From Croatia to Silicon Valley, Cleaning Up The Environment: Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Tech (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What types of companies were generating the large amounts of environmental data?

Neno Duplan: Consulting engineering firms working for Chevron or oil companies. Almost every gas station on every corner can be considered a contaminated site because almost every underground storage container at those gas stations has leaked at some point. They leak into groundwater, and that same groundwater would be pumped into fields three miles away. That led to chemicals in lettuce and other produce.

There was no industry that monopolized environmental contamination. I got involved in Silicon Valley through semiconductor companies. If you look around the early stages of semiconductors here when Fairchild started down in Mountain View, they used very aggressive chemicals for cleaning components during the manufacture of semiconductors. Those chemicals are thousands of times worse than gasoline. Fairchild initially purchased the same underground storage tanks used by gasoline companies, not realizing that steel tanks were not compatible with the chemicals they were storing in them. Over time the steel tanks just disappeared. It took quite a few years for them to realize what was happening.

Semiconductor manufacturing companies were generating a lot of revenue, and they were willing to pay the cost for the chemicals needed for their manufacturing process. They thought the reason they were using such a large quantity of chemicals was that they were being exhausted in the manufacturing process. What they did not realize was that two-thirds of their chemicals were leaking into the ground.

In the early 1990s a couple of spectacular investigations discovered that early manufacturers like Fairchild, Intel, and IBM had contaminated large areas of ground water that had spread to large areas. The government ordered them to clean it up but doing so is not easy or simple. It required putting a lot of holes in the ground and collecting samples and mapping the chemicals. They essentially had to chase down where the chemicals went. It was a huge awakening for many companies at that time and it cost them millions of dollars. Some of those companies went bankrupt because of that. I got very interested in that aspect of the business at that time.

Now you have perpetual data. You have square miles of land that looks pristine on the surface. Everyone wants clean industry. However, underground it is still a total mess. We started building the first Oracle databases at that time. We had a lot of success in selling the software to many of those companies. What was missing at that time was an organized approach to reuse the same tools on multiple sites. Building custom solutions at each site was very expensive. Clients were willing to pay for those one-time solutions because they felt it was a temporary problem that they needed to get out of as quickly as possible. Now we know that the problem was not temporary.

Shortly afterward, I left the consulting company I was working for and kind of forgot about the whole business of data management for environmental projects until 1996. That is when I grabbed a WSJ on a flight and read about a young company called Yahoo that had built a portal that allowed people all over the world to log into where they could find all types of information. That was an eye-opener for me. I realized that what I had been doing five years ago was problematic because of all the customized database solutions. We never got to the point of having an integrated solution. I thought that if we could do something like what Yahoo had done, then it could be a great evolution for the environmental data management industry.

This segment is part 2 in the series : From Croatia to Silicon Valley, Cleaning Up The Environment: Neno Duplan, CEO of Locus Tech
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