#185 Green Hydrogen, Landing Customers, Electrolyzers, Building in Wisconsin, & More w/ Chad Mason (Advanced Ionics)

Chad Mason is the CEO and Founder of Advanced Ionics, a company that has designed a revolutionary electrolyzer. They did this by designing their technology from scratch.

They are currently scaling up this innovative technology and plan to sell these units, known as stacks, either directly or through licensing agreements.

Today, Chad shares his  journey:

• Early Inspiration: How he first learned about electrolysis at age 5 on a farm in North Dakota.
• Career Path: The various steps in his career that led him to start Advanced Ionics.
• Strategic Location: Why he chose Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as the base for his company.
• Corporate Partnerships: How they partner with corporates for capital, pilots, and demand.

Chad also offers his insights on the future of the electrolyzer space, discussing both the tailwinds that are driving growth and the headwinds that present challenges.

Enjoy today's conversation!

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Topics:
**2:00 Intro and Background
**5:13 Utilizing Exothermic Heat for Efficiency
**6:20 Chad's Entrepreneurial Journey
**12:44 Early Inspirations and Career Path
**15:25 Understanding Electrolysis Technology
**18:18 Components and Operation of the Stack
**26:30 Landing Customers
**27:47 The Power of Partnerships and Investments
**31:26 Lessons Learned: Opportunistic with Capital Raising
**40:58 Headwinds and Tailwinds of Hydrogen Industry
**45;36 The Importance of Reliability and Maintainability
**49:10 Talent Acquisition in Wisconsin
**53:16 Takeaways

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Links:
**Chad Mason | Advanced Ionics
**Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn
**@Silas & @Somil_Agg on X 

Chapters

• 2:00 Intro and Background
• 5:13 Utilizing Exothermic Heat for Efficiency
• 6:20 Chad's Entrepreneurial Journey
• 12:44 Early Inspirations and Career Path
• 15:25 Understanding Electrolysis Technology
• 18:18 Components and Operation of the Stack
• 26:30 Landing Customers
• 27:47 The Power of Partnerships and Investments
• 31:26 Lessons Learned: Opportunistic with Capital Raising
• 40:58 Headwinds and Tailwinds of Hydrogen Industry
• 45:36 The Importance of Reliability and Maintainability
• 49:10 Talent Acquisition in Wisconsin
• 53:16 Takeaways

Transcript

Chad Mason (00:00:00):
When this company first started,

Chad Mason (00:00:01):
we looked out and said,

Chad Mason (00:00:02):
if we were to build an electrolyzer from scratch,

Chad Mason (00:00:04):
just throw all the dogma out and everything that's known.

Chad Mason (00:00:07):
Early on, we had a small investment from Total Energies, and then we got BP to lead the last round.

Chad Mason (00:00:14):
We've partnered through Greentown Labs with

Chad Mason (00:00:17):
with Shell and we worked with Repsol in their foundation.

Chad Mason (00:00:21):
Be opportunistic with capital raising, even though it can be a little bit uncomfortable.

Chad Mason (00:00:26):
When you pitch and when you raise capital, there is a strong business development component.

Chad Mason (00:00:31):
There's a sales pitch, there's a market hype, there's FOMO.

Silas Mähner (00:00:35):
What do you see as the biggest tailwinds and headwinds at the moment?

Silas Mähner (00:00:44):
The number one podcast for climate tech entrepreneurs.

Silas Mähner (00:00:46):
Today, I'm speaking with Chad Mason, CEO and founder of Advanced Ionics.

Silas Mähner (00:00:51):
They decided to throw out the instruction book and design an electrolyzer from scratch.

Silas Mähner (00:00:56):
Currently,

Silas Mähner (00:00:56):
they're scaling up the technology and will sell these units or stacks either

Silas Mähner (00:01:00):
directly or through licensing agreements in the future.

Silas Mähner (00:01:03):
They haven't decided yet.

Silas Mähner (00:01:04):
They're keeping that open.

Silas Mähner (00:01:05):
Today,

Silas Mähner (00:01:06):
Chad told us how he first learned about electrolysis at his family farm at age 5 in

Silas Mähner (00:01:11):
North Dakota,

Silas Mähner (00:01:12):
how his career led him to starting Advanced Ionics,

Silas Mähner (00:01:15):
why he ended up building the company in Milwaukee,

Silas Mähner (00:01:18):
Wisconsin of all places ,

Silas Mähner (00:01:19):
how they partner with corporates for capital,

Silas Mähner (00:01:23):
pilots,

Silas Mähner (00:01:24):
and demand,

Silas Mähner (00:01:25):
and he offered his thoughts on the future of the space broadly,

Silas Mähner (00:01:28):
both the tailwinds and the headwinds.

Silas Mähner (00:01:31):
It's a great episode and we hope you enjoy it.

Silas Mähner (00:01:33):
But before you dive in, we have an ask.

Silas Mähner (00:01:35):
Wait, wait, wait.

Silas Mähner (00:01:35):
I promise I'm not asking you for money again.

Silas Mähner (00:01:38):
We do need to hear from you though.

Silas Mähner (00:01:40):
Who are the most influential people in climate tech that we should speak with?

Silas Mähner (00:01:44):
Send us a message or leave us a comment on the Substack post with your

Silas Mähner (00:01:48):
recommendation and why you chose them.

Silas Mähner (00:01:50):
Thank you for your help on this.

Silas Mähner (00:01:51):
But seriously, don't just ignore us on this one.

Silas Mähner (00:01:54):
Pull out your phone, go to the Substack app, pull up this post and drop your recommendation.

Silas Mähner (00:01:59):
Okay, enjoy the episode.

Silas Mähner (00:02:00):
All right, welcome to the show, Chad.

Silas Mähner (00:02:02):
How's it going today?

Chad Mason (00:02:03):
Not too bad.

Chad Mason (00:02:04):
Pleasure to be on.

Silas Mähner (00:02:06):
Yeah,

Silas Mähner (00:02:06):
it's a pleasure to speak with another person who is not only from Wisconsin,

Silas Mähner (00:02:09):
but actually in Wisconsin as we speak.

Silas Mähner (00:02:12):
We're not too far away from each other.

Silas Mähner (00:02:13):
How are you doing?

Chad Mason (00:02:14):
Not too bad, so yeah, I'm calling from my house on a Saturday, actually.

Chad Mason (00:02:18):
I don't know if you disclose that to people, but yeah, here in Cudahy, behind the airports in Milwaukee.

Silas Mähner (00:02:25):
Yeah, we're one of the few, I guess, Wisconsinites hustling on a Saturday, and I shouldn't say that.

Silas Mähner (00:02:31):
There's a lot of people who hustle here,

Silas Mähner (00:02:32):
but I just think it's not like Silicon Valley or something,

Silas Mähner (00:02:36):
right,

Silas Mähner (00:02:36):
where it's a common thing.

Silas Mähner (00:02:37):
But anyways,

Silas Mähner (00:02:39):
man,

Silas Mähner (00:02:39):
just tell us a little bit about who you are and what you're working on today to get

Silas Mähner (00:02:42):
us started.

Chad Mason (00:02:43):
So I'm Chad Mason,

Chad Mason (00:02:44):
founder and CEO of Advanced Ionics,

Chad Mason (00:02:46):
and we're developing intermediate temperature electrolysis for industrial applications.

Chad Mason (00:02:51):
And as I think a lot of viewers will know, all hydrogen today is used.

Chad Mason (00:02:55):
in just really a few sectors such as ammonia and petrochemicals.

Chad Mason (00:03:00):
And we're developing a solution that basically is going to become the default

Chad Mason (00:03:03):
technology for those industries.

Silas Mähner (00:03:05):
So can you just kind of break it down a little bit more clearly?

Silas Mähner (00:03:07):
You're making hardware or you've developed a technology that you're going to sell

Silas Mähner (00:03:11):
to other hardware producers?

Silas Mähner (00:03:13):
What does that look like in a little bit more kind of basic detail?

Chad Mason (00:03:15):
Yeah.

Chad Mason (00:03:16):
At this point, we still have optionality on both, but we will be selling the stack for sure.

Chad Mason (00:03:21):
And that's the technology we're developing right now.

Chad Mason (00:03:23):
So

Chad Mason (00:03:24):
Runs at intermediate temperatures.

Chad Mason (00:03:26):
It's water vapor electrolysis, we call it, the technology we've done Symbian.

Chad Mason (00:03:32):
So it runs at intermediate temperatures, you know, anywhere from that 200 to 600 degrees Celsius range.

Chad Mason (00:03:38):
And this has been a big gap with electrolyzer technology really since forever

Chad Mason (00:03:44):
because you have low temperature alkaline,

Chad Mason (00:03:46):
runs with liquid water,

Chad Mason (00:03:47):
well-established technology,

Chad Mason (00:03:49):
considered reliable.

Chad Mason (00:03:50):
It's been around about 100 years.

Chad Mason (00:03:52):
Yeah, proton exchange membrane technology, and it's been around, you know, 50 plus years.

Chad Mason (00:03:57):
And it also runs with liquid water.

Chad Mason (00:03:59):
And then you have high temperature solid oxide technology,

Chad Mason (00:04:02):
which is really a ceramic based solid state,

Chad Mason (00:04:05):
but you have to have temperatures in excess of 600 degrees Celsius in order for

Chad Mason (00:04:08):
that to function.

Chad Mason (00:04:10):
And so when we,

Chad Mason (00:04:11):
when this company first started,

Chad Mason (00:04:13):
we looked out and said,

Chad Mason (00:04:13):
if we were to build an electrolyzer from scratch and like just throw all the dogma

Chad Mason (00:04:18):
out and everything that's known,

Chad Mason (00:04:19):
how,

Chad Mason (00:04:20):
how should we build that?

Chad Mason (00:04:21):
What does the industry specifically need?

Chad Mason (00:04:24):
And we found that there were two things that, that were true is, you know, one,

Chad Mason (00:04:27):
Basically,

Chad Mason (00:04:28):
you have exothermic processes such as ammonia or hydrogenation,

Chad Mason (00:04:32):
hydrocracking,

Chad Mason (00:04:33):
all of the things that are used to make all the materials that we take for granted today.

Chad Mason (00:04:39):
And the second important thing is that by not utilizing liquid water, you operate much more efficiently.

