Pandora’s Promise – Robert Stone Email, Review Links

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/01/24/pandora_s_promise_review_nuclear_power_documentary_is_persuasive_and_timely.html

Stone, a lifelong environmental lefty himself, unravels that thinking. The film’s incredibly articulate — and deeply progressive — spokemen and women explain the nuts and bolts of why nuclear power, manufactured with the sophisticated breeder reactors that are available today, is fundamentally clean, efficient, and, yes, safe. As Richard Rhodes puts it in the movie: “To be anti-nuclear is basically to be in favor of burning fossil fuels.” Pandora’s Promise makes a powerful case that in an age when former Third World countries, striving for modernization, are beginning to consume energy in much vaster amounts (and why shouldn’t they have the right to do so?), none of the alternative energy sources that are commonly talked about by environmentalists (wind, solar, etc.) can begin to fill the planet’s energy needs. Only nuclear energy can. That’s why France, faced with its own energy crisis several decades ago, went nuclear. (Eighty percent of France’s energy is now generated by nuclear power plants.)

Ah, you say, but what about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? The ultimate issue raised by nuclear power — the one that, according to conventional progressive thinking, stops the pro-nuclear argument right in its tracks — is, of course, the issue of safety. And the very names of those three locales cast a dark mythological shadow. You hear them and think: Meltdown. Radiation poisoning. Death. Disaster. But this is where, as a society, we desperately need more filmmakers  like Robert Stone. Carefully, piece by piece, without hysteria and without dogma, he looks at the evidence of what actually happened during those three infamous catastrophes: the reality of the damage, and the reality of the aftermath. The results, if you truly listen to them, are almost spectacularly counterintuitive. They won’t leave you shaken. They will begin to shake you out of your old tired ways of thinking.

Owen Gleiberman on Pandora’s Promise at Sundance

The term “crowd-pleaser” should probably be retired from the movie universe. When a serviceable January horror flick like Mama can make $20 million its opening weekend (and that’s demonstrably in the off season), you can bet that virtually every film that opens week in and week out at number one is, in ticket sales and essence, a crowd-pleaser. So it seems unnecessary, or maybe just redundant, to single out any one film for fulfilling that definition. It would sort of be like referring to Twizzlers or popcorn as “popular movie junk food.”

At the Sundance Film Festival, however, the term “crowd-pleaser” takes on an almost ideological meaning. Though Robert Redford always tries to play it down in his opening remarks to the press, one of the many things that this festival does is to search for crowd-pleasers, a high-stakes endeavor that is basically — though no one likes to put it this way — a game of trying to find a mainstream movie in a haystack. It’s usually one movie each year that’s annointed, by the collective buzz, as the festival’s reigning crowd-pleaser, and that excitement often translates into the Audience Award — the judgment of the people, man! — and into a headline-making business deal (it was picked up for $3 million! $5 million! $10 million!) that, in many ways, defines the nexus of art and commerce at this festival. Crowd-pleasers matter at Sundance because if Sundance can’t produce movies that please crowds, then it’s just a boutique event, and not the Hollywood-meets-the-edge crossover party that it has promised to be — and been — for the last 20 years.

The more you look at all the famous Sundance crowd-pleasers (Little Miss Sunshine, The Spitfire Grill, Pieces of April, Tadpole), the more you realize that they’ve become a genre unto themselves. They share a lot of the same qualities. They are almost always tales of family dysfunction. They feature token bits of bad behavior by characters who basically have hearts of gold. They are usually centered around kids. They have tidy narratives that are engineered to make you feel really good. And that’s the grand irony, isn’t it? The movies that get hailed as crowd-pleasers here are embraced because they’re basically middlebrow higher-sitcom television. They’re called the real deal, but in many ways they represent everything that the real deal is supposed to be against.

The Way, Way Back is the movie this year that’s been the recipient of the biggest wet sloppy audience kiss at Sundance. (It was also picked up for $10 million by Fox Searchlight, the most money spent for a Sundance film since Searchlight bought Little Miss Sunshine for $10.5 million in 2006.) When I was filing out of the Holiday Village Cinemas after a showing of it, and I started talking to a movie-columnist friend about why I liked the film okay but my enthusiasm for it was limited, she immediately said, “It’s not for critics,” which of course made me sputter for a moment, as I tried to argue that I don’t dislike big open-hearted crowd-pleasing movies, just cookie-cutter versions of them, which is what I think The Way, Way Back is. But there’s no winning that debate. When crowd-pleasing fever is in the air, anyone who goes against the crowd is the enemy.

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So here’s why I thought The Way, Way Back was a perfectly nice and even, at moments, touching movie that didn’t really wow me because I thought it had a shallow, see-through agenda. Directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, the Academy Award-winning screenwriters ofThe Descendents (Rash, of course, is also a star of Community), the film is about a 14-year-old kid, Duncan (played by the scowling, cat-eyed Liam James), who is spending the summer with his divorced mother (Toni Colette), along with her boyfriend (Steve Carell) and his teenage daughter (Zoe Levin), at a beachy driftwood vacation home in what looks like a small town in New England. Duncan is miserable: silently angry that his mother has hooked up with a man he neither likes nor trusts (Carell’s uncharacteristically thin performance cues us early on to see that he’s right), and bored, too, with nothing much on his plate. But then Duncan winds up riding a bike over to Water Wizz, a kitschy, antiquated water-slide park — it was built in 1983 — where he catches the eye of Owen (Sam Rockwell), one of the workers there, who recognizes what a repressed, unhappy kid Duncan is and is determined, almost by instinct, to snap him out of it.

