#202 Battery Swapping, Scaling Globally, 4x Founder, Universal Battery Modules, & More w/ John de Souza (Ample Inc)

Today, our guest is John de Souza. Co-founder of Ample Inc. A startup betting that battery swapping is the future.

If you're at all like me, you're thinking that sounds bat shit crazy. Well, listen to today's episode, and you'll realize it's the opposite. It's the only logical conclusion to EVs.

We can't gloss over this -- John is special. This is his 4th major startup endeavor, and it's clear that it is because he brings a level of maturity and wisdom that very few founders do. He could have ridden off into the sunset, but he decided to stay in the arena because it's what he does.

I guarantee you will learn a lot from John today. I'm not even going to thank you for tuning in today because you're doing yourself a favor by listening to this episode.   

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Topics 

(free preview time stamps are slightly different) 

• 03:26 John's Career & Entrepreneurial Origins
• 05:20 The Inspiration for Ample
• 09:06 Battery Swapping
• 13:51 OEM Partnerships
• 16:15 A Universal Battery Module
• 18:38 Integration w/ OEMs & Production Lines
• 22:54 Deployment & Scale
• 23:22 Business Model & Global Expansion
• 24:47 Ample's GTM Strategy: (Partnering with Uber and Commercial Fleets)
• 28:07 Efficiency & Cost Control: In-House Battery & Swapping Station Production
  —(end of free preview)—
• (get the full episode by becoming a paid subscriber on our Substack today! https://cleantechies.substack.com/subscribe 

Links

• John de Souza | Ample Inc.
• Connect with Somil on LinkedIn | Connect with Silas on LinkedIn
• Follow CleanTechies on LinkedIn
• @Silas & @Somil_Agg on X 
• This podcast is NOT investment advice. Do your homework and due diligence before investing in anything discussed on this podcast.

Chapters

• 0:28 Episode Intro
• 3:26 John's Career & Entrepreneurial Origins
• 5:20 The Inspiration for Ample
• 9:06 Battery Swapping
• 13:51 OEM Partnerships
• 16:15 A Universal Battery Module
• 18:38 Integration w/ OEMs & Production Lines
• 22:54 Deployment & Scale
• 23:22 Business Model & Global Expansion
• 24:47 Ample's GTM Strategy: (Partnering with Uber and Commercial Fleets)
• 28:07 Efficiency & Cost Control: In-House Battery & Swapping Station Production—(end of free preview)—

Transcript

Silas Mähner (00:00)
Alright, welcome to the show John. How are doing today?

John De Souza (00:03)
Good, thank you for having

Silas Mähner (00:05)
Yeah, super excited to have you calling in from San Francisco, I guess. Tell us who are you, just kind of a quick background and a little bit of a teaser on what you're doing

John De Souza (00:16)
So I'm actually born in Ethiopia. My family's born there, ended up living in a few countries on the way, finished my high school in Dubai when it was still a desert, and then came over and studied in the US. Been in startups for a long time and currently working on a startup in the battery swapping space.

Silas Mähner (00:38)
Awesome. Very good. guess, know, rewind in the clock a little bit. Tell us, you know, how would you describe your career at Broad Strokes because you have a pretty eclectic career.

John De Souza (00:49)
You know, I say that when I graduated from university, I'd gone to MIT, did my undergrad there. It's one those points where until that point in your life, you spend so much time focused on, it's very easy what you do. You optimize to get good grades. And then graduated and you go through this moment and go, what do I optimize for now? Grades are gone. And I think that was one time I took the time to say stuff back and say, what is it that I want to do?

Silas Mähner (01:09)
Yeah, exactly.

John De Souza (01:16)
A lot of people jump and say, just want to optimize for money or something else. But I decided I just want to start working on things I cared about and I enjoyed. So actually, spent time initially, I did some work on, I worked on a chess machine a long time ago when there still a concert we're getting the chess machines to beat humans.

I went from there, did my first startup together with my brother in instant messaging. And it was interesting starting that because a lot of people at the time couldn't understand why anybody would want instant messaging. You have email. We did that. It was acquired by Microsoft. Went from there into the financial space working on real -time trading systems. That got acquired by Merrill Lynch. Went to Goldman Sachs, worked on the investing side. Wanted to see what that was like to be as an investor as opposed to an

operator, enjoyed that and taught me a completely new world, a completely new world of a different way of looking at all of it. Then went back into startups. did a startup before this one with my current co -founder, Harlad. We did a company in the health space called MedHelp where we provide tools for people to monitor and manage their own health. Got acquired by Merck and then we started this.

Silas Mähner (02:31)
Yeah, mean, Matt, that's a lot of different things and you've done several successful things. I exited multiple times. I guess what I'm always curious about when I hear this kind of trajectory is how did you get started in the first place? Why did you have this entrepreneurial spirit which is very deeply rooted into kind of who you are,

John De Souza (02:51)
In a part, think in a lot of other countries, entrepreneurship is very, very natural. You can go to parts of Africa, parts of Asia, and people are very starting small things. It could be just cooking and selling to in the community or trying different things. And it's a lot more natural. And I think the hurdle people think of starting things is much lower.