Chad Mason (00:04:47):
You don't have to overcome the heat of vaporization of water.

Chad Mason (00:04:50):
And so combining those two things together,

Chad Mason (00:04:52):
we basically have a water vapor electrolyzer that utilizes the exothermic heat

Chad Mason (00:04:57):
that's provided from all these industrial processes.

Chad Mason (00:05:00):
So it's very elegant.

Chad Mason (00:05:01):
It's something that industry already does, knows how to do with existing steam methane reformers.

Chad Mason (00:05:07):
So it's really a plug and play solution for them that allows them to decarbonize their operations.

Silas Mähner (00:05:13):
Okay,

Silas Mähner (00:05:14):
and we'll get into this in more detail in a bit,

Silas Mähner (00:05:15):
but just to clarify what you're saying there is your technology can just utilize

Silas Mähner (00:05:20):
the heat that's being off-put by other industrial processes like in a manufacturing

Silas Mähner (00:05:25):
facility or like a paper mill or something,

Silas Mähner (00:05:27):
and they can use that to power the electrolyzer.

Chad Mason (00:05:32):
Yeah, part of the process.

Chad Mason (00:05:33):
Basically, it's there to convert that liquid water into steam or water vapor.

Chad Mason (00:05:40):
And so you can't get around thermodynamics.

Chad Mason (00:05:42):
It is what it is.

Chad Mason (00:05:43):
It's not like,

Chad Mason (00:05:44):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:05:45):
when you say someone's developing a better catalyst or a better membrane,

Chad Mason (00:05:48):
that's fantastic.

Chad Mason (00:05:49):
But it doesn't get around the thermodynamic challenges of liquid water electrolysis.

Chad Mason (00:05:55):
And so the only way to do that is really to go into the water vapor or steam electrolysis routines.

Chad Mason (00:06:01):
So what's really nice then is that all of these industrial processes are running exothermic processes.

Chad Mason (00:06:07):
So it's very elegant and it's very symbiotic.

Chad Mason (00:06:13):
You know,

Chad Mason (00:06:13):
a little play on the words of Symbian,

Chad Mason (00:06:14):
but it's very symbiotic with what we're trying to do here.

Silas Mähner (00:06:18):
Okay, very nice.

Silas Mähner (00:06:19):
Well, let's go back a little bit.

Silas Mähner (00:06:20):
I guess, how did you originally decide to get into this space in the first place?

Silas Mähner (00:06:25):
What were your early inspirations as a kid?

Silas Mähner (00:06:27):
I'm always curious how people decide to become an entrepreneur,

Silas Mähner (00:06:30):
and in particular,

Silas Mähner (00:06:31):
why they decide to take on very difficult challenges like these.

Chad Mason (00:06:35):
Yeah,

Chad Mason (00:06:35):
being an entrepreneur,

Chad Mason (00:06:37):
you have to be a little bit crazy to want to put yourself out there and go through

Chad Mason (00:06:44):
the struggle.

Chad Mason (00:06:45):
But

Chad Mason (00:06:46):
You know,

Chad Mason (00:06:47):
the world wouldn't be what it is today without entrepreneurs creating businesses

Chad Mason (00:06:50):
and doing all of the things that we do.

Chad Mason (00:06:54):
Yeah, it really started.

Chad Mason (00:06:56):
I grew up on a family farm in central North Dakota.

Chad Mason (00:06:59):
And,

Chad Mason (00:07:01):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:07:01):
of course,

Chad Mason (00:07:02):
like many farm kids,

Chad Mason (00:07:03):
you become interested in,

Chad Mason (00:07:05):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:07:05):
engineering or developing things or creating new things.

Chad Mason (00:07:11):
And so I was always very creative.

Chad Mason (00:07:13):
I was always someone who liked to build.

Chad Mason (00:07:16):
And I read a lot.

Chad Mason (00:07:17):
I read a lot of science books, even when I was very, very young.

Chad Mason (00:07:21):
And I was somebody who watched a lot of Star Trek and other sci-fi shows like that, too.

Chad Mason (00:07:26):
So that was always very inspiring as well.

Chad Mason (00:07:29):
So, you know, fast forward a little bit.

Chad Mason (00:07:33):
I don't know at what point sometime in fifth or sixth grade,

Chad Mason (00:07:36):
I ran across the concept of electrolysis and,

Chad Mason (00:07:39):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:07:39):
how they pointed out,

Chad Mason (00:07:40):
oh,

Chad Mason (00:07:40):
you can just like put two wires in a beaker and create bubbles.

Chad Mason (00:07:43):
And I think this is something probably a lot of kids can relate to because they

Chad Mason (00:07:47):
Ended up probably doing that experiment, but I ended up somehow deciding to stick with that.

Chad Mason (00:07:52):
So I dove deeper into it.

Chad Mason (00:07:54):
It was kind of one of those early times when there was a fuel cell hype bubble at

Chad Mason (00:07:58):
the end of the,

Chad Mason (00:07:59):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:08:00):
1990s timeframe.

Chad Mason (00:08:01):
So fuel cell seemed like a solution at the time and hydrogen didn't.

Chad Mason (00:08:05):
you know, hydrogen economy, it kind of made all sense, right?

Chad Mason (00:08:08):
So I did dig deeper into that.

Chad Mason (00:08:12):
I built some electrolyzers,

Chad Mason (00:08:13):
like alkaline type,

Chad Mason (00:08:15):
put to a rod inside of a pipe,

Chad Mason (00:08:17):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:08:17):
put in KOH and kind of hook it up and

Chad Mason (00:08:20):
I do experiments.

Chad Mason (00:08:21):
I try to run a lawnmower or try to improve the efficiency of my car's engine and gas mileage.

Chad Mason (00:08:27):
So that was what I would do as a kid.

Chad Mason (00:08:31):
And, yeah, then I basically decided to make a career out of that.

Silas Mähner (00:08:35):
So you then – yeah, so then did you end up just kind of studying it or did you have any like –

Silas Mähner (00:08:42):
Before you ended up getting into building Advanced Ionics properly,

Silas Mähner (00:08:46):
did you have side hustles or things that you did as an entrepreneur before that,

Silas Mähner (00:08:49):
or was it always this technology?

Chad Mason (00:08:54):
This was the first in the sense that I would do side hustles and working on a farm

Chad Mason (00:08:59):
is quite entrepreneurial,

Chad Mason (00:09:00):
but

Chad Mason (00:09:01):
You know, then I went to college and I did a senior design project on electrolysis also.

Chad Mason (00:09:07):
But I realized I did an electrical engineering program.

Chad Mason (00:09:10):
You weren't going to really know electrolysis that well.

Chad Mason (00:09:14):
So I ended up doing a master's at Arizona State, specifically on electrochemistry and alternative energy.

Chad Mason (00:09:21):
And then interestingly,

Chad Mason (00:09:23):
my travels led me over to Finland for a little while where I worked on gas

Chad Mason (00:09:27):
diffusion layers.

Chad Mason (00:09:29):
And that was just a six month stint.

Chad Mason (00:09:31):
And I ended up, interestingly enough, in Singapore after my master's degree finished.

Chad Mason (00:09:38):
So what was interesting,

Chad Mason (00:09:40):
though,

Chad Mason (00:09:40):
is I had to switch to lithium ion batteries and I wasn't happy about it at the time.

Chad Mason (00:09:45):
because I needed a job.

Chad Mason (00:09:48):
But it turned out to be probably one of the best things that ever happened to me

Chad Mason (00:09:51):
because I got to understand another completely other area of electrochemistry.

Chad Mason (00:09:57):
And I think a lot of folks don't get that perspective and that ability to,

Chad Mason (00:10:03):
or even that opportunity,

Chad Mason (00:10:05):
so to say,

Chad Mason (00:10:05):
to go deep into two different electrochemical fields.

Chad Mason (00:10:09):
And I also was able to interact with a lot of people who worked on solar cells and

Chad Mason (00:10:13):
you know, photo catalysis, water technology.

Chad Mason (00:10:17):
So I got to interact with quite a few people over in Singapore.

Chad Mason (00:10:22):
And so when I came back to the U.S.,

Chad Mason (00:10:24):
I ended up ironically then getting a job in fuel cell at General Motors.

Chad Mason (00:10:28):
But it did stick with me a lot that, you know, as I got some free time again, I was like, well, how come

Chad Mason (00:10:35):
Like no one's doing anything about electrolysis.

Chad Mason (00:10:38):
We're still using the same technology as when I was in the 1990s as a kid.

Chad Mason (00:10:42):
It's ridiculous.

Chad Mason (00:10:44):
And so that was one of the genesis for starting advanced ionics.

Silas Mähner (00:10:49):
And were you just doing it in your garage or something,

Silas Mähner (00:10:54):
like doing some tests and just kind of working on some things on the side?

Chad Mason (00:10:57):
No, nothing at all, actually.

Chad Mason (00:10:59):
It was all on paper.

Chad Mason (00:11:01):
And basically,

Chad Mason (00:11:03):
I had the initial spark for a broad platform for some electrochemical improvements

Chad Mason (00:11:11):
in between jobs before I came back to the U.S.

Chad Mason (00:11:15):
And it stuck with me,

Chad Mason (00:11:16):
but I didn't actually know if I was going to attempt to do like long duration

Chad Mason (00:11:21):
battery storage,

Chad Mason (00:11:22):
because that,

Chad Mason (00:11:23):
of course,

Chad Mason (00:11:24):
there was a big need for that.

Chad Mason (00:11:25):
And there's some really awesome companies that have filled that niche.

Chad Mason (00:11:29):
Finally, you have like form and ESS, and there's a number of others.

Chad Mason (00:11:35):
And so I didn't see that there was a lot of or just enough market pull to go into

Chad Mason (00:11:42):
long duration energy storage.

Chad Mason (00:11:44):
I just thought it was going to be really an impossible uphill battle.

Chad Mason (00:11:47):
I didn't have really a network in the United States.

Chad Mason (00:11:50):
So I thought just the network effects would be a problem as well.

Chad Mason (00:11:54):
We're trying to start an endeavor.

Chad Mason (00:11:55):
So that's why I did end up going and getting a job at Driven Motors.

