Paul Shapiro: [00:00:00] You know, welcome to the business for good podcast.

Inna Braverman: Hi, thank you for having me.

Paul Shapiro: It's a great pleasure to be talking with you. And I wanted to start at the very beginning because many people do not have such an interesting welcome to the world story as you do. You were welcome to the world and then quickly left the world for a little bit and thankfully were resuscitated.

But tell us what happened at the very beginning of your life here.

Inna Braverman: So I live in Israel now, but I wasn't born here. I was born actually in Ukraine in 1986 and two weeks after I was born, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded, which was the largest in history nuclear disaster. And unluckily I was one of the babies that got hurt from the negative effects of the explosion.

I actually had the respiratory arrest and a clinical death. And my mom is a nurse. She approached my crib and she looked down and she saw me pale and blue and not breathing. And she was like, Oh my God, like, Oh [00:01:00] my God, the baby's dead. What do I do? And my father reminded her that she's a nurse. He said like, you're a nurse, do something.

And then. Thankfully, she remembered and she gave me a mouth to mouth resuscitation until the ambulance came and saved my life. So I got a second chance in life and I believe the second chance is like a significant part of my drive toward like, you know, making an impact or somehow changing the world for the best.

Paul Shapiro: When did you come to think of that? So obviously now you are trying to make an impact. You're trying to do something good for the world. But you knew this story as you were growing up, as you were a kid and as a teenager, and were you thinking then I'm going to use this second chance to do something good in the world?

Or did that come later?

Inna Braverman: So it all happened when I was a baby. So of course, you know, as a baby, I wasn't thinking anything. I didn't even remember the event, but you know, when I was four years old, my family immigrated from the Ukraine to Israel to a super small town [00:02:00] called Akko in the north of Israel.

And Every time we would have like holidays with the family or like, you know, family gatherings, everybody would remind me that and they say like, wow, would say, wow, it's so cool. You got a second chance in life. Like, you know, everybody would talk about it. Like it's the most interesting gossiping down or like the best story that ever that they ever heard.

And so growing up, I think it's really kind of. Stuck in my mind in the way like, like, wow, you know, I know so many people and nobody got a second chance in life. I got a second chance in life. I should really do something good with it. But it was a little bit difficult to decide or to understand at that point, what can I do that will be good?

Because I was in a super small town in Ukraine first and I was a child. And then when I was four years old, still a child, we immigrated to a small town in the North of Israel that like, Was that small that it didn't even have like a shopping mall or a cinema, which is kind of quite obvious Elements to have in any city nowadays, I think [00:03:00] so I really wanted to make an impact, but I didn't understand how I can make an impact, and I think this is part of the reason that as I was growing up and getting ready to enroll to university, I chose to study political science because I thought, okay, you know, I'm from a small town, but if I go and become So Politician, like maybe, you know, I can really make a change, maybe some piece in the Middle East.

For now, it didn't work out so well, but not for Ukraine and not for Israel. But that was kind of the reasoning that they chose to study what I studied.

Paul Shapiro: Wow. Yeah. Who would have guessed that where you were born and where you emigrated to both be the the political hotspots for for things a few decades later, but so When you were thinking, well, maybe I want to try to solve the Middle East problem, or maybe you want to do something else.

Eventually, you became a translator, right? And so you're working in the energy industry. What led you to that? And what gave you the spark of an idea that [00:04:00] you were thinking? Well, My expertise is in translation. Maybe I should start my own energy company.

Inna Braverman: So it wasn't exactly like that. So in Israel, when you study like a first degree, you can choose like two subjects for yours.

So the two subjects that I chose is political science in the hope of, as we said, becoming this great politician. And the second was the English language and literature. That was kind of the two main topics of the degree. And when I finished my university, You know, at 21 years old, I was super surprised to find out that there was no lineup of politicians waiting to hire a young lady with a degree in English and political science.

