What could happen if we electrified everything? Sam Calisch & His Mentor Saul Griffith

[00:00:00] He just knocked on the door. I don't believe I had any email introduction or warning. I believe he was wearing sandals, which I thought was kind of cool, shorts that were inappropriately short. Yeah, he looked like he just walked out of the woods from somewhere. I believe I said, sure, Sam, you can work here. There's no paycheck. We'll see if we can make a paycheck occur for Europe and there won't be one on day one.

[00:00:29] Welcome to Leap Forward. I'm David Rusenko. Today on the show, Sam Calisch with his mentor, Saul Griffith. There aren't that many moments where something happens that completely changes the conversation. But about five years ago, Sam and Saul co-wrote this book that reshaped the way people thought about the future of energy use. It certainly transformed the way I think about it as a climate tech investor. That book was called Electrify.

[00:00:52] It laid out this exact analysis of almost every single energy flow in America and a practical path for what decarbonization could actually look like. And lots of people took up the mantle, starting businesses, building nonprofits, even changing politics. It reshaped the Inflation Reduction Act that followed. But since then, parts of the IRA have been rolled back and the mood isn't as exuberant as it was a couple of years ago.

[00:01:16] So I wanted to have them on today, both to lay out some of their original ideas, but especially to understand how they see things now in this particular moment. Sam went on to start a company called Copper that builds on many ideas from the book. They build amazing home appliances with batteries in them and have raised about $30 million in funding, including a recent Series A. Full disclosure, I've actually invested in Copper because I love what they're doing. So today will be an episode in two parts. Part one, the stories and ideas behind Electrify.

[00:01:46] And part two, the company that Sam is now building to make those ideas real. Here's Sam Kalish. So when we asked Sal to describe you, he said you brought this farm boy attitude to Silicon Valley. So tell me a little bit more about, you know, where'd you grow up? What was it like? Yeah, I grew up in rural Indiana on a plot of land that used to be a dairy farm.

[00:02:11] There's a really beautiful creek that abuts our property that you could walk for miles down, find amazing fossils, find critters. That was a big part of my life growing up is being outside. So that's how I spent most of my time. When I wasn't doing that, I was building stuff. My father had a woodworking studio. I spent all my time there learning to weld, learning to make things with wood, metal, you know, whatever I get my hands on. Did you have ideas for how you wanted the world to be different back then?

[00:02:39] Yeah, I mean, I was obsessed from an early age. How can we have less of an impact on the earth? Obsessing over miles per gallon of the car I was driving around and, you know, riding my bike, absurdly long distances to get places, you know, real tree hugger shit. But I think also like my entire family are artists and visual artists. And so like I was especially interested in the math and the physics that produced beautiful things.

[00:03:04] So we heard this crazy story about the day that you and Saul first met. And he said that you just showed up and knocked on the front door of his company, other labs. So tell me about your thought process. Like what was your life like at the time? And what were you thinking that led you to that front door? Yeah. At the time I was, I had finished undergraduate recently. I was math, physics, you know, going really deep on, you know, how stuff works from the kind of textbook level.

[00:03:34] But I was really excited to try to figure out how do companies get built, how do technologies actually go and change things. And then found my way to Saul's front door because he was, he was out there working on cool stuff and talking about it. We were in a pretty dilapidated building in a pretty dilapidated part of San Francisco. I had freshly had a baby, so I was roughly going to work to get sleep.

[00:04:00] And the second young man in three months showed up, knocked on the door and said, I'd like a job here. Can I have a job, please? And that was Sam. At this point, it sounds a little cringe, but I heard his TED talk about his prior company, Makani Power, which was trying to dramatically reduce the cost of deploying wind energy. That resonated with me. It's like, how can we use the principles of math and physics and computer engineering in order to avoid having to overbuild?

[00:04:28] And that was like really a through line of Saul's work is how often there's an elegant solution waiting there. What was his personality like? How would you describe him? Sam has always been very calm. So he just brings a level of calm into every room that he goes into, which is really quite lovely. And you can breathe his optimism. He wears optimism like it's a cologne and he's just very calm.

