Episode 16 - Spinning Out of Google X with Ramya Swaminathan
Think there is no pivot that I have made in a company that I shouldn't have made sooner. You know, I I think the thing is that pivots are hard. I think we get attached to our stories and our solutions. You know, it's, we used to joke, at, Rye Development at our old company that sometimes we were all like Gollum and the ring, you know, in Lord of the Rings, and we had my precious, and we didn't wanna change it. We didn't wanna give it up.
Ramya Swaminathan:We didn't wanna give it to anybody else. We didn't you know? And we would say that, you know, as a way of encouraging ourselves to sort of say, like, don't be like that.
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Ilya Tabakh:Subscribe to stay updated and join us as we uncover what it takes to transform visions into ventures. Welcome aboard. Let's grow together. Alright. Well, it's not every day, that we talk about infrastructure and innovation, discussions, but, it's becoming a little bit of a theme.
Ilya Tabakh:This is not, the first, discussion, which to me is super exciting because many of the things that we rely on and are using today, this camera powered by electricity, the Internet powered by telecom, all have worked for decades, if not longer. So it's exciting that we have Ramya with us to discuss her journey and sort of her insights on the many different layers of the onion of infrastructure. So Ramya, thank you for coming on the show and spending some time with us. Maybe normally we begin these discussions from let's go to the very beginning, but your most recent kind of jump from being the leader of an infrastructure company sort of in a tech environment to being an EIR at a really cool innovation program is a pretty big leap. Maybe we'll start there on kind of what's it like to make a transition into sort of being in residence as opposed to a hardline entrepreneurial leader?
Ilya Tabakh:Maybe we can start the conversation there.
Ramya Swaminathan:What a terrific question. But first, let me just take a minute to thank both of you for inviting me on here. Conversations between folks like us who I think have multiple, not only interests, but multiple experiences at what I broadly would call translation among fields. It's always a pleasure, so I'm really appreciative of the opportunity to be here with you all today. So as you rightly said, I stepped down from my role as founder and CEO of a company called Malta, which was commercializing a technology for grid scale energy storage.
Ramya Swaminathan:And the primary thing that I found myself craving at the end of six years of a lot of intensity, as I think any entrepreneurial leader will relate to, When you're leading an organization like that, you become a monomaniac. I went to sleep thinking about energy storage. I woke up thinking about energy storage. You know my dreams were populated by different forms of energy storage, etc. And So what I found myself really craving other than a little bit of time off, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to take was elevation and perspective.
Ramya Swaminathan:And I think that that is so important for all of us who've been on these intense journeys, entrepreneurial or otherwise, because what happens is that you really start to see things in very much intense and productive, no doubt, but tunnel vision kind of way. And the wonderful thing about the fields that we are all in, the fields that we're all interested in, infrastructure increasingly is not just a hardware space, it's a hardware and a software space. There's an enormous amount of innovation happening in every aspect of infrastructure. And so, craving that ability to get a little high and look around, which I characterized as elevation and perspective, I think was absolutely critical, is absolutely critical in my forming thoughts around what it is that I wanted to do next. And in that sense, the role of being an EIR, the opportunity to have a platform, to be with a platform like Engine Ventures as an EIR, is really a gift because it enabled me not only to kind of reflect on my own journey, but also to then look at that in the context of all the different cool things that are happening in the areas that I have a deep passion for climate, infrastructure, electricity, grid, etcetera.
Ramya Swaminathan:And that's really what kind of attracted me to the EIR role.
Ilya Tabakh:Amazing. And it's so funny because you sort of hit on a couple of things that ring really true with me. Mean, that monomaniacal thing is for sure when you're kind of driving. I will say, though, maybe we'll dig into the context point, kind of your background, both kind of where you grew up as well as educational background actually gives you a really rich context to bring to the infrastructure and infrastructure commercialization conversation. Let's dive into that a little bit.
Ilya Tabakh:What was it like from an early age knowing that infrastructure isn't always a reliable kind of asset and having that lens? And then maybe we'll dive into some of the public policy and sort of those perspectives as well.
Ramya Swaminathan:Absolutely. So I grew up in Asia. I grew up in India and in The Philippines. My family is Indian, and I spent my the early part of my life in India and then actually moved. My father got a job in The Philippines and I moved to The Philippines.
Ramya Swaminathan:And India and The Philippines shared one aspect among many, and it really has to do with your point about infrastructure, which is that, you know, although we often hear in the news that there's, you know, a billion people who live off grid, Certainly, I did not grow up in that environment. I grew up in urban Asia, which is very much networked, has access to all kinds of infrastructure, not only on the electricity side, but water, sewer. However, it was and continues to be. It was and is extremely unreliable. So, to give you just one story that can help maybe listeners visualize that, I spent a good deal of time living in an apartment with my grandparents.
Ramya Swaminathan:And they lived in a multi storey building in Chennai, which is in the Southeastern part of India. And at the time that I was doing that, Chennai actually experienced acute water shortages. That continues to be a fact of life in various parts of India, in Chennai specifically. People buy water by the tanker. And there is a public municipal supply of water.
Ramya Swaminathan:When I lived with my grandparents, we would get water for half an hour every other day from the tap. Otherwise, you relied on your private supply of bought water. So for that half an hour every other day, we used to joke that if the most important person in the world himself or herself showed up at our doorstep and rang our doorbell, we would not open the door for half an hour. Because for that half an hour, the attentions and efforts of everybody in the household were focused on having every faucet in the house running, every tap, every bucket, every container that we could catch water in. We had a reverse osmosis water filtration system that we would then fill up and, you know, capture water there.
Ramya Swaminathan:So the attentions and efforts of everybody in the household were completely focused on how much water can we get to tide us over for the next few days, which would then reduce the amount of water that we would have to buy commercially. And that you can take that. I wanted to give you that very specific example. And it was a job that, you know, in some ways it was a great equalizer. Everybody participated in it.
Ramya Swaminathan:It was true not only for us, but our neighbors, our upstairs, downstairs. It was sort of like everybody and in different neighborhoods you got water at different times. So it was a very much a shared experience. And one, certainly people enjoyed complaining about the lack or the quality or what happened or you couldn't catch water that day, etcetera. And so while there was some amount of social bonding, the reality of the situation is the electricity grid was the same way, perhaps not as regular, right?
Ramya Swaminathan:But regular, what would be called load shedding, right? Where if all of a sudden there was too much demand for power on the grid, your area would go down. Sometimes they would tell you ahead of time, but many times they wouldn't. So I grew up very much in an environment of sort of having a sense that all of these systems were very fragile. We were very grateful for them.
Ramya Swaminathan:I mean, we certainly understood the value of water, power. You know, much later telephones became like that as well. I actually grew up, not every household had a telephone, you know, inside the household. Again, my grandparents lived in a kind of, at that time, in a rural area, and the only telephone on their block was at their neighbor's house. And I now tell the story, and my children can hardly understand.
Ramya Swaminathan:But, you know, to get a phone call, you would have to organize it with the person who was going to call you that they would call the neighbor, and you would have to show up at that appointed time to the neighbor's house in order to be able to take that phone call. You know, unless, of course, there was an emergency or something. And so the sense that, you know, infrastructure and its benefits were not universal, they were not universally accessible, and that they were not to be taken for granted was very much a sense that I grew up with. I daresay practically everybody who grew up in a situation like me probably has had a similar experience of feeling like those public services that we kind of take for granted here in The United States were actually kind of fragile, actually not to be taken for granted. I came to The U.
Ramya Swaminathan:S. First for college back in the 90s. And one of the first things I did notice was how robust those systems were, right? Like there was no load shedding in the town of Amherst when I went to college in Western Massachusetts. And frankly, I was amazed by the experience of practically everywhere I went, you could just take water from the tap and drink it with no concern, no need to ask anybody if it was safe, it had been boiled or filtered or anything.
Ramya Swaminathan:And so, that to me really seemed like a tremendous opportunity to add value to the daily lives of citizens in a very concrete way. Like, what if people all over the world could have what was available here, right? That you would have a robust water sewer power utility system that enabled your life and comfort and safety at all times.
