 Okay, my name's Heather Richmond, anything you need to know about me is written in this fancy book, so I'm going to spare you all of that. But I'm on the planning committee here for the Energy Summit and I had an interesting conversation with actually somebody else in the planning committee who I will not sell out at this point in time, and we were talking about he's a venture capitalist and has been very passionate and very involved in energy technology and investing in that for the last few years, for a number of years, and has been really moving into ed tech, ed tech projects and ed tech funding. So I come from a family of teachers, so that's near and dear to my heart, but I was just kind of asking him, like, what kind of prompted this change? And he looked at me square in the face and said, there's nothing exciting going on in energy. And I wanted to slap him. I was like, what? So at that point, I literally started pitching him a company that I know very well, which is an energy company and the CEO is here today. But it really got me thinking, you know, we have this great summit and we are, you know, presented with, you know, really kind of some infrastructure type solutions and various solutions. But, you know, when you're working with startups and you're in that startup space, there are some, you meet these entrepreneurs and they inspire you, right? And you hear about their companies. And these are not, you know, these aren't little companies. These are companies that are working on highly efficient electric motors, which is 40% of our energy spend. And you send energy spend, plug load energy efficiency for enterprise level, which is 40% of the energy used in a commercial scale building. What to do with big data in the energy space? And then finally, on-site pattern generation with categorical efficiency gains and cost reduction. So these aren't little things, right? These are big things. These are companies that are going to change the economics behind energy in our country and globally. So with that, I've got four awesome entrepreneurs. I know each of them pretty well and know a lot about their companies. And I really just want to use this opportunity today to have a conversation. We're not going to do a bunch of slides. We're not going to sit here and give a bunch of presentations. I'm going to ask each of them to go down the line, introduce themselves, talk a little bit about themselves, and really what inspires them, why they're doing this. Because as many of you in the energy space know, it takes a lot of persistence. It takes a lot of commitment. And so why they're here, why they're doing it, and then also obviously tell you a little bit about their company and how it's going to, you know, really be part of this movement to change the world as a whole. So I encourage questions from the get-go, okay? So don't be shy. Again, this should be a conversation. I encourage you to ask each other questions and quote weird movies as you choose. But again, fun. Like this is, there's exciting technologies out there. I don't want to hear doom and gloom. I don't want doom and gloom questions. Although you're free to ask whatever you want. But that's it. I just really wanted to use this opportunity to share some exciting entrepreneurs in the energy space and some exciting companies that are taking both technology, not, I only say risks. I mean, they've got great, amazing technology, but also looking at business model, business plan. How can we take technologies and get over sales cycle situations and challenges? So with that, I will ask Heidi Lubin to kick us off. I'm going to take this mic out so it's not like squaring my forehead. These don't lower down, do they? No? I'll just use this. Thank you. Hi. Thanks, Heather, for pulling all of this together. We will all make an effort to quote the princess bride since you called it weird. Star Wars? Oh, OK. All right. Let's see. I'm the CEO of ATVT. We're working on energy efficient electric motors that are both more reliable and lower cost initially. So it's up to 60% lower initial cost while being up to three times more efficient than over the operating cycle, then competitive technologies without rare earth material. So we can talk about how we do that at some point today, sort of how did I end up running a motor company? I think it's an interesting question that I get with some frequency. So are you an engineer? I said no. I have a background in systems design. And so I think from a systems design perspective, electric motors are, I get really interested and fascinated by things that are really fundamental, that cut across different segments and that sort of cut across lots of multidisciplinary intersections. So I think probably my career and energy started in the late 90s when I was both studying and looking into some of the work that was coming out of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Colorado. And also I spent a summer in Nigeria and had to kind of really understand and learn about the geopolitics of oil and how that impacted the United States and how deeply difficult and humbling it was to go somewhere across the world and try and understand it at any fundamental level given that there were this massive place, there were 200 languages and some of the languages were, I'm actually pretty good at languages but some of them were so complicated that I tried, I remembered, for seven weeks to make a sound. It's this guttural clicking sound that comes from here and I made it once. And then when I came back, there was an article in the New York Times Magazine, I think this was like 99 about Nigeria and they were talking about, oh yeah, just this little place across the world. I remember thinking, what? This place is like half the size of the United States and believe me, it's not little or it doesn't lack any complexity. So I think that for me became a driving passion in addition to the fact that I think entrepreneurship is kind of a gene and you don't necessarily choose it because it's not always rational. Do you want this or do you want that? No, I can not. And I'm super excited to be here with these guys today, they're awesome. So I guess on the Princess Pride, we'd have to say inconceivable. And I think that sort of sums up what a lot of people have felt about clean tech over the last few years. I'm Mike Pfeffer, I'm from Hawaii and I'm a recovery and venture capitalist. I've been investing money in clean tech companies for the past six years and I was presented with an opportunity to take a smart socket technology and spin it out of an R&D firm in Hawaii and try to create a company with it and it got me excited enough that I jumped ship and founded the company, The Spin Out, in February and had the great good fortune of participating in the Hawaii Energy Accelerator Program on