Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: So my favorite part is teaching people, right? Primarily teaching people who are kind of new to the industry about the product. And that's why I love doing this kind of thing, right? Because people are always really eager to come and learn about this industry.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Welcome back to challenge accepted, our employee focused podcast. I'm your host, Anna Lee. And in today's episode, I'm joined by Michael Ray, a battery engineer here at Norfolk. He talks to us about his unique experience in the company, moving around in different teams, and his background in cell technology. If you're curious about getting your career started in the battery industry, then this episode is for you. Now on to the episode.
Welcome, Michael. Thank you for coming into the studio today.
[00:00:48] Speaker A: It's been a great morning so far and really nice and snowy outside, and I'm loving it. Really, really happy to be here today.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you for coming. So could you please just introduce yourself to the audience and what your role is at the company?
[00:01:00] Speaker A: So I've had a wild ride. I mean, Northfold itself has been such a crazy journey, right? We're kind of definitely in the scale up phase these days, but I feel like I came in right at the end of the startup phase, right as we were kind of doing that. And when that happens, you kind of take whatever hats that they hand to you and you just take it rolling, right. So I started out in the cell design team for one of our customer projects. Really a lot of fun. I learned a lot there. I was coming from a previous company in the United States making battery cells, and of course, then some research in university and stuff like that before that. So I had a little strong background, but I didn't have as much of a production background as I'd wanted to get at the previous company. So I was really excited, and I spent a lot of time down in production, kind of solving problems and finding things out and learning as much as I could. And I think spending all that time there, it kind of caught some people's attention. So then I was asked to take over leading what we call our r and D lab, which is the a sample production for those who are in the automotive industry. You'll know what that means. Many of you will not. Maybe. But it means, like, prototypes, right? It's like the prototype production. So it's like the early first stages of a new product coming out. And of course, we had other laboratory work going on there as well as we're investigating the battery cell materials, et cetera. So that was a really fun time. And then I spent a short time, kind of almost acting like an internal consultant for the quality team as a. It's a really cringey title. I didn't like it at all, but it was called cell expert. But I wouldn't consider myself an expert by any stretch compared to many others. But it was a lot of fun teaching the quality team about the product and how to solve problems related to the production. That was a really good time and good because I needed to take some parental leave as well. I needed something a little more flexible. I didn't want to continue with too high pressure for my team. And these days I'm leading a team of engineers who are doing the validation side we call, which is testing the cells after they come out of production and helping us understand how they're going to behave when we build them into the electric vehicle modules and systems. And that's been super fun as well. So I've got a really wide breadth of experience and at my previous company I also got experience directly working with customers and sales and cell design there as well. So it's just been a wild ride.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that's usually the story for most people at Norfolk is, oh, yeah, I started with this, but now I'm in a completely different area, or I'm in the same area, but in a completely different role.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Right.
[00:03:25] Speaker B: It's always just that journey that you have.
[00:03:27] Speaker A: Well, I came here to learn and I certainly have done that, and it's been an amazing opportunity to learn about so many things about, of course, the product, but definitely also about business and getting teams scaled up and teaching them, and it's just been amazing. We'll talk about that later.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: I was going to say, so why Norfolk? Because I know that you're not from Sweden, so how did you end up here?
[00:03:48] Speaker A: Definitely not. So I'm born and raised in Las Vegas in the United States, but I had a friend, so I was doing research at university on battery materials, of course, and we had, what do you call these, exchange programs for the PhD students. And one of them came and she was really excited and quite fun. But she was based, I think, in Yataburi, but I'm not 100% sure about that. Got to know her and then as time went on, she joined Northwolt really early, in the early stages, so I was kind of following her on LinkedIn before Northwolt really kind of hit the pr scene and everybody knew about them. She was kind of posting about what had been done and how she came.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: From Gothenburg to your university to my.
[00:04:29] Speaker A: University in the States. And then that's kind of how I kept in touch with her. So then she was kind of posting jobs.
When I saw one, I jumped right on it because she seemed like she was doing some exciting stuff. And I had already heard about this really great plan for the vertical integration strategy, which maybe you'll talk about in other forms. I won't get into it too much, but I thought it was a really great idea to kind of lower the carbon cost of the battery cells. And I think that's the way to introduce this product to the european market. Right.
