Welcome to "In Good Company." Today, we are diving into the world of batteries, renewable energy, and innovative technology with Peter Carlsson, the CEO of Northvolt.

Thank you. Now, Peter, what is Northvolt?

Northvolt is a battery company that focuses on developing the most sustainable products in the industry.

One of the things we recognize is that batteries and battery supply chains are incredibly energy-intensive and as such, they're also actually producing a significant carbon footprint.

And what we want to show is that there is another way by building sustainable supply chains, by building factory setups in grid solutions that actually provide renewable energy, and doing it with the latest technology, including building a circular setup so that we can drive this battery revolution in a more sustainable way.

And thereby, we get a significantly bigger impact on the green transition.

Now, you've got some really wonderfully hairy goals. Yeah, I love it. Where are you going to be in 10 years' time?

I think in 10 years' time, we will be an entirely, you know, fully circular company.

We will probably at least have 50% of everything that we produce, we will produce with recycled material.

I think we'll build out our footprint to be kind of the Western leader, both in Europe and in North America.

And then with sodium ion, which is a new emerging technology, I think we are rapidly evolving a footprint in, if I call it, the developing world: India, Middle East, Africa.

When you started Northvolt in 2016, many people in the industry didn't think you had a chance, but wow, here we are.

And you know, the factory you are building, you can see on Google Earth, that's how big it is.

Now, one of the reasons why they were skeptical was because of Chinese competition.

So what are the challenges you are facing here?

The Chinese ecosystem, and this is, you know, batteries is a scale business.

It is big or go home.

Generally a good rule in life.

Yeah, that is true, but the Chinese, you know, they have a 5 to 10 year head start on scale, which we need to catch up.

But they have, from the vehicles to the battery supply chain, to the battery value chain, taken a very strategic position.

They have put in a large amount of capital in everything from raw materials mining up until really a very, very clear transition plan towards electrification.

And then, you know, they're formidable in running operations.

So, a head-to-head competition with the Chinese is going to be difficult.

What we are trying to do is that we can do it in a different way.

We can stretch the technology, we can do it in a more circular way, and we can build customization and customer intimacy.

Because batteries are going from being a commodity, you know, five, six years ago when we went out to many of our customers, they were thinking of a battery as a black box.

And today, as this market evolves, we see that the battery, you know, it's a chemistry system.

And as a chemistry system, you can basically optimize that towards the features that your products want to have and that your brand has as an aspiration.

And what we perhaps have been a little bit better than some of our competitors is to work together with our customers' engineering groups on that optimization.

You know, if you're a Volvo, you sell a lot of cars in the northern hemisphere, so cold weather performance is a key feature for a battery.

If you're a Porsche, you know, your customers don't want to stand waiting long at the charging station; they really want fast charging.

So that kind of intimacy and optimizing the systems is also something that we see this is where we can really differentiate.

So what do you actually need to be successful here?

I mean, if I now decided to start a battery factory, and we have had some attempts, or we have some attempts on, you know, to start a startup in Norway, what are the key things there?

Is it money, technology, people? Just how would you rank them?

Starting point is obviously you need a really, really good core engineering in terms of how you optimize that chemistry system.

Is that people or is that property? Can you buy that?

Not really, you know, in a similar way as with many others, these R&D architects who have the full visibility of both how to optimize a chemistry system but can also understand how it affects the process and the manufacturing setup, they are worth their weight in gold.

As a first mover with a very clear impact mission, we were able to recruit a handful of these people primarily from Asia.

Then we've filled up with people from all over the world, but that's kind of the starting point.

And it is still a very emerging technology, so I would say there's probably less than 100 people in the world, it's rapidly growing, that have that full system overview, and they are so important.

Then, again, coming back to that this is a scale business, then you need to be able to attract talent at scale.

What does that mean? How many people is that?

Well, I mean, we've grown from 25 to 6,000 people in the last 6 years.

But what I would say is, per factory, you need a process engineering team that is very, very talented.

And I think you need to be somewhere around 300 to 400 really good process engineers per factory setup.

So that talent base is crucial to bring on, and this is a big, big bottleneck for the industry right now.

Then obviously, you need the capital base, so you need to have strong investors like yourself.

And how much money do you need?

As a rule of thumb, you basically need somewhere between 70 to 90 million US dollars per gigawatt hour that you're investing.

