Work record / Capital / Save the World Air
Save the World Air: testing a claim from inside
A small public company said its technology improved oil flow through pipelines, and no filing could prove it. I took a seat inside to find out what its own people believed.
The seat
Around 2011 I became a consultant at Save the World Air, Inc., paid in equity. It was a personal seat that I held while running Tellus Design and Build, not a Tellus engagement.
| Sector | Energy technology |
|---|---|
| Type of work | Technical-claim diligence from an operating seat |
| Where | Santa Barbara, California |
| Years | About 2011 |
| Through | A personal seat at Save the World Air, apart from Tellus |
| Credits | Common Ground Jesse Fowler, Consultant, with an equity position |
What I was brought in to decide
Save the World Air, Inc. was a small public company in Santa Barbara whose stock rarely traded. Its technology aimed to improve the way oil moves through pipelines. The company raised money on a technical story, and no filing let anyone check it. In August 2015 the company took the new name QS Energy.
I took the consulting seat around 2011 and was paid in equity, while I was running Tellus Design and Build.
What we did
- I took a seat inside the company instead of studying it from afar through its filings. I wanted to hear what its own people believed, not what it published.
- I asked to hear the claim as a mechanism. What did the technology physically do to the oil, the pipe or the flow? And what do pipeline operators already pay for to get the same outcome?
- I asked who, apart from the company, was paid to say it worked. Had any outside lab or pipeline operator backed it with money or a test bay?
- I helped the company raise about $3 million. I kept that separate from the question of whether the technology worked, because the money raised measures persuasion and not physics.
- I was plain about what the seat costs. A consultant holding equity in the company he is testing will judge it more gently than a stranger would. The only cure is a written finding that someone who was not in the room could check.
- I read the later name change as an announcement. It was not a finding about the technology.
Results
- With my help the company raised about $3 million, which gave it the runway it was asking for.
- I came away with a method of five questions for testing a hard technical claim from close range, plus a rule that travels with it. Being close counts as diligence only if it yields a written page that an outsider could verify.
The lesson
Take the seat instead of watching from a distance through filings. Treat the access as the point, and judge the company by what an operator would pay for, never by what the press release said.
Public record
Stories from this work
Questions about Save the World Air, answered
Firm record
Common Ground keeps its own account of this engagement: Save the World Air on the Common Ground wiki.