The #MiamiTech Pod
The #MiamiTech Pod
From Winning 7 Formula 1 Championships To 3D Printing Batteries
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A single “no” can end a career plan or it can light the fuse. Our first guest post-relaunch is a Miami native and co-founder of Material who proves what persistence looks like: he gets shut down at Honda, quits days later, sells nearly everything he owns, moves to the UK, and fights through sponsorship rejections until Mercedes Formula One finally says yes.
We unpack what it’s actually like to design at the highest level and why elite motorsport engineering culture feels so different from the rest of industry. From rear wings to gearboxes, he shares how fast you’re expected to become an expert, what seven world championships teach you about process and pressure, and how COVID ultimately pulls him back home. Then we shift to Rivian, where remote teams, rapid hiring, and thin infrastructure create a different kind of anxiety that many startup builders will recognize.
The conversation turns into hard tech and the future of energy storage. Material is developing a multimaterial 3D printer that can print batteries in any size and shape, not just a cylinder or pouch. We dig into conformal batteries, pack-level energy density, drone battery packs for defense applications, wearables and smart glasses, and why the “manufacturing layer” of batteries may be the biggest untapped lever. We also talk funding, including a $7.1M seed round and Air Force SBIR work, plus the very specific engineers they’re hiring to build a “factory in a box.”
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Miami Tech Podcast Relaunch
SPEAKER_01We're back. I'm excited to announce the return of the Miami Tech Mod. For all the loyalist members that I've run into over the last year and a half, your peer permission worked. You'll notice that I'm a few co-ho short, Will's heads down building digitoys. Ryan has moved up to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he accepted a role at his mama moderate UVA as head of student entrepreneurship. And Caesar recently accepted a role at an Roman on their government relations team. I'm proud of the three of them, and I will miss them dearly. But in the meantime, I'll carry on the torch. I'm excited to continue to bring you the stories of local founders, tech professionals, and investors that are building and shaping the future of Miami Tech. I hope you'll listen in.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for having me.
A Childhood Dream Of Race Cars
SPEAKER_01Thanks. I feel like it's only fitting as we relaunch the podcast to have a Miami native as our first guest, which I'm very excited about. And uh you are now the co-founder of Material, which I'm excited to kind of dive into. But as I was digging into your background, which is fascinating, I there were so many things about your path that I think are important for our listeners to know and to just hear your journey. And I felt like so many times in your career you were just really persistent when you were told no, and you just, you know, didn't take that for an answer. And that's a kind of a sign of a great founder. So I would love to kind of have a start at the beginning of your career. Because I believe you kind of set one of your career goals around like eight years old. Is that correct?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, that's definitely correct. Um really, I so I grew up in South Florida, as you know. Um some of my earliest days that I remember were actually spent around Homestead Miami Speedway. So I was kind of enthralled with cars. And uh very early age, I basically said, like, I want to design race cars. You know, it was it was yeah, probably eight or nine years old. And pretty quickly that kind of turned me towards Formula One. Uh it was kind of uh back in the day, there's a uh channel on TV called Speed Vision where uh I'd end up, I don't know, I wasn't a good sleeper when I was a child, so I'd wake up in the middle of the night, turn on the television, and I see race cars at like three or four in the morning. It took me a long time to realize that they were just on the other side of the world, uh, and that was live, and I was just, you know, uh very excited and watching that. So Formula One was like a goal of mine from an early age, and it was kind of dovetailed by really Homestead Miami Speedway being um built in the early 90s and you know, me going there so frequently.
SPEAKER_01And it was your dad who kind of would you say got you into yeah.
SPEAKER_00So he was a track photographer at at Homestead, um, really from its inception until probably like mid-2000s. Um, so he'd go down there all the time. There'd be testing, uh, actual races, everything in between. And uh so yeah, I'd kind of like on the day, take your son to work day type thing, he'd take me down there, and I'd basically sit in the car and just kind of wait. Uh, but occasionally I'd hop out in the paddock and I'd see like Michael Andretti or Al Anser Jr., these indie car legends, and and uh get to see the cars and just kind of like poke around. And you know, as a kid, that's like the coolest thing, you know. They're so loud, right? It's so like absurdly loud, but I was just really excited by like how fast and amazing they were. And um basically I wanted to be a race car driver. I was like, dad, I don't want to be a race car driver. And uh he he said that you know that was a very expensive proposition for the family. Um, but he said, you know, pretty early, like, why don't you just take up engineering and then you can design a race car? So that's kind of what uh changed my path there at an early age, and I really just stuck with it the whole time.
SPEAKER_01And then so you went to UM for mechanical engineering?
SPEAKER_00That's right. I did undergrad at UM uh mechanical engineering. I graduated in 2010. And uh so that was right after the financial crisis. I think it was kind of in the middle of it, honestly, for us as students. So when I was like trying to get internships, let's say 2008, 2009, there's nothing uh to be had in the auto industry. But um yeah, I just kind of kept sending those resumes out and uh kept having this dream of designing cars or you know, race cars at some point and and kind of persevered through it. And I was able to get a job. My first job actually wasn't until January 2011. You can see how long it took for the economy to kind of re rebound uh for with Honda RD. So I ended up moving to uh outside of Columbus, Ohio for that first job.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so Miami boy in Ohio.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Culture shock a bit.
SPEAKER_00I remember getting like I don't know if it was for my recruit the recruiting trip. I did like an interview trip, but it could have been when I finally moved there.
SPEAKER_01In January of all months. January.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I show up and the snow is at my hip, and you know, I'm six feet tall, oh six one, and and like at my hip. So you can imagine like how high the snow is, freezing. And I was like, this is not what I signed up for, you know. Learning how to drive in the snow, that was a that was a new experience. I'd never done that before.
Honda Engines And The F1 Plan
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah. I yeah, I the only places outside of Miami I've lived are Boston and Chicago, and I definitely crashed my car in this because of ice on the highway once. Um okay, so you end up in Honda.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And then you were, from what I understand, trying to get into their you know, Formula One team.
