Ryan is an electrical engineer and the CEO of Atom Power, Inc. His company designs and builds solid state circuit breakers, a product that makes commercial and residential spaces safer. Although Ryan still does a fair share of designing and fundraising, he tells us his main objective is to reinforce the “why” to his employees.
Transcript
>> My name is Ryan Kennedy and I'm an electrical engineer. What I do now is, with Atom Power, is to develop solid-state circuit breakers. That was a technology that evolved out of my career as an electrician and as an engineer and we solved that. There was some things wrong in the industry that we needed to address, and so we began Atom Power to right or wrong, if you will. We're actually making commercial power safe, essentially circuit breakers with no moving parts, using semiconductors for switching instead of mechanical switches. But to do that, we also had to do everything else. We have to do firmware development, we have to do user interface development, as well as the panel board that all of the circuit breakers sit in. So we actually create the whole ecosystem. We're completely vertically integrated, which means that we build everything in-house. Day to day would be reinforcing the why of what we're doing, you know. As kind of vague as it sounds, that's actually what I do quite a bit, is to reinforce and to help the team to the path of why we're doing it. So what we are doing is we're creating a product that makes electricity safe. We're righting a wrong. You know, electricity's very dangerous, very hard to control, so we're -- that's why we're doing what we're doing. And what we -- what I do a lot is to help the team and figure out what barriers are in their way and take it out of their way. I would say 95% of our product is sourced within 200 miles of Charlotte. So we've kind of taken on the food approach, you know, to source locally, grow locally, so our semiconductors are coming out of Raleigh. All of our printed circuit boards are made here. Everything's assembled here, built here. I would say the biggest travel efforts have been two things. One is new technology that we're looking at, so we're looking at different types of semiconductors, you know, to use for the next-generation product, as well as our fundraising. So most of our fundraising has come from outside of Charlotte, Palo Alto in Boston, to be specific, you know, the classic funding reasons, and that's been where most of the traveling's been.
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