@altgate

Obama Speech on Clean Energy at MIT

2009-10-23T20:30:43-04:00

A repost from the Viridus blog: Earlier today I was in the audience of students, faculty, local entrepreneurs and politicians at MIT when President Obama delivered a speech on clean energy. His talk was brief but made some notable points. The main point, I think, was him exhorting the country to "take a risk on ideas that might fail, but that could also change the world." Obama cited as examples some research at MIT where scientists are using viruses to grow batteries instead of building them. Pretty cool.

Obama started by touting recent achievements in advancing clean energy research and development. Apparently there is $80 billion of the stimulus money ear marked for green projects. And Obama mentioned Governor Patrick's tripling of investment in energy efficiency (the biggest short term opportunity, in my view). He then simultaneously held out a carrot and stick saying that the Pentagon had declared America's dependence on foreign oil a security risk and that there was a $2 trillion potential market in wind energy over the next two decades (Massachusetts just won some federal grant money to build a wind blade test facility).

I haven't read the press coverage on his speech yet, but I bet most will pick up on what he called the biggest obstacle to advancing clean energy legislation. What he called the "myth that there is little or nothing we can do; that politics is broken." I'm not sure that's the biggest obstacle, but it's real for sure.

He finished with some of the best lines of the speech saying that "Today's frontiers can't be found on a map" and that "pioneers are not off in the wilderness but all around us." How true. I see that on Viridus everyday where dedicated, passionate and talented professionals are advancing corporate sustainability. You can see Obama's speech streamed online here thanks to the good folks at MIT.

By the way, the legislation that Obama mentioned (but did not go into any detail about) was the Boxer-Kerry bill, proposed climate change legislation. I've embed a summary version below or you can click on the previous link for all 800+ pages of goodness.

The center piece of the proposed legislation is a cap-and-trade program where the initial credits are auctioned off. This would put a price on a ton of CO2 and would do so rather quickly, similar to RGGI, here in New England. Come join the discussion on Virid.us on how this proposed legislation would affect business and the environment.

Lastly, I just have to say that I was able to briefly meet the President and shake his hand which was pretty cool.

Everything I Need to Know About Entrepreneurship I Learned at the University of Michigan

2009-10-15T13:26:18-04:00

Last week I was back in Ann Arbor, Michigan for the first time in something like 12 years. It was at the request of Thomas Zurbuchen and Doug Neal who lead the University of Michigan College of Engineering Center for Entrepreneurship. I was asked to give a talk on entrepreneurship. The audience for my talk was mostly undergraduate engineering students but the topic was entrepreneurship and I decided to talk about my time at Michigan and how that trained me for a career as an entrepreneur.

Here's a link to a recording of my talk, complete with a simulcast of the slides.

There were six lessons that I talked about during the talk:

Defining a mission
Evolving an organization
Knowing your customer
Working hard, but not too hard
Managing risk versus reward
Having a can-do attitude

I used the context of my experience on the U of M solar car team almost 20 years ago to share some advice on how to address these topics. But I suppose the biggest, most important piece of advice I have for aspiring entrepreneurs is to go out and building things (and sell them). It's impossible in my view to learn to be an entrepreneur in a classroom (or reading a blog). The best way to learn is by doing.

The other funny bit of the story is that after I came back from Ann Arbor, I got requests from fellow solar car team members to share some of the photos I used in the presentation (it was mostly a slide show). In preparing to share them, I downloaded Picasa, a Google product. Picasa is a picture management tool and as it was searching my hard drives for photos I noticed a new "face recognition" feature. Well, long story short, this feature allowed me to find this photo below of the solar car team from about 1991 which includes a young Larry Page, co-founder of Google (I'm in the bottom right in case you care!). Somehow it's ironic that Google allowed me to find its co-founder in a picture that I've had for 18 years and I've looked at many times before.

Words of widsom from my youth

2009-09-06T21:43:55-04:00

I'm preparing for a presentation in about a month at the University of Michigan. It's a speech on entrepreneurship to a few hundred students, faculty and others. As part of my research I'm going back and reading the boxes and boxes of notes and pictures from my time at Michigan, particularly my time on the solar car team.

I was struck by one sheet of paper. You can see it below. It has no title and it's just there in a stack of papers with some bullet points:

The journey is the reward

When they said I had big shoes to fill--I said "don't worry" I brought my own

What goes right is the result of teamwork, what goes wrong is my fault

Don't give people goals--give them direction

The best way to predict the future is to invent it

If you're not making some mistakes, you're not taking enough chances

I must have wrote this in 1991 or 1992 when I was team leader of the University of Michigan solar car team. I love all of my "advice" except maybe point #4. I'm still on the fence on that one and frankly am impressed that I had a point of view some 20 years ago.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, these are just quotes I no doubt copied from others. I know the first one is the title of Steve Jobs book published in the late 80s (in fact, you can see that I even attributed it to Jobs before scratching it out! The quote about inventing the future is by Alan Kay, one of the early guys at Xerox PARC. I don't remember writing this list or what I used it for, if anything, but they must have caught my attention then and all these years later I still think they're great.