And in order to make scale and to become significant, we think that you need to reach at least somewhere between 200 to 300 gigawatt hours.

So if you do the math, how much money is that?

That is somewhere around 20 to 30 billion, give or take 20 to 25 billion dollars over time.

This is not for the poor people.

This is not for the poor people.

And then of course, you need a scalable footprint.

You need a way of setting up your lines and your factories that is systematic, that can be scaled in an efficient way.

So people, capital, and the scalable blueprint, I think that is the core.

You mentioned the client relationships.

You have a great relationship with Volvo, Volkswagen, Porsche.

I met the CEO recently who's really excited about this.

How important are these relationships and the contracts you have?

They are essential.

So if you didn't have any contracts, you couldn't go ahead?

No, you couldn't.

Excuse me, but are these not pretty undifferentiated products?

Can't I just produce loads of batteries and sell it to whoever wants them?

There is a commodity market.

You know, you can buy 280 amp hour LFP batteries at a very, very low cost today from China.

But if you want to design a leading-edge vehicle to be head-to-head in competition with Tesla and some of the others, then you really need high-performance battery, highly defined towards your brand and your performance optimizations.

And those are not commodities.

I mean, obviously, we are fighting head-to-head with CATL and LG and Samsung in those RFQs.

But through these relationships that we managed to build, this has been crucial also to get our investors comfortable that we will not go the way solar cells went, and where the Western kind of lost all those operations to Asia.

You worked at Tesla for some time. What did you learn and what are you bringing to Northvolt?

I learned a lot.

I must say, when I came to Tesla, I felt that I was a pretty seasoned supply chain and operation guy.

You know, I worked with mobile phones for a long period of time, I worked with semiconductors.

But coming into a startup where you build the rail in front of the train, and where you constantly need to challenge, and your strongest assets are your speed and your mission, you really, really stretch your comfort zone.

And Elon for sure stretched my comfort zone.

What did you learn from him?

What I learned from him is how powerful it is to drive a company with a super, super clear mission.

You could argue about management methods, but you can't argue about the mission, and that is giving an incredible passion among people and loyalty.

Then he always challenged the conventional way.

Why should ocean sea freight be slower? Why can't it be faster?

I still remember one time we were looking at the cost of the Model S.

And we were having, you were in the same room with him?

Yeah, yeah, I mean, we met weekly.

And in the beginning, we were basically giving away a check with every vehicle that we produced.

And Elon told me, you know, I would like the entire bill of material to be analyzed based on the cost of atoms for every part.

And, you know, a vehicle is like just a bill of materials, like 3,500 part numbers.

And to analyze the cost of the atoms, I mean, it blew me away.

It's like, holy, how do I do this?

But we got the team to work through, and a couple of weeks later, we came back, and it was actually a whole bunch of different learnings about what is the cost of atoms for steering gear, and what is the sales price, and does it make sense?

We learned a lot, and I would not be here today, I would not have dared to start Northvolt if I hadn't been on that journey.

Do you also have a reality distortion field?

Yes, I think I'm sometimes a little bit naive in what I think we can do.

So give me some examples of where you are kind of asking for the impossible, and where it is actually happening sometimes too.

Whenever I see a budget or whenever I see a timeline, I always think there must be ways to cut this 30-40%.

There must be smarter ways to drive the capital structure, etc.

So I have an inherent push to see where is the boundary, where can I stretch?

And at the end, many times we're not reaching that stretch, but we're still reaching towards something that was better than what we started with.

And that is of course very, very important when you are in any type of industry to continuously stretch.

You know, can you do this a little bit faster? Can you do this a little bit more effective? Can we do it with a little bit less people? Etc.

And how does this work in the Nordic region and in Sweden?

I mean, are we fast enough? Are we efficient enough?

Are there too many regulations and rules?

I do think there are too many regulations and rules.

In an early stage, you know, you're 50 to 100 people, you work around the clock.

But then when you're starting to scale up, and when you're starting, you know, then you have to, it's basically impossible to operate in Sweden without the collective bargaining agreement.

Elon Musk tried.

Yeah, I mean, it's tried, and that is an interesting dispute because I'm not sure who is going to budge first, to be honest.

And it's not easy to see how you will find a win-win in that situation.

But you have a situation where if you're building a company, and if you're starting up new factories, especially if new factories that haven't been built before, that's not done in a 9-to-5 environment.

You know, you need extra flexibility from people, and normally people are willing to give that.