And, you know, I had to find a job at this point. Okay. The studies are kind of done for now. And Then I looked online and I saw an ad for an English Hebrew translator in a renewable energy company. So I said to myself, okay, I'll do it like as a temporary job, you know, like I studied English, so I know English very, very well.

So, you [00:05:00] know, until I can get my real dreams come true, maybe I go work as an English Hebrew translator to kind of earn your first salary. Real money. And although the company I went to work for wasn't exactly, let's say my cup of tea, but I would say that the biggest advantage there was really that I got exposed to this whole, I would say, very interesting and wonderful world of renewable energy.

And whereas, you know, back then wind energy and solar energy were like sectors that were super packed with competition and there was not too much to innovate, you know, solar panels was like, Certain like basically panels that were produced in different countries to lower their costs, but like there wasn't too much that you could do or improve in terms of efficiency or, you know, working mechanism and wave energy, according to all the scientists and engineers actually could produce twice the amount of electricity that the world.

Produces now, which is a super significant amount that can really become game changer. And what I found really intriguing and surprising was the [00:06:00] fact that although it had such an immense potential, no company, no matter how big it was, no matter how much financial or human resources they had, wasn't able to make wave energy reality.

So that was kind of that. Kind of time period in my life that I'm, I guess, very logically said to myself, or naively said to myself, I don't have the money. I don't have the technical background. I don't have the contacts. Let's make wave energy happen.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, well, we definitely want to get into that. But first, let me ask why it is what you just said, because when we hear about renewable energy, we hear about wind and solar and maybe geothermal to some extent also, but it's very rare.

That at least I hear people, including wave energy in that I hear people talking about. We need better photovoltaics. We need better wind turbines. You never hear people. At least I don't. Maybe I'm not in the right circles, but I never hear people talking about better ways to capture the energy that waves create.

So let's just. First talk about why is that? Like, why [00:07:00] is wave energy not included as frequently as wind and solar or even geothermal, and then even getting to the idea of what is wave energy? Like, how do you capture the energy of a wave?

Inna Braverman: So among the companies that are developing or working to develop wave energy, it is high on the agenda, of course, how to capture wave energy and how to make it efficiently.

I would say that not that it's not on the agenda, how to do it, because it is even on the agenda of. States and of like different organizations that are not like directly related to harnessing wave energy. And it's less familiar than wind and solar. And the reason for it for being less familiar, at least for the time being, is the fact that Most companies in the early days of Wave Energy that tried to develop it, did it in a super complicated, super expensive, super like unreliable way, and instead of like Wave Energy to show like, Instead of WaveEnergy showing like [00:08:00] success stories and like exciting new projects coming up to life WaveEnergy was mostly about like, you know, some power plant built once in like, once in the blue moon, once in every 10 years.

And usually this power plant broke down and everybody ended up super emb Embarrassed, wanting to hide the failure. So that's kind of why wave energy didn't become as familiar because there was no real success stories. 99 percent of the competitors in wave energy decided to go into the offshore. The offshore zone is like four or five kilometers into the sea.

Once they decided to go there, that was kind of the beginning and the end of their story. It was too expensive there. You need ships, divers, underwater cables, and mooring. It was breaking down all the time in the offshore. You have waves of 20 meter and even higher. And unfortunately, no manmade stationary equipment can survive the load of a 20 meter wave height.

Paul Shapiro: Is that why they went off shores? Cause the waves are so much bigger offshore. Is that the reason?

Inna Braverman: Exactly. So the thought was interesting. The implementation was not so much because in the offshore, [00:09:00] you do have much higher waves than you have offshore. Let's say on the coastline, because a 20 meter wave height on the coastline is a tsunami.

So obviously we don't, and thankfully we don't see it very often. But yes, the most of the people that, that kind of opened and established those companies were not entrepreneurs. They were mostly like engineers. And you know, they said to themselves, they didn't think about money. savings and like, you know, everything that's logical in the business.

