Shaping Seattle | Max and Rami discuss Energy, Climate Change and Startup Leadership
Tags: Energy, Startup, Natural Gas, Climate Change, Decarbonization

Shaping Seattle | Max and Rami discuss Energy, Climate Change and Startup Leadership Seattleshapers Mar 19·23 min read

Max Mankin: [00:00:00] Natural gas burns at something like 1500 degrees Celsius. But you heat your home, maybe at 30 degrees Celsius. There’s a huge amount of energy that is effectively thrown away and we like to joke that this is a big thermodynamic tragedy on the order of Shakespeare, where you take really valuable heat at 1500 degrees and you trash it and bring it down to 30 degrees where it can’t do anything except heat air.

[Shaping Seattle is a podcast that highlights the work of Seattle Shapers and other local impact leaders in the greater Seattle area. In our fourth episode of Shaping Seattle, our very own Max Mankin and Rami Sayar talk energy, climate change, and startup leadership.

Max Mankin is the co-founder and CTO of Modern Electron, an energy technology startup in Seattle working to decarbonize home energy use. He has a decade of experience building and leading teams, designing and characterizing semiconductors and energy systems. Max earned a BS with honors in chemistry from Brown University and a PhD in physical chemistry from Harvard University, where he held fellowships from the Hertz and National Science Foundations. Max is an inventor on a few dozen patents pending and granted. His accolades include one of Inc. Magazine’s most brilliant entrepreneurs under 30 (2017) and Forbes 30 Under 30 (2016). Find him on Modern Electron.

The host, Rami Sayar, is a technologist exploring the intersection of design, startups, and the web. He is currently shipping new machine learning-powered user experiences to millions of visitors at Microsoft Bing. He is also an elder shaper who has been part of the Montreal, New York City, and Seattle hubs. Find him on his website.]

Episode 4 | Energy, Climate Change and Startup Leadership (Recorded: September 27th, 2020)

Rami Sayar: [00:00:40] Hello Max, welcome to the podcast. I’m really excited to have you here. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself? I’m very excited to share your background with our listeners.

Max Mankin: [00:00:50] Thank you. And I’m excited to be here. So my name is Max Mankin and I am the Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of a startup in the Seattle area called Modern Electron. And what we’re working on is decarbonizing home energy use, which it turns out contributes to about 10% of greenhouse gas emissions throughout the high-income world.

I have a deep, technology and science background. I got into it, initially by majoring in chemistry and material science. And then I did a PhD in Physical Chemistry and Materials, and around year three of my PhD. I started thinking a lot about what I wanted to do with my life and what kind of impact I wanted to have after I got out of school. I’d been on the professor track for a long time. And after thinking deeply about it and talking to lots of people, I realized that’s probably not for me. So I started exploring options and, I did a whole bunch of introspection about, what makes me tick? What makes me excited to wake up every day in the morning, ended up through a series of conversations, ended up being recruited, to be an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at a deep tech incubator out in the Seattle area and it was out of that, that Modern Electron was created.

Rami Sayar: [00:02:18] Can you tell us a little bit more about Modern Electron? You mentioned that it’s, in the home energy space. Tell us more.

Max Mankin: [00:02:24] Yeah. So Modern Electron is a team of about 25 and we’re building a new type of technology that makes home heating a whole lot more efficient and cost-effective. So it turns out in the United States, Canada, Europe, and significant parts of Asia about 80% of the energy used in these homes is for space heating. So think heating up your living room on a cold day or for water heating. So like when you turn on the shower, you need hot water.

And typically a lot of these homes use natural gas. So you just burn natural gas and then use the heat from that to heat up your rooms or your water. We have a new technology that transforms typical gas heating appliances into small power plants. So every time they turn on, in addition to producing heat, they also produce electricity.

And so this electricity then offsets what you buy from the utility grid and saves you hundreds of dollars per year on your utility bills. And at the same time, offsets your carbon emissions from your home.

Rami Sayar: [00:03:38] I grew up in Montreal, Canada and, the heating bill, especially in the winter was probably my dad’s biggest complaint. You can imagine it gets pretty cold in Montreal. We get quite a bit of snowfall and that snowfall and cold weather really increases the heating bill of most Montrealers. So a lot of Montrealer’s invest a lot of time in sealing their windows and improving the structure of their homes. And the interesting thing that I remember growing up is boiling water for showers, for all the things that we need water for was very expensive. So would you with your products be able to help make that more efficient? Especially in places like Quebec, where we are constantly heating water to go use our showers.

