[smt88]

"Just an engineering problem" is a massive oversimplification.

It's an engineering problem that requires financing. After that, you still need to figure out how to do it profitably at scale.

The vast majority of "the science is done" breakthroughs fail to be commercialized because they're too expensive or time-consuming to figure out how to scale, or the unit economics just don't work out.

[motohagiography]

There was a time I would have agreed, but when you seed 5-10 companies engineering a solution, if it's possible, one of them is probably going to succeed and take all. Unit economics are an optimization problem, which is literally what engineers solve, and you can hire them at scale. What doesn't work with climbing walls and beanbag chairs in the bay area might work remote, or somewhere outside the US.

If there is still science to be done, sure, higher risk, but even paying a few scientists to develop IP for 2 years is a rounding error on what investors put into novelty software projects.

[smt88]

> when you seed 5-10 companies engineering a solution

That's irrelevant to this particular article because the intellectual property for this development is owned by only one company.

> if it's possible, one of them is probably going to succeed and take all

> If there is still science to be done, sure, higher risk

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. Your original comment implied by it's just a matter of spending enough on engineering. That's just not true.

So now you're moving the goal post and qualifying "it's just a matter of engineering" with "it's just a matter of engineering... unless it's also a matter of financing and other breakthroughs that may be needed".

> Unit economics are an optimization problem, which is literally what engineers solve, and you can hire them at scale.

Engineering doesn't just scale like that. You don't make a breakthrough in 1/10 of the time just because you hired 10x the engineers. There are lots of limiting factors beyond how many engineers you have.

> even paying a few scientists to develop IP for 2 years is a rounding error on what investors put into novelty software projects

This is just not true. The whole soft part of software is that you can shuffle around some code and have a completely different outcome.

Two years of scientific research on something hard (as in hardware) and also difficult/unprecedented is not comparable to building the next Slack or something, either in costs or the ability to staff it up. You could build a Slack clone today for <$10k and get to v1.0, and then it becomes just a marketing/sales problem.

To advance a new battery tech to a marketing/sales problem can't be done by a few people in a few weeks for $10k. It's orders of magnitude more expensive.