Is there any possible upside to the huge boom and bust in corn ethanol?
Yes. Transmission of alternative fuels was a missing piece. The consumer-facing infrastructure for liquid fuels was missing in our infrastructure. Very little attention was paid to how do you get alternative fuels into the pipeline. Corn ethanol taught us valuable lessons on how we might make that work. So you started as a fund-of-funds targeting seed-stage energy investments in 2006. Could you tell me about that? Our initial fund was formed in 2005 with the stated objective of driving venture capital investment in the seed stage of alternative energy plays. This has been difficult because alternative energy is viewed as a sector requiring high amounts of capital, so no one wants to be an early-stage investor in a technology that could require $200 million to get to market. We chose Nth Power, VantagePoint, and Element Partners as the funds we wanted to put our venture investments in. All are great partners. But the market reality changed and no one was willing to invest in risky early