This isn’t hard for Owen to do, since he’s an arrested cut-up who talks in baroque put-ons. He’s like the last verbal exhibitionist in America who doesn’t have his own late-night talk show, and he brings Duncan out of his shell by razzing him with affection. Almost everyone who has seen The Way, Way Back has compared it to Meatballs, the 1979 summer-camp comedy that put Bill Murray on the map as a big-screen star. Rockwell tosses off some priceless line readings, and his character is certainly, among other things, a knowing nod to Murray’s. But the movie is really Greg Mottola’s Adventureland made with a lot less complication and flavor and pop pizazz. The difference between The Way, Way Back and Adventureland is that the quirky characters in that film all had pasts, whereas Rockwell, a moonstruck sprite of an actor who is now 44 years old, is playing the guy who’s still working at the water park, and the movie gives us no idea why. He flirts, rather relentlessly, with one of his co-workers (Maya Rudolph, doing her usual song-in-the-key-of-peeved reaction shots), but we don’t know where he comes from, or how he ended up here, or what his dreams are. He’s just a “character,” a guy who exists to help the hero grow.

And grow he does. The most “crowd-pleasing” scene in The Way, Way Back is the one that made me cringe the most: At Water Wizz, Duncan is asked to break up a bunch of kids in bathing suits who’ve gathered in a circle to watch a couple of crunk dancers. He tells the dancers to take their cardboard floor away, but instead of getting mad, they make him dance (it’s Welcome to the Dollhouse meets Napoleon Dynamite), and after managing a few hip-hop robot moves, he ends up with the nickname “Pop ‘n’ Lock.” I’m sorry, but that’s either going to make you feel good, or it’s going to make you feel like throwing up in your mouth a little.

Liam James, a good young actor, does an impressive array of variations on moping, but what’s missing from his character is any desire that goes beyond fulfilling the situations that the movie sets up for him. Duncan thinks Carell’s de facto stepfather is a dick — and time will prove that he’s not wrong. The girl next store (AnnaSophia Robb) is a junior hottie who is, like him, a child of divorce, and their bonding over their lost-kid status sprouts a few peck-on-the-cheek romantic blossoms right on cue. It’s all so programmatic, so uplifting. So carefully diagrammed to please.

* * * *

When was the last time you saw a documentary that fundamentally changed the way you think? It’s no secret that just about every political and socially-minded documentary shown at Sundance is preaching to the liberal-left choir. The issue may be dairy farming, human rights abuses in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the marketing of AIDS drugs, or Occupy Wall Street (to list the topics of four festival docs this year), but the point of view is almost always conventionally “progressive” and orthodox. So when Robert Stone, who may be the most under-celebrated great documentary filmmaker in America (watch Oswald’s Ghost if you want to touch the elusive truth of the JFK assassination), arrived at Sundance this year with Pandora’s Promise, a look at the myths and realities of nuclear power, he was walking into the lion’s den. For this isn’t a movie that preaches to the choir. It’s a movie that says: “Stop thinking what you’ve been thinking, because if you don’t, you’re going to collude in wrecking the world.” Pandora’s Promise is built around what should be the real liberal agenda: looking at an issue not with orthodoxy, but with open eyes.

In Pandora’s Promise, Stone interviews a major swath of environmentalists, scientists, and energy planners, all of whom spent years being anti-nuclear power — and then, as they began to look at the evidence, changed their minds. The film begins with a deep examination of the psychology of the anti-nuclear view: how it took hold and became dogma. It goes all the way back to 1945, of course, and the horror of the atomic bomb. From that moment, really, the very word nuclear was tainted. It meant something that was going to kill you, in the form of lethal radiation that you can’t see. By the time of the “No Nukes” protests of the ’70s, to be “anti-nuclear” was to conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power into a single category of scientific evil, a point of view whipped up, over the years, into a doctrinaire frenzy of righteous fear and loathing by anti-nuclear activists like Dr. Helen Caldicott and reinforced by movies like The China Syndrome and even, in its benign satirical way, The Simpsons.

Stone, a lifelong environmental lefty himself, unravels that thinking. The film’s incredibly articulate — and deeply progressive — spokemen and women explain the nuts and bolts of why nuclear power, manufactured with the sophisticated breeder reactors that are available today, is fundamentally clean, efficient, and, yes, safe. As Richard Rhodes puts it in the movie: “To be anti-nuclear is basically to be in favor of burning fossil fuels.” Pandora’s Promise makes a powerful case that in an age when former Third World countries, striving for modernization, are beginning to consume energy in much vaster amounts (and why shouldn’t they have the right to do so?), none of the alternative energy sources that are commonly talked about by environmentalists (wind, solar, etc.) can begin to fill the planet’s energy needs. Only nuclear energy can. That’s why France, faced with its own energy crisis several decades ago, went nuclear. (Eighty percent of France’s energy is now generated by nuclear power plants.)

Ah, you say, but what about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? The ultimate issue raised by nuclear power — the one that, according to conventional progressive thinking, stops the pro-nuclear argument right in its tracks — is, of course, the issue of safety. And the very names of those three locales cast a dark mythological shadow. You hear them and think:Meltdown. Radiation poisoning. Death. Disaster. But this is where, as a society, we desperately need more filmmakers like Robert Stone. Carefully, piece by piece, without hysteria and without dogma, he looks at the evidence of what actually happened during those three infamous catastrophes: the reality of the damage, and the reality of the aftermath. The results, if you truly listen to them, are almost spectacularly counterintuitive. They won’t leave you shaken. They will begin to shake you out of your old tired ways of thinking.

