Interview with CEO of Ambient Photonics Bates Marshall
SC Works: What is Ambient Photonics?
Bates Marshall
Bates Marshall: Ambient Photonics makes the world's most powerful indoor low light solar cells. And you might ask yourself, why do we need indoor low light solar cells? It's because the way we power IoT devices, connected devices around our home, connected devices in business and industry, relies on toxic batteries. Almost all of those batteries end up in landfills, a massive and growing problem. But to add to that, these batteries have a terrible carbon footprint. So for businesses and electronics companies who are concerned about decarbonisation, who are concerned about reducing the carbon footprint of the products that they supply, eliminating those batteries is a massive lever on carbon footprint. Ambient Photonics is a manufacturer of solar cells, more precisely, solar PV cells that are used for IoT and connected devices as a primary source of power.
SC Works: How did you come up with this idea?
Bates Marshall: Well, in short, I didn't. I was brought to the project by an investor named Tony Fadell, who introduced me to a group of investors who are funding research at the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry in the Boston area. I was smitten with the notion that this could be a gigantic multibillion dollar market when today it almost doesn't really exist. And the reason that it could be a big deal is because of this incredible invention that the team at Warner Babcock had made to increase the power density, where you can think of it as efficiency by a factor of about 3.5 times. What that means is that the old tech, which previously had been used to power, let's say, solar powered calculators, could now be used to power all kinds of sophisticated IoT devices. So this was a kind of notion of a market making invention that got me really excited about it, and that was about four years ago.
SC Works: Your new factory groundbreaking was last week. When is the actual projected opening date for the factory?
Bates Marshall: We're anticipating the factory to open in the first half of next year. We were excited at the groundbreaking ceremony, but that's just sort of the beginning of the story. We have some hard work to do at the facility to get it ready for our production equipment, and then that production equipment starts coming in just after the turn of the new year. We haven't announced the date of the ribbon cutting event, but we will have for sure a ribbon cutting event where we will show off what we have been able to accomplish there. A few more details about the factory itself. First, the factory is fully automated. We announced at the groundbreaking that our partner for the factory is a German company called Manz Production Management GmbH. Manz is a very high quality, high reputation, globally famous equipment company that works with some of the largest electronics companies in the world. So they are our partners. They are providing most of the equipment for the facility. And the facility is fully automated. In fact, you can think of it almost as what's called a “lights off” kind of facility where there isn't any operator intervention in the process.
From the beginning all the way through to the end, we take in our substrates. At the front end we take in our raw materials and at the back end, what we ship out are cartons of tested packed solar cells. In between we have robots moving material around from machines to machines. So it's a very sophisticated manufacturing operation and it was important for us to design it in that way so that we could make sure that we could meet our business model goals while still having the manufacturing in not only in the US, but in California.
SC Works: You mentioned automation, but are there going to be actual people in the factory? I was thinking about this a lot recently because if we think of Silicon Valley and all the tech companies recently, there's been a rash of layoffs and layoffs that are coming. I feel like in Santa Cruz we're on a different trajectory where we're hiring. How many people are you imagining that you'll have to hire for this facility and what positions will they be doing?
Bates Marshall: Our factory hiring plan today, as we understand it, is about 50 positions. Those are 50 positions that don't exist today. They run the gamut from process engineering, maintenance technicians, production supervisors, basically the kinds of roles that are associated with supervising and managing a high volume production facility. We are projecting to be open 24 hours, five days a week. So three shifts, five days. That means we need people working around the clock to make sure that production is running well. So you're right, these are not machine shop operators. These are not people that are staffing individual or operating individual pieces of equipment, but they're supervising the production and those are vital roles as well. So we'll have more than 100 full time people by the middle of next year.
SC Works: Why choose to have your headquarters here?
Bates Marshall: Yeah, great question. First of all, I live in Santa Cruz. I grew up in Santa Cruz, and I have deep roots in the community and I'm a massive booster of the Santa Cruz County area. I love it here. It offers a unique quality of life and it also has an incredible wealth of human capital. And for decades from my perch here in Santa Cruz, I have watched people commute over the hill into Silicon Valley, spend hours of their life and untold tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to commute and bring all the benefits of those jobs into Silicon Valley. So as a local boy, I was really motivated to do something good for the community and bring jobs here. That being said, we also consider the Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County area to be a competitive advantage, especially in the search for talent. So we are in a world where the tech industry is dominated by some super majors who are doing their very darndest to hire the best and brightest. It can be difficult to compete with those tech supermajors for talent. So having the facility in Scotts Valley – being able to remove the commute from people's daily existence – is something that we believe our job candidates will really care about.
The other thing that's really important for us is we have a business model where we do a lot of collaboration with our customers. And I can’t think of any better place that our customers would want to visit, spend a week or two working on a project than the Santa Cruz / Scotts Valley area. As you know, it's a wonderful place to be.
SC Works: We're excited to have you here. Not only what you're doing, but also just bringing the opportunity for more jobs and you're adding to the history of tech here in Scotts Valley with Seagate, Zero Motorcycles, Paystand, Universal Audio. I think autotune was even made here in Scotts Valley, but I don't know if that's good or bad. If people want to find out more about what you're doing or keep up and also find out when the jobs are available, how should they be following you?
Bates Marshall: So the best place is our website and that's Ambient Photonics.com. We actually have all of our live job postings up right now, and that list will be expanding. We've been adding two or three people a week every week, so we're growing pretty quickly. And to meet our headcount goals, we're going to have to actually increase from that rate. So it's going to be a busy winter season for us, and certainly a very busy spring as we staff up for both the factory and the headquarters.
SC Works: And of course, Santa Cruz Works is a great place to learn about Ambient.
Bates Marshall: Absolutely!