WEBVTT

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>> My name is Ryan Kennedy and
I'm an electrical engineer.

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What I do now is, with Atom Power, is
to develop solid-state circuit breakers.

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That was a technology that evolved
out of my career as an electrician

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and as an engineer and we solved that.

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There was some things wrong in the
industry that we needed to address,

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and so we began Atom Power to
right or wrong, if you will.

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We're actually making commercial power
safe, essentially circuit breakers

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with no moving parts, using semiconductors
for switching instead of mechanical switches.

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But to do that, we also had
to do everything else.

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We have to do firmware development, we
have to do user interface development,

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as well as the panel board that
all of the circuit breakers sit in.

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So we actually create the whole ecosystem.

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We're completely vertically integrated, which
means that we build everything in-house.

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Day to day would be reinforcing the
why of what we're doing, you know.

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As kind of vague as it sounds, that's actually
what I do quite a bit, is to reinforce

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and to help the team to the
path of why we're doing it.

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So what we are doing is we're creating
a product that makes electricity safe.

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We're righting a wrong.

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You know, electricity's very dangerous,
very hard to control, so we're --

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that's why we're doing what we're doing.

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And what we -- what I do a lot is to help
the team and figure out what barriers are

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in their way and take it out of their way.

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I would say 95% of our product is
sourced within 200 miles of Charlotte.

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So we've kind of taken on the food approach,
you know, to source locally, grow locally,

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so our semiconductors are coming out of Raleigh.

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All of our printed circuit boards are made here.

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Everything's assembled here, built here.

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I would say the biggest travel
efforts have been two things.

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One is new technology that we're looking
at, so we're looking at different types

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of semiconductors, you know, to use

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for the next-generation product,
as well as our fundraising.

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So most of our fundraising has come from
outside of Charlotte, Palo Alto in Boston,

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to be specific, you know,
the classic funding reasons,

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and that's been where most
of the traveling's been.