Moving from IT to green tech entrepreneurship - Why?
Being an entrepreneur means continuously searching for new opportunities and trends that will pay off in the hopefully not so distant future. IT is the classic playground for risk capital opportunists, and has indeed paid off for some of them quite handsomely. Earth2tech has a list of 25 successful IT entrepreneurs that have now turned to environment related technologies.
The list includes many categories, from transport -for example we have talked about Shai Agassi and his Project Better Place venture in Israel and Denmark- to energy production with sun and wind. Given that IT is still big money, it is a surprise that people that know this market well, risk capital in a sector that has less guaranteed earnings. So I came up with a list of what their incentives might be:
- IT becomes increasingly crowded: it has surely been like that for ever but as new generations of entrepreneurs inevitably join the field, there might be less space to manoeuvre.
- Fewer opportunities in IT: Niche areas are countless and Internet access has helped the explosion of startups with no end in sight. But how many have a future? And how easy is it these days to spot the winners in such large numbers?
- Green is trendy: there is no Internet site, TV program or publication without some mention to global warming and how we should do something about it. New investment efforts cannot help it, they are part of this trend and hope to ride the green wave to success.
- Green can be very profitable: if a green venture proves successful it could be the next goldmine. Why? Because environmental pressure is getting so tight, that adoption would be at a universal scale. The EU and US markets alone are huge, let alone the BRIC countries…
In my opinion, the cleantech sector has still not achieved breakthroughs that will give returns right now. But in fact, this is an entirely separate subject which I will come back to in a future post.
