 My name is Eric Westhoff. I'm the editor-in-chief of Green Tech Media. Does anybody know of that publication? Raise your hand. All right. Good answer. Good answer. Thank you very much. Thank you. Before I was employee number one at Green Tech Media, I helped found a couple of companies. One crashed and burned. One got sold to JDSU and one is Green Tech Media, which is the company I currently work for. And unlike many other Green Tech companies, we are a profitable company. So I've seen venture capital from both the fundraising and as a reporter and an editor, I've seen venture capital. Well, it's my job to sort of observe these folks in the wild. And I've spent 10 years watching Green Tech venture capital. And I used to actually log every deal and total every deal. And so I used to be able to present the numbers from, for example, in 2005, there was $820 million invested in 74 deals in the United States and Green Tech. That number, $820 million, eventually grew to about $9 billion a couple of years ago with more than 500 deals per year. Come in. You're late. Here. Okay. And that number has dropped significantly. So the venture capital asset class is about $20 to $25 billion. And in 2013, only a few percentage points of that $20 billion, $25 billion is going to go to Green Tech. That's really the numbers I wanted to present. We're in sort of a cusp where old style venture capital doesn't work. And we have three venture VCs who have funds that are a little different than your standard venture capital fund. If you went to, I'm allowed to name names, if you looked at NEA, New Enterprise Associates, and you looked at their Clean Tech portfolio, you'd see 50 or 60 companies across the board ranging from solar to biofuels, but even more esoteric things like soy protein meat substitutes and a variety of stuff that they may or may not have expertise in. It turns out that the last 10 years of venture capital in Clean Tech hasn't worked extremely well with the exception of Tesla, Solar City, Enphase, and a few others that I think our panelists will be able to mention. I think what we'd like to talk about here is what has been the arc of venture capital over the last decade, and what's going to be able to be different over the next couple of years that allow Clean Tech entrepreneurs to raise money. It's never easy to raise money, but if you went to a venture fund today and said you want to start a thin film solar company, I think you would see the amusement, you would be laughed out of the office probably. It's not as if there's something wrong with thin film, it's just these VCs have the scars and the battle scars to show from the last 10 years. Each of these investors and each of these funds has a little bit of a different slant on venture capital compared to traditionalists, and Sean, I'd like you to, do you want to come up here? Do you want to stay where you are? Stay where you are, stay where you are, stay where you are. Tell us about your fund, and in three minutes or less, and 100 words or less, tell me what just happened in the last 10 years in Green Tech and how we got to this less than enviable situation that we're currently in. In 100 words. Yep. Okay. First of all, a fund at Clean Pacific Ventures is an early stage Clean Tech pure play focused fund. We formed in 2005, and we're in a play, well actually the first fund is now the investment period is closed, we're raising money for the second fund, but we're interested in capital efficient technology, commercialization ready companies, which is very difficult to do. We say we look for unicorns, and it's a very much a rifle shot strategy. We've invested in nine companies from March of 2007 until February of this year in that portfolio, and we'll begin in the next portfolio this fall. Of those nine, we've sold one, one was a zero, and the rest are all past the survival line, so we'll return some money in some form. So we're very proud of that. In 100 words or less, what's happened in the last 10 years, we came in in a period of very, very heavy investment by some very, very large firms into biofuels first, and then front end, what I call front end solar panel and panel production second set secondarily. And we actually didn't form our thesis around that, or I should say around not doing that, but rather, but but it did come about that we saw those as being mistakes before they were generally recognized and formed a much different strategy. So first, the excitement, the cash flows come into the business. Those companies have very difficult time manufacturing, and the biofuels has myriad of problems, which some companies have come through and some have not, and then went through a heavy investment period, I think that will come to a fruition. We do have a few examples of success in clean tech, but I think you'll see that in the monetization, there are portfolio companies out there that will show their faces in exits over the next couple of years that investments made in that period. You've got to remember, there's a very long time horizon for early stage investments in particular, and 10 years is about the average probably for getting out between eight and 10 years. But you classify yourself as an early stage investor, and there aren't that many folks these days who will own up to that. Is that kind of right? I don't own up to it. I wear it with pride on my flag. Okay. Yeah, there you go. Dave, we talked. The thing that makes you different is that you're a venture design studio, if you had to describe yourself in three words. Tell us a little bit more about what the heck your fund company does. And again, same question to you. What happened in the last 10 years? How did we get to this situation we're currently in? Do my best. So venture design studio, Green Start, what that means is that we are a design studio, but we also invest. So we don't work with companies unless we invest in them. And typically how we invest is through design services. What that means and what design means for us is not what most people think about design when they hear it. It's not the beautification of something. It's not the creation of a logo. It's not the creation of a graphic. But instead, it's really the marriage of user experience, brand design, and business model design. And when you combine all of those entities together, you can truly give a company a competitive advantage. And so what we tried to do is to bring those value added resources to our portfolio to help give them a better shot at success. And it's hard, it's tough, and it's costly. But at the end of the day, if you want to be a good investor, you've got to do a couple of things. One is you've got to be able to attract good entrepreneurs. And good entrepreneurs now understand that design is no longer a nice to have, but it is a must have. And the second thing you have to be able to do is to really help companies understand how important it is to create products and services that really are simple and intuitive and are products that companies can, or actually more importantly, customers can rave about. And then when you do that, you couple that with a brand that cuts through the clutter and really differentiates a company from another, combine