This is not a temporary shift.
CHICAGO (Reuters) – Car maker Ford Motor Co. is drawing up plans to retool American plants to make small, fuel-efficient passenger cars that it mainly makes and sells in Europe, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.
The paper said Ford has looked at bringing over European models, including the mid-size Mondeo, in response to high fuel costs that have hit sales of larger, fuel-hungry trucks and sport utility vehicles.
Really, it is not temporary. See VC legends, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Kleiner’s investments defined the Internet’s first generation. Without Kleiner there was no Netscape, and without Netscape there was no cash-gushing dot-com boom. Yet Doerr and his partners have been absent not only from the biggest deals to date among the next generation of Internet companies – MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook – but also from the buzziest prospects for big paydays down the road – LinkedIn, Yelp, Twitter, and a host of similar Web 2.0 startups whose common thread is an interactive, or “social,” relationship with users.
Doerr, who is 56, only grudgingly accepts the premise that Kleiner has turned its back on the consumer Internet. “We made a very deliberate and strategic decision,” he says with the baritone of a deejay, which he was in college. “We could’ve doubled down on Web 2.0, whatever that is. We didn’t.” Instead, the firm has been diversifying. First, in 2006, it created a $200 million fund focused exclusively on preventing infectious-disease pandemics. Then, last year, it raised $360 million to invest in China – Kleiner’s first foray outside the United States and a project that already is off to a rocky start because one of its two key recruits quit within months. The newest addition is the $500 million Green Growth Fund, launched in May.
But the green fund represents more than just an expanded product line for Kleiner – it’s an attempt to stretch the definition of venture capital. Ever since the industry got its start 40 years ago, VC firms have always been small partnerships investing relatively small amounts of money, hoping for a few giant payouts to outshine the inevitable flubs. But together Kleiner’s three most recent funds – including its latest, $700 million venture fund raised this spring – amount to nearly $1.6 billion, a paltry sum compared with the giants of private equity but a massive amount for the venture business. And unlike the usual startup-centric VC approach, Kleiner’s strategy focuses on existing alternative-energy companies that are well beyond the launch phase.
Kleiner isn’t alone in giving a lot more attention to products and services that get us out of the fossil-fueled energy death-spiral we’re in the middle of. But they have a successful track record of successful, forward thinking investments.
The energy game has changed and firms that adjust sooner rather than later will profit tremendously.