 Welcome to today's energy seminar. This is the first energy seminar of this whole academic year. And it promises to be an incredibly memorable one. So here to introduce our speakers for today is the man of the hour, the new dean of the Stanford Door School of Sustainability, Professor Dr. Chief Hancho Dean Arun Majindar. Thank you. I will take that Chief Hancho badge as a badge of honor. But it's great to be here. We're starting a new year. COVID is not over, but it is manageable. And we are all here in person. This is amazing. And it also marks the launch of the new school, which is we just had the opening ceremony on Thursday. And it is, I would say, all over if you look around, there's a bit of an electrifying atmosphere right now that the new school is starting, as it should be. Because given the scale of the problem that we are taking on with climate change, sustainability, water, energy, food prices, this is global issue. And we need the momentum and more to really take on these big challenges. So one of the unique parts of this whole school is the accelerator. And today, we're going to talk about the accelerator. And we have Tom Paramira and Mike Ora, who have been with the accelerator right from the beginning, and sort of being the stewards of the accelerator. And we're going to learn about it. And just to give you a little preview, the accelerator is all about the challenge of scaling, whether it is a technology or a policy or a platform or some way to make impact, but it's all about scale. Because if it does not scale, it doesn't matter. And not everything that happens at university actually scales. And so to understand what does scale and how does knowledge of things that are widely adopted and the journey of scaling feed back to the university to change and modify the research and the education is something that we are going to look at. And Stanford is pretty good at startups. And we've had a few successes on startups. But if you talk to the people who have started up and being successful, they said, well, startup is part of it, but the real challenge is scaling. Because if it doesn't scale, it dies. And the question is, can we learn from those lessons of scale up and bring it back to the university and see how to adapt the research, the education, all the work we do to align it to scale at speed? I'm now using John Doris, speed and scale, but that is true. And these are global issues. So we have to think about, we think globally right from the beginning. We cannot do this as an afterthought, which means we need partnerships and collaborations. And so the accelerator is all about think, plan, and act globally at speed and scale. And so with that, going deeper into that, let me invite Tom Haramira and Mike Wara to explain more detail about this. Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Arun, for kicking this off. There is a lot of exciting things to discuss today. We kept the presentation fairly short and sweet. We wanted to just cover from a high-level overview what we view the accelerator to be currently, where we've been, and where we're going. And then we'd like to open up the Q&A and to feedback. So that's really our goal for today. And Michael and I will be covering different bases here along the way. So let me start with this very first slide, which I think has perhaps the most important sentence, leveraging scholarship and developing solutions to impact the world. So I have news for you. I think Stanford's been doing this a really long time, since 1891, producing leaders that have gone on to policy, economics, finance, sociology, health, technology, and shaping the world as we know it. Here's the challenge. That's the business's usual approach. There's a lot of interest in sustainability. I feel really good, given the interest in sustainability, as we have all kinds of scholars emerging into this field, that we will develop solutions that scale. The question is, can we get there fast enough? Can we get there in time? And obviously, things are not looking really good right now. They're kind of getting worse in my book, kind of year by year. We have to move fast. We have to scale quickly. And then the question becomes, how can we, as a university, morph so that we can address these challenges more quickly and more urgently to develop solutions that scale quickly? We've got to do something different than what we've been doing. Not to say that we have to abandon that. All that is good. We have to continue doing that, developing leaders. But what can we do in addition to not instead of? And that's really some of the things that we'll be talking about today. So the real challenge, as Arun pointed out, we're trying to accelerate climate solutions at speed and scale. And we have to reimagine the role that academia plays in all of this. So I want to give kind of a brief view of the history of how the accelerator, what was the genesis of the accelerator? How did it all get started? And how did we get to where we are today? So I'm going to go back almost three years now, where there was a committee that was led by Arun and by Noah Diffenbaugh. It was called the Structure Committee. It was a charge from the president of the university that asked this committee that I had the great pleasure to serve on of identifying different structural modes of a university. What could you do to the university to foment change and allow for amplification of efforts in the spirit of sustainability? Do you create new departments? Do you create new schools? Do