In Europe, people are much more conscious of these types of people. Every single consumer knows what they're getting into when they buy this stuff. And so in Europe, you got to do it the right way. You can't cut any corners or sneak anything into the background. Right? Northworld is all about that. We don't cut corners. We're super transparent about where we're getting all of our materials and how we're producing it. And that is super perfect for this market. And it's been a lot of fun to be a part of this vision. And just the energy that everybody has here is just amazing. What I always say is that at Northwold, not everybody always agrees on everything, how to do everything, but we all know where we're going and so it doesn't really matter so much, right? We're just talking about possibilities and options. And that feeling of everybody going in the same direction has been what's made me super excited about my job from day one here.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: That's awesome. What do you think of Sweden so far?
[00:05:49] Speaker A: Oh, Sweden is fun. It's really great. I have three kids and so it's a great place to raise a family, that's for sure. And that was a big plus for me. I think Norfolk was the reason I came. But one of the reasons I'm staying is because it's such a great place for my family and for my kids. And we really got more than just a swedish experience here because Northwold is extremely diverse.
What's the last count?
[00:06:13] Speaker B: 119. I think we're at now.
[00:06:17] Speaker A: Everyone that we get to meet is an international experience for me and for my kids, and I really wanted them to have that. So it's a really amazing time.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: That's awesome to hear. I always get excited when I hear that people have a great experience. So what would you say? Because I know that I'm guessing that not a lot of people realize what goes into building a battery cell. And when they hear what you do, what do you think is the biggest myth that people have about your job and what you do?
[00:06:45] Speaker A: A lot of people don't think about this a lot. They're thinking about the end result. Right. The electric vehicle or something on the final end of what we make. So that might be part of it. Right. For one thing, they just kind of think that they're the same thing.
What we're building is the kind of the building blocks that go into that. Right. And they are kind of the fundamental component that drives. Wow. That was a pun I did not intend. But, yeah, that really makes an electric vehicle or other application possible. But more than that, I think people who are aware of them, they still kind of assume that they're similar to other electrical components. They're thinking of them maybe like semiconductor manufacturing or maybe like people who know a little bit about it, like a resistor or a capacitor or something like that, but it's really not.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: Are these different energy.
[00:07:30] Speaker A: Yeah, they're different electrical circuit components. Right. So for people who are aware of that kind of stuff, they assume that they're very similar to those.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:07:38] Speaker A: They're not. They're actually more like a tiny little chemical reactor. We're almost more like a human. Right. With a biological, complex medical history where everything that's happened to it in the past affects its ability to move forward in the future, and sometimes in good ways and sometimes in bad ways. Right. And so it's really more about that chemistry and the complex behavior going on inside the cell than it is about how it fits into the larger electrical system. And so that's what makes it a very exciting role for me. And, yeah, that's one thing people get a look at.
[00:08:12] Speaker B: You really broke that myth or that stereotype of what you were talking about. But what would you say is sort of, since you said that there are a lot of components and a lot of things that go into a little human or a little reactor. Like you were just saying. What do you think is the hardest part of that job?
[00:08:27] Speaker A: Oh, man, that's a super good question. I would say that the hardest part of getting the battery cell to work is the, how to say, uniformity of the material. Right.
We often kind of ignore these things in our day to day lives. We kind of just look around and we say, oh, that's a tree, and that's rock or a car. But when we look at a battery cell, we got to look on the micro scale, super, super small level. And even when things look like they're perfectly uniform, exactly the same. When you go to actually use it, tiny little variations can have a huge impact on its ability to perform. And so being able to think about things on that scale and make sure that the quality of our production is considering stuff that's too small for us to see, that can be very difficult to kind of get across and definitely to solve those problems. We have really great equipment and great teams doing it, but it's definitely not an easy job. And then, of course, at Northvolt, we have a particular kind of strategy where we're working with these really large oems. We call them original equipment manufacturers, the big players, right. Volvo and BMW and Volkswagen and other people as well. That can definitely create some incredible time pressures. Right. Most of our projects are being set based on quarterly earnings plans or whatever they call them by these companies. And so we have to just scramble to meet whatever it is that they can achieve to be able to get into the product that they need to make at a very specific date. So when we have these time pressures, there's not much we can do about them. So we just have to come up with amazing, creative solutions to be able to hit it. And that definitely is the hardest part. But again, everybody's pointed in the same direction, and so that definitely resolves itself.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: But it has sort of, like, double edged there. It's like one part is very hard, but the other part is very rewarding. Like you said, you get to come up with some pretty unique and fun solutions to problems that you really have to deal with right now.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah. It's definitely never boring, but it's also never, how do I say, the type of stress that you might imagine where everybody's starting to get frustrated. That doesn't happen as much because everybody knows what we're trying to achieve. And so it's just a bunch of brainstorming session after brainstorming session, how are we going to solve this problem? And when we come up with those solutions and implement them, it's very exciting.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: I was going to say that goes into my next question. What is your favorite part about what you do?
