 How many of your PhD students, so the day of your calls is the day you are the smartest you will ever be in the history of your life. And I would also argue that after this week, you might be the smartest that you'll ever be in terms of like breadth of energy in your whole life. And actually, you guys, you know, Arpita and the team putting this together is phenomenal. I know it's a lot of work. I was a PhD student in MIT a decade ago, and we didn't have anything like this. And so when you're trying to find people to go change the world with an energy and climate was really hard to find them. So I think you're in a really great situation. So how many of you are interested in creating a startup in energy or climate out of your Stanford experience? How many of yours didn't join a startup potentially? And how many of you want to be professors? All right, so I think all of you would benefit from taking our course, the energy transformation collaborative. I think there aren't MBA students here, right? So the MBA students, when they see the name energy transformation collaborative, they think that we're doing like drum circles and stuff like that. But I want to be clear to you, this is a hardcore energy ventures class. Or you're going to learn a lot of major skills. You're going to really build a tool set. You're going to learn how to launch new ventures. And if our track record holds true this year, 40% of the teams are going to launch new companies. And so I want to start by introducing our team, our team of instructors. We have a dream team here, starting with Joel Moxley, who's over here if you can raise your hand. Joel and I were contemporaries at MIT. We got our PhDs at the same time, kind of when MIT went through a big focus on energy. And we've had our careers and energy ever since. And Joel's story to me kind of started, he's a consummate entrepreneur. He kind of eats and breathes entrepreneurship every moment of every day. And the kind of the epitome of his story is that when he was a PhD student, this was the early days of data analytics and before Moneyball, he took $300 and turned it into $3,000 and turned it into $300,000 using data analytics to put that on baseball when it was legal, when it was legal. Since then, Joel has been a founder of multiple energy companies and other companies that he's sold and is now also an investor in a number of companies across the spectrum of energy in other areas, including an early investor in a company called Rubicon Global, which is a unicorn that essentially is a multi, a more than billion dollar value company that is kind of like the Uber or Trash collection. And Joel and I are actually work together at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which I'll say a word about in a second. And then Stuart, we like to call it the silent or quiet assassin. He actually brings a wealth of experience from all the way back like Sun Microsystem. So he's been in Silicon Valley through, I'd say, the multiple generations of advanced technology. So I think he brings a ton of expertise in startups and especially around, I'd say, exponential technology driven startups, like especially around machine learning, AI, data analytics, these kind of areas. And he speaks about 10% of the time and delivers 80% of the value in the course. And then myself, Dave Danielson, I am a managing director of Breakthrough Energy Ventures now, which is a $1.3 billion new investment fund that Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and 20 other people who add up to about half a trillion dollars of net worth have created to invest in the climate tech game-changing companies of the future. And for that, I was the assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy at DOE, where I oversaw the nation's clean energy research and development programs and was also a founder of ARPA-E, which is kind of like a high risk, high reward part of DOE that really kind of backs game changer technologies and did my PhD in material science for that. And so, just to tee this up, I think you've probably heard a lot about the problem, but I'll just provide the context once again, is that in my mind, clean energy and climate is the defining challenge and the defining opportunity of our time. If you look at where we are today, energy usage is correlated with human development. And a large part of the world, I say, five or six billion people don't have access to the amount of energy that they need to reach a level of human development that we have in North America, Europe, and other kind of more developed nations. And so, as we go from now to the, let's say the mid-century 2050, it's going to be a great thing for those people to get access to more and more cheap energy so that they can raise their human development index and their well-being. So there are people all over the world who are going to be driving at least a doubling of energy usage out to 2050. At the same time, as I'm sure you've heard a lot about, our scientists are now clear that if we don't reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 80% or more by the middle of the century, then we're toast. So we've got to double the amount of energy at least over the next 30 years or so, and we've got to reduce the footprint by a factor of five. So it's a 10x kind of problem. This is a huge problem, and it's going to require a lot of work. And so what I also want to give you a little bit of context in is that 2050 can feel far away. Once you have a kid, it doesn't feel far away, but it can feel pretty far away. 2050, so let's say we've got about 30 years, we can kick back a little bit, right? 