CleanTech Open – Second Day

Hi Everyone,

It’s the second day of the CTO National Academy West #ctonaw18, here at the Seagate Event Center in Fremont, CA.  I’m at the conference this morning, and I wanted to write at least one short post about what we are learning while I can.  The first day was very busy, we were pretty much tied up all day from 7:30am until 10:00pm when we finally left for home.  I didn’t get any time to write yesterday, so today I’m being a bit more proactive.
Many of you probably saw the tweet and post on the Facebook FM page where I checked in.   The picture I included was myself (on the left) and Maurice Velandia, one of our technical consultants, who is attending the conference with me.  Maurice has been a key player in helping draft our financial models and business plan around our biogas generation system (which is still a development in progress).

As I mentioned we are in the Seagate facility in Fremont, pic below.   They have been gracious hosts to the conference, so thank you Seagate!  This building was once owned by a different company, a solar PV manufacturer called Solyndra.

When we arrived we were greeted by some non-human sentries (which a few attendees had some fun with).

A quick summary.  Yesterday, we spent the morning learning about Lean LaunchPad, which is a startup methodology currently taught by several organizations and business schools, and is the basis of this 9 month business accelerator program in the CleanTech Open.  Later in the afternoon, we covered more generalizations like company mission statement, our value propositions impact statements and sustainability factors.   These are all items that will be flushed out over the next several month as we move through the program, which has aggressive weekly milestones.

Today we are working on our elevator pitches, commercialization support ecosystems, product design & manufacturing, working with corporate partners, financial models for start ups, and securing funding.

I’ll provide some additional thoughts and comments after we complete this bootcamp, but realize this is a 9 month business accelerator program so there will be updates throughout the Summer, Fall and into Winter.

Sincerely – Dave