Marianne Macy of Inifinite Energy Magazine has done an extensive interview with Tom Darden of Cherokee Fund and Industrial Heat.

Some qoutes that is of great value when analyzing the business and personal side of the Darden / Rossi relationship:

Darden:

Oh, yeah. I’ve been the primary funder. I think there probably are a lot of people out there like me. Clearly there are. You read in the newspaper about Bill Gates

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We’ve seen a number of tests and we’ve had a lot of people looking at tests. Of course outsiders have looked at
tests. I think particularly the transmutation data is very compelling. I felt very good about that, better than any outlet of test data I’d seen. We’re not interested in or insistent upon perfection from a scientist. What I mean by that is, stuff might work. Stuff might not work sometimes. I don’t find failure to be very depressing. As I said in my talk, I’m a pilot; if you see any airplane fly, then airplanes fly. If the next time an airplane takes off it crashes, you don’t say, “Airplanes don’t fly.” You might say “That airplane no longer flies” or “Often airplanes don’t fly.” But you would say, “Airplanes fly.

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We’ve seen some really good stuff. We want to support
Andrea in his research however we best can.

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He is very rapid at iterating. He is constantly coming up with new things, “Try this. Try this.” I think that’s a good thing. I like that attribute. I think it’s society’s problem to say to someone like that, “Ok, stop. Just work on this. Make a hundred things like this and let’s finalize something.” Well, it shouldn’t be like that. He should be able to do what he needs to do.

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Rossi is a smart guy. The thing I’ve always been interested
in Andrea is how intensely theoretical he is. I’m not smart
enough to know what theories are right. People have a visualization
of things they can’t see. I have no earthy idea if
what they are seeing is correct. I had assumed he was more
of an experimenter, a tinkerer, trying this and this and this,
in more of a random fashion. But not at all. He is laser like
in his attention He is very theoretical, very knowledgeable.
He’s hard working and driven and we’re pleased with the
investment. In any given setting if you are sitting with
Andrea Rossi and there’s a down moment, in most of those
situations he’ll be reading a physics book or physics paper.
At any given moment he has five minutes between when he
is doing that and doing that he’ll be sitting there reading.
People see him like that in photos and think it’s staged. It’s
not!

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Here is the downloadable pdf:  DardenInterview