Yesterday I met with Nathan at his office in UC Berkeley. He showed me some of the prototypes he’s been working on and we talked a bit more about how we could work together. Some of the technology will come from the Residential Energy Manager project at Berkeley. I also met Nathan’s adviser, Professor Paul Wright. He will most likely be involved with this venture as an adviser or something.

Today I went to the CCTO Executive Summary Workshop at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Nathan was also there. This even was intended to provide more information on what the CCTO was looking for in the executive summaries. The executive summaries are due on June 30 and will be used to select the finalists. The CCTO submission could be no more than 3 pages and had to include the following sections: Opening Statement, Target Market, Team, Product/Solution, Market Strategy, Sustainability, and Financials. The sections are pretty typical of most business plans, except for the sustainability section. Since this is a clean tech competition, they want the contestants to focus on the environmental impact their companies will have and not just the products.

The workshop was ok, but I’m not sure I got much out of it. Most of the information could be gleaned simpley by using the executive summary template on the CCTO website. They focused the most on the sustainability section, which makes sense since it’s different from the typical business plan flow. However, I don’t think they covered all that well. I think I was still a bit confused about the expectations by the end. I guess I’ll have to figure it out at some point.