you create a college? Do you create new institutes? What can you do structurally? And our charge, which happened right at the end of 2019, beginning of 2020, as this committee of roughly 30 individuals got together, coming from all over the ecosystem, the charge was to come up with a report and deliver it, if I'm not mistaken, on March 20th, 2020, that describes these different structural modes and their pros and their cons. The last two weeks of that report writing were very hairy. You all remember probably where you were on March 20th, 2020, because it was either your kitchen or your living room. But thanks to Arun and thanks to Noah, thanks to this tremendous committee, the report got in 80 something pages. And I recall, at least personally, I thought that when we turned in that report, nothing was gonna happen for a couple of years. It's like, wow, we came up with all these great ideas and what was gonna happen. Of all these different ideas that we proposed, there was one thing that was in common to all of them, and that is the idea of an accelerator. Because we all knew that you take all this tremendous scholarship on this campus, the intellectual firepower from all these different disciplines, and if we could find a way to put that together in a manner that was ready to create solutions that were ready to work in the real world beyond basic research. Basic research is important. It is essential. We need to keep doing that. Probably we need 10 times more. But we needed some new modalities that would allow for things to get off campus to the other eight billion people on earth faster and better. And so that concept was in all of the options that were proposed. We weren't sure what was gonna happen. Lo and behold, a few months later, it was announced that a school was gonna launch a new school focused on climate and sustainability. At that point, there was this baton passing from one committee to the next to blueprint this thing and operationalize this thing. And slowly and surely the accelerator started taking shape. Many people have participated. Many people. People even long before that structure committee, talking about this concept of an accelerator on campus to do such a thing. And then those things, those plans really started to crystallize. I'm showing on the slide a number of individuals, some of whom are in the room, wonderful partners that we've had a chance to work together with to get this moving and shaking. But there are so many more people out of this room than those who are in the room who contributed to this effort intellectually, providing thoughts, ideas, perspectives, many people who are outside of our campus community as well. And you can see we've got a breadth of scholarship. Very importantly, we've had Dean support all the way. Cam Muller, who is of course the transition Dean, passing the baton to Arun when he was named Dean all the way fully on board. This is important. This is crucial. I wanna give a special shout out to Jenny Milne and Kyle Cole because of all these different ideas that we had of what an accelerator could be. And we'll talk more about the breadth of that later on. Right now, probably the most active thing we're pushing hard on is getting scholarship to action by providing resources to the individuals, to the researchers, to the teams on this campus that have ideas in policy, health, economics, finance, technology, et cetera. We ran a request for proposals that Mike will tell you more about in a moment. And Jenny and Kyle were absolutely essential in helping to construct that, run that, get proposals in, and ultimately disperse awards out. So we'll get more to some of the other activities of Accelerator, but at that point, let me hand the microphone over to Michael who'll tell you more and then we'll come back together. Go ahead, Michael, thank you. So probably the first thing that the Accelerator did that all of you might have heard about or even participated in was a request for proposals that was issued at the beginning of February of this year. And on the time scale, I just wanna emphasize that on the time scale of how things typically happen at Stanford, this was an incredibly rapid effort. This is before the school was stood up officially, but we wanted to get moving and the generous supporter of the Accelerator also wanted us to get moving. And so we did. The proposals were due in March. We managed a, or we, when I say we, that's Jenny Milne and Kyle Cole, managed a really rigorous peer review process such that we were able to fund in the beginning of May. And we had 100 proposals, 120 letters of intent, 100 proposals and we funded 30 ultimately. The goal of Accelerator projects is to have impact. That's a key differentiator from many of the internal and external funding resources that are available to Stanford faculty, staff and graduate students. We funded in policy and technology, which I think is also an interesting differentiator. The breadth of projects that we're supporting in the Accelerator is really, I think reflects the diversity of interests and expertise that really make the Sustainability School of Stanford such an exciting place to work right now. We have focus on human health and a number of the projects, community wellbeing, community adaptation and resilience. We have a lot of focus on clean energy technologies, particularly in the industrial decarbonization space. And I think that's a really exciting and challenging space where we need innovation and where Stanford can play a