Solar Window (WNDW) Your Next Solar Investment?

all right so i'm so lucky to have with me today uh the ceo and chairman of solar window jatinder bogal or i think you've been nice enough to let us call you jay thank you so jay tell me before we get into uh the whole scoop or whatever i'd love to know a little bit of background about you and how you joined solar window i've been involved with solar window since inception uh since the very beginning and at the time there was a research scientist who had approached a group of investors and and i was in the room at the time and he had this idea of of having a patient ingest uh silica nanoparticles which would photoluminesce in other words uh if you could imagine almost like tiny little fireflies that you would ingest and somehow this was going to help with medical imaging and while the idea itself just seemed like a spectacular departure from anything that was out there we were a little perplexed and it just didn't quite add up and didn't make a lot of sense that you had these tiny particles that were really generating electricity they could pass through the blood-brain barrier god knows what would happen if you had electrical charges going off in your brain and and you know we actually stepped away from it and it never never came back for for some time and then all of a sudden uh in fact our lead investor came back and said you know what would happen if we if we took this material which appears to be transparent many ways you know what would happen if we just poured it on a piece of glass and and it was perhaps some of that naivete on our part and it was some of the uh serendipity i think um and you know just just good old-fashioned good luck running into an opportunity perhaps repurposing that that core discovery that this that this one uh one scientist happened to have and thinking to ourselves maybe we could do something different from that the idea of a what we used to call back then a nanopower window was born and of course today with solar window where we're now a much different company we've formalized a little bit and certainly come a long way since the early days and and have discovered i think some really exciting ways of of of applying what we call liquid electricity to flexible plastics to glass and our mission as you know is to is to turn ordinary surfaces into electricity generating products and i think we're well on our way to doing that what an interesting beginning for something that seems uh almost so simple sounding compared to uh something that's going to go into your bloodstream uh so what what is solar window and like how does it actually work solar window and it's a bit of a misnomer because i think oftentimes most of us have the impression that the that that as a company we've set out to ambitiously turn skyscraper windows into electricity generating glass which is part and parcel of what we're aiming to do and that was certainly our motivation i think at the beginning we're no different than any company any technology that i think evolves from a core uh foundational technology to then evolving to becoming a product what we've developed is a platform that allows for uh plastics glass whether rigid or flexible to to suddenly start generating electricity and do it using an organic coating earth abundant materials and what's absolutely brilliant and i credit our our scientists our engineers our our folks that really had the vision and they what we've developed is a coating that's 1 100 the thickness of a human hair there's approximately four or five layers that we apply this all proprietary uh we have i think now just going off the top of my head around 120 patent claims around the world in the united states throughout europe in china and elsewhere we have another 200 this company is in motion we have another 200 or so that are currently in process and what our technology allows you to do is to take this organic material organic liquid coating apply it to these different different surfaces and suddenly you have electricity generating on those surfaces so let's just think about that for a minute what this means is that you no longer need to strap a solar panel onto the rooftop of a car in order to in order to to contemplate the idea of an electricity generating vehicle you no longer need to think of a very heavy cumbersome albeit i think highly efficient and increasingly efficient conventional solar panel that that may contain for example toxic metals heavy you know lead and other materials that i think most of us are trying to get away from and instead if you can visualize surfaces that we've never seen generating electricity before including indoors and we'll get into that hopefully a little bit later these are places where solar has never been able to go before and and if i can if i can be so bold if we turn the clock back a little bit and you think about your cell phone and if you think of the early days of the cell phone and most of us would think why do i need a phone and and you'd ponder that for a minute and i think exactly what you'd say to yourself is i need a phone so i can make a phone call and then someone had the brilliant idea of saying wait a second if you're going to make a phone call let's add a directory to it so you can actually find the phone numbers right and then someone said hold on a second what if we put a camera in this thing and most folks of my generation turned around and said what kind of craziness is that who puts a phone with a camera this is lunacy it's unnecessary when i want a camera i go get my camera in other words we never perceive the need for having this this this concept of mobility this ability to capture moments in our lives to recall these moments this ability to actually have uh photography and memories available to us in our hand in the palm of our hand and likewise i think a lot of us me included for the longest time never imagined that the walls in our living room that the the the boardroom tables in our offices that these surfaces could potentially be generating electricity never imagine that uh perhaps we've never contemplated that with with the electoral mobility movement with the idea of autonomous vehicles coming before us the the very concept of having potentially a non-hackable power source that could potentially be able to immediately provide signaling emergency gps uh emergency response could be activated through this direct form of electrification that could be powered from the sunroof of the car the ability to extend the driving range of a vehicle of a of a big rig of a truck these are things that we've perhaps contemplated more science fiction and now they've become science fact so when you ask you know what's what's the implication or where do we go with with with solar window with liquid electricity ics moving far beyond the concept of electrifying the glass on buildings although certainly it's a very compelling business proposition and it's one that we continue to pursue i i find at the same time it's important to remember that what we have is is a is a product that's evolved far beyond a single product concept for a building and has now really evolved to become a a platform technology so this is i mean yeah you got our attention my mind is unfolding as to the ideas of what you could do so i mean essentially you have a coding uh and it's transparent which is nice because you can put it on windows if it weren't transparent it would you know okay you can't do windows but you could still do walls so how let's let's just say i want to take a concrete wall you know southern facing on my house or something like that can i just get a can of this magic stuff and just slop it on there or and then just attach a couple wires i'm sure it's a little bit more in involved than that right absolutely it's a this is this is a complex chemistry i mean we what we're doing is advanced material sciences and if i think if you were to strip away the sizzle and if you were to uncover the steak you know what's the secret sauce here between what we do behind what we do it's a combination of the application first of all it's the formulation of these coatings it's knowing what characteristics we need to be prevalent in these coatings so they can be applied in certain ways and that's a second part the coatings on them by their own on their own are no different than for example uh you know having you you could have the cure to cancer but if you can't put it in a syringe or if you can't deliver to the patient it's not really doing much sitting in the vial so i think in many ways i see our liquid electricity the same way yes we can have a liquid coating uh that generates electricity it's actually the process is through which we lay it down that makes it a complete product and then there are various other processes that enable the electrons to move and for electricity to be generated and ultimately to be taken off of that glass or off of the plastic and and run through a wiring system so that it can be it can be directed to wherever wherever the need is one aspect of your question though i think is is is really cool um you know when you mention south facing and and let me let me start if i can so why why is it that you picked south facing for the for your question for your illustration um well making the assumption that we're in the northern hemisphere the you get the most uh sun exposure anything that's southern facing because the sun is usually in the southern uh half of the sky right makes absolute sense for conventional solar it makes absolute sense one of the advantages we have is that unlike conventional solar which of course as you know is contin is dependent upon the angle of irradiance of the sun and and and again i don't want to knock conventional solar because i think that's you know we stand on the shoulders of giants that have come before us and this is one of those giants we wouldn't be doing what we're doing if it wasn't for the cadmium tellurides and the and the cigs and and the amorphous silicons and the polycrystallines and everybody else that's come before us at the same time every technology has its advantages they all have some gaps and opportunities and i think we're able to fill in some