Comments on: Xconomy’s First Poll: If You Had $10 Million…You’d Invest In Cleantech! Say What?

By: Cleantech Investing » Blog Archive » Last week in cleantech venture capital…

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 02:21:33 +0000

[...] Another sign of the growing Boston-area cleantech cluster, this terrific MIT event… Finally, half of all Xconomy readers would rather put their investment dollars into cleantech than biotech, r… — and the columnist says that means you should actually avoid [...]

By: James Geshwiler

James Geshwiler — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:58:34 +0000

The challenge with most “clean energy” projects is they are too capital intensive for such a relatively small amount of money. With both the infrastructure requirements of creating manufacturing assets, distribution networks, and in some cases such as fuel cells, supply chains as well, an initial investment of say $100k (remember, you need capital for follow-on rounds PLUS be able to build a portfolio of at least a dozen and maybe two dozen companies) isn’t going to buy you or the company much. Rather, that $100k is likely to suffer heavy dilution from other sources of capital. Mobile or Web 2.0 would fare much better where the capital requirements are lower and you’re more likely to build a portfolio that can generate a return. If you had a $500M pool of money, it’s a totally different game, particularly if there is access to 2-5x in friendly sources of debt b/c energy tends to involve optimizing WACC and not using pure equity….happy investing!

By: Wade Roush

Wade Roush — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:39:33 +0000

Bob, it looks like your insights are swaying the readers already. It’s been about four hours since you posted, and Clean Energy is now down to 48 percent. It’s given up ground to Web 2.0 and Biotech (and interestingly, Web 2.0 has pulled into second place).

By: Thank Al Gore For Your New Economy « BizHub

Thank Al Gore For Your New Economy « BizHub — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 02:39:17 +0000

[...] invest in around New England if you had $10 mil to toss around) came back, and clean energy won more than 50 percent of the votes. Even though Robert Burdei would have inverted them, the results seems unsurprising. [...]

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 22:41:23 +0000

I had a tough time choosing between Mobile and Web 2.0. When I think of “cool” Mobile ideas these days, I instanly think of iPhone and the ability of a user to interact with Web 2.0 applications via their phone. In the end, I had to go with Web 2.0 but clearly there is huge potential for investments geared towards users of smartphones/iPhones. Therefore, the $10 million would have be invested in an online-based but Mobile-utilized application.