TechPulse 360

Speaking yesterday at the Silicom Ventures Summit 2009, serial entrepreneur and “greentech” venture capitalist Vinod Khosla did his presentation on “Maintech” vs. Cleantech; about the same for the last 6 to 9 months!

For Khosla, Maintech refers to mainstream technologies like engines, lighting, appliances, cement, water, glass and buildings – which are huge markets – and can therefore impact significantly the carbon emission problem; as opposed to Cleantech which is more about huge and complex infrastructure projects like nuclear, solar, wind, etc.

I think this is more about semantic than anything else, but it does allow Khosla to rise above the rest of the “Cleantech” investors.

Don’t believe forecasts, invent your future

Khosla started his keynote by discrediting forecasters and analysts, by proving how wrong they were in several occasions; predicting oil and coal prices or the future of the mobile industry.

You just can’t predict the future with yesterday’s technologies or extrapolate the past. And the best way to predict the future is to invent it! So typical Silicon Valley.

Black Swan solutions needed, not Greenwashing

Khosla then went on at looking for some “black swan solutions” that are responsible for market shifts and ultimately energy innovation. Some of these disruptive solutions could be:

1. the best way to clean up the air would be to build more coal plants but using carbon sequestration (Calera)
2. create crude oil from wood chips/waste at refineries through a catalytic process (Kior)
3. A 5% difference in demand brought oil prices down from $147 to $37. So the idea is to double the efficiency of combustion engines, from 20% efficiency today to 40% and would cut oil consumption in half! “It’s not that hard.” (Transonic)
4. replacing incandescent bulbs with more expensive LEDs which are 10 times more efficient. The idea here is to significantly reduce the cost of LEDs

To succeed, these “black swan” solutions must return investment in 3 to 5 years, be relevant in cost, scale and not rely in any long term government subsidies and above all survive the Chindia test: it must work in countries like China and India.

Beware of charlatans

Despite being disruptive ideas, investors and the public must be wary of irrational ideas or “silly stuff,” like Sheryl Crow’s one man, one toilet paper idea! There are no “lazy” green solutions, Khosla contends.

The pragmatics survive!

Finally, for Khosla, pragmatism should prevail and that means focusing on mainstream green technologies as well as the large infrastructure projects.

And here’s a copy of an earlier version of Khosla slides: