Over the last several weeks I have had the pleasure to meet a new face - new to me anyway - Joel Moxley a PhD from MIT, a serial entrepreneur, an active angel investor and a great contributor back to our community. We met through BEN Colorado and I look forward to working more with Joel. Currently Joel is a founder and in charge of business development at Foro Energy. Before Foro, he was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at North Bridge Venture Partners. He has had loads of entrepreneurial success himself as a Co-Founder of PriorSmart, acquired by RPX Corporation (NASDAQ:RPXC), and as the Vice President of Operations of Semprus Biosciences, acquired by Teleflex Incorporated (NYSE:TFX), that developed specialty materials for medical devices.

Foro is pretty cool too. The company is built around technology developed at Colorado School of Mines (one of my alma maters and near and dear to my heart) and is focused on the commercialization of high power lasers for the oil, natural gas, geothermal, and mining industries. Apparently their unique capability is to be able to bust through the “sound barrier” of Stimulated Brillouin Scattering that previously made it impossible to transmit high power lasers over long distance fiber optic cables. With this problem solved, they got a nice grant from US Department of Energy and are working on commercializing technology to transmit high power lasers over long distance fiber optic cables enabling step change performance in applications to drill, complete, and workover wells - a pretty novel and unique application of laser technology.

With all that going on, Joel has still been able to dedicate loads of time to the BENCo advisory activity and has been a prolific contributor with lots of value add. My thanks to Joel for his efforts to give back to our entrepreneurial community and looking forward to getting to know him better in the months and years ahead!