What we talked about
Bert Wank, CEO of infiniRel, shares his journey in power semiconductors and renewable energy, focusing on innovative solutions for grid reliability. He discusses infiniRel’s mission to develop advanced monitoring systems, likened to an “EKG for electronics,” to detect potential failures in inverters used in solar plants and battery storage systems. Wank explores the challenges of integrating modern electronics with traditional power grids, emphasizing the need for harmony in complex systems. He also touches on the financial impact of inverter failures, costing the U.S. solar industry billions, and infiniRel’s predictive analytics to mitigate these losses. Wank shares insights on professional fulfillment through the Japanese concept of Ikigai and offers advice for young engineers passionate about energy and electronics.
Show notes
Bert Wank’s starting point for infiniRel was a single statistic from a Department of Energy presentation: inverter failures account for 59% of all unexpected maintenance costs in a solar plant. His answer was to build what he calls an EKG for electronics:a system that reads the “wiggles” in an electrical signal the way a cardiologist reads arrhythmias, catching failures before they happen rather than after the smoke appears.
What we covered
- Traditional condition-based maintenance:the kind used on aircraft turbines and industrial motors for 40 years:relies on heat, vibration, smell, and sound as warning signs. With electronics, Wank points out, all of those signals arrive after it’s already too late. A semiconductor fails in under a microsecond; by the time anything is visible or audible, the component is destroyed.
- The grid’s move from rotating steam generators to solar and wind inverters has introduced a fundamental fragility: legacy generators carry enough mechanical inertia to absorb disruptions, while semiconductor-based inverters have voltage margins of only 20-30%. A spike that a copper-and-steel machine would shrug off can blow a chip in less than a microsecond. The 2025 Spain blackout, Wank notes, was a live example of a grid going out of harmony with no feedback mechanism in time to correct it.
- infiniRel’s EKG monitors the fingerprint of electrical disturbances and accumulates digital stress readings to estimate how close a component is to failure. When the threshold is crossed, the system raises an alarm. The current product targets large battery energy storage systems:which run 24/7, unlike solar plants that only operate between sunrise and sunset:and solar operators in the field.
- The US solar industry lost $4.5 billion in preventable losses in 2023, the majority from inverters that stopped operating, sometimes catastrophically. Wank frames the economic case for predictive analytics directly: uptime is revenue, and the financial tail when a plant goes offline:lost generation plus potential penalties:is long.
- Wank’s roadmap calls for shrinking the EKG from its current large-format field device to a chip-level solution embedded directly on the printed circuit board. At that scale, the system becomes intrinsically safe:able to monitor and control the power electronics from inside, rather than from outside. He is also in active conversations about data centers in space, where the logistics of replacing a satellite make early failure prediction a mission-critical requirement.
- On advice for young engineers, Wank invokes the Japanese concept of Ikigai:the overlap of what you are good at, what you are passionate about, what the world needs, and what someone will pay you for. He argues that energy and power electronics sit squarely in that overlap right now, and that understanding both analog and digital systems is increasingly a rare and valuable combination.
About Bert Wank
Bert Wank is the CEO and founder of infiniRel, a startup developing predictive analytics for power electronics in renewable energy systems. He has a background in power semiconductors and has previously served on the board of directors of a capacitor manufacturer.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bertwank
- Website: https://www.infiniRel.com
Episode 29 of the PreVetted Podcast.
Full transcript
Bert Wank (00:00.462) Thank
Welcome to PreVetted Podcast, a blend of tech and leadership. Our guest today is Bert Wank. He’s a veteran of power semiconductors and renewable energy. We were talking just before starting recording the tales of two brains. If you want to share that to the audience before we get into your, you know, we’re going to talk a little bit about infinity, infiniRel
Ha
Federico Ramallo (00:30.687) his company, but I think this is a good conversation starter.
Well, yes, actually I can’t take any credit and thank you so much, Federico, for having me.
I was fascinated with Mark Gunger’s presentation of the tale of two brains, how female and male brains process information differently. On the one side, the female brain has everything connected to everything else, like the kid, to the husband, to the home, to the car, to the job. And then the male is very focused on one thing only, making only sure you focus on one thing. Once it’s done, then you focus on the next thing. And so now you can see the dynamics between those two brains trying to process information differently.
