Martha Records is a Cleantech investor and the founder of Green Spark Ventures. She lives in Denver, Colorado, and enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountain region with her husband and three children.

Excerpt:

The Cleantech space is fairly unwieldy. Spanning the entire spectrum
of possible end users and including technologies in areas as far-ranging as
renewable-energy generation, energy-efficiency infrastructure, water, energy
storage, transportation, building materials, plastics, chemicals, recycling,
and waste, the Cleantech sector is hard to contain. Since opening our doors,
we have met with such a variety of companies. Two Colorado start-ups have
developed new energy-efficient window technologies. Another focuses on
the conversion of organic wastes such as cow manure into pipeline gas. An
Idaho Springs company, Oberon, is working on converting liquid waste
from breweries and food processors into protein meal that could be used as a
replacement for fish meal in aquaculture. In Boulder, EEtrex converts hybrid
vehicles into plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles and is developing a vehicle-togrid
bidirectional charger. Porous Power, a company based in Lafayette, has
developed a laminable battery separator that can reduce production costs,
enable faster charge times, improve battery performance, and increase the
cell cycle life of lithium-ion batteries. And there are so many more.

Green Spark has met with thirty-five Colorado companies and a handful
of companies on the West Coast. We have heard from dozens more at
industry conferences and Cleantech gatherings. This is just our experience
in Colorado, a small slice of the larger Cleantech market. I doubt there is
any precedent to this full-throttled enthusiasm on the part of entrepreneurs
for creating such a wide range of companies with the dual purposes of both
making a profit and contributing to the social good. At times it feels almost
like a war effort, but instead of it being led from above by charismatic figures,
this effort is instead advanced by the individual efforts of idealists and
businesspeople who are frequently one and the same.

The extent of the entrepreneurial activity in this space is particularly
impressive given the difficulties these emerging companies face. They must
try to secure capital. They must find and hire scientists willing to work for
below-market pay until operating funds are secured. They must assemble a
competent management team, protect intellectual property, create groundbreaking innovation, and, in many cases, do so without the certainty that any real market will ever exist for their product. Although Cleantech entrepreneurs operate in widely disparate business fields, what most of them share is a desire to make a difference. And that is where we find common ground.