the start of February 7th. So like a week after we spun out, we dropped into this great program and that really did accelerate us. And what we do is we're trying to solve, as Heather mentioned, the sort of 40% or 45% of energy that's consumed at the wall socket for large institutions. So think military, Google, state and federal buildings, schools, hospitals, those kinds of buildings where you can actually make a real difference if you can deploy thousands of sockets, not five or 10 in your home. So we have a very different solution. It's pretty awesome, pretty amazing and we're scaling up very quickly. But I think the thing that kind of got me going, well, I've got two small kids, I've got a five-year-old and a nine-year-old. I'd like them to have a world to live in. We don't live on the beach, but we might if the sea levels keep rising. So we've got to do something and I think we've gone through the first big hiccup in renewable energy, right? We've had all this money, done money, smart money, I don't know, flowed in and a lot of things failed. And now the rest of us are still here trying to make the rubber meet the road with different technologies. And I think the time is now and all of these technologies that we've got here today are ready to go, they're deployable and we can make a real difference. So that's why I got back into the game. My name is Rodrigo Prudencio. You killed my father, prepared to die. It's a line from the Princess Bride, really. First of all, for people who are outside, there's about seven open seats down here or if you would hold up your hand if there's a seat next to you because there's a lot of folks who may not want to stand. It's easy to come through the front door too. So, oh, sure. Okay, so like Michael, I am coming from venture capital into an operating role. I was at Nth Power 4, which is one of the first venture capital firms that was investing in the energy technology space, grew its first fund, raised its first fund in 1997, well below before the wave of capital that came in, that became defined as clean tech and green tech and all that and whatever it's gonna be called next. So I was at that firm for 12 years, led a bunch of our work and my job there was partnerships, first of all, with a lot of the companies that were the energy incumbents and later I led deals on the energy facing, or sorry, customer facing side of the meter, including Herat and then I came over to Herat to become the CEO in November of 2012. So right around Thanksgiving week. So I'm about six months into the job and we can talk a little bit about Herat either here or later, but what I'm excited about, first of all, two observations. I think that there was a massive amount of capital that came into the clean tech space and there's a variety of storylines about why and why how much, why so much came in. I'm a firm believer that at the time that we began Enth Power or I joined Enth Power as it was just starting and there were a handful of other firms, there was about an annual investment amount in early stage venture capital, tightly defined, right? Series A, Series B companies. Of about two to $400 million a year and that in $400 million a year was a big year. There were a few years that were like 700, 800 million, but if you track that over time as we did, that was sort of the steady state. And I think that we have to ask ourselves, is that the steady state we're gonna come back to? Is it gonna be a little bit bigger, a little bit smaller? Because the overall size of venture capital hasn't changed. It's been about 22, 25 billion dollars invested per year that hasn't really changed even through the tough times, the different bubbles or the different downtrends afterwards. It's just that the money shifts around, okay? So keep that in mind. The second thing is, even with, that's still a lot of money. It may challenge the venture capitalists about where they will find opportunities, but as an entrepreneur, I think it's a great time to be operating in this business, operating in this field, because the need to innovate in energy will never go away. It's too big of an opportunity and the drivers around it are too big. You have to be very clear about what part of the energy stack you're attacking. And I think that's part of the challenge that entrepreneurs have. Don't be too broad, focus in, because those focus areas are very, very big. It's a great time, I think, to be operating a company right now because of the fact that you've got, as an entrepreneur, a fantastic opportunity to grow your own equity and your team's equity. And I think that's what's, that's gonna continue to drive, I think, a lot of entrepreneurial activity in this space. So look forward to the discussion. I'm Adam Simpson. I'm a co-founder of Adagen. We're developing high-efficiency engines for distributed generation applications. So we're targeting at the top of the line NGCC efficiencies, so 60% field oil electricity, but at commercial building size and scale. So anywhere at 300 kilowatts to a megawatt. Our technology came out of actually Stanford, my co-founder's research, where they were taking an outside-of-the-box approach to the conversion of chemical resource to electricity. Cumulative of three PhDs and then my work on a side project. Kind of all this came together and we're fortunate enough to have relationships with coastal ventures. We started in June of 2010. Right now we're looking at Menlo Park, 23 employees, we're keeping a low profile. We recently did a Series B where we brought in Bill Gates investment. And I think one of the benefits and why we have caught the eye of coastal ventures in Bill Gates is it's really a fuel-flexible platform. So in the U.S. we're looking at natural gas and biogas, which makes sense. Clean fuel is readily available, but our categorical gains in efficiency, so compared to diesel generators, can make a huge impact in developing countries. So India alone consumes, I like this stat, they consume about 120,000 barrels of diesel per day just for electricity generation. So if you're able to give them a 50% gain in efficiency in converting that, that's equivalent of about installing eight gigawatts of solar in California. So although we're not technically all renewable, those gains are significant. And to put that in perspective, California has under three gigawatts today and that's taken two decades and a lot of incentives to get there. How did I get into energy and how do we start this company? Started back as a little kid, got into engines because I liked cars, worked in mechanic, realized I didn't want to do that for the rest of my life, learned that mechanical engineers designed the cars. So I went into mechanical engineering, took my first semi-dynamic course and just loved the idea of being able to really understand how energy