From a New York Times article about the fall-off in recent performance by the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers:
Kleiner has held a series of status-report meetings with its outside investors this year, acknowledging that recent fund performance "wasn't great," one attendee said. "They really believed green tech was going to be the next big technology wave," this investor added.
I'm not a big fan of anonymous sources, but this line made me chuckle. The ranks of those who "really believed green tech was going to be the next big technology wave" included not only Kleiner Perkins but also President Obama and lots of other investors both private and governmental. There were plenty of journalists, too. That the Times can now admit in a front-of-the-business-section news article that this view was incorrect is a big deal.
That's not to say that no one made any money on this stuff, or to say that no one ever will. But it wasn't as easy or as sure a thing as it seemed at the time.
