are clearly people listening here, thinking about how we can also have similar impacts. Advice you might give your younger self, Vivas, to be faster, more effective and happier along this journey.
Vivas Kumar:
Actually, I would say the opposite, which is don't focus always on just getting faster and more effective.
Chris Wedding:
True. Okay.
Vivas Kumar:
It is a journey and it is enjoyable at the same time. I think when I was younger, I was way too caught up on, how can I do this faster? I was tremendously impatient and actually, the timing of everything in my life, now that I look back, it all happened for a reason. And so, I am enjoying the journey a lot more now than I did in the past.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. The positive spin, it's a marathon, not a sprint. Journey, not just the destination. Okay, cool.
Vivas Kumar:
When you're on a sprint, you can't even hear the people around you who are cheering for you like you can with a marathon. I've done both and the marathon was one of the most inspiring things I did because you have so many people there cheering you on till the very end. So, enjoy those people too. They exist. Stop and talk to them on the journey as well.
Chris Wedding:
Routines, daily, weekly, monthly, that keep you healthy, sane and focused.
39:26
Vivas Kumar:
I am a total health nut. Sleep eight hours every night, no matter what and exercise 45 minutes every day, no matter what. Those two steps, the sleeping properly and the exercising every single day are the biggest professional productivity unlock I've ever had in my life.
I also want to be doing this when I'm 100 years old. I still want to be building companies and solving engineering problems when I'm 100 years old, so I need to make it to 100 and the only way I can do this is by staying healthy.
Chris Wedding:
I love that. Yeah, there's a podcast you might know or like by Rich Roll and he's an ultra-marathon, I believe athlete and vegan, but a lot of his guests, like a recent guest was this guy, Mike, I'll get this last name wrong, but 100 years old, still runs 15 miles a week, ran a marathon at age 90. And so, part of it is this habit, this routine of running. The other is he chalks up a lot of his longevity and health to a whole food plant-based diet. Doesn’t mean we have to be 100% there, but in that direction. So, I hear you.
Vivas Kumar:
If I sat here and talked about my diet optimization, if I told you all the things I do for my health, that would be a podcast in and of its own. And a lot of CEOs out there will tell you that, their biggest productivity hack, your job as CEO is two things, making decisions and making appearances. That's it. How can you make higher quality decisions and appearances? It’s by making sure that you look and you feel good.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah. No endurance, no vitality, those things suffer greatly.
Vivas Kumar:
Yeah.
Chris Wedding:
How about a book or two or maybe a podcast listeners should pick up?
Vivas Kumar:
A book that people should pick up. So, I would say that a book that I particularly enjoyed, which is related to what we're doing in its own way is Nelson Mandela's autobiography. The reason is because it relates to climate change in that he went through a lifelong struggle and in the end, the struggle was worth it.
A lot of times as entrepreneurs, I mean, the stakes and what we go through is very different than what Nelson Mandela went through. I hope that many of you have not been imprisoned for 27 years wrongfully, but all of us are chasing a large goal that is much larger than ourselves every single day in the climate related work that we do, knowing that the eventual payoff will be something that benefits all of society.
And so, sometimes on the dark days of business building, because there are lots, I think back to the fact that the journey is long, the goals are ambitious. When we look back at the end of our lives in the same way that he did at the end of his life, we will be able to say that the struggle was worth it.
I'm not going to sit here and recommend a book about how you can develop more effective habits because there's plenty of those out there. I think this is a little bit more related to why we do what we do and what makes what we do worthwhile.
Chris Wedding:
That resonates with some prior guests who recommend biographies or autobiographies of great leaders. One thing I hear is that it puts things in perspective. As we struggle building businesses that matter, we think, “Oh damn, the book I'm reading, that person also had challenges. Probably bigger than what I'm having right now,” that perspective helps and they got through it as in like, “Look, we can get through it.”
42:59
Vivas Kumar:
But the number and severity of the challenges is so downplayed in a short historical narrative of the person. That's why you have to read the biography to understand the pain that this person felt every single day on their journey towards becoming the leader that they were.
Chris Wedding:
Yeah, it relates to something you said earlier about wanting to be solving similar challenges until you're whatever, 100. I think for myself and I've heard this from many of the climate CEOs in our peer group, it's like, what can I be doing for 40 years, for 50 years? Not what can I do for five or 10 years, sell and then dot, dot, dot. I think it's this kind of what can you do forever approach that really resonates.
Vivas Kumar:
50 years from now, I may not necessarily be working on batteries, but humans have always had an engineering challenge that they have gone after for the betterment of all of society. Going to space, getting semiconductors for the informatics and computing revolution, making better medicines.
Finding a way to improve quality of life for all human beings has been a constant thread in the profession of engineering. And once we solve climate change, there will be another problem that we as humans need to contend with that it will take great problem-solving minds to go out and solve.
Chris Wedding:
Well, I can say that I've never heard on the podcast, once we solve climate change, although I think we all believe that, that's a great sound bite for us.
Vivas Kumar:
I am an eternal optimist.
Chris Wedding:
You have to, yeah.
Vivas Kumar:
Every single time there has been for humans an extinction level threat, we have found a way to innovate around it. The most recent example of this that's relatable to some of the listeners of this podcast is a nuclear Holocaust was supposed to kill all of us off when the tensions were the highest between the US and the Soviet Union. And yet through ingenuity, we found a way to solve that problem.
It involved a combination of political and business solutions. It involved government level solutions all the way down to individual entrepreneurs. Climate change is that level of problem that we need to solve and then there will be something else, and when that something else happens, I believe in the talent that we have as humanity to go out and solve it.
Chris Wedding:
Hear, hear. How about some parting words, Vivas? Are there particular kinds of people or businesses or whatnot that you want to hear from?
45:33
Vivas Kumar:
I would really love to keep hearing from people who are working on what I call the invisible technologies, which is the technologies that are not visible to the human eye, but that have a significant impact on how we live our lives. This is why I love learning about the grid and learning about what goes inside of a vehicle because one powers our life, the other gets us from point A to point B. But I think the average person doesn't understand the trillions of dollars and the hundreds of millions of people who have been involved in getting us to this point with these technologies.
Chris Wedding:
Well said, good close, love the eternal optimism. We're rooting for you-all’s success at Mitra Chem and I hope folks come find you, Vivas.
Vivas Kumar:
Well, thank you. If you guys want to find me, just find me on LinkedIn, Vivas Kumar, or find us at www.mitrachem.com.
Chris Wedding:
Perfect. Talk to you soon.
Vivas Kumar:
Thank you, Chris.
Chris Wedding:
Thank you so much for listening. Seriously, the world needs you, and I know your time is super valuable. If you want more content like this, please subscribe to our weekly newsletter at entrepreneursforimpact.com. If you liked this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. I read every single one, I promise. These reviews are the number one way to draw more attention to the world-changing climate CEOs and investors that I am lucky enough to be interviewing on the show. And each month I pick one listener review for a one-on-one brainstorming call with me. Who knows what can come of those?
47:13
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