Daniel Englander

Liveblog: Power, Drugs & Money February 7, 2008 at 7:48 AM

3:49 p.m. - That’s it! We’re done. Check out the photos.

3:43 p.m. - Final images from the day, including one that sums up the final panel and our current feelings.

Daniel Englander (GTM) & Scott Clavenna (GTM) after a long day of being innovative.

The final panel…

doodles!

Another one of the awesome doodles.

Joe Boyce (GTM) and Sorin Grama (Prometheus Institute, etc.)

3:11 p.m. - Jeff: The unique place where small companies always have an advantage over the incumbent is where things are changing and changing in a big way. Take that!

3:09 p.m. - Travis: In some sense joint venturing is the way to deal with bringing a product to market while letting it remain within its own entity.

BP: But these things are complex and take a lot of time. The last JV we did took seven months of very cordial negotiation. But really its about marrying a good technology with capital.

3:00 p.m. - Travis: I like to retreat into theory. It’s safe and defensible. “Dispersity.” If I had to create a general rule for this it doesn’t make sense to go after multiple technologies because they might cannibalize each other.

BP: I actually agree with that. In the cleantech world, a lot of innovation is occurring with different models. So we would want to pursue a lot of different business models and play them out against each other. Like kittens.

2:56 p.m. - BP: We tend not to think about distributed power. Except for biomass stoves in rural India. Our main thing is that last year China built more coal capacity than in all of Britain. India’s building a bunch more too. Distributed doesn’t make much sense here.

2:54 p.m. - BP and UTC are laughing nervously while Travis does most of the talking. “Eventually scale is enough to keep competitors out.” BP and UTC get really excited.

2:52 p.m. - Travis: “The sun shines everywhere.” In fact, it typically follows me around. Did you know I can levitate too? (ed. It’s true. I’ve seen it and its pretty awesome.).

2:50 p.m. - Now BP and UTC are going to spend the rest of the time talking about Travis’s cell phone analogy and developing economies. UTC guy just got really exciting about BP’s market share in Indian biomass stoves. I think they’re going to explore the added value of a synergistic relationship leveraged on their shared interest in rural India.

2:48 p.m. - Travis: There’s a big difference between drug development and energy development. Large corporations aren’t set up for, or compensate for, taking the kinds of risks entrepreneurs do. BP is very well set up to biofuels, but they’re not well set up to do distributed electricity generation. “In distributed solar, which I happen to know a lot about,” it might be necessary for a big company like BP to pick a company to partner with that shares its core competencies. Travis didn’t really say anything funny.

2:44 p.m. - In 2001 we started talking to DuPont. That was relatively easy because we have scientists and they have scientists. Then all of our scientists got together and had a baby. We named it Biobutanol. The we broke up with DuPont because they didn’t listen to our needs and we formed our own energy & biotech venture. We called it Scotland.

2:40 p.m. - William: We own companies named Chubb and Kitty. I went to Sloan. UTC specializes in eating companies. We eat them and turn them into elevators and firetrucks and guided missiles. And fuel cells - did I mention we make fuel cells. That’s because we’re the biggest company ever.

2:37 p.m. - Travis: “I certainly don’t have an inferiority complex.” I wrote a book.

Just kidding. Travis actually wrote this book.

Travis just said our research is read in 55 countries around the world. That’s like millions of words. Millions and millions of words. I’ve written a few of them.

2:35 p.m. - Justin: We created BP Alternative energy. It houses every renewable energy business ever. We’re particularly strong in providing cooking solutions for rural India. Next quarter we’re hoping to leverage some weight in the chutney market. This is informed by our analysis telling us that a lot of growth in renewable energy is going to be driven by small companies. 1 or 2 employees. Over a biomass stove. In rural India. So, we’re currently reviewing business plans in that growing market. Did I mention I’m British? Really, really British.

2:31 p.m. - William: My company makes everything. We’re the biggest company ever. “We’re working against gravity and against weather.” Like Zeus.

Jeff: “Hey Travis, how many employees do you have at the Prometheus Institute?”