I should have watched that way before I got married. anyway, was hilariously presented and very useful information for anyone that’s interested in relationships.
Yes, not only we cover technology, but also we cover relationship advice, right? Yes.
Bert Wank (01:32.845) Yeah, actually a company is actually like a marriage and then you have investors, which is like a marriage and it has very similar dynamics. so that’s a nice little segue that these things are in fact connected just in different plateaus, but they’re still connected, still very useful.
Yes, yes. At one point I thought about the idea of balance, but you cannot achieve balance all the time because balance means that you have 50 % on one side, 50 % on the other, right? And that’s almost impossible to do, right? And I like the concept of harmony.
The idea of harmony is that everything works together in like a concert, right? And that doesn’t mean, you know, balance. means, you know, sometimes you spend, you know, time with your family, right? That means you spend 100 % of your focus on that, right? And then sometimes you spend some time with, you know, investors, right? You have multiple relationships, right? With clients, with, you know, with employees, right?
Yeah.
Bert Wank (02:45.314) Yes.
and all of them require 100 % of your attention at that time, right? That kind of breaks the balance, but also, if you think it in terms of harmony, it’s much more sustainable concept, I guess, right?
I like your thought about the harmony and balance because as long as you have a feedback system, something that feeds back where you are or signals that you ideally want to have and you’re a little bit off, you feed that information back so you make a correction. It’s the same way as in technology when you have really nice clean audio recordings, there’s a nice tight feedback loop that makes it very precise. But same way if your spouse
gives you feedback, well you better take a note and adjust your behavior so it actually becomes a harmony. Harmony is back in the frequency, right? It’s actually an intrinsic frequency of the system. And this is actually a really nice segue to what we are doing at infiniRel because when we’re looking at electronic systems then they have to be also in harmony.
Yes.
Bert Wank (03:59.406) And we’ve seen that when they become out of harmony. mean, even lately, it’s the Spain blackout. was a disaster, right? It was completely out of harmony. It was disrupted and there was no feedback in time and the control system wasn’t working anymore. So that was an evidence that was exactly to your story. And I think the true mission for us is
to assess those various frequencies and seeing where it is imbalanced and then flagging the imbalances early enough so you can take action to prevent major disasters. That’s kind of a very high level what we do.
And really in this monitoring part, I think of it as an EKG. We actually have, in order to be very precise when it comes to electronics, and we are literally electrifying everything these days now, these processes are so fast that you need to look very, very fast, much faster than old school traditional systems. And that’s like you think about it as the heart of the system has a heartbeat.
but to assess the health of the heart, you gotta look at the…
the noise when the heart starts pumping, right? Since it’s in the noise where you see if there’s any arteries that are maybe clogged or veins or something else happens, something is not proper. And you see this in the wiggles in the signal that is indicative of a heart failure. And that’s actually what we built. We built an EKG to actually measure those wiggles in the electricity so that we can tell the telltale signs, something is wrong. What is this?
Bert Wank (05:50.152) and has caused this disharmony. And then we can flag it and then essentially being the doctor we can say, okay, now we can fix it before it actually literally blows up.
very interesting, very interesting. what you’re doing on InfinityReal is, sorry, infiniRel. What you’re doing is you’re building monitoring systems so you can detect errors before they happen, right?
Yeah.
Bert Wank (06:24.414) Exactly, yes. And we’re focusing on electronics. right? So traditionally, the concept of condition-based maintenance has been around for at least 40 years, right? We’ve been looking at bearings and motors and generators, aircraft turbines have that. So that’s actually a very easy to follow system because if a bearing goes out of whack, you can feel it vibrating differently. It heats up more so you can feel the touch, it gets hotter.
possibly even smell the oil burning off, right? All these human sensories are there before it actually is disintegrating, right? There’s lots of time left to do a repair. Now in electronics, if any of those human senses are triggered with electronics, if you smell electronics, hear electronics, touch electronics, anything happens like that, it is too late. So we gotta have a very different system, much faster, much earlier to actually detect before things go wrong.
Yeah, that’s our mission.
Federico Ramallo (07:27.918) Interesting, interesting. Yeah, I I studied industrial engineering, so I kind of understand what you’re talking about bearings. So the bearings can last many, many years, but at the moment that the truck has a very tiny damage, then every time it turns, the bearing keeps hitting and hitting and hitting there and the damage grows exponentially.