The most startling argument mounted by Pandora’s Promise is that the rise of nuclear power is not merely a good thing, but probably inevitable, because it is, in fact, the only way that we can power the planet and save it at the same time. In what has to be the ultimate liberal-documentary irony, Stone demonstrates that the dire threat of global warming all but demands nuclear power as the key to its solution. Without it, the debate will go on, but carbon dioxide will continue to fill the atmosphere, and liberals everywhere, caught up in reflexive modes of environmental “activism” that are now not just complacent but perilously out-of-date, will continue to let their anxieties trump reality.

Tim Wu, Slate, on Pandora’s Promise

If You Care About the Environment, You Should Support Nuclear Power

By Tim Wu

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Posted Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013, at 2:39 PM ET

A good, politically charged documentary often seizes on what the audience already believes and throws fuel on the fire (see, e.g., the work of Michael Moore). A better such documentary tries to convince its audience that what it takes for granted is flat-out wrong. Pandora’s Promise, which premiered at Sundance, does just that. It makes the utterly convincing case that anyone who considers themselves an environmentalist or takes climate change seriously should favor more nuclear power.

In the 1980s, nuclear power, never truly popular, contracted an image problem to rival Lance Armstrong or even Penn State football. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were so downright terrifying that the public immediately lost its appetite for the stuff. Invisible, cancerous, deadly: Radioactivity hits all of our deepest fears. Hiroshima, Fukushima, Silkwood—the words themselves seem to poison the air.

But our fears may be way out of proportion to the actual risks, Pandora’s Promise says. Truth is, no one has actually died in the United States as a consequence of a nuclear power accident, while coal kills more than 14,000 people a year (mainly through particulate pollution). In terms of worldwide mortality rates, nuclear is scary, but it kills fewer people per watt of power than coal, oil, and even solar. (People fall off rooftops when installing solar panels.) Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history, though it killed many people at the time, has had surprisingly limited long-term effects, according to scientists. Perhaps, like many people, I picture Chernobyl as Hell on earth—but animals and people are actually living there again, and the radiation is at merely background levels.

It’s a question of alternatives. The film centers on a new breed of scientists and environmental activists who were once ardent foes of nuclear power, but now think there is no better option. Greens are all against fossil fuels, but the new breed think that pinning our our hopes entirely on wind and solar actually increases our dependence of such environmentally devastating energy sources. Everyone loves the idea that we could just install more efficient light bulbs and live off windmills and solar panels, but that’s a dangerous fantasy, one that makes us blind to the hard choices we face.

The fact is that even after decades of subsidized investment and building, even the United States, which has invested in wind and solar heavily, still relies on those sources for just 3.6 percent of our power needs. Meanwhile, in China, India, and Brazil, where demand is growing fastest, the wind and solar option is basically off the table. It’s going to be fossil or nuclear: There is no other choice. Indeed the film alleges that the fossil fuel industry loves solar and wind because it knows they will never pose a serious threat to the supremacy of oil and coal. The bottom line is, if we care about climate change, we have to surrender the fantasy that solar and wind are going to solve our needs.

I found watching this film uncomfortable, because, like most of us, I intuitively find something scary about nuclear power. Michael Shellenberger, one of the leading greens for nuclear power, confirmed to me that no major environmental group in the United States officially supports nuclear as of now. But what is the role of science if not to meet our greatest fears with actual data? Tomatoes were once thought poisonous, and doctors once believed it was wrong to treat illness by cutting open the human body. Our fear of nuclear power has gone too far.

Pandora’s Promise – “Crowd Pleaser” review by Entertainment Weekly

This incredible Entertainment Weekly review settles it: “Pandora’s Promise” is a breakthrough!

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2013/01/24/why-is-the-way-way-back-a-crowd-pleaser/

When was the last time you saw a documentary that fundamentally changed the way you think? It’s no secret that just about every political and socially-minded documentary shown at Sundance is preaching to the liberal-left choir. The issue may be dairy farming, human rights abuses in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the marketing of AIDS drugs, or Occupy Wall Street (to list the topics of four festival docs this year), but the point of view is almost always conventionally “progressive” and orthodox. So when Robert Stone, who may be the most under-celebrated great documentary filmmaker in America (watch Oswald’s Ghost if you want to touch the elusive truth of the JFK assassination), arrived at Sundance this year with Pandora’s Promise, a look at the myths and realities of nuclear power, he was walking into the lion’s den. For this isn’t a movie that preaches to the choir. It’s a movie that says: “Stop thinking what you’ve been thinking, because if you don’t, you’re going to collude in wrecking the world.” Pandora’s Promise is built around what should be the real liberal agenda: looking at an issue not with orthodoxy, but with open eyes.

In Pandora’s Promise, Stone interviews a major swath of environmentalists, scientists, and energy planners, all of whom spent years being anti-nuclear power — and then, as they began to look at the evidence, changed their minds. The film begins with a deep examination of the psychology of the anti-nuclear view: how it took hold and became dogma. It goes all the way back to 1945, of course, and the horror of the atomic bomb. From that moment, really, the very word nuclear was tainted. It meant something that was going to kill you, in the form of lethal radiation that you can’t see. By the time of the “No Nukes” protests of the ’70s, to be “anti-nuclear” was to conflate nuclear weapons and nuclear power into a single category of scientific evil, a point of view whipped up, over the years, into a doctrinaire frenzy of righteous fear and loathing by anti-nuclear activists like Dr. Helen Caldicott and reinforced by movies like The China Syndrome and even, in its benign satirical way, The Simpsons.

