Okay, it doesn't have the same ring as the old Gore & Doerr in '04 buttons from 1.0 ago. (And, I wish I could have found mine today so I could scan it). But, at least today's version of the partnership is more than symbolic. In the form of a well-written Fortune piece, it was announced that the former Veep and current Nobel Prize winner is joining Doerr's storied venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a full-fledged partner working on greentech investments.
And for this blog, one particularly relevant blurb...
Doerr says Kleiner will hire more experts, but insists that the ability to vet and assist entrepreneurs is more important for venture capitalists than industry experience. And the green field is something of, well, a green field. "You can't hire an expert in the recombinant-DNA industry when there isn't one," he says, making a reference to the similar problem Kleiner successfully faced when it backed Genentech in the 1970s.
Gore can certainly help in this arena by, for example, introducing Kleiner people to top atmospheric scientists or government decision-makers. Policy and politics, his specialties, will have a huge impact on the business of clean technology.
One thing that we aren't hitting on is open modes of cmonunicatioms with implementation communities (Engineers , Land & Building Development Firms , etc.)There needs to be focused environments of open communication between the green luminaries/visionaries and the people who are actually building things on a day-to-day.One of my main goals when developing mydealbook was to give these RE development collaborative tools a social feel so that these kinds of dialogues could take place. Hopefully it takes place either there or somewhere for the good of the earth.
Posted by: Marvel | July 07, 2012 at 09:31 PM