of these gaps so to your illustration about the south facing wall one of the advantages we have is that we can actually function from dawn to dusk so just keep that in mind well why is that important well it means that we do not need direct sunlight instead we're actually able to work from reflected light indirect light so what by the way what's reflected like for for some of our audience that may not know uh i didn't know someone had to show me so if you can imagine two buildings that are next to each other and if we can just visualize how the light would bounce off of one tower to the other that's reflected light the advantage we have is not only do we do we function in uh in in natural sunlight direct natural sunlight uh but also indirect light reflected light uh we even work indoors now each of these applications and so indoors under artificial light conditions each of these applications will have their advantages and disadvantages and and of course maximum power that can be derived in the lower power nonetheless what it again what it does is this this opportunity through our liquid electricity opens up um opens up applications and electricity generation where it's never been available to us before so i would just say that while we've traditionally contemplated south facing as our opportunity i think what we can look at now is east west east west north south two buildings against each other with just a little bit of light and so on to get back to your question you know what how would we actually apply this to to to one of the walls on the outside of your of your home or on the outside of a building i think a good application just for us to contemplate is a warehouse for example and and there's an application where you do not need transparency per se and by the way non-transparency is our friend it's always going to be our friend um we we have to accept the fact that the more light we're able to absorb the more energy we can absorb from the from from light the more power we're going to be able to generate traditionally rooftop systems on uh on warehousing have played a very important role and i think they've done a great job however we have oftentimes thousands and thousands of square feet around the perimeter of the building the walls and because they're vertical and because the sun just does not hit them at the right angle these these panels are simply unable to produce enough power to make them financially feasible and and that's one of the again one of the advantages we have is we're not dependent upon this angle of irradiance dynamic that we have in conventional solar i hope that helps interesting this kind of leads me to the question then a lot of people are seeking the highest percentage efficiency panel they can find they're willing to pay the nose to get that panel or they're willing to wait years and years we've heard from even many of our viewers who are like you know should i get solar now or should i should i wait because i think in five years the you know the efficiency is going to be higher and oftentimes i'm like what makes the most economic sense for you now like why why wait a couple years your throat sunlight is just being reflected and absorbed by the roof of your house what are you waiting for so you're almost what you're talking about here is that you know while uh you know liquid electricity might not be as efficient as say a solar panel it can go in places that regular solar panels just aren't economical and and i think it's not just economics it's also the practicality you know where where our need is so just getting back to the whole concept of of of a of a cell phone with a with a with a camera if you need a high definition 8k movie production that you're going to do then probably your cell phone camera is inadequate but for the day-to-day you know pictures of your of your kids at their birthday it's just fine i think sometimes what we forget is that we have in our lives power all around us i mean the one constant that that humanities had from from day one through all eternity has been energy uh whether it was uh whether it's thermal energy or what you know whatever whatever the source was uh and we forget that we have we might be sitting in a room and you've got somebody with a pacemaker with an embedded battery in it that's that's that's producing next to nothing in terms of in terms of any voltage or amperage next to nothing and then that same person may have a may have a cell phone that has a has a battery and it's producing a different amount of power uh you may go out to your car and it might be an electric car and suddenly you've got a lot of power in there comparatively speaking so i think what it is is we've been programmed and and again this is the evolution of any technology uh we've been programmed i think to think in terms of um of efficiency when what we should really be looking at is the practicality and i think we ultimately do all of us ultimately migrate to with the convenience and and the need is this technology able to fill a need and in short i think that that we're just not aware yet that the the walls inside buildings the uh the the outer surfaces of buildings uh are vehicles uh buses trains uh aerospace applications uh one of the areas that we've been digging into um and i was i was reminded uh i don't know if you're aware but we we have a 10-year relationship through a cooperative research and development agreement at solar window with uh with one of the world's most advanced research programs through the u.s department of energy at the national renewable energy labs and and one of the folks there the other day was reminding me about how our particular approach uh using this organic photovoltaic uh is is far better than conventional solar panels that are for example sent into into extraterrestrial into space and into high altitude uh drone or high altitude unmanned aerial vehicles as they call them why because of the impact of thermal cycling and radiation cycling on those panels and the degradation it can cause in our case for example in those applications heat happens to be our friend we actually work more efficiently the hotter our material gets so there are all kinds of applications i'm sitting here with my laptop in front of me imagine my laptop being able to produce power uh enough power they can extend uh the battery life on my on my computer and i think we just haven't gotten to that point yet where we can see we can actually experience a lot of these opportunities for power so there's a natural tendency jesse i think for folks to to dwell purely on power conversion efficiency incidentally that is our mission for 2021 i think you're going to hear more about our power conversion efficiency in a big way uh i as you know we're a public company and i'm somewhat constrained due to regulation fd but but that's no secret that uh that that power is our friend and we intend to make it a key feature of our of our uh of our performance and our messaging this year i think a lot of people kind of want to get some numbers though they want to wrap their head around this and i know that on your website i saw something about that if you had a building uh it would be possible to get 50 times more power out of solar window system than it would be to put traditional solar on the roof and that really caught me because i was like what so could you explain i mean did i read that right is that possible so yes you did read it right and and i just i think all of us need to take one step back for just a minute so if this was a skyscraper this was a 40-story building we have the guys you know the panasonic's the ge's the the first solars who are basically battling over the rooftop so on a 40-story building you have roughly 3 000 square feet of usable space and i'm being quite liberal with that number don't forget you have hvac systems oftentimes you want to put gyms rooftop bars and so on so it may not be available let's assume it is you have 3 000 square feet of rooftop space to put conventional solar which is going to work somewhere depending on your geography between two and a half to four hours per day depending on the angle of a radiance of the sun three thousand square feet we have six acres of glass on the same building and let's go a step further the other advantage we have is we're solution processable we're liquid this is so important if you can if you can visualize for a moment a half a teaspoon of liquid poured onto a piece of glass that's three feet by three feet so if you have a three foot by three foot dimension we need roughly half a teaspoon of our liquid coatings in order to generate power meaningful power and and by the way in our independent modeling what we've been able to demonstrate is that you have a one-year financial payback that's the key and i think jesse i think you talked about that earlier where folks are fixated on how much power do i get i think building owners are fixated on how quickly does it pay for itself i think that's what really matters to them this is our value proposition it's the fact that we don't need to manufacture under conditions which add tremendous cost that's the advantage of having liquid coatings and as you know ultimately chemistry is cheap it's the it's the development of that chemistry that that's expensive but once you produce that chemistry it's a it's a it's a very low cost value proposition in the manufacturing cycle now i invested a few years ago in solar window and i know that a lot of investors have been approaching you pretty much knocking on your door and like okay when's it ready i'd like a bucket of that for my house um and so when can they start to see some kind of product that they can buy because i know they're just chomping at the bit to get their hands on it great question so up to 2020 i would say the past the past decade for us has been a has really been an evolution from early discovery through to uh to invention of early prototypes through testing and when i say discovery uh it's important to remember something um when i first went out and met with groups of physicists this is over a decade ago uh i actually met with six different physicists to to get their take on what we were doing and they