 Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here It's even a greater pleasure to be here talk about something that I'm passionate about and that startup companies It's very good to start the whole day with startups, right? And it's even more interesting to see that there are people like us the three of us sitting together and a lot more people in the audience that are those that really do start something from the beginning I I've been an entrepreneur for the last 16 years that is not something that I planned I'm an electrical engineer by training with the MBA in international management and back in the 70s when I graduated There were about 10 of us in a class of 2000 when I started working at Honeywell I was the only female engineer for about 10 years until another person showed up So it is a great pleasure to see so many more people interested in STEM being here and looking forward to participating in the energy revolution I Started my third company last year to develop a thousand megawatts of a floating offshore wind off the coast of California because California has committed to 50 percent renewables by the year 2030 and it will require a lot of energy. However, to get a company going. There are a lot of challenges that we need to overcome Number one financial you already heard at least three times here today in the morning People are looking for money without money. You cannot really make things happen other challenges that we're going to discuss today Include how do you get technology from an idea to reality? How do you get the technology that has been demonstrated to become commercially viable? All those things are very big challenges that we need to discuss here today We have two two panelists Shazia Khan who is with the eco energy finance That's connecting off-grid Pakistanians to electricity and Atosha cave with opus 12 that converts Or looks for CO2 reduction and biofuels I'll let each of them to describe their careers and maybe each of you can talk about How you got to where you are? Did you plan to be an entrepreneur or did it just kind of happen? Talk about your path. So maybe we can start with you Yeah, so I I am a co-founder of opus 12 where we take carbon dioxide water and electricity and we Converted into chemicals and fuels and we do that by using metal catalysts and Electricity to break down the CO2 and water into smaller bits and pieces and then reform them into new molecules and these molecules include things like diesel fuel and Plastics and things like that that we use commonly today and my journey To entrepreneurship started right here at Stanford so I did my PhD work here and me and the other technical co-founder kinder cool We did our PhD together in the lab and in the chemical engineering department and about two and a half years ago We you know we're toward the end of our term here and we're really excited about the products We were working on and really love the technology and really passionate about it and so we wanted to continue the work and we we thought the technology was ready for Industry scale up and so We started to build a company and we we found a Student who was doing an MBA as well as a master's of engineering and we we joined forces and we started opus 12 Out of the lab here at Stanford Okay Thank you, Allah, and thank you all for being here and really for this opportunity I'm gonna start with my journey I can trace it back to one very distinct moment when I was a little girl. I had this very peculiar habit I used to steal gold chains out of my mother's jewelry box And I used to spend hours and hours tangling them up into these knots the more intractable to not the better And then I would derive great pleasure From untangling them just I would try to make the worst knot that I couldn't then just spent hours and hours and hours Untangling them and I can still remember that sweet spot that moment where I was like Oh, I have this puzzle all the threads become clear and they all They all just start to unravel and everything falls into place And I think that as an entrepreneur This is something that you really have to love you have to love problem-solving you have to be able to look at a challenge see it as a problem and then Appreciate it for its complexity and really love the process of solving the problem because as an entrepreneur you Find yourself solving the same challenges again or again again and again you create a model You have one iteration and then each time you have a new development you solve one set of problems There's a whole another set of variables that you have to solve So you have to really enjoy that process. I think as an entrepreneur for the last ten years I've been working on one very big knot one very big intractable problem, and that is the energy crisis in Pakistan It's a really really interesting problem for me My family is Pakistani-American. I was born and raised in the US and upstate, New York I was very interested in finding out what the roots of poverty were and figuring out how to work towards a solution for poverty alleviation in Pakistan and I found that Poverty is inextricably linked with lack of access to energy to electricity certainly in Pakistan, but in many different developing countries and so I went to I Went to law school, and I studied environmental law with a concentration on energy issues I After law school I ended up working for the World Bank first as an intern and then as a consultant But I left there because I wanted to do something a lot more hands-on and really Dig deep into the heart of this problem. So in 2009 I created a company called eco energy finance And when I first launched it it was just a traditional nonprofit I was