Saket Vora

Man, what a busy awesome few days. On Wednesday morning I met with a group of MBA students from Oxford. They were visiting the Bay Area, and a mentor of theirs is from Stanford who told them about BASES. In particular, these MBA students were very interested in social entrepreneurship, so officers with the Social E-Challenge met them for breakfast along with Parul and Peter (the leaders of two semi-finalist teams in this year’s competition) to talk about social enterprise, what BASES does on campus, etc.  Great group of folks coming from a variety of backgrounds, who asked good questions and we got to learn about some neat programs that Oxford has.

In the afternoon, I had an opportunity to chat with Steve Baker, a writer for BusinessWeek (and author of The Numerati). Steve was visiting Stanford to learn about what entrepreneurial minded students were up to these days amid an economic climate, and BASES was a natural place to start. I also invited three other Stanford entrepreneurs to give Steve a diverse look at the kinds of ideas people are pursuing…with a bent towards social ventures of course. Steve was wonderful to talk with — easy going, perceptive, and curious. Props to Eli for making the intro. 

On Thursday I was to have coffee in the morning with a colleague of a VC friend of mine, but it fell through. But in the afternoon, Nick Anderson from UNC stopped by campus. Nick is a remarkable senior at Carolina - interested in development, energy issues, and social enterprise. I had worked (only marginally, admittedly) on a solar installer idea that Nick was submitting to the Carolina Challenge, and we have several mutual friends. Nick was actually admitted to Stanford as a senior, but chose Carolina. We did a walk and talk around campus and talked about future plans.

On Friday, I had a lunch discussion at the Mayfield offices. I was invited by a recent Stanford colleague who works there now, and he gathered some other Stanford students to talk about opportunities in power and smart grid space. It was an engaging discussion - I was impressed at the level of knowledge around the table, from the business case to the engineering. I was the one with the least experience there…I’ve got to match my passion and interest in this space with some actual projects and experiences.

Back on campus, I spent the afternoon talking with Mark and Jennie. Dr. Johnson was in town for the Materials Research Society conference in San Francisco, and they had come down to visit Stanford. We had coffee at the Cantor Art Center then spent the rest of the time walking around campus, taking advantage of the superb weather. It was so great to catch up with them — we talked about NC State, about smart grids and energy opportunities, about the FREEDM center, about schools, etc. Mark is truly into energy research now and is very well connected. I always learn a lot from talking with him and Jennie. 

After they left, I went over to White Plaza where they had a big art exhibit going with live music. Met up with Amit there, and we ran into Kamal, Jimmy, Nader, and even Jonathan. Buca di Beppo was being catered in so we scored a free meal too. Afterward Amit and I hit up the ‘energy social’ gathering at the Sigma Nu house, and I got to meet three new people - onewas a Stanford student working at the Hewlett Foundation and interested in climate change policy and social enterprise (she knew Josh of FrontlineSMS:Medic, Nathaniel Whittemore at Northwestern, Acumen Fund, etc); one was visiting Stanford Law School from ASU and is a Truman Scholar interested in public policy and politics, and the other was a Sigma Nu in in economics & math and MS&E who did a summer at McKinsey and will be joining their SF office after graduation. Good times. 

Even at a place as out-of-this-world as Stanford, you don’t get a lot of days like these, at least for me.

Safeway had a sale on fruit preserves and I tried peach. Turns out, it’s not so good on toast. But what to do then with a whole jar of peach preserves? Serendipitously, I ran into Mary and Matt at the grocery store and who better to ask? Mary recommended that I get some brie and pastry puff to use with the peach preserves.

Why I chose a school night to actually go through with it, I’m not sure..it turns out to be a lot more involved than I expected. Never worked with puff pastry before, and so my wrapping was amateurish to say the least. I used a whisked egg as an adhesive and made each pastry puff with a cube of brie and a spoonful of preserve. I borrowed some of Charles’ rasperry preserve too.

After 10-13 minutes in 360 degF oven (or GBD), they came out like this:

Jam had oozed everywhere. I let them cool and brought the batch to Hindi class (where I typically bring the food that I cook). Overall they came out pretty darn well! Thanks Mary for the suggestion!

CCRMA, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, is a major research lab on campus with a storied history — the frequency synthesizer that was later licensed to Yahama was born out of this lab, and this alone made an enormous impact on digital music. The lab iteself is housed in what I think was the old president’s building — it feels like an old mansion. On the 2nd floor there is a computer lab awkwardly placed in the middle of a formal dining room — crown moulding and large bay windows galore.