Seeking CTO in Boston for Healthcare IT startup

2009-07-14T12:51:46-04:00

This opportunity is with an unannounced healthcare IT startup lead by a MD/PhD with a successful track record of building and selling companies. The management team includes seasoned entrepreneurs with backgrounds in healthcare and IT. The company leverages proprietary technology developed commercially and through NIH grants over the past decade to bring a unique solution connecting hospitals to the drug and diagnostic discovery programs within life science companies. The position is based in Boston, MA. I can't say more about this publicly right now, but this is an awesome opportunity.

Check out the full description below.

These Robots Are Getting Pretty Good

2009-07-13T14:24:00-04:00

You have to admit that there is some pretty cool technology here in Boston.

Take this for example. A couple of years ago I had seen these protypes from Boston Dynamics that look like a robotic mule a couple of years ago but then they were always tethered and on relatively tame terrain. Now seeing these more advanced versions I'm amazed. They are navigating some serious terrain (steep hills, snow, ice, water, etc.). The commercial applications aren't obvious to me but the military ones sure are (and judging from their website, that's what Boston Dynamics is focused on). The video is long (the Terminator sound track doesn't help) and shows the mule-thing for the first 6 minutes followed by short snippets of various prototypes.

Last Chance To Take CompStudy Survey

2009-07-12T16:10:10-04:00

I've posted a couple of times on CompStudy, the annual survey of executive compensation in private / startup companies. If you haven't heard about the survey before I encourage you to check out my earlier posts (use either the previous link or click on "compensation study" in the popular searches above and to the right).

I won't rehash why CompStudy is so cool; instead, I'd like to share two things that are new.

First, as the post title suggests, the 2009 survey will close on July 15th for Canada and the US. There are close to 800 companies that have already completed the survey in North America which is by far the largest participation in the 10 year history of the survey. The survey also covers China, India, Israel and the UK and will remain open for a few more weeks for those countries.

Secondly, I wanted to point out that starting this year, the results will be published online at CompStudy. This means that you will be able to view and filter the data with a lot more precision. The graphic at right is a preview showing some of the controls...trust me they're pretty cool! Think Kayak for startup executive compenation. These aren't finalized yet, but you get the idea.

The other implication of publishing survey results online is that only participtants in the survey can get access to results. If you've seen the survey in the past, you know that the PDFs and hard copy reports were passed around quite a bit, but now those will not be available. The only way to get the report is to take the survey (or for VCs, to get your portfolio companies to take it and mention you).

It's free to participate in the survey so there really is no reason not to do it.

Cracking the Code on Patient Medical Record Search

2009-06-26T17:21:03-04:00

Informatics for Integrating Biology & the Bedside (otherwise known as i2b2) is an NIH-funded initiative managed by the Partners HealthCare System here in Boston. Over the past few months I've been spending time with a team of folks that is involved in various parts of this initiative helping them think about new commercial initiatives evolving from i2b2. It really is an amazing world...hanging out with MD / PhD types and wandering the halls of a medical research hospital is a far cry from a typical tech startup.

The background on i2b2 is that a few years ago the NIH invested something like $20 million into developing an open sourced platform that solves a major problem faced by hospitals (and medical researchers) which is that existing hospital information systems ("HIS") were not designed for search. A typical HIS is great for finding information about a particular patient. Type in medical record number 0123456 or a name and, boom, you have every bit of information from profile data, hospital visits, lab data, radiology, billing, etc. But if you were to instead try to search for patients that were male, aged 37, Asian ancestry, under 6 feet tall and have a particular condition, the system would be unable to answer (actually you're unable to ask). So that's what i2b2 was designed to solve and it's pretty good at it (you can play around with it here).

This is the real Google for medical records.

The technical challenge is daunting in and of itself, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. When dealing with medical records there are the legal issues of patients' right to privacy so having an ability to de-identify or anonymize data is key. And add on that a layer of bureaucracy almost unknown anywhere else and you've got yourself a hard problem to solve.

Apparently there are now 30-odd hospitals live in some fashion with i2b2 and later this fall (targeted for September) i2b2 v1.4 is slated for release and this version is dubbed the "enterprise ready" version. Program director Zak Kohane describes the next release as:

This release allows the entire set of patients from the enterprise to be exposed to the research community of the hospital while preserving patient privacy, providing the way for basic queries to funnel down to a set of patients interesting to the investigator. The chosen set of patients is matched to controls from the enterprise database and a project-specific mini-database is created. Major software enhancements of release 1.4 compared to release 1.3 include a hardening of the project management cell with a new, full featured client for managing enterprise users, a plug-in architecture for the data repository cell that allows complex server-side workflows, and streamlined project mini-database creation with processes to build sets of matched control patients for a given set of patients of interest.

Now there are many for profit companies also attempting to solve this problem including Microsoft, IBM and others but I think open source is a credible competitor in this sector as it has been in so many others.

So this coupled with a huge influx of public and private capital invested in "online medical records" is going to create some very interesting opportunities. Hopefully I'll be able to talk more about this particular project soon. In the meantime, if this is an area of interest or expertise for you, I'd love to hear from you.