Ilya Tabakh:What's crazy about that is like, so I was born in Moscow and I moved when I was a kid and I heard stories of the hot water turning off for a week or whatever. I'm like, oh, that sounds crazy. But it's just like just just to put an additional layer of focus on, you know, when when you're there and you're used to these things and then they don't work. You know, I was in Puerto Rico like four or five months after hurricane Maria came through, and we were working on decentralized energy systems. And it was crazy to sort of see that, you know, that expectation even in like a US territory was just a different, you know, and it's different like hearing it in a story, you know, and I think you did a really good job by the way, like painting what that's like.
Ilya Tabakh:But it's just like, it's a crazy thing to experience it yourself, sort of that break with your expectation as opposed to hear somebody tell it. And so, in many ways, it's great that people don't experience that in person. That means that we've been building systems well in The US, at least for the most part, but it's pretty eye opening. It's like a visceral sort of break with expectations. So I just wanted to kind of double down on that a little bit.
Terrance Orr:I love the story that she shared because in many ways it's the infrastructure to Ramya's life, right, and her life's work. Right? And and I think that's important for people to understand and and to know. And you talked a little bit about that journey sort of go into this small town in Amherst, but double down a little bit more Ramya. You studied anthropology, right, in undergrad and then you went on to study public policy.
Terrance Orr:Talk to us about your educational background, how that informed what you saw in your upbringing and how do you marry those two things, your educational background, what you saw on the ground in Amherst. Talk to us about how you spent your next four years in college and how that informed what you're doing today.
Ramya Swaminathan:What a lovely question. I feel like I have to start with the statement that I've actually never been educated for anything that I've done professionally. So I say that as a statement of hope for everybody, right? In the sense that I think what we want to do in our educational experiences is to learn how to learn. There are, of course, several professions, careers, etc, in which you really have to have specific knowledge.
Ramya Swaminathan:I, for one, would not want my surgeon to have studied anthropology and never have any educational background what he or she was about to do to me. That said, the world is changing so rapidly, and that had certainly been my experience in my own career. So when I came to college, I was new to The United States, And I chose to go to a liberal arts college as an undergrad with the explicit idea that my thought was not really about career at all. It was really about what can I learn that will really kind of change my way of thinking about the world? Anthropology did that for me.
Ramya Swaminathan:It was a framework to look at the variety of people's cultures, experiences, stories, narratives in the world and really think about them, one, as universal, right, as universally human, but two, as varied as the people that we have seen, experienced, heard, talked to, listened to, etc. And that kind of multiplicity and unity really spoke to me, And that's really why I chose to major in anthropology. And of course, like all things, you latch on to a few professors who open your eyes to a whole world. And it was a subject that I had not known much about prior to college. And so I just kind of landed into it, catapulted into it, and held onto it as a way of understanding the world.
Ramya Swaminathan:And I will say that those translations I really think about the through line not as being about anything specific about energy or infrastructure, but about understanding translation, learning to learn, thinking about the ways in which there's sort of formation of culture around society. And that's really maybe a strange thing to say as someone who's, you know, kind of multiply founded companies that work in grid scale power or whatever. But I think that there's a real through line there about how how you build the society you want to be a part of. And that for me was the through line.
Ilya Tabakh:Just quickly jumping in there. I would actually make the argument that especially like investment banking for infrastructure and utility culture is a deep exercise in anthropology. So my biggest disappointment as a technologist is often the best technologies don't win. And it's because it's a combination of the technology, sort of the processes by which you deploy this technology and use these things and ultimately the people. And the people often, especially for the technically educated folks, you know, because I I didn't get nearly as much of a sneak peek into the the the softer, you know, social sciences.
Ilya Tabakh:That's where everybody gets stuck in the mud. It's not typically the technology. So I would actually argue the counter a little bit that having an appreciation for how do you even think about these things is probably more translational than you indicated in your description. But just a thought exercise at least
Ramya Swaminathan:in the terrific insight, Ilya, and I wanted to get a little wonky on you for one second, which is one of the basic kind of techniques in anthropology is something they called participant observation, right? So anthropologists would go and observe groups of people, societies, cultures, neighborhoods, etc. But there was a need from an intellectual rigor standpoint to acknowledge that the anthropologists themselves was a participant, right? Like you by being there, by participating, by observing, you are yourself a participant and you are changing the nature of the interaction by being a participant. And so that participant observation, I'm just underlining your point that really has struck me with force, that that is a technique that carries through in everything, right?
Ramya Swaminathan:You can always be a participant observer, and you have to acknowledge that you are a participant, that you are changing the nature of that interaction, and to take both responsibility for it, but also see the opportunity in it, you know, in every interaction and every group interaction.
Terrance Orr:I want to double down on this because I think it's so important and in the things that we do in a day to day in our day to day lives, building companies, leading companies, coaching people, trying to develop people. I think that this anthropology background that you have, you know, I want to delve it out on this point. I'd argue that the higher we climb, the more it's about people, right? And and the culture and the things that in the conditions that we put around those people to to thrive in essentially. And I also think it's about storytelling and two things that I've seen on full display in the first ten minutes, right, of us being on this podcast is those two things about you.
Terrance Orr:The people aspect coming from anthropology, but also the storytelling aspect, connecting people to real stories, right? Things that you've experienced, right? We saw that what you you talked about your upbringing, we saw that when you started to talk about the people aspect, right, of doubling down on what Ilya mentioned. I think there's another piece of this in your in your background which is around public policy which I'd also argue also about people, right? At scale and the conditions that you create around them to make sure they live a thriving life in the societies that they're deciding to operate in.
Terrance Orr:Talk to us about why you decided to go get your master's in public policy versus anything else that you could have went and got your your masters in?
Ramya Swaminathan:Yeah, so I think that I think you actually stole my Thunder on that a little bit because I think fundamentally the conviction that I had at the time was that public policy was a means to affect lives at scale. And it was really an opportunity, an environment, a sector that understanding the nature of how policy tables are set really has the ability to change the outcomes. It's really about scale, right? There are many, many wonderful professions in which you're affecting one person at a time, and it's hard to overestimate the impact of that. But the benefit of working at a policy level, of understanding the policy level, of leveraging policy in order to affect outcomes is that you're affecting people at scale.
Ramya Swaminathan:And going back to my story about infrastructure, it's it's that's the through line, right? Which is that there are fundamental kind of table setting aspects of the way we build our societies and our built environments very concretely that affect everybody. And that was really the scale at which I wanted to be involved. And so that's what drove my decision to work in public policy and to whether or not ultimately I became myself part of the policy landscape. It felt to me like a fundamental part of what I needed to leverage in order to do what I wanted to achieve.
Terrance Orr:I think another crucial point in in your story here is that you don't necessarily have to go work in the thing that you went to school for.
Ramya Swaminathan:Exactly.
Terrance Orr:And and I really this is a very key point for me. I get this question almost every other week. Every time I sit on a panel or something, we go, well, you studied marketing. You went to law school. You did this thing, but I don't do any of those things today.
Terrance Orr:Right? Literally. I'm not a lawyer. When I became a product manager, every single person had an engineering undergrad degree and an MBA, like, almost literally. And I did not.
Terrance Orr:Right? So but I was really good at talking to customers, understanding their pain points, understanding the market dynamics. And I just think for everybody listening to the call today, like take a look at Ramya's background. It's in anthropology and public policy and although we just sort of went through sort of how those how those things are benefiting her today, she still went to go build in a very technical space. Okay?
Terrance Orr:And spun it out of a very technical company, which we will get into at some point throughout the journey. But Ilya, know you're about to tee up another question for Ramya, so I don't want
Ilya Tabakh:I've got all kinds of questions, man. I like, I think, you know, I really want to dig into, you know, kind of the transition to EIR, but I think I would kind of do the story in the background a disservice if we didn't kind of talk about your work in hydroelectric development and ultimately there's a lot of learnings in actually deploying large civil works and finding ways to get them financed and building stuff. And so I wanna spend, you know, and I think that probably informs a lot of the commercialization and the translational stuff later. So I wanna spend a few beats there kinda maybe picking up the highlights, you know, some of the things that were expected, some of the things unexpected, maybe what you think you kind of learned from that period.