[00:04:56] And those two things I think are rare in combination in somebody who's also quite extraordinary at technology. So you said you had just started other lab. You just had a baby. You know, what was your life like at the time? It was pretty dire. The global financial crisis had just happened. San Francisco is in the, there was a bloodbath as there is every four or five years in terms of employment.

[00:05:22] And I had just left my previous job as a CEO of a wind energy startup, partly born of the, or entirely born of the financial crisis. I had freshly had a baby. So I was in hustle mode, like, oh, I have a new mouth to feed. And we were, you know, back to basics. What do we want other lab to be? What are we going to work on? What are the problems worth working on? And at least initially, what did Sam start working on at other lab?

[00:05:52] We were in, you know, proposal writing and idea having mode. And so we were writing white papers, which was very technical. Many of those projects that Sam helped write those proposals for actually became startup companies, one doing drywall with robots, one doing exoskeletons for the DoD, one doing industrial solar. You know, so we created a lot of value and new technology.

[00:06:19] You know, at some point, if I got this right, Sam babysit for your first son when he was just born. Like, it sounds like that was a pretty kind of family-like environment. I think it was. We were, you know, when you've got a newborn figuring out how to work. I had a desk with three Apple monitors on it. And I remember Sam pulling up pictures of blueberries and trains, which my son was obsessed with. I can't even remember whether he could talk. He just knew what he liked.

[00:06:45] And so Sam would use Google's new image search to search for blueberries and trains. And my son would sit in his lap and talk through that. I was probably napping in the corner. Our first child was not a wonderful sleeper, shall we say. You know, what are some of the biggest things you learned from that time working at other lab?

[00:07:05] I think some of the biggest things I learned from Saul directly were about how bringing people along to your idea for how the world becomes better is more important than does it demonstrate the most advanced math and physics? Does it, you know, demonstrate that the creators were really smart? No, it's so much more important that it appeals to people, that it creates a future that people want to live in.

[00:07:32] So I want to switch now into talking about the book that you helped Saul write called Electrify. It's really special because it's one of those times, I mean, it just doesn't happen that often where this kind of big idea comes around and it completely changes the conversation. I mean, from my perspective, the book kind of went viral and everyone started thinking differently after reading it. But also because it kind of lays the map for what eventually becomes copper. So how did that idea for the book first show up? Was it a moment? So it was definitely a longer process.

[00:08:02] We wrote a proposal in 2008 or 2009 to study in really great detail all of the flow of energy in the U.S. economy. So we actually got funded to do it in 2018. We worked on a really detailed mapping down to 0.1%. And it's only by taking a view that broad that you kind of see these things happening.

[00:08:28] So the book became, you know, a little bit of a, if you're going to solve climate change, this is what you're going to do. Here's a manifesto. We just need to be honest with ourselves and get on with this project. And that was the basis for Electrify. For those who haven't read the book, can you kind of very briefly help us understand like the core concept behind Electrify? The core concept is, you know, Sam and I actually did this work together. We counted.

[00:08:54] There's approximately 1 billion machines that burn fossil fuels in the United States. Those things do things that humans like. They drive us places. They heat our homes. They cook our food. They make electricity for us. How do you continue to do those things? So we like driving places. We like having warm homes. So let's not take that away.

[00:09:15] As you look through all of that, you realize, or I realized that pretty much the only way to decarbonize every single one of those streams was to electrify the underlying set of machinery and to power that electricity with renewables or with nuclear power. And so that became the idea and the basis for the book.

[00:09:35] For me at the time, like any politician uttering the word climate was still in this framework of, oh, the only tool we have is efficiency. The only thing we can do is, you know, turn our thermostats down a little bit. When instead we had this whole new set of tools that were transformation. It was not just using less gas, but actually completely changing the fuel source they ran on.

[00:10:01] And that difference is so big and no one was really talking about what it implied. You kind of touched on it, but what are some of the other key ideas from the book? I think one of the key, key arguments is that when you make the transition to electric, you actually need far less energy to run the economy. That there is an inherent efficiency in switching to electric. And when you add all of that up across the economy, it's actually quite significant. So how much less energy do you actually need?

