Paul English, Kayak, Sequoia, and the Triple-Digit Club

My most recent Globe column focused on what I call the "Triple Digit Club" -- companies that have raised $100 million or more in venture capital funding.

The club includes Boston-area companies like E Ink, Kayak, A123 Systems, GreatPoint Energy, and Luminus Devices. (Kayak is the current club president, having raised $223 million.)

My favorite tidbit from the column is that Sequoia, one of the investors behind Kayak, apparently used them at the famous "RIP Good Times" presentation in October as an example of a company that already operates lean and mean. From the column:

The entire start-up world...took notice last month when several partners of Sequoia Capital, the venture firm that funded companies like Google, PayPal, and Electronic Arts, called a meeting to warn its companies about the coming recession. The text on the opening slide? "R.I.P. Good Times." Spending cuts, the firm advised, are a must, and acquirers will gravitate to profitable companies.

Sequoia, as it happens, is an investor in Kayak (A123Systems, too). According to [Kayak co-founder Paul] English, people who were at Sequoia's cautionary meeting say that partner Michael Moritz mentioned Kayak several times.

"They were talking about us as a company with a lean profile," he says. "In their portfolio, we are the skinniest as far as costs." That frugal posture will be an asset if even gloomier times are ahead.

The video features English talking about his approach to hiring and firing engineers.

Kleiner Perkins Dialing Up Activity in Boston?

Last month, Michael Greeley of Flybridge Capital off-handedly mentioned that Kleiner Perkins had dialed up its presence in Boston, with two partners located here.

So I wanted to check if that was true.

When I asked KP's PR person if there was anyone based out here permanently, or an office that they'd set up in Boston, their reply via e-mail was, "KPCB’s official offices are in China and California. There is a plethora of innovation happening in the Boston area, and KPCB is involved in identifying new ideas and helping to build companies." They apologized for not being able to share more details.

Greeley mentioned that Tom Monath (formerly chief scientific officer at Acambis) is on the KP team, and based in Boston. KP wouldn't confirm that. But here's a two-year-old Mass High Tech article mentioning that they'd brought Monath on board, and were opening an office. But Monath seems to live in Harvard, Mass., and I couldn't find a listing for KP in the Boston area, though he is still listed on KP's Web site as a partner in the firm's "pandemic and biodefense fund." (He didn't respond to my e-mail last week.)

What Kleiner does have locally is a "strategic partnership" with GreatPoint Ventures in Cambridge. Kleiner doesn't have money in the GreatPoint fund, but they do get a first look at "interesting deals we bring them," according to Aaron Mandell of Great Point. That arrangement has been in place for "about six months," he said. They've invested together in GreatPoint Energy and Alta Rock Energy, a geothermal energy company. Mandell said GreatPoint is definitely not an affiliate or "branch office" of KP...

Among Kleiner's Massachusetts portfolio companies are CodonDevices, Bit9, Epizyme, Mascoma, Upromise (acquired by Sallie Mae), and Lilliputian Systems, which just yesterday announced plans to expand its manufacturing facility and add about 100 jobs.

Are you hearing about other KP activity in town? Post a comment if you would....

Gov. Patrick: Let's Crack the Energy Crisis

Gov. Deval Patrick writes about the state's new energy law in today's Globe:

Our vision capitalizes on the Commonwealth's natural advantages in technology and entrepreneurship to combat rising energy costs and satisfy the need for new, clean, affordable ways to meet energy needs - creating a whole new industry along the way.

Later, he mentions a few companies by name:

...A123 Systems in Watertown, which is developing batteries for plug-in hybrid cars to enable them to get up to 150 miles per gallon; Evergreen Solar, which is set to open a new solar-panel manufacturing facility in Devens, encouraged in part by the state's new rebate program for solar electricity installations, Commonwealth Solar; Mascoma in Cambridge and Sun Ethanol in Amherst, two leaders in cellulosic biofuel, the non-petroleum, non-food-based fuel of the future, which will get a boost from a gas-tax exemption now pending in the Legislature, the first of its kind in the country; and GreatPoint Energy, a Cambridge firm now demonstrating its innovative technology for turning coal and biomass into clean-burning natural gas at the Brayton Point power plant in Somerset.

Combating Global Warming: Last night's MIT Enterprise Forum

Last night I was at a meeting of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge that focused on "How Innovative Businesses are Combating Global Warming."

Ian Bowles, Massachusetts' secretary of the executive office of energy and environmental affairs, opened the evening with an update from the State House. Bowles talks so fast I am pretty sure his compensation package has a words-per-minute clause. Very smart guy. But he predicted that we won't see any federal action on a carbon tax or CO2 emissions trading, either of which could help mitigate global warming, until the next Presidential administration.

I moderated a panel with Emily Kreps from Goldman Sachs, Daniel Goldman from Great Point Energy, Phillip Boyle from Powerspan, and Professor Daniel Schrag from Harvard. Schrag led things off with a short and dismaying PowerPoint overview of the latest data and projections about climate change: Houston, we have a problem.

Goldman talked about how his company is transforming coal into natural gas, and sequestering the CO2. Boyle explained how Powerspan removes acid-rain-causing pollutants from power plant emissions, and can also sequester CO2. And Schrag explained some of the thinking related to "global dimming" -- figuring out ways to reflect sunlight before the earth's atmosphere absorbs the heat. He's concerned that some country might decide unilaterally to try a global dimming experiment, with dangerous effects, since we don't know enough about how climate works.

The panelists all agreed with Bowles that we're not likely to see any federal implementation of something like the Lieberman-Warner bill soon, which would cap emissions and reduce them over time.

I suggested that citizen action is what's needed, given that we have a little more than a year before our next President takes office. Initiatives like Hull Wind and the CalCars plug-in hybrid movement work. Why wait for Washington to get moving?

Afterward, I met a bunch of entrepreneurs working on swell stuff.... Michael Chen is trying to develop wind farms in China...Jon Strimling from PelletSales.com was explaining the benefits of using biomass fuels to heat one's home...and Benjamin Brown runs the Web site MakeMeSustainable.