 John, thank you. That was very generous an introduction. In the 1990s, I had the opportunity to take courses with Bo John Wine and Jim Sweeney. And it challenged and changed the direction of my course of study in an era when I had many wonderful colleagues entering the clean energy revolutions at their outset. And one among them was Mr. Mike Lin. So it is a great honor of mine to be able to introduce to you your premier speaker for the opening energy seminar, Mike Lin, who had a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in product design and with a restless sense of purpose, launched out of Stanford to apply that ingenuity to some of the world's most pressing problems, but through the vector of business. Mike now holds six patents, is a serial entrepreneur who has laid claim to truly legendary startup houses like McConny Power acquired by Google, or Squid Labs, especially Instructables acquired by Autodesk. But the crowning feet of earlier part of his career was being the founding CEO of Phoenix International. And this is a company that you might not have heard of, except for right now, you could go to the web and look up NG Energy Access and find a company that is serving nearly 10 million people with renewable energy solutions in some of the places of the world where it can matter the most. That is the result of a company, Phoenix, that Mike had started and led with $45 million of venture debt and venture capital to a growth stage of 350 employees before it was acquired by one of the world's largest utility companies in partnership with three of the largest telecom companies. It's really an ingenious mixture of achieving both speed and scale, phrases that have been popularized and often used here at Stanford, that gives me great humility when thinking now about our opportunity and privilege to learn from Mike's experience as he's made the shift from being an entrepreneur raising venture capital to a venture capital making those investments. And at Stanford, Mike is now a lecturer in the sustainability degree progress program at the graduate level, and I want to tell you the name of his course, if you're not holding it already, the Integrative Design, Entrepreneurship, and Venture Capital for Sustainability course, Sust 234. It is a great honor to welcome Mike Lin as an alumni back to the Energy Seminar. We have such great opportunities to engage people at Stanford through this series. I hope all of you will take the opportunity to join the discussion session immediately following this at 5.30. And if you haven't got all of your fill, we welcome you to have dinner with Mike at the Explorer Energy House, as John Wyatt pointed out at 7 o'clock tonight. With no further ado, Mike, please. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much, Holmes, for the warm welcome. Thank you, Professor Wyatt. Rachel, as well, for coordinating all of this. And my sincere thanks to Stanford, the Door School of Sustainability, the Pre-Court Institute. This is a tremendously exciting time to be a student at Stanford, and I am so envious of you because it was about 20 years ago that I graduated from Stanford with my undergrad degree, and quite a lot has changed. And so today I'm excited to share with you a bit more detail, kind of all the ins and outs and what kind of brought us to these various different milestones that Holmes described. And I guess to begin, as Holmes mentioned, I'm co-founder and general partner at Dangerous Ventures with my two founders, Gabby Darbacher and Ward Hendon. And so we're an early stage venture fund investing in climate tech, but with kind of a different approach rather than saying we're interested in one sector or another looking at just mobility, or perhaps photovoltaics, wind, power generation, what have you, we're taking a little different approach. We're investing in the world's most dangerous and pressing problems, and we think about that in a slightly different way as well. Not only are we looking to mitigate climate change, perhaps even adapt to it, some even want to be more resilient. We're taking a look and asking, might there be companies that are taking an entirely different approach, an integrative one where they're looking holistically, systemically at the challenges that face us? And could they design companies, products and services, but most importantly, business models that are actually anti-fragile, that they can, in fact, get stronger? They're better. They're even more needed when there's even more volatility, when they're more shocks. And surely there's going to be more extreme weather events, storms, wildfires and the like. And so today I wanted to walk you through my personal journey. Starting with my time here at Stanford, as Holmes mentioned, I started in 1999 where I studied mechanical engineering and product design. I took a bit of a gap year. I went to Yale for a year, where I studied at the school forestry, and I took energy systems coursework with Arnold Grubler, but also took classes in gender studies. And I worked in a lab under Natalie Jermajenko, who ran the X design lab. And so it was this really meandering path, if you will, where I was always interested in climate and the environment. And these were the very early days where it was just about reusable lunch sacks and trying to throw your aluminum can in the recycling bin. But upon returning to Stanford, I had the great opportunity and pleasure of being able to take classes at the D school. And so that was just getting off the ground. And courses like Design for Appropriate Technology was offered when I was a freshman, as well before the D school was there, but it was the predecessor of what's now evolved and become Design for Extreme Affordability, which is a class if you're interested in this notion of international development and helping people who are living in poverty pull themselves up out of poverty with new products and services. I highly recommend that you take a look at the D school in that class, Extreme Affordability. But also there were classes on designing for autism and even a project working on sustainability with Walmart. And I need to say thank you to Professor David Kelly, who was the co-founder of the D school and also IDO. And so certainly, this is an amazing resource because it teaches students to think in this really interesting and open way thinking about human-centered needs, taking a customer approach. And that's really amazing. I also was a teaching assistant. I was fortunate enough to be able to work at the Product Realization Lab. And so this is a place where students get hands-on experience. You can see students welding here. This is Professor Craig Milroy, one of my dear friends and mentors, where students get to learn how to build things with their hands, how to take their ideas and turn them into a reality. And also Professor Dave Beach, who through his love of teaching and really the magic of materials in manufacturing really inspired me and now hundreds and arguably thousands of students to go on and become this next generation of entrepreneurs. And so it was at this time, roughly 2000 or so, when JB Straubel was working on his, I think, Porsche 944, an old kind of rust bucket that he had retrofitted to become an electric car. And of course, JB goes on to become the CTO of Tesla. I think reportedly something like maybe 40% of Tesla's early engineers had been at the Product Realization Lab. But this isn't kind of a machismo toxic masculinity kind of environment. I'm delighted to share that it's a really open lab that students who aren't mechanical engineers, who aren't designers, are welcome to come in and use the prototyping facilities and the lab and the equipment. And most importantly, it's about taking these ideas that you might have and then beginning to rapidly prototype them, experiment, fail early, often forward. And most importantly, inexpensively and learn so that you can continue to improve your ideas. And so this was a great foundation. But when combined with two other incredible mentors and professors, Gil Masters and Emory Levens, these are folks who taught various different courses here at Stanford. But Civil and Environmental Engineering, CE176A, was a transformational course that taught me all about energy efficient building design and passive houses. And it was really kind of strange at that time for mechanical engineer to be interested in climate or the environment. But it was the only place that I could actually find my people and kind of where I could kind of get my fill. And that's actually how I first met Holmes 20 plus some years ago. And it was Emory, who in a room similar to this, was giving a guest lecture and totally opened my mind to this notion of integrative design. So it's going one step beyond really what the D-School was teaching in terms of visual thinking and rapid prototyping, human-centered design and building empathy and understanding. That's very important. But if we don't look holistically and systemically at all the things that are interconnected, all the various different stakeholders and how might we continue to expand the boundary conditions of a problem, then we might actually be missing really key components and arguably really interesting solutions that are out there. And so I really recommend all of you, if you're not familiar with Emory Levens or his work, you co-founded the Rocky Mountain Institute now RMI, please take a look at these various different titles because they are just absolutely transformational. So equipped with all this information and knowledge, I thought, great, I'm ready to take on the world. And so while I was still a student, I landed my dream job at Apple. I finished most of my coursework early. I started working part-time, going down to Cupertino. And I have this incredible charge, which is to come up with Apple's climate change policy. And I'm 25 years old. I'm still a grad student. And I know that I'm in way over my head. And so I start emailing my former professors, including deal masters, and start Googling, like how do I come up with a climate change policy? Everything from the corporate campuses to the retail locations, the manufacturing and supply chain, I was overwhelmed. And so it was right at this time, Al Gore had come to campus and was giving his lecture, which ultimately became the inconvenient truth. And so I thought, well, who better than to engage with Al Gore? He has his MacBook there with its glowing logo, and he's talking all about climate change. And yet, what is Apple doing about it? And why not involve him? Well, the day after I graduated, so that Monday after getting my diploma, I get fired for insubordination and for circumventing the management. Because lo and behold, Al Gore is not only just a public figure, a former vice president, but he's also a member of the board at Apple. And so it is a big no-no to go over your boss's head, your boss's boss's head, to go over Steve Jobs' head, and basically directly message a board member and start mucking about. And so the most innocent kind of email outreach lended me just out on the street the day after I graduated, and I was devastated. This was like absolutely heartbreaking. I mean, like I could not have believed like what a terrible mistake I had made. But as it turns out, this was probably the best worst mistake I could have ever made because it taught me, you know, maybe not cut out for a big corporate culture, you know, the big Fortune 500 kind of environment really necessitates you to, you know, kind of fall in line, you know, observe procedures. And of course, you know, there's lots of really great work that's happening at really big companies. But maybe I'm just not cut out for that. And so I joined Squid Labs, which was comprised of a bunch of friends who are both, you know, here at Stanford and MIT, and we spooled up a handful of companies, including Makani. And so Makani is a high altitude wind energy startup. Interestingly, you know, a bunch of folks who were into, you