Can you design the world's most powerful stove and secretly add 1.4 terawatt hours of battery power to the grid? Impulse Labs thinks so.

Episode 28 of S³ and our 2nd ever podcast interview features Impulse Labs with Founder and CEO Sam D’Amico.

From Oculus VR to Founding

I love Sam as a founder, here’s why:

• He’s got a great technical background: Stanford Solar Car team, worked at Oculus

• He’s got a great 1st principles way of looking at the world, most things are a question or interesting problem to him!

• He doesn’t fall trap to what’s in vogue: He has his own takes on deep tech founding, supply chain, and his master plan.

Stoves suck, Impulse’s is amazing

I highly recommend you listen to this bit from the episode where Sam dunks on every other kind of stove for around 2 minutes. From old design to new and bad design to health risks, stoves haven’t ever been a great feat of engineering.

The Impulse stove on the other hand is amazing

• It’s an induction stove. With its novel idea of putting a battery inside of it, you can supercharge its use and boil 1L of water in 40 seconds… No other stove on the planet can do that.

• They’ve built accurate temperature sensors into the stove that allow you to have a level of heat control never before possible on a stove.

• It’s got a clean UI with incredibly cool features.

• Its nobs are great. Yes, I’m calling out well-designed, non-electrically required nobs. Beyond that, you can remove them and clean their surface easily. It’s really satisfying.

• It works on a normal 120V outlet! You don’t need to do any extraneous installation steps like a normal consumer appliance product.

The Impulse Master Plan

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know this was the master plan when I showed up to film at Impulse. My jaw dropped twice while filming. Once, when they boiled water in less than 40 seconds — I made them do it twice more, it is truly magical to behold. Twice, when I learned about their master plan:

Make incredible consumer appliance products (not only a stove) that all have batteries which in aggregate can compete with the likes of a Tesla power wall and can provide grid support.

Read that again. That is a BRILLIANT master plan. It hinges on great product design, which they have proven in my eyes with their stove. It requires them to build a ton of their products quickly which they have a very realistic and scaled take on. It’s a plan that, in my opinion, will be meaningful to achieve and is more realistic and positively impactful than many other master plans.

Thanks to Sam and Deana for working with me to get this ready for release in typical S³ fashion, I really appreciate it.

Thank you for reading, watching, and supporting. Keep on building the future.

— Jason