Quick reminder:  If you've been missing the dealflow notices that used to appear on this column, they've moved over to Twitter so they can be timelier (and a lot less work).

Anyways, many thanks to all the readers who participated in this year's CI Reader Prediction Survey.  We got lots of good responses, and there's a lot of agreement out there about the coming year, surprisingly to me.

In terms of survey participants, it appears to have been a good mix of entrepreneurs, investors, corporate managers, and service providers, with a smattering of researchers, government/NGO types, and others thrown in.  Lots of entrepreneurs and investors.  Geographically, more than 80% of...

Don't forget:  Take the 2010 Cleantech Investor readers' survey.  I'm going to close it over the next day or so, we've plenty of good responses to work with, but the more the merrier.

In case you missed it, among all the other VC predictions for 2010, Peter Hebert of Lux Capital posted a really compelling set on PE Hub (note: link may disappear behind the sub-only wall soon).

I enjoyed all his points, but agreed with some more than others, so in the spirit of dialogue I thought I'd post some of my own thoughts on them:

1.  Venture-backed IPOs rebound smartly, with 50%+ first day price jumps on name brand offerings from Facebook, LinkedIn or Zynga. Among the S-1 clutter, another big...

About this time last year, I put together a few predictions and readers chimed in with theirs.  How did we all do?

 

Question 1:  How far will U.S. cleantech venture dollars drop from 1H08 to 1H09? 

I wrote it could be as high as 40%.  I argued that what was going to go completely missing were the mega-deals, and that on a dollar basis at least those made up a significant chunk, around 40% of quarterly tallies. Readers voted for a drop, but totaling less than a third on a dollar basis.

Well, according to the Cleantech Group's tallies, in 1H08 the total North American disclosed venture capital tally was $2.9B, and for 1H09 it was down around $1.6B.  Which is a 45% drop... 

 

Question...

As we near the end of the year, it's time to take stock of 2009 and look ahead to 2010.  We'll look back at the past year and what we learned in another post, but for what it's worth (and remember what you're paying to read this, and value accordingly) here are five predictions for the coming year in cleantech investing:

 

1.  In terms of U.S. climate change legislation, something will be passed, but it will be more symbolic than impactful

The health care reform kerfuffle has demonstrated that it won't be easy for the Democrats to pass major legislation through the Senate without it being majorly watered down if it happens at all.  For something like climate change legislation in...

You may or may not have heard of the World Resources Institute before, but for anyone interested in environmental data, green business best practices, and policy analysis, it's a hugely valuable institution. Of course, I'm a bit biased, having had the privilege of starting my career there.  But I was reminded again of the value of WRI's work at a breakfast meeting here in Boston yesterday, where Jonathan Lash -- WRI's President -- gave a terrific presentation covering the top environmental stories to watch in 2009.  You can read and see some of the presentation here. A few points from the talk really stuck out for me: 1.  Climate change effects are being seen and felt even...

$7.7B in cleantech venture investments in 2008.  That's the record number Eric Wesoff has tallied up -- and it may not include some deals done at the end of the year, so that number may go up.  More great work from Eric, who's been consistently able to come out with the fastest numbers each quarter... (Eric also touched upon one of the topics of the @Ventures "what's wrong with cleantech VC" presentation when he argued that early stage hasn't completely dried up, since "at least 30 of the 115 greentech deals this quarter were seed stage or A rounds."  But since no one has ever said that early stage is non-existent, I would argue that having only 26% of deals be in early stage is...

'Tis the season for VC predictions, and the NVCA says that VCs still think the world of cleantech, so what kind of cleantech VC blogger would I be if I didn't have a few predictions of my own... But let's break with VC tradition and make some predictions with teeth.  And then let's break with tradition further and let readers vote on them.  No more VC "predictions" like "government will play a bigger role in cleantech" or other so-safe-its-useless bromides -- here are some predictions where I'm setting a quantified "over/under" and then readers are invited to click here to participate in a very brief survey to place your bets on whether I was high or low. 1.  As Michael...