Summary

BatteryBits interviewed Nicholas Perkins, a senior battery engineer at Form Energy based in Somerville, Massachusetts to talk about the world of batteries, his experiences in the battery industry, the importance of having a motivated team, and the challenges and opportunities associated with managing a team in a battery startup as compared to an established company.

Article Snapshot

• If you want to ensure that you have a challenging problem to work on in the next 20 years related to energy, then batteries are what you need to work on.
• Work for a company with a mission that keeps you motivated to get out of bed in the morning and make the world a better place.
• As you start your journey in the battery industry, be a great team member, and tell a convincing story as to why you want to be working on one of the harder technical problems of our generation.

Personal Experience

How did you get into the world of batteries?

In 2013, when the Tesla Model S had just launched, JB Straubel visited one of our energy engineering classes. He said that the thing that was limiting the adoption of electric vehicles was always the battery, primarily due to its cost, performance, and ability to produce it worldwide. He said if you wanted to ensure that you would have a challenging problem to work on in the next 20 years related to energy, then batteries are what you need to work on. After that, Dr. Christine Ho at Imprint Energy took a chance on me after my sophomore year and gave me an internship at Imprint, in Alameda. She was really instrumental in teaching me about the world of batteries and the skills I would need. Moreover, when the opportunity came up at QuantumScape to work on different chemistry, I thought I could learn from some of the great minds, like Dr. Tim Holme, the CTO of the company. He taught me not only about batteries but what other skills can be applied to batteries, such as machine learning. Also, when I came back to Stanford to do a 5th year Masters, I had the opportunity to work with Dr. William Chueh for a year in his lab to help assemble a fast charging setup and optimize fast charge profiles with no a priori knowledge of the existing cell.

After graduating, I was debating between going for a Ph.D. vs. joining Tesla as a full-time employee, and Tesla seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I joined right around when the Model 3 was beginning production. I got an opportunity for an adventure like working at the Gigafactory on battery ramp up and pushing software for cars about to be shipped, all while being able to think about the cell development path within Tesla. I learned a lot and was presented with a lot of challenges but at the end of the day, I really wanted to work in a small team. Being part of a 70 person team within a 35,000–50,000 person company really takes a lot of personality out of the work. You become really attracted to the Tesla mission and everyone is a disciple of that mission but you can sort of lose yourself in that mission. So I started reevaluating that there must be other technical problems to work on at smaller companies where I might be able to make a large impact. I then made the difficult but necessary decision to move to Form Energy in the Spring of 2019 to move from understanding electric vehicles to understanding energy storage for the grid. I really believe in Form Energy’s mission, the team and its been really fun working with them.

Battery Technology

The way batteries operate in electric vehicles vs. on the grid is quite different. How was that transition for you?

Tesla has already answered the question of whether or not electric vehicles can work. So at this point, it is really a matter of let’s go execute — let’s lower the cost of manufacturing for Li-ion, let’s build more factories around the world, let’s strengthen our supply chain, let’s continue vertical integration of electric vehicles with storage and production. There are still some technical questions remaining, about how to make things cheaper and how to improve the performance using lower-cost materials.

But when I went to Form, we had a larger market, being the grid, and we knew we needed to develop a product that would fit that market. Everything else was more or less an open question, such as where do we put the batteries? What do they look like? What will be the final chemistry? And what are the biggest technical milestones? Li-ion was designed and proven to work in the 1980s and I didn’t have much of a say in making that chemistry happen or in making the cylindrical cell. But hopefully, with Form’s technology, I can help bring the product into reality. It was more the timeline and maturity of the technology that attracted me to it and not necessarily the market or the application.

Several battery startups like QuantumScape are growing very rapidly right now. What do you think are some of the secrets to success when it comes to new battery startups?

I think every company needs to understand what level of technology they need to have for people to give them money, but it also needs to think about what interests the talented people who work in their company. QuantumScape was pretty secretive for a long time, working as a stealth mode startup because they knew the technical challenge ahead of them. But at the point when they started to be a bit more public, they started to bring on the ability to get some momentum, money, and attention. I think a lot more people are making that consideration about how to end up working for QuantumScape rather than Tesla. Tesla had a slightly different mission, they were pretty open with what their strategy was the entire time. They challenge people to think differently and consider what problems are people ignoring and what sort of solutions are being overlooked. Batteries have always been challenging where you have to keep your work a secret but Mateo Jaramillo, the cofounder of Form Energy, tells a really convincing story about where the world is going in terms of energy storage, the falling price point of renewables, and where our technology fits into the puzzle.

Looking at the various battery chemistries that were part of the different companies that you worked in, which chemistry do you think is the most promising going forward?

I think the adoption of Si into Li-ion is really promising. Sila has done a great job on that. Tesla and Panasonic have worked to bring that into the market, and their successes will dictate where electric vehicles fall on the price point. Li-ion solves a lot of what the world needs, but I’m also really excited to see the first electric vehicle packed and built entirely with lithium metal cells. That would be a game-changer for how we think about transportation, and starting to replace some of the applications that are harder to be electrified, like aviation, and heavy machinery. Li metal has some pretty serious power density and could really be the solution there. But in my opinion, the Si mix with lithium-ion will be the technology that will allow everyone to own an electrical vehicle in the future. Li-ion is going to saturate the market which it is best for, but the world is really starting to think about long-term grid-scale energy storage. Form Energy comes into that with a different promise where it’s working on the scale required for utility storage and so there will be plenty of markets left for us.