systems work and how efficiently we're converting any resource to a final product work or electricity. That carried me to Stanford for grad school where I worked with Chris Edwards, Professor Chris Edwards in the mechanical engineering department and he was also gonna allow me to kind of create my own quasi mechanical engineering, MS&E, econ, environmental studies, PhD, where I focused on how do we make investment decisions in energy from a technical, environmental and economic perspective. And I came in with the hydrogen wave 2004 in Stanford and even with my undergrad knowledge of thermodynamics and econ, I was like this doesn't seem to be making sense, hydrogens. You gotta get it from somewhere. Pipeline infrastructure and storage infrastructure is not there and it's not easy to do. Then we went through the biofuels wave. So just really want to understand where these decisions were coming from and how they're being made. They let me start working with venture firms in the area, helping them with due diligence. This was when they were spending a lot of money on early stage investments. I think shifting more towards later stage investments. And that's how we built our relationships with Coastal Ventures and started the company in June of 2010. There's still a lot of seats up here for people in the back if you want to let them know. These aren't questions, they're open seats. Open seats. Open seats. I love this, okay. There's a lot of questions. Thanks you guys very much. I think what I've heard about is kind of initially when energy technology and kind of the idea of cleaner energy came along, it was always about producing it, right? How do we produce cleaner energy? The theme that I heard was efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. So can you guys talk to me a little bit about why that's such a big deal? I'm happy to take a quick stab at it. I think if you think about energy efficiency, most of the devices that we've built over the last 150 years of the Industrial Revolution were really built with $2 a barrel oil in mind as a cost basis. And so we never really had to worry about being super efficient until recently. And I think there's all this low hanging fruit and efficiency standing in front of us, right? When we have these plugs that we turn stuff off at night, it seems simple, just turn stuff off and we don't do it. And yet if we do that at scale, you can start to save a tremendous amount of energy and saving energy is pretty much the same as not having to make energy if you do it right. So I think what we're really gonna see is for the next 10 to 15 years is we're gonna retrofit the world from an efficiency standpoint. Heidi's motor does that and we're trying to save energy and that to me is the next wave is gonna be the efficiency wave. It's just easier. I think one of the other themes that we may not have articulated but having had the privilege to know all these guys a little bit is underlying each of our technologies to a large degree I believe is you know, you see sort of Moore's law impacting energy and I think that's kind of a trend that's sort of henceforth, we're gonna see that impact a lot. So for example, the way our motor technologies work is there are three sort of, I like to garden. So I sort of think of different motors almost like different plants and different plants have kind of a different profile. So you have permanent magnet motors and induction machines and then switch reluctance machines or SRM. So we focus on SRM. And the way at a really high level the way induction machines and permanent magnet machines work is you have, you know, ultimately when you're creating a motor you need to induce an electromagnetic field to get the rotor to spin, right? So the way you do that in an induction machine and a permanent magnet machine is you have two sources of excitation and that process is largely focused on the active materials in the motor itself. So in a permanent magnet machine you're talking about permanent magnets which are reliant today anyway and probably for at least the next 10 years on rare earth metals. There are some non-ferrite magnets but the majority rely on rare earth metals. Part of the challenge with rare earth metals is of course that they're a clat, they're actually, so it's the refining capacity that's rare, yeah. There are a class of metals that are low on the periodic table and they're typically located in bands of ore with thorium and thorium is radioactive. It was at one point considered as the alternative to uranium for nuclear power plants and may emerge as the alternative in India and China. So there have been all sorts of NIMBY problems about mining and refining this stuff even in China and Malaysia and so forth. So that's part of the problem there but you have two sources of excitation. With an induction machine you require more copper because you've gotta wire both sides of the motor and then go from there. The way switch reluctance works is you shift the burden of inducing the electromagnetic field to a computerized controller that has a little bit more sophistication than we've had in the past and the reason that's possible is because we have better, faster, cheaper power electronic sub-components. It's the same kind of thing we've seen in semiconductor and computer industries. So that enables a lot more efficiency over the operating cycle of the machine, not just peak efficiency. I think the challenge with that is when we think about energy efficiency it often gets kind of ignored as a stepsister or sort of Cinderella because I think psychologically it's not always as sexy to save energy or save anything, money or whatever as it is to get something new, that sort of dopamine rush in the brain. So I think we kind of have to figure out how to message that and that may be one of our collective challenges. So as the only software company on the panel, through pure software company, the thing that excites me about a customer facing solution around efficiency or really what we do is we manage energy data for large enterprises is the scalability. It's infinitely scalable because it's software. But I think the other challenge but sort of the limiting factor is that when you are in a customer facing solution you have to really get to know your customer's needs and you have to know your customer's priorities and prioritization and the selling cycle and the motivators, all the classic stuff about building a business and energy has its own dynamic about or saving energy or producing. But in this case, saving energy has its own dynamic of customer behavior. Some of it's regulatory driven, a lot more of it I think is priority driven and understanding what priorities you're solving. Are you only solving an energy saving story? Are you solving other information or business intelligence