Rui (00:22)
Hello, Danny.

Dany (00:23)
Hi Rui

Rui (00:25)
How are you doing?

Dany (00:27)
I'm doing quite well. It's been a really fun last few months. I've been slightly overwhelmed in the last few weeks. But the weather is really boosting my mood today. It's been uncharacteristically cloudy. have a friend visiting from out of town and they were expecting sunshine she's like, what is this? is this even California?

Rui (00:48)
Ha

ha ha.

Dany (00:48)
And then

finally today it turned around back to the usual perfect weather we have every day. How are you doing?

Rui (00:54)
Awesome.

Well, I'm having a great time. I was going to throw a party tomorrow and I was like, regardless what's happen to my visa, life goes on. And now that I know the outcome of the visa thing, it will be actually a celebration. So I'm really happy about that.

Dany (01:06)
Yeah.

Nice.

It reminds me of a smaller example of this where my high school best friend Tom and I both applied to Stanford and really wanted to get into Stanford.

So we got, waitlisted and then rejected or rejected. But before we found out, on the day that we would find out, we got a cake to split between ourselves, like a yummy ice cream Oreo cake. And it was either going to be a rejection cake or a getting into Stanford cake. Ultimately, super happy that we both ended up at U of I.

and that I got to meet Ray.

Rui (01:49)
I'm so happy to have met you too. Like now it's being... Jesus, how many years now? I probably met you guys when I was like 21, so seven years at least.

Dany (01:59)
Yeah.

Rui (02:01)
and

There are so many things that have happened to both of us since then. I mean, we caught up maybe two years ago when you were here in Seattle. Yeah, but that was also a while ago and I feel so many things also happened in the last two years.

Dany (02:08)
Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

I'm trying to think if life has changed more in the last two years or the five years before that. And that's hard to compare. I feel like it's about equal.

Rui (02:21)
Right.

I feel like it changed more in the past two to three years for me actually

just a number of things that pushed me think a lot deeper about who I am and where I want to be and spirituality. I guess I've never thought I would say that word,

Dany (02:39)
That's great to hear. I would say that I have some geeky spirituality around. in the little that I know about physics

like, ⁓ man, quantum particles, so cool. But there's all of these core concepts that are fundamental to the universe, but also kind of drive my life philosophy.

Rui (02:56)
The last time I touched physics textbook was back in college. But recently, I am reading The Brief History of Time. And as I am reading that book, I started to have more and more questions. I'm basically retaking physics all over again. And.

Dany (03:14)
Yeah, nice.

Rui (03:16)
But this time, I think because maybe I'm a little bit older and I'm not under the pressure of, getting grades for the exam, I have a lot more freedom to just ask some very fundamental questions that ended up just like blowing up my mind.

to think that we don't even know really gives things mass. least this is what GPT tells me, it's a theory that there is a field, and when the atoms interact with that field, some atoms get the mass, and some atoms, like photons they don't.

how does this thing really work?

Dany (03:52)
You mean

Yeah.

Rui (03:53)
everything that I take for granted, you know, an object like a table or a glass of water, they seem so stable, but actually we know nothing probably about it So it's terrifying.

Dany (04:04)
I mean, even on even on a

more macro scale, we don't fundamentally understand why water expands when it freezes. just something that basic there, there's a bunch of blind spots. And you know, the craziest thing is that mathematical theories, lead to

don't remember whose theorem this was, but it has been proven that any proof system will have things that are true that are not possible to prove.

I'll say it differently. You cannot fully prove or explain everything that is true.

If you are accepting any concept of truth existing, then you must also accept the perpetual unknown, which is absolutely mind blowing. and obviously this is me taking something that's like from theoretical math and applying it to a spiritual context basically, but let me, let me look it up real quick.

Rui (05:00)
while you're looking it up, I'm just gonna say I think that's actually I don't know, experientially, I can see why that will be true. the other day, I just had a tiny maybe epiphany, like, thoughts are in articulated feelings and feelings are in articulated thoughts.

it's a symptoms of something and you don't fully capture it it's so nebulous and you couldn't fully describe what it is anyway.

Dany (05:27)
Yeah, some people I know are very good at taking their feelings, putting it through the language filter and just saying their feelings out loud. And that's incredible. I can't even explain my feelings to myself, most of the time.