And then, you you can hear it. You can you can feel it, the vibrations, the heat. You can, you know, you can listen it in the car without all the other noises you can actually listening which bearing is actually failing. Right. So, yeah, I understand that that that concept and and you can you can hear it like coming up, up, up until, you know, actually breaks. We had a we had an issue with it was a brand new car.
Yeah.
Federico Ramallo (08:26.666) and one of the main bearings of the accessory belt got blocked and then we had to literally tow the car out because it broke the belt and then the car was you know it was impossible to move yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and it speaks about the low reliability of this type of cars right
Mm-hmm.
Bert Wank (08:41.6) yeah, then you start. You can’t get anywhere.
Federico Ramallo (08:53.438) Anyway, coming back to to infinity real right? what what is the relationship between? what you were describing on the microprocessors and the The electrical grid right? Because on the electrical grid you have the issue of feedback loops, right? Where you have Right,
Mm-hmm.
That’s how long it’s been since I need to touch up. Because sometimes they put in new screens, they stuff it all around. Yeah, well there’s always feedback. So I got the page down, so now I gotta do, I’m off to those two.
you need to put all the engines in sync, right? And then if you feed energy into the system but everything is down, now you have peaks of consumption that basically you have to follow a very precise synchronization to start everything again, right? So I’m wondering, you know… yeah.
in places and then the big aluminum.
Bert Wank (09:37.934) Take some of that. Move a little bit.
Yeah, so sorry, I wasn’t sure if you hear the noise, but let me just go to a different room. let’s… Okay, this might be a little bit better. Sorry, this is… Okay.
It’s all good.
Bert Wank (10:07.18) But you follow the concept very well.
It’s it’s
It’s the beauty of working from home. The family is going to show up sometime at the calls. It is all good. So I’ll ask the question again. Again, I was asking about what is the relationship between infiniRel microprocessors and the idea of when we have the grids, we have so many components on the grid, like a nationwide grid, electrical grid.
Sure.
Federico Ramallo (10:40.184) and then you have to put all the engines that are generating all the alternators that are generating electricity they have to be on sync on the wave and then if you start some but then you have peak of consumption somewhere you you have to follow a precise order to get the grid up to generate I’m wondering what’s the relationship between
Yeah, let’s start with how the system still is working. Traditionally, a 100-year-old grid, you have generators that are steam-driven because of gas turbines or coal. We try not to do coal anymore, but…
You know
Federico Ramallo (11:17.09) Yes.
Bert Wank (11:30.21) So there is a rotating mass and the rotating mass carries through if there’s any disruption on the grid. And so the inertia, the sheer inertia just makes it keep on going.
Right.
Bert Wank (11:42.152) And in the last few decades, as we have moved towards renewables, like solar and wind, and now batteries become very, very important, in order to get that type of power to the grid, we use electronics. And it’s typically called the inverter, because they start out as technically it’s a direct current, and in the grid we need alternating current. So the inverter does exactly that. And inverters are built with semiconductors.
semiconductors work very very differently than the copper and steel and wire machines that weigh it on.
and in fact have also a lot less margin, right? So if you have a motor generator, can for short time, you can get double the voltage on this thing. It won’t like that. It’ll not have a 50 alive anymore, but it will sustain it for a while. In electronics, you have a very thin margin, maybe 20, 30% of margin to have a voltage spike. And then you’re walking on thin ice because these chips are so small that a little arc just
Yes.
Bert Wank (12:47.576) blows this thing up and it goes really really fast. It’s like less than a microsecond. And that’s the challenge, right? So you have a very harsh grid and a very sensitive semiconductors and the cost you can make it more robust but there’s an exponential cost to make semiconductors be rated at higher voltage than they normally operate just in case there’s a spike. And energy is a commodity so it’s very cost driven.
So the margins are rather thin and then you have very harsh environments. You’ve got temperature that are sometimes insanely hot and then also freezing. You’ve got moisture that is oxidizing your metal, which is the conductors. And all these perils add up and that leads to a premature failure. So the saying is, there’s no moving parts. It should live forever. Well, that’s a fantasy. It’s actually the opposite is true.
