Jon Powers: Welcome to Experts Only podcast sponsored by CleanCapital. You can learn more at cleancapital.com. I’m your host Jon Powers. Each week, we explore the intersection of energy, innovation, and finance with leaders across the industry. Thank you so much for joining us. Jon Powers: Thank you so much for joining us for today’s Experts Only podcast sponsored by CleanCapital. Learn more about CleanCapital at cleancapital.com. And you can also link up with us at the upcoming Solar Power International in Anaheim later this September. But today we’re speaking with the CEO of Elemental Excelerator, Dawn Lippert. Elemental Excelerator is a startup accelerator supporting companies who seek to improve communities through technology, innovation, economic opportunity, and sustainable modernization. Each year, they fund 15 to 20 companies up to a million dollars to improve systems, systems that impact people’s lives, energy, transportation, water, and agriculture. You’ll hear a lot from Dawn today about those different systems, companies working in this space. Jon Powers: They’ve awarded over $22 million to over 60 companies. But Dawn also is the chair of Hawaii’s Clean Energy Initiative and advisory board, is really working to do some amazing things like set Hawaii’s goal of a hundred percent renewable by 2045. She’s also had an incredible career that’s taken her from Washington state to Yale, to India, Africa, Latin America, and of course ending up living in Hawaii, which isn’t a terrible place to be. So I hope you enjoy today’s conversation. Dawn, thank you so much for joining us. Dawn Lippert: Jon, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure. Jon Powers: Absolutely. I wish I was doing this interview in person in Hawaii, but I’m not. I’m sitting in Alexandria, Virginia. You have quite an extensive background in energy in the environment, including consulting, working on projects all across the globe, but really you grew up a west coaster growing up in Washington state before heading to the east coast to go to school in Hawaii, living in DC, and now back living out in the Pacific. So you must have a good sort of global view of things. What along these travels really stoked your interest in the energy and environmental space? Dawn Lippert: Sure. So I mean, it is a dream to be able to live in Hawaii and work on these issues. It’s been a really exciting time here. What really stoked my interest in Hawaii was actually a project that I worked on in college and in grad school at Yale, in a partnership between the school and the Big Island of Hawaii to understand what’s happening on the system there and how you would transition the big island to clean energy. And then when I went to live in DC, I started working for Booz Allen and they said, oh, we have this project called the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. It’s this big ambitious project, kind of an unprecedented partnership between the state of Hawaii and the federal government to get Hawaii off of oil and turn it to clean energy. And you’ve done some work out there so we want you to help on this project. And so that really started my sort of continued journey. And then I ended up moving out here a couple years after that, after commuting here for a few years from Washington DC. So it’s been an incredibly- Jon Powers: Had you been to Hawaii growing up? Or what was sort of the impetus from Yale to look into it? Dawn Lippert: That’s a good question. At Yale, I worked on projects all over the world actually. So I think it was just another one of those I lived in India, I got to live in Puerto Rico working on sea turtle science and in south America working on renewable energy and environmental issues. And then in India in particular, I was working on commercialization of new technologies and I got really interested in how are new technologies going to change the face of energy? So, Hawaii was another one of those projects that had a really interesting hook into how do policy and finance and technology all work together to make this transition within a place within a community? And so, I just kind of got hooked on that idea. Jon Powers: Yeah. That seems to be a theme in your career, that commercialization piece. When you were at Booz, I mean, going into sort of the consulting world, I guess maybe the best way to put it, what were some of the big lessons you learned that have really helped you in the role you’re doing today? Dawn Lippert: One of the things I realized working there was that when you’re working on issues kind of at a global and national scale, you can really think about them pretty holistically. How do these systems fit together? But you could also get really narrow into energy. And then when I moved to Hawaii and started working at this place scale, on a community scale, you realize how different all those issues are in practice, and what it actually takes to implement things. I mean, we like to say now that you all deployment is local. And so you can do research and innovation and breakthrough science at the national level and say, here’s the big problems we’re trying to solve as a nation or even as a globe. But then when it gets down to actually implementing things and putting projects in the ground, it’s all about sort of local politics, local permitting, the communities, the people, the electricians, people actually doing this work. And it became much more of an actual systems problem. Dawn Lippert: You have to address it in a systems way when you’re in a place. You actually don’t have a choice. Once you start talking about something, then automatically water comes up, or land use permits, or overall planning, or workforce issues. So it’s actually, you’re forced to think in a system when you’re working in a place like this. Jon Powers: It’s interesting. I mean, I feel like so many startups struggle with trying to sort of, in many cases, wrestle with a geopolitical problem or thinking they’ve got the greatest technology since sliced bread and don’t really wrestle with that