80% greenhouse gas production by 2050. If you create a disruptive new technology and it's in the market and it's working, it's going to take you, I'd say, aggressively 20 years to get to a meaningful scale, a scale that would make a dent in this problem. And then if you kind of work backward, so that means you've got to get any new product, if you're going to disrupt, if you're going to really solve this problem, you've got to get a new game-changing product into the market by 2030 commercially. And any real hard tech, especially major new technologies, is going to take you 10 years from idea to commercialization. And so if you really think about this and you work backwards, it's really like now and over the next two, three, four, maybe five years that the 2050 impact startups need to be created. And so my view is that you're in a really unique time and unique place where you're in the hub of global entrepreneurship. Also, I'd say one of the leading hubs of energy thought leadership and innovation. And you're also just happening to be here at the time that's essentially the last five years where building a startup is going to affect 2050. So you're at a really important time and place. And that's what this class is all about. We're really at the intersection of energy and climate and the kind of unique entrepreneurial spirit that is really embodied in the Stanford community. And so what we're really all about here is what's interesting is many of you probably tracked there's this clean tech boom bust in the kind of early 2000s, late 2000s, where a whole bunch of money went into these clean energy ventures and there were a massive number of failures. And so what we saw was this big, big boom and then a bust and now we're coming out and funding is coming back and entrepreneurship is coming back. And one thing that we need to be doing and we're doing a breakthrough and that we're doing in this class is we need to together develop a new playbook for how to build these major impact climate tech companies. And so part of what we're doing in this class is we have playbooks of the right way to build these companies and we're continuing through our experience of breakthrough energy ventures and elsewhere to continue to build out what are the playbooks it's going to take and I think working with you in this class we're going to continue to write chapters of the playbook required to build successful clean tech and climate tech startups. The other thing we want to do is put in your hands tools that you can put in your tool belt for the rest of your career that will allow you, I'd say not only to launch new ventures and be successful in startups but also in some sense what I found is non MBAs are kind of getting like a 10 week accelerated MBA in this class and we kind of teach both at a level where if you don't know anything about business you're going to learn a lot and if you're an MBA who's pretty far up the curve you're going to learn a lot as well. And then finally like I said about 40 we have about 40% of our teams over the last two years have resulted in the launch of a transformative new venture and so I think not only are you going to get the tools in the tool belt but there's a reasonable shot that if you join one of these teams a company is going to come out of it. And so just some of the basics we really are focusing on giving you this replicable tool set that allows you to identify interesting opportunity areas to assess to analyze and assess whether those areas are right for a new venture and then to really design and develop a game plan for launching a new venture. And that's a replicable skill set you can apply to any problem over the rest of your career. Every quarter we have about four or five project teams that are on the order of four or five, six people so it's about 20 to 30 students each quarter we run this every quarter. This is project-based so what we do is we recruit embryonic new venture concepts and usually people who have those either it could be someone looking at an intersectional opportunity of two megatrends that haven't been solved. For example, we're running out of cobalt for electric vehicles we want to go look at that and find a venture opportunity or it could be someone coming in I got a technology out of Stanford lab and I want to go create a startup. And so there's a lot of flexibility but we really build around we have four or five embryonic new venture concepts that then we build teams around. And so you can have an idea and lead a team or you can just come in and say hey I want to be involved I want to join one of these teams. And my mainly graduate students and just a few undergrads have been involved I think one thing that's really valuable about the course is it's very multidisciplinary so it's about half MBA students and half non MBA so more technology engineering students and I think you find that you're able to learn a lot from each other and actually do things that you never could have done without each other which I think is exciting. And we're also going to expose you to some of the leaders in the clean energy and climate field. So we've had leaders like Vinod Posla one of the most important venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and in energy. Jagdeep Singh who is a Stanford alum who's created multiple billion dollar companies and is now leading a billion a more than billion