Chad Mason (00:11:58):
But then as I thought about it some more, I really honed in on electrolysis.

Chad Mason (00:12:03):
And it was interesting because that was my passion as a kid.

Chad Mason (00:12:07):
So it did come full circle eventually.

Silas Mähner (00:12:09):
Hey guys, sorry for the interruption.

Silas Mähner (00:12:11):
I just need a few seconds because Soma and I have two quick favors to ask.

Silas Mähner (00:12:15):
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Silas Mähner (00:12:43):
Now back to the show.

Silas Mähner (00:12:45):
Yeah.

Silas Mähner (00:12:46):
I guess one thing I was impressed by is you've been at this for a long time and

Silas Mähner (00:12:51):
building Advanced Ionics,

Silas Mähner (00:12:52):
it's a lot of persistence to build this.

Silas Mähner (00:12:55):
I guess what kind of keeps you going through the difficult times?

Silas Mähner (00:12:58):
Because it's not always easy, right?

Silas Mähner (00:13:00):
Not every day is rainbows and sunshine.

Silas Mähner (00:13:02):
So how did you keep going?

Chad Mason (00:13:04):
Yeah.

Chad Mason (00:13:08):
It's interesting.

Chad Mason (00:13:09):
I would say you do have to get a good night's sleep.

Chad Mason (00:13:13):
Go ahead.

Chad Mason (00:13:14):
And that's easier said than done when things are on your mind.

Chad Mason (00:13:17):
But it's one thing I'm quite unwilling to compromise on.

Chad Mason (00:13:22):
And I know there's like a lot of folks who are very famous that talk about the importance of sleep.

Chad Mason (00:13:29):
So I think that's the number one thing is because then you despite like whatever

Chad Mason (00:13:33):
challenges you face in the day,

Chad Mason (00:13:34):
you can have

Chad Mason (00:13:35):
a clear mind to do that.

Chad Mason (00:13:38):
You also have to give yourself space to just de-stress and relax a bit as well.

Chad Mason (00:13:43):
So being very particular with scheduling and like a very robust calendaring system

Chad Mason (00:13:51):
is something I've had to learn over the past,

Chad Mason (00:13:53):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:13:54):
three plus years.

Chad Mason (00:13:56):
It doesn't make everybody on the outside happy because a lot of people send me emails,

Chad Mason (00:14:01):
get auto-reject notices.

Chad Mason (00:14:03):
But if you don't do that,

Chad Mason (00:14:05):
one,

Chad Mason (00:14:05):
you won't have mental sanity,

Chad Mason (00:14:06):
and two,

Chad Mason (00:14:07):
you won't actually get real work done.

Chad Mason (00:14:08):
So your business will suffer quite a bit.

Chad Mason (00:14:11):
And then I think the other part of that is...

Chad Mason (00:14:16):
you know, it can't be understated.

Chad Mason (00:14:19):
The support network is quite critical.

Chad Mason (00:14:22):
And for entrepreneurs that,

Chad Mason (00:14:26):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:14:27):
don't have enough of a support network,

Chad Mason (00:14:28):
I would strongly recommend working on that to build connections with people.

Chad Mason (00:14:35):
Milwaukee has a great founders community.

Chad Mason (00:14:39):
And then,

Chad Mason (00:14:39):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:14:39):
when I started this company,

Chad Mason (00:14:42):
I mentioned to my wife,

Chad Mason (00:14:43):
like,

Chad Mason (00:14:44):
this is what I want to do.

Chad Mason (00:14:45):
And if she hadn't bought into it, I wouldn't do it.

Chad Mason (00:14:48):
And so that is absolutely critical.

Chad Mason (00:14:51):
And it wasn't just like she was just saying in the moment, yeah, yeah, go do that.

Chad Mason (00:14:54):
It was like, I know exactly what this is going to take.

Chad Mason (00:14:57):
This is a very long-term commitment and very hard.

Chad Mason (00:15:00):
And she said, yes, you need to do this.

Chad Mason (00:15:02):
So that is very important, I think.

Silas Mähner (00:15:06):
Yeah, I mean, I think you can't really succeed if you have no support on that side, right?

Silas Mähner (00:15:11):
That is super important.

Silas Mähner (00:15:12):
I think recently when I started my company, I had the same thing with my wife.

Silas Mähner (00:15:17):
I had to make sure she was in on

Silas Mähner (00:15:19):
And on the plan, I guess.

Silas Mähner (00:15:22):
So let's go back to the technology and the company a bit.

Silas Mähner (00:15:24):
So you told us kind of high level what you're doing,

Silas Mähner (00:15:27):
but can you break it down for somebody who,

Silas Mähner (00:15:29):
again,

Silas Mähner (00:15:30):
just imagine somebody like me,

Silas Mähner (00:15:32):
who's definitely not an engineer,

Silas Mähner (00:15:34):
has no understanding of how these things work.

Silas Mähner (00:15:35):
Just explain the basic technology like you're explaining to a five year old.

Silas Mähner (00:15:38):
How does this work?

Chad Mason (00:15:40):
Yeah, well, just a few years and I'll be telling it to my kid at that point.

Chad Mason (00:15:44):
And yeah,

Chad Mason (00:15:45):
so,

Chad Mason (00:15:46):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:15:47):
folks have,

Chad Mason (00:15:47):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:15:48):
going back to that example of two wires and a beaker,

Chad Mason (00:15:51):
anybody can do this at home.

Chad Mason (00:15:54):
You can take, you know, baking soda is probably your easiest.

Chad Mason (00:15:57):
Take baking soda,

Chad Mason (00:15:59):
put it in distilled or reverse osmosis water,

Chad Mason (00:16:02):
and then you can basically attach two wires from any DC power supply,

Chad Mason (00:16:06):
like a computer power supply or whatever you find.

Chad Mason (00:16:10):
Not from the wall.

Chad Mason (00:16:12):
And you can basically see bubbles evolve, and that's hydrogen and oxygen.

Chad Mason (00:16:17):
Sorry,

Silas Mähner (00:16:19):
just to clarify,

Silas Mähner (00:16:20):
what's happening is you said that you have distilled water and you put baking soda.

Silas Mähner (00:16:25):
And what's happening is you're passing electricity through the water and it's causing a reaction.

Chad Mason (00:16:29):
Yeah, basically you're evolving.

Chad Mason (00:16:31):
So water is H2O.

Chad Mason (00:16:33):
And you're evolving basically the hydrogen on the cathodes,

Chad Mason (00:16:37):
the negative side,

Chad Mason (00:16:37):
and you're evolving oxygen on the anode side.

Chad Mason (00:16:40):
And basically there's an ion transfer that's occurring,

Chad Mason (00:16:44):
which is dependent on which salt you put in solution.

Chad Mason (00:16:48):
But yeah.

Silas Mähner (00:16:49):
And so this is called electrolysis, like electricity through liquids, basically, right?

Silas Mähner (00:16:55):
Yeah, yeah.

Silas Mähner (00:16:56):
Usually water, right?

Silas Mähner (00:16:57):
So are there a lot of technologies out there that use this already?

Silas Mähner (00:17:01):
I mean, this is like a pretty widely, like very, very common thing within the metal space, correct?

Silas Mähner (00:17:05):
As well as other things.

Chad Mason (00:17:07):
Yeah, glad you asked.

Chad Mason (00:17:08):
So the most common things that people touch today that use electrolysis,

Chad Mason (00:17:12):
one,

Chad Mason (00:17:13):
as you alluded to,

Chad Mason (00:17:13):
the metals is aluminum refinery.

Chad Mason (00:17:16):
Refining is done this way.

Chad Mason (00:17:17):
except the very high temperatures, molten salt baths that they use.

Chad Mason (00:17:23):
And then the other big one is basically bleach and drain cleaners, you know, like sodium hydroxide.

Chad Mason (00:17:30):
So right now, chloralkali process, and I think there's actually a plant in central Wisconsin

Chad Mason (00:17:35):
among other places in the united states they basically can take salt water and you

Chad Mason (00:17:39):
split it into chlorine sodium hydroxide and then you can do other things with those

Chad Mason (00:17:45):
downstream as well but also you know going from there a lot of the solutions that

Chad Mason (00:17:51):
are being developed for the clean energy industry are based on electrolysis or

Chad Mason (00:17:56):
other electrolytic processes

Chad Mason (00:17:59):
And so hydrogen is actually probably one of the most simple examples.

Chad Mason (00:18:03):
There's some very creative use of electrochemistry that are being developed,

Chad Mason (00:18:09):
decarbonizing cement or decarbonizing iron and steel and

Chad Mason (00:18:13):
and start carbon sequestration.

Chad Mason (00:18:15):
There's quite a large plethora these days.

Silas Mähner (00:18:17):
Okay, got it.

Silas Mähner (00:18:17):
So then when you get to what you guys are building, so just tell us more about that specifically.

Silas Mähner (00:18:23):
What does it look like in principle?

Silas Mähner (00:18:24):
What are the components?

Silas Mähner (00:18:26):
Do you need water, electricity, and heat?

Silas Mähner (00:18:28):
And how does it work as an outcome?

Silas Mähner (00:18:29):
How do you capture the output?

Chad Mason (00:18:31):
Yeah, yeah.

Chad Mason (00:18:32):
So taking that example from

Chad Mason (00:18:35):
from the beaker, the tabletop example.

Chad Mason (00:18:37):
Basically,

Chad Mason (00:18:38):
if you were to say,

Chad Mason (00:18:38):
well,

Chad Mason (00:18:39):
how do we make a device where we can make a lot of them really large that's highly

Chad Mason (00:18:42):
efficient and very low cost?

Chad Mason (00:18:45):
Basically, it looks very similar in a sense to like your car battery.

Chad Mason (00:18:50):
If you're to crack open your car battery,

Chad Mason (00:18:52):
you have a lot of plates in there and you have liquid or you have a gel or a glass

Chad Mason (00:18:57):
mat in between those plates.

Chad Mason (00:18:58):
So conceptually, it's very similar.

Chad Mason (00:19:00):
We call that a cell and the cells are stacked together.

Chad Mason (00:19:04):
And then basically to deliver the liquid or the gases and to bring them out, we have manifolds.

Chad Mason (00:19:10):
So anyone who's taken apart a car engine, those have manifolds.