commercialization side. So, okay, how are we going to take this great idea and actually get a customer to want it? And actually get to understand what are the real timelines of a customer. Just because I want to get this deployed doesn’t mean they’re in a rush to get it done or to get their CFO to sign off on a long term power arrangement, which they may have never seen before. So how do you from I guess working globally on this, how do you take some of those lessons and translate them back to some of the startups you’re working with? Dawn Lippert: Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think that’s exactly what we saw when we started the Excelerator was that there was a mountain of grant money and really interesting technology being funded by universities and the government and not necessarily a path to market to make those commercial and help them scale. And we need speed and we need to scale at speed right now, it’s just what the world requires. And so what we did was design the Excelerator specifically for that. So say if there’s lots of interesting technologies, they have working prototypes, they have a little bit of customer interest, and how do we work with these teams to help people get out of the building, do customer discovery and then to actually start implementing things? So the way the Excelerator works is we fund companies up to a million dollars to actually do a project, get steel in the ground, get some data behind it, and then use that as a platform to help scale further. Jon Powers: I definitely want to talk in length about the Excelerator. How did the Excelerator come out of the work you were doing in Hawaii and sort of what was the impetus of getting it growing/scale in sort of the way that you’ve done it? So was it the project you were working on at Booz that sort of stoked this idea and you saw the opportunity to grow it? Dawn Lippert: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it all comes down to relationships. So when I was working at Booz Allen, I was working very closely with the state of Hawaii and sort of our Secretary of Energy for the state, a gentleman named Maurice Kaya, who’s really the grandfather of energy policy in the state of Hawaii and was behind a lot of the renewable energy development that has happened here from the 80s, 90s and through to today. So when we started working on that, it became clear that as, and the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative the goal was to get Hawaii from, we were about 92% dependent on oil for electricity, transportation, and all energy needs in 2008 when it was kicked off. And the idea was to get to majority sort of renewable energy. And then now we have a hundred percent renewable energy target by the year 2045. Dawn Lippert: So really how do you flip an entire economy from oil to renewables? And it became clear that as you do that, you actually need new technology, and also just new ways of thinking about your systems and transitioning that. And so that was really the impetus. So Maurice ended up leaving the state of Hawaii. He asked me to come join him out here and help start funding innovation that would make that happen. So both homegrown innovation and then bringing in innovation from elsewhere too and really make it part of our community in order to accelerate that transformation. Jon Powers: Interesting. And so as that started to grow, the Excelerator has sort of taken a couple different iterations to sort of where it is today. You started hitting on this a little bit earlier, but just in your own words, talk about the mission of the Excelerator, some of the growth that you’ve seen. And then I definitely want to talk about the different companies you’re working with and some of the different initiatives you’ve got going on. But just at the heart what is the Excelerator doing, and what’s the mission? Dawn Lippert: Sure. So the Excelerator has gone through multiple iterations and I consider us always under construction and always learning. And the markets are actually changing quite quickly, so we have to change too. Originally when we started out, we were funding projects and they ended up being kind of one off projects. They didn’t really lead to scale and it wasn’t having a really strong impact. So we’d funded about $12 or $13 million of projects at that point, and really took a step back and said, what do we actually need to do to impact commercialization and to help companies scale faster? And we interviewed dozens of entrepreneurs, investors, hundreds of people really across the country and talked about what they saw the gaps are, what they really needed. And that’s how we designed the Excelerator. And we launched our beta class in that way in 2013, and we’ve been funding companies since then. Dawn Lippert: So now what it looks like is that the Elemental Excelerator is a nonprofit growth accelerator. So we work with companies that are much later staged than companies that have just an idea. So our average company coming in to our go to market track has raised about $400,000 in funding. And our average company coming into our demonstration track has raised a little over $4 million in funding. So they’re a little bit more mature in terms of the startup life cycle. And in our go to market track, we’re taking companies that have really interesting technology and we’re helping them figure out that business model. How do you price it? Who are your channel partners? How do you get it to market? What kind of team do you need around you? How do you fundraise usually for your series A at that point. Dawn Lippert: And then in our demonstration track, we’re taking companies that have really interesting traction where customers certainly want it, but there’s still risk. And we’re working with them to deploy this in Hawaii or in the Asia Pacific or California and new markets. And then to give customers a 50% coupon on that deployment, which encourages them to take that risk and try something new. And then we’re pulling data and metrics off those