stories? All of that is incredibly critical to understand sort of how rapidly your business will grow. And then it's the basics. How many sales opportunities you think you can land in a quarter or in two quarters. How many sales people do you need to pull those people? How much those people need to be paid? How much your contracts can be? What's your value proposition? How do you price your software? All of those things become just basic building blocks of any business. I don't care if you're building other kinds of enterprise software in the case or our kind of enterprise software, right? That you just have to understand the market that you're in and the customer's willingness to spend money or the way that one of my board members puts it, the customer's willingness to part ways with their money. And it's absolutely critical. And I think one of the things that we have to always ground ourselves in is that as businesses and especially as businesses who have sort of a different aspiration about what we want the planet to be and what we want the, you know, almost a values aspiration about our businesses, we have to always remember that our customers may have a different set of values and a different set of prioritizations. And we have to live within those prioritizations because that's what ultimately lets our businesses survive. Yeah. So on efficiency, so we started, you know, our research at Stanford around how do we convert natural resources or any resource to electricity more efficiently. So very thermodynamic heavy energy geeks. And so that's where we started, but taking that concept and our initial work to a product that really just translates to saving customer money. So it's capital efficiency, call it what you will. Some of the customers that we talk with, potential customers through our customer discovery process, they do care, are you beating NGCC efficiency, are you beating this company's efficiency? But the majority just care, how much are you gonna see me, what's the IRR, what's the payback that I'm gonna see. So for us, we really like to geek out and try to get the best efficiency possible, but from a market perspective, they're just talking about and wanting to save money. So there are constraints when we're, you know, developing our designs and everything because those last two points in efficiency when natural gas is cheap doesn't necessarily translate to the economic savings that are necessary to build a successful business. So it is interesting from the purely technical wanna be as efficient as possible, but then from the market perspective, there are trade-offs in efficiency. And I mean, most of the customers sophisticated to know that efficiency and fuel conversion leads to carbon savings, which I would say about 50-50 of the customers we've talked with from Walmart to Target to Safeways care about the carbon savings, which is something that was very surprising before we went out and talked with them. If the IRR is big enough, they'll find, they'll tell their sustainability guide to find the carbon savings somewhere else. So that was something that was very wide. Eye-opening to us. So really for us is now cost play and efficiency helps that by keeping fuel costs low. So that's really where our efficiency is driven from. Awesome, thank you. Heidi, you talked a little bit about the motors. Can you talk a little bit about the market and really specifically a couple applications that you're working on and just how massive the market is? Yeah, that's a great question. So when we went out to go raise cash, one of the things we heard kind of over and over again is first we realized people don't understand how motors work, so that was kind of a challenge. And then we learned that everybody kind of thought, like, oh, well, you're just an industrial play and you're gonna exit at like a 1.6x multiple and that doesn't work. And finally we said, okay, look, here's the thing. We spend 46% of unused electricity on electric motor different systems. That's an annual spend of $565 billion. And our technology is applicable to 73% of those applications, which is about 460, 410, I think, billion. And so maybe it's just us, but we kind of think that's sexy. And so they said, okay, so explain how you exit. We said, well, you know, the exit multiples in the energy efficiency space are actually 16x operating profit. And then they said, okay, but show me how you can actually hit margins with the motor company. And that's when life gets really interesting for us because that's a discussion that we can win because we're reducing the active materials. But I think the point that these guys are making is that doesn't change the burden on us to be extremely focused. So right now I think the most likely rollout for us is the HVAC industry. And the reason is because we're moving from, again, a sort of framework in that industry from peak efficiency to operating efficiency and variable speed. And that's something that we can offer without disrupting the misalignment between the OEM that's making, you know, the HVAC system and the end user. And otherwise I think that's the other thing that's kind of exciting at this moment is that the technologies are becoming mature enough where we're not asking the end user to do something charitable by spending a lot more money and having a huge payoff over time. Like the payoff periods are enormously quick. In some cases, you know, a month or less. And for some of our customers, the reliability benefits, you know, if they go down, it's so costly for them to go down that the reliability benefits pay off also in the same kind of time period. Is that, I think that answers the question. Thank you. Michael, we just wanna talk about what makes, what differentiates, as you talked, you like mentioned the military in two seconds, but like security device health, what makes you different? So, you know, if any of you have been in the residential space or looked at the residential space, you've probably seen some version of a smart socket. And what these things do, I just was a panelist earlier in the week at Nescon's Internet of Things. And so if you think about the Internet of Things concept, what we're doing really is making devices smart, allowing them to do something. And really, you know, the way you make a difference, the way you do something is to understand it. You have to be able to measure it. So our devices are built to do three things really well initially and then we layer a bunch of stuff on there. You have to be able to talk back to a server, right? You've gotta be able to get that information out. And so what we do is we create a retrofit smart grid, if you will. We plug thousands of these sockets in, they all talk to each other and they talk to a server. So now you've got a network. Now you have the ability to