Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Brilliant Ideas, Cleantech Edition

TerraPass - nice one, guys.

There are lots of things to say about this. Probably the most important is that the rate of innovation in cleantech related stuff is accelerating hard, despite a lack of serious institutional support. This is probably why most plays in this space are, well, so cool (viz FutureForests).

The other very interesting thing to me is watching new market (versus regulatory) structures that will ultimately capitalize a cleantech economy emerge and evolve - this is, after all, what plays like TerraPass and FutureForests really are.

In the rest of the venture world, market structures like these were laid down long ago and don't really evolve (save get massively disrupted every decade or so).

Also, having spent a lot of time in the 3rd world, I think one can safely say that regulatory solutions have almost zero percent chance of being at all effective in helping a global cleantech economy emerge (since, no matter which way you cut regulation, 3rd world consumers will essentially end up subsidizing 1st world consumers, which is unsustainable because it's eminently arbitragible).

-- umair // 8:17 PM // 0 comments

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