It is oft said in the environmental field that you can do the work or get the credit, but rarely both. I’m sure you can relate to this yourself. I’m not so special, but at this moment I just feel like tooting my own horn.

I founded Ecostructure Financial in 2001 to organize the “Ecosystems Economic Sector” around a set of clear measurable goals. This November, I changed the name to EcoSector, and posted the new, improved Portal at www.EcoSector.com.

A key part of EcoSector’s strategy is to match profitable green business solutions to specific eco-challenges and then finance the roll-out of these solutions at a meaningful rate and scale.

Over the past two years, I’ve had conversations with staff and associates of Al Gore’s London-based investment company, Generation Investment, urging them to move in this direction. They didn’t do this for the simple reason that Generation only deals with publicly traded stocks and therefore couldn’t pursue “private equity” which is where the real action is in the green investment world today.

So, while “great minds think alike”, I was not surprised to learn from this month’s Fortune Magazine that Gore has become a Partner at Kleiner Perkins, the famous Silicon Valley private equity investment company, and is now promoting the very concept I have been working on and talking about since 2001.

In the article, Gore says:

“We want to give a big shout out…to every inventor and entrepreneur and idea generator at the micro, macro, systems-integration and global-thinker level to create with this alliance a clearinghouse for the identification and selection of the most promising ideas on the planet for quickly solving this climate crisis.”

Replace the word “climate crisis” with “ecological challenges” and you have the same basic language and concept I have been sharing with you and anyone else who will listen for all these years.

Now that Gore is carrying this ball, he will need a team to implement the project, and I want EcoSector to be involved. There’s a good reason for K-P to work with EcoSector: While Kleiner Perkins seems to see Gore’s initiative as mere research & development for their investment “pipeline”, my own business experience over these past several years suggests that the very act of organizing green entrepreneurs as Gore describes can be a profitable business in itself, and at the same time provide important benefits to all environmental leaders, eco-entrepreneurs, and green investors.

When KP started moving in the green direction many months ago, EcoSector began a steady effort to get a meeting for me with John Doerr, the KP partner leading their green initiative, or anyone else there who might have a decision making role, to make this point. No meetings or phone calls resulted from this effort. Herein lies the very purpose for which I founded EcoSector…

In 25 years in the environmental field, I’ve seen again and again that when a business leader “crosses over” to the green message, when a green entrepreneur becomes a recognized success, or even when a politician goes green, there is an instant “overwhelm” of desire and contacts from people who want to make a difference seeking guidance, assistance, and funding. I remember back in the 1990’s, a wealthy fellow said he wanted to start giving money to forest protection non-profit groups. A huge number of people wrote proposals and called his phone. Within a month, he had disconnected his phone and disappeared.

I feel a lot of empathy for someone like that – imagine you wake up one day and decide you want to do some good, and the first thing you discover is that even if you give away all the money you collected by being a success in the “old” non-ecological economy, it’s just a drop in the bucket? For newcomers, there can be a lot of fear and sadness. I say from my own experience that all this fear and sadness – including the new wave of negative emotions coming from the rising awareness of climate change – can disappear when the situation is viewed in the proper light. I’m not saying the problems themselves can just disappear like that, but the sadness and fear, if not resolved into productive action will only exacerbate our environmental challenges – you might say our environmental problems themselves result from unresolved fear that is latent in human beings.

“Overwhelm” in the environmental field not productive. It gives people the impression that there is not enough quality green advice and money to satisfy the desires of people wanting to participate in this field. In my opinion, these shortages do not exist, they are just thoughts. Instead, the overwhelm problem is the result of poor organization and service infrastructure underneath the newly-hatched leaders. EcoSector’s business purpose is to provide that organization and service infrastructure to eco-sector leaders, newly-hatched or oldly-hatched, so that they can effectively play their leadership roles.

So, it was no surprise to me when I renewed my effort to make contact with KP last week that the front desk there is saying they are “overwhelmed”. And is important to me that this overwhelm get resolved promptly. I don’t want John Doerr to pull back from his newly found green feelings like the well-intentioned fellow I mentioned above.

How do you break through the mental fog called “overwhelm” to pitch the solution to “overwhelm”? One approach is to simply increase the volume until we show up on KP’s radar. Here’s where you can help — If what I’ve said makes sense to you, please contact the Kleiner Perkins “greentech” team and give them your recommendation for EcoSector.

Mark Winstein
Founder

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Commentary, Portal News. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.