really leading role. But we also have biodiversity, 30 by 30 efforts that are funded, ecological resilience and importantly, from my perspective, and I'm biased on this, but a real emphasis on environmental justice as a key differentiator of projects that we want to fund. As Tom mentioned, the goal of the Accelerator is to change the kind of activity or at least for some faculty, for some fraction of their effort, the kind of activity that occurs within a university to shift it from basic research towards applied and impact focused activity and to speed up and scale up the level of that activity occurring at Stanford to address the big problems that we see in the world around us that are increasingly obvious due to climate change, but also due to the many other impacts of the growth and impact of human civilizations on the world around us. We opted to have three levels of funding in the first round of Accelerator projects. One was a planning project level that was up to $100,000, that was really geared toward helping faculty to have the resources or their lab groups to have the resources to learn and engage with external partners. There are lots of projects that are funded at this level that really amount to helping faculty and graduate students and staff to develop line of sight to the impact that they want or the outcomes that they want to achieve in the world and partners, external partners to Stanford that are necessary to achieve those outcomes. In the technology space, that might be understanding product market fit. In the policy space, it might be building relationships with policymakers and other stakeholders so that you actually understand the problems that might be solved on a relevant time scale and can contribute meaningful analysis to the resolution of those problems. We also funded mid-range projects at a higher level and these are projects that are kind of where we have basic research that's done and we're ready to think about scaling up that work and really increasing its level of impact in the world. And we funded a few large scale projects up to a million dollars where there were ongoing externally focused efforts that were ready to go big. And I'm happy to talk more about examples later but I think this just gives you a feel for the magnitude of effort and these are all projects that are gonna last up to about a year. So this is a lot of money frankly to help Stanford researchers really shift and pivot toward a more applied focus in the sustainability space and that was the kind of general structure. As we evaluated proposals, the many excellent proposals that we received, we really focused on six criteria in our funding decision making. One was transformative potential. How big a deal would it be? What would the impact be if a project was successful? And this is not just the opinions of the folks on the review committee but also in the opinion of external peer reviewers that we recruited successfully to work with us. A second key criterion was community engagement and co-creation. A hypothesis of the accelerator is that in order to have big impacts in the world, you need to have partnerships external to Stanford. As you develop a new energy technology, a new battery technology for example, you need to understand the use case. You need to understand what the trade-offs are for that particular use case and how that might inform any basic research that one is doing or scale up of a pilot or a small scale experiment to pilot scale. And so a key criterion for us was evaluating a degree to which proposals really demonstrated that external partnership. In the policy space, it similarly was the proposal bringing clear connections to policy makers that already existed to a proposed engagement. Another criterion that we looked at was readiness and appropriateness for acceleration. What does that mean? Well, I think it's fair to say it can mean different things in different contexts, but what we wanted to see was that the injection of accelerator money into a particular research project or program was really gonna drive scale up of a order of magnitude, at least, right, in what was going on. And so we tended to fund projects where there were already kind of experimental demonstrations that the basic concept worked, but where additional resources were needed to get to the level where you could have some sort of a pilot demonstration and then potentially, based on that pilot, exit Stanford, right? And that's another kind of criterion that we're thinking about, is how do we move projects from Stanford, from the academic environment into the bigger world? And what does that process look like? How can we better support that process? And not just, I mean, we have a very well-developed skill set at Stanford for doing that for for-profit companies that bring new innovative technologies to market. We are also interested in the accelerator, and I wanna emphasize this, in nonprofits that are technology-focused, or hybrids of technology and policy, and pure policy nonprofits. And so we're really trying to think broadly, just as the sustainability challenge is broad, it's not just a technology challenge, it's also a policy challenge. We also focused on educational opportunities because the reality is we are a university, and our mission is not just to change the world, but also to create opportunities to help bring the new leaders that are gonna address the sustainability challenge into the world as better educated, better experienced graduates of Stanford. And