Green Giants – Episode 88

Kevin Galloway (03:04)

Being able to build not just the fuel cell itself, but the test stand and characterize the material really drew me in.

Wes Ashworth (03:11)

It’s cool. It makes a lot of sense, but it’s always interesting to me how that early curiosity often ends up shaping an entire career, even maybe when you don’t realize it at the time. But it’s cool that thread’s been there from really early on with you. All that’s really cool. I know. In a previous conversation as well, you said Electra started in a garage, literally, building prototypes with auctioned equipment, which I think is so cool. But what did those early days feel like and what made you take that leap full time?

Kevin Galloway (03:38)

It’s kind of crazy to think about looking back six years and where I was in my life and making that kind of a decision. I had a two-year-old and a four-year-old. I had a job with a great company in the renewable energy space, AES Distributed Energy. Sandeep, who I’d worked with at a previous startup, approached me and said, “Hey, do you want to help me get this thing off the ground? I got a really great idea how I can make a big impact with iron.”

I said, “yeah, I can find some time for you on that. That’s interesting. Let me help you out with that. Nights and weekends I can give you, but I got a full-time job. I got a family.” We were going on auction before we were in the garage, getting equipment on auction. I put in my own money to buy some of this stuff to see it get going. We rented a U-Haul. We moved it ourselves into a pole barn for storage because that was going to be safe for when we got out of the garage and moved into a lab.

Then we just started building the team. We started building the prototypes in the garage and those nights and weekends were just a ton of fun. Lunch breaks even were just a ton of fun. Being with folks that were, a lot of passion and drive and didn’t care about the risk. They were really invested in seeing this thing work and trying to get it off the ground. It’s an addicting atmosphere.

I think the more and more we progressed and the team that we built, I realized I was getting addicted too. I quit my job and jumped into the garage and helped this thing get off the ground. It sounds crazy, but it was that kind of atmosphere and enthusiasm and passion and drive. We’re going to change the way things are done. It was really just, like I said, addicting.

Pretty easy choice for me, as crazy as it sounds at that time.

Wes Ashworth (05:16)

It’s so cool. I love those stories. And I think there’s something really powerful about those early stage moments and when belief and momentum matter just as much as resources and what other people might see is crazy. It’s like you’ve got the belief and you’ve got the momentum behind it. I love that. Looking back again over some of your previous experiences, how did those early battery and microgrid experiences shape the way you lead product development today?

Kevin Galloway (05:44)

I’ve been really blessed in my career to see things from the very early stage when a company’s first forming and you’re scraping stuff together just to get the early prototypes on the bench, running to prove a concept to now you’ve actually got something worth a full-blown product design. You’re actually going to make it and scale it up. All the testing that’s involved to validate the design, getting your first version of the product out.

Wes Ashworth (06:08)

Yeah.

Kevin Galloway (06:08)

Then after that, with having to operate it and continuing to operate it, I’ve seen that across a range of different startups and different phases of their growth. I’ve been really lucky to see each of those stages occur and each one has its own sort of flavor and interaction as it moves from one stage to the next. I think that perspective has helped me understand what types of teams we need to build when, what type of focus the companies have at different stages of that development.

Each part has its own version of fun that comes with it. It’s just a little bit different. The whole time you don’t have any revenue. You don’t have any money coming in and you’re trying to get to that point. Time is of the essence no matter what an entire cycle and that urgency and that the drive to get things done quickly I think is has to be part of the equation.

Wes Ashworth (06:56)

Absolutely. You can really hear how those experiences just created a foundation, not just technically, but just in how you think about teams and decisions and systems and those sort of things as well, too. In addition to startups, like we said in the intro, you’ve also spent time at large organizations like AES, for example. What did you learn there that maybe confirmed like startups were your real home?

Kevin Galloway (07:15)

No, I really appreciated my time at AES Distributed Energy. I got to work on a really cool project. They’re a renewables energy supplier. What I really appreciated about that company is they own and operate the facilities that they build. They have a vested interest in the renewable energy that they develop actually getting into people’s hands and making a difference.

