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Lessons From the Past Ten Years, Part Two: Urgency
I've seen it happen way too many times: cleantech startups that miss their revenue forecasts, but not because they're losing sales opportunities to other vendors. Instead, it's just because it takes...
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Lessons From the Past Ten Years, Part Three: Team
It doesn't matter what kind of business model your startup is pursuing: tech development, service models, financial models, operational projects, etc. Unless you just get really lucky (which does...
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Why We Will Win: Enthusiasm
The headlines can be depressing right now, I know. Because so much journalist attention is being paid to venture capitalists and politicians, when VCs are running scared away from the cleantech...
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Lessons From the Past Ten Years, Part Four: Gaps
I had the opportunity to address a group of foundation managers, investors, entrepreneurs, and DOE staff at a roundtable at MIT last week, discussing the subject of capital gaps in cleantech. That...
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This Quarter in Cleantech Venture Capital investing
The various deal-tracking groups continue to step up their game, doing a better and better job each year. Looking forward to seeing additional takes from CB Insights, Ernst & Young and others, but...
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Lessons From the Past Ten Years: Youth
Had a lot of good feedback from my earlier post about teams and evaluating skills gaps; we even used a version of this as a self-assessment tool for the Cleantech Open Northeast semifinalist teams,...
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Lessons From the Past Ten Years: Overreaction
It would be easy to be pessimistic about the current state of the cleantech innovation sector. We’re under attack by politically motivated facts-and-patriotism-be-damned foes; there’s clearly a...
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Lessons From the Past Ten Years: PR
What is the right PR strategy for cleantech startups? It's a question I've been thinking about a lot lately, and talking about with communications professionals. Because I feel that those of us in...
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Lessons From The Past Ten Years: Self-Description
Because of some of the unique features of our markets and customers, early-stage cleantech startups quite often have to walk a fine line when figuring out how to describe themselves to the outside...
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Bad Analysis of a US Carbon Tax by AEI
If "thought leaders" don't put much thought into their analysis, the analysis is worse than useless. That is the case with this terrible piece of "analysis" from Benjamin Zycher of American...
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Lessons From the Past Ten Years: Fragmentation
One thing I've learned as an investor that is true beyond cleantech: offering a compelling value proposition to customers is important, but it's not sufficient for a startup to be able to grow...
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Book Report: Clean Tech Nation and The New New Deal
It's back to school season, so apparently that means it's time for a couple of book report assignments. Had the opportunity to review Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder's new book,Clean Tech Nation. In the...
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The Next Wave of Cleantech Investing Is Here
The next wave of cleantech is here. The old form of cleantech is dead or dying, everyone agrees. I don't know too many investors out there still looking for capital-intensive ways of making...
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Lessons From the Past Ten Years: Angels
Now should be a period of happy hunting for angel and other seed-stage investors looking for new deals. Venture capitalists have abandoned the sector, at least temporarily. The Cleantech Group's early...
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A Few Things to Note in the SolarCity S-1
I'm a few days late to this party, but finally took a look at the SolarCity S-1 yesterday. A few things have already been written about the business, so I won't redundantly go into all the discussion...
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A Modest Proposal
"It is remarkable how little concern men seem to have for logic, statistics, and even, indeed, survival: we live by emotion, prejudice, and pride." - Dwight Eisenhower, in a letter to Winston Churchill...
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Don’t Fail This Time
We all watched with horror this week as Sandy carved a path of destruction through some of the most populous areas of our country. Please, stop reading this, go find a way to help, and then when you...
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The Role of the DOE in Obama’s Second Term
Have been on a run of policy-related columns lately, and am eager to get back to talking about cleantech entrepreneurs and investors. But I have had a few people request some thoughts on the role of...
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Lessons From the Past Ten Years: Localization
"Cleantech" being a catch-all term that covers a wide range of mostly disconnected industries and markets and technologies, it's always interesting to note commonalities across subsectors where you...
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An Open Letter to Limited Partners from a Cleantech Investor
Dear venture capital limited partners: I get it. You were promised that cleantech was going to be the Next Big Thing and it didn't happen. Instead, you've seen the GPs you've backed in the sector have...
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