figuring out how can I bring solar energy solutions and distribute them To places in rural Pakistan, but once I got there I realized that there was actually hundreds of thousands of people where I only had a couple of thousands of solutions so I I came back and I went to Wharton and I enlisted the help of a group of people from Wharton who could help me turn this into a social enterprise and it's been mentioned that one of the only ways to solve these problems is to figure out a way to Make it profitable and to make it financially sustainable. And so that's what I was looking to do. So in 2011 I turned my company into a true company into a social enterprise and We began distributing solar Solar home systems solar lanterns and we pioneered pay-as-you-go solar in Pakistan I know Anya just talked about that a couple of minutes ago. I have a co-founder. His name is Jeremy Higgs He's an Australian that's been living in Karachi for the last eight years and together we have built a sales distribution network that has powered over 12,000 homes and That's where we sit today wonderful, so It's Russia since your company developed technology and maybe you can talk a little bit about the path that you took to develop your technology the funding how did you raise the money and What would it take and how long would it take for the? Technology and to become a product to become commercially viable available and cost effective Yeah, that's a great question because when we were here at Stanford I mean the our PhD work was pretty much orthogonal to kind of what we do now in terms of developing the country I mean developing the company You know our work here was basic science so it was in the basic science side and our company is Actually building this reactor. So we basically started out with a set of ideas and That's a very risky place to be if you're developing technology because there's technology risk and that there's a chance that your ideas won't work and so it was very tough getting Traditional VC funding, you know people told us well as soon as you build a prototype that's working will fund you But we couldn't afford to build a prototype. We were just grad students and didn't have any disposable income to kind of Build a lab and like have this prototype working. It's not something you can do in your garage so we we basically Set out to build an ecosystem around us that would provide the funding and the mentorship and Things like that to get us going and so we found that through through the Tomcat Center here at Stanford We got a grant through them that helped us build that first prototype we also Got into Stardex and we're also in a incubator at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab called Cyclochon Road and You know, this is this has created this ecosystem around us that allowed us to Use resources to build our prototype Much much cheaper and sort of a lean startup way, which has been Phenomenal because otherwise, you know, who knows what would have happened in terms of us being able to develop this this company So if there's any one bit of advice I would give for building a clean tech Startup is make sure you create this ecosystem around you through incubators and the accelerators and mentors and and funding sources as well And since we've we've been a Cyclochon Road We have developed a prototype and and now that we have data. We know that our ideas work We're scaling them up and we're using Both private money through angel investors as well as government grants So there's small small business innovation research grants that are out there that have been Tremendous help for us because we basically write up our proposal and we show data That shows that these these ideas can work and we've been given, you know small amounts of money to do feasibility studies and then once we can show that it is feasible we'll get a larger sum of money to actually develop the technology and Once we you know can can develop our sort of larger scale prototype Then we'll be very attractive for VCs who will come in later and can support us As we continue to scale up and grow into a large company And and in terms of developing technology, it does take quite some time. I mean you you know Every step of the way you kind of have to show that your technology works You you can't release sort of a product that has a lot of bugs in it because no one You know a company a customer that's buying your product is investing a lot of money in this and they they're relying on it They're you know, it's an energy system or it's something that they rely on so to You have to have it right the first time and so that takes time and it takes funding and takes Setting goals and really being deliberate and making sure you can reach your performance points and knowing The economics of your system and so we've been doing all of that and and we're still pretty early You know, we we're working and we're getting really good progress, but there's still much many more miles to go before we Should say yeah, your company has a service. It's not really a product per se. It's a service So how do you see that service to be able to scale such that it can broaden Its population base and be reachable by many more people. What would you need to be able to do that? Well funding as you've mentioned is definitely critical. We've done We've done pretty well, we've done the best that we could we've raised almost five hundred thousand dollars just through grants debt supplier credit for us It is a service that we're providing we're providing something that's the equivalent of the utility service that you all that we all have here We pay for access to reliable electricity and that's the same thing