Travis: *Choking on his mint*

2:25 p.m. - Jeff : Anyone who tells you they’re an expert in cleantech is lying. They’re pants are on fire. The guy from Ze-gen is going to turn it into energy.

2:23 p.m. - Shoutout to the guy from Babson who recognized us. It’s not that hard. Scott and I are the only ones having fun here.

Breakout 7 - Power: Global Markets, Big Customers, Needed Technology
Moderator: Jeff Andrews, Partner, Atlas Venture; Justin Adams, Director of Technology Strategy, BP, Travis Bradford, Founder, President & Director, Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development; William M. Sisson, Director, Sustainability, WBSCD Buildings Project, United Technologies

2:17 p.m. - Dennis: We have a lot of issues. Probably even more issues once we become public. I’m going back to bed.

2:16 p.m. - Travis enters again. “As if on cue.”

2.15 p.m. - John: Our feedstock costs are spiraling down to $0.20 - $0.25 per bushel. Take that corn ethanol! Losers.

Quick trivia fact: Jim Matheson was a Top Gun pilot. That makes him the coolest person in the room.

2:13 p.m. - Richard: Subsidies need to be large, large enough to spur people to buy stuff. It can grow an industry and it can support it while it needs support. Like communism. We need more communism. “Most of the people we talk to are receptive to that. At least at the staff level.”

Silly congressional staff.

2:11 p.m. - Someone just walked into the room with really awful perfume. It’s making me nauseous.

2:08 p.m. - No one in the room can remember what FutureGen is. Scott C. says back in the 1990s they used to refer to startups that didn’t really exist as living in PowerPoint.

2:07 p.m. - John: We licensed our technology to a Japanese company. But they totally failed.

2:03 p.m. - John: Who can get the largest, cheapest, most dependable supply of biomass into their facility. In biofuels its all about securing your feedstock. Just like in solar. So one of our advantages is that we’ve been able to supply this feedstock pretty consistently.

Dennis: Let me ask a bigger question. Certainly solar and ethanol have at least to date been dependent on subsidies. So, the first question - and I’ll direct it to Matt - is what has the regulatory environment done to move the market around in the last few years?

Matt: We have no idea what’s going on.

1:59 p.m. - Tech guy #3: Take or pay contracts may end up burning you pretty badly.

1:58 p.m. - Tech guy #2: But it might be better to buy short term on the spot market while waiting for long term contracts to come in.

1:57 p.m. - Tech guy #1: On the long term basis its better not to buy on the spot market.

1:56 p.m. - All the guys on this panel look and sound the same.

1:54 p.m. - Richard: We have an ongoing R&D activity that consumes a lot of resources. And then we build manufacturing plants that consume a lot of investment. The majority of these are equity based. But after you get the first one under your belt, financing the rest are a little bit easier. Did I mention I raised $100 million in a day? Our experience in VC/PE was that our business was far more important than ongoing macroeconomic events.
1:49 p.m. - This has nothing to do with the conference.

It’s irresistible. Completely, utterly irresistible.
Read all about it here.

1.46 p.m. - Dennis: What were the lessons you’ve learned so far in the whole IPO process?

John: We learned to be awesome. By combining the world’s best entomologists and microbiologists with my incredibly square jaw, we were able to form the world’s most dynamic biofuel company.

Richard: We weren’t ready to be a public company, but the window looked good. So we jumped through it. Now we’re almost as awesome as John’s incredibly square jaw. But… the ability to finance is outstanding in windows.

John: We had no idea if we were an energy company or a biotech company. So we decided to call ourselves an industrial biotech company. Our growth profiles are a little bit different than your average energy company. They’re square. Like my jaw.

1:39 p.m. - Scott C. - “My experience so far is that it’s nearly impossible to make an interesting presentation out of biofuels.”

1:35 p.m. - Travis Bradford is in the building!