So taught me one thing, one in terms of, if I start something, often people are scared to be scared of what happens when they fail. And I think if you're surrounded by people who care about you and love you, you're not worried about that. So if I fail, as long as I tried my best, that's okay. My family's there, my friends are there, and I don't need to worry about it. So it takes away, I think, one of the big hurdles of actually going through it, starting is what happens if you fail. And honestly, I think for most people who are thinking about it, they'll be fine if it fails. So you need to put that aside.

and just make sure you're not trying to do it to show people how good you are, that you're comfortable with who you are and the people around you to go and support you. But where it actually started is, if I go back and think about my first entrepreneurial venture was, there used to be, and I'm going to date myself massively here, but there used to be a magazine called CNVG, Computer and Video Games, which would actually print out the code of a game.

the actual listing of the code in the center. So it would come out once a month. And if you want to type in the few thousand lines of code and you have a video game.

So my brother and I decided that what we wanted to do is type it in, debug it, because you make so many mistakes on the way. But most people are too lazy to do it. So we'd go through, type it in, get it to work, record it on cassettes, and sell it to other people. it was, so every month it came out, that's our job was go in, get the code, type it in, get the game to work, and go through it. And that gives a flavor of, you're to put in the effort, what you can do.

Silas Mähner (04:44)
So just to clarify, saying, because I don't know if I understand the tech from that time, you're saying you typed it, but you couldn't just copy paste it into something else. Like you had to put it on cassettes. What do mean by

John De Souza (04:53)
Yeah, just like you have USB drives, the USB drive back then was actually audio cassettes. So you'd actually record it onto an audio cassette and you'd sell that cassette to somebody and they could put it into that drive, was they could read games from these cassettes, the old computers, put it in there and they...

Silas Mähner (05:12)
Really? So it could turn it from that and from that like audio into a game?

John De Souza (05:17)
Yeah, the way they actually saw it was as an audio sound. You remember the original modems you'd hear all those funny sounds?

Those funny sounds is how they transmit data. So they'd actually sort of make funny sounds on audio tapes and make multiple copies of this audio and somebody could play that audio back on the computer and get the game to work. So we were willing to put the time in. So we went in, you're typing in a few thousand lines, which is mind -numbing. But it actually taught us a few things. One is that it actually taught us the code. We learned through code, we just all just coded. And if you want to debug code, you need to understand it. So we found out that if you're going to get this thing

Silas Mähner (05:26)
Mmm.

John De Souza (05:54)
work you better understand the code, you better understand how to debug it. So taught us a lot and it also taught us a bit, it gives us a flavor of what it's like to be an autobrinner. It also understands that people value different things. You we said, we can do it once and make multiple copies and do well, but people were just thinking about, I don't waste my time typing it in once. It didn't make sense if you want to do it only for yourself, but if you can multiply it, it makes sense.

Silas Mähner (06:12)
Yeah.

Yeah, I feel a little bit embarrassed because usually I come from a pretty retro background. I usually know at least the concept behind some of these things. That's totally new to me, man. That's a new one. But I guess let's talk a little bit more about the company. I guess to highlight through your background, you did a lot of different things, ended up in health tech eventually, but then with your co -founder that you exited that, you decided to build in the EV space. So I guess let's get into it. tell me, let's talk about the elephant in the

battery swapping. A lot of people say it's crazy, but obviously you're making a really huge bet on it. So tell us why you're bullish on

John De Souza (06:54)
So battery swapping has been around for a really long time. You go online, you can find videos from the 40s and all of fleets of vehicles that are all battery swappable. In the end, battery swapping is very similar to what you have with gas. When gas, stop and you move gas physically into a car and you drive away. Battery swapping is the same concept. As you move your vehicle into a station, you physically move the battery and drive away. I think when we started looking at 10 years ago, we realized that what was going to be the limiting factor in getting a large

adoption of electric vehicles was solving the energy delivery problem. Fast forward, you 10 years later, when people hesitate about buying it, they'll give a lot of reasons, but basically it's charging. They are all worried about what they do when the vehicle runs out of charge.

The people who buy electric vehicles right now, 90 % if you ask somebody, they have a second car that's gas. It makes a great second car. But we're not going to get massive adoption if it's a second car. needs to be the primary car. And if we can solve the charging problem, we can get it to do that. So our solution was this. If you can make it very easy for people to

a full 100 % charge in five minutes, then we have solved the problem and we'll get it optioned. So we looked at a lot of different things. It's very hard to do it through charging. You need very, very powerful chargers, which are expensive, hard to do, and efficient. And so we said, let's just go back to what works with gas, that you physically move the batteries into the car.

Silas Mähner (08:20)
So basically you took a first principles approach to it and said like, this is how other people are doing it, but we don't necessarily think it makes sense because of the restraints that we see now despite the potential, I guess, infrastructure challenges that we might face initially. Is that correct?

John De Souza (08:35)
Exactly. And battery swapping has been done before. When we went back to first principles, we came up with three things that you had to do differently. The first was if you go to a car manufacturer and ask them to change the car, very hard for them to do. So we said we need to find a way to work with the vehicle without asking them to change the vehicle. So that was number one. The second is the beauty about gas is you put it into a Ford, you put it into a Toyota, it works really well. And so we said we need to be able to do the same thing with the batteries. Come up with a battery that somehow is like a universal

like a double A battery, can put into different objects or different vehicles and have it work. And the third is you need to be able to roll out infrastructure quickly and cheaply. So for us, those were the first principles we put out there and said, can we solve this? If we solve this, then we have a company. So we start off just tackling those three problems.