But the gem of this place is its 3rd floor lounge, with a balcony that looks out at the foothills behind Stanford, the Big Dish perched on the hill.

The picture doesn’t do it justice. You can sit at a table there on a nice day…and it feels great. Inside, there are couches and a foosball table, with large windows showing a view out over campus:

Click on the photos for a bigger view. Too bad you need to have taken a music-related course in order to get access to the building..but once you’ve taken a course you get entrance priviledges until you leave Stanford.

This past Saturday afternoon, just as I was sitting down to do some work, I get a phone call from a friend alerting to me to an open showing of Tesla’s new Model S sedan, which made its debut two weeks ago in Las Vegas. The window was closing fast, so I quickly headed over to the Tesla dealership just next door in Menlo Park. It was the same Model S that was in Las Vegas.

The cockpit of the car is um, bright. The speedometer area is a computer display. And there is that giant 17 inch haptic display with a huge Google Maps readout, the music player, and the HVAC controls. Other than that, it feels like any other sports-styled sedan. Keep in mind — this car isn’t set to start mass production for another three years, so a lot can change.

 The dealership has a view to the rear hanger, where the mechanics treat and prepare the cars for delivery. So many Teslas…

I sat in the main roadster, and the steering wheel is like a go-kart!

Another thing that I thought odd was the cheap plasticky covers on the taillights. 

One would think that if you’re going to plunk down over $100,000 for a car, you could get some nice glass covers for your taillights, because let’s be honest — if you’re driving a Tesla, you’re going to be showing your taillights to people a lot.

Met up with Michael last week for lunch and then we checked out the Cool Products Expo, where you can a whole gamut of interesting things. A friend of mine, Peter Frykman, was going to have his innovative low cost drip irrigation system on display, so I definitely wanted to come by and see it.

Peter has started a venture called Drip Technologies to bring this device to market, and is a semi-finalist in the Social E-Challenge competition.

Inside, there were all kinds of products, from an ultralight carbon fiber guitar, to portable handcrank chargers and building materials, to Cooliris’ crazy touch control projected image wall to rival John King, to an interesting spill-proof coffee lid piece for disposable coffee cups. Anybots was there too with one of their creepy robots too.

Menaka,  friend of mine in Hindi class, invited us to the Stanford Law School Musical - an annual event produced by students, with special appearances by law school staff and faculty. Menaka graduated from UNC in 2005 and so she’s a 3L — just a month away from graduating. Amit and I joined her at Old Pro to watch the Carolina game before leaving at the half to Kresge Auditorium.

I knew pretty much no one there — the law school and engineering school are so far apart — and even from a housing standpoint the law students seem to be  characteristically clustered much closer together. Overall, it was an eye opening experience. There was a good mix of 1Ls, 2Ls, and 3Ls, but clearly there was a party atmosphere. The Stanford Law School is on a semester system, so they finish in a month. For the 1Ls and 2Ls, its just about finalizing their job. For the 3Ls, they are done with school but the bar exam is still too far to worry about. Combine that with the very recent shift towards a High/Pass/Fail grading system, you could sense the mental burden on most of the students that night (ie, little to none). 

The musical itself exceed all expectations — easily 5+ months in the making. Featured a large cast of around 30 people, though there were about a dozen main characters. The plot revolved around the idea that the Stanford Business School was closed due to the recent economic crisis and because the 2Ls aren’t graded anymore, they have nothing to complain about so they all left the Law School.  One student getting a joint JD/MBA (in real life he hangs around a lot of B-school folks and wears the preppy popped collar) suggests that the MBA students move to the Law School. Being good B-school students, they promptly take over the Law School, causing a band of law students to go on a quest to find some way to kick them out and save the Law School. They discover a cryptic note written on the Stanford Law School charter that turns out was a note by Benjamin Harrison, one of the Law School founders. They seek the counsel of the portrait gallery (which really exists on the 2nd floor and Menaka says features all these old white dudes that no one knows who they are) and the talking portraits (ala Harry Potter) point the students to a secret note hidden in Harrison’s secret archive. When the law school heroes finally track it down, they find it speaks to the law’s role in ensuring justice in society and how love of the law is required….something the B-school gang found repulsive so they left in disgust. 

