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Exclusive: Internet pioneer Steve Case joins board of Bloom Energy [San Jose Mercury News :: ]
[August 12, 2014]

Exclusive: Internet pioneer Steve Case joins board of Bloom Energy [San Jose Mercury News :: ]


(San Jose Mercury News (CA) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Aug. 12--By Dana Hull Internet pioneer Steve Case, the former chairman and CEO of AOL, is joining the board of Bloom Energy, a privately held Sunnyvale company that makes fuel cells for power generation.



Bloom is scheduled to announce Tuesday that Case, currently chairman and CEO of Revolution LLC, a Washington, D.C.-based investment firm that has backed companies like Zipcar and LivingSocial, will make his first foray into the swiftly changing energy sector.

"There are a lot of parallels between the computer revolution and the energy revolution," Case, 55, said in a phone interview Monday. "If you think about the shift from mainframes to PCs to devices like smartphones and tablets, it's the shift from centralized to distributed. Energy needs to do the same thing." Bloom Energy's board of directors includes John Doerr of venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; former Secretary of State and retired Gen. Colin Powell, who is a strategic adviser at Kleiner Perkins; T.J. Rodgers, the founder, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor; and Scott Sandell, a general partner at of New Enterprise Associates. Case has known many of the men on Bloom's board for years: Doerr was an early investor in AOL, and Powell, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff before being sworn in as secretary of state in 2001, was on the board of AOL in the mid- to late 1990s. It was Powell who first reached out to Case about joining the Bloom board, according to Case.


"In 1985, only 3 percent of Americans were online," said Case. "It took us a decade to get traction. The lesson to me is that revolutions often happen in evolutionary ways. Bloom has been at it for a decade; in the next decade is when a lot will happen, and Bloom will hit a tipping point in terms of acceleration. Companies need to have more control of their energy strategy. If the grid goes down, your company can't go down with it." Founded in 2001, Bloom Energy worked in secrecy for years before unveiling its fuel cell technology at a star-studded event on eBay's San Jose campus in early 2010, announcing that Google was its first paying customer. At the time, Bloom aspired to be the first company to achieve a long-sought advance: commercial production of a solid oxide fuel cell.

"Our mission is to make clean, reliable energy affordable for everyone in the world," said K.R. Sridhar, Bloom's cofounder and CEO, at the time.

Fuel cells use hydrogen, natural gas, methane or other fuels to produce electricity through an electrochemical process that produces a fraction of the emissions of a typical power plant. Unlike solar power and wind, which are intermittent and dependent on weather, fuel cells have the advantage of being able to run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year -- an asset that makes it attractive to technology companies that operate data centers.

Bloom has raised more than $1 billion from investors and racked up an impressive list of top tier customers, including eBay, Apple, AT&T, Yahoo and the federal government's National Security Administration, or NSA. Last year, the company announced the formation of Bloom Energy Japan, and has begun installing Bloom Energy Servers in downtown Tokyo.

Bloom has often surfaced on lists of possible cleantech IPOs for 2014. While Case declined to speak specifically about Bloom's IPO prospects, he generally favors that route.

"I am a believer in building built-to-last companies, and the best way to do that is usually to be a publicly traded company," said Case. "I like working with entrepreneurs who have a big vision that results in a public offering." Contact Dana Hull at 408-920-2706. Follow her at Twitter.com/danahull.

___ (c)2014 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) Visit the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.) at www.mercurynews.com Distributed by MCT Information Services

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