What went wrong at Northvolt?

Northvolt’s ambition was to become a European batterymaker to rival Chinese battery behemoths like CATL and BYD. They wanted to offer a homegrown supply chain to western automakers. But in November, the company announced its bankruptcy. So what went wrong? In this episode, Shayle talks to Sam Jaffe, principal at 1019 Technologies. They walk through Northvolt’s timeline from founding to bankruptcy, including the loss of a $2B deal with BMW. They discuss lessons learned and cover topics like: What went well — from fundraising billions of dollars to securing major off-takers What didn’t go well — like trying to build multiple types of batteries, in multiple factories, on multiple continents How venture capital investors may have pushed the company to be too ambitious The tradeoffs of choosing NMC over LFP Challenges with their equipment supplier Wuxi LEAD The upside: Sam’s belief that Northvolt’s factory will ultimately make batteries Recommended resources Latitude Media: What Northvolt's bankruptcy means for Europe's battery ambitions Intercalation: Battery production is genuinely difficult Bloomberg: Northvolt Has Major Obstacles Ahead Even With Bailout In Reach Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub is working with more than 70 utilities across North America to help scale VPP programs to manage load growth, maximize the value of renewables, and deliver flexibility at every level of the grid. To learn more about their Edge DERMS platform and services, go to energyhub.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Latitude Media, podcast at the frontier of climate technology.

• 0:07Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shail Khan and this is Catalyst.

• 0:13Shayle Kann?

  Their investors wanted them to be huge and they wanted them not to build one factory, but to build six giga factories simultaneously, which is just an impossible task to handle. Coming up, Sam Jaffe and I try to make sense of what went wrong at Northvolt.

• 0:39Speaker 02

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• 1:05Speaker 03

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• 2:11Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shayle Khan. I invest in revolutionary climate technologies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. All right. The Northvolt bankruptcy. You've heard of it, I'm sure. If you're a battery technology entrepreneur, you know how big a deal it is. If you're in Europe, you probably know how big a deal it is. If you're an investor in battery technology or in climate tech in general, you probably also know how big a deal it is. But having talked to many people about it over the past few weeks, I've found two things. First, many folks, even in climate tech, don't realize exactly why it's important. And second, there are so many competing visions of what actually happened, what went wrong, what could the company have done differently, if anything, and what it means about the market. But suffice it to say, it is a big

• 2:55Shayle Kann?

  deal. Northvolt was among the highest funded private companies in Europe overall. Public reports have said they raised something like 15 billion euros. In reality, that wasn't all actually awarded already, and some of it was debt, but that's real money, and it was definitely in the billions. Northvolt was also viewed as Europe's great hope for homegrown EV battery manufacturing to counter the rising tide coming from Asia and from China in particular in recent years. And of course, this reinforces a lesson that many companies have learned the hard way, which is that making batteries is really frigging hard. Anyway, I think it's worth a deep dive, both to tease out the actual story, the history of what happened with Northvolt,

• 3:38Shayle Kann?

  but probably more importantly, the lessons that we should and should not take from it as far as the future of battery manufacturing and venture capital for hard tech things. So that's what we're doing this week. I had Sam Jaffe join me. Sam's been on this podcast a number of times before, but he is a close watcher of the battery industry. And these days, he's a principal at 1019 Technologies. Here's Sam.

• 4:03Shayle Kann?

  Sam, welcome back.

• 4:05Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you very much.

• 4:06Shayle Kann?

  So Northvolt. All right, there's a lot to talk about here and we should start with neither you nor I have particularly inside information here, right? So we're going to be talking about stuff that's in the public domain for the most part, but there's so much to unpack, I think. And from what I've seen, a lot of, I don't know, misguided public thought about both what happened and what it means. So let's see if we could tease it out. I want to start with just going through the history of how Northvolt got to where it is today. Take me back, I guess, to start to the founding, 2016, or if earlier, if you want to go there. Like, give me the beginnings of Northvolt.

• 4:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I guess it goes back to, as so many things in the battery industry do, it goes back to Tesla. Peter Carlson was a Tesla battery guy. He was one of the people that helped to build the original Gigafactory. And he left Tesla and was trying to figure out what to do next. And one of those options was to build a battery company in Europe. And amazingly, he did that. Several other people had that spreadsheet, but he followed through on it. And that was the birth of Northvolt. And the concept was build a battery,

• 5:31Speaker 04

  a major battery player that's located and headquartered in Europe that is able to supply the European automotive and energy storage industries and able to be on an equal footing with the Asian giants that dominate the battery industry.

