David is the founder and CEO of Anthro Energy, a materials platform for next-generation batteries. He walked off Stanford's campus and started building cells by hand in a corner of someone else's lab. His coach has a military background — disciplined, systematic about process and decision-making.
Without my Titan coach, it's hard to imagine the company would be firing on all cylinders as it is.
David wrote about his experience working with a Titan Coach on LinkedIn
See it on LinkedIn →Answers are verbatim from the recorded interview.
I first started thinking about getting a coach when I realized that I simply could not be involved in every decision that was being made in the company. If we wanted this company to scale, I was going to need to not only level up my game, but learn how to level up those around me.
The Titan matching process gave me a chance to interact with a number of different coaches. All of them were really impressive, and it was actually a hard choice to choose which coach to go with.
He has a military background, so he's very disciplined and very good at being systematic about processes and decision-making — which is something I value but don't always reflect in my day-to-day operation.
It's been a really exciting past 18 months. Our team has more than doubled in size. Our production capacity has increased by roughly a factor of 100. We've tripled the amount of customers that we've been serving over the past nine months.
Without the help of my coach, it's hard to imagine that the company would be firing on all cylinders as it is without my involvement in every single thing.
David Mackanic, Co-Founder and CEO of Anthro Energy, in conversation with Titan. Lightly edited for clarity.
My name is David Mackanic. I'm the founder and CEO of Anthro Energy. We develop a materials platform that enables the creation of next generation batteries at scale.
In the early days of Anthro, we were commercializing the technologies that I had developed while I was a student. We walked off of Stanford's campus and we went and we were shoved in a small corner of somebody else's research lab. So we were secondhand renting all their tools to assemble batteries. So thinking back to the early days when it was building cells by hand to where we are today, where we're able to produce up to half a million battery cells per year, the scale in terms of the operation has really increased. But it's also created a whole lot of challenges that are beyond just developing a technology in a lab.
I first started thinking about getting a coach when I realized that I simply could not be involved in every decision that was being made in the company. I realized that if we wanted this company to scale, I was going to need to not only level up my game, but learn how to level up those around me.
The Titan matching process gave me a chance to interact with a number of different coaches. All of them were really impressive and it was actually a hard choice to choose which coach to go with. My coach is awesome. He has a military background and so he's very disciplined and very good at being systematic about processes and decision making, which is something I value but don't always reflect in my day-to-day operation.
It's been a really exciting past 18 months. Our team has more than doubled in size. Our production capacity has increased by roughly a factor of 100. We've tripled the amount of customers that we've been serving over the past nine months. Without the help of my coach, it's hard to imagine that the company would be firing on all cylinders as it is without my involvement in every single thing.
We can imagine a world where the amount of batteries deployed increases by a factor of 50 over the next 20 years. And so everything you think about a battery today, throw that out the window. With our technology, we want to reinvent that.
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