It is a large organization and they have a lot of developing projects in process and a whole procedure and process for how to go through and get those things done. My role in that was really to integrate a lot of vendors technologies into a package that we could then go deploy to project. What I realized when I was doing that is all this really cool tech was coming together and we’re bringing it together to provide a solution.

I wasn’t part of the core development of any of those technologies and that’s really where my, I think my passion lies. I wanted to make that core technology or invent that core technology that AES is going to buy and integrate and go deploy. I think that was a realization I had that I want to be on the inventive side, on the early side, on the development side of those products. That’s really in the spirit of what startups do. You’re creating something new and challenging the status quo.

I think what I realized is a little bit of mismatch for someone like me and where startups are really a great fit. That’s kind of why I’ve been in it. Not kind of, but really why I’ve been in startups my whole career.

Wes Ashworth (08:35)

Absolutely. I think the contrast between environments is helpful to hear. I think people are kind of hardwired one way or the other. It’s good to experience both. You kind of find your passion and what makes you tick and those sort of things, too. So that’s cool. You’re ready to really find that and cover that, learn great things from that environment, but also ultimately find your home.

One thing that, that stands out to me too is, just how intentional you are about the environments you choose with that and knowing the startup vibe is more your space. But I think that leads naturally into startup life itself and what it actually demands from people and how that works. You’ve called startups a concentrated skill building experience, which I would agree. What do people misunderstand most about working in an early stage company?

Kevin Galloway (09:22)

As I’ve recruited for various startups, it’s a question that comes up a lot. It’s like, hey, startups are risky, There seems to be a lot of risk with startups versus a big company or an established organization. I just have like a fundamentally different view of risk. Maybe that’s useful to share, but yeah, there’s your startup, you’re inventing something new, you have no revenue.

You start out, there’s no product. There’s no guarantee the company is going to be around in five years or even two years. You have to ask yourself, well, why would I do something like this? But you know what? The investor knows this. The investors that invest in startup know this. The founder knows this. The people who join startups and have been in startups and are veterans, they know this as well. It’s not about that job security, actually. When you’re in a startup, it’s about a really accelerated way to develop your tool set and your skill set as a professional.

You get exposed to a lot of different aspects of the organization all at once and you get asked to contribute the best you can to every element of that. I think that broad perspective you get to have working with, as an example, in the early days, you design the part, you buy the materials yourself, procure the materials yourself, you build the materials yourself.

You test the materials yourself, you analyze the data yourself. Each one of those steps, you can kind of go back and say, well, why did I design it that way? This thing’s hard to build. Or why did I design it this way? The thing is expensive. Then, man, when I go to test this, I should have designed this thing because it makes it easier to test. The data and everything else comes together. You get that perspective across the range of the development cycle. That really augments and accelerates your learning and growth as a professional.

That just comes with the perceived level of uncomfortableness, that you’ll be asked to do things you’ve probably never done before. But when you do that, you grow and you learn and you’ll fail and you’ll learn from that and you’ll be better for it. I think that’s why you get that opportunity in a startup that really, I don’t think exists in well-established processes and well established organizations, which is really unique.

That’s where I think that the risk is worth it because you develop yourself professionally. It’s not actually a risk. You’re more marketable. You’re growing and learning at an accelerated pace. You actually come out, if the company goes away, you come out better and more mature.

Wes Ashworth (11:39)

Absolutely. I think that’s such an important reframe. I love the way you put that and explain that kind of through and through, especially for people who only see starts through the lens of risk. I think there’s a lot more to it and what you get out of your development and as you said, your marketability after that. When you are hiring it’s got to be right. How do you decide if someone is or isn’t a good fit for a startup?

Kevin Galloway (12:00)

Especially in the early phases of startups, it’s actually hard to find people to even apply. You might have a website that has a vague idea what your mission statement is, if it doesn’t describe exactly what you’re doing because you’re developing the intellectual property. You get people in and there’s a question of, is the mission here really? What’s behind it? What’s the approach? The hardest part is actually getting people to step in and apply because there is a sense of risk even just there.

