 It gives me great pleasure to introduce our speaker today. Hannah Sieber, who's the co-founder and CEO of EcoFlow, a path-breaking, pioneering, portable power electronics storage, electricity storage company. Hannah is actually currently also, besides being CEO of her company in the MBA program at Stanford Business School. In fact, one of the people who told us he might be an even better speaker than he was for the last energy seminar, last quarter, Vivas Kumar strongly recommended her along with a huge group of GSB students. She also, from my EIPER hat point of view, is a rising star in the EMET Interdisciplinary Program and Environmental Resources Joint Program MS student in EIPER. She's also a graduate of Duke University in International Comparative Studies, where she was an honor student and I think won a big title for the best project in her school and actually gave a commencement address, I saw online. Also speaks Chinese, so she seems well qualified, if not overqualified, to talk to us today about entrepreneurship and energy, building a battery company from Shenzhen to San Francisco. Hannah, take it away. Great, thank you so much for that kind intro. And thank you, everyone, for being here today. I know it's late on a Monday and Zoom fatigue is a real thing, so I appreciate everyone and seeing so many names logged in. So today, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about building EcoFlow, the battery company I co-founded in 2016 from a warehouse and from an apartment in Shenzhen all the way now to where we have offices in both US and in Shenzhen. I'm going to talk a little bit about the technical side, about the trends in the industry, and then as well about the personal side of building EcoFlow and some of the lessons I've learned. So to start off, I thought I would just tell you a little bit about myself, thanks to that warm introduction. You already know a lot, but I graduated from Duke where I got my BA, and then I'm right now an MS MBA candidate here at Stanford. In 2016, I was living in Shenzhen, China, and I was working with a few other friends of mine who write DJI, the largest consumer drone company. And at the time, the drone market was about $6 billion market growing at 58% annually. So it was one of the biggest markets on the way to exploding. And we would watch drone pilots, they would go into the field every single day with either their car, a generator, or extra batteries. And all of this was incredibly inefficient. And as we looked around, we realized it wasn't just drone pilots that were using batteries, or sorry, it wasn't just drone pilots that were using generators. We also saw campers here in California. We saw different teachers all across the developing world. We saw all sorts of people using generators to power their life. And so we started to look and we realized that there was a huge market opportunity to displace the fuel generator market. And so here's the market for portable power about how we think about it. On the smallest side, you have your power banks. Those are generally a four cell battery management, four cell systems, they might have USB ports, type C ports, you use them to charge your phone, maybe to charge your laptop. And then on the bigger end, you're gonna have home power walls. So that's obviously the Tesla power wall, Saunin in Europe, and getting into an industrial storage. But there really wasn't any in the middle space. And that's partly because the technical capability you need to build in this middle space, most people were going after the electric vehicle market, which is a much bigger market. And so we started to realize there was a huge gap here in the middle. And so we created EcoFlow to disrupt the portable power space and to create a greener and safer alternative for fuel generators. So here's our product. This is River. This is the very first product we ever launched. And so just to give you an idea, it's about 11 pounds, the size of a toaster. It's the lightest at its capacity. So it's two thirds the weight of anything else on the market at capacity. All the ports you can imagine. So there's USB-C, type C, DC, AC ports, 12V car charger, real time screen telling you the power draw. And then it's also thermal managed. So it can go from negative four degrees. If you're ice fishing to 140 degrees, if you're in the desert or at a music festival, say. So today I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about building EcoFlow. The last thing I'll say is that EcoFlow is a growing company and we have a lot of proprietary information. So I'm sharing a lot of high level thoughts today. If something I say feels simplistic or you wanna dive into it more, just follow up with me offline. I will share my contact information at the end of this. So here are the, first we're gonna talk about the industry drivers and particularly in 2016, how the market was shifting under our feet and what made the business really viable. Both the tailwinds that helped us and the headwinds that slowed us down. Then I'll move on to building EcoFlow, talking about some of the lessons I've learned, both the good and the bad. And then finally, there'll be time for Q&A at the end. And I know that they're aggregating questions. So if you have questions, you can post them in the chat and we'll get to them at the end. So as I was reflecting on what's been happening in the portable power space and why we've succeeded at EcoFlow, it really came down to these three areas. What's been happening in production is declining costs of both solar and storage. What's been happening on the usage side with the growth of portable residential usage. And what's been happening on the