What it is
Save the World Air, Inc. was a small, thinly traded public company in Santa Barbara whose technology was meant to improve how oil moves through pipelines. It was raising money on a technical story that could not be checked from a filing. In August 2015 it renamed itself QS Energy.
Around 2011 Fowler took a consulting seat there, paid in equity, a personal seat held while he ran Tellus Design and Build.
What Common Ground did
- Fowler took a seat inside the company rather than reading it from a distance through its filings, to hear what its own people believed rather than what it published.
- He asked for the claim as a mechanism: what the technology physically did to the oil, the pipe or the flow, and what pipeline operators already pay for to get the same result.
- He asked who besides the company was paid to say it worked, and whether any outside lab or pipeline operator had put money or a test bay behind it.
- He helped the company raise about $3 million, and kept the raise separate from the question of whether the technology worked, since capital raised measures persuasion, not physics.
- He named the cost of the seat plainly: a consultant with equity in the company he is testing judges more gently than a stranger would, and the only cure is a written finding someone who was not in the room could check.
- He read the later name change as an announcement, not a finding about the technology.
Results
- About $3 million raised for the company with Fowler's help, giving it the runway it was asking for.
- A five-question method for testing a hard technical claim from close range, and the rule that came with it: closeness counts as diligence only when it produces a written page someone who was not in the room could check.
External links
- Public data room: Save the World Air data room
Public record
Stories from this work
At a glance
| Project type | Technical-claim diligence from an operating seat |
|---|---|
| Industry | Energy technology |
| Seat | Consultant, with an equity position |
| Ran through | Save the World Air, Inc.; a personal seat, not a Tellus engagement |
| Dates | About 2011 |
| Location | Santa Barbara, California |
| Public data room | Save the World Air data room |
| Related pages | Jesse Fowler |
| Credit | Created by Common Ground |