1:34 p.m. - Breakout 4 - Power: Hitting the BALLPARK Lights
Moderator: Dennis Costello, Managing Director, Braemer Energy Ventures; Richard Chleboski, VP, Strategy & Business Development, Evergreen Solar; John Doyle, VP, Projects, Verenium Corporation; Russell Landon, Managing Director, Canaccord Adams

1:27 p.m. - Scott Clavenna (Greentech Media) & Martin LaMonica (CNET)

1:25 p.m. - The graphical doodles!

Power Keynote #1

Doodles from Steven Connor’s Power Keynote

12:33 p.m. - Time for lunch! Pictures to follow….

12:32 p.m. - The final Q&A: William, how did you choose construction waste?

William: Well, construction debris has a higher energy content (clapping from the other room). It also doesn’t have mercury in it. Third, people are already preparing it for us by grinding and shredding it. This helps us a little bit with the permitting. I said to my team “let’s go with the wood.”

12:23 p.m. - Peter: How do you guys decide on where to site your projects?

Jim: Massachusetts totally tricked us. 30 years ago everyone in the state wanted to build renewable energy. I went to cocktail parties and people were totally begging me to build wind turbines. Now the Kennedys won’t even return my phone calls. It’s frustrating because 84 percent of the people in Massachusetts want us to build Cape Wind. The problem is that the Kennedys count for like 50,000 people each. And there are like 50 of them.

Cristina: We decided to build our batteries in China because of speed, not cost. The Chinese work really fast. Not like you fat, lazy Americans. Did I mention I’m Danish?

William: We expect to complete our demo project in 8 months. So now we’re looking for locations of 5 to 15 acres were we can process 450 tons/day of construction garbage into about 50 MW. So we need access to garbage. Lots and lots of garbage. We need access to the grid too. So… a dirty place with lots of power lines. (ed: New Jersey?)

12:19 p.m. - William: Chasing after equity is like building Mr. Potato Head. But we’ve very successful at it.

Jim: We’ve had a lot of dumb money. And by dumb money I mean me and the board have financed the whole projet ourselves. When we actually get to build something then we’re going to try raising some capital. Like $1 billion. No big deal. We’re Saudi Arabia. But for wind.

Cristina: We build our batteries in China, so financing isn’t a problem for us. That and the $70 million we raised in the last round.

12:13 p.m. - Jim: I want to ferment clean energy in Massachusetts.

William: Dude, that’s totally my job. I entered this industry not knowing anything about waste or energy, and now I run a waste-to-energy company. That’s some serious learning by doing. It was a really big challenge for us to build a first-of-its-kind waste-to-energy plant, and also a really big challenge for us to finance.

12:08 p.m. - Cristina: The U.S. lost out when Bell Labs rejected a funding proposal for lithium ion batteries. So they went to Denmark. And the Danish have become a battery powerhouse. Errr… Cristina also used to feed her kids oatmeal because she worked for free. Scott feeds his kids oatmeal because he thinks oatmeal is the coolest.

Peter: Clearly you’re all visionaries. Clearly.

Cristina: I have great vision. My kids really hate oatmeal.
Jim: I’m glad I didn’t forget my glasses.

12:05 p.m. - Jim: Cape Cod is the Saudi Arabia of wind. Ummm….

Jim: Off our coast, there are 900,000 MW of wind power potential. So a large component of our energy could come from offshore wind. And this energy could be used for both generating electricity, and for powering cars. And for spreading freedom.

12:00 p.m. - William: It’s a little bit about both being an entrepreneur and building a market. So, part of it is building a technology and part of it is building a company. Especially in the waste business, one of the things we spent a lot of time thinking about is devising a plan to avoid pissing off the big waste management players. Our plan was to move everything to the edge of town where the waste was being aggregated instead of stealing business from the waste management companies. Because we’re an energy company, not a garbage collector.

11:53 a.m. – Peter: What is it about the economic or permitting environment that makes it a good time for you all to do what you’re doing?

William: It makes me feel good. All warm and fuzzy.

Breakout 1 – Power: Casting a WIDE Net
Moderator: Peter Rothstein, Entrepreneur-in-Residence, Flagship Ventures; William Davis, President & CEO, Ze-gen; Jim Davis, President, Cape Wind; Cristina Lampe-Onnerud, Founder & CEO, Boston-Power

11:52 a.m. - Never mind. I think they just realized the wi-fi was off. Back online!

