Welcome to our afternoon parallel session on investing in clean tech. My name's John Wyant, I'm the deputy director of the pre-court institute for energy efficiency among other things that means I do whatever Jim Sweeney or George Schultz or Bill Peary tell me to do, which is a pretty good job actually. In this panel on investing clean tech, Jim I and Heather Richmond actually discussed this months ago about how to do it and so on. I had a lot of great ideas, most of which didn't work. So I'd like to first acknowledge Heather Richmond who you just saw in action in the last section for actually providing a lot of ideas that did work. Heather is the senior managing director at SNR Denton's Public Policy and Regulation Practice in Silicon Valley, although I think of her as a freelance champion of clean tech that works across the public and private sector very skillfully. Heather, where are you? There she is. So we do thanks mostly to Heather, have an incredibly all-star cast kind of a bunch of cleanup hitters on one podium. So I'll try to say as little as possible. I'd like to introduce them now and give a little bit of background and structure for the program. The goals are to get out what's new in clean tech, we think, maybe we're wrong, but you guys would know. There's a lot new in the last year in clean tech, number one, number two. We were interested in how the different segments of the clean tech financing business kind of related or didn't relate to each other. So we have the segments all represented here on this panel, mostly. And then we were interested in the role of the public sector in either helping or hindering what you guys, what all you guys do. So for our all-star cast, we're gonna start with Larry Kelly, who's a managing partner of private investment company, Kelly Ventures, but also for this purpose, co-chairs the Energy Clean Tech Special Interest Group for the band of angels. So he's gonna define entrepreneurship and then talk about what the angel investment community looks for in this space. Dave Graham is gonna describe his very interesting and innovative accelerator concept for digital clean tech companies using the model of his firm Green Start, which he started up as an example, and then we're gonna move back more towards the traditional tried and true veteran superstars of Silicon Valley. Josh Green for Mordav, Mordav at Alventures. I learned this morning that Josh is actually a mentor for some of the accelerator projects. So hopefully you guys can make that transition more smoothly than I just did. And then finally, last but not least, the cleanup hitter of the cleanup hitters, Trey Vasello, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, I like to put in Byers because Brooks brother Tom is actually a faculty colleague of Jim Sweeney and myself. So we're really excited. I actually picked up from Trey's bio. She thrives at the intersection of great products and big markets, which sounds like a good theme. So we ought to try to get to that point and I'd like to call on Larry to start us off down this train. So we're gonna do angel investing, accelerators, kind of early to mid stage, conventional venture cap, and then later stage venture cap, although that may blend together a little bit. Thanks very much. I'm leaving it up to you. Thank you. So I have two confessions to make. One of them is nothing I have to say is original. I've stolen it from everybody else and the other is I cheated. I got, I'm the only one doing a presentation and my colleagues aren't doing that. So I thought I'd start and talk a little bit about the band. The band is the oldest professionally organized angel investment group in the country. 19 years old, we have about 140 members. Most of us have been operating executives either in large companies or in startups or in many cases, including my own and both. I started my first company when I was a sophomore in college and I've been involved in more than 20 startups actively since then, both on my own and inside larger companies, but mostly on my own. We look at about 800 deals a year and that would be, I think for more David R. Kleiner, that would be about the same, or maybe even a little bit more. We have 33 present to our greater audience. Last year of those 33 we funded 18, which is a high number for us. It was maybe 11 the year before that of those 33. We invest in life sciences and information technology and in energy and clean tech. Last year of the 33 that presented seven were in the energy and clean tech space. We would have funded all seven. We funded five. We lost one to another company, another firm, and then the seventh one, we haven't come to terms yet. We're still working with them. We invested in two water companies, two LED companies, and a solar thermal company, a transportation company. And one more I can't remember. Our earliest, one of our earliest investments in 1998 was in MBA polymers, which is now the world's largest recycler of durable plastics. And it's about a hundred million dollar company. We are hoping that they go public next year. We went through seven rounds with them. So we call that seven easy rounds to an IPO. So I mentioned some of these statistics. I won't go, so typical deal size for an angel is anywhere from 300,000 to maybe a million and a half. One of the things that separates angels from other, from VC firms is that it's our own money. As I said, we've all been operating executives. And so we're very picky, we're very precise, and we drill right in and figure out what's going on in the company. My own experience is that success comes often from being personally involved, not necessarily in management, but I am oftentimes involved in the active management of a company. But as an active director or as a board observer, is helping the company succeed. And I think that's one of the key differences about an organization like the band. We have in our interest group of, in the energy and clean tech space, there are about 40 of us who invest in companies in this space. So follow up, these are VCs that we've worked with in the past, so typically it's your own money and then it's friends and family and fools and then it's angels and then it's VCs after that. And so these are some of the VC firms that we've worked with in the past. And then this is our deals review process. As I said, we look at 60 to 100 deals a month. One of the things that's different with us versus other firms or other organizations is that we have at least six experts in a given field look at any proposal that comes to us. And in the energy space, I personally look at everyone and my co-chair and I try to meet with, we see 15 to 20 companies a month and we try to meet with everyone and then evaluate it personally. So that's a little bit about the band of angels. Now I volunteered to talk about entrepreneurship because my feeling is that 75 years ago everybody in our country was an entrepreneur. And somehow it's, our society and our institutions and our government are beating that out of us. And in France, 56% of the GDP is controlled by the governments. We're creeping up and I'm concerned about that. So I want to talk about entrepreneurship a little bit. Is this, does anybody know who this is? Anybody recognize, raise your hand if you recognize who this is, ah, good, okay. This is one of my heroes. This guy is Oscar Pistorius. He runs a quarter mile, which is a race that I used to run in college. I still run sometimes but I'm not nearly as fast. He was born without legs, without the lower part of his legs. And you can see that he has these blades on there. And he runs for South Africa. He's about 25 or 26 years old. He runs a quarter mile. The Olympic qualifying trials for the quarter mile is 45.8 seconds. So he does better than that. And they don't want to, they wouldn't let him compete. They said that because he had these prosthesis he was not gonna be allowed. And he went to court and fought and won. So he's now gonna have to try for the South African team. But maybe in three or four or five weeks when we see the Olympics we'll see whether he made it. But this is the kind of guy that is a hero to me because he doesn't quit. He doesn't say no. He figures out what his passion is and he's going for it.  He's gonna do it. So who knows what they think entrepreneurship is?  Go ahead. That's cheating. The world's youngest. We have limited resources to create something that's powerful and great. Oh, great. That's really good. You're close. So here's a possible definition of entrepreneurship. It's a pursuit of an opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled. Now we're all going after opportunities. That's what Darwin's all about, right? But the key phrase here is without regard to resources currently controlled and you said limited resources. And so what an entrepreneur does is gets resources committed to his or her project that you don't get in a large corporation or in a government agency.  Entrepreneurs go out and make things happen. They go out and they borrow from their friends. They get the guy down the street. They get a former business contact to do something for them and they make things happen. So we look for that. That's one of the things we look for. Now what are the, what I would call the, so someone comes in with a proposal and I think Josh and Trey and Dave would look at this sort of the same way. But you can, you could, when you're evaluating a business proposal you might be able to, if you could at a high level, condense your analysis down to maybe 10 words. And all the words are monosyllabic, they're, you know, gut English words. They're not Latin words, Latinate words with lots of syllables. And it's 10 words and it's three questions. And these are the three questions. Is it real? Can we win? And is it worth it? And again, this isn't mine. I got this from one of the original VCs in the valley back in the 1970s. And so is it real as a vision question? That's all about your vision and strategy. You know, does the product do, the product technology do what it's said to do? Can you demonstrate that it really does what you say it's gonna do? Do you have a working prototype? How far, are you in production? By the way, of the 60 to 80 deals that we see each month more than half are already in production which really surprises me in production and in revenue or eyeballs if it's a software product. The second is the customer. What kind of traction are you getting customer? Could you have evidence that customers are gonna change their behavior from what they were doing before because they are gonna have to make a change. And that's always, almost always the largest problem is getting them to change. And are they gonna pay good money to buy your product or service?  