Tech leaders reinvent themselves for revolution

February 15, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Brent Constantz’s last startup, Skeletal Kinetics, created a bone-fracture cement that costs $200 per gram and helps orthopedic surgeons heal their patients.

His new startup aims to churn out billions of tons of market-price construction cement that Constantz says can help heal planet Earth by embedding billions of tons of greenhouse gases into concrete. And it will deliver desalinated water as a byproduct.

Constantz is founder and CEO of Calera, a three-year-old Los Gatos-based startup with a demonstration operation at a Moss Landing facility that once helped make incendiary bombs during World War II. His move from the medical-device field illustrates how Silicon Valley’s dynamic, risk-taking business culture has quickly turned a region best-known for computer technology and life sciences into America’s top incubator of clean, green innovations.

Reinvention is at the heart of cleantech, and several of the sector’s leading entrepreneurs have transformed themselves to pursue these massive, new market opportunities.

Elon Musk, the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla Motors and chairman of Solar City, first prospered as a young dot-com mogul whose credits include PayPal. Better Place, a buzz-making electric-car services startup in Palo Alto, was founded by Shai Agassi, who previously had been a rising executive at software giant SAP. Bloom Energy, an innovator in fuel cells, is led by K.R. Sridhar, formerly a University of Arizona professor who helped NASA explore the potential of life-sustaining technologies for Mars.

Marc Porat had been a key player at Apple and an e-commerce entrepreneur before launching three green building-materials startups — Serious Materials, Zeta Communities and CalStar Products. Kevin Surace, the CEO of Serious Materials, had previously led an e-commerce company.

As Surace tells it, he did not have great expectations when he accepted Porat’s invitation in 2002 to build a business around a polymer patent: “It started out as a hobby,” he said.

Today, Serious Materials is producing energy-saving glass, window and drywall products at five manufacturing facilities in California, Colorado, Illinois and Pennsylvania. The company has raised more than $120 million in venture capital and won praise from the Obama administration for creating green jobs amid environmental and economic troubles.