From Patent to Pilot: Inside Hydrostor’s 12-Year Journey to Market Readiness
Most startup timelines are measured in months. But what happens when your minimum viable product requires digging massive caverns underground? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Curtis VanWallenghem shared how Hydrostor navigated a 12-year journey from patent to market-ready technology.
The Origin: A Problem Worth Solving
The story begins with a nuclear plant struggling with wind power. Curtis recalls, “We had to start turning it up and down depending on how windy it was, because there was now enough wind on the grid and it kind of had priority to dispatch over us.” The maintenance team came with bad news: “Our budgets are going up, the reactor is not meant to operate this way.”
The First Strategic Milestone: Finding the Right Patent
While searching for solutions, Curtis’s analyst discovered a breakthrough: a patent for a new type of compressed air energy storage. As Curtis remembers, “My analyst kind of connected me with them, set up a lunch.” The patent holder, Cam Lewis, “had met the guys named Cam Lewis and he kind of said, I got a patent and I got an idea for Attack. And I came up with a company name, but that’s about all I got.”
The Lean Years: Building Without Salary
With his wife’s blessing, Curtis took a leap of faith in 2010, investing their savings into Hydrostor. “I went, I think it was three or four years without a salary,” he reveals. During this period, they focused on “engineering and these little pilot systems and try to get some grant money.”
Building Credibility Block by Block
Rather than rushing to market, Hydrostor methodically built credibility through a series of strategic milestones:
- Patenting and proving the solution
- Building pilot plants to demonstrate viability
- Securing warranties and guarantees
- Convincing construction companies to build caverns
- Getting equipment suppliers to provide and stand behind their technology
The Near-Death Experiences
The journey wasn’t smooth. When Curtis’s son was born with complications, “the company was out of money. And I remember being in there, my wife had an operation, my son was in that natal ICU and I’m sitting there trying to close an investment.”
Then came COVID: “We only had six or seven weeks of cash left. And then COVID hit and every investor just said, I’m not getting involved or I’m not making commitments until we know where it’s happening in the world.”
The Pivot Point: First Major Contract
The breakthrough came with their first major contract – but even that brought challenges. Curtis recalls, “We win our first contract. But it’s in Australia, we don’t have any people in Australia and they shut the border. And then I had to frantically get a JV partner so that we could move the project forward.”
Building for Scale
Today, the methodical approach has paid off. They’ve secured “about two and a half billion dollars worth of contract signs for two facilities with more contracts to come.” Looking ahead, Curtis shares their three-year vision: “Get our first big plant running and have a couple more under construction and another ten contracted.”
Lessons for Deep Tech Founders
Hydrostor’s journey offers crucial insights for founders building complex technology:
- Focus on strategic milestones that build credibility
- Secure each component of your solution independently
- Be prepared for a marathon, not a sprint
- Keep enough runway for unexpected challenges
When asked if he’d do it all again, Curtis is candid: “If you knew what you know now, would you have done it again? The honest answer is, I would have had a really tough time making the same decision to plunge in because it’s been really hard on your health, your family, just a really long, hard road.”
But for founders taking on similar challenges, Curtis’s experience shows that with persistence and strategic milestone planning, even the most ambitious technical challenges can be overcome. The key is understanding that building credibility is as important as building technology.