ThePanelist.com - Venture Capitalist John Doerr's Talk on Making Money with Global Warming

Venture Capitalist John Doerr's Talk on Making Money with Global Warming

Written by David Neubert

Monday, 23 July 2007

Photo:Johnny Vulkan, Creative Commons, Flickr
I recommend watching John Doerr's emotional talk on green technology and investing at the 2007 TED Conference. I hope he is inspirational to businesses looking to find the solutions to climate change. I also hope he is inspirational to government to get out of the way and dial back subsidies to carbon-creating businesses and activities. I think his idea of buying carbon credits is silly, that process can be too fraught with fraud and frivolous subsidies. But his idea that business and private enterprise will create the technologies to slow climate change is right - that's part of why we created The Panelist.
John Doerr at TED Conference

So you have that big idea on how to save the world and make a ton of money? Check out John Doerr's timeless startup checklist at FastCompany.

Disclosure: I do not know John Doerr. I am invested in Venture Capital funds but not in John Doerr's firm Kleiner Perkins. I also oversee an investment at a Clean Technology venture capital firm as a boardmember of the New World Foundation. This fund is not part of Kleiner Perkins either.

If you are a small investor without some kind of special connection to a successful venture capital firm, you probably should not invest in any venture capital. The fees usually wipe out any advantage venture capital investing might have over the stock market. And since you are small, the fees will be so high as to more than wipe out your advantage. Stick with stocks.

Photo by Pierre via Flickr and Creative Commons.

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written by LauraR , July 25, 2007

John Doerr is an evil venture capitalist who has just found his latest trendy niche for exploitation. He was responsible for hyping up the dot-com bubble -- now he's hyping up green start-ups.

Yes, private enterprise has the opportunity to create inventive ways to clean up our global warming mess -- but people like John Doerr, by overhyping it all, just might ultimately lead it toward a bad investment, after all. (after he takes his fees and the returns on his few bets that actually hit)

What I like about ThePanelist is that it is a balanced approach. Doerr is anything but.

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written by Thomas Glendening , August 11, 2007

Re: LauraR. Possibly on Doerr, I dont know his ethics. However, it strikes me that it is a positive sign that one of the most powerful venture capitalists is starting to push the VC bandwagon in the direction of clean tech.

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written by Thomas Glendening , August 11, 2007

Re LauraR #2. The dot com boom bust cycle still brought about google, amazon, yahoo and phase two youtube, myspace and thepanelist. If the same lemming-like behavior that brought us the dot.com boom bust makes SunEdison, AqWise, and ComVerge to the same level of capitalization, I suggest it will be a very, very good thing as it means real efforts will be being made to tackle climate change and its various siblyings such as energy dependence and water scarcity.

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