demand side as increasing demand has led to really interesting supply chain complexity. So this is probably familiar news to many people on this call, but lithium-ion battery packs have decreased in price significantly in the last decade, been almost a 90% decrease, which is roughly 16% year over year compounded annual growth rate in just the last five years. Lithium, these in this bar chart, if we were to double click, you would see that about 70% of the cost is attributed to lithium-ion cells, while the other 30% is contributed to the battery pack. Within a lithium-ion cell, the three main minerals you have, nickel, cobalt and lithium, all of which have declined substantially and all of which are expected to continue declining. Sometimes I get questions that are asked, what happens if we were to run out of cobalt? Even if prices go up for some of these downstream minerals, there will be the sensitivity with lithium-ion is so small that the prices will be very minimally affected. So kind of the takeaway here is this benefits the entire industry. This is part of the reason we've seen a proliferation of all sorts of lithium-ion devices, your watch, your computer, and much larger devices, such as e-scooters and electric vehicles. But what this also means is that it changed the industry and created a world in which smaller companies can now get in. So it's in the large startups and companies that formerly didn't have the access to capital or the ability to play in a high-stakes market like this to now be able to enter the battery market and to create, and you can see that if you look at the growth of startups, particularly in Shenzhen, which is where we were, which is where 90% of the world's electronics are manufactured. So this has just allowed an enormous amount of startups. And for us, it allowed us to go into the white space of that portable power, half a kilowatt hour in up market that none of the big players were tackling. And the trend here is that this is expected to continue to grow and the industry continues to bet on the lithium-ion. You can see here that it's decreasing along an exponential curve. There's about an 18% learning rate. That means that for every time supply doubles, there will be about an 18% decrease in the price. And something I always laugh about is the current prices are heavily dependent on a lot of the big players that can negotiate huge volume discounts. So it's still cost more for a startup and for a company like us to get into the space than some of these rates you may see. But overall, there's been such big investment over $2 trillion of investment into the space that I would say lithium-ion is here to stay. People often ask me, what do I think the future is? How long will lithium-ion be around? And I think there is really, I'm really optimistic about the future of both solid state of flexible batteries of all sorts of technologies. However, the amount of investment that's come from both the storage and electric vehicle companies means that there's a lot of people who have a lot at stake to continue with lithium-ion. And so I think for the next at least five, if not 10 years, this is what we're likely to see. And so what this means is that, the lithium demand has grown significantly. And when we think about lithium demand, most people think about electric vehicles and I think that makes sense. They're the largest portion of this with over 38% of the market by 2025. But what most people don't realize is that storage is also a huge part. And in fact, storage is growing at an even larger and quicker rate than electric vehicles. So in the last 10 years, from 2015 to 2025, energy storage has grown at about 46% compounded annually. And just in the last five years, it's been about 14%. So what that means is actually the more exponential growth is yet to come. Now we play in a very small percentage of this storage. So what you can see on this chart is that the storage includes other things like grid management, load shifting, reserve power. So the portable power space that we plan is only a fraction, but it gives me a ton of optimism that energy storage is the future. And when I think about what I expect the future to look like, I imagine every single home will have the ability to both generate and capture and store their own electricity. And hopefully, and we'll talk about this when I get to the future a bit more, but hopefully be able to buy and sell and share that with neighbors in some type of microgrid community. So now we're gonna turn to the solar side. I wanna talk briefly about solar even though it's not what we do explicitly at EcoFlow, but because in order to effectively compete with fuel generators, we need to have both solar and storage. And so the picture for solar looks fairly similar. There's been huge cost reductions in the last five years, almost 20%. And some of those cost reductions have come from increases in inverter efficiency, higher module efficiency, better technology overall in the solar space. They've also come from the solar tax credit. Many people are probably familiar with the ITC, which reduces the solar system cost by about 26%. I think the question there is that we're starting to run out, what is the future gonna look like? And the future is slightly less certain. However, I am very optimistic that solar was continued to grow. You can see this year, we passed two million residential installations. That's truly incredible. To put that in perspective, that's more solar installations than electric vehicles we have on the road. So that really excites me in terms of understanding that both together with solar and storage, we can effectively displace traditional