Ramya Swaminathan:Absolutely. And if I could just go back to underline Terrance's point for just a moment because I think it's such an important message for young people to hear. Also, Terrance, get asked that all the time, but I also, at this point, make it a point to emphasize it almost depending on the forum that I'm in because I want to offer it to folks as really a message of encouragement, right? I think the thing is, as we sit today, I think it's going to be impossible to predict what professions, what careers, what meaningful areas are going to exist as opportunities for young people today in ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, thirty years. And certainly, I would have never predicted any of what I have done for myself.
Ramya Swaminathan:And so the reason that I want to just take a minute to underline that is really to provide a bit of a call to action to young folks listening to say, you know, I think the most critical things that you want to really think about is learning the ability to learn. And then believe in yourself that you will be able to learn what you need to do in order to go in the directions that capture you at the right time.
Ilya Tabakh:All right. I got to add then. From a deeply technically educated person, I took the opposite of I had the good fortune, not through any foresight of my own, to get NSF fellowship and do improv training. Essentially, the academic world and the research world was very interested in training technical folks how to communicate with the world. And so I accidentally fell into a bunch of things like ICORE and helping with STEM education.
Ilya Tabakh:And even in a technical education, there's opportunities. So a lot of it is think about what you're good at and what things do you need or are likely to be beneficial. In this conversation so far, being able to tell a story and talk to people and understand people, whether you're deeply technical, lightly technical or whatever, is always a really good skill. And so just to put a plug into because a lot of the discussion are you're either technical or not, I think you can at least have some exposure whether you're kind of deeply specialized on the technical side or not.
Ramya Swaminathan:I think it's a false dichotomy that we create in our own minds. I am a technical person. I am not a technical person. And I hear that so often. And the one thing I'd encourage young folks to do is don't do that, right?
Ramya Swaminathan:You know, like, just don't think of yourself that way, right? Think of yourself as a person who is deeply able to learn. You learn technical things at the right time. You learn nontechnical things at the right time. They interact.
Ramya Swaminathan:They create each other. They reinforce each other. All of these skills are mutually constitutive. And I think it's deeply important to understand that. So, Ilya, I would say, like your journey is the same, like underlines the same point I'm making.
Ramya Swaminathan:You're just coming at it from a slightly like you're going the other way from a technical background to really crossing over to all of these skills that we have in common. And I came from the other side and came to deeply appreciate the engineering heavy technology, heavy organizations that I had come to lead, starting from a position of, well, I have to learn a huge amount in order to lead. I have to learn a huge amount in order to lead this organization.
Ilya Tabakh:Amazing. And probably one of those learning curves is when you got into developing hydropower. Let's dive into that and talk about that period of your career.
Ramya Swaminathan:Absolutely. So I had actually spent the first part of my career in finance a little over a decade, and it was terrific education, largely focused on financing infrastructure projects. So very much a through line to what we've been talking about till today. If you worked in financial services in the 02/2008 region, you probably will feel sort of like a flush coming on because that was a very stressful time, felt a bit like the world was ending. So I left banking with two colleagues and friends, and we together over time built a hydropower development company.
Ramya Swaminathan:Like all entrepreneurial journeys, it was not a straight line. So we actually started with a technical commercialization play to work on what is called hydrokinetics. So harvesting small amounts of power from the free flowing part of the Mississippi River, from St. Louis all the way down to the Gulf Of Mexico. And in large part, it was, you know, there was a group of folks in the New Orleans area who in the aftermath of Katrina had really focused on resiliency, power resiliency, how were they going to really harness the resources they had in order to become a more reliable, resilient island, which they had had to really kind of grapple with that prospect in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Ramya Swaminathan:And so we were developing a technology, a turbine that would work in that ultra low head environment. And it was really intended to be an array of turbines, each of which would harness a very small amount of power, but that would be hooked together in arrays and then kind of land. We had a whole business plan oriented around this. It was super exciting, and it was really kind of mission driven, you know, at that time. Now, it was a terrible time to fundraise, as you can imagine, 2008, 02/2010.
Ramya Swaminathan:But we felt very driven by this prospect. However, simultaneously, you know, as you absolutely put your finger on, Ilya, it's not enough to have a technology, right? Good technologies may or may not end up becoming market dominant, and it has a lot to do with what's happening in the rest of the market. And what was happening in the rest of the market is that gas prices were going down and lower and lower and lower. And so we came to understand and acknowledge that really, although we felt very committed to the prospect of this hydrokinetic business, that economically it simply didn't pencil, not only for the up front capital expenditure, it was expensive to be thinking about driving pilings into the Mississippi River and having arrays of turbines sitting under the shipping channel.
Ramya Swaminathan:But think of the operations and maintenance costs. You would have to have, you know, boats really maintaining these arrays in a heavily sediment laden riverine environment to clean them, to maintain them, etcetera. And it felt very painful, really painful. But we had to acknowledge, and we were bankers after all, so we did understand the economics. You know, we had to acknowledge that the economics simply didn't pencil.
Ramya Swaminathan:At the same time, however, we had understood that there was an enormous opportunity in hydropower writ large, but it wasn't really on the hydrokinetic side at that time. It was in low head hydro built on existing dams. So the headline number still shocks me. There are 79,000 dams in The United States, and only 3% of them have power. And so the pitch really became, could we use all the learnings we had gained in the long pole in the tent in the hydropower development space is the regulatory process.
Ramya Swaminathan:And so going back to your point about public policy, Terrance, like that education really came in handy because I managed all our regulatory affairs. And the thing is that the entire regulatory landscape in The United States was based on the concept of building the Hoover Dam. And of course, if you're going to rebuild the Hoover Dam, that is an enormous, intrusive prospect that requires that level of scrutiny. However, that's not what we were proposing. By and large, in The United States, that haven't been done since the '80s.
Ramya Swaminathan:The last real dam, large scale dam that was built in The US was sometime in the 80s, maybe even before the heyday was in the 50s and before. And so we were able to make a case that you really needed to streamline the regulatory process to allow this extremely low impact hydro, where you were really using a dam that already existed. And so the pitch really was, if you have the dam and you're not taking it down, you might as well have the power. And that was something that resonated even with folks who were conventionally or traditionally opposed to hydropower, right, like the hydropower reform coalition, American rivers, folks who deeply cared about the riverine environment understood that, you know, yes, there were dams we needed to take down, but there were many, many dams that were built for irrigation, navigation, recreation, water supply that were never coming down in our lifetimes. And the idea that if you have the dam and you weren't going to take it down, you might as well have the power because that power was clean.
Ramya Swaminathan:It was practically baseload because it's extremely predictable. And really, you know, rivers are often extremely close to load centers. And so because of the way that cities grew up, it was kind of a perfect source of power. And so, we were able to really build a coalition around that, harness public pressure to streamline the regulatory process, and build a business around that. We actually did ultimately even expand that business with our investors to include pumped hydro storage, which is the oldest form of energy storage on the grid, where you have two reservoirs and they're separated by hopefully several thousand feet.
Ramya Swaminathan:The greater distance between the two vertically, actually, the more beneficial the the storage plant is. The original pumped hydro network grew up around nuclear plants because nuclear is a baseload power. It really was designed to always generate power at a very level, at a very stable level. And if you needed less power, nuclear is not able to react to that by turning down the nuclear plant. So what could you do with that power?
Ramya Swaminathan:You could use it to send the water uphill to the higher reservoir to wait until it's needed back on the grid, and then it would be sent down to the lower reservoir, run through a generator to generate power. And so that's the concept behind pumped hydro storage. And so we expanded the business plan to include pumped hydro storage. So as we transitioned from that hydrokinetic business plan to the conventional hydro and pumped hydro storage, it actually moved further and further away from technology development, right? Both of those, you know, hydropower has existed for more than one hundred years, oldest form of power generation, electric power generation.
Ramya Swaminathan:And actually before that was hydro mechanical power, right? If you think about mills that were actually run by rail.
Ilya Tabakh:The battle wheel.
