The Superseed Debate and New Fund Structures
Andy Payne put me on to this blog, which I admit is not one that regularly read, but Paul Kedrowsky wrote a post and it, with the attendant comments, gives a good picture of the debate around the supersede phenomena. My subjective sense is that a lot of the action is in fact at the superseed level. Chris Sacca, who dropped a comment, has this to say about the superseed investment world: While we are at it though, what your piece doesn't really recognize is that companies backed by Super-Seed funds don't have to IPO or see extraordinarily remarkable exits for...
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What will get funded?
I did a brief presentation to a small group of med device execs the other day. After getting through the remarks that I expected and answering the questions that I expected, mostly on the state of the venture economy, a question which I should have been prepared for, but wasn’t, came up: “What do you think will be hot this year?” Meaning, what spaces will get the investment dollars. The first half of my answer was easy: Capital efficient projects will get funded. The next observation, however obvious, had not really occurred to me: Projects that are not capital efficient will not be funded. Three...
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The Ghost in the Machine and Peak Oil
Like may of you, I have regular automated Google searches for certain topics. One of them has to do with clean energy. I have had this search active for a while, so I only expect new stuff. On Sunday, though, it turned up an interesting blog post by Brad Bradshaw on the subject of predicting peak oil from 2008. Why would a 2008 post come up now? As if that was not enough, Monday's WSJ had an article on a subject near to my thesis that I have posted on from time to time that global oil reserves are systematically overstated. ...
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Cleantech's Investment Dilema
Scott Kirsner’s column in Sunday’s Globe caught my attention for a couple of reasons. First, the levels of investment in cleantech companies in California as compared to Massachusetts is way more skewed than I would have said. But here are his numbers (attributed to The Cleantech Group LLC), and I don’t have any basis to dispute them. State 2008 2009 California $3,480,000,000 $2,100,000,000 Massachusetts $294,000,000 $356,000,000 Texas $88,000,000 $170,000,000 Massachusetts numbers seem scary low to me. If I did the math right, last year there was approximately 6 times as much cleantech investment in California as in Massachusetts, and,...
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Khosla Comments
Here is a link to the Wall Street Journal blog post on Vinod Khosla’s comments at a recent conference. Mostly what Khosla has to say is interesting because he says it. To me the most interesting thing about the WSJ blog post is that Khosla did not appear to say anything remarkable (except perhaps his comment about setting aside 3 billion acres to test various energy technologies). In fact he seems to state the obvious such as “the cheapest thing ends up winning.” Well, that is a problem for investors in new energy technologies because oil continues to be cheap (or at least cheaper...
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