Voices from the startup community: “What we learned in 2012”

DBL’s Nan­cy Pfund appears in this Pan­do Dai­ly piece from Hamish McKen­zie titled Voic­es from the start­up com­mu­ni­ty: “What we learned in 2012”

“In 2012, I learned that despite polit­i­cal silence on the mat­ter, the pulse of sus­tain­abil­i­ty invest­ing aimed at address­ing cli­mate change is intact and, in fact, beat­ing stronger every day. For exam­ple, despite end­less arti­cles con­tain­ing cyn­i­cal assess­ments about elec­tric vehi­cle growth, the Tes­la Mod­el S became the Motor Trend “Car of the Year” in an his­toric unan­i­mous vote. And while the Bright­source IPO did not hap­pen as planned last spring (replaced with a pri­vate round sev­er­al months lat­er), the year end­ed in solar tri­umph when SolarCity’s IPO launched suc­cess­ful­ly, set­ting the stage for more to fol­low. A key take­away from these sce­nar­ios is that, increas­ing­ly, it is the con­sumer, and not just pol­i­cy, that is play­ing a grow­ing role in com­bat­ting cli­mate change and dri­ving clean­tech growth. The rewards of sus­tain­abil­i­ty will increas­ing­ly drown out the crit­ics and make fur­ther silence about cli­mate change not only unnec­es­sary, but total­ly uncool.”