know, windsurfing, kiteboarding had this notion that, well, if you could harness the power of the wind way up high, you know, maybe even in the jet stream, you might be able to produce a whole lot more, you know, power. And also, you won't have the eyesore, some people say, of, you know, the wind turbines there, whether it be on land or offshore. And so what used to be a flexible kite turned into this fixed rigid wing and then they got bigger and then bigger. And so the idea there was these wings would begin by vertically taking off from a stand. They would use a little bit of power to get up there. They were electrical, you know, kind of electric motors and propellers. Once they got up as high as they wanted to go, they would then fly in a circle, being propelled by the wind. And then those same motors would then become generators in reverse, kind of like regenerative braking, you know, in your electric vehicle, sending power back down this tether to earth. And so you can imagine that that is like a pretty crazy science experiment, but you can see here in this image that there's eight turbines and at its peak, I believe Google had developed a system that was producing something on the order of 600 kilowatts. So at the time the company was acquired, it was much smaller. And so this is the product of many years of R&D and research. And ultimately, here's a brief video. Let's see if I can get it to play. That just demonstrates what this is all about. Yeah, those vehicles that fly like this. They're shaped like a glider or making turns like a fighter jet. It's an unusual machine. It was not a walk in the park on any vector. It was world firsts on every single product. Today, our challenge is climate change. We cannot turn away from it. I absolutely believe that we can do something about it. That's what engineers are good at, solving problems. And this is a big one. We just have to fix climate change. It's not escaping. We just have to stay and fight. And so there's a film I encourage you to go out and find it. It's called, I think, Pulling Power from the Sky. As it turns out, this project was a technological success, but actually a commercial failure. The techno economics really just didn't work out in the end. And so there's a variety of reasons. There's still companies that are pursuing this concept. And who knows? Maybe it will actually work in the end. But not every startup is a success. And the idea is you just keep on trying. And so at the same time as this was going on, I was working on a project also related to MIT that was connected to the One Laptop Per Child Initiative. And so this was a project out of the Media Lab led by Nicholas Negroponte. And the concept was if you could develop a laptop that was extremely low cost, then maybe kids who were living at the base of the pyramid in frontier markets could have access to the world's information. They could have access to Wikipedia, to agricultural tips, to YouTube videos. Maker and hacker spaces now are filled with really ambitious, smart, and clever kids who are making this next generation of solutions that we need for the climate crisis. But the idea didn't quite work out. You can imagine that they designed this amazing laptop. And firstly, where are they going to plug it in? Here's a picture, the nighttime sky, a composite of the planet. And you can see that most of Africa is dark, and certainly a lot of the developing country as well, not having really access to firm, reliable power. And so the challenge is where are these kids actually going to plug in their laptops? Where are they going to charge up? And so a small group of us came together. We actually formed a company, raised $3 million, and actually started engineering, designing, prototyping solutions for this laptop. But as it turns out, while the energy solutions worked and they were really exciting to see in the field, these laptops never really took off. And it's primarily because this was a philanthropic initiative. Nothing wrong with that. They had raised hundreds of millions of dollars, I believe, from various different massive corporations. And the business model was to sell these laptops to governments, and then they would then in turn give them out to the world's kids. And so what might happen if you imagine a young child comes home and the parents realize, wow, I have this $100 laptop, and I don't have food on the table. I need to put a roof over our heads, shoes on our feet. And so it wasn't exactly a solution that any one of these individuals were looking for. And so we embarked on thinking about, well, the bigger challenge isn't just about education and laptops. It's really a very big problem. But what about the 1.3 billion people who live without power all around the world? And this is back in 2008. And fortunately, it's actually got a quite a lot better since then. And so we do a bunch of need finding and user research. We spent time way off grid, but then also right in the city centers. In Uganda, the capital city, Kampala, you don't have to go very far to find yourself reading by candlelight, or in this case a little kerosene lamp, which is toxic and dangerous. It emits so much smoke that it's said to be about equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. That's how bad it is. And they might tip and spill, set fire to your home. And so these were really, really crazy solutions that people are still struggling with today. And yet we were really amazed to see scenes like this. So way off in the middle of nowhere, I believe this is in Tanzania, you could be on the coast and be able to find five bars and be able to communicate, text, transact. And so we were just really perplexed as we were working on this laptop initiative to see people using their hard-earned money, buying secondhand phones, and really simple phones to solve their everyday needs. And so that left us wondering, well, where do they charge their phones? And even the power would come and go. So in the capital city, the grid would