3p Contributor: Amie Vaccaro
Recent Articles
Live Near a Waterway? HydroVolts Can Power Your Home
Hydrovolts develops modular hydrikinetic turbines for use in canals & other waterways
At Tuesday’s Academy Awards of Cleantech (The Cleantech Open), attendees were all abuzz about Seattle-based HydroVolts, winner of the $20,000 Cleantech Open sustainability prize. HydroVolts has created a floating in-stream hydrokinetic turbine that generates distributed renewable energy anywhere around the world. Hydrovolts’ vision is to provide renewable energy to millions of people around the world who live near water. The turbines are designed to drop into moving water, such as irrigation canals, spillways, tidal currents, wastewater flows, streams, rivers and other waterways. Energy is collected from the force of moving water rather than pressure, operating like an underwater paddlewheel, so the turbine is safe for fish, unobtrusive, non-polluting and of course, renewable. Each turbine can power 1 to 10 homes along the waterway and is about the size and cost of a small car. The technology is modular, scalable and simple to deploy. Check out this video to learn more.
Join me at the Academy Awards of Cleantech
This year’s Cleantech Open Awards Gala (Tues Nov 17th in San Francisco) is not to be missed. Along with Bill Roth, I’ll be covering the event for TriplePundit. Last year’s event was phenomenal and this year promises to be bigger and better.
The Cleantech Open launched in 2006 and has grown tremendously since. The mission is to “find, fund and foster the big ideas” that address today’s toughest challenges and to date 125 cleantech start-ups have benefited from the organization’s funding and resources. A tribute to the the organization’s strength in finding and nurturing high potential companies, Cleantech Open startups have raised $130 million in private funding, and have created 500 jobs to date. Each year the quality of the applicants has grown as well — a good sign for a still quite nascent industry.
This year’s gala brings together finalists from three Cleantech Open regions – California, Pacific Northwest, and Rocky Mountain - to select a winner, who will receive $250,000 in cash and services. From the all-star line-up of contending start-ups I’m excited to learn more about:
- How Green Lite Motors commuter vehicle gets 100 miles per gallon
- How Micromidas converts raw sewage into biodegradable plastic
- How SunTrac Solar makes a solar hot water heater which captures 50 to 70% of solar energy
- How Alphabet Energy plans to convert waste energy into electricity at low cost
- How tru2earth’s Life Cycle Roof Tile made of recycled plastic bottles is as cheap as asphalt and captures rainwater
- Plus interact with 120 cleantech companies at the pre-gala expo. Register here.
Who are you rooting for?
Super Heroes of Green Building
With unprecedented legislation, forward-thinking design and standards, and many active supporters, one might say that California is a leader in the green building charge. Friday’s 3rd Annual Green Building Super Heroes Award Gala, hosted by the U.S. Green Building Council – Northern California Chapter (USGBC-NCC), honored the achievements of the green building community. Eight hundred people gathered for the event, including an illustrious cast of politicians including Nancy Pelosi, and green building all-stars like Rick Fedrizzi, CEO of the USGBC.
This year’s awards gala was held in the LEED Platinum certified California Academy of Sciences (my most favoritest building ever, and a shining example of California leading the charge). The Academy is the world’s largest public Platinum-rated building, and also the world’s greenest museum. It boasts 1.7 million native plants planted on the 2.5 acre living roof. Not too shockingly, it took 10 years and $500 million to develop.
Let’s Talk About Failure: Lessons to Learn from FailCon
I find people most endearing when they speak with humility and honesty about things they’d rather not have you know. FailCon was an amazing day of just that – successful people describing how they failed, rather than how great they are. Here I’ll summarize my key learnings on running a successful start-up for all of you who weren’t able to attend. (Also check out #failcon on twitter for more).
- Don’t build your resume. You screwed your resume up when you became an entrepreneur, so you might as well just go for it. Who cares what the next person is going to think. ~Mark Pincus, Zynga (Love this one!)