communicate with all these devices like your coffee maker and your copier and all these things that you've just plugged in for 100 years and never been able to understand. The second thing we do is we measure energy consumption for every device that's plugged into the network. So for the first time you can actually start to understand how much energy your coffee maker uses. And I use that example a lot because it's actually startling. Coffee makers actually use a lot of energy, not as much as your Xerox copier, but a lot enough to actually make it worth turning them off. So now for the first time you've got the ability to understand what your devices are doing and then our dashboard allows you to turn them on and off at will in any configuration. And this technology was begun in 2007 by an R&D firm in Hawaii and it was done using primarily DOE and Office of Naval Research money. And so it was designed for the military and I can tell you that the military doesn't like you to put a network, a wireless network on their campus unless it's highly secure. So this has been designed specifically to be, to do a couple of things that I think are different than other people out there and that's to be very, very secure and scalable. And I think that's what makes this exciting is if you're just turning off your coffee maker at home or the five or 10 devices at home, yeah, okay, you're gonna save yourself money and that's great and that's laudable. But when you start thinking about turning on and off hundreds of thousands of devices at night or when they're not in use, that starts to add up. So that kind of answered the question? What was the question? Sure. Never start a land war in Asia. That's the second quote and that's it. It's inconceivable. And can you also talk a little bit about, so obviously there's technology gains and technology improvements, but I think a lot of times it's adoption and how do business models, how do you get this in your customers' hands effectively and sales cycles can be a problem, especially if you're talking about the military, if you're talking about public institutions, schools, that sort of thing. Can you talk a little bit about business models? So when we looked at it, we said, okay, well, you gotta go out and put a thousand sockets in. Well, they're not cheap. And if you're asking people to buy those sockets, you're never gonna get there. That becomes a huge problem. So we developed the model service model. I'm sorry. How much are they? Well, it depends on how many you make. But basically, even at scale, you're looking at somewhere between 10 and $15 cost. You can probably get it down a little bit. Ours are actually more expensive than the ones that they make for the household because we actually try to do a lot more of them together and so they have to be a little more robust. What's the payback? So what we do is the payback is essentially zero because we will put the sockets in for free. So we developed a service model, said, let us come and install this network for you. Give us a three-year contract since we're doing this for free. And when you save money, we get a piece of that. So the basic model allows us to do a service model. We provide you with monthly reports and all that, but it allows us to get in there very easily because I don't have to go and say, hey, spend 150 grand on a thousand sockets or whatever the price tag would be. Let's get it installed. Let's start saving you money. I'll take a rev share on that and then I do all kinds of other cool stuff with energy efficiencies and big data and all the other things that I don't tell my customers about necessarily, but I tell my investors about. But the beauty is you get in and you start turning stuff off and you save money from day one. So we found that that's a very effective way. If I were running a building, how do I get the feedback to know what you're actually doing? I mean, I think the feedback system is very important now. Sure. So while we own our networks, we don't just turn stuff off when you're not around. It's up to you as the customer to, you know, when you guys leave the office, whatever your configuration is, you turn it off. But we have all of that information and so we can provide you with very detailed reports on energy consumption for every device that you've plugged in and then say, okay, these things aren't mission critical. We can turn them off at night when you're not around. A coffee maker can be off. These things are mission critical. Maybe it's a refrigerator with vaccines in it, for example, and you don't want to turn it off, but you want to know if it gets turned off. So in that case, our device is just monitoring the health of the device. So. No, no, so we, our system is, that's a great question. Our system is say 500 sockets and a server. And that server is on site in every location. We punch all of our information up to a private cloud and then we play around with the data, but the system is in place on your campus and you have the ability to interact with it remotely and on site and in some cases. So I'm not sure if that answered the question, but we found that getting in, especially to schools, to have this question, you know, you have to find a way to get, to let people save money and not be a giant burden. Cause otherwise you'd never get through the sales cycle. Where do you get the residual value out of the data? There's a bunch of different ways that we're monitored. I'm gonna repeat the question. Oh, I'm sorry. The question was, where do we get the residual value out of our data? And so if we're very young, so we're still building a lot of that out, but you start to see things like cross promotion in terms of purchasing decisions. So if you're gonna go out and buy 500 copiers or 500 printers, right now you don't know which ones are more energy efficient and we can start to aggregate that data and provide that, sell that into the marketplace. There's a lot of value add in terms of one thing we do for one of the hotel chains is we can tell them when their devices are starting to fail and provide that information and they can then go do maintenance on the little refrigerators that are in your hotel room for the first time. They have no idea. They just replace 20% of them every five years. So that's different ways that we can start monetizing the data. It seems like there's some sort of a startup period where you're trying to get enough data or customers can tell you how to operate these devices. You know, he doesn't want to put it in your hands and shut things off and then see if someone can blame. Right, so we don't shut things off for you. Typically that's something that's handled by whoever in your organization does that. But yes, there's a measurement period where you have to establish a baseline. This is how much these