• 5:51Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, maybe contextualize. So back when Northvolt was getting founded, 2016 or thereabouts, who were the dominant players in the lithium ion battery market then? And how does that compare to today?

• 6:03Speaker 04

  I think it's close to today what it was in 10 years ago. With the exception that the clear leaders were the Koreans and Panasonic. So that by the Koreans, I mean LG at that time, it was called LG Chem. Now it's called LGES and Samsung SDI and to a lesser extent SK, which is now referred to as SKON. And then Panasonic, of course, had the Tesla contract and was probably the, at that point, was probably because the Gigafactory had been built and was up and running, they might have been the number one producer at that point. The Chinese were there.

• 6:47Speaker 04

  CATL was producing in large amounts and BYD. I think the biggest change in the industry today is that there were probably close to 100 Chinese battery manufacturers. And today, there's 10 that matter and that do it at scale. And really, there's two that completely dominate the industry, and that's BYD and CATL. So China was definitely producing batteries, was definitely part of the overall competitive mix, but it was a little bit different landscape at the time.

• 7:25Shayle Kann?

  And my suspicion is that the founding principle, the founding idea with Northvolt probably predicted that the rise of China. I mean, you know, we'd seen this happen in solar, for example, and there were lots of European solar companies that rose and fell. And, you know, I've heard a lot of talk about, okay, we're going to do it differently in the batteries this time. We're going to have a homegrown battery manufacturer, we're going to support it with public funding and with procurement and all that kind of stuff. And we're going to make sure that the whole supply chain doesn't ultimately shift to China as it basically did in the solar context. And so my guess is that even back then, that was, they were foreseeing what you described

• 8:06Shayle Kann?

  has happened since then with the rise of CATL and BYD and saying, okay, Northvolt and a few others, but really mostly Northvolt is kind of the answer to that.

• 8:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that China's rise to dominance in the battery industry was just about the least disguised or most poorly hid story of the last 10 years. It was clearly going to happen and it happened essentially according to the same rulebook as what happened in solar and in other industries and is today happening with cars. I think that the emergence of CATL, which was essentially a company that was really invented in the back rooms of the industrial governmental complex in China about 12 years ago, that and it essentially

• 9:00Speaker 04

  just, you know, it followed the plan perfectly and is now the largest producer in the world.

• 9:05Shayle Kann?

  Okay, so that's the premise upon which Northvolt was based. Do you know, you know, we said homegrown battery manufacturer. Do you know how vertically integrated they intended to be? I mean, we were going to talk about how much they ended up trying to do, but were they going to be a cell supplier? Were they just going to make packs? Were they going to do it all? Do we know?

• 9:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Northvolt was going to, and they do produce cells today and it was essentially a large battery cell factory. They also make them into packs and modules, but I think their main, their main business was to be a cell producer.

• 9:48Shayle Kann?

  Okay. All right. So let's walk through the history then. So they found the company with this idea. We're going to build a European homegrown battery supplier to feed this growing industry. What did they do over the intervening eight years?

• 10:01Speaker 04

  They raised a lot of money. They were very successful at that. And, you know, I think that's, that's the sign that the venture capital model is capable of raising that level of money. And by that amount, it's essentially about $14 billion in total, including money, actual capital raised, essentially people saying, we will contribute this amount in the future to future raises and tax credits, which were a large part of that $14 billion.

• 10:37Shayle Kann?

  And some debt, we should say too, right? So it's a mix of equity and debt.

• 10:41Speaker 04

  Right, and debt, right. I think that the issue is not, does the Western European, North American venture model, is it capable of raising that level of money? It is. The question is, what are the strings attached to it? And I think it's good to go back to look at how it's done in China. There are definitely strings attached to capital raising in China, but it's more of kind of a backroom negotiation where it's, you know, it's not necessarily something laid out on paper. Within the venture community and venture investors, when they contribute that amount of money, they expect go big or go home. And

• 11:26Speaker 04

  in this case, they went home.

• 11:28Shayle Kann?