And so when we come in, we actually monitor the fingerprint of those disturbances, capture those.
and find out what stress has it caused on the electrical component, And then if that stress, we digitally accumulate that and evaluate how close is this to a failure? we can raise an alarm and flag saying, you’re walking now on borrowed time here. It’s time to replace that semiconductor, that capacitor, that element that is stressed out.
Interesting, interesting. I used to play with LEDs and every time I would not put the resistor, right? You have to put a resistor in series to the LED to avoid burning it down, right? And then, you know, when you’re tinkering with it, you know, sometimes you forget, right? And then I will blow out the LEDs and it was like, pop, instantly, you know?
Bert Wank (14:31.342) Mm-hmm.
Bert Wank (14:38.295) Yep.
Exactly.
Federico Ramallo (14:52.238) So the same thing happens with the microprocessors.
Yep, yep, yep, exactly, that’s how it works.
Bert Wank (15:02.252) Yes, yes. And now you have, you integrate both now in the grid, right? You have the old systems and the new systems, and they have to work together, which is going back to your theme of harmony. You know, it’s very disharmonious. You have one system fighting the other system, and it is, so there’s new technology approaches to do this grid following and grid.
starting inverters so they actually can start electrically, they can start the grid. And it’s not trivial because everything has to be synced up in harmony to the European 50 Hz or the 60 Hz in the US. And that’s not a trivial task. we have to have, literally, have to have intelligence where it’s needed locally. And that means, again, your processes to assess what needs to be done on a microsecond level.
Yes.
Bert Wank (15:54.952) not have a grid being challenged with a disruption. That’s actually where the avenue we’re going, right?
Right, right and
Federico Ramallo (16:09.41) And I believe that there also has been, I think it’s in Holland, I could be wrong, where they build these enormous inertia wheels so they could feed the grid and take out of the grid without taking too much into consideration the phasing, right? There can be a little bit of phasing because the wheels take care of
Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (16:39.244) the compensation.
Yes, these flywheels. These flywheel systems are very, yes, that would be the technical term, but yeah, they have been used certainly on very high power application. They store an enormous amount of power, but not as much energy. And it actually also goes back down to a very discussion about bearings, right? Since the typical flywheels are very large.
Flywheels, yes.
Bert Wank (17:06.382) But then we have to remind us that the energy actually is a square of the speed. So it actually makes a lot more sense to make the wheel spin twice as fast than make it twice as big. Because you get then four times the amount of energy when you spin twice as fast. Versus when you make it twice as big at the same speed, you only get twice the energy that is being stored. But it is a wonderful system for localized storage.
Yes.
Federico Ramallo (17:37.922) yes you’re talking about the angular momentum it’s mass by p p squared
Yes, exactly. And guess what? right. then, mm-hmm. And the other beautiful thing for us is that a flywheel, because it’s operating at different speeds, when it operates as a generator, as it slows down, the frequency goes down. So you can’t use it directly to the grid. So you have to first rectify it with power electronics. And when you say you rectified it, then you have to invert it again.
to the nice 50 or 60 Hz. So there is now two power electronics systems at work in the flywheel. Again, it’s part of the big electrification part that is happening. Power electronics is now everywhere.
Right. Right. I am.
Federico Ramallo (18:31.846) I got into a… I’m sorry, digressing to another topic, but I got recently into an original Otis elevator.
Right? So what happened is that it only has, it actually has two speeds, but you know, it only has like one speed, right? And then it’s all mechanical and it has a big spring that you can feel it when it moves, right? To kind of compensate the initial push because it goes from zero to everything, you know? And the motor was, you know, we rented an Airbnb, an apartment.
Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (19:13.026) And the electrical motor was right next to the apartment. So we could hear it during the night and the day, right? And you could hear when it was like starting up at the, you it was trying to catch up to the frequency of the grid, right? And then it will do a continuous sound once it get to the actual speed, right? But then the acceleration, it was done by
by springs, right? It was a progressive spring that you could see, you know, because the whole elevator was a cage, open cage. So you could see the walls moving around you, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s from the 1930s, right? So it was fascinating. know, for me as a, you know, I’m a software engineer, we never see the things moving, right? It’s like zeros and ones, right?
historic one. That’s going to be fascinating to see that at work.