[00:10:31] So the U.S. economy today runs on about 100 quads. Quad is a unit of energy, a quadrillion BTUs. A fully electrified economy can run on like 60 quads. It's huge. And it's things that are sort of obvious, like, oh, in an electric vehicle, 80% of the energy that's in the battery actually makes it to moving the wheels. Whereas in an internal combustion engine, it's like less than 20. So there's just these wild efficiency gains.

[00:11:01] But there's some really non-obvious stuff too. Like some absurd amount of energy that we spend just shipping fossil fuels around. It's like between 5% and 10% of the total. It's wild. And those are the three mile long coal trains you see driving around. Those are the tankers. And when you electrify, like you just don't have to do that. The other big one that caught on was that electrification doesn't need to be pitched as a climate strategy.

[00:11:28] Because it has all these positive externalities, improved air quality, lower utility bills, greater energy security. And to boot, these electric appliances, these electric machines that we can put in our house, they just work a lot better. They're more fun. When you push the accelerator of an electric vehicle, it feels good. But when you install a heat pump instead of a furnace, you can have a much tighter control over how your home feels. It can be cozier.

[00:11:55] An induction stove is so much fun to use. You can boil water way faster. It's more responsive. You can be way more in tune with your cooking than you can on a gas stove. And so there are these, shall we say, just like other reasons you might want to do this anyway that have nothing to do with climate. It all by itself stands as an improvement in quality of life strategy. And so that was one of the other big ideas of the book.

[00:12:20] The real goal for Electrify was to try and get people out of the mindset that solving climate change is going to be about less and struggling and being a little bit colder and denying yourself the good things in life. And really was about, you know, how do you make an abundant future where we do three things at once? Solve climate change, improve our economies and improve health outcomes. So you're writing this book, you're kind of sitting on some of these core ideas that were just not really mainstream. Like, like, how did that feel?

[00:12:48] Was it a sense of, like, excitement? Like we want to get this out in the world once you start discovering that? You know, I was kind of terrified to share the first drafts with people. This is another lesson that I learned from Sol. Sol is really good at sharing his works in progress. And that habit really makes for better final products. So we started doing that. And the arguments improved, the narrative improved, things got tighter.

[00:13:13] I think the moment I realized it was going to be good is I had Paul Hawken and I were having a chat. And I can't remember, I was in a fight with a publisher about what the title should be. And he just walked into my office and he's like, you know, you should just call this Electrify. Books should have one word titles. And as soon as he said that, I'm like, oh, that's perfect. I can't remember. It was it had some title like, you know, fighting the man and solving climate change with electricity or something terrible.

[00:13:44] And so then I was like, oh, this is going to be a thing. This is great. And how did the book and also rewiring America, like what was the impact in terms of America's energy policy? Yeah. So that movement that involved the book and rewiring kind of resulted in a couple years of lobbying in the Inflation Reduction Act and created the low income electrification rebate program. So together about eight billion dollars that went out the door.

[00:14:10] And, you know, for me personally, that was nice because my brother in rural Indiana got to qualify for the low income rebate program and get a heat pump. And just really meaningful for that to actually go full circle and for the results to actually make their way all the way to the ground. And, you know, in the last few years, many I mean, certainly not all, but parts of the Inflation Reduction Act policies have been rolled back. You were also personally involved. So I'm kind of curious to get your take on sort of how do you think about that and how does that feel?

[00:14:39] Well, there were enough ups and downs just in getting the legislation out. And I'm serious. There were a lot of really high highs and low lows in that process that I, you know, grew a thick skin at this point. It still hurts. That said, you know, this is all part of a long game. And I think what you've seen is that the market has started taking this up on its own. And these, you know, the incentives are always meant to help the market adopt a thing that is on its own cost competitive.

[00:15:08] And so you see that with a lot of these technologies now is that even without the consumer facing credits, they're not dead. They're still growing. So here's kind of how Saul described, you know, his perspective and where we are now. So I want to play that for you. It was a lovely dream, vision, idea that America would lead the world on solving climate change. And it was worth holding onto and it was worth working incredibly hard on trying to make that true. And Sam and I both spent a lot of hours working on that project.

[00:15:40] It's now not obviously true. And that's going to be hard for Americans to hear. But the reality is your challenge is you have a lot of fossil fuels and they're relatively cheap. And through largely through red tape and bureaucracy, you've made the process of electrification expensive and you've made electricity expensive. So when I think about the book electrify, I think we got the right idea out there, electrify everything.