that with a business model that scales, you can give a company a, it can break through. All right, so we're going to want to hear about specific examples, but not just yet. So again, give us your bedtime story of what just happened since 2006 in venture capital. Well, I don't think there's been a lot of innovation. And I think what is happening now as you're seeing in beginning to see a lot of innovation to your point a little bit earlier, Eric, the innovation that you've seen in venture capital over the past 30 years is really limited to moving the carry interest from 20 to 30%. I mean, that's it. And now what you're seeing is companies like First Round Capital, Google Ventures, our company actually bringing in real resources and assets that can give a company a competitive advantage, because up until now, over the past 10 years, I think you've had venture capital be at odds with their customer, which is the entrepreneur. So repeat that again, the VC at odds with the at odds. Well, because in large wealth, there are a lot of reasons, but one is that you'll see investments taking place, especially at the Series A where the venture firm is actually trying to invest based upon a percent ownership that they want versus actually giving the firm the amount of money that they need. And in large part, you're giving venture capital, you're giving entrepreneurs more money than they need. It's driving up valuations and it's not working on behalf of, it's not working for them. Number two is they're just giving them money. They're not bringing in value added resources that they truly, truly need. And so from that perspective, I think they're at odds with their customer. Pedram, hi. Pedram's with the Mayfield Fund. It's a hallowed Silicon Valley name, but there's no green tech portfolio on your website, right? What's it called? Energy Deck. Yay. So tell us, so that makes you a little bit different than everybody who puts out a green tech banner or a clean tech banner. So tell us what went into that thinking, why you didn't make 10 investments in thin film, solar, and ethanol, biobased ethanol. Sure. So I'm Pedram Mokri and I'm principal of the Mayfield Fund. And as Eric mentioned, it's one of the older venture capital firms in the Valley established in 1969. We managed about $3 billion and we are predominantly consumer and IT investors. I joined about five years ago while I was actually still a student of Jim Sweeney's, so I was kind of wearing two hats at the same time to help hold out a practice at Mayfield. And the thing that we kind of realized right away was that there is this real over excitement around the concept of clean tech or green tech, but it really missed the picture of what was truly investable from our perspective. And the thing that we thought was interesting was around applying IT and our understanding of IT and consumer investments to the world of energy. So right off the bat, we called it energy tech. And to be honest with you, our initial slide deck that we put together back in 2008 is still the exact same thing that we have in terms of our thesis today. So from our perspective, we haven't really changed at all. We haven't made that many investments, but we've been relatively fortunate. In the five investments that we've made, we've had one acquisition, one IPO, and three thriving sort of private companies still. I'm always on the hunt for interesting new technology. So it's not to say that, you know, we're only going to do one a year, except that we're just very surgical on the way that we look at the market and what we're looking for. And you can kind of probably understand from the way that we're dressed. I'm kind of the old school money manager, uniform. But I'll just jump to your question, which you asked is sort of what has changed since, I guess, the past decade. Not a heck of a lot has changed in the world of energy. And you said to me earlier, look at how is your life different? What changes has venture capital made? And if you want to know what changes venture capital made in the world of IT, you look in your pocket, you look at what your iPhone, but the changes that the world has made in green tech, VCs. I think there's been a few incremental things. I have a fancy, beautiful car and a beautiful fancy EV, right? Yeah, I think from a macro perspective, there hasn't been a lot of change that's happened. And that's why I think there's still a lot of opportunity. We're just at the very, very beginning. I think that's one of the reasons why we're all kind of sitting up here and talking about it still, and that I think the macro problems haven't been solved. The buildings aren't any smarter. We're not fundamentally more efficient. EVs are not ubiquitous everywhere. We're still kind of trying to figure out the mass charging issues. Renewables are still a tiny fraction of verbal reproduction. So there's still a long, long, long way to go. I think the thing that we have learned is that you can't necessarily bribe mother nature by signing a big check and hoping that you can solve material science problems quickly. That is probably the biggest difference. And we never really found that to be an interesting venture opportunity from our perspective. So the investments that we made, which we'll talk about a little bit later, were always around exactly what Dave was talking about, which I'm so glad that his company and his fund started, because it's all about bringing products to people, understanding what the consumers want and figuring out a way to deliver an energy centric product, a package in a way that they can actually understand and absorb into their daily lives and daily behaviors. I'm going to, in an instance of blatant self-promotion, I have to mention that Green Tech Media is putting on an event called Next Wave Investing, trying to take a look at are there new strategies, are there new ways to look at venture capital? And if you have any questions on that, please see me after this program if you want to talk about participating or attending that event. But in fact, the organizer of that event, a guy named Rob Day, who's one of the organizers of that event, Rob Day, who's a VC of the family office on the east coast, said, why should I invest incredible amounts of capital in order to produce a commodity product, which is what has happened with companies like MIA Solay, Nanosolar, Bloom Energy. There's a long list who are putting in billions of dollars, but the product they have to produce at the end is a eight cents per kilowatt hour electron. And why should you go about doing that with a five billion dollar piece of material science that's going to take you 14 years? So the event that we're putting on is trying to look at that and see if there's other ways of skinning that cat. So, Pedram, tell me a company in your portfolio company, in your portfolio, and why you invested in them, and you have an obvious choice. I know we wanted to not give you this choice, but go ahead, it's an important company and they're successful. So tell us about one of your portfolio companies and why you invested in them. This is a softball right here. So I was going to talk about Solar City, but I can actually talk from the same perspective