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The six million dollar men

Silicon Valley plans to clean up by investing in green energy.

Photo: istockphoto.com/grafissimo

"If the best way to create the future is to invent it, we say the second-best way is to finance it." John Doerr is only half joking. He's one of the most influential venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, California, and he knows a thing or two about financing the future. As a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), one of the Valley's best-known venture capital firms, Doerr has enjoyed a phenomenal run of success, backing technology companies such as Sun Microsystems, Google and Amazon (as well as the odd failure, such as computing start-up GO Corporation, which famously burned through $75 million of venture funding). In the process, he's made himself a personal fortune in excess of $1 billion.

But ask him what he's doing now and you won't hear buzz phrases such as "Web 2.0." These days, Doerr is firmly focused on clean technology-in particular, energy technology that can save the planet from global warming. Recently, his firm set up a $500 million fund for investment in green technology, on top of the $200 million it has already invested.

This doesn't mean Doerr has ditched capitalism for worthier goals; his new direction is still driven by an instinct for profit. "Remember the Internet? Green tech is bigger," he told an audience at TED, the annual "Technology Entertainment Design" conference in Monterey, on the southern fringe of Silicon Valley, last year. "This could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century."

John Doerr, partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), one of Silicon Valley's best know venture capital firms.

Photo: Reuters / Dino Vournas

Doerr tantalized his audience with the mouth-watering fact that the global energy business is worth $6 trillion per year. That puts in the shade anything measured in mere billions, such as the market for computers. "Energy is the mother of all markets," he said.

Even a minuscule slice of such a vital industry would keep a venture capitalist in beige chinos and blue shirts for life. But there's more to this story than the search for riches.

In 2000, a financial earthquake hit the area of green rolling hills just south of San Francisco known the world over as Silicon Valley. The Valley had enjoyed a decade of seemingly unstoppable growth—the greatest period of legal wealth creation in history, as Doerr famously put it at the height of the boom. The trick had been to finance and build the technology behind the dot-com revolution. In the space of 10 years, the Internet changed the planet, bringing fantastic wealth to the small band of Silicon Valley venture capitalists who'd financed the companies behind it.

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