Chad Mason (00:19:14):
Conceptually quite similar in the stack context as well.

Chad Mason (00:19:19):
So manifolds bring gas in and then basically sweep it across the plates.

Chad Mason (00:19:25):
And the plates will have the anode and the cathode and then some kind of separator

Chad Mason (00:19:29):
like a diaphragm or a membrane or something like that that's in the middle in

Chad Mason (00:19:34):
between the cathode and the anode.

Chad Mason (00:19:36):
And that keeps them electrically separated from one another so they don't short circuit.

Chad Mason (00:19:40):
And it also facilitates the passage of ions from one side to the other.

Chad Mason (00:19:47):
So a lot of these are very analogous to what you see with a lead acid battery,

Chad Mason (00:19:52):
so people can kind of use that as a baseline example.

Chad Mason (00:19:55):
And of course,

Chad Mason (00:19:56):
people can Google what a stack looks like,

Chad Mason (00:19:58):
and there's some really nice drawings out there.

Silas Mähner (00:20:02):
And then, so you're, you're producing the stack.

Silas Mähner (00:20:04):
So I guess I want to go back a little bit to,

Silas Mähner (00:20:07):
you talked about deciding,

Silas Mähner (00:20:08):
Hey,

Silas Mähner (00:20:08):
there was no,

Silas Mähner (00:20:09):
there was nobody working on this.

Silas Mähner (00:20:10):
I think it's something I can do because I love it.

Silas Mähner (00:20:12):
And I just see an opportunity here.

Silas Mähner (00:20:14):
Yeah.

Silas Mähner (00:20:14):
You know, how did that, how did those early days look?

Silas Mähner (00:20:17):
Did you go out and raise funding?

Silas Mähner (00:20:18):
Were you able to find like a research lab to start funding things?

Silas Mähner (00:20:22):
How did you actually get going and then take us all the way through to when you land your first customer?

Chad Mason (00:20:27):
Yeah, so we were not a university spin out.

Chad Mason (00:20:31):
And I've actually been running into a few more entrepreneurs these days, even just two days ago.

Chad Mason (00:20:39):
here in milwaukee that were not university spinouts and so we were one of them

Chad Mason (00:20:43):
where really it was an idea and i had built up enough materials knowledge and this

Chad Mason (00:20:48):
is why i said it was really important for me to go pretty deep into a few different

Chad Mason (00:20:52):
verticals because if i just stayed in fuel cell and hydrogen i would do what

Chad Mason (00:20:56):
everybody else does which is oh here's a proton exchange membrane i can buy off the

Chad Mason (00:21:02):
shelf and i can maybe play around with it and make it a little better or

Chad Mason (00:21:06):
I can make this catalyst.

Chad Mason (00:21:08):
Whereas,

Chad Mason (00:21:09):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:21:09):
having the background of working across multiple verticals,

Chad Mason (00:21:14):
I was able to just pull myself out of the rabbit hole and say,

Chad Mason (00:21:17):
like,

Chad Mason (00:21:18):
all right,

Chad Mason (00:21:19):
like,

Chad Mason (00:21:19):
we need to just really throw out everything we know.

Chad Mason (00:21:23):
Another big point that I think is not appreciated is that most electrolyzer

Chad Mason (00:21:28):
technologies are really derivatives of fuel cell technology.

Chad Mason (00:21:33):
Naturally, a lot of funding flowed to fuel cell research in the past few decades.

Chad Mason (00:21:39):
So many,

Chad Mason (00:21:39):
many labs have been well set up for that type of work with solid oxide,

Chad Mason (00:21:43):
with proton exchange membranes.

Chad Mason (00:21:45):
And so naturally,

Chad Mason (00:21:46):
as the funding environment shifts and kind of where all the hype is to electrolysis,

Chad Mason (00:21:52):
a lot of labs have been able to very elegantly transition.

Chad Mason (00:21:55):
problem is is those are materials that we don't believe are going to be the right

Chad Mason (00:21:59):
solution for electrolysis here once again stuck with kind of the fuel cell way of

Chad Mason (00:22:03):
thinking or old dogma so that's something we basically threw out i'd say the more

Chad Mason (00:22:08):
important thing too for us is we brought in a very multidisciplinary team as well

Chad Mason (00:22:12):
so you know i can only claim a piece of the pie right

Chad Mason (00:22:16):
We brought in people who have experience with lead acid batteries,

Chad Mason (00:22:19):
with high-temp superconductors,

Chad Mason (00:22:21):
with textiles,

Chad Mason (00:22:22):
with all sorts of different fuel cell and electrolyzer technologies,

Chad Mason (00:22:25):
battery technologies.

Chad Mason (00:22:26):
So you really need that broad multidisciplinary team to do something like what we're doing.

Chad Mason (00:22:34):
So it's both like a good and a bad thing.

Chad Mason (00:22:37):
Good in the end,

Chad Mason (00:22:38):
of course,

Chad Mason (00:22:38):
but difficult to originally do the hiring and assemble a team and put the ideas together.

Silas Mähner (00:22:44):
How did you, I guess, get going with funding then?

Silas Mähner (00:22:46):
Did you go out and raise money based off of the idea and your kind of background to

Silas Mähner (00:22:50):
get – or did you just convince people to come work on this for free initially until

Silas Mähner (00:22:55):
you guys got some traction to go raise money?

Silas Mähner (00:22:57):
Yeah.

Chad Mason (00:22:58):
Yeah, so I ended up moving to Milwaukee specifically.

Chad Mason (00:23:02):
You asked prior about, you know, I basically needed a place to do this work.

Chad Mason (00:23:06):
And so at the time there was a program called Workbench Labs,

Chad Mason (00:23:11):
kind of like a mini little incubator accelerator program.

Chad Mason (00:23:14):
It actually doesn't exist anymore, sadly enough.

Chad Mason (00:23:17):
And a lot of great companies have gone through it.

Chad Mason (00:23:19):
We're just one of them,

Chad Mason (00:23:20):
but like Switch Source and Clear Flame and Meaty Foods out in Boulder,

Chad Mason (00:23:25):
like all these companies have gone through this program.

Chad Mason (00:23:28):
As well.

Chad Mason (00:23:30):
And so...

Chad Mason (00:23:31):
When I got there and I checked it out,

Chad Mason (00:23:33):
they're like,

Chad Mason (00:23:33):
oh yeah,

Chad Mason (00:23:34):
you can use this space,

Chad Mason (00:23:35):
do whatever you want,

Chad Mason (00:23:37):
and it's free,

Chad Mason (00:23:37):
and then it's pretty cheap afterwards.

Chad Mason (00:23:39):
And it was an old building that was used by Ethan Corporation for electronics,

Chad Mason (00:23:44):
switch gear development,

Chad Mason (00:23:45):
breaker boxes,

Chad Mason (00:23:46):
things like that.

Chad Mason (00:23:48):
So it was pretty ideal.

Chad Mason (00:23:49):
I ended up getting a pretty cheap apartment here and starting work in this program,

Chad Mason (00:23:56):
but I was all by myself.

Chad Mason (00:23:58):
So that that's not a good situation.

Chad Mason (00:24:02):
Like the most successful startups generally have a partner or a team as a founding component.

Chad Mason (00:24:08):
So I did look for getting some kind of partner.

Chad Mason (00:24:10):
I didn't really care what that person did as long as they got along with me and they were smart.

Chad Mason (00:24:16):
And luckily, I found Bill.

Chad Mason (00:24:18):
Bill Murray, not the comedian, although he certainly is funny.

Chad Mason (00:24:22):
But yeah, so then we started developing some concepts together.

Chad Mason (00:24:27):
And of course,

Chad Mason (00:24:28):
in startup school,

Chad Mason (00:24:29):
they teach you go find a beach at markets where we're like,

Chad Mason (00:24:33):
oh,

Chad Mason (00:24:33):
well,

Chad Mason (00:24:33):
we'll build this little lab scale alkaline electrolyzer and it'll be cheaper than

Chad Mason (00:24:38):
all these like ridiculously overpriced ones that everybody else sells.

Chad Mason (00:24:42):
And we started pitching and we had some connections into Clean Energy Ventures in Boston.

Chad Mason (00:24:48):
Interestingly enough, through the Workbench Labs program.

Chad Mason (00:24:53):
And so we started talking to them and,

Chad Mason (00:24:56):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:24:56):
just to like paraphrase at a very high level,

Chad Mason (00:24:59):
they're like,

Chad Mason (00:25:00):
don't waste your time on that little thing over there.

Chad Mason (00:25:03):
And because we were telling them, here's our long term vision.

Chad Mason (00:25:06):
We want to do intermediate temperature electrolysis.

Chad Mason (00:25:09):
This is why it matters.

Chad Mason (00:25:10):
And interestingly enough,

Chad Mason (00:25:12):
they were digging deep into the hydrogen market themselves as a venture capital

Chad Mason (00:25:15):
firm to figure out what their thesis should be.

Chad Mason (00:25:18):
It just so happens that we were actually talking to each other about the same exact thing.

Chad Mason (00:25:24):
And, you know, I guess we both quickly realized that.

Chad Mason (00:25:29):
But they did say, go get a bit more data because we had zero data, pretty much zero data.

Chad Mason (00:25:35):
And so then COVID hit.

Chad Mason (00:25:37):
And so in the middle of COVID,

Chad Mason (00:25:39):
we're basically getting parts from McMaster Car shipped overnight and a few other places.

Chad Mason (00:25:44):
And we're basically cobbling together like a mini steam generator on the cheap and

Chad Mason (00:25:49):
putting together some hand-built little pellets to basically show that the concept

Chad Mason (00:25:54):
even has some traction.

Chad Mason (00:25:57):
And so we were able to get barely enough data to say that, yeah, the concept...

Chad Mason (00:26:03):
you know, probably is working.

Chad Mason (00:26:06):
And then that triggered our first, you know, basically pre-seed investment.

Chad Mason (00:26:10):
And so to your point,

Chad Mason (00:26:12):
coming full circle is the first money was basically my own for quite a while,

Chad Mason (00:26:17):
bootstrapping and then venture capital.

Chad Mason (00:26:19):
So no grant funding initially, which is really the opposite of how it often happens.