Federico Ramallo (20:11.97) So here you can see the things moving, know, you can hear the clickings and everything, right? So anyway, it was fascinating. And then I go to a modern elevator and it has these phase shifting engines where it accelerates and it has infinite speeds, right? And it goes right to the edge of the floor and then it stops, very subtle, right? So, you know, it’s a…
Yeah.
Bert Wank (20:33.006) Mm-hmm.
Federico Ramallo (20:41.454) we were talking about the face phasing, right? That’s how I of connected that. So anyway, that’s what I was thinking about that. So tell us a little bit more about infiniRel. What are you doing? I understand you raised some funds. You got some grants. You got some prize rewards.
you
Bert Wank (21:04.942) Right. Yes, yes, as a startup, we’re on the hunt for support, financial support, and believers that the mission that you’re on, in our case, literally it’s infinite reliability. That’s where infiniRel, the name, comes from. It’s if you have perfect knowledge about a system and its future and you see it failing, if you see it early enough, you can change the future.
you can change the path you’re on. So you can correct it. also in electronics, that’s the part where we looked at, or actually when I was back in, in semiconductors, that’s my background, and I learned from a presentation by the head of the Department of Energy, Dan Torn, at the time, that inverter failures were contributing 59 % of all unexpected maintenance cost in a solar plant. I said, that’s a problem. That’s really what started us to
think about, well, if solar is going to be growing and growing and growing, which it did, then this problem will also be growing unless we fix it. So we set out to look at the cause and effect and that’s really where today’s technology, what we call AI or
derivative of that is machine learning comes to play when we recognize a pattern and we see those patterns fast enough and can anticipate and predict them, then we can change the outcome. That’s where our predictive analytics technology is coming from. And where we focusing on initially in our market entry was the two systems, the solar plants, but more importantly, battery energy storage systems also use inverters because the batteries need to be charged and discharged.
and that’s done with electronics. And in contrast to solar plants, battery energy storage facilities have to run 24/7, day and night.
Bert Wank (23:02.953) In the solar plant, you worry about once the sun rises and until the sun sets, that’s when it needs to work. But batteries 24/7. And so that’s where we developed our EKG, our energy cardiograph. And we have now had the chance to work with a very large battery energy storage developer and with a solar operator of these big plants to actually go out in the field into the desert and do what we call the inverter health scans, where we take the heartbeat of the inverters
analyze what is happening inside. So we can advise our clients on the risk of failure and more specifically what elements of the system of the inverter they need to be replacing before it actually costs them a lot of money. Uptime is the name of the game. Units that are up, it’s an asset so it generates revenue, it generates electricity which is revenue. If it stops doing that you lose revenue.
When you lose revenue enough, then actually you might get even more penalties on top. There’s a long tail of financial losses associated with it. It’s been degrading over the years. In 2023, the last number I got was that the United States of America’s solar industry has lost $4.5 billion in preventable losses. The lion’s share of that is the inverter that stopped operating.
literally sometimes catastrophically imploding. And that’s the part that we’re focusing on to avoid as we continue with the electrification of the grid. There’s charging stations using power electronics, electric vehicles use power electronics. This afternoon I’m going on to witness an electric plane here in Palo Alto. I’m pretty excited to go there because wow!
if a plane’s power electronic fails, that might become a glider and some planes glide well and some planes don’t glide well. So it’s a risk. It could be a life and death risk, right? And so these are all implications that our prognostics at certain time of maturity we can actually address.
Federico Ramallo (25:19.222) Right, right. the issue with electronics is that you cannot open it up, it. Like you do with preventive maintenance on internal combustion engines, on airplanes, right? They have to certify every certain hours, every certain time. There is no known path for that type of certification.
for electric airplanes, at least not yet. So, infiniRel would be a good solution for that specific case study, a use case.
Not yet, exactly.
Bert Wank (26:00.811) Yeah, we were definitely working towards that. now, EKG is in a rather large format. That’s why we’re looking at large power plants where a single EKG can avoid five, six orders of magnitude of damage. $100,000 avoided this value.
But in flight, anything that moves, particularly flight, things have to be very light and small. so eventually we want to shrink our EKG to a chip level. And that’s going to be the game changer because then we can be immediately on the printed circuit board, in the electronics on the inside. We can be the brain of it. We can actually operate the power electronic system so we make it intrinsically safe. That’s really the vision I have where we need to go.
