Emerging Enterprise Center Blog - Commentary and Analysis For Entrepreneurs and Startups

  I attended the annual meeting of Mass TLC this morning. Michael Mandel spoke and had a bunch of great insights. I want to get to what he had to say about energy and renewables but I need to go into a few preliminary items first. Mandel starts from the premise that the most accurate measure of the state of the economy, crude though it may be, is employment. The unemployment rate is the unemployment rate. Either you are paying unemployment tax or you are not. There is no ambiguity.  Having established this as his measure of health. He showed that one industry (communications – very... More

  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,... More

I am no Peak Oil maven, but I read some commentary about it in the comments to one or another blog that I read regularly (perhaps Fred Wilson’s blog or Brad Feld’s or Don Dodge’s, I am not sure). Anyway it the issue was what the effect of peak oil would be on technology companies. Aside from placing a huge premium on all sorts of energy related technologies (that is why some massive percentage of investment is going into this space), I am not sure why technology should be affected differently from other industries. Anyway, it caused me to read... More