be there and then not. And so every so often, we would encounter a light pole, a power pole, where the wires were actually snipped. Because the power is off for so long, some entrepreneurial individual thought, well, why don't I just steal the copper and sell it for scrap? And meanwhile, though, really entrepreneurial individuals were also coming up with off-grid solutions, where someone might find a car battery, maybe in a broken-down Jeep or truck, charge it up in the city. And then they bring it back out to the village. And there they would plug in everything from, this looks like a massive desktop phone, to then charging hundreds and hundreds of cell phones for 25 to 50 cents a charge. And so these businesses were ubiquitous. Every street corner, every tiny little town, had a phone charging station. And so that really got us thinking. Nobody, again, wanted these laptops, but everyone had adopted for themselves these cell phones. And this dichotomy just was mind-blowing to us and really inspirational. Also at the same time, we were beginning to see this confluence of technologies and applications where people started to do mobile banking. So now we're all really familiar with Apple Pay and Venmo and Cache App and everything like that. But well before we had these things, people in the frontier markets in Africa and Asia, Latin America, like folks in the global south were actually using their cell phones and actually trading minutes with one another as informal currency. The telecoms, amazingly, to their credit, as big corporations like Vodafone from the UK or Orange from France, they got wise to this and said, well, we should just formalize this and turn this into a mobile banking platform. And so they did. And so when we started to look at the data, we realized, God, there's 1.3 billion people. What a massive market without power. And yet 600 million off-grid subscribers at that time. As we started doing more research, we uncovered that they were spending $10 billion, sorry, a year, on phone charging now, 25 to 50 cents at a time. And they were also spending billions, 38 billion or so on kerosene just to light their homes. And so we asked ourselves, might we be able to facilitate folks to leapfrog just as they had leapfrogging over the traditional wired telephone system to mobile? Might they be able to leapfrog the grid and actually go straight to distributed, decentralized wireless power? Now, of course there's still wires in their home, but what we're saying is like, maybe there's a solar panel on their roof, maybe a smart battery in their living room that could power lights, radios. Maybe it's a water purifier, an induction hot plate cooking stove. All sorts of things could bring about quality of life and really empower them in new and really novel, really transformational ways. And so that's what led to us founding this company called Phoenix, which gets its name from this Phoenix mythical bird, this creature that actually is born from fire. And the idea is that it brings a new light to their world. And so we partnered up with various different, kind of interesting individuals and partners. We had MTN, which is Africa's biggest telecom. Google, which is kind of ubiquitous of course, but at the time they were developing the Android phone. And before they were available for sale here in the US or elsewhere around the world, their engineers were bringing duffel bags fulls of these phones into Africa, into Kampala, Uganda in particular, where we were doing our first pilots and studies because they had this idea that this phone might very well be the way that the next billion people get online. It's not gonna be the laptop. It's not gonna be a desktop, certainly. It's gonna be a cell phone. And so the idea there is the partnerships really began to emerge, where Google actually introduced us then to the Grameen Foundation. And so Grameen is a world renowned microfinance organization. Muhammad Yunus had won the Nobel Prize for Microfinance in Bangladesh. And so this very interesting partnership began to emerge, where the idea of combining the brand recognition of MTN, which operates in some 22 countries, 200 million customers, and a massive brand value. So if you watch the World Cup when it was in South Africa, you might kind of recognize this logo because they're Africa's biggest telecom and operate all across Africa and the Middle East. And with them and Google, and then the Grameen organization providing finance, we kind of had this amazing dream team to potentially start kind of transforming the landscape. And it was really actually hinging upon this one thesis that emerged, which was, well, gosh, if people don't have access to easy and readily available power, well, maybe their phones are off a lot. So they might charge up, make a call, and then shut it off or send a text and then turn it off again. And that meant they were missing calls and texts all the time. And if their phones were just merely charged, might they actually be able to make more money? And so we got to prototyping. We bought a little jumpstart kit. This is a black and decker, almost like a boombox, but it had jumper cables that we took off. And we refashioned it to become kind of our own housing for a smart battery. We developed all sorts of different charging solutions from solar panels to bicycle pedal power generators. And we brought them out to various different villages in Uganda, but then later Kenya, Tanzania, and ultimately we did the user research to try and figure out, well, how do we design something that's a little bit better than that car battery? Those car batteries were dirty and dangerous. They were full of lead and acid. And how do we create something that's more user friendly, that's plug and play, that can actually enable an entrepreneur to make money initially? But we love to see this in everybody's home eventually. And so we equipped these things with GPS chips so we knew where they were with little cell phone devices that would kind of ping