in Off-grid, Pakistan there are 70 million people there that want access to reliable electricity and the biggest challenge that we've had it is Working in a country where the government has no interest in providing Access to you know to energy for these people. They're very focused on increasing capacity for the national grid but 40% of the population lives in these rural areas and the government has no interest or no plan to get them connected or get them Electrified so there was definitely a market opportunity there for us. It was really just about increasing energy access But there is a market there. We have a 93% repayment rate amongst our customers. We go we connect them We did extensive market research We had to get a we got a great deal of grant money just to do the market research because the data in Pakistan is very Scare, so I would say that we spent three or four years just going and trying to understand with the true energy picture In Pakistan was I think that market research is really critical We visited 44,000 households 2200 villages just collecting data figuring out what energy consumption patterns were What people were spending what their livelihoods were what percentage of their income? They were spending and then we wanted to provide them with a drop-in solution That was affordable to them and that was comparable to what they were already paying or less And so now we go we connect people they pay through Through a mobile money agent. It's basically they're pre-paying. They're the same way that they go and they top off on their cell phones They're pre-paying a credit We can unlock it remotely and then that unlocks a corresponding amount of energy to them every single month I think that it's going to take off in the same way that cell phones have taken off a lot of times When I get pushed back, it's that oh well It doesn't really make a lot of sense to have these decentralized Solar solutions instead you should be working on expanding the national grid which is very expensive and doesn't make any sense Or building micro grids well that doesn't actually make any sense either because that's very expensive and that's Generating more electricity than these people actually have the need for they want to light some fans some light bulbs charge their phones They want to power a TV. They want to connect to the internet They don't need to be paying for the infrastructure that a micro grid or that expanding the national grid needs They they want they need something the equivalent of a cell phone to me It's like if somebody were to say well, we really need to still go and build power lines for phones because that's how people do it Why there's a hundred and eighty million people in Pakistan a hundred and thirty million of them have cell phones Why wouldn't they if they can use that cell phone to pay for their electricity? And why if they're already used to paying for something that's in their hand that they can carry around with them Why wouldn't they want the same thing for their energy? So I think it's really just a matter of time before before Decentralized solar solutions become the solution in the same way that cell phones have in developing countries so if you look back and You try to identify three things events something that made you Come to where you are besides the mother's drawer Chains is that you were solving is as a puzzle, but there are other things What are the three things that made you who you are got your company to where it is and Would allow you to succeed in the future? well, I would say for me in Growing up in Houston, Texas. I was a I grew up adjacent to a neighborhood that was affected adversely by an oil and gas waste site and Kind of hearing about this class action lawsuit that was happening really Kind of affected me and set me on the path toward finding Cleaner energy and and and more environmental solutions for our energy and chemical needs So I would say that was probably like the first big spark that kind of Put me on this path Secondly, I would say just having a lot of strong mentors along the way There's several men and women who have really provided great advice and great Mentorship not only just for me, but also for our company now in our team again through these equal systems You know the the start X and the cyclotron row and Tomcat Center have been really great in terms of encouraging us and You know, there were some times when we thought oh, maybe we're not quite ready and and you know Someone said no just go do it and we did it and and and that has been super helpful in terms of building momentum and getting a forward traction and I guess third I would say Getting a good team together. So so I mentioned earlier Kendra and I we did our PhD together So I know a lot about Kendra more than I probably would want to know because we've worked together for so long And so that's been really great to have that really strong not only not only we you know good co-workers, but we also Really understand each other really work well together And then we've built a team that's this phenomenal. We've been lucky and having an attracting really top scientist and and Who also work well as a team is that's been it's been huge. It's not only just It's great to go to work for the sense of purpose But also just it's really fun just to be around this team. So I think that that helps get us through the tough times great Shazia three things that I think Well, I think first that I'm very American. I was born and raised here I would say that my values are very American my confidence my you know bravado is very American but some of the things that really helped to define and to shape who I am are Visits that I had