So those are all the vision parts. And then the second one is can we win? And this is all about execution. So how many people think entrepreneurs take risk? Raise your hand if you think entrepreneurs take risk. Okay, so I don't think so. I think what entrepreneurs do is they get other people to take risk and it's all in the execution. So if you go through execution, you know, it's can we craft the right message, can we get the customer to respond to the message? Can we build the product? Can we ship the product? Can we support the product after it's shipped? Can we price it correctly? Can we manufacture it with high quality? All those things involve execution risk. Now there's vision risk and strategy risk as well. So what a good entrepreneur does is sees the opportunity before other people do and then goes out and lays the risk off on other people, other parties. It's part of that getting things done without regard to resources currently controlled. Lays the risk off on other people. Then the last part is the is it worth it question? And that's all about the return. The Bands IRR going back over 19 years is 53%. So the two functions. So in evaluating a company when a team comes in, now this is me, the two things I look for on the team. Well, let me turn around the other way. What's the most important thing? What's the last thing a company wants to give up? We got control, but I mean, if you had things, yeah, equity, yeah, yeah, yeah. The most important thing a company has is a customer. That's the most important thing, right? So the two functions, and we're here in the Valley, we're doing technology stuff. So the two most important traits that we look for or functions are sales and product development. So if you haven't sold, get somebody on your team who's carried quota and managed sales people. This is really important. My friends who are deans at the Sloan School and the Harvard Business School and the Business School here and elsewhere, if you talk to them and you say, why don't you have sales in the MBA curriculum? And they say, well, it's vocational. And that's a mistake. Sales and sales are really, really crucial to a startup company. So I would recommend that you get somebody with good sales skills on your team. The last is the five traits. So how many in here are entrepreneurs? Raise your hand if you're an entrepreneur. Great, okay, so we got a good bunch. So these are the, it's almost always the CEO. You can take a really great idea and have a mediocre team and they'll screw it up. You can have a really great CEO and a really great team and a mediocre product and they'll build a good business. So the things we look for in a CEO are ability, motivation and character and all those are Warren Buffett's favorite three, experience, Dave helped me with that one and then resourcefulness. And that goes back to defining entrepreneurship. Thanks. Thanks Larry for a very perspicacious introduction to this session and now I'd like to call on Dave Graham for a green start. Move the ball on down. You can sit there if you want, it's fine. All right, let's see if I can do it here actually. See if I can do it in three minutes or less, someone tie me. So green start, what we fundamentally believe is that the world's dependence on fossil fuel is the defining challenge of our generation. And so the best way to tackle it we believe is through innovation and with entrepreneurs. We also believe that starting companies is really hard. We don't just believe that we know that firsthand. And so we're here to help and we're here to help digital clean tech companies have a better shot at success and what I mean by digital clean tech companies are companies that have business models that are primarily software based and either reduce the use of dirty energy or promote the use of clean energy. What we do and how we work with companies is really as follows, we're essentially a design studio combined with an accelerator. We believe that design and design thinking can give the company a competitive advantage. And what we do then is find these companies, invest seed capital, and then we bring them into our office, we bring them out to San Francisco for 12 weeks. And we work with them in four practice areas. First customer development, second UX, third brand design, and then fourth fundraising. It's really hard to get in. We receive hundreds upon hundreds of applications and do about 12 investments a year. We are really bullish on or in about with the clean tech space, but in particular digital clean tech. And we kind of break energy into two segments. One is energy 1.0 and the way we look at it is energy 1.0 was about energy generation. It is about the development, the creation of technologies such as solar, LED, wind. And we believe that the energy 1.0 nut has been cracked. It's working. We see the technology working. We see the price points coming down. We see the efficiency curves going in the right direction. And so we're really excited about energy 2.0 and how we look at energy 2.0 is as we look at it as being smart energy and making energy smart. The internet enabled us to move bits and bytes around and we think that energy 2.0 is about moving electrons around. It's about using software to make energy more efficient, more storable, more usable. We are really seeing some interesting companies come out of this space, look no further than Nest, Opower, a couple of Kleiner companies. We've got some really good companies, Scoot, Ridepal, Growing Energy Labs, Kilowatt Hours that we're really excited about. They can make money and will make money, but their business models actually enable the world to change. And those are things that we really like about what is happening in this digital clean tech space. And so I'll close with what we're looking for and the help that we need. We need help in three areas really. One is with mentorship. And what I mean by that is that we need guys like Larry, like Josh. Josh is actually a mentor at Green Start that can sit down and work with entrepreneurs to help them avoid the pitfalls that if you've been an entrepreneur you most likely fell into. We need not only to bridge that knowledge gap but to bridge that funding gap. And so we need more people like Trey and Josh and Larry at the band that really are willing to put money into to clean tech and the digital clean tech space because we need to be able to attract the right entrepreneurs into this space. And it really ends up being all about the entrepreneur. And so the third thing is just that, entrepreneurs. We need to really create a movement, inspire if you will educate these, our current group, this current generation of entrepreneurs that if they want to make a boatload of money, they have to solve a big problem. And there is no bigger problem out there than the world's dependence on energy or dirty energy. And so inspiring them to, instead of perhaps starting the next Facebook to start the next Airbnb or the next zip car or the next relay rides because those companies are making money. But the difference being is that they're changing the world. And so that's what we're looking for and that's why we're here to help. Thanks very much, Dave. Next to carry the ball further down the field, I'd like to call on Josh Green for more David Howe Ventures, Josh. Thanks, thanks very much, John. More David Howe is a traditional venture capital firm. We're currently in our ninth fund. It's a $700 million vehicle. We've been around for 28 years and we're investing in IT, life sciences and clean technology. Now clean technology's a relatively recent category for us and frankly for everybody. And I'm gonna provide you some observations at least from the venture capital perspective is that what that category looks like. It is following the classic Gartner hype cycle. And the era, for those of you who know that cycle, it is the era of irrational exuberance is over. We are now firmly in the valley of despair and slowly climbing our way out of that. Now what's interesting is that there are investment opportunities at every one of these spots on the cycle. This is not to leave you with an awful terrible message about the future of clean tech. In fact, just the opposite. You need to go through these elements of an investment cycle in order to get to ultimately something that's really valuable and long term and the rest. Now those oscillations tend to be much more severe in nascent investment value chains and clean tech is one of those early investment value chains that's early in its history. And so as a result, it's not surprising to see us where we are right now. A venture capitalist was recently asked, tell me about all the clean tech success stories and on a panel and he provided a blank stare in answer to that question. And you know, my answer to it, if I had sat up there, it would have been to say the categories existed for only about seven years. The average startup that's venture capital back today is nine years to liquidity. So everything you hear about the classical three to five years and all the rest of it, the facts are it's nine years to liquidity. So what do you want from clean tech? Do you want it to be two years early on what the average is? So everything's doing just fine. We do have our failures and we will continue to have failures and that is a necessary and important actually part of the entire process of investing and it's inherent in venture capital in and of itself. So the question becomes given that current status on a macro level, where are we looking at investments today? We're looking much more towards the nexus of clean tech and IT. Right where Green Start has planted itself and I think these guys are doing a terrific job and I'll make another comment about that in just a moment about how venture capital works with an entity like Green Start in looking at investments. But basically it's that nexus of IT and clean tech and that takes two forms. It takes one, a company that's doing great like Opower that's a classical IT company that's planted in the clean technology space and the other are what I would call applied technologies. Companies that look very much like classical Silicon Valley technology companies, hardware based typically and the like we're investors in a company called Cicado which is a LED module, reasonably low capital requirements in revenue, they ship 600,000 LED modules using remote phosphors to create really high quality light. That is very much like classical startups in the 1980s sense of the word in Silicon Valley. So what does the ecosystem look like today? Strategics and large corporations are more important than they've ever been. Understanding their agendas is absolutely a critical insight for us to not only understand where new market entrants and small companies can make a stake but also create accessibility to these markets. These markets look extremely tantalizing because they're tremendous, they're huge, they're multi, multi tens of billions of dollars but the key question that we look at is accessibility for a startup and how can they succeed in that environment? The other is the other side of the equation which is Green Start and accelerators, well there aren't really too many folks like you but basically I would like to suggest that it's the separating the wheat from the chaff and providing us a leg up in areas where we don't really have the resources to do what they're doing and so working closely with folks like that is very important. I wanna end on one other note which is policy. The classical Silicon Valley formulation is to Heisman pose all government, okay? And that has certainly been the case in IT investing. It has not been the case in life sciences and it can't be and I would suggest even less so can it be in energy, in other words, it's an absolute must to be working hand in hand with policy matters. And to be frank about it, I'm really tired of playing defense for the last year or two on clean tech policy. I'm actually the incoming chairman of the National Venture Capital Association and we have worked up a bill called an energy innovation tax credit. Now this looks at energy generation and a lot of our existing portfolio is in energy generation. But what it says is government doesn't pick any winners. This is by the way, I don't know you know this but the energy industry as a whole spends four tenths of one percent of their revenues on R&D, okay? Absolutely remarkable, lowest of any meaningful industry in the United States by a long shot. So this is to encourage more R&D both by startups and by big companies. And the concept would be you get a tax credit for doing so and therefore an incentive until so many electrons have been produced by that commercialized technology or until so many gallons have been produced and the like and then it would trail off. And it doesn't and frankly it is independent of the issue of fossil and or renewables. And the reason for that is that we actually have bipartisan and bicameral support for this bill which is in just in the drafting stages but it allows us an opportunity to now go on offense. Again, I don't know that you saw this but the final epitaph for the Cylindra situation was written