Internet entrepreneur returns to solar energy

By Nichola Groom Reuters
Published: July 20, 2008

LOS ANGELES: In 1973, when Bill Gross was 15 and cars were lined up at every gas station in Southern California, he wanted to do something about high energy prices.
An aspiring engineer, he figured out how to build parabolic concentrators and Stirling engines to capture the sun's energy, selling the plans for $4 apiece through ads in Popular Science magazine.
Gross, now 49, is again building solar power projects after a lengthy detour through the early days of the Internet.
His company, Idealab, created a series of Web businesses in the 1990s, including the pay-per-click advertising pioneer GoTo.com and the toy retailer eToys, which he said eventually "outspent its leash."
"Everything we touched was turning to gold for a while and then the crash came," Gross said in an interview at his office in Pasadena, California.

In its heyday, Idealab was planning an initial public offering and had 5,000 employees in offices in Boston, San Francisco, London and Pasadena. It now has a work force that is at least one-fifth that size and one office.
In the earlier period, Gross also faced accusations - since dismissed or settled - by some of Idealab's shareholders that he used company assets to finance a lavish lifestyle.
Two years ago, Gross was spared financial ruin again when shareholders agreed to pay off a $50 million personal loan he owed to a bank.
As the Internet boom melted down, however, the California energy crisis of 2000 was rekindling Gross's teenage passion for alternative energy.
It turned out that solar technology had not advanced much since he gave up his mail order business to start writing software in the early 1980s.
Idealab embarked on a mission few others were embracing at the time: developing green energy technologies.
A mechanical engineer by training, Gross is hands-on. A smattering of solar projects are crammed onto the roof of the company's small building in downtown Pasadena, and he explains them all in rapid and minute detail.
His idea for small, prefabricated solar-powered thermal power plants, being developed by the Idealab company eSolar, caught the eye of Oak Investment Partners and Google. Bandel Carano, a managing partner with Oak who also sits on eSolar's board, called Gross's solar thermal technology a breakthrough equivalent to the advantages of PC computing over mainframes.
Half of Idealab's 16 companies are focused on energy.
"We used to have 40 ideas a year and do one company a month," Gross said. "Now we have 40 ideas a year and we're doing one company a year."
This is no repeat of the Internet boom, when companies with little revenue and no profits attracted millions of dollars in capital, he said. "Now we say 'Treat these dollars as if it's the last dollars you'll ever see,"' Gross said.