Been away on a major travel binge, so apologies for a download of a bunch of randomness that has accumulated over the past few weeks.  So, in no particular order:

1. Selling even millions of dollars' worth of a Gen 1 product at zero or negative gross margins doesn't count as "Commercialization".  It's just a large beta test.  ...Yes I'm talking to you, thin film solar and solid-oxide fuel cell industries. 

2. Tom Pincince, President and CEO at my portfolio company Digital Lumens, is also a former Forrester Research analyst.  And he has some pretty interesting predictions on LEDs.  Definitely check them out.

3. VC/PE funds often pass on great deals.  And know it.  Constantly-shifting internal firm dynamics often mean they just can't write checks to a company they like, for reasons having nothing to do with the potential worth of the investment.

4. The U.S. Senate advocates of climate change legislation continue to place the wrong emphasis, imho.  They have attempted to craft a law that would have significant near- to mid-term climate impact but still be politically and economically palatable.  But the (short) history of market-based environmental regulations suggests that timing isn't nearly so important -- people get out ahead of regulatory impacts as soon as they see a clear signal.  So pass a law this year to significantly price carbon... in 2020.  The net-positive economic changes will start hitting much earlier anyway, and the painful economic changes will be pushed out beyond most politicians' career half-life. 

5.  I talk about venture investment decisions for the most part on this site.  But that's different from career decisions.  Were I someone looking to choose a career right now, becoming an expert in building energy efficiency commissioning and retrofits would top my list.  So much latent demand, and much of it will have to be labor-intensive... and impossible to outsource overseas.

6. The single biggest missing need in cleantech?  Great sales leaders.  I've been searching for them for a while now, and yet have found very few.

7. The cleantech IPO candidate pool continues to look weaker and weaker.  Strong hype can't overcome negative margins and high cash burn -- at least in the absence of a pre-existing stock market bubble. But I do think there are a lot of great companies waiting in the wings for a second wave... if the market conditions allow it.  And if the market forgives this decade's first batch of cleantech IPOs for having a few belly-flops.

8. If you care about climate change, stop conflating natural gas and oil.  Yes, they both often come out of the same holes, and have the same players.  But not really.  There are "oily" and "gassy" producers (to borrow the parlance of Wall Street), and the communities are fairly separate as far as I can tell.  And as this great MIT study shows, any serious effort to combat climate change will need to embrace the substitution of coal and oil with natgas, at least over the near- to mid-term.  Yet environmental rhetoric and federal legislative proposals around climate change continue to significantly subsidize coal but treat natgas production the same as oil production.  That's a mistake.

9. The more time I spend driving up and down the east coast, the more I appreciate the train.  And the more I appreciate crowd-sourced real-time traffic applications for GPS navigation devices...

10. To anyone who was attempting to take a late-morning nap in my hotel in DC on wednesday, my apologies for undoubtedly waking you up by screaming so loud when Landon Donovan put that ball in the net.  Go USA!