yesterday. That is now officially off of Congress's agenda. So thank goodness. And now we can hopefully move forward. Great, thanks very much Josh. Okay Tray, so now we have the bases loaded with three speed demons on the backs but no pressure at all. I actually forgot to mention Tray has three degrees from Stanford which is a lot better than my three degrees from Berkeley. He stole my lead I was gonna say. So I use every excuse to get back on campus because I clearly spent a lot of years here so. Excellent. Great, so I've been a climber for about eight years and was fortunate to be part of the founding team of our green tech strategy. We've been around for 40 years. Like Josh's team we've historically invested in life science information technology and now we have a burgeoning green tech practice. We in the process of doing that just discovered what we thought to be an amazing opportunity in front of us and so we also added a growth portfolio in addition to our main fund which is a billion dollar fund focusing on scaling up green technology. So you can think of Kleiner as almost stage agnostic. Historically we've been very early stage so we will seed companies not as much as these guys do so we're excited about Green Start. We typically do A's and B's and now we'll do growth investments as well. Our green tech portfolio is well underway. We have over 60 companies to date in this portfolio very broad from energy to sort of my sector where I spend most of my time which is really in what I've been calling digital energy. So I'm an IT person at heart we're in the middle of Silicon Valley so my passion is really taking this great information technology and using that to change the way we interact with our environment. Another theme that I often talk about is now that we have everyone online let's get everything online and once we have everything online it totally changes the dynamic. And so how that has I guess guided my investment philosophy. You know I have four companies that I tend to talk about in green tech which are Opower which has already been alluded to this is a really exciting software company who knew that social benchmarking and customer engagement for utilities actually was a good thing. It's a very basic notion but they have started this wonderful idea and now they're essentially customer engagement for utilities and as energy gets more complex and as customers demand more control of their energy this is an absolute must have trend. That gave us some insight as well as sort of my desire for finding ways to bring the rest of our environment online. Nest was an opportunity that for us was a really really exciting one that just quickly I had been looking at a lot of initiatives to drive efficiency in the home because I'm a big believer in disruption at the edges. You're not gonna be able to disrupt through utility like you can through the customer. The problem however was that all the products out there for customers sucked they're crappy. No one actually wants them maybe the utility wants you to use them but I certainly don't want them in my home. And so how can we get great teams who really understand great product design to design something that a consumer actually wants? And in process of building something a consumer wants it also does great for society. And so for me that embodiment is Nest. This is a team of folks from Apple who said we're gonna take a detour for a while and we're gonna go reinvent consumer products and they reinvented the thermostat. And so that's a whole other thing we can talk about maybe more of that theme later. Another company in my portfolio in fact one of the guys is here and on panel next is Enlighted. And for me Enlighted is the Nest concept but for commercial buildings. Take the low hanging fruit in commercial buildings lighting make it a very smart distributed system and use that to bring our buildings online. And then the last company is Recycle Bank which is really incentives and rewards for getting consumers aligned with doing the right thing for society. So that's sort of a smattering of the area I'm spending my time and I think I'm looking for anything again really in this theme around how can I bring the rest of the world online and using mobile. We've got mobile taking off everywhere else. It's now our interface to the world. So how can we take some of this great thinking that's going on in green and really make it more mobile and more with people on a daily basis. So anyway, I will stop there and let us get into the questions. Okay, thanks very much. Right. So since we're almost right on schedule funding do you guys have any questions for each other or you're all talked out? You wanna go straight to the audience? It's up to you. Whatever you want. It's your call. Let's go to the audience. Well, maybe can interface with each other during the responses to the questions. Okay, let's go for questions then. I hope people have some queued up. We have one way on the back there and we have one up here. Yeah, my question, Tom Faust. My question is for Josh Green. You say you're working on introducing a bill that would have tax incentives for new manufacturing plants. Is that correct? Well, it would be actually more in the R&D stages all the way to commercialization at a certain level. So it would include early manufacturing plants. Okay, in other words, the first manufacturing plant. No, there used to be a 30% ITC and then it was stripped. I really urge you to get that 30% ITC. It'd make it a lot easier to raise funds and capitalize if the investors had less at risk. So I salute your efforts and I really hope you're successful in getting that 30% ITC. And if you could make it so that the funds are paid up front rather than having to wait for them. There used to be that program and then it died, so. Yeah, well, thank you. And for those who don't know, both the ITC, the investment tax credit and the PTC, the production tax credit are both short term, highly politicized credits that come up for mostly wind and solar every year or two years and the rest. The intent of this would be to be much longer term and therefore depoliticize it and to work well with an ITC, PTC and how that works and making sure that everybody's incentivizing all the rest of it. We're still in the details of all that sort of stuff because we want to get the support of those functions as well. But what we're really looking for is the innovation side. So if you look at solar and wind, those are pretty mature technologies now and that would be fine for PTCs and ITCs but this would be at an earlier stage for new stuff. Question for Josh. Josh, you mentioned that a certain unnamed VC, Iron Price had come up blank for success stories in clean tech. Can you give us a couple of examples of success stories in clean tech? It's a softball, it's a cream puff question that have served customers, society and shareholders. Sure. Solarzyme and Tesla, how about that? Good. Thank you. And MBA polymers. Yeah, MBA polymers as well, yeah. I guess I would just add there's a pipeline of companies that are with strong growth sitting behind them that haven't necessarily gone public but are certainly changing the lives of a lot of people. Oh, power saving a gigawatt hour a day. That one up here, one back there and then one up here. Adam. John. Sounds to me like a lot of the investments that you're all involved in fall more or less into the category of perhaps domestic or residential IT related but as you know and I know a lot of the energy being used, most of the energy being used is industrial, commercial in China. There's the global issues of massive amounts of energy being used and will be used. I'm curious if you think the angel model, venture model as much to say about that aspect of energy less the Silicon Valley side. Let me try first. So I think what I heard you say was domestic versus international first and then second, IT versus everything else in energy and clean tech. So on domestic versus international, it's really hard to, as I said earlier, one of the success factors for us is being involved in a company and when a company's more than 60 miles away, you can't drive there. Building a company is in between in terms of complexity and time and resources and skill required more complicated than building a house, less complicated than raising a family and crises happen all the time and if you gotta drive more than an hour, you can't do it, you can't participate. So for us, it's not true for my buddies over here, but for us, more than 60 miles away, forget it. It's just not gonna work, I never mind that. So and then on the IT space, everybody to the left of me, to the right of me said that IT was important, but you know that isn't for us. So as I said, we made seven investments last year and I don't think that the information content was that high in at least four of them and maybe five. What was more important was having an unfair, sustainable advantage and that's really difficult if you're not writing software. You know, you have to have, it's hard to get that unfair advantage if you don't have some software in it and so we'd look for that. We look at our business as a startup. And one of the rules of starting a startup is to brutally prioritize and brutally prioritize on the right things. And so when we look at companies while we would like to solve bigger problems outside of the U.S. perhaps, it's not really an option because A, we need to be with those companies and to surround those companies and to help those companies fill the gaps that they have, first identify those gaps and then bridge those gaps and fill those gaps. Number two is they're gonna need follow on capital and therefore they're going to need to be incorporated in the U.S. Ideally they're U.S. facing and it makes it less difficult but still difficult to get follow on financing for them. Three is that the opportunity here to actually impact, think about energy efficiency and the commercial space. 40% of the consumption of our nation's energy is within the energy efficiency space in commercial buildings.  So I've got two quick answers. One, we actually have a team in China and they're dramatically ramping up green tech investing in Asia. One of our partners actually is moving over there to help them do that and take sort of our green tech base and focus it there. And then my second answer to that is we're actually, the U.S. is exporting technology to China. One of our companies that we were frankly really excited about in the U.S. that had corporate excitement around it, great point energy. China basically just invested in it and they're gonna scale up the technology over there. So, yes, distances and all those things can make it more complicated but in more ways than one, innovation is happening globally. And if I could just add and take a different angle on this. I think that we're in an era right now and one of the focuses on, you're seeing a very IT centric talk around all this but that's the part of the cycle that we're in right now and what that cycle is that we're reasonably capital light on looking at startups as well. It would be really hard to get the billion dollar plus venture through my partnership right now and this current environment that we're in. That doesn't mean that that's not gonna change two years from now because it was two different than this two years ago, vastly different and the like but that's where we are today. It's really important as entrepreneurs for those who are, I saw a lot of hands go up about entrepreneurs in the audience to just understand that, that the financing environment has as one of its criteria these days, capital light and that means tens of millions of dollars to get to cash flow positive, not hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to get there but stay tuned because like I say, that'll change over time and therefore the nature of the projects we work on is gonna change over time as well with inevitably we will go back