Issue #29 — Impulse

We've all been there.

Your mom, dad, husband, wife, whoever — asks you to turn on the stove. Spaghetti's on the menu tonight, and you've got exactly one job before they get home. Get the water boiling.

So what do you do? You forget. Why? Who knows. Maybe you were locked in watching Luke from the Outdoor Boys solo camp in Alaska. Maybe you were watching the Goo Goo Dolls July 4th, 2004 Buffalo concert for the 50th time. Whatever it was, it's not a good excuse. And the hungry person coming home would agree.

What if you never had to worry about that again? And what if boiling water quickly is just the tip of the iceberg?

A company in San Francisco built a cooktop that takes a liter of water from room temp to boiling in 40 seconds. ~5 times faster than the gas stove in your kitchen today.

And I know I’ve said speed is king before, but that’s really just the beginning. How about precision down to the degree? Now you can hold your homemade pasta sauce at the perfect temperature, Brian. And I’ll be coming over to “taste-test”.

Introducing Impulse Labs and the battery-powered cooktop you wish you had.

Okay but how

When you want to change everything people know about stovetop cooking, you don't assemble it from existing parts. You build everything in-house. It's the only way to end up with a product that's truly different from the rest. And that's exactly what Impulse did. For four freaking years.

The powerplant: The cooktop is powered by a 3 kWh battery. Powerful enough for a 10,000-watt burner — hence being able to boil water in under 40 seconds. And if you assume you'll need a special outlet to feed that much power, that's a reasonable thought. But remember where you're at and what you’re reading. This is Left Field we’re talkin’ about. This cooktop is running on the same outlet powering your 2005 lava lamp (we need to bring those back).

But surely this battery runs out quickly. Right? Wrong again. At medium power across all four burners, your battery is actually taking in more power than it's putting out. So while you're chefing in the kitchen during Thanksgiving, your stovetop is gaining juice.

Similar to Base Power, the battery charges when it's most effective. Typically overnight, when electricity is cheapest.

And the obvious benefit of a battery… when the power goes out, you can still cook.

The badass burners: Impulse will change the way you cook. Over time, you've probably gotten pretty good at temperature control on your home stove. But regardless of your skill, eggs and steak can still come out slightly different. Because your inputs are different.

With Impulse, you've got temperature control down to the degree. From 68 to 482 degrees. Every burner, in real time, for as long as you want. 90 degrees to melt chocolate? Done. Your pasta sauce at the same temp for two hours? Done. The perfect sear on a steak? NO FREAKING PROBLEM.

This is starting to feel like a Billy Mays commercial.

The startup details: Let's talk clean-up. The worst. I'm notorious for making a mess in the kitchen, but you gotta let me do my thing, and I'll live with the consequences. Or how about that college roommate who left the kitchen like a war zone? Filthy animals.

(To any of my college roommates reading this… not you. The Porthouse boys were notoriously clean, and the Birdhouse boys never cooked a single meal I was there. Both immensely impressive.)

But when you build everything yourself, you can come up with ingenious product design. The knobs you turn to control your burners are magnetic. You pull them straight off the glass underneath. No more washing around the crevices or pulling up the grates. You just take them off and wipe the whole surface in one pass.

So Impulse makes a stove that works during a blackout, cleans easy, and holds whatever temp you want. I need this thing like oxygen.

The guy who started it

Sam D'Amico — A top 5% Stanford School of Engineering senior class graduate. Not too shabby.

During his 2013 Electrical Engineering Master’s year, Sam participated in the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge on the Stanford Solar Car Project. Essentially, a race across Australia in a solar-powered car. He served as Embedded Software Lead, Solar Array Lead, and Financial Manager. My extracurriculars weren't as impressive, but intramural championships live forever.

After graduation, Sam worked at Google, Oculus, and Facebook before joining Indicator Fund, an early-stage venture capital fund.

And in July 2021, he set his sights on reinventing one of the most-used appliances in your home.

Which, when you line up the resume, isn't that far-fetched. Solar car — batteries. Google Glass and Oculus — small batteries. A venture capital fund — okay, not really battery-specific, but he wasn’t vacationing for eight years.

Pair his battery expertise with the fairly archaic home appliance industry, and you’ve got a recipe book of opportunities (pun intended).

The honest take

It's not cheap. $6,999 for the 30-inch and $7,599 for the 36-inch. In line with established high-end manufacturers. So maybe I won't be buying one for my first home, but a guy can dream.

It's also a cooktop, not a range. So make sure you've got extra room in your budget for that (if you have one).

Then there's service. If you have problems with your Bosch, a local technician comes out and fixes it. If your Impulse fails, they ship you a new one and take the failed one back to HQ for diagnostics. Which, for a startup, is an excellent way to handle it — though it does mean you're eating takeout or Uncrustables until the replacement shows up.

But Impulse is putting their money where their mouth is. The battery carries a 10-year warranty, and it's replaceable, which means this isn't a $7,000 appliance with the battery life of your iPhone.

And they're already working with other manufacturers. Zephyr is selling an Impulse-built cooktop through their dealer network and showrooms, and Thor Kitchen is licensing the guts to build a complete range around it.

There's also hardware Impulse is putting in your stove that isn't even switched on yet. Things like Bluetooth capability, so Gordon Ramsay can yell at you while you mess up a grilled cheese (kidding). But the point is they're including features they know they want to integrate, but don't have built out quite yet. Impulse will send you a software update the same way your phone gets features that didn't come when you bought it. Pretty damn cool if you ask me.

So are things perfect? No. But this is a startup and an entirely new way of thinking about the stove in your house. And for me, I’d be willing to live on Uncrustables for a few days if it meant I never overcooked a steak again.

If they pull this off

I'll be buying one. Intuitive, powerful, and a seriously good product.

But the cooktop isn't the point.

As battery technology advances, why wouldn't every product in our home have a battery? Why are we reliant on the grid at all times? Homes could pull power in when it's cheap, use it when they need it, and store the rest. That's Sam's math. 140 million American homes, three or four battery appliances in each one, and you've deployed over a terawatt-hour of storage.

And Impulse has done all of this on $25 million of funding. A $5M seed in 2021, a $20M Series A in 2022, both led by Lux Capital, and nothing announced since. Most hardware startups burn that cash like the Joker in The Dark Knight before shipping a single unit. Not Impulse.

One could argue Impulse isn't a stovetop business. They're a battery business that sells a stovetop. And hopefully in the future, every other appliance in your home.

Cooking is almost entirely peak demand — getting your pot or pan up to temp and then steady eddy from there. Solving that initial demand in an efficient manner is a battery problem. But nobody in the industry has treated it as such. Nobody until now.

Want to work out there?

I mean — can you imagine the office kitchen? Forget heating up a Hot Pocket for the zillionth time. You can go from cold water to a fresh pasta dish in less than four minutes. And if you’re ready to get in the kitchen… you’re in luck.

Impulse has open positions in San Francisco:

Open roles → https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/impulse

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