sources and particularly have a portable option to displace the fuel generator. So that's a little bit on the production and on the cost side. And the biggest thing is that it's allowed small players like EcoFlow to enter the market and to address needs that are not currently being served. So now if we turn a bit to the portable residential use, here I wanna talk about, again, the portable side. So a lot of the information that's out there is about residential home installations and we're just broader residential use. And here I wanna imagine thinking about it instead of having a generator, what would it look like to have a portable battery that you have around the house? So the biggest reason that's driving this is the unfortunate growth in natural disasters. So this is one of my favorite charts because it's what it shows, not because of the reality. And this is the number of billion dollar weather and climate disasters from 2017. And so you can see there were a bunch of hurricanes. You can see some tornadoes in the Midwest. In California, you see wildfires. That was the year we had the 2017 hubs fire here in Santa Rosa, which was the most significant loss from any wildfire ever in history at that point. And then in 2018, we see a similar picture with slightly fewer events, but actually an aggregate more loss. So again, we see hail storms now, we have hurricanes, lightning, and again, we have wildfires. And that year we had the campfire here in California, which then surpassed the hubs fires, the deadliest fire in terms of damage. And then finally in 2019, you can see it looked very similar. And 2019 was actually a slightly smaller year in terms of loss, but overall, again, it's kind of growth of natural disasters. And so looking at this from a numbers perspective, this is a chart that shows loss events in the US. So this is just a total aggregate number of events. You can see in the US, we've hovered just above or below about 100 events for the last three years. And that's about an eighth of what we see globally. So there's been over 800 events globally with a total loss of 150 billion, globally in just 2019. And this chart breaks it down. So you'll be able to see hydrological events, geophysical events, meteorological events, but the kind of broad takeaway is they're almost all climate related events. And so this is expected to continue and continue to get worse. And what I look at this is that, from an insurance perspective, only a third of this loss is covered. So what that means is that homeowners are more and more focused on preparedness and what they can do to be prepared should anything go wrong. Like many homeowners won't get the money, the back that they deserve or that they need. And so the views towards self-reliance have shifted. And we've actually seen this even continue to grow now with everything happening with COVID-19, which is unfortunate, but with everyone at home, kind of that focus on being self-reliant and prepared continues. So in addition to that preparedness mindset, there's a few other reasons that portable power is taking off in a residential setting. In terms of home backup, lithium ion is now the clear front winner. So many of you might know of lead acid batteries, these are just the precursor to lithium ion. And lithium ion offers several strengths over lead acid. So from efficiency, the lead acid is 30% efficiency, almost lithium ion is over 90%. And if you take the same capacity lead acid battery and lithium ion battery, the lithium ion will charge about five times as quickly. So there's a lot of just plain, in addition to weight and other features, there's a lot of advantages to lithium ion. When you compare lithium ion to a generator, there's also quite a few advantages. So some of them are kind of obvious, you have their quieter, which means that you can do a lot more around the house, you can run it inside, that's a big deal, so that because you don't need to run fuel, being able to have a product or a battery with you indoors. And most people don't realize this, but generators have killed roughly 70 people each year, just in the US, which makes it one of the deadliest consumer products. And so when we think about kind of going after the market, the generator market continues to grow, you can see on the right side, it's projected to grow at about 9%. It's been growing at roughly 9% and predicted to continue growing at about 9%. And part of that's because of the utilities. Utilities are actually incentivized to suggest generators. So even here in California, with all the planned power outages, utilities will suggest people have generators on hand because it won't take away ultimate revenue from the utility and it's a lot less threatening than having solar and storage on hand. And so I hope that we can make a dent in these numbers and that next time I'm showing this graph, we have slightly less than 9% forecasted growth, but that's right now and that's kind of generators are a big part of the market here. So just kind of recap the increase in natural disasters and the quality of lithium ion has led to like a strong preparedness mindset where homeowners are keeping batteries on hand. So next I'm gonna talk a little bit about the demand side and why some of the supply chain complexities have come from demand. So the lithium ion market is a very complex market. Lithium ion mining is distributed across the world predominantly in Chile and South America, but also in Australia. The two biggest cell manufacturers are both located in Asia and then 90% of the world are like manufactured in Shenzhen. And so while this is not uncommon for similar to the auto industry, having a dispersed and