The following interview is a conversation we had with Doron Myersdorf, CEO & Co-Founder of StoreDot, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $200 Million Raised to Power the Future of Electric Vehicles
Doron Myersdorf
Thanks for having me.
Brett
My pleasure, no problem at all. So before begin talking about everything you’re building there at StoreDot, could we just start a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Doron Myersdorf
Sure. So I have a PhD industrial engineering from the Technion in Israel, and I’ve been in several startups doing software, but also I was an executive at SanDisk pioneering the flash memory with solid state drives that we all have in our laptops. And about ten years ago I started the StoreDot that is focused on fast charging batteries.
Brett
And looking through your LinkedIn, I see you were the Co-Founder and VP of business development of a company back in 1999 in Palo Alto, is that correct?
Doron Myersdorf
Yes, I was living in Foster City for ten years and a few startups at the time, one of them was Cyptology that is somehow still operating, and another one was Inner Presence, also in the security cyberspace.
Brett
So what was that like being in Silicon Valley back in the earlier or mid ninety s, I guess? What was that like?
Doron Myersdorf
Well, I’ve seen the bubble kind of really expanding and then contracting and it was really fascinating. You could tell the vibe of the economy to the traffic on the 101. If there’s a lot of traffic and people are standing in traffic, you know that the economy is good. If it takes you only like half an hour to get from, let’s say, SFO to Palo Alto, then you know that something bad is going on.
Brett
I live in SF, so I’m going to go make that drive and we can use that as an indicator to see how things are today.
Doron Myersdorf
Yeah, do.
Brett
That nice. Now a few questions that we’d like to ask just to better understand who you are and what makes you tick as a leader. First one is what CEO do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Doron Myersdorf
So I do like Elon Musk a lot, even though there has been some controversial things that he has been doing with Twitter and the likes. But I think the vision of energy and mobility and space and humanity as a whole is really fascinating. And there’s a lot to learn from the way that this guy thinks?
Brett
Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s a little bit sad to see all the negative press about him and all the negative attention because obviously he does some stuff that’s controversial. But if you just separate that and look at him from an innovation perspective and an impact perspective, you can’t argue that he’s had such a massive impact on this world already and he’s still overall, very early on in his career.
Doron Myersdorf
I think I totally agree. I totally agree. When you’re trying to do extraordinary things, you need to do them in an extraordinary way. He’s an example of how these things are done. And yeah, I totally agree with you. We have to separate some of the noise from the real value that we’re getting from this vision and innovation.
Brett
Yeah, one thing that still surprises me with Musk is all of the people who seem to doubt him and anything new that he starts there’s, people who doubt him. And that’s one takeaway I’ve had from reading some of the books about him and just following him is don’t bet against Elon Musk. It’s probably not going to work out very well to bet against this guy.
Doron Myersdorf
Yeah, I agree with you.
Brett
What about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a big impact on you? And this can be one of the classic business books, but the ones that I find most interesting to hear about are the personal books that really changed how you think about the world or how you operate and things like that.
Doron Myersdorf
So there is this book, it’s called The Goal by a guy named Ellie Goldrad. This book, I actually read it the first time in my early school days at the university when I studied industrial engineering. And it’s a story. It’s a story, but it’s all about the business and how you operate a factory and how people think about the way that they plan things and what is the critical elements in the chain of planning. And then I think later on, when I was also a professor for a little while, I gave my students to read bits and pieces there. And I actually asked them in the exam about the way that people operate the factory, because it is a story, but it is also about human nature and how you can leverage this in the day to day operations of the facility or any business.
Brett
Fascinating. I’ve not heard of that book, but I’ll add to my Amazon cart after this call.
Doron Myersdorf
Great.
Brett
Now, I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ll say it on the podcast. I do have a big SUV, operates on gasoline. I want to change that. And sometime last year I was traveling and I rented a Tesla to give it a shot and see what it was like. And that was my first time ever driving an electric vehicle. And when I did that, I had to go to a Charger station and I had to sit there for like 45 minutes. And for me it just blew my mind how long that took. And for me that was painful sitting there for 45 minutes. Now, I understand at StoreDot this is a problem that you’re tackling to make charging faster, but tell us about the product and what you guys are doing.