Ramya Swaminathan:Absolutely, right? So hydroelectric was one generation up from hydro mechanical. And so, we were able to kind of pivot that. Pivots are always difficult. They're always painful.
Ramya Swaminathan:However, I think the fundamental benefit of being in a small organization that is kind of innovative by design in its DNA is that it enables these pivots. And reality is something that is, you know, can be painful as it was for us when we had to acknowledge that the economics of the original hydrokinetic business were very challenging in the environment in which we were trying to do it. But it's also equally important, a skill, to understand the opportunities that are within that, space to pivot and to synthesize what you've learned to date in order to help you make the pivot. And so that actually ended up becoming the sustaining business. And I learned a tremendous amount.
Ramya Swaminathan:It was my first foray into real entrepreneurialism. Mean, as a banker, a lot of times, bankers, they are entrepreneurial. They are making business calls. However, it is very different to exist as an entrepreneur within a larger platform in an established business than it is when you're kind of creating. I sometimes would describe it as like you have three different immaturity is in a startup company, right?
Ramya Swaminathan:Like you've got at least off at least right. But often you have an immature technology, you have an immature market, and then you have an immature company and you're trying to manage all three immaturities at the same time. The hydropower development business, we weren't managing technology immaturity, at least that was very much a stable part of the business. But making the market opportunity for hydropower, which had largely been more abundant in The United States since the eighties, and then expanding that into pumped hydro storage as an early foray into energy storage, all of those were really an exercise making, in persuading the market that the pain points that the market was feeling could be solved by what we had to offer.
Ilya Tabakh:Yeah. I I wanna I wanna offer a little context here. So in 2006, 2007, I was working on algae based biofuel. Right, in an academic setting. Today we talk a lot about first of a kind and sort of demonstrating the initially scaled technology to sort of make the leap to institutional funding.
Ilya Tabakh:To hear and listen to Ramya's story about being a banker that was trying to commercialize technology in the same timeframe is awesome. Everybody always thinks that they're like first contact with this type of experience and nobody else has done it. It's really hard. It's like, I don't know what to do. There's very few things that are new under the sun.
Ilya Tabakh:But just sort of what the running timeline was at the time as not Ramya pointed out, natural gas and kind of fracking and that whole market sort of expanded at that time. Also, oil went below $80 a barrel, and that essentially put about a ten year pause on a lot of the biofuel alternative fuel. You know, SAF was being talked about at that time. That was probably a ten or fifteen year pause. And so to be, doing innovation at sort of the market finance layer of the and also at the same time, there really wasn't that many infrastructure funds.
Ilya Tabakh:Today, you hear about kind of infrastructure capital and how pension funds are really excited about coupon rate returns for thirty years. There's nothing like power and infrastructure to do that. Fifteen years ago, almost fifteen years ago, it was a different environment. So actually, almost twenty years ago, man. So just I want to kind of bookend that with some what was going on in the rest of the world.
Ilya Tabakh:So kudos to you for being a you said bankers aren't known for being entrepreneurial, but I would argue that you were doing some pretty pretty you know, just this couple weeks ago, maybe a month ago at New York Climate Week, I was sitting with a bunch of insurers trying to figure out how to do risk transfer. Right? And many of the same things that you're talking about today, and they're still trying to figure it out, right? So just kudos and a little bit of context for our audience here.
Ramya Swaminathan:Absolutely. And the other thing I would point out, Ilya, you're absolutely right. And I think one of the most amazing things that I've seen change in the last twenty years are really two things. One, you pointed out, right? Like now you have large established businesses, insurance companies, large OEMs, developers, pension funds.
Ramya Swaminathan:You know, they're all interested in innovation in what traditionally has been kind of a, you know, innovation resistant, you know, risk averse sector, you know, perhaps for right for for good reason, right? Like we don't want our infrastructure to be, you know, the place that we're taking bleeding edge risks without having appropriately wrung some of those risks out. Right? So that's really exciting. So now it's like absolutely everybody is talking about how do we harness innovation in spheres that were not known for putting innovation kind of at the center of their being.
Ramya Swaminathan:The second thing you also mentioned, Ilya, is the part about loneliness, right? Like today, there are tons of entrepreneurs who are doing tons of amazing things. And it's not that people weren't doing amazing things back then, but it's that one. I think there were few of fewer of us, but two, we all were alone. Like we were all operating in our own little worlds and we didn't have community in the journey, in the opportunities, in the celebrations, but also in kind of the loneliness and the frustration and the, Oh my God, I can't figure this out.
Ramya Swaminathan:Or, Oh my God, why am I? Why are people still talking about this when the answer is so obvious or any of those things? I think there's much more support, much more of a playbook, much more of an understanding that we're going to advance this together and that there are real, like, shareable lessons and support, even if you're talking about things that seem on the surface as different as biofuels and hydropower. However, they have they have a huge amount in common. They really do, you know, in terms of the commercialization journey.
Terrance Orr:You talked about two things just now, Ramya, that I really want to sort of double down on. And if you can provide some advice for the entrepreneurs who will be listening to this podcast. You talked about one, I love talking about the power to pivot. All right. I love talking about when did you get the signal to know that it was time for you to pivot during that situation?
Terrance Orr:You talked a little bit about some of those things which is economics just wasn't making sense at the time. Like, it was very clear to us as bankers. Any of the signals that you guys got during that time that said, oh, we we definitely need to pivot and focus more on this thing and double down here because we are learn it alls, not know it alls. And we learned this thing and now we're gonna pivot to go do this other thing. That's the first thing.
Terrance Orr:It's a it's a stat question. Okay? And the second piece of that is using a regulatory strategy, giving your insight from public policy as a lever to tell the story in a different way, essentially to move people in the right direction. Could you could you comment on those two things?
Ramya Swaminathan:I wanted your question about pivoting is so interesting because I think and I I was thinking about it as you were talking. I think there is no pivot that I have made in a company that I shouldn't have made sooner. You know, I think the thing is that pivots are hard. I think we get attached to our stories and our solutions. You know, it's We used to joke at Riot Development at our old company that sometimes we were all like Gollum and the Ring in Lord of the Rings and we had my precious and we didn't want to change it.
Ramya Swaminathan:We didn't want to give it up. We didn't want to give it to anybody else. And we would say that, you know, as a way of encouraging ourselves to sort of say, like, don't be like that, you know, let's not do that. But I think the temptation because, you know, as an entrepreneur, particularly in a startup environment, you're pouring your heart into this thing and it becomes really hard, I think, to acknowledge that it needs a fundamental change. Sometimes it needs to be jettisoned altogether, maybe it needs a reframe.
Ramya Swaminathan:So I've pivoted multiple times in multiple companies, as I'm sure entrepreneur, you know, in this environment could say the same thing. At least for me, I would say that if I had to look back and digest a lesson and share it, I would say, I think often we know when we need to pivot, but we resist it. It's not that, yes, we were bankers and we understood the economics, but we heard it from other people. We had investors, we had a board, we heard it from new investors, we heard it, you know, we've read it in the news. I mean, it was evident, and I think we resisted it until we could no longer resist it.
Ramya Swaminathan:And maybe that's human nature, but I think the challenge is to really encourage yourself in your journey to listen to the signals and then to act on them because I think it's human to not want to because it's painful.
Ilya Tabakh:I think maybe just to in in my experience, I think the act part, right, and and acting aggressively is the key. Because I think from the sort of the pivot point when you're kind of taking the thing and you're thinking about a lot of the time, some of the action pulls back. Right? And and I think in many of those situations, it's it's not necessarily, at least in my experience, whichever way you go, it's fine. The wrong decision is not to do anything.
Ilya Tabakh:Correct. Or to think about it or to sit. And that that's where I see a lot of folks as they're sort of in the process of turning the ship. You know, they they forget that they still have kind of a destination. Right?
Ilya Tabakh:And and so I I would just kinda maybe double down on the act part because often the folks that act aggressively in whichever direction figure out that, you know, that was good or bad and can adjust course quickly. Whereas if you sort of don't have as many at bats, you're probably not making too much forward progress.
