Steve Cotton is the Chief Commercial Officer of Aqua Metals. He is working to help Aqua Metals reduce emissions, toxic waste and unsafe labor conditions when it comes to recycling metals. His background is in building, deploying, managing and decommissioning a better lead-acid battery. Prior to his current position, Steve spent 15 years as the cofounder and CEO of Data Power Monitoring Corporation and IntelliBatt (now Canara), a company with data center battery-monitoring products and services that he grew from his garage to a global multi-million dollar company. Canara was acquired by Columbia Capital in June 2012. He started his career in product development, business development and sales and has held positions at Sendmail, Inc., Lucent Technologies and Octel Communications. Steve holds several patents in the area of battery monitoring and has a BS in computer information systems with a focus on telecommunications from California State University, Chico.