as a child to Pakistan I used to go to Pakistan regularly age 4 age 6 age 8 8 10 age 10 12 every two years I used to visit and Those I have very vivid memories that I don't want to say haunt me But really left an impression on me coming from America. I I remember There was no light no hot water no fans. It was really hot there I remember just seeing so much poverty and it was Really difficult as a child to see just so much poverty and go from feeling this sense of hopelessness to Anger to well, why can't I be part of the solution? So I think that if you see anything that Angers you that that can on the flip side be something to motivate you to be part of the solution or the change I Remember seeing kids younger than me and my brother age 4 selling Chiklitz on the side of the road selling fresh coconut no shoes nothing I mean I will never be able to erase those memories, but now every time I go back to Pakistan I feel more and more Empowered I see different things. I see more positive things. I see how I can I am effectuating change the women that we're working with We're giving them hope. We're giving them opportunities to make a living That's something that definitely shaped me I would echo it Tasha's sentiment having a good team is really critical I knew this is something that I wanted to do But I would say that we this company was really reborn in 2011 when I took on a partner Jeremy Higgs I think that it's really important to have a partner that that balances you out You both need to understand very well your own weaknesses your own strengths and then gravitate towards somebody that can Supplement, you know where wherever you have deficiencies and Third, I mean in terms of the company. It's really important that market research was really important Financial sustainability and whatever you do. It's really critical that from the outset you look at a way to make it financially sustainable and scalable I worked really hard to Grow the network that I needed to give me the funding that I needed and then and then just put yourself out there We I really we we applied to for a lot of grant opportunities that I didn't think that we would get and we did we won National Energy Geographic's great energy challenge. We got a lot of support from the UK government We've gotten great support from the US from the Department of State We've been in talks with USAID for a long time, so there is support out there You just have to be willing to go out and and get it so as we come to the conclusion of the panel if you project yourself to 2050 and You try to imagine that your product your service is now in mainstream. How would you see it? So let's start with you. Yeah, well, okay. There's two things. I would say about 2050 in my my product So also one our use of carbon extends much beyond just fuels and energy I mean we use carbon to make plastics to make household products. I mean You know if in 2050 let's say the you know the grid were all renewables or fusion came on mind You know, we would still need carbon products and so my company my technology really sees ourselves as Like transforming the way we make Compounds and chemicals and products and that we were starting from the ground up We're taking these fundamental building blocks of CO2 and water and we're just making new products from that the same products that we currently already use so I can see us literally making plastics from CO2 that would have been in the air and in providing this sort of Recycling and an industrial CO2 cycle that that we would create another really exciting Avenue for my technology in 2050 is that so the the Martian atmosphere is 95% CO2 So, you know SpaceX and NASA have announced they have plans to go to Mars and Our technology can be right there making fuels and chemicals and products and things that the astronauts there would Would need to survive and so that's really exciting to think that you know if we as a planet decide to go beyond earth and go into this to space that Our our little module can be right there making making some of the most fundamental products that you would need to survive in space So I See that there's 1.2 billion people in this world that don't have access to electricity in the developing world and The technology is already here So I see it by 2050 that this will become ubiquitous as a solution. There's Several companies around the world that are doing something similar to what we're doing So the technology is really only one aspect of it the difficulty is how do you get a technology from a Design lab or from a warehouse and bring it into the hands of people and I think that What's going to be critical for for us to reach this critical mass or to reach this tipping point Where everybody has access to like basic energy services probably through solar in the developing world is going to be when you get Companies that leverage local expertise that you need in order to create the distribution networks To get it into the hands of people. So there's been widespread success in East Africa And Copa off-grid electric. There's been many there's some in India For Pakistan, we don't have the same Networks are the same platforms available. So we have to do something different and Nepal doesn't have the same platforms available So you have to really have a local you really need to engage local expertise and figure out a way to Make distribution happen. So thank you very much ladies. I guess to summarize start off is possible funding is necessary make your dreams happen and Look out to the future because if you can project your product service or whatever to be available 10 15 years from now, you'll make it happen. So thank you very much. Thank you ladies