SPEAKER_00I was, I was uh I I'll call this looking back at it a bit lowbrow, but when I was looking at where I was gonna find my first job, I was just focusing on the companies that I knew had a relationship or history in Formula One only, uh and in the US, Honda, uh, and at the time I guess Toyota um were the only ones that had that relationship that were that were either active or interactive in F1. So I had this idea that, like, hey, I really I'm gonna go uh at Honda, my first job was designing engines. So I'm like, hey, I'm an engine designer for Honda road cars. And if for some reason the stars align and they go back to Formula One and they go as an engine supplier, I'm gonna raise my hand and I'm gonna say, I'm I'm gonna design engines for you, send me to Japan and work on that. So I had that in the back of my head as soon as from day one at Honda, I always knew that I would try to get into their motorsport group from there.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01And you were from what I understand, like sending decks to people you had no no business sending decks to?
SPEAKER_00Oh boy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I did some research.
SPEAKER_00You sure did. Uh so yeah, I guess I was pretty bored doing I wasn't bored, I was learning a lot, but I was in over my head, and and honestly, um there was there was all this like intake of just like learning how to be an engineer on one side, and then the other side I had this like my burning passion to work on race cars or work on any of the special motorsport projects that some of the um more privileged engineers in the office got to work on. So Honda's really famous for kind of uh interconnecting road car and motorsport programs. Uh they'll pull engineers from both, um, pulling them back and forth over the line essentially. So there was a lot of people in my office that either had experience in motorsport, um, were working on current projects. They're in our in my in our passenger car office for the motorsport teams or Honda Racing. So I was like, I saw it, and it's kind of like you look over the cubicle and you see the guy having a lot of fun, and you're like so close, but so far. Right. And then, you know, so so I started, okay. Well, all the the J staff, as we called it, all the Japanese folks, they'd stay late and work on various uh semi-nefarious projects. And and I um I started asking them, like, hey, I had this idea, you know. Um basically I was privileged with the information that Honda was going to go downsize turbo hybrid, which were like um basically making smaller engines that were turbocharged and also have electrically powered cars or you know, hybrids that we know today. And this is in 2011 or 2012. And I looked at that and I looked at the Formula One rule set that just came out for 2014. I was like, huh, they're pretty similar. So why don't I make a couple decks saying like, hey, Honda should re-enter F1? At the time I thought I was uh I was ahead of the game, but um it seems like they you know they had the same ideas. So I'd send some decks to like the head of Honda Racing Japan, and I'd get a nice like broken English email response like Gabson, this is if we re-enter Formula One, this is how we will do it, you know, as engine supplier and like stay in touch, you know, gambate or something. And uh pretty soon, yeah, no, Honda re-enters F1 and and I'm sitting there in my seat in ED1 in engine design, like holy crap! Like my thought in the back of my head when I took this job actually is happening. Like Honda's going to F1, and I want to go, I want to go play with F1 cars too.
Getting Told No And Quitting
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but then you get told.
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah. Um, so I tell my boss, I'm like, hey, hey, like uh now's time to send me an OAP, send me to Japan. I can go work on this, and I can come back and bring you special skills I learned in Japan. And he boped me on the head, and he was like, uh, you know, you need to be here like two decades before we'd ever think about sending you there. And uh yeah, I really that was a that was a tough pill to swallow because I'm sitting here thinking like this is my shot, um, my only shot as an American to do that. Um I had done so much research prior of like how Americans entered Formula One, it's very rare. Uh, you know, one or two a team, and there's only there was 10 teams up until uh I guess this year. Um so you can imagine it's not very many people get to do this. And uh when he told me no, I was I was devastated. So um I took the weekend and I I quit my job on Monday. Yeah. Uh I told him that I would be a Formula One engineer in a year's time. And uh yeah, I just quit my job.
UK Master’s Grind And Networking
SPEAKER_01Okay. Holy crap. Okay, so then for you know, you decide over a weekend to quit your job, and then what?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh I sold everything I owned. I had a I had a cool NSX sports car at the time, which was a fun, uh, fun little runabout. And uh basically I I packed up uh everything I owned into like four suitcases, and um I set off to get a master's in the UK at a school called Oxford Brooks um in motorsport engineering. It's basically applied mechanical engineering. Um and the hope was hey, I'm gonna go to Motorsport Valley there in the UK. In the off chance that I'm good enough, and I'm at least on their doorstep of all the F1 teams, eight out of the 10, uh well, probably seven out of the ten, are right there within 50 miles, basically, where the school was. So wow. So I was like, hey, well, what better shot than than just going there, being on the doorstep, going to one of the schools that's a feeder school of these teams, and try my luck. So so I did that. Um yeah, I needed to scrounge up like every nickel or dime I could get. So I was I was like selling furniture, selling cars, like you want some shoes, sold those two, and I ended up like pulling together, I don't know, it was like probably like 40 grand cash to pay for school or at least to have cash for the year. And uh that um yeah, I just went straight to England. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And how big are like the class? How what was your graduating class?
SPEAKER_00My master's program, and there was two master's programs at Oxford Brooks, which is it was actually a really good school. Um my program was probably 20, and then the other one, uh, which was like race engineering or something like that, was another 20 or so. Uh and they're mostly international students. I would say it's probably like 15% actually from the UK, but the rest were just across the EU, US and Canada, a lot of Canadians, and um, you know, the odd American or two. I think there was like probably two or three of us.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so yeah, there's 20 of you competing for these very few jobs after graduation.
