1188: Testing Assumptions Before Burning Capital | Kevin Hettrich, CFO, QuantumScape

Kevin Hettrich walked into a conference room with a whiteboard full of numbers and a problem no one had fully articulated. QuantumScape’s leadership team was discussing how to scale an expensive R&D tool used to produce early battery materials. Hettrich had spent two weeks gathering data, talking with engineers, and analyzing manufacturing economics. Then he laid out the comparison: QuantumScape’s current performance, the best anyone had achieved in any industry, and what would ultimately be required to succeed in automotive production. There were “six orders of magnitude” separating the industry benchmark from what the company would eventually need, Hettrich tells us.That moment became an early proving ground for a finance leader who had entered QuantumScape from a background shaped by McKinsey & Company, Bain Capital, and Stanford’s joint business and engineering program. Rather than staying confined to finance, Hettrich immersed himself in the company’s technical environment. He tells us he would contribute to at least one patent application each year and spent time “changing targets out of that tool” and mixing chemicals alongside engineers.The broader strategy behind QuantumScape has remained equally ambitious. The company’s goal is not incremental improvement, but batteries that are “smaller and lighter,” “faster charging,” “longer lived,” “safer,” and “lower cost at the same time,” Hettrich tells us. Today, the company has commercial partnerships with Volkswagen and collaborations with Corning and Murata Manufacturing as it works to commercialize its solid-state battery platform.