Silas Mähner (00:26:24):
Yeah, man, I think that's really fascinating.

Silas Mähner (00:26:28):
I appreciate the context there.

Silas Mähner (00:26:30):
I guess from this point, where did you... I guess, first of all, clarify for us, who do you sell to?

Silas Mähner (00:26:36):
And how did you end up landing your kind of first customer, first, I guess, future offtake agreement?

Silas Mähner (00:26:40):
I don't know how this space works exactly.

Chad Mason (00:26:42):
Yeah.

Chad Mason (00:26:43):
So very early on, when you're trying to do something like this, it's...

Chad Mason (00:26:51):
very,

Chad Mason (00:26:51):
very challenging from how you look at the type of capital you need to raise in

Chad Mason (00:26:58):
order to continue to scale and go to an exit,

Chad Mason (00:27:02):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:27:02):
whether that's,

Chad Mason (00:27:03):
because once you take VC funding,

Chad Mason (00:27:05):
you've pretty much decided as a team,

Chad Mason (00:27:07):
we're going to go for some kind of an exit that looks like an IPO or a large scale

Chad Mason (00:27:12):
acquisition down the line.

Chad Mason (00:27:16):
And so you, you really look at it and you're, and you say, well,

Chad Mason (00:27:21):
How do you prove the technology and develop relationships and build first of the

Chad Mason (00:27:28):
kind plants without completely burning through all of your equity and being very

Chad Mason (00:27:34):
capital efficient?

Chad Mason (00:27:35):
So first thing, being in Wisconsin, very capital efficient.

Chad Mason (00:27:41):
It's just a fantastic place to do this type of work and it's very underappreciated.

Chad Mason (00:27:46):
The second thing is acquiring early on,

Chad Mason (00:27:50):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:27:51):
people that have internally at the C-suite level,

Chad Mason (00:27:54):
a mandate to have innovation,

Chad Mason (00:27:57):
to work on green technologies,

Chad Mason (00:28:00):
decarbonize certain parts of their operation.

Chad Mason (00:28:04):
And so we basically have found this with a lot of our European partners and our Japanese partners.

Chad Mason (00:28:13):
in that they have that mandate at the top to take action, to move.

Chad Mason (00:28:19):
And so early on,

Chad Mason (00:28:22):
we had basically a small investment from Total Energy,

Chad Mason (00:28:27):
although they eventually later then spun out their entire venture capital arm later.

Chad Mason (00:28:34):
So they're not investors anymore.

Chad Mason (00:28:38):
And then we basically got BP to lead the last round, and they've been really fantastic to work with.

Chad Mason (00:28:45):
We've partnered in the past through Greentown Labs with Shell,

Chad Mason (00:28:50):
um and we work with rapsol in their foundation as well and we'll have some more

Chad Mason (00:28:56):
announcements coming up as well but we absolutely love working with all of these

Chad Mason (00:29:00):
companies and people may not immediately think of the names i just listed as like

Chad Mason (00:29:07):
companies that are working hard to decarbonize but for them they really need to

Chad Mason (00:29:14):
figure out how to create green ammonia

Chad Mason (00:29:16):
And how to create green materials for all the things we produce and how to do this

Chad Mason (00:29:20):
in the most cost effective manner possible.

Chad Mason (00:29:24):
And and they have a lot of capacity or basically need for hydrogen to.

Chad Mason (00:29:30):
And they already know how to demo new processes at refineries.

Chad Mason (00:29:34):
They do this all the time, new reactors, new catalysis processes.

Chad Mason (00:29:38):
So we've found that this has been a really great route to help de-risk and retire

Chad Mason (00:29:45):
risk from the technology,

Chad Mason (00:29:46):
even at a very early stage.

Silas Mähner (00:29:49):
And so the reason for this being mainly that they invest because they also will use

Silas Mähner (00:29:54):
the technology if they can prove it.

Silas Mähner (00:29:56):
So they're maybe even giving you opportunities to test it on existing projects or

Silas Mähner (00:30:00):
there's just various kind of throughput.

Silas Mähner (00:30:02):
It's not just money and then you got to go find a partner.

Silas Mähner (00:30:04):
It's a money and a partner who will potentially buy it all in one.

Chad Mason (00:30:09):
Yes, exactly.

Chad Mason (00:30:10):
Develops be an early mover as far as purchasing units from the factory as well.

Silas Mähner (00:30:17):
So in essence, then landing your first customer was through the investment process, right?

Silas Mähner (00:30:21):
So you had somebody who would be a customer who could at least make introductions

Silas Mähner (00:30:24):
for you as part of your investor base.

Chad Mason (00:30:28):
So the first, yeah, I mean, yeah, I would probably frame it that way.

Chad Mason (00:30:35):
It's,

Chad Mason (00:30:37):
We have an interesting relationship.

Chad Mason (00:30:39):
Like every partner I've listed there, it's a slightly different twist on the relationship.

Chad Mason (00:30:44):
Like for example, Repsol has not invested in advanced dynamics, but we work with them very closely.

Chad Mason (00:30:52):
Same basically story of Shell.

Chad Mason (00:30:54):
They have not invested in advanced dynamics.

Chad Mason (00:30:56):
A little different though with Total having prior invested and BP have invested.

Chad Mason (00:31:01):
So each relationship we build,

Chad Mason (00:31:05):
We really customize it for what fits best.

Chad Mason (00:31:09):
We're not going to go in and say it has to be like this,

Chad Mason (00:31:12):
X,

Chad Mason (00:31:13):
Y,

Chad Mason (00:31:14):
and Z.

Chad Mason (00:31:15):
One,

Chad Mason (00:31:16):
we're not in a position to do that.

Chad Mason (00:31:18):
And two, we're here to create really win-win situations for everybody.

Chad Mason (00:31:21):
And that looks a little bit different for each partner.

Silas Mähner (00:31:24):
Yeah.

Silas Mähner (00:31:25):
Okay.

Silas Mähner (00:31:25):
Got it.

Silas Mähner (00:31:26):
And I guess over the course of doing this,

Silas Mähner (00:31:29):
if you're willing to share some of these examples,

Silas Mähner (00:31:31):
because I think there's so many opportunities for people to learn from the people

Silas Mähner (00:31:34):
who've walked the trail,

Silas Mähner (00:31:36):
what are some of the biggest,

Silas Mähner (00:31:37):
let's call it mistakes that you made or things that if you were to go back and do

Silas Mähner (00:31:41):
it again,

Silas Mähner (00:31:41):
you would do it differently because it would save you time or save you money?

Silas Mähner (00:31:45):
What are the biggest things you would go back and change slash mistakes?

Chad Mason (00:31:48):
Well, it's hard to say if like if making X change would have had Y effect, that was much more positive.

Chad Mason (00:31:59):
One thing I would always recommend entrepreneurs to do is,

Chad Mason (00:32:03):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:32:05):
be opportunistic with capital raising.

Chad Mason (00:32:10):
Even though it can be a little bit uncomfortable.

Chad Mason (00:32:13):
At times,

Chad Mason (00:32:14):
I think there were some times when we probably could have taken advantage of some

Chad Mason (00:32:20):
cycles in the market a little bit better.

Chad Mason (00:32:23):
and done timing a little bit better.

Chad Mason (00:32:26):
Because people just think that raising capital is really like,

Chad Mason (00:32:30):
I have an awesome product and investors are going to run and give me money.

Chad Mason (00:32:33):
And that isn't the case.

Chad Mason (00:32:36):
When you pitch and when you raise capital, there is a strong business development component.

Chad Mason (00:32:42):
There's a sales pitch.

Chad Mason (00:32:43):
There's a market hype.

Chad Mason (00:32:44):
There's FOMO.

Chad Mason (00:32:46):
Right.

Chad Mason (00:32:46):
And so you do need to be very cognizant of these things that may not seem entirely

Chad Mason (00:32:51):
rational to a new entrepreneur.

Chad Mason (00:32:53):
But these are dynamics that exist as well.

Chad Mason (00:33:00):
Another thing,

Chad Mason (00:33:00):
too,

Chad Mason (00:33:01):
is I would recommend always doubling and tripling down on what your team's

Chad Mason (00:33:07):
strengths are.

Chad Mason (00:33:07):
I think overall we've done really well at this.

Chad Mason (00:33:12):
But any time we haven't.

Chad Mason (00:33:15):
or we ignore a gap, that can eventually bite you, right?

Chad Mason (00:33:21):
And the team is very stretched thin.

Chad Mason (00:33:24):
Like if you're in a startup and you're not stretched thin, I wonder a bit why.

Chad Mason (00:33:29):
Not saying that's always a good thing.

Chad Mason (00:33:32):
Like it's not necessarily a good thing, but it is generally just a fact of the matter.

Chad Mason (00:33:38):
And so the one thing is,

Chad Mason (00:33:41):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:33:42):
you get a lot of advice about it should be this way based upon how someone else did

Chad Mason (00:33:49):
it here,

Chad Mason (00:33:49):
how it used to be.

Chad Mason (00:33:51):
And you as leader...

Chad Mason (00:33:54):
need to take a lot of into like,

Chad Mason (00:33:57):
you have a lot of intake of advice and ideas coming in,

Chad Mason (00:34:00):
and you have to filter it out.

Chad Mason (00:34:01):
And it's very tough to do that you have to have a thesis,

Chad Mason (00:34:05):
you have to be willing to learn to admit failure,

Chad Mason (00:34:08):
but you also have to sift through it and ultimately make a decision.

Chad Mason (00:34:14):
And

Chad Mason (00:34:15):
you need to not be too attached to one way of doing things such that it blinds you to alternatives.

Chad Mason (00:34:27):
So for example,

Chad Mason (00:34:30):
myself and Ignacio,

Chad Mason (00:34:32):
my chief commercial officer,

Chad Mason (00:34:36):
we do quite a bit of the investments work.

Chad Mason (00:34:40):
We raise the funds for the company and we have some help from some of the other team members.

Chad Mason (00:34:45):
And we've had to optimize how we tag team on that versus kind of like what's

Chad Mason (00:34:50):
normally the way of doing it,

Chad Mason (00:34:52):
which is like the CEO just does everything.