It's very hard for me to like, how are you feeling about this? What in particular is, stressing you out or making you sad today? And I'm just well, I get stuck, I can't do it. And I've been working on that. Cause I feel that's an

important skill in general. I'll figure out a feeling and it'll take like weeks, which is very silly. Goodell's first incompleteness theorem.

That's what we were looking for. There are true statements within the system that cannot be proven within the system itself.

Rui (06:12)
Cool.

the last I will have about that when you become a lot more aware of the unknown that we're facing, do you get scared?

You know, so many people criticize Newton for being religious throughout his life and become even more religious towards the end of his life. I'm like, how could you criticize a poor man who is probably at the cutting edge of the thought at that point in time and facing so much unknown and seldom, anyone would be able to understand him. And he would also want to seek a shelter for facing such

overwhelming part of the existence.

Dany (06:52)
Yeah, I've seen memes about this of engineers being like, yay, we can explain all the things and then this shattered poor theoretical physicists in the corner my god, we don't know anything. I am hoping for a glimpse at some sort of truth at some point in my life, but I know it's not coming. I'm working on the same.

questions my colleagues have been working on for decades. So yeah, it's real. find staring into that abyss, to be honest, either comforting or exciting. I've never felt fear about it. what I feel fear about is okay, not fear, but I am extremely unnerved by uncertainty.

which is really funny because in my life I have always craved and sought after the stress of uncertainty with all of my life choices. I'm like, yum, I love not knowing. So I'm just that sort of person I think.

Rui (07:45)
fascinating because I have thought about this a lot myself. you know, when I walk into suburb, it kind of terrifies me because it symbolizes a type of certainty that feels stifling for me. But at the same time, I have no idea how many months already of facing the fact that my life could be uprooted just decision that

Dany (07:59)
Mm -hmm.

Rui (08:09)
the government would make about my visa case. That level of uncertainty is also something that was very uncomfortable for me. And I worked to a state where I felt like I could still live a happy and fulfilling life and carry out all of these activities with as much, strength as possible. But at the same time, it was difficult for me.

it seems to me that I have this very intricate relationship between knowing and not knowing. on the one hand, I'm so afraid of knowing exactly what's going to happen. On the other hand, the amount of uncertainty sometimes in my life also feels extremely destabilizing. and I'm like,

Dany (08:50)
Yeah,

Rui (08:51)
Well, but you did make the decision of like leaving your hometown and just come to the States when you were 18. How would you not expect all of this? yeah, because I didn't think this through. At the same time, would I just choose the other route? Absolutely not.

Dany (09:09)
Yeah, reminds me of a random fun fact about me. I am extremely hesitant to go skydiving or until someone like took me out to theme park, I had no urge to go ride a roller coaster. That being said, I ride a motorcycle almost every day.

Rui (09:16)
Hmm.

Right.

Dany (09:28)
Far more dangerous. I follow the speed limit. I drive super defensively. I wear the highest level of armor and protection head to toe. But ultimately, if you cut out everyone who

died because they were speeding, died because they were drunk, et cetera, Still statistically, way more dangerous than a lot of these things that feel more like giving your fate to the universe. So I find that really, really funny. I giggle at myself a little bit there.

Rui (09:57)
Yeah, all the inconsistencies that we have as human beings. Well, actually, even up until this point, you haven't done the intro yet. So Danny, would you like to give a self intro?

Dany (10:00)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Sure, I'll do my best. I'm Danny. I met Ray in college. I don't remember how. We just clicked and hung out. I think it was through the tech entrepreneurship thing. I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, in the land of certainty, as mentioned. I was

Born in Israel while my parents were stopping there for like six years on the way from Kiev to the US. yeah, so kind of an immigrant background. Grew up without a lot of the social context of the suburban kids around me, didn't watch TV, didn't really know the rules of the sports or anything like that. So definitely always.

ended up hanging out with the immigrant kids and the And from a pretty young age, stuff and engineer stuff. And I to...

I was going through my old emails and some of my first emails were about me and third grader friends were starting a flying car company.

And and thing I kept coming back to and geeking out about was defense tech. There's probably reasons for that, but I won't get into it. I got really into airsoft, it's a military simulation sport basically. And as a teenager, I built rifle defeating body armor.

the inspiration moment was very concrete. the music video for Wake Me Up When September Ends, and I saw a soldier from one of the most powerful militaries in the world in the music video get shot above the knee and go down. And I was like,

Rui (11:32)
Okay.