said you're crazy you're trying to defy the laws of of nature uh this is the equivalent of defining the laws of gravity and the reason they said that is because every solar panel in the world looked like that it was black and so the idea of having a solar panel that could look like this just didn't make any sense you need to harvest the photons of the sun or you it you just cannot do this and and you know i was reminded when i when i was speaking with these physicists um zach asked them a question i said look you know you say that we're trying to defy gravity and interestingly enough there was there was a time when we believe that what goes up must come down and i just hopped in a metal tube traveled 2 000 miles to come and meet you and that tube went up and came down when we decided it was going to do that we call it flight and until bernoulli discovered the concept of lift we would have thought it was crazy when i say that we went through a decade of invention and discovery it's because it's not as though we were trying to be a burger king to mcdonald's for example where there's an existing franchise and we can we can kind of learn from the processes and and replicate and perhaps re-engineer a little bit of what was done we really had to start from scratch we had to we had to invent every phase of this technology from inception to where we are today including for example a common question i get gee how do you how do you get the electricity to travel within the glass and get it off the glass we have to invent what we call invisible wires a matrix that allows a system that allows for us to actually get that energy off of the coatings and direct it to the edge of the glass every aspect of this was invented so for the first decade our focus was discovery invention ensure that we have patentability and protections be able to demonstrate the viability of of our technology and then productization how do we actually productize what we have last year 2020 mid last year about six months ago represented a major turning point for solar window and i think you see some of that reflected today in some of the optimism with what we're doing and some of the some of the support that we've had um it it was it marked the point at which we had raised sufficient capital and were able to i we had a turning point where we were able to demonstrate a a three foot by three foot window that was actually generating power that was for us a very very important moment we had to get past this this one particular obstacle if we didn't get there we were going to have a problem we i think we have some very devoted very loyal uh scientists and engineers they worked through the constraints of covid which as you know it hit us by march and yet by may that actually broke through this barrier uh 60 days later i joined the company i i've served on the company's board for approximately a decade and been around solar window different capacities this is the first time in 30 years that i've ever joined the executive management team of any of our funded ventures as the ceo so to your question you know when will we see this as a product i think what you're seeing right now is the company gearing up exactly for that we've as you know we've established our offices in korea and seoul south korea and unlike i think some of the conventional thinking that may be out there that solar window should be building its own factories and its plants and this and that i think we want to be a little more forward thinking i think for us our priority is to is to be able to productize what we have to mass produce uh a a set of coatings and and to mass produce our applications and our products uh in a in a marketplace where complex manufacturing of chemistry and coatings is done on a daily basis and to us that's in korea and south korea uh it's number one on the bloomberg innovation index so this has been our priority has been to establish the management team have all the elements in place so we can be set for manufacturing and i think you'll hear more about that in the upcoming quarters from from solar window so we've heard recently about apple and hyundai they're supposedly working together on you know apple's new autonomous car and it gets me thinking here that if you can use solar window on a building is it possible that this would be a good use on an autonomous vehicle automotive vehicles autonomous vehicles mass transit uh buses for example offer us a tremendous amount of rooftop space believe it or not recreational vehicles are another market that i think is largely overlooked marine applications are another um high-speed rail all and of course aerospace and um and air travel is is another major market for us that i think is entirely untapped that we should be we should be getting behind because i mean we were just talking to the co-ceos of aptera they're working on that paradigm electric vehicle that can one of the versions can get a thousand miles of range and one of the questions that came up from one of our uh now you know investor club members was hey have you looked into putting solar on the windows as well and they said well we looked into it but at this time it doesn't seem to be economically feasible and i'm thinking well maybe they just didn't know about you guys so would solar window i mean would this be a good partnership to do i think we're open and we're receptive to all kinds of opportunities and i think oftentimes the the there's a there's a bit of a misunderstanding which is or or a miscommunication where we often feel that the actual glass itself needs to be coated and just keep in mind once and you've and you've heard about this back uh late last year we had an important breakthrough on being able to manufacture on roll to roll you know and this is key and if you go back to our history you'll see from time to time we kind of allude to this and if you sort of connect the dots it becomes kind of obvious what we're trying to do our i think the holy grail for us is the ability to to mass produce on a roll to roll system what is that it's where you you know in the old days you'd see the printing presses that were going you know miles of newspaper every day that would come through this role to roll well it's more or less the same system semiconductor industry uses it uh the oled industry uses this for mass production we envision being able to uh manufacture sheets of plastic which are generating electricity uh sheets of flexible glass potentially which we've already worked with and and for those that are unfamiliar with flexible glass it's it's actually a sheet of glass that that is about the thickness of a business card and you can actually fold it down to about a one inch radius so just imagine a sheet of glass that that can actually be folded like this and it springs back to shape in the work that we've done we've been able to generate electricity fold that glass down to one inch radius open it back up and it's still working so why is this important well once you have a sheet of plastic that generates glass that sheet of plastic can be laminated it can be inserted between two sheets of glass which are then brought together and that's of course how you have laminated glass and the sheet in the middle of course is generating electricity now for those that think this is something novel or something different of course the novel part is being able to generate electricity on that plastic what's not novel however is that this is a perfectly normal accepted practice in the glass industry your security glass your high tension glass glass that goes on skyscrapers and towers it's all done that way the vast majority of of glass that's put into certain kinds of vehicle sun roofs is built the same way so if we can if we can think not of just the final product iteration that it can go into a car whether it's an uptera or whether it's a uh an apple car or a or a tesla car or any kind of you know a volkswagen whatever it is just if we remove ourselves from that for just a minute we just and we think instead of a sheet of plastic that is ultra lightweight and and why is this important and it's generating electricity and the entire coating is 1 100th of thickness of a human hair well why is all of this important well we're not shipping sheets of glass around anymore so in the glass industry they call it they call it sand they say you know oh yeah you know we got to ship sand around and what they're talking about is how heavy sand is so if you can think of the last time you actually lifted a bag of sand it's really heavy so think of these sheets of glass if you think of a of an architectural application for example on windows glass windows that would have to be shipped from a factory across the ocean and then you hope that it all stays intact and then you have to install it and hope it all works and you know it's a complex business what if we could just simply sh you know be producing miles and miles of these sheets of plastic which can then be laminated between the sheets of glass this is a game changer so i'm just trying to picture you know if we're either trying to you know coat a building with it or a vehicle uh i'm just trying to get down to imagining it actually you know happening so assuming that we have a you know a window that has this coating in the middle of the two pieces of glass because if most people aren't aware uh windows have generally more than one piece of glass in it it's for thermal uh insulation so that way the heat doesn't just just evaporate out of your window um so there is space to basically put this transparent film with this transparent coating on there so then i you know we've put in windows before uh when we were working on our house and uh so you just you just use a hammer and there's a hammer and it's done i'm assuming the electricity you're gonna have to get it out somehow so there's gonna have to be wires um so basically you'll just have an electrician with the window uh installer and they'll be wiring up the windows as you go along so the way that we've that we've done our product engineering for window applications in particular uh and it's interesting what you said about the thermal and how there's more than one sheet of glass