An Emerging Market: Investing in Nanosolar

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Duration: 5:08
Source: Stanford ECorner
Author: Erik Straser, Mohr Davidow Ventures
Copyright: Creative Commons: by-nc-nd
Found: Nov 5, 2009

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What are some of the investments you guys have made that you feel particularly excited about? I think the one that’s probably farthest along is Nanosolar. One of the reasons I bring that up is it has a lot of Stanford students in it, and it has a lot of Stanford intellectual property in it. The basic premise behind the company - as well as the founder is a Stanford Ph.D. grad. He and Larry and Sergei and I all went to graduate school at about the same time. The premise of the company in solar is just too expensive. And if we found a way to make photovoltaic cells the same way that the nightly newspaper is printed, think about the New York Times and the machine that generates the New York Times everyday by the hundreds of thousands if not millions of copies in one day, how can we bring those printing technologies to the photovoltaic business which to date has been bootstrapped off of the semiconductor business? In semiconductors, you make money by making things increasingly smaller and packing more value into it. In solar, you're trying to create square kilometers of things per minute. And so the collision of those economic forces really was forcing the silicon technologies not to be able to be effective as a photovoltaic technology. So the idea was basically, can we move the economics of photovoltaics to the economics of printing? Today, the company is effectively in production here in south San Jose. There must be 50 to 75 Stanford people inside the company at this point, and going quite well I might say. It's actually an interesting one to work with. Now you were looking at Nanosolar as a business plan or as a Power Point presentation probably with a small prototype or something like it, how did you evaluate the opportunity given that the solar business is neither high growth today nor is it profitable? How did you evaluate the opportunity? We looked at the opportunity in late 2004. And what you saw, I think you had a couple of observations: One,...
Language: English
Category: Business
Tags: Erik Straser, Mohr Davidow Ventures
Country: United States


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