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:

Welcome to CleanCapital’s Experts Only podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. You can learn more about CleanCapital at cleancapital.com. We have a recent new partnership with CarVal Investors. It’s allowing us to acquire a billion dollars in solar assets in the coming years, and you can find further Experts Only podcasts at cleancapital.com. But looking forward to continuing our conversations we’ve been having. Today we are talking to Ilan Gur, who’s the founder and executive director of Cyclotron Road.

Jon Powers:

Cyclotron Road’s a fellowship program. It supports hard science and technology innovators as they advance a project with potential for global impact. Ilan founded Cyclotron Road in order to provide entrepreneurial scientists and engineers the access to infrastructure and the support they need to take their technology and make it a reality. And the program’s based at Berkeley lab in University of California, Berkeley. It’s initial focus has been on advanced energy and material technologies. It’s afforded 41 innovators in some of the world’s top research institutions, since it launched in 2014. Prior to Cyclotron Road, Ilan served as a program director at ARPA-E and managed a 50 billion portfolio, spanning energy storage, solar energy, and advanced materials.

Jon Powers:

And you also, we will talk about this in the interview, launched two different startups or was involved in two different energy startups. So I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation.

Jon Powers:

Ilan, thank you so much for joining me on today’s podcast.

Ilan Gur:

Thanks so much for having me, Jon.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, of course. So, I want to talk a little bit about your personal background. You’ve had an amazing journey, really pretty full circle being back in Berkeley. You’ve got an amazing pedigree, academics and entrepreneurialism working on the government side. But let’s step back for a second. You and I were just talking offline. You grew up in Pittsburgh, how growing up in Pittsburgh… What sort of stoked your interest in energy? What stoked your interest in entrepreneurialism and then how did you even end up going to Berkeley from there?

Ilan Gur:

Yeah, well, Pittsburgh’s an amazing town. It’s only gotten more amazing since I grew up there, but one of the unique characteristics is bunch of universities. So you’ve got a pretty strong ecosystem around academia. My parents were kind of in that ecosystem. And growing up there, I got interested in science in high school. There’s a program there that let high school students go and work in labs at Carnegie Mellon University.

Jon Powers:

Oh, interesting.

Ilan Gur:

And I got a. They asked you your interests and you say, “Well, I don’t know, I’m interested in science.” You’re in high school.

Jon Powers:

Right. Right.

Ilan Gur:

And they assigned me to a lab that was Materials Science and Engineering laboratory, which was just a completely foreign field. I kind of thought I got the butt end of the stick. And ended up just falling in love with Material Science. People can look at how materials are structured, both from a chemistry and physics standpoint. And you can actually go create new materials that the planet and the world have never seen, that do crazy new things. For me, that was like, “Whoa!” It’s super exciting and interesting. And probably the way you’re going to go change the world in a bunch of different directions. So just dove into that field. It turns out Berkeley had, at the time, one of the best Material Science departments in the country. Still does. That’s how I ended up in California.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. And then you stay there through sort of the full cycle of academics? You’ve got your Bachelor’s, your Master’s, your PhD.

Ilan Gur:

I should have known early on that I wasn’t cut out for academia. I violated sort of the Cardinal rule, which is “Don’t stay for grad school where you went to undergrad.”

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

But I loved California. And by the time I was finishing undergrad, I had gotten really passionate about energy and climate change. Was working in Material Science. But the professor here, Paul Alivisatos, was just doing some amazing cutting edge work on new nano materials and how they could solve some big problems in solar energy, at the time, kind of right around 2000. And it was just a no-brainer. Stay in the bay area and work on that project with Paul, who continues to be one of my heroes. So stayed all the way through. And ultimately, the message did sink in that I wasn’t really built to be an academic.

Jon Powers:

Right. You actually started two Venture-Backed energy companies. One focused on batteries.

Ilan Gur:

Yeah. So one was actually a spin out… The reason I figured out academia wasn’t for me is because we were doing some amazing scientific work on new nano-materials for solar. And writing papers, where papers were talking about how the work was going to change the world.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

And I just happened… Because the chemistry department at Berkeley is a stones throw away from the business school. I happened to get caught up in a bunch of business school stuff and meet some folks there who essentially helped me build a cost model.

Jon Powers:

Right, right.

Ilan Gur:

Of our science. And convinced me that we were working on all the wrong products of the problem. And I said, “Wait a second, this is impossible. We’re being so successful. People are writing about us in Forbes about our scientific work. How is it possible we just missed the obvious?”