[00:10:35] Speaker A: Oh, man. So my favorite part is teaching people, right. Primarily teaching people who are kind of new to the industry about the product. And that's why I love doing this kind of thing, right. Because people are always really eager to come and learn about this industry. It's an exciting industry, a really big growth area, and it definitely is making a big impact on the world. And so everyone is excited, from business people down to engineers and technicians and those who every single person wants to learn, and I love feeding off that energy. Right. When I get to teach them about it, they bring me that energy, and then I have plenty of it to go around after that. So that's what I've always enjoyed the most, is kind of bringing people up to speed, coaching them, supporting them as they're working through technical details, but also learning the business and learning about how we work.
[00:11:20] Speaker B: Yeah, like you taught me about battery cells.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:23] Speaker B: So what inspires you to sort of work in this industry? What was it that sparked your interest into this field?
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Yeah. So I was extremely lucky. So some time ago, not going to specify when I was in college and I was a freshman and I was studying and I was selling insurance on the side, like basic car insurance kind of stuff, just to kind of make enough money to survive. Right. And I hated it. Right. I just am not that great of a salesperson, although in the United States, I'm not a great salesperson. But, yeah, I feel that I went up to my very first college professor, Dean Wheeler, shout out if he ever hears this, right? And I just said, I'm desperate. I don't want to sell insurance anymore. Is there anything that is. I was studying chemical engineering, so I said, is there anything related to anything more technical that I can actually get a job in and find out more about this instead? So he invited me to his office that Friday, which I thought was just to kind of give me advice, but I was super shocked when I showed up that Friday, and he had thought that he had said that he was offering me a job. So I was like, oh, great. So I worked in his battery materials research lab all the way through college, and it was an amazing opportunity to learn, and we had many different students come through to get their phds and stuff like that. And I helped them write their papers and do their experiments in the lab and just kind of really, how do I say? Plucky option to do whatever I wanted that was really helpful to the team. And not everyone has that kind of luck to get into an industry at the ground level like that with so much support. And I always tell people, I'm just trying to help you in the way that I was helped. Right. To get when they come into the industry.
[00:13:06] Speaker B: Plus, you also just took the chance and told your professor how you were feeling and then an opportunity.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: Oh, man, I was so nervous when I did that. But it turns out that it was worth it, right? And really just because he's a great guy who was really willing to put his neck out there, do you still keep touch somebody? Oh, yeah, definitely. I still reach out to each of his students as they're kind of transitioning from academia to industry and talk to them about what's going on. Maybe not every single one of them, but a few of them reach out to me.
[00:13:29] Speaker B: So fun. I love that. So if we circle back to Northolt and your role here, what does a typical day look like for you and your.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: So, yeah, so I said earlier that my favorite thing to do is teaching. So I try to find any chance I can to do that. Even though right now that's not my official role. Right. I did more of that when I was helping out the greenhouse team and developing the curriculum. But even as a manager for engineers, I still find lots of opportunity to kind of coach people through the fundamentals of the product and the process, and then also helping them relate to the other challenges relating to their life in general. So that's what my day looks like, is ideally many, many individual meetings with people, helping them understand what it is, problems they're facing with their project, their engineering work, and then just coaching them through it, helping them understand what are the tools that are available to you. Let's review a little bit about this component and how it works so that you can come up with a solution here. Right. And I love those things because they're doing all the hard work and all I have to do is talk them through it.
That's how my day goes these days, and I really enjoy it, but it's primarily. And if I can, and I always try to, I try to get out into the production site, walk the production line, see what's going on, usually with another person that I can kind of talk through it, help them understand this is why we're doing this here. Oh, look at that. That can be a problem. We need to make sure that we're careful about this area. Those experiences are really exciting for me. So I've kind of built my job around those because that's what I like to mean.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: I think it's also worth clarifying that you work at Norfolk Labs, which is investros, and I've mentioned this before as well. But I think it's good to say again that basically when you say you're walking through production lines, it's these very small, cute production lines compared to the scale, comparatively.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: They don't feel cute when you're walking through them. But then you go up to the gigafactory. Exactly up in chileftio and oh my goodness, they're so overwhelming. I think I've gotten lost every time I visit because it's just this massive site and still obviously not finished. I mean, a lot of it is finished, but different phases are still going on, and so there's construction surrounding everything, and then you get into the site and it's massive and many, many different production lines all at once, and it's super overwhelming and a lot of.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: But I mean, that's the whole reason for labs being the way it is, is that it's an r and D center, so you need smaller spaces and sort of a more efficient research and development sort of space to be able to and digestible.