Dany (11:43)
how is the 21st century, like how is the state of the art, the little flying pieces of metal can completely shred people, I actually managed to build something that was like 20 to 30 % thinner and lighter than

what the military had at the time that worked the same, very small sample size. But I did test it at a national ballistics lab. And it was really fun to just be a kid reaching out to these people at export restricted materials companies. hey, I'm a kid, I work on this? Will you send me some samples? And everyone was super happy to help.

I even got my hands on some like artificial, well, I wanted to do a Tony Stark suit or something. So I did a project on artificial muscle also, electroactive polymers and shape memory alloys. And that stuff was being made by hand by grad students and like two research labs. sorry, this is a rambling intro, but that's what I did as a child, And I was really lucky to have

a ton of support from my parents and my family. We're all techies in a really big way.

cool.

Rui (12:51)
is

actually great, I do want to go back a little bit on

your interest in defense

I vaguely remember that you mentioned your parents were working maybe something related to defense. Is that the reason why you got a lot of exposure or not?

Dany (13:03)
not.

So they weren't working in defense things specifically. My dad did have mandatory military service. He met my mom after that. She was his TA at engineering school. Very cute. But no, mom was a physical chemist and dad was a electrical engineer.

Rui (13:10)
Okay.

Dany (13:22)
my interest in defense, I think my mom was always kind of the more militaristic one. She was always into, martial arts, the philosophical concept of self -defense.

really wanted her sons to be like into this with her my brothers were...

Rui (13:37)
so your mom does

martial arts?

Dany (13:39)
yeah, she did Wing Chun Kung Fu for a really long time. But before that, she did like several other martial arts styles throughout her life I shared her interests in the stuff we'd

went to martial arts classes together for a long time. We went shooting together. And that's, guess, where that was. Also, first book I can remember reading. OK, second book. First book was a slow crawl through Tom Sawyer to learn the language. But the second book I ever read was Ender's Game.

that was a formative book of my childhood, definitely, and explains a little bit of this also. I'm trying to think why else I got into defense stuff.

It was really early. was like my dream between five and seven years old that got locked in as like what I wanted to work on.

Rui (14:27)
Do you think it's because maybe defense technology usually is on the cutting edge of many different things and you get to work on some like very cool project it just constantly provide you a source of novelty and exploration.

Dany (14:43)
You're correct. And I believe that was my childhood reasoning for it. and I talked about it with mom and she was like, hell yeah. Like all of the cool new technologies come out of, come out of defense, you know, the internet, AI, radio communications, TV, all the cool technologies come out of it for the most part. It can also cause a lot of harm.

I guess my vision was

Militaries and militarism isn't like going away from the human experience anytime soon. And I feel we need good people working on defense tech

that want less war,

generally want good outcomes beyond victory, victory in a good way.

I guess that's where it added up. was like, this is the way to push technology forward and the bleeding edge of technology at the current state of humanity. And it's also an opportunity to protect the values that I care about in the world

My dream at first was very lofty. The idea was that perhaps one day we can fight wars without killing each other at all. I know that's like some sci -fi shit, but that's where my...

sort of started.

Rui (15:52)
Interesting.

Is there a specific type of defense tech that you wouldn't really want to work on, regardless whether you would have the knowledge or expertise?

Dany (16:01)
So I understand the need of superpowers to work on weapons of mass destruction that target civilian populations as a deterrence thing. Personally, I think the whole mass destruction deterrence concept needs to wind down.

I know it's been a crutch for political stability to some extent But personally, I would not want to work on like nuclear, chemical, biological weapons or anything else that's

generally only useful for killing a lot of civilians at the same time. That is where I draw the line for me personally. don't think that someone working on a radar for a nuclear missile is evil or anything like that. But that's not something I want to work on. I also don't think it's pushing technology forward really.

I know it did, right? Without nuclear weapons, we wouldn't have nuclear power. But even there, because of nuclear weapons being such a big thing, we're not even using nuclear power that much in the US at least.