to energy generation which tend to be the more capital intensive types of companies that we work with. I had a follow up question on that and a great integration of renewables but let's go to the audience first. Yeah, John Massey, question for all of you and actually follow on for that about differences between the IT type startups and some of the other ones in terms of working with big companies and how you manage the distribution chain support and all that sort of stuff and then there's a specific one for Trey, talk some about Nest. Okay, so I guess I'll start a little bit more on Nest. You know, it's funny because when we originally started working with the team and I was sort of pitching this to my partners and to folks, there was very much this, well, what's wrong with the thermostat? No one's gonna buy an expensive thermostat and my point that I kept pushing to folks was you can't take a VCR, connect it to the internet and go look at this great product when TiVo is right here, right? And so basically what people have been doing kind of in consumer efficiency is kind of stacking some new technology concepts on top of 40 year old technology and so what was clear to me is it was ripe for a platform change. The beauty is you've got Apple who's completely changed the mobile industry. Mobile phones are so explosive right now that that has essentially made this kind of technology affordable, doable. You know, if you took a part and there is a great breakdown of the Nest thermostat, looks remarkably like an iPhone and it's because you need a team that understands all of that network connectivity, the cloud intelligence, all of that stuff in order to create a consumer experience that today's consumers are gonna come to expect from that kind of consumer product. So that's been a lot of fun to work with those guys. Was there a specific sort of insight or observation that you were looking to hear more about? Well, I think it was the general thing of how you got into it because the fact that thermostats were born. Okay, so actually it came from a couple different angles. One is, as you heard before, what we do is really about investing in people. In this particular team, Tony Fidel is an industry legend in and of himself. He started iPod, grew the iPhone group under Jobs and he's one of those kinds of people at you back no matter what he does, right? And so he came into our office and said, I'm gonna do this thing and some of my partners were like, really? And fortunately there was me and some other partners who had actually been looking at this area and said, no, really. This is exciting if we can get someone like Tony to focus on something as perceived and boring as a thermostat actually is. And that's the perfect sort of combination of things to create true disruption. So I could comment on the strategic element a bit a little bit. So the classical way in Silicon Valley to work is you stay away from strategic as long as you possibly can and then when you have an overwhelming advantage that they seek from you, then you've got somewhat of an even playing field and now you can get into a negotiation with them. And I think in the clean energy area that's evolving quite a bit. First of all, I don't think that actually that scenario ever was true but I think it's evolving even further than that. So starting about, I'd say three or four years ago, it was very clear that for financial investors they needed validation from strategics in order to create a true presence for that startup and an endorsement for that startup in the form of partnerships and the like. And this didn't mean for those of you who are involved in life sciences at all, just racking up a bunch of partnerships like old life sciences companies did and a bunch of memorandums of understanding and things along those lines. These were really meaningful partnerships and people really looked at them as whether they would help assist the company to really become a presence and a real player in the marketplace. And that's true today. And it's true with I'm sure a bunch of our portfolio companies that we look for them and their partnering activity to be a major milestone in their advancement and the like. The thing that I think is emerging now is that that's coming earlier and earlier in the process. Typically that's been seen, strategics being involved for example, near the founding of a new corporation has been seen as a suffocating event that an entrepreneur wants no part of it all and all the rest of it. But the truth is we're going into an existing marketplace with huge incumbents who have specific agendas and if you can get to a point where you can understand those agendas then and understand that everybody's bringing something to the table which is the startup brings off balance sheet development of whatever that product or service might be. The strategic brings the agenda plus potentially capital associated with that. Then you can see how a symbiosis can start to exist where everybody can live together pretty well. Whether we'll get there or not, I don't know but I see signs that we're marching towards that being the case. I don't know if you agree. That well said. Definitely. I mean, these are huge ecosystems that have existed for a long time. So to be strategic and aggressive about partnering where appropriate makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I would say what I would agree with Josh but just amplify that to say that what a strategic brings is customer validation. And often times distribution and distribution. Yeah, distribution customer validation. So now you know this goes back is it real? You have some customer traction. I would agree. I would agree. I mean, one thing we do see though is that there is quite a bit of aggressiveness on the part of certain strategic now coming to startups at an early stage to begin to build relationships with them and they're looking at these startups as incremental opportunities to bring in more customers and to add to their both top and bottom line. And so we're really focused on helping the startups navigate that world because it is complicated and it's not the same with every strategic. Working with Intel is very different and versus perhaps working with a St. Cobain or a Google Ventures, which isn't really a strategic but most people think of them as a strategic. Other questions? Actually I was struck that both Larry and Bill Peary used this exact kind of built up the numbers to the three or four percent of sales devoted to R&D and the energy space. That was Josh, it was Josh. Yeah. It's actually four-tenths of one percent. Three-tenths of one percent, yeah. So this is sort of a government role in this. That's right. So obviously you think more money should be put in to maybe pre-competitive R&D and the energy space. You mean from the government? Yeah. Actually, I don't think government does such a good job of direct investing in startups and I think we've gone through a few years of that and the vagaries of it and all the rest of it are such that I'd much rather the government be involved in policy setting. Helping demand not to fly. Exactly, that's right. That's exactly right. Yeah, I'd say in research, funding research, funding basic research, that's probably where the biggest holes are especially in storage, for example.  So on the smart grid, you hear a lot about smart grid. Jim Sweeney Center and others are doing these smart meter things, which sort of California seems like that's, people are figuring out what to do with that. What's the next step in that? Do you go, once you go on the other side of the meter, is there a business model there that you've seen and like? Are you trying to find saying, so this would be, to me, if you look at the big energy system transition we need, we need, it's all about grid integration of renewables and other internet and sources and so on. So maybe there's not enough of those to worry about it yet, but what's the next step in that evolution? Well, there's getting the data, first of all. Right now, we're just outfitting, you know, this old web of stuff so that we can actually get the data, but then we need an infrastructure to be able to hold that data, analyze that data, and then turn it into actionable information. And so, you know, I'd say right now we're in the very early, early innings of, you know, no one's been able to access the data, it's been an entirely black box, so we're just now starting to get it exposed. And once it's exposed, and there's a true app ecosystem of like I'm a homeowner or I'm a business owner and here's my data, then there's a lot of exciting stuff that can go on, but that data needs to be freed and delivered to folks in a secure way. And, you know, and there's a problem because utilities have never been built to be infrastructure companies. And so, you know, all of that makes for exciting new forward-looking opportunity. So who do you need? Is it state regulations, local stuff, company initiatives? I tell you what we really need is to end the monopoly by the utilities. Yeah, we need competition. For those of you who may know the telecommunications history, there needs to be a judge-green order, okay? That would be a true game changer. So in the absence of that, at least for the near term, what we look at is the other side of the meter, is building management systems, for example. So you're dealing with enterprises and business to business, and you're fundamentally unregulated. This is the innovation at the customer side. Build a great product that the customer can pull in and then force it back into the utility organization. Right. So we're gonna come back. If you're counting on the appliances on the customer side of the meter to be sprung up to send the data back, you're probably gonna have to wait for all of them to be replaced. You know, you're looking at 20, 30 years for all of those to be, you know, in the manufacturers. So there, we see about that. It's actually pretty concentrated in just a few things though, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, but so there, we see about once a month somebody coming in with the data disaggregation. Yeah, right, exactly. All right, and so with that on the other side, you know, there's an opportunity there, but there are so many companies doing it that none of them seem to be taking a big enough step, you know, to make a real dent. It will probably happen in the commercial and industrial space first. Well, I think one of the keys to it, and I try, you guys have done a great job of investing in the concept, but you have to have something more than just energy savings.  Yeah, exactly, right.  Right, and your bill will go down and all the rest. That in and of itself is not gonna create a big company. Agreed, absolutely. Yeah, it's gotta be social interaction, it's gotta be. It's gotta make your life easier. In a business context, it's gotta drive revenues, okay? That's a really tough one.  That's amazing to me, is that there are great solutions out there that cut costs, and so I think part of what has to happen is just education and standards and some trust being built. And, you know, a great example, and, you know, again, I mentioned this company in Lighted that's on a panel next. You know, it's lighting controls, intelligent, distributed lighting controls. 65% energy savings on average in lighting, right? I mean, it's a sub-2 year ROI. It's kind of no brainer things to do. The problem is you're selling to facilities, there's, you know, it's complicated, there's technology, and so these sorts of things take a little while to create change and trust. But, you know, we're right at the beginning of these new types of folks taking these new kinds of risks that ultimately, hopefully, we can help turn them into heroes instead of the last line of defense. Yeah, exactly. Great. And that, unless there's any burning questions, I'd like to thank the panel for coming through is just a fascinating tour de force.


