By Brad Stone
Are you optimistic that we can slow down climate change?
Anybody who says we’re close to the solution isn’t looking at the whole systems requirement. There’s 20 companies that I have investments in—some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.
And yet the prevailing sentiment in Silicon Valley seems to be negative because the first batch of companies failed.
Some of those didn’t have contributions that would have made that much difference. We can’t depend on being faddish in Silicon Valley. The ease with which you get product adoption in the IT sector does make you naive when you move into non-IT sectors, including energy, about the life cycles, reliability, regulatory framework.