Last night I attended a panel titled “Clean Technology - Sustainable Growth: Innovating and Implementing in the Developing World.” The panel was at Santa Clara University and sponsored by the California Clean Tech Open and the university’s Engineers Without Borders student chapter. Outside the theater there were some displays set up showcasing some of the SCU Engineers Without Borders projects, including the low pressure solar distillation apparatus pictured on the right. Other displays showed low cost building insulation derived from denim and pictures from previous projects.

The main assembly began with a presentation by an SCU-EWB co-chair, Yasemin Kimyacioglu, about the low pressure solar distillation project. The apparatus uses an array of solar tubes and coper pipe to pre-heat the water. An electric powered vacuum allows the water in the pressure cooker to boil at 57 degrees Celcius, rather than the normal 100 degrees. The purified steam runs through a condensing coil which utilizes the original contaminated water as a coolant. The prototype is nearly complete and testing will begin soon. There are still some technical hurdles to overcome before deployment, such as elimination of the contaminants from the pressure chamber.

The panel began immediately following the SCU EWB presentation. It was moderated by R. David Hague, VP of Business Development at GreenMountain Engineering, a consulting firm focused on renewable energy and clean technology. The panel included:

• Patrick Freeburger - Co-founder of BuildFast, winner of the CCTO 2007 prize for Green Building
• Rebeca Hwang - Co-VP BASES Social E-Challenge and Judging Chair for CCTO
• Dr. Ashok Gadgil - Senior Staff Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• John Rockwell - Managing Director, Element Partners, a clean technology investment firm

The bulk of the panel session centered around the problems with deploying clean technologies in the developing world. One of the main problems is a difference in values. Each panelist had a personal anecdote illustrating the common misunderstanding of the problems people in the developing world face. For example, Ms. Hwang described a project to deploy water filters in Nicaragua only to find the local men would rather spend their money on beer. Dr. Gadgil told of an unsuccessful attempt to utilize cheap, single family open space housing plans in Afghanistan, where extended families live together with separate areas for the men and women.

Mr. Rockwell pointed out that the only way to be successful in the developing world is to figure out how to make money. Mr. Freeburger described how his company, BuildFast, changed their business model from building complete housing solutions to providing key materials and knowledge to local builders. Dr. Gadgil pointed to SELCO in India as a good example of meeting the needs of the local people. They provide renewable energy solutions to Indian homes and businesses which could not normally afford them. They are able to replace kerosene lighting with CFLs powered by batteries charged by solar arrays. The service provides pre-charged batteries and the lighting solution delivered where needed replacing kerosene with a clean, more affordable, better lighting solution.

Understanding the culture, the value and needs are more important in many ways than the technology. You can be the foremost authority on water decontamination, but unless you really understand the local situation, your solution will probably not be successful. You are simply adding to the junkyard of Western technologies in the third world, as Dr. Gadgil called it. Sometimes you need to learn before you can teach.

I went to the California Clean Tech Open (CCTO) 2008 Launch event in San Jose. It was held at the City Hall Rotunda, which is a a pretty cool building right next to the City Hall tower. There were exhibits around the floor from past CCTO teams as well as some sponsors. Outside the hall there were some hybrid and electric vehicles from Lexus and PG&E. The host for the evening was Marc Gottschalk, one of the founders of the CCTO. Marc recapped the CCTO from the past two years and talked a bit about changes for 2008.

One of the guest speakers was San Jose’s mayor, Chuck Reed. He discussed the city’s “Green Vision” which is a 15 year, 10 point plan for the city.  Some key point he mentioned are to create 25,000 clean tech jobs, reduce per capita energy use by 50%, and receive 100% of our electrical power from clean renewable sources. The mayor also challenged the solar industry to come up with a way to deliver residential solar energy at zero cost to the end consumer.

Another guest speaker was David Rodgers of the Department of Energy. One of his key points was the effort by the CCTO and the DoE to duplicate the CCTO in other regions across the country. Marc mentioned that requests have come in for help establishing similar competitions all over the world. It would be nice to see this focus on clean tech start-ups gain some serious momentum.

The 2007 Award Ceremony for the California Clean Tech Open were held today in San Francisco. The event was held in the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. It started with an exhibit area where each of the finalist team had an opportunity to present their companies to anyone attending the event. Attendees included press, investors, and various other industry affiliates. We had a poster set up with a flier hand out explaining our product and business proposition. We talked to quite a few different people from a wide variety of backgrounds. This reminded me of a trade show that was open to the public. You just never know who your talking to at any given time, and any contact could provide you with an important connecton, so you have to take them all seriously. This lasted from 4:30 - 5:30 PM.

