The Future of Clean Energy Under Biden

Mr. Westly served on the faculty at Stanford’s Graduate School of business for five years. He helped take eBay public in 1998 where he served as SVP of Marketing, Business Development, M&A and International. In 2002, Mr. Westly was elected Controller and CFO of the State of California. He served on the boards of CalPERS and CalSTRS, which invest more than $450 billion. In 2007, he founded the Westly Group, one of the largest smart energy and transportation venture firms in the U.S. The firm has had four portfolio companies go public, including Tesla Motors, where Mr. Westly sat on the Board of Trustees for 3 years.

Florian Kolb joined Intertrust as Chief Commercial Officer and General Manager, Energy in January 2020 after a 15-year career in a series of business leadership roles within the European energy industry. He is responsible for all of Intertrust’s product sales and business development activities, as well as the company’s initiatives in the energy and related industries.

Most recently, Kolb spent five years as CEO/Managing Director of innogy’s (initially RWE) Silicon Valley innovation group. In that role, he led U.S. strategic investments and innovation activities, including building and managing a strategic investment portfolio aimed at assembling technology assets for data-driven business models for the energy industry. He also helped incubate internal start-ups at innogy, which led to the creation of DigiKoo and Livisi. Kolb is a seasoned deal-maker; prior to taking on his roles in Silicon Valley, he worked in operations, restructuring as well as M&A, driving multi-billion euro mergers and acquisitions in the European energy sector.

In 2016, Kolb founded Free Electrons, a global accelerator program now operated by a consortium of ten leading international utilities. Kolb holds a Master’s degree in political economics from the University of Passau, Germany, and has participated in executive programs at INSEAD and IMD Lausanne.