a big agenda on my part, as the policy director in the accelerator, is to make sure that we train and graduate a generation of students that are going to be the sustainability leaders in the United States and globally. And so educational, demonstrating an educational component to the work was important. Similarly, we focused, or not similarly, in addition, we focused on equity benefits of projects. We wanted to understand, this could be a more or less important factor, depending on the kind of project, certain kinds of technologies that are early, it's very hard to project what equity impacts those technologies might or might not have. What is the equity impact of Facebook circa 2005? Hard to know. What is it today? Hard to know. What will it mean if we develop technologies that allow for the decarbonization of industrial processes that today require natural gas to produce heat? Hard to say. It may not be possible to say with any degree of certainty. But for other kinds of projects, projects focused on policy in particular, we were very interested to hear from groups that demonstrated a focus on improving environmental justice outcomes and improving equity outcomes. And that was a major factor in funding decision making. Finally, we looked at team expertise and project management as a factor because we're asking people to scale up. We're asking people to move fast. And that requires a degree of skill that some lab groups don't always have. And one of the things that we're doing as we implement and manage these projects is really trying to provide those training on those skills to the groups that we have funded. But it was definitely a factor as well. So we're in the early stages of managing the 30 projects that we funded. And we're also in the early stages of developing a second RFP. But we're already thinking about lessons learned from our initial experience with the RFP and also with the projects as they are playing out. One thing I would note is that we are very interested in understanding better what the community wants. We wanna understand where there are teams that we can bring together around centers of interest and centers of excellence for Stanford and support those centers of excellence. We're interested in, we're still learning about how to think about scaling and what it means to be ready to scale or readiness for, ready to be accelerated in this context. And I think that's something we're gonna continue to learn about over the coming months. Another key lesson I think for many of our project grantees has been how to do effective co-creation. Stanford faculty are some of the most talented academics in the world. And they do not always, but they do not always know how to effectively partner with companies outside of academia that are facing expectations around performance and earnings or even institutions within Stanford. Another big initiative of the accelerator is using the Stanford campus as a living laboratory to pilot sustainability strategies at scale. We are doing all kinds of learning about how to do effective co-creation where we are one side of a partnership in that process. And it's something we expect to learn more about and continue to learn about as we partner with future grantees and as our current grantees implement their projects. And the last thing I'd say is that our focus on equity and environmental justice is something that's just gonna continue. It's, I think it is a place where Stanford can have significant impact and where we can bring our analytical capacity to bear in the service of communities and that have not benefited from that level of support in the past. And I personally on the policy side of the accelerator are deeply committed to that enterprise and excited to work with all of you in making that a reality on the ground. So as we have been implementing the first RFP, we're also starting to make the accelerator a real thing beyond a place where we hand out money and there are a few of us that are deeply involved in the day-to-day operations. And what that really means is training and mentoring a set of, I think of it as a cohorts but really a group of scholars at Stanford, faculty, postdocs, students that are interested in doing this kind of applied impact-focused work. It means partnering with a broad global network that we are currently in the process of constructing that's gonna allow us to bring resources to bear when projects hit roadblocks. It's gonna allow us to bring expertise far beyond what exists certainly within the accelerator but even within the confines of Stanford as big a university as we are to bear on problems that come up as these projects are implemented in the world and scale. We're also working on development of educational programs, the Sustainability Academy that's really gonna be focused on bringing these questions of scale and speed to Stanford and to bringing outside cohorts into Stanford to talk and think about these questions and also to learn jointly with the Stanford solution teams. And we're adding domain expertise right now in the accelerator which is really gonna be, right now the accelerator is largely, it's a little bit policy heavy. I'm on staff as is Michael Mastrundrea, my close colleague from the Woods Institute and we're actively recruiting folks that have a stronger technology background because we think that's incredibly important to making this a success. Ultimately our hope is to create a very interactive process with the world of our global network so that we are