[00:15:50] Speaker A: It's not so overwhelming. You can actually go there and see each process one at a time and learn about it, rather than just seeing dozens of them and being like, what's happening?
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: So it's definitely a great place to learn.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: So are there any challenges that you might be facing? It might have been something that you had during the year.
[00:16:09] Speaker A: Yeah, good question. I think I mentioned before, Northwolt really has transitioned away from being a startup, and now we're in a scale up organization, and because of that, we're kind of starting to have to establish the normal things you have at a company, like the bureaucracy and the norms and the plans about who does what and how do they do it. Right. And I really enjoy that, actually, maybe for some people that sounds boring, but for me, it's really exciting to be able to say, okay, you're in this role, how do you make it as efficient as possible? How do you understand your contribution? Track it, improve it, make it better. Right?
[00:16:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: And so the challenges that we're facing right now is that that needs to be done for everyone, and so we all need to be on the same page there. We're kind of constantly discussing it, at least for me, with the other managers. And so the challenge there is just making sure that we're all on the same team, but at the same time not losing that kind of agile and super responsive way that we were when we were at a startup mentality. And so we kind of go forward and then we pull back and we go forward and we pull back and we kind of make sure we hit that right target. Fortunately, we have a great executive team who's kind of guiding the level that we should be hitting, but it's not always easy to do exactly what the plan is. So that's definitely the challenge.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: You're building everything from scratch, so, I mean, it's bound to be a challenge.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: Right. And I think I mentioned before about the teaching. Right. So every single time you implement something like that, it requires a lot of training and understanding, both of how to do your individual job, but also about the product and about the process. People need to understand many layers, the technical side as well as the whole business jargon. I have this job and you have that one all at the same time. So it's a lot of training, a lot of teaching and coaching people into it.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: Would you say that you learn new things every day?
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Yeah, loaded question, but absolutely, of course. And I think I mentioned this before.
[00:17:49] Speaker B: Right.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: The best part about my journey in Northworld is I've gotten to learn so many different areas, so many different things. The more important part about that, though, is because the culture is a place where I feel, I feel at least I think most people do. Safe to kind of explore, to ask questions, to take a calculated risk, to be able to say, can we find a creative solution to this? Can we implement something that can actually make a difference for our customer or for the project or whatever it happens to be? And just going back, I would say it again, everyone is pointed in the same direction. And so I feel like I can always reach out to the person next to me and say, I don't quite understand your area, your particular expertise. Could you spend a few minutes with me explaining it? And never have I had somebody be like, no. Right. They're always super happy to spend a little extra time to help me understand where they're coming from, where their experience has been. And so, yeah, I get to learn new things every day. And again, I mentioned this before, but the incredible diversity we have at Northfold means that I get to learn about that from people with very different cultural backgrounds and experiences, which has been amazing.
[00:18:50] Speaker B: Super, super fun because it's not only sort of their background or something that you might not be familiar with, it might also be that they might have a similar background, but what they've done before has been different. They've done it in a different way. And that in itself, you're learning new ways or different ways of doing things.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: You would think it would be very similar if you have like, okay, I went to school, I had this particular degree, and then I went into the same role, but it's not the same at all. And I'm coming from a very aggressive culture with a particular way of communicating. And I've been learning all these different communication styles, and I love it. It's really been exciting to be able to learn about different people in the way that they want to be understood.
[00:19:29] Speaker B: Has there been a moment where you've been extra proud of you and your team and what you've been able to accomplish?