projects. And we want those projects all to have something different, something transformative about them for the company that can help take the company to the next level. Jon Powers: Interesting. And if you looked at it sort of reading some of the numbers in the last cohort that you guys selected, you had over 500 startups who applied. What was the process that sort of whittled them down and make the selections? And I think if I read right, was it 20 that you selected for the fund, that you expected to select this year for the new fund? Dawn Lippert: Yep. Yep. That’s exactly it. So we’ve funded 63 companies so far over the life of the Excelerator, and we’ll fund another probably about 20 this year as well. So we’ll be up to over 80 companies at the end of this year. The process of getting from 500 to about 20 is all hands on deck as you can imagine. Jon Powers: How many hands are on deck, by the way? Dawn Lippert: We have 22 across our team now in Hawaii and California. Jon Powers: Wow, that’s amazing. Dawn Lippert: Yeah, so mostly work at portfolio managers and folks working on our partnerships. So specifically, we sort of see our team as an extension of the startups that we work with, and helping them get into new markets and helping deploy projects, and actually co-project manage projects with them as well. A lot of times we actually bring in the customers for the projects to get things off the ground. And that’s something that’s really important in Hawaii and also across the Pacific where relationships count for a lot. Right? Jon Powers: Right. Dawn Lippert: So you kind of need the trusted partners and then to bring in folks to help deploy. So the process of getting down to the last 15 or 20 that we select each year is really iterative. So what we’re doing is actually we’re building cohorts and we want to find complimentary companies. So we don’t select competitive companies that are selling the same value proposition to the same customer. So we’re looking at, we’re really taking a systems approach and we want cohorts of companies that can work together, learn from each other, and really have collaboration built into their DNA. Dawn Lippert: So we’re looking for of course, great businesses and differentiated technology, but also teams that can be really open to learning and understanding what others have to offer and also open their networks to other companies. And then finally, we’re looking for things that really will make a difference in these systems. So whether that’s Hawaii or the Asia Pacific or California, we take a systems approach, and we’re really optimizing for systems impact across the portfolio. Jon Powers: That’s exciting. And where do you find a lot of your, I guess, maybe feeders coming from? Where are the companies that are learning about you applying? Are they coming from incubators? Are they coming from universities? Are they coming from Silicon Valley? What sort of leads them to you? Dawn Lippert: So our number one recruiters are our existing portfolio companies. So our existing CEOs actually bring in the most companies into the Excelerator. Right behind that are investors that we work really closely with. And then right behind that, we also have incubators. So we’re part of an incubator network that’s called Incubate Energy. And since we’re later stage than the other incubators and we deploy project funding, they are terrific referral referrers into Elemental Excelerator once the companies are really ready to deploy or grow into new markets. And then beyond that, we have a little analogy that we use. So we have some that are captured by, if it’s fishing, because we’re in Hawaii. Jon Powers: Right, of course. Dawn Lippert: About 30% are captured by the broad net. About 20% are spear fished, which are things that we’re specifically going out and say, okay, here’s a challenge that we see. It’s energy efficiency in restaurants. This is a huge challenge. How do we attack that? What are the best companies looking to do that? So those are some that we spear fish. And then the final analogy is, are ones that are nurtured by our network, which is the fish pond analogy. So in Hawaiian fish ponds, actually Hawaiians used to farm fish with sort of rock walls out in the ocean. And you build little gates into the fish pond, so fish can kind of swim in and out. And then once they get too big, they can’t swim out into the ocean anymore. They just stay in the fish pond and then you can harvest them pretty easily. So those are the ones that are referred by our portfolio companies or referred by investors or others that are close to our network. Jon Powers: Outstanding. I was going to make a comment about the shrimp farms in the north, but that’s a different. Dawn Lippert: The shrimp tracks are also a key part of the program. Jon Powers: Yeah, right. Give me a case study or two of some of the companies I think you’re most excited about, maybe not most excited about so you don’t upset the other ones that you don’t mention, but are excited about that you sort of seen grow. Dawn Lippert: Sure. So a lot of interesting things that were working on right now related to interconnection of solar on the island grids, that’s a huge issue for us. So one right in your neighborhood actually that we’re working with is a company called ConnectDER, which is a meter collar for solar. So essentially enables the utility to both monitor and control solar on island grids or on any grid. And on Oahu, this is a really big deal because distributed solar, rooftop solar is actually our largest power plant across the island of Oahu. So you imagine trying to manage a grid where the utility actually doesn’t have eyes on or control of that power plant during the middle of the day. So this is something that can really increase the amount of solar on the grid. Dawn Lippert: And what we’ve seen is that you can on small grids with new solar coming on, you actually would only have to control or curtail that solar between 1% and 3% of the time in order to open up circuits, allow much more solar