Amen, all right. Keep your place there in Daniel chapter 12, Daniel chapter 12, so part of the chapter that I want to focus on here is verse number 4 where the Bible says, but thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end, many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased." So I've talked about this before, that we're living in a day and age where there's a lot of different, there's a lot of knowledge out there. There's a lot of information coming at us today, but I think that this verse may have a couple of different meetings, even for the part where it says, many shall run to and fro, especially lately. I think it's referring to, you know, travel in general, but I also think that it could be referring to people discerning information differently, you know, running to and fro, discerning information differently, making different decisions, having different conclusions on these things. So, you know, when I look at this verse and I say, and knowledge shall be increased, you know, the Bible is telling us here that there will be a time in the end when there will be a lot of knowledge that's out there, all right? So the question is, how do we sort this information? I mean, how do you make heads or tails of all of this information out there? I mean, just think of it. Think of all the information out there. Just think of just, you know, our favorite thing in the world, right? Just think of YouTube, right? Think of all the information that's on YouTube today.  You know, someone that's always coming up with some kind of weird harebrained thing, you're smiling because you know these people, but they've got something that, you know, they heard somewhere and it's because they found something on YouTube. And the thing is, you know, there's all kinds of wrong information on YouTube.  I mean, just the big ones, right?  You know, I mean, we've all met people who've fallen into this. My favorite one, I didn't even know existed until I moved to California, is the flat earth thing. Right? I mean, who would have thought that these people exist, but they're out there, man. And it's on YouTube.  I mean, there's all kinds of stuff out there.  So, I mean, the point is, is that there's all this information. You could spend hundreds, maybe even thousands of hours just watching YouTube videos on the flat earth.  And that's just one, you know, media outlet, YouTube. So, I mean, the point is that we're living in a day and age where there is so much information coming at us. I mean, what are we to do with this? How are we to handle this? That's what I want to talk about this evening. The title of this sermon this evening is Discerning the Truth. Discerning the truth in a time where there is so much information, how do we discern the truth? How can we filter this stuff, right? So, the first question is, you know, what is the truth? What is the truth? And the first thing that we know, you know, the Word of God is the truth. The Word of God is the truth. If we do a Bible study on the Word truth, the Bible says, you know, John 14, turn to John 14, chapter 6. John 14, chapter 6. The Word of God is the ultimate truth. The Word of God is the ultimate truth. In John 14, chapter 6, the Bible says, Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the Father, but by me. Go to John chapter 8, verse number 32. So, Jesus says that I am, he is literally the truth. He calls himself there. So, what is the truth? Well, Jesus is the truth. Jesus says I am the truth, period. Go to John chapter 8, and look at verse number 32. So, we know that Jesus is the truth. In John chapter 8, verse number 32, the Bible says, and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. So, Jesus says that not only is he the literal truth, but that that truth, the truth, will make you free. Now, isn't that true? Isn't that true?   You're freed from that. And he's freed you from death. You will never experience the second death.  You will never get that. Now, turn to John chapter 17. So, Jesus is the truth. That truth will make you free. Even if you don't feel free in California today, you're actually still free. You're free through Jesus Christ. Turn to John chapter 17 and look at verse number 16. The Bible says this, it says, they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them through thy truth. Thy word is truth. Jesus talking to the Father here, and he's saying that the word of God is truth. The word of God is truth, Jesus says. Now, turn to John 1-1. John 1-1. So, Jesus says I am the truth, and then Jesus says the word of God is truth. Well, which is it? Well, of course, that we know that it's both. In John chapter 1, in verse number 1, the Bible says in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. So, the word of God is God. We know that, right?  He created the world through his word. Look at John chapter 1 in verse number 14. And the Bible says, and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, and the glory is that the only begotten of the Father full of grace and truth. So, Jesus Christ is the word becoming flesh. So, Jesus is the truth. The truth will make you free, and then the Bible says that the word of God is the truth, which is Jesus. So, you know, God used that word.  He used Jesus. Jesus created the world. So, we know that the word of God is true. We know that we have the word of God here. We know that God's promise to preserve his word is in front of us in your King James Bible. So, that's the first thing. We have the Bible to use as a filter to all this information. Okay? Now, look, I mean, we looked at a lot of different things that we used the Bible as a filter on in the American heresy series. And, you know, it's compared to what we're going to get into next in the sermon tonight. This is the easy part, using the King James Bible to filter the truth. Look, filtering theology through the King James Bible is fairly easy, as long as you know what the Bible says. So, this is why, you know, we talk about in a church like this, we're not only going to preach the Bible hard at you, but things that you're going to hear preached at you are that it is important that you read the Bible. It's important that you have personal Bible time, that you're reading through the Bible, that you've read that, you know, if you want to know what the Bible says, you have to read all of it. You have to read it from the front to the back, and then you have to read it from the front to the back again. It's an infinite book. Things will keep popping up at you. Things you'll always notice new things in the Bible. I'm always shocked at the things that I always notice in the Bible when I read it again. The things that my family notices in the Bible, because guess what? When other people read it through several times, they'll notice things that you didn't notice. But that's how you can, the filter is no good to you if you don't know how to use it, what it says. Okay? So look, all these theologies, think of the Catholics, and the Seventh-day Adventists, and the Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Mormons. So easy to filter through the King James Bible. It's so easy. Because look, those aren't even, most of those religions, or false religions aren't even really deep doctrine, they're just, they're fundamentally messing up the simplicity of the Gospel. So look, you have to know what the Bible says. It's important. So that's the first thing. The first thing is that we know that the Word of God is true. So let's dig a little bit deeper tonight. Turn to Romans chapter one. Romans chapter one. Don't get too excited. It's not what you think. Romans chapter one. Romans chapter one. Now put your thinking caps on. Get your calculators out. Romans chapter one, look down at verse number 19, where the Bible says this. It says, because that which may be known of God has manifest in them, for God hath showed it unto them. So we talked about this in the Sermon on Romans chapter one, that God has given evidence to people. He has given evidence to people of his existence. No one has an excuse in this world.  And the Bible is telling us one of those chances here. Look at verse number 20. Excuse me. The Bible says, for the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse.  And we, you know, we generally kind of just talk about creation when we look at verse number 20. But let's dig into the actual words that the Bible is saying here. The Bible says the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen. Isn't that a strange statement that the invisible things, these are invisible things, right? But they're clearly seen, right? How are they clearly seen? Well, the Bible explains. It says being understood by what? By the things that are made. So these invisible things are seen by the things that are made. You ever think about what that means? This is more than just the trees and the flowers. God is talking about that these invisible things are literal evidence of him. So let's go beyond the trees and the flowers and let's look at these invisible things. Now, let me ask you a question. Can you see gravity? Can you see it? Look down at verse number 20 again. The Bible says, for the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made. Can you see electricity? Can you see energy? Can you see work that energy does? Well, I guess you kind of can see that one. Here's a good one. Can you see heat transfer? If I put a cup of coffee on the back table and immediately when I put that cup of coffee that's at 105 degrees or whatever that coffee is at, immediately that cup of coffee, we've talked about this in a sermon before too, it will immediately start going towards the room temperature, 70 degrees. Can you see that happening? Can you see it? You can't. You can't see it. So how do we know? How do we know this? How do we know gravity is real? I have a demonstration here because we can observe it. That's how I know that that invisible thing of God, it can be clearly seen when I drop the pen. We can observe it through experimentation. I just did an experiment. I just tested gravity. It works. We're still good. Man has even invented a way to model these invisible things of God. Man has invented a way to figure out or to model to see how the invisible things of God are going to work. That way that man has invented to model this is called mathematics. These invisible things are things that we can literally gain understanding of. Turn to Second Chronicles chapter 26. People in the Bible gained understanding of these things. Turn to Second Chronicles chapter 26. One of my favorite kings, and I probably give them a little bit too much credit here for some of the things that he did. But Second Chronicles chapter 26, we see King Uzziah in the Bible. And look at verse number 14. And the Bible says, And Uzziah prepared for them throughout all the hosts shields and spears and helmets and habersians and bows and slings to cast stones. And he made in Jerusalem engines invented by cunning men to be on the towers and upon the bulwarks to shoot arrows and great stones with all. Think about it. And his name spread far abroad and he was marvelously helped till he was strong. Look, think about it. He created these machines, these engines the Bible calls it to defy gravity by taking these massive stones that hit a lot of mass and defying gravity by casting these great stones. A catapult, it comes to mind. He made these great machines using engineering, the laws of physics. But look, we don't invent the laws of physics. I didn't invent gravity. Uzziah did not invent gravity and then make a machine that defied gravity. Things like gravity, mass, heat transfer, energy, work, electricity, these are all things that are laws of the universe. These are the invisible things of God. These are the invisible things of God. These are things that are there. They're happening to us. They're things that aren't seen. Right? They're things that aren't seen, but they can be observed by the things that are made. You see what I'm saying? They can be observed when I drop the pen. They can be observed