They were more thinking like, where's the biggest amount of power that I can harness to really like show this wind and solar people how it's done. The problem is that you know, if you're going to a place that you're breaking down every three days and that you cost so much more than, Any element existent out there, you wouldn't have too many clients.

Like you wouldn't be a success story. Like, so I think that was a big mistake. And I'm a little surprised to be honest about this mistake, because if you look at the wind industry, the wind industry for the first 100 years was only [00:10:00] building. Wind turbines on land, what is called onshore. It never went offshore.

It took them 100 years to attempt to build a first offshore wind turbine, and it was built in Denmark. They waited, waited to be like to gain expertise in terms of technology to gain like, you know, the supply chain, the financial support, like they waited to kind of do everything on the land, on the safe, safe side.

And as the time went by and the time was 100 years, they only dared to go to the offshore, which they're building a lot of offshore. Turbines in the middle of the ocean right now, wave energy. I don't know what happened to them. It was like overoptimistic. They said like, ah, forget the 100 years development.

Let's go offshore straight away. We don't have the money. We don't have funding. We don't have technical expertise. Let's go where it's the hardest. This to me doesn't make sense. And I think that's kind of the reason that we do hear about wind energy very often, and we're just starting to hear about wave energy.

Paul Shapiro: And is, are those the reasons you decided to start your own company? I mean, as you mentioned, you know, you were 24 [00:11:00] years old. You had no engineering background. You had no entrepreneurial background. You had no money to start a company. And yet you decided I'm going to quit my job as a translator. And instead I'm going to start my own onshore wave energy company.

What led you to think. I might succeed at that.

Inna Braverman: I don't think I was thinking when I was 24, to be honest, too much, but you know, you have the naiveness, you have a very strong belief, but it didn't really happen like at this kind of turn of events, what happened is that I quit the company first, before I even had like any idea or anything related to that, I started.

I found out that there's like a huge market. There's a huge demand for a product for a reliable cost efficient wave energy product. And I saw that this demand is not being met by supply. You don't have to be genius to, to, to understand that if there's a huge demand and nobody supplies the product, if you can supply the product.

It will be good, you know, you don't need to be very engineering or entrepreneurial [00:12:00] oriented kind of in order to understand that. So that's what kind of gained my attention from the first. There's a big need, there's a big market, yet nobody's using kind of that market and need. Or supplying that need. So I started researching like what is kind of the problem of all the companies, and I really find out, found out that it's five same problems over and over and over again, which is cost reliability, insurability, environmental impact and difficulty to connect to the grid.

So I said to myself, okay, all the companies that existed out there, again, no matter how much resources, techno, technological background they had in the development, all of them failed in these five points. If I fix these five points. I'm, you know, I'm catching the waves kind of, no, no pun intended. So that's what I did.

Like I started looking what, what's like similar between those companies, what different in those companies, like what do you actually have to do in order to solve these five problems? That was my key focus. I wasn't able to do sketches and blueprints. I'm not an engineer, [00:13:00] but I was able to think about like a product that would answer to this problem.

And I did not have, it's not like I was 24 and had no money. And I said to myself, okay, let's open a company. Like, you know, I didn't have money to build a power station, not even to register a patent. So, you know so I did think about an idea, but for a while I put it aside. I thought to myself, okay, it's a great idea, good for you, but it's not really realistic because you don't have the money or anything else that's needed to kind of execute it.

And then like at the social event, I met a serial entrepreneur, his name is David Lab. He really got excited about, you know, wave energy in general. He was thinking about it in a completely different part of the world on his own as well. So kind of our meeting was kind of a match made in business heaven and he ended up investing the first 1 million into the company.

So I did not start the company with nothing. I started the company with an investor, 50, 50 percent partner that actually enabled, you know, our initial research [00:14:00] patents and everything that you need to do to open a company.

Paul Shapiro: So you have this 1 million, you're getting started and you decide that maybe instead of just trying to do everything on your own, you're going to do a contest, right?

You want to get some designs. So where did you do this contest and what happened from it?