us back with their usage. And ultimately we found that in over, just a little over two months, we had 6,000 phones charged. I think this was across maybe it was 15 to 20 devices or so, and generating something on the order of like 15 to 20 kilowatt hours over the course of a short study. And so then we got to prototyping, and I'll fly through these pretty quickly. But it was all about bringing in that B-school process of rapid prototyping and visualizing what it is that we want to see. We made it simple to use. There was just one button. It had a USB and cigarette lighter kind of car charge reports. And ultimately went into making this through injection molding, then it became dozens and then hundreds and then thousands of these. We had to design for reliability and making sure that this thing was actually repairable in the field in these markets. And so the whole notion of kind of designing something for a customer that's halfway around the world really forced us to actually rely upon these processes and also think again in an integrative way. How might we, you know, displace somebody? How might this thing be reliable or not? And so in the end, we ended up bringing this to market in partnership with MTN, where they were selling these solar panels and smart batteries, phone charging cables, even LED lights in a cell phone shop. And so it was right there next to phones and tablets. And so imagine if you were to walk into a Verizon store or a T-Mobile AT&T store here and they would see solar panels. Like how strange but incredible might that be? And so entrepreneurs were using these things to charge dozens and then hundreds of phones. But it got us thinking, you know, how might we actually continue to build or evolve this business model? And again, the model was we were designing and manufacturing these energy systems and we had these partners that were the telecoms that were benefiting because they were able to make money. And then all the various different stakeholders from distributors, microfinance organizations, and even like NGOs and donors, you know, who are benefiting and helping along the way, all the way to the end customer who is purchasing the system and then charging, you know, their neighbors, their friends a small fee to keep their phones charged. But ultimately, you know, the goal was to electrify, you know, these households. And so we developed then a system called ready pay power. So with the advent of mobile banking, we figured, well, instead of working with microfinance organizations that would issue a loan and then you have to go and pay monthly, you know, in person with cash, might we be able to provide pay-as-you-go power where you can walk into the store, take it home for a small deposit, five or $10, and then you would pay, you know, something on your like 20, 25 cents a day. And when you made the payment, the idea is that we would then send you back a code and that code would unlock the battery and then enable you to take power out and let your home charge your phones, do whatever it is that you want with it. If you didn't make a payment, the sun would still power the panel and charge up the battery. You just couldn't take power out. And so the idea was to build this compassionate and flexible financing system as well, knowing that a lot of these individuals are not formally employed. They don't have a stable, you know, paycheck. They're perhaps their farmers or maybe they're, you know, running a small shop. They're entrepreneurs. They're, you know, going out and fishing or even, you know, recycling clothes and rags, picking up bottles and cans. So they have, you know, really unreliable income, but that doesn't mean that they're bad people. And certainly they're not bad customers because they would pay if they could. And it was because we designed this in a manner where that, you know, 20 cents a day, if you could charge somebody 25 cents to charge up a phone, you're instantly in the black. You've made a profit, you know, right off the gate. So the notion was, how do you design, you know, the payments and the financing systems? How do you create an entire business model that considers, you know, the kind of holistic and systemic kind of environment that you're in? And so here's a, let's see, a short video also just to show you kind of what's going on here. Oops. I had no hope of getting electricity. I used to buy candles of 600 per day. So cause it's too late up, there's any billy, but it's not bit billy. But now I just need the sunlight energy to charge my solar panel. Ready pay power works very simply using the solar panel. It puts the sound energy in the battery to do so many things. I use ready pay for lights, phones, radio, and TV. We've been having so many accidents from using card over, children get burned. The ready pay light is safe. Now I get a lot of customers because I have a great light. I can even work for five hours at night. Charging phones was very expensive, but now everything can be done within my house. I did not have enough money to buy ready pay at once, but I'm paying in installments and it's easier on my side. I make a small payment through mobile money. I get an SMS. When you get the SMS code, you enter it into your machine, then you can have access to your power. I can pay weekly, monthly, or daily. It suits my income. I just do because it's a new program, but it's still not new, it's being paid regularly. I'm like, okay, I just do because it's a local solar. So many people have been knocking my door, requesting ready pay power. I feel delighted to see that MTN is bringing power to our communities now. And so, yeah, we continue to grow and scale this with MTN, where they brought this out into the most deep rural villages. They actually produced marketing and flyers and TV and radio ads. They made billboards. And so, this continued to grow and scale, totally invisible to us here in Silicon Valley. And yet, they're adopting the same cell phones that we're using there. And we were able to