Cleantech Ideas — Good and Bad — at the New York Venture Summit

As I said, I wasn’t thrilled with the treatment that the entrepreneurs/presenters received at the hands of the venture capitalists who served as the panelist/judges at this year’s New York Venture Summit.  Having said that, there really were some surprisingly lame ideas that made it through the vetting process that the conference organizers claim they imposed on the entrants. 

I’m reminded of what Kleiner Perkins managing partner Ray Lane told me in a meeting a few months ago: 

There are a lot of ideas.  Ideas are pretty cheap actually.  So you can say: what if we did this?  You get very creative and very innovative about an idea that is not well thought through, but here are somethings to consider.  Is it going to be a big enough market?  Is the risk removable?  Can you scale it up?  What are the economics?  Is it disruptive enough? 

There were people targeting extremely small markets, or projecting really unappealing revenues and earnings.  And, of course, there were people who want money to build a prototype of something that I can see is going to be difficult if not impossible to make happen – even in the laboratory, not to mention the real world. 

This, of course, is why I’m left recommending only a dozen of the 600+ cleantech business plans I’ve reviewed over the last two years. 

Also, some of the presenters failed to make important points.  For example, a speaker presented his company that offers a simple, inexpensive breakthrough for delivering chemical pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides in a more effective way – thus agribusinesses can use less.  In this whole presentation he didn’t mention that reducing the use of toxic chemicals has a positive benefit on world health!  Doesn’t that matter?  Eventually, we’re going to realize that ingesting poison isn’t good for us.  That ought to be worth a bullet point on some slide somewhere.