solar power companies - Bruce Gibney: The Potential of Failed Technology

One of the easiest places to look for new ideas in venture capital is all the technologies of the past 30 or 40 years that have failed to produce a financial return -- but which have huge potential to be realized in the future, says Bruce Gibney, partner at the Founder's Fund. Bruce Gibney: I think one of the easiest places to look for new ideas in venture capital is all the technologies of the past 30 or 40 years that have, for whatever reason, failed to produce a financial return but for which there is no technological reason why they can't work. Energy remains one of sort of the great open questions in venture capital. Clean tech has received an enormous amount of funding over the past five or six years. There's the efficiency side of things, which has worked quite well -- so sort of grid management, cooling, etcetera. The generation side has worked out very badly, and I think the reason why is fundamentally the business model for the generation side is totally off. So the curious thing about -- on the generation side -- about clean technology is that the business models are the most perverse in any part of the startup landscape. So, for example, if I were a handset manufacturer and I wanted to introduce a competitor to the iPhone, I would never introduce something that was 80 percent as powerful, had 70 percent the features and cost 120 percent the price, and say to the consumer, "Well, some combination of government subsidies and good feelings and unicorns and <b>...</b>