Impulse Labs' Sam D'Amico on tariff-proof stove strategy, battery grid play, and plans to license tech to appliance OEMs

with you guys live yeah yeah I'm so glad to hear uh We've I think we featured your post before we've talked about you we've always said that it's uh it's interesting that I feel like in some ways impulse is kind of like a dividend of Ander roll it's not andal for stove but it's something that like people didn't think that you could start a new stove startup in a few years ago and now you can and so uh give us the pitch so basically for context um though I think I overheard you guys talking about me before but basically we make a stove that's about 60 times seven times faster at boiling water than most other stoves so like you can boil like 10 cups of water in like a minute and a half or something crazy so like your mac and cheese is immediate um but then it also lets you set an exact temperature sort of like an oven so it's like instead of low medium and high you can turn our like cool magnetic knob to an exact number and you don't get smoke you can like fry with seed oil without seed oils for all your esteemed health conscious followers lot ofans um and you can buy it right now at impulse lives.

com we have about 12 weeks that's amazing and you can lock in you know you know current pricing at that point I I'll joke about that later cool and uh and and and just uh like the technological innovation here is that there's like a massive battery pack a massive battery inside so basically it's like value prop is you get this cool stove and it has all these capabil you you can't get in an inter stove it's like a a fundamental leap in performance but it wedges a battery into your house cool and once we install enough of these we actually deploy a decentralized battery Network kind of across the grid and you can actually get like more distribution of batteries than like Tesla power wall relatively straightforwardly if you essentially intercept the like 55 million major appliances sold every year in the United States so like there's been like 400,000 total power wall installs in the US and Canada apparently um but like there's always an appliance installation truck on your block like every couple days so like it's it's actually this really interesting thing of um you can actually deploy a crap ton of battery storage that way yeah so that's that's the big Vision right yeah and then we've actually figured out how to get the distribution unlock so one is you can buy the stove at impuls labs.

com it's awesome but we're also um partnering with a bunch of Major Appliance oems to get the tech in there and so that means that you can go to some random Appliance showroom like Joe and Bob's appliances buy a brand you already know and it might come with impulse inside and so starting to roll that out over next year are you thinking about even I'm sure you've thought about this but I'm curious if you're doing it partnering with people that are building homes because that's a big yeah so it turns out interest rates being high means that that's a little less like like high volume it turns out that like you want to intercept the like you want to intercept like where expensive appliances are made to start because you you you're putting a battery in it and like we managed to push the battery cost down substantially but it's it's still something where it's like there's an item that's not in the bomb of a normal stove um and so you kind of want to start highend very similar to Tesla and all other stuff but then where the high-end Appliance is sold kind of diffusely so getting into these Brands um having a standout brand of our own but then also getting into brands that people are already buying lots of um is is is is the way to do that and like I then have to talk to like 10 different oems versus thousands of developers basically it's actually and then and then you monetize the battery the same way either way like once the battery's on once the thing is in the batter is under our software control and so we can sell that battery to utility we can rent that battery to utilities um for grid services and stuff like that so we get access to revenue either way awesome wait talk more talk more about that like talk about the grid integration and and and you know getting that extra leverage and specifically recurring Revenue I mean is the is the base is the base value prop even Beyond like selling energy back to the grid is it is it more just like if the power goes down in my neighborhood this stove could potentially power my house for a couple hours a day what am I thinking the stove itself works and it's got an inverter so it can share power with the rest of your house so if you've got like whole home backup it will support that whole home backup so it'll add like it's like a quarter of a power wall basically and so the vision is once we've rolled this out to multiple Appliance categories and multiple Brands like you could just turn this thing on and you'll have like you won't have to have a power wall you'll just have this Tech how do uh I love the design of the product how do you think about making smart Tech uh stupidly sort of easy to use right I have this I I got a uh yeah I need an app on my phone I'm not the the other day have an app no so the other day the other day I I walk into my uh bedroom and I and I go to like raise the the blinds and it doesn't work and I ask my wife about it and she's like oh yeah we need to charge the blinds I'm like what do you mean and I I look up there like a court I got to like charge it once a year I'm like give me a break I I don't want to think about charging my blinds it's hard enough keeping this thing charged right uh so I think like we're we're entering into like there was like the last 10 years have been like the smart home era yeah but everything