Be a Pirate, Move Fast, and Break Limits

This is an old one. We have had the pirate flag in our lobby since our early days at A123. It has its origin in Bill Aulet’s Entrepreneurship class at MIT back in 2012, he said entrepreneurship is to have the spirit of a pirate and the execution skills of a Navy SEAL. We have always been and will always be the startup, the underdog, the challenger, to status quo, to established limits, and to bigger and more powerful companies. We don’t take things personally, we don’t allow bureaucracy, we move with a sense of urgency, and solve real fundamental issues.

Focus on Real Results, Not Process on Paper
In ancient India, a few blind men were asked what an elephant looks like. One touched the trunk and said it looks like a hose, one touched the leg and said it looks like a tree, and one touched the tail and said it looks like a snake. A battery is like an elephant, it’s very easy to focus on a particular aspect and miss the bigger picture. There is a growing disconnect between what’s in thousands of pages of documents and what’s actually happening in reality. Real world common sense and intuition should always go before process. We need to be data driven, but also think about how to properly interpret data and what data we have not collected. The Real Universe is much bigger than the Observable Universe.

Make It Work
The world doesn’t need another battery company or another battery breakthrough. What the world needs is someone that can take a battery breakthrough and make it work. Truly, practically and completely work. And then scale it up and put it in thousands and millions of vehicles and compete not just with emerging technologies but the gold standard, Li-ion. And do all that without going bankrupt. This is what we signed up for and this is why we are here. If we cannot deliver, we should not exist.

SES - Multi-layer Li-Metal Cell