FWD.us is an organization started by key leaders in the tech community to promote policies to keep the United States and its citizens competitive in a global economy—including comprehensive immigration reform and education reform.

I admire that Zuckerberg and his merry band of do-gooders for embarking on this quest. I also respect the idea of education reform and applaud the leadership position this group is taking here. And I also applaud the efforts the group will devote to science and innovation.

However, what I hate is the focus put on a specific immigration issue; but I am getting ahead of myself. This is from an op-ed currently on the FWD.us website:

The economy of the last century was primarily based on natural resources, industrial machines and manual labor. It was an economy where many of these resources were zero sum and controlled by companies. If someone else had an oil field, then you did not. There are only so many oil fields, and there is only so much wealth that can be created from them for society. Today’s economy is very different. It is primarily based on knowledge and ideas — resources that are renewable and available to everyone.

Yup, ideas and knowledge are renewable and available. But do they lay the bricks for the data centers that house Facebook’s servers? Do “ideas” — as Zuckerberg & Co describe — actually build the dams that in turn produce the electricity that helps you poke Mark? The food on your plate, it too is just bits and bytes?

Yup, those things don’t need people. They crop up magically. No natural resources, no machines, no manual labor, just …. ideas and knowledge!

What that snippet from FWD.us tells me that when it comes to our Silicon Valley leadership, there is a disconnect in understanding the real world that exists beyond the browser or the mobile phone. We don’t do empathy and human interactions very well in the Valley, especially companies whose raison d’être is social and people. You know, like Facebook.

The problem with this effort is that many of those leaders live in a bubble that is of their own making and have little interaction with the real world. The fact is that any immigration reform needs to dovetail with the domestic reality of the 21st century America. In order to change the world and wanting new policies, there needs to be a deeper understanding of the world around us.

The Flyover Nation

Between Sand Hill Road and Wall Street lies a big country that is going to bear the brunt of the coming connected age. Sorry Mark, but in the age of data, Facebook is Standard Oil and you are Rockefeller. And unfortunately, you have the data and we don’t. If we did, there would be naked transparency on data and privacy from Facebook. But I am digressing again.

Any immigration debate has to start with the education and re-education of the American workforce. With the coming connected age and continued proliferation of technology into our physical world, we are beginning to see disruption and massive displacement on a large scale. We don’t have the mechanisms in place to train people for this quantified society, where data looks to become the ultimate arbiter. How can we have any talk of immigration and a knowledge economy that doesn’t acknowledge that there is a silent desperation outside of Silicon Valley and New York and Washington, D.C.?

People talk about robot-helpers and an army of drones, but I don’t hear how the factory workers and farmers will actually learn how to use them, as well as tame the data these gizmos will throw up and then will put it to work. What is going to happen to millions of people who will be replaced by those drones and robots? After all, they are as much a part of the capitalist food chain that makes the world go around. Damn … if we are going to continue to be an innovation economy, then it has to be about more than a couple of million people.

The Invisibles

Now let’s talk about immigration issues, because when I see FWD.us and the focus of its charter, I see the same old self-serving argument the technology industry serves up when it comes to immigration reform. In my years of writing about technology, I have seen pretty much the same argument made every single time — just change the billionaire or the company clamoring for this change.

Every discussion is about getting startup visas, or visas for engineers and knowledge workers and experts and how we need to get these people to stay in the U.S. after they are done with college. Let’s not trivialize the challenges facing our society and the reality of immigration and job creation in today’s world.

As an immigrant, I see any such discussion as limited. We can’t have a discussion about immigration reform unless we talk about other immigrants — the invisibles who do a lot of the work in the offices of Facebook and Yahoo, but never get invited to the IPO party or are handed an iPhone. How can we have a lobby group which has no representation from those people? Instead we have this:

Across America, creative, hardworking people in coffee shops, dorm rooms and garages are creating the next era of growth. Let’s embrace our future as a knowledge economy and help them — and all of us — reach our full potential.

If Mark and others really cared deeply about immigration reform on a holistic level then the conversation would involve a whole lot of other people — members of non-engineering and non-technology corps. So, no, I don’t buy that just because an immigrant works on an algorithm make her more important.

