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I am a greentech enthusiast and I have been closely following the greentech VC investment landscape. The VCs like Kleiner Perkins who have had a large greentech portfolio including companies such as Bloom Energy are scaling down on greentech investment . Their current investment is not likely to get any returns close to what a VC would expect. The fundamental challenge with such greentech (excluding software) investment is that they are open ended capital-intensive; you just don't know home much time it would take to build the technology/product, how much it would cost, and how much you would be able to sell it for. The market fluctuations make things even worse. This is not only true in the case of start-ups but also true for the large companies; Applied Materials' grand plan to revolutionize thin-film solar business ended up in a bust .   There's a different way to approach this monumental challenge. Just look at how open source has evolved. It started out as non-commerc...

I am in India visiting a large customer who has heavily invested into organized retail stores, a relatively new category for the Indian market. Their head of analytics shared some details of their last promotion with me. They ran an email promotion to send out coupons that were valid on one and only one day -15th August, the Independence Day of India, which is a holiday in the country. They were really bold to take out a page-long ad in all large newspapers on the 15th August highlighting this promotion. Their sales, in all regions, soared on that day. It not only soared but broke all their previous records. They registered the highest sale in that year which was more than the Diwali sale. In the American terms, they managed to sell more on 4th July than on the Black Friday. This shocked me. I analyzed their efforts further to better understand this behavior. Indians in India don't drink beer, barbecue, or watch fireworks on the Independence Day. In fact they don't do anything....