when I make a machine, when Uzziah made the machine to throw. He could, he can see that gravity still would eventually take that stone back down. So he could see these things. He could experiment with these and now we can model these things with math, with mathematics. But I've often thought that as an engineer that I'm just basically trying to re-reverse engineer inside of God's universe, if you think about it that way. Because look, I have to model how all these things are going to happen to me. And if I don't model them properly, it's not going to go well. Now, I don't talk about this a lot, but several years ago, for several years, I was in the field of research and development. And it was my job to basically invent new technologies for the company that I worked for. But not only did I invent new technologies for the company that I worked for, but I also evaluated technologies from other people. Okay? So I evaluated people would want to come and sell our company these machines, as the Bible would say, these engines, as the Bible would say. And they wanted to sell this to us. So I had to kind of dig in and see, look, I've met a lot of mad scientists, literally, in my life. And let me, let me just say this. I've met a lot of these guys that they would come and they would pitch these things. And I had to figure out if what they were saying was true. So what did I do? What did I do? I used the biblical principle is what I did. Look back at verse number 20. When somebody comes to us and say, hey, we have this great machine. We want to sell it to your company. It's going to, it's going to do this for you. And it's going to work this way. And it will only cost you this much money. And it can create this type of energy. I would have to figure that out. So the first thing that I would do is I would use math that we know of the invisible things of him. So I would use math to model that what these invisible things are known to follow. Did you know that I can come up with a mathematical equation to show you exactly how much time it will take that pen to hit the floor after I drop it? Exactly. You can model it that close. But you have to get, you know, the mass of the pen correct. You have to put in certain variables to be correct. Okay? The second thing I would do. So first, we would model with math the invisible things. That's what we would model to look at these ideas from these scientists. The second thing that we would do is look at the thing that was made. So we would model the invisible things, the laws of the universe that God put in front of us, that we know how to model, and then we would look at the actual things that were made. In short, the math must match the machine, is what I would say. Now look, I've seen, and typically it was pretty easy, and here's why. Because I mean, I've seen some wild PowerPoint presentations, man.  I mean, all kinds of crazy stuff. And I'm like, all right, well, you know, first thing we do is we've just looked at the math and all this kind of stuff. But for 90% of these types of things, there was no machine. And the reason there was no machine is because the math wouldn't work. So it wouldn't work. The math wouldn't match the machine. Thus, they couldn't build that machine. You see what I'm saying? I mean, it was spectacular presentations. I mean, the most famous one of these, not in my experience, but the most famous one of them that maybe some of you have heard about, I'm sure there's YouTube videos on it, is perpetual motion.  A perpetual motion machine is a machine that will keep moving in a closed system without adding energy to it. But it's impossible. It defies the laws of physics. It defies the laws of thermodynamics because with friction and heat losses, you always have to keep adding energy. You always have to keep filling your car with gas. Because there's nothing that's more than 100% efficient. There's nothing that's 100% efficient. So, I mean, there's a lot of, the point I'm trying to get at on this second point is that we know the Bible is true is the first point. And then we know what is observed. God's observable universe we know is true. All else we must be skeptical. Okay? All else we must be skeptical. So let me tell you something. There's a lot, and I've met a lot of these people. There are a lot of technical false prophets out there.  There are a lot of technical false prophets out there. And I'm going to explain to you later in the sermon, you know, why that is. Okay? But look, let me give you an example of this in this whole coronavirus situation that we're in right now. Okay? There's a lot of, and look, I'm not going to stand up here and say, I know what's going to happen because I don't. I don't know. But I'm going to tell you that I don't know what I don't know.  But here's what I do know. What scares people most about this virus situation is two things that I see. It's the number of cases out there and it's mortality. How many of these cases die? How many of these people that get the disease die? Okay? Now look, I have an equation. Here's how you calculate that. You take the number of deaths and you divide it by the number of known cases and you get whatever this mortality rate is, how many people die that get the disease? Okay? The problem is this. Half of that equation is unknown. The number of known cases is completely unknown. Yet they keep reporting it and showing it rise and rise and rise and rise. I'm going to give you an exact example in Fresno here. I'm going to read you a news article from Thursday.  While we were actually at church, Fresno shut down before, then I mean it's so hard to keep track of it. It was like every five hours something new got taken away from us. But look, ABC 30 and Fresno reported the story this way. I'm going to read it for you. The city of Fresno has issued an emergency order telling everyone to shelter in place starting at 12.01 a.m. Thursday and lasting through March 31st. But there's a long list of exemptions for essential functions. This is the whole essential, non-essential. Mayor Lee Brand called it an unprecedented problem and said his attitude has changed over the weeks, especially after meeting with other big city mayors. I'm not going to address that, but that's a sermon in itself. Quote, we are literally making life and death decisions here, Brand said. He says public health officials have told mayors. Listen to this now. Listen, right here. He says public health officials have told mayors all these big city mayors because he said he's been talking to big city mayors all across the country. Public health officials have told mayors that because of lack of testing, that they should take whatever their local numbers of confirmed cases are and multiply them by 50. I'm going to read it again. He says they should take whatever their local numbers of confirmed cases are and multiply them by 50. Look, that's crazy. That means, you know what that means? If you take China's known cases and you take this equation, this simple equation of known cases divided by people that died, look, nobody wants anyone to die. Okay? I understand that one life is valuable, we go out soul winning, but I'm just talking about what we're seeing in the news. If you take known cases in China, number of people that have died in China, you multiply that bottom number by 50, the mortality rate goes to about the same as the common flu. Am I saying that the mortality rate of the coronavirus is the same as the common flu? No. So what do I think it is? I don't know. That's my point. I don't know. If you're taking a number and multiplying it by 50, you don't know either. You have no idea. Look, we don't know if the 50 number is right, but that number, that low number, that, look, if you multiply it times 50, you get a much smaller number.  That's all that they know. That's probably a fairly accurate number, because somebody that is going to die of coronaviruses in bad shape, they're going to go to a hospital, they're going to get tested, and then, you know, unfortunately, they pass away, and they know that that's a confirmed death. So they know that. So, look, hopefully, you know, that 50 number is low, but they're multiplying it times 50, but they're not reporting that mortality rate. They're reporting the mortality rate of the people that have just been tested. You see what I'm saying? It's dishonest. It's technical fraud, and they know what they're doing. It's crazy. Look, there's a cruise ship that came back. The Diamond Princess. They're saying that, and here's some reasons why they have no idea what that number is. It's not just because of lack of testing. I mean, that may be the broad reason, but look, the Diamond Princess came back and they reported that over 50% of the people didn't even have any symptoms. They tested everybody on the ship because they were concerned about, you know, the quarantines and everything. 50% of the people were asymptomatic. So, if you have no symptoms, are you going to go get tested? If you have a slight cough, are you going to go get tested for coronavirus? Are you kidding me? I mean, it's not going to happen. Look, it gives us hope, you know, that there's a lot of people out there that are getting it and getting over it. You know, that's, I mean, there's some hope there, you know, and moving on, there will be some immunity in the community in a few weeks. I mean, that gives some hope, but that's just a theory. Look, that's just a theory, but look, they just keep reporting this number of known cases went up 10,000 today. Guess what? The more people they test, the more it's going to go up, but times 50, times 50. So, look, we have to look at what we can observe. All right? We know, like, I think we can pretty much say that this is very dangerous for older people. I mean, I think that that's, that's a known at this point, but you know, the only things that can be known is what can be observed, folks, and that's how many people have died from it. Okay? There are a lot of problems with exactly half of the equation. There's two variables, and one of them is, it might be, I mean, think about it. We used to run simulations on circuits, okay? And there was like dozens and dozens and dozens of variables that we would plug into these simulations, because before we go out and spend millions of dollars of design time, we're going to make sure that we come up with a design that's going to work or at least get close to working. You see what I'm saying? So, we model it with math, and we put all these variables in dozens of variables, sometimes hundreds of variables. But we used to have a saying, and the saying was this, garbage in, garbage out. Meaning, if we missed those variables and those variables were wrong, the circuit wouldn't work. We would go build it and it wouldn't work, period. I mean, and I'm talking about, when we were talking about certain variables being wrong, we're talking about maybe two or three percent. I mean, 50, we're talking about five thousand percent. You would be laughed out of any kind of profession that's trying to build anything with these kind of numbers. Yet, this is what's being used to panic people. It bothers me. It bothers me. So, Jesus warned us about misinformation. Did you know that? Turn to Matthew 24. Jesus warned us. Jesus said that people will constantly be telling you things that aren't true. Go to Matthew chapter 24. Don't get me wrong about this sermon tonight.  But look, I know when there's a garbage variable somewhere. I used to do it for a living. I mean, I know I can recognize it, and that's why I'm sharing it with you. Matthew 24, verse number five. Matthew 24, verse number five. For many shall come in my name saying, I am Christ and shall deceive many. Jesus says that there's going to be people out there that come and say that they're the Messiah. Okay, go down to verse number 24. And these are the majority of the ones that we see today are, you know, in verse number 24. And he says, in verse number 26, I'm sorry, we'll start at verse number 24, for their show of arise false Christ and false prophets, and they shall show great signs and wonders in so much that if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. Behold, I have told you before, where if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert. Go not forth. Behold, he is in the secret chambers. Believe it not. Look, this is all these people that we talked about weeks ago claiming that Jesus was coming back on a certain date. I mean, they claim Jesus is coming back on this date. They claim that, you know, David is coming back on a certain date, and all the patriarchs are coming back.  