Doron Myersdorf
Okay, but first I have a confession, because I also drive SUV, a Subaru, when the time that I took that lease, it was two years ago, we didn’t have almost any cars in Israel that I could actually drive as an electric, especially not a four x four. And I am looking for one to replace that one now that the lease is coming to an end. So very soon, hopefully I will also drive a green and clean vehicle. But yeah, I totally agree with you. The number one barrier for adoption of electric vehicles today is what is called charging anxiety. It used to be range anxiety. People were worried that they won’t get to their destination. But now it became more exactly what you said. You don’t want to sit for 45 minutes. 45 minutes actually not so bad. Sometimes people stay in line for a couple of hours until there is an available charging station.
Doron Myersdorf
This is a real problem. So, yes, sodot is trying to solve this problem by the chemistry of the battery. Because the problem is that even if you had a very powerful charging station, like a supercharger of Tesla, a traditional battery that is based on graphite cannot really charge very fast in minutes because it’s a safety concern. The graphite, which is the element in the battery that accepts the lithium ions to be stored, has high resistance and it requires a very slow insertion of these ions in order to preserve the energy. And what we are doing is we are replacing this element, this graphite, which is carbon, basically we are replacing it with silicone, which is a cousin, but a much faster and much higher energy element.
Brett
And I know the company was founded in 2012, so can you take us back to those early days, what was happening there at the start and what’s really the origin story behind the company?
Doron Myersdorf
So, yeah, I was actually sitting at SanDisk and looking for new materials that can actually improve the flesh memory when we looked at some research that was done at Tel Aviv University about new peptides. These are like amino acids, biological materials that can actually improve semiconductor as a hole. And there was a paper about this in Nature that really fascinated me. So we started doing some work with the university and then I said, no, maybe we can actually use these materials in other applications such as displays, batteries and semiconductor production, like low K materials for production of chips. So we started the company and we got the first investment from Samsung. Actually, it wasn’t about batteries, it was just about these new materials and how we can introduce them to various devices.
Brett
Got it. And then when did the idea come for batteries? At what stage in the journey?
Doron Myersdorf
So we did in parallel back in 2012, we did like five programs. One was displays, one was memory, one was low K materials and one of them was fast charging of batteries. And I saw that I can charge a smartphone in 30 seconds. And this is the time when we’ve actually put online on YouTube at the time, and I had 50 friends on Nicholas at the time and it was Google Plus. And I thought maybe I’ll get 50 hits on this YouTube video clip that shows how I charged the phone in 30 seconds. It was like three and a half million in 24 hours. And this was at the time that not everybody were on YouTube. Right? So this was really fascinating to see. And by the way, you can still look it if you look up on Google or on YouTube, 32nd phone charging with stoddled or without stallot, it will show up.
Doron Myersdorf
And this is just a fascinating vision of the ability to charge fast a phone. And this was also how we can charge faster scooter or a drone or a car. So back in 2014 is when we said, okay, let’s forget everything else and let’s just do fast charging of a battery. And later on it became just the vehicle itself.
Brett
And then who are your customers? Is it the vehicle makers themselves?
Doron Myersdorf
So these are the end customers? So, yes, people like Tesla, but obviously we are not Tesla and I cannot name all of them. But we have some car makers that are investors in stored out such as Mercedes Daimler, we have Ola india, we have VinFast from Vietnam, we have Volvo from Sweden, also Polestar, we have BP from Britain. So there are many ecosystem players. Most of them, like you said, are car makers that are just looking to solve this problem of extreme fast charging. Because the chemistry of the battery today, which is basically the same one from like 20 years ago and this was also the Nobel price in chemistry. The Nobel price only came in 2019 for Good Enough et al, professor Good Enough, he came up with the idea of how you can store the lithiumions in graphite or in an active material.
Doron Myersdorf
But so we are leveraging on this great innovation of the lithiumion technology, but replacing the materials so they would allow the fast charging in minutes of the entire vehicle.
Brett
Wow, so charging in minutes?
Doron Myersdorf
Yeah, in minutes. The product that we are shipping now, we call it 100 in five, that’s 100 miles for each five minutes of charging. 100 miles of range? Yes, for each five minutes. But we are moving also to 100 in three in our next generation, which is 100 miles for every three minutes. And then we have the holy grail of 100 in two. So at the end of the day, the experience of the charging will be exactly like fueling, only without the fumes of it.
Brett
Wow, that is such a game changer. And what’s the comparison? I know we talked about Tesla there a little bit at the start, but in general, what is the range for typical batteries today?
