GigaOM » Nancy Pfund

Photos: Tesla Model S customers drive off

Katie Fehrenbacher — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 00:02:48 +0000

Driving off

Electric car maker Tesla Motors officially handed off the first ten of its Model S electric cars at a launch event at its factory in Fremont, Calif. on Friday. Workers filled a corner of the factory and surrounded a line of the cars as the first customers accepted their keys and were driven off with their cars. Early customers that picked up their cars included DBL Investors Partner Nancy Pfund and DFJ Partner Tim Draper. Here’s out photos of the event:

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Tesla’s Model S electric car is finally here

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 07:10:05 +0000

Customer rides of the Model S Beta

Tesla Motors investor, and DBL Investor Partner, Nancy Pfund has been waiting about three years to get her Model S electric sedan. Her model is one of the elite Signature series, with a unique red paint job, and the largest battery range available at 300 miles. Pfund is one of a group of customers that will receive their Model S cars during a big media event at the Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif. on Friday.

Pfund and her firm backed Tesla back in 2006 and has seen the company’s ups and downs over the past six years. So it’s pretty exciting for her that the cars are finally here and are reaching customers. She plans to drive her Model S off the factory floor for the first time on Friday, and potentially up North to the Napa Valley area with her family. “It’s amazing how Tesla has really captured the imagination,” says Pfund in an interview in her San Francisco office this week.

The Model S is a crucial car for Tesla. It represents the company’s chance at profitability as well as its goal to be a more mainstream auto maker.

The basic Model S costs $50,000 (after federal tax incentives) and has a 160 mile range, while the higher-end Model S can cost $100,000 for a close to 300 mile range. Tesla plans to ship 5,000 Model S cars this year and 20,000 in 2013, and the company has 10,000 reservations for it. Just 8,000 Model S cars sold by 2013, could lead to the company turning a profit for the first time.

As an investor, Pfund wanted to support Tesla early on and was interested in buying Tesla’s first car the Roadster. However, Pfund says her husband is 6 foot 7 and just didn’t fit comfortably in the Roadster, and in addition, she says the $100,000 sports car just wasn’t practical for her family and two children.

But Pfund knew she wanted to put a reservation down for one of the first Model S cars early on. She tells me: the Model S is “a pivotal icon,” for the electric car industry.

If you’re interested to know peoples’ impressions of the Model S, Tesla and electric cars in general, check out our GigaOM Pro research report (subscription required), including results from a survey of GigaOM readers.

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Waste-to-fuel startup Enerkem withdraws its IPO, too

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 20:42:18 +0000

Waste to fuel startup Enerkem has withdrawn its IPO plans citing — what else — poor market conditions. The move is the third greentech IPO hopeful to cancel public market plans this month, following moves by gas farming startup Luca Technologies, and solar thermal company BrightSource Energy.

As I pointed out when Luca withdrew its IPO filing, the hope that there was a greentech IPO revival brewing is now officially debunked. An investor in BrightSource, DBL Investor’s Nancy Pfund, lamented in an op-ed this week the sad state of a society and marketplace that won’t allow a solar thermal to go public at the valuation it wants, but in the same week can support a large secondary offering from Dunkin’ Donuts.

Solar inverter company Enphase Energy was the only greentech company that had intended to go public in recent weeks, and which actually did. On May 30 the startup sold nearly 9 million shares at $6 a piece, raising about $54 million. The company is currently trading at $6.86 per share, slightly above its debut price.

Enerkem is a Canadian company, founded in 2000, that develops technology that turns waste into biofuel. The company has won federal government backing — a conditional commitment for an $80 million loan guarantee from the USDA — and also counts giant trash hauler Waste Management, oil refiner Valero, Rho Ventures, Braemer Energy Ventures and the Westly Group as investors.

Enerkem gasifies various forms of waste — everything from old telephone poles to mixed municipal garbage — and then turns that syngas into various fuels including methanol and ethanol. Enerkem has inked non-binding agreements with Waste Management and Valero to sell its equipment, and those deals give Enerkem the option to co-own refineries with Waste Management and Valero.

Since 2008, Enerkem has been running a pilot plant in Sherbrooks, Canada, that can process 4.8 metric tons of feedstock a day, and its demonstration plant, in Westbury, Canada, was built to produce 1.3 million gallons of fuels per year. The company is now building a commercial refinery, located in Edmonton, Canada, that will be able to make 10 million gallons per year. It expects to get ready for producing methanol at the Edmonton facility in the first quarter of 2013; ethanol production should follow in the second half of 2013, says the company.

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When donuts trump clean energy

Katie Fehrenbacher — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:22:24 +0000

Greentech investor Nancy Pfund — who I once called the most successful and positive greentech investor you haven’t heard of — can’t always be positive. She penned an interesting, albeit depressing, op-ed in the San Jose Mercury this week on how her fund’s solar portfolio company BrightSource pulled its $150 million IPO plans due to poor market conditions, in the same week that Dunkin’ Donuts raised $895 million in a secondary offering.

When you put it that way: yikes! And, as she points out, the analogy between cheap fossil fuels and cheap fast food runs deeper than the public markets. The price of both fast food and fossil fuels are falsely low in the U.S. because the market ignores externalities like climate change for fossil fuels, and problems with mono-agriculture and our ever expanding waistlines for the food industry.

Pfund writes:

As an investor, I understand that in volatile markets, the tried and true triumphs over game-changing innovation. Capital markets place a premium on proven performance and established market positions in times of uncertainty. As an American, however, I can’t help but worry about this state of affairs.

Amen.

If you’re worried about Pfund and her firm DBL Investors (stands for Double Bottom Line) now that BrightSource has pulled its IPO — don’t be. Pfund joined JPMorgan in the mid-80′s and founded DBL Investors, which was a spin-out of JPMorgan’s Bay Area Equity Fund I in January of 2008. DBL was an early investor in electric car company Tesla Motors, which went public in the Summer of 2010, an investor in solar rooftop installer SolarCity, which is an IPO candidate and growing quickly, eMeter, which was bought by Siemens in December, and solar installer PowerLight, which was bought by SunPower in 2007. So yeah, a pretty decent portfolio.

Image courtesy of lokate366.

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