  But if you set aside the venture investor mindset there, is there a ver... Well, let's talk about what going big meant for Northvolt. I don't know whether this was the venture investors pushing this, or whether this was management pushing this, but going big, I think we should clarify. I think what you mean is not build a big factory, because they had to build a big factory. There are economies of scale that are hard to escape in battery manufacturing. So that part seems inevitable to me. My suspicion is what you mean is they did a lot of things that weren't just building a big factory. So let's, assuming that I'm right about what you mean there, let's talk through all the things over the

• 12:09Shayle Kann?

  years that Northvolt decided to do that go above and beyond just, we're going to build a battery factory in Europe.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a great point, because it really comes down to the definition of big. In other words, their investors wanted them to be huge, and they wanted them not to build one factory, but to build... What they ended up trying to do was build, essentially build six giga factories simultaneously, which is just an impossible task to handle.

• 12:42Speaker 04

  And I think that the, you know, that, that, the, the, the concept of build, build, perfect, and then repeat was, was not applied. And they tried to do everything at once.

• 12:59Shayle Kann?

  Yeah. So what were those six giga factories supposed to do? They weren't all replicas of each other. They were doing different things, at least some of them, right? So let's, let's just like walk through what the portfolio of Northvolt prior to failure and bankruptcy and before things started to turn south, like at the peak, what was the portfolio of what they were trying to do?

• 13:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. So they, first of all, they were going to, they were, they were working on establishing a second factory in Germany that would, that would directly produce for the German automotive industry. Then they were essentially doing the same thing in Eastern Europe. And then the IRA happened and all of the subsidies available to building factories in, in the US happened and they, they said, okay, we're going to do that in, in North America. So right there, that's, that's, you know, that's a total of four factories. Additionally, they bought a, a, a next generation battery startup called Q-Berg,

• 14:01Speaker 04

  which made lithium metal batteries or, or was developing lithium metal batteries. And they established that the, the goal was to establish a factory that would build those types of batteries also in the US. And they had a very large R and D facility in California also.

• 14:18Shayle Kann?

  Right. Which lithium metal, potentially super high energy density could be for aviation batteries or just much higher energy density, but, but like earlier stage for sure. Not, not the scale of the giga factory with known technology idea.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  Right. And, and when, when they purchased Q-Berg, Q-Berg was specifically an aviation battery company that they, they, they full on stated, we are, we are developing futuristic batteries for future applications. And, and then there was also a sodium ion battery that they were developing and, and they were planning to build a factory for that also. So three different, three different types of batteries, different generations of batteries, different continents. It was, it was extremely ambitious.

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• 17:19Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, I want to come back to the supply chain bit because I, from everything that I have learned and speaking to a few people, that actually does seem to be a critical mistake or a critical failing ultimately. But before we get to kind of what went wrong, I mean, we should say, there were strong indications that if they could build it, that, you know, if you build it, they will come. They did have strong indications of demand, right? Like their, their output where should they have been able to produce it, seemed like it was going to be spoken for.

• 17:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, they had, they had a lot of traction with carmakers, especially the European carmakers, and they had very, very realistic purchase orders from European carmakers, including VW, including BMW and, and others. And, you know, that's exactly what you need and exactly what you want. But that's, again, when it takes a long time to build a battery factory and you can get a purchase order and you don't show up and those batteries never get made or delivered.

• 18:28Shayle Kann?

  So we've got this company, they raise a ton of money. And they're trying to do a bunch of things at once, clearly. But the main thing, the first thing, the thing, as you said, they, they had not yet perfected, is they've got this Gigafactory in Sweden that is supposed to be ramping up and rolling off the line, you know, high quality, high throughput, reasonable cost lithium ion batteries. And it started to become clear, I think, what, earlier this year, that, at least publicly, that production was not anywhere near where it was supposed to be.

• 19:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it happened even last year in 2023, where, where there were, there were publicly acknowledged signs that things were not, were not going smoothly.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  So if you can imagine the complexity of battery manufacturing, it is not one factory. It is 18 mini factories doing separate things to build to end up with a battery, all of which have to be choreographed and perfectly timed with each other to make it work and to optimize it. And it's chemistry, you know, it's hard science to make that work right. So it's definitely not every battery factory that I've been familiar with has had significant problems with ramping up. The most famous, of course, is the first Tesla Gigafactory, which apparently they had

• 20:03Speaker 04

  close to half of their cells that they produced in the first year of that factory's production had to be discarded because they weren't getting the quality right. They fixed that and they ended up making, doing it very efficiently, but it was very painful. So it's something that everybody goes through, but they were having an especially bad time. And I think a lot of that leads to their equipment supplier choice and their relationship with that equipment supplier.