complicated supply chain, it has meant that it makes it much harder for smaller companies to get going, having the ability to co-locate manufacturing and production, having the ability to design on site, those are all things, having the ability to build a new factory if you can't have capacity quickly enough are all the advantages that bigger companies have and part of the reason we at EcoFlow have taken a two-prong strategy. So we have a team in Shenzhen on the ground and we actually have a team that's partly in our factory there and then we have a team in the US and that's allowed us to at least bridge some of the cross seas and some of the bifurcation. You know, this is something that I think about a lot from just supply chain dislocation. Lead times are very long. It can take about 12 to 18 months to source components in this industry. You know, for the longest time there was less supply of lithium than there was demand that has now shifted. However, that means that if you're a small player like us being able to vertically integrate, being able to work with suppliers directly and being able to buy at volume have all been really helpful tactics as we think about how to grow. Great, so that will kind of wraps up some of the technical side. From a global supply chain perspective just the complex planning, the forecasting and the flexibility are all challenges to small companies and obviously there's a huge inventory risk anytime you're sitting on but whether it be components that you can't manufacture and finished products you can't sell all of that is a huge threat to just our financial liability and our cashflow. And so while these first two are more headwinds that you know, both the excuse me the first two are more tailwinds both the costs and the increase in residential preparedness. This one has been more of a tailwind. This one has been more of a headwind that's been challenging us as we move forward. That's great. So now I'm gonna talk a little bit about building EcoFlow. So here's some just quick facts about EcoFlow. We were founded in 2016. I founded it with three others. There was Bruce Eli and Frank. All three of them were at DJI, the consumer drone company. We have global teams, both Shenzhen and San Francisco and we've raised just over 10 million in VC capital. So we are a VC backed startup. So this was, I showed this graph earlier to kind of talk about the market we play in. Now I wanna talk a little bit more about the actual products that we have in this market. And so starting on that first side you'll see River Mini. So River Mini is the first stackable battery ever. We're really excited about it from a technological engineering point of view. And the reason we built it is actually because of some of the challenges around large scale lithium ion. So anything over 100 watt hours is fully regulated which means you can't fly with it. It means that there's special taxes associated with it. It means shipping it is very challenging if you've ever gotten those boxes that have the big diamond on it that says has Matt dangerous good. That's because it has over a hundred watt hours of capacity. And so River Mini was our way to get around that. It's a product that people could fly with. It's a product that if you could take each segment alone has a hundred watt hours and then you can clip them together to have more and more capacity. And so we did that through Pogo pins and through it has wireless charging on the top and other opportunities or other ways in which we've technologically engineered it to be both applicable to the standards and also great for our customers. The middle product is River. And that's the product that I opened with and talked a little bit more about. It's a half a kilowatt hour of energy and really great for your kind of home devices that are not heat generating. So we have a lot of people who will use that if they go into the field to take with their drones. We have a lot of people that use it for home backup power to have their lights or fans or routers going. And also people that use it for medical reasons. So if you have a nebulizer or a CPAP or if you wanna use it as a UPS and uninterrupted power supply during the night that's another great opportunity for River. And then finally our third product which I don't have a picture of here but if you go to our website you'll see it. We just launched it's called Delta and Delta is a 1.3 kilowatt hour product that was truly a replacement to a fuel generator. So the best selling generators, the Honda 2000 and our goal is to continue to build upward until we have a product on the market that's both superior in terms of product and pricing. And so just here's a recap. We went over this a little before but it's about a two billion market here in the US and about 20 billion globally. So fuel generators continue to grow and they're loud. They're not good for the environment. They require maintenance. They require fuel and they're dangerous. And so there's many reasons in which we'd like to see a cleaner, greener, safer world with fewer generators. And here's just a few pictures of some of our different use cases. So we have a strong professional use case. So it's part of that's construction. You can see in the top picture there in the top row lithium ion cordless tools have been growing and so we work with more and more home contractors and another professional use case is film and photography. We work with people like the Weather Channel, National Geographic, anyone that's doing aerial droning and that needs a high power battery lights or high power to camera and lights for their products. We have a big recreational use. So that's anything