then grow this into Tanzania with the leading telecom, their Vodacom, and then elsewhere in other markets. And so, excitingly, we were able to partner with all these various different telecoms, bringing it to people who are, again, living a half a world away. And the impact has been really exciting, closing in on nearly 10 million people in nine countries, and I think nearly a billion phone charges a year. And I think nearly 10 billion hours of LED light. And again, getting rid of that toxic kerosene smoke and enabling people to make an income. And all the while, the telecoms are generating something on the order of like, I think it was 10 to 14% more revenue per cell phone customer, per month, like month over month, just because their phones were on. And so, it was this truly amazing win-win kind of opportunity. Through the kind of very challenging and arguably difficult process of figuring out and navigating, it's all really obvious now in hindsight. But we had thought long and hard about other business models. Could we partner with Coca-Cola? Because, hey, they've got amazing distribution. You can find a Coke in any village. And so, maybe they have a desire to make, you know, refrigerators and get solar panels and batteries and fridges out there and we could piggyback off of them. Well, it turns out, people are pretty accustomed to drinking a warm Coke. As crazy and disgusting as I think that is. That's just like ubiquitous. That's the culture there. We also thought about pharmaceutical companies who are designing and distributing vaccines. And so, there's the cold chain and they have to keep them refrigerated. So, might we be able to piggyback off of them? And so, turns out, well, they sell their vaccines to the Ministry of Health or some NGO and they're responsible for the cold chain. And the more vaccines that fail, actually, the more they sell. So, there's this almost perverse incentive. So, it was really kind of obvious now only in hindsight that we could find a partner that was actually aligned to, you know, meet the goals and the incentives. We're all kind of, you know, lining up so that everybody's winning along the way. And so, I'm delighted to share, you know, we went from something like this, this little kiosk with a candle with light and ultimately, as Holmes mentioned, NG has acquired Phoenix and now also a handful of other companies kind of rolling up businesses in the microgrid and mini-grid space, systems larger and smaller to serving, you know, millions of people across nine countries now in Africa. And I want to, you know, transition then to dangerous and how this has really informed our investment thesis and how, you know, as we look at all the challenges that are in front of us, we really believe that there's a massive opportunity on the demand side. You know, so there's, of course, the supply side, solar panels and wind turbines. You know, hopefully this next generation of fusion technology holds a lot of promise. And also, there's carbon removal. That's really important, too. But what about the elephant in the room, which is the demand side? Everything that we, you know, use, that we touch, you know, the building that we are in, the food that we eat, the car that I'm gonna go home in, these are all the demand side. And so, we've invested in a handful of companies. I thought I'd just showcase a few of you, a few of them here today and how they're thinking about building, you know, companies that are really resilient but actually perhaps even anti-fragile. And so, one of them is called Channing Street Copper. These are co-founders who came from the Squid Labs kind of family. And Channing Street Copper is designing this next generation of induction ranges. And so, when I first saw this company, I thought, oh my God, there's no way we're investing in this. Hardware is hard. How are they gonna compete against LG and Samsung? Like, this is insane. What are you guys doing? But then, as I sat down with them and kind of shut my mouth and actually listened to them for a second, they said, well, hey, we've noticed that the cost of lithium-ion batteries is coming down. Cost of batteries in general are coming down. There's so much new innovation and it's all being driven by consumer electronics and electric vehicles. Yet, the cost to install something like, you know, energy storage in your home, like a Tesla Powerwall or other solutions is kind of staying flat. If anything, it's actually increasing because of permitting costs and delays and also, you know, needing truck rolls and electricians. And so, what they've done is they've integrated a battery into the range, meaning that they put a small but mighty lithium-ion battery into the actual stove itself, such that this device can actually run off the grid if you need to, but that's not really the purpose. It's actually to enable anyone to be able to plug this thing into a normal outlet. And I never really thought about it that these large induction ranges actually require 240 volts and a ton of power in order to enable you to cook. But not all the time, it's just to get the water boiling or to heat up the oven. And once you're warm and hot and kind of things are going, it doesn't take that much at all. And so, what Channing Street Copper has done is, now, really taken a lot of the cost out of helping people decarbonize, you know, their homes to switch from perhaps a gas, a methane, you know, stove or range and switch it over to electric. And this is really important when it comes to an equity and just energy transition perspective because there's a lot of people who are living in low-income housing. They're working with the New York Housing Authority to explore, well, there are a lot of buildings that have crumbling infrastructure. In fact, over Thanksgiving, there's a bunch of buildings that didn't have gas at all because the local utility said, we just can't service this. It's leaky, it's dangerous, I'm sorry. And yet, what are these folks gonna do? How can they cook? And