Venture-capital firm Khosla Ventures announced Tuesday that it had raised more than $1 billion in two new funds–the first time the firm has raised funds from outside investors instead of just investing the money of its founder, Vinod Khosla, a longtime venture capitalist and a founder of Sun Microsystems (JAVA). Khosla Ventures is putting two thirds of the money towards clean technology investments. But what about tech?

David Weiden, one of Khosla’s partners who concentrates specifically in tech investments, said the firm is allotting more money towards clean tech because that sector boasts “a lot of opportunity where there’s relatively little competition relative to the size of the market.” In the crowded tech field, meanwhile, opportunities can be “somewhat harder to come by,” he said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Vinod Khosla emphasized several times Thursday that costs–and not idealogy–will drive the clean technology industry, and said that much of the hype around cleantech is fueled by misunderstood information.

Khosla, a legendary venture capitalist and one of the most active investors in cleantech through his firm Khosla Ventures, said some of the books that have helped generate buzz were “probably written by English majors who could not get a real job,” he said onstage at the AlwaysOn Summit at Stanford University.

The industry is far more scientifically dense and difficult to predict than many seem to believe, he said, so almost everything being about cleantech today should be taken with a grain of salt.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

How do you know when one of the world’s most respected investment firms has veered off path and bet wrong? That’s the crux of the question raised by a piece in this month’s Fortune magazine, entitled “Kleiner bets the farm” that puts Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers under the lens for its recent investment decisions.

Read the rest of this post