“I hate gassers!” laughs Dr. Rob Wilder as he burns rubber across the parking lot of his favorite sushi restaurant in Encinitas. He means cars that run on gasoline and rock oil like the cars most of the rest of us drive.
Wilder rods around SoCal in a pumpkin orange, all-electric Tesla convertible, one of the first sold in San Diego County. He ordered it special from Tesla Motors and waited two years for the car. He and his wife bought a Nissan Leaf more recently. too, which they love as well.. Nearly Just about the only thing with more torque than the Tesla, he says, is a turbocharged Porsche.
It’s strange to “scream” around a parking lot in a car that makes no noise, no scream at all, since it has no real grinding gears or throttle. It’s just the sound of rubber on pavement as we smooth up the road to Wilder’s house in Encinitas. The roof of the house is covered with solar panels, and the panels are the things that charge the car. Wilder takes great and mischievous anti-gasser delight in this fact.
“We’re running in essence off the sun,” he explains.
Wilder, 51, has an encyclopedic mind for all things alternative — solar, wind, geothermal, transport and energy — both in the U.S. and worldwide. He is CEO and founder of Encinitas-based WilderShares, whose Indexes are tracked by funds, including by the half-billion-dollar Clean Energy Portfolio (PBW) and two other ETF’s or exchange-traded funds (funds that track an index but can be traded like a stock.)
Wilder’s focus is to help select the companies that may go into his indexes. He likes game-changers and he’s not politically correct about his choices. “I hate PC-ness! Hate it!” (Counterintuitive note: Wilder was just elected to the board of the Sierra Club.) If a company is huge, but still has game-changer or important innovation in clean technology and conservation — like Kyocera, for instance with solar — then it could make the index. Or if it’s small and potentially revolutionary, in may go in too. The main tracker fund is made up of about 55 companies and a percentage of the fund is allocated to a company when selected, as much as $15 million each.
“That’s a drop in the bucket for a Kyocera, but that just may jump-start a small outfit. That can bring those guys a new day.” (Kyocera is currently not part of the fund, as it has moved to the “purer-plays.”)
Wilder helps select companies for Indexes, but is not a stock picker, not the money guy. There’s a self-imposed firewall between what he does in Indexing in Encinitas, and the backroom, the Wall Street side, which is handled including out of London and Arizona with his partners.
“My wife says all my life I’ve been running away from money. Well, this time I failed miserably!” Wilder shouts more seriously. “I’m pushy about green solutions, I like to push the envelope! And a car like this importantly, proves electric cars can also be fun and sexy. I mean this car’s a babe magnet, and I say that as a happily married man. Why do men buy sports cars? It’s evolutionary!”
In the early ’80s, Wilder wanted to change the world. He had a law degree and a doctorate in environmental policy. He’d written a very decent book called “Listening to the Sea,” and as an activist helped to influence some of California’s ocean policies.
He also felt an intense drive to help find better, green solutions. He tried working for the Nature Conservancy, and had worked in marine conservation in Maui. Yet the change he wished to see in the world wasn’t happening fast enough for him. After seeing Aa solar hot water heater was installed atop his house. simply worked great, he He got to thinking about going further. He began to noodle away on the Internet late at night, looking at the little upstart companies that were trying to get something going in solar, wind, hot water or fuel cells. He helped create a website and began to rank and pick them.
Wilder drives his Tesla electric sports car near his North County home. — Howard Lipin / U-TWilder understands money and markets. Teaming with a partner in the late 1990s they felt indexes were at last possible and wise, for smart green solutions. He got on a plane and flew to Boston to talk to some big old-line mutual fund guys, tell them the world was about to change.
They thought he was crazy. ETFs were a new and risky idea. The place to be was Coke, IBM, Dow Chemical. Any edgy money left over was going into socially conscious plays. That was how to change the world, the big boys told him: charity.
Wilder argued that if you wanted to create real change, you needed to bake in a profit motive and support the people whose products and ideas would lead the charge. They laughed him out of Bean Town. It was a long, long flight back to Maui.
A few years Much later he got an email from Chicago. They proposed that the idea of a clean energy Index be an actual traded fund, and so it was on.
The time for green Indexing was then barely just beginning, but “I’d advise, Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good — or the great. That’s my advice to entrepreneurs. Get it done. Get it out there and try. The initial concept will change, I guarantee you. You should see my ‘no’ pile. It’s high. Very high. But when people turn me down and I think the idea’s a good one, it makes me angry. Let me clarify that. Doesn’t make me angry. Makes me motivated. In my experience, it’s not the people into money, money, money that make the real money. It’s the ones who understand the technology, and they form their company around that. If they’re right, the money follows.
“I had a guy on my advisory board who’d won one of the most prestigious scientific prizes in the world. I was interviewing him for the board early on, offering him this and that, and he leans across the table at lunch, and stares me down.
‘Mr. Wilder, I am repulsed by money!’
“That cracked me up. Of course, I had to put him on the board.”
Our interview is over. Soon he backs up the car in his driveway to take me home. It’s eerily silent.
“You know,” he says, “the Tesla people are maybe worried the car is so quiet at slow speeds somebody might run over a pedestrian. Here’s an idea: Create a sound box that goes vroom when you throw it into reverse. Or maybe a dog barks, like on an iPhone, or a few bars of the blues. Like it?”