Stone, a lifelong environmental lefty himself, unravels that thinking. The film’s incredibly articulate — and deeply progressive — spokemen and women explain the nuts and bolts of why nuclear power, manufactured with the sophisticated breeder reactors that are available today, is fundamentally clean, efficient, and, yes, safe. As Richard Rhodes puts it in the movie: “To be anti-nuclear is basically to be in favor of burning fossil fuels.” Pandora’s Promise makes a powerful case that in an age when former Third World countries, striving for modernization, are beginning to consume energy in much vaster amounts (and why shouldn’t they have the right to do so?), none of the alternative energy sources that are commonly talked about by environmentalists (wind, solar, etc.) can begin to fill the planet’s energy needs. Only nuclear energy can. That’s why France, faced with its own energy crisis several decades ago, went nuclear. (Eighty percent of France’s energy is now generated by nuclear power plants.)

Ah, you say, but what about Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? The ultimate issue raised by nuclear power — the one that, according to conventional progressive thinking, stops the pro-nuclear argument right in its tracks — is, of course, the issue of safety. And the very names of those three locales cast a dark mythological shadow. You hear them and think: Meltdown. Radiation poisoning. Death. Disaster. But this is where, as a society, we desperately need more filmmakers like Robert Stone. Carefully, piece by piece, without hysteria and without dogma, he looks at the evidence of what actually happened during those three infamous catastrophes: the reality of the damage, and the reality of the aftermath. The results, if you truly listen to them, are almost spectacularly counterintuitive. They won’t leave you shaken. They will begin to shake you out of your old tired ways of thinking.

Pandora’s Promise Premiered at Sundance January 18, 2013

When I was a young nuclear engineer in the late 1970s there were protests and public debates on nuclear power.  Antinuclear protestors even painted condemning remarks on the side of the nuclear reactor building at MIT where I was a graduate student.  I participated in many of those debates on the pro nuclear side, of course.  It was tough going but very eye opening.  Then in 1979 there was Three Mile Island – America’s only nuclear power plant accident and meltdown.  The nuclear industry did what it could to recover, but soon the nuclear industry was flat lining.  It seemed as though the anti’s had won.

Fast-forward 40 years.  Things have changed.

A couple of years ago two of my friends, Jim Swartz and Steve Kirsch, approached me to consider helping them seed the development of a documentary film about nuclear energy to be titled Pandora’s Promise.  Always interested in things nuclear since a little boy, I met with Robert Stone, the director.  Through his own education and research, Robert had concluded that nuclear power is the only real solution to address global climate change related to CO2 production.  And, he had found many environmentalists young and old who had also come to the same conclusion through their own work.  I was sold.

As a team we raised the money to produce Pandora’s Promise – a Robert Stone documentary about how the environmentalist, also known as the greens, are now supporting nuclear power.  The film sets you back in your chair with an opening of the Fukushima disaster in 2011.  It then lays out the arguments against nuclear energy conveying well the vigor and vile of the anti nuclear movement in the 1970s.  Having lived through it, some of this was tough to watch.

You then watch a short bit of history, some great footage I might add, of how the decisions that determined today’s nuclear power designs were made, but also what could have been.  You learn the scientific truth about the real impact to the environment and to human life caused by the disasters of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.  Only Chernobyl caused any deaths.

And then you take a tour of the planet to show you that we live in world of radiation.  Stone measures radiation all over the planet, including at the sites of the three disasters, where people are coming back to live.  The simple measuring of radiation, conveyed by a simple yellow device is the most prominent and in-your-face element of the story about the non-issue of radiation.  Throughout the film you watch and listen as the greens change their mind about nuclear energy as they too learn the truth about nuclear power, its risks and its benefits so well conveyed by the movie.

I’ve never been to Sundance, but I’ve seen films that ultimately make it to the larger market.  Knowing that about 8000 films are submitted I’m proud that Pandora’s Promise made all the cuts to be premiered.  I only hope now that those who see it see it for what it is – a true story about nuclear energy, a case for nuclear energy in the 21^st century and the key role it must play in the fight against climate change from CO2.  But also, just how really safe nuclear power is.

A word on Climate Change

The world’s climate is changing; make no mistake about it.  While the Sun is the largest factor on Earth’s climate, science tells us that CO2 is a major factor as well.  And the biggest contributor to CO2 in our atmosphere is the burning of fossil fuels – coal and gas for electricity and petroleum for automobiles.  I’m not a climate expert, but I can read and understand the science in the reports of these experts.  So, how can we slow down or even stop the production of CO2?  The biggest impact would be to switch our sources of fuel we use to make electricity from fossil to nuclear.

Lots of power plants are going to be built in the next several decades, even century.  Developing countries are building electric plants as fast as they can to satisfy demand of their growing economies.  China is reportedly starting up a coal plant every week.  By mid 21^st century the countries of the developed world, the United States, Russia, Europe, South Africa will have to replace their electric infrastructure just to keep their economies going and their way of life stable.

The world is demanding more and more electricity.  Intelligent estimates put the increase in electricity production in the world to double by 2035.  Double.  Folks, we have choices to make.

Some people have put forth that alternative energy sources like solar and wind can provide the base load power the world demands.  When smart people run the numbers on what is required, it simply does not pencil out.  This is not fiction.  Rather, this is science and engineering.  The sun does not shine at night, and the wind does not blow all the time.  Hydro, a significant contributor in the alternatives category is largely built-out in the developed world.  China just completed the world’s largest hydro power plant with at Three Gorges – a massive facility.  Demanding economies, new and old, need electricity 7×24 forever.

So we have a choice.  We can continue to build fossil fueled plants and produce prodigious amounts of CO2 contributing to climate change and suffer the consequences thereof.  Or, we can start to roll out nuclear power plants for our base load electricity and reduce CO2.

Failure: A Prelude to Success

A lot has been said and written about innovation, risk taking, and entrepreneurship.  The American capitalistic economy has always been and continues to be the hotbed of innovation and risk taking.  It is, in part, what makes the United States one of the greatest countries in the world and its economy the most productive. 