• 20:35Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, that seems to be the crux, what I was referring to earlier. I want to get to that in one second. But yeah, the result of that is that, at least from what became public, Steve Levine at Information reported earlier this year that Northvolt was operating, that that factory was operating at about 80 megawatt hour capacity, which is one two-hundredth of nameplate capacity, basically. And it got bad enough at one point, not just that they weren't producing enough, but that there were enough quality issues that then I think the thing that really seemed to, you know, make the slope of the downturn for the company accelerate a lot was BMW canceling this big $2 billion order because of quality issues, as far as I understand it.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  So I think there's another element, not just to the BMW cancellation alone, but to the entire automotive industry. And to the Northvolt story, which is they made a chemistry choice, NMC, high nickel content cathode material that was that turned out to be not wrong, but not as much of a no brainer as was expected. In other words, LFP reemerged, lithium iron phosphate reemerged in 2018, 2019. And the carmakers realized this isn't, you know, we don't, we don't necessarily have to make these cars with high nickel content,

• 22:03Speaker 04

  cobalt containing, very energy dense batteries. There's a way to do it with LFP, the Chinese have shown that. But Northvolt had committed to NMC. You can't just turn around and make, change the cathode and make the batteries exactly the same way at the battery factory. So that, I think that was one element of it is, is in addition to the, I don't want to call it a lowering of, of demand for EVs, but there's certainly been a slowdown in the, in the demand for EVs in Europe, which, which led to this. There was also a, a decision, I think, by the, the car manufacturers in Europe,

• 22:46Speaker 04

  saying, let's reassess our chemistry choices, which leaves a 40 gigawatt hour plant in Sweden to be especially exposed when they can't really change their chemistry.

• 22:58Shayle Kann?

  Okay, so all these things going on, but let's get to, I think what seems to be sort of the heart of the challenge, which you alluded to, which is the relationship between and choice of equipment supplier that Northvolt made. So talk to me about Northvolt's equipment supplier and what you've seen as where things went wrong there.

• 23:20Speaker 04

  So they they chose as their main equipment supplier, a Chinese company called Wuxi Lead. And there's a conundrum when building a battery factory, which is that there's very few companies that produce, as I mentioned, there's essentially 18 stages that you're each with its own different types of equipment. And there's very few companies that make every one of those pieces of equipment. And especially, there's there's very few Chi non-Chinese companies that that have that you can essentially go and say, I want everything. In China, Wuxi is one of the few that you can do that. And they they chose Wuxi. So essentially, they're they're providing most of the equipment for that factory.

• 24:05Speaker 04

  And they're essentially, you know, in charge of making the equipment, installing it at the factory, and then making sure it works right. And somewhere in those in that three step process, things broke down, probably that the third part, making sure it works right.

• 24:23Shayle Kann?

  Yeah. So I reached out to a couple of friends of mine who have as much battery manufacturing experience as anybody in the world about this. And universally, they all really dialed in on this equipment supplier relationship. And there's some public information on this, too. There was a Northvolt employee who wrote a blog post in Swedish, but it got translated a while back, sort of laying out their view of the challenges. And this was at the heart of it as well. It seems like there were quite a few components of why this ended up being a challenge, this relationship between Wuxi Lead and and Northvolt. But I'll read you a quote from one of my friends and get your reaction on it. He said, "You need flexible, responsive equipment suppliers who want to work with you, preferably

• 25:08Shayle Kann?

  who speak your language. And then you need a focused team that is only trying to make one version of one product ramp in a first factory." And so it's sort of, there's a bunch of things embedded in there, right? It's like, was the was Wuxi Lead incentivized properly to learn alongside Northvolt and try to work out the kinks? Was there a language divide, which is the type of thing you don't think about often as being a real challenge? But but it turns out, given how hard it is to make batteries, actually, it does become a thing. And then there's a focus question all kind of embedded within there. Does that align more or less with sort of how you how you see that challenge?

• 25:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, although I would, I would, I would make the assumption that the, the reference to language there is, is an abstract concept of language. I don't, you know, I, there's obviously-

• 26:00Shayle Kann?

  No, I think it's literal, actually.

• 26:02Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, the, the, there is no Swedish battery equipment provider that provides all-

• 26:09Shayle Kann?

  Well, but that's a challenge, right?

• 26:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, it is.

• 26:12Shayle Kann?