You know, it doesn't need to be demanded, normally you can get it on a voluntary basis.

And then when you're trying to convert this into how does this adhere with the collective bargaining agreement, you stumble into a whole bunch of bottlenecks with the central organization.

Because they are basically saying, it's not that they don't understand what you need, but they are of course worried if we give this flexibility to you, immediately a Volvo or an ABB will start and come for the same.

And we get stuck to some extent in our regulation.

I think actually it is time to a little bit review some of these structures we have because nothing comes for free.

Succeeding also requires hard work, and as long as it is a mutual understanding, why not?

But why not allow people to work specifically during a certain period of time when you need that?

So which part of the structure, kind of the Scandinavian model, is it that you think we need to review?

I think we need to allow more flexible working hours.

In Norway, in Sweden, a lot of our industrial infrastructure was built long ago, and it wasn't built by 9-to-5.

And if you look at our competition that is being built in China, to take an example, I was visiting one of our competitors, and we were walking through their factory, and I was kind of, you know, is it three-shift structure or is it the four-shift structure?

And there was a, this is a two-shift structure.

So we have two teams, 12 hours a day, six days a week, and then, you know, flexible overtimes on Sunday.

We are competing with a five-shift structure in order to fill the factory.

I'm not saying that we should go towards the Chinese model, but what I do say is that if people want to make a bigger impact, if they want to work a bit more, also making more money, we should have a bit more flexibility for that.

Is that why you are starting factories outside Sweden?

No, it is not.

The reason why we're doing that is both proximity to customers, but it's also access to talent base.

We have recognized that at least short term, with what we're doing in Västerås, what we're doing in Skellefteå, and what we're doing in Gothenburg, we are draining a lot of the capabilities and the talent base that is in the surrounding.

So it is driven by other reasons.

Moving on to the whole battery market, you say that battery is the key technology to replace the use of coal and gas. Why? Could you elaborate a bit on that?

For example, if Europe should meet our Paris Treaty obligations, which is basically 80% CO2 reduction over three decades, we basically both need to get oil out of our transport, a little bit more difficult with airplanes, but with most of our transports, it is absolutely doable.

But then it needs to be replaced by electrification, maybe some hydrogen, but primarily, which is also driving an electrical powertrain, but primarily it's going to be batteries.

And in the same way, if we want to transform our energy generation from natural gas and coal and oil, we also need to transform it.

And we need to build a new infrastructure with renewable.

You know, Norway and Sweden have the hydropower that is crucial in this.

But then it is wind and solar, and there's probably a certain part also of nuclear.

But all of these will create more and more instability in the grid, which means that your ability to store energy to balance this in the grid is also becoming crucial.

And you also have the situation where we're sitting here in Stockholm today.

Stockholm has basically an infrastructure, I think it is around three and a half megawatts, that's the copper cables that come into the city.

This is maxed out between 9 and 2 in the day.

And with all people that are now transforming into electric vehicles coming in from the suburbs, you know, want to charge the vehicle during the day and get back, we probably need to create an additional maybe 50% increase during peak hour.

And we can either do it by digging up the entire city and, you know, pump in copper, or we can build energy storage in the city so that we can fill that up during the night and we can utilize it during the peak hour.

And I think the latter one is going to be a much more efficient model for how we develop that.

So the ability to store energy is absolutely crucial in the transition.

Now, historically, we've been dependent on lithium, which you find in places like Argentina, Chile, and China, but not in Europe.

So what are the challenges here?

It's not the challenge about access in the sense that lithium is very available on Earth.

The easier access is either by rock, where Canada, Australia, for example, are really big, but we have it in Serbia, we have it in Portugal, and in other locations.

Then you have groundwater that has a strong lithium content.

And there, for example, South America, where you pump up and you're basically evaporating in big brines.

This industry is evolving very fast.

I have a little bit of a concern over creating these big dams in the desert over time.

I think this will have a pretty big environmental impact.

But there is also new technology emerging around so-called DLE, so where you do direct lithium extraction without these ponds.

So I think technology will solve it.

Part of the challenge today is that almost all of this lithium, if I call it an early concentration form, then goes to China to be processed into either lithium carbonate or lithium hydroxide.

So, the whole value or the processing part, I think is somewhere between 80 to 85% of the world's production is in China.

So that's an advantage that China, these producers have.

It is an advantage, and this is where we need to build value chains.