SPEAKER_00And um, you know, England was really cool. So that was like my immersion experience. It's uh master's programs in the UK are 12 months. So in the US, it's two years typically uh to get a master's. Um, but it's 12 months straight. So uh it's pretty intense. Um but I treated school like a job since I'd already worked in industry. So nine to five, go to school, come home, do my homework. Um, even into the summer, I was just pretty disciplined. So if I wasn't working on like schoolwork, I was trying to contact the Formula One team in the area. Like, hey, I'm here, this is my master's project idea. Do you guys want to support my dissertation? This and the other. Um, so I treated it really like a job for that year. And um I ended up getting support on a master's, uh my master's dissertation for a project which I thought would be interesting to the teams. I before I left Honda, I contacted some of our software suppliers that we use for simulation tools. And they were like, hey, yeah, I support they one of them had supplied Formula One teams with this software. And so I had kind of asked them some questions, like, what are the projects you're working on? And he gave me an idea around like um ancillary drives on uh Formula One engine, which is like um on a passenger car would be like your air condition or your water pump or your oil pump, like those things that are driven off the engine. And uh so I took that as an idea and I ended up building on it. I got support from a company called Cosworth, um, which is an engine supplier, uh tons of experience in Formula One, right there in the Midlands, it wasn't far from where school was. And I I started piecing together these these connections and I would do a lot of networking. And uh that ended up being really interesting because this master's dissertation I was writing um started to catch the interest of some of the Formula One teams. It came up immediately as I have an interview. So it kind of acted as a a good way in the door, and then yeah, I kind of had to do the rest at that point.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so where do you end up landing after?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um I ended up interviewing with like probably six teams. Most of them would reject me immediately because I needed sponsorship, right? I'm a foreigner in England. Here, I know this is like such a timely topic, right? Immigration, uh, it's it's really intriguing to be on the other side of the of the coin. Uh being a foreigner there in a country where they kind of don't want you. Um so uh really difficult, right? Um and I would say the UK's uh foreign immigration policy, especially for non-EU nationals, is very strict. So very few teams are willing to sponsor me. So they just like after the interview, sorry, can't, you know, can't help you. Um good luck with your endeavors and your dreams and all, you know, the so I I wouldn't get anywhere. Um I got rejected from like McLaren, uh Chiefs Honda rejected me. They were already, you know, even with my experience. Yeah, Honda Racing, um, Red Bull, all the teams you could think of, because they just didn't want to sponsor. But uh Mercedes had a job opening that popped up. Probably I had about a month left on my visa to stay there. So this is like the end of my master's, and uh perfect job pops up, uses all the skills that I had learned when I was in industry at Honda. Um, it was like future car concept, and I did this interview, and uh it was the hardest, still the hardest interview of my life by far. Probably five or six hours straight interview, just uh nuts. And uh yeah, I got I got the job the next day. And they were cool to sponsor my visa. It was like uh yeah, just the stars aligning. And I think it was just about perseverance. Like I went up until the 11th hour, really, and we were talking like two weeks until I had to leave the country, you know.
SPEAKER_01Oh my god. And where were they where were you living then?
SPEAKER_00Uh Oxford. I was in Oxford. Oh, they were still in Oxford, okay. Yeah, so uh Mercedes Formula One team is based uh about twenty-five miles north in a town called Brackley. So it's just like a quick shot up the highway um every day. But yeah, I lived in Oxford.
Building Championship Cars At Mercedes
SPEAKER_01And then you were with Mercedes how long?
SPEAKER_00Uh so seven seasons, yeah. Um I uh see, I have seven world championships at Mercedes. Is that too shabby? No, it's great. I drank way too much champagne, as I tell a lot of people. I I have no my palate, I have no taste for champagne anymore because every Monday after we won a race, uh bottles would pop at about 10 30, 11 a.m. and come get your glass. And you know, I mean it gets gets old after a while. I hate to say that because I have I have friends all across the grid when I was in F1 that they would have prayed for a podium, much less a win. Oh wow. And I won like 77% of the races that I was entered in. Uh so uh I was on the right team. I mean, it's kind of like getting drafted to the Patriots when they were winning Super Bowls, you know.
SPEAKER_01I store subject right now. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh but yeah, amazing times. Uh I designed uh just about everything on an F1 car except for suspension and brakes. I had uh I had at least detailed design on just about every other piece at some point. Um in an F1 team, you do so many different things. Like when you're a design engineer like I was, um you'd be working on a rear wing one year, and then oh hey, you have to do the diffuser, then you have to do the gearbox. They'll just put you on these projects, and then you have to ramp up your experience and understanding of like these different parts of a car very quickly. They don't have time for you to like, oh, I need a year to figure this out. Like there's no year. You have to be an expert, you know, pretty quickly. So it's a lot of like um extra time studying, a lot of long hours. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So at this point, you're how old?
SPEAKER_00I won my first world championship at 25. Yeah. 25. So yeah, three years out of UM, basically. Uh fast track through the masters, I hop on the team in the middle of the 2014 season. Yeah. Won uh won that world championship. So that counts as yeah, my first world championship would have been 2014. Okay.
SPEAKER_01And so you would set this goal from a little kid, and you now you've reached it. What happens now?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um was it everything you thought it would be?
SPEAKER_00The first championship party will still go down as the best party I've ever been to. It was um like I don't know if it kind of like it the only thing I could describe is if it was like going to a movie and seeing like the cr a crazy party in a movie. Um some I don't know what movie. I'm you know, I'm just but I'm sure everyone's seen it. You know, um you see something like that, it's exactly how it was. Like to the T, like a crazy band performing, you know, it's me and two, you know, basically it's 2,000 of us total, um, because it's a thousand of us that designed the chassis uh and worked on the car, and then another thousand just did the engine, the powertrain, and uh they were about an hour away from our facility. Um, so all in all, it's a large group of people to win one world championship to design uh two identical cars. And yeah, that was still the craziest part.
SPEAKER_01I just picture like that scene of the hangover where it's like a blur of the colour.
SPEAKER_00A blur, total blur. Uh, and we had like our trophies. I have pictures of me, and I'm in my tuxedo and everyone else's, and we're it's just like one of those nights that like you just ingrained in your head, like, I can't believe I won a world championship. Um it's so it's so rare. And you know, as an American, like these are things that you can only just see on television, you know. Um, this is before Drive to Survive, it's before the F1 movie. Um there was only a handful of uh you know Americans on the team, and it would always be just one or two. And we all had similar stories, just like absolutely balls to the wall. Like I wasn't gonna be denied. I had to make it out there. And yeah, uh, I was the lucky one that got to win some championships in the process because we were very dominant uh during my time.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so then you win now seven. It's like the novelty has worn off a bit.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And now you're trying to decide what what to do next?
Coming Home During COVID
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um COVID kind of helped me make that decision, uh, for sure. I I had a permanent contract, so I could have stayed there indefinitely, retired um at Mercedes or any F.
