Opportunity Green: Will green biz transform biz as usual?

So I missed THE talk I wanted to hear at Opportunity Green. Futurist Jamais Cascio gave his "Green Tomorrows" keynote at a ridiculously early 9 a.m. or so. He even gave me a shout-out (he used one of my pics in his presentation) -- and no, I wasn't there to wave in response.

Damn those early morning conference starts! Note to self: Staying out late the night before a conference that kicks off at 8 a.m. is never a good idea even if it really, really seems like it at the time... Once I arrived around 11 a.m., I had a dozen or so people come up to ask where I was when I was mentioned.

The rest of the keynotes and most of the panels were, unfortunately, rather meh. The convo between John Picard, sustainability consultant, and Sam LaBudde, Goldman prize-winner, sort of wandered and meandered. The convo with Kevin Wall, founder and CEO of Live Earth, was a bit too self-congratulatory.

I liked the "Women In Sustainability Shaping the Future" panel, as I mentioned in a previous post. But after that came the "Green 2.0" panel, which was so bad that I -- and some others -- ended up leaving for the concurrent panel. Noah Kagan of OKDork.com actually started quizzing the audience like junior high students, telling them to shout out what companies they thought of as green, followed by shouts about what companies they thought of as not green.

Um, we came to learn from experts here, not participate in some weird impromptu call-and-answer session about consumer perception. I hear that later in the panel, Noah actually called green just a fad. Well of course it is, if you think about it just as a money-making tagline.

At the end of the night, I thought I might puke if I heard "vote with your dollar" one more time. By that, I'm not saying you shouldn't vote with your dollar. Yes, by all means, always think about putting your money where your mouth is. But the audience was made of enviro-diehards who'd already heard that, a lot. And I really was hoping to hear something new.

In many ways, Opportunity Green was biz as usual. The number of female speakers and panelists? Eight. Compare that to the 28 male speakers and panelists invited to participate. The number of female keynotes? Zero of five. Non-white panelists or speakers? None, as far as I could tell, although there were a couple breakout sessions so there may've been a couple in the panels I didn't attend.

But I did get some good stuff out of Opportunity Green, just because many cool people were there. Post-conference, Jamais wrote: "The lesson I took from the Opportunity Green event is that activist passion doesn't necessarily translate well into business passion." I couldn't agree more. My friend Jeremy Jacquot, writer for Treehugger, twittered: "opp green was good but ... for my part, i thought it was a wee bit too predictable."

I should add that I liked the organic Casa Barranca wine at the after-party.

De-car-ing: The way there -- Metro 720 to Westwood, plus a bit of a walk into the UCLA campus.  The way back -- a ride from my friend Barent. Thanks dude :)

Photos by Siel

Comments

[Jessica Jensen]

Hey Siel I am with you on Opp Green being a wee bit ho-hum...but I have to say I am psyched to see LA green folks trying to catch up to San Fran in terms of meaty events. So my hat is off to the organizers and I am sure they can bring some more spice to the party next year.

I do have to bust a bit on the investing panel in the afternoon....I thought/hoped that there would be some over-arching discussion of what's going on in green biz investing...what VCs are looking for...which cleantech companies are getting funded and why...good learnings. Instead there were four start-up companies pitching to a panel of investing judges (all white dudes, by the way) who then peppered the companies' reps with questions. So if you already know to anticipate questions like "What's your competitive advantage?" or "How big is that market growing?" you weren't going to get too much out of it. There were a lot of UCSB undergrads who seemed to enjoy it though, so that's cool. I hope next year they will let investment professionals speak their minds and field questions from the audience.

[michael]

I had a similar vibe from the meet up. It wasn't so much about ecological and environmental ways to living together with others and all the wonderful living things that make this world alive...it was more about how can we make a 'buck'...which btw... is decreasing in value globally... every day...

[Siel]

Yep -- I agree it's good to see conferences like Opp Green happening in LA :) Hopefully what seem like shortcomings this time around are just growing pains --