Ilan Gur:

That we were working on the wrong parts of this. And I realized actually mainly academia is about generating kind of new knowledge and discoveries. And there’s not much incentive to go chase down and build a cost model.

Jon Powers:

Right. Right.

Ilan Gur:

So we actually, about 18 months into my PhD, kind of did a pretty major pivot and shifted gears on what we were working on, trying to do something more practical. We spun out that technology into a company called Selecint. And then I had a chance to go join up with the [node coastlands near call 00:05:53] as they were starting coastal ventures and help them incubate one of their first energy companies, a company called CO, which was a battery materials company.

Jon Powers:

Interesting. I’m glad you went down the road and talked to the business school. Right?

Ilan Gur:

Exactly.

Jon Powers:

Well, I mean, you could find that in a lot of entrepreneurs, right? Folks who may straddle one side, may straddle the business side, but don’t understand the science or science that doesn’t understand the business. And when you really start to wrap your own heads around both sides of it, you can really drive some significant change.

Ilan Gur:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Powers:

So when you were working on those issues, Arun began to stand up ARPA-E as part of DOE. What sort of attracted you to that challenge and what were some of the things you really wrestled with? And for folks that don’t know what ARPA-E is, we had a podcast with Arun earlier in a series, but it’s DOE’s Advanced Research Program for Advanced Research Projects at Agency–Energy, ARPA-E for short. Based after defenses, DARPA, really a fascinating program.

Ilan Gur:

Yeah. So I had this great experience where I realized that the startup has built for startups. I loved everything about it. You were doing cutting edge sort of science and technology, but you had an eye toward the market. You were nimble not dealing with a bunch of bureaucratic BS. Yeah. I loved it. And I had this really exciting opportunity about four, I think, four years into building CO. I basically started scratching my head in the way a lot of people did around how venture would be suited for really early stage tech that ultimately was going to be trying to penetrate big industrial markets and manufacturing markets. And it wasn’t hard to imagine that we could create a lot of value with the technology we were building. The question of how that value creation fit with the traditional venture financing model was top of mind for me in the trenches. And it felt like there was something that wasn’t a perfect fit there. And at the time Arun, another one of my, my heroes…

Jon Powers:

He is an amazing person.

Ilan Gur:

Was standing up ARPA-E with a number of other folks that I respected. And they said, “Well, why don’t you come kind of come help us do this.” And for me, it was like, “Well, okay, ARPA-E is about energy and climate. It’s about taking new science, driving it to product and trying to use market forces to scale it and make big change and tackle big opportunities there. But it’s not just the academic model. It’s not just the venture model.” ARPA-E was going to be the biggest seed fund for energy innovation across the country, across business models, across institutional models and across sectors. Right.

Ilan Gur:

So the idea to have that kind of exposure for me was sort of, well, if there was going to be a perch from which I could understand how to do early stage innovation in hard spaces like this, I couldn’t think of anything better. And actually that’s kind of how it turned out. I worked with some amazing people from a perch where we could see everything going on across the landscape where anyone would pick up our phone calls, ended up being able to drive a lot of, I think really compelling new technology and projects personally there, but also walk away with a lot of learning.

Jon Powers:

I was at the Pentagon and I remember going over to one of the first ARPA-E summits over the national Harbor there and just walked in completely in awe of the amount of energy in the room and how excited people were about what was really being developed there.

Ilan Gur:

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that Arun, he was on with podcast said, hopefully it came out in your conversation with him, but one of the things Arun was phenomenal was A: just attracting amazing talent to what he was building both in the agency and the people we were funding, but then B: being able to show how much more powerful that is when you build some community around it. Right?

Ilan Gur:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jon Powers:

And I think those two things together made ARPA-E at that time a pretty special place.

Jon Powers:

Actually, and much like you, he’s very good at communicating these big problems. Right. So we actually had him come and present a couple major defense summits about the questions around energy. And he just did it in a way that you didn’t have to have a PhD to understand what he was talking about. So from that ARPA-E experience, what were there gaps that helped you to really wrap your head around the need to create Cyclotron Road? What was sort of the next step for you?

