Cleantech
topic on 5 shows · 14 statements across 11 episodes
Catalyst 
the Green Blueprint 
the a16z Podcast 
20VC 
Capital Allocators
14 statements about Cleantech, every show
Schroepfer: Clean tech requires a 1,000x increase in venture capital
“We need thousand X venture investment. We need a thousand X to startups. We need more people switching from other careers into clean tech.”
Wagner: My biggest cleantech contribution at Accel was avoiding bad deals
“Like, I devoted a substantial amount of my time to cleantech at one point you know, just because, and this was in like, 2006, 2007, 2008. And it was because, you know, no one else at the firm was spending any time on it, you know, I sort of felt like it was an…”
Naam: Mass-produced factory cleantech will maintain rapid learning rates for decades
“I do think there's lots of reasons, not in every single cleantech, but in those, the ones we make in factories, mass-produced in high volumes, that those will have a very, very rapid learning rate for decades to come.”
Orum: Distressed clean-tech investing will emerge as a major energy transition opportunity
“This hasn't yet happened in the energy transition, but I think because of what occurred in the last couple of years in the current environment that we're in, I think there's going to be a very interesting opportunity around distressed investing in clean tech, …”
Kann: Cleantech 1.0 relied on generalists rather than dedicated capital pools
“Though there was capital that was sort of directed toward what then we called clean tech, it wasn't dedicated pools of capital for the most part. It was mostly generalist investors saying, I have a clean tech strategy.”
Naam: Cleantech VC funding dropped 4x to 5x between 2008 and 2015
“We saw this retrenchment of venture capital, and maybe it peaked around 2008, something like that, and by 2015, the dollars flowing per year had dropped by a factor of four or five, and especially for the earliest stage deals.”
Naam: Deep tech startups no longer need commercial scale to exit
“It's no longer the case that we have to wait all the way until we have a product commercially on sale or at scale for this to produce an exit.”
Naam: Global cleantech spend grew from $50B in 2004 to over $500B
“If you go back, 2004, the world was spending maybe fifty billion on cleantech, very broadly defined. Now we're spending well north of five hundred billion.”
Eggers: Cleantech investing will resurge in the 2020s under Biden
“Yeah, I think it will, especially if we end up with a Biden administration.”
Ma: Clean Tech 1.0 failed because VCs misjudged capital intensity and commodities
“Just to distill it down, I think what happened there was there was certainly a lot of overhype, capital flowing in, especially by firms who May not have really developed the deep expertise on the sector. They may have developed expertise in semiconductors or s…”
Ma: Clean tech VC and PE returns rebounded strongly since 2013
“Since really, 2012, 2013, and we tracked this data at the company level in our database of venture and private equity backed clean tech companies. They've actually rebounded quite significantly since 2013, where if you look at the IRRs and the TVPIs of these c…”
Khosla Ventures' cleantech portfolio will generate a positive overall return
“We will end up positive, and there's a number of companies that are worth north of a few billion dollars there that are making real impacts.”
Janeway: Billions wasted in mid-2000s VC nanotech and cleantech investments
“Back in the mid-aughties some billions of dollars were wasted in venture guys investing in nanotechnology. Venture guys investing in science for ultimately Clean tech opportunities, but that were way upstream, that took much too long, much too much money, and …”