Inna Braverman: So I, I was. Really kind of scared, you know, to utilize the money in an incorrect way or to spend too much because, you know, it's my first kind of entrepreneurial experience and I really wanted, look, both of us, David and I, both of us are not engineers and we had great ideas that seemed great on paper, but we didn't really know if they would work in real life, you know, so I did.

Put as kind of a priority to save as much cost as possible until the point that we know, okay, our idea is actually feasible. So instead of doing the initial kind of R and D and testing in Israel, I went back to Ukraine to the same city where I was born and I made a competition between like 300 engineers, giving [00:15:00] them kind of, you know, What's the product that we want?

What do we want it to do? What limitations? We don't want it to have and like for them to offer their own kind of execution pathway to our idea. And then from this team, we chose a team of five engineers that kind of we believe that could assist us in Okay. Making our concept a reality. And then we went on to test like a very, very small wave energy array.

The first one that we ever built in the hydro mechanical Institute in Kiev. It's like a Marine Institute. And from there we, we continued already to real conditions testing and so

Paul Shapiro: on. Wow. So what is the actual technology that you all are using? So it's different from the technology that would be used offshore, as you mentioned, like four or five kilometers out in, into the ocean, what is the technology that you're working on?

Inna Braverman: So our technology is considered like a technology that is implemented in the onshore and near shore zone. When I say onshore, I don't mean like prime real estate or like, you know, Miami Beach [00:16:00] coastline. I mean, more existent structures such as piers, breakwaters, jetties, piers, like, and I need other types of structures.

The floaters connect to existing structures. They go up and down with the movement of the waves, pushing a hydraulic cylinder, which transmits biodegradable fluid into land located accumulators. A pressure is being built, the higher the weight, the higher the pressure, turning the hydromotor, turning the generator, and sending clean electricity into the grid.

So,

Paul Shapiro: so, so how much can this do? I mean, we're going to include in the show notes for this episode at business for good podcast. com a wink. So you can see photos of these floaters that you're talking about. They're attached to something like a pier or something else that on land and the, with the ocean water is moving, they're going up and down.

How much energy can that actually generate? Like, are we talking about something that can, that can power a city? Or something that could power just the energy needed by the peer. Like what is the quantity of energy that we're thinking about here? [00:17:00]

Inna Braverman: So the good point about wave energy, that it has about more than 800 times.

Density of water than density of air so you can produce much larger electricity amount with much smaller spaces and smaller devices like as a rule of a thumb. Even if I compare to solar energy, solar energy needs about 10 square meters per each 1 kilowatt of installed capacity in Gibraltar, the first grid connected power station that we built, we had an installed capacity of 100 kilowatt on the 20 square meters on the same space.

You could do 2 kilowatt of solar energy. So 50 times more installed capacity on solar energy. So you can produce very significant amounts like on a large breakwater of like three to five kilometers, which is a standard size of breakwater for a port. You can put about. 50 megawatts of power of installed capacity.

It's about 50, 000 households in simple words. So yes, you can produce significant energy amounts. It all depends on the space that you have available. And of course, on the wave height and [00:18:00] wave period, which is the resource from where you're, Harnessing your electricity.

Paul Shapiro: Well, so it sounds really encouraging, right?

So you can have something that doesn't pollute. But is there there's obviously no fossil fuel that's used here, right? So you're creating clean energy. And 1 of the concerns about, let's say, offshore, as you mentioned, is degradation to the marine eco habit, eco habitat. Is there anything associated with that on onshore?

Sure.

Inna Braverman: So we don't have we actually did that for our Israeli project, which is the first ever in history grid connected wave energy array that's connected to the National Israeli Electrical Grid. We actually performed a third party environmental evaluation before building the project. The evaluation came back very positive.

It showed that we have no impact on the marine environment. Our floaters do not connect to the seabed. They only connect to the existent man made structures, which are usually basically cement or sand. Stone. Cement or stones are not exactly [00:19:00] environmentally friendly when you just put them in the middle of the water.