Max Mankin: [00:04:24] Yeah, that’s the general idea. The Northeast United States and that the sort of South Southeast part of Canada is a great case study. So about half people there heat their homes with natural gas. And what kind of heating did you have in your

Rami Sayar: [00:04:41] I had electric, but I’m curious, can we use the same technology to switch to natural gas. I knew of some people that had geothermal heating that kind of helps supplement the usage from the electrical grid. So tell me a little bit more about the technology. Can we use it in all these different places?

Max Mankin: [00:04:58] So the technology is best suited for use with natural gas. It would not really work with electric heating, or geothermal. So by the way, electric heating is probably why your bill was so expensive. It’s very expensive and fairly inefficient compared to other forms of heating.

You know, bigger picture. The world is slowly decarbonizing and the EU and Japan are really leading the way on this. And the US is following Canada following. But generally people are decarbonizing. The challenge is that 80% of our primary energy still comes from fossil fuels. Despite decades of exponential growth of renewables, that still only comprises something like a few percent of our primary energy source.

So for better or worse, natural gas will be around for a long time. And we view this as a way to continue using natural gas and make it a lot more environmentally friendly and save people money at the same time. You wouldn’t necessarily want to go backwards from geothermal to natural gas.

I think that would be poor for the environment and it turns out in a place like Quebec. There’s a lot of hydroelectric. And so what that means is that the carbon dioxide intensity of electricity generation in Quebec is fairly low. So in that sense, even though you may be heating with electricity, the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of electricity per kilowatt hour might be lower than burning natural gas for the same amount of heat even if it is a little bit more efficient.

There was a lot of technical mumbo jumbo there. Sorry, I can, we can back off that if you want.

Rami Sayar: [00:06:43] Oh, no, absolutely. I love the technical aspects of all this stuff. And actually, I want to ask you a little bit more for those of us that are having a hard time imagining what is this product? How would you describe it? Is it like a black box or is it piping? What is it exactly?

Max Mankin: [00:06:58] So imagine going to buy a furnace. When yours breaks and you have two choices, you see one on the left that has a typical brand name. And then you see one on the right that has our brand name. And they look the same, except ours says saves you $200 per year. Which one would you choose? So ultimately what my company is building is a specific technology that goes inside the combustion chamber of the furnace. So it actually sits directly between the flame and what’s called a heat exchanger, which passes heat from the flame into heating for you. And so you don’t see it as an outside user of the appliance.

it’s in there working every time the appliance turns on.

Rami Sayar: [00:07:46] You’re rendering that furnace a lot more efficient with your technology, by capturing energy that may be wasted and converting it into electricity.

Max Mankin: [00:07:56] Yeah, that’s right. So to give you some sense of this natural gas burns at something like 1500 degrees Celsius. But you heat your home, maybe at 30 degrees Celsius. There’s a huge amount of energy that is effectively thrown away and we like to joke that this is a big thermodynamic tragedy on the order of Shakespeare, where you take really valuable heat at 1500 degrees and you trash it and bring it down to 30 degrees where it can’t do anything except heat air. So in that sense, this is an opportunity really, to more efficiently use the energy that’s in that fuel to generate both electricity and heat instead of just heat.

Rami Sayar: [00:08:43] If I was trying to install this into my home, what are the steps that I would have to do so I can take advantage of this electricity.

Max Mankin: [00:08:49] Yeah, so effectively you have to call your HVAC technician, and, and they’ll install it for you. Oftentimes consumers don’t actually do the installation or have much of a choice it turns out when they’re installing their appliances. But the install looks effectively the same as a normal furnace with one extra electrical hookup in this case, because you’re producing electricity, in addition to heat, but otherwise everything is plug and play and swappable with existing appliances.

Rami Sayar: [00:09:20] So this is pretty exciting technology, right? Because you’re finding ways to take inefficiencies that are out there in home eating and converting them to electricity that could be useful and helps most homeowners save on their electricity bill.

