A Missed Opportunity

Last week, I attended the Climate Week/NYC series, a series of 500 events in and around Manhattan.  It was a wonderful experience, with brilliant speakers who pushed one to think anew about climate change and how to slow it.

Big names like Al Gore and John Kerry spoke the plain, hard-to-handle truth in ways only they could deliver.  Organizations as diverse as the Washington Post, the United Nations, and Nest organized events covering everything from transportation to food. Huge venues like the Javits Center and boutique salons at NYU’s law school. It was a global event with leaders and attendees from the Global North and South. And finally, it was terrific to revisit my old hometown of NYC, still one of the greatest cities on the planet. Every night was a new dining experience.

But it was also a bittersweet experience because I saw the future that could have been Los Angeles’ before my eyes in NYC.  Eleven years ago, we held the first Global Showcase in downtown Los Angeles.  Our goal was to attract entrepreneurs and leaders worldwide to showcase their technologies, companies, and thinking.  As co-founder and CEO of the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, I saw GloSho (as it became known) as a vehicle that would bring Los Angeles into the center of the cleantech universe.  My vision was to create a cleantech version of Las Vegas’ SEMA show – the largest automotive event in the world.  In a sense, I wanted to make sure that all cleantech roads led to Los Angeles.

In June of 2013, when we hatched this idea, we didn’t know how to do it and what it would take.  We’d never tried to put on a conference, let alone one with ambitions to have a global reach. Yet, somehow, we did what all entrepreneurs do – we figured it out and put together a world-class conference that attracted over 500 visitors IN THREE MONTHS.  We put GloSho on for the next two years, attracting noted entrepreneurs, policymakers, politicians, scientists, and academicians from over twenty countries.

I believe GloSho put the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator on the map in many ways.  That same year, LACI was appointed one of seven incubators (out of hundreds of applicants) to gain the DOE’s support. We ranked in the top ten of the 1200 incubators the UBI research company evaluated. We attracted the support of large corporate stakeholders and saw our funding more than double.  LACI, and by definition, Los Angeles, began to gain a global reputation as a cleantech innovation center.

And then we stopped doing GloSho’s.

Oh, there were lots of reasons. LACI was building its new campus, and we already had too much on our plates. It was a huge time suck that one could argue wasn’t core to our business.  We never figured out a sustainable business model, putting a financial strain on our small organization. It was difficult to justify any losses from non-core programs, no matter their potential.

I failed as well.

I envisioned one huge event, more like the Change Now events in Paris rather than engaging the entire city in making it a cleantech week.  I was too territorial. I wanted LACI to be the center of everything.  In some ways I couldn’t see past our Downtown LA roots.

And no matter what I did, I couldn’t gain the support of city/county/business/ community leaders to buy into the vision of Los Angeles as a global center for cleantech innovation.  Rather than buying into the international opportunity before us, too many of our leaders wondered whether a city-sponsored program like LACI should even venture out to include the county of Los Angeles.  It was challenging to draw the line between a global reputation, its pulling power, and how it benefited the City of Los Angeles.

Bottom line, I couldn’t sell the vision. I couldn’t figure out how to fund it. And I couldn’t find the time and resources to actually do it.

Eleven years later, it’s painfully clear what we missed – a destiny-changing opportunity that could have benefited everyone in the city as we transform into our carbon-free future.  Eleven years later, and it’s still painful to think about.

But is it too late? Eleven years is a lot of lost time unless you view the cleantech market for what it is – embryonic. We’re at the very beginning of our march to a carbon-free economy, not near its end.  Why not use the 2028 Olympics as an excuse to fund and build a world-class sustainable expo that continues past the Olympics?  Why not make Los Angeles the living model of a sustainable city? Where do leaders gather to figure out how to make megacities into clean, prosperous, sustainable living environments?

There are dozens and dozens of reasons not to do this.  Too many and too obvious to innumerate here.  But there is one very, very, very big reason to do it.

We can change the trajectory of our city and its residents. Forever.