People come from all over the world to be entrepreneurs in the United States.  Today American universities offer many entrepreneurship courses in all degree categories.  It is a wonderful thing.  But there is a side of entrepreneurship that is not often taught or even discussed.  I’m talking about real world entrepreneurial experiences that seem to happen over and over again.  Failure.  But it is those failures that ultimately lead to the great American companies, truly great companies.

Everyone knows that not all new ideas succeed in business.  That’s part of the process.  But how many budding entrepreneurs know that from failure comes great success.  Not necessarily a badge of courage, failure is not fun.

Failure is a fact of life.  Anyone who dares to do something different, or something important, or something bold will fail at some part of the process.  And the truth is, failure is part of the process of innovation and its ultimate success – maybe even the most important part.

In life there is no immunity from failure. But failure is often a prelude to success. What matters is what you do when failure presents itself.

History is full of famous failures -­‐ innovators who failed before they were successful.  They demonstrated real entrepreneurial grit -­‐ the kind that makes great companies.

Did you know that Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper job because he lacked imagination and had no original ideas?

Or that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team?

Henry Ford lost all the money from his first group of investors without producing a single car. It took him three tries to get Ford Motor Company right.

One of my favorite examples of entrepreneurial grit is Robert Goddard – the inventor of the liquid-fueled rocket. For most of his career, the press ridiculed him for his theories about space flight. In fact, a New York Times editorial in 1920 scoffed at his idea that man could build a rocket capable of reaching the moon.

On July 17, 1969 – the day after the launch of Apollo 11 – the Times wrote a three-­‐paragraph editorial titled “A Correction.” It summarized its editorial from 49 years earlier and concluded with the following statement, “Further investigation and experimentation have confirmed the findings of Isaac Newton in the 17th Century and it is now definitely established that a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere. The Times regrets the error.”

The list of accomplished Americans who failed before they succeeded goes on and on.

Clearly, Winston Churchill was employing his great and powerful skill of observation when he said, “You can count on Americans to do the right thing… after they’ve tried everything else.”

Bringing the discussion to more current times and locales, what can the Silicon Valley inform us about failure. It certainly has had its share of flameouts, as we say in the venture business.

Before Apple launched the Mac in 1984, there was the Lisa. Lisa was a powerful innovative computer that offered many great features we take for granted today. But it lacked sufficient performance to satisfy business users, and failed in the market.

And then there was the Newton, Apple’s early personal digital assistant and tablet platform. Despite investing more than $100 million in Newton, the device failed in the market. Of course, Apple got it right with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.  From a few failures over a decade came Apple’s most spectacular successes.

It is not possible to discuss failure as a prelude to success without mentioning Steve Blank. Steve is now an award‐winning teacher of entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley, Stanford and Columbia.  Steve is a force of nature. He is blunt and wicked smart with boundless energy.  Like all great entrepreneurs exhibits impatience and urgency all the time.

In his 20 years as a serial entrepreneur in the Silicon Valley, he started or worked in 8 startups. His last startup, Epiphany, was a dot com pioneer in the customer relationship management space and a huge commercial success.

But two startups that Steve lists on his resume and that occurred before Epiphany standout for exactly the opposite reason. In Steve’s own words, they were both “huge craters.”  That’s Valley speak for big failures and loss of major investor money.  A life‐is‐too‐short kind of guy, Steve has often said that in his career he liked to “fail fast, move on and not look back.” Again, in Valley speak we’d say, “The lemons ripen fast. Next.”  Steve is one of those entrepreneurs who picked himself up and went after another innovation after learning amazing lessons around startups.

Sometimes when failure presents itself, you have to reassess.  Entrepreneurs are clever if nothing else.  But with assets in hand, team assembled, and a few dollars in the bank, a company of mine demonstrated that from failure one can rise to succeed.  That company was called Qpass.

In 1995 I provided seed funding for Qpass. The company built an infrastructure to process micro transactions on the Internet just as ecommerce was taking off. Things were going so well that the company early in 2000 filed an S‐1 for an IPO. Then the Internet bubble popped. And all – and I do mean all ­ of Qpass’s customers disappeared literally over night.  The company was so close to winning big.

But did we give up.  No!  Why?  Because there was a great team and a working product. The company just needed a market to apply their products!  Who could have foreseen the crash in 2001.

Qpass pivoted and became a transaction engine for cellphones. It was the very early days of smart phones and everyone wanted “wallpaper” for their new phone. Qpass made that happen, millions of transactions a month.

A great success, failure, and success again, Qpass was successful because it had a team, capital, and grit, and ultimately a market.

It is clear that there is something very real about the idea of failure as a prelude to success. I seen it many times.

Even when deals are successful, the course to success can be anything but straight up and to the right.  In my early years as a venture guy I heard over and over, every week at the partners meetings when our companies were running out of money that “it always takes more time and costs more money to achieve success.”

With limited experience I asked the senior partner at Venrock, “Exactly how much longer does it take, and how much more money does it cost to be successful?” He turned to me and said – “that is a great question, Ray, why don’t you figure that out?  So I did.

I spent months pouring through Venrock’s archives and analyzing the data of our winners.  At that time, of the 150 or so successful tech deals on which I could get good data, I found that it took about 18 months longer to break even and about 2.5 times more capital than the entrepreneurs originally estimated. These are real numbers based on real data.

A related question easier to answer is just how many successful companies actually accomplish their original business plan on time and on budget. I can tell you that of the 300 or so companies in Venrock’s history that we considered successful, just 5 made their original plan on time and on budget. Just 5.

