(Bloomberg) — Battery startup QuantumScape dropped some news last week that we reporters like to call a Friday night news dump. That’s when companies try to bury unpleasant information by releasing it at the end of the work week, when reporters are tired and readers are headed to happy hour.
The company did just that on Friday, announcing the departure of Chief Manufacturing Officer Celina Mikolajczak after a year in the job. The Tesla and Panasonic veteran was a key hire when she joined QuantumScape to help bring battery innovations from the lab to the factory floor.
It’s a bad sign for the company backed by Volkswagen. QuantumScape has been targeted by shortsellers and pummeled with shareholder lawsuits alleging it oversold its technology to investors ahead of a buzzy SPAC merger in 2020 that raised $680 million. Mikolajczak brought credibility and the expertise to take the company’s ballyhooed battery into production.The startup cited “differing management styles,” and said its manufacturing and supply chain teams will now report directly to CEO Jagdeep Singh, a well-regarded salesman and tech leader in Silicon Valley, but not a manufacturing expert. Mikolajczak will join the company’s scientific advisory board for at least one year, and keep her stock grants. She’s going to focus on building a “U.S.-based battery supply chain,” according to the filing. In response to this newsletter, QuantumScape said it has been “growing and strengthening our manufacturing team across the board.”
No doubt, Mikolajczak will have a new job soon. In the hyper-competitive race for battery talent, her experience scaling up Tesla’s Nevada gigfactory — and her years as a consultant figuring out “why batteries go boom,” as she once described it — make her a rare find. She’s also a female executive with serious technical chops in a very male-dominated field.
In her absence, Clayton Patch, a veteran of silicon chip foundries who joined the company in May 2021, will run manufacturing, QuantumScape told me. Patch worked closely with Mikolajczak.QuantumScape is one of dozens of startups trying to reach the “holy grail” of battery innovation: a solid-state battery that can deliver longer range, faster charging times, long cycle life, lower fire risk, and lower cost. The company can make this battery at lab scale.
The big question is whether it can produce it for millions of EVs. Doubters say making QuantumScape’s key component, a ceramic separator, without too many flaws is very hard to do at an economically viable cost. QuantumScape’s solution is hidden behind closely-guarded IP.There are differing theories on the split. One view is that Mikolajczak was brought in too early, when the cells weren’t yet ready for high-volume production and the kind of inflexible deadlines that large-scale manufacturing requires. She had the right skills but at the wrong moment in time and was trying to change too much. The counterpoint to that is: that’s what she was hired to do. Mass production requires change. And a perusal of her LinkedIn page suggests early-stage cell work is well within her grasp.QuantumScape, spun out of Stanford University and backed by tech luminaries John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, represents the Silicon Valley moonshot approach to innovation. The company wants to leapfrog Asia in the battery race with a big breakthrough, not by incrementally improving what Korean and Chinese battery makers already do.
“I just think that’s a tough hill to climb,” Doug Campbell, the CEO of Solid Power, another battery startup, told me last month. “You’re going head to head with the Asians, and I think it just elevates your risk profile.”
Singh, the QuantumScape CEO, often compares his company to Tesla in its disruptive ambitions. But it’s not just large, well-funded battery manufacturers he’s up against. While he spends the next couple of years working toward commercialization, competitors are bringing improved batteries to market that could erode the value of QuantumScape’s innovation. And he now must get from the R&D lab to the factory without Mikolajczak’s knowledge and skills.
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