and in a in for example a insulated glass unit is what they call it igu and it can be two panes or three panes of glass as you as you know so what's what's super exciting for us is that when our coating is applied inside that glass what most people don't know is that gap that we see in the middle in in between the sheets of glass is actually filled with an inert gas that inert gas helps our coating actually increase its durability in its life cycle so there's a there's a there's a natural environment which helps us perform even better in an insulated glass unit configuration with regards to how how we would for example on a building how would you connect uh these these windows together and what have you so years ago we actually developed what we call plug and play solution and it's exactly what it sounds like where you can literally have the have the windows either in a dc configuration or an ac configuration we can be we have the flexibility to uh to for example have all of the power that comes from an entire floor of these uh of these glass windows be directed to a central uh battery system or energy storage system that might be in a building or you can simply have the energy redistributed on a single floor or you can or you can actually use it as a direct source of power right then and there whatever the most practical application is for that particular installation uh we believe that that we've been able to engineer our way through that process and and it's been an important feature to uh to ensuring the practicality of of productizing solar window so i mean sounds like solar window is going to work great on buildings it's going to work great on transportation of all kinds ships and and cars and trains is there any other place that solar window could work that i'm not thinking of right now i think that's a great question and i'm always surprised because we get calls for example some of our biggest supporters of course are stockholders we get calls all the time from folks in telecom decision makers in in in different industries and as i as i was mentioning earlier one of the areas that i think i had put aside for a long time was extraterrestrial was space applications i think some of the aeronautical applications that we've always known have held some promise for us but they were a little bit back burnered we didn't know quite how to approach them from an engineering perspective i think in the past few years we've had some important important validation of our technology and of our approach that that opens a doorway to for example aircraft commercial aircraft uh opens a doorway to to space uh vehicles and and in one of the aspects of space travel that we sometimes forget we all think of folks being in space and and everything's weightless and i think that's kind of the image we have what we forget is that the average payload costs around ten thousand dollars per pound well you see where the dynamics suddenly shift uh ten thousand dollars a pound is really really heavy and really expensive for putting a source of energy uh up in space and if we can do this um you know rather than doing it for pounds do it in ounces bring the cost from from hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars down to down to numbers that make economic sense or even more feasible and and on top of that if we can provide electrification to surfaces that have not been electrified before uh it's suddenly again it becomes a game changer and that that's i think these are some of the areas that we did not traditionally consider but you may have heard us starting to talk about this a little bit more in the past i'd say 12 or 18 months so i'm just thinking of the you know the mars base uh and of course it's got the dome over it and usually it's got the big giant solar field with robots cleaning off all the solar panels of the martian dust uh the dome itself could now be uh generating the electricity and all the buildings in the vehicles inside the dome and outside the dump well into your question though so i mean this is a transparent coding or it can be um and i've seen some video and pictures on your website and we're probably seeing some now and this looks great because in most applications like an office you don't need 100 transparency in fact a little bit of of sun shading could be good but like let's say i wanted to have a greenhouse with plants in it um is it possible to coat my windows on the roof with this will enough sunlight get through to my plants to grow them or is it really going to take too much power away what a wonderful question my god i'm loving you guys more and more uh the agrovoltaic sector as they call it and it's and it's an emerging market the the idea of providing electrification to agriculture uh in is is a relatively new concept uh dr xavier sarat in uh in spain who's one of the world's foremost authorities on plant uh growth and and plant biology and the impact of light on plant growth he's been working with us for some time and and one of the things that excites uh xavi so much is that there's this there's this interesting dynamic that happens with plant growth and and so with at first of all in short does solar window have the promise of electrifying greenhouses the short answer is yes the nuance to it is that while most of us think about plant growth in terms of optimizing the yield of plants there are certain applications of plants where you actually want larger leaves to be to to to flourish and grow rather than simply more volume of plant so a good example is a spinach industry and studies have been done in fact they were just published last year where if you can if you can actually reduce the amount of light that the spinach receives the leaves naturally grow bigger because they're trying to grow and they do what nature intends them to do which is let me increase my surface area so that i can bring more nourishment to myself and of course you know if you're going down to the supermarket and you see you see two bunches of spinach one has larger leaves and the other doesn't you're probably going to buy the one that has so the agricultural market is for us is very exciting there are opportunities i think in in northern hemisphere markets or opportunities in new emerging markets especially where greenhouse applications and greenhouse growth and the greenhouse industry is starting to really come into its own but we're super excited about this along with i think high efficiency lighting systems that have been introduced into the agrovoltaic sector which have really turned this into a science as much as an art form so we see it as a very exciting application thank you for bringing that up i heard you mentioned earlier that you can use this indoors and my mind kind of just passed that up because i was so focused on the rest of the stuff but now my mind is like knocking again like uh you can use this indoors wait a minute what right it's like crazy because you know we use a solar panel as our desk and of course it's not hooked up to anything because it's not really going to generate any appreciable amount of power but you're saying that you can generate electricity indoors how the key to remember here is we're not reliant on sunlight we're relying on light and that's very very different as you know so the the advantage we have is when we're using the energy from the light it can be artificial light it can be it can be uh natural sunlight i i think for us in terms of indoor applications what we're primarily going to go after is is the applications that require voltage this is this is the key for us i think that you're there we're entering a new phase of building comfort that's going to be driven by sensors for example that need to be need to be powered and the idea of running wiring through your home or through an office can you imagine if you're in a hospital or an office building or a school a shopping mall or hotel and you're running wire through the entire building so you can put sensors up it's ludicrous and it's equally ludicrous to think that you're going to be changing the batteries on uh you know 300 rooms in a hotel uh it's it's silly so i think for us the opportunity to create peel and stick applications which are which are embedded into into sensors and uh and a new again a new generation of technology that enables comfort in ways that we've not seen it and then to be able to evolve the technology from from these point of use direct current type applications to various other iterations that we've been working on very actively i think is going to be another exciting evolution for indoor power that's generated using solar window all right so new tech is all fine and good right we get a lot of stories across our desks all the time about new graphene super you know batteries and so forth but we've kind of grown a little bit i don't know biased i mean elon has said that it's it's fun even to build a prototype but then the next day stage is really hard which is scaling up and it's even harder to make money when you scale so is this going to be economically viable i mean is it what's the time frame and what do you need to scale and at the end of the day is this just going to stay in a lab somewhere or is this actually going to come out into the retail world absolutely we're coming out and and the reason that i'm uh that i've joined the team the reason that we've stacked our our management team in the course of last year with folks that come from a history of commercialization and productization of new technologies and is is precisely for this reason you asked another very important question can we do this in a way that's economically viable or will it just be another you know cool toy and i think that's a fair question uh we are driven by the economics in this business unlike i think a lot of invention and discovery and early startups for example that are driven by perhaps the engineers and the scientists we were founded by entrepreneurs who who valued the uh the brilliance of the engineering and the science that came and enabled us to do what we're doing so from day one the first question we've asked us is can we do this in a way where where it makes economic sense and uh that's the only way