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Gosh, I'm excited to talk about this one. Yeah, absolutely. I will say that my time at the r and D lab, right, this was the prototype production we mentioned earlier. I was asked to kind of take. This team had really great people leading it before me, but few of the leaders kind of all left at once. Right? So we were left with a bunch of people who hadn't had a lot of leadership experience yet, myself included. I was learning as well, but it was an incredibly diverse team with lots of different viewpoints and everyone there, because it was this prototype lab, had gotten their hands dirty with the product, knew exactly what we were doing and why we were doing it. And because of that, we just gave people the roles they needed to build the team and get it up and running at the same time. We had this insane plan to build a new r and D center. We call that R and D 2.0. I'm not sure when 3.0 or 4.0 is ever going to be. It's a flexible kind of production space where we can move equipment in and out and try new form factors and new processing steps. It's an amazing place. It's about a 15,000 square meter site, which meant that we had to prepare three of these new flexible style production lines in order to get it off the ground. And that was insanity, right? At the same time, we also needed to increase our output of the current production prototypes that we were making and the quality of those prototypes. So all at the same time, this new facility with three new production lines improve the ones we have and get the quality better. And so it was including things like not just products, but also like our laboratory analysis, like tearing down a cell and analyzing how it's going to look on the inside and behave, right? So our entire leadership team was completely new to it, and most were new the industry. But we adapted, we grew, we figured it out together, really had nothing to do with me. They were just great people. And then in less than a year and a half, we were able to double the output of five of our products. While we continued to improve the quality, we generated, key lessons that we're able to pass on to the scaled production, which we call b sample and c sample. C sample is the gigafactory, b sample is the. We're just going to create cells that can go into the very first test vehicles and stuff like that. Right. And then we commissioned the two new production lines. Third one still kind of pending. But I think the majority of that success is due to the inherent diversity of that team and the trust that we all had because we'd all kind of worked on the ground together before any of us had been given the opportunity to lead these teams. So we were all learning about leadership, we were all learning about developing people, but we were also a really tight knit team with lots of opportunity to figure things out. And I think this is a testament to that kind of new adage in management that says that a diverse team ends up being a better performer, even if we have a little rougher time getting off the ground. And this was a really good example of that. And those people, all those people who were on my team are still leading teams all across Northfold and have kind of spread out doing amazing work ever since we left. And so I absolutely can never stop bragging about them and what they achieved.
[00:22:20] Speaker B: That's fantastic. I love hearing that, especially when you hear of diverse teams that are struggling, you also then forget that, like you said, those are also some of the best performing teams because it might take them a little longer, but they can get so many good ideas because they have so many different types of people.
[00:22:41] Speaker A: And they were empowered knowledge because there was no one else. We had to make our own decisions and kind of be a little scrappy and able to solve our own problems. And because of that, the diversity was able to kind of blossom as a useful thing rather than getting in the way of some sort of exactly, like, bigger organization plans or something like that. Right? So it was really fun.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Nice. Okay, so to round this episode off, I would like for you to share a sort of personal anecdote or story with the listeners.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: Okay. So a little bit of insight into me and kind of how I got into being interested in this type of work, right? So when I was a teenager, I very luckily was able to grow up next to my grandparents all my life back in Las Vegas. And so I worked as kind of like a handyman and general laborer for my grandfather. He was an older man, for sure. He was a child of the depression, so he liked to get up before five every morning and just do whatever he wanted to do, which usually meant building stuff out of scraps and doing chores that nobody really felt needed to be done, but everybody wanted to help him anyway. He just hated paying professionals to do their jobs, which I'm definitely a big fan of, but he definitely wasn't. So he thought he should be able to do everything himself again comes from that generation, at least in the United States at the time. Right? He had a pool that he'd built, kind of himself, mostly with, like, salvaged plumbing and pumps. And he had borrowed a backhoe from someone to dig it out. It was insane. And recently, he'd installed some solar heating panels because he liked the water to be extremely warm so that my grandma and her friends could do their water aerobics every morning. So it was 90 degrees fahrenheit, which, sorry for the american temperature reference, but I spent a couple of summers and many, many days after school trying to take this just ramshackle equipment and make it work right? And so this is where I started to fall in love with the idea of engineering, of solving these problems and getting things streamlined and the efficiency up. And by the time I was done, I'd gone from, like, twelve to 15 hours a week spent on this whole thing to just a couple of hours a week to kind of maintain things and balance chemicals and get everything under control. And so this is before I did anything at all in the real world, right? But it was an amazing opportunity for me to solve problems on my own, and that's always what's been driving me. And now going into battery cells, I studied chemical engineering, which led me to batteries. And now I'm here, and it all just kind of feels like the same story. Optimizing systems, getting things more efficient at the same time, helping people. And so it's been a lot of fun. And I think everything I still do today is based on the same principles I learned fixing that silly pool back when I was a teenager.
[00:25:16] Speaker B: That's awesome. Thank you for telling that story. Okay. Thank you so much, Michael, for coming into the studio. And thank you for coming in and talking to me. Some people think this is a little daunting, so I'm glad that you came in and talked to me. Anyways, please go listen to Michael's episode in the loop about battery cells. Thank you guys for listening, and I hope that you enjoy this episode as much as I did.