Chad Mason (00:34:54):
Well,

Chad Mason (00:34:55):
if I was just doing everything on the investments,

Chad Mason (00:34:57):
then I wouldn't be managing the company very effectively.

Chad Mason (00:35:00):
I'd be doing a very terrible job at that.

Chad Mason (00:35:02):
And I am very passionate about making sure the company is a very well oiled machine, right?

Chad Mason (00:35:07):
So we work really well to like figure out what's the best use of him.

Chad Mason (00:35:12):
What's the best use to me at the right situations when investors want to talk to me

Chad Mason (00:35:16):
about strategy,

Chad Mason (00:35:17):
the plan,

Chad Mason (00:35:18):
finances,

Chad Mason (00:35:19):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:35:19):
the engineering,

Chad Mason (00:35:20):
all those kinds of things.

Chad Mason (00:35:21):
So that's just one dynamic, and I hope it resonates on some level with people.

Silas Mähner (00:35:26):
Yeah, no, I think that that makes a lot of sense.

Silas Mähner (00:35:30):
On that topic,

Silas Mähner (00:35:31):
I guess I want to ask you,

Silas Mähner (00:35:32):
as a very technical founder,

Silas Mähner (00:35:35):
how do you,

Silas Mähner (00:35:36):
I mean,

Silas Mähner (00:35:37):
maybe talk a little bit about when you brought in a commercial person,

Silas Mähner (00:35:39):
but like,

Silas Mähner (00:35:39):
how do you manage?

Silas Mähner (00:35:40):
There's probably some things that you maybe understand,

Silas Mähner (00:35:43):
but you're not like the best at because you're more of a technical person.

Silas Mähner (00:35:47):
How did you navigate understanding, okay, I need to bring somebody else in who knows what I don't know.

Silas Mähner (00:35:52):
Can you just talk about that?

Silas Mähner (00:35:54):
Because there's a lot of people in climate who are very technical in nature and

Silas Mähner (00:35:58):
they need to bring in partners to help them grow to the next stages.

Chad Mason (00:36:02):
Yeah, I highly recommend bringing in partners no matter what.

Chad Mason (00:36:05):
It's just like what skill sets do you need in the early stage?

Chad Mason (00:36:09):
And a lot of times that early culture sets the culture for the rest of the company,

Chad Mason (00:36:14):
both the good and the bad.

Chad Mason (00:36:16):
It's different in every situation.

Chad Mason (00:36:19):
Generally, you'll hear people oversimplify this.

Chad Mason (00:36:23):
way oversimplify this.

Chad Mason (00:36:25):
And you can Google it, you can read advice, and you should definitely take stock of that wholeheartedly.

Chad Mason (00:36:31):
But you do have to customize it to your situation.

Chad Mason (00:36:33):
So what I did is I spent all of basically 2017 and almost the big chunk of 2018

Chad Mason (00:36:39):
just doing a pretty deep amount of market research.

Chad Mason (00:36:42):
I went to a lot of conferences.

Chad Mason (00:36:43):
I went overseas.

Chad Mason (00:36:47):
I talked to people about my ideas, you know, and people would probably wonder, like, who's this

Chad Mason (00:36:52):
guy who's just telling me about intermediate temperature.

Chad Mason (00:36:55):
Like he has nobody.

Chad Mason (00:36:57):
He has no team.

Chad Mason (00:36:58):
He has nothing.

Chad Mason (00:37:00):
But that was very beneficial because I put together a strategy,

Chad Mason (00:37:04):
a very,

Chad Mason (00:37:05):
very deep strategy with a lot of complexity and nuance because hydrogen is that way.

Chad Mason (00:37:10):
that all of it remains true to this day.

Chad Mason (00:37:13):
Like everything I had figured out and strategized on in 17 and 18 holds true.

Chad Mason (00:37:18):
And that's not to say we don't make adjustments and we don't course correct and

Chad Mason (00:37:22):
pivot on these little things,

Chad Mason (00:37:23):
but like the thesis remains what it is.

Chad Mason (00:37:28):
So that gave me a lot of confidence to do certain portions of the business

Chad Mason (00:37:34):
development at a very,

Chad Mason (00:37:35):
very early stage when it was more about the tech.

Chad Mason (00:37:39):
Because if you don't develop the tech, nothing else matters.

Chad Mason (00:37:42):
And this was actually a fascinating thing because we did get a lot of advisors

Chad Mason (00:37:46):
early on and that continues to be case and to be true.

Chad Mason (00:37:50):
And that is something I also recommend a lot of entrepreneurs do is do get a lot of

Chad Mason (00:37:55):
advisors from very diverse backgrounds.

Chad Mason (00:37:58):
But this is where it got complicated is some were saying,

Chad Mason (00:38:01):
hire a business person now as your third person or fourth person.

Chad Mason (00:38:06):
And other people were like,

Chad Mason (00:38:08):
well,

Chad Mason (00:38:09):
if you hire a biz dev person,

Chad Mason (00:38:12):
they won't have anything to do and they'll quit.

Chad Mason (00:38:15):
And I think one of my advisors gave me an example of a startup where they went

Chad Mason (00:38:19):
through seven or eight biz devs because they came in and realized there was nothing

Chad Mason (00:38:24):
to sell and they wanted to leave.

Chad Mason (00:38:26):
And all the partners just wanted to talk to the CEO.

Chad Mason (00:38:29):
They didn't want to talk to the biz dev person.

Chad Mason (00:38:32):
Now,

Chad Mason (00:38:35):
Like I say, it depends on every startup.

Chad Mason (00:38:37):
If you can get a biz dev person that can think at a very high level,

Chad Mason (00:38:41):
very strategically,

Chad Mason (00:38:42):
and can integrate into other facets of the organization and not just be pure sales

Chad Mason (00:38:48):
and marketing,

Chad Mason (00:38:49):
but can be like product strategy,

Chad Mason (00:38:52):
product design,

Chad Mason (00:38:53):
or can plug into the admin or do some other things operational.

Chad Mason (00:38:57):
then yes, you should definitely bring that person in right away.

Chad Mason (00:39:00):
But for us, like, it just didn't shake out.

Chad Mason (00:39:02):
We weren't meeting the right person.

Chad Mason (00:39:04):
And then just this past year, we started to really need to have this person.

Chad Mason (00:39:09):
And Ignacio became available as well.

Chad Mason (00:39:13):
And, like, when we first met, you know, you kind of, like, you're a match, right?

Chad Mason (00:39:17):
Like, you can work here.

Chad Mason (00:39:18):
I want to work with you.

Chad Mason (00:39:19):
And so it just fell into place really nicely.

Chad Mason (00:39:22):
Yeah.

Silas Mähner (00:39:24):
I guess on the same topic of advisors and people,

Silas Mähner (00:39:27):
I'd be curious if you were given a chance with a microphone and say,

Silas Mähner (00:39:33):
hey,

Silas Mähner (00:39:33):
I want to thank all these people for helping me.

Silas Mähner (00:39:35):
Who have been the companies and people along this journey that have been the most helpful to you?

Silas Mähner (00:39:40):
Mentors, just people who are willing to kind of sit down and work through these things with you.

Silas Mähner (00:39:44):
Any people that have really been an impact on helping you achieve this journey that

Silas Mähner (00:39:48):
aren't necessarily in the company?

Chad Mason (00:39:51):
Yeah, there's actually far too many to list.

Chad Mason (00:39:55):
The person who's been with us the longest and continues to be is John Broberwich.

Chad Mason (00:39:59):
And he's affiliated with Thing Energy Ventures as an angel investor.

Chad Mason (00:40:04):
But he's been incredibly important to our success here.

Chad Mason (00:40:10):
But I mean, there's a lot of folks.

Chad Mason (00:40:14):
There's even some folks that work with us part time that are very, very experienced as well.

Chad Mason (00:40:19):
that have other kind of big gains besides working with us.

Chad Mason (00:40:24):
Yeah.

Chad Mason (00:40:25):
We work with a lot of former general electric people.

Chad Mason (00:40:27):
It's just kind of funny how that's kind of just fallen into place,

Chad Mason (00:40:31):
but there's like an ecosystem of almost 10,

Chad Mason (00:40:33):
like former GE people,

Chad Mason (00:40:35):
GE healthcare,

Chad Mason (00:40:36):
GE aerospace.

(00:40:37):
Yeah.

Chad Mason (00:40:38):
uh, people that work with us.

Chad Mason (00:40:39):
Um, and they're, they're amazing to work with.

Chad Mason (00:40:41):
Um, and then, yeah, folks from just a variety of other disciplines as well.

Silas Mähner (00:40:45):
Yeah.

Silas Mähner (00:40:46):
It is interesting that there's a lot of, there's a lot of really great talent that, that came out of GE.

Silas Mähner (00:40:52):
So I think, uh, you're probably not the only, only company who, who leans on that.

Silas Mähner (00:40:56):
Um, I,

Silas Mähner (00:40:58):
One thing I did want to address or ask you about is there seems to be – if you're

Silas Mähner (00:41:03):
looking at producing electrolyzers,

Silas Mähner (00:41:05):
there's a concern with some people,

Silas Mähner (00:41:07):
kind of their bearish take is,

Silas Mähner (00:41:09):
hey,

Silas Mähner (00:41:09):
there's not going to be enough demand to buy – there will be electrolyzers.

Silas Mähner (00:41:14):
People are going to buy them.

Silas Mähner (00:41:15):
But even if we improve the efficiency, there's not that much demand still.

Silas Mähner (00:41:19):
Do you like what is your take on that?

Silas Mähner (00:41:21):
I mean, broadly speaking, do you think, yes, that's sort of true.

Silas Mähner (00:41:24):
But as time goes on, it will just continue to grow.

Silas Mähner (00:41:27):
Or do you think that,

Silas Mähner (00:41:27):
hey,

Silas Mähner (00:41:28):
based off of more efficiency,

Silas Mähner (00:41:30):
there will be more use cases for like,

Silas Mähner (00:41:32):
how do you how do you visualize that in terms of the total addressable market?

Chad Mason (00:41:36):
Yeah, I have a very nuanced take on it.

Chad Mason (00:41:41):
It's funny because I remember back when I just left the battery field,

Chad Mason (00:41:45):
I think I went to a hydrogen conference and they were just like poo-pooing

Chad Mason (00:41:49):
batteries quite a bit.

