Grading Cleantech Business Plans as “Good” vs. “Best”
A reader offers me advice re: my reviewing cleantech business plans with an eye towards identifying “the best.” He writes:
Given your line of work, you might want to be more politically aware in your statements. Instead of saying that you referred an investor to “the company that, by my wits, offers what I believe to be the most promising technology in …. (a certain space)”, you may want to say something like you referred that investor to “a company with a very promising technology.” If I made money helping to match investors with farmers who grow oranges, I would not publish a blog that said that I had recently referred an investor to the farm with the BEST oranges.
It’s possible that your blog, as written, will alienate potential customers because of your absolute statement that you’ve found the best technology in this field.
Interesting idea; thanks for your viewpoint.
My decision to refer to a company as “the best one” in its arena vs. “a good one” comes down to my perception of the job I perform, which, is ferreting through thousands of business plans and distilling out those that, based on my background in both business and science, I deem the very best in each category. I.e., I don’t help all companies in hydrokinetics, wind, biomass, etc.; I try to identify the best one (or ones) and focus my efforts there.
I don’t see this as damaging to my position; in fact, I see it as the function that I perform. To use your metaphor, if I paid a consultant to go find me the best oranges and he came back and told me where some good ones were, he would have failed to deliver on what I had asked him to do.
An important caveat: I can be wrong in my judgment of the merit of these ideas, and I make that very clear. I’m not a registered broker/dealer, and I make it extremely clear at every turn that a) only accredited investors should be pursuing these ideas, b) whoever is interested needs to do his own due diligence, and c) even if I were registered, I could be just as wrong.
Thanks again for your insights.
Craig,
Here we agree fully.
There’s not enough money to spend on all technologies, and we need to be as clever as we can about ferreting out what the maximum gain for our investments might be. When every investment group thinks this way, there would be two or three competing companies within each worthy platform type, only one of which would eventually survive… but that’s far better than the ultra-leftist fantasy where we dump money into everything, and still only one company for a few select platforms would survive, we just waste endless time and resources on unlikely or impossible paths.
I cannot imagine a single investor who would be willing to seek out anything other than the best of any given platform. If you can’t answer “what is the best bet?” and then defend that answer, then that’s probably the last time you’re opinion will be sought on this topic.
The PC idea that everyone is equally worthwhile has long since been disproven, but that was self-obviously incorrect before we started down that path. We cannot prosper, and possibly cannot even save our society if we don’t abandon such absurd notions.
Right. To think otherwise is to reason: Darwinism got us through the last 4 billion years quite brilliantly, but now it’s time for human civilization to throw it in the garbage.