Silas Mähner (09:22)
Yeah, so I guess how did you get involved or interested in the EV space in the first with EV charging, I should say, like why was that of interest at the

John De Souza (09:31)
So both me and Harlead, we were both looking at buying vehicles and so they're literally electric vehicles. And as soon as we did, we ran into the same problems. We said, oh, let's just, I went to upgrade the electricity in the house to put a slightly faster charger, it gonna cost $5 ,000. And I said, this doesn't make sense. The vehicle costs a lot. So it didn't take long to say, look, we see everybody pushing very aggressively for electric, but there's a big problem that nobody has a solution for and nobody's really solving. So we said, if we can go through and solve it, fast

five, six years, we'll have a solution that really meets the needs of the industry.

Silas Mähner (10:04)
Mm -hmm, got it. Okay. So, okay, so then you decide that you're to work on this fast forward, you know, that's what you're doing. Let's walk through the tech itself. So just to make sure I can recap what you've discussed so far is that you're building something that is kind of universal that can be used with any OEM. You just have to find a way to integrate with them and then you're going to make it. So it's basically like fueling up your car. You drive in, it's going to swap out the battery. You don't have to charge the batteries super fast. You can do it with, you know, existing infrastructure in terms of the charging.

but then they can drive away and they can use it similar to just filling up their car. So I think that's what we've covered so far. Did I get anything wrong there so far?

John De Souza (10:42)
know, this is exactly, I'll only add a couple, one is the same station works across a full range. would be a small car, it be a truck, we use the same station. And it plugs in very easily to renewable energy. The difference between using renewable energy with charging is that, you know, the sun shines in the day and often people want to charge at night, so you need to put batteries in between. But with battery swapping, you can take the energy and directly put it in the batteries. When the vehicle comes, you move the battery into the car.

Silas Mähner (11:09)
Yeah, okay, got it, got it. So the biggest thing I'm always curious about when I hear this, and this is how it was when we first had our initial conversation, I was trying to figure this out is, how do you go about building this company? Because you have to convince the OEMs to, mean, for example, let's just take, I don't know if you guys have a partner you want to talk about or you can mention publicly, but can we go through one particular example?

John De Souza (11:32)
So a good example I think with this is initially it's hard to get the OEMs, I call them OEMs, those are the auto manufacturers. It's hard to get the OEMs on board because you don't have customers and you hardly get the customers on board because you don't have any vehicles.

It's stuck in this horrible cycle of each part saying get the other part in, we'll solve it. So the way we did it is actually we worked with Uber and Uber we thought was a very difficult use case. They have drivers that drive really long hours, they're a lot of distance and for them time is money. So what we did is we went through and decided to go through and retrofit vehicles and we went, we took a set of vehicles, retrofitted it, gave it to drivers and had them go through and drive it for a couple of years. And that gave us the data, gave us the support and Uber

was a great partner, we to go through and say, now let's go back to the OEMs. We have a partner that's used it, that likes it, we have real data. And that allowed us to go to OEMs and say, wow, this works really well. So that broke that. Then we started working with the partners, the ones that we've announced so far. We're working with Mitsubishi Fuso as well as Stellantis. And then started working with them to go through and get the vehicles out there. What's interesting is once you start working with them, and the initial hesitation they have

is how much work is going to be for us. When they realize that it doesn't take a lot of work, we give them something that is a drop in replacement for the battery pack they use. Then they can take a step back and say, does this solve the problems they're facing on a sales side? And it doesn't take them long to find a bunch of customers that are really excited about using it.

Silas Mähner (13:06)
Got it. So just to highlight that for people, think that's a really good theme that somebody else could use is if you have a hard time with your hypothetical buyers, find a tech forward partner like Uber in this case, who is willing to take a little bit more less necessarily risk, but they're more open minded, if you will, and then prove out the tech then to get to the other OEM. then tell us about how this works. So you design what you'd have to kind of co -design a platform specifically

that will allow them to instead of having their existing kind of chassis, you'll use your product that can be swapped out for each car. Like does it have to be specifically designed for each car or do you guys have just one thing that you sell and they can just integrate this into their design process?

John De Souza (13:49)
So we have two components. One is we came up with almost like a universal battery. We did modularization to save you the swap smaller batteries rather than a big battery pack. And then what we do with the smaller battery module is we make that fit into a car by creating a vehicle plate that fits into the car.

The vehicle plate has the same shape, the same connectors, the same bolt pattern as the battery in the car. And the EV batteries are pretty large. It weighs about 1 ,000 pounds. It goes from underneath the car. So what we do is we give them this vehicle plate and modules. That looks the same as the battery pack they have. And they can insert it in exactly the same way as they would the battery pack that they use. It goes along the line.

Silas Mähner (14:34)
So, sorry, just interjecting to make sure I got this. So, if I understand correctly, a lot of the OEMs have a platform that they use to build most of their EVs on top of, so there's maybe only a few different differentiated designs there, but you are making a specific kind of receptor basically that that part of it, they are able to swap out directly for what they're already using, so there's very low friction. Is that correct?

John De Souza (14:57)
That's exactly right. So most of them may have two or three platforms that they do. We'll create essentially a battery pack for each of those platforms. For us, that's much easier because the modules inside it are identical. So all we do is we're creating a casing that matches the shape and the structural elements that they need, but the battery modules are the same.

Silas Mähner (15:17)
And so are the across the different car manufacturers, are most of the designs close enough that that's really easy to do? Or are there like some that are just totally whack in terms of how they're set

John De Souza (15:29)
So they're very different sizes and shapes, but essentially they're all sort of rectangular and fit at the bottom of the car. So we'll have some that have 12 modules in it. It could have as few as six modules in it. So you have a full range of it. But other than the fact that the size is different and sort of strength is, it's still in end fits in as a battle car.