also learning from them about where white spaces are in the sustainability space and where there is overlap between those white spaces and the comparative advantage that Stanford can bring to bear on solving problems. We cannot solve every problem in the sustainability space and so we need to focus and focus on the areas where we have the greatest expertise and the greatest capacity to create solutions that will have significant impact in the world and really address the climate challenge that exists, the biodiversity challenge that exists and the equity challenges that exist in our world. I think that's where we were gonna end. Tom, do you wanna say? Yeah, what you're looking at is our roadmap for the future and certainly we wanna get some questions and some feedback but it's not just about projects, it's not just about de-risking technologies, it's not just about engaging the community, it's trying to bring expertise from the outside in saying this is the need, if you could please point your neurons in this direction and think about this really challenging problem, we might be able to get some traction here and also recognizing that problems in this world, these global scale challenges are not unidimensional, they need multidisciplinary approaches coming from all kinds of different angles and that's really why we needed a school of sustainability to bring that all together and so it really serves as a focal point, there's a tremendous community of scholars outside the school that are not rostered in the school as the one school at Stanford that was really built recognizing that those bridges are essential for the success of the school itself and so we're just really trying to leverage all of that expertise to the community to work on problems that are real and that if we can come up with solutions they have a pathway to scale and to have positive impact. All the meanwhile, educating as you can see new forms of educating the next generation no matter what that discipline is that people are studying if they can engage the accelerator, get that training, how to talk to investors, how to talk to policy makers, how to talk to people who understand markets and then how to bring professionals from the working world into Stanford so they can both contribute to that education as well as get educated themselves and then all the meanwhile whether some ideas might do well in scale and others might not, all the meanwhile people are getting educated and how to do that better so that the day that they leave Stanford campus when you all leave Stanford campus you'll be much better prepared to engage the real world so to speak than without that training and education beforehand. Sound fair? All right, so with that why don't we conclude the kind of formal remarks in the slide deck happy to take questions. Great, thanks Tom and Michael for such an inspiring introduction to the accelerator. I must say for myself seeing these proposals get worked over I think the first six or seven I simply concluded this is a good idea but it'll never work and I actually think it did take the establishment of the school and people like you to run the show to actually make me much more optimistic that this is gonna be a major element of the new school and the solutions we need. So with that said we have 18 minutes for questions so thank you for leaving a lot of time for absolutely, if I could add one more thing we have more requests for proposals plan just an FYI so heads up if you're a student if you're a postdoc no matter what your rostering is in this university there's an opportunity to engage this so keep your eyes out we will have more projects so be thinking about what problems you might want to tackle and how you might want to tackle them. Maybe we'll get some pitches right now. So we usually start with student questions. Student any students have questions about this? Hi, thanks for your presentation. I was just curious if you could give some examples of like what a project would be that would really hit all six of those criteria. Maybe you could give a policy example and also a text example that would be really cool but yeah. Absolutely, yeah these projects are kind of my bread and butter and you know one of the things that I didn't mention one of our goals in this is to make it easier to propose good projects and get them funded than is typical in normal academic process where you're writing in an SF grant or perhaps an NIH grant but also in exchange for that ease we are doing much more intensive project management and pushing people to pivot when things don't work. So some people have asked us other accelerators will claw back money when things aren't working. We're not doing that but I don't think that would really fly in academia and it wouldn't be fair but we are pushing people to make decisions and be more nimble and be more flexible in the way that they implement projects to maximize their chances of effectiveness. So on the technology side I'd say one of the projects we funded that jumps to mind I'll just mention a couple. One is a project focused on industrial heat as an issue where a number of faculty have come together to work on marrying power, advanced power electronics to microwaves to basically create sources of high quality industrial heat. That's one project, it's very much a technology project to just flip back here. It's got huge transformative potential. They demonstrated significant community engagement in the sense of clear evidence of working with partners who