Early on, I wanted to work on technologies that were purely, purely defensive. I've definitely let that go as I've grown up. Probably sometime around middle school, sometimes someone just wants to kill you and you have to defend yourself.

better armor and better protection and things like that aren't the only way to defend yourself better. And a non -lethal future of warfare is still very, very far out.

right now in the world as it is today with the imperfect humanity we have, generally everything I would want to work on is not useful for killing a lot of civilians at once.

for example, some people are really freaked out about there's this classified but publicly known missile that

the US has. As far as I know, it's a fly -by -wire missile, so it's super precision targeted. It's a large long -range missile that doesn't have explosives in it. It has swords. that are spraying or gas loaded right before impact.

It's basically used for assassinations of leaders of terrorist groups and stuff like that. how it became public is I might be misremembering this. So I'm just gonna tell it how I recall apologies if it's factually incorrect. From what I recall, there were multiple people in the car and only the target was killed. And you could see the pattern from the swords.

embedded in the car. And that's how the weapon became publicly known. And some people are horrified by this. And I'm like, that's way better than air striking the entire block. Are you kidding me? I'm glad we have this. I even hope our adversaries have this it adds something to the

arsenal that literally cannot be used to mass murder civilians because it doesn't make sense. Not that assassination technology is what I'm into, but that's kind of...

the moral framework that I have about this at this point.

Rui (19:12)
Interesting.

I know that you were working on a defense tech startup but before this, you were working on a solar panel energy startup

Can you describe a little bit more about that?

Dany (19:24)
Yeah, so I joined Optivolt and became a co -founder in 2018, right after Optivolt got into an accelerator program, Tech Stars Chicago. And what Optivolt ended up doing was solving what I see to be the biggest problem with solar panels.

And the biggest problem with solar panels is that they are very bad at dealing with uneven light across the panel. It's really obvious to see this problem in residential solar installations or off -grid solar installations because you can tell that when a leaf falls on it or there's a shadow from a tree or a power line, it has massive disproportional effect on the power output. So you can lose like

half the power you wanted for the day because of a little line shadow going across your solar array. But the less obvious issue here is that even in big utility scale solar installations, this issue causes the majority of early failures in solar panels. Because every time there's a weaker section, a less productive section of a solar panel, that part heats up.

becomes even less productive over time and eventually causes failure, either by directly burning a hole through the panel or by a bunch of other materials, things that can happen. Or sometimes the diode on the back of the panel that's meant to route power around a weaker section gets overstressed and fails. So hotspots and bypassed diodes are the two top failure modes of solar panels.

the unevenness is just from manufacturing tolerances between a hundred cells you'll have one this weaker and by micro cracks which just happened naturally along the life of the panel so

Rui (21:13)
So basically

the weakest point is the lethal point at the end of the day for the solar panels.

Dany (21:18)
Yeah,

And that's because solar panels have a bunch of cells wired in series. So the current has to like flow all the way through. So if there's anything wrong, that's a resistor in the way. there's one way to fix this, which is you take the power from each cell or each couple cells individually and put it through its own converter.

Rui (21:24)
Mm

Dany (21:39)
and output it to something. But that requires adding a ton of wiring and a ton of electronics, and it's just not practical. So what we did at Optivolt is came up with new power electronics designed to connect to these series pre -connected cells and through some clever switching and magnetic stuff, shuffle the power.

so that it's averaged across the panel. This prevents the resistance effect where you get heat, and it also makes output much more proportional to how much light is hitting the panel. And it's super cost effective.

Rui (22:21)
I see. I have to say, obviously, I don't have the relevant experience and technical knowledge to understand all the stuff that you just shared, but I'm gonna still try to ask a few questions. The first question is how do you derive that is the solution to the cell imbalance problem? because maybe a solution would be, how do I make sure the manufacturing process is as precise as possible and within the margin of error

or you can solve this problem by I have no idea any other potentially number of ways, that thought process, and if you can somehow simplify it to the point that I could also follow that would be great.

Dany (22:56)
Sure,

So Optibolt started out trying to put solar in kind of non -standard places and on non -standard devices. And this resulted in a unique problem space where you have intentionally, you have different parts of a solar panel that will be exposed to different amounts of light. That's where the inspiration started and where the first inventions came in terms of mitigating this with

the lowest number of electrical components. So it wasn't about longevity at the time. It was just about being able to power a device with just solar that's sitting out somewhere doing something. And why is this the way to solve it? So essentially it is the cheapest,

way to solve it in terms of dollars per energy. That's why it's the best way. If you wanted to change, like the quality control process to get the cell tolerances tighter to extend panel lifetime would make the panels far more expensive compared to this. So it's just a cheaper way to do it. But.