we're that that is the only way in which we're moving forward with our product is with it making economic sense uh with regards to our timing i think one thing we all need to remember is that we're no different than any other business we're no different than any other evolution of a new technology and it's funny you know you mentioned elon musk earlier and his experience was seeing you know cool new prototypes but how do you turn into product absolutely correct um all of us go through a period of the r d then we go through a period of ensuring that we have the intellectual property and and we have the protections that we need to have in place in order to move forward and then what we do is we seek the partnerships i think there's a and that's a major shift in dynamic from how business was done perhaps a decade earlier a decade ago the idea of pre-orders was ludicrous the idea that you would pay for something and hope it arrives while some folks would put manufacturing in place to actually produce it just didn't seem to make sense we were hoping to walk down to our local sears store and buy something and of course now we look back on that and it just seems like eons ago um i think we're no different we're part of this shift we're part of the shifting dynamic we're not interested in building uh building factories where we're producing solar window product the reason again we're in korea uh the number one the number one region on the bloomberg innovation index in fact was just ranked number one again for complex manufacturing for innovation is seoul korea and we are there because we believe that we need to effectuate the right commercial and manufacturing partnerships to enable us to mass produce our product cost effectively so this is the next part of our evolution and and how where you can sort of evidence is firsthand is the shift in solar window as a company moving away i think from a heavily uh r d focused management group to instead folks that are really focused on productization in the next evolution one of the one of the one of the fellows that joined me when when we came when i came on last year in july is john rhee and john's a good friend of mine uh what most people don't know about john and you know he he's a very smart guy he's one of these yale graduates who who went on and served in uh you know as part of white house council many many years ago part of the team today sits on the barbara bush foundation is with a nobel sustainability trust really great guy the one part that they don't know about him is that he was also the head of alternative investments at softbank and you may have heard his company called alibaba and he was actually the lead to to drive the alibaba program at softbank that was a that was an initiative where uh softbank put 20 million dollars into that venture of course it became a 60 billion dollar trade so just keep that in mind we've been stacking our team with folks that i believe can help us do the next important things that are going to allow us not just to produce a one-off prototype put some you know put some flashy prototypes on a car and create a an exciting youtube video and get some folks excited that's not building a business the way to build our business is on a solid foundation it's by bringing the right folks in by the way the other part to that story is when softbank invested in alibaba there were five employees there and that's perhaps the part that most people don't know so we're going through the same evolution we brought in joe song as our director of operations in korea jose a brilliant young man his last mandate at one of the private equity firms he was with uh was with seventh as directing operations on the team uh seven thousand employees three billion dollar a year company uh the last new product that he launched went from zero to a hundred million in year one uh this this is the caliber and the quality of the team that we've assembled and we have not i'm not here and our team is not here so that we can um we can you know we can do anything short of disrupt the energy space and do so with what we believe is a breakthrough product that is so smart because i mean i feel a little privileged here on this channel to talk to a lot of startup companies and they usually get stuck right about there at the manufacturing phase where they had a great idea awesome and they implemented a great prototype whatever and then they're like oh it's really hard to make this thing at scale guys i'm like yeah but you guys are saying yeah skip that don't try and reinvent the wheel and figure out how to make a factory and how to make go to the the leaders in this and partner with them and i think that's a really smart thing but yet most founders you know if jesse and i were to found a company like we don't know how to do that and so it's really cool to hear that you guys have figured out you know the right people that do know how to do it and to that well into that question i i was looking at your team because i when i'm investing in company i like to see who's running the team and as i was going through your website i was like awesome awesome awesome and then i see miss alexandra musk and i'm like that's funny elon has a sister named alexandra musk could this be the same person so ellie is definitely she she's a member of the musk family and and um she's a she's a godsend um she is someone uh who uh in fact i just spoke with her yesterday about some of the things that we're doing and and um she she's she's playing a very important role i think in the next phase of our development there's a reason that apple is not going out and building its own automotive plant they could do it in heartbeat and they've not done it so far and there's a reason i think that you're seeing this this proliferation of folks who say you know what we're really good at manufacturing and you're really good at at innovation and brand building and new product development let us do what we do best you do what you do best let's bring peanut butter and jelly together and let's all have some fun and i think that's where we are now that's really helpful because i got to say as an investor for the longest time um looking at your website kind of refreshing refreshing refreshing and being like what are they doing over there they're just still working in the lab um and i honestly got a little frustrated because i think the time frame for many investors is like you know they expect something to have happened by now but it's really uh invaluable to hear that this is the the plan because it now all all the pieces are fitting together in my head like oh this completely makes sense of what that you know their next steps will be um i want to talk a little bit just outside the box here about energy and innovation um for the longest time uh i think that we haven't put together the fact that energy drives innovation and i think we've all been stuck with the fact that if we need more energy then we have to build another coal plant so yeah i guess we don't want to do that um or just even the availability of energy within a within a home uh i mean we have a a very very old leaf blower right you plug it into a 110 outlet and you can blow the leaves but we have a much better battery powered leaf blower and the reason that it's better is because it has more energy that you can pull from it than you can get out of the wall and that's really a different sort of paradigm because you've never been able to do that before it's sort of a decentralization of uh power you'd either need to go to gasoline burning gasoline which is you know most leaf blowers or gasoline powered because if you want a high powered uh you know leaf blower for example you have to burn gasoline you there was no battery uh for you to be able to draw energy from and it's kind of a similar looking thing here um we've moved in very recent you know in this last decade to be able to actually generate power in your house um that isn't uh you know a fossil fuel isn't an outside generator that you only you know use during a storm it's something that could be generating electricity all the time but now we're almost taking another step forward to be able to put that energy generation on anything as you were mentioning earlier just as an extension of your thought because i you're bang on and and it's our it's it's our con it's our it's our shared experience i think amongst all of us how we're seeing the availability of energy in places that we never saw it before the idea that you can carry around an electronic device a cell phone a laptop that has that has hours and hours and hours of charge in some cases days of charge was was a was a hypothetical at one time and now it's so normal we don't even think about it um and it's interesting what you said about energy because um and its availability so if we do a simple you know back of the napkin calculation the sun alone provides us at any given moment ten thousand times all the energy that the planet actually utilizes so just do the math for a minute a hundred seventy three hundred seventy three thousand terawatts of energy come from the sun at any given moment the planet utilizes one ten thousandth of that if you add up all the fossil fuels all the coal all the solar all of our gasoline all over electricity everything combined so the energy is there what we're having a tough time is figuring out gee how can we capitalize on this energy the abundance of energy and and we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves you know the human race we've done we've made incredible strides if you if you look at how far we've come you know you mentioned coal earlier you know i feel indebted to coal if it wasn't for coal uh we wouldn't have uh we wouldn't have electricity uh if it wasn't for uh fossil fuels we wouldn't have had uh you know we wouldn't have elect we wouldn't have cars which eventually would would become electric powered uh so i think all of these energy sources were very necessary from the first guy that that decided to take two rocks together or rub a couple of sticks together to to someone figuring out how to turn it into a matchstick to to us today contemplating the future of energy with solar and with with