would actually be able to deploy this technology at scale and they were ready, they had a demonstration and we're helping them to scale that up. Another project that I'll just mention on this kind of a hybrid project is we're helping Rosemary Knight who is a faculty member that has worked for a long time on using new approaches to finding where groundwater recharge can be most effective and we're helping her to partner with groundwater agencies, water districts all over the state of California that are in the process of developing their sustainable groundwater management plans under Sigma to actually really map and identify where these special places where if you have a flood you can put the water from the flood and it will actually get into the groundwater as opposed to just sitting on the surface maybe causing the orchard trees to just keel over. So that's another thing where we had a proof of concept, it was working and we're helping Rosemary to develop software that's going to be able to be useful to all the water districts in California and then partnering with about a dozen of them that are kind of critical players to do that work. So it's sort of a technology policy hybrid perhaps. And then we have funded a number of projects that are very policy focused. Let's see, we are funding, well I'll just, I'll describe, we're funding work that actually I applied for before I was a member of the accelerator team focused on wildfire policy in the Western United States. And we've partnered, we have close partnerships with the Karuk tribe, which is a key player and cultural burning efforts in the Western US and we're working with them to continue and scale up policy initiatives focused on increasing the degree of beneficial fire usage in the Western US which is a key strategy for reducing wildfire risk. And that's an example of kind of co-creation where on the policy side, where you have a strong partnership with an equity focused partner. Tom, do you want to? Yeah, I'll just add a couple of quick comments on that. I mean, great question. First of all, all 30 projects, you can find it on the school of sustainability, the Stanford School of Sustainability website. So they're there, you can get a sense for what's going on. Just to map it onto why do we find these projects so important for sustainability. So the first project, the tech project that Michael mentioned, if you're an industrial, so industrial, the industry in general is a massive global emitter of CO2, naturally producing all the products that we use from the clothes that you wear and the seats that you're sitting on and the projectors that are projecting, et cetera. So the question is if you, and a lot of that requires heat, where does that heat generally come from? It's from burning natural gas, which of course is a big emitter. If you, what if you could electrify that process if you had, if you used electricity, if you run electricity through a resistor, you get heat, right? How do you design reactors to operate kind of more in that mode to get an electrified heat? And that's the, but it's not simple. And you need new types of power electronics and coupling it to the chemistry you're trying to do. And so that's what that project's about. The second project in terms of what Rosemary Knight is up to in terms of imaging the subsurface, the challenge is, of course, we're in a big drought in California, we all know it. And I think this summer was a microcosm of the impacts of extremities in climate where you have drought, drought, drought, drought, and it was really hot. And then what cooled us off? It was a hurricane, right? And so when you have these times of extrema, like what do you do? So it turns out in terms of total rainfall on the state, you know, it's not clear that that's necessarily gonna drop total, the challenges that will go through these extreme periods of drought and then massive amounts of rain. And if all that just runs into the Pacific Ocean, where do you get your fresh water from? So the idea is if you store it underground in the aquifers, you got a chance, but where do you do that? You need to get an image of what's happening underground, and that's the software and the hardware that Rosemary's been developing to be able to image that stuff and then create, and then work with policy makers so they can make the right decisions on how to route water when it does flood so it doesn't just disappear. And then the wildfires I think is a pretty clear case. So this is how we kind of look at things of like, what has impact? And by the way, these are like, a lot of these examples might be California-centric, but wildfires are not just here and certainly droughts and floods are very apparent also in recent months on some terrible tragedies happening around the world. This is a global problem. And if we can figure out how to do that here by combining, say, technology and regulatory frameworks and co-creation, et cetera, hopefully we can make it in a portable way that is extendable to far beyond the state of California. Hi, thank you for the presentation. I was just wondering, how is the IP affected for the person who goes through this process? Is the IP the universities or is it the person developed? In general, actually this is always true. When you develop IP using support from Stanford at Stanford, Stanford owns the IP. That being said, we're working closely with the Office of Technology Licensing, which is kind of the process by which Stanford IP gets out into the world to form companies, to