On grid-scale energy storage, what are some of the promising energy storage technologies, not necessarily electrochemical?

For most non-electrochemical energy storage technologies for the grid-scale, the question is what is the capital cost? Without naming any competitors, they all have cheap energy storage materials, whether that is something that stores heat, water, or potential energy, but they have some pretty capital intensive pieces of equipment to do that transformation from stored energy to electricity, such as heat exchanger, pump, turbines, cranes, etc.

Having worked at both startups and big companies, how was your experience different between the two and what do you think are some of the things that each of them are good at?

Small companies move fast as they can easily switch around and work with low inertia. I think a lot of the best technology leaders come from small companies and it’s because they are exposed to a wide variety of problems and they are used to finding innovative solutions. Big companies are good at fostering strong cultures and at applying expertise. People that are subject matter experts tend to exist at big companies as they can afford to focus on one thing. The support system at big companies, their ability to build supply chains and to build organizations that support their company is something that is really taxing to develop for a small company.

Managing a Battery Team

What are your thoughts about management at small vs. big companies?

I think that larger companies do a better job of splitting responsibility between the decision-makers and people that are able to support the decision-making process. Separating these two groups can lead to more efficient decision-making. In a small company, you have talented folks who are often very opinionated, and it can be harder to come to a consensus. When building out a team to solve tough technical problems we can think about it as solving a puzzle: the edge pieces form your founding team. To turn a complex idea into a real product, those people need to be there to identify the problems and set the vision, you can’t start a puzzle or understand where to go without them. After that, you work to add smart people into the mix that fit with those edges to finish the puzzle.

What do you think is the biggest challenge of managing a team in a small company?

A lot of battery companies are full of people who were the smartest kids in their high schools and the smartest in their undergrad or grad programs. Now if you hire these people, you’re never gonna build consensus and you’re never going to get 100% of people to agree on something. So learning how to disagree with each other is a big challenge and I think that’s something I was not trained on. I believe it’s a really important aspect of teamwork and a lot of people at Form are working to teach us that message.

How do you propose to resolve the issue with disagreements within a team?

When forming teams, make sure to give them really clear vision and to give them the skills to understand what questions are worth answering and what disagreements are worth shelving. Build a team with members that trust each other so even when they do disagree, everyone understands that we all are trying to be part of the solution.

What roles can team managers play to ease disagreements?

Sometimes you just need to take a step back. One of the most important responsibilities of a manager is not to do anything, but to think about the “why” question. They should not be the person saying “these are the temperature ranges that I want to test our battery at” but rather say “we want to understand the kinetic performance of our cell because it matters for this reason”. You should then empower your team to solve those problems and when they come to a disagreement, it is your responsibility as a manager to guide them on the path forward.

Advice

What are some of the key elements that you consider when looking for a job?

The mission of the company is really important to me. Moving from Tesla to Form Energy, I did not have to sacrifice on the mission. It is just as ambitious and unifying and keeps you motivated to get out of bed in the morning to build energy storage for a better world or to accelerate the world’s transition to renewable energy. I hope to never work at a company without a clear mission that resonates with me and the things that are important to me. I also care about the quality of the team, having both world-class talent and world-class people. I have been really lucky to always work in companies that have had that. And when I was deciding what I wanted my work relationship to be, I knew I was going to be spending a major proportion of my time at work and not spending as much time with my family or seeing my friends. So I made a choice to find a team that felt like family and friends. Form has really welcomed me with open arms, and it’s made moving from California to the east coast a lot easier.

What is one piece of advice that you would give to a team manager?

Understanding the “why” is more important than the “what”. Irrespective of whatever team you are working in, when you seek to understand what is important to the team and why they are doing things, it makes it really easy to understand what they are doing.

What is one piece of advice that you would give to someone who is looking to start a battery company?

If they are looking to start a battery company, they are already working on a problem that is worth solving. I think you should be able to tell a really good story of why you are trying to convince people to sacrifice some part of themselves to go with you on this journey. If you do a good job at that, you will be successful.

What is one piece of advice that you would give to someone who is starting fresh in the battery industry?

Be a clear communicator of your ideas and your values, be aware of what you are good/bad at, and be comfortable asking for help so you can improve.

What invention in the battery industry do you hope materializes within your lifetime?

Form’s battery! If we can make renewable energy storage and a 100% green electric grid a reality within my lifetime, I will feel like I have lived a meaningful life. If Form specifically can build energy storage that comes at a price point where it is economically feasible all around the world and allows for renewable energy to be stored, I will be very happy.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Tim Suen, Linda Jing, Katherine He, Eric Zheng for reviewing portions of the draft of this article and providing helpful feedback.

Nick Perkins is a senior battery engineer, working on optimizing the performance of Form Energy’s low-cost energy storage solution. Originally from Southern California, you can often find him outside, exploring his new home of Somerville, with his partner Alex. Feel free to connect and chat batteries with him here.

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