Today the final submissions of the presentation slides for the CCTO were due. While we did make some final adjustments today, the slides have been pretty much done for a couple days now. I guess we’re getting a little better not waiting for the last minute. Now the only thing left for the CCTO is actually making the presentation on Wednesday. After that we have to wait until October 29 to find out who wins.

Today we had the opportunity to give a pitch to a mock CCTO judging panel. The pitch was at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (WSGR) in Palo Alto. The mock panel was made up of a VC, an academic and a CCTO member. The pitch was to follow the same structure as the real pitch sessions next week, that is: 15 minute presentation using 10 slides followed by 10 minutes of Q&A.

As planned, Nate gave the pitch (picture above). I recorded it on my video camera so he could review it later. He did a good job. The only real rough patch was when a couple slides came up in reverse order, but he smoothed over it fairly well. I think he took about 13 minutes. The Q&A session started out more as a critique of the presentation, which was useful as far as fine tuning the presentation, but didn’t really give us a feel for the Q&A process. It also lasted more like 15 minutes rather than 10. Overall the feedback was quite positive.

We have a couple days to refine the slides. The final version is due on September 30. Our final pitch is on October 3.

This week I had my first taste of writing a grant application. Even though we were very tight on time, Nate and I decided to apply for a grant from the California Energy Commission’s Energy Innovations Small Grant Program. It is part of their Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program aimed at smaller grants. The recent grant solicitation was related to their Electricity Program. The main problem was the due date: September 27, and it required sending a hard copy to San Diego, which meant we had to get it out via FedEx earlier today. It was quite a battle since we just finished up our business plan and didn’t have much time for the grant. Oh yeah, and we had to finish the first draft of our pitch presentation too. Anyway, the grant application turned out pretty well. We won’t get the results until February 2008, but it would really come in handy to help us deploy our prototype systems next year. There will be a Natural Gas solicitation sometime this fall. If we decide to submit a proposal for that one, I’m sure we’ll allocate a lot more time.

As I mentioned, a preliminary version of the pitch presentation was due today. This is for a “dress rehearsal” pitch on Friday. Nate is going to be delivering the pitch. He had his first run through today. It has some rough edges, but over all it was pretty good. Rob, whom I’ve mentioned before, helped once again by giving some great feedback on the pitch. It should be much smother for the Friday rehearsal. Our CCTO mentor, Ed, will be there Friday as well, so hopefully we’ll get some more feedback and have a sleek pitch ready to submit on Sunday. The actual pitch is on October 3. I have the utmost confidence that Nate will be stellar.

I’ve been riding BART to Berkeley whenever I go to the office. It’s pretty convenient and I can even work when I’m on the train. I even loaded a BART QuickPlanner application on my Palm Treo 650 phone so I always have access to schedules and station locations. The goal is to make Aptility a sustainable company, so every little bit helps. When possible, I simply work from home to avoid commuting at all. Unfortunately, BART only goes as far south as Fremont, and I live in San Jose. I have to drive up to Fremont, BART to Downtown Berkeley and then walk to our office. The drive to Fremont is about 15 miles as opposed to 43 miles to the office in Berkeley. So I’m saving about 56 miles per round trip, which is almost 2 gallons of gas in my Ford Escape Hybrid. That’s equivalent to about 40 pounds of CO2 emissions according to terrapass. Plus I get in about two miles of walking in Berkeley.

Next up: “green” business cards.

Well, it wasn’t the last minute, but it was close. Nate and I submitted our business plan to the CCTO at 11:49PM, 11 minutes before the deadline. We even managed to catch the second to last BART train out of Berkeley. In fact, I’m on BART right now writing this on my Treo.

There are still a few things in the plan we would like to improve, but over all we we’re pretty satisfied. The version we submitted is 0.8. We’ll probably get to 1.0 before we go to any investors. Next up we have a grant application due followed by the pitch dress rehearsal on September 28. I wonder when we’ll get to the real work…

By the way, here’s the Aptility logo:

Tonight was that last of the CCTO Summer Workshop Series at Wilson Sonsini. The evening started with a Q&A session with David Rodgers, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency withing the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) at the U.S. Department of Energy. I missed most of this session, only catching the tail end. The EERE will spend over $1.5 Billion dollars this year in its quest to drive more clean energy sources to market. The discussion revolved around how CCTO contestants can get involved with various EERE programs. Too bad I didn’t have a chance to catch all of it.

