Activate Celebrates Its New Community With New Friends and Old at the ARPA-E Innovation Summit
Washington, DC weather is as fickle as the region’s groundhogs. On the first day of the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) conference, the temperature evened out in the mid-60s. By the second day, it soared to 83F. Spring was in the air, and after a sweaty day of presentations on topics including grid storage and federal policy for energy startups, along with a collection of tech demos, Activate welcomed approximately 120 old and new friends to a local pub for a reception, news announcement, and a panel talk, followed by two hours of networking, food, and conversation.
As guests arrived at the Irish Whisper pub in the warm late afternoon, Activate Anywhere Managing Director Hannah Murnen kicked off the evening by announcing the opening of Activate’s newest Community: Activate Houston. “Houston is undergoing a transformation of its own from the leader in the oil and gas industry to the leader for the energy transition that we're all undergoing. It's rich with innovation, ample talent, and capital infrastructure: a perfect backdrop for the next Activate Community. We will begin supporting fellows in 2024. And so we need all your help to finesse the most exciting entrepreneurs and scientists that you know, to be those inaugural Houston fellows,” Murnen told the capacity crowd.
Former ARPA-E deputy director Cheryl Martin then said: “Activate started on a whiteboard in my office where Ilan [Gur, Activate’s founder] came in and wrote about the idea. So we've gone from a two-dimensional whiteboard to a community in Berkeley to this multimodal cross-country organization. I did work with Activate on its expansion strategy, which is really far-looking and addresses the question about talent being everywhere and how we reach it and enable it, and give it the education and the mentorship to go forward.”
She continued: “And so to see this come to fruition in Houston, which is actually just the gateway into all of Texas and in the Southeast, is really, really awesome. I look forward to not only Houston but also to where next.”
Activate Fellows’ impact reverberated throughout the summit’s keynote. A full half of the organizations featured in the ARPA-E addresses were Activate Fellow companies. U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm hosted a panel including Leah Ellis (Cohort 2020), CEO and co-founder of Sublime Systems; and in her opening address, current ARPA-E director Evelyn Wang featured Cody Finke (Cohort 2019), co-founder and CEO of Brimstone, and highlighted Alexa Schmitz (Cohort 2022), co-founder and CEO of REEgen, saying “I look forward to seeing what [REEgen] does next.”
We were lucky enough to welcome Schmitz to our evening panel at the Irish Whisper, along with DCVC partner Rachel Slaybaugh, Greentown Labs senior director of membership Jason Ethier, Energy Impact Partners’ Shayle Kann, and hosted by Activate’s own senior investment manager Calvin A. Cupini. The panel covered a wide range of topics, including what’s motivating the explosion in climate tech innovation, where Kann remarked: “I fundamentally believe that almost everybody in the space has some entrepreneurial ambitions, and there's some combination of three motivating factors: The climate warrior thing (where we’ve got to solve the climate problem), second is just a deep love of technology and wanting to see it help the world, and third, people who want to go build the next big successful thing like Elon Musk or whatever.”
Schmitz talked about why scientists like herself are becoming entrepreneurs who want to have real-world impact: “The difference now is that there’s starting to be a lens toward impact that is actually changing the kinds of work that people want to do and how they want to do it. A lot of it is in some sense a response to demand from students who really want change.”
Following the panel, crowds headed for the venue’s patio to enjoy the warm night and the new sense of possibilities for the future in the first days of spring.