Chad Mason (00:41:50):
And I was just sitting there thinking,

Chad Mason (00:41:52):
I'm like,

Chad Mason (00:41:53):
this is just painful to hear because batteries are going to eat fuel cells lunch

Chad Mason (00:41:56):
for transportation.

Chad Mason (00:41:59):
And so I think the hydrogen industry is a fantastic industry.

Chad Mason (00:42:05):
wonderful collaborative industry just amazing people to work with but it does

Chad Mason (00:42:12):
suffer from too much group think or just like optimism sometimes like how versatile

Chad Mason (00:42:20):
the molecule is

Chad Mason (00:42:22):
And that really sucks people into a big kind of thinking trap a lot of times.

Chad Mason (00:42:28):
So to your point,

Chad Mason (00:42:30):
I'm very,

Chad Mason (00:42:31):
very optimistic about industrial decarbonization and expansion of hydrogen into

Chad Mason (00:42:38):
some sectors like steel.

Chad Mason (00:42:40):
I'm very bearish about its expansion into anything that's not industrial.

Chad Mason (00:42:46):
So yeah, both sides of the fence.

Silas Mähner (00:42:49):
So broadly speaking, industrial use case is a huge opportunity, but other things, maybe not so much.

Silas Mähner (00:42:57):
So that makes a lot of sense.

Silas Mähner (00:42:59):
I guess one thing I'd like to move on to a little bit is

Silas Mähner (00:43:04):
On the macro,

Silas Mähner (00:43:05):
what do you see as the biggest challenges in the next kind of stages of your growth,

Silas Mähner (00:43:11):
but also for the industry broadly?

Silas Mähner (00:43:13):
And if you were to try to do your best at a crystal ball looking through what's

Silas Mähner (00:43:17):
going to happen,

Silas Mähner (00:43:18):
what do you see as the biggest tailwinds and headwinds at the moment?

Chad Mason (00:43:21):
Yeah, with the industry as a whole, it's gone through a lot of hype cycles before.

Chad Mason (00:43:29):
And it's on, at least my view is...

Chad Mason (00:43:32):
A good chunk of it is on the downward slope of the hype cycle again.

Chad Mason (00:43:35):
So it'll go through some kind of valley here.

Chad Mason (00:43:39):
I wouldn't say it's a valley of death,

Chad Mason (00:43:41):
but it'll be a valley of despair for a little while where I think you'll start to

Chad Mason (00:43:45):
see some consolidation in the industry,

Chad Mason (00:43:49):
especially on the low temperature electrolysis side,

Chad Mason (00:43:52):
just because there's a lot of really nice ideas out there,

Chad Mason (00:43:55):
but I don't think there's enough space for so much of what essentially is the same thing.

Chad Mason (00:44:02):
So I think that's one aspect of it.

Chad Mason (00:44:05):
Another one is I was talking to one of our advisors the other day,

Chad Mason (00:44:08):
and it's something that we kind of imply a lot,

Chad Mason (00:44:11):
but we don't say out loud is,

Chad Mason (00:44:13):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:44:13):
he was telling me that the big issue with the industry or even for us isn't like

Chad Mason (00:44:19):
what our competition is doing as far as like other electrolyzer companies.

Chad Mason (00:44:24):
It's the competition is kind of a spin on the old do nothing.

Chad Mason (00:44:27):
Like your competition is a customer to do nothing.

Chad Mason (00:44:31):
In a sense that you see a lot of projects that are not reaching FID, final investment decision.

Chad Mason (00:44:37):
It's ridiculous, actually, the ratios.

Chad Mason (00:44:40):
So only a small portion of proposed hydrogen projects are reaching FID.

Chad Mason (00:44:46):
There's a myriad of reasons why this is.

Chad Mason (00:44:48):
I mean, part of it is just the continuation of uncertainty with the IRA.

Chad Mason (00:44:52):
But you see worldwide,

Chad Mason (00:44:53):
too,

Chad Mason (00:44:54):
that there was just like a lot of bad techno economics and bad politics

Chad Mason (00:44:59):
underpinning a lot of proposed projects with hydrogen.

Chad Mason (00:45:01):
They just never made sense in the first place because it just doesn't pencil out.

Chad Mason (00:45:06):
You could do it in a few cells on a spreadsheet.

Chad Mason (00:45:08):
I just don't.

Chad Mason (00:45:09):
I just don't know how that people came to the conclusion on some of these.

Chad Mason (00:45:14):
And so that's where the course correction will be.

Chad Mason (00:45:17):
But through that,

Chad Mason (00:45:18):
you're going to see strong projects being proposed will make the operator,

Chad Mason (00:45:25):
the customer,

Chad Mason (00:45:26):
the developer money.

Chad Mason (00:45:28):
So through that will be a lot of strength for the industry.

Chad Mason (00:45:31):
And then we'll start to see actual decarbonization of these industries.

Chad Mason (00:45:36):
For us,

Chad Mason (00:45:36):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:45:37):
basically everything wants to see something that looks like what traditional

Chad Mason (00:45:41):
alkaline does,

Chad Mason (00:45:42):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:45:42):
which is the reliability and the maintainability of existing alkaline electrolysis,

Chad Mason (00:45:48):
which has been around a long time.

Chad Mason (00:45:49):
It's well proven, it's well bankable, right?

Chad Mason (00:45:53):
And so the challenge for us is to basically demonstrate that as quickly as possible

Chad Mason (00:45:58):
with a brand new technology that's been built from scratch.

Chad Mason (00:46:01):
And this is getting back to the partnership.

Chad Mason (00:46:03):
This is specifically why we're doing it with partners at an early stage.

Chad Mason (00:46:08):
They'll be on the inside.

Chad Mason (00:46:10):
They'll be more likely to purchase the funnel product because they'll understand the ins and outs of it.

Chad Mason (00:46:15):
So that's a little bit in a nutshell, but I can always go deep on specific topics.

Silas Mähner (00:46:21):
I think it's quite interesting.

Silas Mähner (00:46:22):
I mean, I oftentimes think about the, when you, when you look at,

Silas Mähner (00:46:26):
The Industrial Revolution originally.

Silas Mähner (00:46:28):
There was a lot of innovation that was happening because there was no preconceived ideas.

Silas Mähner (00:46:32):
But then you get something that effectively works well and you stick with it, right?

Silas Mähner (00:46:36):
You stick with it because now you've built a multi-billion dollar business.

Silas Mähner (00:46:40):
And the truth is – I mean I think people underestimate this.

Silas Mähner (00:46:44):
I've said this several times on the show, but people underestimate how –

Silas Mähner (00:46:47):
fragile people think these businesses are.

Silas Mähner (00:46:49):
They're afraid that if they breathe sideways, they're going to destroy the whole thing.

Silas Mähner (00:46:53):
So they're very afraid to try new things.

Silas Mähner (00:46:56):
And even though the new thing might be more efficient,

Silas Mähner (00:46:59):
that whole past idea where the founders were leading these things back in the early

Silas Mähner (00:47:04):
days of the industrial revolution,

Silas Mähner (00:47:06):
they were willing to take these risks because they were building it.

Silas Mähner (00:47:08):
But now it's managers, it's CEOs.

Silas Mähner (00:47:10):
These people are just there to keep things going and

Silas Mähner (00:47:13):
They're not willing to try new things.

Silas Mähner (00:47:16):
So I think it's really interesting.

Silas Mähner (00:47:17):
You can find ways to navigate that to get people to try new things or find the

Silas Mähner (00:47:21):
partners who are open to trying those things and just finding ways to de-risk it

Silas Mähner (00:47:25):
for them.

Silas Mähner (00:47:25):
This is essentially the core challenge of innovation in industry because things are

Silas Mähner (00:47:31):
more fragile than you think.

Silas Mähner (00:47:33):
People tend to not think that because it's a multi-billion dollar business.

Silas Mähner (00:47:36):
How could it be fragile?

Silas Mähner (00:47:38):
But it's not.

Silas Mähner (00:47:39):
It has a lot of people running it who have their own conceived notions and maybe

Silas Mähner (00:47:44):
their own childhood traumas about breaking things.

Chad Mason (00:47:46):
Yeah.

Chad Mason (00:47:47):
Well, yeah.

Chad Mason (00:47:48):
And to me, it just seems like a lot of history has decided to outsource this creativity to startups.

Chad Mason (00:47:55):
I'm on the fence if that's a good or a bad thing.

Chad Mason (00:47:58):
You know, ask me 10 years from now, but it's essentially is what it is.

Chad Mason (00:48:03):
But if it can be done effectively where capital can flow to innovative companies,

Chad Mason (00:48:11):
I think it can result in good outcomes.

Chad Mason (00:48:14):
There's something else about just like when you're running a startup,

Chad Mason (00:48:17):
we're just ridiculously capital efficient.

Chad Mason (00:48:20):
Like, there's just no way a large company or the mothership can be that capital efficient as we are.

Chad Mason (00:48:27):
I mean, it has its downsides, no doubt.

Chad Mason (00:48:28):
But, you know, so there's something.

Silas Mähner (00:48:32):
I just recently heard the story of I remember exactly the details of it.

Silas Mähner (00:48:37):
It was on Twitter.

Silas Mähner (00:48:39):
I believe it was on Acquired,

Silas Mähner (00:48:41):
on the Microsoft episode of Acquired,

Silas Mähner (00:48:42):
and they were talking about how IBM,

Silas Mähner (00:48:45):
they did a super,

Silas Mähner (00:48:46):
I believe it was IBM,

Silas Mähner (00:48:46):
they had a super tiny team that had to go and build this new,

Silas Mähner (00:48:50):
I think it was when they were going into PCs,

Silas Mähner (00:48:53):
and they needed a super,

Silas Mähner (00:48:54):
super small team to do it,

Silas Mähner (00:48:55):
even though it was a huge company,

Silas Mähner (00:48:56):
right?

Silas Mähner (00:48:57):
They needed somebody who was fast.

Silas Mähner (00:48:58):
So I think it's just a really interesting dynamic, and I don't think that a lot of

Silas Mähner (00:49:02):
managers of these big businesses understand it well, unfortunately.

Silas Mähner (00:49:05):
Maybe it's fortunate for the innovators, but in some ways it's unfortunate for other people.