devices are consuming over 24 hour periods and then this is how much we can save by turning them off for 12 hours. So there is an interactive component to that. I'm Sue Higgins and I'm from Naval Postgraduate School and we are very involved in very large organization that's trying to make a lot of change happen with regard to energy. And you're all involved in technologies, hardware or software or combination of some kind. And you mentioned adoption and that we're finding is that the technology is what the entrepreneurs usually want to go after and the BCs want to go after. So I'm wondering if each of you could maybe help us understand around adoption. How does a BC deal with that time lag between the technology is here and there's a long time. I mean the military takes a large organization like we have, it takes 10 to 20 years to make a change. So investments become really tough choices to make. So I'm just curious if you could all speak to from your own perspective. You want us to wear our old VC hats? Yeah, I was like, please. How do I lie to myself? I think the challenge, again, it's about knowing your market, knowing your customer. So as a venture capitalist you'd spend a lot of time if you didn't know these customers already you would be trying to get to know them, get to know other companies that were in that space, in that specific field. And you'd want to be dealing with a management team that had a very clear understanding of those adoption cycles. And so they might have different approaches to their hiring, like they might hire a lot more slowly and do a lot of CEO level selling. You don't bring on, there's a lot of companies in the software space who don't bring on a CEO until they're doing a million dollars of revenue, or sorry, not a CEO, a sales head until they're doing a million dollars of revenue. It's just an ironclad rule that a lot of CEOs will follow because until they can invest in a sales person they want to know that the market is looking for it. Now for something that requires longer sales cycles you would want obviously to be selling something to the Navy, selling something to utility and then hopefully selling something to a few private sector customers. And those private sector customers you might sell them at a price point that's a loss leader, so you're not so much worried about how much money you're gonna make on the first few versions of the product or dozens of copies of the product, but you're more interested in getting feedback from the customer and getting an understanding of what would they pay. So it's a constant, entrepreneurism in building a business is a constant exercise of experimentation and what you want to do is always know that you're building your business and spending your money in a way that that experimentation is telling you something that is going to ultimately give you more insight into what you should do next. And so hopefully you're talking and in the case of the companies that you would be assessing or were in front of or had some touch on they hopefully weren't just talking to you. They were hopefully talking to lots of other companies or potential customers that had sales cycles of a different nature. I think to your, can everybody hear me, okay? Okay. Stand up. Yeah, get down tonight. I think to your question it's, I think there were, I heard two questions. One is about the adoption cycle and from two perspectives, the solution. So yeah, it's, we may tend to focus on technology but what problem are we solving that we'll get the customer to adopt and then on the flip side, how long does it take us to get to the point where we're ready to be actually solving the problem and how do we finance it? So in our case, you also heard Michael say that we were spun out of, we're a university tech transfer play originally. So the technology was incubated in a long time. The patents already issued, we're well past the point where there are any miracles to solve. There's going to be application engineering for different applications because our eBike customers want something different than our HVAC customers slightly but there's a lot of scalability in that. So I think one of the answers is, you've seen the industry or clean tech, if you will, get smarter about partnering with large customers, with large strategics and you've also seen us hopefully continue to improve how we spend technology out of places that have the capacity to incubate them for to a longer or a more mature point. To your point about the solution, I think to reframe it in the way we talk to our customers is it is, what problem do we solve for them? So my electric bike customers, it's more cost effective, it's more reliable. They can climb hills better because the motor dissipates heat better. So their motor's not going to run out and leave them halfway up a hill. If we're talking about an HVAC system, yes, it saves money, but it's also more comfortable. It's a more comfortable product because I have more variability with how I tune the system because of the sophistication in motor control and because of the way I can interact with airflow. So those kinds of things. So just real quick on your question. We're not solely focused on the military. And like Heidi said, we've been, this technology is five years old and the company that developed it works with the military. So we're three years in to the wonderful 10 year process. I'm really hoping it's not 10 years, but we are now certified with every branch of the military except the Coast Guard and have installations on campus. But very definitely what we did was we looked for multiple markets, multiple verticals that are very different from one another. And you have to, if you're, take the VC hat off and put the entrepreneur hat on, you have to define how you're going to get into those markets and at what time and what level of effort you're doing. So do we abandon the military because it takes forever? No, because it's a huge potential market. But nor do we focus solely on it or even heavily on it at the beginning. The same might be true with state and federal buildings. Because you've got to do with all that bureaucracy. But private institutions, private schools versus public schools are very, very different sales cycles. So we've kind of defined out those verticals, focused enough on the ones that we know we can penetrate more quickly to get scale going. And then you keep working on the harder ones. And hopefully you get there. Because you don't want to do that. We invested in a company when they were in the military and we invested in a company with my venture fund that was focused on the military. And seven years later, and they still haven't gotten anything done, so I'm not interested in doing that. And to your point, I think it's, I mean, when you're going to market, you want to