And you know what? I'll live in it. I'll live in it until they get here. Right? I mean, these are the types of people that Jesus is warning us about. People that claim that the hot dog stand guy I told you guys about last week.  I mean, look, these people are walking around right now. Jesus warned us about these spiritual false prophets. But I'm telling you, there are a lot of other types of false prophets, too. The spiritual false prophets turn to Deuteronomy chapter 18. They're pretty easy to spot. They're pretty easy to spot. If, once again, what's the prerequisite? You know what the Bible says. If you know what the Bible says. Look at Deuteronomy 18. Look at verse number 22. The Bible says, when a prophet speaketh in the name of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the Lord hath not spoken. But the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. Thou shalt not be afraid of him. Look, these people that were fooled by all these false prophets and all these cults, like the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses and even the Catholics. Look, they may have come into it, you know, just silly and just not knowing, right? But if they would have known what the Bible said the first time that one of those false prophets said something that didn't come true, they should have been gone. Just like that. And that's the way it should be with you. You should know the Bible. So if somebody gets up and says something that's not true, that's it.  Abraham is going to walk through that door in six months if you give me $10,000. Yeah, I mean, Abraham doesn't walk through the door.  But I mean, the point is that, you know, when it doesn't happen, you know. It's easy, right? It's black and white. It's easy to discern.  All right. The problem is, is that people see someone with doctor in front of their name. They see someone with a white coat. They see someone, you know, and they assume that everything that that person says is true. Let me tell you something. It is not the case. It is not the case. I have personally worked with and met these people. And there's a lot of, think about it, engineering. It's math. There's a lot of engineering fraud out there. But I'm not a doctor. But there's a lot of engineering frauds. People pitching things that aren't true. And if you're not, you know, sharp and know what you're talking about and looking for, they'll get you. They will get you to buy into what they're doing. I've had a rule over the last 15 years. I call it the 10% rule, okay? And it's been true in engineering. And I would be shocked if it wasn't true in the medical field as well. Especially with some of the doctors that I've met out there, okay? It's the 10% rule. The 10%, there's 10% of engineers and probably doctors that are the ones grinding out the details and coming up and doing research and coming up and building new things. The other 90% are just following along and doing what the guy before them did. They're just, they're, they're average at best. I'm talking about the 10% that are thinking outside the box, that are coming up with the new stuff that you see every day. They're coming up with the new ways to communicate and the new ways to travel and all these different things. They're the ones that are actually solving the problems. 10%. And I think that that's actually generous. Kind of scary, huh? Because that means that there's 90% out there that could easily be part of this technical fraud, technical false profit group. So there's a lot of misinformation, folks. And look, let me tell you something. That 10%, I'm speaking from experience here.  Never. They're never the one standing up, being the voice piece or whatever. That's why, look, I don't know if you saw the FW, I'm going to plug somebody right now, but I don't know if you saw the FWBCLA video from Dr. Elethorff on this whole thing. But look, that lady knows what she's talking about. And I can tell, look, she's done her homework. Her numbers were right. I checked. You can tell she's done research. And here's the thing. Here's the thing that really set her apart. She had solutions. She had things that she's come up with, that she's researched and tested and studied and observed. I mean, this is someone, that is someone who is looking for answers. That is someone who has used a technical career to look for answers. I can recognize it. And what she said was true. I checked. But guess what? She's probably never going to make it on the evening news. It's a shame. It's a shame because someone that goes on the news to say, well, at this point, we just can't say. We just don't know. Sensationalism is what sells. Pictures of red viruses with spikes gets you to click that article.  Look, I hope it doesn't happen. I don't know. But it's not a reality right now. And that's the reality that they're pitching off of false variables. You see what I'm saying? I mean, you would think it's real reading the news. You would think it's real and people think it's real, by the way. That's why people are so concerned. So no one knows how bad it'll get. But right now, you know, right now, it's not, it's not there. They don't know. They don't know. So in conclusion this evening, what do we know is true? We know the Bible is true. Hopefully you knew that before you got here. The word of God is truth. We know that pestilence is used as judgment. We know that poor leadership is another part of, you know, the judgment package. You know, look, I'm not saying this isn't serious. That's not what I'm talking about. But you need to be careful with the things that you read. And that's why I'm telling you this. You need to be careful. Look, there's a lot of panic and propaganda out there today. But most things that you read in the media are wrong. And let me give you another example of this. There was a reporter last year that came to the Red Hot Preaching Conference and I knew she was there. Pastor told a couple of us that she was there. She went soul-winning with Miss Joanne and Pastor. She's a reporter from the LA Times. She blended right in. She wore, I think she wore skirts and she stayed there for the whole conference and she was doing a story on the conference. And I'm like, this is great.  Miss Joanne got somebody saved, I think, when they were out soul-winning.   And then she saw the Red Hot Preaching Conference. And there's like, if you've never been there, there's tons of kids there and they're constantly playing games in the back. It's like the best thing ever. And I'm like, you know what, she's going to see this. And she's going to be, this is, how could this be wrong? She's going to think. Even if she's the most hardened liberal I was thinking to myself. And, I mean, just the whole atmosphere of the Red Hot Preaching Conference, you know it. You've been there. And I'm like, how could anyone think that this is something that's not wonderful? You know, from the kids to the adults to everything, right? And she got to hang out with the best people. I mean, I shouldn't even say that. But I mean, she got to hang out with, you know, you know what I'm saying? She got to hang out with the pastor and his wife, you know? And I mean, I'm just like, this is going to be exciting. I mean, she came out and she just trashed the church. And she trashed the kids. I mean, that's a hard-hearted person. But the point is, you read the article, the story came out and you read the article, it was the opposite of what was true. You see? The same thing happened in the 2016 protests at Verity Baptist Church. If you go and you talk to the men and women that walked past those crowds of all those sodomites and all those benjamites supporting them, and you hear them tell you the things that they were trying to show the kids, the things that they were trying to do in front of the kids, to try to get the children to see these things. We have experienced this here. Not as bad as that. But when you read the news articles about it, you don't see any of that. You see? What you read in the media is, I hate to use the word, but I'm going to use the term, it's fake news. I mean, there's a lot of fake news out there. It's the opposite of reality. I mean, it would be nice if we could get some practical advice. Hey, if you're going to ruin the entire country, can we get some practical advice please? That's what I loved about the doctor from FWBCLA. The advice from our leaders is, hey, wash your hands. Hey, thanks. Tomorrow, are we doing colors and shapes?  Thank you. Now you're broke. We're going to ruin your life now and the entire country. So we know that the physical universe is true. Things that can be tested and observed. That will show you, look, just watch that, watch that. My advice to you as a church family is to watch the daily death rate. That number is known and that will tell you when we're coming out of this thing. Okay. That's the number you can count on. You know, when you see that, when you see that and we don't want anyone to die, I don't want to sound callous about it. Okay. But that's the number that will show you. That's the number in the countries that have already come out of this in China. You know, if you can believe what's coming out of China. But I mean, when that number starts coming down, that won't let you know that either everyone in the country is immune or it's dying because of the flu season is over or whatever. I mean, who knows, right? But my point is that's the only reliable number that I see right now. That's the only reliable number that I see right now. And then, you know, we can all have our theories and that's not what I'm going to do from here. But I mean, pray that God would just lift His hand off the country. That's all because that's where it's really coming down to. We always kind of have to come back to that. We're complaining about what's happening and the freedoms that have been taken from us and all these things. But really, we just have to remember that this is God's doing. This is God's doing. We don't have to like it. But pray that God will lift His hand off this country so we can get back to church. So we cannot have Ninja Church. We can get back to church with lights. So we can have organized soul winning in California. I mean, look, pray to God. Pray to God that He would lift the plague so we can get out and get some people saved.  I mean, I think that that is a prayer that I would hope that God would at least consider if enough people are praying it. Let's just remember that. So please discern these things. Be careful what you're reading. There's a lot of things that nobody knows right now. There's a lot of uncertainty right now. And just maybe while you're sheltering in place, and we were talking about this in my house today, here's some here's some more advice. Maybe as you're sheltering in place, just unplug from it for a while for a few days.  It can be, it's happened to me too. Okay.  That's what I do. All right. And pray. Just pray. Prayer is God. Here's our prayers. Prayers work. All right. Let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this evening. We thank you for allowing us to come here and hear your word, Lord. And we just thank you for the freedoms that we do have, Lord. And just hope that this ends soon. Give wisdom to the people that need wisdom, Lord. And, you know, be with people that are sick, Lord, and just help keep people from this illness. And it's your decision, Lord. It's in your hands. And we're here.  We love you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.


