As much as the individuals at KPCB may be mission driven, they have to marry mission to outsize returns. Scale is a very important part of what he has to do every day as he sorts through opportunity sets. It was mission that drove KPCB into cleantech investment. It was mission that was attached to the expectation that they would be able to create big businesses that scaled, found liquidity & had a large impact as a result. That has turned out to be a much harder industry to invest in & they have really had a difficult time realigning what they knew about tech investing & applying it to cleantech. Hopefully they’re getting it right, getting better? Things that take a long time to liquidity, things that take lots & lots of capital to get to liquidity those are generally not great venture investments. When talking to any VC , they have a business & that business is investing other people’s money & they have to return other people’s money with extraordinary returns on a regular basis in order to raise their next fund. Investors have to marry their mission & purpose with business fundamentals.
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