Cleantech VC Is Dead! Long Live Cleantech VC!

Energy Gang

Wood Mackenzie

Tech News, Environment, Sustainability, Innovation, Renewable Energy, Technology, Alternative Energy, Energy, News, Cleantech, Wind Energy, Business, Climate Change, Solar Energy

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2016

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Enjoy this free episode of The Interchange from GTM Squared. If you like what you hear, make sure to become a member: http://www.greentechmedia.com/squared We’re more than a decade on from the beginning of the cleantech gold rush -- and a lot of venture capital firms failed to strike it rich. In this week's show, we tally the boom and bust in cleantech VC, and look at how it compares with other sectors. We're joined by Varun Sivaram, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Ben Gaddy, the director of technology development at the Clean Energy Trust. The two recently teamed up with another colleague, Frank O’Sullivan from the MIT Sloan School of Management, to log the performance of venture investments in clean energy and materials from 2006 to 2011. They then compare it to the medical field and software. They found that the failure rate in cleantech was much higher (and the returns were much lower) than these other fields. Their conclusion: venture capital is not the right model for revolutionizing the energy industry. So if that’s true, what should take its place? We debate. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello Energy Gang listeners Stephen Lacy here. A couple brief housekeeping items
0:05.0	before we start this week's show. Firstly the Energy Gang is on summer hiatus
0:09.3	for the next couple of weeks. We'll be back together on the week of August 22nd and that brings us of
0:13.4	We'll be back together on the week of August 22nd. And that brings us to our second order of business.
0:16.4	Our conversation this week comes to you from the Interchange, a weekly show hosted by me and Shale Khan for our premium service, GTM squared.
0:25.5	We have thousands of subscribers now, and I'm just going to be blunt.
0:29.2	You should subscribe too. I know that many of you run businesses you run
0:33.2	consultancy you make policy you're looking for a job in the industry and if
0:38.0	that's the case GTM squared is a no-brainer
0:40.5	$249 that's what it costs per year. $249. That's like 68 cents a day. That's virtually
0:47.4	nothing to pay for a continued education in clean tech. So if you like this podcast, you like GTM, and you want to go even further in depth, go over to
0:56.1	Green Tech Media.com slash squared.
0:59.7	And finally, a big thanks to our Energy Gang sponsor, Solar Edge is a leader of the DC Optimizer
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1:19.2	inverters. To find out more about solarges inverters and optimizers,
1:23.2	visit Solar Edge.com.
1:25.8	And now enjoy the show. This is the Interchange, a weekly conversation about the changing business of energy and clean tech from GTM Square.
1:43.7	I'm Stephen Lacy and in this week's show we're revisiting clean tech venture capital.
1:48.2	We're more than a decade on from the beginning of the clean tech gold rush and a lot of VC firms failed to strike it rich.
1:55.0	We'll chat about one of the most comprehensive tallies of the boom and bust in Clean Tech
	...

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