MIT Angels and MIT Club of Northern California present

Cleantech Pitch Lunch -Startups Pitch to a Room Full of Investors

Business Careers in Clean Tech, June 13th - Part 3
Saturday June 13 2009 12.30pm-2:00pm
Computer History Museum , 1401 N Shoreline Blvd, Mountain View, CA  94043
Registration Link:

The Program:
Cleantech Pitch Lunch will host seven Cleantech companies, to present their business plans over Lunch.   Take a look at some promising Cleantech companies along with MIT Angels.    You are welcome to join whether or not you have made early stage investments previously.   Those attending the meeting as an angel or an investor should be an Accredited Investor.

Presenting Companies:

Bridgeway GreenTech, Inc.-  developing a breakthrough energy storage system which will allow renewable power sources to be totally independent of and cost competitive with grid power.

Firebird Composites - a range of high-performance light weight composite materials that impart superior performance useful across several industries (High Voltage Power Transmission, Coal Mining, and Oil/Gas Field Production) that enable energy efficiency and/or lower energy consumption.

Green Pacific Biologicals - algae biofuel venture with a platform for efficient nuclear genetic engineering and consistent nuclear transgene expression.

MeterVision - a Wireless monitoring solution aimed at upgrading billions of legacy gauges and meters worldwide to smart meters.

NBT Ventures - giving consumers clear, actionable feedback as to how they consume energy in their homes and buildings with a goal to make "energy efficiency" part of the daily vernacular.

Rotavi, Inc. - small, highly efficient, biofuel-optimized engine for both direct-drive and hybrid vehicle applications.

Siverde - capture and monetize CO2 emissions by converting the emissions into biofuel. 

For further information please send us an email at: shuja.keen@alum.mit.edu

Moderator:
Wasiq Bokhari, Managing Partner, Cleantech Circle

Judges:
Stefan Heuser, President and CEO, Siemens Technology-To-Business Center
Anup Jacob, Partner, Virgin Green Fund
Alex Kinnier, Partner, Khosla Ventures
Rahul Prakash, COO & Head of Business Development, Virgance
Tom Schulz, Managing Partner, Cleantech Circle

Wasiq Bokhari
Managing Partner, Cleantech Circle

Wasiq has worked with technology startup and Fortune 500 companies on the adoption and commercialization of materials and nanotechnology with applications in energy, IT and medicine. Wasiq also works with entrepreneurs, early-stage startups and multiple venture funds in to help emerging nanotechnologies cross the “valley of death”. He brings extensive entrepreneurial, operational and (equity and debt) financing experience to his activities in cleantech. His interests include energy generation, water and emerging fuels technologies.

Recently, he was the CEO of Bioident Technologies, a provider of medical and environmental diagnostic solutions based on company’s proprietary printed semi-conductor technologies. The company products were recognized as the semiconductor technology innovation of 2007 by the Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, he was the co-founder and Managing Partner of Quantum Insight, a business consulting and investment firm. He was part of a small team that started and built a nanomaterials focused business unit of Chevron. He has worked with Hitachi as a strategy and venture consultant for identifying new companies and technologies for investment, partnerships and acquisitions. Previously, Wasiq was part of the founding team and Senior Vice President of Products of Clickmarks, an enterprise infrastructure software company, subsequently acquired by Semotus Solutions.

He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in the group headed by Nobel laureate Jerome Friedman. He was part of the team that discovered a fundamental particle called the top quark at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in 1995, one of the most prominent physics results of the decade. He is an author of more than 50 scientific and technical publications, and is cited as an inventor on 8 US patents, granted and applied. He has co-authored a widely recognized report on the potential of nanotechnology for the California Commission for Science and Technology (CCST). He was a co-founder and Steering Committee Chair of the MIT Stanford UC Berkeley Nanotechnology Forum. Wasiq works with PCAST (Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) on issues related to energy.

Stefan Heuser
President and CEO, Siemens Technology-To-Business Center

Stefan Heuser is president and chief executive officer of Siemens Technology-To-Business (TTB) Center in Berkeley, California, a subsidiary of Siemens Corporate Research that identifies and develops innovative technologies and converts them into new Siemens products or businesses or independent companies.   Heuser was named to this position in 2004.Prior to this role, Stefan served as chief financial officer for TTB and was responsible for strategy, performance measurement, project controlling, budgeting and managerial accounting.  He was also actively involved in developing processes for start-up investments and spin-in projects, coached start-ups and developed relationships with selected venture capital companies and business angel organizations.From 1997 to 2002, Stefan worked at Siemens Capital Corporation in New Jersey, Siemens’ in-house bank for North America.  He held the positions of vice president, Cash Management and senior vice president, co-managing the company.

