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April 15, 2007
KP's Lane Calls For Cleantech Bubble
The new CN Portfolio mag has a stupidly-named feature ("Behind the Green Doerr" -- beyond a cute title, what's the connection to the long-ago Chambers porn flick?) on KP and John Doerr's cleantech investing ambitions. Despite working semi-diligently to come up with something controversial --- oooh, taxpayers may foot the bill for some cleantech investing! -- the piece doesn't advance any story, nor shed any new insight on what KP/Doerr are doing in cleantech.The only fun nugget was at the close, where newbie KP VC Ray Lane offers up that cleantech will almost certainly become a bubble. (And earlier in the piece Doerr sez that the dot-com bubble wasn't a bubble.) But KP, of course, will prosper he says. You go, Ray.
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The article repeats some of the same quotes from the current Fortune article. The two central questions seem to be (i) What the hell happened over the past 15 years with the internet? and (ii) Can the same thing happen over the next 10 years with cleantech? It’s hard to sum up 15 years of history in a couple of sentences but looking at the long term, the VCs and tech entrepreneurs have nothing to apologize for. Net of the burst bubble many great businesses were created. One of the key success factors of the VC supported tech companies was that the big companies that had something to do with computers 15 years ago ( IBM, Microsoft, HP,…) totally missed the boat on the internet. Many established companies were busy lobbying the government for a trunk and branch information superhighway. Will GE, Siemens, Exxon make the same mistakes and leave a huge market to the upstarts? I don’t think so. I expect the cleantech wave to lead to several nice companies with nice products but no billion dollar firms.