She sold her battery startup to Chinese investors. Now she’s leading the effort to bring battery manufacturing to the U.S.

– 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.

Courtesy of Cadenza Innovation

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

The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.

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PARTING WORDS

"We’re conditioned to believe that in order to make financial decisions for ourselves, we have to wear a business suit and work on Wall Street, but it’s actually not that complicated or hard."

—Haley Sacks, whose informative and fresh take on financial planning as Mrs. Dow Jones has attracted hundreds of thousands of followers.