I've heard it said that venture capital is an apprenticeship business, that it takes about seven years for a VC to become a proficient investor.  As I now get close to my eighth year investing in the cleantech sector, that aphorism resonates with me -- especially as I look back at the many ways I've failed so far as a cleantech venture investor.

I've been taking the opportunity to take a retroactive personal look at my investment patterns, at what I think has worked, and at how I've failed. I'm not talking about failed investments per se. I've had my share of those, but I'm really talking about failures in the sense of "Wow, that didn't work out according to plan."  In some cases,...

The Cleantech Group released their Q3 preliminary tally recently, and there appears to be some positive news in there.

In their global count, they saw not only an uptick in the dollars going into the sector ($2.23B in Q3 2011, up from $1.81B in Q3 2010), but also an increase in the number of financing rounds (189, up from 179 in Q2 2011).  Even more encouragingly, the number of Seed / Series A deals went up, so this wasn't just a quarter of insider follow-ons like we've seen at times in the past. The total of 128 deals they counted in North America was a new high for the region, they report, and represented a second straight quarter of deal-count growth. While they point to energy...

The economy is sputtering; VCs and LPs continue to be wary of cleantech; federal government support of the sector continues to be feckless; political rhetoric regarding cleantech is reckless; and the sky is falling (at least where I live -- we had five inches of rain in two hours yesterday).