from camping to music to now work from home. I get a lot of people who tell us that, you know they're so grateful to have this with everything happening from work from home they can work outside on their patio. They can make sure all the kids devices are charged. They can take it with them in the car on road trips. That's been a big one. And then our third one is home use. And by home use I really mean home backup power but for any of those natural disasters we talked about earlier, being able to know kind of you can have some semblance of life right away and to keep things going. So as I thought about this presentation and kind of the audience, I thought maybe it would be helpful to just talk to you a little bit about some of the lessons I've learned and kind of what's gone right and what's gone wrong at EcoFlow. So my first lesson is just that need statements change. And I think this sounds quite intuitive but it was really hard when we were starting out. So we built EcoFlow specifically for drone pilots. It was a product that we thought, you know we would take off in the droning industry. And soon it became clear that actually home backup power is a much, much bigger industry. And so here are the photos. This was actually after Hurricane Maria in 2017. We went down and we donated units to both hospitals, homes, a couple of schools in Puerto Rico. And you can see up the top we have Lula and her husband using it for their oxygen in his bed. And then on the right hand side there was Maria using it for her lights and her fan. And this was a time when, you know the power was completely ravaged from the country and from the island for months on end. And so for us realizing that, you know home backup power was a much bigger need. And that's, it was interesting because people don't always buy for what they need for. We still have a lot of people who buy it for all sorts of different use cases but this has definitely been the number one use case that we've seen. And so how did we learn this? So it started by we did a pre-order campaign. So we launched a Indiegogo campaign in spring of 2017 and we sold over 2,000 units. We raised over a million dollars. We completely blew away our expectations. And what was so great and why I urged anyone that's ever looking to do something to start with a pre-order campaign is it's such a low risk way to get to talk to customers. You know, we built a community of people that were really excited about our product and that shared some of their passions and interests with us. So people that were like, I wanna use this for my Blackberry camera so that I can take pictures all night long. We had people that said, you know, I'm so excited. I just wanna have this so that, you know everything could be organized around the house. And so you started to learn kind of where people were coming from. And through this we learned we did a lot of digital marketing and a lot of face segmentation through our Facebook and other online advertising. And we quickly learned that there was a strong kind of preparedness focus and need. And so then on the right hand side, you see our team, this is us kind of getting all the boxes ready. And I share this simply because people often ask me, you know what does my job look like? What do I do? And every day of course is really different but a lot of those early days I spent, you know, shipping at the warehouse talking to customers doing everything I could to make sure that I really understood and had the most customer empathy possible. And I could build the best product for our customers. And so I share this cause I just wanna say you have to follow your needs and your need statements for business survival. Backup power in the US is a nice to have but not always a need to have. I'd love to spend a hundred percent of our time focused on the developing world and focused on places that need us most. But it's also important to understand where we can sell and what people need and who needs the product. So my second lesson here is just talking a little bit about our fundraising process. So we went out to raise $5 million for our series A and it had been just after that crowdfunding campaign. You know, we had raised over a million dollars we had filed on cloud nine and we had demonstrated huge success in terms of product interest in some level of beginnings of product market fit. And as it turns out, 2017 was a really hard year for hardware. You know, I wish I'd seen this graph at the time and knew that that was gonna be the case. But, you know, we started raising our series A we pitched over 20 VCs and almost every VC asked us if we had thought about building an app for both data collection and for recurring revenue. And this is widely this is not something spread across energy and this is an issue that's widely spread across hardware and energy simply because the returns are not optimized on a VC horizon that same year in 2017. We'd seen Juicero, you know, kind of have a huge hit or scandal we saw job on go out of business. And so we'd just seen, you know, a ton of a negative kind of pressure and look at the consumer hardware space. So we went out and I asked customers about adding apps about adding wifi and you know, only one group thought it was useful. First responders came back and shared that yes, they would love an app. They thought it would be great and they'd be able to go into the field and they would know, be able to maybe be pinged when their devices were fully charged. But almost everyone else was kind of neutral. And ultimately, you know, as a startup you have to prioritize your energy and your resources. And we didn't have the resources at the time to build