Interview with Peter Nieh on using the government to bridge cleantech financing gaps
Peter Nieh is a founder of Lightspeed Venture Partners. The venture capital firm manages over $2 billion in capital and just closed its most recent fund, Lightspeed VIII, worth $800 million, earlier this year. Some of Lightspeed’s hits include Brocade, Ciena, Informatica and Riverbed Technologies. Nieh began focusing on cleantech investments three years ago, and the company has made five investments in the field to date. He recently made a bunch of predictions about where the cleantech industry will be in 2009. We caught up with Nieh at the recent AlwaysOn Venture Summit West conference.
VB: How did you make the switch to investments in cleantech?
PN: We investigated companies to see if they met our bar for being high-impact companies. We saw that. By contrast, with nanotechnology, we looked a few years ago and we didn’t see that. We saw a confluence of things. We think there are venture opportunities with commercializable technologies. They weren’t technologies looking for solutions like we saw in nanotech. There was a fair degree of technology risk but fairly low market risk. If you could produce a solar cell that had higher efficiency but had half the cost of a crystalline silicon solar cell, you can expect there would be a market for it. With other businesses, there is a lot of consumer adoption risk. You can build a web site and nobody would come. You might not get traffic. If you could produce diesel fuel that is clean and has good economics, you can sell it.