Ramya Swaminathan:Absolutely. And I think it also points to the need to have a safe, stable set of folks that you can talk to with no risk. Right? Like, what if I changed everything tomorrow? Right?
Ramya Swaminathan:Can you think that through with me? Can you play it out? And you know, a person or a group of people that are not going to then take that as anything other than you're hypothesizing in safety, right? Because I think it's important to think it through before you act. But I agree with you, Ilya, that not acting is also a decision and usually the wrong decision.
Ramya Swaminathan:Right? It doesn't matter in some ways, like which direction you go in, but you got to pick a direction, call it and move, particularly when you're leading other people.
Terrance Orr:I think the other thing that I want to call out here is, your comment around, it's a lot, not you didn't use the word easy, so I'm going to use this is not what Ramya said, but I'm going to use this word. It is a lot easier to start something with a large platform and with the resources of a larger company inside something and be entrepreneurial than it is to do it externally with none of those people that that brand equity that they bring to the table and all of that good stuff. When I got my lesson in entrepreneurship, it was on training wheels is what I like to describe it to people, which is, you know, I became an entrepreneur inside of corporate or inside of a corporation where I became an entrepreneur and I incubated something and I was like, Oh, I know I'm good at product, right? It can't be that hard. That's really hard.
Terrance Orr:Yeah, right. You know, when it was time to actually, when it was time to actually go do it on my own outside the corporation without legal, without HR, without all the resources that I had, I was like, oh my goodness, this is very hard to do. And you get humbled very quickly and you start to realize that I need to humble myself. I need to learn from other people around me who've been on this journey before. Get good mentors, get good sponsors around you and you're learning every single day.
Terrance Orr:Every day you would not know something. Every single day. And you just have to be willing to go out and learn that thing and not beat yourself up about it. And every single day you feel impostor syndrome. Every single Absolutely.
Ramya Swaminathan:Absolutely.
Terrance Orr:And I just want people to understand that, you know, from, and I just think it's a very key point that you mentioned. I just don't want it to get lost in, in, in the great storytelling that, that you have around. It is hard to do this thing on your own without the platform of a bigger entity, you know?
Ramya Swaminathan:It really is. The other the other thing I would say you're 100% right about all those things, Terrance, about, you know, being humble, learning, you know, making sure you don't judge yourself, you know, give yourself a break and all those things. But you also have to be an optimist. You have to believe that you're making progress and that you're going to get there because otherwise it becomes an impossible load to shoulder, right? So you have to believe that you're doing good, in whatever metric matters to you, right?
Ramya Swaminathan:That you're moving in a direction that is positive and that you're going to get there. You have to believe that.
Ilya Tabakh:Amazing. So you mentioned a community in sort of the you know, deep tech, climate tech, energy transition world. You know, I I mean, in in many ways, EIR Live is about sort of community for EIRs. And so you you've had a a couple different awesome encounters as an EIR, you know, kind of the the Google X with Malta experience, and then now over at Engine. Can you talk about kinda how those two are different from each other and and maybe kind of compare and contrast them a little bit?
Ilya Tabakh:And then we can kind of dive into a little bit into the nuts and bolts of your EIR experience for our community here.
Ramya Swaminathan:Absolutely. So I wanted to just be clear about one thing. So when Google approached me to spin, so they had been incubating the idea for what was then Project Malta at X at the Moonshot Factory. And they approached me about leading the spin out, putting the business plan and the syndicate of investors together. I was not formally an EIR, but I did leave my position at Rye Development and then take six months essentially to do that, you know.
Ramya Swaminathan:And it was one of the hardest things for me because until that point, my core kind of experience with building a company, leading a company, was having been part of it from day one. And one of the kind of critical changes for me working with a fantastic team at Google X is that actually Malta had had a big long life before me and I knew very little about it, even as I attempted to kind of synthesize what everybody knew, the lessons learned, put the forward plan together, put the kind of destination, the journey, the plan, the roadmap, all of that together. I had to kind of acknowledge constantly that of the people around the table, I knew the least. And that was very humbling, very humbling. Whereas, in a company that I had been part of the core founding team and then built up through every pivot, I kind of knew everything about the company.
Ramya Swaminathan:And so that was, for me, a very different experience. I think it was a terrific learning experience because dealing with uncertainty, leading with uncertainty, leading with incomplete knowledge is something we all do every day. We have to do it. We have to do it well. And in this case, was so extreme, you know, like the extremeness of the fact that I was the Johnny come lately, who was then going to be the CEO of the company, who knew little, who understood the technology the least, who, you know, understood the history of everything of the patents they had developed, of the, you know, the the things that the red flags that they had seen, etc.
Ramya Swaminathan:So how could? So the first question for me during that period of time where I was really kind of translating the the the core of the knowledge that had been accumulated about Malta, translating that into an actionable business plan with commercial and technical milestones along a very specific roadmap that investors could then invest into, for me, really became a process of, as quickly as possible, understanding the key kind of pivots, the key downsides, the key red flags, the key challenges, the key opportunities. And I certainly knew on the market side, I had my own views of that. On the technology side, I really found myself like you know, having to ask extremely basic questions. And that's one of the places where actually I think it's super helpful to come from a background that is very different from everybody else, because you actually don't feel embarrassed about asking the stupid questions because there's no reason that I, as an anthropology and public policy person, would know that thermal exchange, you know, heat exchange would be the absolute center of the Malta system.
Ramya Swaminathan:Is no reason that I would understand, you know, that the density of the heat exchangers and how quickly that they could move towards a path of becoming smaller and therefore lighter would govern the entire economics of the system. And I could ask those questions like what are the key levers, you know, etcetera, without feeling the pressure to know it going in.
Terrance Orr:Oh, that's a beautiful thing. And and and I want to just, you know, very quickly, this is a key thing that I see a ton in EIRs who go join venture studios, for example, you know, a venture studio light model where a concept has been validated through customer discovery through a team essentially to say, hey, there's something here. It has legs. Now it's in a good space for us to go off and recruit Aramia to go off and lead the thing into the next phase of development. Almost always they show up exactly how you just described your story, which is I'm used to being a part of this thing from day one.
Terrance Orr:How do I get the confidence that all the right things were done here? You've tested all the scenarios, you've tested the hypotheses and you just sort of have to take the the word almost of the people in the room by asking the right questions and get comfortable with that before you build that conviction and go out and build it to the next, you know, leg of the journey. And I just want people to hear you say that like in real time because I I get a lot of EIRs who reach out to me with they struggle with this of I was recruited to this venture studio. They want me to lead this thing as CEO, but I was not a part of any of the discovery. I just have to believe that
Ramya Swaminathan:Right.
Terrance Orr:It was done the right way.
Ramya Swaminathan:It's terrifying. Terrifying. Terrifying. You know, and you you have to go out and represent that, you know, you know, and building that conviction is really hard. It's really hard, and there are some parts of it that you have.
Ramya Swaminathan:You end up taking on faith, right? Because you end up almost kind of diligencing the people because I could not possibly diligence every engineering decision. It's not only would I not have had the time, I don't have the capability, right? But I could ask the question, the output, the outcomes, and then believe the fantastic quality of the people who were saying it and have conviction through that means.
Ilya Tabakh:Just a quick point to make on especially infrastructure like heavy, what I call heavy metal startups, most of them are started by technologists, and the level of documentation, and sort of the ability to company for that company to execute without the people that's necessary for institutional capital to come in is a whole different level. So the other kind of value in a fresh set of eyes, even with the same experiences, you actually have to document all this stuff. It's normally locked into the five year or three year or ten year arc of the folks that have been building it. They know the answers, but they've never actually had to write it down to where it's reproducible. And that just doesn't fly when you take institutional capital, do project financing, any of these things that you need in order to be successful.
Ramya Swaminathan:So at
Ilya Tabakh:least from a deep tech, it's super important.
Ramya Swaminathan:And also, think, to be completely honest, I don't think I've ever struck the exact right balance between progress and process at any company I've led. Right. But I do to underline your point, Ilya, I think like at those, you know, kind of like deeply technical folks who are in this innovative sprint to get a product kind of defined to get to commercialization. They're leaning entirely, I think, towards progress, typically, right? Like they know all the answers.
