25 Who Ditched Infotech for Cleantech
Steve Westly
Background: Former executive at eBay, controller CFO of CA
Current: Founded the The Westly Group, a cleantech VC firm in Silicon Valley
A veteran of both the federal and state governments, Steve Westly must be more than comfortable with all the regulatory talk of the cleantech world. Westly cut his teeth in renewable energy policy in the DOE’s Office of Solar and Conservation under Jimmy Carter. Following stints at eBay, Sprint and NetCom, Westly founded his own cleantech investment firm, The Westly Group, in 2000, which has high-profile investments like Akeena Solar, Amyris and Tesla, where he is a board member. Oh, and did we mentioned he ran for California Governor in 2006?
[...] Earth2Tech has a roundup of information-technology entrepreneurs entering the cleantech market looking for the next “Google of cleantech.” [...]
Why are there no women (or very few - some I couldn’t tell) on this list?
A somewhat sad commentary, is that not?
Something all these infotech people should remember regarding computer technology vs. energy technology:
Infotech is basically a technology of the abstract: bits per second, operations per second; Gbytes per sector. All of these are abstractions of logical 1’s or 0’s which fundamentally, could be represented with the presence or absence of a single electron. That is to say; their technology is not closely related (at least theoretically) to physical limits, at least not yet anyway.
Compare this to energy. A watt is a watt. You get something to produce 100 watts; you can’t simply change your lithographing strategy and increase its yield by a factor of 10. You have to fight for every bit of improvement. Welcome to the REAL, real world.
[...] 25 Who Ditched IT for CleanTech [...]
Well said Jim.
I noticed that most of your stories focus on USA backed companies, but here in Germany there is a very large emerging economy around green science. The University in Salsbury has large green science and economics department. Someone should do a list of which countries are the most green taking education, finance, and law into consideration. You will USA is among the worst.
[...] mean you’re only interested in creating businesses that make huge profits — though our list of 25 that ditched infotech for cleantech are certainly still trying. Estonian entrepreneurs Ahti Heinla, a Skype guru, and Rainer Nolvak, founder of MicroLink and [...]
I don’t think ‘jim’ the sarcastic knows what he’s talking about!
Cleantech, whether it’s building EVs or power plants is a direct result of advances in IT and is directly related. Large scale production of Li-ion batteries for laptop computers and high powered IGBTs from semi conductor companies inspired the first high performance EV demonstrator the tzero. Software will become an increasingly important part of EVs as they become totally dependent on microprocessors to run everything from battery management to their AC motors, brakes and even automated vehicle dynamics.
How about Sterling solar dishes that have to track the sun from dawn to dusk, only really possible with PID routines run on cheap silicon chips. Even PV solar, which are mostly made from silicon. It’s still all about technological development with what ever the current level of technology allows and it’s the same game of guessing where the future might lead and pushing the state-of-the-art to get an edge on the competition.
[...] always on-it earth2tech crew has a run-down of 25 entrepreneurs who crossed over from the bubblicious infotech markets to [...]
[...] for risk capital opportunists, and has indeed paid off for some of them quite handsomely. Earth2tech has a list of 25 successful IT entrepreneurs that have now turned to environment related [...]
[...] for risk capital opportunists, and has indeed paid off for some of them quite handsomely. Earth2tech has a list of 25 successful IT entrepreneurs that have now turned to environment related [...]
Jim, IT goes hand in hand with green tech, and if you were right, it would be narrow minded to discard them.
[...] 25 Who Ditched Infotech for Cleantech « Earth2Tech Stem of voeg toe aan : Mooie quote uit Livre Tags: duurzaam ondernemen, [...]
they are going to lose their shirts er skirts
[...] solar thermal funding from Google.org. In March the news was out that the Goog branch invested in Bill Gross’s solar thermal startup, eSolar. Google is looking to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into [...]