certainly, you know, they can't just take out their existing gas stove and plug in a new one because they don't have 240 volt power there. And so, ultimately, this is an amazing solution for the Housing Authority. It's an amazing solution for renters and homeowners. But it doesn't stop there. As they started thinking about, well, what else could this thing do? They started looking at the whole system. They started expanding the boundary conditions and taking an integrative approach, thought all about, well, how about the stove in your kitchen is right next to your fridge? And so, I think, you know, the fridge is here on the right-hand side. What if you were to be able to plug your fridge into your stove and be able to share that power from the battery in the event of a power outage? And for a low-com family, it can mean, you know, make it or break it. Like, all the food in your fridge and your freezer's spoiling. Could you imagine, like, how expensive that might be? Well, if this keep it going, you know, keep the fridge cold and the freezer, you know, from thawing out, how transformational might that be? Maybe you can even plug your microwave in. That's a whole lot more efficient to heat up, you know, some hot water for tea or to cook some pasta in the event of a power outage. And so, they're not stopping there. They're looking further at things like hot water heaters, electric clothes dryers, and basically any gas appliance. So, they're a public benefit corporation with a mandate of trying to eliminate as many methane connections as possible. And so, another company that we're looking at that we've invested in is called Sapphire. And so, they're a really novel battery technology. And so, the idea there is, they've developed a novel liquid to solid electrolyte additive for any lithium ion chemistry. And it prevents fire and explosion in the event of a crash or impact. And it even imparts a ballistic protection. So think military. And so, they came out of Oak Ridge National Labs, was funded in part by ARPA-E. And I'll show you also another quick video. Telephones or electric vehicles. The electrolyte inside the battery is an organic liquid. This organic liquid is flammable, like gasoline. In the event of a crash or a mechanical event that smushes the battery, the electrodes touch each other and all the energy is released at once. That energy is given off in the form of heat, which causes the organic to heat up and vaporize. And eventually, it could catch on fire. The Sapphire technology replaces the electrolyte with a new electrolyte that is a liquid under normal circumstances. But the minute you hit it, it becomes a solid. That solid forms a solid barrier between the materials and prevents them from touching during a crash. Nice thing about the Sapphire technology is it's a drop-in solution compatible with existing manufacturing processes. You don't have to retool production lines or reimagine how to build the batteries. You can use existing facilities just with a slight modification of the electrolyte. You can envision putting it in automotive applications. The benefit of an automotive application is if you make your battery tougher, preventing an impact damage to it, you could theoretically remove several hundred pounds of armor from around your lithium-ion battery. Now your car will go farther on the same size batteries because you're not carrying around as much dead load of armor around the battery. And so, I'm not sure if you caught that bit at the end, but I'll reiterate it. And this is where I think this integrative approach, really, it's honing in on, well, maybe there's one really important thing that one can do that could have a transformational impact, in this case, to electric vehicles, which is the batteries are, in fact, really fragile. And so, as a consequence, there's a lot of armor around the battery pack. And that adds to cost and weight. And what that has is an impact on the affordability of a car and ultimately the range of a car. Not to say, also, that the safety is obviously really important. And so, Tesla has actually gotten patents issued on ballistic protection for the battery pack because of things like car crashes and actually debris coming up from the road and hitting the underside of the car. And so, a technology like Sapphire can actually bring the cost of electric vehicle down, addressing accessibility and equity, but also extend the range and deal with range anxiety and, of course, address safety. And so, these are kind of the compounding co-benefits that we see as kind of a consequence, a product of some really thoughtful kind of design and applications. And so, I know I'm running out of time, so I'll be quick with this one, but a really exciting company in the agriculture space is called Verdi, where they're making a climate resilience adaptation, and dare I say, even anti-fragility platform, where they're automating irrigation through the utilization of really smart satellite data and clever irrigation. So, fertilization as well. So, fertilizer and water. And what they're able to do is enhance the yield by not over-watering and not under-watering. And actually driving up the quality of the fruit, in this case, this is a winery, but they're also working with Driscoll's, the berry maker, you know, that makes strawberries and blueberries wonderful, POM wonderful, that makes, you know, pomegranates and also pistachios. And so, they're actually able to generate more revenue per acre, use less water, and then at the same time, when all of the conditions are right, all the plants all mature at the same time, so they don't have to have multiple harvest. They can have one large pass in terms of the harvest, and that saves on fuel and emissions, but also processing and labor. And so, again, I want to thank you all again for coming today and say how encouraged I am to see so many of you here, and that you're working on this, and that what exciting time it is to be here at Stanford and at the Door School of