Doron Myersdorf
So, the average in the US of a vehicle, electric vehicle that is being sold is 300 miles and this is what we are target for. This is the sweet spot for most people. If they can do 300 miles, that’s plus minus what? Psychologically the anxiety goes away, even though by the way, I believe that you can live with even 200 miles and it will still be okay. Again, assuming that you have where to charge in minutes, then you have basically a continuous road trip and you don’t need to worry about it. But 300 miles is the average today.
Brett
And it probably depends a lot on where you live. Right, if you live out in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest of the United States, you probably need a lot more range than if you live in San Francisco or New York City.
Doron Myersdorf
Exactly. And the vast majority of the people who are buying electric vehicles today are in the west coast. And that brings me to the issue of the cold temperature, because this is also something that we are working to solve and we’ve made much progress. On is if you’re at -20 celsius degrees, then the whole battery becomes very slow. Let’s say this is because the electrolyte freezes and then the whole movement of ions is very slow. And so if you live, let’s say in New York or anywhere on the east coast where it’s really freezing, then you have an issue. That’s why less people buy vehicles on the east coast. With our solution, this problem goes away, you can still charge in very low temperature as well.
Brett
Wow, fascinating. And what do you do to build trust and credibility with customers and really get them to believe in the product because this isn’t a little SaaS tool or like a software widget that gets added to a website, this is serious technology that goes inside of the vehicle. That sounds like. So I imagine trust and credibility is extremely important and very critical to what you’re doing. So what do you do to build that trust and credibility with customers?
Doron Myersdorf
So actually for us it’s relatively easy because the proof is in the pudding and the pudding is the battery. If you can deliver a battery that has a data sheet as a specification and you can demonstrate at the customer site that everything that you said in this data sheet is actually validated on their premises, then basically this is where the trust is being built. And we’ve done it so far with like 15 car makers that have received the battery and they said, wow, okay, we thought it’s impossible to do, but here we see it and this is the pudding. So we have built trust over time, over the last ten years with a solution that we delivered that it was really considered impossible to do. Many, I want to say, 100 professors that came to visit us with the VCs that wanted to invest here, or university experts and so forth, that came, they all told me, duran, you’re wasting this 200 million, this can never happen.
Doron Myersdorf
You’re doing something that is impossible to do. Go read the books in physics, why it cannot be done. But what they forgot is that everything starts with the materials. If you work on the material science of the solution, then you can basically break the boundaries of what is known to be possible. And this is exactly what we have done with the silicon solution.
Brett
And for you as the inventor here and as the Founder, was that hard to hear? To be told what you’re trying to do is impossible? Did you ever have moments where you doubted it and said, hey, maybe these people are right, or were you able to just always steamroll right through that?
Doron Myersdorf
Okay, so here we can go back and talk about Elon, right? Because like you said at the beginning, everybody told Elon that he’s crazy, we’ll never get to Mars, or we’ll never have Solar City, or we’ll never have a cost effective electric vehicle. So yes, sometimes there are doubts because you don’t think that you are the only smart person in the room that will be very vain. And so I did have doubts at some point that like the hundred professor tells you the same thing. But I did have a gut feeling that they are all wrong because I said, if this is such a big problem for humanity to be able to charge fast because it creates the whole energy mobility transformation happen. And if this is such a big problem, and I already seen the lab, a very good indication that this thing can work, then I said this gap has to be bridged.
Doron Myersdorf
With sufficient brain power and resources, getting the best people, getting the best lab at giving them sufficient time, which took us ten years. Basically, we can break this boundary. And eventually this is what happened.
Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. And can you talk to us a little bit about adoption? And are there any numbers or metrics that you can share that highlight some of the growth and traction that you’re seeing so far?
Doron Myersdorf
Yes, but we are still pre revenue, so we haven’t sold even one piece. I mean, I did sell samples and I do have some POS for some of the largest car makers on my wall here. And I’m looking at it now because I’m very proud to have those, but these are not in the many millions. The thing here is that it’s like once you get the first platform let’s say a Volvo platform or a Mercedes platform, then the numbers are in the tens and hundreds of millions of revenue. But we are not there yet. We are still a design of a vehicle takes at least five years. So even though our batteries are already a year or more in testing, we haven’t really identified the final platform that it will go into. And this might be a 2025 2026 platform. So there are still a couple of years before we’ll show significant revenue.
Brett
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Brett
Love to talk a little bit about your patience as a Founder, because I think a lot of founders struggle with being patient. And you’re eleven years into this journey, the timelines you just shared, those are four or five years or I guess three or four years away from today. So you’re able to be very patient, it seems like, with bringing this technology to market. How did you develop that skill? How did you learn to be so patient?
