Insights by Danielle Fong

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2022-01-14 08:00:08

TLDR; LightSail Energy, now LightStore, is effectively a defunct company that owns and licenses IP, which is far from the worthy and world changing company it could have and should have been. And Energy Storage, as far as investment is concerned, is back. Why wasn’t I saying anything, and what am I up to now, anyway?

It’s been far too long since i’ve written anything here. I felt rather overconstrained to speak about my situation and what I was working on in long form. and it’s been hard to explain why!

One large part of it was twitter; far too many of my essays were “eaten by tweets, as deer run ravenous consume the saplings that would become tall trees.” I’ve tweeted a lot, and while I’ve gotten a lot out of the platform, it is undeniably the case that tweets do not sum to a body of work like long form writing does, and that my absence here was a form of hiding.

Basically, I was in a double bind. I felt tied up about the misrepresentation of my company. I wanted to take the high road. I wanted to come back with an actual solution to energy storage. I did not want to petulantly point fingers for a defunct company! I did not want to bait the Streisand effect by calling out the lies of a particularly badly behaved journalist. Better to work in the shadows than to court controversy, especially when I didn’t actually need the media profile. That’s what I told myself, at least. I pretty much left the internet to study, recover, and recollect, and only really returned in a big way to warn about Covid.