CleanTech Open First Meet & Greet

Hello Everyone,

So yesterday Dr. Moller, his wife Rosa and I attended the first meeting in the CleanTech Open.  It was a mixer in Oakland that included members of the Western region cohort and many of the mentors who volunteer in the program.  It was an enjoyable evening, and I had to give a 1-minute impromptu pitch on Freedom Motors.   

We met several of the mentors in the program, but one of them stuck out.  Dr. Fred Schlachter worked as an atomic physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for much of his career and is an expert in battery technology.  Now retired and a mentor in the CleanTech Open, he talked about an article he wrote about flying cars, which of course perked our interest.  He and Dr. Moller had quite a long conversation, as Dr. Schlachter is also very dubious of the claims of many flying car companies as well, but most of his own analysis has been from the perspective of a battery scientist rather than from an aerospace perspective.  He made an observation five years ago that there is “No Moore’s Law for batteries”, for which he received a lot of flack.  Of course, he wasn’t wrong either.  He acknowledges that there  could be a breakthrough technology that greatly improves the capabilities of current battery technology, but we are still in a wait-and-see situation.

I am looking forward to the 2018 CTO Academy West, which I will be attending next week.  That is the “business bootcamp” which half of CleanTech Open 2018 Cohort members will be attending. I’m guessing around 50-75 companies will be attending that 3 day event in Freemont, and the other half of the Cohort will be attending the Academy East in NYC.  I’ll blog from the event to share the experience with all of you.