I know, because I am one. Perhaps FWD.us and Zuckerberg should start actually learning about the whole and real problem: a society disrupted in connected age.

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This week Reuters published a report, citing anonymous sources, saying that Kleiner Perkins held a meeting with its limited partners (the funds and endowments that put money into Kleiner’s fund) where Kleiner leader John Doerr apologized for a weak fund performance and promised to do better in the future. Kleiner closed on a new $525 million fund a little less than a year ago, and at the time made a bunch of changes.

Kleiner was one of the most aggressive and high-profile venture capital firms to put money into cleantech startups, and at one point had been hoping to invest a third of its funds into green companies. Part of Kleiner’s poor fund performance no doubt has to do with its greentech investments that haven’t made the firm money. And actually a bunch of its investments struggled mightily, like Miasole, Fisker Automotive, and Amonix.

I’ve written a lot on why cleantech and VC is a difficult match. Check out these pieces from over the years:

• “Greentech investing: not working for most”
• “The perils of cleantech investing”
• “We can thank Moore’s Law for the cleantech VC bust”

But one of the more nuanced reasons that I haven’t spent much time on is passion: what I think was investor passion for doing good, for helping fight global warming and for saving the planet. It’s hard to paint that type of enthusiasm as a bad thing. But I think the drive to be known as an investor that makes the world a better place was something that could have distorted the lens used to find investments that will make money.

A lot of the venture investors in Silicon Valley are cut from the same cloth. Many are environmentally-leaning Californians who have kids and who are in their mid-50s and 60s. Many made their fortunes — either through startups or investing — off of the IT sector. The general mindset several years ago was to look for what came next after IT, and greentech provided them with something they could feel good about doing and providing the right legacy for their kids.

That feeling of righteousness is a powerful drug that can cloud rational thinking sometimes. A startup with a potentially game changing innovation that can save the world should succeed — we all want it to succeed — but how much of these investments were hopeful money, blinded by do-gooder passion, as opposed to rational money?

That Doerr put his own personal money into some of these companies as they struggled highlights just how strong the do-gooder pull is and how personal these investments were sometimes. Reuters reported last month that Doerr dipped into his own pocket for the about $2.5 million that struggling solar company Miasole needed to make payroll before it was sold. I’ve heard rumors that Miasole isn’t the only company that Doerr, and Kleiner Partner Ray Lane, put personal funds into. When those companies fail, it’s a slap to the identity of the investor as the savior.

More money going into greentech innovations is the right thing to do from the perspective of the world. The planet needs this technology. But it will likely have to come from non-VC pockets of money, like government funds or project finance.

While Kleiner is the highest profile of the venture firms to make an aggressive bet on cleantech and then (seemingly) retrench, it by no means is the only one. VantagePoint Venture Partners admitted recently that it had to curb its cleantech fund due to lack of interest from investors. Private equity firm Hudson Clean Energy Partners also halted its clean energy fundraising process and the managing director resigned.

Other firms, like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mohr Davidow, have shifted strategies to focus on cleantech lite, or cleanweb startups. There’s a few VC firms left that are still trying to do investments in new energy tech and sustainability-focused startups like Khosla Ventures, Braemar Energy Ventures, and Lux Capital, but these are few and far between. The silver lining for those guys is that there’s a lot less competition out there now.

Clearly over-exuberant save-the-world optimism wasn’t the only problem with cleantech. The sector is vast, complex, science-heavy, partly regulated, partly government dependent, and many areas haven’t seen innovation in decades.

We’ll be watching closely to see if some of the cleantech 2.0 strategies are actually working and if those include that same do-gooder passion.

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Kilar had spent a lot of time next to Amazon’s maverick CEO Jeff Bezos and he learned well from the master of disruption. Like Bezos, he focused on playing the long game and ignored the naysayers.

He used his rolodex to hire the right people. He went to China and acquired a piece of technology to roll out Hulu to the masses at a breakneck speed. Most importantly, the team at Hulu built a simple, elegant and easy to use a minimalistic service: which no one expected. It was so good and I was so wrong. And glad I was, for when I was recovering from my illness in 2008, Hulu became a constant bedside companion.