Sustainability. I want to make another plug to the Change Leadership for Sustainability Program, so if there are any undergrads in the class, this is a co-term master's program in sustainability. You can get a master's of science or master's of art, and I want to thank Julia Novi and Jeff Koseff, the directors of that program, and this is my class, SES 234, on Integrative Design and Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital. And then also, CE 107R 207R. So, Amory Lovens and Joel Swish are back at Stanford, teaching this class this winter, so I encourage you to check it out. It's offered on Wednesdays and next quarter as well, so if you can't take it this quarter, take it next or take it twice. And I'm serious about that because I took that class plus or minus 20 years ago, and it's a distinct pleasure of taking it again, and really just highlighting the demand side opportunity that this graph illustrates, there's a ton of power that is essentially coming in. Oops. That very little is actually the useful energy that we take advantage of, so you might be familiar with this diagram, but ultimately, what we need is, of course, speed and scale, and so with that, I'd like to thank you all so much and thank you, Professor Wyant. Yeah. Thanks, Nick. Thank you. As advertised, that was terrific. We now have a time just for maybe two questions from the audience. We like student questions here. We have one up here. Any others? Questions? Maybe one on that side. Okay, so let's just do one on this side and one on that side, and then as mentioned, Mike will be around later on today in different groups. Let's make that a few. Hi, thanks so much for the talk and the amazing story. I think you seem to have found a really nice balance between making a profit and having some kind of social good with your enterprises. I just wanted to ask if you could speak a bit more on how you approach that trade-off or if you even see it as a trade-off. Yeah, that's a great question, and I think that there's a really exciting argument to be made that there's really no trade-off. That can't be true in every single instance, but in terms of our investment thesis and our criteria, we really look long and hard at, well, every problem is complex and so it's unfair to look at it through very simplistic kind of eyes and lenses. And so we're really looking for entrepreneurs, first and foremost, who are approaching these kind of really dangerous and pressing problems in novel and interesting ways. And so might you be able to build a business sustainably? Might you be able to treat your employees with dignity and respect, your customers, well, enable a kind of a really beautiful future and maybe I'm naive, maybe I'm a little silly for thinking that, but I think that's an area of interesting research actually to dive into, and that's something that personally, I think is part of my work at Stanford is to investigate venture capital as an industry. Gets a bad rap and it really deserves it because there's a terribly bro-y and toxic culture around venture capital at times, and so how might we be able to change this and kind of fund companies and grow them in this more sustainable way? Okay, one last question over here. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Hi, thank you for your talk. My name is Nia Jones, and my question is, what were your strategies for a community engagement in your work with international energy development? Oh man, that's an incredible question. A one word answer is grandmas. So as it turns out, you can't just like waltz into a rural village and start like hawking your wares. The first thing is, you look different, you're not from around there. What are you doing? Are you trying to scam me? These are absolutely valid and natural questions, and so by engaging with trusted partners on the ground firstly, so that was MTN, the telecom, and don't get me wrong, if you ever dealt with Verizon or T-Mobile, then you kind of like dealt with MTN, but at the same time, you know that they're there. They're trusted, they're not gonna be a fly-by-night company and disappear, but then also by partnering up with the Grameen Foundation and also folks at Google, like they developed really great relationships firstly, and so they brought us in. We sat down with the village elders, the teachers, the doctor that's in the community, and established trust, and we just had to shut up and listen and observe. We saw these entrepreneurs with their battery charging kiosks, and it was working with them, and then also working with the people that we might displace. So the people that were selling kerosene and candles in the community, what would happen to them? So we engaged with them to become maybe the second entrepreneur that would open up a second phone charging kiosk in the village, because before they were selling candles and kerosene to everybody, we don't want them to get left behind, let alone be harmed by the introduction of this new product. And so surely, we had missteps, we priced this thing wrong in the first place, we had all sorts of reliability issues, but the whole notion of kind of failing fast and forward and expensively, failing in a way that hopefully gets you better and better was the goal. And the best way to do that is to engage with folks and actually take into account what their needs are, not like what I want to impose on them. Great, before I thank Mike, sorry, just about that, out of time. Next week, of course, because of Martin Luther King's holiday, we don't have a class, but I would urge you to investigate the 279 past energy seminar videos that are on the Stanford YouTube channel. And just to tie things together, you will find in that long list, people like Aymre Levins, Joel Swisher, and Holmes Hummel talking about very similar issues at Harvard's or at Mike's talk. So with that, Mike, thank you so much for sharing your incredible experiences with us. I've found it extremely informative and tremendously inspirational. Thank you. Thank you.