Gene Berdachevsky
Co-Founder & CEO, Sila Nanotechnologies. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineer@SilaGene ↗LinkedIn ↗silanano.com ↗
He was the seventh employee and Principal Engineer at Tesla Motors, leading development of the first mass-produced automotive lithium-ion battery system for the Tesla Roadster. In 2011, he co-founded Sila Nanotechnologies, developing Titan Silicon anode materials to enhance the energy density and charging speed of batteries.
1shows
1appearances
17statements
10resolved
9supported
0contradicted
90%fully supported
Everything Gene Berdachevsky said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Berdichevsky: Electrification is a path function driven by founders, not inevitable
“The world is not in technical terms, a state function, meaning in a state function, if something should exist, it becomes that just because the world should be electric does not make it electric. The world is a path function. I mean, I think about like an alte…”
Berdichevsky: Silicon should replace graphite across all batteries in 20 years
“So I think there'll, there'll be a place for graphite, but I would say in 20 years, silicon should be able to replace it in every nook and cranny.”
Berdichevsky: Autonomous EVs will be an order of magnitude cheaper than gas
“And as you can imagine, with the cost of recharging an EV being almost nothing compared to the cost of refueling a car, you know, autonomous EVs are going to be not just a little cheaper than gas powered EVs, but they're going to be an order of magnitude.”
Berdichevsky: Automotive scale will make lithium-ion dominate electrical grid storage
“Being somebody who's in lithium ion, I actually think the scale of automotive will also lead lithium ion to dominate most of the grid.”
Berdichevsky predicts most fossil fuel use will disappear by 2050
“I think by the middle of the century, I'm very, very confident that most fossil fuel fuel use will go away.”
Berdichevsky argues climate change is no longer a technology bottleneck
“I don't believe that solving I don't believe solving most of climate change is going to be a technology problem. I think we have the technologies. I'm watching them get invented. I'm watching them get scaled right now.”
Berdichevsky: Graphite-metal oxide battery chemistry has completely flatlined
“This graphite metal oxide chemistry went through an S curve and flatlined, totally flatlined. And that's sort of when I started to see it flatlining at Tesla as part of the, was part of the impetus for starting Sela.”
Berdichevsky predicts battery costs will reach $50/kWh by 2030
“And so you can plot that out and you can see the costs. If technology improves trending to kind of 50 bucks a kilowatt hour, which would have been unthinkable to people, you know just a few years ago. I mean, a hundred seemed like a real stretch for everybody.…”
Berdichevsky: Increasing battery cell energy density is key to affordable EVs
“And it turns out the more energy each battery cell can store, the cheaper the battery pack can be. And the way to think about the reason for that is if every battery cell you have stores twice as much energy, then you need half as many cells. And if you need h…”
Berdichevsky: Graphite in lithium-ion batteries has hit its thermodynamic limits
“There is, and it's a thermodynamic limitation. So it is the laws of the universe, it is what God gave us, and there is no getting around it. And we are at that limit in every lithium-ion battery today.”
Berdichevsky: Once thermodynamics prove a breakthrough possible, success requires only effort
“The thermodynamics said it was not impossible, which is all you have to know. Once you know, it's not impossible. It's really just a question of how long and how hard is it going to get.”
Berdichevsky: Sila will achieve a 40 percent energy density improvement over graphite
“And so that's where the technology is today, and then over the next few years, we'll get that to a 30% improvement. Eventually, we think we can get that to a 40% improvement over state-of-the-art graphite chemistries.”
Berdichevsky: First consumer cars with Sila technology expected in 2026
“And right now we're planning to be complete with the Current phase of the factory, what we call phase one at the end of this year, and we'll spend the first half of next year bringing that online very carefully to make very high quality product, and we'll begi…”
Berdichevsky: Autonomous vehicles will drive 1-2M miles per decade
“Is as we get to autonomy, which obviously is going to take a little longer than everybody expected, you know, vehicles are going to go from driving a 100,000 miles in 10 years to driving a million or two million miles in 10 years.”
Berdichevsky: China mines, processes, or refines 95 percent of battery graphite
“Yeah, something like 95% is mined or processed or refined in China. So some of it gets extracted, let's say, in Australia, but then it gets shipped to China to process. So that's right.”
Berdichevsky: Automotive battery integration takes roughly five years post-consumer electronics
“We, 10 years in, we got into our first consumer electronics device, and, you know, it'll be Sort of around five years more from then to get into, you know, first car that folks can buy.”
Berdichevsky: Deep-tech founders must evaluate success by inputs rather than outcomes
“When it's a science project, you have to decide what you're going to measure yourself by. If you're Measuring yourself only by the result, then you will never take on something where you might fail. So, you know, you have to measure the inputs and the inputs a…”
Mercedes plans to deploy Sila batteries starting with the electric G-Wagon
“So we have a supply agreement with Mercedes and they plan to bring us into their electric vehicle lineup. They say mid decade starting with the electric G wagon, the EQG.”
Sila signed a supply agreement with Panasonic for automotive batteries
“And then we also made a announcement that we signed a supply agreement with Panasonic. In December. And so we're also working with them to bring our batteries into their customers' electric cars.”
Berdichevsky: Silicon anode technology requires dramatically less mining and labor
“And to your point, they require dramatically less mining. They require really much less labor. These technologies are much more efficient.”
Berdichevsky: Silicon anodes can give the US battery dominance like fracking did
“In the lead for 21st century energy, you know, it'll take 10 years, but just like we got there with oil and gas through technologies like fracking, we should get there in batteries through technologies like silicon anodes and others.”
Berdichevsky says he, not Musk, chose Roadster's 69-cell battery configuration
“No, that was, no, that was me. That was me.”
Berdichevsky: Advanced battery tech will probably double phone runtime
“Probably you can probably extend the runtime of the cell by with a, with not just our technology, but other technologies by roughly a factor of two.”
Berdichevsky: Early Tesla battery prototype was super-glued laptop cells
“The sort of initial prototype of the battery was laptop cells that were literally super glued together. And so that was what we started with. And over the course of four years, we engineered a system that was able to interconnect cool and safely manage Almost …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Gene's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 AMERICAN OPTIMISTLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, Sila Nanotechnologies | 1 | 17 | 90% 9/10 | full record on American Optimist → |