There are some in Silicon Valley who ask me why I am a fan of Kilar. Here is why:

• Hollywood is about profit maximization even at the expense of paying public.
• Silicon Valley is about building a great consumer experience and build profits in the long term. Google and Amazon are two perfect examples.

Jason was able to marry both those constituencies. Don’t believe me? Just look at the site’s financial performance: at the end of 2012 it had three million Hulu plus subscribers and about $695 million in revenue. The number of paying subscribers for Hulu Japan tripled in comparison to 2011.

With so much good news, it perhaps was the right time for Kilar to announce that he is going to be leaving the company sometime during the first quarter of 2013. It is not as big a shock for his departure has been rumored for a while, especially since the company’s big media owners recently completed a buyout of co-owner Providence Equity. Hulu’s co-owners including Comcast’s NBCUniversal, Disney and News Corp., have been plotting the future without Kilar.

Herding cats

Hulu CEO Jason Kilar with former CTO Eric Feng

Many of my sources have told me that Kilar was more like a UN peacemaker and trying to organize board meetings with the media-doyens was a nightmare. A Fast Company profile last year pointed out that Kilar had skills to manage up. But things went progressively south after the exit of Peter Chernin, the News Corp. COO who was the heavy on the board and who loved the concept of Hulu. That Kilar survived and helped turn Hulu into a business that 3-million people want to pay for is a testimony to his (and his team’s) skills.

My initial skepticism of this big consortium came from years of observing such beasts of burden trample over saplings of innovation, mostly because the new way threatened their established business practices. At the turn of the century, a Silicon Valley company called @Home Networks had a bold idea: send broadband via cables owned by cable networks. The idea was backed by the likes of John Doerr and soon all big cable companies such as Tele-Communications Inc. (later acquired by AT&T, which was in turn gulped by Comcast) became investors in @Home Networks.

While @Home suffered from adult management, it was the cable companies which essentially killed the pioneer. Once they learned that they could buffer their profits by selling broadband, they proceeded to kill the baby they had helped birth.

Show must go on

Having seen that movie before, I knew that Hulu would have similar problems. With Jason gone and private equity investors having locked in their profits, get ready for the egotistical media companies get their evil way with Hulu.

Kilar will leave Hulu at an interesting juncture. The rise of multiscreen households has turned the video business on its head. The relevance of the older media distribution channels is on the wane and we are transitioning to broadband and web. Think about it this way: world’s biggest live event didn’t happen on ESPN, Fox or NBC. Instead it was YouTube that hosted the Felix Baumgartner’s space jump. South Korean pop star Psy has had a billion views on YouTube. I bet you the top 100 artists have not received that kind of attention on MTV.

The fact is that we are looking at a world where Netflix and Amazon Prime along with YouTube are the cynosure of attention when it comes to video. Hulu has it for now, but its big media owners have their legacy businesses to protect. They need to make the TV station owners happy. They need to fleece the cable customers by selling them packages no one wants.

Hulu was their bridge to the future — but large media companies suffer from a weird kind of astigmatism.  They are businesses set up to serve other businesses — movie theaters, cable companies, satellite companies, DVD sellers and now on-demand video providers. That is why they can’t put viewers first, even if they want to.

Too bad, Kilar isn’t going to be there to look out for viewing public.

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No medallions, dreadlocks or black fists

Just that gangsta glare with the gangsta raps

—Dr. Dre, “Let Me Ride”

At Opsware I used to teach a management expectations course, because I deeply believed in training. In it, I made it clear that I expected every manager to meet with her people on a regular basis. I even gave instructions on how to conduct a one-on-one meeting so there could be no excuses.

Then one day while I happily went about my job, it came to my attention that one of my managers hadn’t had a one-on-one with any of his employees in more than six months. While I knew to “expect what I inspect,” I did not expect this. No one-on-one in over six months? How was it possible for me to invest so much time thinking about management, preparing materials and personally training my managers and then get no one-on-ones for six months? Wow, so much for CEO authority. If that’s how the managers listen to me, then why do I even bother coming to work?