Silas Mähner (15:51)
Yeah. And so I guess how do you how do they typically reconcile the idea of having some that are probably, you know, a bolted in battery that that doesn't swap versus having yours? Because I'm assuming they're not going fully to this, right? They're kind of making both cars. Do they have to change anything about their production lines?

John De Souza (16:10)
So what they do on the production line is if somebody's ordered a vehicle that's swappable, they put in our battery. If somebody's ordered a vehicle that's not, they'll put in somebody else's battery. That is a change. There is a set of certification we do as well. We want to go through certifiers. So we do certification to make sure the vehicle meets all the specifications as safe. And then it just comes down. The customer orders, say, 500 vehicles and wants them swappable, they just put in 500 of our battery. If they don't want it swappable, they put somebody else's into it.

Silas Mähner (16:39)
and it doesn't really affect too much of their actual production lines. Not like they have to have a side, like a whole other production line just for these ones. They can just maybe route it to a different part and they swap your batteries versus their existing. Okay. And then I guess it's maybe a little bit obvious, but I just want to clarify that even if your infrastructure isn't deployed yet, which we'll get to that in second, if they have the swappable battery, they can still charge it on their own, correct?

John De Souza (16:49)
Exactly. Yeah, we don't need to change.

Great.

Silas Mähner (17:07)
Okay, so really you just take like all the objections that just like vanished.

John De Souza (17:12)
Exactly. So you can go through and charge it.

or you can swap it so you get both of those. And it gives you a lot of interesting benefits that you don't realize. One is you can choose variable capacity. So when you go to a station, you can decide to want all of it or want less than it. The advantage of taking less is it's cheaper, you pay less for it, and the vehicle weighs less, it's more efficient. You're not carrying a thousand pounds everywhere if you don't need a thousand pounds. it gives you those benefits. Secondly is you can keep the vehicle as long as you want. You don't over time have as a battery

that's degrading as a new battery. So your battery is always good, but also as newer technologies come, your vehicle goes further and further. So you keep your vehicle for 10 years, it might go 50 % more than when you bought it, which is a nice benefit that you get.

Silas Mähner (18:01)
Yeah, I that's an obvious downside with the Tesla design, right? Of like, the batteries right into the, if I understand correctly, right into the frame, right? So to replace that battery is very expensive, I assume. I don't know the exact details, but I assume it's very expensive. And this would just allow you to basically, instead of a software update, you know, you can get a new battery update once they have better technology. And that's quite interesting. Okay. So I can see why this became, you know, pretty obvious for you as you guys went down this path and kind of figured this all out.

John De Souza (18:14)
Thanks,

Silas Mähner (18:31)
I guess I am really curious at this point, how much of this did you guys figure out kind of early on and how much of it took a long time to realize, okay, these concerns are actually not concerns anymore?

John De Souza (18:44)
So I think the high level concerns we got, we really understood well. Over time, we went through and you start a lot of smaller things or times that you didn't realize. A simple example is if you're a car manufacturer, you need to skip spare parts for 10 to 12 years after you stop selling a car. So what does it mean for the battery? It means that they...

buy these battery chemistry changes, when they stop producing the car, they buy a lot of these batteries, put them in a warehouse, and cycle them up and down for 10 to 12 years. It ends up costing them a lot of money to do that. But with swappable batteries, since they're, at least our batteries are sort of can work with the, or backward compatible and forward compatible, you don't need to store batteries. You can just use the current technology. So there's a lot of these nuances that we realized over time. We didn't realize also all the nuances of how much static storage costs if you want to use

with renewable energy or the details of the carbon footprint. But over time, we started speaking to them and we went through and realized we recently spoke to a fleet that had an interesting perspective on charging. Every vehicle has a charging port at a different point in the car. So for a fleet, what you end up having to do is you end up with cables everywhere to reach everything. And that is a massive hazard for the workers. They end up tripping on all the cables. And because the charges need to reach front and back, they

on the side but they said then what ends up happening is often the drivers will back into and break the charges. So all these nuances you don't realize later on.

Silas Mähner (20:15)
Yeah, that's interesting. good that you guys have seen all this because you're at deployment phase and the phase is not correct. Let's talk about that. How far advanced are you guys in terms of you have number of partnerships and you have a number of people putting this in. So tell us about scale where you're at today.

John De Souza (20:31)
So we have deployments currently in San Francisco and in Japan. And we're starting in Madrid as well. So we deployed in Kyoto, Japan. We've been going through and using it. And we have an interesting use case there. We started off with lot of the taxi and corporate fleets going through and using it. In San Francisco, we still have it being used by Uber drivers for ride sharing. And that will be launching in Madrid a little later this year.

Silas Mähner (20:59)
Okay, great. okay, now I want to ask, so just to clarify then, your primary selling is done to the OEMs, correct? You have to develop a partnership with them and then they just basically buy X amount of this hardware depending on how much they're producing, correct?

John De Souza (21:15)
Actually, we don't sell to the OEMs, so they're a partner for us. There people who actually purchase out of the fleets. So the fleet will actually, they'll go through and purchase a, say, a truck.

they pay for the truck less the price of the battery. So they're paying like two thirds of the price for that. Then they pay us two things. They pay us a battery subscription, which should be a couple of hundred dollars a month or something like that, based on the mileage they're driving. And they pay us a fee for the energy similar to what they're paying for gas. So those are the two things they pay, and then they buy the vehicle less the cost of the battery.

Silas Mähner (21:49)
So you're focused on currently commercial fleets, like small commercial fleets? Okay.