Once we get people in, generally the interview process is really to understand how people approach solving problems, what the thought process is and the logic is behind solving problems they may have never seen before or asking questions that we know you probably don’t know the answer to. We just want to evaluate where your thought process is.

It’s interesting to screen people that way because it becomes very clear. People with innovative thought processes that think outside the box, that love a challenge and want to think of things maybe differently versus, “I don’t know how you would do that. That sounds hard.” You probably need to find someone else to go do this for you. That’s a really good indicator of if you have the entrepreneurial spirit or the ability to face challenges head on and want to find solutions.

Wes Ashworth (13:20)

I appreciate how you frame that and around the ways of thinking. How their brain works and how they solve problems, how they go through it. I like that a lot. Not just focusing on the resumes or skills or those sorts of things, but really kind of seeing, how does their brain work? Is this a good fit? When you think about your own leadership, what scars or lessons from past startups have shaped the way you build teams now?

Kevin Galloway (13:31)

Great.

I’ve done the gamut to date and that my latest role is probably the most people that I’ve been a leader of in my career. I’ve worked small teams. I’ve been also an individual.

I’m leading leaders at this point. Over that evolution in my career, think what’s been interesting and even a struggle for me is to really transition from being a technical contributor and using my technical abilities to solve problems to really focusing on enabling the team to do that work for the organization and not doing it directly myself. Along the way, what you have to do is establish a trust in your team to do the right thing. Because you know you would do the right thing, but you have to trust someone else to do it for you. That’s really important. Part of the team dynamic is that trust.

Really the core function you begin to serve is less on a technical front and more on enabling your team, making sure that they have the right tool sets, breaking down any barriers that exist to them executing and doing their job. Really being a cheerleader for the team, recognizing the success and learning from the failures and letting people fail and grow because of it. I think that’s been an important part of my journey.

Learning that failure is okay has been an important part and learning that in a leadership scope I think was pretty critical part of my growth.

Wes Ashworth (14:59)

There’s a lot of wisdom there. I heard somebody say it one time, it’s letting go of the vine. That’s the hardest part. I agree, I’ve seen that so many times, but it’s never easy. It’s always a little painful, but you start to see the power of it. When you start to let it go and you start to see other people kind of rise to the occasion and start empowering them as well too. But yeah, not easy, but I think you hit nail on the head there. Exactly.

The willingness to question assumptions as well and kind of the way you go about things and just rethink how things are done is exactly what I think led you into an industry that most of us rarely stopped to think about, which is steel and looking at what you do. I wanted to spend some time on that and kind of the core of what your product is and how you’re doing that and the technology, those sort of things. You said you hadn’t thought much about steel before Electra. We mentioned some of your past experiences, but what surprised you most when you dug into the industry?

Kevin Galloway (15:51)

No, certainly I think the way that this all kind of came into our purview is I had experience with iron and trying to develop a battery that was based on iron and use that for grid level energy storage. When Sandeep approached me about this opportunity he said “I want to do something really cool with iron for steel.” We don’t really think about steel. It’s hard to look around anywhere in this world, in this office, outside of this office, in any city, and not see steel somewhere. It’s ubiquitous. It’s all around us. It’s a major commodity and a very large amount of this material is consumed globally and produced globally. I didn’t really think about the process for making steel and how impactful that process is. It touches our lives in so many ways, but really the core part of the process, it’s a very energy intensive process.

Really the core part is getting iron for the steel. Steel is over 98 % iron. That iron comes from ores and rocks and is extracted using a large amount of energy. The typical incumbent way of doing that is using fossil fuels. What sort of struck me was the realization that two tons of CO2 are emitted for every ton of iron produced.