Now, in terms of the environmental impact of that, it’s I can imagine it’s pretty tremendous, but you probably have some numbers or you’ve made some calculations to tell us how: if everyone just installed these Modern Electronic furnaces, how much would the planet be improved in terms of CO2 emissions

Max Mankin: [00:09:51] So worldwide, there are about 300 million people or 300 million homes that heat with natural gas and, each one of these appliances, depending on where you live can avoid up to about a ton of CO2 emissions per year. So when you multiply that out, it turns out you’re at a good fraction of a gigaton of CO2 avoided per year. So that would be a huge dent, positive dent in the world. if we could pull it off.

Rami Sayar: [00:10:22] Do you believe there will come a time when we will move away from natural gas as the main fuel that we use to heat our homes and what would Modern Electron do at that point?

Max Mankin: [00:10:34] We get that question a lot, actually. And I do believe that yeah, the world is trying to decarbonize and that’s the right thing to do. As I said earlier, wind and solar have been on an exponential growth path. That’s amazing and wonderful for the world. And the challenge is really that fossil fuels are affordable right now.

The experts in energy and I had referred to the IEA or, the Department of Energy Analyses, generally project that it’ll be hard to get off of fossil fuels completely in the next several decades. And we’re going to transition there’s no question that the future will be a large mix of solutions.

And electrification and renewables and bio gas and other sorts of fuel sources are coming and that’s wonderful. So in terms of Modern Electron, there are two, two ways that I think about it. One is that long-term energy transitions take decades and what’s in the DNA of Modern Electron is technology innovation and I expect that we’ll stay ahead of that and on top of that and continue innovating in the energy space. Second is that I’m really excited lately about hydrogen. So hydrogen is a fuel, that also has pretty high energy density like fossil fuel, and it can be burned for high-grade heat, just like fossil fuel.

But when you burn it, it only emits water, not CO2. And so hydrogen is like a wonder fuel. If we could switch to it. The challenge is that right now, hydrogen is very expensive. So it’s expensive to make and it’s expensive to ship. Lately, we’ve seen a huge trend toward decarbonizing sectors like steel making and glass making and petrochemicals by switching from natural gas to hydrogen. Even transportation now, people are looking at hydrogen cars, although, no pun intended. That’s been labeled a pipe dream for many decades now. Even though the technology has been around and that’s largely because of the high cost of hydrogen relative to natural gas. So what we’re seeing is that the EU and Japan in particular are really pushing hydrogen as a fuel and as a replacement to natural gas in a lot of these industries.

And assuming that trend continues. And everyone thinks that it probably will. Modern Electron’s technology actually works better with hydrogen it turns out than with natural gas, for a variety of technical reasons that we don’t need to get into. And so that would be a way, actually to offset the cost of hydrogen by affording energy bill savings with our technology and that could actually accelerate the transition to hydrogen.

Rami Sayar: [00:13:23] So in the future, you believe that hydrogen may actually become a replacement for natural gas in in home heating. Is there anything that if you could do to make that transition faster, what would it be?

Max Mankin: [00:13:35] If we want to accelerate the transition to hydrogen, we need to bring the cost of it down. So right now, the cost of hydrogen. For home heating in particular will be related to the transmission infrastructure. So hydrogen has two main challenges. One is generation. So you have to generate it at a scale at a cost that’s comparable to natural gas.

And the other is that you have to then transmit it. The problem is that hydrogen doesn’t work with the majority of the gas lines and pipes that are in the ground today. So for instance, if you wanted to switch the United States gas grid to be hydrogen compatible, it would cost you trillions of dollars and you’d have to rip up or put in new pipes across the entire United States.

So that’s not a transition that can happen in the scale of years. That’s going to take decades if it happens at all. So one of the things that I’m really excited about is seeing work on distributed generation of hydrogen. And the idea here is that you actually generate hydrogen locally, and then, that way you don’t have to ship it.

So you avoid this massive infrastructure investment and timeline that could take decades to install and also, cost taxpayers, trillions of dollars in one form or another either on their bill, sort of normalized into their bill or on their tax bill. And that could be a way to sidestep this need for deploying massive new infrastructure.

So I think that speaks to a general theme in new energy technology, which is that technology by itself, isn’t enough. The technology to generate hydrogen exists, but it’s not yet economical. And so if you look at an analogy in solar, solar panels existed nearly in their present form 30, 40 years ago. But it wasn’t really until solar financing came into play that they became more widespread. And so one of the messages is that I hear, a lot in deep energy technology is we need more R and D we need more R and D we need more breakthroughs. And that is absolutely true, but you also need to pair those R and D people, those breakthrough people that the geniuses and the innovators with experienced business savvy people. Energy is a $5 trillion industry and, when you really think about that, in order to reach scale, something has to be economical. It has to have a financial incentive, in order to scale and make a real dent.