Doron Myersdorf
So I don’t think patience is the appropriate term. I haven’t been patient. I have been pushy and I have been persistent. At the end of the day, you do lose the patience because you’re burning, let’s say we are burning a couple of million a month on salaries at the labs. We have a lab also in Irvine, California, by the way. We have a lab here. We have a lab in China. We have a lab in Sweden. This is a lot of money. So you can’t be patient. You have to push really hard for the progress to happen and for the solution to be commercial. But it’s true that you need to have a belief in your vision. And even if everybody around you kind of already loses it, there’s one person who is the CEO that has to maintain this vision and has to believe in it and has to pull everybody to be aligned with this one goal to achieve this extreme fast charging.
Doron Myersdorf
And it’s not for everybody. Let me tell you this list some people. It’s not for them because over the years, I’ve seen people come and go, even though the scientists, the key scientists are here, but people come and go because they cannot cope with this. I would say long haul of taking such a groundbreaking technology to market.
Brett
Yeah, it makes sense, and I can see that. Now, I know we’ve talked about a few things that are holding EVs back from mass adoption. So we’d mentioned range anxiety, charging anxiety. What else is holding it back, would you say? Are those just the two primary factors or is there anything else that’s holding it back?
Doron Myersdorf
No, there’s of course what we mentioned is the charging infrastructure. Because for fast charging to happen, you need the side of the vehicle, which we are taking care of. But you also need a very powerful charging station, at least 350 kw. If you want to charge, let’s say a Tesla Model Three, if you want to charge it in ten minutes, you need 350 kilowatt. And today most stations are lower in power. We are talking 50 kilowatt, 100 kilowatt. We do see like from Electrify America and even from Tesla, we do see already 300 plus kilowatts. And this is in the right direction, but it will take time. At the end of the day, we will see very powerful charging stations all over. Like for example, BP, British Petroleum, who invested in stored even five years ago. They realized that all their forecoats and they have 18,500 no gas stations that they need to repurpose to be charging.
Doron Myersdorf
Now, they understood early on that it has to be extreme fast charging in minutes. Otherwise the whole model of the station, of the folklore doesn’t work. The real estate doesn’t work, the retail doesn’t work. I mean, you can’t sit 2 hours and buy a coffee, right? Especially not in the center of London or San Francisco or wherever you are. So this is a mega transition for the infrastructure that it needs to happen. And you need to remember that it’s not just the station itself, right? You need to bring the power from the grid. So you need the power plants, you need the transportation of the electricity, you need the substations transformers that are near those forecoords. So all this value chain of power needs to be seriously upgraded over the coming decade in order for everybody to be able to charge in minutes.
Brett
And what do you think the horizon is there for that to happen? Are we a decade out, two decades out, three decades out, for us to really have that infrastructure in place and then have all the other technologies out there?
Doron Myersdorf
So I think we can all learn from China here, because even five, six years ago, and when I was there in Shanghai, I already saw the plan at the mayor’s office of all the extreme fast charging stations that they deployed. Now, then the government decided, there is the federal grid and then the municipal grid, everybody is aligned because the government decided or the party decided, and everybody is doing that, and it can happen, and it’s already there. People can charge fast in China especially, that most people do not have the ability to charge at home. They do not have a home. They live in a very large complex of apartments. So there’s no way to charge in the street or at the parking lot, fast charging. So China is actually ahead of the game in terms of putting together this infrastructure. But we do see movement, especially again led by Tesla, for superchargers around the world, by the way.
Doron Myersdorf
And as we all know, they have opened it up not only for Teslas, but also for other car makers. So that’s a great step in the right direction, by the way. It also allow them for nice income from all the others that are charging on their network. So I would say it really depends where we are talking about. I think in the West Coast, it will move faster. I think Europe will move slower. I think China is leading, I think India. It will take 2030 years, but I would say in the next decade, mostly in the US, it will have a sufficient volume for people to be very confident when they’re buying an electric vehicle.
Brett
And do you think we’re ever going to get the point? Or that gasoline vehicles just go away, like in places like the US. Is that going to happen? Will my kids or my grandkids, do you think, not know what a gasoline vehicle is? Or are gasoline vehicles always going to be there? To some extent?
