It's been pretty fascinating to watch how many strong opinions have been expressed over the past couple of days regarding Fred Wilson's "two VCs" post (and then some others pointed at me after my response to his post). So I thought I would paraphrase some of what I heard (note: mostly NOT from Fred, but from others who've piled on) and give some replies.

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Rob, are you saying Fred is wrong?

No. I totally agree with Fred that there's an important divergence of two very different approaches to venture capital right now -- the lean VC (put as little capital as possible to work in each company, grow it quickly and as low-cost as possible, and then sell it as early as possible),...

Fred Wilson recently wrote that there are now two venture capital industries: One software-based, and one that is capital intensive. He argues that the former has gone capital efficient, and the latter (including "cleantech, biotech and other capital intensive tech businesses") that "operates largely the same way it has operated for the past twenty or thirty years". It's a good post, as with many of his thoughts, well worth reading if you haven't seen it already. He mentions forthcoming data that should be interesting to see.

I think he's right. There really are two divergent strategies in venture capital right now. The one goes for as little cashburn and as quick an exit as...

Rolling up startups is hard to do correctly.  It's easy to say that two companies would work better as a combined entity, but in reality it's quite difficult to do regardless of the scale of the companies involved -- you have cultural shifts to make, personnel who will need to change roles and perhaps leave, a combined set of investors to fit into the same size boardroom, significant operational disruption, not to mention the difficulties involved in pricing and structuring the deal, etc.

So it's not something to be bandied about loosely.  But nevertheless, I think it's time for more cleantech startups to be thinking about how they can team up and carry forward as combined efforts.

I'm not much of a web guy, but I'm terrifically impressed with Twitter these days.

For one thing, after I posted a pretty critical take today on a book I'd just read, it was a new experience to have the author (Vinnie Mirchandani, "The New Polymath") pretty immediately reach out to me to ask why I felt that way.  That launched a good online dialog between the two of us.  We agreed that cross-disciplinary innovation is huge for cleantech in particular.  We agreed on the need for significantly more resources to be put behind it, and to be put into the sector in general.  We disagreed on the level of demonstrated effectiveness shown by IT entrepreneurs and investors crossing over into...

Now that energy efficiency is all the rage in cleantech venture circles (note to cleantech VCs: don't pitch LPs on your firm being "differentiated" because you target capital efficient businesses...), investors have been particularly attracted to the energy efficiency plays that appear to be at the intersection of energy efficiency and information technology.  The hope being that these investments would scale like an IT play, but be accessing the large market opportunity in energy efficiency.

The majority of such investments I get approached on, however, are simply information gathering and presentation tools.  A dashboard, either for the home or for a larger building, showing the...

As you pull into the parking lot, the grit of crumbling asphalt crunches under your tires. No shade trees or white curbs in this parking lot, just lines on tarmac, narrow spaces, and an unfiltered summer sun.  You get out of your car and look up at the tall, nondescript brick building, and head toward the effectively unmarked entrance, a metal door that makes you remember public schools from years ago.  A train rattles by on an elevated track directly behind the building, picking up speed as it carries its daily delivery of bankers and lawyers downtown. A few other people amble into and out of the building, but it's far from busy.  This isn't one of the newer generation buildings with...

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...