toward making an app. It would have changed our ability to work on other products. And so, yeah, I share this just to say you should stay true to your product needs and requirements. And you should change your product needs for customers but don't necessarily change them for VCs. I think that there's, you know, a lot of great opportunities to build the best product but also part of strategy is figuring out what not to do. So this is lesson three. And this is a little bit about building innovative products and building a new market. So on the left, you can see that was an end cap. So that's kind of the merchandising display at a Home Depot. And we really didn't know where to merchandise. Were we an electronic? Were we a generator? We go in the home section. You know, where did we go? And people look at your product and they don't really know what it is. On the flip side, up top you'll see this is an image from our HSN, so our Home Shopping Network debut we did not long ago. And you'll see Home Shopping Network which is a TV retail network for people who don't know. It was a really interesting opportunity for us to display multiple scenes, to talk about the product, talk about the interface, the ports, how you use it, why you use it. And this was a huge lesson to us that when you build new innovative products, you're often means you have to build a new market. And that takes a lot of time because products don't sell themselves. And I think we had always thought and hoped, you know, this is the best product on the market. This is the most innovative product. People are gonna want it. When in fact, there was a lot of consumer explaining and consumer awareness that we had to do in order to orient people to the market and orient people to our product. So lesson four, this is just a lesson on the fact that if you wanna build best in class products and if you wanna tackle something hard, it takes a long time. And this has hindered us sometimes in launching EcoFlow to do things slowly and to do things the right way. You can see, you know, here's our product compared to a few other options on the market, anchor and then also goal zero. And you can see that we surpass them in many ways, whether it be in the number of output ports, the weight capacity ratio, the ability to recharge quickly, battery life in cycles is a really important one and just recognizing that we can hold charge for a year whereas most of our competitors will charge for about a third to a half of that time, which means they're not nearly as effective if you wanna have the product around for preparedness, if you wanna be able to keep it in the closet, should you have power to go out unexpectedly? Likewise, we have flow through charging and we're solar powered and solar enabled. And so, you know, some of this talks about thinking about especially in the energy space, if you wanna build a great product, it's not just a quick, you know, this has been a four year journey and then we're only just beginning and it's been really incredible to start to find product market fit and start to understand what customers want, what customers need and how we can deliver that. So now I'll just wrap up quickly. You know, there's a lot of things on my mind as I think ahead and a lot of things that excite me about the future of this industry. So just from the lithium ion perspective, we're gonna see a lot of really great product changes and this is industry wide, not just an eco-flow. So these are things like the growth in energy, better energy density, longer cycle life, meaning if you can recharge it 500 times, you can recharge it 100 times. Think about on your iPhone, when you all of a sudden the battery in the top goes to orange and it only charges to 80%. That's because you pay your cycle life and then lower costs, which I shared at the beginning are really gonna enable batteries to start to be an equalizer. You know, to me, so much of this comes back to when I was in college, I'd spent time in Nicaragua volunteering and every single night, the sun went down around 630 and we had no power, no solar. And I started to see how much energy is an axiom for quality. It's the way in which we do our work, it's the way in which we go to school, it's the way in which we go about our lives, we cook, we eat, we clean and all of that and being able to create products across the globe and particularly what excites me are the areas where there's not a developed grid infrastructure and they have so much potential to almost leapfrog the grid. And that leads into that second part which is the half-life of batteries. Just being able to, something people don't realize is so a lot of times once you've gone through that first battery cycle, you're still able to use the battery, it just may not charge as efficiently. Now that's a problem if you're in life threatening or in the critical applications but for things like energy storage, there's a huge potential to reuse batteries from their half-life, allowing them to essentially have already eaten up maybe 50, 80% of the cost in the first product such that you could offer them to at a much, much reduced price for a second go. And then the third thing that really excites me is the ability to export power back onto the grid. I think we're already starting to see this and it's an exciting time, certainly in the residential and solar space but buying and selling among neighbors, I see a world in which you could have collectively your own storage in a microgrid system and we're able to share that with neighbors, maybe even bringing in the blockchain as you think about what it would look like to trade distributed energy. So with that, I'm going to wrap