sort of solar photovoltaics uh you know you mentioned graphene earlier perovskites these are new generation materials and and speaking of new generation materials um zach you know one of the things and and just one of the things that i think we like to pride ourselves on a solar window is that is that our technology has been built as much on this material chemistry that we have however we've really developed our what we call our device architecture in other words how do we apply those layers in a way that allows us to swap out our chemistry so if and this is really cool by the way and i don't mean to geek out on you but i get kind of excited sorry so just imagine if for a minute we have one of those multiple layers and uh jesse you come up with a better idea you say you know what let's you know i can i can create a better secret sauce that does the same thing you're doing in that layer no problem bring it on we'll use it and so part of what we've been working on so when people say gee you know what you've been doing for a decade part of what we were doing and this is this is i think one of the distinctions between sort of the entrepreneur side the business side versus being purely driven by material science one of the one of the passions that i think scientists spring and engineers bring is a real belief in what they're doing but there's also a tendency to get married to it one of the things entrepreneurs bring one of the skills that entrepreneurs bring is the ability to embrace other people's ideas and say you know what that's a great idea zack great idea jess love your coding i'm going to incorporate it into my product so when we talk about next generation and we think of the future we think of the evolution of energy and we think of perovskites or graphene or we think of other materials just know one thing that we have built the foundation of our technology so we can swap various aspects of it for whatever the newest the latest and the greatest opportunities might be in material science and that's a key feature behind our approach and i think it's a key distinction behind what we're doing today versus products that may seem cutting edge but ultimately they become the ford model t they may have been a barrier breaker but they don't come with a reverse gear you know and they only come in black and they don't you know so so this is something that i think is hard for a lot of folks to embrace there's a certain sense of pride and ownership when you feel that you have the best way but if you pick up the average cell phone today very few companies own all the components in those cell phones if you pick up a laptop or a computer it's only recently as you know that apple itself has has been switching up components that they now natively own or manufacture and and this is an important important distinction and something i think everyone needs to know we've been planning for the future from day one never ever wanting to be uh arrogant enough or letting our ego get in the way i think of our mutual success which which comes from embracing the ideas that others may have and technologies that others have integrating them into our final product when i'm looking at a product i kind of want to be able to touch something or wrap my head around it or you know a time frame is there any glint that you can give to our viewers as to what they might see first or when they might see it because if i was in charge of the company i think i you know i've heard that it's basically going to be some kind of magic roll i would think to put it probably in like commercial glass first because it's a very controlled environment and it's a lot of surface area so like i would try and go after something that sounds fairly straightforward as opposed to like going after putting this in tesla's or something like that first is that something we might see first is some kind of commercial window first and then it might go into other products i think what you're going to see is that our product rollout is predicated not on what we believe is best but rather by what our customers believe is best and who are our customers our customer is not and this is an odd thing to say it's not the consumer our customers are actually our partners so what does that mean so for example if it's the automotive industry and the automotive industry wants a sunroof that generates electricity that is our customer in turn you know of course they're selling the vehicle to the consumer the same with the glass industry we're not we're not interested in building a solar window uh window product that's not we have no interest in that our interest is in providing the power source that can electrify that glass so if you're a window maker and you're interested in providing electricity generating glass to your customers if you want to be someone that has a differentiation by the way the glass industry has a major issue the last major innovation major innovation disruption that happened in in the commercial glass space was almost half a century ago with uh with with the uh with the invention of float glass uh sir pilkington in the uk developed a system that allows for buildings to no longer have concrete towers with little windows punched out of them instead now you have floor to ceiling glass that was made possible because of float glass since that time other than some incremental advancements in that industry and and of course uv coatings and various other coatings um there's been relatively little innovation we have electrochromic windows and all kinds of other applications that allow for tinting of that glass but i think the idea of generating the the prospect of generating electricity on acres and acres of commercial glass is certainly very compelling uh but again our business model is not to attempt to uh to develop a product which is direct to consumer uh i think there are there are companies and brands and products that do that very very well they're already well positioned our question is how do we provide the energy source to electrify those products that's our that's our sweet spot well i'm just so excited that i have this job because i mean i got to hear about this company years ago from one of our awesome viewers and then i get to talk to the ceo of the company now and that's all because of our viewers a that they you know elevated us to the status where jay actually took our call but the fact that you're actually here talking to us and and exciting me again about i mean this is what elon talks about all the time we want to have something that gets us excited to get out of bed in the morning and this to me is one of those things because now i can picture things that for the longest time you know we were told like in residential buildings don't put too many windows they're just an energy drain so just put them as sparingly as possible and now i'm thinking you might have just changed that paradigm because now it's like oh put as many windows as you want they make energy that would be wonderful so thank you so much for joining us today this has been just a fantastic conversation thank you i want to remind everyone that you know you're please visit us at solarwindow.com our 800 number is is is on the website of course our contact information is there reach out uh connect with us we're here we're open for business and zach you know you mentioned that that you became a shareholder a few years ago i remind our management team that every morning when you get out of your bed the first question you have to ask yourself is not how do i get more power out of my product not how do i make it cheaper faster or whatever the first question you have to ask yourself is how do i reward my shareholders comma today that's the first question if that means generating more power you go generate more power if it means reducing cost you lower cost if it means a higher throughput r d program that's what it means if it means more patents you go produce more patents we are driven by a mission to create a successful business that is our mission the electrification of products through liquid electricity happens to be our product but there let there be no mistake we are not driven by some misguided belief that we're going to somehow uh create a successful business by fixating on one very narrow part of that business we have to we have to fixate instead by what's going to reward our shareholders and shareholders only reward one thing and that's progress that's success we have some of the most patient stockholders in the world i believe we have evangelist shareholders who believe in us and who know that that we're working and you know feel free you can text me two o'clock in the morning and there's a reason i'm up it's because our korean guys are up they won't let me sleep and and the next day we're up at six am but it's not just me it's all the members of our team they've been driven in this way for a decade and you will not hear a lack of enthusiasm or lack of passion or like lack of excitement for what we have and uh i think moving forward you're going to hear a lot more that addresses many of the questions that you asked and i thank you for your patience and i thank you for your support and uh what more can i what more can i say thank you thank you jay this has been great i would love to have you uh join us on our now you know investor club at some point and maybe you know answer some questions from members that we didn't get to today that i think that would be hugely important and i just think it's also hugely important for for people who are out there right now thinking about going into some business or starting a business it's been really valuable to hear your experience and how basically you were in the room and an idea came out and instead of saying no that sounds crazy you embrace the idea and it didn't immediately lead to anything but the the steps were started right there in that room and and the evolution that happens after that um and and in fairness you know because i think we have this romantic look back and and one thing to remember for me i have to i have to remind myself i was actually one of the naysayers i didn't see the opportunity to me the idea of these you know some guy ingesting