Productive Uncertainty
OriginalIt’s tempting, as a venture investor, to back companies developing amazing new technologies. But this often doesn’t work out as well as investing in companies that are using existing technologies in a new way. New technologies have a larger long-term societal impact but new markets are better investments.
Because new markets begin small and their impact is measured along a different metric than the one people are used to, they are often derided as “we wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters.” This exhortation disguised as an observation leads venture investors astray. 140 characters—a new market—was a great startup investment; flying cars—a new technology—has been a poor one. Take, for instance, new technologies most of us would much rather have exist than flying cars: cleantech.
In 2007 legendary venture investor John Doerr said “Green technologies…could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century” and he committed Kleiner Perkins to investing $200 million in cleantech. This is a perfect example of wishful thinking: of the $25 billion of investment in the sector between 2006 and 2011, only half was returned; a huge miss. What went wrong?
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