Louis Noel
Welcome to Longitude Sound Bytes, where we bring innovative insights from around the world directly to you.

Hi, I am Louis Noel, I will be your host today.

We are exploring the approaches of individuals to contemplation, experimentation, and decision making in scientific and creative fields.

For this episode, I had an opportunity to speak with Vivas Kumar. Vivas is a business leader and engineer with executive and commercial experience across the electric vehicle and lithium-ion battery industries. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Mitra Chem, a company primarily focused on shifting the Western electric vehicle and energy storage industries’ batteries towards better, safer, cheaper iron-based battery cathodes.

Previously, Vivas was a senior manager in Tesla’s Battery Team, where he was the lead commercial negotiator for multi-year contracts representing billions of dollars of spending along the battery materials supply chain.

Vivas studied electrical and computer engineering as an undergraduate at Rice University, my alma mater, and earned an MBA from Stanford later on. I was curious about how the engineering mindset differs from the MBA mindset, so we started our conversation with that before diving into his approach to decision-making.

Enjoy listening!

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Vivas Kumar
I learned very different skills in both schools. So, in engineering, the classes were the first half of engineering school was very focused on problem like problem sets, and learning a mountain of equations. And then the second half of engineering school was the practical applicability of everything that you learned in the first half, I just had a lot more fun in the second half of the first half of engineering school, because it was team-based project work, we were actually building a real product they could bring out to the world. What I realized though, after starting my professional career is the skills that I learned in engineering school can only get me so far in terms of becoming a business executive, that it teaches you a tremendous problem-solving mindset. But there’s still some important parts of the business world that were lacking from the experience that I had. So, learning about finance, learning about marketing, learning about this business strategy, like these were all skills that I thought would be very important to turbocharge my own personal development. So that’s the reason why I chose to go to Stanford Business School. Now, when I went to Stanford Business School, my prerogative was simple. It was to learn topics and take classes that were as little quantitative as possible. And as much qualitative as possible, right? It’s quite difficult. And I knew that the problem-solving skills that I learned and the math skills that I learned were easily transferable. But taking classes on psychology, on economics, on concepts like finance once again, like it was just very, very different, and I got a very holistic education between the two.

Louis
Yeah, definitely. Recently, I read a writing of Jeff Bezos, in which he explained how his job as CEO of Amazon hinged on making a small number of high-quality decisions. Is that true for early-stage high growth companies like Mitra Chem as well?

Vivas
I completely agree with Jeff. It’s different because his company is much bigger than mine. Right? But wow, like I’m trying to reduce my time down to making the highest quality decisions that only I can make. That inherently I can make either because I’m the most qualified to make them or because the rest of the company needs that decision from the highest level possible.

Louis
Absolutely. And as a follow up to that, as CEO of Mitra Chem, what is your process for making important decisions? And how does contemplation play a role in it?

Vivas
There’s only two types of decisions that I make. One is very rapid decisions that unblocked from the team. And the second is long term strategy for the company that will completely fundamentally change the way in which everybody’s working. For the former, it’s the information that I am privy to and have access to is very important and making sure that there’s established lines of communication to get me that information as quickly as possible, in the easiest, digestible way as possible, as the top priority. For the latter, that’s having a very trusted and small circle of executives that I can rely on to have, you know, to bounce ideas and engage in active problem solving.

Louis
Excellent. So, I will move to another question that plays off of that. Gut instinct or intuition often contracts with calculated well thought out decisions, yet both can hold equal value. How do you balance the use of gut instincts with analytical data and your decision-making process? And could you share an example?

Vivas
Even starting Mitra Chem was very much a gut decision, right? Like it is a huge leap of faith that you’re taking to work with co-founders on starting what is a rocky and volatile journey, when there are plenty of much safer jobs that you can go to. Now, the strategy that we built around what Mitra Chem was going to do and why was a very methodical process involving lots of study of market data. So already see the intersectionality between the two types of things and just in the way that the founding of Mitra Chem happened, right? One is non-emotional looking at market data. One is very emotional, which is am I willing to commit my entire life to doing this?

