From Lab to Fab: How LeydenJar Rewired Its DNA to Scale
- Emin Askerov
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Going from project to product is hard and unique in many ways. Here is how LeydenJar is doing it. In the early days, LeydenJar was a research company. They tinkered with what was possible with silicon anodes and what it could mean for battery performance. The team was small, mostly engineers and scientists, and the work was defined by speed, uncertainty, and technical breakthroughs.
This worked well for a time. Customers took an interest. However, as plans for commercialization became more concrete, the constraints started to shift. A pilot line was no longer just a milestone - it had to function. Samples weren’t just for internal testing - they were being evaluated by major clients. Conversations moved from "can this work?" to "can this be scaled?"
The culture powering early discovery started to create friction. Teams were still solving problems in real-time, but the problems were no longer scientific; they became operational. Timelines were slipping, reproducibility was an issue, and the existing quality control systems, built during the R&D phase, were too brittle and too early. It became clear that a reset was needed.
At this point, LeydenJar brought in a COO with a background in manufacturing. His role was not to optimize what was already there, but to introduce a completely new logic. There had to be a deliberate transition to a production-oriented organization. “Our COO is a no-sayer. And that’s exactly what we needed”, says Ewout Lubberman, head of product at LeydenJar.
As an example, one of the first decisions was to dismantle the early-stage quality control system. It had been implemented with good intentions, but it was misaligned with the maturity of the product and was consuming too much attention from a team that still needed to solve core engineering challenges.
This transition also changed how the company thought about hiring. The priority was no longer deep specialization or theoretical brilliance, but execution, discipline, and the ability to operate within defined boundaries. This required different people. The people who thrive in chaos are rarely the ones who maintain order.
What LeydenJar understood, and what many FOAK hardware startups sometimes miss, is that scaling is not just a function of capital or customer demand. It’s a cultural transformation. And unless that shift is timed correctly, the entire organization can end up stuck between modes: too structured for real innovation, too chaotic for reliable production.
LeydenJar didn’t manage to avoid that tension. They managed through it.
💬 What was the moment when your startup stopped being a project and became a product?