Masoot, I know this is a topic that's throughout your time at the IMF, but of course now also is occupying your thoughts, and I would like to get your take on where you see the topic of AI and future of human labor headed. Masoot. Thank you very much, Ali. So first of all, as Ali said at the beginning, artificial intelligence is playing a role in our daily lives in many, many ways. And almost every day now, if you open the newspaper, you will see some article about how self-driving cars are going to use artificial intelligence, and that's going to have big consequences for the 3 million people who work in the transportation industry in the U.S., for example. But I think the point I want to make is that the development of AI will affect the future of work far more broadly than what you see at the moment. There's been work done by academics, which suggests that in the U.S., for example, almost half of the occupations are going to be impacted in a major way by artificial intelligence. OECD has done a lot of work, and then Mari is going to present it shortly, which will show that in OECD countries more generally, we're going to find many, many occupations that range across the board, which are going to be impacted through the development of AI in ways that we can anticipate and in ways that we cannot yet anticipate because AI is developing so fast. But I want to say to you that this is not simply an issue for the OECD or advanced economies. Artificial intelligence is going to affect the nature of work in developing countries and emerging markets, and those countries and markets are in many ways less prepared for the consequences of artificial intelligence. Adidas makes 300 million pairs of shoes every year, employing about a million people, mostly in Asia and in Africa. Last year, they opened a factory in Germany, which produces 500,000 pairs of shoes using robots. This year, they're producing a factory in Atlanta, which will do the same thing. Now, question. Ten years from now, will robots be producing 3 million out of 300 million pairs of shoes for Adidas or 200 million out of the 300 million pairs of shoes that Adidas produces? And if so, the million people that are now working on producing shoes in Vietnam, in China, in Africa, will they be retrained to do something else or will they not have jobs? So will they have new jobs or no jobs? And what does that mean for countries like Ethiopia, countries like Kenya, countries like Senegal or Vietnam, which are now thinking about their development strategy? Traditionally, when you thought about development, development was basically done by taking surplus labor, which came from agriculture, when agriculture became more productive, and you moved them into light manufacturing. But if light manufacturing becomes increasingly done by robots and through artificial intelligence, that rung of the development ladder disappears. So where do these people that come off from agriculture go? Are they immediately going to jump into high value added, more sophisticated manufacturing and services? Do they have the skills to do that? Do the education systems that are struggling even to equip people to do the simple manufacturing, are they going to be able to give them the skill set that they need to be able to take on the new jobs that we're all struggling to define? Another dimension of this, and I'm going to stop after that. Another dimension of this is how are we going to cope with the fact that many people during this transition, this is a much faster industrial transition than the three industrial transitions that we have seen in the last 300 years. Because it is happening within one generation. It affects all nature of our work, and many of the people are going to find that they cannot retrain themselves fast enough to take on the new job. So concept comes up, how are we going to deal with that? And one issue that people are thinking about is to introduce a universal basic income, which is to say everybody should have some basic income. Now it's an interesting concept, but I think it raises many questions about is it affordable? Is it feasible? Can a country like Senegal or Kenya or for that matter a larger country like Pakistan be able to introduce a universal basic income when they don't even have a universal safety net? So I think artificial intelligence is happening. It is coming at us much faster than we anticipate. I personally believe that the people who are complacent and saying, no, no, no, we have gone through this in the past and we're going to manage it, are kidding themselves I think when it comes, we're going to find that our institutions are not strong enough to deal with it. It will create a great deal of social tension in our societies because young people who are coming into the labor market will not have the skills to be able to take on the jobs and the jobs are going to be migrating out and we need to start planning and preparing for it. I'm not suggesting you try and stop it. It is on balance, it will add to our productivity and to our ability to live better lives. But to do that, we need to equip ourselves now and to make this much more of a national agenda and I think a panel like this is a great way to get us started into that discussion.


An LED or learning dialogue promotes concept acquisition through learner interaction. We have seen how to take a one-hour lecture and chunk it into a sequence of multiple LEDs by identifying the pause points in the lecture. However, that is not enough, we still need to provide for learner interaction within an LED. Why is this important? Just because content transmission in a monologue form can result in learners getting disengaged with the content, however short that content may be, hence it is necessary to provide points where learners can connect with the content and interact. This is called the reflection spot. The reflection spot in an LED is a logical point where we provide the learner with opportunities for micro-practice to assimilate what they have just learned as well as to express their opinion or interact with the content in some way. It is a structural point where the learners may get disengaged. So at any point when we feel that the learner is likely to get disengaged, that is a good spot to introduce a reflection spot. Reflection spot can be implemented in multiple ways. In the simplest way, it could be a multiple choice question or a one or two line answer. Having said that, here is a reflection spot. Consider one of the LEDs that you have thought about for your course and identify one reflection spot that you will insert into the LED. Once you have done this, you may resume the video. So this reflection spot was about deciding the reflection spot in your LED. Some of you may have thought about asking a question on the preceding content where the learner has to recall some fact that you have mentioned in that content or you may have thought of asking a multiple choice question where the learner may have to give a single answer which is also there in the preceding content. While both of these are good ways of creating a reflection spot, they primarily serve the purpose of structural engagement wherein we break the monotony for the learner by making the learner interact with the video. On the other hand, we also want to create points of logical engagement for the learner where the learner goes beyond merely recalling what was said in the preceding content where we provide the learner with some opportunity to micro practice or express their opinion. For example, if we consider the same topic that we saw of CS101 of comparing between a for loop and a while loop, in that LED, one reflection spot could be to ask the learner to say when is a while loop preferred as compared to a for loop. Different learners would have different answers, so even though both of them can be used in an interchangeable manner to a large extent, it brings the opportunity for the instructor to bring out the different nuances of the differences between these two types of loops in the content that follows the reflection spot. Continuing with the same example, another reflection spot could be to show one or two lines of code of a loop and asking the learner to predict the output of that loop. A third type of reflection spot could be to show one type of a loop and ask the learner to think about how it can be transformed into another type of a loop. In this way, for the same topic of comparison of different types of loops, there can be multiple reflection spots that can be introduced in the LED. It is not necessary to introduce a variety of reflection spots in an LED. All you need to do is to pick the one that you feel will connect most with your learners. Finally, what should be the content that follows a reflection spot? It should not be something new altogether, but it should be a validation of the learner's responses. So the instructor needs to anticipate what could be the different responses that learners give and address them so that the learners feel connected to the LED. Another thing that could be done is a summary of diverse views that could be obtained for a given question or closing the micro-practice that has been provided for the learner. So in this way, the LED is complete with some content being explained in the beginning followed by reflection spot where the learners are engaging with the content and finally we close the loop by responding to what the learners may have reflected upon during the reflection spot.


This study examined the relationship between the atherogenic index of plasma, AIP, and cardiometabolic risk factors, CMR, such as waist circumference, WC, triglyceride levels, TG, insulin resistance, IR, and low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, HDLC. The authors concluded that most studies that reported high WC, TG, IR, and low HDLC also reported high AIP. However, few studies investigated blood pressure, BP, and there were inconsistencies among the results. They suggested that further research should be done to determine whether AIP can predict metabolic syndrome, METS, before it becomes clinically apparent. Additionally, they recommended that more cohort studies should be conducted to examine the relationship between AIP and METS, stratifying by gender and ethnicity. This article was authored by Beatrice Leoey, Richard James Webb and Farzad Amarabdelaian. We are article.tv, links in the description below.


As long as I've been in marketing there's been always a fight that, you know, maybe marketing's not as important and I do think that tide shifting especially with the onset of digital companies are understanding that they can make one dollar spend like two or three or four and so they're more willing to invest I've seen in the past couple years versus 10 years ago. In 2023 the hardest situation that all marketers are facing is identifying the right audience and then meeting them when they're open to receiving your brand messaging. So really finding who those people are is something we know but where they are and when they're open to engaging with us and making that meaningful impression is what we're really after. How to find new audiences while keeping the consent and losing a lot of that third party data. Really get crisp on your objectives and your key performance indicators really sticking to what your objectives are what the goals are numerically and checking in on those goals quarterly to make sure you're on track for what you want to deliver by the end of the year. There's so many data points available to find out about our audiences and what they like and they're consuming and purchasing behavior so just tailoring like marketing directly towards that as much as possible is the way forward. Be more strategic about your approach and before you actually spend your money do research and development. The idea of weathering the storm and doubling down on a loyal audience listening to them where they are making sure that your you know campaigns your meaning behind everything you're putting out is aligning to where consumers' wallets are. My prediction is that we're going to expand like as an industry expand more innovatively into measurement of like mass channels. I think like with the CTV and digital eco space as a whole I think a lot more companies are going to be shifting a lot more budget towards that. Where we're kind of placing our bets is connected TV and streaming TV so I think that's going to be a good way for brands to get that top of funnel awareness and then connect it to the rest of their marketing initiatives. I think that demand will actually continue to rise even though there's all these signs of a recession I don't think demand is going to slow down. Regardless of whatever year it is things will always be uncertain so just keep pushing and keep thriving and if we do go through economic downturn that means there's less competition people have taken their foot off the gas so just go harder. I think it's going to get crowded the need to stand out is more prevalent than ever. People are going to continue to narrow down where they spend their time and spend more time in those places so rather than being a brand that is everywhere for everyone I no longer feel like that is really what a brand should be attracting but finding a home and building a community in that one or singular several you know deeper places rather than just being like the first to try it all.


I love this one, favorite endings all time at Nissan Stadium. Start with one last year, Marcus Mariota to Corey Davis to beat the Eagles in overtime. How about Jake Locker to Justin Hunter to finally beat the Chargers in 2013? Joe Nedney's double mulligan field goal to beat Pittsburgh in the 2003 playoffs. Bob Baronis' bomb from 60 to beat the Colts in 2006. But this is my favorite, November 29, 2009, last play of the game. The 18th play of what would be a 99 yard drive against the defending NFC champion, Arizona Cardinals. Young pumping, looking, firing into the back of the inch up, it's caught!