Louis
Definitely. You mentioned earlier about bouncing decisions off of other executives or perhaps partners, venture capital firms are working with inspiration is a guiding force to find answers to some questions. But when do you look for inspiration versus deriving your own conclusions?

Vivas
So, looking for inspiration is something that I do a lot and the way in which I look for inspiration is… let’s talk about decision-making abilities. I look to CEOs of companies that are further along the company building process, or have truly reached breakout status, and try to learn as much as I can from the way that they have done business to inform my own thinking for how I should be doing business as well. Talking about Bezos, like Bezos is a really good example. He says a lot of good things, from his 27 years of having led Amazon of like boiling down all of that knowledge into three or four crisp sentences. Like, for example, your job as CEO is to make a very small number of high-quality decisions. He can know that because he’s got decades of experience. See what actually matters was versus what doesn’t. This is the other part about being a CEO that like I never understood until I took the job. A lot of it is just determining what, what actually matters for you to decide versus what you should be delegating to others and empowering them to do so.

Louis
It reminds me we one of the famous quotes we used in figuring out the inspiration for the series was Pablo Picasso when he said it took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.

Vivas
Yeah. And the wonderful thing about being a CEO in Silicon Valley is other CEOs are actually very helpful. If I reached out to somebody whose company three, four years ahead of mine, and I’m facing a problem that I believe that they’ve faced, they’re generally willing to reciprocate, and tell me how I should think through it.

Louis
Moving on, when some people get stuck searching for an answer, or new inspiration, they turn to rituals, like taking a walk, listening to music, or doing something creative to clear their head. Do you do anything similar? When you feel stuck during project development or executive decision making?

Vivas
I exercise. I exercise every single day. It is the biggest unlock on my mental health and on my productivity. I strongly recommend everybody does it.

Louis
Very good. Along those lines, do you ever experience any difficulty putting your ideas into words? And is there like a structured or creative process you follow to break the writer’s block?

Vivas
Yes, actually, ironically, writing is how I get my ideas down on paper. Writing, like very long emails that are like memos that I send out to my team, if I can structure it really well, then that’s how I get over my inability to communicate. Sometimes, as the number of people in a company grows, the value of each individual communication that’s company wide, grows exponentially. And so, making sure that you have exactly the right words, to balance what the company needs to hear, and the tone that needs to be set. I will spend hours and hours thinking through every single question that could come up in the audience.

Louis
I read that you delivered keynote speeches in multiple languages around the world. Could you share us your process for contemplating ideas and preparing talking points that resonate with diverse audiences?

Vivas
One of the nice things about climate change, which is the industry in which I’m working, is, it is a human problem that transcends any language, any race, any ethnicity. And so always bringing what I’m doing in context of the larger societal generational problem that we’re building helps establish rapport from the very beginning.

Louis
You spent time as the global lead negotiator for Tesla’s battery supply chain, and particularly in your dealings in South Asia, how did silence function as a tool from both a psychological and decision-making standpoint in negotiations?

Vivas
You said silence?

Louis
Correct.

Vivas
Okay, so, interesting. Actually, the way that I think about it is, you use the word silence, I think about time. And having control over time, and control over when to respond, and lengthening the time for one to respond in negotiations, brings you a lot more leverage. Ultimately, so he who has the least time in a negotiation is most apt to lose, because they are rushed into bad decision.

Louis
Is there any difference between electronic communication in negotiation versus in person?

Vivas
The idea is when you’re negotiating for large sums of money, or contracts involving large sums, you always have to do it in person. Like there’s just there’s truly no other way around.

Louis
Makes sense. Are there any unanswered questions you are fascinated with, that you find yourself thinking about occasionally?