Silas Mähner (00:49:09):
But one last thing I do want to touch on before we close off is you've talked about

Silas Mähner (00:49:13):
Wisconsin being a good place because of capital efficiency and just generally it's

Silas Mähner (00:49:17):
a good place.

Silas Mähner (00:49:18):
It's completely not what I would have thought either.

Silas Mähner (00:49:20):
So what has it been like trying to find talent here, especially in Milwaukee?

Silas Mähner (00:49:26):
Like, I know it used to be a very big industrial center.

Silas Mähner (00:49:28):
There's still a lot of manufacturing in Wisconsin broadly.

Silas Mähner (00:49:30):
But how have you found kind of finding people who are willing to join,

Silas Mähner (00:49:33):
let's call it an early stage startup,

Silas Mähner (00:49:35):
something that's a little bit more risky than what they're used to?

Silas Mähner (00:49:37):
Like, what has that been like?

Chad Mason (00:49:39):
Yeah, there's a lot of threads there.

Chad Mason (00:49:42):
So one is there's a variety of people that are from Wisconsin that want to move

Chad Mason (00:49:47):
back and they're in kind of that stage of their life,

Chad Mason (00:49:50):
especially folks that might be in their 30s or 40s in their mid-career.

Chad Mason (00:49:55):
So we're seeing a good amount of that.

Chad Mason (00:49:57):
The second is we have been able to bring talent in from out of state relatively

Chad Mason (00:50:04):
successfully because they love what we're doing or they see the quality of life

Chad Mason (00:50:09):
here or there's a variety of factors.

Chad Mason (00:50:14):
The other one is

Chad Mason (00:50:16):
Folks that are here, especially a lot of young folks, they want to do something that matters.

Chad Mason (00:50:22):
They want a company aligned with their goals, with how they think about the world.

Chad Mason (00:50:29):
And our mission, of course, is well aligned with that to decarbonize heavy industry.

Chad Mason (00:50:35):
And so you get a lot of folks that they're like, I just want to work in a clean tech startup.

Chad Mason (00:50:39):
And I know you guys exist.

Chad Mason (00:50:41):
Another one that we've seen a little bit lately is a few people have recently told us,

Chad Mason (00:50:45):
I was waiting for you to post a job that I could apply to.

Chad Mason (00:50:49):
You know, I was waiting and waiting.

Chad Mason (00:50:50):
And finally, you posted one that was my fit and I applied.

Chad Mason (00:50:53):
And and so I really love hearing those those stories as well.

Chad Mason (00:50:57):
We have struggled with certain disciplines if they don't exist here,

Chad Mason (00:51:02):
you know,

Chad Mason (00:51:02):
especially like chemical engineering really exists more in Houston.

Chad Mason (00:51:07):
But that is why we do have one person at Houston.

Silas Mähner (00:51:11):
Yeah, I think it's I appreciate the perspective.

Silas Mähner (00:51:14):
I guess I would not have.

Silas Mähner (00:51:16):
There's some things on the surface I would not have thought of,

Silas Mähner (00:51:19):
but if you dig into it,

Silas Mähner (00:51:20):
if you're one of the very few climate tech startups in the space or in the area,

Silas Mähner (00:51:24):
I should say geographically,

Silas Mähner (00:51:26):
you have more opportunity to capture the talent who wants to work there regardless,

Silas Mähner (00:51:30):
like you said,

Silas Mähner (00:51:31):
regardless of what they're just waiting for the right job.

Silas Mähner (00:51:33):
So that's encouraging to hear.

Silas Mähner (00:51:36):
Maybe something for other people to consider, which is,

Silas Mähner (00:51:39):
going to let's call it an underappreciated area that might have some advantages.

Silas Mähner (00:51:45):
Maybe there's some challenges that come along with it,

Silas Mähner (00:51:46):
but you can kind of think about it and make the trade-offs versus just going to the

Silas Mähner (00:51:51):
hub because everybody else goes to the hub,

Silas Mähner (00:51:52):
right?

Silas Mähner (00:51:53):
Finding a way to work around that.

Silas Mähner (00:51:55):
So anyways, man, this has been a pleasure.

Silas Mähner (00:51:58):
I really am fascinated by what you guys are doing.

Silas Mähner (00:52:00):
Obviously, again, big fan because you're in Wisconsin.

Silas Mähner (00:52:03):
Tell everybody where can they reach you?

Silas Mähner (00:52:05):
What's your call to action?

Silas Mähner (00:52:06):
How can people follow?

Chad Mason (00:52:08):
Yeah, so basically you can reach out to our company and LinkedIn.

Chad Mason (00:52:13):
You can fill in a form on the website.

Chad Mason (00:52:17):
I'm a little bit hard to get a hold of, unfortunately.

Silas Mähner (00:52:20):
That's all right.

Chad Mason (00:52:21):
My LinkedIn and my email inbox is very deep right now, and I feel terrible about it every time.

Chad Mason (00:52:28):
um just stay at it and we'll try to answer fair play maybe if you really need

Silas Mähner (00:52:35):
something go around find another way in right get creative yeah uh yeah but yeah we

Chad Mason (00:52:39):
do have a website form just say i've heard chat on the podcast and i want to chat

Chad Mason (00:52:45):
it'll it'll get filtered to the right people awesome my executive assistant it's

Chad Mason (00:52:49):
just ea at advanced dash annex.com too it's

Silas Mähner (00:52:54):
Very nice.

Silas Mähner (00:52:55):
Awesome, Chad.

Silas Mähner (00:52:56):
Well, I appreciate you coming on.

Silas Mähner (00:52:57):
Looking forward to seeing how you guys go in the next couple of years.

Silas Mähner (00:52:59):
And we'll have to, I did promise you at some point I'll be coming down for a visit.

Silas Mähner (00:53:03):
So I will make that happen.

Silas Mähner (00:53:04):
It's just been crazy.

Silas Mähner (00:53:05):
Started my own shop as well.

Silas Mähner (00:53:07):
So I will get down there.

Chad Mason (00:53:09):
Yeah, I was going to say that.

Chad Mason (00:53:10):
Definitely stop by anytime.

Chad Mason (00:53:12):
And yeah, very much appreciate it.

Silas Mähner (00:53:15):
Yeah, thanks.

Silas Mähner (00:53:16):
All right, welcome to the takeaway section.

Silas Mähner (00:53:18):
Thank you guys so much for spending the time with us.

Silas Mähner (00:53:20):
Let's get into it.

Silas Mähner (00:53:21):
So there are a couple of things that really stood out to me with this episode with Chad.

Silas Mähner (00:53:25):
One of those being the reason why they seem to be doing well is they threw out all

Silas Mähner (00:53:31):
assumptions and started from scratch.

Silas Mähner (00:53:34):
Where most companies kind of make a variation on the fuel cell,

Silas Mähner (00:53:37):
they're trying to improve some aspect of it.

Silas Mähner (00:53:39):
They started basically from nothing.

Silas Mähner (00:53:41):
And there's people who do this who end up not being successful because they're not

Silas Mähner (00:53:45):
thinking about playing with the existing partners.

Silas Mähner (00:53:48):
But they took everything from zero while keeping that in mind.

Silas Mähner (00:53:53):
How can we integrate with the other partners in the space better?

Silas Mähner (00:53:56):
Keep de-risking things, making sure things are reliable.

Silas Mähner (00:53:59):
So you have to have both.

Silas Mähner (00:54:00):
You can't just throw everything out and say we're going to reinvent it from scratch

Silas Mähner (00:54:02):
because if you're not considering the buyer,

Silas Mähner (00:54:05):
you will not have luck.

Silas Mähner (00:54:06):
So that was really interesting.

Silas Mähner (00:54:08):
The second thing is how they are a ruler of the rule.

Silas Mähner (00:54:12):
That's the term I came up with for this.

Silas Mähner (00:54:13):
By being in an area where there isn't as much climate tech stuff going on, i.e.

Silas Mähner (00:54:18):
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, it's not really a climate hub per se.

Silas Mähner (00:54:22):
They are able to win attention from the people who want to work in climate.

Silas Mähner (00:54:26):
He shared how many people have been keeping an eye on their website,

Silas Mähner (00:54:28):
just waiting for a job to come up that suits them.

Silas Mähner (00:54:31):
I think this is something I don't believe anybody else on the show has done or at

Silas Mähner (00:54:36):
least not mentioned specifically.

Silas Mähner (00:54:37):
They usually want to go to a place where there is a lot of talent in that space.

Silas Mähner (00:54:41):
And as he shared,

Silas Mähner (00:54:42):
there are some cases where they struggle to find talent,

Silas Mähner (00:54:44):
but for the majority of things,

Silas Mähner (00:54:46):
they do have the talent and they have the eyeballs because they're the only dog in town.

Silas Mähner (00:54:52):
Finally, he brought up how they partner with corporates in different capacities.

Silas Mähner (00:54:56):
And not all of them are investors, but they work with people who have a mandate for innovation.

Silas Mähner (00:55:01):
And this is something nearly every successful hardware startup that has come on the pod has done.

Silas Mähner (00:55:06):
They all have some form of partnering with these people.

Silas Mähner (00:55:09):
So just highlighting it as a theme that is continuing across these.

Silas Mähner (00:55:12):
So if you are building a hardware startup and you're not already doing that,

Silas Mähner (00:55:15):
you got to figure out how to do that.

Silas Mähner (00:55:17):
Find people who can help you

Silas Mähner (00:55:19):
get through these phases without having to destroy your equity table and build out

Silas Mähner (00:55:24):
a factory or something,

Silas Mähner (00:55:25):
right?

Silas Mähner (00:55:25):
Just go do it smart.

Silas Mähner (00:55:28):
Find the people who can partner with you.

Silas Mähner (00:55:30):
That's all for today.

Silas Mähner (00:55:30):
Do us a favor.

Silas Mähner (00:55:32):
If you enjoyed, share with a friend.

Silas Mähner (00:55:33):
If you hated it, get into a comment battle with us on Substack.

Silas Mähner (00:55:36):
We could use a little of excitement in our lives, so feel free to do that.

Silas Mähner (00:55:40):
And we will see you next time on Clean Techies, the number one podcast for climate tech entrepreneurs.