you know electricity generating liquid just seemed ludicrous i mean why would you do this and i and i was quite involved in biotechnology at the time i still am through some other investments that i have but um i just started shaking my head and saying this is nuts and could you imagine the fda trying to regulate something that you're that you're potentially putting in your body and is is throwing off sparks in your brain this is not a healthy thing but again you know our our lead investor had the for some reason we i don't know why you know happens to be sitting in this in this in the scientists waiting room some time later looks through a window and asks himself wait a second you know forget this medical thing that's what we should be doing but one of the one of the things we realized was that it was kind of unstable when we tried to put it on glass in the way that we did and a part of me wondered you know why are we doing this maybe we should give up and actually went back to our investors and i suggested that we that we maybe revisit this out of an abundance of caution because after all this is a you know we were pre-revenue company we were early stage did i really want to put millions of dollars more into this knowing that we had hit this critical sort of inflection point and you know bless the folks in the room for having the vision because they actually redirected me they opened me to to an awareness and said hang on a second are you telling us that you actually got a spark off of this thing it was tiny it was one centimeter by one centimeter and we got like a millivolt out of it or something it was it was so tiny and but they turned around they said you know what if you got that spark what would it take to go through the next process so we actually went back produced a bit of a project plan we said you know maybe another 5 million bucks we can take the old kick of the can these are real numbers especially back in the day and uh so we raised the money and we continued to go on and and little did i know that uh two years later we would unveil the world's first ever electricity generating glass that was transparent uh we did that early you know we did that maybe eight years ago it was a tiny little piece of glass ugly as sin but it generated electricity and that was the moment and then we knew you know now we're on a trajectory so everything after that has been about taking that discovery and turning it into an into a product innovation productizing it raising the capital as i said now having the management team in place so we can actually springboard to success and each of these things has to happen in the correct sequence you can't have an awesome you know management team that creates products when you're still tinkering in a lab and and we also can't do the opposite so zach your timing and and the timing of this call jesse you guys reaching out and connecting with us and giving this opportunity uh to me and to our company to present to your audience i value it i cherish it and uh it just happens to be a key moment i think in our in our evolution and you'll hear more about that i promise you you'll be hearing a lot more about it something i found interesting that you just said there jay was that early on um you you thought you had something and you needed 5 million bucks or something like that which is no small amount of money but it's not you know the biggest amount of money when you're talking uh big companies but it's it was probably a moment where you had to really question do we want to go down that road because that's not you know where do i get five million bucks um and when we look today at things like this gamestop story of you know people just pouring billions of dollars into a company that we all know is not gonna go anywhere it's at the end of its life and yet um just everyone is just piling in hey let's let's invest i get a little upset because i'm like well how are we moving humanity forward by investing in gamestop i mean i i i know you all want to you know make a fast buck but uh and stick it to the shorts but investing in a smaller company that's working on something that's game changing and that's good and let's just go back to the good part what you're working on at solar window is something that if it works will be fantastic for all mankind and that's where i want to put my money because every risk you know there's every investment in the stock market is a risk but here if my risk pays off we get something great as opposed to if i invest in gamestop what i get another game stop on my block like how do you feel about that first of all you know i can't i can't offer anyone investment advice that's that's not my place i think what we're experiencing whether it's gamestop and it's interesting we're talking about tesla early on and someone may say well gee where's you know where's the equivalency in that i think there is and funny enough jesse you you you're going to say what does a leaf blower have to do with this decentralization i think was a word you used and to me and you were talking about sort of the decentralization of power this dependency on a power socket because now your leaf blower works using a battery right so now you're no longer tethered to something that was kind of physically holding you back and in the same way i think that many of us are uncomfortable with change and and this is this is part of the evolution it's part of the democratization that that we're going through uh we just don't see it because we're going through it when we read history books everything just seems so obvious so what does this mean in more practical terms when the internet first came out i'm not talking about the darpa days i'm talking you know when the average folk could have access to the internet we were all concerned uh just too much information people can build weapons now using the internet they can they can hurt people uh they can do nefarious things our children are going to be exposed to things that they shouldn't be exposed to there there's too much information and you know if it wasn't for the internet we would not have had some of the medical breakthroughs that we've had we would not have had some of the fastest uh engineering and human history that has supported the development of these vaccines for kovid i was involved with a with a community online of over a hundred engineers researchers scientists that were developing ultra low cost devices to help covet patients in developing countries developing ventilators and air supply and other related equipment for pennies on the dollar and giving it away for free that was impossible without the internet that's democratization of knowledge it's democratization of information and i think we're seeing the same thing uh with blockchain for example we're going to see the democracy democratization of finance will we need to go to a bank for a loan i mean it's just a practical question why can't i just connect with jesse for example and if he has a hundred dollars that i need to borrow why can't i just borrow it from him why do i need to go to to the bank of profits pay them interest when that interest goes straight straight to you and of course that disruption really bothers the folks that profit from these things and i'm not saying profit's a bad thing rest assured i'm a fan of profits what what i think is is uncomfortable though to to conventional thinking into conventional markets has been this uh been this process of democratization and we're now seeing it in the energy space as well democratization means that you may not need to rely on a utility the way that you had to well that's kind of disturbing isn't it if i'm a utility i've got to think twice now what do i do now what's my role how do i play a role in this and i think the utilities have generally done a pretty good job of positioning themselves just as just as you know we're talking about the coal companies and fossil fuels what i think what most folks are oblivious to is that the fossil fuel industry has been investing heavily in renewables for for the past decade plus so so this is this is what democratization does it drives change it drives institutions to change and i think we're going through the same process when you talk about gamestop to me it's fascinating is it a bunch of guys that are that are out there to make a quick buck is it someone sort of jesse i think you were saying kind of you know are they giving it to the short sellers uh what whatever their motivation is what what it represents to me is democratization of power only an institution used to be able to do that before and i think the fact that now the masses can can invest in the way they want to good bad and different whether it's for quick profits whether it's to voice their their their disgust at predatory short sellers uh who really are preying on the retail investor that's who loses in all of this it's a retail investor that loses this is part of a natural evolution and in case anybody thinks it's a new thing uh it's not it's been going on since the 1600s go back to the east india you know to the dutch east india company in the 1600s uh one of the majority stockholders was an activist uh who went out and raised uh you know raised a voice and started to sort of run this protest within the company and started to sort of have the other shareholders you know uh jostle and and and make maneuvers and make moves that ultimately today we call them activist shareholders well i think democratization is taking that one step further you don't need to be a carl icon you don't need to be a warren buffett you don't need billions of dollars behind you or be necessarily a highly sophisticated investor you can be the average investor and still have impact whether that's a good thing or a bad thing we'll see how it plays out ultimately but it's it's certainly uh representative of the democratization of virtually every aspect of our lives i think that's such an interesting point and i mean yeah bringing it back to power and bringing it back to the utilities i mean uh when we wanted to put solar on our house the utility said okay here's here is the maximum amount that you could put on your house and we went like but