But ports and coastal cities have to build those in order to protect coastal communities and the ports, you know, from storms and from dangerous weather conditions. So we take something that is not good for the environment and has to be built and actually turn it into a source of clean electricity. So no, there's no really negative impact there.

Paul Shapiro: Okay, great. And so you mentioned in Gibraltar, you mentioned in Israel, you're working on a pilot program in the port of Los Angeles as well. How many of these do you have actually today that are providing electricity for some grid?

Inna Braverman: So, so far we built two grid connected projects. One is in Gibraltar, second is in Israel.

In Israel, we did it with the collaboration and co investment from EDF, Electricite de France, which is the largest The renewable energy developer in Europe and was the French National Electrical Company. And in the port of LA will be our third one and will be our first penetration to the US market, which we find the [00:20:00] US market very, very exciting right now, especially with the inflation reduction act and with all the goals that were set to decarbonize, you know, kind of the United States.

States. The fourth one that we will be building will be in Porto, Portugal. It's the fourth one will be actually our first commercial project. We just got all the licenses just a week ago. I was in Portugal. I just returned on Thursday, and it was amazing. We actually got like approval for everything. We visited the site.

We had an official kickoff meeting, and I believe the project in Portugal will not only be Eco Wave Power's first commercial project, Scale project, but first commercial scale project for the wave energy field as a whole. So the success of this project means a lot, not only for like wave power, but in my view for the world.

Paul Shapiro: Wow. Well, congratulations in advance on that. That certainly will be very encouraging to see you turning the tides for wave energy pun intended. You mentioned the first million dollars, you know, that came in, obviously you've needed more than a million dollars to [00:21:00] do all of this. So how did you go about fundraising after?

That first million and how much have you raised prior to the IPO that you had?

Inna Braverman: So the good thing about our technology that it's not really capital intensive because we install on existing infrastructure and because we're a technology company and not an execution, not an engineering company. So we don't have to have a lot of like construction people on board and mostly engineers for planning and supervising.

So after the first $1 million, we did two fundraising rounds, two private rounds two VCs basically invested. After that in 2019, we went public for the first time on Nasdaq, Stockholm, and the second time that we went public was on Nasdaq, United States, NASDAQ Capital Market in 2021 under the stock symbol wave.

Which we were very lucky that was available because we had to fight for it with another company. And we raised about, I would say so far a little bit in excess of 26 million dollars. Is

Paul Shapiro: 26 [00:22:00] million dollars enough or do you need to continue raising into the future?

Inna Braverman: Look, so far, I think we were very smart and kind of Cost efficient with the funding that were raised that we did not come back to market to raise funding since 2021, which is very, very rare for a company that's actually doing the R and D and developing a new product and building power stations, which like is not a small thing.

Usually, you know, not need a lot of capital all the time. So I'm very proud in the fact that we did not dilute any of our shareholders since 2021. We didn't have to come back for money. We have now a Cash on our balance sheet, and we were able to be lucky and not to have to raise and dilute our shareholders.

Also, because of the fact that we did amazing strategic partnerships, as I said, in Israel with EDF, which is the French national electrical company. The Los Angeles project is co funded by Shell. Which is a huge, of course, energy company as well in Portugal right now, we're also negotiating a big infrastructure with a big infrastructure fund that would come [00:23:00] in and fund the project at the kind of SPV at the, you know.

Company project company level. So we also receive grants. We also receive a lot of support. So I think it really helps us to be able to do the most possible while providing our shareholders, the best value.

Paul Shapiro: How many folks work at the company now?

Inna Braverman: We have 12 people. We're not, we're not big company mostly engineers right now we will hire some more people because we're opening we're kind of splitting the operations of the company.

Eco, Eco Power Israel will remain kind of the engineering hub, you know, Israel is kind of the startup nation and we're really, really good with our engineering and the U. S. is. I don't know the sales nation. So you're really good there in business development, sales and so on. So in Miami, Florida, we're now opening offices and we'll hire some more people for business development, for sales and so on.

