Today's guest post comes from Oliver Guinness of Clearpoint Ventures. In recent posts, we've talked about the need for re-examination of various venture capital investment models and how they've been applied to the sector. Oliver and his colleagues' take on the sector is an interesting version of the old "evolution vs. revolution" debate. As such, I asked Oliver to write up their investment approach in his own words. Enjoy!

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When we launched Clearpoint Ventures a couple of years back, we used Steve Blank’s “Customer Development” methodology to come up with an alternative strategy for investing in cleantech. We knew the energy and building sectors were extremely different from...

In the last couple of posts we first looked over the past 15 years of cleantech venture capital, and then we looked at the various ways to generate VC-type returns in the sector -- and concluded that some of those models are being over-applied and others are being under-applied.

Within the sector, I'm starting to see some investors who get this kind of thinking and are building new types of efforts accordingly.

This harkens back to some of what I laid out a while back in my presentation "Cleantech Venture Capital in 2015," particularly the theme-driven builders and the "lean cleantech" players. We're now starting to see them emerge.

Here are a few examples I've noticed and am...

In my last column, I rushed us through my take on 15 years of cleantech venture capital history. Because if we're going to look at the path forward, we need to understand how we got here in the first place. I would also refer everyone to Matthew Nordan's great four-part take on the state of cleantech venture capital from a little while back, particularly Part 2, where he argues that cleantech has performed at par with the overall venture capital category.

To which I would say: nuts to that.

It's not that I in any way wish to slight Matthew's smart analysis; it's a must-read. But if the conclusion is that cleantech has been at par with other sectors simply because on average it...

Over the next few columns I’m going to talk about what I see as a critical set of lessons and paths forward for cleantech venture capital. But first, I thought it would be necessary to set the table by laying out my own vastly oversimplified version of how cleantech venture capital got to this point.

Where to begin? In the 1990s, there were a very few venture investors tackling alternative energy and environmental technologies. They had small funds and invested mostly in hardware plays of some kind. Sectors like solar and electric vehicles certainly didn’t dominate.

Then the dot-com bubble and IPO frenzy happened. This rising tide lifted a lot of boats, including in this sector....