- We are living in a time and place where there is a high reward for success and high social acceptance of failure. We call this Boom Town. Take advantage of it. ~ Thor Muller and Lane Becker, Get Satisfaction
- Don’t get funding too frequently, or too much. This made the team very lazy. The coolest things we’ve done have been when we’ve been close to running out of cash. There’s something about being in a tight spot that you have to innovate out of. ~Ali Moiz, Peanut Labs
- Get empathy into your business. Spend time with your target customers, learn about their behavior and motivations, connect these insights to your business objectives. ~Brandon Schauer, Adaptive Path
Five Start-up Mistakes Not to Make, Courtesy of Meebo
I’m writing from FailCon today which is shaping up to be an excellent use of a Tuesday. I have a lot of opinions about conferences and two of the things I look for in a conference are that speakers are forced to prepare relevant, thoughtful content beforehand. And the dress is casual. FailCon meets both of these needs. Kudos!
Seth Sternberg and Sandy Jan, co-founders of Meebo revealed five mistakes they made.
1) Don’t try to do it all on your own. You need co-founders.
2) Don’t team up only with people like you. People have a tendency to attract similar people with similar skill sets, which can greatly hurt a team. Find people whose skills complement yours.
A Conference on Failure: Tell Us Something You Don’t Want Us To Know
Silicon Valley is filled with swagger. It is also one of the best places on the planet to fail. Very few start-ups succeed and failing seems to be encouraged. Some investors will only invest in entrepreneurs who have failed at least twice. The more failures under your belt, the better your chance of success at the next one. But what can we learn from failures? Will a tale of failure prevent my start-up from sharing the same fate? I’ll find out.
Tomorrow I’ll be attending SNAP Summit’s FailCon, which is billed as the first conference to ask successful folks what went wrong and how they fixed it. The conference is produced by Cassie Phillips who said the idea was a joke at first in response to the way “speakers love to rattle on about big successes, and brush over their mistakes.” The conference features CEOs and other leaders from companies including Meebo, Evernote, Fast Company, Slide, Zynga, Aardvark and more.
Tips to Entrepreneurs and Small Business Owners from BizTechDay
After two full days of panels, keynotes, and hallway conversations at BizTechDay, I collected the following tips and comments–mostly paraphrased–that I think will be most useful to entrepreneurs and small business owners. (See also my post on Tim Ferriss’ tweeting style and Mark O’Leary’s lessons to small businesses).
On marketing
- Claim your local business listing on Google for free at google.com/lbc. ~Ryan Hayward, Product Manager, Google Local Business Center
- Unlock your business’ Yelp page at www.yelp.com/business (only takes 5-10 minutes). And don’t abandon your social media. ~Michelle Broderick, Marketing Director, Yelp
- Try using Facebook instead of a newsletter so you can deliver nuggets of information to your fans and create conversations around your brand. Set up custom tabs on your page to speak to different audiences. More than anything, make your Facebook page fun. ~Hazel Grace, Founder, Socialbees
- Use a handful of social networking sites. Kevin Rose, Founder of Digg.com watches a number of early-adopters to see what tools they use and then makes bets about which will become big by getting involved
- Social media is here to stay. Be authentic and real. ~Porter Gale, VP Marketing at Virgin America
- A useful and attractive website is essential. Yola has a number of resources to help you get started by building a free website
How to Tweet Like Tim Ferriss
I’m a huge Tim Ferriss fan and I don’t think I’m alone. He spoke on two panels at BizTechDay. Working 4 hour weeks is pretty much anathema to starting a small business, and I get the sense that Ferriss himself works more than 4 hours per week. Ferriss, author of New York Times best-selling 4-Hour Workweek, angel investor and tech start-up advisor, introduced himself as “about 14 minutes into my 15 minutes of fame.” In any case, he imbued some priceless nuggets of wisdom I’ve compiled here. They may not be sustainability focused, but this applies just as well to someone getting out a green message as it does to someone selling widgets.