Paul Shapiro: That's great. Is the company profitable or the, or are these partnerships that you're working on render the company profitable [00:24:00] today?

Inna Braverman: So the company is not yet profitable. I don't think you can become really profitable with only making like pilots and the first step, like no country, unfortunately, in the world will let you build a commercial scale, like profitable, huge project without coming in with a pilot and a pilot will never be profitable because you have kind of the same, same expenses, same unique expenses as a big power station, but it's on a much smaller scale.

Scale of revenues. So right now, no, we're not profitable, but like we finished last year at 2023 with net loss of around like 1. 8 million, which is not considered significant for the energy industry.

Paul Shapiro: Right. Yeah. It's a very small amount to lose for, for that. So When you went public, I presume it was a great educational experience to learn what it's like to take a private company into the public sector.

How are things changed for you now that you're publicly traded? Do you every day are you going on and looking at wave and seeing how, how you're doing? Are you looking at it every hour? Is there changes, anything about what you say publicly? [00:25:00] What's different now that you're running a publicly traded company?

Inna Braverman: I don't go look at it every day or every hour. I don't think that I think that, you know, kind of CEOs or employees that get stuck on the stock price kind of lose sight of what's important because if you have a good product and you have a good technology, no matter how badly your stock does at a certain moment in time, it will catch up.

And if your stock is doing amazingly, but your product is very bad, but people still haven't noticed. You know, the same thing will happen. The stock, the stock will crash at a certain point. So I don't think the stock is really what's important. I, I put a lot of attention on operation on delivering what we promise on showing to the market that like, you know, what we say is what we do and that we value our shareholders and that we're not like there's some companies that come to the market and they keep raising more funds and more funds and more funds.

And then the shareholders that invested end up with very little stock because they go diluted every time there was a fundraising round. So we really don't do that as a decision. The advantages [00:26:00] and disadvantages of being public are also pretty clear. Like the disadvantage of it for a company, our size, like an innovative company and the growth company is the fact that it adds an additional kind of layer of.

Something that you have to manage because a funding entity is like its own product. You know, you don't need to communicate with the shareholders, issue reports. You have a lot of work that's associated with being public. So that's definitely not the positive side, but the positive side for us, for example, is that once we went public, we were able to close many more deals for projects and get licensing faster because most of the time the projects and licensings and lands are owned by.

You know, governments, municipalities and so on. And they really like working with publicly traded entities because of the transparency involved. And so really, I think that's the big advantage for us. And I'm looking forward to showing our shareholders that we perform and that we do what we promise and making them proud with, in November, we're planning to have the big opening of the [00:27:00] Israeli project.

It was a bit postponed because of the war. We didn't do like the official ceremony. Then soon we're up, we're planning to open the LA project and then the Portugal project. So I really think that our shareholders will be proud and you know, hopefully they would also become successful and see that it's a good decision you know, having EchoWave Power Stock.

Paul Shapiro: Let's certainly hope so. You sound pretty bullish on the company right now. You know, were there any times during the past decade plus that you've been running this, where you thought that maybe this wouldn't work, that maybe this actually is not going to cross the finish line?

Inna Braverman: No, if I would think it's not going across the finish line, I don't think that I would be here today.

And I don't think that I would be here today in a position saying to you that I never sold any stock and the founders of the company currently hold majority of the shares of the company. So majority of the company is not public. It's private, actually, by the founders. So the fact both founders never sold anything, I think, shows the belief throughout the time in the company.

And yeah. No, I, I really think [00:28:00] that we have a good product. So

Paul Shapiro: you've never taken anything off the table even after going public? No. Yeah. Okay. Well, you're betting big. I admire it. I admire your, I admire your faith in the company. That's fantastic. Thank you. Were there any resources enough for you that were useful?

You know, you started as somebody who, as you self described, didn't know much about running a company and you've obviously learned a lot in more than a decade of doing so. Were there any resources that were useful for you that maybe somebody who's listening would think, Oh, I really admire what she's done.