In the meantime, need to collect a lot more data so we know exactly how we architect the system as we shrink it to a small and very affordable size.
Bert Wank (27:01.792) Imagine when your car actually is reliable. You don’t have to be afraid that it stalls out. That’s the point, having confidence.
Right, right. So you’re.
Federico Ramallo (27:10.946) Right, right. But the benefit with the car is that you can stop at the side of the road and you’re going to be fine, right? But with an airplane, you don’t have that luxury, right?
Then it is exactly that’s a mission critical part. There none of you talking about space. mean, one of the exciting parts that I learned recently about is science. Now the press is full about AI and data centers and data centers are so power hungry and can we get the power? And then where do we locate the data centers? And then of course there’s data security involved in which countries are involved. And now imagine we have data centers in space.
mission quickly.
Bert Wank (27:47.915) that actually there are half a dozen companies that work on data centers in space. And they need to be reliable too, and they need power. So that’s actually the one thing I’m currently reaching out to find out is there’s an interesting avenue to accelerate our roadmap since in space things have to go to a trip level.
That would be amazing.
Bert Wank (28:11.485) So if we could have a partner in that area to say, hey, we need a trip like that so we know that when we have to replace a data center, pretty much a satellite.
before it actually starts failing. We can plan that weeks ahead of time because in logistics, shoot up rockets like ad hoc, you have to plan all these things. That information would be very valuable to do. So that’s actually an exciting part for us to consider as our partner development strategy.
So if there’s any listeners that work on data centers in space, please reach out to me at bert.wank, that’s W-A-N-K, @infiniRel.com, because that would be a great discussion to have.
Great, and we’ll put your contact information on the notes of this episode so people can reach out to you as well
Super, thank you. I much appreciate that, Federico
Federico Ramallo (29:12.686) Yeah, absolutely happy to help. So what other plans do you have for infiniRel? What are you planning to do in the next 12 months?
So with the end game, the next part is we need to get access to a bunch of more plans. We need to spool up our data. So that’s really where the machine learning, need to have, again, the harmony, the frequency, the feedback from…
from the power plants. And so we’re looking for the early adopters, the handful of companies we can work very closely with to roll out our EKG technology, be on site and then follow the life of the inverter along. And we will see some failure along the way. And that’s exactly the valuable information that we need to feed back in the system. A, have we detect that failure risk before? So that’s affirmation, the feedback, yes, we are on the right
track, we saw the right parts, or have we not seen it yet, then we need to change the algorithm. So that’s really in our next immediate steps to roll out the next 12 months. And then building more EKGs, so we currently also in the fundraisers, so we can build some more of those. I’m also in a supplier discussion to shrink the first generation, so we can be a lot more liberal in deploying EKGs when the size and the cost is a factor of
10 smaller, but at the same time the performance actually goes up another factor of 10, right? So it’s actually a merit increase of a factor of a thousand. So that’s pretty exciting and looking for the right partners for us to move into that next level of maturity where we can…
Bert Wank (31:01.609) deploy EKGs more liberally in those battery and solar facilities, particularly the ones that might be powering data centers because that’s part of the mix.
Right, right, very interesting.
So I wanted to ask you one more question about
about what advice would you give to a young engineer that would like to get into the superconductor industry or follow your steps, what advice would you give them?
superconductor industry. Superconductors are actually a fascinating topic. We’ve been pushing the boundaries on high-temperature superconductors.
Bert Wank (31:49.547) Actually, it’s not really related to a specific area in general. Just follow your passion. I think that’s a driver because we will always see as we push our boundaries, we will always see obstacles. And to overcome those, we have to have that internal drive, that internal motivation, that quest. And rather than being pushed or nudged by friends and family to something that you may not really want to do.
but you just nicely, kindly have to correct and you have to focus on what drives you. In fact, there is a Japanese term for the professional fulfillment. It’s called “Ikigai”. And you find that actually on my LinkedIn page as part of the images where you have four quadrants and when they overlap,
all of them, then that’s your Ikigai. That’s the sweet spot of your professional fulfillment, which means you do what you’re good at, because if you’re not doing what you’re good at, then it creates the fear that someone else is better and you’re out of a job. So it’s the avoidance of negative emotions. This is part of the…
the game. The second part is you do what you’re passionate about because time is irrelevant. Time just flies by and you have so much fun you can’t wait to do it again. That’s really important because if it’s not the case then you just check your watch and say man when is this job over and they go home. Well that’s not fun. You gotta have fun with it. The third one
which is also important, that you have to have a human purpose. You touch someone in this world. could be the world in itself. It could be one person on this planet that you touch with your solution, that you improve. Because if we’re not doing it for some other human being, even indirectly, it feels empty. We’re not feeling fulfilled. If it’s just stuff.
