The Energy SiG will meet via Zoom on Tuesday, June 2nd at 11:30 AM with Mike Biddle on the topic “The journey from large corporations to entrepreneur to venture investing to focusing on carbon capture and carbon to value". If you would like to attend, please email Larry Kelly.

Topic: Mike will give a presentation about his journey from large corporates to founding and running a multinational CleanTech/HardTech company focused on recycling plastics from some of the most complex waste streams in the world (with the help of early investors from the Band of Angels), to deciding to leverage that experience to tackle an even more difficult, but also more important pollution problem: GHGs – greenhouse gases. To do this, Mike first explored the angel investor/advisor to CleanTech start-ups, but realized he needed more resources to tap into so joined Evok Innovations, a new CleanTech/Clean Energy fund that started up about 4 ½ years ago. Mike will also discuss a few of Evok’s investments in the areas of carbon capture, carbon to value and clean energy, the challenges with investing in this space and his fund’s ongoing search for more solutions.

Mike's Bio: Dr. Biddle is the Managing Director of Evok Innovations, a venture fund that aims to increase the success rate of early-stage clean energy innovations. Mike serves on the Board of six companies – all in the CleanTech space (Opus 12, Mosaic Materials, Kelvin, Syzygy Plasmonics, Quidnet Energy, and Bureo). Dr. Biddle started MBA Polymers over 20 years ago and grew it to the world’s leading company recovering plastics from end-of-life durable goods. Raising over $150M from investors (including the Band of Angels) enabled the build out of processing capacity to over 300M lbs/yr. Before MBA Polymers, Mike worked for General Electric, Cummins Engine Company and Dow Chemical. Mike received a B.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Louisville and a Ph.D. in Polymer Science and Engineering from Case Western Reserve University. He was also a Sloan Fellow at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, graduating with an MS in Management Science. Mike, often called the “Garbage Man” for his work in extracting valuable resources from waste streams, has won several international awards. Recently, he picked up both the 2017 SME Circulars Award and the Davos Prize at the World Economic Forum. Other awards include the 2012 Gothenburg Award (Nobel for Sustainability), the 2014 World Technology Network Award for the Environment (same year that Elon Musk won it for Energy), the 2010 Economist Innovation Award for Energy and Environment, the 2008 Intel Tech Museum Environmental Award, the 2007 Ascent Award for Entrepreneurship, the 2006 Tech Pioneer Award from the World Economic Forum, the 2002 Thomas Alva Edison Award for Innovation, and many others.