up and just say thank you guys for tuning in today and for joining on the end of your Monday. My email is there for anyone who wants to get in touch. Thank you. I would say, Hannah, thank you very much. That was a very concise, comprehensive and inspiring talk for sure. To it, we actually got quite a few interesting questions so I will try to not make you give away inside secrets from your business strategy which several people want to know about. So let me start with a more techie one and that is, are you considering or do you want to hear about battery technologies that go even beyond lithium ion at this point? Yeah, so that's a great question. We're always thinking about that. We're really excited about what's happening in phase change material and just some of the ways in which we could bring better products. I think at this point in our R&D pipeline really is focused on lithium ion certainly for the next 18 months to three years but I'm always following the trends and I do believe we'll see a step function growth into new technology sometime in the next five to eight years. Great, next one is on the back end. Have you a plan for using your products when the battery cells degrade and or recycling them at this point? Yeah, so that's a great question. So we manufacture, like I said in China you actually can't import batteries back into China so everything that we export we have to recycle we go to great lengths to make sure we're doing that in the most sustainable way. We work with R squared and R third partners here in the US certainly for all the batteries here and so recycling is really important. And then like I think kind of to the second part of that question from a refurbishment point of view we do believe a lot in the ability to refurbish and reuse like I said we don't have a product on the market right now but something we're really excited about is just the half life of batteries and the future potential that would give us to innovate and create even more products. So that's something definitely on our minds. Just to generalize in part the first part of your last response what important differences have you observed in the customer markets in the US and China and also doing business which you already did touch out in the two marketplaces and finally just to pile out a little bit how do you select the sequence of markets that you target in the first place? Yeah, that's a great question. So we started by launching our Indiegogo campaign which was a global campaign. So we had people from over 30 different countries by our products right off the bat those countries were predominantly in Europe, North America and then throughout Asia. We launched in the US partly because that was just my, I'm an American citizen, my co-founders are Chinese citizens partly that was kind of the market we knew best but we have quickly moved. So we sell right now in the EU, in Japan, in China and we're starting to expand just beyond that. I think for us prioritizing markets has just been about taking our time focusing and when we do a market, we wanna do it right. So that means that we put a lot of both time, money and resources behind it. So it's kind of been slow and steady. I will say that it's been really interesting watching how world disasters have affected. So two of the largest global disasters in 2019 were the Taisans in Japan and that we've actually seen has also shifted a really strong Japanese mindset towards preparedness and since then there's been a lot more uptake there. So some of it's also been watching globally what's happening and adapting our strategy as needed. So then we have a set of questions regarding how long you can use the, let's make it more specific. So if there was a disaster, how long does the initial charge device get you and is there a plan for what would happen for a long term, say a Puerto Rico scenario where you would need to get more obviously, if the sun's out, you could do solar jet and so on. So what's your overall game plan in that situation? Yeah, so it's a great question. They hold charge for a year. So that means if you were to put it in your closet on January 1st, you could expect to still have a charge a year later on December 31st, December 30th. From a perspective, long term, these aren't batteries that are meant to keep your entire house running forever. These are portable. And so you would need to recharge it with solar. You can also recharge it via the wall so you can plug it into the grid or you could recharge it via your car through 12-volt car charging. And then everything we do is flow through charging so you can use the product while it's charging meaning that there's not an elapsed wait time. So that's a great general answer. On the more specific thing, if you get knocked up by a storm, how long can you go on the initial charge that you start with at that point? Yeah, so it depends, of course, on what products you're using. You could charge your computer a half dozen time. You could keep your phone charged for 30 nights. You could charge a CPAP through two nights. It really depends on just the energy drawn and the products you're using. So another one, this may be too close to confidential. The general version of this question is what's your strongest competitive strategy? And someone knows about a company called Go Zero, which it is alleged is a potential competitor for Delta. Yeah, so I'm no Go Zero quite well. They were actually bought by Energy about six years ago now. They're doing really great stuff in the space. We watch them all the time. Our products, we feel are superior for many reasons, but we'll probably take that one offline. Great, great. Let's see, there's