go to market with the minimum viable product. So you do the process of customer discovery and you get out there and talk with as many people as possible, figure out what their problems are and what their price points are to fix those problems. And then you work closely with your engineering team to figure out what does that look like, how difficult is that. So for, you know, we've talked with military, we've talked with commercial buildings, data centers, grocery stores, and they all have different subsets. So some will only buy a product if it can also operate grid-independent. So the boride backup, some don't care about that. Some want six nines of reliability, which automatically they're a very late adopter because you have to have five years of runtime to prove that you can hit those numbers. Military has some interesting specs in terms of bomb proof and stuff. So, I mean, we're not gonna be testing that and going after the military at first. So it's really about finding those early adopters that are willing to take a risk and it's not that critical if, you know, you have some hiccups along the way. So someone that's willing to work with you. I feel like it's ultimately the ROI, right? So if you've got a motor that costs $400 that will save you $13,000 in your first year, that's pretty good ROI. So I think we're seeing companies that are really focusing on how long does it take to recover the cost to your product, which may be why efficiency is making the surge it's making. So. I'm getting the payback. Michael, with your arrangement, where you're offering this service for free, with no capital. Yeah, low capital. People don't actually like freeze. You gotta charge them something, but not a lot. What do you see as the split? How do you approach negotiating the split in terms of the value of the energy savings you're delivering in terms of what you get, what your customer gets? Sure, so the question is how do we negotiate and we try not to negotiate. We basically say, you know, we get 50% and you get 50%. We always provide our customers with a net savings per socket per month. But we're saying, look, you know, we have to recoup the cost of putting this network in. And so we haven't had any real resistance to that because we go, you know, if we can show a school that we're saving an average of say $6 a month per socket, we get three, you get three. They're like, wow, we got three bucks, you know, cash in the pocket, that's huge for a school. What we are looking at is after the, after that payback after we've recouped our costs, then, you know, the more savvy customers say, well, let's go, you know, 30, 70 and we'll take 70. So we're still ramping up and exploring on that. And that's part of, one of you guys mentioned the sort of iterative process of when you're launching a company and scaling, you know, we're getting some of that pushback, but we know our customers really well in Hawaii. And so we're able to actually be pretty friendly with the ones that we've got. You can take some from the back. Yeah, you got, by Jack in. Great, you know, Silicon is certainly well known for its innovation in technology. Do you see any of the technology that you're describing actually fitting into emerging economies, you know, people that are not quite caught up? I mean, are they able to leapfrog and really actually adopt your technology? They will leapfrog, yeah. Yeah, I think that's part of the vision that our investors share with us is the opportunity to leapfrog the distribution infrastructure. And similar to the telecom industry and the developing countries and developing world, they don't have phone lines. So I'd all went cellular. So that's a great opportunity to avoid that cost that governments see, which is very significant when you're building centralized power plants. So that is a major opportunity. But, and we hope to be able to get there, but in order to get there, you know, you need to have a foolproof product that's gonna deliver and with known reliability and everything. So that's what we're working on here. Ed. Two of the major scriptures of innovation in the last couple of decades are the innovators dilemma and crossing the chasm. Crossing the chasm talks about finding a beachhead market that other people aren't noticing where you can do clever things. Is that a model applied for you guys? What way? I like clever things is always good. You know, I think so definitely what got me so excited about our IntelliSocket technology platform was that everyone else in the smart socket category was focused on the household residential, right? You're gonna turn off your AC and manage your television better. And we really didn't see that as a very interesting space from a business standpoint. But when I looked at this technology and realized that the inventor had really built it to be scaled for large institutions, right? It's a completely different market for smart sockets. And so that got me excited because to your point, you know, virtually no one else is in this space quite yet like we are. There's a bunch of people trying to move into the industrial space or the commercial space, but I think we're a little bit ahead of most of them. Yeah, from our perspective, we are still searching for that beachhead. Unfortunately, the beachheads have a higher and more difficult technical requirement. So Alaskan villages that run primarily on diesel and spend $10 a gallon for diesel, which is equivalent to around $60 per MMB to you. Natural gas is around five today. So, but they have to operate a negative 40. So great beachhead, but not necessarily the minimum viable product. Yes, yeah. This may be a little dangerous in the background of two of the panelists, but sort of fundamental question, strategic partner or venture partner, what's going to be better for you for success? If you're an early company. Well, you know, so here's what, here were my observations about doing the strategic partnering work at Nth Power and what worked for some of our companies. And also, you know, also thinking about it in the context now of being a CEO. Oftentimes, the strategic venturing arm of a corporation was not doing business with you. They were investing in you. Now, as an entrepreneur, it's really exciting to be talking to ex-corporation and raising money from them. But more often than not, I found that companies often couldn't drive actually a business relationship deeper because the rest of the corporation had a different set of priorities. And so again, for the entrepreneur who might be looking at a strategic partnership, I try to ground as much as possible that conversation in a, you know, let's do a million dollars of business together. And then when you make that million dollars of business, I'll give you equity, you know, or I'll give you equity in the form of the