sort of make that process smooth, help faculty, researchers that are developing new intellectual property supported by the accelerator to kind of see a path to licensing and to ultimately benefiting from the IP as well. Hi, very happy to hear that you have all these amazing values at the forefront of this program. But then looking at other global partners, I imagine that some of them might have more of a profit-oriented motive in the front of their operations. So I'm wondering how you foresee those relationships working. Will anyone have to make concessions? Do you see a world where no one is making concessions? I'm curious what your opinion is on that. I'm gonna go first. Sure, yeah, I mean I think that a mix of for-profit companies and non-profit enterprises are gonna be important both to solving the problems that we confront in the sustainability space on a global basis. Profits create incentives for people to do things and that's valuable. And Stanford has a long history of producing new enterprises or rather Stanford, our graduates and some people who didn't graduate have a long history of producing really important for-profit enterprises that change the world. And I would hope that we can change the world in positive ways that have impact on particularly the climate crisis. And I just say that particularly in the energy space, I think for-profit enterprises are gonna be very important to getting us where we need to go. We're gonna need to make sure that the products of those new innovative companies are affordable and available to everyone or we don't solve the problem. If low-income economies, lower-income economies and developing economies can't afford the technologies that we develop, I mean frankly then they can't scale. Because the people that we really need to solve for in the climate crisis are in the developing world and they urgently want something like the lives that we all have sitting in this auditorium. When I used to teach international environmental law, the first thing I would say to my students is, look, this has to work, not just for us, but for the parents who live in rural parts of the developing world. And the thing they want the most is for their kids to have a chance that's even like 30% of the opportunity that everyone has that's sitting in this room. And that's the way we solve the climate crisis by lifting people up out of livelihoods that are really challenging and difficult and that's not gonna happen if we don't have the profit incentive working for us and also if the technologies can't scale because they're too expensive. So that would be my response. I also believe deeply that non-profit entities have enormous impacts on the world and you don't need to look any further than the efforts that were made to pass the Inflation Reduction Act in the United States where a number of nonprofits really changed the conversation in a very positive direction that was unexpected say three years ago. And now we have this enormous new piece of legislation that's gonna be transformative for the United States and our energy future. So there's no question that that's also true. And I think we need both, right? And the goal here explicitly is to support both kinds of enterprises. Well said. I mean, there was also opportunity to invent new modes of operation. So I mean, I would call that consider that an area of scholarship. You know, thinking like what are some other modes of scaling anything beyond the kind of standard for profit or not for profit model. Hi, thank you for the presentation. I was curious about like how you're actually funding these projects and what the sources of funding are. Like you're investing millions of dollars into 30 companies. Like do you envision that as something you can repeat consistently year after year, especially if they're just like given out as grants like whoever is providing the money in the first place. Like are they expecting returns? How do you envision that's gonna play out? Yeah. So we're not at liberty to divulge the donor, but it is a donation and at least to get things started. And we have some runway to work with. And I think the opportunity that we have here as we build this out, this is an opportunity to build more investment into what's going on. So in other words, once you build the core of what we define an accelerator to be and show its merits, show its success, I think other investors may be interested in contributing in other ways to help broaden the broadened the activities and deepen the activities. And so really the key is to get things off the ground. That's always the hardest. So we've got some momentum we can keep pushing and then hopefully continue to build. I just add that I think that the place where we're trying to exert influence is very early in either the company formation or the policy formation process. And that's pretty inexpensive. It's also very high risk. And that's something that's a little bit different maybe than a typical university or academic funding source where if you've ever written an NSF grant or been involved in that, but high risk is not always what gets funded. But one of the wonderful things about the anonymous funder is that they are excited for us to take risk. They are okay with lots of failure as long as we are trying things and achieving some wins. And so I think that's a huge difference from the way that typical academic support is provided and it creates a lot of opportunity. It does mean though that as the successful projects grow and scale