SPEAKER_01Is that common? Does everybody get just permanent contracts?
SPEAKER_00No, it takes a while. Um it I didn't get my my permanent contract until probably like five years in. So um they like to put people on very limited contracts, one or two year contracts, because they really want to test you out and have the the ability to say, hey, get out of here if you don't if you're not up to snub. So what this means is the office is like really only A players at that point. It's it's top-tier, you know, I don't know, first round draft picks. I'm surrounded by people way smarter than me. And that was the case for my entire time there. Uh I'm I'm a man enough to admit it. That was I was uh surrounded by very brilliant people. Um but yeah, that that was a really it was a big struggle. So once I got my permanent contract, I was like, okay, well, I can get a um, you know, permanent residency, get a British passport, that's usually the next step. But do I want to like live here forever? I kind of struggle with that. You know, I'm 5,000 miles away from home. I I I'm I like the sun and the beach, and I always yearned to come back here every time we had a chance I could. But my job was so fun. Like that was not a job. That was a pass up. Yeah, I mean, kids dream about that. Like, still, I know when I when I quit my job, they said that they had 1,500 applicants for it. You know, you're talking about people just around the world, they're just throwing their hat in the ring and saying, hey, please, I don't want that role. So you can imagine how competitive this is. Um but yeah, I I uh was doing well and and just like really didn't want to see, you know, be so far away from the parents and grandparents getting older and and uh then COVID hits, and that kind of accelerated things because uh look, you know, if you guys thought lock. Down in the US was tough. I mean, it was way, way more draconian in in the UK. And that uh as soon as they shut down the office, I was like, hey, I'm gonna go back to Miami uh for a bit. You guys let me know when you reopen and I'll I'll fly back over. Um so that was uh yeah, it kind of accelerated my desire to come back. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And did you think when you were coming to Miami, it was just gonna be a few weeks and you'd be back?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, ended up being like four or five months. And then basically during that time, I was like, hey, I'm just gonna put my notice in. So if you guys reopen, uh your note, my notice uh notice period was six months. So I had to give them six months' advance notice that I was leaving. It's not like two weeks here in the US. Uh six months was low in Formula One. Some teams uh a one year's minimum, especially if you're like a senior engineer, leadership, and one, two years, and they'll put you on a year of notice, so they just stick you in the corner and you work on projects that like no one wants to work on, and then a year of gardening leave, so they actually pay you to stay home. And there's a reason for this, it's because it's so competitive that like um Formula One is competition engineering, that's that's the way a lot of people call it. So you can imagine the best and brightest engineers um are very valuable to uh you know your competitors, so they want to keep you as far away from the development process as possible.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, makes sense.
Rivian Remote Work And Growing Pains
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, but anyways, yeah, came home uh middle COVID and ended up finding a nice landing spot at Rivian, uh, which allowed me to work remote here um in Miami for three years total. And Rivian was cool, yeah. Really, really cool stuff.
SPEAKER_01And what were you focused on there?
SPEAKER_00Uh electrical hardware. And um, I was working on the low voltage electrical hardware, specifically mechanical design of the R1T, the R1S, and now the Amazon delivery van you guys see everywhere. So I worked on all three of those. Rivian was, yeah, it was cool. Uh it's back in mass production, very different company from Honda. Um, still a vehicle, still car, right? Steering wheel, four wheels. Um, so a lot of the same problems uh, you know, that you'd have in Formula One or you might have in uh passenger car, you know, would come up there. The difference is Rivian uh is a very new company. So not a lot of structure, not a lot of support, a lot of running around with your hair on fire.
SPEAKER_01I think how big was the team at that point?
SPEAKER_00Wow. Uh Rivian was like 10,000 employees total when I joined. And this would have been 2021. Uh no, I I joined, I guess, yeah, late 2020 when I moved back. So um that so 10,000 employees, and they were hiring 100 people a week at Rivian. Uh and my team was split up across the UK, um, East Coast, Central, and West Coast United States. I mean, it was it was like a massive team of people. We're all working remote basically in design and development at that point because middle of COVID. So you know. Uh yeah, that was uh fun times for sure.
SPEAKER_01And then what made you, you know, decide to leave there?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Rivian was cool. I mean, it allowed me to catch up, obviously. I was a part of the IPO. Um, that was an experience, right? Biggest IPO since Facebook, um, you know, at that at that time. And uh I think it was because of COVID.
SPEAKER_01A lot more champagne all over again.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, for different like at Rivian, you're well compensated. When I was in in Formula One, I mean, I was I was pinching pennies the whole time. It was very like I made half of no money. Like it was just all for the, as they say, the love of the game, right? Um and everyone was really doing it, but also we're on the younger end of of our careers in Formula One, we made no money. Uh, you know, two, three roommates, you're driving a car that costs 500 quid, like really tough place to be. Um, but the positives seemingly outweighed the negatives in that regard. Uh, Rivian was the total opposite. I mean, they they paid me well, I made up for lost time. Um, and the the thing about Rivian, which was a bit tough, was um I was I was used to so much structure and support in Formula One. Everything was automated. Uh, there was support engineers upon support engineers to just support me as a designer to do my job as fast as possible. Um, so I had like the the procurement office was like ready to go. Like it the handoff was so seamless in Formula One that I could design a part on a Tuesday and I could have it on the track Friday morning for you know at a race somewhere around the world, as quick as you can imagine. So they'd be 24-7 manufacturing, uh verifying what they manufactured, packaging, might even be assembling something and sending it really around the world to the team wherever we were. Um, and that seamless process was just so I mean, it was like magical to work in. Like I dream of like the support around that I had as a Formula One engineer. Can't find it anywhere.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So Rivian was pretty much the total opposite. No support, no infrastructure, um, no automation, you know. So like you're sitting there just pulling your hair out the whole time. Like, why doesn't this work? Why doesn't this group talk to that group? Why don't you know where my parts are that I just sent to the factory? Like it so these teething problems, and what you realize is this company at 10,000 employees, right? This is a startup car company, had grown at such a astronomical, like the trajectory was just massive, right? Um, that they didn't build those foundational aspects that make a good engineering company. They're just like, throw money at it, like more people, more people. That'll solve the problem. It's not always the case. And um, it made the launch really tough. I mean, like the factory when we launched R1T or R1S, like the factory was a mess. We'd be flying in there every week to this middle of nowhere town in Illinois, um, you know, thousands of us flying into this airport. And the airport only has like three gates, and we would just pack it full of Rivian employees. So every time I got to Atlanta flying from Miami, hop off my plane, and I know I'm getting towards the the normal Illinois um uh the Bloomington, Illinois, uh like gate because you just see like Rivian bags, and we're all just like funneling in like ants to get on this plane to go save, you know, the world at the factory. And um, but it was such an interesting experience because this is like uh, you know, we're working on a first of its kind product, a mass production truck, and now a delivery van that was fully EV, you know, fully electric. And um it was uh really ahead of its time in some some ways, and other ways it was a little bit uh too overdesigned um and uh not not really optimized. And you start to realize why it's because it was like designed by committee, and and as the company grew in in startup land, keep throwing a little bit of tranches of money at it, um, the CEO, RJ, would would be like, hey, I'm just gonna go hire an engineering service company in the UK and they'll work on this part of the car. Well, that group working in certain fashion, and some group in California and a group in um you know Detroit, they had Michigan, Plymouth. All these different people are designing different parts of the car, working on different projects, and they're not all really working together. And this makes an over-designed car. So um probably costs a lot more money than it should, probably weighs a lot more than it should, um, but still very uh very nice vehicle. I see them all the time, and I'm always like, hey, how do you like your Rivian? And I I like hearing the responses of the owners. They love the cars.