11:49 a.m. - So, there’s no wi-fi in the breakout rooms, which these posts are going to start coming up in slightly slower than real time as I room back and forth between the hallway and the conference rooms. Oops. Good job MIT.

11:42 a.m. – Steve: Name for me the members of OHEC – the Organization of Hydrogen Exporting Countries…
These MIT guys really have no sense of humor.

11:32 a.m. – This talk is like renewable energy for dummies. Really. So much for MIT’s edge on innovation.
Although, there are six types of NIMBY. Did you know?

11:25 a.m. – Steve: Is snakeoil a biofuel? Or, physics vs. Photoshop. FutureGen, billed as C02 “free” was actually not – coal barges were replaced by trees. The Chetwood Associates “Wind Dam” is also kind of silly.

11:20 a.m. – It’s hard to believe someone actually gets paid to be a professional doodler.
Steve: A new energy policy requires: aggressive end use efficiency, domestic energy diversity, and modernized energy networks. So I tend to think about energy demand in space and time. The first way to do this is to rethink energy efficiency. The current way is to think about this in terms of more efficient energy conversion devices, like CFLs.
But the huge opportunity is in energy utilization efficiency. The poster child for this is the hybrid car. A smart house… or a not dumb house. Or integrated energy efficiency.

11:17 a.m. – Steve: So what’s a killer amp? We should be able to find someway to reach down and grab the low hanging fruit
1. building and appliances
2. vehicle fuel economic and biofuels
3. industry efficiency
4. C02 – intensity of power

11:15 a.m. – Steve: All energy is local and situational. Energy, unlike biotech or infotech is really a substitute product or service.
Convenience and reliability are huge aspects of this new market. “Right now it’s not plug and play, it’s plug and pray.”

11:13 a.m. – Steve: My thinking is you need a market to get greentech out the door. “What’s the next Killer Amp?” Ha!

11:10 a.m. – Power Keynote: Stephen Connors, Director, Analysis Group for Regional Energy Alternatives, MIT Lab for Energy and the Environment
10:52 a.m. - Okay… networking break. Back in a few minutes with the first energy breakout session

10:50 a.m. - Doug: Everyone wants to be in clean energy. Last year in Mass., there were 120,000 people out of work, though 90,000 jobs were available. Nick - put these people to work.

10:46 a.m. - Nick from the New England Clean Energy Council wants everyone to know he has lunch with people from Germany. And they love Boston because we’re so innovative. Like the Germans. Who’s paying for Nick’s flights to Germany? NECEC’s party plane: Your membership dollars at work.

10:42 a.m. - Scott K.: VCs in Boston have a “geezer fetish.” That’s kind of gross. Apparently they’re not willing to take bets on first time, young entrepreneurs. I guess salted cod innovation isn’t going away. Also, funny Pilgrim hats. And smallpox.

10:37 a.m. - Joe B. just walked down the aisle. The whole GTM Cambridge team is here now and cooking with gas. I think Scott is doing his taxes.

10:34 a.m. - Some guy in the audience from Harvard’s tech licensing office just got really pissy about Chris G.’s dissing the school. Now they’re fighting. Chris G.: “if Harvard was pro-innovation, I think it would help change the attitudes of a lot people around here.” Chris G. plays the Judah Folkman card.

Scott: I blame Harvard for letting Facebook move to Silicon Valley.

10:28 a.m. - Doug: Innovation at the nexis of cleantech is happening in Boston. There’s a big crossover of batteries and wind power and nanotech and it’s all happening here. We just need to stop acting like Pilgrims. Or invent salted cod 3.0.

10:27 a.m. - Scott: Miami used to be full of old people and the criminals who mugged them. But it was saved by Madonna and Gianni Versace. So the culture in Boston can change too.

10:19 a.m. - Chris G. thinks Harvard is the biggest impediment to innovation in Boston. I’m all of a sudden really proud to be a student there. Chris G. thinks Harvard is big, lame, and snobby. Yeah…. it’s true.