Those sorts of approaches also would have no effect on the shading problem, where like snow, dust, shade from nearby structures, trees, et cetera, Sorting out the cell binning or manufacturing doesn't solve any of that. And that's the problem we originally set out to solve in the first place.

Rui (24:15)
I see. So the context was it originates for very specific niche case for devices potentially out there in the mountain. And so you must withstand a variety of conditions. But the same problem still persists even in let's say solar farms, right?

Dany (24:33)
Yes it does.

Rui (24:33)
or

Dany (24:34)
So there is less of a problem with utility compared to residential solar. If you're putting it on your roof, there's a lot of stuff around your roof. So that was our immediate kind of next thing. Beyond devices was residential. In utility scale, the problem is certainly a little bit smaller.

but it's still big enough that it would be cost effective to use this, if that makes sense. you can imagine a solar field, it's not gonna be perfectly clean. It costs money to clean it. There's dust, there's vegetation somewhere nearby. some things that

add variants. but mostly it's just the built in variants that really messes up, utility scale installations.

Rui (25:16)
I see. are you still working on Optivote?

Dany (25:18)
No, so

we, there were three co -founders and two of us parted ways with the third one Rohit, who's the CEO in April. We're on good terms. We just caught up recently. They're doing really well. Can't share too much about that, but they have been doing really well and we're excited to see where it goes.

we were starting to kind of itch for going back to our roots and starting the defense company that we've dreamed of starting since we were in high school.

Rui (25:47)
Interesting. And just last few questions about the solar industry in general. I have heard that China is leading on the solar panel energy. From your perspective what kind of edge that China has in this specific industry

Dany (26:03)
The main area is manufacturing and manufacturing automation. There's a misconception, I guess, that China is winning in solar panel manufacturing because of cheap labor or something like that. That's not true.

both technology and capital investment in solar manufacturing. Of course, the capital upfront to start a factory is higher in the US, but the running cost has been decreased significantly. And the quality control has been improved significantly over the last 10 to 15 years by China's solar sector.

And yeah, I think there has to be some reshoring by the US of solar capacity, just for like energy independence reasons. I think China has done great on that front

Where the US and other countries compete is on the electronic side. That, I think, China hasn't really caught up. So power comes out of a solar panel. You have to convert it into a format that's useful for something.

Rui (27:06)
What do mean by electronic side?

Dany (27:16)
so I mentioned the cell to cell issues. Well, if you have a hundred panels and they're wired in series, it's not quite how it works, but we'll simplify it. And then one panel breaks or has some other issue. You also have to have a way of dealing with that. that's sort of the two things going from DC to AC is a big problem. Charging batteries with.

with solar is another electronics problem. Optimizing output from one panel at a time is another electronics problem. So all of these, most of the innovation in that field, as opposed to solar panel manufacturing and even solar cell manufacturing, has come from outside of China for a while.

Rui (27:56)
That's very interesting to know. one last question in this area. in the last episode when I was chatting with Shane, doing some consulting project for the government around, for example, how to encourage renewable energy in general.

He mentioned one of the key assumption in simulation model is to assume that US would have the infrastructure to transport the solar energy

I'm curious about based on your understanding of the industry and where it's at, at least in the United States, how's that infrastructure side And I can see like your facial expression suddenly just changed the moment that I talk about infrastructure.

Dany (28:35)
Yeah,

no, you've touched on a major key issue in solar deployment as part of the regular grid. And I want to preface this by saying I am not an expert in utility scale solar or the larger scale power grid. My work mostly focused on off -grid and then residential solar with some exploration of

utility scale generation. So I don't know that much about this. What I do know is that it is as big, if not a bigger problem than actually getting generation capacity. As far as I understand, the US has a ridiculous amount of solar generation capacity that remains unconnected to the grid. And there's

Two issues here. One is literally running the wires. That's not easy. It requires buy -in from lot of parties, a lot of bureaucracy. It requires a lot of people to fulfill their end of a deal. And also can be technologically complicated in some scenarios, especially at large scale. The other big issue is storage.

