Green Jobs: Venrock Loses Two of Its Cleantech Staff, Shifts Out of Greentech VC

Another VC firm changes direction, plus executive moves at Powergenix and SMA.

Eric Wesoff January 06, 2014

Eric Wesoff

Editor-at-Large
Greentech Media

Eric Wesoff is Editor-at-Large at Greentech Media. Prior to joining GTM, Eric Wesoff founded Sage Marketing Partners in 2000 to provide sales and marketing-consulting services to venture-capital firms and their portfolio companies in the alternative energy and telecommunications sectors. Mr. Wesoff has become a well-known, respected authority and speaker in these fields.

His expertise covers solar power, fuel cells, biofuels and advanced batteries. His strengths are in market research and analysis, business development and due diligence for investors. He frequently consults for energy startups and Silicon Valley's premier venture capitalists.

Matt Trevithick, VC Partner at Venrock and lead investor in Transonic Combustion, Atieva, Nest Labs, FINsix, and solid-state heat pump manufacturer Phononic, has left the firm.

Matthew Nordan, a former Venrock VP, has joined Chivas Lam (former Qiming venture partner) and Greg Manuel (former Amyris SVP) to form MNL Partners, a clean energy project development company focused on China.

Steve Goldby, a cleantech-focused partner, remains with Venrock.

Venrock VP of Marketing Nicole Pack said that the firm will take an "opportunistic" approach to energy investments and focus on the intersection of energy and IT or healthcare.

This is a common refrain in greentech venture capital (see MDV, Battery Ventures, etc.), and it highlights the marked difference in greentech and energy VC compared to traditional VC. Despite some successes (e.g., SolarCity, Tesla, Nest, Opower), the cleantech VC model is broken and must adapt to survive. It's a topic Nordan covered at our recent NextWave Greentech Investing event at SRI in Menlo Park and one we'll cover in more detail at this year's event.

PowerGenix named Robert Jaworski as CFO. He was previously a Director at NY-BEST.

SMA America named Brad Dore as the Director of Marketing for the PV inverter builder.

Law firm Foley Hoag has named Mark Barnett as Partner and Co-Chair of its Energy & Cleantech Group.

Green Charge Networks, an energy storage startup, announced that Richard Lowenthal, founder and CTO of ChargePoint, has joined Green Charge Networks' advisory board.