Fundraising Survival Guide

Paul Graham (of Y Combinator fame) has recently posted a great essay on how to survive the difficult task of fundraising.

I particularly like this because it talks about the pressures experienced by the entrepreneur and the behaviour witnessed by both parties - investor and entrepreneur. There are very rational reasons that lead VCs to act the way they do. One of my favourite quotes from him was the following:

Problem number 3: investors are very random. All investors, including us, are by ordinary standards incompetent. We constantly have to make decisions about things we don't understand, and more often than not we're wrong.

We don't like to call ourselves incompetent - but the truth is that being good at being a VC involves learning a lot about something new very quickly. Even with a certain degree of specialization, the entrepreneur will know more about the particular business than the VC. Of our areas of focus (life sciences, IT, and cleantech), I primarily focus on cleantech. However, within cleantech there are still a huge range of subsectors - solar, wind, fuel cells, batteries, smart meters, biofuels, grey water, black water, carbon storage, synfuels, etc. While I've had the privilege of being involved in startups in a number of these areas, if you come to me with a new material that dramatically improves the energy efficiency in some market somewhere, I'll need to understand how much value the market will place on your offering, the technical feasibility of what you've done, the difficulty it will be to ramp up manufacturing, the cost sensitivity of the inputs, the competitive landscape, etc. So, we get good at learning quickly.

However, all of this dance of information exchange can seem, to the entrepreneur, to be frustrating. The entrepreneur has been living this vision for the past "x" months/years and can't understand why everyone else doesn't see what they do. We try to recognize the situation from the entrepreneur's point of view. and this is why, if we aren't going to progress an investment, we strive to provide companies with a quick "no" rather than a slow "no", and this is why we try to give feedback where we can - although often it is difficult for us to provide feedback because the reasons for us progressing an investment can often be intertwined with other investments we are considering. Nevertheless, the road to funding can be a long one, and Paul's post I think helps chart the course.

4th AustralAsian Cleantech Forum

I just returned from the two day cleantech conference in Melbourne entitled the "4th AustralAsian Cleantech Forum" (http://www.cleantechforum.com/).

My co-worker Ivor and I had the opportunity to check in with a number of people we hadn't spoken with in a while. The conference is showing tremendous growth over last year, and last year's event was pretty decent. It was good to run into a number of familiar faces - this is giving me confidence that I'm seeing more and more of the players in Australia's cleantech community. As well, 14 companies pitched to the group - 7 either in Seed or Series A stage, and 7 in Series B stage (or later, as some of the companies had already gone public).

The companies showcased an interesting mix of technology. There were two ocean power companies, a high-performance diesel engine, biodegradable plastics, some water recycling companies, a couple of concentrating solar technologies, and some clean coal companies. All in all, a pretty diverse mix, and hopefully an impressive preview of the further improving dealflow happening in Australia.

In addition to the company showcase, there were several presentations and panel discussions. Premier John Brumby opened the conference. It was good to see him there as he is a big supporter of the cleantech opportunity and the benefits it can provide to the state of Victoria. Several US LPs were there, including representatives of CalPERS and Pacific Corporate Group Asset Management. There is growing interested by US investors in the Asian cleantech space, and I think many of them are realizing (as is our thesis) that Australia, as an English-speaking country with a British-based legal system is a great launching point to Asia.

Also of interest is the greater role that India is playing within this forum. Jeffrey and Peter Castellas, the founders of Cleantech AustralAsia have put together a good team to link opportunities, both for investment, and for companies entering the Indian market, between India and Australia. This is a great move. Every VC understands that tapping into the Indian and Chinese market is incredibly valuable for a growing company, and yet both markets can be very challenging. By leveraging the connections between Australia and India, this market entry can be made easier.

All in all it was a great event.

Rooftop Wind Gets Traction

Welcome back! It's been a wonderful Christmas break, but it's time to get back to work. The new year has started quickly at Starfish, with my time being split between tying up loose ends left from before Christmas, to getting a jump on a bunch of new opportunities.