Doron Myersdorf
I think they will be to some extent. But the whole transition will happen very fast because there is a tipping point and we can think about what happened to the film when you take photos with Kodlap, right? So it took like two, three years where people weren’t sure whether digital photography is good enough or not, and they were still buying someone like myself. You were talking about the years of 2000, I remember that I bought in 99, I bought my first digital camera. It was a Canon, but I also had another Canon which was film based, and it was huge and it was much better. And every time that I had something with the keys or went out, I took my big camera and I didn’t use the digital camera. I mean, today it’s not even an issue, right? So I think it will happen very fast because the tipping point is very close, both on the price of the electric vehicle, also the experience of driving an electric vehicle, and also, like we said, the charging infrastructure is there.
Doron Myersdorf
And of course, what we are providing with the extreme fast charging is also coming very soon. So I think it will happen very fast and say 90% of the vehicles in about 15 years will be all electric. I think, like, say in 2030, about 50% will be of new cars. There’s going to be still always on the fleet cars that remain online, even though they cannot go into the major cities like into San Francisco, but you can still drive out in rural areas. So we see some of those, but I’d say the vast majority, it will be more like a museum thing, but the vast majority will be electric vehicles for sure.
Brett
So it’ll be more like a collector’s vehicle where it’s like, hey, look at this thing, it runs on gasoline. And that’ll be novel at that point.
Doron Myersdorf
Exactly. And you’ll have to have a special permit to own something like that. And it will be very expensive also.
Brett
Wow, that’s interesting and certainly exciting to hear that the world’s making that kind of progress. I feel like ten years ago, when you were just starting this, it was what really just Tesla creating electric vehicles. Maybe Toyota had, was it the Prius or whatever their vehicle was, but there must have not been that many electric vehicles on the road back in 2012, is that right?
Doron Myersdorf
That’s absolutely right. And to be honest, when we first started, I didn’t think the solution will be for an electric vehicle. I was thinking about smartphone or a drone or something small. But once I saw that the solution works, electrification in mobility is happening big time, then we shifted all the efforts to the vehicle because this is where we can be really a market maker as opposed to a nice to have the feature on the phone.
Brett
And I’m sure for you as the Founder too, just in terms of impact, that has to feel good, right? The impact of using this for vehicles and transforming the world that way is probably much more impactful than making cell phones that charge faster.
Doron Myersdorf
Exactly. And you mentioned the patience. So, again, not the patience, but the persistence really is getting serious support from the fact that we know that we are doing something good for the planet, and this is true, by the way, for all the employees here. We are 130 people today. If you’ll go and ask one by one why they are at stored and not in some other company, is because they feel that they can make an impact on the planet, on global warming, on the environment, and especially the younger generation. It’s much more important for them than salary or a big vehicle or the prestige or whatever. They just want to make an impact. And I think this is very significant in the way that people think about the place of work and these days.
Brett
Yeah, and I think every Founder these days wants to have a mission driven company. But a lot of times what I’ve seen is they say they’re a mission driven company, and then you look at their product and their product is like a faster version of Snapchat or something along those lines, but it’s not really a product that’s going to transform the world and make the world better, but what you’re building truly will. So I can see how that really motivates you and helps you get through that persistence. And then, of course, with your team and everyone who works there, they’re very motivated. It seems like by that purpose that you have absolutely.
Doron Myersdorf
Right? Yeah.
Brett
Now, last question here for you. Since I know we’re running up on time, let’s zoom out into the future. So three or five years from today, what’s stored out look like and what’s that high level vision that you’re working towards?
Doron Myersdorf
So the goal is really to be synonymous to fast charging. So when people think about charging in minutes and like I said, our product names are 105, 103. So people know that if stored out inside, like internal inside, stored out inside, you can charge in minutes. So when they go and buy the vehicle or they are interested in a new electric vehicle, being a Tesla or any of the other brands, they come and ask is stored out inside, can I charge in minutes? And if people will ask that we did our job.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Well, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here. Now, before we do wrap up, if people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where should they go?
Doron Myersdorf
So we have a website, but I know I’m also very active on LinkedIn and on Facebook because this creates a lot of interest around the world, this solution, because it was considered impossible to do. So if you want to follow and see what we are doing, LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter is where we show the new things.
Brett
Amazing. Dorian, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story, sharing your vision and talking about everything that you are building. I really respect and admire you as an entrepreneur for embarking on this journey and really having a mission driven company and I’m rooting for you guys and really look forward to following along as you execute on this vision.
Doron Myersdorf
Thank you, Brett. Thank you for having me and asking all these important questions so we can bring this vision to the world. Thank you very much.
Brett
All right, let’s keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s.
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