That goes into the steel making process. Wow, that’s a lot. But man, you know how much steel we consume. That process is like 10 % of the world’s CO2 emissions. Just the scope, the vastness of the impact in that industry is massive. That was really something that struck me. I thought batteries were going to be a big thing to go work on. You talk about steel and it’s like, holy cow.

This is a massive, massive impact that we want to challenge the way that’s done and we want to change the way that’s done. This could have massive impact for the world.

Wes Ashworth (17:38)

Huge impact. I think one probably most people don’t think about when they think about CO2 emissions and climate change, those sorts of things, the impact of these types of industries. But I love being able to really make just a significant contribution to that and what you’re doing in a way that’s not as traditional. Most people are like, hey, I’m going to go in solar. I’m going to go in batteries or what have you. But so cool. Do want to pause for a second just to understand briefly, maybe not like highly technical or anything like that.

Just what Electra is doing, you know, in terms of what’s different from a traditional steelmaking company that’s out there. What are some of those differences in how that’s reducing that carbon footprint or CO2 emissions?

Kevin Galloway (18:18)

This is part of what we learned when we started the company, we were on a thesis that we wanted to impact iron. Iron was really the problem statement when you talk about the overall waste generation from the process of making steel. What that led us to is evaluating the value chain for iron. Where it starts is at a mine. Ore is mined in order to get enough quantity of iron in the rock that’s sufficient to go into the process for iron making in a blast furnace today. But even at the mine, when you look at what’s done at the mine, a lot of materials mined, a lot of energy is expended and effort to get at that material that’s sufficient. But there’s all that material that doesn’t get passed forward in the process and ends up as tailings. If the material has to be upgraded, additional waste streams and tailings are produced.

There’s this inefficiency in the way, even at the mine, that iron is making its way into first the blast furnace, where then again it’s basically upgraded, iron is reduced to metal. There’s waste streams from that process that are generated, both material and greenhouse gas waste streams. Then it gets to the steelmaking process.

When you’re in the steelmaking process, there’s additional waste streams that are had because of whatever purity of materials is feeding forward into it. You look at the wide value chain, there’s a lot of areas where waste is generated. What our proposition was is, let’s develop a solution where not only will we remove greenhouse gas waste emissions.

Can we make more efficient use of the materials as they pass through the value chain? Can we process materials that were not normally able to be processed from the mines so that the mining yields are higher? Can we pass forward a purer product to the steel makers so that they’re not generating waste and that they can make more efficient use of their resources? We wanted to produce a holistic solution where we’re using renewable energy but we’re also minimizing waste across the value stream and increasing efficiency. It’s just a broader value proposition versus solely greenhouse gas abatement. It’s also touching different parts upstream and downstream of how ultimately steel, the efficiency of making steel.

Wes Ashworth (20:29)

That kind of like holistic and systems level thinking is you’re looking at all the pieces of that. To me, it feels essential when you’re trying to solve problems, especially at this scale. So for those of us that aren’t as into it and maybe aren’t as informed, what are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about steel’s role in climate change?

Kevin Galloway (20:50)

Like I said earlier, I don’t think you realize how much steel is made globally. It’s two billion tons of steel made globally. The primary process for doing that is one that uses coal. Metallurgical grade coke is produced, and you light that on fire, you generate CO2 in the process you’re making iron metal.

That metal then goes into steelmaking. It’s a very energy intensive process. Think a lot of process routes there, they happen at very high temperatures. This is like 1600 degrees Celsius where these processes are occurring. So massive amounts of energy are going into making steel. The approach that we’re taking is one where we want to have a low temperature process. We want to have one that’s compatible with renewable energy sources, one that you can turn on and off if you need to if the sun’s not shining or the wind’s not blowing. I think that’s one aspect of it. The other aspects are if you go to a mining site and you see what we’re doing to get at that very critical resource for us, you just see the massive scale. You can see these sites from space.

It’s pretty incredible to think about what all goes in in industry to realize this material is very important material for a society. Just their global impact that that has is pretty significant.