SPEAKER_01Okay, they do, okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I mean, the ones I know, yeah, do too. But I'm now that you know that it's a little maybe not. How we got there?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, how how they got there is is uh uh astounding. Yeah, I'm surprised sometimes. I'm like, I can't believe that we were able to launch this truck, yeah, or all three of the trucks at once.
SPEAKER_01And did that just weigh on you? And that's when made you decide to leave? Yeah, like the lack of support.
The Moment Material Clicks
SPEAKER_00Support, the anxiety that so I had tons of anxiety when I was in Formula One, right? Because there was like a gun to your head the whole time, you know. Uh a hundred million people watch every F1 race on average. Something breaks fanatics, yeah. Yeah, when something breaks for you, like uh it's everyone sees it. So it's just like you had to be perfect. So that had a a level of anxiety that it produced, you know, for me physically. Um, Rivian's anxiety was just because like I don't know what everyone else is doing. Like this is this is like too much for me, you know. And and uh we're working, um, you know, a lot of us were working remote, some were in different groups, but even my department was spread across three sites and in two say two states besides us working remotely, which was there's tons. So like I have people in my own department that were somewhere in Plymouth, Michigan, somewhere remote in the US, somewhere in San Francisco, somewhere in LA, and we're all supposed to be working together on the same like assembly. It's an insane proposition, you know. Um, and that produced a lot of anxiety, and I think it was just one of the major negatives. And so it was kind of like at that time, I started saying, Hey, you know, I want to see what what's going on in the startup space, and um start talking to friends networking and see if I could find another spot to land at. One of my classmates at UM, Miles Dotson, uh, I reconnected with him and he tells me, uh, he's like, You gotta meet my buddy Chris. He 3D prints batteries, and that's what started this whole thing. And this was like the middle of my time at Rivian. And so I'm like, oh, okay. 3D prints batteries, huh? Like I start running, like, you know, the gears start moving. I tell people this a lot. In your head as an engineer, um, you love tools, like tools are my favorite thing, you know. Um, a tool to design something faster or optimize a design for that matter, even hand tools or like things that can allow me to do my job better, I want more of. So when someone says, like, I have a tool that could print energy storage, like, do you want to hear about it? Of course I want to hear about it. Because I designed uh I worked on energy storage devices really all across my um my career. So like, sure, I want to hear about that. I could have I can rattle off the times or I could have used that exact thing in industry, you know, it just wasn't ready or wasn't available then. So yeah, we started working uh kind of nights and weekends, and they had this idea that they wanted to make a city car, like a smart car, and they wanted to retrofit the powertrain with a fully electric powertrain and then 3D print a battery pack for it, just for like last mile journeys. So I'm the car designer. I'm like, well, I can I can help you with like the car design part, but I I was really interested in the 3D printing of batteries. After like two or three weeks of like we were working like nights and weekends, just like musing PowerPoint engineering, you know, just like, hey, if we make a battery of this volume, it'll you know, we can get this energy density, and you know, we had this, it was all really theory at that point. I kind of stopped everyone. I said, like, this is great, but um, we should be commercializing the 3D premium batteries, not like building a smart car where that just has a little bit of this technology, like just focus in on this. And it wasn't until we really focused in that things started moving at a fast rate on that kind of spawned material that you know today. Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_01So material was founded when exactly.
3D Printing Batteries From Scratch
SPEAKER_00Okay. Yeah. So we founded this. Um effectively we went we founded it like uh middle of 2023. We went full time basically January 2024. Um on it. That's after we raised our first pre-seed funding uh and joined uh the Hacks Accelerator uh with SOSV.
SPEAKER_01And so the company 3D prints batteries, any form, shape, size.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so we've developed a multimaterial, multimodal 3D printer that can print all parts of a bat a battery. So the anode, the cathode, the separator, and the casing. Those are like the four main parts. Um and we've made those materials uh 3D printable, and we make the machine around it. So um this was a field when Chris, my co-founder, um published his PhD. It would have been uh his thesis would have been like 2017 or 2016. When he published, he was he was the first person in the world to fully 3D print a lithium-ion battery at that moment. Fast forward to today, this is a very well-pursued um uh uh subject in academia. There's researchers across the world that are 3D printing batteries, um, 3D printing packs, different materials. Um, and they're doing this all for the same reason. We're all perplexed with the idea that electrical energy storage has to be constrained to a cylindrical cell, a pouch, or a prismatic cell. Like, why do batteries have to be this shape? And that's that's really what spawned this, this uh you know, this pursuit. And um, I'm really happy to be kind of on the forefront of it. But um yeah, now it's it's well understood and it's something that really is exciting a lot of people.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01And so you the business model is you sell the machine and you also sell products within it.