John De Souza (21:53)
Yeah, and we're going after big commercial fleets. going through and delivering, the good thing with that is they go through and they deploy a lot of vehicles, they drive a lot of miles, so they're great partners. A lot of them have global footprint that allows us to expand with them into other countries as well.

Silas Mähner (21:56)
okay.

Interesting, okay. And is part of it because they kind of have a business case for it? At some point, I assume your objective would be to also be in the consumer market

John De Souza (22:17)
Yes, exactly. So what we do in the cities, once you have stations deployed all around the city, then you can start opening up to consumers. But the initial focus is go to the commercial fleets. They tell you where what the routes are. You deploy the stations for them and decide, you know, they start using it. And over time, you keep on expanding the number of stations based on the number of vehicles in the market.

Silas Mähner (22:39)
Okay, interesting. This is really interesting. So just kind of put this in perspective for people for this go -to -market strategy. So let's back up a bit. You first find a way that you can partner with people with Uber, like doing some retrofits, right? Really the MVP basically. Then you go to commercial fleets who have a particular reason. They have kind of a motive to do this in the first place, but you can also then specifically almost build to fit, if you will, the charging networks themselves.

and then once you've done that after after a while you'll have enough that will allow the consumers to use it but the commercial fleets also allow you the expansion opportunity globally so there's kind of a double -edged reason to sell to them first is that

John De Souza (23:20)
Yeah, and when we went out to commercial fleets and we decided that pretty early, there are a reasons that went. One is that you sell it before you deploy any of the stations. So you initially sell to them and then you go through and deploy the stations versus consumers you need to deploy and then sell. So being a startup company, in order to be efficient with the money you raise, you can go through, get the customers and go through and deploy it. The second thing with the commercial is that they know the routes. So they come to and they tell you where you are versus consumers that are going everywhere. So you need to

dense network with the consumer versus with commercial they tell you exactly where you need to go. Commercial as well you're selling you could be selling a thousand vehicles to one customer versus with consumers you need a thousand customers to go through and buy it. And the last one which is interesting is with commercial fleets you can actually go through and finance the batteries and infrastructure because they sign long -term contracts.

Silas Mähner (24:13)
I was gonna ask that next, yeah.

John De Souza (24:14)
Yeah, so it makes it very easy because you go into each year with sort of backlog revenue and you can actually raise the money needed to build infrastructure.

Silas Mähner (24:25)
Yes, so just to clarify what you're saying there is that you've obviously raised equity funding initially, but then once you get to a certain point of contracts, you can use that as basically proof and then use a much cheaper financing for like project financing for the infrastructure build out, which I the, to talk about the infrastructure build out because if I understand correctly, the stations you're building, like you'll have to at some point mass manufacture these. So like, I assume you're probably at a point where you haven't mass manufactured them yet. You're probably building them individually,

John De Souza (24:39)
It's epic.

Silas Mähner (24:53)
How do you think about that and will it be, know, usually when you think of like a debt facility, it's usually for smaller consumer products or at least smaller things, but this is going to be probably some big charging facility, but you'll probably mass produce these at some point as

John De Souza (25:06)
Well, there are two different things. We need to produce the batteries and we actually have a fully automated line to go through and produce battery modules. We can go through and produce them at pretty high volume. And then there are the stations themselves. The stations themselves, there are parts that are automated and parts that you need to do manual. It's hard to go through and automate the full process. So for that, when you think about the facility, the facility goes together with the contracts you have. So if you get a fleet that wants to deploy a thousand

vehicles from a debt perspective, they look at those contracts and say you have a high credit worthy counterparty so we can go through and finance against those. So it makes it easy to finance the batteries against the battery subscription. It makes it easy also to finance the stations against the energy that they're going to use.

Silas Mähner (25:57)
Okay. And how, when you really started at the beginning, how did you go about this? Did you just use like a third -party contract manufacturer to get some of this stuff done and tell us the whole kind of thought process from how you started and then how you got to this point? When did you decide, hey, we're going to build our own facility for these things versus using some third

John De Souza (26:18)
We realized one of the things if you had mentioned about the three things we want to do was to find a way to deploy the infrastructure quickly and

And in order to be able to do we needed to be able to be very close to that manufacturing process. You want to be able to design it so that you can bring the costs down. But you also want to design it so that you simplify the deployment process. As a result of both those two, we actually have always built it in -house right from the start till today. And we stayed very close to keep on modifying your design. You know, when you initially design it, you're looking and saying, want to get functionality, I want to get reliability. And then you start doing the design for manufacturing to go through and bring

the price down. But we also want to get deployment and we didn't want to have any construction. And so we want to find out how could you deploy this very quickly and we can deploy station in three days without having to break ground. Because if you do, it's very different process and gets very expensive. So, because of that, we kept it in -house. Again, we have the two

battery modules, we spent a lot of time understanding how we could fully automate the production of those and we were able to go through and do that. And then for the stations, a lot of work goes into it. These are pretty loud stations. Understanding how do you control the cost? How do you make it efficient to go through and scale?

Silas Mähner (27:30)
Interesting. that's quite fascinating. guess I would say most people probably wouldn't go quite that way, but it makes sense why you did. Are there any particular tips or things that you would share as takeaways from this whole process? Because usually this is a very capital intensive thing to build your own factory, your own facility, produce them. Like did you have, hey, we're going to build a small version. found somebody who's got extra space for us so it's cheap. Any kind of tips on how people can, when they're looking at doing something related, how they can do this.

John De Souza (27:59)
I think you want to understand what is important. Sometimes it may not be that important. You're not producing that many.

