Word: techs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have happened, however, without a spark of venture capital. That came from Martin Tobias of Seattle-based firm Ignition Partners. A restless ex-Microsoft executive, Tobias thought software had maxed out, and by 2004 he was looking for the next big thing. He found it in the emerging clean-tech sector - which encompasses renewable energy, environmental efficiency and water - and discovered the struggling start-up Seattle Biodiesel, which had just been launched by a former airline pilot. Tobias injected badly needed capital, eventually buying 20% of the company and becoming CEO of the renamed Imperium Renewables. ("Less local," he explains...
Once the province of those with long hair and short credit lines, today clean tech is a prime target for the smartest - and richest - investors in the world. Green investment by American venture-capital firms reached $2.6 billion in the first three quarters of 2007, the highest level ever recorded and nearly 50% more than the total for the whole of 2006. The European clean-energy sector is already producing winning companies in countries like Germany and Spain, and in rapidly growing China nearly 20% of all venture capital was channeled into clean companies in 2006 - double the percentage...
...thing For CEOs who founded clean-tech companies before this explosion of interest, the sudden materialization of capital can seem too good to be true. When Tom Todaro launched Seattle-based Targeted Growth, which uses genetic engineering to greatly enhance the yields of crops, he thought the company's ability to multiply the amount of feedstock available for biodiesel or ethanol would make it a star of the emerging biofuels sector. But it was the late 1990s, when clean tech made up less than 1% of total venture-capital spending, and investors weren't interested. "I went begging to friends...
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...