Peppered throughout were jabs that are to be expected — poking fun at certain professors, common experiences of all students, current events, etc. There were cameos from a well loved professor, from the dean of the students, and even from the head of the law school himself, who giddily recounts how he decided to do exactly the opposite of what the law school faculty council suggested he do. All throughout the show there were cheers and applauses — the crowd was absolutely into it. The 3Ls we were sitting by were gone by the intersession….as the show ended I saw an near empty bottle of Maker’s Mark and several empty wine bottles. 

The writing was terrific — these guys really knew what they were doing. There was a whole scene with the 2Ls on their Oregon Trail upon leaving the law school, complete with references to hunting buffalo, fording a river, and dying of dysentary. There was a hilarious scene featuring the original Willy Wonka and three oompa-loompas (representing Google search servers), with perfectly recreated oopma-loompa dances too!

Between scenes as the stage hands got the next scene ready, the band would cover songs from the last decade that had nearly the whole audience singing along to — the real iconic songs that everyone knew. Practically everyone in the audience is 24-29 years old, so both pop culture and music references were common experiences — really smart production there. Throwbacks to classic rock were done really well too, like this one with Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing.

 Just a State school boy
did undergrad at Illinois
he drove a piece of shit car to Stanford Law
Just an Ivy girl
on the way to rule the world
she flew a private jet out to Stanford Law

[famous professor signs a girl's arm] 

Sitting in the Law Cafe
it smells of weed and Tanqueray….
…read their books, it goes on and on and on and on

1Ls, no grades,
spending all their nights at Rudy’s (a bar)
….
so much potential, they got the world in front of them
but they’re all in Vegas and Tahoe!

Even for someone like me with an interest in law issues and with only a passing understanding of law school (thanks to Win), I was laughing constantly during the show — which is a real testament to the writers.

As a parting note — it was eye opening to see the level of community and camaraderie on display in the auditorium. It was just tremendous — really stirred the jealously pot.  The law school class size is ~170, but at least for a year it seems that the curriculum is mostly the same for everyone — it gives you a chance to get to know so many people in your class and you’ve all got common experiences to share and draw upon. With the engineering graduate program, everyone ends up rapidly specializing and very quickly your pool of ‘comrades’ shrinks to one or two dozen, at most. And in EE @ Stanford, this starts happening by your 2nd quarter. I hear that the GSB tracks closer to the law school in that regard. And judging from what I know with medical school, it’s probably like that too. Is this something unique to ‘professional’ schools only? Is it the type and age of people who attend these professional schools? 

For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine what I saw happening in an engineering school…and that’s a shame.

This is awfully scattered, but bear with me. At the ThinkGreen forum last week, the lunch keynote was by Mark Mills, a physicist who has worked in a variety of capacities including engineer, consultant to the White House Science Office under Reagan, Dept of Energy, national labs, policy, and writing. It was a wonderful keynote, engaging and offering a perspective I hadn’t heard (and you go to enough cleantech focused gatherings, you start hearing the same things). I wish I could have gotten a transcript of it, but here are a few takeaways:

• When looking at the energy sector, there is really oil and everything else, particularly when examining the production mix. For electric power, burning oil makes up roughly the same order that electric power is encroaching upon the domains that oil dominates (ie, transportation). I think for electric power production, oil is like 1 o 3% of total.
• The myth of energy efficiency. Mills says it has been the policy of every administration to support energy efficiency measures, but every single year there is a net increase in energy consumption. Energy efficiency isn’t necessarily motivated towards decreasing energy consumption. The fact is, as energy efficiency improves, consumption increases.
• For example, if a Google data center used ENIACs, it would consume the amount of power that Manhattan  does. Because computers became more energy efficient, they were made affordable and practical to more people, so more were bought and brought online. The net effect? The energy consumed by the information technology sector is on par with that of the entire aviation industry.
• Don’t forget about energy density. Mills used the drive range of an automobile to compare sources. If you made a normal car run on lead acid batteries, it’d go roughly 20 miles. With lithium-ion batteries in the same amount of space, 100 miles. Ethanol gets you 400 miles, while oil (gas) achieves 700 miles. This is why airplanes will always run on oil.
• The last point was that while people like to use BTUs as a standard form of energy accounting, not all BTUs are comparable like apples to apples. To get the energy (BTUs) contained in a barrel of oil, it would cost you $20 if you burned wood. Barrel of oil right now is ~$50. It would cost you $70 if you used ethanol to get the same amount of BTUs. If you took a generic kWh of electricity and expressed that in a barrel, it would cost $200. That’s just generic electricity; if you wanted regulated and filtered electricity like the kind needed to run a data center, it would cost you $10,000. And finally, if you took the kind of energy in a laser beam and priced it in terms of energy in barrels of oil equivalent, it would cost $200,000 per barrel.
• Mills told us to note the entropy. It takes effort to lower teh entropy of a system. Burning wood is high entropy.  A laser is highly ordered, coherent energy -  one that has very low entropy.