How to use Twitter
- Ferriss uses twitter for 3 things
- To communicate day to day bits of info that are not relevant for his blog
- As a microblogging tool to convey useful resources to his audience of 60,000+ followers
- For polling and getting feedback from the broader world (i.e. market research)
- Keep it fun. It should not feel like work. And if you’re tweeting and using other social media for business reasons, you better have a measurable output
- Don’t tweet when angry or drunk. Even if you delete a tweet, it doesn’t disappear
- Posting a pic or a video gets massive click through rates (if you’re Tim Ferriss)
- Ferriss uses direct message rather than @replies to respond
From BizTechDay: Seven Things Small Business Owners Need to Know to Succeed
I’ll be blogging today and tomorrow from BizTechDay, the small business and entrepreneur conference. I seem to attend every possible social/enviromental entrepreneurship oriented conference, so this will be an intereting change of pace given the focus on pure entrepreneurship.
Mark O’Leary from Comcast Business Class kicked off the conference with citing seven things small business owners need to know to succeed. These are high level – I hope to flesh some of these out over the course of the conference, as many of the upcoming panels touch on these topics:
1) Focus relentlessly on a niche. You can’t be everything to everybody. Do what you do better than anybody else.
2) Executive brilliantly. (yes but how? He didn’t elaborate. More later perhaps)
3) Get to cash flow fast and keep expenses low.
4) Funding: Figure out what type of funding do you need? Consider all the options.
5) Brand creation. Think carefully about your brand. It has to manifest the value of your product.
6) Brand building. Once you get the right brand you have to build it.
7) Be rigorous in finding the right people. The talent level of job applicants is higher than ever, according to O’Leary. This is a great time to “Get the wrong people off the bus and the right people on.”
What did he miss? More to come…
BizTechDay: Helping Start-ups Succeed
Later this week I’ll be writing from BizTechDay, which is billed as the most powerful entrepreneur and small business conference. Two days long, the schedule is jam-packed with successful entrepreneurial speakers. I’ve recently joined a start-up, Viv, and naturally have loads of questions about launching and building a business that I hope will be answered.
With so many start-ups failing, I’m excited to learn from leaders of some who’ve succeeded. The conference is broken into 3 tracks: fundraising, social media, and marketing/selling, all of which pertain to your start-up or small business.
While this conference doesn’t bear an explicit sustainability focus, I would argue that entrepreneurs with a leaning towards doing good need to learn these lessons more than the rest, to enable maximum uptake and maximum impact. There are very few businesses with killer value propositions that also solve environmental and/or social problems. Those that do are among my favorite businesses of all time (e.g. RecycleBank, TerraCycle, Shorebank etc).
Predictions, Warnings and Best Practices From Day 2 at Socap09
Kevin Jones at Socap09, Photo Courtesy of Simon Roberts
A quick search on twitter for #socap09 will reveal just a fraction of the “turkey dinner of ideas,” as one colleague called it, that was Day 2 at Socap09. Below I attempt to distill some of the most hard-hitting, surprising, and indicative sentiments of the day. (Note: quotes may be paraphrased)
On the future of the social capital marketplace:
I predict impact investing will approach a tipping point in 2015… CSR in the US is merely a band-aid. ~Charly Kleissner, KL Felicitas Foundation
We’ll see increased scrutiny and demand for data on impact investors are having and increased collaboration between different types of investors. ~Amit Bouri, Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN)
Social capital will not be sufficient to get us to a brighter future. We’ll have to mobilize major sources of funding. We need to mobilize government to change the rules of the game. ~Dan Crisafulli, Skoll Foundation
Today’s investments are complex, opaque and anonymous. We need to get to a place where investments are direct, transparent and personal, based on long-term relationships. ~Don Shaffer, RSF Social Finance
Socap09: Takeaways and Key Questions on Social Enterprise From Day 1
The opening day of Socap09 brought many rich discussions, which left me with a few nuggets of advice and even more unresolved questions.
