Saket Vora

Tonight I attended an event called GREENtrepreneurs at the Graduate School of Business. I hadn’t realized what kind of event it was until getting there (the couple next to me forked over $80 to get in, whereas I showed my Stanford ID and got in free). The finger food before the panel talk cost $15 so I skipped that. The panel included three entrepreneurs and two venture capitalists.

The first company that spoke was Recyclebank. This was founded by Ron Gonen in New York. The idea is that people take part in city recycling programs but practically all of them never see any money come back to them for their effort. Thing is, the city saves a bunch of money by reducing their landfill diversion fee. So Recyclebank does is that they give people a large container outfitted with a chip, and add some sensor hardware to a truck that goes and collects the container. The chip tells the truck how much the container weighs, and the household is credited with Recyclebank dollars for their recycling effort. These Recyclebank dollars can be redeemed online or in person at a very large number of popular retailers. Recyclebank rolls out their service for free, but it signs 5 year agreements with cities in which they get 50% of whatever the city saves in landfill diversion fees. So far they have implemented this on the northern East coast.

Gonen is a lively and engaging speaker. He started by asking those that recycled in the past month to raise their hands. It was practically unanimous (450 people in the room). He said that’s why he loves California. “If it were New York, this tiny corner would raise their hands.” He then asked “how much of you got paid for your recycling effort?” And only 2 people raised their hands. “Exactly.” After he showed us the website and told us about, he took several ‘VC-like’ questions from the audience. Many of them quite good, about his business model, about how he wards against competitors, etc (”This is why I’m scared of speaking at Stanford. I see you all out there taking notes!”) Then someone asks “what about quality control? What’s stopping someone from putting a bowling ball in the container?” And he laughed. “See, that’s the first question I get when talking to people in New York! But in California, it takes a while before someone brings it up.” Overall, I think the audience was pretty responsive to Gonen’s idea.

The second company was Lucid Design Group, with CEO Michael Murray. I was very interested in hearing about this company, as many readers of the blog will understand immediately. Though not as dynamic of a speaker as Gonen, the demostration he did of their web dashboard for energy usage in a Emory dormitory was extremely impressive. NC State needs to get on board with this. (UNC has a dashboard in their Morrison Hall).

And finally we heard from the CEO of GreenPlug, with founder Frank P. Paniagua. Paniagua was the founder of the Video Electronics Standards Board, which got different vendors to talk to other and communicate their designs so video quality would improve in early computers. He and his wife was going to a wedding and he realized he was lugging around eight or nine AC/DC power converters. This is ridiculous he thought. Paniagua is much older than Gonen or Murray, and he had an easy way of talking to the group like a veteran. He gave some shoutouts to familiar faces in the crowd, and spoke overall in a matter-of-fact way. GreenPlug aims for companies to create a universal DC charging solution. His company has created a chip that lets electronics talk to each other securely about their power needs. So he envisions DC power hubs. “What’s the most coveted spot at the Starbucks or at an airport? The one by the power outlet! It doesn’t have to be like that!”. You plug into a hub with any electronic device, and your device will tell the hub how much power it needs and what voltage and current, and the hub supplies it. Simple. It’s an interesting take on the cleantech that can have a lot of promise — but relies on getting companies to start shaking hands. We’ll see.

Overall pretty interesting panel. I didn’t get to hear John Denniston of Kleiner Perkins talk. I remember seeing him at the social innovation talk last quarter when they had the founder of Ashoka speak. I sat next to a 1st year GSB student from Bulgaria and 2nd year enviro/energy graduate student.