The topic of the night was “The Investor Presentation”. As usual, Dave Weinerth laid out the agenda for the evening. He also pointed out the looming deadlines:

• September 19 - Final Business Plans are due (≤20 pages +5 pages of appendices)
• September 28 - Dress Rehearsal for Presentations
• September 30 - Final Presentation slides due (≤10 slides + 5 Q&A slides)
• October 1-9 - Final Presentations (15 minutes + 10 minutes for Q&A)
• October 29 - Awards Ceremony (winners will be announced)

Next up was Andrew Chung of Lightspeed Venture Partners. Andrew’s presentation, “Presenting to a VC,” provided a good overview on what and how to present to investors. His presentation focused on a full investor pitch of 30-45 minutes, but many of the points were applicable to our 15 minute CCTO pitches. The key sections of an investor pitch are Mission Statement, Management Team, Market Analysis, Technology Description, Operations and Finance. Starting with your mission or vision tells the investors what you do so they won’t spend time trying to figure it out for themselves. The team description should include any advisory board and indicate key positions that need to be filled. The market section can be tailored to the audience; that is, don’t spend a lot of time describing what they already know, focus on the specifics for your company. The technology section needs to be concise but sufficient and point out key differentiators and a clear value proposition. The operations section needs to show the go-to-markets strategy as well as any sales pipeline, notable customers, and channel partners. And finally, the financials needs a solid 3-5 year plan of revenue, expenditures and funding needs. Some other pointers from Andrew are:

• Know your audience
• Be conscious of time
• Get to the point
• Simple and clear slides
• Be ready to jump around (a lot!)
• Inspire confidence
• Look them in the eye
• Coordinate team roles before you pitch

After Andrew’s presentation on how to do a presentation, we got to actually see a presentation. Zach Gentry, CEO of Adura Technologies (2006 CCTO Energy Efficiency Winner), was kind enough to give his pitch to the workshop audience. Andrew Chung and Lee Cooper (Sr. Program Manager, Emerging Technologies, PG&E) served as judges for the mock pitch. Zach gave his 15 minute pitch followed by a Q&A by Andrew and Lee. After that, Zach, Andrew and Lee served as a sort of panel fielding questions about the pitch process from the contestants. The most important piece of advice from this session: practice a lot!

So the summer workshops and business clinics are over. They have been very valuable to Nate and I. While we are certainly striving to win, being a finalist has provided enormous benefits. First of all the workshops have been a great help to better understand the business plan process, especially the workshop on sustainability which was a new topic for both of us. Second, the business clinics provided us with a great opportunity to ask seasoned professionals about key issues such as incorporation, patents, PR, and angel investors. Our CCTO appointed mentor, Ed Harley, has been instrumental in getting us to rethink the way we approach the value proposition and market segmentation. And last but not least, the CCTO has given us hard deadlines to really kick us in to gear!

Special thanks to Rex Northen, Marc Gottschalk, Mike Santullo, Jeremy Walker, Dave Weinerth and the rest of the CCTO team. Great job guys, you are a great asset to the Clean Tech industry!

There are only two weeks left until we have to turn in the final business plan for the California Clean Tech Open. There was not a workshop this week so Nate and I could focus on our planning. Recently we have been spending a lot of time thinking about exactly how we want to proceed with the business. We had some really good meetings this week with some technology guys in both embedded software and microprocessors. We also had a productive discussion with one of Nate’s past colleagues, Rob. Rob has really helped us shape our ideas into something on which we can execute. We’ve finally settled on a direction and are now focused on the business plan. Nate is focusing on rewriting the marketing and financial sections of the plan and getting some help from a marketing professional named Wendy. I am focusing on sustainability and operations.

I have found a ton of resources on the web to help with sustainability issues from both a planning and reporting perspective. I’ve gotten a lot of great information from sites like the Global Reporting Initiative, the EPA’s ISO 14001 site, and various corporate sustainability sites. I’m really starting to understand how we need to apply sustainability metrics to all aspects of our business and product planning and execution. A lot of the operational issues and product benefits are becoming quite clear.

The main thing I’m struggling with right now is quantifying the impact of the materials and manufacturing going into the product itself. It’s hard to find all the appropriate data to quantitatively close the loop on the life cycle of the product. I have found a lot of data from sites like the Energy Information Administration, but not a lot of the specifics I need pertaining to the semiconductors, PCBs, and housings which will make up our product. I can apply the G3 reporting concept of boundaries to limit the problem, but I’d really like to be able to do a full environmental balance sheet for the product. Maybe as we get further into development I can get some of this data from our suppliers. For now I can focus on the Design for Environment (DfE), Supplier Network Management, Environmental Management System (EMS), and End-of-Life Practices (EoL) we will need to establish to create a sustainable company.

Nate and I are already trying to set a precedence for employee contributions. We are only commuting to our office in Berkeley a few days a week (though that will increase for the duration of the CCTO) and when we do commute, we do so using public transit where possible. Nate is able to take BART from San Francisco to Berkeley for his commute. I have to drive to Fremont, then I take BART the rest of the way. We even try to locate our meetings with others at locations which encourage public transit such as BART. So far we haven’t had to dive in to the whole arena of supplies and equipment, but that will all come soon enough.