Rami Sayar: [00:16:16] Tell me a little bit more about what excites you the most.

Max Mankin: [00:16:20] I think there are a few things. I look at this on kind of the big picture and the little picture, and I think both are important. So big picture, we have an opportunity to make a really positive dent in the world, and that’s not something that a lot of people can really say about their work.

This is something I’m thankful for and that gets me up out of bed every morning. The opportunity to work on one of humanity’s grand challenges is, is once in a lifetime and something that I’m very grateful for. Small scale I think there are a few things that really excite me.

One is I get to work with some of the smartest people I know every day. I lead a team of about 20 and it spans physicists and material scientists all the way through engineers with 20 to 30 years of experience. And they are best in class. They come from top companies and top universities and their tenacity and intuition and ingenuity is just staggering.

One of the great joys that I take in my job is developing teams. The most effective model for teams that I’ve seen has been pairing an engineer with a physicist, or an extremely experienced materials engineer with a fresh out of school chemist for instance, and these pairings of very different people often create a poll for different people to stretch in ways that they’re not used to doing. And that’s when I’ve seen the most creative results. So something that I’m excited about on kind of the microscale is team engineering, and making sure that, I’m able to find and recruit amazing people, but also then that they have the opportunity to do their best possible work, in whatever environment that I’m able to craft.

Rami Sayar: [00:18:09] You’re clearly a great leader at your company. How did you develop these leadership skills?

Max Mankin: [00:18:14] Lots of failures. by the way, I, I’m not yet convinced I’m a great leader. It’s a constant work in progress and, if you really want the truth, you should ask some folks on my team about it. The way I learned, for better or worse was I was effectively thrown in the deep end.

And when we started the company, there were three of us and it scaled fairly quickly up to about 12 or 13. And when we hit 13, things broke, it was a totally flat organization. We all met every day to talk about what we were working on and agree on priorities. And around 13, everything broke. And at that point, I was still a cofounder doing investor relations and fundraising.

I was the CTO, trying to set plans and budgets and roadmaps. I was recruiting. I was still a test engineer. So I was actually doing measurements on electron beam physics in the lab every day. And then moonlighting as a manager and a CTO and trying to fundraise and it didn’t work and everything started to break.

One of the best things that I’ve ever done is found people who have done this before. And I think regardless of what career anybody’s in, this is worth doing. And I formed what I’d call a personal board of directors. So this is like a whole bunch of people that I look up to for some reason or another.

And, like I may look up to person a for their management skills and I may look up to person B for their roadmapping skills and person C for their fundraising skills. And they don’t all have to be amazing at everything, but with a personal board of directors like this, I’m able to pick and choose, and these are relationships that I’ve actively cultivated and they’re incredibly important.

And so oftentimes I’d go to these folks and say, Hey, I have this problem with this person, what do I do about it? Or I have this problem where I’m having trouble balancing resources. How do you think about this? How do you put a framework to this? And these are folks who have been doing this, sometimes times for just a year, more than me, sometimes for 30 years, more than me.

And they’ve all been incredibly generous with their time and they would help me through some of these things. I can also tell you that my team actually helped me through a lot of these things. I work with a whole bunch of very brilliant people who oftentimes are, not at all shy about saying when something isn’t working for them.

And I really deeply appreciate that. So I have one engineer who, who comes in and I got to talk to you. She sits down. And she says, this isn’t working, you got to stop, quit doing whatever. And she’s that straight with me. And that kind of learning I’m on the job has been, I’d say arguably more valuable than any management or leadership book that I’ve ever read.

Of course, there’s lots of reading. There’s lots of self reflection. There’s lots of journaling. But a lot of it was honestly learned through trial and error and lots of failure and lots of very valuable feedback from my team.

Rami Sayar: [00:21:21] What would you consider your biggest management success?

Max Mankin: [00:21:23] There are a few engineers on my team who, when they started, I was worried about their fit. And now there’s some of my top performers. They consistently produce results. They are leading the rest of their team members. They’ve really emerged as defacto leaders in the day to day and the strategic direction setting on my engineering team.

And I think my biggest success was transforming them from people I was worried about who were on the edge of startup fit or professionalism or technical ability into people who are true leaders.