  And maybe that language is English. People in Sweden speak good English. But, um, but the point being, like, I actually think it is a literal reference to there having been a language challenge. And, and to your point, right? If the thing, the primary thing that ended up being the struggle was not the provisioning of equipment, but getting it to work, you know, working out the kinks and workshopping it, like, that's, that's a nuanced thing. And I don't know, I can see how language actually does become a challenge there.

• 26:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, I, and also, you know, uh, culture. And, and I'm not talking about broad Chinese culture versus broad Swedish culture, but it's kind of the business culture in China. You know, if you think of what's been going on in China in the last 30 years, is everybody has been building enormous factories that make everything constantly, and they're doing it quickly, and then they're, and they're making it work. And everybody is, is essentially calibrated to that, that, that process and that focus, as he said. And then I think that, that there, there's also an element within China of, within Chinese business culture of promising the moon and delivering what you can, but everybody understood

• 27:25Speaker 04

  that in the first place that you were promising too much probably anyway. Um, let's call it the, the Elon Musk approach to, uh, to, uh, business communications. So I think when, for that to work, I mean, in, in, I've been involved in, in, in factory development that, um, where, where I've seen this firsthand, which is the, um, the, the equipment suppliers are embedded in that factory for between one and two years. And the factory owner is married to- To those people, they become the most critical people in the in the success of the company. And if you're not paying a hundred, just like in marriage, if you're not paying a hundred percent

• 28:09Speaker 04

  of your focus on making that relationship work, bad things happen. And I'm sure that that had something to do with it was was just, you know, it's people that working on different motivations, on different schedules, on different set of expectations on the two sides and not communicating. That's what, whether it was a language issue or a cultural issue or just bad management, they weren't communicating clearly from the reports that I've seen.

• 28:37Shayle Kann?

  I wonder what you think about the institutional knowledge challenge? That's another thing that I've I've heard a few times now where, you know, obviously there's not a ton of, there are not that many people in the world who really know how to make batteries at scale. Prior to Northvolt, very few of them were in Sweden, one would assume. And so they had to sort of import that institutional knowledge. And, you know, you can hope that your equipment supplier delivers some of it. But one point somebody made to me is, look, equipment suppliers actually don't know how to make batteries. They know how to operate their piece of equipment or pieces of equipment. The institutional knowledge on how to make batteries sits in the OEMs for the most part.

• 29:17Shayle Kann?

  And so you have to marry that experience in operating and in setting up and operating equipment with the bigger picture. As you said, it's 18 separate sub factories sort of combining together and working in perfect concert. So, I mean, we'll get to this in the question in a minute of what lessons we should and shouldn't take here. But how do you think about this challenge of like, if you're building a de novo giga scale battery facility, how do you, how do you get the institutional knowledge that you need such that you don't repeat mistakes that somebody else made?

• 29:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a really interesting point because keep in mind that until the Tesla Gigafactory was built, nobody, and that was back in 2014, 2015, when it was being built, nobody knew how to build a battery factory of this scale. There was no institutional knowledge. It had to be invented. And there definitely is some now, especially in China and in Korea. And we're building them in the US today. And there are other enormous factories being built in Europe also. It would be easy to criticize the Silicon Valley venture capital model and say, you know, oh, they were, they were, the make it till

• 30:32Speaker 04

  you fake it, fake it till you make it, approach doesn't work if you fail while you're faking it. But at some point, you have to invent that institutional knowledge. And that's okay. The problem is that the investors of the company have to interpret the goal and the focus of that company correctly. And if their goal and focus and their investors had pushed them very hard to get that one factory to work right, do anything you can to get that one factory to work right, and then we'll figure out everything else later,

• 31:15Speaker 04

  you know, I think it could have worked. But this applies to, I mean, think of the fusion industry. There's so many fusion startups that are collecting enormous amounts of investment, venture capital investment. And again, you definitely have to invent institutional knowledge. There is no such thing as a functioning, ongoing fusion reactor today. I think that the Silicon Valley mindset is probably the right way to do that, the right way to invest and to shepherd those companies, at least one or two of those companies, to success. But you have to, you have to keep things focused. When that, those amounts of money are involved, it's hard to do that.

• 32:00Shayle Kann?

  All right, so let's talk about the lessons here. I've seen so many articles since Northvolt announced, filed for bankruptcy, offering various lessons about what does this mean about everything from the venture capital model, as you said, to battery manufacturing outside Asia, et cetera, et cetera. Let's start with what you think the wrong lesson is, and then we can talk about what we think the right lesson is.