as our investment in Solar City. I can talk about our first investment, which was a company called Seapower, which ended up getting acquired by Constellation Energy. And in both cases, it was an understanding that there was a stable regulatory environment that had created a new market opportunity to build a services company that actually connected the regulatory environment and sort of the regulatory constructs and the market opportunity to end consumers. In the case of Solar City, the end consumer is sort of the residential homeowner that wants to have solar on the roof. In the case of Seapower, it was access to demand response and energy efficiency services for commercial and industrial customers. And in both cases, it was sort of our understanding of what the market factors were that had created a stable new environment where you can create a managed service company to connect them to the end customers. And the only reason that both of these companies were successful is that they were consumer-centric. They understood what the customers wanted and how to deliver them and connect them back up into these new market constructs versus the other way around of actually being sort of technology-centric or market-centric. And that was sort of the critical success in both those companies. And that's in common with Solar City, like you mentioned, to a certain extent. It's a channel, customer acquisition play. It has nothing to do with transparent, conductive oxides. Exactly. So it's all about delivering a product or a service that the end customer eventually wants. In the case of Solar City, their big inflection point around growth was actually around the stable ITC or investment tax credit that enabled them to offer sort of low cost or zero upfront cost solar. In the case of C-Power, it was this shift and trend towards the electricity markets offering demand response markets and demand response services. Good. Dave, tell us about one of your portfolio companies, one of your proud parent of. I'm going to talk about one of actually our latest investment, which would be with a company called Yirtle, Y-E-R-D-L-E. Why we invested in them, well, first and foremost, was Team. It was a young yet really accomplished team, the former Chief Sustainability Officer at Walmart and the youngest president of the Sierra Club and then the team they put behind them to actually create a shared economy collaborative consumption model whereby the platform enables people in particular friends to share things that they have in their garage, in their house, what have you. That model is consistent with the trend that we're seeing out there, which is the younger generation doesn't want to own anything anymore. They just want to share or borrow. We think that the platform that they put together has a good shot at actually going viral here in the not so distant future and it's meeting a need. At the same time, by meeting that need, what I like most about it is that it addresses resource constraints by enabling people to actually consume less and to share more your reducing use of dirty energy, promoting use of clean energy, reducing resource constraints in some way, shape or form. Okay. All right. I have to bother you, Dave, just for one quick question because you call yourself a venture design studio. Typically, I want to get money from Petrum. I bring him a PowerPoint. I lie to him for about an hour. I tell him that I'm going to be at $5 billion in two years. In three years, we're going to go public or get acquired. He gives me money and I see him once a month at a board meeting occasionally, but he's a good VC. He helps me build my company. What's the process? Who do I have to lie to at your company and do you give me money? What's interesting is that typically you'll come to me, I'll find out about your company through Paydram or Sean or some other venture cap. That is our channel for finding opportunities and why they introduce us to those opportunities is because they bring the money and we bring the services that they can't provide. While we have invested in cash 17 companies as of late, that's not why companies are coming to us. They're coming to us for UX. They're coming to us for brand strategy and business model strategy. These guys are coming to us because they can't provide those. If the VC has some confidence in your capabilities, they essentially outsource some of the company's structuring to you. Is that the wrong way to put it? They're coming to us to help their portfolio or which will soon be our portfolio reimagine their business. It's a very different model than what's been done so far. No one's doing this right now. I reimagine all the time. Sean, don't touch him please. Sean, tell us about a company in your portfolio. I've got a company in my portfolio called Lumigro. It's kind of a both an ag play. It plays off of ag and but it's an LED company. It's LEDs for greenhouses. It is kind of a poster child because what we look for are big. We go out and look and see or decide amongst our partnership what we think big growth areas are going to be. Right away we thought solar had left the station in 2006. We looked for a back end play. We had a solar racking company so instead of front end back end. It benefits from the overall growth of solar. It has done so. Lumigro that was sunlink? Sunlink, correct. So just the mounting hardware for modules on rooftops? Correct. Non-penetrating rooftop mounts. And now they do ground mounts. But Lumigro, so you have everybody chasing the LED market. Everybody realizes that LEDs are the future. But the white light market is 100, I mean how many hundreds of billions you can choose for yourself. But LEDs for greenhouses which access very specific parts of the light spectrum, the reds and the blues that enhance yields for growers is a very small market. It's only about two and a half, three billion dollars. Two and a half, three billion dollars is a plenty big enough market for me. And it's not very competitive. They were leading the league already. The guy had bootstrapped for three and a half years, had the patent, was already post revenue but still looking for a reasonable valuation in our minds to get help and was extremely capital efficient. We're about to go break even in a couple months and there's only been 1.25 million dollars into the company. So they're not making their own LEDs. They're packaging fixtures and selling to greenhouses. Is that right? Correct. The patent is to design the board and on the board you have the LED lights that we buy from them. So what are marijuana growers using currently? Well if you go on YouTube you'll find that Lumigro is very, very popular company. You know what? It's not counting. I told them not to sell into that market and it's actually, we have a few sales into Distributor. We're trying to legally stay appropriate but Distributor up anyway. It's a very small part of the business. Sorry, we've digressed. We've digressed. You get like 10 minute videos that can be done in 30 seconds. Yeah, this is good. But you are replacing incandescence or high pressure sodium or halogen florescence and high pressure sodium. Okay. Florescence and in growth chambers which is universities and