From IT to ET (Energy Technology) - Tom Seibel

Tom Siebel spoke at Stanford sometime ago.
See it here - Emerging Opportunities in a Post IT

Key takeaways -
1. First few minutes of talk shed light on how IT grew at 17% compound rate in the last 20 years of 20th century. Since 2000, the growth rate in IT has slowed down to about 3% that matches the growth rate in GDP. Basically IT has become a matured industry.

2. Regulation will be the dominant focus for governments in developed countries for several years to come.

3. World population will reach 9 billion people. A very significant number of those in developed countries will be more than 65 years old. The per capita use of energy has gone up significantly and is now at unsustainable levels. Supply of oil will run out in the next 50 years.

4. This creates major issues and thus major opportunities in food, water, healthcare and energy. This is the Moore's law of our times

5. Shanghai, China is the new center of gravity for innovation in the world. The leading University in Shanghai admits about 3,000 students from a pool of 8 million applicants. This is a mind-boggling number. They have high work ethic, are very smart and work very very hard.

6. Siebel launched two parallel efforts -

(a) $20 million prize for an energy free home that costs the same amount of money to build that a conventional home would and satisfies all the building codes. The house has to be on 2000 sq ft., 3 bd room and 2 bath. Teams from all over the world participating in the prize.

(b) C3 - a company to respond to the market needs. C3 will build software to manage, monitor, mitigate and monitize carbon footprint. Just like public companies today have to report their financial statements to the SEC, they will be required to report their carbon usage to the government. This is a major opportunity that is going to form in the coming years in the US and European Union. C3 is already up and running and has a stellar group of people involved in it.