dollar valued company developing a next gen solid state battery. And a whole bunch of other interesting people that you're going to get to hear from and get really kind of candid perspectives kind of behind closed doors candid perspectives and kind of hear about their journey their insights and ideas that they have for areas that if they were starting over again they would look to launch new ventures in. And so in terms of just the results that we've seen over the last couple of years is 120 students getting a really exciting new set of tools a new skill set that they are able to apply to other parts of their life and career. You know like I said if you're a professor you may spin out a company or you may have someone spin out a company from your lab. I think you're going to want to understand understand even if you're not going to go leave with the venture if you're going to be involved in it I think you want to understand how that works. And so I'd say whether you want to do a lead a startup create a startup join a startup or be a professor those are you're going to get a lot from this class. So we've got 25 project teams over the last three years and 10 new companies have launched from those teams. And four of those have already gotten private investment I think it's probably above three million now of private you know venture investment in addition to probably twice that amount of government funding and grants. And two of these companies already have revenue you know in a very short period of time. And so we've got AI Onyx actually so our our TA is going to be Austin Sendek who's defending his PhD thesis in in two weeks so he's probably not listening to anything that I'm saying. But he's going to be our TA he took the course and out of the he looked at the intersect he was doing research on machine learning applied to battery innovation and ended up doing a lot of exploration and turning over a lot of rocks and ultimately finding a really great business model for starting a new company in this area and has now launched the company and actually has revenue with major parties on the outside. Climate AI is a company that was taking kind of advanced modeling simulation of climate and climate impacts to provide risk mitigation services to the industry and insurance insurance industry and others. Moraine is looking at optimization of charging of autonomous electric vehicles fleets in the future. Safi Analytics is looking at they've actually now launched their company in Kenya and is building a company to do kind of advanced meter and data analytics driven industrial energy management for industrial companies in Africa. And Ferbo I think you may have heard from Tim already on but I wanted to use Ferbo as a really interesting I think case study of what it's like to do a project here. So Tim had come from the auto industry and then was in the shale patch in Texas where he learned a ton about the emerging technology of horizontal drilling and multisonal stimulation and they came to Stanford and was really interested in applying that to geothermal. And so he took our class one quarter and worked on a different project than the second quarter. He launched into a very aggressive effort to explore this intersectional opportunity and was able to recruit a really amazing team of people from you know things that are half MBA half PhD postdocs on this team and it ended up resulting in a couple of these folks going and launching the company but I think everyone else gained an amazing new skill set that now they're applying to other things that they're doing out in the world today. And I think you already heard about this but you know I think this is an example I think of like a potentially game-changing venture and I just saw today that the United States just surpassed oil production of Saudi Arabia for the first time and anyone can remember just in the last month or so and that was because of the shale revolution. Imagine a world where you know when you look at the 2050 everyone thinks there's like zero geothermal but if Tim and his team are successful then we may be looking back and saying holy crap I can't believe that we we didn't realize that geothermal was going to be the next shale boom. So if you're interested please get in touch with us send us a note follow up with us after outside the way we do this is we accept a lot of people's ideas for project concepts that they want to lead and then we select four or five of those project concepts that we think have the most promise to be good projects in our class and then individuals who just want to get involved we invite you to sign up for the class reach out to us and we'll get you connected to the people who are rallying these projects so that you can try to find good fits and join teams that will be a good experience for you and so we'll work hard to get you connected to the right kind of team. If you don't take it this quarter you can take it the next quarter or the quarter after and so thank you for your time you know we we get really excited about investing a substantial amount of our time here because we know how unique students are here and how entrepreneurial they are and so you know we're excited about putting time into you because we really believe that you know if you really invest in yourself and think big here that you can be the people that are actually creating these these companies they're going to solve the 2050 climate crisis so thank you very much looking forward to working with you guys