You know, we started a joint venture in Portugal together with Galp to build one of Europe's first lithium processing.

And this is a necessity to build these supply chains because eventually batteries will be a regional business.

Batteries are so heavy, they are a bit dangerous to transport, and the customers would like to have just-in-time setups.

So there will be a regionalization of the market, and as part of that regionalization, it's super crucial to build also these regional supply chains.

Do every country have to have a battery production?

Not every country needs to have it.

Does Norway need to have it? It's a good question.

I think Norway probably has the opportunity of having a good battery production given its grid setup.

But then there is a whole bunch of other things that needs to come together for that to happen.

But in reality, over the next, I would say, next couple of years, most of the decisions that will drive the transformation of the entire auto industry will be taken: where are my key strategies for battery supplies?

Then it will take 10 years to execute them, but it is very important that Europe as a total is on our toes.

Because if we don't have this infrastructure in the next decade, then the train has gone, and then the infrastructure is built up, and it's so much capital that it's going to be very difficult to change this.

So then we would be in a situation like we have been in solar panels, microchips, and so on, right?

Exactly.

Tell me about the new sodium ion breakthrough you've had.

Sodium ion has been in research for for for quite quite some some time, as it is probably the you know the second best to lithium, and it's even more abundant.

From a Northvolt perspective, one of the things that that we've seen over uh over the last couple of years is is you know in the drive for lower cost batteries which is necessary for even higher Market penetration and with very fluctuating uh raw material prices lithium ion phosphate so so iron based batteries have grown uh a lot driven by a very very uh rapid and and efficient uh execution of of of uh of of the uh the Chinese.

It is roughly half the energy density of high performance uh nickel batteries but for energy storage and for lower cost Passenger cars it it works.

And obviously as as a company you're sitting and seeing that and you're kind of you know should we should we address that uh that market what should be our strategy?

We've been struggling with with how to approach this I must admit both that we would be almost 100% dependent on Chinese active material and the fact that this active material would come with a very large uh carbon footprint.

So it would be very difficult to how do we combine our mission with with this type of of technology.

And lastly these lfp batteries as they're less valuable there hasn't been a natural development of of recycling methodology.

It's coming but it's also going to require more regulatory demands in order for for for that to to to make make it happen.

When can you have a big production of this?

We are right now working on our industrialization plan for for this um uh and and we think we can scale this up in the 2026 20 uh 27 uh Ty of time frame.

Will this be a unique product or will all companies have well you know there is a raise on on sodium what is a bit unique uh is is that I think we were a bit ahead of the competition in being able to uh uh to develop um based on on this pran blue cathode to produce an lfp type performance competition is is either working with an iron based uh uh uh cathod material that has lower uh lower energy density or they working with with a nickel based cathode so then H but what we've what we've shown is is that we can do a product without without both and and this I think is is a big Edge.

Well, you know, there is a race on sodium. What is a bit unique is that I think we were a bit ahead of the competition in being able to develop, based on this Prussian blue cathode, to produce an LFP-type performance. Competition is either working with an iron-based cathode material that has lower energy density, or they're working with a nickel-based cathode. But what we've shown is that we can do a product without both, and this, I think, is a big edge.

What is also very interesting with sodium ion batteries is that lithium is very reactive, but sodium you can basically heat up a sodium ion battery towards 300° without getting a thermal runaway.

So they are inherently safer, which I think also becomes very important, you know, in both harsh conditions if you're putting battery storage in the desert next to a solar farm, or if you're moving energy storage into cities and where where you know the fire hazard is is of course very very uh important.

One more thing, you touched on the importance of having this recyclable infrastructure as well, parallel to your battery production.

How does this work?

Basically, the way it works is you're taking end-of-life packs, and you're dismantling them.

You remove copper and the aluminum in the pack, and you discharge it.

And it seems simple, but to take a battery pack absolutely down to zero is not, you know, in industrial it's not that novel.

Then, you basically crush and sort it where you need to take out the electrolyte that is very important.

And the end product of that is black mass.

And out of that black mass, you can then either use pyro technology, so you use furnaces to remove it, but then you lose lithium.

Or, you can take the way that we've done where you're using a hydrometallurgical separation, and then you can basically get over 90 towards 95% recyclability of nickel, of cobalt, but also of lithium.

Do anybody else do this?

There are other companies who are evolving, but we have been able to build a pretty strong IP base around this.