[00:16:05] But we failed at the two important consequences, make electrification the process of getting electric goods easy and making electricity cheap. So that if there's going to be a revival of the climate movement in the US, it's got to be focused on doing that. So he says in that answer that what we really need now, especially in the US, is to make electricity cheaper and to make these electrified goods a lot easier to get. Does that sound right to you in terms of where we're going next?

[00:16:33] It does. Leads right into what we're doing. Yeah, I think it's really important to recognize that electrification on its own does not necessarily make energy cheaper in the US. But one of the best ways to drive down the cost of electricity is to get more batteries out on the grid. And that's core to what we're trying to do at Copper.

[00:17:01] After the break, how Sam is solving the next step towards electrification. And we're back. So let's dive into copper. Why don't you give us the idea of what copper is? And then I kind of want to get into that moment where you sort of first had the idea. Do you remember when you had that aha moment? I do, yeah, but I'll get there.

[00:17:29] So in most markets, the primary component of the electricity price is not its generation. It's actually in the delivery cost. It's getting that electricity from the power plant to your home. Here where I'm sitting in California, that's 70% of the price I pay for electricity is in delivering it to my doorstep.

[00:17:49] The best way to drive down that cost is to put more storage out where energy is used and therefore drive down the cost of delivering electricity. And so, okay, but I could go buy a battery and put it on my house. What's wrong with that? The problem is that the way we put batteries out on our buildings also has a lot of bloated cost, a lot of red tape. And that's because we typically install home batteries in the same job as putting residential solar on our roofs.

[00:18:19] There's a lot of permitting, there's inspection process to deliver that to you. All of these things bloat the cost. And so you see that batteries have become very cheap. The hardware itself, batteries came down 10x in a decade in cost. That is crazy. But the cost to put it on your house did not. It's actually plateaued. So we needed a new paradigm for how to do that.

[00:18:42] That was the aha moment was, oh, shoot, like put a battery in an appliance and you can get it in every home in America without paying through the nose. So, you know, today, if you get a conventional induction stove, you're going to have to wire a 240 volt 50 amp outlet to your kitchen. If I put a battery in that stove, I can make it plug into the outlet you already have. And that was the aha moment. And we wrote a patent on it. We're like, that's a good idea. We should do that. And I remember writing that patent with Sam and then we wrote a proposal to the Department of Energy.

[00:19:12] Like, here's a good idea. And the DOE funded that proposal. How did you feel the first time that you told someone you were starting a company? So I'd say that having that idea and starting the company did not happen at the same time. You should prove some things out before you incorporate a company. Among those, the big one is do people care? And that's the one we spent a lot of time trying to figure out. We went and did a bunch of customer interviews.

[00:19:37] We did some online surveys and ads to try to put some data behind this. But really, like the best piece of information was as we started being a little more public about this, people started walking in off the street. We had people walk in holding a quote for, I want to get an induction stove, but the electrician says it's going to cost $10,000, you know, to like upgrade my service. And I heard you guys are doing something about that. That was the moment I was like, oh, okay.

[00:20:06] Yeah, we got to start that company like yesterday. And at that point, Sam was like, okay, I think we should do this. We should do a company. And I said, absolutely. How do I help? And away we went. So I want to talk about your vision also for how to make the appliance affordable. What does it take to get there? Yeah. So as a startup, you only get to make one product first. But if you're doing it right, I think you need to be testing multiple hypotheses with it.

[00:20:36] That's how you retire risk quickly. That's how you build a startup quickly. And so we very intentionally came in at the premium level because we wanted to demonstrate two things. We wanted to prove that there was pull from high end customers, but we also wanted to use this product to service the scale demand of very cost sensitive B2B buyers. And so we brought product to market that could stretch and fill both of those goals.

[00:21:01] So we have a contract with New York City to supply 10,000 units into public housing. This is an extremely cost sensitive buyer as we develop a lower cost version of our flagship product for them and for other buyers of this type. You know, what was it that NYCHA saw that caused them to say, this is what we need? And there's a spreadsheet that has to work, but there's also a story that has to come along with it.