If you are wanting to be an entrepreneur, these next few paragraphs are for you.  After a career of nearly 25 years and 52 direct investments in addition to assisting in hundreds of other Venrock companies, I’ve made a few observations about what works and what doesn’t work and about what the great entrepreneurs do to be successful.  You might say it’s my pattern recognition.

First, your goal as an entrepreneur is not to not fail.  Your goal is to win. The team that plays, “not to lose” almost never wins.  Play to win for your company.

Second, you must be agile. The world changes every day. Be prepared for that. Use your pattern recognition skills to see what works and what doesn’t work. Study your competition. Take calculated risks along the way, not crazy chances, but thoughtful calculated risks. If you sense failure on your current course, then pivot. Regroup. Rethink. Restart.

Third, never give up. Your goal as an entrepreneur is to take risks and build something great. Build a great company and I promise you – the money will follow, not the other way around.
Just Imagine the world without Mickey Mouse, Michael Jordan, or the iPhone.

I have also concluded that there are five things that all great companies have in common.

Great companies and great entrepreneurs have the ability to communicate a vision to its employees, customers and investors. Being able to succinctly, clearly and in an exciting manner tell your mission is where it all starts.  I started at Venrock in New York on the 55^th floor of 30 Rock.  Imagine you are getting on the elevator at 30 Rock to come see me. It is a 60 second ride to the 55th floor. Amazingly, Mr. Rockefeller gets on the elevator with you and of course you recognize him. Like the gentleman he is, he introduces himself and you return the introduction. After the pleasantries he asks, “ What does your company do?” You now have about 30 seconds to answer that question. It turns out this is not an unusual story but it can be difficult to do well. The point is you must project your vision in a clear, crisp and exciting way.   You never know when that matters because it matters all the time.

The second trait of a great company is its talented and committed team. Turns out you can’t do it alone and great teams win. I once heard that a great vision without great execution is just a hallucination.

Building a startup is difficult.  The third element in success is dedication to company first and above all else. Entrepreneurs who are about themselves and not the enterprise fail and often quickly. Also, smart and savvy employees who’ve joined the team quickly figure this out if it wasn’t obvious in the beginning.  If the team goes, so goes the chance of success.

The fourth observation I’ve seen in organizations large and small is goal alignment.  Alignment of  goals among all the stakeholders is crucial.   It is hard to be successful if some stakeholder in the value chain is not successful.  Stakeholders are your employees, your investment partners, and most importantly your customers. Alignment is crucial and essential, not just sufficient.

The fifth element to great success is to have fun. Fun is contagious. Fun is the sort of buzz that gets out and suddenly you have more great people wanting to be at the company. Also when things aren’t going so well, and there will be those days, the fun will save you from despair and keep you on track.

This all boils down to people – employees, customers, investors – who must believe in you, your idea, and your vision. This is what the founders of the most successful companies have done. I’ve seen it many, many times.

The founder of Venrock, Laurance Rockefeller, followed his grandfather’s, John D. Rockefeller, inspiration.  These words you can read on the plaque at skating rink at 30 Rock.  It reads:

“If you want to succeed, you should strike out on new paths rather than travel the worn paths of accepted success.

I Wish I Were a Billionaire

The former chief technology officer of Microsoft on why he’s backing the nuclear energy startup TerraPower.

NATHAN MYHRVOLD

For some technologists, it’s enough to build something that makes them financially successful. They retire happily. Others stay with the company they founded for years and years, enthralled with the platform it gives them. Think how different the work Steve Jobs did at Apple in 2010 was from the innovative ride he took in the 1970s.

A different kind of challenge is to start something new. Once you’ve made it, a new venture carries some disadvantages. It will be smaller than your last company, and more frustrating. Startups require a level of commitment not everyone is ready for after tasting success. On the other hand, there’s no better time than that to be an entrepreneur. You’re not gambling your family’s entire future on what happens next. That is why many accomplished technologists are out in the trenches, leading and funding startups in unprecedented areas.

Jeff Bezos has Blue Origin, a company that builds spaceships. Elon Musk has Tesla, an electric-car company, and SpaceX, another rocket-ship company. Bill Gates took on big challenges in the developing world—combating malaria, HIV, and poverty. He is also funding inventive new companies at the cutting edge of technology. I’m involved in some of them, including TerraPower, which we formed to commercialize a promising new kind of nuclear reactor.

There are few technologies more daunting to inventors (and investors) than nuclear power. On top of the logistics, science, and engineering, you have to deal with the regulations and politics. In the 1970s, much of the world became afraid of nuclear energy, and last year’s events in Fukushima haven’t exactly assuaged those fears.

So why would any rational group of people create a nuclear power company? Part of the reason is that Bill and I have been primed to think long-term. We have the experience and resources to look for game-changing ideas—and the confidence to act when we think we’ve found one. Other technologists who fund ambitious projects have similar motivations. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are literally reaching for the stars because they believe NASA and its traditional suppliers can’t innovate at the same rate they can.

In the next few decades, we need more technology leaders to reach for some very big advances. If 20 of us were to try to solve energy problems—with carbon capture and storage, or perhaps some other crazy idea—maybe one or two of us would actually succeed. If nobody tries, we’ll all certainly fail.

I believe the world will need to rely on nuclear energy. A looming energy crisis will force us to rework the underpinnings of our energy economy. That happened last in the 19th century, when we moved at unprecedented scale toward gas and oil. The 20th century didn’t require a big switcheroo, but looking into the 21st century, it’s clear that we have a much bigger challenge.

As China, India, Brazil, and other parts of the developing world raise their standard of living, they’ll want a lifestyle—and therefore a degree of energy consumption—that matches ours in the United States. Meanwhile, our own energy consumption increases. To meet these demands, the world’s energy generation capability will have to multiply by a factor of at least five in this century, and possibly more.