like Monsanto just put a big order in. They have a huge underground facility in St. Louis. It's, I don't know what they did. Monsanto you never know. They did an ancient orange and DDT but this will be good stuff. But we're lighting some projects for them. Dow Agri Sciences is a client. Syngenta is a client. The top grow over the year for North America. Rainbow up in BC, Canada is a client. Big names. Okay. Doesn't go in the vice fund. You know there are vice fund portfolios, right? Yeah, if you like. Okay, I understand. I'm not big on classifications. You know it's, it's, I want to sell a product. You know that's the bottom line. You know you've got a company, venture capital is very, very easy and you have a twist on it now and I think it's a great twist. But it's, you're buying equity and there's a lot of different structural formats you can go through to do that. But at the end of the day the company needs to sell a product. You know it's very basic and you've got to just drill into you know how defensible is, well I won't go through the whole screen. All right, good. You know I just ran into a venture capitalist who will mention his name. Works for a reputable large brand name and they no longer have a green tech practice. It used to be that they put one third of their money into green tech companies. They no longer put any new money into their, into green tech unless you can sort of call it a green IT play. If you can throw green into some other vertical they can, they can say okay we'll invest in that. But that's a company with 70, that's a firm with 70 green tech investments. They've invested, they have 70 portfolio companies in green tech and they are running as fast as they can away from that rubric. Pedram is this, are we going to see a lot more, I mean you know we joked it was not that easy to populate this panel because nobody owns up to being a green tech investor anymore. Do you have any pattern recognition that you've seen something like this before where this will rebound or are we stuck in a green tech VC asset class of half a billion dollars a year for the rest of our lives. The pendants swung pretty far the other way. You know as as as rosy colored as everything was I think five years ago where you know it doesn't matter what you do or how much capital you needed you'd get funded. We are sort of in that lull right now where there's not a lot of traditional firms that are chasing new deals and that's absolutely true. But I think that what's going to happen is it's better for you right there's more deals it's lower valuations there is but on the flip side the the concern now the big concern right now which which has actually been for about three or four years is is follow on financing. So even if we come in with the first check are we going to be stuck funding the entire progress and development of the company going forward. So I think what's going to start happening though is is I don't think that there's going to be a re-emergence of a lot of of traditional VCs coming back into the sector like they did before. But I think what's going to happen is there are companies like Nest right where there are true consumers consumer product companies that that do offer an energy solution and a grand scheme of things but they kind of do look like traditional venture places at the same time. So I think those types of companies are absolutely going to get funded by by the traditional VCs. I think the a lot more of the science oriented companies are going to get funded by a new crop of emerging early stage venture capital firms right the the things that you know next gen firms that we just haven't seen yet. I think that model is going to to to serve itself and we see that and the same thing with with IT we were talking about some of these new smaller funds right right sized funds where even if you do get a you know a single or a double it's still pretty good for the fund. So in other words if they sell a company for 30 million dollars and they have a 100 million fund they're they're sitting pretty right whereas you sell a 30 company for 30 million dollars it doesn't move the needle right. Yeah we call that a you know wasted shot right it's a wasted bullet. That's too bad because 95 percent of all exits are at a hundred million dollar valuation or less okay that's where the big opportunity is right now right. And that's why I think there's going to be a lot of new fund managers that are going to have sort of that type of appetite with with the ability to actually get LPs in these quote unquote right sized funds that get in there and take advantage of exactly what Dave's talking about. So the hot the hot trend right now from what I'm hearing in terms of limited partner interest is with funds that are 35 to 75 million focused on seed and growth funds that are 400 million or more the hard to raise funds are in the range of 150 to 300 and that going at early stage. So not the early stage but that late stage financing that you just well so you're saying that late stage that Petra mentioned is easier to get than that round I'm talking about growth. Yeah I'm talking about growth so mezzanine and beyond that's that's where we're seeing funds easier to raise. Yeah I'll jump in on the fund on the second round so I mean you're absolutely right. I mean there's a flight flight to to wherever but strategies are coming in big time. I mean we have we have big corporate venture arms all over us for Series B rounds and beyond. You're saying as limited partners or as co-investors in your portfolio. As a as a as a funding and a co-investor a funding investor for the next round. But they're a very important part of the whole ecosystem and it's you know it's a little bit if you get one then well there's if you have one strategic investor if they don't eventually buy you then it's going to be hard to sell it to another strategic you know somebody in the space because they say well you knew a lot more about that company than I'm ever going to know and you didn't want it so why would I want it kind of thing so you need to get a couple of strategic involved I think. So is there the typical venture fund in its platonic ideal is a 10-year partnership is that is that right it's typically a 10-year partnership and then it's dissolved or it doesn't it doesn't exist. No it goes on. But you're no longer investing from that. You're no longer investing after you should I mean if you're talking about a typical generic fund you're no longer investing in de novo investments after five years. Okay after that point. My point is is that if you had a cure for cancer and it was going to take 15 years to get to market you'd have to pass on that deal. Yes you're passing on the cure for cancer. I'm not passing on cancer saving I'm saying that it's not my feel but if you know that it's cures cancer the valuation is probably a little over my head. Okay all right it's not exactly what I wanted to pull out of you. Are there is there room within the venture capital world to change the model a little bit if materials plays take more than 10 years well then why doesn't your why don't your LPs give you 15 years if are there changes in the covenants that you deal with in your LPs