Wes Ashworth (22:10)

It’s huge. I really do think that kind of clarification is really valuable, especially for people outside of heavy industry that don’t think about it every day, don’t see it. So when you zoom out, I think for me, as we talk through, it becomes clear that steel isn’t just a technical problem. It really is a systems problem and brings us to how Electra really approaches its work at a higher level. We started to touch on this. I just want to dive a little bit deeper into it. So you described Electra’s philosophy of solving one problem without creating another.

You started to touch on that there. And I love this thought, but how does that philosophy guide your product decisions?

Kevin Galloway (22:43)

It’s really core to our mission statement. I’ll give an example of how we think of it. When you get iron ore from the ground, it’s not pure iron ore. It comes with other impurities in it. One of the impurities that comes with ore is alumina. It’s an aluminum oxide. Today’s processes for making the iron from that ore, that aluminum oxide comes out ultimately as a slag in steelmaking or in ironmaking and becomes a waste stream. It comes out with silica and other impurities in the ore and it’s really a very low value. So it gets discarded as waste.

There’s another process that we use called the Bayer process to get alumina out of ores in order to make aluminum for aluminum cans, aircraft and aluminum metals. That process takes in these ores and iron is impurity in that process. Iron comes out as a waste stream. It’s actually a pretty hazardous waste stream in red mud. We have one process where we’re taking ores and trying to extract the iron and we create race, alumina waste. We have another process where we take ores and we try to get alumina and we make iron waste.

Fundamentally, when we think about it, we should be using those ores and getting both of those materials out as products, not as wastes. That is really core to the process that we’ve developed is we will take these materials in and we will extract the most amount of value that we can from them. The Illuminar process is normally seen as an impurity actually becomes a product. The iron becomes a product, the silica becomes a product. In this way, we’re reducing waste.

You could go about a process where you solve the emissions issue with producing iron, but you create a lot of solid waste in that process or maybe hazardous waste that you have to store somewhere. That’s not a great solution. For us, we don’t want to create one problem while solving another. We need a holistic solution that really addresses higher material usage efficiencies.

Wes Ashworth (24:40)

I love that so much. I think that that kind of principle driven approach seems especially important when the stakes are this high. I think from our history where maybe we didn’t always think that we didn’t think that way, we solved one problem and it created others. There was a kind of like ignore and ignore and override, move forward. But you being very holistic and thinking about that and I think it’s smarter, more efficient, but also more sustainable and those kind of things too. So I appreciate that.

The practical examples to really walking through it from a product leadership standpoint, what were maybe some of the hardest non-technical decisions that you had to make as Electra moved from idea into this real company and starting to scale?

Kevin Galloway (25:18)

The non-technical ones are the ones I’m still learning how to solve those. I’m very comfortable in the technical challenges and addressing those. Certainly, I think one of the challenges we had as an organization is you’re in the process of scaling up your tech. You get a lot of momentum behind it. A lot of work goes into getting it to certain place in the scale-up process.

We were there with our technology last year. We were getting basically getting ready to launch it and go to the next phase and then demonstration. This is a lot of money. It’s a lot of effort that’s gone to get to that point. A lot of design work and finalization of these things. We had some work that came out of the R &D group. It was a game-changing innovation that we were seeing great results on the bench scale. You’re devoting all of your resources towards a path and a drive in the organization for a very thing for us to achieve in that next level scale up. But it looks like you have something that could potentially change the game and make a better solution overall and simplify our process. We had to figure out how do you make a decision between the momentum and the trajectory that you’re on. You have a lot of effort and want to say attachment from the team to that direction because of all the effort that’s gone into it.

You have to figure out, is this the right decision? Do we pivot here? Do we do it now and set ourselves up better in the future and take that risk? It’s only been proven at bench scale. So it was really a difficult decision for us to decide to make a pivot and then redirect the team off of all of the momentum we had developed on one scaled up process that was working.