I thought that leading by example would be the sure way to get the company to do what I wanted. Lord knows the company picked up all of my bad habits, so why didn’t they pick up my good habits? Had I lost the team? I recalled a conversation I’d had with my father many years ago regarding Tommy Heinsohn, the Boston Celtics basketball coach at the time. Heinsohn had been one of the most successful coaches in the world, including being named “coach of the year” and winning two NBA championships. However, he had gone downhill fast and ended up with the worst record in the league. I asked my father what happened. He said, “The players stopped paying attention to his temper tantrums. Heinsohn used to yell at the team and they’d respond. Now they just ignore him.” Was the team now ignoring me? Had I yelled at them one time too many?

The more that I thought about it, the more I realized that while I had told the team “what” to do, I had not been clear about “why” I wanted them to do it. Clearly, my authority alone was not enough to get them to do what I wanted. Given the large number of things that we were trying to accomplish, managers couldn’t get to everything and came up with their own priorities. Apparently, this manager didn’t think that meeting with his people was all that important and I hadn’t explained to him why it was so important.

So why did I force every manager through management training? Why did I demand that managers have one-on-ones with employees? After much deliberation with myself, I settled on an articulation of the core reason and I called up the offending manager’s boss — I’ll call him Steve — and I told him that I needed to see him right away.

When Steve came into my office, I asked him a question: Steve, do you know why I came to work today?

Steve: What do you mean, Ben?

Me: Why did I bother waking up? Why did I bother coming in? If it was about the money, couldn’t I sell the company tomorrow and have more money than I ever wanted? I don’t want to be famous, in fact just the opposite.

Steve: I guess.

Me: Well, then why did I come to work.

Steve: I don’t know.

Me: Well, let me explain. I came to work, because it’s personally very important to me that Opsware be a good company. It’s important to me that the people who spend 12 to 16 hours per day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life.  It’s why I come to work.

Steve: OK.

Me: Do you know the difference between a good place to work and a bad place to work?

Steve: Umm, I think so.

Me: What is the difference?

Steve: Umm, well …

Me: Let me break it down for you. In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. It is a true pleasure to work in an organization such as this. Every person can wake up knowing that the work they do will be efficient, effective and make a difference both for the organization and themselves. These things make their jobs both motivating and fulfilling.

In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.”

Steve: OK.

Me: Are you aware that your manager Tim has not met with any of his employees in the past six months?

Steve: No.

Me: Now that you are aware, do you realize that there is no possible way for him to even be informed as to whether or not his organization is good or bad?

Steve: Yes.

Me: In summary, you and Tim are preventing me from achieving my one and only goal. As a result, if Tim doesn’t meet with each one of his employees in the next 24 hours, I will have no choice but to fire him and to fire you. Are we clear?

Steve: Crystal.

Was that really necessary?

You might argue that no matter how well managed a company is, it will fail without product/market fit. You might argue further that horribly managed companies that achieve massive product/market fit succeed just fine. And you would be right on both accounts. So was it really necessary for me to make such a dramatic speech and threaten one of my executives?

I think it was for the following three reasons:

• Being a good company doesn’t matter when things go well, but it can be the difference between life and death when things go wrong.
• Things always go wrong.
• Being a good company is itself an end.

The difference between life and death

When things go well, the reasons to stay at company are many:

• Your career path is wide open because as the company grows lots of interesting jobs naturally open up.
• Your friends and family think you are a genius for choosing to work at the “it” company before anyone else knew it was “it.”
• Your resume gets stronger by working at a blue chip company in its heyday.
• Oh, and, you are getting rich.

When things go poorly, all those reasons become reasons to leave. In fact, the only thing that keeps an employee at a company when things go horribly wrong — other than needing a job, which isn’t so applicable in the current macro environment — is that she likes her job.

Things always go wrong

There has never been a company in the history of the world that had a monotonically increasing stock price. In bad companies, when the economics disappear, so do the employees. In technology companies, when the employees disappear, the spiral begins: the company declines in value, the best employees leave, the company declines in value, the best employees leave … Spirals are extremely difficult to reverse.