Rami Sayar: [00:22:03] So Max you told us about your greatest success, but what about your greatest failures?

Max Mankin: [00:22:08] So many, it’s hard to even know where to start. I’ll give you one. So around the time when we were maybe 15 or 16 people, it became time to institute a project management framework, and this wasn’t something you needed. When your company’s 12, 12 people, you can get in a room and talk about what you’re going to do.

Around that time, I went out and I read a whole lot about management and project management and software engineering best practices, even though we’re not a software company. And I picked a tool and I forced my team to use it and it turned out it was the completely wrong tool. It was the totally wrong practice and my team, finally moved off of this tool, but, since then it’s become this kind of running joke of, I, I don’t want to name the tool, but the name of this tool has been a running joke for management mishaps, making decisions that just didn’t work. Again, I’m very thankful to my team for bearing with me on that one and rolling with the punches and giving me the feedback that it just wasn’t working.

Rami Sayar: [00:23:12] When you look at your role as a leader of this very technical company, how are you able to balance your desires as a chemist, as a technical person to jump into the technical side of the work and really just instead focus on your responsibility as a leader of the company.

Max Mankin: [00:23:35] This is a huge challenge. So as I mentioned earlier, Around 12 to 13 people, everything broke. We couldn’t just get in a room anymore and talk about priorities. And so at that point, I really had to transition from a kind of individual contributor, wearing a leader hat into a full time manager and leader and drop a lot of my individual engineering and scientific work.

And that was really hard. I started off, frankly, by driving people absolutely bananas by trying to come in and still be involved. And this is something you often see with first time managers I’ve learned and now observed in other people, where, they’re still transitioning roles and that mindset shift takes awhile.

Every once in a while, I’m still able to get back in the lab and do something myself. And I get to scratch that itch every once in a while at work. But I’ve also recognized at this point that some of the best things that I can do, or get obstacles out of the way for my team and empower them, to do their best work and then stay out of their way.

It’s my job to define the goal and the swim lane and the resources and make sure they have everything they need to get to that goal. And then step out of the way these are super smart people and they can handle themselves. The way that I scratched that itch now is actually I occasionally go home and do hobby projects at home where I do a lot of home automation and kind of building things and tinkering. So I play a lot with the raspberry PI. I’ve been learning microcontrollers and Alexa skills just for fun. And I’m actually working on my first Alexa skill now, as a side project and that’s how I scratched that technical itch at home.

Rami Sayar: [00:25:23] I want to follow up on how you learnt that from your team. It sounds to me like the team must have had an intervention to tell you to stop breaking things, because you were probably coming in to where it’s random moments and making some changes that probably broke some stuff.

Am I right? Is this suspicion right?

Max Mankin: [00:25:42] You’re absolutely right. And I don’t think it was so much of an intervention as a few people who were for lack of a better word, courageous and trusted me enough to be able to give me some really hard feedback and I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that. These are folks who would come into my office and sit down and say, Hey, I appreciate your input, but you got to back off because every time you open your mouth in that meeting, you confuse the team as to what the priorities are.

Or every time you touch my experiment, it breaks. Stop. That one. That one was the hardest, because I prided myself or I still do on my experimental ability and my good hands and my knowledge of how to do good measurements. And and that one was the hardest, but they were right.

Ultimately. And so I think what’s really key is that especially in a small team, you need to establish an environment where feedback is appreciated and people have enough trust with each other to be able to give that hard feedback and enough professionalism in general decency to give it in a kind way, right?

If somebody comes in and trashes on my attempt intentions and says, Hey, quit trying to sabotage me. That’s not going to go over super well, but if somebody comes in and says, hey, I felt that in that meeting, when you said this, it undermined my authority as the project leader, because you come in with the title of leader, and you say something different from me. And that really confuses the team and doesn’t really empower me. So I’d appreciate if, you could run those things by me first, before coming to the meeting and just riffing. And that candid feedback that I got from both engineers and managers on my team really did help.

And as you said was an intervention. So I’m incredibly grateful to those people.

Rami Sayar: [00:27:40] The second question that I wanted to ask you on that point, you mentioned that you’re going back home to create all of these automations. Any one in particular that you’re proud of?

Max Mankin: [00:27:51] Yes, but I can’t talk about it yet. It’s in stealth mode.

Rami Sayar: [00:27:58] I have a feeling that you’re going to come up with a new product line aren’t you?