A few tidbits of wisdom from panelists and presenters:
1. The sustainability revolution is not on par with the dot com bubble, but rather on par with the industrial revolution. This will be great retrofit of our lives… Everything we’ve ever created was created wrong. We need those all those crazy ideas. ~ Steve Newcomb, Virgance, The Future of Social Innovation on the Web
2. If your idea isn’t twice as good as the next guy’s, contemplate joining another venture you really respect. ~ Premal Shah, Kiva.org, The Future of Social Innovation on the Web
3. Don’t give up on your venture. Change.org has been four years in the making. ~Ben Rattray, Change.org, The Future of Social Innovation on the Web
4. Impact measurement is critical, but difficult – resist the temptation to track everything that can be measured. Focus on a few key impact metrics. ~Sara Olsen and Brett Galimidi, SVT Group, Impact Management Workshop
5. Invest in what works. ~Sonal Shah, White House Office of Social Innovation, Keynote
Today’s panels surfaced many fundamental questions that need to be addressed as we work to align financial, social, and environmental incentives.
1. What is government’s role in the social capital marketplace? How can every day citizens push forward the work of the government and more particularly the Office of Social Innovation?
2. Do we want to engage traditional investment firms in the social capital space or not? Steve Newcomb pointed out the absence of tier 1 venture capital firms at Socap, and proclaimed that we’ll have succeeded once we see those firms attending and investing in the space. A colleague of mine proclaimed exactly the opposite – we will have failed if traditional venture capital firms are investing in the space and expecting a 10x return, as we ought to be reinventing the meaning of investment.
3. Is it better to work together and come to consensus or work heads down and push forward your own idea or venture? Should we be running fast and alone or together and not so fast?
4. Are we producing too many entrepreneurs or do we need to generate as many entrepreneurs with good ideas (which may fail or succeed) as possible?
What’s your take?
Look for more from me tomorrow on Day 2 of Socap.
XSProject Creates Jobs for Indonesia, Cuts Waste Stream
Ann Wizer, XSProject
More than 500,000 people in Indonesia attempt to make a living collecting and reselling garbage. Artist Ann Wizer lived above a colony of these trashpickers and inquired about what waste they could not sell: plastic drink pouches and other non-biodegradable plastics. Wizer began purchasing these scraps from the trashpickers and using them to create bags, book covers, and other products. Not only does she produce a useful, well-designed and beautiful product (everyone who sees the bags loves them), she supports trashpickers, creates jobs for the Indonesia’s poor, utilizes landfill-bound trash and educates all who come into contact with her products and operations about consumption and waste.
“Why are people still accepting products that end up in a landfill? ” Wizer asked, “We shouldn’t have them. Our task at hand is to find ways to keep these materials out of landfills by reusing them. I am not interested only in upcycling or making “sympathy” products – I want these goods to be fabulous, they need to be able to compete in markets.”
Socap09 Lays out the Roadmap to a Social Capital Marketplace
Social capital lies “at the intersection of money and meaning” according to Kevin Jones and Gary Bolles, founders of the Social Capital Markets Conference (Socap). Socap08 was about mapping the landscape of the social capital marketplace (also the topic of my first ever TriplePundit post). Two hundred attendees were expected, 600 came.
“Last year we wanted to validate the asset class – prove that social capital is real, large and resilient. Social capital was hurt less than other sectors. It didn’t participate in the bubble and it didn’t cause the bust and has since out performed the traditional capital market. This is partly because so many more risks are factored in, in terms of externalities,” Kevin Jones said.
Socap09 (coming up Sept 1-3, 2009) outlines the roadmap to a new economy, focusing on three themes:
1. The new administration and its focus on social innovation and social enterprise
2. An increasing acceptance of social venture funds and impact investing
3. The impact of disruptive technology
“This market is evolving. Pieces of infrastructure are starting to get filled in. Two years ago it was about discovery and finding our way. Now there is a roadmap. It doesn’t mean it’s a smooth highway. It’s extremely tough,” Jones explained.
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