margin I'm gonna make from that business relationship. Let's get you putting the skin in the game that actually matters to me as building that business. But when you're building, but you know, when you're an entrepreneur and you need that next million dollars to keep your business going, it's hard to say, it's hard to say no. So I think the thing is, is that treat strategic money and treat venture money as capital and treat it appropriately and know what its limits are. But don't be so, but push a little bit, I think if you're talking to a strategic investor to really understand what's really behind it as a business opportunity. And if you're clear that there's not a business opportunity or you're just gonna have to sell them like you sell any of the customer, then fine, you've got that expectation grounded. But if they come in and say, I'm gonna, I want a lower valuation because I'm gonna give you 10 million dollars of business, then I'd say, we'll wait a second. You know, now you're talking about the equity I need to give up in this business. Let's talk about really sort of the purchase order. A fair bit's been made about the differences between venture capital investing in technology versus energy. And how long it's taken certain venture capital investors post among them to figure that out. One of those distinctions is you don't see that many grand slams coming out of energy investment. Do any of your companies have a credible case for a 50X or 100X return to its investors? Did you guys all hear that? Tasking is there's a credible case and these companies have a credible case for a 50X or 100X return, I think a grand slam from a venture investment. So, I'll take that because I think we've been around the longest and I mean, Hurrah has had a fairly high profile of venture investors, including Nth Power, Kleiner Perkins, Jaffco, some strategic money as well. And we've historically raised 45 million dollars. So that's a big, when I look at sort of, do we have to make, you know, 400 to make a 10X, 800 to make, you know, in terms of gross return? If we are going to succeed in that, what I'm absolutely convinced of is that we have to be more relevant to the bigger enterprise. Today, we are very good at gathering enterprise level data about energy and resource consumption and we do it for very, for great companies. We love our customers, but I need to be selling more inside of the enterprise. So my tool has to ultimately speak to more parts of the organization and be more relevant to the business needs of the organization. Otherwise, I have two paths to growth. I need to quadruple the number of customers I have or I need to, you know, raise by 10X the amount of money I'm making inside of each customer. And so if it's the latter, then it means I've got to invest more in my product. So that would be the pathway to a much, much bigger outcome and a much, much bigger opportunity. And that's part of the challenge I'm taking on. That's what's ahead of us. The other thing, though, is in software businesses, right, you also wanna see rapid amount of growth. And I think there again, we need to speak to a broader set of the enterprise if we're gonna see higher growth rates because we started as a business that spoke primarily to the carbon sustainability need of the enterprise. The great part about that is that almost every company has that dialogue, has that conversation. The unfortunate part about that is when you start talking to them about separating themselves from their money to pay for software to do that as opposed to run it on spreadsheets, you know, there's very, that's a smaller market share. I'd like to take a stab at a slightly different take on your question. The first answer is, of course, yes, IBIS is 50 to 100X return and our wiring instructions are on the back of my business card and you're all accredited investors, right? I think one of the things that's exciting about today and that we saw in the IT space, in the social networking space, your ability to create a really big company with a much smaller amount of capital is just, it's freakish, right? I mean, it's just unbelievable. Basically, everything is a commodity now other than your idea. And so, you know, you can go so much further with so much less money than you could even five or 10 years ago. So I think we're starting to see, you know, certainly my goal for IBIS is not to have to take 45 million dollars, it'd be nice to have 45 million bucks to play around with, but we don't need that to get where we wanna go and that's gonna help us get those kinds of returns for our investors. And I think the, you know, sort of the bifurcation of the first wave of clean tech investing, you mentioned Kozla put a ton of money in some very big projects and we haven't seen that money come out yet. I think now we're starting to see the ability, you know, Heidi's company, you can, for very modest amount of money, get into the market and start making money and scale that way. So I think we're gonna see those kinds of returns in quote unquote, clean tech, two point, whatever it is. I think also though, I think two things. Yes, however, I think one of the things is we've forgotten that it takes a bit of patience and even the companies that we think of as grand slams like Google and Facebook, they were not, you know, I mean, it took a while, right? And it's, I think, arguably like that platform that has enabled some of the Pinterest and some of these other acquisitions that we've seen. And even those stories, if you really dig, they were typically not the one year in and out that the media seems to grab onto. I think they're doing all of us, frankly, a real disservice. So there's some interesting articles about there, Steve Vasello wrote an article from Foundation Capital, Matt Norden has a note on his blog about some of the case studies there. And I would encourage all of us to kind of take a look at that and dig a little bit deeper into the way the media reporting is going on around this. Because when you really look at the grand slams relative to even hardware companies, these were all hardware companies. I mean, Google, Facebook, et cetera, have massive server farms that consume enormous amount of energy. The idea that you can just invest in software, make a lot of money, because you don't have any hardware needs. It's mostly, I think, a fallacy. And then I think the other piece of that is also that on the other hand, we need to stay solution focused, right? So as long as I am solving problems for ultimately people, companies, right? Then yes, I think the 50 to 100 X is possible. Well, it's 12 o'clock and I wanna make sure that you guys aren't stuck with the bad lunch. So a quick round of applause please for our panelists. We'll be here for a couple minutes. We're gonna ask them any further questions.