• 32:25Speaker 04

  I think the first, the one that I've heard repeatedly is, well, you can't build batteries in Europe, or in, outside of China, or anywhere except for China. And that is definitely not true. Europe has close to 100 gigawatt hours of battery manufacturing today. The US will, in the next few years, have close to 300 gigawatt hours. It is possible. Yes, the labor costs will be higher, probably, energy costs will be higher, the cost of capital will be higher. But all of that is, you know, that's, that's the nature of commerce, is it costs more to do things, but often it can be done better, and it can be done appropriately in, in Europe

• 33:10Speaker 04

  and in, in North America. That's, I think that's the, the most important misguided lesson to be learned. It is possible, and it is being done.

• 33:21Shayle Kann?

  Okay, and then, in your mind, what is the right lesson?

• 33:24Speaker 04

  Again, it goes, it goes to the, the venture capital model. And I think there's, there's so much to be, to be celebrated about the venture capital model, but when the, you know, the venture capital is high risk, high reward. And by high reward, you mean, in this case, their, their investors said, let's, you know, don't, don't be a 40 gigawatt hour battery company, be 150 gigawatt hour battery company. Build six factories at the same time, whatever it takes. And that's what I think was the fundamental problem.

• 34:04Shayle Kann?

  I won't disagree with you about what happened. I will say, I don't think that is inherent to the venture capital model. Like, I would separate out what Northvolt tried to do from, now, it is true, you know, in venture capital, as a venture capitalist, I'll defend my kind. Um, you know, our job is to, to take big swings, but that doesn't inherently mean we're trying to push companies to do too many things all at once, right? I think there's a, an alternate version of events wherein with the exact same investment and the same investors, Northvolt could have done the, the thing that you said would have made more sense, which seems like clearly in retrospect, the right thing, which is build the factory,

• 34:44Shayle Kann?

  get it working, prove it, and then scale from there. Do it again, get into another technology, et cetera, but build from a foundational base of we know how to make batteries. They clearly thought that they had that in hand much sooner than they actually did, and that gave them the confidence to branch out into a variety of things that distracted them and, you know, disperse their resources elsewhere. I don't think that's inherent to the venture capital model is what I'm saying. There's lots of companies that can raise that kind of capital and do the one thing right before really kicking off the bunch of things. For me, that's the right lesson. It's not, it's not about the venture capital model. It's about, in battery manufacturing in particular, this is true of lots of places, but it seems

• 35:26Shayle Kann?

  especially true. You know, the, the truism is that battery manufacturing is hard. It is, it seems to be. Um, and thus, if you're going to do something, the more novel it is, for whatever reason, either because it's novel technology, or because you're building the first ever giga factory in Sweden or something, focus, at least in the early days, seems to be the key component, that if you lose, you're just subject to a bunch of risk, right? And, and eventually, you know, as things started to go south for Northvolt, I think they tried to retrench back to that.

• 36:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I, I think so. That, you know, the, the, I was, I was also involved with a company called Better Place that raised 800 million back in like 2010, 2011.

• 36:17Shayle Kann?

  2010, yeah. And then like it went south in 2012 or something.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and it was, it was a very similar story where, you know, and, and I guess that's, I'm not, I'm not necessarily saying that the venture capital doesn't work. I'm saying at that, at those levels, it became, it, its weaknesses start to be exposed in terms of shareholder expectations and, and what means, what, what winning means. The other thing I would say about Northvolt is the, the, the executives and the current shareholders, I think that they have exited stage left, but that factory, I believe strongly, is going to be making batteries. Somebody else is gonna, is going to own it,

• 37:02Speaker 04

  and they are going to be making batteries and, and it's going to, you know, in, in the end, they'll, they'll say, yeah, poor, poor guys that, that lost their money on it. But in, in the end, they built a battery factory that will be, I think, producing batteries.

• 37:17Shayle Kann?

  Well, that's a good high note to end on. For, for this whole story, this whole saga, hopefully we'll get a Swedish giga factory operating at full capacity and making lithium ion batteries that go into vehicles and on the grid. Sam, thank you so much for the time as always and, and helping me walk through this, this story.

• 37:37Speaker 04

  All right. Thanks very much, Dale.

• 37:41Shayle Kann?

  Sam Jaffe is a principal at 1019 Technologies. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Prelude backs visionaries, accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at preludeventures.com. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf. Mixing by Roy Campanella and Sean Marquand. Theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacy is our executive editor. I'm Shayle Khan, and this is Catalyst.