SPEAKER_00Right. Initially we're selling batteries. Um we're selling batteries, and those can be single cells or multi-cell pack, everything in between. Um when you 3D print a cell, we're not constrained to just doing one cell at a time, which is how current batteries are made. Uh you know, battery manufacturing now is commoditized, right? You make that millions of these cylindrical cells at your cell factory, and then someone has to take, you know, a couple thousand of those cells, put them together to make a module, put a couple modules together to make a pack. This is how a Rivian's built, basically. So there's like, or a Tesla, right? Seven to eight thousand cells on the floor of your car, and each of those has to get connected to the other, can you know, and put in this box. It's such a maddening process, you know. And my time in automotive, and I I've been wrenching on cars since I was like 16 years old. Uh, so I've seen a bunch of gas tanks in my time. Gas tanks in a car are any shape that you can fit, right? Because they hold a liquid. That liquid holds energy, it has a lower heating value. I could burn it, it gives off heat, you know. This the fact that you can hold uh petroleum energy in in any shape that you want doesn't translate to electrical energy. And so when you when you start to make that connection and say, hey, like I wonder if I could store electrical energy in the same shape as my gas tank, what possibilities are there? How would devices look? Um how how you know how would electrical devices interact with us as humans? You know, everything we use from our cell phones, um, I mean, that's not powered, that thing there, but think about your your smart, smart glasses, your your Apple Watch, even your your AirPods, like all these devices are compromised by the batteries used, every single one of them. Um so what happens if that's not the case? What is it how does that change the world we live in? So that's that's what we're pursuing.
SPEAKER_01And so you have a headquarters here as well as in Texas, is that correct?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so we're principally located here. Um the bulk of our business, uh, business development, commercial activities, um, and the commercial printer design, which is something I'm leading up, is all done here. Um, Chris, my co-founder, um, he's well positioned in the set in Central Texas, uh, and that's where we do a lot of our uh nanomaterial and chemistry development. So it's really about developing the materials that the printer needs to use. They are um I tell people this all the time, we bid off a lot when we started this company, right? A very wide tech stack. So we're developing a material, multiple materials, that then go into the developed printer to make the brand new batteries, right? All three of these things, you could start a company just working on each of those individually. Um that's that's our entire tech stack. So um the great thing is, you know, when we get towards commercialization, we would have vertically integrated the whole stack and um, you know, we'll have a really good handle on our ability to set the margins and and understand, you know, cost of the goods, et cetera. So um we like where we're going because we're accelerating. But yeah, when we started, it's it's a daunting task, you know, to say, like, hey, we need to grow the nanomaterials, which we do that we design. We have to design the nanomaterial, then we have to design the material that that nanomaterial goes into, then I have to put that into the printer, then I have to put all these different things into that printer, and then that combination plus some software spits out these batteries. It's um yeah, it's it's it's complicated, I would say.
SPEAKER_01Sounds like it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh and so you're fresh off of a$7.1 million round seed round.
SPEAKER_00Yep. Um very excited to announce that. Uh, co-led by Outlander and Harpoon, uh, as well as participation from uh Go Head Ventures. Um it's uh yeah, a very exciting time because the really all the stars are aligning for us. Um what we're working on is not misunderstood. We used to have VCs ask us, like, I don't know why you'd want a 3D printed battery. I don't know why you'd want a conformal battery, like I just invested in uh a potassium ion battery, like that's my that's why I'm hitching my wagon to. It now um people are realizing that the limitation in the chemistry side of things and the and the massive investment that goes into it, the way we're looking at the manufacturing of the battery as being the untapped portion of this whole tech stack and fixing and working on that um has really opened up a huge door for us because everyone has this insatiable appetite for more energy on device.
SPEAKER_01So do you feel like it now is just the right time for it?
Defense Drones And Energy Density
SPEAKER_00It's the right time. And and um interestingly enough, the applications which need this energy are now really at the at the forefront. They're they're they're right in our face. Um there's two places where um it's really hard to fit batteries into devices, uh, or um there's inherent constraints. And those two places are I would say consumer electronics and wearables, um, like smart glasses. We all see the smart glasses that are popping out from meta, they all look hideous, uh, no one wants to wear these things, right? But that's now, that's today in 2026. Tim Cook, I I think hypothesizes correctly that we're all gonna be wearing some sort of smart glass in the next decade. For us to get to that point, batteries are gonna have to turn into um different shapes than uh you know a standard pouch cell that sits in the on your temple. Um they're gonna have to be more elegant, ergonomic, form to your body, uh, and allow energy to be stored in places that you can't you can't currently. On the other side of that, uh the defense um apparatus is making the drone the de facto weapon of war. Um drones uh have battery pack just like a car, it's just less cells. Um and uh because of weight limitations, they're usually really uh significantly hindered by the amount of energy you could store on a on a drone. Um that could be an FPV drone, that's a tritable, so one-way drone, or something that loiters and does surveillance, everything in between, they all need more energy. And uh the military has really made that um uh an emphasis of theirs. And once they saw that, hey, if you give us an un unusually uh shaped volume that they might have stuck cylindrical cells into, you give us a chance to print electrodes or cells that fit into that volume, we can add more energy in that same volume for no weight penalty. That's a massive change to the way that drone battery packs are made, and and that's why they've taken such a strong hold onto us.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because I believe I read that you got a$1.5 million contract from the government.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, in total, um we won a phase one and now a phase two silver from the Air Force um to prototype. Now we're prototyping um these multi-cell drone packs with industrial partners. Uh we partnered with uh PDW and now uh another one, which I can't name, um, but both are massive uh defense primes and uh are sending really tons of drones to various uh portions of the military. Their battery packs are inherently quite limited when you get down to pack level energy density. And so you'll hear, I mean, we heard it a lot from VCs, but you'll hear in the in the industry, oh, you know, my my cell has X number of watt hours per kilogram, you know, it's a energy density. When you start taking multiple cells and sticking into a pack and putting welding bus bars and putting insulation, and then you have these casing, your energy density drops like a rock because you're surrounding these little electrical cells with stuff that doesn't hold energy, right? So what if I could pull all those things that don't hold energy, just pull them out of the assembly, get rid of them, and instead print uh and fill those voids with uh active battery materials, anode and cathode, um, to add more capacity into that shape. Well, then you get a you get a position where it's like based on the chemistry that you use, you have literally the most amount of energy you could store in that volume. And that's a significant jump from what's available today. Um so that's why everyone's very interested.