Solar power is generated during the day. Reflecting it with mirrors at night is a questionable approach that has recently got some funding, but I would point people at EEVblog on YouTube to find out why that's not a good idea.

But really you have to balance out when the energy is made and when the energy is used. And when the energy is used sorry, I'm gonna use an industry term here.

there's a duck curve of energy generation

It shows the timing imbalance between peak demand and solar power generation. So the power is not made when you actually need it, which means you have to store it at a very large scale. Storing it at a very large scale, the most effective way to do that today is with lithium batteries. Unfortunately, lithium batteries have

material requirements which are fundamentally restricted and hard to get enough of. that's a huge problem. And there's a lot of people working on this problem, but there's no promising just about to be solution for that scale of storage. residential

Solar plus storage has become more and more of a thing and that helps a lot. But most of the solar power is still generated in a big centralized location where you need one big huge battery. And to serve the entire country's energy demand, you would need more batteries than the world can make. I think it's a solvable problem.

There's a couple of promising ways to solve it. You can use water pumped uphill to store the energy. Not efficient, but very cost effective and very reliable. You can use, well, okay, gravitational storage with solid blocks of mass I don't know if that's gonna work. Someone gave a company doing that like $100 million to try.

good luck, it's just not very efficient.

The amount that you have to move a like 10 ,000 pound block to charge your phone is higher than you would think. So energy density matters. The best energy density is lithium batteries. You can't make this many lithium batteries. We either need to come up with a better way to make batteries. So there's like new

battery material technologies being developed, or we need to mass produce a different type of storage solution. then the interconnection part is like an even bigger problem that's also unsolved.

Rui (32:16)
Is it?

Dany (32:22)
I do think that larger infrastructure problems require coordination and it's not a type of coordination that any country in the world is good at doing. China also has a ton of solar fields that remain unconnected to the power grid. It's the same problem. And there does need to be more research on just the human side and the material side.

of scaling this. think that.

because coordination becomes inherently political, that gets in the way of people doing the research to do it right. the assumption that it'll all get connected is probably caused by political pressure. And it's not like one political side is giving this pressure. Any politicization of the issue causes effects to

become forgotten because it's just easier. And then there's people that think like if a solar field goes next to their town, it'll take all the sunlight away and all their crops will die or something like that. Yeah. So there's also an education issue. Same with nuclear.

Rui (33:18)
You

This is fascinating. OK. I

If I go, all the way back to the defense tech startup, I know that we can't talk about the specific content or the things that you're working on. now this is the second startup, could you share a little bit more story about the funding?

Is there a drastically different style of getting funding because the amount of capital, where the type of people that you're dealing with,

Dany (33:48)
So I would say there's some overlap in the types of investors that would fund a solar power electronics company and the types of investors that would fund a defense tech company. The overlap is limited, but it's there. There are some investors in tech that just fund software. There are some investors in tech that

just fund B2B software as a service tools that shave dollars off your costs as a business for some specific niche. And that's the only thing they will fund. sometimes that's impactful and meaningful. Sometimes it's a complete waste of brilliant human minds on pointless problems.

There are investors who specialize in hardware. There are investors who a third or more of their portfolio is defense. And there are investors who mostly invest in defense.

for venture capital in the US. I think it's kind of one of the great prides and joys of our nation, to be honest, that there's someone out there for everyone, basically. There's someone out there for everyone. You just have to find the right people.

Rui (34:58)
You

Right. And can I assume those defensive tech investors? They themselves have done like create a lot of these types of technology.

Dany (35:12)
So it's folks that have at least some experience as an operator at a company. It's funny when they, this is like a term used in the startup and investment world, an operator, to describe, I'm not just an investor with an MBA that had family money.

I did a startup or I worked in research or something. I was an operator. But in defense tech, it's really funny because operator is also sometimes used to refer to soldiers in combat more commonly special forces soldiers. And I've talked to some people with that sort of background and it's funny like, ⁓ you were an operator like what?

which kind. But you don't have to have specific industry background or expertise to be an investor in that industry. So long as you have the expertise around you and you build the expertise by working really closely with the founders you back. But honestly, that's a less common story.

Like it happens, sure, but mostly people are investing because they've had some sort of adjacent exposure, maybe not to your exact thing, but something somewhat relevant. But I don't want to knock the people that build expertise over time specifically to become good investors. That exists and kudos to them. That's awesome.

