I clearly need to come visit the bay area more often.  Not only do I simply miss San Francisco, it's also always a super-busy trip as there are just way too many people to visit with in any single trip.  Maybe 14 meetings in 2.5 days doesn't sound like much to some, but when you consider travel time it adds up to some really full days...

• No offense to Boston, but I got more high-quality deal leads in a couple of days here in SF than in a couple of weeks back east.  Maybe there's some selection bias at work there, not suggesting any hard and fast ratio or anything.  But the level of high-quality entrepreneurial cleantech energy (so to speak) in the bay area really does trump...

It's been pretty fascinating to watch how many strong opinions have been expressed over the past couple of days regarding Fred Wilson's "two VCs" post (and then some others pointed at me after my response to his post). So I thought I would paraphrase some of what I heard (note: mostly NOT from Fred, but from others who've piled on) and give some replies.

--

Rob, are you saying Fred is wrong?

No. I totally agree with Fred that there's an important divergence of two very different approaches to venture capital right now -- the lean VC (put as little capital as possible to work in each company, grow it quickly and as low-cost as possible, and then sell it as early as possible),...

Fred Wilson recently wrote that there are now two venture capital industries: One software-based, and one that is capital intensive. He argues that the former has gone capital efficient, and the latter (including "cleantech, biotech and other capital intensive tech businesses") that "operates largely the same way it has operated for the past twenty or thirty years". It's a good post, as with many of his thoughts, well worth reading if you haven't seen it already. He mentions forthcoming data that should be interesting to see.

I think he's right. There really are two divergent strategies in venture capital right now. The one goes for as little cashburn and as quick an exit as...

Rolling up startups is hard to do correctly.  It's easy to say that two companies would work better as a combined entity, but in reality it's quite difficult to do regardless of the scale of the companies involved -- you have cultural shifts to make, personnel who will need to change roles and perhaps leave, a combined set of investors to fit into the same size boardroom, significant operational disruption, not to mention the difficulties involved in pricing and structuring the deal, etc.

So it's not something to be bandied about loosely.  But nevertheless, I think it's time for more cleantech startups to be thinking about how they can team up and carry forward as combined efforts.

I am in Zurich this week attending the 2010 European Energy Venture Fair.  It's a good "one stop shop" event for meeting most VCs and investors involved in clean energy in Europe.  It's very heavily geographically focused -- there are not many investors from North America who aren't cross-Atlantic shops, and I haven't found many Asian investors, etc.  And so I assume it makes it a nice cross-section of where European cleantech investing is right now.

So some quick thoughts in no particular order:

1. In going around the room (~200 or so participants), the first thing that strikes you is how many smallish funds there are in this community.  <$200M in size, even for growth-stage focused...