A good interview with David Lincoln of Element

If you get a chance today and can check out this interview with David Lincoln of Element Partners before PE Hub pulls it back into the subscriber-only archives, do so.

It’s a good discussion of some of the trends identified in the @Ventures presentation from last week, from the perspective of a later-stage investor.  Smart thoughts from David, who’s one of the most experienced cleantech investors around.  A good interview by Connie Loizos.

One small clarification:  Loizos did make one small but important misinterpretation of one bulletpoint in the presentation, when she suggests that 80% of cleantech VCs are moving to late or balanced stage.  I don’t know whether or not that would be true (I suspect it’s not), but the 80% was referring instead to what “balanced” might hypothetically mean, in terms of a fund’s dollar allocation between late stage and early stage investing—effectively, mostly a late-stage fund…

Of course, according to the Cleantech Group’s Q1-Q3 2008 tallies, about 70% of North American cleantech deals were in “follow-on” (versus seed and first round) investments.  The dollar amounts, of course, were even more lopsided.  So the deal activity speaks for itself.