Good morning, Broadsheet readers! EY's Janet Truncale will become the first woman to lead a Big 4 accounting firm, USWNT's Emma Hayes will be the world's highest-paid women's soccer coach, and a top battery entrepreneur juggles startup life with geopolitics. Have a terrific Thursday.
- Power up. In the mid-2000s, Christina Lampe-Onnerud founded a lithium-ion battery company called Boston-Power. When it came time to look for a buyer, the Sweden-born chemist ended up with one option: sell to Chinese investors.
So in 2011, she did. "We could not scale in the U.S.," she recalls in a conversation with Fortune CEO Alan Murray on the latest episode of the podcast Leadership Next. "Nobody wanted to do it."
Today, Lampe-Onnerud is a leader of the Li-Bridge coalition, which aims to build a robust battery business in the U.S. (Alan calls Lampe-Onnerud "the Battery Queen.") The geopolitics of battery production—China owns at least 70% of the market—have become a hot-button political issue, with U.S. lawmakers calling out national security risks of U.S. dependence on Chinese batteries.
Lampe-Onnerud's path from China-backed startup founder to advocate for U.S. industry may imply some misgivings about her decision to sell, but the entrepreneur says it's not that simple. "We don’t want to hear we are against China," she says. "That’s borderline naive." The average person is using China-made goods every day. "We shouldn't be so black-and-white," she said.
The United States' leadership in the battery category depends on itself—not on what other countries are doing, she argues. "We are a leading nation. We can take ourselves down—we are not taken down," she says.
Today, she's the CEO of a new battery company called Cadenza Innovation. Her career path was influenced by her father, who worked in high-power transmission. As she's encountered obstacles over the years, her family's lessons have stuck with her. "I grew up knowing that you could do cool things if you cared a little more, if you fought a little harder," she says.
Listen to the full interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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