SD Forum’s Green and Clean Dinner Meeting

August 22, 2008 in business benefits, investing by nils | 1 comment

I attended the SDForum Green and Clean Dinner tonight. The topic was “Where’s the Money?” Five panelists, representing a VC firm, a bank, an angel funding group, a bridge-financing firm, and an entrepreneur who has raised his money independently, discussed the various sources of funding for clean tech companies. i took extensive notes, and will provide more details later, but for now some of the highlights were:

Liquidity may be different for clean tech companies than we got used to for high tech companies during the Internet boom
Because of the technical risks involved in clean tech, the old venture capital adage of “market first, team second, and product third” often needs to be turned around
Especially for power, this is a global market – Europe is at least 15 years ahead of the U.S. in terms of regulations supporting alternative energy and other clean tech
There are a lot of entrepreneurs seeking funding – the VC read over 2,400 business plans and funded only 21. The angel investor says one of his biggest problems is “perpetual motion machine” proposals – they have to do a lot of scientific due diligence on the proposals

SDForum’s next Green and Clean event is a breakfast meeting in San Francisco on September 30, focusing on Innovation in Transportation.