Ilan Gur:

Yeah, well, Cyclotron Road is kind of my next startups…

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

And not just mine. We’ve got an amazing team of people and partners that have been building this basically from the ground up, but I kind of fell into it. It wasn’t what I expected. I came into ARPA-E as an entrepreneur and expected I would come out the back-end building another tech startup, or maybe investing in the private sector.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

And just a bunch of observations from that experience just started building this kind of seed of just a bit of an itch that I couldn’t figure out how to scratch. And it was basically by the time 2013, 2014, once I’d been at ARPA-E for a few years. What I started realizing is reflecting on my experience. I was kind of in academia and then said, “No, I got to go figure out and commit my life to figuring out how this science turned into a real product.”

Ilan Gur:

And in retrospect, the only reason I had the chance to go do that in the way that I did is because you had someone like [Minode 00:10:49] who basically was willing to take a flyer on a crazy early deal, threw $2 million at us when we were basically, it’s kind of cliche, but science projects and a few PhDs.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

And in that case, CO ultimately was acquired by Bosch successfully. So in that case, it worked out. I think in general, the venture community, when you looked at the aggregate data, said, for these spaces, chemistry, materials, hard technology, and in sort of big manufacturing industrial markets, the idea that the traditional venture model could come in at like the couple PhDs and an idea and try and crank in the sort of 18 month cadence of more of capital and more value creation. I think people became very skeptical that was the right model for this space.

Ilan Gur:

And so 2013, 2014, what I realized was there were far fewer of those few PhDs and an idea. I’d go in and throwing them lives into startups. And the interesting thing was one of the observations I had from ARPA-E was, well, you take a talented individual who wants to drive science towards a product. It’s a tough path. It’s… Right? So you take someone with that motivation and they’re willing to kind of go all in on that. If they’re not going and doing a startup, which is kind of the institutional mode that’s set up for that, where do they go? And what we realized is, well, either they’re going into academia, where there’s a lot of amazing stuff they could do in academia, but they’re not going to be able to have that intense, singular focused experience of moving things to product. They got to publish, they got to go to conferences, right?

Ilan Gur:

Or they end up going into a big company where today, again, they’re not really going to be empowered to run a really speculative project like that. So we just started seeing amazing talent just fall off the map. And the question arose, there’s something wrong with the system if the only way you take… We know there are incredible opportunities in value creation, in energy and climate, right. Big space, big change.

Jon Powers:

Yeah.

Ilan Gur:

We know there are amazing ideas, technology wise, and people that have been trained with the skill set to build unique solutions with technology and they want to go all in and do that. What does it mean that because venture can’t make money at the early stages doing that. We don’t have a path for these folks. Right. It just feels really pretty weird.

Jon Powers:

Yeah.

Ilan Gur:

And actually inspired a lot by what I saw Arun do at ARPA-E, which was well, identify gap, surround yourself with a lot of amazing talent and good things will happen. The realization basically came like there’s sort of a latent asset in the system, which is this hungry talent that wants to throw the lives into these projects and moving things to product. And they just don’t have the right path to do it. A number of us at ARPA-E had a bunch of colleagues at sounding boards started taking napkins and blank piece of paper and said, “Well, how would you create a different home or a different path for those folks?” And that’s kind of what Cyclotron Road has become. And I can tell you a little bit more about how it works, but that was kind of the motivation and very much inspired by what we saw there.

Jon Powers:

Talk about how it works. Talk about, well, first of all, how’s within Berkeley, is it a standalone? Talk a little bit about sort of the structure, how it works? I think what’s interesting is the strategic and business resources that you’re providing to the folks involved. So, in your own words, talk a little bit about what the structure looks like and what are some of those resources. And some of the folks you’re working with.

Ilan Gur:

There were a few realizations that kind of led to the design of what we’re doing. One was, you’ve got talent and technology ideas, unlike the digital technology space.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

Right. Where you could take the talent and the ideas, you can hold them up in a Starbucks for six months, with 50K of friends and family money. And they can actually go iterate through 10 different ideas and start actually figuring out how the technology looks as a product and testing traction.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

Right. And then you can decide do you have the right indicators, KPIs, that meet venture and easy to get venture to scale. One of the issues you have, if you run that same story back with someone who’s more of a physics or chemistry innovator, and they’re trying to disrupt new industrial separations technologies, right, they’re not going to get those learning cycles nearly as quickly, nearly as cheaply, but they’re also not going to get them at a Starbucks. Right?

Jon Powers:

Right. Right.