that might make that that might not close out a generation of new energy entrepreneurs. Well I think you know when you're saying it's a 15-year timeline this is a very weird hypothetical construct because the average the average age of a fund is I think right now 15 or 16 years because you add on extra years after the 10 year because there are tailors there are poor for the companies that are still alive still have promise but have not and LPs don't want to be allocated individual shares in these companies and then they have to deal with what they're paying us to do so they keep on renewing and pass and take care of those those companies so it's a weird construct that you're thrown out there but that being said can can I mean the LP GP relationship is a very complex one that changes in cycles and right now gay nailed it nailed it I mean I'm in the market I've got $50 million on the cover of my PPM they're looking for micro VC rifle shot capital efficient people that know the space and have been in the space they're not looking to fund the the the old norm which is the 250 million dollar go take a take a couple of shots at the market and make sure you can invest at least 20 million dollars in each in each company because that's that's that is that's a hindrance to growth you know when you say I have to be able to deploy you know the 20 to 30 million dollars in a company in order to make it worth my while that's a problem I mean we look at trade sales and we look at valuations that are low enough that we can get out at a nice you know cash on cash return without having to go over your 100 million dollar number that you quoted and it's a model that is it works screamingly well so far okay sounds like a good job Dave I'm still I want you to dig down a little into the design and give me an example yeah of you know you have a dozen portfolio companies more or less give me a before and don't use people power but give me a before and after example you know let me give you an example of a brand that I think will resonate with everyone here relative to what design can do and what I mean by reimagination let's think about let's think about nest so you've got you've got before nest 100 plus different thermostat companies out there not sexy who cares and then along comes nest and from a user experience perspective it's completely reimagined as a matter of fact last night except my wife is in Tahoe right now last night I get home we live in Napa I crank the ac to 66 I get a phone call from her because she's on her phone and can see what I just did in terms of the thermostat she's like why do you have it at 66 talk about a reimagination of user experience like that that's creepy but wild right yeah from a brand perspective I mean think about it you walk into a lot of some of my friends you walk into their house and they literally think that nest is sexy it's the first thing they want to show hey look what I got they have like a little yeah chairs sitting looking at the thermostat yes and then from a business model perspective they're doing 50 60 thousand month units a month right now so how many how many 50 to 60 thousand it's it's it's it's unreal from a user experience brand and business model perspective what what design can do and design thinking can do with regards to reimagining the way in which something works and is done and sold okay but I asked you to give me an example from a company in your portfolio yeah absolutely absolutely so so scoot it took it took it reimagined the way in which people commute through the city and basically is now like zip car for electric scooters and so now in in san francisco there are scooters all over the city where people are taking locating the scooter with their phone using that phone as their key and they're they're running errands they're taking you know a scooter for the weekend and traveling around the city and they're reimagining the way in which people actually you know commute through the city move yeah all through design who are the customers who is it is it really young people is it or is it a more varied it's kind of it's twofold one it's the it's the it's the it's the tech kind of crowd that you know want to go down from their office building and and and grab a scooter and go run an errand and it's also you know the the weekend visitor that comes in and instead of you know taking the bus or a taxi or something like that hops on the electric scooter and sure goes around there goes around town all right petra and this is a great theme actually i just wanted to touch on that i mean the reimagining existing industries doesn't necessarily have to be done through technology i mean we're investors in a company called lift which is doing the exact same thing right it's just reimagining public transportation through ride sharing and you know i don't know if you guys have seen their little pink moustaches up in san francisco it's it's it's the entire experience is trying to to change make it a better cheaper experience and just get jumping into a cab i totally see all the pink moustaches but i have no idea what's going on behind yeah just download the app and get a ride okay you might actually every car with that moustache is a lift is a participant a participant in that that's right yeah yeah you get a fist pump too right that's right now i know um petra let's we're talking in general let's talk about utilities just for a second okay just a little bit um you've thought about reimagining the utility a little bit we've had a lot of conversations in this so let's just keep it clean but um what what do you what what do you re-imagine the utility uh organization for me solar city think about it great one word answer i love that and in fact they call themselves utility linden rive calls himself utility 2.0 and so that's that's a that's a beautiful example i think right that distributed generation um and they're not just solar city their energy storage company as well as energy efficiency recently announced so they're a real threat to um utilities right yeah and a potential partner as well right it's delivering the services when you're a threat yes um so give me a different a so solar city that's an easy answer what what do you think if you were going to invest in something that approached that looked at pricing or electricity or delivering electricity yeah what do you see as as yeah we actually spent a long time thinking about that and uh and we started by looking at the uh the retail markets down in texas and also in the pjm market is being interesting areas that you could reimagine what a retail business would look like if you were just an energy service provider um and and there's a lot of different ways of thinking about i mean those guys are just basically competing by having you know fancier billboards and that's that's about it right there's really about the in the energy retail area territory this exactly yeah and there's buying for each other's business last i checked there's like 39 of them that you can go choose from and they're all fundamentally offering the same thing some with a free thermostat some not but but it's it's a little bit on price but it's not really being super creative about the types