Eileen Tanghal, managing director, IQT International (London), delivered a welcoming address to the audience to kick off the second day of the GCV Symposium 2021, focused on climate tech. She spoke about sustainability and how In-Q-Tel, the venturing unit of the Central Intelligence Agency. She reminisced that she entered the world of corporate venture capital more than a decade ago, nearly at the peak of the first cleantech boom and bust cycle.
She summed up the developments in the cleantech space since then with a simple phrase: “Venture capitalists lost money but cleantech actually succeeded.” She cited data on the growth of clean technologies, stating that there has been a 10x growth in the solar photovoltaic market and 4x in wind tech growth over the past decade, and there is still room to grow. She also said that thanks to these developments interest in cleantech or climate tech (as it is often referred to today) has been revived, even though it had a bad reputations among the venture capital community because of the losses incurred in the past.
Tanghal also summarised the lessons learnt from the first wave of cleantech 1.0, which include the realisation that going in too early is the same as being wrong, that hardware development is a hard business and the importance of keeping realistic expectations about capital and time needed to scale.