SPEAKER_01And so what is the plan with the 7 million?
SPEAKER_00Uh 7.1. 7.1, yeah.
unknownThank you.
Hiring The “Rare Pokemon” Team
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That that 100k definitely went to our LEVO bill. Um gosh. Yeah, founders out there. Your uh your price round is expensive, just so you know. Yeah, so 7.1 is really uh focusing on uh two two places, hiring the best and brightest that are experienced in this field. There's tons of researchers, there's people in industry, 3D printing batteries. I need to find them. I want to find all the rare Pokemon. I want them working on us. Um and focusing that in on delivering this phase two SIVR. The money that the government gives us gets us across the valley of death to an extent. We really need the private funding from industry, from uh from these venture capital firms to fulfill our obligations of that phase two and get to uh the phase three, um, where we can start delivering uh real goods to the Army and or sorry, the Army, Air Force, and uh to the industrial partners that are working on this project with us. That takes some money and takes a lot of a lot of investment. I mean, so we're putting that um really the bulk of that money over here the next 18 months is going towards fulfilling this uh this phase two and realizing these multi-cell drone packs.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell So assuming we have maybe some rare Pokemon listening to this, who what is the who is the who are the people you're looking for? Who what what classifies a rare Pokemon?
SPEAKER_00So um this is it's interesting. There's two two places I'm trying to find real experts. One is in uh the building of a commercial 3D printer. We've made a machine so far here in Miami that is is at the intersection of semiconductor fab manufacturing and uh 3D printing, industrial 3D printing. So it has a combination of a lot of the uh the main components there: the controllers, uh the motion system, and even our deposition system. Finding experts that have worked on that and know how to build in that space, not just like, hey, I project managed it, but like I actually built it. I either designed it, I know how to spec it, I can do the hand calcs to be able to explain why it is the way it is. Um so we're putting all that together because our machine is a factory in a box, so it's complicated. It has atmospheric control, it has print verification, has a fast motion system, and then our deposition. Uh, and it's it's fully enclosed. It's meant to be deployable potentially for the Army or the Air Force. Um, that's one side. Those I need rare Pokemon there. And the other side is um uh, you know, people who have 3D printed batteries, either in industry or in academia. There's a lot here in the US, there's a lot for a lot of foreigners that are working on this. Um, as you can imagine, China's probably leading in the publishing of 3D printed batteries right now. Um, I mean, there's there's patents and there's there's new papers coming out every every month. So not gonna be fishing in the China Pond necessarily because of my current partners, but uh I want to find the best and brightest here in the US working on this this space. You know, and there's some researchers here at the University of Miami, and I know at FIU they're 3D printing electrodes and working in nanomaterials. That's all interconnected to exactly what we're doing.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so if you're a rare Pokemon, reach out. Please, yeah.
Building Hard Tech In Miami
SPEAKER_00I need to hire many of you. So um, but you know, we have a good team to start with. It's what I've learned now is um, you know, as CEO, I I designed, I don't know, probably 50% of the printer that we're currently building. I can't spend my time in CAD really anymore. It's not a good use of my time. I need to be fundraising, finding uh new commercial partners um and customers, and really working with our partners in government. Um so I need to hire engineers who could do the work as good as I could, you know, if not better, hopefully, yeah, to do that.
SPEAKER_01So Well, I have to ask, what is it like being back in Miami and building in Miami?
SPEAKER_00It's it's interesting. It has its days. You know, um on the inside, I feel like no one really thinks that we could succeed here.
SPEAKER_01Um and does that help fuel you or a little bit.
SPEAKER_00I have a I have a severe chip on my shoulder. Coming from here, I mean, when I was a young uh young engineer just graduating, I had to leave Miami to do something real purposeful in mechanical engineering because it the jobs didn't exist here. Coming back, I hope to be able to give those opportunities, you know, these these generations now, these graduates. But um, yeah, I I mean I proved in my personal career that, yeah, there's there's good engineers that come, there's talent from here in South Florida. Um I do take I take slight offense to to the fact that that the venture capital space thinks that all the talent pops out of California, and that's the only place to get good engineers or scientists, and also that's the only place to get your funding uh or to build a company. We're we're finding that's not the case. We're I would say uh our founding team is will deliberately be working in Texas and Florida uh exclusively, you know, throughout our our startup journey here because we know we could do it here. And also there's so many benefits, you know, uh the tax breaks and uh really the cost of starting a company here in Florida is so much less, you know, uh than what we'd have to pay in Southern California. Um and convincing talent to come here is actually not that hard. Uh that's we're finding. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That's good to hear.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um, I think the talent, homegrown talent, it needs to show itself a little bit. Uh that is not their fault, though. I think the university system needs to um mature, I would say. We're trying to partner with a lot of local universities. I find that they're not ready to engage with industry in in such a dynamic fashion that you see a lot out of, let's say, Stanford, uh Cal, MIT, these well-known schools that put uh that make real good industry connections and take their stuff that comes out of labs and they put it into uh into practice very quickly and they do it um with agility. The university's here, a bit slow. Um, they really don't know what that looks like, but it shows it it can have a tremendous benefit if the whole ecosystem in South Florida just makes a concerted effort to go in one direction, which is really up, I guess. You know, yeah.
