Lara Abrams Communications

Now Accepting Applications - The California Clean Tech Open 2008

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

I had a chance to attend the California Clean Tech Open’s 2008 Entrepreneur Matching Event the other night, and went, wanting to see how different things would look from even just a year ago, or two years ago, and knowing that the CCTO 2008 was about to roll up its sleeves for a new year’s round of competition entrants.

CCTO is now in its 3rd year, and what started as a business plan competition focused on clean tech and renewable energy has grown to be a competition that to date, (if I took notes correctly during the evening), has handed out more than $1.2m in prizes, and seen over $15m in private investment go into CCTO startups. And the organization is now at a point where they’re actually taking on 3 full time staffers this year, and talking further expansion.

The purpose of the evening was to give interested entrepreneurs an opportunity to do some networking with some of the country’s most prominent labs and universities, their licensing groups and technology transfer offices, as well as clean tech research centers. So labs such as Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, SRI, and major research universities like Berkeley (LBL), Stanford, and UC Davis were represented, as was Technology Ventures Corp (hopefully I haven’t missed anyone!). Just listening to all these folks ‘pitch’ their capabilities to prospective competition entrants - one after the other, in 5 minute snapshots - was a unique experience, to be sure. I’ll tell you this much: for an entrepreneur with a clean tech idea, it doesn’t get much better than the CCTO.

How to Apply? More here.

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Contact Lara Abrams

To contact Lara, please email her at lara@laraabrams.com or call 415 613 1704.