10:15 a.m. - Bob: Boston is really old. And innovative. Our economy has crashed and burned at least four times since the 1630s. Taking the long view…. Pilgrims made awesome salted cod fish in the 1640s. Boston was a salted cod fish tech cluster. Salted cod fish = fish 2.0

10:14 a.m. - Chris: We have great genetics. “Where are we? How are we doing on being an innovative, entrepreneurial place? Bob?”

Robert: I fight against black and white thinking. Xconomy’s really trying to shine the light on what’s going on… really get to all the gray areas. New England is way cooler than Silicon Valley.

Doug: No one is better than New England at looking at other people and thinking about how they’re better than us.

Scott: We should all vote for Chris G. on the conference feedback forms, so he finally gets some positive election results. Ouch.

Four journalists and a failed politician.

10:05 a.m. - Chris: By the end of this panel, we’ll have a plan to turn New England into Silicon Valley.

9:59 a.m. - Someone’s ringing a bell. Like we’re dairy cows. All of the innovators have escaped for more coffee.

9:56 a.m. - Plenary Session - The Future of New England Innovation:
Moderator: Christopher Gabrieli, Co-founder & Chairman, Mass 20/20
Panel: Doug Banks, Editor, Mass High Tech; Robert Buderi, Founder & CEO, Xconomy; Scott Kirsner, Innovation Economy columnist, Boston Globe ; Bob Krim, Executive Editor, Boston History and Innovation Collaborative

9:52 a.m. - John Kao (channeling Steve Jobs)… “One more thing.” He cues up his Colbert Report appearance.

9:47 a.m. - John Kao: Q&A - “voting booths have curtains on them for a reason.” He’s definitely voting for Walnuts!

9:42 a.m. - John Kao: Systems integration is really where the big breaks are going to be. For entrepreneurs, its really about Americans leveraging global talent - building a global enterprise through communication. So these are good times for entrepreneurs, but with it comes a new way of thinking. “What can you do for the world?” Now, we need to be saying to ourselves - “what’s good for the world is good for America.”

9:39 a.m. - John Kao: So what does this all mean for entrepreneurs? The inputs to the innovation process are now globalized. The government of Singapore will fund 30-40 percent of your digital media project through grant funding - totally off balance sheet.

So… we’re opening a Greentech Media office in Singapore.

9:36 a.m. - John Kao is “stunned” by how dumb our leaders are. “We need to reinvent”. Kind of like building the sense of urgency we had after Sputnik. In 1957 we built a national innovation strategy - DARPA, etc. The irony now is that we have a real problem in 2008, but no one seems to care. But because a lot of the issues we’re talking about don’t have “pain points”, then its hard to get these ideas through. We need someone in the White House to really care about this - the new president has to name someone to be the steward of the national innovation agenda.

9:33 a.m. - Finland is one of the most advanced country’s in the world for having an advanced ecosystem for innovation. They’ve merged three major universities - the school of business, school of technology, and school of design: The Innovation University. That was a 600 million Euro investment.

So we need to develop a private consensus among business, government, academia, etc. to really get this going in the U.S. So how do you get these kind of institutions to work together?

9:29 a.m. - John Kao: We suck compared to Scandinavia.

9:26 a.m. John Kao: So that’s human capital. What about financial capital? We could funding a Biopolis every 10 days with the interest payments on the national debt. Oops. William Gibson - the guy who invented the term “cyberspace” - has said we’ve entered an age where wars will be fought over the resources of talented people. Money, talent and IP are borderless.

9:22 a.m.- But, America has also always relied on waves upon waves of talented immigrants. But standards of living abroad and the growth of quality academic institutions have really stifled this talented immigration pool. So has our immigration policy. Now, instead of Silicon Valley, talented foreigners are going to the Singapore Biopolis. We’ve already lost the head of the NIH and the head of biology at UCSD. Singapore now has three national innovation priorities - biotech, cleantech, digital media. The Biopolis is aiming to have 10,000 Ph.D.’s in the life sciences in 4 or so years - that’s in a country of 4.5 million people. “It’s like Brooklyn deciding to become a life sciences haven.”

