From Zero to One to Many: How Richard Wang Built the Cuberg Team
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After earning her Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry from the University of Florida in 2014, Olivia Risset knew she wanted to work in industry. She found an exciting scientist role at a battery startup, doing material design research, but the position was short-lived. When Risset told a friend—Steven Kaye, part of our inaugural cohort in 2015—that she wanted to join another startup, he suggested reaching out to Richard Wang and Mauro Pasta (Cohort 2016) who had recently launched Cuberg.
Risset did just that and found herself meeting the co-founders at a Berkeley pub. She went in thinking it was an interview, and had to readjust on the fly as her would-be employers walked in—along with a bunch of other fellows. Turns out, they’d invited Risset to their weekly happy hour.
“I was really prepared to sell myself,” she says. “But Richard and Mauro were just like, ‘Hey Olivia, what's up? What have you been up to?’ We talked for maybe a half an hour and they said, ‘you have an interesting background, come visit us.’”
Risset was hired shortly thereafter, but Wang acknowledges that he has learned a great deal about hiring in the years since then, and has a far more standard process. He also says that they struck gold with Risset.
“When we first started out, I really didn't know much about effective interviewing and hiring,” he says.
Fortunately, the fellowship provides useful guidance and resources on hiring, and the fellowship community understands how critical it is to get hiring right. “I take much inspiration from a fantastic article that I think was shared in the fellowship Slack several years ago,” he says, pointing to this blog post on hiring from Carbon Lighthouse.
Olivia Risset in the Cuberg lab.
“We deviate from what they outline in a few minor details, but overall, this is almost exactly the process we run today,” says Wang of the very rigorous and research-based approach that Carbon Lighthouse takes. “Rather than only a sample project, we ask candidates to present both on a research topic of their own choice as well as a topic of the company's choice. This is highly illustrative for figuring out technical and thinking ability.”
Outside of technical presentations, Wang says Cuberg’s interview process is geared largely toward assessing personal and cultural traits, “which are harder to assess and also most critical to get right,” he says. He asks many open-ended personality questions and ensures that each candidate is asked the same questions.
A lot has changed at Cuberg since Risset joined—the team now numbers 45; Cuberg battery cells have set world records; the emerging European battery giant Northvolt acquired the startup earlier this year, and it has early customers in the aviation industry, with a roadmap for its batteries to be used in cars by 2028. But Risset, who has sat on the hiring panel for almost every Cuberg employee, says the characteristics it looks for in new hires has remained constant. “The first one is purpose. We are a very mission-driven bunch,” she says.
That means selecting new team members who are not just deeply talented and ambitious, but also focused on sustainability—people committed to accelerating the electric mobility revolution by commercializing next-gen batteries with improved performance and decreased cost.
“We really try to foster an environment where people feel good about what they're doing,” she says. “You hear stories about toxic environments where people complain that not everybody's carrying their load. We've never had that.”
Building a trusting and supportive environment has helped ensure that. “Richard believes in himself and those around him,” says Activate president Matt Price.
Wang notes that hiring mission-driven team members has also helped keep employee turnover low. “It's not an area I felt comfortable interviewing for early on, but it really is critical to have and provides a major edge in competitive talent markets and in retention.”
Despite Cuberg’s rapid rate of growth, it maintains a high-touch and rigorous hiring process, but Wang notes that he is actively looking to bring on a full-time recruiter to “help us supercharge our efforts, take some burden off of the hiring managers, and allow us to take a more active approach for reaching out to prospective candidates even if they're not actively seeking jobs”
That recruiter is guaranteed to be busy. Cuberg is currently looking to fill 26 positions, including battery cell and pack engineering roles.
While Risset has an important perspective as Cuberg’s first hire, Brian Bartholomeusz, who directs innovation transfer at Stanford’s TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, has watched the startup, and Wang as its leader, evolve from a Ph.D. to CEO. He’s been a key advisor to Wang since Cuberg’s earliest days. “The fellowship was just an absolutely critical bridge for Richard to get to where he is. And he has put together a remarkable team—their dedication and devotion, and their capabilities … they have just chopped down all the obstacles in their path one by one. I think it's a model for any kind of hard tech entrepreneur, the kind of choices he’s made,” Bartholomeusz says.