I want to do something cool like that as well. Are there any things that you would recommend that a listener might check out?

Inna Braverman: I really liked there's a Sheryl Sandberg's book. It's very famous and also Ted Talk called Lean In where she describes how it was for her, like as a female entrepreneur and what she encountered in different kinds of Times of her career.

So for female CEOs, future female entrepreneurs or managers or whatever, I would definitely recommend [00:29:00] her TED talk and her book. I really liked it. And I think what really also helped me was kind of inspirational stories that were similar to mine a bit. So for example, If you look at Jack Ma, the, the, one of the, I think the richest man in China or was the richest man in China.

I don't know the exact status. So

Paul Shapiro: The founder of Alibaba.

Inna Braverman: Exactly. So the founder of Alibaba, he was the school teacher in his profession. Like he had nothing to do with the e commerce or this type of software that they developed. And he became like a very, very successful entrepreneur with Alibaba. And there's a, you know, a very known story about him that he tried to go and get hired in KFC chicken.

And they didn't hire him and he tried to go to Harvard 10 times and he didn't get accepted. So it kind of gave me the belief that, wow, look, you don't have to necessarily have the background or, you know, or finish some degree or. Anything in a field that you want to pursue sometimes, you know, having a [00:30:00] good idea and a lot, a lot of passion and persistence is enough.

Paul Shapiro: Indeed. Indeed. I actually, one time found myself, I was sitting, I was in Silicon Valley and I was at a Chinese restaurant and I looked over at the table next to me and Jack Ma was eating there with a couple people. And I couldn't believe that I was sitting so close to him. And I of course did not.

Muster the courage to say anything to him, but I wish that I would have at least shaken his hand. So I saw that I did

Inna Braverman: it. So similar thing happened to me. I was in a restaurant in Paris and both of us were speakers in a conference in the same conference and I look there and I subject my sitting in the corner of the restaurant.

But as opposed to you, I went to him and I introduced myself. I gave him a business card. I would like to be honest and say that he never emailed anything. But it's not really related to the wave energy sector. So it's not very surprising, but you see, there's some similarities.

Paul Shapiro: Yeah. Maybe he would want to invest at least, [00:31:00] but I, I appreciate that you had more courage to actually go talk to him because I did not want to bother him.

He was with a group of people. None of them were speaking English.

Inna Braverman: I'm Israeli bothering people for our, for our needs is our, the chutzpah is in our blood.

Paul Shapiro: Very good. Very good. Very good. So speaking of chutzpah, there may be people who are listening, you know, who are thinking I'd really like to start my own company, but frankly, I don't even know what I should do.

Are there any things that you wish somebody else would start either in the energy sector or anything that you don't yet exist that you wish that they would do?

Inna Braverman: I think there's so many things that really don't exist, like it's really a world of endless opportunities, like I'm sure that the whole energy sector would like to see better accumulation, energy accumulation systems, because right now the ones that are available are either super large in size, like if you want to accumulate a significant amount of electricity, then it's super large in size and you don't really have where to put it or it's super [00:32:00] expensive.

So that's something that I think that would really help to turn the world into like, you know, a fully 100 percent environmentally friendly energy generating world. Like, that's what comes from the top of my head, but like, even covering different needs of technologies that are doing good, but when they go out of kind of cycle, they don't do so good.

So, for example, with solar energy, I heard like, again, that's not my niche and my field, but I heard many times that after a solar field, solar energy. Stops operating after 20 or 25 years. The land on which it stood is kind of like dead for 100 years. And there's nothing to do with the equipment that was standing on it.

There's, there's not really a good recycling option for solar panels. Apparently I didn't know that somebody from the industry told me, so maybe, I don't know if a company would see that as a need and invent some way of recycling solar energy and making sure that it doesn't harm kind of the land on which it stands for that extended period of time.