Ilan Gur:

So the solution basically needed to be, all right, you’d get to find a way to give these folks more time, but also give them time with access to some real facilities to get stuff done. And in the existing system, the only way to do that is they got to go raise enough institutional capital to build themselves a lab and have 18 to 24 months of runway, which basically means they’ve raised institutional capital and they’ve committed two years of their life before actually knowing if there’s an idea, let alone whether the idea matches venture. And so, sort of a cart before the horse in that story. And actually, for most innovators, it’s like you’re two years of pre-game only to potentially discover that you’re locked into a finance relationship with somebody who wasn’t the right investor. Right?

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

So we basically tried to turn it around and we basically had three components. One was “Okay, you start with the people, start with these innovators. They’re the core asset.” And what we do at Cyclotron Road is, we run a competition once a year. And we basically say, “If you’re this type of person, right, you’re the person who can go build the technology team and build the science, you probably made the discovery or was involved in it. You want to commit your life to figuring out how it gets to a product. And you’re not head down, you’re motivated by thinking about the market. You’re that rare breed. We’re going to give you a place to do that.” So if you’re the best of the people who apply and we have roughly 200 plus people apply every year. Most of them are kind of PhD-level scientists, or they’ve been in the workforce for a few years.

Ilan Gur:

“Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to support you for two years, but we’re going to support you… This isn’t a fund.”

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

“The intervention point is earlier than that. Let’s acknowledge you don’t have a business or a product yet. And we don’t actually know what the right way to move this forward is. So we’re actually going to fund you with a fellowship.” We now call Cyclotron Road an entrepreneurial research or entrepreneurial technology fellowship program. And the idea is you’re a core asset for the country, for the world, right? Rare breed of scientist who cares about moving things forward, who’s willing to go all in. So we’re going to give you a path to do that. We fund you two years under a fellowship. It’s important that it’s a fellowship because you don’t have an employment relationship. So you don’t have to sign your IP to anyone.

Jon Powers:

All right.

Ilan Gur:

Right. So we want you to be singularly focused on getting things to market. And we want to have the structure aligned with that, but we can’t build you a bespoke lab and it wouldn’t even make sense to do that. Because again, we don’t know if there’s a there. So what we’ve done in this program is we actually run the program out of Berkeley lab, one of the department of energy’s 17 national laboratories.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

It’s a roughly a billion dollar a year research facility. We now have a partnership with University of California, Berkeley and the fellows, the entrepreneurial fellows that come into our program, they’re focused on how their science can move to product. They’ve got two years to do that. So they can actually start sort of pivoting around with that timeframe. They don’t have a gun to their head in terms of investors. They’re generally starting a new co or a company alongside because that’s the whole point.

Ilan Gur:

But in those two years as a fellow, they can do that with access to world-class research facilities and capabilities, and we’ve structured it in a way where there’s sort of a win-win relationship. So if they invent things, even if they’re working at the lab, the lab doesn’t tie up the commercial rights to their inventions, they can actually own those inventions. But if they actually are intellectually collaborating with laboratory scientists and there really was an intellectual contribution, that’s jointly owned, they got to license it back. So it almost looks like a traditional kind of commercial JDA type of agreement.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

And that is sort of a really great way for the asset, which is these people. What they generally don’t have is they don’t have the time to explore and refine their ideas. And they don’t have the physical assets and the laboratory to actually be productive in that pathway.

Ilan Gur:

So we give them two years, they have access to the laboratory and then we’ve built a support program behind it, which is essentially a combination of mentorship education and a very strong network, really focused on hard technology and industrial markets to basically say, “Look, starting a company or moving technology forward in this space, it’s not going to look like a software company.” And guess what? 90% of the blogs you read on…

Jon Powers:

Right. Right.

Ilan Gur:

Entrepreneurship are going to basically give you the rules of thumb and the recipe for building either a software company or a traditional venture company. And a lot might not be. You’re definitely building software companies. So we only have this program open to people who are doing really hard technologies where they need this, but you might not even be a good fit for traditional venture. And that’s been one of the really cool things we’ve found in the program is A: we created the program in 2014, without a lot of marketing, we put up a website and said, here’s kind of the framing of it. And in two and a half weeks, we had to actually shut down the application portal.

Jon Powers:

Wow.