And so you say, look, I'm going to go do an outsource manufacturer. As long as it works, it can be slightly more expensive, but it's not from a cost perspective, it's not critical to go through and do this. understanding what you're optimizing for makes you make the right decisions. We knew two things that we needed to really bring the costs down and we needed to be able to iterate on this until we got there. So if we went and outsourced it initially, we were not built to that. understanding how critical it is for you to bring it in -house and which parts are important to bring out

is important to do. You're spending your time on the things that are really going to have an impact. For us, cost has a huge impact on economics and on the deployment time. So we had to bring that in -house.

Silas Mähner (28:49)
Did you have experience working with an outsource manufacturer before this? Because a lot of people would not assume that unless they've had experience dealing with this. I'm just curious if you had direct exposure to that in the past.

John De Souza (29:00)
Yes, we've worked with outsource manufacturers and I think what they do really well is when you kind of have a.

in a pretty mature design, you give it to them and let them go through. There are two, there's some of them that will go through and optimize it or you optimize it to give them and have them just go through and produce a volume and bring down the costs. But there's a lot of innovation going on here. And so we, it's always, you'll find yourself that you need to keep on innovating in this process as you're doing the manufacturing at the same time. And that is harder to go through and just outsource it upfront. They want a stable.

design so that they can increase their volume, which is not as conducive with how do you go through and innovate on it to make sure you can get, you know, get the advances you want into the product.

Silas Mähner (29:45)
Yeah, okay, that makes sense. One last thing, I didn't have this prep before, but how do you view your moat with this kind of whole business model and everything? Because I have some thoughts, but I'm just kind of curious how you guys look at

John De Souza (29:58)
So I think there are two different. I think one is a lot of people think about charging. And I think we've reached this age where people have realized that you see some of the slowdown in EV sales. It the people that could easily use charging of repurchase cars. How do you get the rest of the world? People have only one car and rely on it. So I think that's one is charging. It's an easy one. People want something that's at least as good as gas, and it's harder with charging. I think there are others. You do see, for example, a lot of swapping going on in China.

understood the benefits that there are a lot of good companies out there that are going through and doing a lot of swapping. And I think for them, there are a couple of things for us that are unique. One is our ability to work with any vehicle without asking them to change it. That's pretty unique. And the second is the ability to use the same battery in any car. We have a lot of IP on those. So those make it very hard for somebody else to easily enter it. I think where you see people trying to enter the space is they develop a battery and they go to the

car manufacturers and they'll look if you use this badly then you can use those stations.

Silas Mähner (31:03)
Hmm, because they're going directly to the consumer right

John De Souza (31:06)
Yeah, they're going to consumers, they're trying to get to different brands. And so they go to a new brand of vehicle and they go, look, wouldn't it be great if you could get your cars to be swappable, but in order to do that, you need to redesign it to use our battery.

Silas Mähner (31:20)
I see. But also, once you build this, would you hypothetically say somebody else develops another battery pack that can be swapped? Would you ever just become the charging network for those, or would you say this is Amples, we have our stations and we swap our batteries? Is that how it would work, probably?

John De Souza (31:38)
So we do swap, we can work across brands and we make pretty much any brand swappable. I think if you would look down the road, there could be a part where we say, we license IP and allow other people to develop cars that are swappable in our stations.

Silas Mähner (31:52)
Okay, I see. Yeah, so basically my point being is, first of all, I think you guys have a pretty far, at least to my knowledge, you're pretty far along in terms of first mover. So that's an advantage, but I'm just kind of curious. Once you get these things locked up, it's pretty difficult. Obviously on the commercial side, like you have kind of the loyalty and there's different things there, but once you eventually go into the consumer market, I was just trying to think about how that would play out. So let's shift. go ahead.

John De Souza (32:16)
One thing also, it is pretty long process for somebody to start working in OEM. We've invested a lot of time and with our partners to go through and get the vehicles to market by doing all the certifications. So if somebody wants to enter it, it's not a quick process to enter the market.

Silas Mähner (32:29)
So the sales process taking a long time is another like a time based mode. Okay. That's helpful. So let's shift things a little bit here. Hopefully you don't mind me asking these questions. With the 2024 election kind of coming up soon, how do you kind of look at, I guess the main considerations you have in case the administration changes? We've heard some things that they're maybe somewhat favorable to EVs, but sometimes not. We're not quite sure exactly. So how do you kind of calculate

as you're running

John De Souza (33:00)
One is that you want

you want to be able to come up with a company that doesn't rely on election results to survive. And I think when you're looking at it, we build all of our economics assuming you don't get subsidies and say it needs to make sense. So that we can stay in business regardless. The subsidies, you know, improve margins and all that, and that's good. So I think that's one. Second is things like we're in California, we do have a grant from the CDC. There are other things that are independent of election results that we'll continue to go. So I think the key is one is get it

work independent so that you're not relying on it. And then in the end, focus on the states that have a commitment regardless of what the results are.

Silas Mähner (33:40)
Do you, I guess, if you're willing to say, do you think that there will actually be any kind of macro challenges for climate tech in general if we do see an administration change? Or are you not too worried about it actually?

John De Souza (33:52)
I think we will. think that there will be a change in the landscape of subsidies that you get depending on what the situation is. There are very different approaches to it and different things that they want to go through and subsidize. So I think you will see a change. And even if you end up with subsidies, I think the mix of subsidies will vary.