Rui (36:33)
Have you met any investors that you particularly enjoy working with, or at least have a really good relationship with?

Dany (36:41)
Yeah, there were definitely some folks that invested in Optivolt that I particularly enjoyed working with. In fact, there were some folks that didn't invest in Optivolt that I really enjoyed speaking to that really asked good questions and did their research and all of that, including one person who I will not name who is

famous in the entertainment world. And I was not expecting such great technical questions. I don't think they would have been a great fit for us in any case, but that's kind of an example of when I really enjoyed a conversation.

then there's folks that have written checks that I didn't even know were investors when I was talking to them. the way that we kicked off our fundraising relatively recently was I was in a

Twitter group chat that was mostly defense tech founders. Everyone just geeks out about defense stuff mostly. And I was talking about this kind of problem space that we're in and someone on the thread was just like, hey, we should take this to the DMs. And then they invited me to go hang out, grab coffee, grab lunch. We ended up

talking for several hours. And then it was like, by the way, I'm an investor. Me and the folks I know have a fund and this looks like something we'd be ready to fund. Let me introduce you to the partners. I wasn't planning to take any money for a couple of weeks. I'm totally not ready to follow this up with more investor meetings with other people, but.

It was a really good fit. They had great expertise, great advice. They knew the right people, once again, to introduce us to. And they're super skilled builders of their own right. And they've really done the thing. These are true operators that continue to be operators now. So they're not full -time investors even.

I want to talk about the other side of things.

Rui (38:33)
Go ahead.

Dany (38:35)
Not all investors are skilled, competent, and professional. And founders are starting to kind of notice and realize that, hmm, in this formula, who creates a lot of the value? Who is the product? The product is the founder, right? What if we had

back channel lists that we shared between the founder communities that like call out bad behavior from investors so you know who to avoid. Exactly, yeah. And typically the list isn't to demonize anyone. It's just to record patterns of behavior that might waste a founder's time or otherwise

Rui (39:03)
This is almost like a dating list, right?

Dany (39:16)
harm their chances of building what they want to build. This is not to say that these are bad people, but they have been like recorded doing a thing over and over again that founders might wanna know about before they spend their time with this person. This is not primarily about things that are over the line in terms of safety or legality. there are definitely cases

pretty rare, but cases of harassment or people being made to feel unsafe, that's not cool at all. And definitely there's lists for that, but I'm not talking about that. This is a much less heavy and important list. It's things like if they take a lot of meetings, but they're suspiciously not writing checks.

And then it's later revealed that they don't have money. They're just talking to you to present like, look at all these cool founders I talked to, to their investors. And as I said, it's okay. It's okay to meet with a founder and say, hey, our fund is not closed yet. I'd love to keep talking. Let me help you in other ways. That's great.

The bad behavior is not telling them that and pretending you're evaluating them for a present investment. I haven't run into this, but I've definitely seen this around. something I have run into is folks reaching out to me in person via LinkedIn, saying that they're interested or want to learn more.

I respond with a short pitch, if the sound's relevant, ping me back. And then they don't read it.

They don't read it. Look, if you read it and then don't respond, some people, know, generally that's considered impolite, but I get it. If I'm having to evaluate so many deals that I'm overwhelmed, But not reading it?

I'm like, what are you doing? How are you going to get deal flow? Why are you doing cold outreach? So I just find that really baffling.

frankly, like the the investors with very good reputation that I've spoken to don't don't do this stuff. and how you get a good reputation as an investor is There's there's articles about this. I won't get into it. But in general, be upfront. Do no harm.

Try not to waste the founder's time. And don't let them waste your time either. That's the basic playing field. Bonus points if you send rejections. People hate sending rejections. I get why. I've sent rejections in recruiting processes before. It sucks. I was late. I ghosted some people and I feel bad. Apologies if you applied and I ghosted you.

I am sorry, I should have responded. But that's what I'm saying. I can relate to that, that's okay. Some people can't relate to that and they think if they're not sending out rejections, they're being impolite. I'm like, okay, it's fine.

Rui (42:05)
I think you can take the exact same list you just mentioned to dating or any other type of relationship, including friendship.

Dany (42:14)
Yeah, it's true. It's very true.

Rui (42:17)
Like how you be a

decent human being probably apply the same principles in every part of your life.