The main program ran from 5:30 - 6:30 PM. It was kicked off by Marc Gotthschalk (left), one of the founders of the CCTO. He was followed by a series of speakers including David Rodgers (top right), Deputy Assistant Secretary, Energy Efficiency, Department of Energy; Jeff Byron (bottom right), Commissioner, California Energy Commission; Noah Horowitz, Senior Scientist, National Resource Defense Council; and Tim Woodward, Managing Director, Nth Power. David Rodgers announced that the DoE had decided to provide each of the winners an expense paid trip to Washington, D. C. to pith their plans to the commercialization group at the DoE. Jeff Byron of the CEC pointed out that California, as a nation state, would be second only to the U. S. as a whole in the consumption of gas. Noah Horowitz of the NRDC pointed out that the current climate crisis has developed environmental heroes in unexpected places, noting that WalMart is responsible for selling over 100 million Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFLs).

Next in the program were the awards. This section started with the presentation of a CCTO Alumni Award, for the most successful companies from last year’s competition. The award was presented by Rebeca Hwang, Judging Chair for the CCTO. The runner-up is EDC Technologies, last year’s winner in Smart Power and the winner is GreenVolts, last year’s winner for Renewables which recently closed $10M in funding. This year’s winners are as follows:

Smart Power

Winner: Lucid Design Group - Real-time information feedback drives energy conservation
Runner-up: Federspiel Controls - Wireless supervisory control of HVAC systems
Sponsor: AMD
Presenter: Larry Vertal, AMD

Energy Efficiency

Winner: NiLA, Inc. - LED stage set lighting for the entertainment industry
Runner-up: Ahwahnee Technology - Advanced area lighting, disruptive alternative to LEDs and fluorescents
Sponsors: PGE, SDGE, SCE
Presenter: Sharareh Moaddeli, SDGE

Renewables

Winner: 1-Solar - Low-priced long-life inverters for solar PV
Runner-up: Tahoe Water Systems - Self-contained solar/wind based water
Sponsors: PGE, SDGE, SCE
Presenter: Todd Strauss, PGE

Green Building

Winner: BuildFast - House kit for low-income and post-disaster housing
Runner-up: Enverity Corporation - Environmental data management software
Sponsor: Google
Presenter: Bill Weihl, Google

Transportation

Winner: Syncromatics - Automated vehicle location for transit line efficiency
Runner-up: Hum Cycles - High performance electric sport motorcycles
Sponsor: Lexus
Presenter: Kimberly Gardiner, Lexus

Air, Water & Waste

Winner: Microvi Biotech - Waste-free water treatment technologies
Runner-up: EarthGuard - Environmentally friendly plastic packaging
Sponsor: ENVIRON Foundations and Grundfos
Presenters: Alfan DeLorne, ENVIRON Foundation & Poul Doft Fredriksen, Grundfos

Thanks to all the volunteers at the California Clean Tech Open. It was a great experience!

For additional coverage, check out the California Clean Tech Open site and Green Wombat.

CLEAN TECH AWARDS EVENT GALA!
Monday, October 29 - Evening

Anyone. Everyone. Clean Tech Professionals. Curious Minds.
Tackle Global Warming. Great Food. Awards Presentations.

SPEAKERS
Brad Barton, Director of Commercialization, U.S. Department of Energy
Jeff Byron, Commissioner, California Energy Commission
Noah D Horowitz, Senior Scientist, Natural Resources Defense Council
Tim Woodward, Managing Director, Nth Power

An organic buffet dinner and wine will be served by Living Room Events.

Please register early - Event Details

We just finished up our final presentation for the CCTO about an hour ago. I think the presentation went well. Nate did a great job. There were 5 or 6 judges for the pitch. They seemed pretty impressed with the delivery, but I’m not sure they bought into the product concept. One of the problems you run into when pitching a home product to investors is that they can easily view themselves as the customers. In our case this was a bit of a disadvantage. Some of the judges have very high-end home automation systems so they see our solution as more low end, like something you would find at Home Depot. But our pricing strategy is not meant for the low end. It is targeted more at the middle to high end. Many of the judges seemed to think we either had to go for the extreme high-end or the commodity pricing.

Anyway, I think the pitch went well and we said everything we wanted to say. Unfortunately I don’t think the audience was completely receptive to our story, so I don’t think we’ll be winning this competition. We definitely got a lot out of participating in the CCTO, so definitely no regrets. Now we have to start moving forward with the plan regardless of the outcome of the CCTO. We’ll find out those results on October 29 at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The awards event is open to all, you can go to the CCTO site to register. I think we’ll have an opportunity to present our plan there in exhibit sessions.

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!