[00:21:27] A story about, oh, this is easier than what we would otherwise do of spending money fixing gas pipes, of dealing with explosion risks, of dealing with tenants that have gas shutoffs. After you hear it, it has to sound kind of like obvious. You're like, oh, yeah, of course. Like we just plug it in. Oh, that's great. I, it's important to note that for this particular contract, this has been a long time coming.

[00:21:51] We were talking about this product and this story with folks in New York well before we had product in market. It was a little uncomfortable. We were showing prototypes that were not polished, that were just illustrating the idea, but like weren't ready for prime time yet. You know, a lot of the climate change conversations are so big picture. It's, you know, national policies and global weather data and all that kind of thing. But, you know, a lot of these changes are real on the ground changes.

[00:22:20] Like I'd love for you to just paint a picture for me of like someone who lives in a NYCHA building, who gets a new copper stove. Like what's that going to look like from their day to day in terms of how that changes their lives? Yeah, I think I'll draw one from a building we just did in Washington Heights is a co-op building that had been without gas for, I think, about three years. Wow. Because there had been a leak and it's just, it's very costly and very time consuming to figure out how to fix these old gas pipes.

[00:22:49] And so they'd been cooking on hot plates for the last three years without an oven. So we replaced all 20 gas stoves in that building in a day. And from the experience of people that living there, I think the quote that I liked was, there's a guy who was really excited to be able to make lasagna again because he hadn't had an oven for three years. And this was such an improvement in his quality of life because he loves cooking.

[00:23:15] At the end of the day, copper's goal is to help orchestrate how all these batteries operate and how they help deliver clean energy and help give people more control over that energy. What's that going to kind of mean in very concrete terms of people's lives like energy security? How does that show up in their day to day? Yeah. So, you know, if you have copper stove today and power goes out, you can cook meals for your family. You can sanitize water for your family.

[00:23:43] Regardless of what's happening with the grid, you can run on that battery and that gives you control. There's a great quote from one of our customers during the San Francisco blackouts a few months ago. She said she counted like 20 broken down Waymos because, you know, the grid was down, but her soup was simmering just fine on her Charlie stove. I want to spend a minute also talking about how you've built the company. Saltos is really sweet story that stood out to him about a day when he stopped by copper. So I want to, I want to play that tape.

[00:24:11] They were celebrating some company milestone and they were having a lunch outdoors in their little industrial space there. And it was a lovely sunny day in Berkeley and the food was magnificent. And I just appreciated that Sam had done such a good job of curating the people leading up to that moment. If that makes any sense. There were a lot of people who were absolutely willing to help him. He was very gracious in, in thanking everyone.

[00:24:38] He was not long winded nor arrogant in giving a talk to the people who were assembled. It was just a beautifully concise and inspiring speech. And it was a true joy to see that he had the capacity to assemble through that sort of that grace that he held in that moment. So how, yeah. How do you think about curating people and the culture at copper?

[00:25:02] Part of copper's culture that I'm really proud of is, you know, one of our company values is this is a group activity. And it's trying to remind ourselves that we're working on something that's much bigger than we will solve within our four walls. And we shouldn't act like we're going to. I think there's a lot of like tech startups that fall into that trap.

[00:25:23] And that actually a really important part of doing our mission and accomplishing results is telling our story to a broader audience and inviting them to come help us. Part of that is showing where things aren't perfect. I think Saul was probably talking about one of the weekly lunches that we have on Thursdays, and we always invite a big group of guests in. The point is not to present as polished to have like a curated event.

[00:25:48] The point is to invite people into the reality of what we're doing, what's going well, what's not going well, and actually be vulnerable and ask for help. And this has just been a strategy that's paid for itself so many times over, you know, including the example I gave you of New York housing of being vulnerable and sharing early prototypes, early works in progress resulted in an RFP that resulted in this 10,000 unit order.

[00:26:12] And so we do try to practice that, like on a weekly basis, and then just investing in people's growth such that they feel like copper is a place for them, not just today, but will help them grow into, you know, the future versions themselves that they want. And, you know, it's important to acknowledge like that could mean advancing here at copper, but it's also, it's totally possible that could mean that, you know, we had a lovely time together.

