“An aerospace engineer, a material scientist and a cleantech entrepreneur walked into a room and stumbled over the world’s most advanced flywheel energy storage technology.”
That was back in 2017 and it is with a heavy heart that I have to inform you that Darin Olson, the material scientist of the original founders team, has passed away last week as a result of a sudden metastatic pancreatic cancer.
Although over the past few years, Darin was physically and operationally at a distance from QuinteQ in the Netherlands, he has been instrumental in the origins of the company. When we uncovered the Boeing flywheel IP back in 2017, it promptly became clear that we did not have the chops to assess the true scientific and technological foundation that Boeing had developed. We luckily found and were able to contract Darin as our own ‘Big Brain’ to engage with the team of Boeing PhD’s. With an undergraduate at MIT and a PhD from Stanford in material sciences, Darin was certainly able to level with John Hull et al @Boeing.
I remember Darin coming back from several weeks of technical due diligence at the Boeing lab in Seattle with a full report which he handed over to us with the historical words “this is a 100 million dollar rocket ship about to launch, you better get on-board”. And so we did and the rest is history.
Apart from his seemingly unlimited ability to dumb down every and any ultra-complex technological issue to a simple analogy, he, above all, was very funny. His witty jokes never got old and somehow, neither did he. Some people are blessed with going out at the right time, Darin went too early.
Below is a link to Darin’s personal introduction on the QuinteQ website and here is a link to a pitch he did in San Francisco, way back in the days. If you have time, sit it out and hear him joking about how “a flywheel with 0,1% of standby losses would last 40 days and therefore was the official energy storage system on Noah’s Ark”..
https://lnkd.in/eryy86M2
Building a startup to a scale-up is like being part of a generational family and we just lost one of our elders.In Darin’s spirit we will continue to boldly go where no flywheel has gone before..
Darin S. Olson – November 12, 1964 – November 7, 2024
– Paul Vosbeek
