Um, it's good to be here. Thank you James.

Thank you Adam for introducing me and giving me the opportunity to speak to you. I'll try to keep this to 20 minutes, but
this was always my challenge. I'm going to speak about materials and nano technology as requested, but I'll also try to tie
it in to some of the themes you've probably already heard already about and that is that in short the more that we look at
nano technology that some bio inspired path is at least the more fruitful near-term path to a
some pretty dramatic futures. What I mean by that is, I'm trying to talk about to set up two paradigms for nanotech development.
One that's more semiconductor inspired. A top down model if you will of building things, engineering
them and making the work more or less like you designed them to work and then a completely different area closer to the field of
evolution or biology which is a bit more out of control but a bit more powerful and trying to reconcile
the two provides quite a rich array of business and technology and we think is the
forefront of future innovation. So in a way this will be a more broad of a talk than just nano
Technology but hopefully it will be relevant and will focus on what we consider to be nano tech. So I spoke to this audience last year
about nano technology and the context of Moore's law. I believe it was entitles Transcending Moore's Law through Nano Technology
and we still adamantly believe that the future of electronics is nano technology and it's just
a question of when. Is it 10 years from now, 20 years from now or 50 years from now that we look back at
the Silicon CMOS transistor with the same sort of nostalgia as we look at the vacuum tube. And so
this is a photo of Gordon Moore. We went salmon fishing just off these shores not too long ago and so
my talk today is not so much about Gordon Moore and the paradigm of Moore's law but more about that fish and
the paradigm of biology and what we can learn from the fish. Gordon himself didn't have a Moore's law of fishing but he did
ruminate a bit on the topic and he's just a wonderful individual. I'll speak about nano tech as an introduction
for those who might a quick primer on it but nothing to detailed. I believe that's been covered
enough in the popular press and I'll focus on some examples of what I might call the bio nano hybrid opportunity.
And some examples from the nonprofit world in particular so I don't just promote our own companies
which is my tendency because that is what I know the most about. Let me start though with just one slide about us. You know the biases
and background of the speaker you have in front of you. We are in early stage of venture capital firm if you haven't heard of us
and over the last 10 years we've expanded internationally. We are a 20 year old organization but for ten years
we've tried to spread our venture capital around the globe. So this gives a chance to look at a lot of business plans and see a lot of proposals.
Not just those in our back yard. We get about 30 thousand business plans a year and
in aggregate we manage a bit over $3B of capital. Enough about us. The real heroes of our organization are our
entrepreneurs and in the field of nanotechnology and MAMS and novel materials in particular, we've done about
about 28 investments and continue to look for more. For example, in the last three months we've done three
clean coal investments alone involving catalytic processes for making coal a much more cleaner fuel source. And we'll continue to
look at opportunities in energy. What you see at the bottom on the screen in Sals State Lighting, opportunities in molecular electronics,
which I spoke about last year. In the tools sector, sort of in the middle, involves a
number companies most of which are at the revenue stage. One of which, DOA, is here in the audience today. So you have a chance to
talk with them further if you are interested.

So, what is nanotechnology? I'll just show this in case there is anyone in the audience who doesn't know. I doubt that that's the case
but I think the important points I want to emphasize is not a precise, you know, NSF inspired definition and to do with a scale dimension
but really what does it mean. Why does it matter? Why do we talk about nanotechnology when we haven't really spoken
about technologies on a length scale before. In show technology never really caught on in the vernacular
and nor did any other length scale. As being a particularly relevant descriptor having any meaning
whatsoever and I would argue give it time and nano tech will probably lose all meaning as
well. But for the near term, we see two interesting elements. One is that when you do operate at that
scale interesting properties of matter can emerge that you wouldn't observer at a higher, sort of a higher
statistical sampling and our senses don't tend to work at that scale. Our eyes can't see single photons. We
don't really understand the properties of matter intuitively at that scale unless you study them from a quantum mechanical
sense. For example of this discontinuous from the bulk sciences. All just mention one example that if you take
that Pepsi can of aluminum and grind it down to 20 to 30 nanometer particle sizes, it will
spontaneously explode in air. It becomes a rocket fuel and that wouldn't be assumed from the bulk
properties of aluminum if you studied it at that scale. It's only when you jump down to the nanoscale that
some of these unusual properties can emerge. So that gets us excited. It makes us think hey maybe
there are some new technology here. But even more important to us than that is the human drama element. This inner disciplinary
point at the bottom which is scientists can strip, you know, decades of systems vernacular away and find a common
language. You know, the quantum chemist, the quantum physicists, the geneticist are finding ways that they can communicate with other
scientists from other disciplines in a way that is not in the systems theory but more at the core, at the lowest level if you will, of
of their hierarchy of learning and it's stripping away a lot of barriers to communications and quite simply the reason we
get excited about nanotech is that it's where scientist, it's the place, whether it's physically the place at a University campus or in a
government lab or in a company, it's physically the place where scientists can come together from
discretely different disciplines and find these opportunities that are inturshtesies between their
disciplines and by the way the reason that excites us, that we think it's a general rule of thumb that disruptive innovation occurs
at the edge. It's not allowed the entrepreneur who's well fed, it's not the organism, you know, that's
living a very happy life that pushes evolution forward. It's the organism at the edge of survival. It's the
start up out of the mainstream and complexity theory, all interesting life and phenomena
occur at the edge, between chaos indeterminacy and in science we would argue that most of the important
breakthroughs occur not within the core of the discipline but at the boundaries between them. That's an arguable proposition but
certainly within nanotech we think it's what gets us excited. So why do we talk about nanotech now? Well one of the main trends
across a number sciences is that they migrate over time from being lab sciences of trial and error experimentation to
simulation sciences. This is true as much for chemistry and biology today. Certainly true for biotech.
You can't take their computers away from modern biotech lab and be productive but in many cases
you can take a lot of the lab equipment away and overtime as the simulation migrates into a field it accelerates the pace of
of experimentation and therefore the pace of learning and the pace of progress.