Being a good company is an end itself

When I first met my friend Bill Campbell, he was chairman of Intuit, on the board of Apple and a mentor to many of the top CEOs in the industry, including Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. However, those things did not impress me nearly as much as his time running a company called GO Corporation. GO essentially attempted to build an iPhone in 1992. The company raised more money than almost any other venture-capital backed startup in history and lost nearly all of it before selling itself for nearly nothing to AT&T in 1994.

Now that probably doesn’t sound impressive. In fact, it probably sounds like a horrible failure. But I’d met tens of GO employees in my career, including great people such as Mike Homer, Danny Shader, Frank Chen and Stratton Sclavous, and the amazing thing was that every GO employee that I’d ever met counted GO as one of the greatest work experiences of their lives. The best work experience ever despite the fact that their careers stood still, they made no money and they were front-page failures. GO was a good place to work.

This made me realize what an amazingly effective CEO Bill was. Apparently, John Doerr thought that too, because when Scott Cook needed a CEO for Intuit, John recommended Bill even though Bill lost a ton of John’s money at GO. And for years, everyone who ever came in contact with GO employees knew what Bill was about. He was about building good companies.

If you do nothing else, be like Bill and build a good company.

Ben Horowitz is co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. He was a co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP, and he ran several product divisions at Netscape. He serves on the board of such companies as Capriza, Foursquare, Jawbone, Lytro, Magnet, NationBuilder, Nicira, Okta, SnapLogic and Tidemark. He blogs at http://bhorowitz.com/.

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Moritz is part of a rare breed of uber-VCs who have had multiple billion dollar exits. Moritz, John Doerr, Vinod Khosla, Jim Breyer and Fred Wilson belong to this super club. Moritz, who spent early part of his life as a journalist and wrote for Time magazine, is well known for his investments in Google, Yahoo and PayPal. Moritz spoke at our RoadMap conference last November and is a big champion of finding investment opportunities in India, China and other parts of the world. Moritz also wrote the seminal Apple book, The Little Kingdom.

On a more personal note, I have gotten to know Mike over the years and I am stunned by this development. He informed the firm’s limited partners in a note earlier today. This is the text of the email that was sent out.

We have always tried to be straightforward with you and, in that spirt, I need to share something. Unfortunately, I have been diagnosed with a rare medical condition which can be managed but is incurable.

I’ve been told that in the next five to ten years the quality of my life is quite likely to decline. Right now I feel fitter than ever and I hope that I’ll be one of the lucky ones who can live a full life and defy the statisticians. But there is no way of predicting this with certainty and thus for me, life has assumed a different meaning and I am making some adjustments.

I am going to extract myself from the daily management of Sequoia Capital, a task that has consumed a large part of my time for the past sixteen years. I will become Chairman of Sequoia Capital and will be deeply involved with nurturing the fresh investments, ideas and relationships that can be of significant long-term benefit for all of us. I will also work very closely with some of our younger and newer members, will continue my role as Managing Member of existing funds and maintain all my current company responsibilities. I will use twelve to fourteen weeks – sprinkled throughout the course of each year – for various pursuits, diversions and trivial indulgences.

Nothing about this should cause much of a change because everything that has been achieved at Sequoia Capital has resulted from the teamwork and contribution of many people. Our overall business is in the best shape it has ever been and we are better positioned than at any time in our forty year history. Doug Leone will assume full responsibility for coordinating the business we have gradually developed over the past couple of decades and almost everything else remains entirely the same.

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The move is part of a transition in the partnership structure at Kleiner, says Primack, and partner Brook Byers is also not named as a general partner on the next fund documents. Update: Primack also reports that cleantech-focused Kleiner investor Bill Joy is not listed on the next fund documents.

As anyone that follows cleantech knows, Ray Lane has been one of Kleiner’s cleantech champions. He’s led cleantech investments in startups like electric car company Fisker Automotive, grid battery company Aquion Energy; GreatPoint Energy, a company that converts coal into natural gas; Luca Technologies, a company that produces natural gas via naturally occurring microbes in coal beds; efficient auto company NextAuto Networks (formerly V Vehicle), and solar thermal company Ausra.