Ramya Swaminathan:It's all in their minds. It's encoded, etcetera. You can ask them questions, but there's no documentation. There's no process around it. Right?
Ramya Swaminathan:And there's a formalism to the product development process that can be irritating. However, it is essential because it does uncover gaps between the kind of customer requirements and the market requirements and the product requirements. What are the gaps? There should be gaps, Because otherwise you're engineering a product, I think, with specifications that are too easily defined, that are too defined and too relaxed a manner. If you can actually reach every single pinpoint, it seems unlikely that that's a product that would not have been designed in the past, right?
Ramya Swaminathan:So there are probably gaps. But having some formalism around that, I think, is an essential part of what you're talking about, like attracting institutional capital. And certainly capital will require it, but that's not the only reason to do it. You should do it because it's the right thing to do in order to move forward with building that product, Right? And in my experience in those early stages, even continuing years after the early stages, I've kind of careened between progress and process, right?
Ramya Swaminathan:Like you kind of impose a lot of process. It's a little aggravating. The system slows down. You realize you need all this documentation and formalism. And then you're like, Oh, but now I need to really, like, do a sprint on the design side, etcetera.
Ramya Swaminathan:And then someone comes in and says, I don't like your cybersecurity protocols at all. You need to have totally, you know, some institutional investor or commercial partner or large OEM or, you know, whatever, like, no, this is not how we document anything like, you know, redo it all this way. And then you kind of move towards a little bit of imposing process and then, you know, etcetera. So that's what I mean by the company is immature. You don't have those scaffolding you might, Terrance, have talked about.
Ramya Swaminathan:Like, not only do you not have legal and HR, you also don't have like an inbuilt DNA ready process for doing things, right? So people would, anytime somebody would say like, What's our process for blank? My response would be like, yes. Come up with one, please.
Ilya Tabakh:And all of a sudden, turn into the Socrates of startups. Right?
Ramya Swaminathan:Exactly. Right. Right.
Terrance Orr:This is such a good story, but alright. I'm I'm gonna move us because I wanna dive. Do you have so many questions about this here? But I wanna I wanna keep keep us going because there's a fascinating time during this time. So one, you you you already joined a group.
Terrance Orr:You gained conviction. Right? There's something here. You have to spin the company out. Key point people.
Terrance Orr:It's very hard to spin a company out of a of a larger platform. Ramio was able to do that with a team and go off, make it an independent company and raise capital for something that is very, very capital intensive to start and most investors would run for the hills. Somehow you and your team were able to go out and raise a series c plus, right, for for Malta. Walk us through that process of raising money for Malta as an independent company from the likes of Breakthrough Energy Ventures and a bunch of other storied investors. What was that process Yeah,
Ramya Swaminathan:so I mean, you know, capital is the lifeblood of hard tech. I mean, it's the lifeblood of most everything, right? But in particular, when you think about developing hard tech, tough tech, as the engine calls it, you know, it kind of has the opposite characteristics of everything we think of as being a good investment, right? Like, takes a long, long time to prove out successes and failures. It takes a large amount of capital.
Ramya Swaminathan:Pivots are actually quite hard because you are locked into certain design features, you know, and the hard tech nature of it makes it hard to change them. You can't just slap a patch on afterwards. That's not how hard tech development works. And so when you think about the characteristics that make good investments, hard tech kind of has all the opposite characteristics, right? And so everybody in hard tech is kind of struggling with that as a landscape.
Ramya Swaminathan:The great thing is, there definitely has been a renewed interest on the investor side for investing in hard tech because there is a new consensus and understanding that this really like we're not going to make the energy transition happen, not only from a decarbonization standpoint, but from a reliability, resiliency. You know, all kinds of other innovations are providing energy security, energy independence, all these virtues and values that, you know, I think there's broad bipartisan, nonpartisan, you know, everybody kind of consensus around is going to take innovation to to make all those things happen. So I think that's the good news. So I think fundraising in that environment, I will say, was much easier than fundraising in the 2008, 2009 environment, where I don't think there was a consensus that these kinds of businesses were really hard to raise money around. And that's why I spoke a little bit to the loneliness and the lack of community, right?
Ramya Swaminathan:It's not that other people weren't doing it. It's that people were doing it in silos. There wasn't a kind of community. There wasn't the kind of, you know, industry attraction to institutional investment. So I just wanted to say that, fundamentally, it was an easier environment to do that.
Ramya Swaminathan:And even within that, there, of course, there are ups and downs. There's great years and less great years. I think we're coming out of a little bit of a quieter time. It's been a little harder to raise capital over the last year and a half. You know, as diligence process have gotten longer, exits have gotten fewer, etcetera, I think I see some signs of some unfreeze, which is hopefully good news.
Ramya Swaminathan:But the ability to raise capital is kind of the core, maybe the core competence of a CEO in clean tech because it's necessary, it's hard, and it's not outsourceable. Like, you know, the only way that institutional investors are going to invest in a business is if the core leadership team starting at the top has conviction and a plan. You know, conviction alone doesn't cut it. You know, a plan without conviction is unlikely to be successful and certainly doesn't cut it, right? But you need both those things.
Ramya Swaminathan:And Terrance, you've talked a lot about storytelling. I mean, I think the fundamental part about raising capital is about being able to tell a story that an institutional investor can understand about pain, why it needs to be solved, and how you're solving it. Right? Like, those are the three elements, you know.
Terrance Orr:Why now? Why? Why? Why now for them to pour their money into because they can grow more in the future, you know?
Ramya Swaminathan:Exactly. Right. And that that comes because of pain, right? Like there is a pain that needs to be solved. This is a need to have.
Ramya Swaminathan:It's not a nice thing. It's a necessary thing, right? And it has a big application and a big market. And yes, in hard tech, we're kind of all in the business of big if true. I mean, there's a lot of risk ahead of you, right?
Ramya Swaminathan:Any time you're kind of developing a hard tech company and a technology that has not reached commercialization, a lot of the risk pathways are not technological, they're also commercial, right? Like, does the market exist? Are people going to pay for that? How are you going to deal with the risk profile of the technology from a commercial instrument standpoint? For example, liquidated paying liquidated damages, insurance, indemnifications, codes and standards.
Ramya Swaminathan:Has the codes and standards organizations caught up with this new thing? Is there a code for this? Right? Has how do you get to customer adoption is not always a straight path, and it's not always about do you have a good technology? There are many more good technologies than get commercialized.
Terrance Orr:Did you guys hear that one more time for the audience? Oh my goodness.
Ramya Swaminathan:There are many more good technologies than get commercialized, and it's for all kinds of reasons, all kinds of reasons. And some of them are heartbreaking, but they are nevertheless true and they are constraints. Right? So, you know, having the kind of ability to look at that in a holistic way, which is to say you've got a technological road map, you've got a kind of market roadmap, and you understand what are the levers and things that need to change in the markets, the codes, the kind of ancillary commercial space, which is not just about getting capital fund either the technology development or the project development. But as I mentioned, like, how are you going to pay for liquidated damages?
Ramya Swaminathan:What's your balance sheet? Are you credit worthy? How are you thinking about those things? All of those go into the fundamental equation, and they're very complex. You have to understand how to, one, know, realize that they're there, but two, to tell a story about that in a way that somebody can understand.
Ilya Tabakh:What I love about, you know, generally folks that have been entrepreneurs and then become entrepreneurs in residences, many of these stories that you're telling and kind of perspectives that you're sharing come from, you know, real encounters with reality. Right? And also, there there's sort of a framework on when you see it again and you sort of look out into the world, you have some heuristic on how to prioritize and navigate. And that, I think, is actually sort of the intangible, and the real value of having an operator or somebody in residence that has that background. So I love as I'm, like, listening to you talk through these issues, I can only imagine, like, the the tangible things.
Ilya Tabakh:Maybe, if we could take a little bit of a moment to just share kind of some some more stories and challenges along the way because I think those are some of the things that, you know, typically get remembered the most vividly. Right? And ultimately kind of alter this perspective. So if we can spend a little bit of a moment there, I just you know, I'm sure there's a lot of really good ones, but if you could share, one with us that we can dig into a little bit, I think it'd be great for the audience.