going back yeah we need to get smarter but also Dumber at the same time we've been in the midwit the midwit home era it's the midwit home it's the midw home it's the midw home it's like um it's it's like okay does your smart home require someone who's like an IT expert to set it up and then don't want to tou anything because you'll like disconnect your light switch and then by the way like Google home still doesn't have an llm to it and it still doesn't know how to set an alarm properly and like if I ask it to play a certain piece of content it thinks it I mispronounced it even if I always request that content like it is actually crazy how bad this stuff is yeah it's wild but what we realized was like okay people hate these touch panels on the stoves and stuff like that so we we we figured out a way to do knobs where like they're magnetic and removable so you can clean all the gunk underneath them oh that's cool if um so so that was prettyy cool but then um basically the UI is really simple it's like you it's it's the same as like a gas stove it's like you basically push in and twist and you get you get heat like it's not like any sort of yeah any of crazy it's like it's like and then the smart feature we realized was make it hold temperature accurately so instead of like you can say low medium high we still have that but like you also can say 315 degrees and then like your eggs come out exactly the same every day um and the butter doesn't burn maybe it lightly Browns if you don't want the bottom of the egg to Brown you can set a lower temperature but like basically we just give you like direct control over the thing that people actually want to do which is not playback a smart recipe and like be on Rails with New York Times cooking it's like no I just want to be able to do the thing that good chefs are able to do by like hovering the pan over the burner and like doing all the right motions that they how do you think about uh what's your vision for humanoids in the home because I it's not hard to imagine you know my my humanoid going grabbing the steak out of the fridge slamming it on the impulse and then you know just like you know doing that but but maybe they don't even need to touch the knobs right if you just have the integration like they're just you don't really have to touch the knobs with ar thing either because you just turn it on once and then it's just like it's just like at the temperature you don't have to mess with it but like I realized that the number one Automation in cooking was actually just holding temperature consistently on a on a pan and if you can do that you elevate a midwit cook to a decent cook and so do that and then that's that's kind of the 8020 of that's the 820 of kitchen automation like I I cook at the office I made some like crazy bra thing and it was like super simple um I made rice without a rice cooker like you don't even need these accessories do you have a rule with your team where it's like you can't order out like you have to use the product every day at lunch yeah I I got I got to tell everyone that the tariffs are you know cutting into the lunch budget now oh yeah yeah let's talk about the tariffs and your supply chain I'm sure you're impacted it's impossible not to be and and one one thing I'll with is like we're we're in an interesting space because all of our competitors are also impacted so like basically even in the us-made appliances like so if you go to like a whirpool factory all the circuit boards in there are actually like made by like German or Chinese companies and so or a German company in China in many cases so it's like basically if you tear down any induction stove you pretty much like see Chinese and German components inside even if it's made in the US and so for that reason it's like okay we're we're building our stuff overseas we're going to figure out hey what the lowest tariff regime is you know make it it Vatican City or whatever whatever whatever whatever works hopefully blessed by the pope yes yeah yeah we we can commiserate over our Italian Heritage but um but the uh our shared Italian Heritage but basically um but basically the point is like everyone's going to be impacted because inputs are impacted so like even if I go in if I build a factory in in let in let's call it like Phoenix Arizona um I'm not like my Subs suppliers have haven't on shored yet in volume like an example is like I'm like I'm an investor in hadrien like hadrien like does not have enough CNC machines to make all the world's iPhones yet for for instance like it would take them it would take them a second I I I'll I'll I'll I'll overestimate I I'll I'll be optimiz here it'll take them at least a second to uh to uh to to get that capacity up and running and this is going to happen across the board so like the lesson from the last wave of tariffs was Vietnam um basically Vietnam was this like kind of quotequote pole country that now is seeing like 45 plus% tariffs or whatever but Vietnam was the tariffs were only on China um there was a lot of Chinese manufacturers that just basically just drove across the border and set up a factory and all the all all the engineering staff Chinese like they're just flying in it's kind of like two-hour flight one hour flight situation from Shenzhen but effectively it's a Chinese run factory um now to get them made in Vietnam you had to actually get make some of the components there um but what this meant was all of the large format injection molding machines because what did people mov there first televisions um they moved all the T because like $600 TVs and stuff like that they moved them there but that meant all large format molding machines are just completely occupied and so like if we want plastic parts like our like induction coil assembly or something like that want to do that in Vietnam we probably couldn't