Thank You Andreessen: New Venture Fund Will Have "No Cleantech, No Electric Cars"

marcandreessen.image1All day long, news of the $300 million fund raised by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and his longtime partner, Ben Horowitz, has been dominating the webosphere. The duo, which have together invested in a dozen or so web firms, including Twitter, plan to invest in both early-stage and more mature Internet companies. Given that the partners have a long history in the development of the web, it’s fitting that they’re sticking to what they know. But interestingly enough, Andreessen tells Fortune that they will be keeping a wide berth from anything related to cleantech, energy and transportation, stating flat out: “No cleantech, no rocket ships, no electric cars.”

So the team won’t be following in the footsteps of the Elon Musks, Vinod Khoslas and Kleiner Perkins of the world, who used their infotech background to segue into energy investing — or just ditched infotech altogether to pursue opportunities in an industry in which they had little background. (Musk covers all three, including rocket ships). For Andreessen and Horowitz, that’s probably a really good idea.

Energy and car startups require a completely different style of investing and incubation than software and web firms. Neal Dikeman, a partner at Jane Capital Partners, aptly summed this idea up last week in his post on “the rules” in cleantech investing. Some important rules Dikeman notes include:

Energy is slow and big – Energy technology R&D and commercialization time frames are longer and costs higher…At scale, there is no capital efficient investing in energy.

For some investors, Dikeman’s rules are as hard to follow as those other rules are for the dating clueless out there. And so far there hasn’t been that many big cleantech hits coming from the investors that built the dot-com industry. But as Dikeman notes, many of these companies (Tesla, Khosla’s biofuel bets, Kleiner’s energy storage plays) will take a lot more time to develop before we can actually determine if they’ve delivered a success.

So while we’re watching the wave of cleantech investments from the former infotech crew over the past two years mature, we’re kind of glad there’s not another $300 million being dumped on cleantech by some really smart investors that have the web — but not necessarily the energy landscape — down pat.

Image courtesy of mathoov and Creative Commons.

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