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Though they couldn't be more different from former dotcom darlings like? Pets.com, clean-tech start-ups were hit hard by the vaporization of venture capital in the wake of the tech and Internet bust of 2000. Funding for green venture capital plunged over the next three years. But it wasn't just flashbacks to that meltdown that initially kept venture capitalists cool on clean tech. Starting up an Internet company required relatively low levels of capital - at least before you started buying your employees massage chairs - and dangled the possibility of a quick and lucrative payoff. Cracking the energy...
...tide began to turn in 2004, thanks partly to rapidly climbing oil prices that instantly made alternative energy more competitive, and partly to government action in the U.S. and elsewhere that provided support for clean tech. The Gore-approved narrative of climate change - as both a threat and an economic opportunity - penetrated the venture-capital community. Adam Grosser, a venture capitalist at the Silicon Valley firm Foundation Capital, struggled to convince his partners that they should expand beyond their traditional IT focus into clean tech. "When I first proposed it, my partners scoffed," he says. But Grosser persisted, and today...
...clean-tech sector was absorbing 11% of all venture capital in North America and Europe. Investors started knocking on Todaro's door, and they haven't stopped since. "We went from hat in hand to not being able to return investor calls," Todaro says. The company won millions in financing, and has just announced a deal with a firm called Green Earth Fuels to develop 100 million gallons (380 million L) of biodiesel by 2010. Says Richard Kaufman, CEO of the international sustainable investment company Good Energies: "There is just a wall of money out there...
...single venture capitalist may be more responsible for that shift than Khosla, who formed Khosla Ventures in 2004 in part because his Kleiner Perkins partners were still hesitant to dive into clean tech. Khosla had no such fears, and he has emerged as a clean-tech evangelist. "By 2000, I felt that software and other businesses were reaching a dead end," he says. "But energy was an area where there were large markets that could benefit from innovation." Khosla hasn't held back - in the first nine months of 2007, Khosla Ventures participated in 14 deals worth nearly $70 million...
Still, the dotcom bust casts a shadow, with fears that once again too much money is chasing too few good ideas. The drive to go green, so strong today, could rapidly lose momentum if oil prices were to drop significantly, and it hasn't escaped notice that clean tech has yet to produce a bank-breaking success like Netscape, which made Kleiner Perkins a fortune. "Everybody with a dollar thinks they're a clean-tech investor now," says Foundation Capital's Grosser. "A ton of people could lose a lot of money on solar or biofuels." But defenders point...