At least two of these companies have required a massive amount of capital to scale up and reach commercialization — that can be a difficult strategy for venture capitalists, as early investments can get diluted during large later rounds. Fisker Automotive has raised around a billion dollars in private funding, and has been struggling with production problems with its first electric car the Karma. GreatPoint Energy recently raised $425 million in equity from Chinese industrial conglomerate China Wanxiang Holdings.

Fuel cell maker Bloom Energy, which was one of Kleiner’s first investment in cleantech, has also raised hundreds of millions of dollars over its almost a decade in existence. Solar thin film maker MiaSole has been fighting for survival in a solar market that has seen many manufacturers shutter factories over the past year, and raised $55 million last month to help it enter new markets and boost its sales staff.

Lane is not Kleiner’s only cleantech-focused investor to be sure. The firm lists an almost two dozen team for its greentech investments, including heavyweights Bill Joy and John Doerr. Lane told me in an interview in the Summer of 2011 that Kleiner is not planning to move away from cleantech investing. Update: As mentioned above Joy also isn’t listed on the next fund.

However getting exits in the cleantech space has been rather difficult for investors. Some of Kleiner’s green exits have included Ausra, which was sold to Areva in 2010, and solar inverter company Enphase Energy went public last month. But Silver Spring Networks has yet to go public, despite listing in the Summer of 2011, neither has Mascoma (it had more than a few red flags in its S-1 which it filed in September 2011). Luca Technologies is supposed to go public this week.

Lane told me last year that he thought there would be 6 to 8 IPOs out of its cleantech portfolio from firms like Bloom Energy, Miasole, Silver Spring Networks, Enphase Energy, Mascoma, Fisker and GreatPoint Energy. “They’ll probably all IPO. I’m not forecasting when, but these companies will be huge,” said Lane. He also said (in the Summer of 2011): “If you and I sit down two years from now and we don’t have a single IPO from this group [their cleantech portfolio], I’d say now we are behind.”

Other Kleiner-backed companies that have struggled include next-gen car company Next Autoworks (formerly called V-Vehicle), which cancelled its factory plans. Think Automotive, an electric car maker declared bankruptcy recently (Kleiner’s investment was just a tiny one for the American rights).

Lane will still be active at Kleiner working with his current portfolio of companies, and will still have the opportunity to bring in new investments to the fund, but just won’t focus most of his time on bringing in new investments. Lane also is executive chairman at HP.

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The new funding will come from investors including investment firm Temasek Holdings, energy giant Total Gas & Power USA, SAS, NAXOS Capital Partners, HH Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalifa Al-Thani of Qatar, an entity affiliated with Kleiner Perkin’s John Doerr, and an entity affiliated with Amyris director Fernando Reinach. So clearly the company’s existing investors are willing to keep giving, which can be a good sign.

Amyris stock rose 8.33 percent in morning trading to $6.50, after plummeting below $5.80 last week — it’s lowest trading since its IPO in 2010. At one point after its public debut the company traded in the $30′s, and priced its debuted at $16.

Amyris uses genetic engineering to turn biomass into chemicals and fuels, and its first product turns sugarcane syrup into Biofene, a form of the industrial chemical farnesene, which is a fragrant hydrocarbon that’s used to make cosmetics, lubricants and other materials.

Amyris will announce its fourth quarter 2011 and year end results at the end of the day.

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Renmatix says it uses water at high temperatures and pressure as a solvent to break down the biomass into usable sugars rapidly. The process is called “supercritical hydrolysis” and Renmatix says that while that process has been used in other industries like pharmaceuticals and coffee production, they are the first to implement the process for biofuels and biochemicals. The process is very rapid — think seconds and minutes — compared to other processes that can take days.

Public company Codexis is also targeting the low cost sugar market, and sells its enzymes to make sugars to biofuel producers, in addition to other products. Codexis has major backing from oil giant Shell and Brazil sugar giant Cosan. I interviewed Codexis CEO Alan Shaw earlier this year, and he was saying the same things that the executives on the panel said on Tuesday afternoon: cheap sugar is the new oil.