But towards going backwards, in some essence, to scale up another newer, better way of doing that’s not something that you get taught and how to convince people it’s the right thing to do. I think that comes along with the idea that you really need to trust each other. You trust your leadership the same way that you as a leader trust your people to do the right thing. I’m proud to say the team came together and turned around this pivot so rapidly and executed so cleanly towards scaling that up.

We really didn’t miss a beat in our timing and schedule for scale up. We were able to secure grant funding to take our technology to the next level to a demonstration facility. That’s really just an amazing achievement that started with something technical, but having to transition a team’s thought process and having to transition all of our resources off of one thing and onto another, because resources aren’t, especially in a startup, aren’t infinite.

The way that we were able to pull that off and do that is one of the things I get really excited and jazzed about telling people.

Wes Ashworth (27:53)

I t’s incredible. Those decisions often end up shaping a company just as much, if not more, than the technology itself. Sometimes they are the most difficult ones to make, but I think even more so the power of having the right people in place, people that are kind of bought in and willing to go the direction, stick to it, row in the same direction type of thing. But I love that. I think that’s a key fundamental trait of the companies that really get off the ground and make it.

When you’re looking at this, how do you measure success? Maybe not just technically, but in terms of real world adoption and industry impact, what does success look like?

Kevin Galloway (28:26)

When you’re in a startup, you’re looking to change the status quo. You’re looking to change something that’s been done before. We know how to do. We could just keep doing. You’re going to fundamentally change how that’s done. I think for me, it looks like that. Seeing the things and the work that you put in, all the effort and passion of the team that goes into developing the tech.

To me, that success is really taking it to that level where it can have an impact in the world and influence the way that we do things. You may not take over the entire market, but if you influence the direction of an industry, that to me is success because that’s what we all set out to do in the first place was change the game and question the status quo.

Did you get the market cap? Did you get some level of profitability? Of course, we want to increase the value of the company for our investors, but the real larger success for me is like, did it make a difference in the way that we go after problems in the way that we’re doing things in industry?

Wes Ashworth (29:22)

I like the way you put that. Keeping the focus on that impact and the direction and those sort of things rather than these hyper-specific milestones or something like that. I do think you’re out to sort of change the world in lot of ways. Big impact type of stuff. It’s ambitious, which I love. I think building something that’s ambitious also means playing a long game, especially when you’re working with physical technology rather than software.

You’ve said that physical products require different investors than software. I agree, I’ve seen this and we talked about this a little bit before, but what do the right investors look like when you’re doing something like this and how do find them?

Kevin Galloway (30:00)

I’ve certainly seen a diversity of investors and startups. We carried some of the scar tissue forward, including our founder and CEO, Sandeep, from previous experiences there and understanding of what an investor is really looking for. I think we’ve really built an incredibly strong investment group. Really the way to think of an investor is they’re an extension of the team.

They need to be as vested in the solution you’re developing and wanting to make that change that you’re driving towards as much as you do. Really when you talk about physical tech or deep tech and the type of change that we’re talking about making, it’s not the type that happens overnight. You don’t get an ROI in three to five years on this type of thing. So you really need an investor that understands that, that knows that this is a long term process to develop and change an industry and is willing to be there with you and hold your hand on that journey and open doors for you. Open doors into the industry and help you develop the right strategic mindset on how to go deploy and how to go scale up, get you the right partners so that if you’re lacking in one area, maybe of your expertise, you can get access to it and through networks.

I think that we, more than any time in my career, the team on the investment side and the investor side that we’ve been able to build, strategic investors and financial investors, but them sharing that vision and being invested, not just in money, but also in our success and driving for our success. I think that’s been a really awesome thing to be a part of.

Wes Ashworth (31:35)

It’s so good. I think that alignment piece feels like something people probably often underestimate early on. They’re more aligned than just needing an investor. But having that true alignment, I think it’s really powerful and enables you to do a lot more. As you’ve gone through this several times, what advice would you give to other founders in hard tech about choosing the right capital partners? What advice do you have for them?