Ilan Gur:

Cause we had 150 PhDs from around the country basically say, if they got in, they would move to Berkeley in a heartbeat. So it’s important, right? We run this program out of Berkeley, but program’s open to anyone.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

So a lot of people are actually moving here kind of spinning into the program, embedding here. And what we found is because we’re giving them a path to figure out how to move their technologies forward, without putting the cart before the horse, a lot of them come into our program thinking their goal in life is to raise a series A from venture. And by the time they get to the end, they realize they actually have an interesting value creation opportunity. But the worst thing they could do right now is raise venture.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

And instead, they’re getting their efforts off the ground with a million dollars of NRE or a kind of a JDA license deal with an existing customer. And we’ve got others that they came in and we were really skeptical, and we didn’t think they had a venture story, but then they discovered some really interesting premium early market or something shifted in their technology development. It was a venture story and they’ve actually been able to go raise venture money.

Ilan Gur:

So that’s been a really cool part of the experiment, relative to the finance world, is actually by having this space where you don’t have to jump straight into venture. We’re actually giving people the opportunity to basically probe a much broader spectrum of ways to get their technology out and start building companies with kind of a different foundation than you would if you just kind of started with a series A. At least that’s part of the thesis.

Jon Powers:

Interesting. So just in numbers wise, so how many, of those 150, for instance, how many would get chosen? Like what’s a cohort look like in terms of numbers?

Ilan Gur:

Yeah. So that first year we had 150, we had funding for five.

Jon Powers:

Right, wow.

Ilan Gur:

I think we actually had funding for four and Berkeley lab, to their credit, actually, they floated the pilot of this, but the department of energy quickly leaned in and said, the talent you’re getting is incredible. And the stories are the first… We ended up actually stretching and bringing in eight fellows across six projects. So two of them were kind of co-founder teams or co-inventor teams. And the stories were just insane. Right? You had cutting edge experts in fields, like folks out of Stanford, trying to make next generation engines and propulsion systems with no moving parts that could be twice as efficient as the best Honda generator in the world. Really compelling technologies. One of 10 people in the world with the skills to go make that happen, basically saying to us, “Oh, if I didn’t get in this program, I probably would’ve ended up an academic or management consultant.”

Ilan Gur:

So we had that sort of but-for cause, but then we basically saw that once they were here, you take in a super talented person, who’s entrepreneurial, who’s willing to go all in, you connect them to the resources and the credibility of kind of major research institution and program like ours. And then you give them a two-year cliff and say, “You got to make progress in two years or you’re out.” Turns out they can be extremely productive.

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

So we basically found almost all of those first teams, new learnings, both on tech and market, actually some pretty significant pivots, which you don’t see often in hard tech. And then many of them getting grants to support the early tech development and coming out with different forms and flavors of private funding. So that first group of eight fellows was sort of a really strong validation point for us. We’ve since brought in four…

Jon Powers:

So you’re a pilot program?

Ilan Gur:

Yeah. We just brought in three additional cohorts. So, in total, now we’ve supported 41 of these fellows across 30 projects/companies. And it’s been awesome. Both the quality, the breath, the diversity of the scientists and entrepreneurs coming in has grown over that time. We’ve done a lot of learning and pivots and changes to the program, but also you’re getting just an amazing critical mass. So we’ve got BU physicists next to University of Colorado chemists next to Stanford material scientists, all working on engines, solar, all these different things. You end up getting a lot of amazing cross leverage from the teams in the groups.

Jon Powers:

That’s incredible. I have one final question, but just before getting to that, what’s been the response of the investor community then? They coming around and recognizing obviously the spinoff of the talent? And do you find that they’re even coming in trying to poach folks? What’s the overall response of the investors that you guys are seeing out there?

Ilan Gur:

It’s been great. What we basically found once we started was we had a bunch of stakeholder groups leaning in. Just in the last year, we’ve probably had five CTOs for multinational corporations come and visit Cyclotron Road to just meet these teams. These teams are crazy early, right?

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

Most of them are pre-product if not pre-prototype. But what we hear from corporates is, “Well, wait a second, this pipeline’s so important to us. And like, we can’t do it, right? Like we can’t get this talent and establish this pipeline. Government funding agencies, actually, these are exactly the types of folks we want to fund. And without you it’s not clear they’re going to be operating in this way and nearly as efficiently.” So they’re excited. And then the investor community is kind of the same thing, which is, “Hey, this is exactly what we want to see. We want to see a lot of leverage at the early stage.”

Ilan Gur:

“We want to see some time so we can see how these things are developing and pivoting and whether they match our thesis.”

Jon Powers:

Right.