However, there is a business concept I've seen a couple of times now that I think is interesting. It is a concept that I had the privilege to hear about when I was at AeroVironment (AV's Architectural Wind product is shown below, and another company, Marquiss Wind Power's product is shown to the right), and this is rooftop wind. Similar to rooftop solar, in that this allows the power generation to be close to the source (and therefore compete economically with the retail price of electricity, not the wholesale price). In addition the units, if designed well, allow the building to function as a wind funnel, channelling (and accelerating) the wind over the top of the building. The turbines can be located in a zone of far greater wind-speed than the typical mean windspeed at ground level. This gives the turbines decent performance.


The final benefit is that the turbines can improve the visual aesthetics of a building. This is something that AV has done in spades with the ravenclaw look to their product. What's brilliant about this is that the initial reaction to having a bunch of turbines on a roof of a building is concern about noise and the building visuals. With an attractive design, the concerns over aesthetics are addressed, and the turbines allow a building's "green cache" to be much more easily seen and promoted.

In the last year in Australia I have seen not one but two companies with a similar concept. Both had different product designs, one using a vertical axis. These products had some cost and reasonable payback difficulties. However, I thought, at the time, that it was interesting to see more work done on the concept.

Well today it was announced that Marquiss Wind Power raised $1.3m from Velocity Venture Capital and Strategis Early Ventures. They have a ducted fan design (shown above and to the right). They are in their early design phases and their product looks a lot like the earlier iterations of AVs product, but there is room for improvement. Like many other cleantech products widespread adoption will be determined by the economics, so lifetime reliability, and $/W will be key.


However, I'm interested that four different firms (at least) are pursuing this concept. I imagine that will actually be good news for these companies. When trying to prove a new concept to skeptical customers, a number of competitors in an early growing market can be a good thing as competitors are far more likely to validate the concept than compete for a specific sales dollar. So, it will be interesting to see if more companies jump in this space, and to see whether or not the economics can succeed.

Rural folk

I have noticed something with the upcoming Cleantech revolution, and that is a growing power placed with one of this nation's earlier entrepreneurs (as well as the entrepreneurs of my previous nation - the US - and my previous nation before that - Canada). I'm talking about farmers and ranchers. These people don't get much thought these days (at least by city-dwelling folk like me), and in many ways I think that they've been sold short. I've noticed in all three countries that I've lived that there is a divide between rural and urban dwellers. That being said I must say that the divide in Australia is the narrowest, and in the US it is the widest (so much so, that the political spectrum is almost neatly divided between urban "blue states" - Democrat supporters, and rural "red states" - Republican supporters). As an aside, I've noticed that the split is nearly reversed in Canada - the rural people are left wing, and the urban people are right wing (sort of), but I digress.

Where am I going with all of this? Well, with much of the "new economy" hoopla over the past ten years many people in the media have given the impression that entrepreneurs are all engineering students between the ages of 20 and 30 starting up web-based businesses. Everyone else was dismissed as "old economy". Agriculture wasn't even hip enough to be classed as "old economy", it was simply dismissed entirely. Growing up in Saskatchewan (a very farming oriented, rural province of Canada) I saw a lot of this. However, farmers are some of the most entrepreneurial people I know. The original pioneers who populated the West of Canada and the US (and rural Australia) endured risks far more than any dot.com entrepreneur, and the farmers of today know what it takes to run a business, and are very innovative.

What I think we'll see happen, and in many cases I have begun to see it already, is the entrepreneurial spirit of farming will resurge and play a major role in Cleantech. At least three huge sectors of Cleantech are a good fit for rural life - wind farms, solar farms, and biofuels production. Farmers are used to using their land as a business to make money, and I've seen many cases where farmers were eager to set up a wind farm or grow biofuel suitable plants. There is a lot of push in the rural community to make big on the opportunities presented by Cleantech, and given the entrepreneurial history required of rural life, I think it is somewhat exciting that this group, often overlooked by traditional urban, tech-oriented folk, could have a resurgance and play a major role in this new wave of tech adoption.