they have to find other sources of funding. Like we're not a long-term support structure for projects. We're a way for projects to grow enough and prove, de-risk themselves enough that other sources of funding become available. And in the meanwhile, continue to educate and that way we have 10 times more people, let's say faculty, staff, students, postdocs. They're more prepared to engage the outside world and realize, oh wow, I know how to do this. I can do this better. It seems that lots of these projects that you've mentioned, Theo-funded, have begun in labs or with faculty or postdocs. Might they begin with undergraduate students and if so, have you seen that work out this last year? Yeah, so in this first round and again we envision multiple requests for proposals coming out. They will not all look identical to the first one. We take into our lessons learned and also try to figure out, okay, how can we, what might we do differently to engage, let's say, a broader audience? I would say that in that first RFP what we asked for is that every project had to have a Stanford PI, a PI eligible person. We encouraged if undergrads or grad students or others had ideas, really it's just a matter of, they could reach out to us and if they didn't know who to turn to and we could maybe identify a PI eligible person who could serve as the PI for that project. So that will likely be a mechanism to be employed on any RFP to be coming out. We might have some that are more focused on student-only projects. These are things that we're actively discussing how we might modify our future requests for proposals. Yeah. We have time for one last question in this room. Could I just add one thing and I would just say if you have ideas and you don't have a PI you should reach out to me, okay? There you go. Like, I'll help you. Thank you, Michael. I had one question which is, since this is obviously an academic institute, you're gonna be surprised it's not the question you're thinking, no. Are you building into this at all the preparation and publication of academic papers or is the view it's sort of up to the team to decide whether there should be any publication? Cause, again, it seems to me that thinking through that element, especially whether it's cross-disciplinary, so it may not be obvious sort of what would be the publication, but for the true response that I think we wanna have at Stanford. So I'm wondering if you can talk about the academic publication aspect if you are looking at that. Yeah, I'll just say a quick word in the past to you, Michael. So I would say it's all case by case depending on the team, the project and their goals. And the idea is that we establish with them what are their milestones? What do they see as the key metrics for success on the path through their project such that by the end they're ready to have impact off campus. So what does that pathway look like? By and large, publication, there's nothing that says they couldn't publish. It really depends on where they wanna put their resources, but sometimes the output might be, for instance, software or the output might be an analysis, a tool online or what have you or engagements with the community. So there are other metrics for success that are not instead of, but I would say in addition to publication, but publications I would say is by and large always an option. Michael? We're not, I think the goal here is to be flexible with teams, but, and there are very strong incentives within academia to publish, but that is not necessarily the objective of the accelerator. I'd like one last question. Yeah, yeah, so thanks, this is great. I really like the focus on partnerships and trying to do things through co-creation. So just a question, let's say I'm starting a project talking to a potential partner for something. Like I was wondering, could I come, like what resources could I look to to kind of figure out that partnership or how to scope that partnership? Because something you mentioned was like faculty in the academic context, we don't necessarily always know how to do work in partnerships. So like what resources would you recommend to kind of get feedback on how we're scoping the partnership? Yeah. Well, what I'd say is that as we develop the next RFP and there'll be a formal announcement of the RFP and at that point, I would strongly recommend that you reach out to one of the team members on the accelerator, myself, Michael Mastro-Andrea, we're in the process of hiring folks that are more engineering focused as well and that have real startup experience on that on sort of hard energy technologies and talk to us. That's the best recommendation I can offer at this point. We're trying to provide that basically as a service within the accelerator, right? It's a resource. It is a resource to come to because whose door do you knock on this campus? And that's what an accelerator can be kind of an obvious front door for people who have interest in having an idea and they want to scale and they're not sure kind of where to go because we've all been trained in basic research and in education. That doesn't mean that we've kind of lived through that of taking something from the idea stage all the way out to a real world application. Before we wrap up, I remember there's a reception right outside, right now, great food, lots of fun, neat, interesting people. With that said, I'd like to thank Tom and Michael for a dynamite seminar, all of you for asking great questions. Thank you all. Yeah, thanks for coming.