He laughs and we scream down the road, without making a sound, of course.
Wilder rods around SoCal in a pumpkin orange, all-electric Tesla convertible, one of the first sold in San Diego County. He ordered it special from Tesla Motors and waited two years for the car. He and his wife bought a Nissan Leaf more recently. too, which they love as well.. Nearly Just about the only thing with more torque than the Tesla, he says, is a turbocharged Porsche.
It’s strange to “scream” around a parking lot in a car that makes no noise, no scream at all, since it has no real grinding gears or throttle. It’s just the sound of rubber on pavement as we smooth up the road to Wilder’s house in Encinitas. The roof of the house is covered with solar panels, and the panels are the things that charge the car. Wilder takes great and mischievous anti-gasser delight in this fact.
“We’re running in essence off the sun,” he explains.
Wilder, 51, has an encyclopedic mind for all things alternative — solar, wind, geothermal, transport and energy — both in the U.S. and worldwide. He is CEO and founder of Encinitas-based WilderShares, whose Indexes are tracked by funds, including by the half-billion-dollar Clean Energy Portfolio (PBW) and two other ETF’s or exchange-traded funds (funds that track an index but can be traded like a stock.)
Wilder’s focus is to help select the companies that may go into his indexes. He likes game-changers and he’s not politically correct about his choices. “I hate PC-ness! Hate it!” (Counterintuitive note: Wilder was just elected to the board of the Sierra Club.) If a company is huge, but still has game-changer or important innovation in clean technology and conservation — like Kyocera, for instance with solar — then it could make the index. Or if it’s small and potentially revolutionary, in may go in too. The main tracker fund is made up of about 55 companies and a percentage of the fund is allocated to a company when selected, as much as $15 million each.
“That’s a drop in the bucket for a Kyocera, but that just may jump-start a small outfit. That can bring those guys a new day.” (Kyocera is currently not part of the fund, as it has moved to the “purer-plays.”)
Wilder helps select companies for Indexes, but is not a stock picker, not the money guy. There’s a self-imposed firewall between what he does in Indexing in Encinitas, and the backroom, the Wall Street side, which is handled including out of London and Arizona with his partners.
“My wife says all my life I’ve been running away from money. Well, this time I failed miserably!” Wilder shouts more seriously. “I’m pushy about green solutions, I like to push the envelope! And a car like this importantly, proves electric cars can also be fun and sexy. I mean this car’s a babe magnet, and I say that as a happily married man. Why do men buy sports cars? It’s evolutionary!”
In the early ’80s, Wilder wanted to change the world. He had a law degree and a doctorate in environmental policy. He’d written a very decent book called “Listening to the Sea,” and as an activist helped to influence some of California’s ocean policies.
He also felt an intense drive to help find better, green solutions. He tried working for the Nature Conservancy, and had worked in marine conservation in Maui. Yet the change he wished to see in the world wasn’t happening fast enough for him. After seeing Aa solar hot water heater was installed atop his house. simply worked great, he He got to thinking about going further. He began to noodle away on the Internet late at night, looking at the little upstart companies that were trying to get something going in solar, wind, hot water or fuel cells. He helped create a website and began to rank and pick them.
Wilder drives his Tesla electric sports car near his North County home. — Howard Lipin / U-TWilder understands money and markets. Teaming with a partner in the late 1990s they felt indexes were at last possible and wise, for smart green solutions. He got on a plane and flew to Boston to talk to some big old-line mutual fund guys, tell them the world was about to change.
They thought he was crazy. ETFs were a new and risky idea. The place to be was Coke, IBM, Dow Chemical. Any edgy money left over was going into socially conscious plays. That was how to change the world, the big boys told him: charity.
Wilder argued that if you wanted to create real change, you needed to bake in a profit motive and support the people whose products and ideas would lead the charge. They laughed him out of Bean Town. It was a long, long flight back to Maui.
A few years Much later he got an email from Chicago. They proposed that the idea of a clean energy Index be an actual traded fund, and so it was on.
The time for green Indexing was then barely just beginning, but “I’d advise, Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good — or the great. That’s my advice to entrepreneurs. Get it done. Get it out there and try. The initial concept will change, I guarantee you. You should see my ‘no’ pile. It’s high. Very high. But when people turn me down and I think the idea’s a good one, it makes me angry. Let me clarify that. Doesn’t make me angry. Makes me motivated. In my experience, it’s not the people into money, money, money that make the real money. It’s the ones who understand the technology, and they form their company around that. If they’re right, the money follows.
“I had a guy on my advisory board who’d won one of the most prestigious scientific prizes in the world. I was interviewing him for the board early on, offering him this and that, and he leans across the table at lunch, and stares me down.
‘Mr. Wilder, I am repulsed by money!’
“That cracked me up. Of course, I had to put him on the board.”
Our interview is over. Soon he backs up the car in his driveway to take me home. It’s eerily silent.
“You know,” he says, “the Tesla people are maybe worried the car is so quiet at slow speeds somebody might run over a pedestrian. Here’s an idea: Create a sound box that goes vroom when you throw it into reverse. Or maybe a dog barks, like on an iPhone, or a few bars of the blues. Like it?”
He laughs and we scream down the road, without making a sound, of course.
