Gene Berdichevsky is a former member of the team at Tesla. Now he is building his own startup called Unicorn, which is valued at more than one billion dollars. Berdichevsky recently appeared as a guest on the Dealmakers program. During his exclusive interview, he talked about his own journey, as well as the creation of his first solar car and how he raised hundreds of millions of dollars for a technology startup that is gaining momentum at an incredible pace.
Gene Berdichevsky's path to mechanical engineering
He was born on the Black Sea in Ukraine, then spent some time in St. Petersburg and even lived north of the Arctic Circle for five years. He went through all this before moving with his family to Richmond (Virginia) and attending college in California.
Gene from an entrepreneurial family, he could watch his father start his own small business. Both of his parents were software engineers and worked on nuclear submarines. As Gene said, he was definitely not going to be an engineer, but he was always very fond of math and science. This subsequently contributed to the fact that he began to study mechanical engineering.
During his first year at Stanford, he participated in a solar machine project. Students competed in building a solar-powered car, and they needed to drive a distance of 3,700 kilometers across the country on such a device.
Gin’s team designed the car chassis from scratch, made a carbon fiber body and equipped with a battery of about the same power as a toaster in any kitchen. He fell in love with his job and was really inspired by the fact that he built something from scratch.
Tesla and Battery Issues
At the end of his college years, Jin became the seventh employee at Tesla as technical director for battery system architecture. Tesla has had many different trials. They began to literally glue laptop batteries together with the goal of creating a battery pack.
Then, as part of safety, it was necessary to prevent accidental failures, which often happen with batteries. About ten people worked in Tesla when Berdichevsky came there, later the company grew to about three hundred employees when he left it. Tesla now employs more than 45 thousand people, whose market capitalization is forty billion dollars.
His big lesson in this company was that, as the founder of a startup, he learned to solve really serious problems and tasks. Gene says that sometimes it’s easier to overcome a greater difficulty than a small one. That is how he developed his talent. At Tesla, he learned that you need to be prepared to do what the world considers impossible.
Own business
From the day he entered Tesla, his brain was already fixated on organizing his own business. He even wrote a business plan for the production of electric cars in the US market, while in his first year at Stanford.
Later, while traveling around the world, he met his future co-founder Gleb Yushin. Soon after, former Tesla employee and part-time colleague Alex Jacobs became their third co-founder.
Project financing
Immediately after the formation of the group, young entrepreneurs began to attract financing. They had a great advantage in the form of intellectual property. They already had their own promising technology.
Among other things, the organizers managed to attract a group of talented engineers to their company, who also helped them build a new business. Now their business model revolves around new ideas, development, production and sale of their own battery products.
Their product today is presented in the form of a powder that replaces graphite as part of the creation of lithium-ion batteries. Their developed technology reduces battery weight by about twenty percent and increases energy reserves by about the same.
Thus, Jean Berdichevsky is today an engineer and power engineer, whose work is characterized by innovative ideas in the field of creating batteries. This mechanic from Ukraine managed to build his own billion-dollar business in the United States.