Renmatix is far from the scale of Codexis yet. The company only lists Kleiner Perkins as an investor and will no doubt need major funds to build it’s facility in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. But the company has scaled up a pilot plant in Georgia that is says is turning three dry tons of woody biomass into sugars per day.

Kleiner Perkins also invested in cellulosic ethanol company Amyris which went public in April 2010, and was one of Kleiner’s bigger exits in cleantech. Renmatix no doubt will work closely with Amyris, and Amyris CEO John Melo joined Renmatix’s board.

The event on Tuesday featured Kleiner Partner John Doerr,  Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, the CEO of Renmatix Mike Hamilton, and execs from Dupont and the Department of Energy.

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1. DOE Secretary Steven Chu. An obvious one, but Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu had arguably the biggest influence on the greentech sector in 2010. The DOE has funneled billions from the stimulus package into greentech sectors across the smart grid, green cars, energy efficiency, carbon capture and sequestration, and clean power. As a scientist he “gets” the issues, and also is on the cutting edge calling for open research and collaboration. I’m clearly a fan.

2. Bloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar. While it’s not entirely clear how successful the oh-so-buzzy fuel cell company Bloom Energy will be in the long run, it’s clear that in 2010 Bloom Energy ruled the mainstream green tech news. Heck, the company’s launch dominated our top 10 most read stories of 2010. The combo of the eight years of stealth mode, the Kleiner Perkins backing, the Colin Powell connection, the 60 Minutes launch and the high-profile first customers blew the rest of the green tech industry’s PR attempts out of the water. To me, that says the greentech industry is still very small, and is craving a success story.

3. Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Another easy choice. Tesla CEO Elon Musk helped the Silicon Valley electric car startup climb a mountain in 2010. The company had one of the only successful greentech IPOs out there; it scored a key OEM deal with Toyota; it bought the NUMMI plant for cheap, and its stock keeps climbing (above $30 today). Now about those two more years ’til the Model S comes out…

4. Kleiner Perkins Caufield, Byers Partner John Doerr. While Kleiner seems to be pulling back a bit from its greentech ambitions, the Valley’s most well-known venture firm shaped the greentech investing landscape of 2010. In particular, Doerr commonly spoke throughout the year about the massive market size of greentech and the importance of federal energy R&D. If the firm does pull back significantly from greentech, it will also have wide influence on the rest of its greentech VC peers.

5. Philanthropist Bill Gates. For the first time, the Microsoft founder and billionaire philanthropist took an interest in energy and green tech in 2010. Gates’ coming out party to greentech was his TED speech in February 2010, and since that time, he’s unveiled investments in startups like nuclear firm TerraPower and efficient engine tech EcoMotors. He’s also put money in Vinod Khosla’s fund. The technologist brings a new perspective to the industry, pointing out Moore’s Law doesn’t apply to batteries and the pace of innovation in the sector has been very slow.

6. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn. Ghosn has been one of the most outspoken and aggressive auto CEOs when it comes to electric cars. He sees “a big future” for the company’s upcoming electric car, the LEAF sedan, and has also partnered with Silicon Valley EV infrastructure company Better Place. Ghosn said this summer that Nissan was in “crisis mode” and the company’s future looks to be resting on EVs.

7. DOE’s Loan Chief Jonathan Silver. Just about one year into his role heading up the Department of Energy’s loan program office, former venture capitalist Jonathan Silver believes the agency has come a long way from its first few years of neglect and delays. He told us in a recent interview that the loan program functions “as well as, and possibly better” than private counterparts, when you consider the scale and complexity of the projects it’s meant to support. Not that there haven’t been hiccups and hurdles in the process.

8. GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt. GE has made one of the biggest bets on clean power and energy efficiency products with its Ecomagination line. Whether it’s wind turbines, smart meters, energy efficiency technology, power grid batteries, or its new electric car charger, GE has its fingers across the greentech sector. The company even got creative this year with its launch of a smart grid fund, where companies can compete for funding from GE and a group of venture capitalists.

9. NRG Energy CEO David Crane. The CEO of power company NRG Energy, David Crane, led the company to make massive investments in solar projects, including its most recent plan to spend up to $450 million in equity over four years on a 250-megawatt project being developed by SunPower. NRG Energy is also building what it says is the first privately funded electric vehicle infrastructure project. Crane was also a regular on the greentech speaking circuit in 2010.