of things that people want and so what we're actually starting to see is that that the uh the entertainment um and the communications companies are now starting to tread in this territory as well you know companies like Comcast and companies like AT&T are now realizing that it's not all that difficult to be a full service provider because energy from their perspective is a commodity that they can just as long as you own the customer experience through things like Nest then you can sort of get a wholesaler or a wholesale provider to provide everything else that you need in terms of the infrastructure on the back end for energy so so i think that that's that's the way that i think the future is going to go is going to be more of these bundled package solutions that aren't just electrons flowing but but a lot more services packaged into them i was at um it's the Edison Edison electric international meeting is that sound right it was a couple of weeks ago in san francisco and it's where a thousand um executives from iou's from investor owned utilities descend and uh if you're interested in what utilities really feel you need to go to that event because when they come to green tech events their own best behavior and they kiss butt right um but when they're in amongst a thousand of their own folks they they let their hair what little there is of it down and they talk about the threat to their basic existence that renewables pose and you could hear a little bit of renewables actually are big enough now to be bothering them a little bit and there there there's going to be some showdowns maybe good spirited bad spirited but there's going to be some interesting um adversarial events coming up between renewables and and and and the large utilities i think sorry that was a diversion that was a digression uh sean you you have a couple of water companies in your portfolio which is somewhat unusual um especially that you have a few in in not that enormous of portfolio and the the the vc lore is that you can't make money in water we just sold one for three three times our money okay so much for vc lore um the the other one is uh is uh electric deion deionization which is the next uh rev on purification and vc lore also has it that these take uh that there's a time mismatch when you're dealing with water because you're always selling to municipal water uh we're actually selling the residential i mean it was a it's it's a it's a technology that the ceo founded uh or or has 50 patents when he was at seamans he was uh and they had they well actually just are in the process of selling it off but it was a 300 million dollars a year of business in the municipality space we took it and our client to the resident uh residential and because he's just shrinking it down making the technology much smaller and uh restaurants you know um small businesses apartments uh apartment buildings i should say um i mean water waters is is it's it's the ocean i mean it's scary it's got a lot of power there and we don't have enough fresh water and whoever comes up with the low energy diesel idea is going to be you know on in the force 400 right away um but at the end of the day people there haven't been many good ideas we specifically look for water because we have a partner who knows water very well um and have um you know you say we funded two out of our nine portfolio companies uh that that is a big percentage but we i mean compared to what we've seen we we've been very very very targeted um all right so so how is deal flow these days petrim are you are you still beating the bushes you're still talking to entrepreneurs every day yeah we're looking at a company we're absolutely like i said we were we're as active as we've ever been i mean our our thesis hasn't changed from from day one and and we're still we're still looking um but it just really has to do with with the uh the same types of filters that we have on any other deal so so we don't have an allocation specifically for energy um you know but i think that you know when the deals for good deals right that's it 100 allocation on good deals is what we're we're gunning for um if you know the right team like for example the the team Yurtle that that Dave was mentioning comes in with the disruptive idea that's fantastic so we'll do those all day long okay and and the action the level of activity that you're seeing i mean Dave are you lots lots you know because we're we're typically on the it side and and what has happened over you know the past call it four or five years been in particular over since 1995 is that the cost to actually start a startup has gone down in fact it is 99 cheaper cost you 99 less to actually start a company today than it did in 1995 and and so what that turns into is more and more startups actually um coming about so you're looking at more and more opportunities more good more more bad but at the end of the day more and more companies but uh okay but is uh Sean or anyone if if someone comes in with that capital intensive play you tell them to find another someone who can afford the round C and the round D i do that all the time you do that all the time say no right because of capital intensity okay okay and so it's not our game i mean it's it's uh if there's a factor if there's a factory in the future since there's a factory in the future it's not part of your program no i mean we've got a company that actually just bought a factory so he puts me in a little bit of a spot here but it's also a segment what that nobody would nobody would fund this woman um she'd gone to at least 100 different places and she walked to my door and i we funded her we led the first round and uh they're going to be in the news soon it's a segment that wasn't it's in the ag space basically and a segment that wasn't even identified as under the clean tech umbrella before uh at the time of investment and it's become very very successful and they're they own a factory but you know that's not that wasn't what i was thinking going into it and i just think i mean one thing you can count on for sure is that things will change i mean that's why you you overweight management in an investment decision is because there will be pivots there will be changes i mean without question 100 percent of the time nothing goes perfectly i mean that's why projections are just kind of a it's like a consulting interview you know case study it's like they we want to see how you're thinking about it rather than what the actual numbers are well the the google interview has turned out to be a load of garbage right if they ask you how many ping pong bowls you can fit in the empire state building it proves nothing even if you get the answer correct why aren't manhole covers square why are manhole covers square why aren't they why aren't they why are they why are they around i don't know you don't get a job you don't get a job at microsoft indeed um petrim same for you somebody comes in and says and this is a little tricky right somebody comes in and says they have a thin film cadmium telluride solar play for you named real solar um what do you do what how did you end up with that against your thesis yes sorry sorry team honestly it was yeah so so we