Kevin Galloway (31:44)

You want to look for investors, like I said, that share your passion and mindset of how you want to actually impact the industry and are less focused about when is liquidity day, when’s an ROI, what’s that looking like. Of course, there are times and places for that type of investment, but really at the beginning and the early stage, you want a partner, you want a strategic partner.

You know, for us, one of the key things, I think that Sandeep did a great job was, was looking at the whole value chain of the impact we were trying to make for steel, not just of iron making going to steel making, but also upstream. Who is mining the ores? What are the challenges that are faced at the mine? And how do we become a partner, both upstream and downstream? How do get the right players and investors on both sides?

It becomes a very powerful situation where you got more pull than you have push in the industry. So I would say if you can, find the people that share that passion, but also have access more broadly than you might be thinking on your impact.

Wes Ashworth (33:04)

It’s really good. I think a lot of people kind of go through it and learn that the hard way so maybe they can hear that and kind of start there from the beginning. We obviously have a lot of a lot of startups in this space, a lot of new technologies coming online. Going through this a few times, I’m curious just from your perspective, what increases a startup’s odds of survival in climate tech specifically, especially in physical tech?

Kevin Galloway (33:08)

Let’s start that way. The odds of a startup, and I think you’ll hear a good investor say this too, is when you’re investing in a startup, you’re really investing in the team and its ability to solve problems. We’re all looking at problems in a different way and trying to produce solutions that haven’t been done before. Your odds are up to the strength of that team that you build.

So it’s super, super critical to focus on the team, focus on the expertise you need to carry with you and the partnerships you need to carry with you. But ultimately it’s that ability and that DNA that you need to build into the team of solving problems and being dynamic and facing challenges head on, not running away from the problems. I think that’s so critical.

I think that it’s also what makes it very cool to be part of a startup because that really is about the team and building and growing that team. You end up with a really strong team and it’s amazing what you can achieve and the energy that you get every day out of it. You know, it’s what drives me to come into work is working with the team that we’ve built and it’s something to be proud of.

Wes Ashworth (34:28)

Most definitely. I love that focus on people and the team, right? I think sometimes people lose sight of that of how important, how critical that is to have the right people. You can see it. You can see it in sports. You can see it in business. You can see it in everything. So if you have that group that’s really just bought in and man, it’s difficult, it’s hard, but we’re gonna figure it out. We’re gonna figure it out together. We’re here together. We’re gonna solve these problems. We’re gonna keep pushing forward.

I think that that’s such a key fundamental part of that. Before we wrap up, I want to zoom out a little bit, talk about the broader moment we’re in and how you personally think about the future. So we’re in a strange moment where AI is attracting massive investment while clean tech sometimes feels a little over overshadowed. You get sort of back and forth messages some time, although I think those are in it. We see it up into the right and it’s moving forward. Thinking about AI coming in and all that. So how do you view this shift? What goes through your mind when you think about it?

Kevin Galloway (35:26)

There’s certainly been through waves of this and different startups and the hype cycles that occur, and the headwinds and tailwinds you have in the investment community and getting funding for different endeavors. I remain very optimistic about what we’re working on here at Electra. I know that we saw a lot of funding changing for different climate tech incentives. I think we’ve seen an increase in funding for things like AI, things that are consuming more energy to produce AI products and computing data centers and these things.

But I think that at the core, we’re still working on the right problem and we’re producing the right solution and it’s the right problem because, not just because of greenhouse gas emissions, not just because of the climate, but also because we’re just producing a better solution that generates less waste. We’re touching it in different parts of the value chain.

So I think that where some technology will struggle is if you’re producing a sort of myopic or singular value proposition, if you can have a more broad interest and more broad impact in the industry, that’s what draws me towards optimism. I really do think a lot of our customers on both sides, we’ve had great partners in steel makers that are still very interested in the product that we’re developing. We have great partners at the mining companies that are still very interested in making better use of the materials in their mines.

This solution that we’re developing really still addresses and still provides a solution there and we still see that interest. Things seem a little weird and shaky and there’s hype cycles for sure and differences in political climate, but overall I think we’re going after a solution that is robust to those things.