10. Executive Secretary for the UNFCCC Christiana Figueres. After a disastrous U.N. climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009, the Cancun negotiations in 2010 were able to complete one task: They saved face for the UNFCCC process. That’s actually a pretty big deal. Thanks can go in part to Christiana Figueres, who held the negotiations together and rallied the troops. Now we’ll see if she can push for an actual agreement from countries before the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. While the greentech industry tends to feel disconnected from this process, the agreement (or lack there of) that will come out of these negotiations will be fundamental to greentech business.

To read more on greentech policy check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Predictions for the Greentech Marketplace in 2011
• Smart Algorithms: The Future of the Energy Industry
• Report: Cleantech’s Third Quarter Growing Pains

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In his talk, “Is the Energy Race Our New ‘Sputnik’ Moment?,” Chu said countries such as China have replaced Russia as the biggest threats to U.S. dominance in science. These countries are gaining economic and political clout rapidly on the international stage because of their willingness to invest heavily in scientific research and to do so with long-term policies in place.

“I think time is running out. We shouldn’t lose sight of this, and federal support for science R&D will be critical for our economic competitiveness,” Chu said.

Chu spoke on the day when the White House’s Office of Science and Technology issued a report recommending an annual spending of $16 billion in energy research and development, which would be a big boost from the current annual average spending of $5 billion. The speech also happened on the day when President Obama announced a proposal to freeze wages and salaries for federal workers, a move that raises questions about the government’s ability to attract talents to work for the DOE and the network of national labs that play a critical role in energy research.

The federal government has spent billions of dollars over the past two years to support research as well as demonstration and even commercial projects in a variety of energy-related industries, including renewable power, electric grid upgrades, electric cars and their batteries, biofuels and a host of technologies to reduce energy use in office buildings and homes. The largess came from the stimulus package that aimed to rescue the ailing economy, and its various programs are coming to an end.

It’s highly unlikely that lawmakers will approve similar spending, particularly given the takeover of the House of Representatives by Republicans as a result of the November election. The new political landscape is prompting exercises to prioritize what issues are worth fighting for and what could be let go among lawmakers, the administration and lobbyists.

Chu didn’t say how much money the DOE should receive for research and development. He noted that the country’s $5.1 billion spending for energy-related R&D in 2010 is about 0.14 percent of the overall federal budget ($3.6 trillion). He cited numbers showing that only 0.3 percent of the sales in the energy industry went to fund public and private R&D in 2007.

“These recovery funds are important down payments for what we have to do. The real question is, after the recovery act, you can’t spend at that rate. We are looking hard at how to use our precious resources in the future. It’s a nonpartisan issue, it’s all about economic prosperity,” Chu said.

The $16 billion annual spending recommended by the White House’s Office of Science and Technology mirrored the one from the American Energy Innovation Council, a private group consisted of well-known names in the tech business, such as Bill Gates, GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt and Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr. The council members have used their celebrity status to promote its recommendations in recent months.

In his speech, Chu also pointed to progress that China has made that makes it a formidable competitor. China moved from 14^th to 2^nd place in published research articles in less than 15 years (the U.S. is No. 1). Eight out of 10 global companies with the largest R&D budgets have research centers in China or India or both. Applied Materials, a Silicon Valley stalwart, recently opened the world’s largest private solar research facility in China, Chu said.

China’s two top universities, Tsinghua and Peking, also happen to supply the most foreign students who get Ph.D.s in the U.S. Many of these students return to China because they couldn’t stay legally to work after they’ve completed their education. But changing the country’s immigration policy to accommodate these graduates will involve a tough fight.

“They come to the United States to get an education because the research in the United States is still the best in the world. But if they go back, then we lose a great deal,” Chu said.

For more research on cleantech financing check out GigaOM Pro (subscription required):

• Cleantech Financing Trends 2010 and Beyond
• Report: IT Opportunities in Electric Vehicle Management
• Car Data As the Next Platform for Innovation

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