What about renewable energy? Unfortunately, no such technology can completely replace fossil fuels, which provide base-load power all day and night, regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. There is no carbon-free base-load power source except nuclear energy.

Let’s be clear: conventional nuclear energy has drawbacks, principally that it relies on enriched uranium. That’s problematic for several reasons. In the first place, there’s not that much uranium: if you tried to scale conventional nuclear energy to meet the world’s energy needs, you’d run out. And the enrichment process required to use natural uranium in today’s light-water reactors is complicated, expensive, and wasteful. In the U.S., more than 700,000 metric tons of depleted uranium—the by-product of enrichment—sits in storage.

TerraPower’s technology is designed to use that depleted uranium as fuel, turning the cheap by-product of today’s reactors into enough electricity to power every home in America for 1,000 years. The technology would also virtually eliminate the need for new enrichment facilities, which is important because enriched uranium is a proliferation risk. It can be used to make bombs, and so can plutonium, another by-product of the nuclear fuel cycles in use today.

TerraPower offers a path to zero-carbon, proliferation-resistant energy. Yes, there are a lot of challenges—scientific, engineering, and above all, political. The time it takes to develop a nuclear reactor and get it licensed is so daunting that it would be a crazy proposition for any ordinary entrepreneur.

Though we believe there’s a lot of good TerraPower can do for the world, it’s a for-profit venture. It has to be: competing commercially is the only way any energy option can become sustainable. That said, TerraPower’s investors, which include Khosla Ventures and Charles River Ventures, share the long-term view of its founders. They recognize that the biggest returns come from the biggest advances, and those take time. That long-term view makes it possible to invest in innovation that could revolutionize our energy infrastructure.

Neil Armstrong – 1930 – 2012

Neil Armstrong was America’s hero of heros.  While he would never want this said of him because, as he said, it took tens of thousands of people to get us to the Moon and it was only a 50 50 chance he would actually land on the moon, this is what he is.  It did for sure, but he did take the first step and that was not easy.  Walter Cronkite once said of Armstrong that 500 years from now when the history books are written, the 20th century will be remembered for Man Landing on the Moon — and Neil Armstrong.  Why?  Cronkite clearly a student of history observed that history books today regarding the 15th century only talk about Christopher Columbus and the discovery of the New World, and in that order.  You see in time, wars, politics, boundary disputes, and the like are all irrelevant when compared to humankind’s quest to discover new things, new worlds, and new ideas.

I was lucky enough to know Neil and his wife Carol.  They were so generous with their time and home letting Nathaniel and I stay with them on our trip across America to college in 2009.  Like many, the first I had heard of him was when I sat glued to the TV watching that first step after starring for hours at the TV screen of that black and white moonscape just waiting for him to come down the ladder.  Later in life, he helped me with a little company, space.com, back in the 1990s.  What fun that was despite that it didn’t work out too well.  He was always a trooper, always had good ideas, and always brought good sense to our board discussions.  And, once he told the board the story of why the pilot sits in the left hand seat of an airplane.  It’s a good one told to Neil by his original flight instructor when he was 15 who happened to with the Wright Brothers when it came to pass.  You can imagine he had a lot of great stories.  Nathaniel and I listened for hours!

We were together at a board meeting when SpaceShipOne made its successful voyage to the edge of space.  There he was, clued to the TV screen pointing out everything the news people were not.  He commented on the engineering, the trajectory, the issues and concerns, but mostly he commented on how great it was to see this endeavor.  While skeptical of commercial space flight, he never thought it a bad idea for folks to try.

Neil always thought he knew his place in the world.  Last year I inquired of him to be the keynote speaker at the National Convention of Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society, and where 400 or 500 of America’s top engineers gather each year.  He politely declined saying something like, ‘if I could do it justice I would but I’m afraid the bar is very high to address a distinguished group like this and at my age I fear I would let them down.’

So Neil, we will miss you very much.  We will miss your subtle and humble leadership on matters of national importance and we will miss your always optimistic smile and charm.  As he inspired me to think that, if you don’t invest in the future, you will have no future.

Remarks at the 2012 National Venture Capital Association Meeting

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the NVCA 2012 Annual Meeting.  My name is Ray Rothrock, a partner at Venrock.

It’s a great pleasure for me to be here this morning and a special honor to begin my new role as Chair of the Board of Directors of this amazing organization with all of you here today.

I’d also like to acknowledge our outgoing directors, who were instrumental in our recent successes. And of course Mark Heesen and the rest of the staff at the NVCA deserve a huge shout out for their strategy, commitment, tenaciousness and good old hard work that makes the job of being an NVCA director look easy.

Thank you one and all.

I’ve been part of the venture capital industry for the last 24 years. During that time, the industry has grown and changed so much. We’ve had our ups and downs, but through everything I can honestly say that there has never been a day in the last 24 years that I wasn’t proud to be doing this work.  Reconnecting with many of you is wonderful.

That’s because at the end of the day, our mission as venture capitalists is to discover the very best entrepreneurs with the very best ideas, and help them build and grow companies. The capital and sponsorship we provide help eliminate barriers and reduce friction that might otherwise impede their growth. And when they are successful, our limited partners and we share in their success.

Even more important, the American people benefit from the success of innovation and entrepreneurs – through great new life changing products and services, through outsized contributions to the American economy and its global competitiveness, and through jobs.  This is the American story.

History has shown us that when bright entrepreneurs are given a chance and the capital, they can create great companies and in many cases great industries. Semiconductors, personal computing, local area networking, wide area networking, bio pharmaceuticals, medical devices, overnight delivery, ecommerce, social networking – the list of industries that came into being because of the partnership between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists goes on and on.

