What does it mean for a technology to scale?

A particular failure mode that we’ve noticed among scientists and engineers doing ambitious technology research is ignoring the question “does this technology scale?” It’s a question that gets thrown around a lot by VCs and technology analysts, but people rarely unpack what that means and (I suspect) many of us don’t even know. Scalability and the work to scale a technology is worth unpacking because often scaling a technology can be more work than inventing it in the first place and ultimately, the most capable technology in the world won’t have much impact if it is too expensive to be used or there just isn’t enough of it to go around.

To a large extent, “does this technology scale?” translates to the question: “in the limit, can you make enough of a thing at a price that people want it?” With that in mind, clearly scalability means something very different for different technologies. There are fewer requirements on a scalable drug manufacturing process than a commodity chemical manufacturing process both because consumers are willing to pay far more for drugs and you need far smaller volumes of drugs for them to be effective. Cancer drugs can cost ~$10,000 for a ~100mg dose; ammonia costs less than $1000 for a metric ton which can fertilize ~10 acres of corn.

You might notice that the term “manufacturing process” snuck into the previous paragraph. Talking about scaling inevitably involves talking about how you make something. Scalability is a property of the process of making the thing more than the thing itself. Asking whether aluminum, the material, can scale is meaningless — if you’re making it via a chemical reaction like the Wöhler process, scaling is a very different proposition from doing it through electrolysis. The chemical reaction involves expensive chemicals, batch processing, and creates an impure product that still needs a lot of refinement. Aluminum electrolysis, on the other hand, is a continuous process that produces a relatively pure output whose cost is mostly determined by the price of electricity. (Of course, there are ways to design a technology that make its manufacturing process more or less scalable.)

There’s a narrow definition of scaling that asks “what happens to the unit price of a thing when you make more of it?” That is, what happens to the cost per kilogram, cubic meter, or widget, as you make orders of magnitude more mass,