Wes Ashworth (37:10)

I agree. A lot to be optimistic about and hopeful for. I think everything’s moving in the right direction. We always tell people don’t worry too much. It’s going to be okay. We’re going get there. We’ll figure it out. So think about that too. You’ve been a young engineer starting out. What advice would you give to other young engineers or professionals who want to build careers in clean energy who feel uncertain about where to start?

Kevin Galloway (37:19)

If I were to give myself some advice 15, 20 years ago, I would have told myself not to be afraid to fail and look at failure in a different way. Failure, if you’re learning from it, is okay. It’s okay to fail if you’re learning from it. It’s going to make you wiser and stronger moving forward. It also makes you appreciate the success that you have when you get it.

Don’t be afraid to jump in and take the risk and fail because that really is an opportunity to learn and grow. I think sometimes, especially in engineering disciplines, there’s always a right and wrong answer. It’s like math, right? It’s either right or wrong and you did it right or wrong.

If you’re growing in your career, doing it wrong is okay. You’ll be better for it. So take the chance, take the risk, and just be ready and open yourself up to the opportunity to learn and develop.

Wes Ashworth (38:26)

Great advice there, great advice for anyone. I love the focus on you just embracing failure and using it as a teacher. I’ve told my daughter that before. She’s a great soccer player. But I told her early on, I’ll remind her, you see somebody that’s better than you at a skill or something, it just means they failed it at more times than you. That’s it. Simple as that. They’ve just gone through that failure more times and be on the other end of it. But it applies to everything that we do as well too in life and likewise. So I really like that advice a lot.

Let me ask you this too, thinking into the future, if Electra succeeds at full scale, how will the world look different in 20 years if that happens?

Kevin Galloway (39:01)

What a wonderful world it would be. I think in order for us to succeed in our mission, it’s not just that we develop this technology, but also that we deploy renewable energy to feed this technology. The process for making iron is energy intensive, and we’ve been using fossil fuels for good reason to do that. But if that’s going to change, we need more sources of energy to replace that fossil fuel and our technology is part of the solution, but we really do need more sources of energy to feed that solution in order to really realize its full and true potential.

When we’re successful, I think what that looks like is a wide range and broad range of energy sources that we are accommodating and working with to make our product for steelmaking. I think that mining will be more efficient. The footprint of a mine will be lower. Old mines that didn’t have use before and mineral resources that are sort of abandoned can have new use and value. I think overall efficiency across a wide range of today’s operations will just improve. I think it’s pretty exciting to see how that will go. Where in the world it will impact the most. But that to me is what I think of. I also think of driving an electric vehicle with our iron and the steel of that car and being pretty happy driving.

Wes Ashworth (40:21)

I love it. Great, long-term vision. Really what makes this work feel meaningful, I think is you’re able to vision those into the future and what that’s going to look like and the impact that it will have as well too. So I love it.

Final question. I’ll leave it to you. Any other things you want to share, things you didn’t get to share, piece of wisdom, anything you want to leave with the audience as we close?

Kevin Galloway (40:41)

Something to stress, and at least in my career, and something that I’ve really enjoyed, is just the team dynamic and finding great leadership. Our founder and CEO, Sandeep, is someone that I know I’ve come to respect and admire in my interactions with him and seeing him grow as a leader.

It’s really what drew me out of my job and into a garage was that leadership. I think the core values that he brings forward, a focus on the team and on people and on growth and professional growth and a focus on the team dynamic is really just a healthy atmosphere to be in. If you can find it, hold onto it because it’s a ton of fun and it’s really, really rewarding.

I think that throughout my career, I searched for various startups and found different team dynamics. This has been an incredible journey for me. I hope other people can find the same.

Wes Ashworth (41:32)

It’s awesome. Powerful note to end on. I love that we’ll leave it there. But Kevin, thank you for such a thoughtful and grounded conversation. It’s rare to hear someone speak so clearly about both the technical and human side of building something that truly matters.

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