Our Culture
Our Values
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.
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.
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.
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
I n 1962, the world’s first computer game Spacewar! was developed, it had very primitive graphics. Now 60 years later, we have video games with sophisticated graphics that hundreds of millions of people around the world can play together. Assuming similar rate of progress, one day we will have simulations that are indistinguishable from reality. We have a chance to develop a super intelligence system to simulate our batteries. Safety, quality and cost are big burdens in the battery industry. We cannot and don’t need to compete with the established players in a race to the bottom in cost, we can implement new technologies such as artificial intelligence and blockchain to guarantee safety and develop entirely new business models. The fundamental fabric of our industry is being disrupted. Throw away everything we know, we are entering Battery Metaverse.
One means elemental. We break things into elemental building blocks governed by laws of physics, and we cut through noises and solve real fundamental issues. One also means synergy. We are one group of people from different parts of the world, SES Boston HQ, Shanghai Giga and SES Korea work as one to achieve one goal. Deliver world’s first commercial Li-Metal battery to automakers, and in the process build a super intelligence system that will fundamentally change the future of electric transportation.