So I think there's a lot of big needs. And once in [00:33:00] the energy and the renewable energy sector. And I think it's, it's really one of the most critical sectors because right now, 60 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions are from the way that we produce our energy. So I really would like to see more invention in the energy industry.

Paul Shapiro: Great. Well, I do want to end back on nuclear here because we started talking about the Chernobyl disaster and you're talking now about some of the environmental side effects of clean energy, right? Of like solar panels and so on. There a lot of the clean energy advocates have in recent years become great advocates for nuclear thinking that this is going to be one of the key ways that we're going to power our civilization without fossil fuels.

As somebody who was a victim of Chernobyl, what do you think? Have you come around? Are you in support of nuclear energy as a clean energy source, or would you prefer to stay away from it?

Inna Braverman: Well, that's, I would say a hard question on the one hand, nuclear. When nothing bad happens, when [00:34:00] there's no explosion, problem, I don't know, anything of this sort, the nuclear does not really pollute, you know, it doesn't have, it can produce a lot of energy, but does not really pollute.

But then once something does happen, it pollutes for like, 100 years, because like, for example, Chernobyl happened, I'm 38 now, so if Chernobyl happened 38 years ago, because it happened two weeks after I was born, and till now it did not clean up, like you have still like approximately 62 years to go for it to clean up according to all the scientists.

That's not a good thing, like, and if there would be only one Problem like that that happened. You can say, okay, that's like a unique experience. But then something similar happened in Japan. They had a problem there with nuclear next to the water, which also scared everybody a little bit. So kind of, I don't know really what to say because they have pluses.

They have my nonsense. I think like everything in the world [00:35:00] and depends if there's a way to make it 100 percent safe. Do it if, if it's like very risky, I would prefer like 100 percent renewable

Paul Shapiro: energy. Yeah, I think that those who are in favor of nuclear would say that none of these energy sources are 100 percent safe.

As you mentioned, even solar has these downsides of environmental degradation. And so the question is, you know, per per kilowatt hour produced. How, how much risk is there? And the advocates of nuclear will say, well, if you look at how many hundreds of nuclear plants there are and how few problems there are with them, it's actually safer than many of the other options and certainly safer than continuing to spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with coal and oil and gas.

And so on. So you know, it's a, it's tough because making energy requires Some sacrifices somewhere and apparently not with onshore wave energy, but everything else, there seemed to be some, [00:36:00] some concerns depending on

Inna Braverman: what, depending which concern, you know, like there's a concern that really, like they say, solar, like the land that solar is being put on is not useful for a big amount of time.

But on the other hand, the land that is being put on usually from the start is not the land that's dedicated, let's say to agriculture. So

Paul Shapiro: Yeah, I think the, I think the bigger environmental concern about solar is the actual production of the photovoltaics. The actual production of the panels is not so environmentally friendly.

Of course, dramatically superior to using fossil fuels, needless to say, but there's always going to be trade offs. And whether it's, you know, with wind turbines

Inna Braverman: and when you build a nuclear plant or a gas plant or an oil plant, you're not harming the environment when you build like this huge gigantic plant and with a lot of steel and cement and, you know, I

Paul Shapiro: couldn't, I couldn't agree more, you know, I couldn't agree more.

There's trade offs for everything. We have to figure out what are going to be the ways to do the least amount of harm with the energy that our civilization demands. So my [00:37:00] hope is that eco wave power will be producing a lot of the percentage of energy that civilization needs and that I get to see your Los Angeles pilot.

When it is up and running and feeding into the grid, I'd love to go down there and be able to check it out and say, even though I never spoke to Jack Ma, I will one day be saying, Hey, listen, one time I talked to, you know, Braverman and I, and I know her. And then people will say, Oh, you got to give her my card for you.

So that will happen one day. You'll be the Jack. And I will

Inna Braverman: email the people that gave me the card.

Paul Shapiro: Very good. Very good. Well, Anna, thanks so much for all that you're doing. I really admire your journey and what you are accomplishing and I wish nothing but the best for you.

Inna Braverman: Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.