find the machine we'd have to import that part from China regardless um because the machine would be occupied and then there's a back order of those machines and like all this other stuff so it ended up like even to get to this point where a ton of consumer electronics from like Samsung LG meta Etc moved to Vietnam it took like six year or five or six years wow from when those tariffs kicked off and so if you want like a preview of what like us reshoring would look like it's going to be something of that nature or prices are just going to go up a bit and people want to put it in the put it in the line I'm want to check out so like weirdly enough it's like we're insulated from this a little bit by making a high ticket item that's cool um and like maybe we'll get permission to raise prices by by other folks or whatever I don't want to be the leader in that space because I think that that would stick my neck out but it's something where and then additionally like as a component supplier to all these Appliance oems where we actually make our money in software and recurring revenue from the battery storage we're very insulated in that respect of the business um but it's something where like I had kind of a reaction to this being like it would be really cool if uh I I would have a different approach to reshoring Manufacturing in the US and it would be more around like making it legal to build a factory in San Francisco again and stuff like and stuff or the B the San Francisco Bay area again without getting like Angry nimes on your your ass um or having to build a tent in the parking lot like Elon did like five times uh I I me El's the only guy who did it because you have to basically operate in this like legal gray area yeah yeah yeah uh where else are you seeing the most opportunity in home appliances or just like tech for the home uh ovens seem adjacent I don't know what you we can do that with the battery really well you think so that's fun uh anything else come to mind yeah so I mean I think there's actually there's some interesting the hom Tech and the humanoids come to mind is like I think just making a laundry machine that folds stuff at the end would be sick that' be amazing people would spend like five grand on a laundry machine if it did that totally yeah it's crazy you would basically repic the whole like laundry Market if you you like I think and I think the tech for that is going to exist like next year yeah I think you just spawned like five YC companies with that yeah yeah they can go license P like Pi's models or whatever um yeah but I'm excited for that that that sounds amazing yeah but so so you can do that um we're we're actually thinking like I want to be the index startup for anything with a power cord effectively so anything with a power cord realize that like most appliances are used intermittently and even within that intermittent use they're not used at full power like you're you're not like blasting a turkey fryer level of power which we can do we can actually fry a turkey indoors on our thing um but you're not even when you're frying a turkey you don't need full power all the time you just need oil and so um and so I'm be able to blow dry my hair in two seconds and it's just like there's a problem with like maximum temperatures and you know you don't want to burn your hair and stuff like that um they've tried it they've tried it they tried it but yeah but basic basically I I I think that there's this play where you can essentially realize that energy is used super intermittently but the greatest size for Peak use all the way around I think power companies had really good explainers on a bunch of these things as well but basically we solve a similar set of issues kind of like even at the more hyper local level than even at the home panel or something like that sure sure but um it turns out you can basically any device that kind of has like high peak low average draw shove a battery in it and have an inverter in it so when the device is not active it's able to share the battery with the rest of the building so that's the vision get that into as many devices as possible turns out stoves are a kind of Juicy Target to start and then then go from there and why don't you just drop the link one more time for the fans who want to pick one up where do they gool labs.

com and if you order it now um it ships in like I think it'll ship like early summer and we just got most of our compliance shts all like officially granted and the rest of them should come very like momentarily so it's legal to install in your house as well which is exciting fantastic well thanks so much for stopping byting thanks for hosting I'll be around for peanut gallery on tariffs and trade and all sort stuff whenever you want so fantastic that'd be great you you got you're a Tak Smith I can tell a takes Smith that sounds terrible okay I no it's a good thing it's a good thing uh you got good takes ready to fire them off yeah we need to slap an Impulse we're getting a new studio soon you just put the stove in the middle and you guys can do some hot pot or something it'll work yeah yeah I just want to be uh yeah eating uh steak all day long throughout the show that's my future for sure do let me know if you want one down in La I can yeah yeah yeah yeah we'll figure it out awesome awesome well thanks so much Sam great to talk to you we'll see you soon and we got Scott woo from cognition coming in uh to the Studio he's not here yet but I did get an interesting question for him I posted tune in to TBN today at 1:45 Pacific for our interview with Scott woo if you have any extreme uh extremely complicated math problems you want him to do in his head leave it in the comments and we got one um someone said Aaron uh no no no no that that that was more of a joke uh uh Brian Shia says ask him if he really did