Sam D'Amico '08
Sam D’Amico wants to sell you a stove. Specifically, he wants you to buy his stove
from a major manufacturer (insert any household appliance name brand here).
That step is coming, but the Beverly native and Stanford-educated electrical engineer has already done the hard part. He and his team have invented the coolest cooking device of the 21st century.
The Impulse Cooktop range is the most powerful and precise stove ever made for mass production. “Obsessively engineered,” the company website notes. It can boil 10 cups of water in under 90 seconds. It’s a smart stove; it knows the surface temperature of the pan you’re cooking with. That means you can hold a steak’s surface at 400 degrees, so it sears without smoking. When the oven technology D’Amico is working on reaches the production phase, he wants it to cook a pizza in a minute and a half.
Powered by a 3 kilowatt-hour, integrated battery—i.e. what it takes to power a 3,000-watt device for an hour—this thing needs no electrician to install and lowers your electric bill. It cooks five times faster than the leading gas stoves and three times faster than other induction cooktops. Oh yeah, it’s also silent.
Photo: impulselabs.com
Q: You interned at Google as a college senior before working for them. What was that like?
A: I actually worked on the Google Glass team. I got sucked into the vortex of working on one of the busiest consumer electronic devices of the early 2010s. It was a really good experience of seeing how things fail at that scale. Super valuable lesson. Like, the product actually has to be useful. I saw how you could screw up if you were running your own startup. Unlike Google, I only have one set of lives.
Q: You also spent time at Oculus and worked for them in China over the course of two years. What were the key takeaways you brought to launching Impulse Labs?
A: Really understanding how stuff gets made so you can leverage that to make new stuff is an incredibly useful skill. There are so many people all over the world doing talented stuff, and China’s figured out how to scale these things. To do something super-complicated like our stove product with a 25-person company means you need to find someone who’s making something like our stove, and then you need to figure out how to coach them to mass-produce your product. Our stove needs to be like a Lego kit, and I need to figure out how to get each Lego brick I want manufactured.
Q: So, how does it work once it’s assembled?
A: Basically, all types of stoves are designed with an accelerator, but not cruise control. Ours works like any other induction stove (heating coil or infrared-powered), but—to really simplify the concept—ours has a dimmer switch. Also, stoves waste energy because getting stuff done faster is more efficient. You want to boil a pot of water; mostly, it’s sitting there hot, but not hot enough. We also figured out that what separates a bad chef from an okay chef is essentially maintaining consistent temperature in the pan. This is why your first pancake in a batch is always bad.
Q: There’s more to the consumer cost-efficiency thing, too, right?
A: Absolutely. You can plug it into a 110 or 220-volt outlet. Normal induction stoves require upgrading your home to 200‐amp service. We install batteries to power the product, and the end-user saves because we can lower home consumption during peak hours when rates are 30 percent higher and have your battery charge at noon when there’s excess solar on the grid. So we’re building this distributed network of batteries that can send energy back to the grid even when you’re not cooking. If a power plant goes down, the grid automatically asks for backup and we discharge our batteries. They pay us for that sort of thing, which is exciting. You get enough batteries in a house powering similarly innovative products, you can eventually power your whole house on batteries.
Q: Where’s your Prep experience in all this?
A: There’s a Prep connection in the product! I ran into Miguel Galvez ’08 and Deckard Sorensen ’08 [who sold their company NBD Nano to Henkel in 2022] at the Consumer Electronics Show. They created this anti-fingerprint coating technology that we now use in the stove so our screen doesn’t pick up fingerprints. More broadly, I came to Stanford as a much better writer than my peers, which put me ahead as an EE. Also, it felt like some classes at Stanford were step down in difficulty. The math education at St. John’s was very effective, and the community we built inside the culture of the computer labs was something I took with me.
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