Saket Vora

After grabbing a few hours of sleep, Amit and I were on the 7am train to attend the ThinkGreen forum held by ThinkEquity at the swanky Intercontinental Hotel in the City. In contrast to the Green:Net conference we attended yesterday, ThinkGreen was a more mature and upscale event — lots of C-level (CEO, CFO, COO, etc) speakers from companies that are major players in the cleantech field.  The crowd was largely analysts, investors, and other professionals — of the 150 or so attendees, I counted around 10 students.

Still, the conference was really good. Clear, well moderated tracks such as the Solar Value Chain, Advanced Lighting, Future of Fuels, Resource Optimization (focus on water management), Smart Grid, Beyond Silicon for Solar, Policy Initiatives, Batteries, and Wind power. It was a good chance to learn about the key challenges and issues these companies are facing, largely from a market and business standpoint.

Lots of talk about how the economic downtown and the stimulus package is affecting the businesses. Many speakers commented at how this new administration is a really big help for green initiatives and renewables, unlike the last one. Some people/companies I also knew that I was looking forward to: Kevin Surace of Serious Materials and Don Young of Aspen Aerogels. I had read a HBS case study on Aspen Aerogels for my entrepreneurial finance company, and it was neat to actually meet the guy the case was about. Young in person was really great — Amit and I came up to him after his talk to learn more about the aerogel material. Even though a line was after us and we were lowly students, he took time to talk to us and pulled some samples out of his bag and showed us the products they are currently installing. Really enjoyed meeting him.

Between sessions there was a chance to network. Amit and I bonded with the crowd that skewed younger — the business school students and newly minted analysts or associates from VC firms. Surprisingly, water purification popped up as did WaterPLUS (it never goes away!). An associate at Sequoia pointed me to Crystal IS, a semiconductor firm making germical UV-LEDs out of alumnium nitride. Also, a contact from Crosslink Capital also mentioned that one of his analyst colleagues did his B.S. in EE/CPE at NC State, and a MS in EE at Stanford. Interesting path!

The lunch keynote speaker was Mark Mills, a physicist who had experience in government (an advisor to the Reagan admnistration), author, and a venture capitalist. What a great speaker! I will write a separate followup to him, but check out a Daily Show appearance he did. Get this — halfway through his talk he was explaining the physical nature of entropy and how it affects the way you should view energy to a room full of investors, analysts, and business executives. It was great.

Overall I’m very pleased I attended, and I must thank Amit again for scoring the passes. It was very upscale – warm breakfast (like the fancy buffet styles), three course lunch, and a cocktail hour with topshelf spirits and really good food. During an intersession break the 2nd day, they had someone blending fruit smoothies for us. :)