Silas Mähner (33:57)
Mm

John De Souza (34:13)
you know, are you going to subsidize the energy, the charges, or where is it? And I still think very early in the stage, we're trying to figure out how do you come up with the right subsidies, that, for example, you don't just subsidize putting a charger there, you subsidize delivering energy to the vehicle, so you make sure it's being used. So I think the administration change, depending on where it goes, could slow that down. You want to make sure we're getting subsidies, but getting the right subsidies, and you want to be able to work closely with the administration to get there.

Silas Mähner (34:42)
Yeah, I think this is interesting. The way I try to look at it is it's almost like a realization that we need to make sure that clean technology in general should be very bipartisan in nature. We should be focused on doing everything we can to make it very no -brainer because there's always a reason to be more sustainable. think you could put it in the... You could make the argument that if people really want to compete against China, we need to make our industrial production much more sustainable and lower OPEX so that we can compete.

because we can't really compete with labor costs. So you could argue that the sustainability measures would be beneficial towards that. But it's hard sometimes to get people to get outside of their bubbles. But I appreciate your thoughts there.

John De Souza (35:23)
And one other thing I also say as well is that it's people looking at often short -term competitiveness.

And it the same with all the competition. Is this going to help us or not? Are we raising short term costs in the home of our climate gain or not? And we're being short term less competitive. I do think that at this point, a large part of the world is going to go to EV. And if you don't focus on it, you basically giving up the ability to compete in that market because it's moving very quickly. People are focusing on those vehicles and making them better and better and bring the costs down.

to wake up five years from now and realize that we have a lot of vehicles that just aren't competitive.

Silas Mähner (36:04)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So let's talk a little bit about fundraising. Can you just walk us through some of the big learnings that you've had for your fundraising journey with Ample? I mean, obviously you've done this many times, but specifically with Ample and maybe if you have other ones you want to carry over, but tell us the story of the fundraising, the whole thing, and then maybe any different parts and then the

John De Souza (36:24)
So fundraising is always difficult. It is a tough process and it takes, it always takes longer

than you think. with those, I tell people as you're raising money, don't raise small amounts because then you end up being in special cycle fundraising. And as an entrepreneur, it takes a lot of your time. And if you can't take those breathers in between to actually move the company forward, you end up in of trouble. So I push people to say, as you're raising it, make sure you're raising enough to give yourself a chance to really get to the next milestones you can go through and do it. Same in terms of getting investors

There's some investors that will help you out getting a good group of investors around the table is really important because they know that they know the other Investors out there. They're ones who can do a lot of the diligence calls for you to in the speed room They need to invest time to help you go through and read

Choosing the right getting them on board is important. then I think as you go through, having a global perspective is exceedingly important because each country goes through waves. think as you go through an election cycle, some funds will wait to see the results before they go to invest. So there are investors in all across the globe and be able to go through and find the investors internationally.

They can help support you is really important.

Silas Mähner (37:52)
And I guess would you mind just kind of walking us through some of the story of how you guys went from the idea through the different fundraising cycles if you're willing to give us the cliff notes there.

John De Souza (38:01)
Yeah, just agree. For us, initially, we held it in myself. We funded it initially because we didn't know if the technology was possible. We came up with some high -level goals, and we spent the first few years going through and tackling that to say we could. We did the first round where we realized that was technically possible. And that was the first round in terms of going through and say, hey, we have done enough work to prove that technically this could be done.

So we didn't raise the first round of funding, second round of funding. We actually had a real prototype that worked. Got it up and running. We ran a first pilot to show that this thing could work. Next round of funding, we actually showed commercial viability. As I mentioned, we worked with Uber, ran it, could show them results. And then the last one, we actually showed that we were able to get into major OEMs. So each one, we hit a major milestone that allowed us to go through and get to the next round.

Silas Mähner (38:57)
Yeah, I really like that. think it's helpful for people to hear that there are certain ways to do things if you can. If you can find it yourself, for example, or get to a prototype, basically, it can make things a lot easier. I also would like to ask you here, I didn't plan to ask this, but I think you'd be good person to speak with about this. A lot of people, they'll have an exit or maybe even two and they'll have a really good

And then they sit back and they sip a pina colada on the beach or something. You decided to go back and do it again. Is there a particular reason for that? Because I find it really commendable that people who have walked the walk, they've gotten scars from failing and doing things wrong, they can go a lot faster or do harder challenges, things that other people would never be able to do. So could you just talk about your mentality around that? Or was it just like, hey, I can't stop being an entrepreneur?

John De Souza (39:49)
I think everyone you learn so much more. If I think about the first startup, everything was a challenge. think about what type of cooperation do you do. You're learning so much. So I think the types of challenges you can take on get bigger and bigger because you solve a lot of the components as you go through. So that allowed us to say, let's do something much bigger. There are a lot more things that are involved in the startup that are comfortable and we focus on the challenge there. So I think that's one is you do get better at startups.

They're always hard and solving the problem is a little bit at least it makes it easier to go through. But the other part of it is it's also I think very satisfying to build a company that you're proud of. And we have we have very good people at the company. keep on saying we have very low turnover. Often the hard part of a startup is you keep on you know people come in and leave. But if I look back at the company you know five seven years almost everybody at the company then it's the company now. And the two starts is I think we have about 42

We have 200 people. we have wonderful diversity at the company. But we also have, we have sisters at the company, we have brothers, have a father, son, mother, son, uncle, niece, and you don't bring people, your relatives into a company unless you like it. So it's an option for us to really sort of push the boundaries as to, we spend so much time at work. How do you create an environment where people enjoy working? Because when you look at the lot of people who

not satisfied with their work environment. And it's all about work -life balance, but in the end, you do spend so much time at work that you better enjoy work. Work -life balance is not running away from work so you can live your life. It's actually finding a place to work that fits into your life.