Ramya Swaminathan:Yeah, absolutely. I was smiling as you were speaking, Ilya, because when I was in banking, I worked with a compliance officer who used to say that what she really looked for in bankers was good judgment. But the thing is that good judgment came from having had bad judgment in the past. And so I think all of us can relate to that, which is to say that we all come by our knowledge and our experiences honestly, right? We've all made mistakes.
Ramya Swaminathan:We've all learned from them. We've all vowed never to make those mistakes again. And if we're super successful, we'll make other mistakes, but not those ones, you know, etcetera. And so I was just smiling when you said that, right? It's important to have a heuristic, and the world is path dependent.
Ramya Swaminathan:So we all have these heuristics in our mind that arise out of the experience, the specific experiences that we have had, you know, and so, etcetera. So let me maybe give you a major pivot in the Malta story that actually ended up, you know, being part of the success of the company, but didn't feel that way at the time. You know, felt very difficult at the time. So when I first met the Google folks, they had really thought about the design process for So Malta is grid scale, maybe just taking a minute to explain what the company is and what the technology is. It's grid scale energy storage.
Ramya Swaminathan:And when I first met the folks at Google, one of the things they told me is think about Malta just like pumped hydro storage, but without the hydro. And it's a great frame to look at it because instead of pumping water from a high elevation from a low elevation reservoir to a high elevation reservoir, you're pumping heat from a low temperature reservoir to a high temperature reservoir. And when we had originally put the business plan together, we had thought the fantastic technical team at Google had put together a plan. I really liked it. And I want to say, like all our investors really liked it, that we were going to start with a smaller product, 10 megawatts, which in the scale of the electricity grid, it's certainly large, but it's not super large, right?
Ramya Swaminathan:So large power plants are really in the hundreds of megawatts. And so we started with this idea that we were going to design a 10 megawatt plant, which would, you know, be an appropriate storage facility for a large C and I type customer, maybe a micro grid, that kind of thing, but would not by itself, you know, be able to firm the output of a, you know, grid scale solar plant or wind plant or replace a coal plant or anything like that. And then the idea was so 10 megawatts, and then the idea was that we would step up into the 100 megawatt area, which the thing about Malta, it's like many scale technologies, turbomachinery really likes to be big and it gets more efficient, it gets more power dense, and so the cost curves on a per unit basis really go down and start to sing the bigger you are, not the smaller you are. And it's not a modular technology. It's not a modular technology.
Ramya Swaminathan:So you don't build 100 megawatts by building 10 megawatt ones. You know, like the economics are just way, way better to go directly to 100. So we had put this whole roadmap together. We were going do 10 megawatts, you know, prove it out, smaller bite size, and then move to 100 megawatts. We then started talking to, you know, older, wiser folks, not necessarily older, but certainly wiser folks.
Ramya Swaminathan:We had gotten quite a far away, including with technical partners, including with design parameters down the path of designing a 10 megawatt plant. And one of the things that kept coming up in our commercial advisory discussions was these are different products. It's not a step function like that. You're thinking that you're going to do a 10 megawatt and then build up to 100 megawatt, but these are fundamentally different products. Actually, the 10 megawatt, like there's much more of a pull from the grid scale side for energy storage, where you've got all kinds of issues with intermittency, you know, from large solar, you need peak shaving, but it's all on the grid scale side.
Ramya Swaminathan:And so, you know, you're not really, from a market adoption standpoint, it's going to be much harder to find individual And this was back in 2018, right? Market dynamics have changed since then, 2018, '20 It's going to be much harder to find individual C and I customers that are willing to buy a standalone storage technology, you know, on-site with a molten salt kind of storage unit with all that that entails and really get it to affirm their incoming power. That's really not something that is a step function in the way that you are conceptualizing. You meaning me, right? Like, this was the advice I was getting.
Ramya Swaminathan:And like, I mean, to be completely honest, as I said before, I think every major pivot I have seen and made in a company have probably waited too long, right? It was clear to me that there was really a kernel of truth here, right? And that and in fact, if we were to switch to 100 megawatts, even at the incipient stage of design, we could see that we'd probably have to start with a clean sheet, right? Like, it wasn't just a matter of adapting the size or taking some different turbomachinery. It really was altogether a different system.
Ramya Swaminathan:You would have to start with clean sheet design, clean sheet compressor, clean sheet, etcetera. And making that pivot, building the consensus around it, starting with the investors and the other stakeholders, the technical partners, the commercial partners, the team you know, who had poured their hearts into designing a smaller system to some stage of maturity. That really kind of ended up taking me the better part of several months, you know, and kind of pivoting that within the same company, within the same stakeholders, within the same team. So this was not about going into a different business or anything, but it was really about kind of pivoting the strategy and understanding the market pool and what we would need to do from a technical perspective. I I think I still have some gray hairs from those months.
Ilya Tabakh:That's amazing. Well, and it's actually funny because as smart as technical folks are, many of them haven't actually you know, in building heavy metal stuff, the balance of plant is normally more than 50% of the cost of the thing, and people are used to being experts in the widget, not in the thing that they plant the widget into. And grid level storage is the ultimate widget planting exercise. And so I I I can't even count the amount of times that people tell me that, hey. We can make this thing really cheaply, then we gotta transport it a thousand miles.
Ilya Tabakh:I'm like, it's not gonna work because it's really cheap. Transportation's really expensive. Or, We're going to build one of these and then we're going to use 1,000 of them to generate at scale. And I'm like, Highly unlikely that that's going to be It's funny because very smart people are not able to sort of think through all the moving pieces.
Ramya Swaminathan:Absolutely. And remember that for a lot of these technologies, and it was certainly true of Manta, like in 2018, there was no market for energy storage. The So market is developing at the same time like you're building the airplane while you fly it right. And all of a sudden the conditions are different and you're looking around saying, Oh, well, the market pulls really coming from a different place than I had imagined. You know that I thought I saw, you know, nine months ago.
Ramya Swaminathan:And that was maybe it was predictable, but we didn't predict it. Know, you know, it's hard for me to say exactly if it was predictable, right? But we had not quite appreciated that in exactly the same way. So, you know, it's not like you can just go to a customer in a lot of these cases and say, like, what is it that you want? And they will just give you a spec sheet and you can build that thing.
Ramya Swaminathan:Right? That is not how this works, right? You're hypothesizing. It's sort of like, you know, a space mission, right? You're hypothesizing the kind of orbit of where the market is going, and you're shooting to the point that you think it will be at the time you are ready to intersect it.
Ilya Tabakh:Right. In a nondeterministic universe where the laws of gravity don't apply.
Ramya Swaminathan:Path dependent. Totally path dependent universe.
Ilya Tabakh:Amazing. Well, I mean, you know, this whole background and your journey to this point gives you a really interesting kind of perspective. Looking forward, like, what are some of the trends and kind of infrastructure and energy that you see developing that you're excited to explore as EIR? Just kind of where are things going that have you kind of excited and engaged in your current work?
Ramya Swaminathan:So as you probably have heard from my story, my real expertise is in the electricity side. I've been in the electricity business now for thirty years, and I stopped counting at thirty. So I will always have been in the business for thirty years. And I think we're in a transformative moment on the electricity side. For the first time in decades, we have an environment of load growth, and that is placing like a twin crisis of reliability and affordability, right?
Ramya Swaminathan:I think if you see it's not uniform, it's certainly not true everywhere, but if you look around the country, there are places that are going to see their power prices spike, sometimes in the double digits. And that is going to be an issue in environment where people are hurting already, right? So affordability is key. And going back to my original point about wanting to build all this infrastructure because you're talking about a quality of life for people in their daily lives, we cannot build things without that affordability criteria front and center in our minds. And then the other thing is that, you know, for the first time, there are predictions that we're going to be short capacity in the electricity system, you know, sometime in the next five years.