Now, most of the people in this room are painfully aware that the venture industry is coming out of a relatively bleak decade, perhaps an understatement. I’m sure we’re all happy to put it behind us. And while our economy is improving after the Great Recession of 2008, its global aftermath persists, creating a lingering uncertainty.

Through this entire gloomy decade, I’ve been continually amazed at how entrepreneurs just don’t seem to read the newspaper, watch TV or the news. And if they do, that just doesn’t seem to stop them. They keep on looking for opportunities to bring great ideas to life. Their ideas, their belief in a better future and their unflagging optimism is inspiring.

This year, we are seeing a renewal of the IPO and the public market in general.  Frank Quattrone’s remarks yesterday show this to be the case.  The renewal is stoked in part by companies reaching the scale to go public, but also by the buy side seeing these young companies up close, and having enough confidence in them to buy their stock and watch them grow.

The public market is so very important to venture. I don’t think we fully grokked its impact until it went away a decade ago.  Besides liquidity for our startup dollars, you may already know that 92% of all job creation from successful venture backed companies comes after the IPO.  Further – and I’ve said this many times – the public markets keep the M&A process honest and active. When growing companies have choices, everyone wins.

So in this next year – as the JOBS Act takes hold, as the public markets pay more attention to our startups, as our limited partners start to get a return on their invested capital – we all need to keep in mind that the company creation process is an essential element of the growth and prosperity of our economy and our way of life.  This industry matters for the nation, and for the world.  We must keep it strong.

This process is uniquely American. The industry is changing, yes. We’ll talk about some of that today in our sessions. But these changes are good. And just as entrepreneurs invent new products and industries, as venture capitalists we must reinvent ourselves to better partner with them.

Let me wrap up with one short story.

When I started at Venrock in 1988, we were backed 100% by the Rockefellers. Every year, like all good venture capitalists, we would give our annual report to our investors. In the room were David Rockefeller, Laurance Rockefeller, their aides, and many other family members. And every year we would go through our successes and our failures, giving a completely transparent report. Mr. Crisp, our CEO, held nothing back.

Our founder, Laurance Rockefeller, would sit patiently in the front row taking notes.  There would be questions sprinkled all through out the presentation, mostly details about this or that company.  But every year he would ask the same questions at the end of the report:

How many people does the portfolio employ?

How much wealth for the companies and their shareholders was realized?

What incremental tax basis did we create?

What impact to the American economic landscape did we have?

In a few moments, we’ll hear from another superangel and statesman of our industry who also carries the highest regard for entrepreneurs and their impact on society: Arthur Rock. I hope it inspires you to remember that while our industry may grow and it may shrink, at the end of the day it’s about building great companies with great entrepreneurs.

Let’s Connect with them.  Let’s Discover with them.  And Let’s be Inspired by them.  If we do this right, the all the rest will follow.

JOBS Act is the Law – Congratulations America. Let’s get back to the Business of Innovation!

Today, in the Rose Garden at the White House at about 2:40, President Obama signed into law the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act.  This morning when I departed my hotel it was overcast and pretty chilly outside.  I suddenly regretted not having my overcoat.  But, as the morning past and early afternoon arrived it suddenly was a beautiful day with tulips in full bloom everywhere at the White House.  The sun was beaming overhead making it warm and soothing in the crisp spring air.  When I think about making the JOBS Act law, this day is a perfect metaphor.  From a gloomy start to a sunny and warm finish complete with exploding tulips there was a sense of optimism and renewal for American innovation.   This law makes capital formation easier, safer, and better for everyone from the smallest startup in Ithaca to the boldest tech startup in Boulder. 

The JOBS Act does not do away with any of the important work of the last decade bringing abuses under control.  It moderates and allows startup companies to obtain capital from the smallest of investors previously excluded to allowing the adolescent company to become an adult over a period of years or success.  Nothing was eliminated, the rules and regulations were only modified to adapt to the real world of American innovation.

There are so many places that summarize this new Law I’ll just link to them.  But let me say this.  It is very possible that fifty years from now, the country may look back at the JOBS Act and call it the 12 Act, kind of the like the “34 Act.”  The Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, known as the 34 Act was a seminal piece of legislation which put in place regulation and control of financial securities issued by companies following the Great Depression.  It created the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In his remarks today President Obama highlighted how important startup companies are to the United States and the world.  He cited Bell, Edison, Gates, Google and others that have created whole industries with their big ideas.  He cited how important it was that today’s entrepreneurs have access to American capital at the smallest amount.  And he emphasized how important that access to the public markets was essential for American to remain competitive and create new jobs.  He is so right.

Prior to the signing ceremony I also attended a Roundtable in the Roosevelt Room at the White House chaired by National Economics Council Gene Sperling and Steve Case.  There were 20 people in the room from small and large businesses from all over the United States.  Crowd Funding was a part of the JOBS Act and it was highlighted in this session to a great degree.  I pointed out that at the other end of the spectrum of capital formation that making it easier for growing, successful companies to tap the public markets was essential for two reasons.  One it would be source of unlimited capital for expansion leading to new jobs by the millions and to new industries.  Two that 90% of the jobs derived from successful startups are created after the IPO.  It was pointed out that this bill is also good for large private companies for a variety of reasons.  Everyone got something from this effort, that was clear.

My hope is that it will also shorten the lifecycle of risk capital that folks like I put into promising ideas.  Recycling capital more quickly means that we all get more swings at bat.  It also meant that more of my brethren in the venture business might return to their early stage roots and take chances on unproven but attractive deals, like so many people used to do in decades past.