Nick Terzulli is Vice President of Research and Development at Fellow, the San Francisco coffee equipment company whose products can be found everywhere from Target shelves to your favorite third-wave coffee shop. Before Fellow, Nick worked on military robotics and designed medical devices at Stryker and Dextera, before spending several years scrubbing toilets at a coffee shop for $10 an hour just to learn how to make coffee using the best equipment available.

The central problem Terzulli came to Fellow to solve has constrained home espresso since the beginning: 120V household power limits thermal and pressure stability in ways that commercial machines, running on much higher amperage, simply don't face. The best home machines either take 40 minutes to heat up or sacrifice performance to achieve fast heat-up times. Terzulli's answer, which  ...