Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Khosla fund LightSail Energy in $37M Deal

Good luck with your company! Management of the systems is a seriously underappreciated and difficult problem, especially with batteries. To do it well, you have to really know the chemistry.

I think the difference in fanfare is probably because, unless you change the levelized cost of stored energy to be less than the cost of producing power from fossil fuels in the first place, you can have a significant effect, but you can't really change the way the mainstream grid operates. Existing technologies can't do that.

The companies that have staked their reputation on trying to climb that mountain are those which have attracted the likes of Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates -- who are not in it to make a buck or megabuck, but to change the world.

Management and monitoring is an important part of changing the world, but whether or not it happens depends on the cost of the system. The suspense, then, and pressure, is on us. But all players stand to play an important part -- and make a fortune.

A knee-jerk reaction by poorly informed and motivated reviewers, which included a fear of:

- Hydrolock (solved by default) - Corrosion (solved) - Inability to separate water and air (easy to solve and quickly solved) - a lack of understanding that water could provide heat to air on expansion (proven...)

We actually disproved all of their claims within 2 weeks of their decision. The problem, however, is that you don't get a conversation when talking with grant agencies. So most things are misunderstood and they default to funding based on seniority.

At the time, our competitors were not taking the water based approach...

The advantage of world class investors is that, even if they disagree with you, they think for themselves, so you can actually talk to them.

FWIW, Peter Thiel is totally awesome, and one of the most rational and brilliant and human people I know.

Thanks!

Congrats Danielle.