a couple of questions on the home emergency backup power. So I guess an easier one to answer is, how much do you think it is natural disasters versus, well, climate-induced, weather-induced natural disasters versus COVID? Is COVID adding a lot more interest, a little bit about the same to what you've got as you presented the last two or three years of natural disasters? Yes, so I think it certainly is natural disasters because this trend has been around for a while. I do think COVID has made people a little bit more focused on the uncertainties in life and the fact that maybe some of the assumptions that we've all taken for granted can sometimes be uprooted. And so with that, I do think that in some ways, COVID has made people focus a little bit more on what they can do themselves to kind of be in control and to understand and to just be prepared. But I think there is a strong baseline just towards, COVID has not made the power go out, for example, for many people. And so I do think there's still a strong natural disaster I think I'm here to. Yeah, back to the app part of this, this actually cycles back to some of the previous questions. I know you didn't wanna muck around too much. It's kind of like the Apple Watch with all the health apps. I know they wanted to get the product out first and now they're adding onto it. So there is a group actually even at Stanford that does kind of optimal power management, designing a device in an integrated way that takes into account the use of power during the different cycles and how much power you have left and how you could optimally allocate, say, the different uses that you have going on at any one time. Any interest in that? We obviously have a lot of app people around Silicon Valley, as you know. Yeah, so certainly. And I think we definitely will start to, or there's likely to be an app in the future. It was more kind of a focus and prioritization. And I think the way you said it was great was like getting the product out was our number one priority. But I think there's a lot that can come from remote access of being able to see the power draw, what products you're using, how much energy, imagine a world where you could also then start to tell like, is my refrigerator leaking? What's happening? What does a usual power draw looks like? What does it look like today? And so there's a lot of monitoring as well as just ease of use that could come from an app. Great, there's another hit on China. So what are the biggest challenges in the China market versus the US market? Yeah, I mean, so for us, I mean, the China market has been quite strong and continues to be. I think that there's some differences around just kind of disposable income and kind of awareness. Most people in China are living in apartment buildings, which in some ways is great for us. They can't run a generator anyways, but it in some ways means that there's maybe less of a mindset towards kind of preparedness. And certainly in the China market, we have a lot more kind of copycats and a lot more people competing with us at a different level or different scale. So that's the other thing to keep in mind. Another one by a very famous faculty member is, how do you think about the cost competition between just using batteries and using your device? Yeah, so, you know, our device, we sell river right now for 499, so it's about 500 US. It's certainly more expensive than if you were to go by just the regular batteries. However, the kind of ability to continually use it, the ability to use it in a wide range of temperatures. So in the kind of freezing cold to the very hot, we surpass a lot of what you can do with batteries from that perspective. Additionally, just the kind of multiple ports. And so when we think about that, you know, I think that there's just a lot of value add that we add in our products. The next one, maybe as a semi-obvious one, have you thought about scaling up the size yet again and perhaps hitting the larger scale kind of business market as opposed to households? Yeah, so we will definitely be getting bigger. I can't share what is coming next, but we are definitely moving bigger and that is the future for sure. I guess I have one final question on my own. I have an account which several people hinted at. For someone like you, I always like to know, what's next for you? What are your longer term career goals to the extent you can pick your ad up, maybe during COVID, you could actually not be traveling around as much and think through that. Because I think you're gonna be a pretty big role model for a lot of the young students here. What do you, how do you see your career unfolding? What would you like to do and how would you like to do it? Yeah, certainly, I mean, so I'm very proud of everything we've done at EcoFlow and when I continue to see that through, I think that it's just the beginning of a long journey. I think personally, I love building things. I love building products, I love building companies. I plan to continue to do that. For me, I have a strong focus on helping others and things I can do to make the world better as cliche as that sounds. So, focused on what we can do, things that right now, whether it be in the supply chain, whether it be in manufacturing logistics, I like a lot of these kind of, you know, more physical, tangible industries. I mean, I think a lot of them are ripe for really great innovation. Well, Hannah, thanks a lot for a great talk, which obviously inspired a lot. We had 21 questions, which is the only part, partially summarized and in particular for that last answer, I'm sure we'll all be watching for what you do next. Thanks again, we very much appreciate it.