Ilan Gur:

And we can then serve as an intermediary. One of the things we talk about in the program is, our goal is not to get our teams to raise money. Our goal is, hopefully, to get our teams to raise money, but more importantly, is to prevent misalignment from the capital that’s supporting them at the early stage. And actually what they’ve learned about what they want, what the market needs, what the financing, what the right sort of financing plan is. And so, one of the coolest things has been to watch the response of the investor community in terms of appreciating that we’ve got this breeding ground of talent and value creation, but that their particular mode of investing is probably only matched to a subset of what we’re doing.

Ilan Gur:

So we’ve got venture capitalists coming in here and finding things that are a great match for venture capitalists. We got family offices visiting and saying, “Well, that doesn’t look like the sort of thing we care about from an impact perspective, but this does, and we’ve got a longer time horizon.” We’ve got angel investors and teams finding each other in some cases, even philanthropic investing. So that’s been a really cool thing. And what’s been cool to watch is that A: I think something very good is happening on the investor side, which is you’re starting to see actually a broader spectrum of models in terms of what are the constraints on just the financial model of the fund, whether it’s corporate VCs doing creative things in the way they structure their funds, you’ve got breakthrough coalition.

Jon Powers:

Right, of course.

Ilan Gur:

Congruent has a very interesting early seed model. And so we’re actually finding a more diverse range of investors, which means it’s actually easier and easier to find matches with teams that have different phenotypes. Does that make sense?

Jon Powers:

No, it totally makes sense. Totally makes sense. So I’m gonna ask you one final question that I sort of ask all of our guests, and if you could go back to yourself in Pittsburgh, when you had your internship, you could sit down and grab coffee or, you were too young at the time to grab a beer, and give yourself one piece of advice. What would you say?

Ilan Gur:

Back in Pittsburgh?

Jon Powers:

Yeah. Before you headed out West.

Ilan Gur:

Yeah, I was going to say, first piece of advice was move to California.

Jon Powers:

Right. Or flip that around, coming out of your PhD. Earlier in your career, what advice would you want to give yourself to accelerate to sort of where you are now?

Ilan Gur:

I don’t know. It feels like I’d answer this question differently on different mornings. The answer that comes to mind right now, given that I didn’t have a heads up on it, is probably that there’s a significant sort of edge that you can have in life and in your career by not taking the traditional path.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, absolutely.

Ilan Gur:

And by not accepting the conventional wisdom. I see it in terms of what we’re doing here, creating Cyclotron Road, as you know, a lot of people come and say, “Well, wait a second. Why are you doing this?” Right? Cyclotron Road is a nonprofit. Sort of where’s the upside of it? A lot of people come to our teams and say, “Wait a second, you’re talking about not taking venture money, but you’re working on something so hard. Like it’s worthless if you don’t take venture money.” And I think for most people, and I try and give this advice to our entrepreneurs, that puts you in a space where you say, “Wow, like I’m on the wrong track.” But actually it’s those cases where being on the wrong track, you end up as the winner. Right.

Jon Powers:

Right. Right.

Ilan Gur:

And that actually, if you lean into that, that can sort of be your alpha and your edge, is something that’s been on my mind lately. So that would probably be the advice I’d give myself to save myself some stress over the years.

Jon Powers:

Take the road less traveled.

Ilan Gur:

Yeah.

Jon Powers:

You’ll find the shortcuts. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. I mean, you guys are doing amazing work and would love to have you out in the future, even with some of your fellows talking through some of the work you will continue to do and hopefully get to see you on the West Coast sometime soon.

Ilan Gur:

Yeah. Yeah. And you and your audience for this podcast definitely go on to cyclotronroad.org. It’s not about us as a program, it’s about the talent we’ve been able to recruit and the innovators we have. They’re working on just like unbelievable projects across the energy landscape. We’ve got a tab there where you can go and sort of search and filter by space and read their bios. But I encourage you to do that and, if it makes sense, to have some of them tell their stories. I think that’d be great.

Jon Powers:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks so much.

Ilan Gur:

All right. Thanks, Jon. This was fun.

Jon Powers:

Thanks so much to Ilan for joining us. As he mentioned, you can go to cyclotronroad.org and follow the stories of the amazing fellows that they’re working with and learn about how they’re taking their discoveries and learning to create, hopefully, really valuable companies that’ll have a global impact for all of us. I’m going to put a special thanks here to our producers, Emily Connor, Lauren Clickman and our intern, Greg Phillips, for helping to put together the program. You can get more Experts Only Podcast at cleancapital.com. 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’d 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.