Silas Mähner (41:36)
What are some of the concrete ways that you guys kind of try to foster that culture? Because there's one thing to give people enough time and to have it be kind of an enjoyable place. But are there particular ways that you've cultivated that culture?

John De Souza (41:48)
Well, one is I think for interviewing process is critical. You don't also start, you know, how do I meet everybody that we bring on board? And I think what has helped us with that is you have to be smart to do it. But we want to find good people. We want people who actually nice people, people that you want to work with. And I think that has really helped us in terms of going through and creating an environment where these are the people that you enjoy spending time with. When I travel and I come back to work, I feel like I'm coming back home. So I think

that helps us creating an environment where it's okay. And simple things where we celebrate, if you're doing an experiment and you break stuff, we celebrate that, we have ice cream. You want people to and say, look, stuff happens. Always assume good intent from others. And then if we do that and we all support each other to solve tough problems, we're able to do it.

Silas Mähner (42:40)
Yeah, I really appreciate that. That's helpful. What are, you you've exited multiple companies, you've done this a lot of times, so I'm really curious across your entire career, what would you say are your perhaps three top pieces of advice to founders?

John De Souza (42:56)
I would say one is I think a lot of people jump into being an entrepreneur for the wrong reasons. You know, I just spoke with somebody a few days ago.

who's saying, I'm going to leave the company, I'm going to do it. And I had question for him. said, look, if you do it for 10 years and I don't think you should start a company if you're not willing to put seven to 10 years into it. But I say, suppose you do it for 10 years and it fails. Will you be happy to look back and say, look, I'm really happy I tried to solve this problem because no, I don't make lots of money. That's definitely not right. You know, if you have to lots of money, go to a big company, stay there and much higher probability of doing so. I think one is don't start it for wrong reasons. I think people just think, OK, I'll go there and make money.

Silas Mähner (43:25)
Yeah.

John De Souza (43:36)
There are much easier ways to make money than to go jump into it. The same is not knowing yourself. People feel they need to jump in and they need to run the company. But you need to understand your own personality, things you like. There are many positions at a startup company. You need to understand the one that you want to have, that melds with what you want to go through. And so I think people don't they don't understand themselves well enough. And so often in a simple example, as someone say, I'm going to run

company, they don't they don't like meeting new people. They don't like being on the road and all of that. So they end up just spending the time inside doing a lot of the technical work or lot of product work and not the fundraising work. So if you're going to that, you need to you need to know yourself and get to your right spot. Last one I'll say is there's a lot of value in getting a partner.

It's a tough road. It's a really tough and having a co -founder with you really helps. that you know you trust, you can both be very open and honest with is vital. I think those three would, if you hit those three then I think at least you're off on the right start.

Silas Mähner (44:46)
Awesome. what are a couple of business ideas that you have for other people to start climate tech startups? Anything that you see that you see an opportunity

John De Souza (44:56)
I actually think we're still at the early stages of it. I think there are just so many opportunities that as people understand the carbon footprint of companies, I think there are lot of ways of people pushing things around. OK, I'll buy credits of this. not really going to change behavior. I think we need to get to the next stage of how do you actually help people understand? One is understanding your carbon footprint.

What can you realistically do to change it so that you're actually lowering it and not just buying offsets to go through? And then maybe the technologies to actually go through and help people with lowering it. So I think anywhere in the spectrum right now is fair game. People don't, when you go across it, all those stages they don't understand. So it's still pretty early. There's a lot to be done. The only thing I'll say is just be careful of fads

And everything, or there's sometimes everybody's interested in climate change and they lose interest for a while. So you just need to think longer term to say, how's my company going to survive the ups and downs of the industry, which can be very mercurial.

Silas Mähner (46:05)
Yeah, that's good advice. And I guess are there any particular companies in climate that you consider to be underrated that you would say somebody should check

John De Souza (46:16)
Actually, I...

I probably, you know, there many of them, but I probably need to look at them more before I'm able to go through and say, you know, they need to go through. I think there are segments that I think are interesting. I think a lot of people looking at it, it seems renewable energy in general is entry. So you see a lot of fusion and all that, I think we need to get more efficient ways of getting more renewable energy. Carbon capture, there's a lot of stuff that's interesting out there,

Again, looking and really understanding what goes into it and how they're going to do it. And there's a lot still of work being done on batteries. Batteries still cost a tremendous amount and we're interesting innovation there. They're coming up with batteries that you always end up with you have. you have cycle life? Do you have fast? What do you do? And I think we're coming up with newer batteries that help address a bunch of those.

Silas Mähner (47:11)
Awesome man. Well this has been awesome. I really appreciate this. The time has gone by fast. So as we wrap, what is your, I guess, where should people reach you if you want them to reach you? And what's your, you know, what's your call to action?

John De Souza (47:23)
I'm on Twitter, or you can just go to ample .com and reach out to me through there as well.

And I think as we go through this, we're hitting some incredible temperatures in the last week in the Middle East and I was looking at places that are hitting nearly 60 centigrade out there. So I think people feel overwhelmed that it takes a lot to have an impact on climate change. I actually think a lot of small changes from a lot of us can have a huge impact. So my call actually is, look, everybody can do this small part, do that small part because I think between us, we can actually

a large impact.

Silas Mähner (48:00)
Yeah, awesome. Well, it's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for coming on.

John De Souza (48:04)
Thank you so much. Bye.