[00:26:38] We worked together for a couple of years and yeah, I understand like your career is taking you somewhere else and that is okay. Many of the people I work with I've known for 15 or 20 years and have worked with across multiple companies. Acknowledging that is a way to really like make sure people feel prioritized because that's what's important is those relationships. You know, kind of speaking of the people that he assembles, if I have this right, the son that Sam kind of babysat for a bit also just interned at copper, is that right?

[00:27:06] That's right. It's pretty amazing. I think he was one or maybe zero when we met Sam and he was 16 and he went and did a week's internship and designed a little testing instrument. I'm really, you know, now I'm 50, you do think about the long trajectory of things. And I think about the role that people like my MIT professors have played in my life. And I think you think about the role of mentorship. I was bad at asking for mentors.

[00:27:34] I've been lucky enough to be a mentor for some extraordinary people, Sam, especially. And I think that's beautiful how we pass down knowledge. You know that you won't be the one that inspires your kids. It's going to be somebody else. So actually, the real success there is being able to palm off your parenting onto somebody who your children are going to trust a bit more than you are in that moment. More after the break.

[00:28:07] And now, back to the episode. You know, while you've been building copper, so I moved back to Australia. You know, I wanted to pick his brain on like, what does it look like and feel like to be there? And he described his experience of what his life is like in using energy. And it kind of like sounds like he's describing, you know, the future that you called for in the book. So I want to play that tape and then have a quick conversation about that.

[00:28:33] So the reality is in the rest of the world where rooftop solar can be cheap and the renewables are going in without fuss, the world's getting on with it. Particularly in the shadow of this debacle in the Middle East, you know, Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand, they're all moving even faster towards electrification because fossil fuels are volatile and risky, which, you know, we had said 10 years ago, but now we're really, really appreciating that that's true. And paint a picture for us outside the US.

[00:29:03] Here's my picture. I wake up. It's 6am. I look at my phone and I check what my solar produced yesterday. And I probably produced about 120 kilowatt hours and I probably used about 80. And I probably made 20 bucks selling excess electricity. In the evening, I have two vehicles that can do vehicle to grid. There's so much free electricity at noon that the Australian federal government just told all of the utilities that they have to provide electricity for free for three hours from 12 to three every day.

[00:29:33] So literally we've got to free electricity here. Now I'm saving $8,000 a year on fossil fuels because I don't buy any gas anymore. And I'm getting paid another thousand dollars for my batteries doing grid services. I'm into my first cup of coffee, having had all of those thoughts. And then I'm like, Claude has done my homework for me overnight. And I've done a whole bunch of cool engineering and data projects while I was sleeping. And I feel like the future could be extraordinary. And isn't it great?

[00:30:03] I have free energy and a free compute. And then I read the New York Times and I get depressed. So the rest of the world can't quite understand why, you know, we really, as Stuart Brand said, we are as gods. We better get good at it. We are as gods. We really, the world could have this extraordinary future, but we haven't convinced ourselves yet that this world of all electric abundance and clean energy is going to be great.

[00:30:30] It should be the best party in town, but culturally we sound like we're not as much fun as the party that's on a drag strip burning rubber with, you know, gallons of Iranian oil. The climate movement needs to make our party sound like the funnest party to be at. So, you know, in contrast to Saul's experience, sometimes it feels like we're not quite living in that future yet. But like you stuck around, you know, you clearly still have the vision to make that future happen. What's kept you motivated to keep marching towards that?

[00:31:01] Yeah. Well, you know, despite what's in the New York Times, it helps to have something to throw your weight into every day. I find that personally very motivating. If there are things that feel outside of my control, there's some stuff that's in my control and I can see the results of it. But I think it's really important to continue reminding ourselves of the miracles that have happened already, that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of new energy, that electrification is available to us today.

[00:31:28] And that we're just busy working on a third miracle of making it easier for people to access electrification and making electricity cheap. And actually being a part of that solution is among the most motivating things to me. And we're seeing the results. And I'm not just talking about copper here. There's just an explosion of companies in this space of making it easier for people to access energy and putting more agency back in people's hands about where their energy comes from.

[00:31:56] As an example of this, if you look at what states are installing solar the fastest, like my home state of Indiana is in the top three. Texas is dominant in the wind and solar landscape. And so I think this idea that renewable energy is getting clobbered by the political winds of our time is actually more narrative than fact.