Here’s one that I heard Saul Griffith, a noted inventor, say in his TED talk. He recounted how he was at a Silicon Valley event where a VC asked him what he worked on. Griffith, who did his PhD thesis on self-replicated machines,  has worked on a novel way of creating cheap eyeglasses for the developing world, smart electronic rope, and most recently the idea of using kites as a platform for solar PV. Griffith said “hardware” and the VC responded with “how quaint.” Griffith wondered about this, and thought to himself that the really big problems facing the world right now actually need hardware to solve: clean energy. clean water. cleaner, more functional materials. I would add public health to that list.

IT can play a big role in helping us tackle those problems, but eventually you will need to move beyond just bits and bytes. Not being a software engineer or an agile ‘hacker’, I sometimes feel like a fish out of water here; particularly a year ago when I first arrived. Web 2.0 this and Web 2.0 that. I actually had a recruiter at a job fair — he initiated the conversation, not me — ask me what the heck I was doing there without a software background or interest.

So Griffith’s comments resonated with me. The big problems in the world still have much to benefit from software and IT, but those aren’t the end all and be all of the solution.

First day of classes for my last quarter at Stanford. Went to a Building Systems class about commercial and institutional buildings, taught by an energy efficiency consulting professor. Looks good. Not too many other interesting classes to sit in on today — got 4 lined up for tomorrow. Had a great 2 hour chat with a friend about the cleantech space, then rolled into Hindi. We finally cover simple past tense!

Hit the video cave afterward to put the final touches on the Hindi film from last quarter (I promise…its coming online within 2 weeks), then back home. Noticed I had a small bit of onion/tomato leftovers from Sunday’s guacamole and a package of week old mushrooms. How about a mushroom sauce? Never tried one before but I’ve seen them do it on TV. Mom hinted at using some cream, but I just had milk so improvised by mixing in some AP flour. The sauce turned out awesome. I was so pumped.

But then again, there was sizable amount of butter that went into it. And that would probably make anything taste good. :)

Checking in with the course advisor tomorrow — need to make sure I read the degree requirements right or else this quarter can turn nasty really fast.

After seeing Melih last week, I wanted to revisit Tokbox and used an hour long video chat with Sapana in Chicago and Mom/Sachi in NC to do it. Video quality is getting better, and long duration calls are having almost no technical glitches. The new UI is sleeker, easier to navigate and use.

But what really impressed me was the ability to bring up SlideShare documents, at least PowerPoints, and interact with them during the video conference call. SlideShare is a service that let’s you upload documents and share them with people in a very very simple way. Check out an example of me sharing a slidedeck with the call:

In addition to sharing a PowerPoint, you can even share a YouTube video (though when I used it the YouTube video part was a little sluggish).

A quick overview of why Tokbox is something you should check out:

• entirely browser based — no programs to download, install, configure.
• no account needed to join a video conference call. You can send someone a URL and they can jump right in even if they’ve never been to Tokbox before.
• The video conference can support up to ~20 people. I have never had enough people online at once willing to try a stress test of this, but that’s pretty neat.
• You can very easily send ‘video mails’ to people (even those without a Tokbox account!). I wasn’t sure about how useful this was until I actually got one. It actually felt pretty good to actually see the person and listen to what they had to say. I’m gonna start trying this more.

And to anyone looking to get a new laptop —  pay the extra $$ to get an integrated webcam. Stuff like this is only going to get more ubiquitious and popular and having one integrated is sooooo much more convenient and easier than using an external webcam.

Keep it up Tokbox!

At the same time as these two green/cleantech conferences we going on, the main attraction for the City was the Game Developer’s Conference, the largest gathering of game industry professionals and independents on the planet. I’ve known about the GDC for a while now through my friend Mike, who has attended three of them in the past. Helped by the growth of the industry and the decline of E3, the GDC has really expanded and the 5 day conference is packed full of technical tutorials, issue summits, discussions about business practices and industry trends, and showcases where people can reveal the innovations they are working on.