And up in Skellefteå, we're right now commissioning Europe's largest recycling facility.

It's a 4 gigawatt hour setup, and there's a brilliant bunch of people who are now getting all these processes to work.

Moving on to corporate culture, a pretty unique situation to build something from zero to 6,000 people in eight years.

How do you think about what type of culture you want to have in the company?

I'm a person that is driven very much by passion and energy, and obviously, it is a company culture that reflects that is very, very important to me.

I, you know, when I step into a room, I'm very sensitive to the energy level in the room.

That is a very important thermometer for me, whether there is true activity going on.

Sorry, and just, how do you measure that?

So now you come into a room, what do you gauge? What do you look for?

What you're looking for is, can you feel the energy?

Can you see people standing over together, looking at something, whether it's in a display, whether it's a prototype?

Or collectively, you can feel whether there is an energy, whether it's like a newsroom before the night's 7:30 play, or whether it's a trader room in a stock market.

You know, that type of energy. So that is important to me.

The other important thing, and we worked a lot from day one, and we kept the same kind of core words, which is being bold, being passionate, and being excellent, as the key pillars of what we're doing.

But one important thing when you're building something like this, and that we're driving, is you cannot run at maximum speeds all the time.

It doesn't work like that.

But when you're hitting a bottleneck, that's when the light needs to be on.

That's when you need part of an organization to sprint.

And that principle is very, very important to me that whenever we stumble, because it is still so, speed and the pace forward as a company is one of our biggest assets.

Who do you hire?

We have 125 nationalities in the company, so we're very, very diverse.

We want to hire people who have done difficult things, who have multiple experiences, that are not afraid to roll up the sleeves and shovel dirt.

We want to hire people specifically that are logical but also dynamic.

You say speed is an asset.

Now, in our strategy document for the fund, we have speed is a mindset.

How do you make sure that you keep the speed up?

Do you walk around on the floor here and whip people?

No, I think it's incredibly important to constantly drive that culture.

And that is a challenge when you're growing very, very fast.

Last year, we were having a kickoff with the first and second layer, the 50 people, and we realized that we have one group who's been with the company for three, four, five years, and they are totally engraved in the culture.

But then we're starting new sites, and we're bringing in more people.

It requires a bit of effort to bring everybody else into what is it being a Northvolter.

And this is crucial.

What is it to be a Northvolter?

Well, I come back to it, it is about being passionate, it's about being bold, and being excellent in what we're doing, with a strong focus on what our customer needs.

But it is a challenge when you're being proud of being this diverse, but you also have to remember that if you come from 125 different nationalities, your perspectives, if you come from Asia on how an organization works versus the Nordic model of being very flat and goal-oriented, this is a big mental transition.

And this won't happen over days.

So we work a lot with both getting people together in big team buildings.

So I, for instance, hear that you have a weakness for ski challenges.

You got your whole management group to do Vasaloppet.

Now, for those of you who are not into cross-country skiing, Vasaloppet is a pretty damn long cross-country trip, 90k, right?

Even the people who hadn't done it before, cross-country, they had to do it.

So how did that go?

We haven't done it yet.

We're on the path.

And the Vasaloppet is not the important thing.

But basically, what we said is, with this focus that we have on the ramp-up in the factories, we will have our management teams up in Skellefteå on a weekly basis.

This is where the focus needs to be.

And as a little bit of a feature to being in Skellefteå is the availability of snow.

So Monday evenings, after we have had our management meetings, we're doing a joint training on cross-country skiing.

And we have this excellent coach, his name is Claus Neelson.

He's won the Nordenlopet, which is the world's longest cross-country, it's 220 kilometers.

So he has been helping us, and as bringing the team together with one goal, it's been very, very fun.

But we've started on very, very different levels.

And perhaps kind of suitable to go for something which is pretty marathon-like, because this is going to be a marathon to build Northvolt.

It is a marathon for sure.

What are your leadership principles? What is the most important thing for you?

I think it is very, very important in order to understand the problem, to go to the depth.

Whenever you have a problem, don't just leave it at face value.

The Japanese have this saying, Gamba gutsu, go to the source and see it.

And I very much like that philosophy.

We're trying to find a model, and I'm trying to apply a model where people are given a lot of responsibility, and I will leave them alone until they prove that they can't manage that responsibility.

But I'm a strong believer in people.