were we were enamored with the team and and their ability to not necessarily want to create um and and product company but a tools company and that's exactly what they've done before their their xkla tank our guys uh it's one of my portfolio companies actually uh with the technology of super low cost solar manufacturing which they don't want to do in-house they actually are a licensing model with the projections to get down to 30 cents a watt um out of their first run and that's what we're kind of gunning for helping to help them position so it's it's not it's not somebody who's going to come back and say we need to build a half a billion dollar factory no because that's that's uh you know shan mentioned strategic that's exactly what we're looking for right now right is is that the series b series c is no longer going up and down sandhill road it's actually going and finding folks um you know in russia in china yeah yeah everywhere there so you know the the title of this panel is investment trends in energy and it's it's it's too enormous a scope to talk about you could narrow it down to just water or uh ride sharing or the sharing economy or cadmium telluride so it's it's does a little bit of a disservice because we can't cover what we want to and well it does a service because we can skip over and talk about anything we want which is what we did um we have 10 minutes um you have three venture capitalists who are open for business please feel free to rich hilt right there um my name my name is rich hilt and i'm unaffiliated um just like grouch remarks any affiliation that i would have would you wouldn't belong to any club that would have you as a member there's a whole bunch of pieces to the venture capital business the the piece that got attracted like a moth to the flame was the it high tech part um if you look at the medical devices farm a part of vc it it seems to be more comfortable with the longer term from developing a product the larger investments requirements what is it about the it part is it simply the larger narcissism within that sector that that drew them to clean tech as opposed to drawing the med tech people to clean tech so it's it's funny because eric and i were actually talking about this exact same thing if you think about the the med tech side of things it's uh it's it's capital intensive it's it's very very long time cycles time time frames it's highly regulated it's highly regulated there's a lot of things that that you could say are are similar except for one fundamental difference which are um patents and your ability to actually extract um high economic rent from your end product so the the issue that i have for example and i'll just you know i'll sort of bash my own portfolio company for a second that my real solar guys at the end of the day they're producing electrons and there's no way for them to say because of the way that i produce my electrons i'm going to charge you 50x what pg and e charges you um whereas if i do have a drug that prolongs life for initial three and a half years for cancer patient i can virtually name my own price so that's the fundamental difference right and i think that that the the med tech folks are smart enough to realize that that they don't have that advantage in the in the commodity industry um where you have to compete with coal and you have to compete with existing water technologies whatever the case might be right so so it's the ability to extract that economic rent as i think the fundamental difference between the two and so from from an it perspective and then the second part of that is that a lot of the technologies that we saw um on the on the solar side really were around semiconductors initially and so that was a more natural fit because it was semiconductor processes semiconductor components and what have you so i think for for those two reasons alone is i think where people shifted that way sir yeah john mashey tech visor um so in thinking about the ups and downs in clean tech investment uh could you maybe partition that into the what's particular to clean tech and what's particular to the thing we've seen in vc investments over the years where you know there were investments in 30 disk drive companies all of whom were going to have 50 percent of the market and then there were a pile of investments in mini supercomputer makers but well you know etc etc so how how much do you think this is of the here's a bunch of new ideas a whole lot of companies start a lot of investments go and now it takes a while to sort things out until the sort of next things come along so how much is similar to that and what's different you want to take crack at this one first sure um i think what happened is the the the term clean tech got coined you know it leg is on a lazy basis it's always there's always been clean tech i mean it's been waste management it's been environmental tech all these different things but what happened was 2005 you know element went out dfj element went out put up 150 uh 150 million on a cover and came home with 282 million dollars and the place you know everyone went crazy cash flows it's very interesting it's it's very uh feel good you know there's a lot of sri you know social responsibility um everybody's talking about the double bottom line at that point in time so a lot of money flowed into the sector everybody wanted to get into it a lot of quick poor decisions were made a lot of i mean it it like like you said quite well i think it takes sorting out and i think the the and the press has a lot of blame too because you know i've heard about a clean tech bubble okay clean tech is going to be going for the next hundred years at least i mean energy is just too big of a segment on its own besides anything else in clean tech water or efficiency or anything like that energy on its own is is such a huge global industry that you cannot not try to invest in new technologies and new delivery mechanisms and new everything new in that sector so what happened is it is a very very broad umbrella and some people started doing me to investing in the first you know with the biofuels and this in the front end solar and then people got smarter and but there was the failures were so public and so unfair i mean selenger oh we were not going to bring that up selenger was unfair okay because it was a good technology with too too much money in and but too too long of a timeline didn't anticipate so far coming down and but the press that that got compared to the dollars invested in a lot and smart ideas was ridiculous and really pushed public opinion i think that's why a lot of these uh generalist funds that played in clean tech because they it's a vc is a business you know we have our clients our clients are lps so and their lps are starting to they're reading the paper going selenger what a huge f up you know why why are you why did you invest it no even why you know why are you even in that space get out and so they dictate to these these and and and the the generalist funds that have lps that are angry about it don't want those lps angry because they're going to be keep raising funds right but people that are dedicated to the sector are are going to roll with the waves and