Last night the FACCSF organized with its Sustainability Committee a ‘’VC Trends for Green and Clean Business’’ at the Winston & Strawn offices.

After a short introduction by Carole Granade, Executive Director, to present the French-American Chamber of Commerce, Sheeraz Haji from Cleantech Group began his presentation. The environmental engineer gave his global view about the Cleantech industry and its investments. He explained that major VCs have started invested drastically in that industry even if it has not yet offered the great returns internet has.
In that way the government investment will be huge in addition to the private investors.
Courtney McColgan, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, describes first her company: started investing in Cleantech in 2001, and DFJ has invested $200M in 45 clean technologies. And it represents 1/3 of DFJ investments. The DFJ sector and geographical focus are wind, energy storage, efficiency and distribution, most in China and India.
Bernard Slede from Hewlett-Packard shows us the point of view of a big company, and its power to make change every day. The HP technology, size and scale give them enormous leverage to affect positive change. So HP trying to become greener, has reduced its data centers from 85 to 6. The example of the trade data center of Wynyard, Scotland shows the awareness of HP. It saves about 40% of energy costs, using the North Sea winds, and the systems approach is to integrate the data center to its environment. HP tries also to reduce the commercial printing.
For the end of the presentation, we listened to Dan Baldi from Silicon Valley Bank. He gave us the main trend of the historical clean technology VC investment (North-America, Europe, Israel, China and India): it increased from $0.9B and 164 deals in 2002 to $8.5B and 567 deals in 2008.
Then, the panel has a great debate about the optimization of resources in western countries, and the influence of developing countries and China. For Sheeraz and Courtney this last country will have a strong role in the future investments in Cleantech, it could take the leadership and influence the industry.

After the conference, the guests enjoyed a cocktail and networking part, with Lebanon specialties.

For the attendees, if you want to get the powerpoint slides of the speakers, please send an e-mail to marketing@faccsf.com

See our Sustainability Committee and its events:
http://www.faccsf.com/Events/Committees/SustainabilityCommittee.htm