Stefan began his career with Siemens in Corporate Finance in Munich, Germany holding several challenging positions of increasing responsibility.  During this time, he was a consultant in the area of Cash Management and Treasury, and a member of the EURO Working Group at Siemens which was a vanguard of European companies in the implementation of the EURO.  As Treasury consultant and Treasury System implementation manager, Stefan was part of the implementation team for Siemens’ first global treasury system.  He was responsible for the setup of this system at the treasury subsidiaries in New York (Siemens Capital Corporation) and Hong Kong (Siemens Finance Asia).

Stefan is a member of “The Angel Forum” (TAF) in Silicon Valley, California.Stefan graduated in 1991 with a Master’s Degree in Economics and Business Administration from the Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich.  

Anup Jacob
Partner, Virgin Green Fund

Anup Jacob is a founding Partner of Virgin Green Fund and a member of its Investment Committee. VGF is a private equity fund focused on growth capital investments in the renewable energy and resource efficiency sectors. Prior to VGF, Anup was an investment professional with TPG and a partner in TPG’s Aqua Fund, which focused on growth capital investments in the water and renewable energy sectors.

Anup currently serves on the board of Solyndra Inc., a California-based thin-film solar company.

Anup started his career at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in New York and India in the Global Power and Merchant Banking groups. Anup previously served on the board of Jain Irrigation Systems, Ltd.

Anup is involved in several children’s charities and environmental charities in India and the US. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago.


Alex Kinnier
Partner, Khosla Ventures

Alex is working to speed up the next industrial revolution, focusing on solar energy utilization, thermal efficiency, energy conversion devices, energy storage, and biofuels. Over the past 10 years, Alex has successfully created, launched, and grown a variety of technology and household products. As a Group Product Manager at Google, Alex built the Agency display advertising team and created Google's next generation third party serving and targeting system. As part of this effort Alex was a leader of the $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick. On the consumer side of Google's business, Alex earned an Executive Management Group award for leading the product response to Microsoft's IE7 browser launch that significantly increased Google's search share. In Brand Management at Procter & Gamble, Alex leveraged a forgotten technology and led two award winning marketing campaigns to build his brand to $80 million in sales. And, in Product Development at Procter & Gamble, Alex led the development and launch of three new-to-the-world Febreze products that helped the brand achieve sales of over $400 million in 50 countries in 24 months.

Alex also knows the joy and pain associated with starting a venture from scratch. In 2002, Alex began in Cleantech, founding Ocular Technologies to commercialize enhanced efficiency evaporators utilizing a proprietary monolayer coating that improved air conditioning performance. The challenges of commercializing components of a larger system controlled by an entrenched industry provided Alex with a learning experience that informs his investing.

Growing up outside of Philadelphia, PA, Alex earned a BS in Chemical Engineering with honors from Lehigh University and later an MBA with distinction from the Harvard Business School.

Rahul Prakash
COO & Head of Business Development, Virgance

Rahul has been building successful companies for the past decade.

Rahul is Vice President of Business Development and a founding team member for Virgance, a company that utilizes the power of social media and social networks to cause social change in a way that works in partnership with business.

Prior to Virgance, Rahul was Vice President at Spock where he ran marketing. Spock was acquired by Intellius in 2009. Prior to Spock, Rahul founded his first company, Advantix, while he was a junior in college.

He is a founding member of the Full Circle Fund’s Environmental Impact Circle, serves on the Board of Directors at The Junior Statesmen Foundation & The Coro Foundation, and sits on Public Policy Committee for the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce. In 2009 Rahul was appointed to the Mission Bay Citizen’s Advisory Committee by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom.

Rahul serve as an adviser to several prominent elected officials across the country on clean energy and technology policy. Rahul is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

Tom Schulz
Managing Partner, Cleantech Circle

Tom Schulz is a serial entrepreneur and investor in the Cleantech and Internet spaces. He is a co-founder of the Cleantech Circle.

One of Tom's current projects is BioCee, an advanced biofuels startup out of the University of Minnesota. BioCee bridges the gap between microbiology and chemical engineering.

Prior to becoming an investor, Tom already had over twenty years of technical and business experience. He worked on computer languages at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Lab in Palo Alto and artificial intelligence and multimedia projects at Apple Computer in Germany. Tom was a strategic management consultant for The Boston Consulting Group at their Munich and San Francisco offices.

In 1995, Tom co-founded the first publicly traded, nationwide Internet service provider in Germany, Cybernet AG, where he served on the executive management board.

After going public with Cybernet, he went on to become an angel investor with the Munich Business Angel Network. Later he was a member of The Angels' Forum, a professionally run investor group in Palo Alto which also manages the Halo Funds. Tom currently serves on the advisory board of Earlybird Venture Capital in Munich.

Tom earned an M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Tom founded the Bay Area regional chapter of the KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) Alumni Association.

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