on the grid. So there’s a lot of fear around controlling solar and sort of opening up that pathway from utilities. But in reality, it’s really just on the margins, like 1% to 3% of the time that you actually would need to control solar in order to get more solar onto the grid. So that’s one company that we’re working with. We work very closely with our electric utility here on a number of projects. That’s one of them. Jon Powers: Is that technology put in place by the utility or by the actual array owner? So is it something that would be at for instance behind the meter or is it on the utility side of it? Dawn Lippert: So it can be put in place by either organization and it sits right behind the meter as sort of a collar right around the meter. And it also avoids expensive electrical panel upgrades for the homeowner and for the solar installer. So solar installers are really interested in it from that perspective, but utilities can also be the customer and essentially deploy this across their system. So it’s an interesting technology and a number of the companies we work with actually sit at kind of that grid edge as green tech media would say. Jon Powers: Yeah, that’s right. Dawn Lippert: And there’s question marks, right? Like how exactly are those deployed? And there’s lots of different pathways to deployment. Jon Powers: Interesting. Dawn Lippert: Another one that we’re working with sort of on the electricity grid side is a company called Amber Kinetics. They’re out of California. And we installed a flywheel on the west side on Oahu here. And we’re really interested in all kinds of energy storage. And particularly this flywheel is fascinating because it’s four hour storage. So it’s actually a long duration flywheel. Most flywheels are only for very short duration energy storage. And then at the end of its life, it’s completely recyclable. I mean, it’s basically all steel. It’s quite inexpensive at scale as a storage method, and doesn’t contain metal. So another company that we’re really excited about. Jon Powers: Yeah. Solar is such an exciting space. We’ve got a couple episodes coming up where we’re talking to folks in that industry. Because I think it’s one of those spaces that everyone’s talking about and folks are still trying to learn about it. Right? Dawn Lippert: Absolutely. And then I’ll just give you one or two examples from our other industries, because we also do a lot of work in mobility, agriculture, water, and FinTech in addition to just sort of straight up energy. So two quick examples on the agriculture side. One is a company we’re working with called TerViva, which we’re planting trees. So it’s one of the more physical projects that we’ve worked on and the initial orchard is on Oahu’s north shore. And the interesting thing about these trees is that they create pods, the Pongamia tree, and they create pods and you can shake the tree kind of like a nut and then collect the pods and press them for oil. So that oil can then replace fuel oil or diesel or gasoline for electricity or transportation. And then you can take the remainder, which is this something called a seed cake and that’s very high in protein. You can use it for cattle feed or other kinds of nutraceutical or other supplements. So it kind of addresses both energy and food. And out here in Hawaii, cattle feed is super expensive. So that’s a big challenge. Dawn Lippert: And the final one I’ll mention on the ag side is a company that we work with called Ceres Imaging. And they’re also out of California and Ceres Imaging mounts cameras and sensors on fixed wing aircraft and then flies over fields. So in Hawaii that might be pineapple. California it’s almonds. They’re also working in the Midwest on corn. And they can identify areas of water stress, and really what’s caused the water stress also by these patterns and their special imaging technique. It’s usually turned around in one day. So it’s really highly actionable for farmers and landowners. And they can also now anticipate when there’s going to be a pest invasion on a field. Even before it happens, they can kind of see it coming. Jon Powers: That’s incredible. Dawn Lippert: So those are ways you can really kind of reduce or manage pesticide use and manage water use better at agriculture. And they’re growing really well. And I think it’s a pretty fascinating use of both hardware and software for resource efficiency in agriculture. Jon Powers: I love it. So I want to talk, well, with a limited time, you guys are working across so many cool different systems and I think you’ve hit on some of those examples today, which is I think great for, I think all the levels of sustainability we’re looking at. But just to change topics for a second, you’re also involved with the Emerson Collective. And can you talk a little bit about what that is and how it’s tied into the Excelerator for folks that are not familiar? Dawn Lippert: Sure. So about a year ago we entered a strategic partnership with Emerson Collective, which is the philanthropic and investment platform of Laurene Powell Jobs. And this actually is a partnership that has roots in the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative as well because Andy Karsner, who is one of the managing partners at Emerson Collective, was the person at Department of Energy who back in 2008 was really the catalyst for the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative within Department of Energy. And so when he came to Emerson Collective, he was really interested in how does the Hawaii story and the Hawaii transition, how do we scale that and take that to other communities and really draw lessons learned in ways that can be impactful for the climate and for other places? And so last year we entered a shared partnership with Emerson Collective, and what that means is that we’re growing the Excelerator platform and we’re starting with our next geography will be in California. We’re working in the Bay Area. Dawn Lippert: And just like we have geographic islands in Hawaii, in the Bay Area