One of Amit’s friends was an exhibitor for NASA (he’s working for NASA developing their social media) and got us tickets to an afterparty on Wednesday night and then Expo Floor passes which we capitalized on for Thursday after the ThinkGreen conference ended. At the afterparty, I told him how much of spaceflight dork I am. He asked if I could name all the astronauts who walked on the moon. “Just the ones who walked on the moon or all of Apollo?” For my troubles I got  a sweet NASA pin. ;)

One area was entirely dedicated to the indies (the heroes!), a sizable amount for schools and countries hawking themselves (spoke to the guy from Wake Tech), and then of course some of the big names. Word on the street was that companies had really scaled back this year — didn’t have the same crazy feel like last year. I went by Havok’s display at Intel’s booth where Tim showed us what the the crazy physics engine could do. Mike came by and walked around with us for a while too. Some interesting things:

• Ambient peripherals. You can get tiny desk fans, desk lights, and rumble keyboard wristpad that can be activated as you are playing a game to help make the ambient environment match what’s going on.
• Ultra-compact, low cost real time motion capture kits
• An ultra-sonic based Wii-like remote for the Xbox 360
• Neurosky’s brain-wave powered control device
• PS3’s 3D glasses enabled games

A lot of focus on new ways of game interaction. After the expo hours wrapped we wanted to go get a bite to eat. A lot of places shut down in the financial district, but we got some Chinese food before we made our way to the uber metrocool W hotel’s lounge for an afterparty. Exhausted after 3 days with very little sleep and facing a packed Friday, I left soon after to catch the Caltrain home.

Really memorable and exciting 3 days in the City, that’s for sure!

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. :)

Whew! Great day at the Green:Net conference (where IT meets energy) at the Golden Gate Club in the Presidio. Got to talk with the really cool Wattbot folks (they won the judges award during the launchpad!), see and hear from so many other people I’ve been following online. I’ll write a fuller report of it later.

Afterward my friend Ben was kind and gave us a lift to Market St. where we met up with my buddy Tim, Melih, and Mikey (VP Marketing at Tokbox). We took the bus over to Godzilla Sushi and had a great dinner there, made better by having everyone get to know each other more.

We stopped briefly at Tim’s place in the Mission — what an awesome apartment! — before finally catching the last lonely train back down to Palo Alto.

Gotta be up in 3.5 hours — the ThinkGreen conference in SF is next. Check out that line up…wow. The GDC is going on so I’ll swing by the Moscone center and check out the action there too.

After strolling the Farmer’s Market (mmmmm, fresh warm naan) in the morning, Mike, Amit, and I headed up 280-N to the Golden Gate Bridge. Weather in the Bay Area can be highly volatile — you trust short-term weather reports far less here, especially as you travel through the micro-climates which seem to occur every 15 miles you go up the peninsula. Anyway — it looked like the weather in Marin was going to clear up and since Mike was checking into his hotel at 7th & Market that afternoon anyway, we decided it an opportune time to check out the Marin Headlands.

Marin County is just across the Golden Gate Bridge and offers great views of the bay and the City.

Check out some of the views:

Terrell has a practice of taking a shot of him ‘leaping’ at all these places around the world — I saw him take one of leaping over Half Dome at Yosemite last summer. I quickly recognized an opportunity here, and we got the following:

Hehehe. Another family saw what we were doing and since I was already lying on the ground anyway, their two daughters tried a leap as well.

Afterward we walked a bit on the bridge a bit. The wind wasn’t even as bad as I thought.

We headed to the Good Hotel where Mike checked in. This hotel really pushes green and sustainability and positive sociatal impact. The lobby had a real One-Laptop-Per-Child device — first time I’d actually seen one. The UI was pretty confusing, but was sorta impressed they had a ‘Measure’ app with a lightweight frequency spectrum plot of the mic input.

Tim, the ‘04 Park who I went to Yosemite with last summer, was still at work getting ready for GDC, and we met up and had a coffee in the financial district near the Havok offices. He’s taking some intensive Japanese courses on the weekends. Afterward Amit and I headed to the Mission District and found a Vietnamese restaurant for pho, which was great (first time having pho). The area was surprisingly quiet, but I had a feeling that the buzz was closer to 21st Street.

After returning to Stanford, we watched Tropic Thunder, which was really, really, funny. Robert Downey Jr. was superb.  Another pretty nice day for spring break — now for a bit of work these next few days.