9:17 a.m. - John Kao: How is the U.S. doing in terms of human capital? Well, you can either make it or acquire. Too bad our public schools have really taken a nose dive. The sad thing is our kids actually do pretty well until they hit high school, and this has to do with the nature of the system. Many of the people who teach math and science in our public schools were drafted - they don’t do a particularly good job. Finland produces twice as many Ph.D.’s per capita as the U.S. So, there’s an issue of growing domestic talen.

9:15 a.m. - John Kao: Innovation’s important, not just nice to have.

John Kao

9:12 a.m. - John Kao: We have a challenge ourselves to become an innovative nation. Smart, creative action. “We need an innovation president. We need someone in the White House who really understands this issue.”

9:10 a.m. - John Kao: Topic #1 - Innovation. Telling story about Googling “innovation” and getting 321 million hits. The word “innovation” is used so often that its largely lost its meaning. So, we’ve got to find a new one. Jim M. said “innovation is something new or different.”

John - “So is my three year old son’s art.” But as my work evolved and I began looking at large organizations or incumbent organizations, that definition has become inadequate.

Innovation - “the capability or set of capabilities that enables the continuous realization of a desire future state.” You heard it here first.

9:05 a.m. - Jim: John Kao is a renaissance man. The most profound thing about Kao is that he’s really challenged America on our approach to innovation and capital. Kao was also on The Colbert Report (!).

9:00 a.m. - They’ve hired professional doodlers (!) to capture graphically all the dialog and content throughout the day. Definitely getting pictures of this… More to follow.

8:57 a.m. - Jim’s thanking all the organizers. ChenPR, 451 Marketing, MIT EF, etc., etc., etc…

8:53 a.m. - Jim: Today’s two main themes are innovation and impact. We’re really looking at the New England innovation scene and how we can impact the global economy through power drugs and money. New England’s always been a leader in financial services. More recently we’ve developed a strong biotech sector. Now we’re moving into energy.

Thanking the sponsors….

Jim Matheson

8:50 a.m. - Jim Matheson takes the stage. “Today is about being here, meeting new people, thinking differently.”

8:49 a.m. Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money” is playing.

8:41 a.m. - Some woman on my right is religiously reading her thumb-worn copy of John Kao’s Innovation Nation. These people aren’t messing around.

Meanwhile, the room is slowing filling in. The “innovators” video is still playing - there’s a large proportion of British people on the video. Something about the accent. The Sloanies here are painfully obvious. They’re the ones trying to look cool while secretly begging everyone for a job.

Just kidding, Phil…

8:34 a.m. - They’re looping this video on the big screen of “innovators” on their life lessons in entrepreneurship. The guy on now is telling this story about Larry Ford - head of corporate research at 7-11 - on how he revolutionized courtesy at the convenience store. In the end they found no causal link between courtesy and sales. It’s all about quickness - any 13 year old knows this. Maybe they had brain freeze up at corporate.

8:21 a.m. - Waiting…

8:05 a.m. - Eating breakfast at Boston’s Seaport World Trade Center. The attendees and speakers are rolling in. People are crushed with the news of the ITC’s failure. Jim Matheson’s opening speech should start in about 30 minutes.

Wait! How’s it supposed to work? First you get the drugs. Then you get the money. Then you get power. No… That’s Scarface.

Welcome to Greentech Media’s liveblog of the “Power, Drugs & Money” MIT Enterprise Forum on innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology in New England. In case you were wondering, “Power, Drugs & Money” refer to energy, biotech, and venture capital – three major highlights of the New England innovation and technology scene. The MIT Enterprise Forum has assembled a great list of panelists, running the gamut from tech guys at energy startups to well known VCs to analysts with inside-out industry knowledge.

I’ll be here all day following the big ideas from the keynotes, plenary sessions, and energy breakouts. Just remember to hit your refresh button constantly, as I’ll be updating quickly.

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