SPEAKER_01If academia, if you're listening, there's some tips.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Um and I think the funders here need to uh get a little more experience too. You know, um the VCs, the ones that are base here, the small funds. When we when I pitched them, and I I trust me, I went to everyone here, um, I probably pitched locally at least 20 VCs, you know, and I didn't I don't think I got a second meeting out of a single single firm here in South Florida. To me, it's not it's not all their fault. I'm not gonna say, you know, like, hey, you passed this up. I don't think that they uh the VCs that are are let's say not tier ones that are based here, know what they were looking at if I would have showed it to them or could theorize what this how big it could be, the material. And uh the ones who do are I mean, San Francisco, uh New York, these firms, when I tell them what I'm working on and I explain to them, they have the scientific background to be able to be like, yep, that's that's going here. I see where that that works, I see the applications, I see who your customer base is, I know what your TAM looks like. It I don't even have to explain it to most of them. But the ones here wouldn't know where to start. And I that disappoints me a little bit because I'd love to say that we're home funded, um, but we're definitely homegrown, you know, here in the south. And uh we'll continue to do that. So it's just about educating. It's a bit bit like uh salmon swimming swimming up the river at times, I think.
SPEAKER_01Sounds like we've got some work to do, but excited that you're building here.
Founder Mindset And Do The Math
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I hope to be able to showcase it um, you know, as we take our next step and get towards uh series A, that people can see a lot of uh purposeful um technology development here in South Florida and not not vaporware, uh, you know, uh not NFTs uh or or uh you know fringe crypto coins, like actual stuff that's gonna change the world. Um it they that can be developed here in South Florida, and I think it is. Um you know, I see uh what ExoWat is doing, and I I'm I'm a fond uh fan of uh Hanan and I I like the work that they're doing there and and uh that's right down the street from me. And that's real, real hard, hard tech. And uh just up the road, Eros Energy as well. Like these are groups that are they're building tangible, tangible things that are gonna have a huge impact on our lives. Um and I'm sure there's tons of others. I just I'm not seeing you. I think I need you I need them to be more visible. So that's where the ecosystem can come and kind of prop these new companies up.
SPEAKER_01Uh so closing, two questions.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01What is something you're working on as a founder? And what is one piece of advice you'd give a fellow founder?
SPEAKER_00What I'm working on as a founder, uh, I'm working on rounding my edges. Yeah. I came from an industry where there was no no excuses. Um in really England, I would say Formula One might have had a an impact on me uh to to make me just in a way a bit ruthless in the in the way that I want output. Just because I was able I saw what happens when people stop giving excuses and and they just make it happen. Um and it's really, really powerful when a group can get together and make a concerned effort. And you know, in our case, it was making a car that went 220 miles an hour and and do that. But so I see I see what it looks like at the top. When you're really sharp and you can just be very militant in the way that you manage people, because I was one of those people. Um I realize it doesn't work uh in other industries, and it's allowed me time to kind of learn uh, you know, that that not everyone we're not a monolith. And like the people that work for me or work with me are um very they come from different walks of life and they work at different paces and they have different things that excite them. And I think a good CEO is is kind of learning um how to manage, you know, those A players, the B players, the C players, and then try to push everyone up to be better in their in their little space. So um that comes with a little bit of more massaging and and speaking differently to people. Uh so I'm learning that. Uh and you're gonna have to remind me of the second question.
SPEAKER_01What would be a piece of advice you'd give another founder?
SPEAKER_00I think early on, spending a real good amount of time understanding your market, um we did a unit economic study just uh kind of behind the curtain, uh probably Jan or Feb 2024. I took with uh a friend of mine who's kind of acting as our fractional CFO now, um I took probably a month working on a very, very detailed unit economic study, all the way down from the raw material we were purchasing, how we were synthesizing, how we were developing it, uh the cost of the machine, how many batteries we thought the machine could put out, uh, all the way, you know, to total end output. And once we did this map, this study, it's a very detailed study, and this was pre-seed. You know, most companies don't even think about this stuff at pre-seed. We we started to see what it would take for us to get to a profitable company, what our margins could be, and um how big this could get, right? Once I had that picture and I could show that to the VC firms, everything just clicked. They were like, oh, these guys actually took some time to really look at it. This isn't some goofy idea. Um, you know, that this is something where they they took a lot of time, they know the materials, they know their ins and outs, and they could see, you know, what our our TAM could look like basically. Um, that made a huge difference. And I would recommend, if you can as a founder, early do it as early as possible, but really put a good amount of effort towards it because it'll tell you a couple things um very quickly. It might not be a viable solution. It and I saw this, I'm not sure if I I agree with what they did as a company, but there was a um, I forget the name of the company, but they put out a product called Cellvision. Um it was a battery company, I think, out of out of Chicago. They raised uh a seed round, it's a year ago now, raised a seed round and gave all the money back. And they gave it back after a month because they did a big Excel spreadsheet and it basically told them that their solution was not economically viable. And they literally just gave all the money back to the VCs. And I would have been like, okay, well, could we adjust this? Could we pivot? Could we work towards a different output that might be economically uh viable? Um, maybe a different chemistry. It was a can it was a battery chemistry company, but they were just like, no, this doesn't work, give the money back. Yeah. So the quicker you figure that out, the the better that you can sleep a night and go raise money. And you know, we did that and it really changed our trajectory. Um, it wasn't throwing spaghetti at the wall anymore, it was like a real concerted effort. We knew where we were going, we could back up and verify, uh, especially when it came to like key constituents, like our nanowires that we grow. Once we started showing, like, hey, our cost for our nanowires is actually matching what we projected. That's the most expensive part of our battery slurries, okay, well, if we scale up, if I buy more of this or more of that, the cost is gonna continue to drop. We're gonna get exactly where we think we need to be. So I I know that that was a right, uh our projection was correct there. That's really exciting because then you can go and start pitching the company with like real conviction like this is where this is how much a battery could cost now, this is how much it's gonna cost two years, five years, ten years from now. Um, that's you know, that's really powerful. So I would say work on that. Do the math, I guess, early.
SPEAKER_01Hopefully before you raise the speed. Yeah, RIP Excel vision. Yeah. But thank you so much. This is incredible. It's so great to have you building in Miami, and we're excited to see where material goes.
SPEAKER_00Thank you so much. Uh I do appreciate it. And uh yeah, I guess watch the space.
SPEAKER_01So awesome. And Pokemon Reach up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, please. Pokemon.