we could have more and we could have a surplus of energy and they're like no you can't can't do that if you want to be on our grid and you actually have to be on our grid in order to have your residency permit and uh so yeah it's uh it's what is it uh 10 kilowatts 10 kilowatts so there you go we said but we're going to have electric cars in a couple years and they went we don't care um it's funny because uh yeah they will try to put limits on us and and you'll you'll see that in the financial you know sector too that you know whichever way you believe uh things went uh it people became limited uh in order to in some cases service uh you know the institution and so that i think is is interesting but the more tools that we have just like the the stuff that you're developing with solar window uh can give power to people who typically don't have literally power like literally actually electricity um we you know people will be able to afford it and have it in places where it wasn't financially uh viable to build a coal plant and substations and long transmission lines to get out into the middle of nowhere uh it was just like well whatever you guys doesn't matter today uh you know with solar panels and with your technology we can we can switch to having everyone have a little bit more equity which i think is really amazing thank you and and it speaks to again um an evolution it's a natural evolution you know the the the idea of dragging an extension cord around uh you know everywhere we go and being again tethered to a particular utility that will go uh there was a time when you when you had to pay a fee to leave yourself uh you know your your cell phone provider uh that day is gone um so you know there's just this natural evolution that happens the utilities i don't blame them for what they're doing right now because it's the only way they know how to do business and it's not an excuse but it's kind of our reality um they're you know i think they've had they've had to also accommodate and and change and morph uh for for for this shift where where guys like you were saying look i'm going to put this rooftop solar on and and hey i may not need you as much uh but i may need you from time to time to still you know augment my power and they're saying but wait we spent you know 35 billion dollars running these wires to to this grid and doing this that the other thing you know it's kind of it's kind of reminiscent we all look at the rise of amazon for example and we look at kind of the phasing out of conventional retail and that's that's something we're all seeing firsthand and we have to and yet you see a company like walmart which has really done a pretty good job of holding its own you see companies like costco that have actually grown while this internet and online shopping phenomenon has happened and the reason you see that is because they have capitalized on that technologies remember earlier we were talking about solar window and how we've built our architecture so we can capitalize on the next best coatings next best materials well likewise if if the utilities simply open themselves up and embrace these ideas and and become part of the solution then it all works and in fairness the utilities some of the biggest utilities in america are in fact some of the biggest drivers of some of this change unfortunately it will take time i think before the average consumer resident or even commercial user of that electricity really sees that happening in the background but it has been happening for a long time the utilities have been sort of on the cuspin at the cutting edge of this of this new evolution in energy there's no doubt about it well speaking about that the democratization of energy do you think that um so we talk all the time on this channel about vpps or virtual power plants where a you know a neighborhood or a city's worth of of homes could turn themselves into basically a power plant i see a solar window as being a big piece of this because now instead of just being kind of limited to you know whatever solar i can get on my roof and some batteries now there's a whole bunch more places i can put my solar do you think that that vpps i mean is that something you give any thought to at solar window the ultimate manifestation of how our product is used is a reflection of whatever the dynamic is in the market at that time amongst consumers whatever the consumer driven movement might be our focus is is to deliver a form of electrification to the folks that might make for example a laptop and how can they create electricity generating surface on that it's to align ourselves with the auto makers and say to them we can provide you with electricity generating coatings for your glass how the consumers or the windows in a home or in an office building what the dynamic is in the marketplace to leverage that power and how and how people choose to use that power i think i think the you know there's a world of opportunity and that's probably what i think it's what fascinates us and excites us the most a solar window uh when i speak with our engineers in fact i'm speaking with them later today just just the whole idea that we can have a clean uh ultra lightweight organic form of energy of electricity and and that consumers will be empowered to decide you are empowered to decide how you want to use that and and what it ultimately becomes does it become part of a virtual power plant does it become part of a distributed energy system does it become a solution in a building is it is it emergency power for example for a guy that's driving a big rig and by the way that's a very exciting application on a semi for example if you just take the front tractor portion ignoring the trailer which is you know 40 feet plus just the front tractor alone we can generate enough electricity there to offset the equivalent of about one-fifth of what the average american home uses in a year that's an incredible amount of power now well gee how's that possible i think for one thing many of us still have this idea that the rig is only going to be generating power when it's driving not true it could be standing still could be parking could be doing whatever it's doing the other thing is it doesn't necessarily need to have direct sunlight so again if you had a conventional vehicle and the sun was not tapping the the sunroof at the right angle it wouldn't be working but in our particular case we can coat various parts of that of that rig and incidentally when i give you those numbers they've been modeled not for the entire rig we remove of course the front windshield that's not something we'd look to electrify for a host of reasons we remove the entire front of the uh the hood of the rig because in europe they don't exist and so it's a very conservative model and uh i believe that it's something that excites us a lot is again these applications that have been unavailable to the marketplace jay we're going to be getting a tesla semi so i know the first stop we're going to be making uh we're going to go to upstate new york and park at your house until we get solar installed on it that would be yeah that would be awesome well we we look forward to working i think with with all of the glass manufacturers out there all of the automotive companies and uh you know who who that may be and when it might be i think you'll learn more about that and uh it's not to be coy it's just you know i think i have to be a little bit careful as you know uh but nonetheless we're like i said before as consumers we see we see a product when it arrives in our hands we oftentimes don't see the evolution of that product from where it started to where it comes so this is something that really excites me the fact that you've actually caught us and we're speaking at this particular inflection point when i believe that we're at the springboard we're ready to go and um you know i i look forward to coming back and and sharing with you more of what's happening we'd love to have you back and to that point for those of you watching right now and you're kind of curious i mean we're not financial advisors you should do your own research but uh the ticker symbol that uh in the you in the u.s is wndw um and is there a ticker symbol for another market like you know is it on another exchange or is that the one no we trade only in the us as wndw again the company the the website is solarwindow.com and uh i invite you to connect with us and uh and to uh to sign up for uh receiving uh alerts from the company and information from the company and we look forward to to your support as i said before our most ardent supporters our evangelist stockholders the guys that force me to get up in the morning and get to work and and who harass me every night it's a blessing i love it are our shareholders uh they're a wonderful gift we have 15 000 shareholders which for a small company is a large number of stockholders that's really exciting well we'll definitely have you back because i know that when some exciting news comes from your company we're going to want to hear it from you so thank you so much jay for being with us and just remember that if you want to find out the latest of what's going on always tune in to the disruptive investing channel because uh where else are you going to hear directly from ceos like this thank you again jay thank you thank you so much for watching this episode of disruptive investing be sure to like the video and subscribe click the bell button to be notified when new videos come out

Channel: Disruptive Investing

Views: 171,385

Rating: 4.8671732 out of 5

Keywords: disruptive, investing, stocks, usa, companies, disruptive investing, money, save, bank, growth, science, sustainability, solar window, in depth, zac and jesse, nowyouknow, solar tech, solar panels, transparent, technology, renewable, energy, wind, power, generation, city, innovation, new, see-through, window, glass, layers, liquid, electricity, tesla, roof, aptera, elon, musk, alexandra musk, flexible, bendable, groundbreaking, game changer, charge, solar roof, solar walls, buildings, solar building, skyscraper, sun

Id: LQHcTSn3Ync

Length: 81min 27sec (4887 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021