Dany (42:25)
Yeah, honestly, yeah.

Rui (42:29)
So maybe in way to vet funders or the way to vet investors is to understand their parts of life outside of work.

Dany (42:37)
Ooh, that's a spicy take. love that. But actually, I want to say like a lot of the serious reputable big funds, tend to or serious reputable small funds, But they believe in this and they understand that it's a human relationship.

And they evaluate founders as a long -term human partner in some endeavor. And they want to know who you are, not just what your startup is. And that's a huge part of their investment decision.

Rui (43:06)
No, 100 % because like

to me, if I ever enter into at some point in the future, a business venture or partnership with someone, I have to be able to trust and respect this person, not just in terms of business decisions and knowledge, but like this person's character and integrity. and I don't think you will be able to be a

completely different person just because you're off work. I mean, you're you. Maybe you can show up a little bit more, show up a little bit less, depending on the time of the day, depending on the context. But at the core, you're the person you are.

Dany (43:45)
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's that's somewhat true. I think it can change over time. I'm not a believer in like your core is set and that's who you are deep down inside

Rui (43:53)
over time I totally believe a person could change if I don't believe in that there's no use to do any amount of self -growth like for myself even right but I'm talking about like at any given moment in time if you take a screenshot of that person's life across the board

Dany (44:02)
Yeah.

Rui (44:11)
It will be really surprising, I guess for me at least, to see you have completely different moral and ethic bases when it comes to professional and personal things.

Dany (44:21)
Yeah, very much true. And I think that if you're someone who has a very, very different face in different contexts, to the point where it's calculated, maybe kind of towards the sociopathic scale, the underlying sociopathy is still consistent. So there's no loophole, you know?

Rui (44:37)
True, that's very true.

The last maybe question that I would like to ask is, I know that in the very beginning of the podcast, you sort of mentioned that you're not a super emotional person, and your mood is quite stable. honestly, uncertainty doesn't faze you

I see that you have a caveat, potentially you want to add on to that statement. And please add a little bit more nuance to what I just said. But I guess the point that I'm trying to get to is...

what emotional depth that you dove into intentionally or unintentionally in the last few years throughout this journey that really sort of give you this pause

Dany (45:19)
⁓ that's a really tough line of inquiry, especially since I've mentioned before that I am pretty bad at talking about feelings. my mood stability is more of a day to day thing. I'm typically like, I'm doing okay. I'm kind of stressed out and overwhelmed. That's just typically Danny. That's just who I am and kind of where I like to be. It doesn't mean that the uncertainty doesn't get to me. It does sometimes I like.

can't sleep about it but I am used to it, right? It's not a big thing. I just mean more generally there's folks who throughout the day, have big peaks and low valleys, or maybe they're more expressive about it. Maybe I have them too, I'm just like not out there about it.

That's what I was referring to as like I'm relatively mood stable. And it's not any sort of good or bad thing whatsoever. I think it's a disadvantage in a lot of ways. And it's not a mental health miracle. Like I still have to take care of my mental health in terms of

big feelings that have changed me over the past three to five years?

my first job resulted in me being responsible for the jobs and careers of a bunch of people to some extent. And that.

is a kind of special kind of stress that I hadn't experienced before. From recruiting through being a manager of people to being a co -founder who has some input on the direction of the company, I'm considering all the humans that I see every day that are

super excited to work on this that are learning and as I'm learning and my responsibility to them is to facilitate their growth and to give them as much as I can towards that While also like making sure that they have a job long term if I can help it right.

Rejections are really hard. Layoffs are really hard. And those are things I hadn't dealt with before. I always...

did these things in a way that's empathetic and generally in a way that does minimal harm to the people that I've worked with. I'm fairly confident that that is the case. I think I did pretty good. and I'm not perfect and

in general.

I think that I've done my best for the people I've worked with.

that

prepared me to be a leader and a founder again in a way that nothing else could. It caused

some of the biggest feelings that I had throughout the startup journey for sure. It was about people and doing my best for the people I'm working with.

Rui (47:52)
Thank you for sharing that. And I could tell like, there is a lot that's going on within you, And you're sort of describing it in a pretty factual way.

Dany (48:03)
Yes, this is what I mentioned. I tend to be super even keel, particularly when talking about things that made me feel big feelings.