Bert Wank (33:48.075) it just doesn’t have the same value for us intrinsically. And so that’s also very important to have. And the last one, of course, it has to have some value. Someone actually pays you, which is the hardest part in this startup to work on, at least initially, right? The payout is usually at the end, you know, when you see it all the way through… but when that happens in the meantime, you know, there’s lots of iterations and, you know, a lot of failures, a lot of corrections, a lot of feedback, right? To bring back into harmony, which I really like that you started out this whole subject on the harmony line.
Yeah, that would be my advice. AI is super, it’s like one of those big, big things to absolutely pay attention to. It’s like the internet was, it’s just at the tip of the iceberg to see its true potential.
That’s big. Power and energy is very fundamental still in power electronics. Understanding analog systems is equally important as understanding digital systems and usually it takes two different types of personalities. There’s always exceptions but if you have a quest for analog, just go down the analog path. Systems are by and large analog but
Digitalization helps incredibly efficiently to work with analog systems. So it really takes both. It’s a symbiosis of both analog and digital. And there’s always an intersection, an exchange between both sides. That is also good to keep in mind for any follow-on generations that want to engage in the world of energy and electronics and power and even generically follow the passion.
Federico Ramallo (35:33.71) right. Very interesting concept. The Iki
EKG then, energy cardiograph.
Yeah, and the four quadrants that you were talking about, very interesting concept.
Yeah, when I saw that, it’s like that makes sense. We get usually stuck in one or two quadrants and then after 10 years, it’s really hard to break out. And so if you’re aware of that early on, you can make adjustments and change the direction that you’re going to get a greater fulfillment.
So it’s actually also like how did you get into the recording side? How did this proliferate until you ended up where you have so much fun that you’re smiling and it’s like, yeah, this is the stuff I want to do. is what we enjoy.
Federico Ramallo (36:26.808) So I got into the, I mean, I’m a software engineer, so I kind of like being focused too much on the technical part. And I’ve been moving towards more towards relating with people, right? And then I find this format much better to have meaningful conversations.
So I start doing this to start writing myself, to start feeling about some ideas that I wanted to explore. And then from there, I found that it was much more interesting to have it with different people, right? Because you can have these meaningful conversations that you cannot have on a conference or you go to different events.
I was in Santa Clara Convention Center in February or March and you meet so many people that you get overwhelmed, right? being able to have this space where we don’t have too many distractions and we can just have more meaningful conversations, that for me has been kind of why I got into this and why I’ve been enjoying it more and more, right? Because then…
Yes.
Bert Wank (37:54.101) Bye.
As you mentioned, the times flies by so quickly that we just… I have a lot of fun and I feel that the guests have a lot of fun as well. So that’s kind of how I continue doing this.
So you found your Ikigai.
Yes, yes. So, so yes, it’s very interesting. Yeah. And my first job, when I started my first job, said, I was saying I would do this for free. You know, it’s great that they pay me for it, you know. But, you know, I was having so much fun getting into code and all that stuff that, you know, I was thinking I would do it for free. It’s great, you know.
Very good. Congratulations.
Federico Ramallo (38:47.918) They pay me because now I have more resources to do more of what I like, right? So yeah, I completely agree. So thank you very much Bert for being here, for joining us. Unfortunately, we ran out of time. I don’t want to overstep of our schedule.
Exactly.
Bert Wank (39:08.361) Yeah, that was great. It was great to have a chat, Federico. I appreciate it. Thank you too for the opportunity. I’ll meet you next time in Santa Clara, the Bay Area. Come look me up. There’s a good chance I’ll be around and then we can have another chat or cup of coffee or tea.
Sounds like a good plan. Yes, we’ll do that.
Alright, great. I appreciate it. Thanks again.