We make bags of black powder, they go into sort of inside of a dark battery, that goes inside of a dark box,

that goes somewhere underneath the floorboard of a car, and yet it makes your car worth buying.

The modern car, the 21st century car, is defined by battery chemistry.

Yo, technology. What is it all about?

Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley. This week I ventured all the way to the island of Alameda, which is about 12 minutes from my house. Usually I only go to Alameda because that's where the nearest target store is.

But last week, I went for a different reason.

To meet this week's guest, which is Gene Berticevsky, who is the founder of SILA Nanotechnologies.

And I'm going to guess that you've never heard of Gene or his company, but you will.

Because SELA has been quietly working on something that could very soon affect all of us.

It is a battery company.

And what they have done is crack a new chemistry, a new battery chemistry, which is the first

since lithium ion was introduced nearly three decades ago. And what that means is that your

phone could soon do more stuff, last a lot longer. Electric cars could become cheaper and better.

Berticevsky's ultimate goal is to become the Intel inside of the electric car revolution.

And a couple months ago, Daimler led a $170 million funding into the company.

So it's one of those quiet companies that could become hugely important for all of us.

And I wanted to bring you that story first.

So I showed up at their headquarters in Alameda to have a tour and to sit down

with you. Yeah, let's go. Let's walk through the whole lab. Okay. So this is the R&D lab.

Yeah. We've added some tools since you've been here, but more or less the same.

We make sort of gram scales of our material, mostly thermal processing.

This is kind of the lab, right?

...