Ask HN: What is the most important publicly unknown fact in your industry?

Smart does not mean experienced. I don't say this often on HN, but you really have no clue with what you are talking about here.

Could you speak to the reasons why successful startups are not really being founded to develop more advanced batteries? Is the issue primarily 1) widespread lack of knowledge across the entire battery "stack", even within the industry, 2) widespread mismanagement and inefficiency of processes within manufacturing or R&D or 3) the fundamental R&D for battery improvements is just outrageously hard?

I get that it's probably all 3, but I feel as if the main problem being 1) or 2) would lend itself well to startups with extremely knowledgable battery industry veterans.

So how many programmers you know use a professional keyboard, say? I don't want to provide free advertisement here so I won't mention any brands. But the ones that have hands separated and keys placed in recessions for comfortable wrist position and modifier keys under thumbs? And those that are fully programmable, the ones that cost from 300 euro and up? I don't know about you but I have (on my mechanical 100+ euro keyboard) 'Ctrl(Caps Lock)-Command(Alt)-Enter' remapped to 'Alt-Backspace' (in parentheses — the original key) using a Lua-scripted software. If it's your idea of “refined” and “precise” then that's fine :) Moreover most of programmers I know (hundreds and hundreds) use a “minimalist slick” keyboard from a Californian company. It's a good keyboard for googling a guacamole recipe and a nice example of a “good-looking“ industrial design. But it's not a professional tool by any means.

I don't really want to get started about those slow laptops (that have “Pro” labels on them). I don't know about you but for me their performance is disappointing. (By the way, I use a 2010 Macbook Air as my home machine so no need to call me “picky”). Yet those “Pro” machines seem to be “default” ones in so many organizations I know. They are a good trade-off indeed between looks, portability, versatility and price. But they are nowhere near “pay whatever it takes to scrape every last drop of performance and reliability from your tools” approach that to me seems to designate the choice of tools by professionals.

About software. There's the brilliant, inspirational and slightly sad article: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff . Where, I remember, was a comment with a person asking, “do you want to pay hundreds of dollars for a text processor written with the level of quality described?” And my reaction was, “Hell, yes! If it's a professional tool and I earn tens of thousands using it, I should be able to pay accordingly for my main equipment”. In web development industry there's an apparent trend now to switch to “hipster” (I mostly like things hipster) text editors. Won't specify the names here but they are usually written in Javascript and HTML and are “highly customizable” but I rarely see them made to perform functions my IDE does out of the box. In the meantime, IDEs for web development are a few (are there any besides the Prague-made ones?) and are not very customizable by my needs (compared even to aforementioned lightweight editors).

Anyway, thank you for your answer and I am glad, that you do focus on the positive side of things!

A lot of it is because the battery world isn't very startup-y. You can hack together a prototype for an app or a website with a handful of developers, sleepless nights and some caffeine, and push that out to the real world, and show that to VCs and raise money. The battery world doesn't work like that. The scientists and engineers you hire will want to work stable 9-5 jobs with decent salaries, you won't have anything to show for years, and success is binary. 99.99% of hypothetical battery startups would have nothing to show for their research except a handful of useless patents for design processes that will never be practical. One would have the breakthrough that brings them to unlimited riches.

Another problem is that there are two categories of success: you find a simple way to make amazing batteries, or you find a massively complicated way. If you find a simple way, that's great, but it can be copied by anyone who wants money, and you'll end up like the Hoverboard - a very successful _idea_ but the company only captured a fraction of the market. If you find a complex way, it's very likely to require an expensive material or process. For example, say you need a rare metal or something that's not currently produced in large quantities. The capital you'd need to raise in order to extract or create this material could be absolutely massive. For example, let's say you got a 10,000 Wh/kg battery but it needed a substantial quantity of rhenium. Well, worldwide production of rhenium is about 40 tons/year. You'd have create a worldwide industry for extracting rhenium, perhaps rivaling the oil industry in size. Imagine that conversation with VCs. "You want to raise $1.5 trillion? With a T?" "Yep, and we want to do it to create a battery that could either enable our world to look like Star Trek. Oh yeah, and it might become obsolete in months if someone has a better idea."

Another thing is that there's not much to "disrupt". If someone gave me $XXX million for a battery startup, it'd basically be set up in a very similar way to the research arm of Panasonic or Samsung SDI. If some genius comes up with a way to improve the efficiency of the core research - sure, that's obviously worth funding. But the problem is that everybody is trying to get to the breakthrough directly, not invent tools to get to the breakthrough faster.

Imagine if you were in a room with 1000 people, and an authoritative source announced that there's a pot of gold buried in the hill behind the room, and it'll probably be found in a few hours. Do you spend two hours driving home, getting your shovel, and driving back? Or do you run out there and rabidly start digging? Sure, you might answer "get a shovel" now, but in the real world 999 of those 1000 people will be digging with their hands.

The last problem is that the risk, and the return, is absolutely ridiculous. With startups, say 1 in 1000 makes you a billion dollars, 600 return your money and 399 go bankrupt. Great, that's acceptable. Even worst-case scenario, you take a big loss but you don't lose _everything_.

With moonshot battery research startups, every single one will lose all your money except for one - and that one will make you fabulously wealthy beyond your wildest dreams. If the breakthrough is big enough, it would revolutionize literally every field from space exploration to aerospace to power generation to electronics to vehicles. There are so many variables you can't even start to calculate the odds.

I've seen your posts before (I'm a lurking life-extensionist so it's difficult not to notice). My question to you:

Are any credible organisations offering even rudimentary rejuvenation therapies? If yes can you list them, with links and costs if possible?