let it come wave technologies can come yeah all right let's take another question hi i'm dan miller with the rotor group or clean tech seed state to enter capital following up actually on that discussion so one of the major drivers of clean tech that's actually not even been mentioned is climate change we're there's a huge problem and when congress didn't pass the energy bill everyone said well i guess climate change was a passing fad and even though i kind of wish it was a passing fad it's not and so i'd like your comments on how the current and coming impacts and more attention and knowledge of the problems facing us and the need to address them are going to change current situation in clean tech investing i'd like to start but jump in at any point just jump in you know vc is a business like i just said and you need money to be able to fund solutions to the problems of global warming and to help our earth live so that's why you we haven't heard it yet because the you mean your fund has to make money to raise more money to be able to address more problems at the end of the day i chose clean tech because of what you're talking about because i i feel that our environments in peril and i have young daughters and i want that i'm not going to cry like a kid with the john tour but but i feel the same way i mean i'm i'm very very much a true believer i'm a i'm a i'm one of the target markets for a lot of companies that come in that we say no to because their only market is true believers i'm that guy i'll pay a little bit more to have something green uh but that's not a good business uh but that's just to start so dave do your do your startups care about global warming can well yeah i mean that's it's one of the reasons i know that's not what you ask but close enough well you know we started green start under the premise that that that climate change was the single defining challenge of our generation and if you're gonna help solve that problem you need an entrepreneurs and innovation to do that and then and then how do you do that well you find good entrepreneurs and you help them and and the good news is that we see good entrepreneurs getting into the sector not only to make money but to to to to help solve this problem and they're actually figuring out they're inspired by actually solving a problem that is climate change and making money from it so we see a whole new trend of of young smart motivated and then passionate people coming in to solve this problem so petra a company comes to you and says there's going to be cap and trade legislation in the next four years and we have a software program that will do will ease some aspect of carbon trading whether it's arbitrage or or just i funded that company okay it's zero what's the name of the company carbon flow carbon flow oh neil dykeman yes okay um all right that answers he answered your question yes so i just wanted it's uh i love actually audience questions because because they end up kind of going together really well so so the the climate change issues actually goes back to the previous question um you know these these different cycles i think the climate change issue was the catalyst that actually created a lot of the interest that we saw in the first wave of investments right i think that that was the the number one thing if i have to point that one thing right you say oil prices blah blah blah but i think really it was it was the first time that that all these things came together which which created a quasi inflection point for people to get interested in start investing um and it's not going to go away right but i think it's kind of served its purpose that now the general awareness is there and there's a lot of people like like davis saying um that they do want to continue to add to this i think the the one thing that i would point to which has really nothing to do with energy is uh is education i think education is a similar sector that's going to get disrupted and it's going to get a lot of interest much like the the world of energy and clean tech did about five six years ago because of the the technological disruption that we're seeing in the world of education and how that you know like the ipad for example can change the way that teachers and students interact so so there's there's always something that needs to happen before you end up with with these types of cycles and i think carbon climate change definitely serves purpose reaper from sri international following up on the question that you asked yeah um seems to be there you know there has to be clarity of purpose and i'm hearing on the one hand clarity of purpose so if the fund is there really to make money i see plenty of opportunities because the this industry is so huge several trillion dollars so getting a piece of the action can make certainly some investors very very rich but does it move the needle on the climate change is the question and if i look at what has happened the only thing that Allah has changed to any significant amount to bring down the co2 emissions has been the switching from coal to natural gas what about right and an economic downturn that helped as well no no i can tell you that it was not just economic downturn if i factor that out and look at only the emissions from electricity production in the us because if i look at the how many terawatt hours and we can talk that separately offline yes but you can you can factor that out also despite that if you look at the tonnage of co2 abated you'll see that that's where it's happening so we probably in the 30 seconds we have here we're probably not going to be able to address this but are you saying that natural you're saying that natural gas has made some fundamental changes in our carbon footprint my question was about is the VC should the public be looking to the VC should the public be looking to the VC the answer is no i don't know you don't even have to finish that sentence whether whether that whether or not they do we are trying to address you know the underlying issues i mean i think if you look at energy efficiency there's no nothing better than taking a load off the grid right and there are i mean there's an extreme example i mean if you want to look at a micro case study and not micro it's a big country japan with their nuclear disaster and what they've tried to do as a government and and they have big plans and it's a lot of energy they're taking off the grid and that will lower emissions yeah energy efficiency in general especially with commercial buildings and then you talked really quickly about well i wanted to talk about leakage because you yeah i think that um leakages it relates to um that i should have uh yes exactly that it could solve it but but methane leakage is another problem that that that results by using this technology and so what do you do there was just a 128 million dollar investment in a company called skionic to do ccs carbon capture and this is quick sequestration to turn it into baking soda if the science is actually real i'm not quite sure i think we have one more question 128 million dollars it better be real it's not a guarantee nope that's it that's it thanks for our panel Sean, Pedram, Dave, thank you guys