I don't set the agendas for people, and I'm very focused on two things: how they, together with the team, achieve their objectives, and secondly, how they are building the teams around them.

You know, how they're being talent attractors.

When I'm having performance reviews, these are the two parameters that are very, very important for me.

When you make decisions, how dependent are you on analysis, and how much is pattern recognition, are things you've seen before?

I think data is important because a number of the things that we're doing, to some extent, we're doing it for the first time.

But I'm also cognizant about, you can go and collect data forever.

It is about having the sufficient amount of data so that you're not going totally off the track.

But if you have 80% of what you need, then I'm normally ready to take the decision and go on.

Now, One former colleague of yours described you as optimistic, bold, forward-leaning, and aggressive.

So where does this come from? What is your driving force?

As with many of us, there is a little young achiever inside that wants to do good, that wants to learn and wants to succeed.

And then, obviously, wants to get a certain recognition for it.

I'm not driven by financials, but I do like to get recognition.

It was interesting, I gave a speech at the Stockholm School of Economics yesterday, and I asked people to put up their hand if they if they really, you know, wanted to show the world, and surprisingly few people did.

And I suspect it's just because they didn't admit it, want to admit it.

Who do you want to prove wrong? Who do you want to show?

Yes, in the sense, I want to prove the ones that are saying that we can't solve this big problem, the climate crisis and the green transition, in the timelines that we set up.

We need to give ourselves more time because the solutions to solve these problems are there.

It is about executing them.

In 2017, I was out for an accident.

I was in an avalanche, and when they found me, I didn't breathe.

So I actually don't recall it until I was on a helicopter on the way to the hospital.

And I was in pretty bad shape.

But when I was recovering, I was lying there and thinking, what is important now?

Then I got kind of a second chance.

And then what came very, very clear, because I was also engaged in a whole bunch of other startups, this is my mission in life.

This is combining what I've learned through my career with my passion.

This will be hopefully the important effort of my life.

Sometimes, you know, when you can feel a little bit almost overwhelmed, you know, what have I started?

I kind of go back to, at the end of the day, this is really, really important if we should be able to contain climate and global warming to at least below two degrees.

We need to take these dramatic, rapid actions, and we need to be bold.

Did the event change your life in other ways?

It did.

I think it made me much more humble to how fragile life can be, and to make sure that you're not pushing all your wants to the future.

And I can clearly say that if I would die tomorrow, I would still be very happy with the life I've had.

How do you relax?

You know, one of the things that I think is a good feature when you're an entrepreneur is, as an entrepreneur, you have a lot of shitty days where you're thinking we're not going forward, we're going backwards.

And you just get an aggregate of all the pile of that happens when you're building and starting new things.

But I have this ability to feel like go to bed, sleep, and wake up with totally new energy.

It's like almost like a goldfish.

How much it uh does one have to take to be a good entrepreneur?

The harder task you take on, the more pile of you will experience.

That is probably a law of some sort.

But I'm also a bit of an on-off person.

So we have a board meeting today, but but later tonight I'm going to jump on the uh the train and and I'm going to go up to AA with my kids and I'm just going to focus on going skiing and and spending a weekend with them and go back a little bit refreshed here on on Monday.

And I'm just going to focus on going skiing and and spending a weekend with them and go back a little bit refreshed here on on Monday.

Lastly, Peter, what is your advice to young people?

I think it is super important to follow your passion.

Don't follow what other people tell you to do.

If you're not passionate about what you're doing, you're not going to put in that extra effort that is required to really achieve excellence.

In the early days, we were sitting in an attic in Stockholm, a small team, and we had a room where we put up favorite quotes.

There are two quotes that still stick out very much in my mind.

One, I think it's from the Google Founders, is good ideas are normally perceived as not good at all until it's really good.

You know, if you have an alternative, you should never give up and try.

And when you've tried and proved that it works, your surroundings will recognize, oh, you know, this was a really, really great idea.

But it takes a lot of effort to get there.

The second one was from Mike Tyson: Everybody got the strategy up until they went in and got the first punch in the face.

And that's really something, what do you do then to continue going on when you're constantly being challenged?

That is a very, very important thing.

Well, Peter, it for sure seems like you are following your passions, and I have to say, I'm also thinking perhaps a few more of us need a tiny bit of avalanche to shake out the really important things in life so we can focus where it really matters.

But big thanks for taking the time and all the best of luck.

Thank you.