we have islands of opportunity. So there’ve been places that have done really well with tech and sort of with the future economy. And then there are places that haven’t done so well and have been left behind. And those places actually have a lot in common with Hawaii, both in terms of education and demographics and some of the other challenges that we have here. And so what we’ve opened in California for the Excelerator, as we’ve stood up our office there, is something called our equity and access track. So now we still have our go to market track, our demonstration track, our work with companies. And then we’ve layered on top of that equity and access track. Dawn Lippert: And the focus of that is as we move to clean energy, as we transition off of fossil fuels, how do we ensure that everyone comes along? There’s actually economic opportunity for everyone in that future. And so that’s been the focus of our work with Emerson Collective, and it’s been really exciting to be able to grow this platform. As I said in the beginning, we’ve been iterating, we’ve been learning, we’re under construction. And I think now we’ve built a machine that works really well for companies. It can help accelerate commercialization. And so we’re ready to start scaling that. Jon Powers: I mean, you’re scaling along with your startups, which I think is really exciting. Dawn Lippert: Yeah, we learn a lot from them along the way. So it’s really an honor to be working with them. We just had a CEO summit with our startup CEO and Leadership Summit, which we do about once a year. We did it on the north shore here in Oahu, and we learn just as much from them as they learn from us. It’s all peer to peer driven. But the beautiful thing about having a community of startups is that within the community, there’s always one that’s three months ahead of you, or three months behind you, six months ahead of you, six months behind you. And they have the best market intel about what investors are like and what they’re actually doing. It’s best to get that really current information because it changes constantly. So by having this community of startups, I think they can really draw on each other for that. Jon Powers: And I feel like when you’ve got a collective of CEOs and co-founders, they’re usually pretty candid about those conversations, especially when talking about investors and what they’re seeing in the market and what they’re doing. So yeah, we always sort of give some of our best conversations about where we should be looking from folks that are in the same space we are. Dawn Lippert: Yeah, absolutely. Jon Powers: For our listeners, I sort of challenge you to go to the Elemental Excelerator’s website, elementalexcelerator.com, and check out some of the amazing initiatives like they’re transcending oil effort with Hawaii, which outlines a path to clean energy for Hawaii. A lot of lessons can be learned from that for so many other municipalities. And of course, continue to see some of the reports that they’re putting out and learn about some of the amazing startups that they’re working with and the work they’re doing. Jon Powers: Dawn, one final question for you. And we asked this to all of our guests. You’ve had such an incredible journey, if you can go back to yourself and have coffee or beer with the version of yourself coming out of high school and college and give yourself one piece of advice, what would you say? Dawn Lippert: I would say that you should meet some entrepreneurs. I think when I was coming out of high school and college, I just didn’t realize the potential of entrepreneurship and of starting companies, and of going into a brand new field and trying something new. It wasn’t something that we have on campus recruiters on. Jon Powers: Right, right, right. Dawn Lippert: It wasn’t as evident in east coast schools I think. And so I’ve even seen a lot of my classmates 5, 7, 8 years after graduating sort of come to entrepreneurship and it just lights them up, or come to sort of the startup world from consulting or banking or something else they were doing. And so I think, I mean, now at Elemental Excelerator where we have a really robust internship program where we pay for interns to be in our startups. And I really believe in that early exposure. So I would tell myself to just call up some entrepreneurs and see if they’d grab coffee with me. Because I think that would’ve opened my eyes much earlier to what’s possible and how we’re going to solve some of our toughest problems on the planet. Jon Powers: That’s amazing. I felt like when I left the military, I didn’t even know what entrepreneurism is. And I started to over time, get to meet folks and founders and really get excited about it. And actually as a vet, I look across the energy industry, and there’s so many other vets who’ve come out and it took them a while, but once they wrap their heads around this idea, the excitement of starting something and sort of driving a mission and leading a company, it’s a home for many folks that have had those other experiences. Well, thank you so much for your time and thanks for joining us and the amazing work you do. We look forward to keeping folks updated on your progress and good luck with this next cohort. Dawn Lippert: Thanks so much, Jon. I really appreciate it. Jon Powers: So many exciting things happening at the Elemental Excelerator. Learn about it at elementalexcelerator.com. Also learn about CleanCapital and what we’re doing at cleancapital.com. I’d like to thank our producers, Lauren Glickman, Emily Connor, and our intern, Greg Phillips for the hard work going into this podcast. You can get more episodes for Experts Only at cleancapital.com. And thank you so much. I look forward to continuing the conversation. Jon Powers: Thanks for listening in today’s conversation. Find more episodes on cleancapital.com, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe and leave us a five star review. We look forward to continuing our conversation on energy, innovation, and finance with you.