Vivas
Unanswered questions? Every single difficult question I ask, is all related to the people that I work with. Specifically, at any given moment, Do I have the right people in the right places doing the right jobs with the right skills? And it’s a really difficult question, because when you’re a startup, the context is evolving so quickly. Every six months, this company is different, right? And when the company is different every six months, if people cannot grow with the changing needs of the company, or there’s a skills mismatch, there will automatically be some kind of dissatisfaction that comes up in the company.

Louis
Yeah, I think that’s the, you know, the age-old trial of hiring people as well for certain positions and just growing a business where the objectives change constantly, and that it’s really hard because as CEO, you have to, you know, look out in the future and make decisions according to what you think is best. at that time.

Vivas
Let me revise something you said. It’s that, at any point in time, the skills needed to further or you risk the business or what are changing.

Louis
Okay, revision accepted, I’ll take it from you.

Vivas
By the way, that’s not to say that you’re wrong. It’s just one of these things. And once again, it’s like, like, there’s certain things that Bezos knows because he’s done it for so many years. Right. And it’s like, in my now three years of having been a CEO, I’ve also just learned how to reframe and recontextualize the exact problems that I’m trying to solve. It’s not like somebody’s a good person or a bad person, it’s just that they may not have the skills that I needed at the time, they need those skills to be implemented in the company to continue the trajectory of growth that we’re on.

Louis
That leads me to a question I’d written up about thinking in first principles, how do you use first principles in approaching decision making?

Vivas
So I really liked this concept of first principles. Because when I worked at Tesla, Elon was all about first principles thinking as the way in which we got things done. Essentially, what the idea of first principles thinking is, it’s very straightforward. Remove every single preconception that you have, and go to the scientific basis for your assumptions, and then deconstruct the problem and reconstruct the solution based solely on the known laws of physics. Okay? Now, obviously, we were a highly technical company so that’s why I’m talking so much about like physics, right? But this is no different even for business problems, right? Like, let’s take, how do you maximize the profit of a company? Start from the very beginning, what is profit? Profit is revenue minus cost. What are your revenue drivers? How can you increase them? What are your costs? How can you decrease them? Right? So, it helps to remove some kind of decision paralysis, analysis paralysis, when you can recontextualize problems in that way.

Louis
Yeah, you’re exactly right. And that was a really good walkthrough. Alright, my last question, deals with managing tradeoffs in decision making and how to think through them. You know, when you’re determining a solution for a problem, it’s easy when it’s a known problem. And it’s like example, for Mitra Chem and designing a battery architecture or a particular application. Very easy. But when you are charting your future into a potentially unknown and having to deal with unknown factors, how do you balance tradeoffs in your decision making to potentially have a more stable outcome? or higher likelihood of a success?

Vivas
Yeah, absolutely. The unknown problems are the real killers of any business. Things that you don’t know or things that you can’t solve for. And unfortunately, by the time you know that it’s a problem, it sometimes becomes too late. So, the question here is not necessarily how do you solve unknown problems? It’s how do you figure them out very quickly. And the only way to do that is just be relentless in questioning. And this just goes back to first principles thinking like you reveal problems they did not know existed before if you just asked a lot of questions.

Louis
I agree.

Vivas
The problems is, humans are psychologically biased. After they turn 15, there’s a market drop off a number of questions that they ask, which obviously, you know, it puts them in compromising situations.

Louis
Wait, let’s touch on that real quick. You said after they turned 15, there is a marketable drop in the number of questions they ask?

Vivas
There’s noticeable drop off in the number of questions that they ask.

Louis
Why do you think that is?

Vivas
It’s because society tells them to not ask questions anymore.

Louis
Okay, what’s the solution to that?

Vivas
The solution that’s exactly, it is that you have to recognize that you are programmed to not ask questions and remove that psychological barrier for yourself.

Louis
Excellent. That’s a first principle solution.

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Louis
We hope you enjoyed our episode. What stood out for me from this conversation was learning how Vivas applies a structured, engineering mindset to business development. I could especially see this in how he was able to rapidly articulate complex answers in an easy to understand way while sparing few details.

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