Comments on: To Kleiner Perkins’ web woes, add greentech

By: solarmd

solarmd — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 09:13:31 +0000

Stop chasing manufacturing deals! America can’t compete in manufacturing in the long run.
$500 million could have been invested in 100 other IT or non-manufacturing clean tech startups and
get a few winners, more quickly.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 06:53:46 +0000

Kleiner is continuing their trend of late stage tech investing with deals like Twitter and Spotify. I see a lot of hot deals going on in Silicon Valley and Kleiner’s name isn’t on them. So much of Kleiner’s success in the current era was due to John Doerr and Vinod Khosla during the late 90s and early 2000s. I’m not super impressed with their folks over there. They miss out on a lot of stuff and they seem to prefer very late stage deals, which indicates they are risk-adverse.

I just don’t think they have the horsepower like they used to. Look at AH and then look at KPCB. There’s really no comparison.

By: cornelius

cornelius — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 15:32:12 +0000

KP committed 3 VC no-no’s. It tried to finance basic research which is best left to big companies and governments, it invested in an area which, as a business, can only exist economically with political support, and they bet the farm in that one area instead of sprinkling the money over a number of technologies. a venture fund’s success is highly dependent on the 10% of the portfolio that contains the big winners. this means that there needs to be adequate diversification to make sure the net is wide enough to capture them.

By: DeepInScience

DeepInScience — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 03:22:53 +0000

It is just luck and the right time for John Doerr, Ray Lane etc to make fortune in the past.
However, investors in them lost the money not them, so who cares !
None of them understand the physical science, its future, and the limitation/time
to make profits. In the past, luck, and timing are what made them succeed !
Not any more as the future is not easy to predict.

By: Charles

Charles — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 17:38:23 +0000

I don’t know whether this is just a bump in the road, but KP has survived other big bets that went wrong. Remember pen computing? The hard-drive stampede? The early 2000′s biotech bust? These were gigantic holes in the portfolio, for both KP and lots of other VC’s. It comes with the territory- big wins come from placing big bets on things that have a lot of uncertainty. Some of the people here can gloat over KP’s current troubles, but as a fellow VC all I can say is it sounds like sour grapes.

By: seyitaylor

seyitaylor — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 15:11:16 +0000

Goof article. Not sure what’s wrong with this sentence though:
“but if those web investments aren’t their either, then that’s a big problem.”

By: warwick99

warwick99 — Sat, 25 Aug 2012 01:14:50 +0000

In this climate is it not time to move from the Zero to a billion in a nano second.

Use old fashion business methods grow organically zero dept firm foundations.

These Cavalier business practices have murdered at birth brilliant technologies that needed time to mature before roll out.
They are run but money guys trying to sell moon beams not good old fashion commerce .

We need these brilliant technical minds and need to rethink the business models.
The focus should be on technical excellence
Not to dump shares when the other guy is not looking
Perhaps this is a little boreing

By: Suminder

Suminder — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 22:49:16 +0000

So here is a story that may mentore shared with me recently.

A father gives his son $1 and asks him to double the money. The sons goes out and tries his luck. Son can be interchanged with daughter, for political correctness. Son comes back empty handed. Father asks what happened? Son say another kids with $10 ended up taking his $1.

The VCs forgot that to compete with big boys, with trillions already invested in infrastructure, and most of it amortized, one needs to spend much more to win the game. US lost of to China because US built its infrasructure long ago, while China is building out and was willing to go all out. While our (US) political system, weighed down by sharp polarization, did not have the balls to play the game with China.

Cheers

By: Clear

Clear — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 18:26:33 +0000

I think the problem is that none of the partners at Kliener Perkins have been tech entrepreneurs (and NO having a senior management position in a tech company doesnt automatically qualify you). If you look at guys like John Doerr , Ray lane, Wen Hsieh etc..it is obvious that they dont have the background to understand deep technology; a lot of which involves physics and materials science.

By: Rampworth

Rampworth — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 05:43:25 +0000

Before trying to analyze this too deeply, I’d suggest you engage in a discussion with these folks from the perspective of a customer (ie: a prospective new technology ). The degree to which they tower over the normal level of VC hubris is shocking (i cant imagine anyone with a “hot technology” even consider dealing with them?)