Yesterday I drank ocean water and ate 31 day old fish.

And it was tasty.

I don't get the opportunity as a cleantech investor to do many taste-tests, yet funnily enough yesterday I got to do two of them.  First I attended a ribbon-cutting for Oasys Water's new facility in Boston's Innovation District, where Mayor Menino and a host of other folks including yours truly were invited to sample some ocean water that had been desalinated using the company's technology.  Tasted like Dasani.

Later that day I was kindly invited to a dinner hosted by Global Fresh Foods where they celebrated their first commercial shipments of sustainably-farmed salmon from Norway to the U.S., by doing a multi-course blind taste test.  GFF management, their investors, and their impressive partner Slade Gorton (and me, an interloper) got to enjoy a very tasty meal with identical courses of, on one side of the plate, salmon shipped by the current expensive and wasteful method (air freight), and on the other side of the plate salmon from the same region shipped via ocean freighter and kept fresh by GFF's technology.  One fish was just a couple of days old, the other was 31 days 'fresh' (as GFF likes to stress).  I honestly couldn't tell the difference.  (And it was also a great excuse for a really lovely meal, my thanks to GFF, S-G and Marty Lagod of Firelake for the kind invitation)

For the past few years, a lot of cleantech investing has been about the promised potential of new technology and new offerings.  Big bets made on solar startups, biofuels companies, car companies, etc.  In many cases, we're still waiting to see the full commercialization of these products, the potential has yet to be realized.  I find it interesting that in the meantime, companies like Oasys and GFF have been able to get out there with actual products and services.  And by now, even some of those longer-term development efforts appear to be poised to bear fruit.

I don't think cleantech investors are feeling very patient these days.  There's some seed stage and pre-revenue investing going on, surely.  But for the most part, a lot of investors I speak with are looking to see actual proof -- not proof of concept, but proof of product and proof of market acceptance.

So yesterday was a lot of fun.  Because it was a day where I got to see some of that proof in action.  Another piece of evidence telling me that once the cleantech sector is able to emerge from the current doldrums, it'll be even more robust and mature than before.  The next decade of cleantech investing will be about many more technologies than just the high-profile ones like solar and biofuels that got so much attention in the past decade.  And it'll be about actual products and adoption, not promised products and potential adoption.

(Btw, I have no stake that I'm aware of in either Oasys or GFF)