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How Green is My Valley
December 8, 2006
John Doerr may recently have lost the fight to get California voters to back a $4bn tax on Big Oil to fund green technologies, but he still has his eyes fixed on the bigger prize. This morning in Berkeley, the top venture capitalist was closeted with once (and possibly future) Presidential hopeful Al Gore.
Gore’s message to the small invited audience at a Kleiner Perkins conference on "greentech": venture capital and private equity investors still haven’t realised how much money there is to be made in this field (though the amount of cash heading into these technologies suggests that’s changing. Kleiner partner John Denniston reckons that more than 10 per cent of VC investment in the US this year will be in green technologies.)
Doerr and other Valley VCs have been learning to play state and national politics as they dive into an area where big policy issues hold such sway. Unfortunately, just as Doerr delicately broached the question with Gore about how he plans to advance his global warming agenda over the next nine months (by which time the next Presidential race will be looming,) a Kleiner heavy turned up to escort this correspondent from the room. Seems Doerr - the man who once famously called the internet "the greatest ever legal creation of wealth in the history of the world" - still prefers to pull the strings behind the scenes.
Doerr is precisely the kind of venture capitalist the UK needs but, alas, is never likely to have.
These are green tech projects with vision, the kind which can make a difference. He should be commended.
Posted by: MPR | July 16th, 2008 at 12:56 pm | Report this comment