And you see that many lab sciences sort of hop on Moore's law if you will. You can see that in the way Craig Venture was
able to decode the human genome. It was largely jumping on to a computer revolution to accelerate that
process and breaking away from a pure lab science approach. Another reason is, you know, a lot of money is
flowing freely and wildly into the field and anyone who writes grants in an academic setting knows how to write them
creatively so that they suddenly become nanotechnology no matter what they might be doing and when billions of
dollars are flowing then people find a way to do that and I say that with a bit of
cynicism, but it is also true. Internationally of course investment is outstripping of the U.S. of both in the EU
and in Asia and has for every year since it's been measured. Of recent dates, that's starting to catch up and the U.S.
is on par with the world.

Now, transitioning to something a little different, I am not here to talk about the 50 year futures and
some might argue that 50 years isn't as

long as it used to be and that the 50 year future perceptually might come in the next twenty years or less.
But never the less if you look beyond your forecast horizons of even the most bold predictors, there are some pretty
radical things that might come down the pipe in the way we build just about everything for just
about a dollar a pound. That's what the far out futurists, when I say far out I mean looking farthest to the future would predict
that why should a Ferrari cost any different than a potato. Other than IP, other than software. Right, the actual manufacturing cost
should be any different. So that's kind of interesting and it captures the fancy of scientists just like Star Trek, you know,
motivated a number of developers and programmers to try to realize this vision that may or may not be
entirely true. But that's not an investment thesis and so in our challenge to wrestle with, you know, what is this
interesting long-term attracter, this star to which many scientists may be on motivated to
move towards and the pragmatic realities of where we are today. How can we bridge between our capabilities today
in terms of markets, businesses and technologies and this future vision that you may have seen
in many a science-fiction novel as well as a futurist kind of portrayal and is there any path for the venture capitalists
or for a business person today that bridges those two or are they two completely divorced worlds. So one way
to help, you know, chip away at that intellectual problem is the following. Imagine I could hand you today as a
thought experiment any nanotech thing you have ever heard of and really think bold. I mean think about the
sugar cube size super computer, the bloodstream robot that zaps cancers cells. I'm talking about the wild
futuristic stuff. Imagine you could, in fact, you dream it up. Hand me whatever specification you want in any format you want
and I just hand it to back right now. Pick something as a thought experiment so that you can be thinking about
that example. Now as you imagine the spec you're going to give me. You know, did you think through all of the implications
of what that might look like. I mean, in other words, when I handed it to you, did it just blow off my hand and float in the
air as a piece of dust. Did you think about how you were going to find the device, communicate with it, give it
power on any kind of useful time scale and did you have to in fact design an entire industry of
precursors and cofactors to interface to this nano skill device. Meaning given what we have today where
would you interface with the nano world. We have submicron and you know the chip industry and some parts of the disk drive industry
some elements of structures that are at the nano scale but we don't really have a rich interface to
this world. It would be as if I handed you a Pentium chip today. Equally useless product for most people in their
hands. You first have to wire bond that to a print circuit board, actually wire bond it to a lead frame. Put in a big package. Put
a huge heat sink on it. Put it on a print circuit board. Put some bullet compositors, a lot of traces coming to, you know, a big switching
power supply and oh by the way a three prong plug that you can put in the wall and hope there is a grid that can service
you before that Pentium chip has any value to you. And in the semiconductor industry, those sort of