[00:32:18] If you look 20 years from now, paint a picture for what copper looks like as a company and sort of how that's contributing to where the U.S. is as a country from an energy perspective. You know, we're trying to get to a place where every appliance has a battery in it. That's going to happen both with copper zone products, but we're also going to work with other major appliance companies to enable them to deploy our battery technology inside of their appliances.

[00:32:43] Whether they're in the kitchen, like stoves and cooktops, or if they're in other points in the home. What are your hopes and dreams in terms of where you see copper going in the next five or 10 years? Well, we need all of these technologies to get to huge scale as fast as possible. We don't need niches. We don't want the battery in the stove to be a luxury device for 1% of the market. You want it to be making a difference in every stove.

[00:33:12] So I think that's the difficult thing to juggle is all the early market pull is from the high end of the market. But the thing that is impactful on energy and climate is penetration throughout the market. And I think Sam is fully engaged with that question. And I think if we navigate that successfully, we'll find out whether copper is going to be Apple or hopefully more.

[00:33:36] The big stove brands make their stoves better and making a difference in real people's lives, lowering their energy bills and making the air quality in their homes better. And so I think that's a mixture of brand and licensing. Kind of heading towards the end here, I asked if there was anything that he wanted to say to you that he hadn't had a chance to say. And so I want to play that clip for you. Oh, a little tear in my eye as you asked the question.

[00:33:59] I actually think Sam and I have had a beautiful friendship for a long time with a lot of trust and a lot of honesty. So I don't know that there's anything we haven't said. But the thing I haven't said to him is I really wish we could work more closely together all the time. Inventing with Sam in real time is quite a joy because he has so much depth on so many topics and then can assemble them all together.

[00:34:28] I could spend 40 hours a week with that guy's brain and just love it. We've always found ways to collaborate. He's been just a fantastic advisor to Copper as we've been getting it off the ground. And I'm confident we will figure out how to keep doing this. But yeah, the sentiment is the same. You know, he's half a world away right now. And so these things are challenging. When you look back on your 15 relationship with Saul, what's one thing that you feel like you've learned that really stands out?

[00:34:56] So very clearly, I think what I have learned from Saul is that people matter. Like the through line of his work is that people matter more than anything. Prioritizing people, caring about people, caring about their families. Also prioritizing people in what we choose to spend our time building. Building things that improve people's lives is what matters and actually is also what tends to be most successful.

[00:35:21] You know, obviously technology is a huge enabler, but at the end of the day, it just it has to come back to does it move the needle for people? And Saul demonstrates that so well. Yeah. And speaking of that, have you installed a stove for your parents? I have. Yeah. Both my folks and my brother now have stoves. They both they all live in Indiana. They were going to like it no matter what, because, you know, it's my thing. But like I could actually see like, oh, yeah, this is great.

[00:35:48] Like, you know, they were coming from an electric coil stove, which was an absolute piece of garbage. And so it was just such an obvious improvement. And it was just easy. That made me feel good. Having worked with Sam and known him, you know, earlier on and then seeing him being this founder and CEO at Copper, what have you observed in terms of his personality and what's well suited to being CEO, but also maybe things that he's changed from the early days?

[00:36:14] Oh, Sam is just continuously grows in maturity and confidence and expertise. You know, is Sam a natural born CEO? You know, I think Sam could be many things. He could be a world class academic. He could be a world class CEO. And I think he's humble about all of that and just honestly does what needs to be done. And what needed to be done was him just step into the CEO role and make this technology work.

[00:36:43] And so I actually appreciate his pragmatism and rolling up his sleeves. You know, he brings farm boy attitude to Silicon Valley. Like, well, OK, just got to get this done. I'm glad he came by. This podcast is brought to you by Leap Forward Ventures, an investor in early stage startups. If you like this episode, we'd love your help spreading the word.

[00:37:12] Forward it to a friend or give us a rating wherever you're listening. This episode was produced by Kim Naderfein-Petersa. Craig Ely is our engineer. Rhys Laudano made our cover art. Music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. I'm David Orsenko, and this is the Leap Forward podcast. See you next episode. Bye. Bye. Bye.