Max Mankin: [00:28:01] Perhaps, maybe someday. Maybe that’ll be my next startup, but for now it’s still just a hobby, not quite ready to talk about it, but in the past I’ve worked on things like automated cat toys. So I used to have a cat and it would turn on at a random time of day and move a laser pointer around my apartment just to keep the cat busy and entertained. Other sort of simple things like that and automated plant watering which was really fun, but really messy once when a pipe leaked all over my desk. So that one got put away pretty quickly.

Rami Sayar: [00:28:34] Okay, Max, what book are you reading now?

Max Mankin: [00:28:37] I just finished Neal Stephenson’s Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. And that was a really thoughtful and scary take on the future of Neuroscience and AI and Quantum Computing. And what could happen. It also dovetailed really interestingly into this current trend of fake news and exponential growth of fake news in social media.

So I would recommend that if you’re into that dystopian future, cyberpunk technology and speculative technological fiction literature.

Rami Sayar: [00:29:15] What leader are you looking up to right now?

Max Mankin: [00:29:17] Pass come back to me. In two minutes,

Rami Sayar: [00:29:21] How many hours of sleep are you getting?

Max Mankin: [00:29:23] I get about seven hours of sleep and I make sure I do that every day. That’s really important to being able to function.

Rami Sayar: [00:29:30] I totally agree with you there.

Max Mankin: [00:29:32] I also just read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. And it scared the hell out of me. If anybody’s on the fence or doesn’t believe in why sleep is important, go read that book and you’ll want to get seven hours of sleep every day.

Rami Sayar: [00:29:46] Yeah, I have that book and every time I read a chapter, it just makes me very upset about all of the times that I didn’t sleep very well and absolutely agree. That’s a great recommendation. If there was anything you could wish that a genie could grant you, what would be that wish?

Max Mankin: [00:30:02] I wish that we could, as a species erase our us versus them cognitive bias. I think one of the greatest challenges we’re going to have and I see this in energy. You see this in the news. These days is squaring off side versus side instead of coming together into a unified common dialogue to reach compromise. Inevitably, there’s going to be different opinions and different assessments of what we need to do and how we need to do it.

One of the big challenges in energy, at least I think is that a lot of people tend to square off in an us versus them way. And the dialogue is really broken. If I had to make one, one wish for the betterment of the world, I would love for people to be able to overcome that squaring off, and establish a common, robust dialogue so we can reach some compromises and then take some action on some of the really pressing and challenging issues that our world and our species are facing.

Rami Sayar: [00:31:02] What leader are you looking up to the most right now?

Max Mankin: [00:31:05] This is hard. There are too many good options and no good options.

Rami Sayar: [00:31:08] Doesn’t have to be anyone that people know. It could just be someone in your company.

Max Mankin: [00:31:12] I like that. Sorry too many good at this is hard to choose. Okay. I’ll I’ll just pick one. So I really look up to one of my engineers. We’ve been having some hard conversations lately about what we think is possible with our first product and the timelines in terms of specifications. And she’s been, incredibly courageous in terms of having these conversations with me and engaging with me and the other leadership members to reach some compromises on what we think we can do and what’s going to be really challenging.

Rami Sayar: [00:31:46] That’s great leadership right there.

Max Mankin: [00:31:48] It is. Yeah, hard conversations are never really fun. but the people who are courageous enough to step up and have them of their own volition are people who I really admire. And I think, I have lots of people on my team who are doing that, but one engineer in particular has just really impressed me the last six months with this.

Rami Sayar: [00:32:06] All right. Last question, Max, where can we find you?

Max Mankin: [00:32:09] So I do my best to stay off of social media as much as possible. But you could probably find me hiking out in the woods of Washington State, or potentially at the zoo, which is one of my favorite places in the world.

Rami Sayar: [00:32:23] I love that answer. So there is a great zoo in Washington State. You’re going to have to go to all of them and maybe you’ll find Max. I love that.

Well, Max, thank you so much for joining us in our podcast for the Seattle Shaper hub. Really appreciate the time that you have given us here today and your expertise and your insights into the technology and energy spaces.

I am very excited to hear from our listeners about what they thought of this podcast. If they have any additional questions to Max, I speak to Max on a regular basis. So I’d be very happy to get more answers to your questions and share them in a follow-up episode. Thank you so much, Max.

Max Mankin: [00:33:08] Thanks for having me. This has been great.