Ramya Swaminathan:I think this dynamic is really bringing to fore, an enormous opportunity set, right? Because all of a sudden now, the only way we're going to solve these problems is by innovation. Right? The traditional way we would have solved a capacity issue would have been just to build new large power plants, you know, build a lot more gas, etcetera. And for reasons unrelated to load growth, you know, there are supply chain issues, transformers, gas turbines.
Ramya Swaminathan:The interconnection queues are very difficult, if not impossible, to kind of get large generators connected. So we're not going to be able to use our traditional tools to solve what we see as the future problem. And so I think that opens up, one, a huge amount of urgency. And in those moments of urgency, people are willing to try things, right, because they got to solve this problem. We've got to do it.
Ramya Swaminathan:And it also opens the door to innovation because we know that the solution is not something we did before. It's going to be something different. And it's not going to be one thing. It's going to be a lot of things because the electricity system is so big, so complex, etcetera. There's hardware, there's software, there's control, there's smart grid, there's transmission, there's, you know, etcetera.
Ramya Swaminathan:So I am super excited about and what I'm doing right now is exploring that universe, you know, of alternatives, pathways forward at grid edge. And the and the good news there is that, like there are so many things, so many tools in the toolkit, some of which exist, some of which exist partially, some of which, you know, almost exist but need, you know, something to kind of get them to the finish line. And so I think there's an enormous amount of opportunity for innovation and that's really what I'm thinking about right now.
Ilya Tabakh:Yeah. Just to that we have too much time to double down, but I'm gonna do it anyway. You know, the future grid has always been about you know, the twenty first century was supposed to be driven by a robust multi you know, bidirectional grid. And I think your point about innovation is actually I just wanna make sure that that our audience recognizes that there's probably people and system innovation there as well. You know, there's a Duke study that was pretty interesting about if data centers were to curtail about 2% off their peak load, there's probably about a 100 gigawatts of extra, you know, capacity, from the established already built out grid.
Ilya Tabakh:Right? But that requires better coordination, and also sort of a cooperative relationship as opposed to a supplier and an off taker. And those are innovations that are kind of at the cooperation software coordination layer, right? Kind of people plus a little bit of technology maybe. And so just to draw that out.
Ilya Tabakh:But for me, what's exciting is if we're actually going to continue to have this demand and be able to sustain it for you know, ten or fifteen, maybe twenty years, we have sort of the ability to really reimagine the grid that we've been talking about for thirty or forty years. And that to me, like, I think is pretty exciting. To your point about having to do something, in many cases, deferred maintenance is not sort of the environment in which you make bold action. And so just to kind of double down on where things may be going here in near to medium term.
Ramya Swaminathan:Yeah. There's a huge opportunity here. And as you rightly say, Ilya, not all of it is from inventing new hardware. There's all kinds of there's market mechanisms, there's cooperation, there's software, there's collaboration, there's, you know, different relationships between market actors, all of it. And we're going to need all those tools.
Terrance Orr:Incredible. I can tell you for another hour about this topic. You have to go. I know you have to go, but we're gonna we're gonna get you to the end right now. I promise.
Terrance Orr:What's one thing on your LinkedIn profile, Ramya, that people like they can't read about you, but you enjoy doing?
Ramya Swaminathan:What a great question. So it isn't on my LinkedIn profile, but something I've been doing for more than a decade is that I teach at our Sunday school at our temple. I teach little kids. I've taught as young as pre K, and at the moment, I'm teaching fifth grade, and I've had a teaching partner for eleven years now. And we look forward to it every week.
Ramya Swaminathan:You know, it's sort of the highlight of our week where we get to sit outside ourselves and immerse ourselves in the lives and the eyes of these kids who come, you know, completely differently positioned than we do every single week, week after week, right? And we see ourselves through their eyes, we see our culture through their eyes, we see, our practices, what we teach them. And it's an enormous kind of pleasure to have that mirror, that innocent mirror held up every week. It's really a highlight of my week.
Terrance Orr:Oh, that's super cool. I I really like that. And there's one other thing because I'm when I when we start the interview people, I'm a little bit of a stalker, right, learning a little bit about about your background. Okay? Don't use that that term in the public.
Terrance Orr:But, know, one thing that I saw on your profile that I was like, wow, she's multilingual. And the one language that that stuck out to me was Spanish. Tell me about your your professional proficiency in Spanish and where did that come from? What what made you go off and learn Spanish?
Ramya Swaminathan:Well, I, I lived in The Philippines for years, And I learned so in The Philippines, they don't speak Spanish, but of course, it was colonized by Spain for four hundred years. And, you know, Spanish is a deep cultural inheritance. And I learned Spanish to a very high degree of proficiency in The Philippines as a child, actually, I mean, a young person. And since then, I've been lucky enough to do work in Spain. Know, Malta was bicontinental and actually had a huge presence in Spain.
Ramya Swaminathan:And so keeping up business proficiency in Spanish was one of the pleasures of my life.
Terrance Orr:-I'm impressed. I'm incredibly impressed. I saw that on your profile and it stuck out to me because I have friends who grew up in The Philippines and some of them can speak Spanish, but other than mostly speak the Yeah. The local language. Language.
Terrance Orr:Yeah. Tagalog.
Ramya Swaminathan:Tagalog. Yeah.
Terrance Orr:Exactly. Yes. Yeah. Correct. Alright.
Terrance Orr:I won't put you in any more questions about stalking your profile. I promise.
Ilya Tabakh:No. I'll I'll As is our tradition, we've gone a bit over, but we've dove into, at least for me, some of my more interesting and exciting areas to talk about in life, is sort of the bedrock of the systems that billions of people rely on every day. And so I guess just to close this out, how can people connect with you and follow your journey, Ramya?
Ramya Swaminathan:Yeah. So definitely LinkedIn. I'm available on LinkedIn. I welcome connections and particularly for, again, not to use chronology, but people earlier in their journey, if there's a way that I can be helpful, you're not alone, right? Like, the only thing I would say about that is, you know, there were certainly times earlier on that I felt alone in the problems that I faced and this and the other.
Ramya Swaminathan:There is no reason to suffer in silence. You know, reach out. And not only me, but there's a whole community of entrepreneurs who would be very glad to help.
Ilya Tabakh:Amazing. And on that, you know, I just want to thank you for your time and for joining us for an amazing conversation.
Ramya Swaminathan:Absolutely. It was just my pleasure.
Terrance Orr:Man, I got to tell you, if if you're looking for, perspective, if you're looking for inspiration, if you're looking for elevation in what you're doing right now, especially if you're in hard tech and critical infrastructure and deep tech in that world, this is absolutely gonna be the episode, to listen to Ramya. She's a business maggot, a business athlete, and someone who is not afraid to pivot. What do you think, Ilya?
Ilya Tabakh:No. Amazing. I mean, having, Ramya spend, you know, quite a bit of time with us. And, you know, this episode runs our traditional length, but we were able to cover so many different perspectives. And she just brings such a rich tapestry of, you know, personal experience and then kind of like a a bit of a nontraditional background.
Ilya Tabakh:But there's just so many gems in this episode. And I'm a little biased because it's also one of my favorite topics. And so having somebody that's spent, you know, thirty years at pretty much every frontier of kind of heavy infrastructure, you know, from like investment banking to power development to spinning out of a technology company. There's just so many different views that it was really awesome to be able to slice and dice through this really dynamic world. So I enjoyed it.
Ilya Tabakh:I'm glad that we were able to take the time and she was able to share. It's still a part. We didn't get the whole thing, but we got some really amazing parts of Ramya's story. And it will be exciting to see what she does as the EIR at the engine going forward. So I'm excited to have everybody take a look at this episode and really dive in.
Ilya Tabakh:Absolutely.
Terrance Orr:Thanks for joining us on EIR Live. We hope today's episode offered you valuable insights into the entrepreneurial journey. Remember to subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes and check out the description for more details. Do you have questions or suggestions? Please reach out to us.
Terrance Orr:Connect with us on social media. We really value your input. Catch us next time for more inspiring stories and strategies. Keep pushing boundaries and making your mark on the world. I'm Terrance Orr with my cohost, Ilya Tabakh signing off.
Terrance Orr:Let's keep building.
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